Flood

by Stephen Baxter

  The boat seemed cramped to Lily, but was roomy enough for courtesy; as she and Thandie passed the men got out of their way, smiling. Everything was spotlessly clean, brightly lit. And with everybody wearing those same blue coveralls, everybody being about the same age, it was a faintly eerie environment. It was like being in a hospital, Lily thought, an institution.

  As they walked the corridors, and Lily slowly rebuilt her strength and walked off the ache in her healing leg, they spoke of their lives since they had last met.

  Thandie had always tried to keep in touch with those she had known in the old days, the slowly diminishing network of scientist types—including Gary Boyle, who was still holding out in the Andes—and Nathan and his community on the Ark. When Thandie had noticed that the New Jersey’s course was going to cross the Ark’s, she had persuaded the captain to make a minor detour; the Ark was a significant enough vessel for the Denver government to take an interest in. It had been no coincidence that Thandie and the sub had shown up when she did, though fortunate for Lily.

  Thandie listened to Lily’s accounts of the Ark’s voyage, the seaborne communities of aging boats and disintegrating rafts, what she had seen of the brutal regime emerging in Tibet. She encouraged her to relate all this to the anthropologists on board.

  “Things are better than that in the US, for now. Much of Utah has flooded now, and that’s put paid to the Mormons. But you still have this relentless pressure of refugees from the lower lands, crowding into the last scraps of high ground—or trying to.”

  “You can’t take them all.”

  “No, we can’t. We’ve not yet fallen into the barbarism of Tibet. But we have pretty rigid border control, Lily. We do take doctors and engineers and the like, if you have a proven qualification of some kind—but that’s rare since most colleges shut down long ago. Otherwise you’re turned away.”

  “How long can it last? Even Denver will go in the end.”

  “Something else we don’t talk about. It may not come to that, however. Not for all of us.”

  Lily looked at her. “Sanjay said something about Ark One.”

  Thandie nodded. “I told him to get a message to you, if he could. I wasn’t sure if I should send such news through Nathan . . . Whenever I’m in Denver I keep hearing rumors of some kind of last-ditch program. The Arks, they call them. Supposedly top secret but it’s leaky as hell, because that’s the way of the engineers and scientists who are working on it; we talk. Nathan himself was involved at one time.”

  “Hence Ark Three.”

  “Yes. I think it began as an initiative of the rich, a global network of them trying to find ambitious, high-tech ways to save themselves. I briefed some of them, years back. They shared ideas, technicians, resources. The operations on US soil were taken over by the Denver government long ago, but the program has continued. So I hear.”

  “So what is Ark One?”

  “I don’t know. But whatever they’re doing at Denver has got to be a better long-term bet than Nathan Lammockson’s schemes. I remembered your pledge to your fellow hostages, to Helen Gray’s daughter. Gary made the same promises.”

  “Grace, yes. She’s on Ark Three.”

  “I don’t have any idea how you’d get Grace into Ark One, whatever it is. Maybe I could find out, though. I have contacts back in Denver. Gordo Alonzo, for one.”

  Lily held her breath, choosing her words carefully, not wishing to extinguish this flickering flame of hope. “It would be a hell of a challenge.”

  “Oh, I like challenges.”

  More days passed. Lily wasn’t always sure if she was awake or dreaming. She found she read passages of Dickens until some sentence or memorable image stuck in her memory, and she realized she was reading the same page as yesterday. Gradually, however, day by day, she felt fitter in mind and body.

  It was just as she began to feel restless that Thandie invited her to come view her work area.

  This was an extensive science bay that had been cannibalized from part of the missile compartment. There was a well-equipped biology lab, with glass flasks and tubing and pipettes and white-box equipment Lily didn’t recognize. An area for geology and hydrology stored shallow sea-bed cores and minute samples of sea water from the changing oceans, held in neat racks, and Lily remembered going to New York with Thandie to present a bank of evidence like this to the IPCC, a visit all of twenty years ago.

  The pride and joy was the in-cruise observation area, a curtained-off room lit only by a dim red glow. Those sitting here in near silence were mostly scientists, supplemented by a specialist crew like sonar operators. All middle-aged men, they glanced around as Lily and Thandie entered, irritated at the light they let in. Then they went back to their work, mostly simply monitoring the screens, making occasional notes verbally into microphones or scribbled on paper blocks—seashell paper from the Ark, Lily was pleased to see, if surprised.

  “At last,” she said in a whisper. “Red lights, bleeping sonar, guys huddled over screens. This is what I’ve been waiting for. Red October chic.”

  “Oh, shut up. Listen, the boat has its standard complement of sensors.” Thandie pointed to displays labeled BQQ-6, BQR-19, BQS-13. “Bow-mounted and active sonar, navigation arrays. But for these cruises that’s supplemented by science gear. We have a towed array, robot vehicles, and we’re shadowed above the water by various surface drones and UAVs.”

  Lily guessed at the latest acronym. “Unmanned air vehicles.”

  “Yes. With pressure, temperature, density, chemistry sensor suites, imaging in various wavelengths, sonar, radar, and a link to the surviving GPS network. We can put together quite a picture. Look at this.” She pointed to a screen that displayed a kind of false-color map, an archipelago of scattered islands isolated in an immense ocean. A flashing green splinter was, Lily guessed, the position of the New Jersey. “This is what I brought you in to see, Lily. This submerged landscape. Thought you’d be interested.”

  “So where are we?”

  “Britain.”

  85

  Thandie showed Lily to a seat, and handed her a china mug of coffee.

  All that was left of Britain was a scattering of islands over what had been Scotland, the peaks of the submerged highland mountains.

  “Ben Nevis still shows above the sea. But England has long gone, and all of Wales—even Snowdon is a couple of hundred meters down by now.”

  “Britain? But you picked me up in the Pacific. What’s the speed of this boat?”

  “Around twenty knots cruising.”

  “So how long have I been shambling around like a zombie?”

  “Longer than you think, I guess. Ask the MO . . .”

  They looked over the operators’ shoulders at screens that showed external views, from cameras mounted on the hull. The water was murky, full of floating fragments which sometimes glimmered with bright, unnatural colors, indestructible plastic detritus speckling the sea. But it was mid-morning, the sun was high, and the particles in the water caught the light, creating long beams like the buttresses of some immense church. It was quite beautiful, and rendered in the boat’s screens in true colors, a deepening oceanic blue. And in the further distance, dimly visible, Lily made out a hillside, with a tracery of rectangles that might have been field boundaries, and blocky roofless buildings.

  “This is what we call the photic zone,” Thandie said. “Top of the water column. Water is pretty opaque; ninety-nine percent of the sunlight is blanked out in only a hundred and fifty meters. Below that you’re in permanent darkness.”

  “But the flood’s around a kilometer deep, isn’t it?”

  “A bit more than that.”

  “So most of Britain isn’t just submerged, it’s in darkness.”

  Thandie said gently, “Does that make a difference?”

  A darting shape shot across the field of view of one of the screens, making the operator jump back.

  Lily asked, “What was that, a seal?”

  “No . . . Bi
ll, you want to play that back in slo-mo?”

  It turned out to be a child, a boy naked save for a pair of shorts, his lithe body sliding past the boat’s hull. Aged no more than eight or nine, he actually turned and waved into the camera.

  “Cheeky little bastard. Visitor from a raft up above us. Fisher folk, probably.”

  “Wow. How deep are we?”

  “Oh, a hundred and fifty feet,” an operator said.

  Thandie grinned. “This is nothing. You get the kids following you down as far as three hundred feet, and I’ve heard reports of deeper dives yet. It’s happening all over the world. The kids are figuring out breathing techniques for themselves, and passing them on through radio networks, and they’re going deeper and deeper. This is innocent enough. We do get less welcome visitors, people trying to damage the sensor arrays, even plant limpet mines on the hull.”

  The freeze-framed kid reminded Lily faintly of Manco, another avid ocean swimmer. “The world was flooded before these kids were born. The ocean is all they have to explore.”

  “So long as they stay away from my sensors, they can play Aquaman as much as they like,” Thandie said sternly.

  Lily watched the maps as the boat turned south, and began to track the length of Britain.

  Thandie said, “We’ll skirt the highlands to the east, cross the Firth of Forth over Edinburgh, and then track down the east side of the country over the Lammermuir hills. Even the Lammermuirs will be hundreds of meters below the prow. Nothing’s going to foul us. Then we’ll cross the border to England over the Cheviot Hills. There’s a point to the voyage, Lily. We’re surveying the topography of the country, studying how it’s adjusting as the water mass settles over it, mapping the quakes and the landslides as the isostatic load changes. It’s part of a global portrait that we hope will help us predict future quakes, and hence tsunamis.”

  The boat sank deeper, and the glimmering light from above dwindled to darkness, those cathedral columns dimming. At last, somewhere below two hundred meters, external lights mounted on the boat’s hull flared to life, and picked out a sparse array of living things, Lily saw, things like fish and jellyfish and eels. It was impossible for Lily to believe that she was effectively poised in the sky above southern Scotland, flying in a submarine, surrounded by these wriggling creatures.

  “This is the midwater,” Thandie murmured. “There’s no sunlight down here. Photosynthesis is impossible. So there are no plants, only animals and bacteria. And with no primary production these creatures have got nothing to eat but each other. They have evolved all sorts of strategies to evade predation—invisibility for instance. The water is full of gelatinous creatures, there’s even an invisible octopus. Hey, look at that.” She pointed to an unprepossessing-looking fish. “That’s a bristlemouth. Thought to be the world’s most common vertebrate, the most abundant animal with a backbone.”

  “Really?”

  “And you’d never heard of it, had you? Lily, the ocean is where the action has always been. There are whole categories of life out there, probably, entirely undiscovered. It was only in the 1970s that we found black smokers, biospheres entirely independent of sunlight, only in the eighties that we found methane seeps, and more chemosynthesizer communities. What else is there? Who knows? We never will, that’s for sure. Mine’s the last generation to be privileged to be able to conduct science in this way, probably. Our children and grandchildren will be back to counting types of jellyfish.” She laughed, an empty sound. “Hey, Bill, can you douse the lights? Let’s see the bioluminescence.”

  “Sure.”

  To taps of the operators’ fingers on their key pads the screen images faded to darkness, which were then stopped up to gray. The ruddy light of the observation room dimmed further too.

  “It’s tricky to see until you get cued in,” Thandie said. “And life down here is sparse . . . There. See that?”

  There was a scattering of lights like a drifting toy submarine, too dim for Lily to make out their colors. And then a more spectacular sight, a blue spiral sparkling yellow.

  “That’s a siphonophore,” Thandie said. “Kind of a colony, hundreds of jellies strung out along a central cord. Uses those glowing tentacles to lure in its prey. It’s thought that eighty percent of the species down here in the midwater are bioluminescent. You use it to attract food—”

  “And predators, surely?”

  “Well, some species use their lights to attract bigger predators to fight off their own hunters. Lots of intricate strategies.”

  Lily saw a thing like a jellyfish, illuminated by its own spectral light, swelling and diminishing like a puff of smoke. It was extraordinarily beautiful.

  Thandie said, “Actually there is an ongoing extinction event out there. As the world gets warmer there’s a reduction in the volume of the big cold currents from the poles that plunge under the lighter, hotter water from the lower latitudes. That displacement used to carry oxygen into the depths, and fuel life. Now that vast transport is shutting off. Everything down here is suffocating and starving. But it’s happened before. The fossil record shows there were similar pulses of excess warmth ninety million years ago, sixty million. But an extinction is also an opportunity . . .”

  Traveling steadily south, they passed over a mountain called the Cheviot in Northumberland, an old volcanic mound, its summit once twenty-seven hundred feet above sea level. Now the cairns built by climbers on its crown were twelve hundred feet down. But life gathered over the mountain’s ice-carved slopes, a loose column of fish and gelatinous predators swimming over the summit. Lily thought she saw a shark.

  “An oceanographer would call the Cheviot a seamount,” Thandie said. “Ocean currents are forced up and over the hill. That causes a cycling of the water above, called a Taylor cell, an exchange of nutrients and life forms. Stimulates the biota. Makes for good fishing too.” One of the operators confirmed there was a human raft community drifting on the surface above them. Thandie said, “From the air you can still make out the topography of the drowned countries, from the fishing fleets clustered over the peaks of the hills.”

  “A shark, swimming over Northumberland,” Lily said, wondering.

  “That would once have seemed unusual,” Thandie conceded.

  The New Jersey slid deeper into the water. Forty or fifty kilometers further south from the Cheviot, around the latitude of Newcastle, a remote camera swimming alongside the boat picked out a ridge on the landscape, its crest marked by a cluster of colorful sponges.

  Thandie punched the air. “Ha! I knew it. You know what that is?”

  “Surprise me.”

  “Hadrian’s Wall. We’re near the fort called Housesteads here. Most of the countryside is coated by calcareous ooze, cruddy sea-bottom stuff. But there are some species that prefer bare rock, they seek out ridges and slopes where the ooze won’t settle. Corals, sea lilies, specialized starfish, sea squirts, crinoids. So there’s a whole carnival colonizing the ridge the Wall stands on, as well as the stones of the Roman Wall itself.” Her grin widened. “Even in the circumstances that’s a remarkable sight, isn’t it?”

  “Show-off.”

  Lily and Thandie took breaks to eat and sleep. But Lily was always drawn back to the observation room, this red-lit hive of mystery and quiet monitoring, of screens like windows into a changed world. She marked their progress as they sailed inland toward the Pennines, a chain of mountains that ran down the spine of the drowned country. They detoured to pass over the carcasses of Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, cities that had once glowed with the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution, now lost in the abyssal dark. And still the New Jersey sailed on, heading for the lowlands of southern England.

  Over Nottingham Thandie showed Lily a recording of a creature they had just observed, picked out by the boat’s lights. It looked like a vase, maybe, or a flowerpot, with the seams bristling with spines. “Sorry you missed it . . . That’s a vampire squid.”

  “A what?”

  “A real reli
c—like the coelacanth, the fossil fish that turned out not to be a fossil at all. You see these things in deep strata two hundred million years old. We’re somewhere near an oxygen minimum, Lily, around fifteen hundred feet down. Right here, not much can survive.”

  “Save this vampire squid.”

  “Yeah. A peculiar niche. It’s a strategy to avoid predators, just hide out where nobody else can breathe. And when the mass extinctions come your descendants can radiate out into all those empty niches.” Thandie shook her head, marveling. “It’s like finding a living dinosaur, to see this thing. I wish you’d seen it live. You think Manco would be interested?”

  “You could try.”

  But he wasn’t.

  Over the Midlands, over Leicester and Northampton, the submerged land was two thousand or twenty-five hundred feet down. Thandie got unreasonably excited when she spotted various exotic life forms wriggling in the “calcareous ooze” that now blanketed the streets and fields of central England. One of them was a sea spider, with yellowish legs that Thandie said had a twenty-centimeter span. “Antarctic fauna in Leicestershire! It’s astonishing that they found their way this far north in just a few years . . .”

  Remarkably, Lily learned, the southern English lowlands were now deeper than the offshore continental shelf had been before the flood, and the life forms that had inhabited those undersea plains around Britain couldn’t survive here. But the shelf around Antarctica had always been deeper. The whole continent had been thrust down into the body of the Earth by the sheer weight of the kilometers-thick ice sheet it carried, and the life forms on the shelf had adapted to the greater depth. Now those polar creatures were colonizing new environments, like Leicestershire and Northamptonshire.

  The final target of the journey was London. But at more than three thousand feet down the city was too deep for the New Jersey, which had a hull crush depth of eighteen hundred feet. So the scientists planned to send down ROVs, remotely operated vehicles, self-propelling platforms laden with cameras, lamps and sensors for temperature, pressure, salinity and other indicators, while the New Jersey hovered over the city’s streets like a wartime barrage balloon.