Flood

94

March 2044

When the moon went into totality, when the Earth’s shadow crossed its face entirely and that compelling bloodred color bloomed, Lily could hear the gasp that went up across the community of rafts, a crowd’s murmur of awe, children saying, “Look at that!” in a variety of languages. The orange light of the eclipsed moon washed down over Manco’s upturned face, making it shine like a coin. As the sky was stripped of moonlight the other stars emerged, dominated by Jupiter, king of the planets.

Lily tried to imagine how it would be to look back from the moon itself, to see the breast of Earth’s ocean glimmering in the tainted moonlight, unbounded from pole to pole save for the last scattering of mountaintop islands with its speckling of rafts and boats and islands of garbage, and the people turning up their faces to see the show in the sky. Lily felt like relaxing into the spectacle herself.

But she had work to do, information to drum into the thirteen-year-old head of Manco.

She shifted to get more comfortable beside Manco on the scrap of plastic tarp, salvaged from the Ark, that they spread out over the sticky seaweed-algin floor of their raft. “Now, Manco, you need particularly to watch out for the moments when the Earth’s shadow touches the moon’s limb, which is when the moon enters or leaves the cone of shadow. Because you can time those moments precisely, you see, within a second or so.” She made an entry in Kristie’s handheld, to make the point.“And then you note down the time, like this-”

“The light’s funny,” he said. “Not like moonlight at all.”

“No. That’s because it isn’t normal moonlight. You get moonlight when the sun’s light shines on the face of the moon. During an eclipse the only light the moon gets is refracted through the Earth’s atmosphere. It comes around the edge of the Earth, and it’s red. Like all the sunrises and sunsets in the world, all at once, falling on the moon…”

He wasn’t interested.

And her voice was giving up on her. She was thirsty. God, she was sixty-eight years old, and for three years she had been living on a raft, and the plastic buckets had stood empty for long days. She had a right to a sore throat. You could always get a little moisture from the fish, from sucked-out eyeballs or spinal fluid, which kids like Manco seemed to have no problem with. But it always made Lily queasy, and left behind a salty, oily aftertaste that was almost worse than the thirst itself.

She tried to focus.

She was trying to drum into Manco’s young head the method she had figured out for calculating longitude.

Because precise timekeeping was essential, figuring out longitude would be a challenge in the future when all the watches and clocks had stopped working. But she had her old astronomy almanac, a souvenir of the New Jersey, which had timing predictions of lunar eclipses as seen from Greenwich for every year until 2100. A lunar eclipse was an event visible from across one whole face of the planet. All you had to do was keep track of the date-she knew from Kristie’s handheld that tonight was 13 March 2044-and if you spotted your moment of eclipse, and pinned it down to the right prediction in the almanac, you knew the precise Greenwich time at that moment. And knowing that you just had to look at the stars above you, and figure out how they compared to the position of the stars the almanac showed for that moment in the skies over London, and you could tell how far around the curve of the world you were…

Even to Lily it felt terribly complicated.

“I don’t see what difference it makes,” Manco said. “Longitude, yes, OK, how far we are from the equator-”

“Latitude,” she said softly. “That’s latitude. Longitude is-”

“Latitude’s easy.” He pointed at the pole star. “It just depends how high that is. And latitude’s important.” So it was. It was best to stay close to the equator, where the great hurricanes rarely roamed, but you would always venture north or south a little way, because where the hurricanes passed the water was stirred up, and the fishing was better. “But who cares about longitude? What difference does it make? It’s all the same, it’s just water, no matter how far east or west you go. I mean, where are we right now?”

“About seventy-five degrees east. Somewhere in the Indian Ocean.”

“So what? Who cares? What’s Indian?”

“India. It was called India. The point is-”

“Can I go see Ana? I’ll tell her about the eclipse, and latitude and stuff.”

“Longitude.”

“Whatever.”

And with that off he went, walking gracefully, wearing only a ragged pair of shorts. He padded over the raft’s floor, thinking nothing of Nathan’s marvelous substrate, an everyday, self-maintaining miracle that everybody took for granted, and most of the young didn’t remotely understand, or even notice.

At the edge Manco slipped into the moonlit water and swam away.

She heard Nathan’s cough long before he came looming out of the dark.

Nathan came up, hobbling; in the last few years he had become plagued with arthritis, blaming the damp of the sea. “Where the hell’s Manco? I thought school was in.”

Lily smoothed out a heap of blankets for him to sit on; he lowered himself painfully. “Oh, Nathan, you know how it is with these kids. You can’t keep them still. Ana isn’t a bad kid, anyhow. Have you met her parents? Russians, who made it to the western US after the flooding overwhelmed the mother country. Tough story. Ana doesn’t remember any of it, of course.”

“My perception is these kids just want to swim and screw all day. Some of them catch fish with their teeth, y’know. Hell of a sight.”

“Well, maybe-”

“They got to be taught,” he insisted, slapping his palm on the floor. “We can’t let our kids turn into fucking seals. They got to learn their longitude. They got to learn to read and write and figure. They got to learn they live on a fucking ball in the sky. Because otherwise, in a generation’s time, they won’t be using your lunar eclipses to work out longitude. They’ll be cowering from God’s blinking eye.”

“I know, know-”

“That damn kid Manco is worse since his mother died. Say what you like about Kristie, and she had plenty to say about me, she was a good mother, a tough one.”

Lily flared.“Oh, you think I’m doing such a bad job? Christ, Nathan, I’m nearly seventy years old. If I could get his mother back I’d do it like a shot. It’s not as if you did such a great job with Hammond.”

As soon as he could after the sinking of the Ark, Hammond had commandeered a couple of the lifeboats and had headed off, making south, he said, hoping to find a foothold back in the Andes. His father hadn’t wanted to release him. Their parting had been marked by a fistfight.

Now, though, Nathan didn’t seem worried by the jibe. He leaned closer to Lily and whispered, though there was nobody around to hear, “Speaking of Hammond, got a message from him today.” They had kept in touch via Nathan’s wind-up and solar-powered radio gear.“Sent back some news about the Spot.”

The Spot was an apparently permanent hypercane system that roamed around the Earth’s tropics, feeding on the heat of the warming air, unimpeded by land as such storms had always been before. It was called the Spot because that was how it was thought it would look from space, if any satellites were still functioning, a permanent storm on Earth like the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. Nathan reeled off some coordinates. It paid to know where the Spot was, and its satellite storms, so you could avoid their destructiveness and yet plunder the mixed-up, nutrient-rich waters they left in their wake.

“And,” Nathan said,“he got a message from Alma. Or rather he didn’t get one.”

“Alma, Colorado.” The highest city in the US. “And now?”

“Glug, glug, glug,” Nathan said.

“God.” Lily tried to remember what smaller US cities had been like-the downtown, the out-of-town malls, the schoolhouses and gas stations and suburbs. Gone, all of them, erased more completely than any of the vanished empires of the past.

The endless litany of losses was increasingly unreal. The sea was so high now that even mountain cities in the Andes were being lost: Bogota, Quito, La Paz. And before that, Australia had gone, the first continent to vanish entirely from the face of the Earth. Lily had marked the day, following her scratch calendar, when she had calculated that the seas had at last closed over Mount Kosciuszko in New South Wales, two thousand, two hundred and twenty-eight meters high, the island continent’s highest point. Lily had softly sung “Waltzing Matilda” as she bade it goodbye…

She wasn’t listening to Nathan. As always she was drifting off into reverie. She tried again to focus.

Nathan, rocking gently, kept talking, the way he used to, as always setting out his vision of the future. “We got to keep these kids educated. They are the heirs to forty thousand years of culture. In the past the world humans made was all around you, the buildings and the books and the machines, and it shaped you. That’s all gone now, erased, save for what’s in here.” He thumped his temple, but gently, favoring his arthritic wrist.“This isn’t just a flood. It’s a vast collective amnesia. Well, that can’t be helped. They’ve got to learn. But they won’t learn. They won’t listen. They won’t keep to the rotas we set for them…”

She had heard these arguments before, and not just from Nathan. More commonly people complained that the kids wouldn’t pay any attention to the itinerant preachers and imams and rabbis who slowly worked their way around the raft communities. If the kids were rejecting Nathan’s can-do vision of the world, they were also seeking their own gods, it seemed, somewhere in the endless water that dominated their world.

Nathan mumbled, “Anyhow the flood is just another climatic convulsion in a long line. Five million years ago there was a grand cooling in Africa, and the forest broke up. Our forefathers split off and started evolving adaptations for open country. The chimps stuck to the forest fragments, and you know what, they were still there when the fucking waters rose up to drown them. The Earth birthed us, and then shaped us with tough love. This new watery age, the Hydrocene, is just another rough molding, and we’ll come through it, smarter and stronger than ever. We are the children of the Hydrocene. Yes, I like that…” He looked around, as if seeking somebody to write the phrase down for him. “Damn chimps, I mean kids, they just swim…” His eyes were closing, as if he were falling asleep even while he was talking, and he rocked stiffly, seventy-three years old.

“Nathan, maybe you should go to bed.”

“They just swim…”

A light flared in the sky. Lily glanced up, thinking it must be the end of totality, the bright sunlight splashing unimpeded once more on the moon’s face. But the moon, still wholly eclipsed, was as round and brown as it had been before.

It was Jupiter: Jupiter was flaring, still a pinpoint of light, but much brighter, bright enough to cast sharp point-source shadows on the glistening weed of the raft substrate. But the light diminished, as if receding with distance. And soon Jupiter shone alone as it had before.

That was the Ark, she thought immediately. That was Grace. What else could it be?

Then a sliver of white appeared at the very rim of the moon, lunar mountains exploding into the sunlight. She was quickly dazzled, and Jupiter was lost. She was never going to know.

“I got you here, didn’t I? I kept you alive.”

“Yes, Nathan.” She pulled a blanket around his shoulders as he rocked and mumbled about evolution and destiny and children, an old man bent over his arthritic pain. “Yes, you did that.”

But if it had been Ark One, she thought, maybe the crew planned the timing of that strange departure, knowing that over much of the dark side of the Earth eyes would be drawn to the eclipse, the spectacle in the sky. It would be quite a stunt, one hell of a way to say goodbye.

“I kept you alive. We’ve got to adapt. The chimps, I mean the kids, they’ve got to learn…”