Flood f-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “Well, maybe-”

  “They got to be taught,” he insisted, slapping his palm on the floor. “We can’t let our kids turn into fucking seals. They got to learn their longitude. They got to learn to read and write and figure. They got to learn they live on a fucking ball in the sky. Because otherwise, in a generation’s time, they won’t be using your lunar eclipses to work out longitude. They’ll be cowering from God’s blinking eye.”

  “I know, know-”

  “That damn kid Manco is worse since his mother died. Say what you like about Kristie, and she had plenty to say about me, she was a good mother, a tough one.”

  Lily flared.“Oh, you think I’m doing such a bad job? Christ, Nathan, I’m nearly seventy years old. If I could get his mother back I’d do it like a shot. It’s not as if you did such a great job with Hammond.”

  As soon as he could after the sinking of the Ark, Hammond had commandeered a couple of the lifeboats and had headed off, making south, he said, hoping to find a foothold back in the Andes. His father hadn’t wanted to release him. Their parting had been marked by a fistfight.

  Now, though, Nathan didn’t seem worried by the jibe. He leaned closer to Lily and whispered, though there was nobody around to hear, “Speaking of Hammond, got a message from him today.” They had kept in touch via Nathan’s wind-up and solar-powered radio gear.“Sent back some news about the Spot.”

  The Spot was an apparently permanent hypercane system that roamed around the Earth’s tropics, feeding on the heat of the warming air, unimpeded by land as such storms had always been before. It was called the Spot because that was how it was thought it would look from space, if any satellites were still functioning, a permanent storm on Earth like the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. Nathan reeled off some coordinates. It paid to know where the Spot was, and its satellite storms, so you could avoid their destructiveness and yet plunder the mixed-up, nutrient-rich waters they left in their wake.

  “And,” Nathan said,“he got a message from Alma. Or rather he didn’t get one.”

  “Alma, Colorado.” The highest city in the US. “And now?”

  “Glug, glug, glug,” Nathan said.

  “God.” Lily tried to remember what smaller US cities had been like-the downtown, the out-of-town malls, the schoolhouses and gas stations and suburbs. Gone, all of them, erased more completely than any of the vanished empires of the past.

  The endless litany of losses was increasingly unreal. The sea was so high now that even mountain cities in the Andes were being lost: Bogota, Quito, La Paz. And before that, Australia had gone, the first continent to vanish entirely from the face of the Earth. Lily had marked the day, following her scratch calendar, when she had calculated that the seas had at last closed over Mount Kosciuszko in New South Wales, two thousand, two hundred and twenty-eight meters high, the island continent’s highest point. Lily had softly sung “Waltzing Matilda” as she bade it goodbye…

  She wasn’t listening to Nathan. As always she was drifting off into reverie. She tried again to focus.

  Nathan, rocking gently, kept talking, the way he used to, as always setting out his vision of the future. “We got to keep these kids educated. They are the heirs to forty thousand years of culture. In the past the world humans made was all around you, the buildings and the books and the machines, and it shaped you. That’s all gone now, erased, save for what’s in here.” He thumped his temple, but gently, favoring his arthritic wrist.“This isn’t just a flood. It’s a vast collective amnesia. Well, that can’t be helped. They’ve got to learn. But they won’t learn. They won’t listen. They won’t keep to the rotas we set for them…”

  She had heard these arguments before, and not just from Nathan. More commonly people complained that the kids wouldn’t pay any attention to the itinerant preachers and imams and rabbis who slowly worked their way around the raft communities. If the kids were rejecting Nathan’s can-do vision of the world, they were also seeking their own gods, it seemed, somewhere in the endless water that dominated their world.

  Nathan mumbled, “Anyhow the flood is just another climatic convulsion in a long line. Five million years ago there was a grand cooling in Africa, and the forest broke up. Our forefathers split off and started evolving adaptations for open country. The chimps stuck to the forest fragments, and you know what, they were still there when the fucking waters rose up to drown them. The Earth birthed us, and then shaped us with tough love. This new watery age, the Hydrocene, is just another rough molding, and we’ll come through it, smarter and stronger than ever. We are the children of the Hydrocene. Yes, I like that…” He looked around, as if seeking somebody to write the phrase down for him. “Damn chimps, I mean kids, they just swim…” His eyes were closing, as if he were falling asleep even while he was talking, and he rocked stiffly, seventy-three years old.

  “Nathan, maybe you should go to bed.”

  “They just swim…”

  A light flared in the sky. Lily glanced up, thinking it must be the end of totality, the bright sunlight splashing unimpeded once more on the moon’s face. But the moon, still wholly eclipsed, was as round and brown as it had been before.

  It was Jupiter: Jupiter was flaring, still a pinpoint of light, but much brighter, bright enough to cast sharp point-source shadows on the glistening weed of the raft substrate. But the light diminished, as if receding with distance. And soon Jupiter shone alone as it had before.

  That was the Ark, she thought immediately. That was Grace. What else could it be?

  Then a sliver of white appeared at the very rim of the moon, lunar mountains exploding into the sunlight. She was quickly dazzled, and Jupiter was lost. She was never going to know.

  “I got you here, didn’t I? I kept you alive.”

  “Yes, Nathan.” She pulled a blanket around his shoulders as he rocked and mumbled about evolution and destiny and children, an old man bent over his arthritic pain. “Yes, you did that.”

  But if it had been Ark One, she thought, maybe the crew planned the timing of that strange departure, knowing that over much of the dark side of the Earth eyes would be drawn to the eclipse, the spectacle in the sky. It would be quite a stunt, one hell of a way to say goodbye.

  “I kept you alive. We’ve got to adapt. The chimps, I mean the kids, they’ve got to learn…”

  95

  August 2048

  Gary Boyle came to visit Lily, on her slowly spinning raft. Lily went to the lip of the raft and watched the boat come in.

  Gary rowed over with a younger man, the two of them pulling strongly on their oars. He came from what looked like a scattered archipelago of low, green-clad islands. These were actually the summits of the Collegiate Peaks, a chain in the Rockies, the highest in the US outside Alaska. Now those huge mountains hardly stuck out of the rising water.

  Raft kids went swimming around Gary’s boat, their little bodies like sea lions dipping and bobbing as they sang one of their endless nonsense chants: “I laugh you more my fun, you’re my enjee, you’re my tee-fee, I laugh you more my fun…” One of the kids was Boris, the son of Manco and Ana, not yet two years old, swimming as confidently as any of them. Ana stood by the water and clapped her hands to try to make him come in.

  Gary and his partner pulled the boat in alongside the raft’s ragged edge, and climbed stiffly out. Lily gave Gary a hand, more for affection’s sake than for any practical use, and he folded her in a big hug.

  He let her lead him across the raft. “Wow, what is this stuff, rubber?…” The slime-covered seaweed base of the raft, Nathan’s last legacy, persevered three years after a lung infection had finally killed the man himself. “Gen-enged, really? Oh, I’m impressed.”

  They sat together in the little plastic-and-tarp shack Lily used, sharing sometimes with Manco or Boris but rarely with Ana, who preferred to stay with her own family. Lily gave Gary fresh water, and dried fish spiced with some of the precious pepper she had been able to buy from a big floating farm in the mid-Pacific.“You shou
ld see those farms, Gary. Hanging gardens and water fountains, wind turbines and solar cells, out in the middle of the ocean. They have chickens in coops bolted to the walls, and vegetables growing in old truck tires. Even Nathan would be impressed.”

  Gary, listening politely, was fifty-six. There were vestiges of the boy she had known in the old days, Lily thought. He had always kept fit, as a field scientist always outdoors, always on the move, and then as a refugee for so many years. Nothing much had changed about his life in that regard. He was well-dressed, comparatively. Where Lily wore the remnants of her AxysCorp overalls, repeatedly washed and mended, Gary was dressed in a shirt and slacks that looked barely faded, freshly plundered from some drowned American town. But his hair was drastically thinned and peppered with gray, and there was a kind of sad tiredness about his eyes. And there was a crease on his temple, the scar of a gunshot; he didn’t talk about that.

  Gary had spent decades in the Andes communities, where Walker City had finally ended its long trek. In the end, though, as the situation started to crumble there, he decided he wanted to end things at home, in whatever was left of the continental US, and after an oceanic odyssey of his own he had finished up in Colorado.

  And now he was here. He leaned forward and took her hands. “God, it’s good to see you, Lily, to hear you talk. It’s good of you to come all this way, to have crossed the world.”

  So she had. The rafts were navigable, just, if you used rudders and caught the wind in your sails. After Nathan’s death Lily had inherited his goods, including his precious radios. She’d used them to track down Gary when he moved back to North America. And when he had told her what a significant year was coming up she had felt compelled to come and seek him out. The others indulged her. They didn’t much care where they were, it seemed to her, as long as the fishing was good.

  He said,“You’re living a life a lot more alien than anything I’ve gone through yet. What do you do all day?”

  “We fish,” Lily said. “We catch water. We tend to the rafts. We trade a bit. Mostly we swim and screw.”

  That made him laugh.

  She said, “For me more of the former, none of the latter. They’re having kids, you know, younger and younger. Manco and Ana, for instance, were only fifteen when little Boris came along. The mothers give birth in the water. Even Manco and Ana aren’t much like you and me. And the new generation, the Borises, will have no contact with us. Nothing in common, no shared memories. That’s my fear, anyhow. I tell them a lot of stories. Where they came from.”

  They spoke of other friends, of Thandie and Elena and the rest of the scattered community of scientists, still holding hearth-gatherings over their surviving radios, still trying to witness the vast transformation that was overcoming the world. They spoke of Nathan, who had died bereft of his son, and of their fellow hostages, of Piers and Helen and even of John Foreshaw, who had died in Barcelona and had known nothing of the flood.

  And of Grace. Gary knew even less about Ark One than Lily did. Lily had long accepted she was never going to know what had become of Helen’s daughter.

  They spoke of the year coming up. “It is one for disaster connoisseurs,” Gary said. “In the next twelve months or so we’ll lose continents by the hatful. In January, Europe will finally go when Mount Elbrus in Russia is covered. In May it’s Africa’s turn, when Kilimanjaro drowns. By then the continental US will have gone too, save for a couple of mountains in Alaska. In the year after that South America, even the Andes, and there will be nothing left in the western hemisphere at all…”

  She didn’t like to admit that she wasn’t sure when January was, what month it was now. You lost track out on the sea. “I wonder how we’ll mark time when the land is gone. Maybe by the great events that we experience. I’ve heard Manco and Ana talking about ‘the year of the big wave.’”

  He leaned forward, interested. “What big wave?”

  She described it, an immense pulse in the water that must have been a hundred meters high, spanning the ocean from horizon to horizon. It was disconcerting, terrifying. But the rafts had been in deep water at the time, and the wave hadn’t broken over them. The rafts just rode up, and were lowered smoothly down the other side.

  Gary nodded. “That sounds like a planetary wave. The theory of ocean worlds anticipates such things. A wavelength on a global scale, a slosh that circles the world’s unbroken seas over and over.”

  “Nothing to stop it.”

  “Right. Maybe it was started off by an underwater quake, or a landslide. The weight of the water settling on the land is still causing geological kickbacks. We see it in the seismic readings, but we can’t usually tell what’s going on. No way to get down there to see anymore, of course.”

  “ ‘Ocean worlds.’ ”

  “Yeah. We even saw some in the sky, back in the day when we had planet-finder telescopes. When you think about it a world like Earth ought to be rare, a mix of oceans and rocky landscapes. Worlds that are all rock, like Venus or Mercury, or all water-like Titan, the ice moons, frozen oceans hundreds of kilometers deep over a rocky core-have to be a lot more common. Anyhow we’re now seeing ocean-world features emerge here on Earth, like the planetary waves, and the perpetual hypercane-strength storms like the Spot, and a simpler global ocean circulation system.”

  “So what about life?”

  He smiled. “Yes, what about it? Listen, I have my own theory about where we’re heading. Don’t quote me. Thandie would kill me if she could hear me.”

  “Jeez, I’m not reviewing an academic paper, just tell me.”

  “Actually there are precedents. In the days of Pangaea a couple of hundred million years ago, when all the continents were joined into one, you had a semi-global ocean that was an approximation of what we’re facing now. Look, the flood has made a real mess of the biological cycling of carbon…”

  Carbon was drawn down from the air into the vegetable matter of plants on land and in the sea by photosynthesis, and then released back into the air through the respiration of living things, and the decay of the dead.

  “Before the flood this carbon cycle was dominated by terrestrial life, the green things on land, and we’ve lost that whole major land-based mechanism. And we pretty much lost a second mechanism too, which is the weathering of surface rock-the cee-oh-two is rained out dissolved in water, the acid rain etches the rocks, blah blah. That was only a thousandth the biological component, but on a longer timescale it’s effective-or was.

  “What’s worse is that even in the seas the drawdown mechanisms are failing. The rising temperatures are reducing the efficiency of the phytoplankton. The increasing acidity of the oceans isn’t helping either-carbon dioxide plus water makes carbonic acid. Also you don’t get the cold polar currents descending under the warm low-latitude waters, taking oxygen and nutrients to lower layers. That’s why you get algal blooms following storm systems; you get some mixing-up, temporary, localized.”

  “We know about that,” Lily said. “We feed off it.”

  “We’ve lost all these drawdown mechanisms just at a time when we’ve had a massive one-off injection of carbon dioxide into the air from the fires, and the rotting of the vegetation cover of the drowned land. It’s as if we made a bonfire of everything green on the planet.

  “So things have to change. The Earth is a system of flows of matter and energy, of feedback.”

  Lily whispered, “Gaia.”

  “That’s the idea. The biggest pressure on her has always been a slow heating-up of the sun-the energy the sun pours onto the Earth is up by about a third since life formed. Now, Gaia’s systems adjust, unconsciously, to maintain an even temperature at the surface, a temperature at which life can survive, despite this heating up. In the early days methane was injected into the air, another greenhouse gas, to keep the temperatures up. Some time around two billion years ago the sun’s output was optimal for life on Earth. Since then it’s been getting too hot, Gaia needs to keep cool, and the main way she does this
is by drawing down cee-oh-two from the air, and storing it in the rocks, fossil stores like oil, coal.”

  Lily nodded. “The less greenhouse gas there is, the less heat is trapped.”

  “That’s it. But that mechanism is nearing the limit of its capability. The atmosphere’s cee-oh-two tank is, was, pretty much empty. Gaia was already old, even before the flood, and the hot sun is pushing too hard.

  “Some of us think that the glaciation, the Ice Ages, was a kind of experiment with a new stable state. The Ice Ages were tough for humans. But from Gaia’s point of view, if you give up the higher latitudes to ice, you lose a percentage of your productive surface, but you reflect away a hell of a lot of sunlight. Meanwhile life can flourish in the cooled-down mid-latitudes, and indeed on the land surface exposed by the lower sea levels. And the oceans are more fecund when the water is cooler; Gaia likes it cool. So the mechanism worked. But it always looked like a last-gasp effort.

  “And now suddenly Gaia is finding herself water-rich, very hot, with very high carbon dioxide levels. She’s under stress again, a kind of stress possibly unprecedented in her history.”

  “That’s what Thandie says. Stress-”

  “Yes, but we know the Earth likes to settle in stable states, where all its geological, climatic and biological cycles work together. For the last couple of million years it’s flickered between Ice Age and warm interglacial. Now I think Gaia is reaching for a new stasis, a new point of equilibrium, where we’ll see a much higher level of carbon dioxide in the air, and a much higher global temperature. All that heat will generate storms and whip up the sea, promoting life there by stirring up the nutrients, and providing a drawdown mechanism for the carbon dioxide. So you’ll get a stable state, though with a higher cee-oh-two level than before.”

  “I see. I think. No need for land at all?”

  “No. A whole new stable equilibrium, on a hot, stormy, watery Earth. In a sense you could say this is why the deep subsurface reservoirs have opened up now, to release the water to make this new state possible; the old states, the glacial-interglacial, were on the point of failure. You know what? I did some calculations, just blue-sky stuff. I figure that with a configuration like that there could be more total biomass on the Earth than before. The planet will come out of this actually healthier.”