Stephen Baxter - Flood

She glanced at him. “You understand a great deal.”

“For a sherpa?”

“I was going to say, for a lawyer.”

He smiled. “Well, most of my customers don’t particularly want to talk to me. When I walk, I get plenty of time to think.”

That night they slept under stars, in air as crisp and clear as any Lily had ever known.

The next day they reached a picturesque bridge across a deep valley, called the Friendship Bridge, the only remaining crossing point, they were told, between Nepal and Tibet. There was a formal entry barrier here, with a red hammer-and-sickle flag fluttering over a spectacular red and gold frontage. The barrier was manned by a handful of soldiers in brown uniforms. Their faces, in contrast to the essentially Indian features of the Nepali, were flat Mongolian. Nathan’s party and their guides were passed without much fuss, and only a small bribe in Nepali currency. They were made to understand, however, that a tougher scrutiny would follow later.

They spent one more night on the road.

And then, in the middle of another hard day’s walking, they broke out of the green valleys at last, and climbed up onto a flat, ruddy brown, rock-strewn terrain. There were no trees, only clumps of tough grass. Lily remembered spacecraft pictures of the surface of Mars; this place had exactly the same rusted, dust-strewn, wind-eroded look. But when she looked up she saw a range of foothills, lumpy and brown, leading away to a sawtooth row of higher mountains, a celestial beauty on the horizon. It was an astonishing sight. This was the Tibetan plateau. Lily found it hard to believe that she was here, that her own strange journey had propelled her all the way from those basements and cellars in Barcelona to this, the roof of the world.

But the plateau was cut across by a barrier, a Berlin Wall of concrete slabs, barbed wire and machine gun towers. Beyond, Lily saw a splash of communities stranded on this bare high ground, clusters of tents and shacks, a few threads of smoke rising up into the still, clean air.

Jang pulled up his white scarf so it covered his mouth. He glanced at Lily. “Fallout from the bombs,” he said. “My mother always made me wear this.”

“You had a smart mother.”

Nathan, wheezing from the exertion, led his party toward the big, imposing gate set in the fence. The Nepali sherpas were quiet now, even Jang, keeping their eyes averted from the guards who glared down from the gun towers.

Before they got to the gate the party converged with a line of porters coming across the plain, heading for the gate from a different direction. They were laden as heavily as Nathan’s sherpas, with bulging bamboo baskets on their backs. The porters were flanked by armed men, Chinese, like sheepdogs controlling a flock. As they walked, mournful bells clanged.

Jang murmured to Lily, “Once those bells hung around the necks of yaks. When the Russians and Chinese and Indians came here to fight over this place, they ate all the yaks, or killed them with their bombs. Now men and women wear the bells.”

“Are these people slaves?”

Jang shrugged. “What does that word mean? Too many people, too little room, too little food. Those who hold the high ground can do as they will.”

At the gate the column of bearers was passed through, but Nathan’s party was halted. Deuba’s young man spoke to a commander in rapid-fire Chinese, but the guards showed no inclination to raise the barrier.

After maybe half an hour another man came out through the barrier, an older man, a European but dressed in a kind of Mao suit, as Lily thought of it, though cut of good cloth. Aides shadowed him.

“At fucking last,” Nathan muttered. He strode forward confidently. “Harry! Harry Sixsmith, you old dog.” He greeted Sixsmith exactly the same way as he had Prasad Deuba. Lily imagined him having a series of near-identical business relationships with men like these, studded around the planet. “You old dog!”

Harry Sixsmith submitted to a handshake.“Good to see you, Nathan. How long has it been?” His accent was cultured, upper-class British. He was tall, fit-looking, maybe Nathan’s age, but Lily couldn’t read his expression. Certainly he didn’t look too happy to see Nathan.

They began to confer in English, with a Chinese translation for Sixsmith’s aides.

Piers whispered to Lily, “Harry Sixsmith is another business contact of Nathan’s. Once based in Hong Kong, but moved to the mainland after the British handover. An Englishman who made it in China. He and Nathan made a small fortune out of property speculation during the Chinese economic boom. But he’s also said to have worked on government advisory panels concerning crackdowns on dissent.”

“Nice guy. I can’t make out what they’re saying.”

“Perhaps my ears are sharper,” Jang said.“Mr. Lammockson’s friend is insisting that Tibet is not a place you would want to bring your people. He is trying to persuade him of this, even though he personally, Harry Sixsmith, would make a profit from it.”

Piers murmured, “And why would he do that?”

Jang gazed at him blankly. But Piers’s radio phone sounded before he could reply, and Piers walked away, speaking quietly into the mouthpiece.

“Tell me,” Lily said to Jang.

“This was a battle zone,” Jang said. “You know that. A strategic war was fought over this place by Russians and Chinese and Indians, when it became clear how drastic the flood was likely to become. Nuclear weapons were used. Local people, the Nepali and the Tibetans, caught in the middle of a three-way invasion, had to find ways to survive, or be erased. There was huge loss of life.

“In the end a new administration emerged, a hardline Maoist faction, basically Chinese but not attached to the Beijing government. The Maoists are supported by some Russians, Indians, westerners as you can see-even Nepali, their former enemies. Since it won power this administration has conducted campaigns against the people under its control. Cleansings. Campaigns of indoctrination. All on a landscape made barren by altitude and poisoned by radiation.

“Nevertheless the Maoists are able to impose whatever conditions they like on those who would come here. Harry Sixsmith is telling Mr. Lammockson that if he brings the crew of his Ark here, he will be expected to pay a tithe.”

Lily stepped closer to hear for herself. Lammockson was trying to bargain with technology, his advanced manufacturing techniques, his Norwegian seed bank. But Sixsmith said the Maoists cared nothing for seed banks. The tithe would be in drugs, weapons, women. And “underclass.”

Lily asked, “Underclass?”

“There are rumors of still more drastic tithes imposed on the refugees,” Jang said.“This is a poor place, crowded with people. How are they all to be fed?” He looked at her steadily.

“Cannibalism? We’ve heard of this. Desperate communities stranded on high-ground islands-”

“There is no desperation here, not among the rulers. The Maoists have borrowed notions of castes from the Hindus for a theoretical justification. Here the farming of people is systematic.”

Lily stared at Sixsmith.“Jang, why didn’t you tell us any of this before we came here?”

“You did not ask. I am a mere sherpa. In any case you might not have believed it if you did not see it for yourself.”

“But you knew.”

He smiled. “We Nepali imagine the future. The sea-level rise is over a hundred meters a year. Kathmandu is only four hundred meters above the sea now. In four years, or five or six, where am I to go? Perhaps I will be standing here, with my mother’s scarf over my mouth, begging for entry into this ideological Utopia.”

Nathan came away from Harry Sixsmith.“Jesus Christ on a bike,” he said, glowering.