Stephen Baxter - Flood

“You were wise.”

“Yes. Because then the trickle became a stream, as those of lesser means came pouring in. The middle classes, I suppose you would say, of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. They too handed over their wealth for a place in this scrap of a country of ours. Many more grew rich, at least in paper and credit and gold, but gave up their most precious possession, in return, their own land.

“And still they kept coming, refugees from the Indian plains, millions on the move now, the poor, the dispossessed, the desperate, swarming through the drowning provinces of Utar and Pranesh and Bihar. We accepted some, we set up refugee camps. We were rich, we were humanitarian. But every effort was overwhelmed by the sheer masses on the move. The government tried to seal the border, but it is long and difficult to police. So in the end corridors were established.”

“Corridors?” Piers asked.

“We granted the refugees safe passage through Nepal to the higher ground, the crossing points to Tibet. We Nepali have always been a trade junction between India and Tibet.”

Piers frowned. “What then? What became of the refugees?”

“Ah-” Deuba spread his hands and smiled. “That is the responsibility of the properly constituted government in Tibet.”

It was hard for Lily to dispel his manner, his patter, and think through the implications of what he was saying. “It must have gone on for years. Whole Indian provinces draining through your country. It must have taken its toll.”

“Oh, yes,” Deuba said easily. “It began with food riots-all those people had to be fed while on our soil-we actually had a revolution. Perhaps you heard of it. Our Maoist insurgents, who for decades had been a troublesome presence in the hill country, managed to leverage the popular unrest to overthrow the government. Now we are treated to lengthy lectures on the philosophy of the great leader,” he said urbanely. “But little else has changed. The Maoists retained the old civil servants and junior ministers, and ride around in their government limousines. They even kept the monarchy, the symbol of the nation. But the Maoists have been able to maintain a productive dialogue with their counterparts over the Tibetan border, with whom they share an ideology, of sorts.

“And of course, in the end, the flow of refugees from India dried up, though we still get a few stragglers by one route or another.”

“Like us,” Piers said grimly.

“Indeed. My friend Nathan, we have done good business in the past. But I have to tell you I cannot help you now. I know exactly what the government’s response will be. They will not turn you away out of hand, but will set a quota. Three hundred, say, ten percent. The most skilled of your doctors and engineers and so forth. They can stay, they will be welcomed on shore. No children, however; we have enough of them. The rest must sail away.”

Nathan was angry now. “You’d cherry-pick my crew and tell me to fuck off? What kind of deal is that?”

Deuba shook his head sadly. “Not my terms, my friend. My government’s. Our country is full!”

Nathan reined in his temper. “Come on, Prasad. I know you better than that. Is this just some hard-ball game you’re playing here? Because if there’s anything you need-”

Deuba adopted a look almost of pity. “Look around you, Nathan. What do you have that I could possibly want?”

Nathan stood up. “All right. Then what about passage through the country to the Tibetan border?”

“I can certainly arrange that for you.”

“For a price?”

“A toll. Not a ruinous one. The journey will mostly be by foot, I am afraid. I can of course hire porters and so forth. We are not short of casual laborers! But you will need to go on ahead and arrange your own passage through the border itself.”

Lily touched his arm. “Nathan, is that really a good idea?”

“It’s an option,” Nathan said, visibly trying to calm himself. “Maybe we can do business with the Chinese if not with this lot.”

Deuba made placatory gestures. “Actually the Tibetan government is no longer Chinese, strictly speaking… It will take twenty-four hours to organize the journey. Please, accept my hospitality in the meantime. For friendship’s sake.”

Nathan glared. Then he softened, subtly. “The hell with it. All right. I need a shit, shower and shave anyhow. But look, Prasad, I still haven’t taken no for an answer. We are decent, resourceful, law-abiding people who would be an asset to your country.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Deuba said smoothly, “and if only it were in my power to make it so. In the meantime-come. I’ll show you to your rooms.”

Piers and Lily stood, uncertain. Lily felt humiliated by this out-of-hand rejection. Humiliated and scared.

They followed Deuba out of the reception room, shadowed by flunkies.

Before they set off the next morning Nathan came around his group, checking they had been taking the anti-radiation pills doled out by the Ark’s pharmacy. It wasn’t a cheery way to be woken up, Lily thought.

Another of Prasad Deuba’s bright young men, looking Chinese by extraction, was assigned to lead them to the Tibetan border. For the first few hours they drove. Then, all too soon for Lily, they ran out of road, and the party set off on foot, the three of them from the Ark, a few AxysCorp guards, Deuba’s guide, and a handful of sherpas carrying their luggage, wiry young men who carried huge bamboo baskets using straps across their foreheads.

The hike was a steady climb, hour after hour, broken only by dips into green valleys, descents which always ended, frustratingly, in yet more climbing. Lily had tried to keep herself in shape on the boat, with her daily kilometers with Piers on the promenade deck and hours on the weight machines and treadmills in the gyms. But it only took half a day of this trudging climb to expose the limits of that fitness, to make her legs and back and lungs ache-to remind her that she was, after all, sixty-one years old. Nathan, now sixty-seven, was the slowest of the group and couldn’t even carry his own backpack. But sheer stubbornness wasn’t about to allow him to give up.

Always ahead of them, floating beyond the horizon like a dream, were the gleaming Himalayan peaks.

Lily’s sherpa was called Jang Bahadur. Aged about thirty, he was handsome, strong-looking, apparently content. He wore a white scarf around his neck, and effortlessly carried a tremendous basket full of goods, clothing, tent equipment, food. “I used to be a lawyer,” he said. “I specialized in patent law. Now I can carry forty kilograms for twelve hours at a stretch. My professors would never believe it!” His accent was some strong Indian dialect Lily didn’t recognize.

“I keep expecting to get altitude sickness,” Lily said.

Jang shook his head.“Unlikely nowadays, unless you climb the mountains themselves. Effectively we have lost a kilometer of altitude, thanks to the flood, and the atmosphere has been pushed upward. So, you see, while Kathmandu was once fourteen hundred meters above the sea, now it is only four hundred meters-nothing.

“It isn’t altitude sickness that causes us difficulty, in fact, but lowland sickness. The older generation, my own parents for instance. When they came down to the sea they always found the air too thick, too rich for their blood, like altitude sickness in reverse. My mother always said she could never sleep while air like a suffocating blanket pressed down on her face. You could acclimatize, but it took time. Now it is like this even in my parents’ home, the air thick everywhere.”

“Not everybody can adapt.”

He shrugged. “The old ones die. My parents died. And it is true in the natural world.” He pointed at the mountains on the skyline. “As the sea ascends, so it drives zones of life ahead of it, up into the higher altitudes, until at last they are forced off the very summits of the mountains and, with nowhere else to go, must vanish. It is a peculiar mass extinction we are witnessing, a montane catastrophe.”