Flood

78

June 2037

From Geneva, the Ark cautiously crossed to the head of the Danube at Donaueschingen. From here the navigators guided the ship east along the track of the drowned river valley through southern Germany and Austria, crossing the sites of Ulm, Regensburg, Linz and Vienna. Each city was marked by the usual scum of garbage and bloated corpses, and by a cluster of starveling raft communities who competed with the seagulls for scraps. It was a sorry end for Europe, Lily thought. Nathan gradually tightened security on the ship. He ordered that the city sites be given a wide berth, and he set up a twenty-four-hour armed patrol of the promenade deck. Any boat parties sent to the high ground went heavily armed. The mood aboard became tense, fearful, fretful.

It was a relief when the Ark crossed the site of Budapest, and ran south over the lower ground of the Hungarian plain. The cities here, deeply drowned, left no sign of their existence on the surface of the placid sea. Beyond Belgrade the Ark had to pass through a relatively narrow valley where the Danube traced the Romanian border. Communities of some kind survived in the Carpathians to the north, as you could see from rising threads of smoke, but there was no response to Nathan’s radio hails.

By now, nearly two years after leaving Chosica, the ship was accumulating problems. The OTEC, the aquaculture experiments, even the sea-concrete plants proved cumbersome and problematic, and the ship’s limited factories could never keep up with the demand for spare parts. Without the spares they had picked up in Switzerland many systems would already have failed, Lily judged. Even so the ship’s systems had had to be cannibalized, internal partitions ripped out for repairs to the hull and the major bulkheads. The ship started to have a shabby, decaying look.

The Ark came through a broad valley in what had been Walachia, and sailed beyond the scummy patch of debris that marked the site of Bucharest. Once they had passed the old coast of the Black Sea, Nathan had the ship anchor, and launched a review of every aspect of the ship’s operations.

During the refit the onboard debate about the ship’s future intensified. The big main restaurant was used for weekly “parliaments,” as Nathan called them, where anybody could raise any issue they were concerned about. At these sessions Juan Villegas was the most senior of those who challenged Nathan’s unmodified fundamentalist vision of the future.

“Let us be realistic, Nathan,” Villegas said. “Our needs are elemental. Fresh, land-grown vegetables. Seeds if we can obtain them. Topsoil, even. Basic supplies of all kinds. And whatever we can get to refurbish the ship.”

“No. You know my philosophy, Juan,” Nathan said.“If we go back to sucking on the teat of the land the first chance we get, we’ll never wean ourselves off it. What we need is people. Engineers, biologists, doctors. Visionaries to drive forward the great project of independence.”

“We can’t eat vision! Dreams don’t float! And we do not need more people. We need the precise opposite. We need less. We must find ways to offload crew. You have seen the figures, the way our basic supply is not keeping up with our internal demand…” He produced a twenty-year-old handheld and began scrolling through tables. But Nathan wouldn’t focus on the results. Villegas grew steadily angrier.

In their time at sea, once he had got over his own shock at the events surrounding the abandonment of Project City, Villegas had grown in seniority among the barons around Nathan. Lily wondered if in some way his relationship with Amanda had actually been holding him back in Project City. Now Lily saw the insight and decisiveness that must have made Villegas his preflood fortune in the first place.

But at the same time his view of the ship and its crew, their mission and their needs, was diverging from Nathan’s. Villegas wanted the voyage to end as soon as possible, before some terminal accident befell them, as surely it eventually would. Nathan wanted it never to end at all. As time went on their differences were becoming overwhelming. Villegas and Nathan were like two dinosaurs, Lily thought, the last of their kind confronting each other. After one of these parliamentary sessions turned into a near-riot, Nathan had his loyal AxysCorp cops man the stage with him, their sidearms visible.

It was typical of Nathan that in his heart of hearts he was developing a compromise. Lily, still in his inner circle if only because of Grace, detected this shift in small hints, the tone of his conversation, subtexts of briefings he asked to be prepared. He was not about to give up on his dream of a floating city, but he was starting to accept that in the short term at least he was going to need support from the shore. But it was also typical of Nathan that he shared none of this evolution in his thinking with his most senior officer and most significant challenger, Juan Villegas.

Lily had her own subplots to deal with, meanwhile.

A day came when Grace refused to eat. Lily was twisted with guilt. She’d told Grace how she’d used hunger strikes against the Fathers of the Elect, in her Barcelona dungeons. She herself had put the idea into Grace’s head. Now here was Grace, held hostage in another floating cell, under pressure from Nathan, doing exactly that.

But Nathan wasn’t about to be beaten by a mere suicide threat. He threatened to have his doctors force-feed Grace, if that was what it would take to keep her alive. Lily spent a lot of time with Grace, trying to find a way through this mess, a way to have her come down of her own accord.

The sea-level rise topped a kilometer, another ghastly and unwelcome landmark. There were surges and lulls, but it still showed no signs of slowing from Thandie’s doubling-every-five-years exponential increase. Nobody talked about this hard fact, however.

The Ark sailed south over Istanbul and the Sea of Marmara, and through the Dardanelles to the Aegean. From there she passed over Suez and along the course of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.

Then she turned northeast to cross India, following the river valleys, heading for the frontier with Nepal. Much of India was deeply submerged, but nowhere was free of detritus, the slicks of oil, the islands of indestructible plastic garbage slowly spinning in the torpid currents, and the bodies, bloated and naked, that floated up like balloons from the rotting ruins below. Billions had once lived here; billions must have died.

Lily found it a great relief when land was sighted on the northern horizon, the foothills of the Himalayas, their summits brown and jagged. They had reached Nepal.