Martin Amis - The Drowned World

Riggs roared at this display of disgruntled humour, then stood up, buttoning his tunic. “Robert, you’re a strange one.”

Kerans finished his drink abruptly. “Look, Colonel, I don’t think I’ll be able to help you this morning after all. Something rather urgent has come up.” He noticed Riggs nodding slowly. “Oh, I see. That was your problem. My problem.”

“Right. I saw her last night, and again this morning after the news came through. You’ll have to convince her, Robert. At present she refuses point-blank to go. She doesn’t realise that this time is the end, that there’ll be no more holding units. She may be able to hang on for another six months, but next March, when the rain belts reach here, we won’t even be able to get a helicopter in. Anyway, by then no one will care. I told her that and she just walked away.”

Kerans smiled bleakly, visualising the familiar swirl of hip and haughty stride. “Beatrice can be difficult sometimes,” he temporised, hoping that she hadn’t offended Riggs. It would probably take more than three days to change her mind and he wanted to be sure that the Colonel would still be waiting. “She’s a complex person, lives on many levels. Until they all synchronise she can behave as if she’s insane.”

They left the suite, Kerans sealing the air-locks and setting the thermostat alarms so that the air would be a pleasant eighty degrees in two hours’ time. They made their way down to the landing-stage, Riggs pausing occasionally to savour the cool gilded air in one of the public drawing-rooms overlooking the lagoon, hissing at the snakes which glided softly among the damp, fungus-covered settees. They stepped into the cutter and Macready slammed the door of the cage behind them.

Five minutes later, the catamaran gliding and swirling behind the cutter, they set off from the hotel across the lagoon. Golden waves glimmered up into the boiling air, and the ring of massive plants around them seemed to dance in the heat gradients like a voodoo jungle.

Riggs peered sombrely through the cage. “Thank God for that signal from Byrd. We should have got out years ago. All this detailed mapping of harbours for use in some hypothetical future is absurd. Even if the solar flares subside it will be ten years before there’s any serious attempt to reoccupy these cities. By then most of the bigger buildings will have been smothered under the silt. It’ll take a couple of divisions to clear the jungle away from this lagoon alone. Bodkin was telling me this morning that already some of the canopies—of non-lignified plants, mark you—are over two hundred feet high. The whole place is nothing but a confounded zoo.”

He took off his peaked cap and rubbed his forehead, then shouted across the mounting roar of the two outboard diesels: “If Beatrice stays here much longer she will be insane. By the way, that reminds me of another reason why we’ve got to get out.” He glanced across at the tall lonely figure of Sergeant Macready at the tiller, staring fixedly at the breaking water, and at the pinched haunted faces of the other men. “Tell me, Doctor, how do you sleep these days?”

Puzzled, Kerans turned to look at the Colonel, wondering whether the question obliquely referred to his relationship with Beatrice Dahl. Riggs watched him with his bright intelligent eyes, baton flexed between his neat hands. “Very soundly,” he replied carefully. “Never better. Why do you ask?”

But Riggs merely nodded and began to shout instructions at Macready.

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