Flood

53

Lone Elk arrived alone, though Gary suspected he would have a guard or two in the gathering shadows outside. Thandie stood to shake his hand.

The Seminole was shorter than you might expect, Gary supposed. He wore a straightforward shirt and trousers of tough artificial fabric. He was aged about sixty, his skin dark but not weathered, his black hair cut short and peppered with gray. He looked more like a Hispanic businessman than a tribal leader.

Michael served fresh coffee for them all. Lone Elk sipped his, probably out of politeness; the elders were used to better stuff than this. He and Thandie made small talk for a while. Thandie spoke of her background, sketched her career before the flooding began, and outlined what she had done since, her global eyewitness sampling. They were sizing each other up, Gary saw.

“Forgive me for prevaricating,” Lone Elk said eventually. “Actually it’s not my way. Generally I like to cut the bull and get to the point.” His accent was like a lilting Bostonian.

“A habit of a busy man.”

“But I know I’m going to have to listen carefully to what you have to tell me. I spent a small fortune in government scrip bringing you here because Gary tells me you’re just about the best in your field. We live in a world of lies, of denial, of willful ignorance. My problem is that I have to judge what you tell me not only on the content of your words, but on you.”

“Take me as you find me,” Thandie said evenly, and Gary sensed she was close to taking offense.

“Oh, I will.” Lone Elk sat back.“But what do you make of me, I wonder? You’ve seen the world. Did you expect to come home to America, and find your friend Gary in a camp run by an Indian?”

Gary had been surprised that Lone Elk and his people preferred to use that term.

Thandie shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I expect it? Everything is so mixed up now.”

“My people lived in the east, in Florida. We were among the first in North America to be confronted by the European settlers. It was not a happy experience, as you can imagine. We were hunted to near extinction in the Everglades. But we survived the dispossession, the plagues, the attempted genocides, the generations of discrimination.

“Then at the end of the twentieth century a miracle happened. Through gambling, we became wealthy-hugely wealthy. The money gave us power. We bought back, for instance, our sacred grounds which had been earmarked for ruinous exploitation by one concern or another, and we began a language reclamation project. It was the same for other tribes across the country. There was a new sort of tension between us and the whites, and between ourselves, our different nations. But we were heading, I believe, for a new equilibrium-a way of living in a new age.”

“And then the flooding came,” Thandie said.

“Then the flooding came. Again, we were among the first impacted, the first to have to move, the first to lose our lives. But money is still useful, isn’t it? God gave me wisdom, I believe, and money gave me the power to buy what needed to be bought. Land. Tents. Portaloos.” He grinned. “I used to mount music festivals. I know how to host thousands of people in a field. This is no different. A Woodstock of the flood.

“And so here we are, surviving where others have lost everything or drowned, because they were not decisive enough. And now I must be decisive again.”

“Yes.”

“Many of my family believe that this too, the flood, is the fault of the whites-if they had stayed at home, none of it would have happened. Do you believe this is true, that human agencies are to blame?”

Thandie shrugged.“There’s still no concrete proof. Things are changing too quickly; there are too few of us, too many observations to make. I have the feeling we’ll never know for sure. Anyhow, does it matter? What we have to deal with are the symptoms of this global sickness, whether we understand the causes or not.”

“Quite so.” Lone Elk steepled his fingers.“I am privy to certain confidential federal government briefings. I’m told the average sea-level rise is now around two hundred meters.”

“That’s the ball park.”

“Then what is becoming of the world, Thandie Jones? Tell me what you’ve seen.”

She nodded. She unfolded a screen.

All the world’s maps had changed.

In South America, the flooding had taken big chunks out of the continent’s familiar cone shape. The Amazon basin had been turned into an inland sea that lapped against the foothills of the Andes. In the north, lowland Venezuela and Colombia had vanished, and in the south another mighty sea was pushing in from the River Plate estuary, drowning Uruguay, Paraguay and western Argentina, and threatening to separate the Andean spine from the Brazilian plateau.

As west and north Africa flooded there was a flight to the high grounds of the south. Pretoria was emerging as a major regional player.

Australia was lost, all save high ground in the west of the continent and a fringe of mountains.

In Europe, vast populations continued to be driven from the northern plain, and were crowding into the high ground to the south and north, in Spain, the Mediterranean countries, the Alps, Scandinavia. The European Union was still functioning, just, out of a new base in Madrid, trying to cope with an unending crisis of refugee flow, shortages of food and land and water, disease.

“But Eurasia is the real cockpit,” Thandie said. “We don’t have good data on the ground; our best information comes from the remaining satellites. We know European Russia is gone, flooded from the Baltics deep into Siberia, save only for the Urals. And so there’s been a vast flow of people east and south, into Kazakhstan and Mongolia. And meanwhile lowland China is flooded east of a line from Beijing through Kaifeng to Changsha, and refugees have been driven up from that direction. The Russians and Chinese are facing each other in Mongolia. I don’t think anybody knows what’s going on there-even the respective governments, where they’re functioning.

“Overall, the numbers speak for themselves. To date we’ve only lost something like twenty percent of the old dry land area, but that was home to around half the world’s population.”

Lone Elk nodded. “And North America?”

She brought up more maps. “In the west the coastal lands have been lost, and the sea has encroached through San Francisco Bay into the Sacramento Valley. But it’s in the east the real damage has been done. Look at the map. You can see we’ve lost a swathe of land extending in from the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, covering Louisiana, Arkansas as far north as Little Rock, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia as far north as Atlanta. Florida is gone, of course.”

“I know about Florida.”

“The Carolinas are gone as far west as a line through Charlotte. Of course the east coast is entirely underwater, Virginia, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, all lost. The sea is now pushing up the Mississippi Basin beyond Saint Louis; pretty soon Chicago will be threatened from the south and from the north, by the rise of the Great Lakes, and a new seaway will cut the country in two.”

Even so, America was surviving, comparatively. Much of the lost eastern lowland had been the nation’s most populous, the most fertile terrain. But in the west there was plenty of room. On the Great Plains-the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming-you had an area greater than France, Germany and the Low Countries combined, holding fewer than three million people before the refugees came. So the government was trying to look beyond the immediate imperatives and was devising a massive project of construction and relocation. The government had recalled advisers from the State Department’s Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization, which over a couple of decades had acquired experience of rebuilding countries that had failed, through natural disaster or war. Now that expertise was being brought home, and resources recruited from what was left of the public and private sectors. The next few years would see whole new cities springing up on the Plains, with the agricultural and industrial hinterland to support them.

“It’s a fantastic project,” Thandie said. “Like a crash terraforming program.”

“And,” Michael said, “an awful lot of money will be filling an awful lot of corporate pockets.”

“Well, yeah. But at least it’s visionary.”

Lone Elk nodded. “But in the short term, what of Texas? What of us?”

Thandie traced a contour on the map. “Right now the threat is becoming critical on a line running south down through Dallas-Fort Worth, Waco, Temple and Austin to San Antonio. Pretty soon all those people are going to have to move. Two million in San Antonio, for instance, best part of a million in Austin. There are six million in the Dallas-Fort Worth urban area, the fourth largest metropolitan area in the US-”

“All those people. And all of them coming this way.”

“You’ve got to bet on it.”

Lone Elk smiled. “I never gamble, actually. I just take the profits. I’ve heard the government is already talking of sequestering land in the Panhandle to cope with the anticipated refugees. Bringing in the army.”

“So I’ve heard too.”

“Well, the feds will dump half of Dallas onto us. They’ll turn this place into a slum. And then we’ll be overwhelmed by more fleeing hordes.”

“That’s what you need to plan for,” Thandie said evenly.

Lone Elk nodded. “Then it’s clear. We’ve done well here. But now we must move.”

Gary looked at him. “Move? The whole city?”

“This place is too close to the rising human tide. We must retreat up the beach, a little further.”

As Lone Elk discussed details with Thandie, Gary thought it over.

Moving the city sounded impossible. But it also sounded a better option than sitting here and waiting for the millions from Dallas to come climbing up out of the canyons. But that, of course, was the selfish thought of a man who had a full belly and water and a place to sleep looking down on those who had not.

Gary considered his own position. He had to get Grace and Michael out of here before the overspill arrived. That was the bottom line. Joining Lone Elk’s unlikely migration sounded a better bet than going it alone, becoming just three more ragged refugees. But if that didn’t come off, maybe they’d have to make their own way to higher ground, west to the Rockies. Or maybe they should even take up Lily Brooke’s longstanding invitation to go down to the Andes…

Michael was watching him, grave, going through his own inner calculations.

Gary came back to the conversation.

“You’ve seen horrors,” Lone Elk was saying to Thandie.“Populations in flight. Whole ecosystems destroyed. But you must have seen some wonders too.”

“Oh, yeah. The whole world’s being transformed, turned into something new. I’ve sailed ships over the North American transgression-I mean, over the flooded eastern states. The world’s reverting into something like it was in the Cretaceous, before the dinosaur-killer asteroid fell, a world of shallow seas. But the new shallow-water ecosystems may not have time to bed in before they are drowned in turn. We don’t know what comes next.”

“ Why don’t you know? How high can this water rise? The government has no projections, or none it will release.”

“The surviving governments have no credible models that I’ve seen. Even in Denver they don’t want to face the worst possibilities-to look into a future that they won’t be able to manage. It’s become a matter of ideology, kind of like the old battles about climate change. Government advisers are flood deniers, because that’s what the politicians want to hear, even while the waters lap around their feet. And denial makes for bad science.”

“So what is the good science?”

“The data is patchy,” Thandie said. “It always is. Masked by local surges, hot spots, other effects. Take what I say with qualification-”

“I’m no fool, Ms. Jones,” said Lone Elk evenly. “Tell me what you believe.”

“The sea-level rise is still accelerating,” she said bluntly. “We seem to have settled into a long-term growth paradigm. For the last five years the rise has stuck pretty closely to an exponential increase at a rate of fourteen percent per annum. But of course the growth is compound.”

He grimaced. “I ran casinos. Compound interest I understand. That means a doubling of the rise every five years. And if this goes on-”

“You can do the math.”

He shook his heavy head and steepled his fingers. He didn’t look as shocked as Gary might have expected. “Then that is what I must plan for.”

“I’d say so. I have a more detailed report for you on my laptop.”

He waved that away. “Later. Do you have children, Dr. Jones?”

“No.”

“If you did, this would be harder for you, to witness the suffering of the world.”

“I imagine it would. But I hope I’d do my job even so.”

“Yes. But I do have children. And my job is different. My duty.. ”

They talked on.

The night deepened, and the lantern’s glow filled the tent. Michael made more coffee. After an hour Gary started to wonder about food.

And after a couple of hours more Grace called Gary on his cell to say she was staying with her friend Karen for the night.