by Chris James
“Hold on, man,” Billy interrupted. “I know of an empty house just a mile from here. We could start building our Utopia there tomorrow. But on an island in the Bay of Biscay that isn’t even here yet?”
Pilot’s look stunned Billy to silence. It was an expression he had recently placed in his armoury as a weapon against anyone trying to usurp his authority. In combination with the right words, it was lethal. “Don’t interrupt me again,” he said, turning his stare up a notch while trying not to blink. He could almost feel the testosterone surging through his veins. This time, it was Billy the poet who looked away first.
If they’d all blindly believed in the island, and in him as its leader, Pilot would have been worried. Both were tall orders. But, as Lavery said, they had all turned up for this meeting, and that in itself was positive. Pilot decided to ignore the first hurdle of plausibility and concentrate on laying out his own credentials. He believed that if you can converse on a subject the listener knows little about, and can do so with confidence and conviction, they will unconsciously elevate you. So, he began summarizing the theory of the Solar Tide, the magnetic pull it exerts on the magma and the effect this has on the Earth’s crust. Ten minutes into his oration, he could sense that they were beginning at least to believe the science.
“That’s what’s happening below us,” Pilot said. “Now consider what’s happening on the surface. Where other people see blue, cloudless skies, all I see is red. For me, there’s no escape from the mass suffering taking place on our over-populated planet.”
Pilot could sense Lavery and Mara warming to him.
“The Earth is sinking,” he continued on his wave. “Humanity has tried any number of pumps over past millennia to clear the water from the hold, but none – Christian, Communist, New Age, you name it− has had the depth or the bore required to do the job. We’re losing the battle. The more people who come aboard the ship, the more bilgewater that’s created and the closer to sinking we get.
“With the raising of this island, we’re being given the opportunity, unique in world history, to build a different kind of pump. Not one based on make-believe deities, or flakey philosophy, but on nuts and bolts. To make this pump work−to make it a credible force− it has to be seen as being outside the existing order.”
“Anarchistic.” Mara said.
“Literally speaking, the label fits us. We’re trying to overturn the accepted order. But what happens if the accepted order is unacceptable? This same anarchist then becomes someone who is trying to overturn ‘disorder’. What’s important is being outside the existing chaos. Geographically, we will be. Conceptually, we are, assuming you feel the same way I do.” Pilot looked at each in turn. “The priests have had their day. It’s time to bring in the plumbers.”
“The priests have had their day. It’s time to bring in the plumbers,” Mara repeated. “I like that.”
Bulls eye, Pilot thought. “Your house down the road isn’t up to the task, Josiah,” he said to Billy. “The entire world, and every country, city and town in it, is a dystopia. That’s why we need this virgin territory in the Bay of Biscay. No-one can touch us there.”
“That’s bull, man. They’ll be on us like flies on shit.”
“Not necessarily. Let’s take it one day at a time, Josiah. Right now, we should be worrying about what clothes we’re going to pack.”
“We should be worrying about what’s going to happen when we get there, surely,” Lavery said. “What’s the plan, Lonnie?”
“It’s in there,” Pilot said, pointing to Lavery’s head. And in the minds of everyone else who will be landing in August. All we’re taking to the island is the raw material for this experiment, not the finished product. We’ve set ourselves a basic survival agenda to begin with – food production, shelter, drinking water, medical. We’ve identified potential obstacles and devised ways of dealing with them. An astronaut-scientist can’t get down to any meaningful work until he’s in orbit. Once we’re in orbit, we can start ours.”
Mara laughed. “Dizzy answer.”
“To a confounding question. The world population hit eight billion last month. Drug abuse has permeated up to the highest levels of government and business. The northern right whale became extinct last year, the Sumatran Rhino in April. And martial law has been declared in Hungary. We won’t be taking the solution to these problems with us to the island. But maybe, after five, ten, or twenty years, we’ll have created one.”
“The precedents aren’t good,” Lavery said. “Take America’s Founding Fathers. A group of spiritually aware, gutsy people flee the religious persecution and dogmas of the Old World to a new, virgin land – an entire continent no less. Ignoring the people already there, I might add. And what do they do with it? Within a blink of the Earth’s eye they turn it into a bigger, brasher and more destructive version of what they’d left behind. What chance have we got out there in the cold Atlantic?”
Pilot’s passion and frustration were boiling over. “Put 86 pessimistic optimists together on a slab of rock in the middle of the ocean and… Look, for the sake of a shorter and more constructive meeting, let’s assume everything’s going to happen just as Vaalon said it would. We make landfall, get up next morning… then what?”
“Make breakfast,” Billy said.
For Pilot, returning to Penzance was an anti-climax. After his years of isolation, the energy generated through interacting with the others in Dublin was new and exhilarating. After dinner, the four of them had talked in Pilot’s room until three in the morning, gradually molding themselves into a team fit for purpose. The skepticism of earlier had been superceded by guarded optimism, largely due to a power of persuasion Pilot never knew he had− because he’d never had anyone to persuade until now.
Jane Lavery stayed on after the others had left. Pilot had wanted to know more about the hydroponic growing system she’d written about on one of her blogs, and she was more than happy to expand.
“Hydroponics – suspending plants in water without soil− is perfect for where we’re going and will complement the conventional growing methods we’ll also be using. Pumping the nutrient solution from a reservoir requires electricity we may not have, so we’ll be using passive hydroponics, where the nutrient solution is simply drawn up through the plants’ root system. I’ve persuaded Mr. Vaalon to bankroll thirty hydroponic growing tanks, most of which I plan to use to cultivate Moringas.”
“The world’s most generous tree.”
“You know the Moringa leaf. I’m impressed.”
“Five times more iron than spinach.”
“Twenty-five times more, Lonnie. And four times more protein than eggs; ten times more vitamin A than carrots; fifteen times more potassium than bananas. I’ve been testing a solution of nutrients specially developed for growing Moringas − manganese, copper, potassium phosphate, calcium nitrate, zinc, boron… the results are astounding.”
For another half hour they had talked about the challenges of food production that would soon be facing them, until tiredness overcame both. As he showed her out the door, Pilot had surprised Lavery, and himself even more, by kissing her lightly on the lips.
Like a battery losing power, Pilot’s high had begun to descend the moment his plane landed in Exeter. Now, in the cold light of his net shed, doubts were beginning to muddy his longer sight. On paper, Vaalon’s vision seemed so perfect− a world of harmony, purpose, energy and life. But the reality from August would be nothing more than grim subsistence living on a naked shelf of rock – the first landfall in three thousand miles for the fearsome North Atlantic seas and freezing dagger winds.
Pilot’s experience in Dublin with Lavery, Mara and Billy had underlined the need for unity and commitment among the crew. The remaining 82 recruits were still an unknown quantity, but Pilot decided that Vaalon’s selection and screening skills had been passable so far, Josiah Billy being the only question mark, and that it was pointless worrying. He had three weeks to kill before his trip t
o New York and decided that the best remedy for toxic rumination was activity.
Two days later, Lonnie Pilot was boarding the Plymouth-Roscoff night ferry. He’d surrendered to a pressing need to see the waters of the Bay of Biscay for himself, feeling that in some way he might then be able to bridge the gap between possibility and probability; fiction and fact; blue printers ink and real seawater.
From Roscoff he took a train to Brest, then a bus to Le Conquet, where, at two on the afternoon of June 5th, Lonnie Pilot set eyes on the Bay of Biscay for the first time. A heat haze smudged the horizon, making it difficult to tell where the sea ended and the sky began. He was just able to make out the islands of Beniguet, Litiri, Ledenes and Molène, stringing out to the northwest towards the larger island of Ouessant, beyond which, somewhere on the floor of the Bay, he would soon be living. As he stood at the end of the pier looking out to sea he experienced a sensation similar, he thought, to what medieval seafarers felt when the Earth was still believed to be flat− a strange mixture of fear and wonderment at what lay over the edge of the world. He tried to imagine standing in this same spot in three months time watching a wall of water as wide as the eye could see, charging towards him.
Pilot walked to a small, sandy cove nearby and took out the crab sticks and cidre he’d bought at the Super 8. When he’d finished eating, he opened his notebook to the entries he had made at the IGP. According to the computer models, the wave would hit La Rochelle and Saint Nazaire first, whiplash up the coast to the furthest northwest tip of Brittany and Ushant and then carry on to Cornwall and County Cork. And it would be a killer. There had been nothing in Vaalon’s files about any provision to warn the authorities and coastal populations of the impending catastrophe, and this bothered Pilot. He tried to divert his thoughts from the tsunami, but was only engulfed by another – a wave of invaders overrunning their island within hours of its emergence like Josiah Billy’s flies on shit. With the beginnings of a migraine, Pilot took out his phone and began texting.
As he waited for a reply, serious doubts were growing as to his own suitability as chief novitiate of this extraordinary colonisation. He had every intention of resigning when his phone sang and vibrated three times. The message from Vaalon acted like the antidote to a snake bite.
The system’s in place. It’s foolproof and failsafe and took several years to organize. There’ll be no shipping anywhere near the path of the waves at the time in question. Nor will there be a living creature within range of any tsunami anywhere in western Europe from Biarritz to Bantry Bay… IF people heed the warnings. Human nature will create it’s own victims, but we can’t be held responsible.
Vaalon’s text message was enough to close the subject for the time being. Pilot had no idea how the entire coastal populations of three countries could be successfully relocated, but if anyone had the resources to do it, it was the world’s 97th richest man. He pulled himself to his feet and marched towards the road, leaving his headache buried in the sand.
V
Vaalon’s idea of a limo was a two-seater Smart car, which met Pilot at Paddington station and took him to his mentor’s London home in Douro Place, South Kensington. The following morning, Forrest Vaalon and Lonnie Pilot would be flying to New York for a meeting Pilot saw as being pivotal. Much as he wanted to, he could not see their claim of sovereignty succeeding and was impatient to hear Ambassador Geirsson’s plan.
The first thing that met Pilot’s eyes outside the arrivals hall at JFK was the elongated, charcoal-grey, chauffeur-driven Lincoln Continental with tinted windows waiting at the curb. Vaalon stopped at the back door of the limo. “These are as common as black cabs in London,” he said. “An inconspicuous way to travel around Manhattan.” He pointed to the car behind – a Nissan – and began walking towards it. “That’s ours. Even more discreet.”
The driver – black-haired, stocky and a lot shorter than Pilot− Vaalon introduced as Aaron Serman, one of Pilot’s American crew. “Sit in front, Lonnie. I’ll go in the back.”
Vaalon’s brownstone in the Upper West Side was as understated as his car− on the outside. The antique furniture, sculptures, carpets and paintings inside confirmed Forrest Vaalon as a man of taste and appreciation. Serman, who’d been working as the man’s New York assistant for three years and had a room on the top floor, showed Pilot to the guest suite and handed him seven take-out menus ranging from Armenian to Vietnamese. “I’ll come back for your order in half an hour,” he said, glancing at his Piaget. “Help yourself to a beer. They’re downstairs in the fridge.”
When Serman had gone, Pilot began touring his suite as if in an art gallery. An original Peter Lanyon hung over the sofa, with two Henri Rousseaus either side of a gold leaf sunburst mirror. A six foot tall by seven inch wide Giacometti sculpture stood guard between the two windows. On the wall opposite was a photo portrait by Robert Frank of a beautiful, coal-eyed young woman whose identity Pilot guessed, and confirmed on checking the back of the frame. Ruth Belkin Vaalon, 1952. He walked into the bedroom, where two more photos of Ruth, one by Man Ray, the other by Lee Miller, continued Vaalon’s tribute to the love of his life. The en-suite bathroom was the largest Pilot had ever seen. He ran himself a bath, then lay down on the bed for twenty minutes while it cooled, imagining what it would be like to drown.
Later, over enchiladas and refried beans, Pilot and Serman began to get acquainted, Vaalon having deliberately accepted a dinner invitation on the other side of town to facilitate the two men’s bonding.
“How long have you worked for Mr. Vaalon?” Pilot asked.
Serman, dressed in loafers, white socks, navy blue corduroys and button-down Brooks Brothers shirt, crossed his legs and prepared to impress the man he considered to be his line manager. “After graduating from Columbia, I taught at Deerfield Academy for a semester. Thought it would be safer teaching in a prep school than trying to control fifty heavily armed high school students in Brooklyn. Boy, was I wrong. I couldn’t cut it. So I answered an ad in the New York Times for a personal assistant/driver. Mr. Vaalon’s only here maybe fifteen days a month and I spend the rest of the time at night school – computer technology.”
“What did you study at Columbia?”
“Statistics and Japanese.”
“Wouldn’t that have qualified you for something grander than this?”
“I tried,” Serman said with a smile. “Tried to conform, that is. Couldn’t.”
“In your dossier Forrest describes you as being a logistical genius.”
“I most probably am.”
Having been told by Vaalon that Aaron Serman was privy to the island’s imminent arrival, Pilot had no problem asking his next question. “Statistically speaking, Aaron, what are the chances the island will be coming up as predicted?”
Serman thought for a moment. “Well, there are no statistics on this, so we have to resort to the racecourse. I’ve studied the form – the science and the computer models – and I think the odds on it happening as predicted are very good. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Yes, it is. Thanks, Aaron.”
Serman rose to leave. “Sleep as long as you want in the morning, Lonnie. Your meeting isn’t until two o’clock.”
At six foot three, Lonnie Pilot was taller than most people he met, apart from Forrest Vaalon, but when Fridrik Geirsson greeted them at the door of his apartment, Pilot found himself looking up at the underside of a grey-blond fringe. At six foot eight, Geirsson was a big man at the UN, both physically and influentially. Pilot guessed that he was in his early forties at most.
“Glad to meet you at last, Lonnie,” Geirsson said, extending a wide hand. “Forrest, you look tired. Come in and sit down.”
He led the two men down the hall and into his study, whispering something to his secretary on the way. In the centre of the coffee table was a ring binder. He offered Vaalon a comfortable armchair, motioned Pilot to a sofa and took a chair opposite him. He leaned across the table and positioned the binder in f
ront of Pilot. “Mr. Vaalon has already seen this,” he said. “It’s a 200-page draft, substantiating and documenting your case for sovereignty over the island. Forrest told me this was a particular worry to you. We have had to be very creative in constructing our arguments.”
Geirsson opened the binder and folded his hands on the top page. “It is all built on definitions and precedents, or rather on the lack of precedents,” he said, drawing his forefinger back and forth under his nose as if it had been soaked in a liquid aid to concentration. “The crux of our argument is this: The moment a portion of the continental shelf breaks the surface of the sea, it ceases to be a continental shelf, under the current definition of such, and becomes an island. If this island surfaces within a country’s territorial waters, the law declares that they have outright sovereignty. This is logical. Second scenario: It surfaces beyond the country’s territorial sea, but still within its contiguous zone. In this case, ownership becomes less clear, but is still weighted heavily in favour of France.”
Geirsson’s secretary placed a coffee tray on the table and began pouring.
“Now, this is where it begins to get complicated,” Geirsson continued when they were alone again. “Eydos will be surfacing between 80 and a hundred miles off the French coast – well outside her territorial sea and contiguous zone, but still within her EEZ.” He pushed the binder towards Pilot while rotating it 180 degrees.
“You are welcome to read this from cover to cover, Lonnie, but it cannot leave the apartment. There is a guest room if you need to stay over.”
“I wouldn’t mind a quick read, but I’m happy with your summary.”
“Good. It might help to define the different types of island, because they have relevance. And the reason they have relevance is that they are irrelevant to your claim. Unlike all these other islands, Eydos has no precedent in modern human experience, and this is the basis of our argument. The proof is in what is extant, held against what is to come – or rather what, on a certain day and time in August in the Bay of Biscay, will have occurred.”