Flood

68

From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

All along the flooded fringes of the Andes the rafts drifted. Nobody knew how many there were, how many people were struggling to survive out there on the breast of the sea.

Nathan Lammockson posted troops along the shifting coastline to stop them landing. There was never any shortage of volunteers for that duty.

And he sent out boats among the rafts. The boats carried doctors, but not to administer to the sick.

Nathan had long been digging up old population-reduction philosophies and techniques. Even before the flood began there had been voluntary human extinction movements, developed by those who believed mankind was essentially a scourge and that its sole remaining duty was to restore Earth to its pre-human condition as best as possible, before submitting gracefully to the dark. Lammockson argued that here you had a rationalization for not fleeing from the encroaching flood, for submitting to it. So the doctors in the boats were “suicide missionaries,” trained to counsel refugees to accept their fate. They were equipped with appropriate medications.

Other missionaries, not sanctioned by Lammockson, sailed among the desolate raft communities. One motorboat carried a preacher, gunning up and down the shore, haranguing with a loudhailer. This is how it feels to live in a world with an intervening god, he said. How mankind was back in the days of the Old Testament. Nathan considered shutting him up, but decided he was doing as effective a job as his suicide doctors.

The population of the rafts wasn’t fixed. Rafts broke up, or were cannibalized by others. Or they drifted away, over the horizon, to a fate nobody on the land cared to imagine. But there were always more, rising up from the flooded towns.

Kristie watched this. Isolated from Cusco for years, she wondered if there was anybody in there who fretted as she did about how long this could go on.