Stephen Baxter - Flood

Well, if I can live with it, Lily thought, so can you, Amanda.

But she knew that Amanda’s problem with Piers was not only his peculiar, longing fixation with Kristie. No, Amanda’s problem was that she had come to blame him for the shooting of Benj, caught in the cross-fire that day in Pizarroville. Piers had been nominally responsible for the security operation. It was a responsibility he fully accepted, though in any moral sense it wasn’t his fault. None of that helped with Amanda.

“Look, Piers isn’t a bad man. He’s shouldering as much responsibility as anybody else here. We all have weaknesses. We all make mistakes.”

Amanda scrunched up her face and turned away. “Juan doesn’t make mistakes. Or he doesn’t think he does. Right now he’s out with the Holy Guards, patrolling the eastern foothills for refugees.”

As the sea-level rise had continued, now approaching an astounding four hundred meters, the flow of refugees was relentless. So Nathan had created the Holy Guard, tough, heavily armed units that went out into the chaos, doing whatever it took to deflect the refugee swarms. Many of the Guard were recruited from Pizarroville-the desperate poor fighting to keep what they had.

Lily said, “It’s a tough job. I couldn’t do it.”

“That’s the trouble,” Amanda said.“Juan can’t either-or he couldn’t, until he fell in with the New Covenanters. He’s a man of conscience, believe it or not. He needs to find a way to justify what he’s doing.”

Lily knew the theory. If God had broken the Covenant He made with Noah after the Biblical flood-Genesis 9:11: “Neither will there any more be a flood to destroy the Earth”-it could only be because humans had broken it first. But was God punishing all mankind? Surely those who had been wise enough to move to higher ground early were a kind of elect, raised out of the herd of sinners, and had a duty to preserve themselves for a new post-flood age to come. And conversely those who had not been smart enough to prepare showed their weakness as well as their sinfulness. So the high-altitude elect therefore had a holy duty to stay alive and hold onto their ground.

“They’ve had meetings about it here,” Amanda said, fiddling with a lock of hair. “Business types like Juan, but also soldiers and doctors and priests. I have to organize drinks and nibbles while they talk about the best way to machine-gun refugees, and the moral justification for the culling.”

“ ‘Culling’?”

“We had a doctor here who talked about ‘apoptosis,’ which is a phenomenon of the body, unhealthy cells committing suicide to make room for the healthy. It’s got pretty elaborate, theoretically speaking. They’ve written up screeds of justification for what they’re doing-it’s all online, you can read it if you want.”

“God, Amanda. I don’t know how you deal with this stuff.”

Amanda flared suddenly.“I hate it, if you want to know. Don’t you? I hate everything about the way we live here. Living behind walls, behind wire and machine gun towers, while everybody else starves. Nathan with his mad schemes, his artificial crops and his ocean mines and his stupid Ark. People like Juan, decent enough once, now going slowly crazy because of what they’re doing to stay alive. And me with a son dead and a daughter who won’t speak to me except when she needs me to keep her out of prison. I hate it all. My life started going downhill when Jerry walked out on us, and it’s got steadily worse since. When we were growing up in Fulham I never would have dreamed it would come to this.”

“No.” Lily had an impulse to go over to her, to comfort her. But Amanda looked away.

Lily stood up, setting down her drink.“I need to get ready for my trip to Lima. I’ll call you when I get back. And we’ll go see Kristie together, yes?”

“Whatever.” Amanda sipped her drink and waved her hand, making the voices of the soap opera characters swell and boom so they filled the empty room.

With a bit of arm-twisting by Piers, Lily got a seat on a supply chopper flying out to Lima.

The coast was draped in the low, clinging fog the inhabitants of Lima had once called the garua, so the chopper descended into a white-out. And then the complicated, boxy superstructure of an oil rig came looming out of the fog. Lammockson had established this old rig over the heart of the drowned city as a base for his continuing salvage operations.

The chopper landed on the rig’s upper deck, and Lily scrambled down.

She found she could walk to the edge of the platform, which was fenced off by a rail and sheets of Plexiglas. The sea, gray and rolling, stretched off to a horizon blanked out by the garua. She might have been in the middle of the ocean. In fact she was standing directly over the heart of a megacity, of which there was no sign at all.

An AxysCorp flunky came running to meet her, an earnest young man prompted with instructions from Piers. Sanjay was on the rig, but was supervising a deep-dive submersible descent into Lima, and she had some time to spare, maybe an hour. The flunky tried to persuade her to go down below where it was safe, to have some food, a beer even, watch some TV. She refused. She needed the air. She was given a thick coat to pull on over her coverall, and a cup of coffee, and she got away from Piers’s nanny and went walking around the rig platform.

She passed among outcroppings of machinery, like open-air sculptures, attended by engineers in hard hats and coveralls. She recognized some of the operations going on here. Most of the salvaging operations were run remotely, with cranes lowering robot machinery with manipulator arms and cutting gear down among the drowned buildings. Even after years of systematic plunder, Lima, like all the world’s lost cities, was still a tremendous lode.

But Lammockson always thought ahead, and more advanced technologies were being trialed on the rig. His surveyors told him there was gold, zinc, copper, silver and lead to be found under the ocean floor, raw materials for the long-term survival of civilization. The scientists even knew where to look, around big volcanic deposits called “sea floor massive sulphides” built up by hydrothermal vents, places where water circulated through deep cracks in the sea-floor rock, dissolving metals as it moved through the rock and precipitating them out in conical black chimneys. So Lammockson was creating an ocean-floor mining capability. He had other teams of experts working on locating undersea oil deposits. Sea mining had been frowned on in the past because of the damage the noise, sediment plumes and turbulence might do to fragile seafloor ecologies. Nobody cared about that anymore-or at least nobody was in a position to police it.

Lily was watching a fresh robot salvage machine being lowered over the side when Sanjay came up to her. “Lily! What’s a landlubber like you doing on a rust bucket like this?”

As usual when she met a face from her past, Lily felt overwhelmed by a spasm of emotion, a peculiar kind of longing. She grabbed Sanjay and hugged him. “It’s good to see you.”

He submitted gracefully enough, and hugged her back. Sanjay, short, compact, dressed in a standard-issue AxysCorp coverall, didn’t show his forty-five years save for the gray in his beard. He said, “You want to go down into the rig? There are lounges, bars. Get you out of this breeze if you feel like it.”

“Would you like that?”

“Well, I’ve been in that control room for hours, sniffing up cigarette smoke and stale beer and coca-plant halitosis. I’d rather stay out in the fresh air if you can stand it.”

“Then let’s walk.”

They continued Lily’s slow perambulation of the deck. Sanjay asked about Amanda, and he spoke of his children and their mothers in the Scottish archipelago, where an extraordinary new amphibious society was emerging among the clans.