Flood

42

Having passed through the strait, the Links tracked the coast of the Black Sea to the eastern shore. She landed close to the border between Russia and Georgia, over a drowned seaside resort called Sochi.

There was no functioning harbor here. Shallow-draft boats had to shuttle the scientists to a kind of pier that had been improvised on a main north-south road called the Kurortny Prospekt. There was nobody to help them disembark save the ship’s crew, and they had to haul their own luggage and equipment. But there were trucks waiting, hired by Woods Hole. Gary wondered how much the fuel had cost the distant bursars of Woods Hole.

Much of the town of Sochi, where it survived above the waterline, seemed abandoned, the shops and bars closed up or burned out, and there were few people about. A Russian girl called Elena Artemova, seconded from the Shirshov Oceanology Institute in Moscow, pointed gloomily to the mountains that loomed over the coast.“Everybody sensible has gone to the high villages,” she said. “And so must we, for the night.”

The trucks took the scientists and their gear up into the mountains to a village called Krasnaya Polyana-once a favorite of President Putin, a leathery, tobacco-chewing driver somberly informed them. The drive was spectacular but somewhat scary, the road snaking along ledges cut into steep mountain gorges. As they climbed Gary could clearly see how the coastal resorts had been flooded, their beaches drowned, and how the ocean had pushed deep into river valleys lined with conifers.

This was the Caucasus, the fat peninsula that stretched across the south of the Russian Federation, bounded by the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov to the west, and the Caspian Sea to the east. Gary had studied the local topography. It was varied country, with the north dominated by steppe and to the south mountains, until very recently still snow-capped. What was most interesting to the climatologists was that northern band of steppe, stretching from Rostov to Groznyy, much of it a meadow carpeted with wild flowers and rush-filled river valleys. This was the lowest stretch of this neck of land that separated the Black Sea from the landlocked Caspian. And when the rising Black Sea broke its bounds, across the steppe was the way the water would flow.

At Krasnaya Polyana they were taken to what had once apparently been quite a grand dacha, a scatter of single-story buildings under a canopy of spruce. The trucks parked for the night, and the drivers disappeared to their own dwellings in the main village. The scientists explored the dacha, calling to each other. The only tall building was a grand limestone block covered with stucco and peeling paint. The long entrance hall had a decorated ceiling, the images obscured by damp, and iron spiral stairs led to rooms off the upper balconies.

There were staff here, locals, mostly elderly, who spoke no English, and Elena Artemova and other Russian-speakers had to interpret. They seemed disappointed the scientists were so few, and that they would need little space. Elena seemed embarrassed to be drawn into negotiating over fees with an elderly woman.

Sanjay said, “You wonder what use money is to people like this.”

“Just as well this old crone hasn’t figured that out,” Thandie murmured. “While her sons have pissed off to the hills to grow corn and fight over the girls, she’s stayed on, accumulating a stash of rubles against the day things get back to normal. Good plan.”

“Perhaps she has no choice,” Elena said harshly. “Did you think of that?” Aged twenty-eight, she was a gloomy woman, but beautiful. Her face was long, with pale, luminous skin, large eyes, a downturned mouth; she wore her hair pulled back, which emphasized the boniness of her forehead.“Perhaps her sons would not take her to “the hills.” Perhaps she cannot work up there. This is all she has. Each of us is under pressure in a changing world, Thandie Jones. And we don’t all have rich western institutions backing our adventures.”

Thandie snorted. “Don’t give me that, Mother Russia. You’re taking the Woods Hole dollar just like the rest of us.”

“If not for us and the ‘Woods Hole dollar,’” Sanjay said, “this old woman and those who work with her would go hungry. So everybody wins, yes? Let’s leave it like that.”

Neither Thandie nor Elena was satisfied, but they had been rubbing each other up the wrong way since Istanbul. Their ongoing argument, oddly, brought out the stereotypes in both of them, Gary thought, the dour moralistic Russian versus the cut-the-crap American.

Nobody chose to stay in the main house, though they would use its facilities, like the showers and laundry room. Instead the dozen of them settled for a cluster of the little single-story chalets under the shelter of the spruce trees. They were close enough together that in the shared yard outside they could build their evening hearth, an important ritual.

Gary doubled up with Sanjay. Sanjay, exhausted from his traveling, dumped his rucksack, kicked off his boots, threw himself on a bunk, and slept. Some of the Americans, stiff from the drive, started an improvised game of softball in the shade of the pines.

Gary went to find Thandie and, on a mischievous whim, Elena, and suggested exploring the village. The women eyed each other warily, but went along.

Surrounded by forest-clad peaks, Krasnaya Polyana was a pretty place, and at six hundred meters above the old sea-level datum was much too high to have been touched by the floods. It was good to walk briskly, and to breathe in air unpolluted by smoke or sewage. Gary could see why Putin had liked it-a man with taste, he thought. In fact it was probably better for the casual traveler now that twenty-first-century tourism had receded, so long as you didn’t get shot by some Russian brand of survivalist.

They found paths that led to an arboretum, and to the remains of a hunting lodge that had to predate Putin, and indeed modern Russia; maybe it belonged to the tsars. And beyond that they came to a river valley, where a threadlike waterfall tumbled into a plunge pool.

Thandie glanced around. There was nobody in sight. “Fuck it.” She ran toward the water, whooping, stripping off her clothes as she ran. She hopped as she got her jeans off. She was naked by the time she got to the water, her brown body lithe and muscular, and she splashed into the pool.

“Watch your feet on the rocks!” Elena called after her. “And the water will be cold-”

“Elena.” Gary touched her arm. “Lighten up. Come on.” He unzipped his own coverall.

“Very well. But no peeking.”

Gary stripped bare. Elena kept her underwear on, sensible stuff, heavy pants and a kind of sports bra. She was bustier than she had looked with her blouse on.

By now Thandie was splashing about under the waterfall. Her crisp hair sparkled with water droplets. The water was cold enough to make Gary hop and squeal as he went in centimeter by centimeter. Thandie kicked spray at him. “You classic wimp.”

“Oh, shut up. Christ, Thandie, you must have rubber skin.”

Elena slid uncomplaining into the water. It was just about deep enough to swim, to float your body off the rocks. Elena took a few solemn breaststrokes, her unsmiling face staring straight ahead.

The three of them gathered in a circle. Once you got used to the water the cold wasn’t so bad, and the contrast with the warmth of the air was refreshing. Gary did his best to keep his eyes away from Thandie’s bare body, and from Elena, whose underwear, soaked, didn’t conceal much.

As for the women, Gary knew he was no hunk, but he had thought they’d peek. But they seemed to be working harder at not looking at each other than not looking at him. Aha, he thought. Maybe that was why there was so much tension between them.

Elena said to Gary, “I suppose you must have dreamed of places like this, during your captivity.”

“You bet.”

“Forgive me for asking. I have known you for some time, but I do not know you well. We have not spoken of your captivity before.”

“That’s OK. Most people are embarrassed to mention it, I think.”

“How long were you kept?”

“In all, three years.”

“I am shocked.”

“The others got me through. The worst times weren’t the rough stuff, the humiliations and the beatings. Or a habit they had in one of our holding centers where they would throw us our food and make us scrabble for it, like apes. The worst time was when I was kept alone.”

Elena nodded. “We are social creatures. We are defined by our relationships with others. Without that-”

“We’re nothing.” He splashed water into his face. “I always knew there were good times like this ahead of me. That kept me going.”

Thandie said, “But there are no more good times for Helen Gray.”

“No. Poor Helen. I don’t suppose Lily has made any progress in finding out what became of her kid?”

“No. Though the child is still supposed to be in the continental US somewhere. Lily thinks she’s become a pawn in the latest complicated diplomatic games regarding the various factions in Saudi, and what’s going to become of their oil. Lily’s sticking at it. Actually I got to see Lily when I was sent to South America. She’s mostly working with AxysCorp in Peru. Something called Project City.”

“What the hell’s that?”

Thandie shrugged. “Who knows? Just another dumb idea of Nathan Lammockson’s.”

Elena turned to her.“You were in South America recently? How are things there?”

Gary said, “Maybe we should wait for the hearth…”

As the global flood event unfolded, the international band of climatologists, oceanographers, geologists, seismologists, hurricane-chasers and ecologists who traveled the globe gathering data and cooking up hypotheses had formed a community of their own. There weren’t all that many of them to begin with, they were broadly of a similar age and from similar academic backgrounds, and they kept bumping into each other.

With time the data-gathering and the face-to-face sharing of news added up to a kind of ongoing global workshop that came to seem increasingly important. The civilian population was too concerned with just getting through the challenges of the next twenty-four hours, and the governments with providing the essentials of life to a stressed population-and, perhaps, hanging onto their own power. It was only in the endless conversation of the itinerant scientists that a planetary consciousness of what was going on was maintained.

And the ritual of the hearths had emerged as a central part of the process. On nights like this, when a group felt it was quorate, you would sit around a camp fire, real or metaphorical, to drink, smoke, shoot up, make out-and, most important of all, you talked your heart out about what you had seen. Generally the sessions were transcribed by speech recognition systems and uploaded to what was left of the worldwide web, to provide an expert oral history of the flood.

But Thandie said,“Nah. When we do the hearth later, we can embellish. In the meantime I’m comfortable here.” She scissored her long legs in the crisp water. “You want to hear about South America or not?”

“Shoot,” said Gary.

“To begin with, the glaciers are vanishing in the Andes…”

Even as the seas rose, global warming was increasing faster than ever. An immediate consequence was that cities along the Pacific coast of South America that relied on glacier runoff for their drinking water were running dry as the glaciers vanished. Others too, in similar locations in North America and the foothills of the Himalayas, were going thirsty.

Meanwhile on South America’s east coast, Thandie said, there had been a major sea incursion at the broad mouth of Rio de la Plata. Coastal cities like Montevideo and Buenos Aires had long been drowned, but now the sea was pushing hundreds of kilometers northwards, flooding the lowlands of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. An even more dramatic incursion had forced its way into the mouths of the Amazon and back along the river valley, creating a giant inland sea. “Even where it isn’t drowned the rainforest is dying back,” Thandie said.“Just rotting away.”

“And so becoming another source of carbon dioxide, rather than our greatest land reservoir of carbon, as it should be,” Elena said. Her special-ism was global ecological cycles. “More greenhouse.”

“Yep,” said Thandie. “Every little helps.”

And of course, Gary thought, ahead of each of these clinically mapped incursions a desperate crowd of refugees would be driven headlong, and behind it cities and towns would be left drowned and littered with corpses. Such things no longer needed saying.

Thandie said that after spending some time with Lily in Peru they had traveled together to the US, where they had tried to push on the search for Grace. But the federal government was in the middle of a major relocation from flooded-out DC to Denver, Colorado, the highest state capital. And there Thandie had formed an impression of what was becoming of North America.

Florida and Louisiana were all but gone now, nothing left but salvage crews working over the flooded ruins of the cities. The great plains of the eastern half of the continent were rapidly being inundated, and throughout the eastern states immense bands of refugees washed west. A major community was coalescing in the Appalachians, the highest point between the east coast and the Rockies and still above the floodwaters. America’s single greatest problem was a savage drought, which was affecting much of the agricultural heartland. Meanwhile both coasts were battered by a plague of hurricanes, more of them and more intense every year, giant storms feeding off ocean heat that raged over the ruins of the abandoned coastal cities.

But there was also a gathering refugee crisis in Canada, as Hudson Bay spread inexorably wider, and the sea forced its way down the throat of the Saint Lawrence valley toward the Great Lakes, drowning Quebec and Montreal and Toronto. Elena said there was another extinction event going on there. The Lakes were the largest bodies of fresh water on Earth; now their ecologies were poisoned by salt.

When it was Elena’s turn, she began, “I myself have seen much of Europe in my travels…”

The plight of northern Europe was in fact the big story of the year. The inundation of Holland had been the beginning of a drastic flooding episode that now extended across the north European plain, through north Germany and into Poland. An immense population was in flight, heading either north to Scandinavia or south toward the Latin countries, a program of evacuation still more or less controlled by the European Union, though national rivalries were reemerging. But the south had problems of its own, with an intense drought locked down from Spain to the Levant. Meanwhile isostatic shifts were sparking off earthquakes and volcanism across the Mediterranean region. In the Middle East a major war was brewing between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the proximate cause being audacious attempts by Syria and others to get their hands on the Israelis’ advanced desalination technology.

They spoke in broad-brush terms of other areas none of them had witnessed in person recently, relaying secondhand accounts. Gary repeated Sanjay’s description of Australia.

In the Indian subcontinent, the misery of flooding and war in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh had been augmented by years of monsoons that failed or mistimed because of shifts in the global ocean circulation system. In southeast Asia there was great suffering. In Vietnam there had been a tremendous evacuation from a drowning Ho Chi Minh City to the highlands of the north. Cambodia and Thailand were mostly gone. North and South Korea had abandoned their fratricidal struggle and opened their common border, the better to manage the flows of refugees caused by the rising of the Yellow Sea. In China, that same rise had caused the abandonment of Beijing, and a huge wash of refugees into Inner Mongolia and beyond.

Much of Africa was gripped by drought, while the Rift Valley was flooding. The rainforests of the Congo were dying back too, and Gary had heard of heroic efforts to save the last colonies of African great apes.

“And in Russia,” Elena said,“all across the roof of the planet, the taiga is burning, the world forest.”

“Great,” said Thandie. “More cee-oh-two.”

Elena said, “A number of us are as concerned about the warming as about the flooding.”

Thandie managed to laugh. “I love your Russian understatement. Yes, quite a number of us are concerned about that. More sources of cee-oh-two, less available sinks as the land drowns with its forests and marshes. Even in the sea we’re not getting any breaks. Higher temperatures reduce the productivity of the phytoplankton, so they can’t draw down as much of the cee-oh-two as they used to. Oh, and as the sea spreads at the expense of land and ice, the planet’s albedo is reduced.” The flooded world was getting darker. So it reflected less light, absorbed more of the sun’s heat energy, and got even hotter.

“And so it goes,” Gary said. “A whole interlocking set of feedback cycles, all of them set to ‘positive.’”

“Yeah,” Thandie said. “In fact I think we’ve reached a crucial point where the climate changes driven by the sea rise itself are starting to kick in major league.”

“So what next? You think your sea-level rise is going to keep on coming?”

“In the longer term,” Thandie murmured. “But short term we’re going to see a pulse, an artifact of ice cap melting…”

The sea rise and the accompanied warming had together been enough to destabilize both the Greenland and Antarctic caps. The West Antarctic ice sheet, floating on the ocean, was beginning to shatter as the water steadily rose and warmed. But the seaborne sheet acted as a dam which blocked the glaciers, rivers of ice running off the frozen continent. Now those glaciers rushed to the sea, calving into icebergs. It would not be long before the huge East Antarctic sheet, anchored firmly to its base of rock for twenty million years, would also begin to crumble.

“So,” said Elena. “Floods. Earthquakes. Vast refugee flows, which in turn bring resource shortages, the spread of disease and conflicts. Shifting climatic zones which, among other things, change the ranges of mosquitoes and other infection vectors. Our planet is failing us, and our civilization is under immense strain.”

“Nicely summarized,” Thandie said dryly.“You fucking Russians are a miserable bunch.”

“We have a saying,” Elena said. “The first five hundred years are the worst. I fear I am getting cold. We should go and unpack for the night. And then we can share this desolate news all over again.” She clambered out of the water, her underwear sticking to her flesh.

Thandie watched Elena, and she saw Gary watching her. Thandie stood up, stretching, and walked over to Gary. She really was quite beautiful, he thought, in an athletic, hunter-gatherer kind of way. She murmured, “You keep your observations to yourself.” But she grinned at him, not malicious. She walked on, showering him with droplets warmed by her body.

As they dressed, Elena said she had negotiated with the dacha staff for an evening meal. “There will be local delicacies, beetroot soup, and trout served in walnut sauce. Do not be concerned about the fish. Only the deeper parts of the Black Sea are poisoned by industrial hydrogen sulphide…”