Flood

49

Benj walked Lily through the P-ville slums to the biofuel field. Shacks slumped around them, built of sheets of corrugated iron or plastic-there was never any wood to spare. A couple of AxysCorp cops accompanied them, wearing company blue like Benj and Lily. Unlike the cops Benj carried no weapon.

The biofuel field was an open rectangle in the middle of the shantytown’s spread. Plants unfamiliar to Lily, green leaves on foot-high stalks, grew here in neat rows. Lily knew something about this project. She had a kind of floating role in Nathan’s organization, with various assignments; she had done some work on the management and logistics of field experiments like this. But she didn’t recognize these new plants.

She could clearly see the scar of the explosion, a blackened circle that spanned much of the field.

Benj walked her around the field boundary. In places the fence was broken down, overrun by the moundlike forms of shacks. AxysCorp cops patrolled, automatic weapons cradled; they looked tense, alert, waiting for trouble, maybe wanting it.

“You can see how they’re pushing in, the shacks,” Benj said. “Although Nathan has this area clearly marked out as Green Sector. Every few months we shove them out, rebuild the fences, but back they come; we don’t have the manpower to keep them out.”

“Like fighting the tide,” Lily murmured.

“The encroachment into Orange is even worse, you can imagine.. ” Hands on hips, he looked around, at the field, the shacks, the children peering curiously at them from the shadowed interiors. He waved and smiled at the kids; some of them waved back. “Mostly up to now we’ve been growing stuff you could eat, if it wasn’t used for fuel. Sugar cane, corn for ethanol, canola or soy for biodiesel. With those products the problem is mostly theft. We can deal with that, but Nathan got impatient with the losses. So he ordered a switch to this stuff.”

“What is it?”

“Jatropha. Comes from Africa, places like Tanzania, Mali. Favors hot and dry conditions. A little gen-enging and it grows fine here.”

“And Nathan prefers it because?”

“The oil it produces is poisonous,” Benj said.“You can use it for fuel, but you can’t eat it. So there’s no point in stealing it.”

“Right.” Lily glanced at the fringing shacks, the round faces of the children. “But if you’re a parent trying to feed her kids-”

“You see the problem.”

“And now it’s come to this,” she said.

Benj was twenty-two now. He had grown taller even than Piers Michaelmas. He would never be good-looking, he lacked his mother’s delicacy of features, but he looked competent, Lily thought, and kindly. He was quite unrecognizable from the withdrawn, gadget-hungry kid he had been in London, although that kid had always shown a lot of common sense when he needed it, such as at Greenwich, and a lot of compassion. And he had found a role that suited him, working here among the slums of Pizarroville, Project City’s unrecognized and unwelcome doppelganger.

For all Nathan’s boasting, Project City pretty much conformed to the usual standard of a rich Green Zone surrounded by a shantytown. The slum had grown haphazardly as all slums did, Lily supposed, congealing out of the vast flows of refugees coming up from Lima and the other coastal towns. However there was some order here. Once he had recognized that P-ville wasn’t going away, that the flow of refugees up the valleys to Cusco and beyond wasn’t going to stop for a long time yet, Nathan Lammockson had done what he always did and imposed his own vision. If this slum must exist on his doorstep, it was going to be a planned slum, designed for some kind of sustainability. It was either that or have it turn into a hinterland of starvation, disease and riot.

So there was now a crude communal water supply, rudimentary welfare and medical care, policing performed by AxysCorp guards and P-ville volunteers. There was even an economy of sorts, as the shantytown served as a pool of cheap labor for Project City. AxysCorp also rented space on shack roofs for solar-panel arrays, and paid for sewage to be used on the farms, a token fee for the slum’s only pitiful export. A kind of internal economy was growing up as well, feeding off the drowned carcasses of the lowland towns. People trekked hundreds of kilometers for salvage, even all the way to the higher suburbs of Lima, a megacity become a submerged midden.

And in his boldest intellectual stroke Lammockson had sliced up the slum into sectors, the land area divided into rough thirds. The Silver sector was “residential,” the core of the slum. The Orange third was to be left wild. And the Green third was agricultural. The idea was to make the place sustainable. But there was a constant tension between the need for basic living space and room for crops. Lily had observed that people always seemed to find it difficult to fulfill Nathan’s visions for them.

It was thought that a million people might be living here, drained mostly from the eight million who had once crowded Lima-a number growing all the time, such was the continuing influx and the explosive birth rate, in contrast to the declining population in Project City itself, where Nathan was running a brisk campaign to discourage unnecessary propagation. P-ville was a fecund slum surrounding an aging Utopia. And a slum was still a slum, however the world changed. The children who stared out at Lily were sunken-faced and big-eyed with hunger. These were people who had been poor in the vanished cities and were poor here now, people for whom the flood had meant only that they had swapped a slum in a river valley for one in the mountains.

This city around a city had no name Nathan cared to give it. Those who lived here called it P-ville: Pizarroville.

“You know,” Benj said,“there were people here who were glad when Lammockson walked in and bought Cusco. The government had been falling apart, because of the floods, and the droughts when the meltwater from the Andean glaciers was lost, and the border disputes with Ecuador and Chile. Chaos, conflict, mass migration and no functioning democracy. The people were happy to swap a set of ineffective bosses for an effective one, especially when Nathan started making so many promises about how he’d look after P-ville. There’s a widespread feeling of betrayal that it has come to this, Lily, soldiers keeping starving people out of fields of inedible crops.”

“So what was it, a petrol bomb?”

He grinned. “An inventive use of our own fuel. Right now I’m trying to stop this incident blowing up into some kind of policing war.”

“I’m flying to Titicaca later with Nathan. You want me to talk to him about it?”

“That might help. It’s still the case that what Nathan says goes.” He looked at her. “You’re going up there to talk to Kris, I guess.”

“That’s the idea.”

“Did Mum send you?”

“No.” Lily pulled a face. “In fact she accused me of interfering.”

“Well, you are.”

“We can’t afford to fall out, the family. Kris is finding her own life, and that’s fine, that’s what she must do. But in the end we’re all we have, each other.”

“But for you, ‘we’ means more than family,” Benj said. “You have your friends-the hostages. You’re always drawn to them.”

“I see them as family too,” she said. “You know that.”

“Yes. But I wonder if Kristie feels-I don’t know-that the others get in the way.”

She frowned, wondering if he was trying to tell her something. “There’s a problem with Piers? Is that what you’re saying?”

He shook his head.“I’m just not sure what you’re going to find inside Kris’s head, when-” A screen embedded in his suit sleeve flashed pink; he tapped it and looked at a bit of scrolling text. “I need to go. Trouble in another bit of P-ville-another experimental field.”

“You want me to come with you?”

“No. You go catch your flight with Nathan. Give Kris my love. Tell her I agree with you that she should call Mum, which will probably make her even more determined to do the exact opposite. And tell that Quechua chap she’s with, Ollantay, that he owes me a glass of chicha.”

“I will.”

“Got to run.” And with that he detailed one of the cops to escort her out of P-ville, and he was gone into the shantytown’s winding streets.