Flood

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 should 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.”

“But without room for us,” she said.

“Not necessarily. There’ll be plenty of fish in the sea, if we’ve the wit to catch them. But this whole story has never been about us, has it? It’s always been about the Earth, transforming herself as she has in the past. Even if we gave her the kick in the ass that induced her to start the process.”

Lily looked at the children playing in the sea. “Our civilization is gone. Everything we built. But look at those kids swimming. They don’t care that the Smithsonian is drowned, or that we’re all offline forever.”

Gary murmured, “Yes. And even if we pass away, you know, it’s a happy ending of a kind. ‘One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the Earth abideth for ever.’ Ecclesiastes 1:4.” He grinned. “It was Thandie got me looking up the Bible, but don’t tell her that either.”

“So what about you? When North America drowns, will you come with us?”

“I guess not,” he said, as boyishly as if he was refusing nothing more than a second cup of water. “I think I’m done with traveling. And there are people back there I care about.”

Lily smiled. “You always were a people person, in the end. If not for you, Grace couldn’t have survived. But I can’t see you quitting. You’re only fifty-six. I’ll give you some of Nathan’s raft-seaweed to grow.”

“Thanks.” He seemed concerned. “But, Lily, look, the seaweed by itself isn’t enough. Eventually you’ll run out of other stuff. The plastic, nylon fishing lines, everything else.”

“Oh, we know the rafts don’t last forever. Every so often we get hit by a storm we can’t avoid, and a few more are lost. And there are still pirates out there. It’s a steady attrition.”

“And doesn’t that worry you?”

She shrugged. “What can we do about it?”

“It’s a tragedy, you know,” Gary said. “We just ran out of time.” He looked up at the huge sky.“Another fifty years and we’d have had power stations in orbit, and mines on the asteroids and the moon, and we wouldn’t need the damn continents. Well.”

“Yes.”

They stood, helping each other up. Arm in arm, they walked to the edge of the raft, where Gary’s friend was waiting beside their rowboat. He was playing coin tricks for a shoal of children, some of them in the water, some out of it. They looked enchanted.

Gary said to Lily, “I know where you’re heading next.”

“You do, do you?”

“There’s only one place to be, in the end, isn’t there, one last sight to see? You’ve got time, a few years left yet.” He hugged her once more, and clambered down into his boat. They pulled on their oars and the boat slid away. “You just know she’s going to be there.”

“Who?”

He had to call back from the boat. “The disaster tourist’s disaster tourist. Thandie Jones! Give her my love when you see her.”

The boat receded, heading back toward the near-submerged Rockies. The raft children splashed and played in its wake, begging for coins. Lily heard Ana’s thin voice calling for little Boris to come in.