Flood

77

April 2036

With great caution, the Ark approached the coastline of Europe.

Nathan’s purpose was to reach Switzerland, where he hoped to establish trading relations with the nearest thing to a functioning national government left in western Europe. Then he wanted to pass on east to the high ground of central Asia. His destination there was Nepal: the gateway to the Tibetan plateau, a place he believed he could do good business. “It’s the most extensive upland in the world,” he declared. “And the pivot of the future for mankind. That’s why we’ve got to be there.” But the news out of the region had been fragmentary since reports of a disastrous three-way war between China, Russia and India over the precious high land-a war that was rumored to have gone nuclear before it was done. A number of the crew were concerned about what they would find, if they ever got there. But that was far in the future.

The ship passed from the ocean into the Westerschelde estuary. Sonar and radar tracked the drowned landscape passing beneath the prow, and the inboard TV system relayed heavily processed images to Lily’s cabin, a ghostly carpet of houses and roads and rail tracks. This was Holland, its dykes and canals finally overwhelmed after centuries of defiance, all slowly sinking beneath a layer of ooze. The flood was now so deep, in fact, that the submerged landscape was starved of sunlight by the column of water above it. If you had stood in the submerged streets of Antwerp or Arnhem you could not have seen the Ark’s hull pass overhead, like a lenticular cloud.

But on the ship, you always knew when you were over what had been dry land. Birds fell on the ship in flocks, finches and starlings and crows, land birds deprived of their roosting territories. The children earned extra food rations by going up to the sports deck and knocking the birds away with brooms. And a thin scum of oil and rubbish coated the waters, still seeping up from the wrecked cities below. Much of it was plastic, brightly colored and as indestructible as the day it was manufactured, or masses of rotting cardboard or gray food scraps. Seagulls came out of nowhere to descend on this stuff. And occasionally you saw darker, lumpier shapes, bloated remains released from the unintended tombs below, swimming up to float among the purposeless garbage.

Manco and the other children were forever badgering to be allowed to go swim among these intriguing floating treasures. To them, born a decade or more after the flood had begun, such things as aluminum soda cans and plastic microwave-meal formers were exotic marvels. Of course it wouldn’t have been safe, even if the ship were not underway.

The Ark passed southeast, crossing the German border. Wherever possible the Ark would follow the courses of the river valleys, still incised into the drowned landscape, and every so often the ship stopped to allow a manual sounding, made by the ancient expedient of lowering a cable. Nathan always ordered extreme caution in navigation, and didn’t trust electronic systems alone.

On the animated maps the passengers were able to count off the cities over which they were cruising: Duisburg, Dusseldorf, Cologne. By the time they reached the vicinity of Bonn they were floating over the higher ground through which the Rhine valley was incised. The navigator stuck rigidly to the center line of the valley. Now, to east and west, scraps of high ground protruded above the waves, hilltops reduced to low islands. Lily saw remnants of the urban landscape of once-crowded western Europe, houses coating the islands like coral, factories and power stations, pylons and phone masts, occasionally the glitter of a modern development like a shopping mall. Nathan’s bridge crew looked out with telescopes and binoculars, and sometimes sent a boat party to explore. And the ship sounded her mournful whistle, the deep bass note rolling across the sea without echo. There was never any reply, but birds would fly up from the islands in great clouds.

At last Ark Three sailed into the heart of Switzerland.

The Ark came to anchor somewhere over the flooded remains of Geneva. The northwest of the country was now dominated by a salt-water merger of the old Lake Neuchatel and Lake Geneva, itself just another bay of the hugely extended North Sea.

A shore party was to be taken to meet federal and canton government agencies in a mountainside community called New Geneva. Set well above the waterline, this was a temporary site, tents and houses of clapboard and corrugated iron, but nevertheless was a functioning city. The Swiss were in a position to deal with Nathan and his offers of trade. Some of the cantons in the mountainous regions had not been directly touched by the flooding at all, and the Swiss had quickly organized themselves to keep at bay the waves of hungry refugees who had come flooding from the lowlands of Germany, France and Italy. Nathan intended that the Swiss should be treated as valuable long-term trading partners. He even intended to put forward a proposal for the Ark to do some deep-sea mining on the Swiss’s behalf.

Lily wasn’t in the official party, but she did get the chance to go ashore briefly. After eight months at sea it felt very odd to stand on land, not to feel the world swaying under your feet. The lake was a mirror, deep blue, surrounded by mountains that stretched into the distance, still sharp and vivid, even if they had lost much of the snow that had once coated their lower slopes. If you hadn’t known Switzerland before, Lily reflected, you’d never know that anything was wrong in this scene, that anything had changed, that beneath the waters of this brilliant lake whole cities lay rotting.

And before this backdrop the Ark floated on the water like a toy, gleaming in the brilliant clear sunlight. The ship looked at her best today, with those stacked decks and the bright paintwork of the funnels reflected in the water. With typical showmanship Nathan had had the superstructure draped with fluttering flags. It was at moments like this that Lily glimpsed the insane genius of Nathan’s vision. In this drowned-out world from which so many of mankind’s achievements had been erased, the Ark looked like a visitor from another age, not an ocean-going ship but a time machine.

Piers was the de facto leader of the shore party. But Nathan put his son Hammond into a suit and tie and sent him along too. This was part of Nathan’s slow wooing-back of his estranged son, after the betrayal and humiliation of a year ago. Lily thought that Hammond was coming to an accommodation with his father. But a grain of bitterness was lodged in Hammond for good, like a bit of seed between his teeth.

She was more disturbed by Nathan’s order, on this trip, that Grace should accompany Hammond.

Nathan clearly wanted Hammond to take a woman, to start a family. It was entirely self-interest. Nathan thought a suitable relationship would domesticate Hammond, as well as providing a conduit for Nathan’s genes to pass to the future. Hammond had rejected the candidates Nathan had produced so far. But since the beginning of the voyage, Nathan had had his eye on Grace Gray. She did have Saudi royal blood. And maybe it was a way, for him, of uniting two of his pet projects, his son and the loose family of former hostages he had been sheltering for two decades. And Hammond, Lily could see, didn’t mind the idea of having Grace at all.

But Grace wanted nothing to do with Hammond. She had emerged from her peculiar life in Walker City reclusive, withdrawn, and, Lily thought, almost certainly a virgin. When she was forced to be with Hammond, earthy and grasping, she retreated even further into herself.

Lily didn’t like to oppose Nathan, or even Hammond. But she felt a duty of care to Grace. She tried to talk about this to Piers. He was much more of a politician than Lily would ever be, and would say only that things were “complicated.”

She couldn’t see what harm Grace could come to on this trip, however, as she and Hammond were going to be out in public the whole time they were together. She returned to the ship and got on with her own job, her concern about Grace niggling quietly at the back of her mind.

Then, twenty-four hours after he had gone ashore, Piers called her. Grace had done a runner, and disappeared into New Geneva. “Lily, it sounds as if she’s been waiting for the chance to get away from Hammond. The trouble is, if the Swiss find her before we do they’ll throw her in the lake. They have very tough laws about refugees.”

“I’ll be there,” Lily said, and she folded up the phone. “Shit, shit.”

Grace was found quickly by the Swiss, and handed over to the Ark crew.

They spent months on the extended Lake Geneva, trading, training, refurbishing the ship. Throughout that time Grace was restricted to the Ark, and watched by AxysCorp guards, and Lily remembered Barcelona.