Flood

22

May 2017

Piers Michaelmas sent an oil company jet to pick Lily up from Denver, where she’d flown in from England, and bring her to Texas.

Houston from the air was utterly flat, a grid-plan cityscape set down in a country of low hills, pine forests, swamps and bayous. The only topography was man-made; the glass blocks of downtown looked like a huge sculpture set up on the plain. To the east was the bay, with the lines of the Ship Channel clearly visible and more industrial sprawl beyond. This was the area colonized by the petrochemical industry, domed storage tanks and spindly fractionating towers like a comic-book city of the future, spreading kilometers away toward the Gulf of Mexico. On the bay itself a tracery of levees and barriers gleamed, protection against the rising sea, huge constructions in themselves, brand new. But Lily saw that, despite the new defenses, the bay waters had already penetrated the old coastline, and pooled at the feet of the white storage tanks. All this under a pale smoggy sky, in heat so intense the air shimmered, a city under a grill.

Lily looked along the sweeping curve of the Gulf Freeway, hoping to glimpse the blocky architecture of the Johnson Space Center where tomorrow she was due to meet Gordon James Alonzo, a real-life astronaut. But it was lost in the detail.

On landing she took a call from Piers, advising her on where to meet him.

The airport terminal building was a glass block so aircon-cold she considered digging a sweater out of her carry-on bag. Then she had to walk a few meters under the open Houston sky to a waiting limousine, and it was like stepping into a sauna. When she got into Piers’s car it was so cold it made her shiver again.

Piers wore an open-necked, short-sleeved white shirt, and black shorts that looked like cut-down suit trousers. It was nine months since Lily had last seen Piers, back in London; she’d suggested meeting up when she found out they were both going to be in the Houston area. He patted her shoulder brusquely, and took her bag and lodged it on the floor. The car pulled out. The driver was all but hidden behind a screen of smoky glass.

“You still travel light,” Piers said.

“I live light,” Lily said as she buckled up. It was true; what she owned wouldn’t have filled more than two or three backpacks. “I’ve never felt the need to acquire much stuff. Certainly not since Barcelona.”

“Quite. It’s not really a time to put down roots, is it? Not unless you’re a banyan tree.” There was that mordant wit, the infrequent flashes of which had always made her feel warm. “So was the flight OK? How do you feel?”

“Like I just jumped into a plunge pool.”

He laughed. “Ah, that’s Houston for you. Always been a tough environment, as hot as Calcutta, barely a human place at all. And, I must say, when I started working here I came down with a string of colds. My doctor said my immune system was weakened by the temperature swings. And how are Amanda and the kids?”

“Fine. Still in their caravan park outside Aylesbury. They still haven’t been allowed to go home to Fulham. The kids swim to school. I’m kidding! My own work’s going OK.”

“On this diving project, I suppose.”

“Just background stuff for now, mostly in England.”

They were driving toward downtown; the central skyscrapers loomed ahead. Houston seemed to be a mash-up of residential, industrial and retail developments. It looked rather dated, Lily thought, very 1960s. She saw sprinklers working away at lawns of tough-looking thick-bladed grass.

Piers’s manner and accent hadn’t changed at all, despite his immersion in Texas for so many months; he was still cool, ironic, officer-class British. But his eyes occasionally unfocused. He must have an Angel, or the latest mil-spec equivalent, speaking in his head; even in her company he remained separated, alone. But, clear-eyed, clean-shaven, his hair neatly cropped, he looked healthier than she’d ever known him.

“I can see you adapted, Piers. Nice shorts, by the way.”

He raised his eyebrows. “My shorts are serviceable and neat, thank you.”

“You’re enjoying life here, aren’t you?”

“Well, Americans are always welcoming. Houston’s a pretty diverse place, I think. There’s even an Iranian district now, quite remarkable. But the main thing I like is the room. Only an hour to the Gulf coast, only a day’s drive the other way to desert, or hills.. The work is the thing, of course. Having something meaningful to do makes a big difference to one’s morale, doesn’t it?”

“That it does. I saw the levees from the air.”

“They’re talking about a tidal barrier further out, a series of gates that would dwarf the Thames Barrier. Typical bloody Texans. But they do have a lot to protect. Most of the detailed work I’ve been doing has concerned Houston’s petroscape.”

The protection of the Gulf was a public and private project, a shared task of governments, oil companies and other multinationals. Piers was the leader of an exchange party from Britain, who were applying the lessons learned safing British oil facilities like Canvey Island to the much larger-scale problems here.

“You wouldn’t believe the size of it, Lily. This is the largest concentration of petrochemical refinery and storage facilities in the world. A hundred kilometers of tanks and cracking towers, stretching from Houston all the way to the coast.”

“And all of it threatened by the sea.”

“Quite,” he said mildly. “Galveston Island, for instance, rises only three meters or so above sea level-I mean above the old datum. Houston is even worse off. It was built on marshland in the first place, and there’s been subsidence because of the oil and water they’ve been pumping out of the ground here for so long. In some places the city is actually below the old sea level. Well, we know that the average global rise is already up to five meters. If the sea did break through-well.

“But immense as it is, this project is an incident in the bigger picture. You have to see that this is a global crisis, impacting a world already afflicted by climate change, energy shortages and ideological tensions. We are trying to save the hubs.”

“The hubs?”

“You’d be surprised how dependent our world-wide network of energy and material flows is on a few key nodes. Grain silos, power stations, oil sources and refineries.”

“Like Houston.”

“Like Houston. And of course an awful lot of these facilities are on the coasts, even on flood plains. So we’re trying to sustain that network as far as possible. In the short term it’s all about emergency measures. For instance we’re trying to make sure all the tanker fleets are kept at sea. Any manufacturing or processing facility we believe might be lost is being worked as hard as possible to produce durables for the transition period-that is, the transition until everything’s been moved inland or uphill, and is made safe against the floods. Bronze, stainless steel, plastic, that sort of thing, age-resistant. You should see the Goodyear plant.”

“Goodyear? The tires people?”

“They’ve been here for decades. Now they’re churning out mountains of the damn things.”

“Why do we need tires?”

“Rafts,” he said.

That simple word took her aback. She had had the sense with Piers since they had come out of Barcelona that he was much closer to the center than she was, that he knew far more than she did, that he looked that much further into the future.

The car slowed. They were southwest of downtown at an intersection of two major avenues, Montrose Street with Westheimer Road. She glimpsed galleries, cafes, restaurants, bars, shops. It was a lively area that Amanda would probably have called “counter-cultural.”

“This is the Montrose District,” Piers said. “One of the few walkable neighborhoods in the city. I thought you’d appreciate being here. Your hotel is just around the corner-there, you see? Look, I have to go back to work for a few hours. Sorry to abandon you for now.” He handed over her bag.

On impulse, she kissed him on the cheek. “Later then.”

“Sure.”

The car door opened, and Lily jumped out. Again she was struck by the sheer physical intensity of the sunlight that bounced off the sidewalk flags. There were few people around in the heat of the day.

Piers called from the car, “Oh, Lily-make sure you’re in your room at about midnight. I’m fixing up a conference call with some old friends. Call it my treat.”

“It’s a date.”

The car closed itself up and slid away. She hurried up the steps and through sliding doors into the hotel’s cool, dark interior.