Stephen Baxter - Flood

Sanjay said the DSV dive just completed had gone well enough. “Though these days I rarely have to make them myself, thank Ganesh for that. Look, you can see the boat.” He pointed to an ungainly craft that dangled from a crane, dripping; it looked oddly like a conventional submarine cut in half, with manipulator arms, cameras and windows cluttering the cut-through cross-section.“That’s a COMRA. Developed by the China Ocean Mineral Resources R amp;D Association.”

“A Chinese design?”

“Purchased by Lammockson for AxysCorp for a huge price-along with luxury villas in Project City for its crew and engineers. One of the most modern designs from the preflood days. The dive into Lima went well. We went down to the cultural center around the Plaza Mayor, and the shops at Miraflores. San Isidro, the business district, is pretty accessible. And we got some good science data. Actually the dive was paid for by a Quechua community, up in the Andes somewhere. They had salvage targets of their own.”

That pricked her curiosity, and she wondered if it had something to do with Ollantay, but she wasn’t much interested in the mining of Lima.

He said now, “I heard from Gary Boyle.”

“Via Thandie Jones, I guess? I haven’t heard from him for years.”

“Well, he isn’t in a place it’s easy to send postcards from.”

“Where is he?”

“That’s just it. Nowhere…” He told her how Gary was now part of an itinerant community, thousands of people wandering through the crowded western states. “They’ve been on the road for years, Lily. After they were forced out of their camp at Amarillo, they have failed to find anywhere permanent to stay.” Sanjay shrugged. “It’s happening all over, from what I hear. Tremendous populations on the move, washing back and forth in search of room to live.”

“Gary still has Grace with him?”

“Oh, yes, according to Thandie. Michael Thurley too.”

“Grace must be sixteen now.”

“Yes. And a stroppy teenager, according to Thandie.”

“That’s healthy,” Lily said firmly.“I wish there was something I could do for them.”

“There’s still a bond between you all, you survivors of Barcelona, isn’t there? Gary’s OK. He’s probably wishing he could find a way to help you.”

They agreed to talk this over more later. And Lily told him she was going to visit Lammockson’s Ark Three to meet Kristie. She offered Sanjay a ride.

“I’d like that. Ark Three? I wonder what Nathan is up to now.”

“You’ll see what there is to see. Not that he tells us anything.”

He glanced at her. “You seem uncomfortable about it.”

She thought it over.“I keep away from Nathan’s more baroque efforts. There’s something unbalanced about his super-tech projects. Obsessive, you know? Here he is trying to master the world through technology. While all around us…” She gestured at the gray ocean that rolled over the drowned remains of Lima.

“I understand,” Sanjay said, thoughtful. “But maybe at such times as these we need big thinkers like Nathan Lammockson. Because for sure we need big solutions.” He grinned. “The insane as a last-resort evolutionary resource. But don’t tell Nathan I said that. I’d better go sign out with the COMRA crew. I’ll meet you at the helipad.”

“Sure.” But as he turned away she called,“Incidentally, you said a Quechua group put some funding into the dive. What were they after?”

“They guided a robot into the cathedral.” He grinned.“They brought up a coffin. Pizarro’s bones!”

Chosica, a thousand meters above the old sea-level datum, had once been an inland resort town for the residents of Lima. The Rimac river ran through it, but the landscape away from an irrigated valley floor was desert, the mountain slopes bare sun-bleached rock. To put up Nathan’s workers, a rough community of shacks had grown up around the heart of the old town. Lily and Sanjay walked through the shantytown, guided by a sat-nav patch sewn into Lily’s jumpsuit, seeking the hut Kristie shared with Ollantay. It was late afternoon now.

This was just another slum in a world of slums, where, in the roughly built shacks, pots boiled, children played, and dogs slept in the heat. There was a persistent stink of sewage. But above all this loomed the outline of a ship, the slim lines of a vessel big enough to be an ocean-going liner, covered in a bristle of scaffolding.

“I don’t believe it,” Sanjay said. “That thing must be three hundred meters long! I know you called this project ‘Ark Three’ but that could have meant anything-something metaphorical-a seed bank, maybe, a vault of frozen zygotes. I didn’t think it would be an actual damn ship. We’re a kilometer above the old sea-level datum! How’s Nathan planning to launch the thing?”

Lily had no idea. “Whether the ship goes to the sea or the sea comes to the ship, it’s going to be a spectacular sight, isn’t it?”

“There’s something about the lines of that tub that remind me of something. I’m no marine engineer. Maybe I’ll think of it.” He took out his old phone and paged through its memory.

“Actually Nathan is building it in conjunction with a consortium.”

“A consortium of who? People like him?”

“Nathan isn’t saying,” she admitted.“But I think that’s the idea. Even the super-rich have run out of places to build Green Zones. So they’re looking for other solutions.”

“I guess if this is number three, there must be other arks.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

He couldn’t take his eyes off the boat. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing. A ship, halfway up the Andes! The man has to be crazy after all.”

Lily’s GPS patch bleeped. They came upon the shack Kristie shared with Ollantay. Amanda must have been here already, for, remarkably, Jorge, Amanda’s butler, was standing outside in a suit and tie; he looked entirely unaffected by the dirt around him.

Lily glanced at Sanjay. “This might be bloody.”

“Families.”

“Yes. Come on, let’s get it over with.”

The shack was a box, with plastic sheets for walls and roof, cluttered with junk, heaps of clothes, a bed, a table, cupboards. There were vents and windows, and a fan was running from some power source, but it was ferociously hot. The teddy bear stuck on top of a cupboard was a small reminder of a lost past.

In this tiny one-room hut, four people were pressed into the corners, sitting as far from each other as they could get: Piers, Amanda, Ollantay and Kristie. Amanda was wearing her black trouser suit, and Kristie a grubby but colorful dress of woven wool. Piers and Ollantay wore AxysCorp coveralls, and looked oddly alike as they faced each other, separated by the diagonal of the room. Nobody spoke as Lily and Sanjay walked in.

“So,” Lily said. “You remember Sanjay McDonald, from London?”

Nobody responded.

Sanjay seemed unperturbed. He nodded at them all, and sat on an upturned plastic crate in a corner, flicking through images of classic ships on his phone.

Lily said, “I have the feeling we walked into the middle of a row.”

“You could say that,” Amanda snapped. “Or a joke.”

“Oh, Mum-” Kristie said.

“Of course you missed the punchline,” Amanda said. “Why don’t you tell Lily what you just told me?”

Uncertain, distressed, stubborn, Kristie glanced at Lily. “We’re getting married,” she said. “According to the traditions of Ollantay’s people-”

“She’s pregnant,” Piers said. “That’s what she’s told us. Pregnant. By this man.” He couldn’t bear to look at Ollantay, evidently, or even to speak his name. Stiff, immobile, Piers looked more brittle than ever, Lily thought, desiccated and fragile. And now she saw how heavy Kristie looked, gravid beneath her loose woolen clothes.