Flood f-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Kristie wept again that Christmas night, as she hadn’t since August. Wept for Manco and for the loss of Ollantay, wept for the arrogance and foolishness that had killed him, as she had always known it would. And she wept for London, for how far she had come, and how she could never go back.

  76

  March 2036

  Lily came out to the promenade deck’s walkway. It was seven thirty a.m. The day was overcast, gray, drizzly, but not cold, and the Ark heaved slightly on a steel-gray sea. They were underway; she could feel the screws’ turning in a faint vibration of the deck.

  Piers emerged to meet her. He wore a lightweight coverall, the sleeves rolled down. He handed Lily a John Deere baseball cap, once deep blue, now faded to a kind of gray.

  She took it reluctantly. “Must I? I never liked hats, my head’s the wrong shape.”

  “Precipitation over a millimeter per hour.”

  “Piers, we’re under cover, for God’s sake. I can see the rain, but there’s not a breath of wind. We’re dry as bones under here.”

  “Ship’s rules. Acid rain. You know the score. Better a hat on your head than a burned scalp. You’re a sourpuss today,” he said with good humor.

  She grunted. “It’s just such a lousy day. The whole world is gray. Well, come on, let’s get it over with.” She put the hat on her head.

  They took their places side by side. Piers set his watch and off they went, heading anticlockwise on their usual circuit around the hull, their pace not too fast, their running shoes padding over the polished wood of the deck. Naturally it was always Piers who ran the watch, who paced them, who kept control; Lily had long since given up arguing about that.

  They passed a couple of walkers, people Lily knew vaguely-after seven months at sea she “vaguely” knew all of the few thousand people in this floating village. Lily and Piers broke their run as they passed the walkers, who nodded and smiled. This was friction-reducing behavior Nathan always encouraged, an excess of politeness that reminded Lily of Japan, another intensely crowded environment.

  When they reached the stern Lily saw the ship’s long wake streaming behind, a highway cut across the ocean.

  They turned around the stern and headed back up the ship’s starboard side, past the gangways that led to the OTEC energy plant. This was a raft in the water towed alongside the sleek flank of the ship. The OTEC was Lily’s area of work; she had senior responsibility there. Nothing was on fire or sinking, and she was content it could survive another hour without her.

  She asked Piers, “Any idea where we are?” She had long lost interest in the details of the Ark’s wanderings.

  “The North Sea. We’re steaming south toward the Dutch coast. Then we’re going into Europe. Heading down the Rhine valley, toward Switzerland. There might be some scenery for a change.” He glanced at her. “You’re not the only one who’s a little stir crazy.”

  As if to prove the point they passed their starting line. The circuit around the deck was less than half a kilometer, and even at their modest pace they finished it in just a few minutes. Off they went again, completing their minuscule laps.

  Piers was panting hard. “Finding this tough today.”

  “Maybe it’s the carbon dioxide.”

  The unending rise in cee-oh-two levels in the atmosphere was one undeniable consequence of the flood, though there was no climatologist aboard to explain the link. Aside from the warming pulse it caused, acid rain burned the leaves of the plants in the ship’s gardens and little farm, etched away at the solar cell panels, and, sometimes, stung unprotected human flesh.

  “The young don’t seem to be bothered by it,” Piers said. “But then the young never are.”

  “No. You ever wonder why we do this, you and I, Piers? Running around this stupid track, day after day? We’re such creatures of habit. Christ, we even run the same way, anticlockwise every time.”

  Piers sighed. “You’re not going to get deep, are you?”

  “Well, you have to face it, Piers. We spent five years in cellars. Now we’re in confinement again, and here we are, running around the walls. As if we’re testing the boundaries of our cage.”

  “Or maybe we’re just trying to keep fit.”

  “Kristie says we should have had more therapy when we came back from Barcelona.”

  Piers snorted.“I seem to remember London was flooding at the time. It was hardly an opportune moment for long sessions on the couch, was it?”

  “Maybe not, but-”

  “It’s not us who have the flaws, Lily. It’s not us who are psychotic, however long we spent chained to radiators. It’s the world. The world is psychotic. I mean, is this how you imagined spending your old age? And besides, frankly, Lily, you’re one of the sanest people I know on this ship. If you’re going crazy, we’re all doomed.”

  “Maybe so.” But it didn’t always feel as if she was so sane, not when she lay awake in her bunk in the small hours, alone in her head, listening to the deep groans of the ship’s hull as she forged endlessly over the deepening world ocean.

  Looking back after seven months of the voyage, the first few days and weeks had been extraordinary.

  The intense social life of upper-crust Project City had transplanted itself to the Ark, brittle, gossipy, somehow desperate, as if this was simply some exotic cruise. Four-course dinners had been served in the great restaurant every night, and Nathan’s pet refugee string quartet played in the verandah bar. Amanda would have been in her element in those early days, Lily thought sadly.

  But that veneer of cruise-liner luxury hadn’t lasted. Lily had been able to keep her suite, but it was an awfully long time since anybody had come to fill up her mini-bar. In fact she now used it to keep her socks in. The always artificial barrier between “passengers” and “crew” had broken down in a farcical scene when Nathan had tried to discipline one of the kitchen staff for getting a passenger pregnant. They were all crew now, all of them had a job to do.

  And as the relationship of the crew with each other had sorted itself out, so the internal functions of the ship had been reorganized. Nathan had ordered that a few areas be kept aside for recreation and exercise, like the promenade deck track, but others had been given over to vital functions like desalination.

  One of the swimming pools was now being used as a mineral extraction area. Electrical currents were passed through sea water to make the minerals dissolved in it accrete out on metal mesh. The water was full of calcium carbonate, the relics of the shells of tiny sea creatures, which could be used to make a kind of concrete. And there was magnesium too, present at a concentration of a kilogram or so per ton of sea water. Nathan’s plan was to use these materials to maintain the fabric of the ship itself. Lily thought it was miraculous to see these substances appear out of nothing; she had had no idea that sea water itself was so rich.

  Her own OTEC plant was an experiment in extracting another resource from the water: energy. “OTEC” stood for Ocean Thermal Energy Converter. There was a temperature difference of a few tens of degrees between the warm surface of the sea and the deeps where the temperature was only ever a few degrees above freezing; just as it was always dark down there, so it was cold. The idea of OTEC was to extract usable energy from this temperature difference. The floating raft topped a stalk that plunged more than a kilometer deep into the ocean. The warm surface water was cooled a little, the cold deep water warmed a little, and the flow of heat between them could be tapped. The temperature difference was greatest in the warmth of the tropics, which was where Nathan hoped to sail his Ark for most of the year.

  There was a side effect, however, in mixing up the nutrient-rich deeper waters with the surface. Around the OTEC algae bloomed in a frenzy of feeding and breeding. These algae were harvested, especially a variety called spirulina, optimal crop plants with almost their whole substance being edible, nothing wasted on such fripperies as leaves or trunks or stalks. But the algal protein needed some heavy preparation before it became palatable for hu
mans.

  There was something even more exotic going on in the old verandah bar on the promenade deck. With the dance floor covered over, the bar had been converted into a lab where more of Nathan’s pet scientists were trying to develop a radically new form of solar cell. The panels on the Ark’s sports deck, conventional titanium-coated polymer cells, had an efficiency of ten percent, but photosynthesizing algae could trap up to ninety-seven percent of the incoming solar energy. Nathan’s bioengineers hoped to be able to grow bright green solar panels like leaves, coated with the light-harvesting pigment molecules to be found in the algal cells. Nathan intended that in the long term these new solar arrays, with the support of the OTEC, could make the ship independent of resupply of uranium for its primary power plant. And in a world where sunlight was about the most easily accessible energy source of all, the new technology could be hugely commercially valuable.

  But Nathan had deeper purposes in mind than trade. All these projects were facets of his greater vision.

  Nobody expected the voyage to last forever; sooner or later this new Ark would come to rest on its own Ararat. But in the meantime Nathan wanted to make his floating city entirely independent of the land. He could feed himself from the sea, and collect fresh water from the rain. With the OTEC and his solar cells he hoped to harvest useful energy from the sea and the sun, and with his sea concrete and magnesium he hoped to be able to maintain the fabric of the ship herself from the resources of the sea, without resupply of any kind from the land. Lily imagined a day off in the future where every bit of the ship had worn out and been replaced by materials extracted from the sea. It would be the ultimate defiance of the flood and the damage it had wrought to human ambitions.

  For all his faults, Nathan was a kind of genius of foresight, Lily acknowledged. Maybe the world needed such dreamers, as she remembered Sanjay McDonald once saying to her. She often wondered how long she could have survived without the shelter Nathan had given her since Barcelona.

  Of course that wasn’t to say that his dream of his ship-city sailing endlessly on the sea was actually going to come true, any more than his Andean enclave had ultimately survived its greatest challenge.

  They completed their usual twenty laps, a distance of around eight kilometers. On the last lap Kristie came out to wait for Lily, leaning on the rail.

  Lily pulled up beside her. Kristie let her aunt get her breath. Piers ducked indoors, heading for his cabin and a shower-salt water, that was the only choice now. Kristie didn’t acknowledge him, didn’t even look at him. She had brought a couple of mugs of coffee substitute. Lily drank gratefully, though she would have preferred fresh water, even the vaguely chemical-smelling stuff that came out of the ship’s reverse-osmosis desalination plants.

  This morning Kristie was ready for work. Over a regular AxysCorp coverall she wore a light protective suit with a hood and goggles, and had thick gloves tucked in her waistband. She worked in a plant that had been built into the ballroom, where the shells of crab, shrimp and lobster were processed for their chitin, a substance that was used as a cellulose substitute in the manufacture of paper and cardboard. It was one of Nathan’s more ingenious schemes, a product of his endless quest to find ways for the Ark and its passengers to make a living: they could sell crustacean-shell paper to other seaborne societies. Lily thought this wasn’t as good an idea, however, as the little optical workshops Nathan had set up elsewhere aboard the ship, where spectacles lenses were ground; people would need to be able to see long after they had given up writing things down.

  “Wasn’t expecting you,” Lily said, recovering. “So what’s up? Manco all right?”

  Kristie pulled a face.“Little bugger’s a pest this hour of the morning.” Occasionally, mostly when she swore, Kristie’s London roots showed through the vaguely transatlantic veneer she had picked up. “He’s in the jungle gym. It’s better when we’re not underway, and he can go swimming. But I have to wear him out before I can deliver him to school with a clear conscience… Lily, I came to find you. I thought you’d like to know.”

  “What?”

  “It was on the ship’s news. The Scafell Pike beacon was lost overnight.”

  “Oh.” Scafell Pike in Cumbria was, had been, the highest point in England. “The Welsh mountains, the Scottish Highlands must still survive.”

  “Yes, and full of bandits, according to the news. Britain’s still there. But England’s gone, every scrap of it. It’s astonishing, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is. And we were there at the beginning for England.”

  Kristie smiled. “When you had to come and save us from Greenwich.”

  “Well, you’d done pretty well yourselves. And now here we are at the end.”

  “We went to Cumbria a few times, the Lakes, Mum took us.”

  “I remember the postcards.”

  “But we never climbed Scafell Pike.”

  “Climbing wasn’t your mum’s thing, was it?”

  “ ‘What, in these heels?’ ”

  Lily laughed. Suddenly she longed to hug her niece, this damaged thirty-one-year old, an abrupt, powerful impulse. But she knew she mustn’t, this contact must be enough for now.

  The problem between them was Piers. Just as her mother had never been able to forgive him for the death of Benj, so Kristie had never forgiven him for killing Ollantay. Lily had tried to talk her down out of that, but Kristie knew how much satisfaction Piers had got from gunning down his rival. She had seen it in his face, in his eyes, as he pulled the trigger. She had even come to blame Piers, it seemed, for the death of her mother.

  In any other age Kristie could have got away from Piers, simply moved out. But they were stuck on a boat that felt very small if you shared it with somebody you hated. In that way, Lily thought, the Ark was like a scale model of the whole reduced world.

  “Well, so much for England,” Kristie said. “Time for work.” She allowed Lily to kiss her cheek. Then they broke to begin their day. Lily headed to her cabin to change, and Kristie made for the ballroom, where the day’s batch of dead crustaceans was already being prepared for processing.

  77

  April 2036

  With great caution, the Ark approached the coastline of Europe.

  Nathan’s purpose was to reach Switzerland, where he hoped to establish trading relations with the nearest thing to a functioning national government left in western Europe. Then he wanted to pass on east to the high ground of central Asia. His destination there was Nepal: the gateway to the Tibetan plateau, a place he believed he could do good business. “It’s the most extensive upland in the world,” he declared. “And the pivot of the future for mankind. That’s why we’ve got to be there.” But the news out of the region had been fragmentary since reports of a disastrous three-way war between China, Russia and India over the precious high land-a war that was rumored to have gone nuclear before it was done. A number of the crew were concerned about what they would find, if they ever got there. But that was far in the future.

  The ship passed from the ocean into the Westerschelde estuary. Sonar and radar tracked the drowned landscape passing beneath the prow, and the inboard TV system relayed heavily processed images to Lily’s cabin, a ghostly carpet of houses and roads and rail tracks. This was Holland, its dykes and canals finally overwhelmed after centuries of defiance, all slowly sinking beneath a layer of ooze. The flood was now so deep, in fact, that the submerged landscape was starved of sunlight by the column of water above it. If you had stood in the submerged streets of Antwerp or Arnhem you could not have seen the Ark’s hull pass overhead, like a lenticular cloud.

  But on the ship, you always knew when you were over what had been dry land. Birds fell on the ship in flocks, finches and starlings and crows, land birds deprived of their roosting territories. The children earned extra food rations by going up to the sports deck and knocking the birds away with brooms. And a thin scum of oil and rubbish coated the waters, still seeping up from the wrecked cities below. Much of i
t was plastic, brightly colored and as indestructible as the day it was manufactured, or masses of rotting cardboard or gray food scraps. Seagulls came out of nowhere to descend on this stuff. And occasionally you saw darker, lumpier shapes, bloated remains released from the unintended tombs below, swimming up to float among the purposeless garbage.

  Manco and the other children were forever badgering to be allowed to go swim among these intriguing floating treasures. To them, born a decade or more after the flood had begun, such things as aluminum soda cans and plastic microwave-meal formers were exotic marvels. Of course it wouldn’t have been safe, even if the ship were not underway.

  The Ark passed southeast, crossing the German border. Wherever possible the Ark would follow the courses of the river valleys, still incised into the drowned landscape, and every so often the ship stopped to allow a manual sounding, made by the ancient expedient of lowering a cable. Nathan always ordered extreme caution in navigation, and didn’t trust electronic systems alone.

  On the animated maps the passengers were able to count off the cities over which they were cruising: Duisburg, Dusseldorf, Cologne. By the time they reached the vicinity of Bonn they were floating over the higher ground through which the Rhine valley was incised. The navigator stuck rigidly to the center line of the valley. Now, to east and west, scraps of high ground protruded above the waves, hilltops reduced to low islands. Lily saw remnants of the urban landscape of once-crowded western Europe, houses coating the islands like coral, factories and power stations, pylons and phone masts, occasionally the glitter of a modern development like a shopping mall. Nathan’s bridge crew looked out with telescopes and binoculars, and sometimes sent a boat party to explore. And the ship sounded her mournful whistle, the deep bass note rolling across the sea without echo. There was never any reply, but birds would fly up from the islands in great clouds.