Stephen Baxter - Flood

“Project City.” She grinned.

“Yeah. Look, I know there’s something screwy about Lammockson, but he’s a tough, resourceful guy who’s committed to protecting us, I mean our group of hostages. He’s stuck to that line for fifteen years now, and Lily and Piers are pretty close to him. I’m going to try to make it there, I think.”

She frowned. “That means going south. Through Mexico, Panama.. ”

“I don’t imagine it will be easy. But there are no easy choices, are there?”

“That there aren’t. Come on, let’s help those two idiots fix the tent.”

So they got the tent up. Gordo let Gary charge up his phone from a battery in the jeep. And an Army doctor came out to check Michael’s wound; he cleaned it up and replaced the stitches with a plastic adhesive, but told Grace she’d done a good job. Michael stayed unconscious through the whole thing.

As the night drew in Gordo set up a camping stove, and they cooked chicken and pork and stir-fried vegetables, military supplies; it was better food than Gary had tasted for years.

Grace came back with a girlfriend. They listened to music, by headphones plugged into a little power-free crystal radio set. The girls sang along with the song they were hearing: “ ‘I love you more than my phone / You’re my Angel, you’re my TV / I love you more than my phone…’ ”

The Denver government broadcast music through the surviving network of satellites, but nobody was recording music anymore, and you heard nothing newer than fifteen or twenty years old. Gary missed it badly. Always a big music fan, when he’d come out of the Barcelona cellars he’d spent a lot of time catching up with the output of his favorite bands, and devouring the best of the new stuff. Now that was no longer possible. Gary wondered how much the girls understood of the lyrics they were repeating, the phrases that casually referred to a vanished world. But he envied them their discovery of stuff that was at least new to them.

The girls started improvising dance moves, and the adults clapped along. Gordo produced more alcohol, wine this time, and Thandie and Elena accepted some. Even Gary relented. Grace took a sip, her first-ever alcohol so far as Gary knew, but pronounced it bitter.

They talked on, drinking quietly, as the stars came out over the Plains. There was one mild eruption around midnight when Elena got to her feet, noisily accusing Gordo of putting his hand on her thigh. It turned out to be Thandie playing a malicious joke.

Then they settled into their tents, Michael, Grace and Gary squeezing into the small orange dome they had carried in pieces on their backs for years, and Gordo and the women in the big, sturdy, bottle-green military tent he’d borrowed for the night.

It was around three in the morning when Gary was woken by the crashing noise of low-flying aircraft.

He scrambled out of the tent. Gordo and Thandie were already out, Gordo pulling up his pants, his head tilted up. The planes roared over, their lights like constellations in flight. Their noise was more than loud; it was oppressive, crushing.

Gary yelled at Gordo, “Ours?”

“Hell, no. That’s a Russian design, MiGs. Fucking Mormons.” He grabbed his jacket and started hauling down his tent.

Gary faced Thandie, for one last moment. He said, “Denver, then.”

She replied, “Project City. I’ll remember.”

“Good luck-”

He heard a boom, like a crash of thunder. He looked southeast, toward Lincoln. Fireballs blossomed in the night.

“Shit,” said Gordo. He threw stuff in the back of the jeep and jumped behind the steering wheel. “So it’s come to this,” he said as he started the engine.“A civil war over a drowned interstate. You know, we should have been flying to Mars, right now, tonight. NASA had this schedule. I could have been on the flight, not too old yet…” He looked up at the stars and gunned the engine. “You two dykes getting in or what?”

May 2034

From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

The footage on the Toodlepip. com website was ambiguous. It was hard to be sure of the details or of the precise sequence of events, in a murky panorama of broken, slushy polar ice under a leaden sky, the blurred figures of the humans, the small, scrambling bear.

The flood was causing an extinction spasm, an event that was gathering pace rapidly. All over the world animals were driven from vanishing habitats, or slaughtered when they came into competition with humans for the remaining high ground. Birds were more mobile, but their nesting and feeding habits were always fragile; birds had been suffering since the beginning of the event, when a teenage Kristie had noted plunges in the populations of blue tits and other garden birds. As climate zones shifted or were drowned, vegetation was forced to relocate or succumb; the changes came much more rapidly than the life cycle of most trees, and the forests which burned or drowned were not replaced. Even the microbial world was stirred up, a cause of the new plagues which afflicted mankind.

Much of the dying was out of sight, however; coastal and shallow-water life was being erased all but invisibly, for example. Toodlepip. com ’s unique selling point was that it gathered images at the very point of these extinctions: pictures of the last of a kind succumbing to the dark, transmitted painlessly to the site’s remaining subscribers in Green Zone enclaves around the world. Some of these images were unspectacular. It was hard for most people who weren’t actually ecologists themselves to grieve over the destruction of a coral reef. But cute mammals were always a different story.

The polar bears had been the poster stars of the global warming crisis that had afflicted the planet long before the flood itself. Now, all around the Arctic ocean, every spring Toodlepip and other agencies watched anxiously, or eagerly, for the bears to emerge from hibernation, the crux point of the animals’ survival. If the sea ice melted the mother bears wouldn’t be able to get to the seal cubs whose meat they relied on after a winter’s hibernating. And if the mothers couldn’t feed, their babies starved, and that was that.

The last wild bear of all, it was commonly agreed, was a wretched starveling cub, stained yellow by the urine of its dead mother. And since the zoos had long been abandoned as expensive luxuries, the last in the wild was likely the last in the whole world, and the bears would join the elephants and the tigers and many, many more species in their final refuge in gene banks and zygote arks.

What wasn’t clear from the Toodlepip footage was whether the cub died of natural causes, or whether it had been shot by the Inuit hunter who had guided the camera team to this remote spot in the Canadian Arctic in the first place. Even that was a story, the last Inuit bringing down the last bear. There was so much chatter about the event that it broke into international news summaries.

June 2035

The AxysCorp chopper descended from a turbulent sky. There was a pad ready for it on the Nazca raft, marked out by bright yellow paint on a cluttered surface that heaved and swelled gently. The bird set down gingerly. Lily, watching from the raft, knew that the company pilots disliked having to bring their birds down on the town rafts, and you could see that reluctance in their flying.

As soon as the engine died and the rotor blades slowed, Juan Villegas clambered down and ducked under the slowing blades, hauling a crate out after him. The pilot, insectile behind his sunglasses, stayed in the safety of the gleaming bubble of his cockpit; he didn’t even release his harness. Lily ran in, head down, and took hold of the crate with Juan. Villegas stumbled on the heaving surface. The crate wasn’t heavy, but it was bulky and awkward. Together they made their way to the edge of the helipad, two elderly people hauling luggage, Lily thought, over this rough, swelling surface of plastic tarps.