Stephen Baxter - Flood

But Grace looked at him blankly.

And Domingo couldn’t care less about global ocean currents. He grumbled, “I hope they take the girls and leave the Diet Cokes. I myself like Diet Coke, and don’t want it all given away! Is it a sin to wish for that?”

They climbed back toward the line of trees, and the relative cool of the forest.

Later on the day of Lily’s last visit to the Nazca raft, Nathan Lammockson held what he called an “equator-crossing party” at Chosica, in a lounge of his still-unfinished ship. Lily was drained after the jaunt to Nazca. But it wasn’t the sort of event you could get out of, if you were as close to Nathan as she was.

Nathan played host beneath a huge animated wall-map of the world, which showed the rising sea and the continents drowning, over and over. Lily, as smart in a trouser suit as she was capable of getting, stood uncomfortably with a glass of fruit punch in her hand. Juan Villegas looked the part in a dapper lounge suit, as did Amanda at his side. Slim and elegant in her brittle way, Amanda was still beautiful in her mid-fifties. Age suited her, in fact, Lily sometimes thought; she looked good with the wrinkles in her brow, the lines that framed her eyes, the stretched flesh at her neck, even if she did color her hair.

Nathan had a string quartet playing soothing classical pieces. The players had been filtered out of the refugee streams, their skills detected and tested for by Nathan’s efficient personnel department. You could find any skill you wanted in the crowds washing up from the lowlands, if you were patient.

And through the unglazed portholes that lined this unfinished lounge you could glimpse Chosica and its sprawling shantytown of workers, a grim contrast to the glittering atmosphere aboard the ship. Lily was all too aware about the muttering over Nathan’s grandiose folly. In the 1930s the original Queen Mary had absorbed the industrial output of sixty British towns, and was built in a shipyard with decades’ experience. Nathan had had to build not just his ship but the shipbuilding industry around it too, and he had sucked Peru’s technological resources dry to do it.

Given the atmosphere, it really wasn’t much of a party.

Lily plucked up the courage to say something about this to Nathan. “We’re so tired, Nathan. Dog-tired. The endless pressure of events, you know?”

“It is kind of relentless, isn’t it?” He took a healthy slug of his drink, a mash whiskey with water. “But, hell, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a good time. That’s why I call these landmark parties. Every time we have something to celebrate, let’s roll out the barrel.”

She had to smile; just for a moment he sounded like the archetypal Londoner. Rowl aht the barrull. “Yes, but Nathan, I don’t even understand what landmark we’re celebrating here. ‘Crossing the equator?’ What equator?”

He grinned. “I’ll announce it later, but since it’s you… According to the boffins, today’s the very day the sea rises past eight hundred meters above the old datum. Now, you know as well as I do that that kind of data is always iffy. I mean, the measurement of the rise itself is getting patchier as those radar satellites fall out of the sky, and altitude measurement was always shit besides. You’ve been to Nazca today, which is just going under and isn’t that supposed to have been six hundred meters up?… However. The brainiacs say it’s eight hundred meters today, and so it’s eight hundred. Now you see why it’s an equator to cross?”

She nodded. “Because eight hundred meters is the fifty percent mark.”

“Right. Today is the day we lost fifty percent of the world’s old land surface. Of course the percentage of useful surface lost is a lot higher; we still got Greenland and old Antarctica, ice deserts poking uselessly above the waves, and all the mountain ranges… Still, fifty percent. And about five-sixths of the human population displaced or dead. What a mess. Cheers.” He drank more whiskey.

“You can be a cold-hearted bastard, Nathan.”

“You think? Maybe I’m just getting tired too. I mean, look at that fucking map.” He snapped his fingers.

The big wall display froze at a projected eight hundred meters. The map was mostly blue, with the shapes of the old continents showing in a paler tint-new continental shelf, carpeted with drowned river valleys and deserts, forests and cities. The Andes were an eerie tracery down the western shore of South America.

Nathan said, “Look what’s left. In North America the Rockies states are surviving, from New Mexico up through Colorado, Utah, Oregon. In Africa you have that big slicing from southwest to northeast, sparing South Africa and the eastern nations, through Tanzania and Kenya up to Ethiopia. In Asia you have the Himalayas, Mongolia, the Stans, just a pit of warfare, chewing up lives like a meat grinder. Aside from that nothing save for scattered mountaintops and bits of high ground in Britain, Australia, India, Indonesia. Europe’s gone outside the Alps, pretty much. Russia gone, even the Urals.”

“Mountaintops and bits of high ground,” Lily repeated.

“We still get messages. Beacons from the high places. Hell, I never heard of most of these places before they started transmitting to each other over the world ocean.” He glanced at her.“Something I have to tell you. The highest city in Spain is called Avila. And guess what?”

“Tell me.”

“We got a message from there. When Madrid was evacuated the Spanish government collapsed, and there was a final power struggle. And the faction that came out on top was-the Fathers of the Elect.”

“You’re kidding.”

He shook his head. “They’ve been asking for help. They heard I’ve been sheltering you and the others. Maybe they thought that was enough of a connection.” He laughed. “They’ve asked for your forgiveness, you and Piers and the rest.”

She was astonished. “What do they want?”

He shrugged. “The usual. A place on the high ground. I doubt if we could help anyhow. But it’s your baby. What would you say?”

She considered. “They kept me in a hole in the ground for years. They killed one of my friends, they raped another, and they left us for dead. Fuck ’em.”

“Fuck ’em.” He raised a glass and drank to that. He looked at the map once more. “There’s still a ways to go before we run out of land. Lhasa in Tibet is four kilometers up. La Paz is just as high… I think we’re seeing an end game to the wars, though. In each of the main surviving highland zones, the Americas, Africa, the Himalayas, you’ll soon see control established in the hands of a few strong governments, or individuals. There’ll be order, of a sort. And maybe a bottoming-out in the deaths. We’re nearing the final end of the corporate feeding frenzy too. Things have broken down too far for that to be sustained any longer. The survivors among the rich will be those who were smart enough to have converted their wealth to power and security by now.

“There are some who say, you know, that this global collapse is a good thing. Or at least it will look that way in the long run. Maybe our civilization was over-complicated, like a mature forest, with every scrap of land occupied, every convertible bit of matter turned into biomass, the trees, worms, beetles all locked into a complex web of dependencies, everything living off everything else. Maximum efficiency but minimum resilience. So then when the shock comes, the fire or the earthquake or the drought, the die-back is huge. But what survives is stronger, more adaptable, robust.”

“Hm. I’m not sure it’s a good analogy, Nathan. Anyhow I can’t imagine you embracing any die-back. I bet you’re thinking ahead. You’re always thinking ahead.”