Stephen Baxter - Flood

Hammond glowered back.

“But you betrayed me.” Nathan spoke softly. Everybody on deck was so silent now that every word rang out clearly. “You allied with my enemies, that fool Ollantay. You let them into Project City. Your actions resulted in the smashing up of what it took me twenty years to build. But you know what I have to do? I have to forgive you. Kneel before me, son.”

Hammond didn’t move. Lily saw his hands flexing, his big muscles working.

Nathan nodded to his guards. One of them produced a nightstick and whipped the back of Hammond’s legs. He grunted with the pain, and his legs folded up, spilling him into a clumsy kneeling posture. The guards stepped behind him and grabbed his shoulders, holding him down in the kneel.

“Before you all,” Nathan said, “before my closest friends here, you must purge yourself, son. I have to hear you apologize, in public, in full.” He smiled.“If you come back to me, you will have everything. All I own when I die. A princess to carry on my genes-our genes-through her children.” And here he glanced oddly at Grace. A faint alarm bell rang in Lily’s head.

“But I do have my authority to maintain. If you persist in your betrayal you’re no use to me, and it’s the fishes for you, son.” He glanced out to sea. “So what’s it to be? Love or hate? Life or death?”

Hammond tried to look away, but a guard grabbed his chin and tipped his head up. Father and son locked gazes. It was an extraordinary moment, Lily thought, pure primate drama.

Hammond cracked first. “Very well,” he hissed, his jaw clamped by the guard’s grip.

“What was that?” Nathan gestured for the guard to release his mouth.

“Very well. I apologize. I apologize for my betrayal. You win.”

“Yes, I do, don’t I?” Nathan grinned and stood back.

The guards released Hammond. He slumped forward, rubbing the back of his legs.

Nathan turned. “Now that’s done and we’re a family again, we can get on with our cruise. The cruise of a lifetime, ha!..”

Lily felt rather than heard the engines start up, a deep thrumming that came vibrating through the decks. Glancing at the shore, she saw it begin to slide away, as the Ark pushed itself through the water under its own power. The ship’s whistle sounded, a deep bass note like a whale’s bellow. Birds flew up in a cloud from drowning Chosica.

Nathan raised his glass, and a ripple of applause broke out among his friends.

Hammond got slowly to his feet.

December 2035

From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

The first scrapbook entry Kristie made during the voyage of Ark Three was on Christmas Day 2035, the first Christmas at sea. Until then she hadn’t been able to bear to touch her handheld, not since the death of Ollantay and her mother on that calamitous day in August.

But Nathan made an effort for Christmas, with a big party for the ship’s children in the restaurant, hundreds of them. And then Kristie gave Manco his own little party in their cabin, with seashell-paper streamers and a toy Inca warrior she had made herself, a doll knitted from the vicuna wool of their old clothes. She let Lily see her great-nephew too. Lily brought sweets. Kristie recorded some of this, for Manco’s sake in the future. It seemed churlish not to.

But she caught Lily looking at the handheld, and her old pink backpack that she had brought from London and had later risked her neck to retrieve from under the nose of Wayne in Dartmoor.

The backpack and its contents meant a lot to Kristie in a way she wasn’t comfortable thinking about. Her little bag of souvenirs was a last link to her own deepest past. And she had brought it with her into Cusco, on that fateful August day. Why would she have done that if she hadn’t already sensed, on some deep level, that that day would mean another break with the past? She suspected Lily was mulling over the same ideas.

Kristie wept again that Christmas night, as she hadn’t since August. Wept for Manco and for the loss of Ollantay, wept for the arrogance and foolishness that had killed him, as she had always known it would. And she wept for London, for how far she had come, and how she could never go back.

March 2036

Lily came out to the promenade deck’s walkway. It was seven thirty a.m. The day was overcast, gray, drizzly, but not cold, and the Ark heaved slightly on a steel-gray sea. They were underway; she could feel the screws’ turning in a faint vibration of the deck.

Piers emerged to meet her. He wore a lightweight coverall, the sleeves rolled down. He handed Lily a John Deere baseball cap, once deep blue, now faded to a kind of gray.

She took it reluctantly. “Must I? I never liked hats, my head’s the wrong shape.”

“Precipitation over a millimeter per hour.”

“Piers, we’re under cover, for God’s sake. I can see the rain, but there’s not a breath of wind. We’re dry as bones under here.”

“Ship’s rules. Acid rain. You know the score. Better a hat on your head than a burned scalp. You’re a sourpuss today,” he said with good humor.

She grunted. “It’s just such a lousy day. The whole world is gray. Well, come on, let’s get it over with.” She put the hat on her head.

They took their places side by side. Piers set his watch and off they went, heading anticlockwise on their usual circuit around the hull, their pace not too fast, their running shoes padding over the polished wood of the deck. Naturally it was always Piers who ran the watch, who paced them, who kept control; Lily had long since given up arguing about that.

They passed a couple of walkers, people Lily knew vaguely-after seven months at sea she “vaguely” knew all of the few thousand people in this floating village. Lily and Piers broke their run as they passed the walkers, who nodded and smiled. This was friction-reducing behavior Nathan always encouraged, an excess of politeness that reminded Lily of Japan, another intensely crowded environment.

When they reached the stern Lily saw the ship’s long wake streaming behind, a highway cut across the ocean.

They turned around the stern and headed back up the ship’s starboard side, past the gangways that led to the OTEC energy plant. This was a raft in the water towed alongside the sleek flank of the ship. The OTEC was Lily’s area of work; she had senior responsibility there. Nothing was on fire or sinking, and she was content it could survive another hour without her.

She asked Piers, “Any idea where we are?” She had long lost interest in the details of the Ark’s wanderings.

“The North Sea. We’re steaming south toward the Dutch coast. Then we’re going into Europe. Heading down the Rhine valley, toward Switzerland. There might be some scenery for a change.” He glanced at her. “You’re not the only one who’s a little stir crazy.”

As if to prove the point they passed their starting line. The circuit around the deck was less than half a kilometer, and even at their modest pace they finished it in just a few minutes. Off they went again, completing their minuscule laps.

Piers was panting hard. “Finding this tough today.”

“Maybe it’s the carbon dioxide.”

The unending rise in cee-oh-two levels in the atmosphere was one undeniable consequence of the flood, though there was no climatologist aboard to explain the link. Aside from the warming pulse it caused, acid rain burned the leaves of the plants in the ship’s gardens and little farm, etched away at the solar cell panels, and, sometimes, stung unprotected human flesh.

“The young don’t seem to be bothered by it,” Piers said. “But then the young never are.”

“No. You ever wonder why we do this, you and I, Piers? Running around this stupid track, day after day? We’re such creatures of habit. Christ, we even run the same way, anticlockwise every time.”