Stephen Baxter - Flood

The butler waited. Jorge had been in Amanda’s service for years now. He was studying for a doctorate in biotechnology at Nathan’s technical college, and was somewhat overqualified to be standing around taking coats. But if you were rich in Project City you could take your pick of the swarm of refugees who continued to struggle up from the valleys; there were bright, beautiful people who did far worse than this for a place on the higher ground.

Jorge showed her through to the big living room, the old hotel lobby with its wall of Inca stone, where Amanda sat on a leather sofa. She wore a loose trouser suit, her legs curled under her, a glass in her hand. The big plasma screen showed a soap opera, part of the unending streams of sport and computer-scripted dramas pumped out by Project City’s broadcasting service, dubbed into English, Spanish or Quechua as you preferred. It was one of Nathan’s many strategies to anesthetize his huddled population. Amanda didn’t get up. She raised her glass; it was half full.“Sit. Have a drink. Jorge will get you what you want. This potato vodka isn’t half bad, once you build up some immunity.” That, at least, was a flash of the old Amanda.

“Give me what’s she’s having, please.”

Jorge bowed and withdrew.

Lily sat gingerly on the edge of one of the room’s sprawling sofas.

Amanda watched her soap opera. She was over fifty now, still beautiful, Lily thought, still slim, still possessing that unconscious flexibility of pose that men always found so attractive. But the bitterness that had been planted in her when Benj had been killed in P-ville was apparent in a tightness around her eyes, a smallness in the way she held her mouth.

This room of shining leather and polished floorboards was adorned with artifacts looted from the submerged cities. JuanVillegas, born a Catholic, had acquired a fine collection of church plate, stored in cabinets of bullet-proof glass, a row of chalices lined up like sports trophies. Rumor had it that he had an entire door detached from Lima’s cathedral.

Jorge returned with Lily’s drink, and withdrew. Lily sipped it; it was very strong.

“So,” Lily said, uncertain. “Where’s Juan today?”

Amanda waved a hand, and the soap volume reduced. “Out with the Holy Guards. Should be back soon.” She looked at Lily. “You don’t change, do you? A bit more leathery.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re pale, though.”

“That’s the sunscreen and the hats. It’s hot out there, Amanda.”

“Which is why I never go out. Still working on the gen-enged crops, are you?”

“That and Nathan’s agricultural program in general…”

She spoke about Nathan’s current schemes, as his scientists labored to resolve the pressure on the available agricultural land. Nathan’s new cultivars of maize, corn and rice were resistant to drought, and more nutritious than the old forms. The most radical technique was to turn single-season crops into perennials: varieties of wheat and barley and maize that didn’t need sowing. That would save hugely on labor, and permanent root systems would dig deeper and seek out nutrients and fresh water, ever more scarce on the surface. Argentina and Mexico had always been big on transgenic crops before the flooding, and recruiting genetic engineers for this sort of work hadn’t been hard.

There was also a longer-term program of adaptation. As the sea level rose, it was as if the farmland was on a sinking elevator. For now the agriculturalists were cultivating crops suitable for montane conditions. But in the future, as ecological zones migrated upward, they might have to shift to a different suite of crops suitable for lower altitudes. All this was strange and scary to think about, but Nathan insisted they prepare even so.

Lily tried to tell Amanda how good it was to be out among green growing things-even if it was a strangely quiet countryside. There were few farm animals now; chickens and pigs were kept to consume vegetable waste, thus maximizing land use efficiency, but cattle, sheep and even the native llamas and alpacas were seen as too expensive. It was like this all over the world, it seemed. It was extraordinary that an extinction event was going on even among domesticated farm animals.

Amanda listened, but she clearly wasn’t interested, and let her attention drift back to the flickering images of the soap actors.

Lily shut up, and sipped a bit of the vodka. Then she said, “So-Kristie.”

Amanda raised her eyebrows. “She wants something. That’s the only reason she ever gets in touch with me. Otherwise I have to rely on reports by the AxysCorp cops just to find out what she’s up to. Juan has access to her crimint file. Surprising how much you can find out about people that way.”

“Come on,” Lily said. “Kristie’s not a criminal.”

“Maybe not, but last month that Quechua boy of hers was a millimeter away from a conviction for disrupting potato shipments from the Titicaca area. What an idiot he is. I had to pull strings with Juan to get him transferred to Chosica and the Ark project. Otherwise he’d have been exiled.”

Exiled: banished from all the Andean communities under Nathan’s direct or indirect control, and so cast into an outer darkness of chaos, hunger, flight and disease.

“And of course he took Kristie with him. Even if he’d been sent away she would have had to go with him. Oh, she’d have had no choice. Juan would have seen to it. He’s very much a supporter of the New Covenant, you know. It’s all black and white with him now. If Ollantay hadn’t shown a residual bit of common sense and backed off, I couldn’t have persuaded Juan to spare him, or Kristie. Why should he?” She took another strong slug of her vodka, and put the glass on the arm of her chair. From nowhere Jorge appeared with a fresh, full glass, which he smoothly substituted; dew gathered on the chilled crystal.

“But this time it’s different,” Lily said. “I mean, she’s contacted me as well as you. Maybe she’s got some other kind of news. Or maybe she just wants to see us-”

“You’re dreaming.”

“Let’s go together,” Lily said impulsively. “I have to go down to the coast tomorrow. They’re mounting another dive into Lima. Sanjay McDonald is supposed to be there, running the science for Nathan.”

“Sanjay who?”

“Climate scientist. He was in London. An associate of Thandie Jones, who knew Gary. As far as I know Gary is still with Grace, somewhere in the US. With any luck Sanjay will have some news about them.”

Once more Amanda’s eyes drifted back to the murmuring soap. As the years had passed she had grown less and less interested in Lily’s connections with the Barcelona hostages. But conversely, as her own family had disintegrated around her, Lily’s bonds to those who had shared her captivity seemed to grow stronger.

“Never mind that,” Lily said. “When I get back let’s go see Kristie together, you and me.”

“You and me and Michaelmas, you mean.”

Lily said tightly, “Piers is my partner. He cares about us.”

“He’s a locked-in obsessive who ‘cares’ about Kristie.”

“That’s just foolishness. A weakness. Something Piers deals with.” That was true enough; it was a trait in himself Piers despised.

Lily had long got over her own odd, surprising stab of resentment at his feelings for Kristie. She knew Piers had never loved her, and never would; in fact she had come to believe that despite a divorce and a couple of failed relationships he hadn’t truly loved anybody before. Somehow, for some reason, presumably as a product of the last few impossible years, he had become fixated on Kristie, a girl he barely knew. But Piers was in his mid-fifties now, and Kristie only twenty-six. Such love of the old for the young was a kind of mourning.