Stephen Baxter - Flood

“Wasn’t expecting you,” Lily said, recovering. “So what’s up? Manco all right?”

Kristie pulled a face.“Little bugger’s a pest this hour of the morning.” Occasionally, mostly when she swore, Kristie’s London roots showed through the vaguely transatlantic veneer she had picked up. “He’s in the jungle gym. It’s better when we’re not underway, and he can go swimming. But I have to wear him out before I can deliver him to school with a clear conscience… Lily, I came to find you. I thought you’d like to know.”

“What?”

“It was on the ship’s news. The Scafell Pike beacon was lost overnight.”

“Oh.” Scafell Pike in Cumbria was, had been, the highest point in England. “The Welsh mountains, the Scottish Highlands must still survive.”

“Yes, and full of bandits, according to the news. Britain’s still there. But England’s gone, every scrap of it. It’s astonishing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. And we were there at the beginning for England.”

Kristie smiled. “When you had to come and save us from Greenwich.”

“Well, you’d done pretty well yourselves. And now here we are at the end.”

“We went to Cumbria a few times, the Lakes, Mum took us.”

“I remember the postcards.”

“But we never climbed Scafell Pike.”

“Climbing wasn’t your mum’s thing, was it?”

“ ‘What, in these heels?’ ”

Lily laughed. Suddenly she longed to hug her niece, this damaged thirty-one-year old, an abrupt, powerful impulse. But she knew she mustn’t, this contact must be enough for now.

The problem between them was Piers. Just as her mother had never been able to forgive him for the death of Benj, so Kristie had never forgiven him for killing Ollantay. Lily had tried to talk her down out of that, but Kristie knew how much satisfaction Piers had got from gunning down his rival. She had seen it in his face, in his eyes, as he pulled the trigger. She had even come to blame Piers, it seemed, for the death of her mother.

In any other age Kristie could have got away from Piers, simply moved out. But they were stuck on a boat that felt very small if you shared it with somebody you hated. In that way, Lily thought, the Ark was like a scale model of the whole reduced world.

“Well, so much for England,” Kristie said. “Time for work.” She allowed Lily to kiss her cheek. Then they broke to begin their day. Lily headed to her cabin to change, and Kristie made for the ballroom, where the day’s batch of dead crustaceans was already being prepared for processing.

April 2036

With great caution, the Ark approached the coastline of Europe.

Nathan’s purpose was to reach Switzerland, where he hoped to establish trading relations with the nearest thing to a functioning national government left in western Europe. Then he wanted to pass on east to the high ground of central Asia. His destination there was Nepal: the gateway to the Tibetan plateau, a place he believed he could do good business. “It’s the most extensive upland in the world,” he declared. “And the pivot of the future for mankind. That’s why we’ve got to be there.” But the news out of the region had been fragmentary since reports of a disastrous three-way war between China, Russia and India over the precious high land-a war that was rumored to have gone nuclear before it was done. A number of the crew were concerned about what they would find, if they ever got there. But that was far in the future.

The ship passed from the ocean into the Westerschelde estuary. Sonar and radar tracked the drowned landscape passing beneath the prow, and the inboard TV system relayed heavily processed images to Lily’s cabin, a ghostly carpet of houses and roads and rail tracks. This was Holland, its dykes and canals finally overwhelmed after centuries of defiance, all slowly sinking beneath a layer of ooze. The flood was now so deep, in fact, that the submerged landscape was starved of sunlight by the column of water above it. If you had stood in the submerged streets of Antwerp or Arnhem you could not have seen the Ark’s hull pass overhead, like a lenticular cloud.

But on the ship, you always knew when you were over what had been dry land. Birds fell on the ship in flocks, finches and starlings and crows, land birds deprived of their roosting territories. The children earned extra food rations by going up to the sports deck and knocking the birds away with brooms. And a thin scum of oil and rubbish coated the waters, still seeping up from the wrecked cities below. Much of it was plastic, brightly colored and as indestructible as the day it was manufactured, or masses of rotting cardboard or gray food scraps. Seagulls came out of nowhere to descend on this stuff. And occasionally you saw darker, lumpier shapes, bloated remains released from the unintended tombs below, swimming up to float among the purposeless garbage.

Manco and the other children were forever badgering to be allowed to go swim among these intriguing floating treasures. To them, born a decade or more after the flood had begun, such things as aluminum soda cans and plastic microwave-meal formers were exotic marvels. Of course it wouldn’t have been safe, even if the ship were not underway.

The Ark passed southeast, crossing the German border. Wherever possible the Ark would follow the courses of the river valleys, still incised into the drowned landscape, and every so often the ship stopped to allow a manual sounding, made by the ancient expedient of lowering a cable. Nathan always ordered extreme caution in navigation, and didn’t trust electronic systems alone.

On the animated maps the passengers were able to count off the cities over which they were cruising: Duisburg, Dusseldorf, Cologne. By the time they reached the vicinity of Bonn they were floating over the higher ground through which the Rhine valley was incised. The navigator stuck rigidly to the center line of the valley. Now, to east and west, scraps of high ground protruded above the waves, hilltops reduced to low islands. Lily saw remnants of the urban landscape of once-crowded western Europe, houses coating the islands like coral, factories and power stations, pylons and phone masts, occasionally the glitter of a modern development like a shopping mall. Nathan’s bridge crew looked out with telescopes and binoculars, and sometimes sent a boat party to explore. And the ship sounded her mournful whistle, the deep bass note rolling across the sea without echo. There was never any reply, but birds would fly up from the islands in great clouds.

At last Ark Three sailed into the heart of Switzerland.

The Ark came to anchor somewhere over the flooded remains of Geneva. The northwest of the country was now dominated by a salt-water merger of the old Lake Neuchatel and Lake Geneva, itself just another bay of the hugely extended North Sea.

A shore party was to be taken to meet federal and canton government agencies in a mountainside community called New Geneva. Set well above the waterline, this was a temporary site, tents and houses of clapboard and corrugated iron, but nevertheless was a functioning city. The Swiss were in a position to deal with Nathan and his offers of trade. Some of the cantons in the mountainous regions had not been directly touched by the flooding at all, and the Swiss had quickly organized themselves to keep at bay the waves of hungry refugees who had come flooding from the lowlands of Germany, France and Italy. Nathan intended that the Swiss should be treated as valuable long-term trading partners. He even intended to put forward a proposal for the Ark to do some deep-sea mining on the Swiss’s behalf.

Lily wasn’t in the official party, but she did get the chance to go ashore briefly. After eight months at sea it felt very odd to stand on land, not to feel the world swaying under your feet. The lake was a mirror, deep blue, surrounded by mountains that stretched into the distance, still sharp and vivid, even if they had lost much of the snow that had once coated their lower slopes. If you hadn’t known Switzerland before, Lily reflected, you’d never know that anything was wrong in this scene, that anything had changed, that beneath the waters of this brilliant lake whole cities lay rotting.