Flood

46

In the diffuse shadow of the Con Ed building’s clock tower a giant raft drifted over Union Square.

The raft must have been a hundred meters long. Its core was a slab, black as tarmac, bordered by barbed wire and with giant Stars and Stripes dangling limp and wet at its corners. There were shacks on its back, built of ply or plastic or corrugated iron and lashed down by ropes and cables. One of the shacks, a bit grander than the rest, rose to a couple of stories, glass-walled like a lookout tower. People seemed to be working all over the raft, hauling stuff back and forth from tarpaulined heaps of materials. Boats docked with the raft, everything from canoes and rowboats to sleek-looking launches in AxysCorp livery. The raft even had a helipad, marked by a big H splashed crudely in white paint.

The chopper ducked down to an easy landing on the H. Lily saw they were being watched all the way down from a kind of bunker of sandbags set up on the raft, with a slit window from which glass lenses glinted.

Lily stepped out into driving rain. It bounced off the surface of the raft, which was, she saw now, a quilt of ply and plastic tarps, roughened up to give firm footing. The raft bobbed massively, and the vertical lines of the buildings around her dipped and swayed. She pulled her poncho tight around her body, and shook her hood forward to keep the rain off her face; the rainwater tasted salty where it dribbled into her mouth. There was a stink of sewage, and something else, something more profound, corrupt.

She could hear the hissing of the rain on the floor, the calls of the people, even the cries of the gulls. They were sea-coast noises, she thought. Other than that the city was astonishingly quiet. But then Manhattan’s traffic, the private cars and buses and flocks of yellow cabs, lay rusting meters beneath her feet.

Nathan Lammockson strode forward, here in person to meet her off the chopper, bulky and purposeful in a waterproof coverall. He was shadowed by an aide who made continual notes on a handheld. Lammockson shook the pilot’s hand. “Bobby. Neat landing. Remember me to your mother.”

The pilot grinned, pleased and flattered.“Thanks, Mr. Lammockson.”

Lammockson embraced Lily. “Good to see you again. Let’s get you out of this fucking rain.” He led her toward the two-story building.

She glanced back at the pilot. “Look at that guy. You’ve made his day.”

“The old tricks are always the best. I knew Tony Blair. Did I ever tell you that? I learned at the feet of the master.”

The tower turned out to be a kind of two-level apartment, with a kitchen and storage area down below, and an open-plan lounge-diner-bedroom up top. It was small and basic, but furnished exquisitely. The white-leather armchairs had evidently been salvaged from Bloomingdale’s, for a store tag sat like a trophy on a little coffee table. It must have taken one hell of an operation to retrieve these beasts from under the water without so much as a single mark; salvage was already hugely difficult in a city in which all but the tallest buildings were now entirely submerged.

Lammockson helped her out of her poncho, while he warmed up some coffee. “Welcome to my humble,” he said. “Hey, you want something stronger than that? I have some Jack Daniel’s that needs finishing.” He showed her the bottle.

“No, thanks. Quite a place you have here.”

“Costs me an arm and a leg in rent. The Collective claim to be a bunch of bohemians, but they’re as sharp as any Lower East Side slum landlord ever was.”

“What Collective? I just assumed you owned the whole raft.”

He laughed and handed her a coffee. He poured a slug of Jack Daniel’s into his own mug. “Hell, no. Cheaper to rent. Especially since, as you know, I’ve no intention of staying around longer than I need to. I still have some business here, supplying the remaining recovery and evacuation consultancies, but basically I moved out of New York after the hurricane.”

For years Nathan had been steadily transferring his wealth into tangible forms, in power and land and other assets. As communications and transport links steadily broke down, the surviving financial institutions were under increasing pressure. Nathan always said he didn’t want his wealth to disappear when the power failed in some bank’s computer.

“The Greenwich Village Collective built this raft, mostly from automobile tires and oil drums. Planned and assembled it right here after the hurricane blew out, even while the waters rose steadily around them. Only don’t call it a ‘raft.’ A raft is a kind of vessel, right? This raft isn’t meant to go anywhere, too damn big to navigate down the city streets. Think of it as an island. People live here; they ain’t just crew.” He pointed to low buildings. “ That is a water filtration plant. And that’s a school. There are already kids in there who don’t remember the world before the flood.” He waved his mug at the flooded streets, the floating garbage, the cliffs of glassless windows around them. “To them, this is normal. Think of that! Time goes on.”

“So how do people live?”

“Scavenging. We’re floating above the carcass of the greatest city in the world. It will last for decades.”

“I thought the federal government was in control of salvage rights.”

Nathan raised his eyebrows. “Look around, Lily. The federal government’s in Denver. It doesn’t have a lot of control on the ground in a place like this.”

“I see the Stars and Stripes flying everywhere.”

“Oh, sure. The people here are still Americans. Who’s going to be the first to haul down Old Glory? But they’ve been looking to their own defense and provision for years already. The federal government doesn’t even collect taxs anymore, save from the likes of me who can’t get under their radar. It’s the same in Britain. The rump government in Leeds has no control over the ratty little salvagers who go scuba-diving in the Thames estuary.”

Lily shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t had much news out of Britain since the tsunami, not since I got my sister and her kids out of there-thanks to you.”

Lammockson nodded. “Where is Amanda?”

“The AxysCorp compound in Iowa. I thought I’d join her there, and take her down to Project City with me.”

“Fair enough. You don’t want to bring kids into a place like this, if you can help it. I mean there are hazards enough, the sewage. The other day, over on the east side, we found Freon bubbling up from an underwater mountain of rusting refrigerators, down on some dump. And every day you have the corpses bobbing up to the surface. The kids here earn a few Collective-scrip dollars by poking away the stiffs with boathooks. Five, ten years ago you would never have imagined you would live to see such scenes. And in another five years you won’t either, when the fishes have eaten the bodies of the urban dead.” He drank his coffee. “So what about your buddies? Piers Michaelmas is in the area, isn’t he?”

“I heard a British chopper is bringing him in to Manhattan later today.” Much to her surprise, Piers had finally abandoned his British army commission and had “taken the Lammockson shilling,” as he put it, coming to work for AxysCorp, though he hadn’t yet committed to come to Project City.

“And the scientist guy?”

“Gary’s in the States too. He’s in Colorado, at the NOAA headquarters there.”

He nodded. “Look, I’ll have Michaelmas brought here. You can use this apartment for the night. I have my yacht moored over at Coney Island, I’ll be fine there. You can conference-call Gary and whoever else you want. My staff will show you how.”

“Thanks, Nathan.”

“It’s not generosity, believe me, but calculated self-interest. I want you guys with me, you hostages, you who have already weathered a worse storm personally than any global-flooding shit is likely to unleash on us.

“The world is changing, Lily. This is no longer an emergency, because it has no finite duration. We are entering a new phase in human history. Earth itself has intervened in human affairs, trying to shake us off as a dog shakes off a flea.” He was standing up straighter, apparently unconsciously, and his voice took on the sonorousness he adopted as he addressed his worldwide flock. Lily remembered Piers’s observation that Nathan was a man who actively sought a crisis commensurate with the stature he perceived in himself. “Listen. The average sea-level rise is already up somewhere between seventy and eighty meters, depending who you believe, and still accelerating, still following Thandie Jones’s exponential curves. And humanity is in flight. I’ve some satellite imagery I should show you, taken in the infrared. Whole refugee nations marching inland, dogged by thirst, famine, disease and brushfire wars. Before the flood, fully a third of the world’s population lived at elevations below a hundred meters. Well, we’re approaching that level of rise now, so there are two billion people who must be either dead already or on the move.

“The governments have at last shed their denial about what’s happening, but it’s too late for them. They are losing control over their own resources and populations, just as they’re getting locked into a new kind of geopolitics. Suddenly altitude is a more valuable resource than oil. There are rumors that Russia and China are moving toward war over Tibet, for instance. Governments will soon become irrelevant. Governments will always be at a disadvantage because they have an obligation to deal with the whole population, to support it or suppress and control it, or whatever. Private organizations have much more limited goals-selfish goals if you will, but goals much more achievable by their very finitude. And so it’s the corporations, the big consultancies and the multinationals, that will stand when governments crumble and crack.”

“And you mean to stand with them, Nathan?”

“You can bet on it.” He reached for the Jack Daniel’s. “You sure you won’t have a slug of this? You’re not going anywhere else today. Relax. Take your boots off. The shower is hot. Come on, I’ll get you a glass.”