Flood

61

June 2035

The AxysCorp chopper descended from a turbulent sky. There was a pad ready for it on the Nazca raft, marked out by bright yellow paint on a cluttered surface that heaved and swelled gently. The bird set down gingerly. Lily, watching from the raft, knew that the company pilots disliked having to bring their birds down on the town rafts, and you could see that reluctance in their flying.

As soon as the engine died and the rotor blades slowed, Juan Villegas clambered down and ducked under the slowing blades, hauling a crate out after him. The pilot, insectile behind his sunglasses, stayed in the safety of the gleaming bubble of his cockpit; he didn’t even release his harness. Lily ran in, head down, and took hold of the crate with Juan. Villegas stumbled on the heaving surface. The crate wasn’t heavy, but it was bulky and awkward. Together they made their way to the edge of the helipad, two elderly people hauling luggage, Lily thought, over this rough, swelling surface of plastic tarps.

“Thanks,” Villegas said with feeling. “I wasn’t expecting it to be so unsteady underfoot.”

“You’re doing OK,” Lily said, and she meant it. He was fifty-seven now, only a couple of years younger than Lily herself. There was very little left of the sleek blackness that had once made his hair shine, and he wore an AxysCorp coverall as battered and patched as Lily’s own, rather than a sharp suit. But he was still a handsome devil, she thought with a rare pang of jealousy. “I mean, you’re here. A lot of Project City folk won’t set foot on the town rafts.”

He nodded. “I know. Tell it to my pilot.” The raft heaved again, making the two of them stagger, and Lily almost dropped the crate.“The storm is coming,” Villegas said. He glanced to the west, toward the Pacific, uneasily. “We could see it from the chopper, a sheet of black cloud. The weather forecasts have predicted it for days. And when the surge comes, that will be the end of Nazca. You’re confident the raft will hold together?”

“As confident as I can be. Maria’s hut is just over there-that’s Maria Ramos, the mayor. That’s the best place to leave this gear.”

“I’m in your hands.”

They pushed on.

Lily had been involved in the construction of the raft, leading a team of AxysCorp engineers. The raft’s skeleton had been laid down in a great sprawl in the heart of the old town, the basic pontoons of tires and oil cans overlaid by girders scavenged from ruined properties, and then topped by plastic tarps and treated corrugated iron, anything nondegradable. Shacks and huts constructed of bits of garbage and tied down by guy ropes clustered over the raft’s broad back like frogs clinging to a log. A Red Cross flag fluttered over one larger building, the medical center, and a few more advanced structures towered, a transmitting mast, aerials, a wind turbine.

When the project had begun, two years before, the sea had still been remote, its waves breaking far below Nazca’s altitude. It seemed absurd to be building a raft so high above the water. But after twenty years of the flood the sea-level rise was approaching some eight hundred meters above the old datum, and it was now rising at an astounding hundred meters per year, a rate that itself continued to increase. And suddenly here was the water, worming its way even into this mountainous region, and with its huge, implacable strength already starting to lift the raft up from the town that had given birth to it. The place was crowded and frantic as the final evacuation approached. People hurried everywhere, laden with mattresses, sheets and blankets, bundles of clothes, baskets full of food, pots and pans, bits of furniture, bales of string, coils of wire, spades, hoes, anything that might be useful in the long years to come, when the raft would be adrift on the face of the ocean.

They found Maria Ramos’s home and set down their crate. Lily stepped up to the rough doorway.“Maria? It’s Lily. We have the AxysCorp gear for you.”

As they waited Villegas peered curiously at the detail of this raft-borne dwelling. The mayor’s residence was just another shack built of corrugated iron and doors taken from some abandoned building. Chickens and pigs were restless in cages made from plastic mesh. Bowls had been strapped to the roof with bits of rope, to catch rainwater. People came and went in a hurry, adults and children, loading up here as everywhere else. Lily vaguely recognized Maria’s grown-up children and grandchildren. She had been working with this woman for years.

A child ran across their path, making Villegas start. She was no more than five, but she carried a wicker basket full of clothes on her head. There were many, many children here, toddlers, infants in papooses on their parents’ backs.

Villegas said,“Nathan will be disappointed his birth-control programs and his ‘voluntary limits’ lectures are not working.”

Lily grunted.“Deeper drives kick in when you’re threatened, it seems.”

“I suppose so. It is said that after every war there is a population surge. And what is this but a world at war? Nathan should tell more of his inner circle to come out of their high-tech fortress and take a hard look at what’s actually happening out here.”

Which, to his credit, Juan did. As the years had worn by Lily had come to see strengths in him she hadn’t discerned in the dandyish socialite she had first encountered. Juan had always thought of himself as a weighty figure in his community, regardless of Nathan’s patronage, and that was how he behaved. And his Christianity, having been through its harsh New-Covenant phase, was now expressing itself more generously. He had become a useful ally for Lily in Nathan’s court. And despite her own occasional pangs of jealousy she was pleased that he had brought a kind of stability for the last few years to the ever-troubled life of her sister.

Maria came out of her house. She wore a faded woolen shift, her face was grimy, and she looked tired, tense. “So you came,” she said to Lily.

“As promised. This is Juan Villegas. Juan, Maria is-”

“I know you,” Maria said, peering at him. “You used to be in the society pages, back in the day. A playboy, weren’t you? Dating pop stars and tennis girls.” Her English was good, and lightly accented with a mix of Spanish and Quechua intonations.

Juan shrugged, looking embarrassed. “That was a long time ago. In a different world.”

“Well, that’s true. But you’re surviving, evidently, aren’t you?”

“As are you,” he said gently.

A breeze whistled among the guy ropes, and a few drops of rain spattered on the plastic sheeting under their feet. They looked to the west, where, just for a moment, the light strengthened, the sun trying to break through the storm clouds. Maria pushed a stray lock of gray-black hair back from her forehead, and when the light caught the planes of her face this fifty-year-old woman was beautiful, Lily thought, with something of the look of a mestiza despite her Christian name. But her eyes were black with tension, her full lips pursed.

Lily had seen this all through the Andes. Maria was of a generation that had already seen one huge dislocation. Driven out of Lima as a young woman, she had come here to build a new home, and had endured half a lifetime of withering work breaking new land. But now the sea was rolling over farms established scant years before, and Maria had to move again. It was hard for people to take. Older folk felt exhausted, unable to face another uprooting. The young, conversely, resented being driven from the only homes they had known, and blamed the old for the wastefulness that may have caused this global convulsion. Even as the huge work of evacuation continued, there were family arguments, divorces, suicides, murders.

“The storm is coming,” Maria said. “You’d better leave before it hits.”

Lily felt obscurely hurt by this curt farewell. “We brought you the standard AxysCorp package. Radio equipment with backups, all solar powered. A GPS navigation suite. Fifty cellphones…” All products of Project City’s high-tech factories, equipment designed for robustness and longevity, though many of them were assembled from the components of scavenged older gear. This was Nathan Lammockson’s standard gift to each new raft community, a way to keep in contact with them, and maybe retain some control.

Maria glanced at the crate. “Thanks,” she said flatly.

“I hope we’ll keep in touch, Maria. There is a chopper rota. If there are emergencies, medical needs Project City can help you with-”

“This raft could not have been built without the advice of your engineers, Lily,” Maria conceded.“But let us not lie to each other. AxysCorp encourages drowning communities to build rafts because otherwise we would all become refugees and wash like a tide up the valleys, and then what would happen?”

“Come on, Maria. You know how it is. We’re already beyond the theoretical carrying capacity of the higher ground. We have to find other solutions.”

“I know, I know. But is there not room for one more town, one more family-one more child?”

“We must all make judgments,” Villegas said.

Maria shrugged. “Indeed we must.” Another gust of wind, more raindrops. That golden light faded, clouds raced overhead, and again the raft heaved under their feet, restless.

Juan glanced at Lily.“Perhaps it is wise to get moving before that pilot loses his nerve and lifts without us.”

“Go, go,” Maria said, and turned her back on them.

The raft was surging constantly now, and Juan fell flat on his face when he was tripped by a bit of plastic rope. The Nazcans were rushing, gathering children indoors, strapping down the last bits of loose gear. By the time they reached the chopper the wind was gusting, the rain coming down solidly. The chopper’s blades were already turning, and inside his rain-streaked cockpit the pilot waved at them to hurry.

As soon as Juan had the door closed the pilot gunned his engine and the chopper lifted. The raft’s muscular surging was replaced by a sharper buffeting as the chopper’s blades bit into the turbulent, stormy air.

The bird dipped, turning north, and Lily looked down at the Nazca raft. It was a ramshackle island that rose up amid the rooftops and drowned streets of this sun-bleached old colonial town, its back studded with shacks and wind turbines, every flat roof gleaming with rainwater pails and buckets. At the raft’s center topsoil had been spread out over a bed of stones, a splash of pale brown that would become a seaborne farm. Almost everything of which the raft was constructed predated the flood, Lily reflected, over-manufactured imperishable junk now lashed together to make this new home, rising like a dream above drowning Nazca.

And then the sea surge began, tall waves washing in from the west, and the raft heaved. She saw ropes break, bits of the structure splitting and separating, and people scrambled to make hasty repairs. But the chopper swept north and the raft and the drowning town receded behind her.

The pilot found some smoother air, and his confidence seemed to lift. After a few minutes’ flying he pointed down. “Last chance to see,” he called back.

Lily glanced down. Some twenty-five kilometers from Nazca, flying north away from the storm system, they were passing over a plain that once must have been arid, desolate, but was now awash with gray sea water.

Juan leaned past her to see. “The Nazca lines. They were discovered from the air, you know. Have you seen them?”

“I let Nathan fly me around up here a couple of times.”

This was the pampa, once one of the world’s driest deserts. It had been an immense sketchbook for the ancient folk who had lived here, and their scribbles, made by lifting stones to reveal the lighter earth beneath, had been preserved by the intense aridity. But now, of the strange millennium-old geometric markings trampled in the high dirt, of the monkey and spider and flower and the elaborate birds, there was no sign, all of it erased by salty ocean water.

“Another of mankind’s treasures lost,” Juan said without emotion.

The chopper rose higher still. Looking back to the south and west, Lily could see the storm-lashed Pacific surging against the foothills of the Andes. But to the north and east too she saw ocean, calmer, steel-gray, an extension of the Atlantic that had pushed across the continent and was now lapping against the mountains. Pacific and Atlantic visible in a single glance. And all along the new shorelines, to east and west of the mountains, the rafts clustered, like ghosts of the towns beneath the water.

Juan Villegas leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.