Stephen Baxter - Flood

They went back to the staircase well and descended further, hurrying down through the main deck, and decks A and B-the lower decks went down to G before you got to the machinery rooms, holds and stores in the belly of the ship. They paused on C deck, and Piers brought her to the restaurant, a tremendous room with a dome set in a towering ceiling. It was divided by columns into a nave and side aisles, like a church. One wall was dominated by a huge decorative map of the Atlantic. But a side door opened to reveal a glimpse of a shabby, stuffy-looking kitchen, and a Quechua girl hurried through laden with a sack of rice.

“This was once the largest public enclosed space afloat,” Piers said. “Large enough on its own to have held all three of Columbus’s pioneering transatlantic ships. Imagine that! There’s a swimming pool on D deck below. And a Turkish bath, next to the hospital-”

“Enough, Piers. Jesus!”

“The use of the ship is certain to evolve. We have time to work it out. The ship herself will be rebuilt as we sail. We have facilities to handle that too.”

“Rebuilt? What about raw materials?”

He smiled.“You’ll see. One of Nathan’s surprises. Our position is clear, however you feel about it.” He raised his hands.“This is our world-this ship, the sea she sails on and the air, and whatever we can extract from those resources, this is all we have. And in such a closed world there are rules to be obeyed, if we are to survive.”

“Control our population growth, for instance.”

“Well, quite. And now we can begin the job of defining those rules.” “You’re going to enjoy that, aren’t you? Working out how people should live.”

“Somebody has to take the lead,” he murmured.

Studying him, she saw again the paradox in him. He was the one who had arguably coped worst with Barcelona. Now here he was nineteen years later, aged fifty-nine, actually relishing a new confinement. It was like a neurotic wish-fulfillment, Lily thought, the captive returning to his cage, this time as captor.

“You know, this ship is everything I thought it would be. Insane. A grandiose folly. This is why I stayed away from Nathan’s mad project all these years.”

“Wait until you hear what Nathan has to say about it himself,” he replied mildly. “And wait until the fitting-out is finished. I think you’ll be impressed.” He glanced at his watch.“Come on. We don’t want to be late for the boss’s party.”

Nathan’s maiden-voyage party was held on an open area at one end of the sun deck, where a big helipad H had been painted. Waiters circulated, doling out glasses of champagne. Lily took one and sipped. She was no fan of champagne, but it was a novelty nowadays to say the least. Something in the fizz, the alcohol, seemed to ease her lingering hangover from the mini-bar gin. From here Lily was able to look back at the ship, at its rising stepped decks and that row of ornate funnels. It was like a mixture of an aging hotel and a half-finished shopping mall. It was hard to believe she was really here, floating away on this thing, and that she was perhaps doomed to spend the months and years of the rest of her life on this ship.

The party was small, restricted to Nathan’s closest companions. So here were Lily and Piers, and his closest aides like Juan Villegas. Villegas wore black today; his partner Amanda had died only yesterday, and he cast a regretful glance at Lily. Her sister could have done a lot worse, Lily thought, not for the first time; Villegas really had cared for Amanda.

Grace Gray stood by Villegas. She wore a trim white dress. She showed no interest in her surroundings. Even when her gaze passed over Lily there was no recognition. Lily felt a stab of anxiety, a premonition of guilt. She had sworn to keep Grace from harm. Was that promise already being violated, just by her having been brought here?

And there was Hammond Lammockson, looking even more uncomfortable. He kept his eyes downcast, his hands bunched in fists. He actually wore a suit, as did his father, and you could see a superficial resemblance between them, but Hammond was stockier, darker. At least he wasn’t cuffed, but two burly-looking AxysCorp guards stood behind him. Lily wondered uneasily what Nathan planned for him today.

Nathan chimed a glass and cleared his throat. “Thanks for coming. Not that you had a choice.” It was one of his characteristically disconcerting sallies aimed at those dependent on him, and there was a nervous murmur in response. “I got to tell you first we’ve had some news, relayed from Denver. We’re not the only ones who have been at war. Jerusalem has gone, drowned. Of course most of it was ruins by now anyway, but yesterday the sea closed over it. So that’s the end of the war of Abraham, and all the wars over Jerusalem I guess, wars going back to the Romans, a war extinguished by the sea as a rising tide puts out a camp fire on a beach.

“That’s the way it’s going to happen now, all over the world. The water level is rising at somewhere over a hundred meters a year. A hundred meters! That’s going to put enormous pressure on human societies. Governments and corporations and cultures will crack and crumble under the strain.

“And that’s why I built this ship,” he said, pacing. “First of all as a refuge. This was always meant to be a place we could live if we ever got kicked out of the Andes. Well, we’ve achieved that so far, haven’t we?

“But I have other objectives. I want to bring hope.” He waved a hand at the deck, the funnels rising above them. “I saw the old Queen Mary as a boy, concreted to her wharf at Long Beach. For all I know she’s still there now, trapped and drowned under the sea. I fell in love with the old girl immediately.”

So that’s it, Lily thought. Nostalgia for a boyhood adventure.

“And that’s why I brought her back now, in this new form. The Queen Mary was the culmination of a shipbuilding tradition in Britain that went back to Brunel and beyond. People were fascinated by her, by her construction, her launch, her feats, the records she set. She was a technological triumph, a moon rocket of her day. And she was beautiful, a marriage of art and engineering, a synthesis we lost somewhere along the way.

“And that’s why I wanted to build a fine ship to sail out of here on, not just some tub, another shabby raft. Every other damn ocean liner has long run out of gas and been turned into a floating refugee center. The Queen Mary represents the pinnacle of her age, the technological civilization that spawned us. Now she’s back, and she’s underway, although I was hoping to wait another year so she could be launched on her centenary, but there you go. And as we sail around the globe I want her to represent hope in the minds of those who see her, an aspiration of civilization presented to all those ratty raft communities on the water and the drowning refugees on the land, hope that beauty like this can be brought back into being someday in the future when this damn flood lets us all go.”

“I’m trying not to laugh,” Lily whispered to Piers.

“You’ve always been skeptical of Nathan’s ambition,” Piers murmured. “Just remember-”

“I’m on his boat. I know, I know.”

And now Nathan came to his final motive for building the boat.

“She’s for my son,” he said, without looking around at Hammond. “For all I know my only surviving relative. The repository of my genes, and my dreams.” Now he turned to Hammond, who glowered back. “I did it all for you, Hammond. It was always for you, you know that. Even when I denied you, or turned from you, or punished you, or spoke to you harshly, it was all for your own good. I spent my life telling you so. You understand that in your heart, don’t you?”