Flood

85

Thandie showed Lily to a seat, and handed her a china mug of coffee.

All that was left of Britain was a scattering of islands over what had been Scotland, the peaks of the submerged highland mountains.

“Ben Nevis still shows above the sea. But England has long gone, and all of Wales-even Snowdon is a couple of hundred meters down by now.”

“Britain? But you picked me up in the Pacific. What’s the speed of this boat?”

“Around twenty knots cruising.”

“So how long have I been shambling around like a zombie?”

“Longer than you think, I guess. Ask the MO…”

They looked over the operators’ shoulders at screens that showed external views, from cameras mounted on the hull. The water was murky, full of floating fragments which sometimes glimmered with bright, unnatural colors, indestructible plastic detritus speckling the sea. But it was mid-morning, the sun was high, and the particles in the water caught the light, creating long beams like the buttresses of some immense church. It was quite beautiful, and rendered in the boat’s screens in true colors, a deepening oceanic blue. And in the further distance, dimly visible, Lily made out a hillside, with a tracery of rectangles that might have been field boundaries, and blocky roofless buildings.

“This is what we call the photic zone,” Thandie said. “Top of the water column. Water is pretty opaque; ninety-nine percent of the sunlight is blanked out in only a hundred and fifty meters. Below that you’re in permanent darkness.”

“But the flood’s around a kilometer deep, isn’t it?”

“A bit more than that.”

“So most of Britain isn’t just submerged, it’s in darkness.”

Thandie said gently, “Does that make a difference?”

A darting shape shot across the field of view of one of the screens, making the operator jump back.

Lily asked, “What was that, a seal?”

“No… Bill, you want to play that back in slo-mo?”

It turned out to be a child, a boy naked save for a pair of shorts, his lithe body sliding past the boat’s hull. Aged no more than eight or nine, he actually turned and waved into the camera.

“Cheeky little bastard. Visitor from a raft up above us. Fisher folk, probably.”

“Wow. How deep are we?”

“Oh, a hundred and fifty feet,” an operator said.

Thandie grinned. “This is nothing. You get the kids following you down as far as three hundred feet, and I’ve heard reports of deeper dives yet. It’s happening all over the world. The kids are figuring out breathing techniques for themselves, and passing them on through radio networks, and they’re going deeper and deeper. This is innocent enough. We do get less welcome visitors, people trying to damage the sensor arrays, even plant limpet mines on the hull.”

The freeze-framed kid reminded Lily faintly of Manco, another avid ocean swimmer. “The world was flooded before these kids were born. The ocean is all they have to explore.”

“So long as they stay away from my sensors, they can play Aquaman as much as they like,” Thandie said sternly.

Lily watched the maps as the boat turned south, and began to track the length of Britain.

Thandie said, “We’ll skirt the highlands to the east, cross the Firth of Forth over Edinburgh, and then track down the east side of the country over the Lammermuir hills. Even the Lammermuirs will be hundreds of meters below the prow. Nothing’s going to foul us. Then we’ll cross the border to England over the Cheviot Hills. There’s a point to the voyage, Lily. We’re surveying the topography of the country, studying how it’s adjusting as the water mass settles over it, mapping the quakes and the landslides as the isostatic load changes. It’s part of a global portrait that we hope will help us predict future quakes, and hence tsunamis.”

The boat sank deeper, and the glimmering light from above dwindled to darkness, those cathedral columns dimming. At last, somewhere below two hundred meters, external lights mounted on the boat’s hull flared to life, and picked out a sparse array of living things, Lily saw, things like fish and jellyfish and eels. It was impossible for Lily to believe that she was effectively poised in the sky above southern Scotland, flying in a submarine, surrounded by these wriggling creatures.

“This is the midwater,” Thandie murmured. “There’s no sunlight down here. Photosynthesis is impossible. So there are no plants, only animals and bacteria. And with no primary production these creatures have got nothing to eat but each other. They have evolved all sorts of strategies to evade predation-invisibility for instance. The water is full of gelatinous creatures, there’s even an invisible octopus. Hey, look at that.” She pointed to an unprepossessing-looking fish. “That’s a bristlemouth. Thought to be the world’s most common vertebrate, the most abundant animal with a backbone.”

“Really?”

“And you’d never heard of it, had you? Lily, the ocean is where the action has always been. There are whole categories of life out there, probably, entirely undiscovered. It was only in the 1970s that we found black smokers, biospheres entirely independent of sunlight, only in the eighties that we found methane seeps, and more chemosynthesizer communities. What else is there? Who knows? We never will, that’s for sure. Mine’s the last generation to be privileged to be able to conduct science in this way, probably. Our children and grandchildren will be back to counting types of jellyfish.” She laughed, an empty sound.“Hey, Bill, can you douse the lights? Let’s see the bioluminescence.”

“Sure.”

To taps of the operators’ fingers on their key pads the screen images faded to darkness, which were then stopped up to gray. The ruddy light of the observation room dimmed further too.

“It’s tricky to see until you get cued in,” Thandie said. “And life down here is sparse… There. See that?”

There was a scattering of lights like a drifting toy submarine, too dim for Lily to make out their colors. And then a more spectacular sight, a blue spiral sparkling yellow.

“That’s a siphonophore,” Thandie said. “Kind of a colony, hundreds of jellies strung out along a central cord. Uses those glowing tentacles to lure in its prey. It’s thought that eighty percent of the species down here in the midwater are bioluminescent. You use it to attract food-”

“And predators, surely?”

“Well, some species use their lights to attract bigger predators to fight off their own hunters. Lots of intricate strategies.”

Lily saw a thing like a jellyfish, illuminated by its own spectral light, swelling and diminishing like a puff of smoke. It was extraordinarily beautiful.

Thandie said, “Actually there is an ongoing extinction event out there. As the world gets warmer there’s a reduction in the volume of the big cold currents from the poles that plunge under the lighter, hotter water from the lower latitudes. That displacement used to carry oxygen into the depths, and fuel life. Now that vast transport is shutting off. Everything down here is suffocating and starving. But it’s happened before. The fossil record shows there were similar pulses of excess warmth ninety million years ago, sixty million. But an extinction is also an opportunity…”

Traveling steadily south, they passed over a mountain called the Cheviot in Northumberland, an old volcanic mound, its summit once twenty-seven hundred feet above sea level. Now the cairns built by climbers on its crown were twelve hundred feet down. But life gathered over the mountain’s ice-carved slopes, a loose column of fish and gelatinous predators swimming over the summit. Lily thought she saw a shark.

“An oceanographer would call the Cheviot a seamount,” Thandie said. “Ocean currents are forced up and over the hill. That causes a cycling of the water above, called a Taylor cell, an exchange of nutrients and life forms. Stimulates the biota. Makes for good fishing too.” One of the operators confirmed there was a human raft community drifting on the surface above them. Thandie said, “From the air you can still make out the topography of the drowned countries, from the fishing fleets clustered over the peaks of the hills.”

“A shark, swimming over Northumberland,” Lily said, wondering.

“That would once have seemed unusual,” Thandie conceded.

The New Jersey slid deeper into the water. Forty or fifty kilometers further south from the Cheviot, around the latitude of Newcastle, a remote camera swimming alongside the boat picked out a ridge on the landscape, its crest marked by a cluster of colorful sponges.

Thandie punched the air. “Ha! I knew it. You know what that is?”

“Surprise me.”

“Hadrian’s Wall. We’re near the fort called Housesteads here. Most of the countryside is coated by calcareous ooze, cruddy sea-bottom stuff. But there are some species that prefer bare rock, they seek out ridges and slopes where the ooze won’t settle. Corals, sea lilies, specialized starfish, sea squirts, crinoids. So there’s a whole carnival colonizing the ridge the Wall stands on, as well as the stones of the Roman Wall itself.” Her grin widened. “Even in the circumstances that’s a remarkable sight, isn’t it?”

“Show-off.”

Lily and Thandie took breaks to eat and sleep. But Lily was always drawn back to the observation room, this red-lit hive of mystery and quiet monitoring, of screens like windows into a changed world. She marked their progress as they sailed inland toward the Pennines, a chain of mountains that ran down the spine of the drowned country. They detoured to pass over the carcasses of Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, cities that had once glowed with the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution, now lost in the abyssal dark. And still the New Jersey sailed on, heading for the lowlands of southern England.

Over Nottingham Thandie showed Lily a recording of a creature they had just observed, picked out by the boat’s lights. It looked like a vase, maybe, or a flowerpot, with the seams bristling with spines. “Sorry you missed it… That’s a vampire squid.”

“A what?”

“A real relic-like the coelacanth, the fossil fish that turned out not to be a fossil at all. You see these things in deep strata two hundred million years old. We’re somewhere near an oxygen minimum, Lily, around fifteen hundred feet down. Right here, not much can survive.”

“Save this vampire squid.”

“Yeah. A peculiar niche. It’s a strategy to avoid predators, just hide out where nobody else can breathe. And when the mass extinctions come your descendants can radiate out into all those empty niches.” Thandie shook her head, marveling. “It’s like finding a living dinosaur, to see this thing. I wish you’d seen it live. You think Manco would be interested?”

“You could try.”

But he wasn’t.

Over the Midlands, over Leicester and Northampton, the submerged land was two thousand or twenty-five hundred feet down. Thandie got unreasonably excited when she spotted various exotic life forms wriggling in the “calcareous ooze” that now blanketed the streets and fields of central England. One of them was a sea spider, with yellowish legs that Thandie said had a twenty-centimeter span. “Antarctic fauna in Leicestershire! It’s astonishing that they found their way this far north in just a few years…”

Remarkably, Lily learned, the southern English lowlands were now deeper than the offshore continental shelf had been before the flood, and the life forms that had inhabited those undersea plains around Britain couldn’t survive here. But the shelf around Antarctica had always been deeper. The whole continent had been thrust down into the body of the Earth by the sheer weight of the kilometers-thick ice sheet it carried, and the life forms on the shelf had adapted to the greater depth. Now those polar creatures were colonizing new environments, like Leicestershire and Northamptonshire.

The final target of the journey was London. But at more than three thousand feet down the city was too deep for the New Jersey, which had a hull crush depth of eighteen hundred feet. So the scientists planned to send down ROVs, remotely operated vehicles, self-propelling platforms laden with cameras, lamps and sensors for temperature, pressure, salinity and other indicators, while the New Jersey hovered over the city’s streets like a wartime barrage balloon.

On the day the ROV flotilla was scheduled to launch, the Chief of the Watch made an announcement about it over the tannoy. There was a lot of excitement among the crew, who usually behaved as if the world outside the curving walls of their boat didn’t exist at all. But the fate of a great city like London stirred imaginations. The captain arranged for the images returned from the ROVs to be piped through the ship, to the flat screens in the galley and elsewhere. Even Manco was interested, though he barely understood what was happening, and he came with Lily to the observation room.

Thandie waylaid Lily before they went in.“Listen, Lily. I’ve had some luck.”

“With what?”

“With finding out about Ark One.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s something to do with Pikes Peak-the USAF base there. And there’s some kind of operational center in the town of Alma, Colorado, which happens to be the highest city in the continental US. I got a few hints because some of my buddies at NOAA are involved. It’s evidently a major operation.”

“So what is it, another ship, a submarine, a refuge?”

“I don’t know. Nobody’s speaking. But the leaks are coming because they’re recruiting a crew. Tough selection for skills; sounds like you have to have two doctorates just to make the short list. And single people only, no families, no kids. But they are taking pregnant women, early term anyhow.”

“Why?”

“Genetic diversity, I guess. As large a variation as possible given the size of the crew. If I’m pregnant I’m carrying the father’s genes along for the ride.”

“So how do I get Grace onto this program?”

“I’ve no idea. Tell you who I’d ask, however.”

“Who?”

“Nathan Lammockson. If anybody can pull the strings to swing something like this it’s going to be Nathan, right?”

Maybe, Lily thought. But there was also Hammond in the equation, Nathan’s own son. Wouldn’t Nathan put him ahead of Grace in the queue for this miraculous sanctuary? Thinking quickly, she said, “Can you get me through to Ark Three? I’ll try to speak to Grace direct. And I need to get back to the Ark myself.”

Thandie pursed her lips. “That depends on the captain and ship’s orders. Might be months away.”

“I know. Whenever you can.”

Bill called from the observation room. “Show’s starting, you guys.”