Ark

5

Holle stood in the middle of the circle of the four men, peering up.

Nathan introduced his companions. “George Camden, one of my senior guys in AxysCorp.” Camden, black, was slim, confident, apparently competent; he returned Patrick’s gaze. He wore a coverall in AxysCorp blue, with the corporation’s famous logo, the Earth cradled in a cupped hand, emblazoned on his chest. Like Patrick’s own Alice, he stayed silent and stood back, watchful.

“And Jerzy Glemp.”

Glemp, tubby, his greasy black hair speckled with gray, and with heavy old-fashioned spectacles perched on a thin nose, was nervous, intense, his palm damp. He wore a stuffy-looking suit. “Mr. Groundwater. I am pleased to meet you.” His accent was heavy, east European or Russian. When he smiled his jowls crumpled, stubbly. “I learned your name through Nathan. How you were one of those who expressed concern at the reaction of the 2018 IPCC in New York.”

2018, when maverick oceanographer Thandie Jones had presented her conclusions on the state of the world to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to be met by what struck Patrick as unjustified skepticism by the scientists, and then denial and evasion by their political masters in the months and years that followed. “Yes, I was there-that’s where we first met, right, Nathan?”

Nathan grinned and clapped Patrick’s shoulder. “After the session I made sure I got him locked into LaRei there and then. Hell, I could see right off that here was a man with resources and vision-the kind of man who sees through the bullshit and false hope and thinks about the long term, and deals with it. And I was right, wasn’t I, Patrick? It was after that meeting that you started buying up all that land on the Plains, and what a smart move that was. And that’s what I intend to come out of today-what we all intend. A fresh new direction.”

“So you’re based in Peru now?”

“Yeah. You’d think I’d be used to the sun.” He wiped sweat from his fleshy brow. “I should have glopped up. Some days you almost miss the rain. But it rains like Manchester even up in the Andes.”

Jerzy Glemp said, “Mr. Groundwater, you’re originally Scottish, aren’t you?”

“Is my accent still so strong?” But Glemp would know all about him from Nathan’s files. “Born and bred in Orkney, from an old family there. We took Holle there once. Let her crawl around in the Ring of Brodgar, just so she could say she’s been where her ancestors grew up. She was only six months old. But now the place is drowned, every last island. So we’re rootless.”

Glemp said, “As are so many of us. And your wife-”

“A local girl,” Patrick said. “Lost her a year ago, to cancer.” They looked uncomfortable. “It’s OK. Holle knows all about it.”

Holle stared up at Glemp. “Where’s he from?”

Glemp laughed. “We’ve been ignoring you, haven’t we? She has your color,” he said to Patrick. “And your charming accent. I myself am from Poland.”

“Where’s that?”

Patrick began to try to explain, but Glemp cut him off. “It is nowhere now. Under the sea. A place for the fishes to play.”

“You’re funny.”

“Well, thank you. Today, you know, we are going to try to make sure that when you are grown up, your children will have a place to play.”

“Instead of the fishes?”

“Instead of the fishes. Quite so.”

“You’re funny.”

Nathan said to Patrick, “He works for Eschatology, Inc. He’s always like this. Got to love him. Well, let’s hope he’s right.”

The public library was a collision of eras, a sandstone and glass block from the 1950s cemented to a redbrick block from the 90s: another aging structure that hadn’t been refurbished for a decade or more. They had to get through another layer of security to enter, this one operated by LaRei and a lot tougher than the police and military cordons elsewhere.

An open area on the ground floor of the library had been set out for a conference, just rows of fold-out chairs set up before a podium. It was a homely setting, Patrick thought, as if they were here for a town meeting to discuss planning applications. But shadowy figures sat at the back of the block of chairs, like Alice and Camden, guards and minders. And maybe twenty of the fifty or so chairs were already occupied, by men and women many of whose faces Patrick immediately recognized from news media and conferencing and some face-to-face contact. There were people in this room who could have bought and sold Patrick and even Nathan Lammockson a dozen times over.

This was LaRei, a secretive and exclusive society, established in the years before the flooding as a source of contacts for good schools and exclusive vacation resorts and fabulously expensive merchandise like watches and jewelery, now become a kind of survivalist network of the superrich. LaRei, where a net worth of a billion bucks wouldn’t even get you in the door; without Nathan’s sponsorship Patrick wouldn’t be here.

And at the front of the room, by the podium, stood a slim black woman of about forty, wearing a battered coverall that might once have been AxysCorp blue. She was setting up a crystal ball, a big three-dimensional projection system that showed an image of the turning Earth. Patrick recognized Thandie Jones.

Holle was distracted by the pretty Earth globe, whose blue light cast highlights from the library’s polished wood panels and the rows of books on the shelves. But she quickly grew bored, as Patrick had expected. He let her wriggle to the floor and explore the contents of his shoulder bag, pulling out books. When she got her Angel started up, before she got the gadget settled, a few bars of music wafted through Patrick’s own head. Right now Paul Simon’s “Graceland” was her favorite. Nobody was making new music now, but that made no difference to Holle; she was developing her own tastes, and was working her way through Patrick’s own collection, all of it as fresh to her as if it had been written yesterday.

Then she became aware of another child, a blond little girl of about her age, sitting on the other side of the room. They stared at each other as if the adults around them were as remote and irrelevant as clouds.