Flood f-1

by Stephen Baxter

  57

  Chosica, a thousand meters above the old sea-level datum, had once been an inland resort town for the residents of Lima. The Rimac river ran through it, but the landscape away from an irrigated valley floor was desert, the mountain slopes bare sun-bleached rock. To put up Nathan’s workers, a rough community of shacks had grown up around the heart of the old town. Lily and Sanjay walked through the shantytown, guided by a sat-nav patch sewn into Lily’s jumpsuit, seeking the hut Kristie shared with Ollantay. It was late afternoon now.

  This was just another slum in a world of slums, where, in the roughly built shacks, pots boiled, children played, and dogs slept in the heat. There was a persistent stink of sewage. But above all this loomed the outline of a ship, the slim lines of a vessel big enough to be an ocean-going liner, covered in a bristle of scaffolding.

  “I don’t believe it,” Sanjay said. “That thing must be three hundred meters long! I know you called this project ‘Ark Three’ but that could have meant anything-something metaphorical-a seed bank, maybe, a vault of frozen zygotes. I didn’t think it would be an actual damn ship. We’re a kilometer above the old sea-level datum! How’s Nathan planning to launch the thing?”

  Lily had no idea. “Whether the ship goes to the sea or the sea comes to the ship, it’s going to be a spectacular sight, isn’t it?”

  “There’s something about the lines of that tub that remind me of something. I’m no marine engineer. Maybe I’ll think of it.” He took out his old phone and paged through its memory.

  “Actually Nathan is building it in conjunction with a consortium.”

  “A consortium of who? People like him?”

  “Nathan isn’t saying,” she admitted.“But I think that’s the idea. Even the super-rich have run out of places to build Green Zones. So they’re looking for other solutions.”

  “I guess if this is number three, there must be other arks.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  He couldn’t take his eyes off the boat. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing. A ship, halfway up the Andes! The man has to be crazy after all.”

  Lily’s GPS patch bleeped. They came upon the shack Kristie shared with Ollantay. Amanda must have been here already, for, remarkably, Jorge, Amanda’s butler, was standing outside in a suit and tie; he looked entirely unaffected by the dirt around him.

  Lily glanced at Sanjay. “This might be bloody.”

  “Families.”

  “Yes. Come on, let’s get it over with.”

  The shack was a box, with plastic sheets for walls and roof, cluttered with junk, heaps of clothes, a bed, a table, cupboards. There were vents and windows, and a fan was running from some power source, but it was ferociously hot. The teddy bear stuck on top of a cupboard was a small reminder of a lost past.

  In this tiny one-room hut, four people were pressed into the corners, sitting as far from each other as they could get: Piers, Amanda, Ollantay and Kristie. Amanda was wearing her black trouser suit, and Kristie a grubby but colorful dress of woven wool. Piers and Ollantay wore AxysCorp coveralls, and looked oddly alike as they faced each other, separated by the diagonal of the room. Nobody spoke as Lily and Sanjay walked in.

  “So,” Lily said. “You remember Sanjay McDonald, from London?”

  Nobody responded.

  Sanjay seemed unperturbed. He nodded at them all, and sat on an upturned plastic crate in a corner, flicking through images of classic ships on his phone.

  Lily said, “I have the feeling we walked into the middle of a row.”

  “You could say that,” Amanda snapped. “Or a joke.”

  “Oh, Mum-” Kristie said.

  “Of course you missed the punchline,” Amanda said. “Why don’t you tell Lily what you just told me?”

  Uncertain, distressed, stubborn, Kristie glanced at Lily. “We’re getting married,” she said. “According to the traditions of Ollantay’s people-”

  “She’s pregnant,” Piers said. “That’s what she’s told us. Pregnant. By this man.” He couldn’t bear to look at Ollantay, evidently, or even to speak his name. Stiff, immobile, Piers looked more brittle than ever, Lily thought, desiccated and fragile. And now she saw how heavy Kristie looked, gravid beneath her loose woolen clothes.

  Ollantay was thirty now; his neck was thicker, his skin heavier, his boyish looks gone, but he was as cocky as he had ever been. He smiled.

  Lily blew her cheeks out, and sat down herself. “So that’s why you called us here, Kris.”

  “You’re family,” Kristie said. “You’re my aunt.” She took a breath. “ She’s my mother. I wanted to tell you in person. I hoped you might be happy for me.”

  “Happy!” Amanda snapped. “Oh, you bloody little fool.”

  “Ollantay’s family are happy. His mother-”

  “For God’s sake, Kristie, I couldn’t care less about a pack of flea-ridden alpaca herders.”

  Ollantay glared at Amanda. “In my culture,” he said, “lovers live together before the wedding. It is a period we call sirvinakuy, which means ‘to serve each other.’ We marry only when we conceive, and have demonstrated we will bear strong children. Everything about our relationship has been honorable, in my tradition.”

  Piers stood up. “Oh, this is all-it’s not to be tolerated.” He stalked out, ducking to get through the low doorway.

  Amanda glared at Kristie. “What’s it going to take to make you give this up? Shall I speak to Juan, or Nathan? Shall I have this clown who’s knocked you up arrested?”

  “Oh, Mum-”

  Amanda stood and closed on her daughter. “How about a forcible abortion? I could do it, you know.”

  “Mum, I’m seven months gone!”

  “You think that matters? I’m not talking about an NHS hospital. It would only take a word to Nathan. Is that what you want?”

  Kristie turned her face away. Ollantay stood up to protect her. Lily got up quickly, trying to get between them before it turned to violence.

  And Sanjay, in his corner, peering into his phone’s screen, was laughing. “I knew I’d seen that profile before. It’s the Queen Mary. Nathan Lammockson is rebuilding the Queen Mary halfway up the bloody Andes! Oh, thank you, Ganesh, for keeping me alive long enough to see this!”

  58

  September 2031

  Gary set one foot after another on the cracked, dusty blacktop. Grace walked at his side, sixteen years old, slim, erect, almost feral. Between them they pushed the shopping cart that contained the inert form of Michael Thurley. Michael slept uneasily under a plastic tarp, curled up in the big wire mesh basket.

  And before them and behind the walkers shuffled, a line that stretched for kilometers. The mayor’s guards walked parallel to the main column with their shotguns and pistols visible. Around them the flat desolation of the Great Plains stretched to the horizon.

  This was Walker City, a city on the move. To walk was the world. To walk was life.

  Much of Gary’s time passed in a kind of daze. So long as the walk itself wasn’t too strenuous he would lose himself in its slow rhythm, the gentle rock of his body, the working of the muscles, one foot after another, walking his youth away over this tremendous, continent-spanning, mind-numbing plain. Gary thought sometimes that this excursion was a karmic response to his experience in the cellars of Barcelona, that age of enclosure now balanced by these years of semi-infinity, the plain beneath his feet, the huge sky above.

  And every morning, after a couple of kilometers or so and the muscles were warmed up, his mind wandered away like a balloon cut loose of its tether. At thirty-nine years old he seemed to have shed so much, his obsessive questing for meaning in the past, his fears over what was to come for himself and Grace and Thurley. None of it meant anything when all you could actually do was walk, put one foot after another, a slow propulsion into the real future.

  But every so often he came back to himself.

  He had long since shed every gram of excess fat. His feet were like pads of leathe
r, the muscles of his legs and buttocks hard as rock. His boots were so worn and supple and polished they were like part of his skin. He wore his old AxysCorp-durable jumpsuit, so faded it was the color of the dust itself. On his back was his pack containing another jumpsuit, his single change of clothes, underwear washed so often you could see through it, and other lightweight gear, plastic sandals, a silvered poncho that could keep out the rain or the sun’s heat, a thin but warm sleeping bag and inflatable bed roll, elements of a blow-up tent, cooking gear. He had a few things that wouldn’t fit into the pack, a light spade and pick, and another bag was slung at his waist, heavier, holding food and water canteens.

  All his stuff had self-selected in the long years of walking, surviving a Darwinian filtering based on utility, robustness and lightness, where other junk had broken down or proven too awkward or heavy. All of it products of a civilization that had pretty much vanished, all of it unbearably precious.

  Which was why, of course, Thurley had got himself into so much trouble a few days back. You couldn’t afford to let your boots be stolen, even at risk of your life.

  This country wasn’t like Iowa, where at harvest time they had walked through country that glowed with life, the red barns bright in the yellow and green fields, the gleaming water towers, the mighty white grain elevators. There had always been a good chance they could find work, for nobody had any gasoline now. The big harvesters stood idle, and the gathering had to be done by human and animal muscle.

  But in Nebraska there was nothing but emptiness, a plain that went on and on. The towns were little one-street places with not much more than grain silos and defunct gas stations and dead cars, with ad billboards painted over with uncompromising messages: NO FOOD. NO GAS. WE SHOOT. KEEP WALKING. DOGS. Between the towns the roads were empty save for an occasional motor home or SUV abandoned where some earlier emigrant had run out of gas. The population was gone, save for those who found it easier to prey on those who passed by than to produce anything for themselves. And in the end Thurley had been preyed upon.

  That was why, today, Gary couldn’t switch off his awareness of the walk, because of the burden of Thurley. The shopping cart, that had traveled far from the supermarket where it belonged, was on loan to them from the mayor. It was just big enough to carry Michael with his thin legs tucked up to his chest, though he was jolted when the small wheels jammed. Michael’s boots were lodged underneath his body at his own insistence. Michael had nearly given his life for the damn things, and he wasn’t about to lose them now.

  Gary was sharing the burden of pushing the cart with Grace. But walking like this was unbalancing him, and as the kilometers clicked away he could feel that asymmetry niggling in his hips and back. He resented it, he admitted it to himself, as the long day bore down on him, and his aches grew worse.

  By mid-afternoon he felt so bad he was actually relieved when the F-15 came screaming down the road over their heads.

  Everybody ducked, stumbling. Gary let go of the handle, and the cart tipped off the blacktop. Thurley was rattled around, and groaned in his pain-filled sleep. The column stopped, raggedly, and a murmur of conversation replaced the steady shuffle of feet.

  “Wow,” said Grace. She took off her worn baseball cap and wiped sweat off her brow. The plane was a glittering jewel, receding along the dark stripe of the road.“What do you think? Denver or Salt Lake City?”

  Gary grunted. “Far as I know the Mormons haven’t got an air force yet.” But, he reminded himself, he actually knew very little, and that plane had been an antique.

  Grace checked on Thurley. He had fallen back into his deeper sleep. He was drooling, the spit clinging to the papery flesh of his thin cheek. “Yeck,” Grace said, pulling her face; sometimes she looked much younger than her sixteen years. But she bent and wiped his mouth with the collar of his own jumpsuit. Then she dug a canteen out of her pack to give him water.

  Gary stepped away from the road, treading over the scrub grass of the prairie. A city guard eyed him, but made no move to intervene. Looking down the line Gary tried to see what was going on at its head. Vehicles in military olive were lined up on the road, blocking it, and a quite enormous Stars and Stripes hung, unruffled by any breeze.

  “Roadblock,” he murmured.

  “You got it,” said the guard.

  From the head of the line, whistles started sounding, blown by the mayor’s officials. That’s it for the day,” the guards called along the line of the column. “Break the line, form up, everybody off the road.” An electric car came driving down the line with a tannoy broadcasting the night’s instructions. “Surnames E to F on latrine duty, I to K on water sourcing, please report to the guards for local details. E to F on latrines…” The line split around the axis of the road, people clearing the tarmac, plodding into the dust. Packs were dumped on the ground, and the components of tents were drawn out, groundsheets and inflatable struts and guy ropes. Reluctant-looking men and women came out of the column bearing shovels and picks, preparing for the chore of digging the night’s latrine trenches.

  Gary helped Grace shove their cart away from the road. They moved back fifty meters or so until they found a clear space. Grace threw their plastic tarp on the ground and lifted Thurley out of the cart. Wasted, worn out by walking, he was light enough for her to lift by herself.

  Gary got out his cellphone. He pressed the power button gingerly, wincing at the single pip that showed how low the battery had run. But he left it on, and set it on the blanket beside Thurley, letting it make its connections and figure out where it was, and pick up any messages.

  The sun was still high; that was one advantage of the unscheduled halt, earlier than the mayor generally planned. So Gary dug his mirror stove out of his pack and began to set it up. They had no fuel for a fire. Gary sometimes imagined the whole of the North American continent had been scoured clean of lumber by the clouds of human locusts that had passed back and forth across its face for years. But the mirror stove was a valuable piece of gear. It was a parabolic mirror with hollow struts, blown up with a few brisk breaths, that sat on a little wire stand. If you positioned it right, face up to the sun like a silvered sunflower, you could set a small pan of water to boil on a wire frame at its focus.

  Grace said, “I think he’s OK. He’s not lost any more blood. And the wound hasn’t reopened.”

  Gary grimaced. “Well, that’s good.” In fact it was a miracle, given the only doctoring Michael had had, for a wound that would have seen him in intensive care back in better days, had been first aid from Gary and Grace.

  “Let’s let him rest a bit,” Grace said. “Then we’ll try to feed him.”

  “Sure. Later I’ll walk up the line and see if I can get some time from a doctor.”

  Gary dug in his pack for their tea leaves and tin cups, and he checked over their food. It was travelers’ fare, tough, difficult to chew, long-lasting: a jerky of rabbit meat, slabs of hard unleavened bread provided by the mobile city’s bakeries, and sun-dried fruit, raisins and apricots.

  Grace saw he had his phone turned on. “So where are we?”

  He picked it up and paged for the GPS functions.“A few kilometers north of Lincoln. I don’t think we would have made it tonight. Tomorrow, for sure. All depends on the holdup by the roadblock.”

  Such a blockage was a genuine problem. The mayor had negotiated a stay on open ground north of Lincoln for a few weeks at least, with lodging and food and water in return for labor on flood defenses and harbor work around the Nebraska town, as well as work in the fields. The walkers could carry little in the way of supplies, and they were running low on food. A holdup of more than a day or two could see real hunger setting in. But there was nothing Gary could do about that now.

  He took his boots and socks off, always a key moment of the day. He dug out the plastic sandals he wore around camp, open and soft, so his feet had room to breathe and relax. He hid his boots under a blanket, and took out his penknife and rasp, meaning to get to work o
n the hard skin of his heels. Like a soldier, he thought absently, maybe like the guys in the roadblock up ahead, and every infantryman right back to Alexander. You always took care of your feet.

  “You’re daydreaming,” Grace said. “Switch your phone off.”

  “Yeah.” He held it up regretfully. Its small screen shone like a window to a better place. Here was his only connection to the rest of the world beyond the walking city, the family he hadn’t heard from since his mother had died, his science colleagues, Lily from Barcelona. He had a charger but no power source. It had broken his heart when he had had to trade away his portable solar-cell array for food when the city had been going through its worst time, trapped by a dust storm somewhere near Dodge City. Occasionally, very occasionally, you came across a community where there was power, from the sun or biofuels or the wind or geothermal heat, and he was able to top up the phone’s battery in return for labor. But the last charge-up had been a long time ago, and the few seconds or minutes each day he allowed himself to turn it on were steadily draining the energy.

  He held his thumb over the power button. But then the screen sparked to life, with a text message. “Don’t switch off. Am coming. Will find U.” It was from Thandie Jones.

  59

  A jeep came barreling along the road, open-topped, driven by some guy in uniform, with Thandie and another woman in back. The jeep was at least fifteen or twenty years old, and looked a lot older. But evidently the Army at least still had access to gasoline. People stared. Aside from the city’s own little electric carts, you rarely saw a moving vehicle nowadays.

  This was a thrill for Gary. He hadn’t seen Thandie for five, six years, not since the time she had briefed Lone Elk in Cadillac City. He knew she’d been roaming the shore of America’s gathering inland sea, studying its formation and advising the Denver government on its navigability, ecology and other issues. He’d actually been expecting to meet up with her in Lincoln, if the mobile city got that far. Now here she was coming out to find him.