Flood

80

Before they set off the next morning Nathan came around his group, checking they had been taking the anti-radiation pills doled out by the Ark’s pharmacy. It wasn’t a cheery way to be woken up, Lily thought.

Another of Prasad Deuba’s bright young men, looking Chinese by extraction, was assigned to lead them to the Tibetan border. For the first few hours they drove. Then, all too soon for Lily, they ran out of road, and the party set off on foot, the three of them from the Ark, a few AxysCorp guards, Deuba’s guide, and a handful of sherpas carrying their luggage, wiry young men who carried huge bamboo baskets using straps across their foreheads.

The hike was a steady climb, hour after hour, broken only by dips into green valleys, descents which always ended, frustratingly, in yet more climbing. Lily had tried to keep herself in shape on the boat, with her daily kilometers with Piers on the promenade deck and hours on the weight machines and treadmills in the gyms. But it only took half a day of this trudging climb to expose the limits of that fitness, to make her legs and back and lungs ache-to remind her that she was, after all, sixty-one years old. Nathan, now sixty-seven, was the slowest of the group and couldn’t even carry his own backpack. But sheer stubbornness wasn’t about to allow him to give up.

Always ahead of them, floating beyond the horizon like a dream, were the gleaming Himalayan peaks.

Lily’s sherpa was called Jang Bahadur. Aged about thirty, he was handsome, strong-looking, apparently content. He wore a white scarf around his neck, and effortlessly carried a tremendous basket full of goods, clothing, tent equipment, food. “I used to be a lawyer,” he said. “I specialized in patent law. Now I can carry forty kilograms for twelve hours at a stretch. My professors would never believe it!” His accent was some strong Indian dialect Lily didn’t recognize.

“I keep expecting to get altitude sickness,” Lily said.

Jang shook his head.“Unlikely nowadays, unless you climb the mountains themselves. Effectively we have lost a kilometer of altitude, thanks to the flood, and the atmosphere has been pushed upward. So, you see, while Kathmandu was once fourteen hundred meters above the sea, now it is only four hundred meters-nothing.

“It isn’t altitude sickness that causes us difficulty, in fact, but lowland sickness. The older generation, my own parents for instance. When they came down to the sea they always found the air too thick, too rich for their blood, like altitude sickness in reverse. My mother always said she could never sleep while air like a suffocating blanket pressed down on her face. You could acclimatize, but it took time. Now it is like this even in my parents’ home, the air thick everywhere.”

“Not everybody can adapt.”

He shrugged. “The old ones die. My parents died. And it is true in the natural world.” He pointed at the mountains on the skyline. “As the sea ascends, so it drives zones of life ahead of it, up into the higher altitudes, until at last they are forced off the very summits of the mountains and, with nowhere else to go, must vanish. It is a peculiar mass extinction we are witnessing, a montane catastrophe.”

She glanced at him. “You understand a great deal.”

“For a sherpa?”

“I was going to say, for a lawyer.”

He smiled. “Well, most of my customers don’t particularly want to talk to me. When I walk, I get plenty of time to think.”

That night they slept under stars, in air as crisp and clear as any Lily had ever known.

The next day they reached a picturesque bridge across a deep valley, called the Friendship Bridge, the only remaining crossing point, they were told, between Nepal and Tibet. There was a formal entry barrier here, with a red hammer-and-sickle flag fluttering over a spectacular red and gold frontage. The barrier was manned by a handful of soldiers in brown uniforms. Their faces, in contrast to the essentially Indian features of the Nepali, were flat Mongolian. Nathan’s party and their guides were passed without much fuss, and only a small bribe in Nepali currency. They were made to understand, however, that a tougher scrutiny would follow later.

They spent one more night on the road.

And then, in the middle of another hard day’s walking, they broke out of the green valleys at last, and climbed up onto a flat, ruddy brown, rock-strewn terrain. There were no trees, only clumps of tough grass. Lily remembered spacecraft pictures of the surface of Mars; this place had exactly the same rusted, dust-strewn, wind-eroded look. But when she looked up she saw a range of foothills, lumpy and brown, leading away to a sawtooth row of higher mountains, a celestial beauty on the horizon. It was an astonishing sight. This was the Tibetan plateau. Lily found it hard to believe that she was here, that her own strange journey had propelled her all the way from those basements and cellars in Barcelona to this, the roof of the world.

But the plateau was cut across by a barrier, a Berlin Wall of concrete slabs, barbed wire and machine gun towers. Beyond, Lily saw a splash of communities stranded on this bare high ground, clusters of tents and shacks, a few threads of smoke rising up into the still, clean air.

Jang pulled up his white scarf so it covered his mouth. He glanced at Lily. “Fallout from the bombs,” he said. “My mother always made me wear this.”

“You had a smart mother.”

Nathan, wheezing from the exertion, led his party toward the big, imposing gate set in the fence. The Nepali sherpas were quiet now, even Jang, keeping their eyes averted from the guards who glared down from the gun towers.

Before they got to the gate the party converged with a line of porters coming across the plain, heading for the gate from a different direction. They were laden as heavily as Nathan’s sherpas, with bulging bamboo baskets on their backs. The porters were flanked by armed men, Chinese, like sheepdogs controlling a flock. As they walked, mournful bells clanged.

Jang murmured to Lily, “Once those bells hung around the necks of yaks. When the Russians and Chinese and Indians came here to fight over this place, they ate all the yaks, or killed them with their bombs. Now men and women wear the bells.”

“Are these people slaves?”

Jang shrugged. “What does that word mean? Too many people, too little room, too little food. Those who hold the high ground can do as they will.”

At the gate the column of bearers was passed through, but Nathan’s party was halted. Deuba’s young man spoke to a commander in rapid-fire Chinese, but the guards showed no inclination to raise the barrier.

After maybe half an hour another man came out through the barrier, an older man, a European but dressed in a kind of Mao suit, as Lily thought of it, though cut of good cloth. Aides shadowed him.

“At fucking last,” Nathan muttered. He strode forward confidently. “Harry! Harry Sixsmith, you old dog.” He greeted Sixsmith exactly the same way as he had Prasad Deuba. Lily imagined him having a series of near-identical business relationships with men like these, studded around the planet. “You old dog!”

Harry Sixsmith submitted to a handshake.“Good to see you, Nathan. How long has it been?” His accent was cultured, upper-class British. He was tall, fit-looking, maybe Nathan’s age, but Lily couldn’t read his expression. Certainly he didn’t look too happy to see Nathan.

They began to confer in English, with a Chinese translation for Sixsmith’s aides.

Piers whispered to Lily, “Harry Sixsmith is another business contact of Nathan’s. Once based in Hong Kong, but moved to the mainland after the British handover. An Englishman who made it in China. He and Nathan made a small fortune out of property speculation during the Chinese economic boom. But he’s also said to have worked on government advisory panels concerning crackdowns on dissent.”

“Nice guy. I can’t make out what they’re saying.”

“Perhaps my ears are sharper,” Jang said.“Mr. Lammockson’s friend is insisting that Tibet is not a place you would want to bring your people. He is trying to persuade him of this, even though he personally, Harry Sixsmith, would make a profit from it.”

Piers murmured, “And why would he do that?”

Jang gazed at him blankly. But Piers’s radio phone sounded before he could reply, and Piers walked away, speaking quietly into the mouthpiece.

“Tell me,” Lily said to Jang.

“This was a battle zone,” Jang said. “You know that. A strategic war was fought over this place by Russians and Chinese and Indians, when it became clear how drastic the flood was likely to become. Nuclear weapons were used. Local people, the Nepali and the Tibetans, caught in the middle of a three-way invasion, had to find ways to survive, or be erased. There was huge loss of life.

“In the end a new administration emerged, a hardline Maoist faction, basically Chinese but not attached to the Beijing government. The Maoists are supported by some Russians, Indians, westerners as you can see-even Nepali, their former enemies. Since it won power this administration has conducted campaigns against the people under its control. Cleansings. Campaigns of indoctrination. All on a landscape made barren by altitude and poisoned by radiation.

“Nevertheless the Maoists are able to impose whatever conditions they like on those who would come here. Harry Sixsmith is telling Mr. Lammockson that if he brings the crew of his Ark here, he will be expected to pay a tithe.”

Lily stepped closer to hear for herself. Lammockson was trying to bargain with technology, his advanced manufacturing techniques, his Norwegian seed bank. But Sixsmith said the Maoists cared nothing for seed banks. The tithe would be in drugs, weapons, women. And “underclass.”

Lily asked, “Underclass?”

“There are rumors of still more drastic tithes imposed on the refugees,” Jang said.“This is a poor place, crowded with people. How are they all to be fed?” He looked at her steadily.

“Cannibalism? We’ve heard of this. Desperate communities stranded on high-ground islands-”

“There is no desperation here, not among the rulers. The Maoists have borrowed notions of castes from the Hindus for a theoretical justification. Here the farming of people is systematic.”

Lily stared at Sixsmith.“Jang, why didn’t you tell us any of this before we came here?”

“You did not ask. I am a mere sherpa. In any case you might not have believed it if you did not see it for yourself.”

“But you knew.”

He smiled. “We Nepali imagine the future. The sea-level rise is over a hundred meters a year. Kathmandu is only four hundred meters above the sea now. In four years, or five or six, where am I to go? Perhaps I will be standing here, with my mother’s scarf over my mouth, begging for entry into this ideological Utopia.”

Nathan came away from Harry Sixsmith.“Jesus Christ on a bike,” he said, glowering.

“We heard enough,” Piers said grimly.

“Harry risked his own neck to come and warn us off. And he risked his neck again to persuade those guards to let us go. I never imagined anything like this.” He was pale, trembling, the muscles in his cheeks working. He glared around, at the arid ground, the mountains. “Maybe this is where the last act of humankind will be played out. The last survivors fighting over human bones, while the sea laps around their feet. Christ. Well, we can’t stay here.”

Piers said,“Nathan, I had a message. There’s trouble at the Ark. Some kind of mutiny. An attempt to scuttle the ship, so we would have to disembark.”

“They’re forcing my hand. What’s that prick Villegas doing about it?”

Piers’s face darkened. “According to the captain, he’s leading the revolt.”

“Christ, Christ.” Nathan shook his head. For a moment he looked utterly weary, his shoulders hunched, his head dropping, as if he couldn’t take another step. But then he straightened up, glanced around as if figuring out where he was, which way to go. “No time to waste. Piers, get these fucking sherpas lined up again.” He strode off.

As they moved away, Piers walked beside Lily. “It’s like a concentration camp,” he said.“The whole plateau. Worse than anything the Nazis dreamed up.”

“There has been so much horror in the world, Piers. We’ve been spared it, mostly, haven’t we? The drowning, the starvation, the plagues, the utter desperation-”

“That’s true.”

“Why? Why us?”

Piers looked at her. “Lammockson’s strong arm, and blind luck that we found ourselves in his shelter. And if we hadn’t been spared, we wouldn’t be here to ask the question, would we?”

Lily glanced back at the Maoist border. The big gates opened to allow Harry Sixsmith back inside. A road led away from the entrance, through whitewashed, flat-roofed buildings. The road was lined by posts, on each of which had been placed a human skull, jawless.