Flood

47

It was late in the day by the time Piers reached Union Square, and came to the raft. In Nathan’s apartment, he stood before the window and gazed out at the view while cradling a glass of Lammockson’s whiskey. He looked like he needed leave; his eyes were gray-rimmed, his stubble untidy.

The clouds had broken up. Behind the battered shoulders of Manhattan’s surviving buildings the sunset towered into the sky in layers of pink and red, and the light shone in the oil pools on the surface of the waters.

“Quite a sight,” Piers said. “Volcano sunsets, they say. All that dust in the air.”

“Yes.” Lily hadn’t seen Piers for six months. She didn’t much want to talk about volcanoes.

She tried to get a sense of him. He was the same Piers she had always known, the same mix of strength and fragility, of personal power and awkwardness. But he did seem a little more nervous than usual around her, however. As if there was something he wanted to say to her, but didn’t know how.

“Piers, I’ll swear you were wearing that same shirt when I last saw you in Newburgh.” It was an AxysCorp-durable garment, in fact, already years old. As other suppliers fell away, Nathan Lammockson was clothing the world.

He shrugged.“It’s a while since I’ve been shopping,” he said with some of his old dryness. “Slowly but surely we’re all turning into scarecrows.”

“Which will make no difference to my dress style at all.” That was Gary’s voice, crisped by the connection.

They turned. Gary had appeared in the screen of the laptop Lily had set up on Nathan’s coffee table. The image fritzed a bit.

Piers and Lily walked back from the window. Lily raised her Jack Daniel’s. “Hey, Gary, you have a drink there?”

He reached out of the image and retrieved a cup of something steaming hot in a china mug. “Coffee. Only been passed through the perk about four times. And then there were three.”

“Yes.”

Piers raised his own glass. “To Helen, and John Foreshaw. Absent friends.”

They drank together.

Lily said, “I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you here today.”

“Ha ha,” Gary said.

“Well, we know why,” Piers said.“You want to persuade Gary here to sign up with Lammockson, and for us both to come to the Andes with you.”

“Yep. I happen to think it’s the best option we have.”

Gary said, “I have some unfinished business which has a bearing on that. We’ll get to it.” He looked past them. “Quite a sunset you have going on there.”

They shifted so he could see out of the window. “New York City’s not as pretty as it looks,” Piers said. “People living like rats on a vast garbage dump.”

“You always were a poet, Piers. So how’s Newburgh?”

“An unhappy place too.”

The new townships in the Catskills, vast sprawls erected at huge expense, had absorbed a good fraction of New York’s fleeing millions. But they were now themselves under threat from the water that forced its way up the Hudson valley, lapping higher every day.

“We go through stages of abandonment,” Piers said, and he made a dyke of his upright hands, and moved them back step by step. “We tried to save the city by building levees and river walls and drains and pumps. When that failed we moved the people to new towns up in the hills. And now that’s failing in turn. Everybody’s exhausted, I think. Worn out by the years of building and salvaging and rebuilding. Nobody wants to move again… I think there may be a danger of a kind of psychological collapse.”

“That would be fatal,” Gary said dryly. “Because the sea’s continuing to rise whether we like it or not.”

“So,” Lily asked, “how’s the science?”

Gary shrugged. “Thandie’s models are being borne out by events. Data points sitting neatly on the curves. We need to nail a few parameters-the exponential rise rate seems to be settling down to a new value. And we’ve had some surprises. For instance because industry has collapsed globally in the last couple of years, the injection into the air of aerosols-ashes from fires, soot, smut, sulphates, all kinds of garbage-has stopped, suddenly. But a lot of that stuff was actually screening out the sun’s heat from the ground. So the air’s getting cleaner, but the downside is we’ve had an even stronger warming pulse.

“As to the future, we have nothing better than outline hypotheses on what’s coming next. We just have to keep observing. NOAA managed to persuade the USAF to grant us a couple of ICBMs to launch clouds of smart motes. Microsensors that get blown on the wind, and embedded on the land or in the oceans. Fifty-year lifetimes, powered by motion, communicating and reporting through self-assembling sensor webs. With luck, before we lose the capability to do it, we’ll saturate the planet with sensors, and never lose the capacity to monitor what’s going on.”

“Another grand gesture,” Piers said.

Gary smiled, wistful. “It’s an irony that just as we’re starting to understand the planet properly, our civilization is being screwed. But if it’s correct that the trigger for the whole event was anthropogenic activity, that’s no coincidence. Thandie thinks it’s our fault, for sure. But she also thinks we’re losing the capacity ever to prove it.”

“Where’s Thandie now?” Lily asked.

“Watching the filling-up of one archaic inland sea or another. We do keep in touch.”

They spoke of their plans.

Piers said, “Nathan has loaned me to the US government. After my work saving Sellafield I’ve been asked to go and consult on the nuclear plant at Palo Verde. Palo Verde is a big plant in the desert west of Phoenix-the biggest in the US, and the only American plant not on a river, bay or sea coast. They’ve stockpiled fuel there. Assuming the sea keeps away there will be power there for a long time to come without dependence on imports from anywhere else. A locus for civilization.”

Lily asked, “And when you’re done you’ll come to Project City?”

“I’m thinking about it.” He had a wary look. “I mean, yes, I’ll come. But it’s complicated.”

“Complicated how?”

He hesitated. His expression was closed up, as if he longed to be hiding behind his towels again.

Lily held her breath, sensing how important this moment was to Piers. Gary looked away.

“Look, Lily-this is a whole new start, for all of us. We’re going to be building a new life, one way or another, up in the mountains. I can barely conceive how it’s going to be, save that it will be different. And you and I, well, you have your sister, but-”

“We’re both alone.”

It seemed to take an enormous amount of courage for him to cover her hand with his. “We may never love each other. We may never have kids. God, it’s hard to think of a worse time to have kids. But-” He wouldn’t meet her eyes.

She thought she understood what had brought this on. As Nathan understood in his own way, the pressure of the flood had become such that everybody was in flux, there was no certainty. Piers’s own advice of only three years ago-that they should all move back to Britain-was now proven to be wrong-headed. That was why Nathan was relocating his core functions and staff to an enclave in the Andes. That was why the hostages were having this conversation now.

And that was why Piers had made this strange declaration. To him, refuge wasn’t so much a place to be. To Piers, Lily herself was his haven, as perhaps she had been in Barcelona.

To mock Piers now would be fatal, terminal. She had to be honest, straightforward.

“Yes,” she said.

Piers looked at her, surprised. “Yes?”

“Yes. I’ll be with you.”

“That’s settled, then,” Gary said, sounding pleased. “Good.”

Piers blew out his cheeks, his face reddening.

“So what about you, Gary?” Lily asked. “You coming to make up the quorum?”

“I got something else to do first,” Gary said.“I mentioned unfinished business. I had a message from Michael Thurley. You remember, the Foreign Office guy?”

Lily frowned. “I’ve heard nothing from him since Helen was killed.”

“Well, he’s still working on the case, still trying to track down Grace. To their credit, the British government kept up pressure on the Saudis, while they had a lot of other things on their minds.”

Piers nodded. “Good old HMG. So what’s happened now?”

“Said has been on the run for two years, since the coup. In the end he exchanged Grace in return for a safe haven, somewhere in the Rockies. And meanwhile Grace has been handed over to Thurley, who’s in Denver, where the State Department is operating out of now.”

“So Michael Thurley has Grace, at last.” Lily shook her head.“I don’t believe it. Poor Helen! She never saw her baby again.”

“But Thurley doesn’t know what to do with her. And she’s not ‘baby Grace’ anymore; she’s five years old. So Thurley contacted me. Here’s my plan. I need to finish up my commitments here. Then I’ll go to Denver to meet Thurley and Grace, and I’ll bring Grace to Project City, and meet up with you guys.”

Piers grunted. “Gary, don’t leave it too late. It may not be possible to make that kind of journey much longer.”

Gary nodded seriously.“I hear what you say.” He glanced at his watch. “If we’re done we ought to shut down, this link is costing Nathan a small fortune. You know, I can’t remember the last time we were together in person-all of us survivors.”

Lily said,“Once we couldn’t get away from each other, now we can’t meet.”

“We will,” Gary said. “Look after yourselves.”

“And you look after Grace.”

He reached over, his hand disappearing out of sight of the projection system, and his image dissipated.

Lily and Piers were left standing side by side.

“Well,” she said. “Suddenly this is awkward.”

“Oh, if you’re going to be an idiot about it I’m taking a walk.”

“Have a drink with me first-”

There was a boom, like an artillery piece firing. Both Lily and Piers ducked reflexively.

They turned to the window, where the sunset was fading. A billowing cloud rose up from some part of the abandoned city, far away. Maybe it was a building falling, Lily thought. Or maybe not. As the noise echoed from the flat concrete walls the pigeons took flight, rising from their nests in windowless rooms that had once been occupied by lawyers and web designers and public relations representatives, lifting up in a great gathering flock that darkened the towering red sky.