Stephen Baxter - Flood

Lily had her own subplots to deal with, meanwhile.

A day came when Grace refused to eat. Lily was twisted with guilt. She’d told Grace how she’d used hunger strikes against the Fathers of the Elect, in her Barcelona dungeons. She herself had put the idea into Grace’s head. Now here was Grace, held hostage in another floating cell, under pressure from Nathan, doing exactly that.

But Nathan wasn’t about to be beaten by a mere suicide threat. He threatened to have his doctors force-feed Grace, if that was what it would take to keep her alive. Lily spent a lot of time with Grace, trying to find a way through this mess, a way to have her come down of her own accord.

The sea-level rise topped a kilometer, another ghastly and unwelcome landmark. There were surges and lulls, but it still showed no signs of slowing from Thandie’s doubling-every-five-years exponential increase. Nobody talked about this hard fact, however.

The Ark sailed south over Istanbul and the Sea of Marmara, and through the Dardanelles to the Aegean. From there she passed over Suez and along the course of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.

Then she turned northeast to cross India, following the river valleys, heading for the frontier with Nepal. Much of India was deeply submerged, but nowhere was free of detritus, the slicks of oil, the islands of indestructible plastic garbage slowly spinning in the torpid currents, and the bodies, bloated and naked, that floated up like balloons from the rotting ruins below. Billions had once lived here; billions must have died.

Lily found it a great relief when land was sighted on the northern horizon, the foothills of the Himalayas, their summits brown and jagged. They had reached Nepal.

Landing craft from the Ark took ashore one of the ship’s hydrogen-fueled armored trucks, and Lily was driven in toward Kathmandu with Nathan, Piers and a few AxysCorp goons. Villegas was left in executive command of the ship.

They drove along tight, winding roads that climbed into green-clad hills. In small, crowded villages, people watched apathetically as they passed. Every so often the view would open up, and Lily glimpsed the higher peaks to the north. But these summits did not gleam white as they used to in picture postcards; now the brown streak of bare rock scarred the mountains’ faces all the way to their peaks.

Before they got to Kathmandu they were stopped at a military perimeter. Serious-looking hardware peered down at them from watch towers. A polite young man in an orange tunic introduced himself. He was a representative of Prasad Deuba, Nathan’s contact here. He apologized for the inconvenience of the security. Tense negotiations ensued, led by Piers.

Lily stayed in the truck and kept out of it. The Nepalese guards stared in at her, their faces hard, blank. Their drill looked competent, the way they held their weapons assured. Lily recalled that the Gurkhas, a main-stay of the British army for decades, had come from Nepal. Evidently the training and tradition had rubbed off. But some of these young men bore facial scars that looked like radiation burns.

In the end a deal was done. The AxysCorp troopers were not made to give up their weapons, but they had to proceed under armed guard. So they drove on, with silent Gurkha-type troops sitting composed in the rear of the truck, their own weapons cradled in their uniformed arms, and they were tailed by a couple of Nepalese army jeeps.

Kathmandu, when they reached it, astonished Lily. It was a sprawling city that had once hosted a million souls, and might still do so now-a major conurbation that had been more than fourteen hundred meters above sea level. And on the skyline the profile of the higher mountains loomed, still the highest in the world. Deuba’s polite young man acted like a tourist guide now, and pointed out memorable sights. Streets that ran between delicate pagodas were crowded with pedestrians, cyclists and peculiar three-wheeled motor cars. Holy men still lived in their ashram near the great temple complex by the river, and on the opposite bank families still gathered around the greasy smoke of the funeral pyres.

But the place had evidently become astonishingly rich. In among the temples, Hindu and Buddhist, were modern buildings, glass-fronted office blocks and villas, sprawling private residences behind tall automatic gates. The people in the streets, their features delicately Indian, wore expensive-looking clothes. Even the beggars squatting in the road, their hands held out for food as the truck passed, wore fine clothes, if dusty. Some of them even wore jewelry that glinted at their necks.

“But you can’t eat diamonds,” said the young guide.

They passed a residence of the King, guarded by carved stone elephants. A band played in the street.

“Fuck me,” said Nathan. “Bagpipes!”

Prasad Deuba, Nathan’s business contact, welcomed them to his home. It was actually a complex of new buildings, a grand villa at the heart of the old city. Lily thought its fortifications looked more formidable than had the country’s border’s. Deuba fed them tea and cake, British style, and offered them a yak’s-milk liqueur. “Very rare and valuable, now that the Russians have eaten all the yaks!”

“I bet you managed to turn a profit even out of that, Prasad, you old dog,” Nathan said with an admiring growl. He said to his companions, “You’d be lucky to get out of a deal with Prasad with a shirt on your back.”

Deuba smiled, but Lily saw his eyes remained cold. He wasn’t going to be fooled by a little flattery.

Prasad Deuba had clearly been a businessman, in the old days. Aged around sixty, he had the expansive gestures, quick smile and penetrating stare of a salesman. He wore a western-style suit, very well kept, and his hair was gelled flat against his scalp. His accent was smooth, almost British. He had been sent to England for his education.

Nathan made his pitch. By now he was not looking for trading partners, as in the deals he had struck in Switzerland. What he wanted, he said, was sanctuary.

“Look, Prasad, you can see how we’re fixed. Ark Three-you must come and see her, you’d be my honored guest, we put on a hell of a dinner in the restaurant-”

Deuba inclined his head. “It would be my pleasure.”

“She’s a fine ship, and she might last years, decades. But maybe not forever. We need shore support. I accept that.” He waved a hand at Deuba’s villa, the reception room they sat in, expensively furnished, servants standing silently in the corners. “And I can’t think of a better place than this, a better partner than you. What I need from you is a liaison with your government, those Maoists who run your country now. We have a lot to offer.” He began running through the Ark’s assets, the nuke plant, the pioneering OTEC and manufacturing gear: the ship was a floating city full of the latest technological sophistication.“And then there are the people, my engineers and doctors and craftsmen and sailors-”

Deuba held up his hand.“My question is simple. It is the only datum the government would ask of you. How many are you?”

Piers said evenly, “Three thousand. That includes a non-productive percentage, the elderly, the very young, the disabled, the ill. I can give you precise figures.”

Deuba nodded. “ Three thousand,” he said mournfully. “You have seen our ever-changing shoreline, where the rafts of the dispossessed cluster like seaweed.”

“The Ark is no raft,” Nathan said, irritation growing.

But Deuba spoke to them of what had become of his country. “Nathan, you must understand our situation.

“It started even before most of us knew of the existence of the flood: a slow trickle of refugees coming across the border from India. Not that we would have called them refugees then. They were rich people, coming from India’s coastal cities, and they had access to the best science data and predictions. They knew what was coming. They sought to escape the regional wars and the disruption of the flooding in the short term, and to preserve their own comfortable lives in the longer term. They came here with money, intent on buying property and land in our higher provinces. Those who sold them land quickly grew rich too. I admit I saw the straws in the wind earlier than most. I bought up a good deal of land for a pittance, before selling it on to rich Indians for a healthy profit. The result was a last explosion of twenty-first-century affluence, a building spree in this city. A country that had been one of the poorest in the world actually became, for a brief interval, one of the richest, per capita. All because of its altitude. I myself used my wealth to buy and reinforce this place, my fortress.”