Stephen Baxter - Flood

And before this backdrop the Ark floated on the water like a toy, gleaming in the brilliant clear sunlight. The ship looked at her best today, with those stacked decks and the bright paintwork of the funnels reflected in the water. With typical showmanship Nathan had had the superstructure draped with fluttering flags. It was at moments like this that Lily glimpsed the insane genius of Nathan’s vision. In this drowned-out world from which so many of mankind’s achievements had been erased, the Ark looked like a visitor from another age, not an ocean-going ship but a time machine.

Piers was the de facto leader of the shore party. But Nathan put his son Hammond into a suit and tie and sent him along too. This was part of Nathan’s slow wooing-back of his estranged son, after the betrayal and humiliation of a year ago. Lily thought that Hammond was coming to an accommodation with his father. But a grain of bitterness was lodged in Hammond for good, like a bit of seed between his teeth.

She was more disturbed by Nathan’s order, on this trip, that Grace should accompany Hammond.

Nathan clearly wanted Hammond to take a woman, to start a family. It was entirely self-interest. Nathan thought a suitable relationship would domesticate Hammond, as well as providing a conduit for Nathan’s genes to pass to the future. Hammond had rejected the candidates Nathan had produced so far. But since the beginning of the voyage, Nathan had had his eye on Grace Gray. She did have Saudi royal blood. And maybe it was a way, for him, of uniting two of his pet projects, his son and the loose family of former hostages he had been sheltering for two decades. And Hammond, Lily could see, didn’t mind the idea of having Grace at all.

But Grace wanted nothing to do with Hammond. She had emerged from her peculiar life in Walker City reclusive, withdrawn, and, Lily thought, almost certainly a virgin. When she was forced to be with Hammond, earthy and grasping, she retreated even further into herself.

Lily didn’t like to oppose Nathan, or even Hammond. But she felt a duty of care to Grace. She tried to talk about this to Piers. He was much more of a politician than Lily would ever be, and would say only that things were “complicated.”

She couldn’t see what harm Grace could come to on this trip, however, as she and Hammond were going to be out in public the whole time they were together. She returned to the ship and got on with her own job, her concern about Grace niggling quietly at the back of her mind.

Then, twenty-four hours after he had gone ashore, Piers called her. Grace had done a runner, and disappeared into New Geneva. “Lily, it sounds as if she’s been waiting for the chance to get away from Hammond. The trouble is, if the Swiss find her before we do they’ll throw her in the lake. They have very tough laws about refugees.”

“I’ll be there,” Lily said, and she folded up the phone. “Shit, shit.”

Grace was found quickly by the Swiss, and handed over to the Ark crew.

They spent months on the extended Lake Geneva, trading, training, refurbishing the ship. Throughout that time Grace was restricted to the Ark, and watched by AxysCorp guards, and Lily remembered Barcelona.

June 2037

From Geneva, the Ark cautiously crossed to the head of the Danube at Donaueschingen. From here the navigators guided the ship east along the track of the drowned river valley through southern Germany and Austria, crossing the sites of Ulm, Regensburg, Linz and Vienna. Each city was marked by the usual scum of garbage and bloated corpses, and by a cluster of starveling raft communities who competed with the seagulls for scraps. It was a sorry end for Europe, Lily thought. Nathan gradually tightened security on the ship. He ordered that the city sites be given a wide berth, and he set up a twenty-four-hour armed patrol of the promenade deck. Any boat parties sent to the high ground went heavily armed. The mood aboard became tense, fearful, fretful.

It was a relief when the Ark crossed the site of Budapest, and ran south over the lower ground of the Hungarian plain. The cities here, deeply drowned, left no sign of their existence on the surface of the placid sea. Beyond Belgrade the Ark had to pass through a relatively narrow valley where the Danube traced the Romanian border. Communities of some kind survived in the Carpathians to the north, as you could see from rising threads of smoke, but there was no response to Nathan’s radio hails.

By now, nearly two years after leaving Chosica, the ship was accumulating problems. The OTEC, the aquaculture experiments, even the sea-concrete plants proved cumbersome and problematic, and the ship’s limited factories could never keep up with the demand for spare parts. Without the spares they had picked up in Switzerland many systems would already have failed, Lily judged. Even so the ship’s systems had had to be cannibalized, internal partitions ripped out for repairs to the hull and the major bulkheads. The ship started to have a shabby, decaying look.

The Ark came through a broad valley in what had been Walachia, and sailed beyond the scummy patch of debris that marked the site of Bucharest. Once they had passed the old coast of the Black Sea, Nathan had the ship anchor, and launched a review of every aspect of the ship’s operations.

During the refit the onboard debate about the ship’s future intensified. The big main restaurant was used for weekly “parliaments,” as Nathan called them, where anybody could raise any issue they were concerned about. At these sessions Juan Villegas was the most senior of those who challenged Nathan’s unmodified fundamentalist vision of the future.

“Let us be realistic, Nathan,” Villegas said. “Our needs are elemental. Fresh, land-grown vegetables. Seeds if we can obtain them. Topsoil, even. Basic supplies of all kinds. And whatever we can get to refurbish the ship.”

“No. You know my philosophy, Juan,” Nathan said.“If we go back to sucking on the teat of the land the first chance we get, we’ll never wean ourselves off it. What we need is people. Engineers, biologists, doctors. Visionaries to drive forward the great project of independence.”

“We can’t eat vision! Dreams don’t float! And we do not need more people. We need the precise opposite. We need less. We must find ways to offload crew. You have seen the figures, the way our basic supply is not keeping up with our internal demand…” He produced a twenty-year-old handheld and began scrolling through tables. But Nathan wouldn’t focus on the results. Villegas grew steadily angrier.

In their time at sea, once he had got over his own shock at the events surrounding the abandonment of Project City, Villegas had grown in seniority among the barons around Nathan. Lily wondered if in some way his relationship with Amanda had actually been holding him back in Project City. Now Lily saw the insight and decisiveness that must have made Villegas his preflood fortune in the first place.

But at the same time his view of the ship and its crew, their mission and their needs, was diverging from Nathan’s. Villegas wanted the voyage to end as soon as possible, before some terminal accident befell them, as surely it eventually would. Nathan wanted it never to end at all. As time went on their differences were becoming overwhelming. Villegas and Nathan were like two dinosaurs, Lily thought, the last of their kind confronting each other. After one of these parliamentary sessions turned into a near-riot, Nathan had his loyal AxysCorp cops man the stage with him, their sidearms visible.

It was typical of Nathan that in his heart of hearts he was developing a compromise. Lily, still in his inner circle if only because of Grace, detected this shift in small hints, the tone of his conversation, subtexts of briefings he asked to be prepared. He was not about to give up on his dream of a floating city, but he was starting to accept that in the short term at least he was going to need support from the shore. But it was also typical of Nathan that he shared none of this evolution in his thinking with his most senior officer and most significant challenger, Juan Villegas.