Stephen Baxter - Flood

Gary considered his own position. He had to get Grace and Michael out of here before the overspill arrived. That was the bottom line. Joining Lone Elk’s unlikely migration sounded a better bet than going it alone, becoming just three more ragged refugees. But if that didn’t come off, maybe they’d have to make their own way to higher ground, west to the Rockies. Or maybe they should even take up Lily Brooke’s longstanding invitation to go down to the Andes…

Michael was watching him, grave, going through his own inner calculations.

Gary came back to the conversation.

“You’ve seen horrors,” Lone Elk was saying to Thandie.“Populations in flight. Whole ecosystems destroyed. But you must have seen some wonders too.”

“Oh, yeah. The whole world’s being transformed, turned into something new. I’ve sailed ships over the North American transgression-I mean, over the flooded eastern states. The world’s reverting into something like it was in the Cretaceous, before the dinosaur-killer asteroid fell, a world of shallow seas. But the new shallow-water ecosystems may not have time to bed in before they are drowned in turn. We don’t know what comes next.”

“ Why don’t you know? How high can this water rise? The government has no projections, or none it will release.”

“The surviving governments have no credible models that I’ve seen. Even in Denver they don’t want to face the worst possibilities-to look into a future that they won’t be able to manage. It’s become a matter of ideology, kind of like the old battles about climate change. Government advisers are flood deniers, because that’s what the politicians want to hear, even while the waters lap around their feet. And denial makes for bad science.”

“So what is the good science?”

“The data is patchy,” Thandie said. “It always is. Masked by local surges, hot spots, other effects. Take what I say with qualification-”

“I’m no fool, Ms. Jones,” said Lone Elk evenly. “Tell me what you believe.”

“The sea-level rise is still accelerating,” she said bluntly. “We seem to have settled into a long-term growth paradigm. For the last five years the rise has stuck pretty closely to an exponential increase at a rate of fourteen percent per annum. But of course the growth is compound.”

He grimaced. “I ran casinos. Compound interest I understand. That means a doubling of the rise every five years. And if this goes on-”

“You can do the math.”

He shook his heavy head and steepled his fingers. He didn’t look as shocked as Gary might have expected. “Then that is what I must plan for.”

“I’d say so. I have a more detailed report for you on my laptop.”

He waved that away. “Later. Do you have children, Dr. Jones?”

“No.”

“If you did, this would be harder for you, to witness the suffering of the world.”

“I imagine it would. But I hope I’d do my job even so.”

“Yes. But I do have children. And my job is different. My duty.. ”

They talked on.

The night deepened, and the lantern’s glow filled the tent. Michael made more coffee. After an hour Gary started to wonder about food.

And after a couple of hours more Grace called Gary on his cell to say she was staying with her friend Karen for the night.

June 2029

From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

Sister Mary Assumpta’s webcam, shakily held up in the air, gave a vivid impression of the crowds swarming around the monumental ruins of the palaces of the Roman emperors, here on the Palatine Hill. And occasionally, as the camera waved wildly, you could glimpse the rest of Rome, heavily flooded, the ancient city once more reduced to the seven hills from which it had originally sprung.

Italian police, stationed throughout the Palatino, watched nervously. Long experience had taught them that the devout were not necessarily well-behaved, and a surge, or worse a stampede, could be catastrophic. And on days like this there was always the possibility of terrorism.

The noise of the helicopter broke suddenly over the crowd.

Sister Mary’s camera, searching, returned a blurred image of ruins and blue Italian sky. And then she found the chopper, done out in a combination of Italian police colors and papal yellow.

The helicopter lowered a cage to the Flavian palace. And when the cage rose up again, there was the Holy Father ascending into the air, surrounded by cardinals and security men in black suits, his robes dazzling white, his hand raised in blessing. A great murmur rose up from the crowd, more a groan than a cry, and the webcam’s microphone picked up Sister Mary herself muttering prayers in rapid-fire Irish.

The rumor was that the Pope would now return to his homeland, America; he would continue to address his global flock through modern communications. But everybody there on the Palatino knew that this was the day the popes had finally abandoned Rome, with the Vatican already lost, an end to two millennia of turbulent history.

The chopper ascended into the sky and turned away, heading west toward the rising sea where an American aircraft carrier waited to collect the Holy Father. The police came to move through the crowd, trying to begin the process of dispersal.

Somebody cried, in a harsh Australian accent, “Next stop Mecca!”

August 2031

Amanda sent a car to bring Lily across Cusco to her home. Lily waited for it with some anxiety.

The car slid up to Lily’s door. It was one of Nathan Lammockson’s hydrogen-powered limousines, new, sleek, sweet-smelling inside. It pulled away silently.

Eleven years since they had come to Project City, six years after Benj’s death, Lily rarely saw her sister in person. The tension between Amanda and Piers had become unbearable after Benj’s shooting. And Piers’s peculiar obsession with Kristie, obvious to Lily as soon as Ollantay had pointed it out all those years ago, hadn’t gone away, and didn’t help either.

But now Kristie had got in touch with her mother and her aunt, and asked them both to come down to Chosica, where Ollantay, Lily learned to her surprise, was working on Lammockson’s Ark Three project. Lily didn’t feel she could disregard such a request. She didn’t imagine Amanda could ignore it either. So she put in a call to Amanda, suggesting they should talk it over. She was faintly surprised when Amanda agreed to meet her.

At least the car was comfortable. In a way it represented the core of Lammockson’s vision for Project City, Lily thought, a vision that was at last being realized a decade after the city’s establishment. The two nuclear stations and the wind and solar farms split water into oxygen and hydrogen that fueled the city’s farm vehicles and a handful of private cars, their tanks themselves effectively serving as a mobile energy store. The car was an emblem of a new way of living, with systems that were distributed and adaptable, resilient, long-lasting, clean, no obsolescence or waste. That was the dream, anyhow.

And it was in this inward-looking, static, high-tech Utopia that Amanda lived all the time. She rarely ventured out of her house, and when she did have to attend some function or other she would rush straight into one of Villegas’s limousines, barely breathing the musty, sewage-laden, carbon-dioxide rich air of the city. She certainly never saw the hinterland around Project City, the shantytowns like P-ville, or the suffering in the chaotic regions outside Nathan’s remit altogether.

When she reachedVillegas’s miniature palace, Lily felt oddly reluctant to get out of the car.

The butler met her at the door and led her into the old hotel. The air-conditioning unit had been looted from the American embassy in Lima, and its chill was ferocious but welcome. Lily stripped off her hat and reflective poncho, and rubbed the sun cream off her face at a mirror by the door, trying to get the oily stuff out of the deepening lines on her fifty-five-year-old forehead.