Flood

81

October 2037

F rom Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

The rise of the sea past a kilometer seemed to change the attitude of the Ark crew to the flooding.

In the year after the Ark sailed away from Nepal, the seas rose another hundred and fifty meters. The crew watched Nathan’s animated maps as one by one more lights were extinguished. Tehran. Cabramurra, Australia’s last surviving town. The great cities of southern Africa at last coming under threat, cities like Harare and Pretoria. Even South American cities like Caracas. Nathan’s onboard news services still picked up broadcasts from wherever he could find them, notably Denver, and other surviving high-altitude enclaves. But the logs showed that the crew were tuning in less to the images of human suffering, the endless migrations, the raft colonies, the petty wars, and more to altitude records and graphical summaries of the tremendous event unfolding around the world. As it approached its terminal phase the flood was becoming an abstraction in people’s minds, a thing to be tracked through numbers and grisly milestones.

Lily Brooke and Piers Michaelmas held a kind of private wake when the beacon from Avila was lost and Spain fell silent, and the Fathers of the Elect were defeated at last.