Flood (29 page)

“Nicely summarized,” Thandie said dryly.“You fucking Russians are a miserable bunch.”

“We have a saying,” Elena said. “The first five hundred years are the worst. I fear I am getting cold. We should go and unpack for the night. And then we can share this desolate news all over again.” She clambered out of the water, her underwear sticking to her flesh.

Thandie watched Elena, and she saw Gary watching her. Thandie stood up, stretching, and walked over to Gary. She really was quite beautiful, he thought, in an athletic, hunter-gatherer kind of way. She murmured, “You keep your observations to yourself.” But she grinned at him, not malicious. She walked on, showering him with droplets warmed by her body.

As they dressed, Elena said she had negotiated with the dacha staff for an evening meal. “There will be local delicacies, beetroot soup, and trout served in walnut sauce. Do not be concerned about the fish. Only the deeper parts of the Black Sea are poisoned by industrial hydrogen sulphide . . .”

43

T
he party crossed the Caucasus, heading north and east, skirting the foothills of the southern mountains. Then they descended toward the shore of the Caspian Sea, traveling over a steppe of sandy clay until they reached the lower valley of the Volga.

They lodged for a day at Astrakhan. Close to the border with Kazakhstan, this was a coastal town that sprawled across the delta of the Volga, spanning eleven islands. The Caspian Sea, cut off from the global ocean, had not yet risen, and the lands around its shore had not yet suffered the flooding experienced elsewhere. It was strange for Gary and the others to run around town and to see the cathedral, the city’s kremlin, the bridges, all eerily intact, as if nothing in the world had changed. But the city was all but drained of its people, and they saw more soldiers than civilians. The Russian authorities knew the oceanic transgression was coming, and had taken what precautions they could.

The party split up here to provide distributed viewpoints to observe the incursion. Some of them, including Sanjay and Elena, stayed in Astrakhan. The rest broke into pairs or threes and spread out away from Astrakhan up the river valley or around the northern shore of the Caspian, where some thousand square kilometers of the coastal land was below the old sea level, a great band of lowland that stretched right around the ocean shore and spread maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers inland.

Gary was paired with Thandie. They set up camp at the shore, close to a sandy, deserted beach. There they waited for the expected breakthrough.

Days passed. The weather was good, and they swam in the landlocked ocean, but it was foul with industrial waste and oil. In fact they could see drilling rigs out on the water, gaunt shapes like floating factories. They worked. They had their laptops and satellite connections, and they spoke to their colleagues, spread around the shore of the sea and in the river valley. They held a number of virtual “hearths,” where the scattered researchers sent each other webcam images of their campfires.

After a couple of days they were joined on the shore by more observers, in tents and mobile homes. Few spoke English; none seemed to be scientists. “Disaster tourists,” Thandie said dismissively.

“Like us,” Gary pointed out.

At night they discussed their lives, Gary’s captivity, Thandie’s ambitions, their shared memories, their mutual friends. And after a couple of days, in the dark of their tent as they tried to sleep, Gary dared raise the subject of Elena Artemova, and the swim at Krasnaya Polyana.

“I swing both ways, if you want to know,” Thandie said.“But I don’t swing for you. Sorry.”

“That’s OK,” he said calmly.“There’s something about Elena, though, isn’t there?”

Thandie snorted. “What, her chest?”

“No. That sadness you see in her. She reminds me of Piers Michaelmas, on his dark days. I want to make her smile. Does that sound dumb?”

“No,” Thandie said. “Since I feel the same way.”

“Good,” Gary said. “I mean it.” He thought of her lost baby, and felt warm. “If you can find happiness with Elena—”

“Shut up, Boyle.”

“Roger that.”

So they drifted to sleep, both thinking of Elena, who for all Gary knew might be thinking of both of them, or neither.

On the fourth morning they woke to a distant roar. When they climbed out of their tent the rubberneckers were already standing by the shore, binoculars in their hands.

Sanjay made an excited webcam communication; he had to shout over a noise like a waterfall. “It’s broken through! We let you sleep, we thought you’d like to discover the sound for yourselves. It was a storm in the Black Sea that did it . . .” The rising waters of the Black Sea, fed from the global ocean via the Mediterranean and the Sea of Marmara, had at last broken through the Caucasus barrier at its weakest point, forcing their way up the valley of the Don, flooding Volgograd, and then pouring down the Volga valley to Astrakhan. “The whole damn town’s already inundated. It’s extraordinary!”

The distant rumble continued, like a far-off war.

Thandie checked her data feeds. “The Black Sea had risen to around fifty meters above the old datum when it broke through the Caucasus. Whereas the Caspian was about twenty-seven meters
below
the datum. That’s about seventy-seven meters of head. No wonder it’s so damn loud.”

“We’ve work to do.”

“Yeah. But let’s go see first.” On impulse she grabbed his hand. They walked down to the edge of the sea.

All along the littoral the grubby water was advancing slowly, like a tide coming in, surging a little when a wave broke. They paced back before it, counting, timing their steps.

“At this rate it’s going to amount to a half-kilometer advance per day,” Thandie said. She pulled a handheld from her pocket and did some quick figuring. “A vertical rise of maybe ten centimeters a
day
.”

“It’s going to take a while to fill up to the global datum, then,” Gary said. “A year?”

“More.”

The tourists were baffled. They seemed to have expected a giant wave you could surf on. Well, if you wanted spectacle you should be in the Volga valley, Gary thought. But he had a scientist’s imagination, the capacity to understand the numbers.“The Caspian is a thousand kilometers long. A sea that could swallow Japan. And it’s filling like a bathtub.
Think
of the volumes that must be pouring down the Volga.” And, Gary thought, it was just going to keep on pushing back and back, eating away at the land.

They stood there and let the rising water wash over their bare feet. Thandie said, “Nobody’s seen a sight like this since the Ice Age. Do you think we’re privileged or cursed?”

“Both, maybe.”

“Listen, Gary. What’s next for you?”

“What do you have in mind?”

“More of this.” She waved a hand.“We’re going to see a re-creation of giant bodies of water that haven’t stood on the Earth since the last glaciation, when meltwater filled every hollow: the lost great lakes. From here the sea will eventually extend all the way north to the Arctic coast. In Africa, the ocean will force its way up the Niger and the Nile to re-form Lake Megachad, a sea the size of western Europe. And in North America Lake Agassiz will form again, a huge inland sea that stretched from Saskatchewan to Ontario, from the Dakotas to Minnesota. Sights not seen for five hundred human generations. Let’s go see . . . Why, there’s even good science to be done. Even if nobody will ever buy my book about it.”

But he had already decided what he should do. He could keep working wherever he went: in the midst of a global transformation there was data to be gathered everywhere. He would still be part of the worldwide community of watchers. But he’d decided. He would go back to America. His mother had died and he had no immediate family there. But he thought he would see if he could help Lily find Helen’s baby. At heart, he was discovering, he was drawn to people, not spectacle.

Twenty-seven years old, he wanted to go home. He tried to explain this. Thandie didn’t press him.

The sea continued to advance, rising, until it soaked the cuffs of their trousers. A rubbernecker a dozen meters away glared in disappointment. “Is this all there is to it? What a bust.”

44

February 2020

F
rom Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

When he joined up in Omaha, Bennie Thornton didn’t know much about the purpose of the crusade. As far as he was concerned it was a holy war, a chance to earn some grace by sticking one to the Muslims, a last chance before the world finally went to hell.

In fact, he learned during his orientation and training, the war in Jerusalem was all part of a grand scheme designed by a group of American Christian fundamentalists called the Third Templars—a project intended to bring about the apocalypse.

A little Googling showed Kristie that the religious response to the flood had been complex and multifaceted, even just within Christianity. How should a Christian act in these extraordinary times? Some commentators cited Bible passages that supported an argument that the devout should concentrate their efforts on ensuring that they and others were among those saved. And adherents of the modern “prosperity gospel,” who believed that God rewarded faith with wealth and material success, argued that the time to use that God-given wealth was right now, to buy up the high lands and let the less worthy drown. But the US National Association of Evangelicals led calls for the government to take various actions regarding the flood and its effects, just as it had once led calls to act over climate change, actions it claimed were entirely consistent with Christianity.

Gradually an ecumenical campaign by Catholic and Protestant leaders won traction, arguing that selfish actions conflicted with basic Christian teachings of self-denial, humility and charity. They pointed to Christ’s expression of the Golden Rule:“And as you would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise” (Luke 6:31). That was surely a mandate to help those afflicted by the flood, which was disproportionately affecting those of limited means, like the poor inhabitants of shantytowns and river deltas. Leaders of other great religions developed similar arguments.

It seemed to Kristie that the religions were in general doing a great deal to harness ethical and material backing for the vast relief efforts being mobilized around the world, and indeed to temper the thrust of some of those efforts, as some of the super-rich and the consultancies and multinationals continued to try to use flood emergencies as opportunities to extract profits and colonize fresh economic territory.

But the Third Templars had a more specific cause.

They claimed that, according to Revelation and other sources, the building of a Third Temple on the Mount in Jerusalem was a necessary prerequisite to clear the way for the coming of Christ, and put an end to this age of turmoil and disaster. So that was what they set out to do. They were joined in this purpose by a gang of Messianic Zionists.

Unfortunately the erection of the Third Temple required demolishing various Islamic monuments in place on the same site. So the mission had immediately sparked a war that involved all three of the monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The war of Abraham, they called it.

It had quickly widened out to a regional conflict involving other issues, battles over high land and water and desalination technology. The Israeli state had been a pioneer in weapons and security technology since 9/11 and before, and fought back viciously against any threat. And the Palestinians in their walled-off enclaves were making one last attempt to win back the land they believed had been stolen from them. There had been many wars fought over Jerusalem, Bennie learned, all the way back to the ancient Romans and probably beyond. But this, one way or another, was likely to be the last.

All Bennie cared about was getting into the fight. Aged nineteen, his body a mass of muscle and testosterone, he whooped as he jumped out of the plane to make his first parachute descent into the burning city.

45

June 2020

T
he AxysCorp chopper skimmed over the oily waters of Upper New York Bay, heading northeast toward Manhattan. The pilot banked the bird, and pointed out the Statue of Liberty. “Everybody wants to see the old lady,” he called back.

Lily leaned against Plexiglas. The day was dull, the sky a solid mass of slate cloud from which rain fell steadily, rattling on the bird’s hull. The gray of the sky was reflected in the gray of the sea, gray over gray.

And there was Liberty, tilted over by Hurricane Aaron two years ago but still standing on her submerged pedestal, surrounded by a turbulent sea. Lily didn’t imagine the grand old statue could keep standing much longer; one good storm would probably do the trick. But, according to Thandie Jones, the statue herself would survive indefinitely, submerged and buried in sediment. Even when the green patina on the lady’s copper sheeting thickened and turned to stone, her sculptor’s design would still be visible to whatever strange undersea visitors she might receive.

As the flooded cityscape glided beneath the chopper’s prow, Lily used Liberty as a reference point to get her bearings, trying to see how much had changed since she last flew in here over two years ago for Thandie’s science presentation. There was no sign of the barriers and levees hastily thrown up in those early panicky months; they were covered by the water. There was Brooklyn to her right and Jersey City to her left, the ground now entirely submerged, and only a few tall buildings protruded above the water. Grand-looking vessels lay at anchor around the shallow coasts, some the metallic gray of navy ships, but also yachts, brilliant white, floating like toys in a bathtub. The last refuge of New York’s super-rich, perhaps, lying at anchor above the wrecked city. And Manhattan was a reef, directly ahead of her, the tallest buildings thrusting out of the water like splinters of quartz.

The chopper ducked down into the Financial District, sweeping between the shoulders of battered, burned-out skyscrapers. It was like flying through a virtual-reality version of some great canyon system, simplified rectangular blocks and straight-line cliffs with the water lying in the rectilinear valleys below. The glassless windows of the buildings were dark, but there was activity on the water: powerboats raising wakes that lapped against the stained walls, and heavier, lumbering rafts. The water itself was littered with garbage, plastic scraps and bursting bin liners.