Flood (43 page)

“It is kind of relentless, isn’t it?” He took a healthy slug of his drink, a mash whiskey with water. “But, hell, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a good time. That’s why I call these landmark parties. Every time we have something to celebrate, let’s roll out the barrel.”

She had to smile; just for a moment he sounded like the archetypal Londoner.
Rowl aht the barrull
. “Yes, but Nathan, I don’t even understand what landmark we’re celebrating here. ‘Crossing the equator?’ What equator?”

He grinned. “I’ll announce it later, but since it’s you . . . According to the boffins, today’s the very day the sea rises past eight hundred meters above the old datum. Now, you know as well as I do that that kind of data is always iffy. I mean, the measurement of the rise itself is getting patchier as those radar satellites fall out of the sky, and altitude measurement was always shit besides. You’ve been to Nazca today, which is just going under and isn’t that supposed to have been six hundred meters up? . . . However. The brainiacs say it’s eight hundred meters today, and so it’s eight hundred. Now you see why it’s an equator to cross?”

She nodded. “Because eight hundred meters is the fifty percent mark.”

“Right. Today is the day we lost fifty percent of the world’s old land surface. Of course the percentage of
useful
surface lost is a lot higher; we still got Greenland and old Antarctica, ice deserts poking uselessly above the waves, and all the mountain ranges . . . Still, fifty percent. And about five-sixths of the human population displaced or dead. What a mess. Cheers.” He drank more whiskey.

“You can be a cold-hearted bastard, Nathan.”

“You think? Maybe I’m just getting tired too. I mean, look at that fucking map.” He snapped his fingers.

The big wall display froze at a projected eight hundred meters. The map was mostly blue, with the shapes of the old continents showing in a paler tint—new continental shelf, carpeted with drowned river valleys and deserts, forests and cities. The Andes were an eerie tracery down the western shore of South America.

Nathan said, “Look what’s left. In North America the Rockies states are surviving, from New Mexico up through Colorado, Utah, Oregon. In Africa you have that big slicing from southwest to northeast, sparing South Africa and the eastern nations, through Tanzania and Kenya up to Ethiopia. In Asia you have the Himalayas, Mongolia, the Stans, just a pit of warfare, chewing up lives like a meat grinder. Aside from that nothing save for scattered mountaintops and bits of high ground in Britain, Australia, India, Indonesia. Europe’s gone outside the Alps, pretty much. Russia gone, even the Urals.”

“Mountaintops and bits of high ground,” Lily repeated.

“We still get messages. Beacons from the high places. Hell, I never heard of most of these places before they started transmitting to each other over the world ocean.” He glanced at her.“Something I have to tell you. The highest city in Spain is called Avila. And guess what?”

“Tell me.”

“We got a message from there. When Madrid was evacuated the Spanish government collapsed, and there was a final power struggle. And the faction that came out on top was—the Fathers of the Elect.”

“You’re kidding.”

He shook his head. “They’ve been asking for help. They heard I’ve been sheltering you and the others. Maybe they thought that was enough of a connection.” He laughed. “They’ve asked for your forgiveness, you and Piers and the rest.”

She was astonished. “What do they want?”

He shrugged. “The usual. A place on the high ground. I doubt if we could help anyhow. But it’s your baby. What would you say?”

She considered. “They kept me in a hole in the ground for years. They killed one of my friends, they raped another, and they left us for dead. Fuck ’em.”

“Fuck ’em.” He raised a glass and drank to that. He looked at the map once more. “There’s still a ways to go before we run out of land. Lhasa in Tibet is four kilometers up. La Paz is just as high . . . I think we’re seeing an end game to the wars, though. In each of the main surviving highland zones, the Americas, Africa, the Himalayas, you’ll soon see control established in the hands of a few strong governments, or individuals. There’ll be order, of a sort. And maybe a bottoming-out in the deaths. We’re nearing the final end of the corporate feeding frenzy too. Things have broken down too far for that to be sustained any longer. The survivors among the rich will be those who were smart enough to have converted their wealth to power and security by now.

“There are some who say, you know, that this global collapse is a good thing. Or at least it will look that way in the long run. Maybe our civilization was over-complicated, like a mature forest, with every scrap of land occupied, every convertible bit of matter turned into biomass, the trees, worms, beetles all locked into a complex web of dependencies, everything living off everything else. Maximum efficiency but minimum resilience. So then when the shock comes, the fire or the earthquake or the drought, the die-back is huge. But what survives is stronger, more adaptable, robust.”

“Hm. I’m not sure it’s a good analogy, Nathan. Anyhow I can’t imagine you embracing any die-back. I bet you’re thinking ahead. You’re always thinking ahead.”

He glanced at her. “Well, I always have a plan B. I guess you know that much about me by now. And where I don’t have plans, I have options. Such as, I managed to buy up the Svalbard vault from the Norwegians, before the government there collapsed.”

“The what vault?”

“A post 9/11 if-the-apocalypse-comes thing. A worldwide project to establish a seed vault, three million samples, a hundred meters deep inside a mountain on some Norwegian island. It was a smart design. Even if the power failed it would have been kept cooled by the permafrost. But they didn’t see the flood coming.”

“So where are the seeds now?”

He grinned and pointed down. “In the hold.”

“On the
ship
?”

“Nice touch, don’t you think?”

“All right, I’ll buy it. When the flood goes down, Nathan Lammockson plays Johnny Appleseed and restocks the world. What else? Give me one headline.”

“Race-specific weapons.”

That shocked her. “Jesus, Nathan.”

He glanced out of the window at the laborers in their shacks. “I’ve had a team of experts working on the problem for years. An application of pharmacogenomics, they call it. If the shit really hits the fan, I want to be sure me and mine survive.”

“You really are crazy.”

“Everybody says that,” he replied, unperturbed. “But you’ve all followed me from Southend-on-Sea to this damn place, and nobody close to me has suffered so much as a day’s hunger. Who’s crazy, then? I pray I don’t have to use such weapons. But I know I wouldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t prepare for what I can foresee. Naturally this is confidential.”

At that moment Piers approached Nathan. He was dressed in his grubby field coverall, and looked as out of place in this glittering lounge as a tramp in a palace. “Trouble at La Oroya,” he said.

“Shit,” said Nathan. “We need that smelter.”

“A chopper’s waiting.” Piers glanced at Lily. “You’d better come.”

“Why? Oh. Ollantay’s involved?”

Piers said nothing.

“I’ll find Amanda,” she said, and pushed her way through the crowd.

65

T
he smelter facility dominated the high valley of La Oroya. The mountains surrounding the valley made a natural bowl which stopped the breezes blowing the pollution away, so that smog hung thick over the town, visible from kilometers away. And as the chopper swept in you could see the columns of white smoke rising from the stacks, rising into the clear air. The land itself had been turned into a grubby industrial site, scarred by waste dumps and vehicle tracks.

On the ground, Ollantay greeted Piers confidently. Ollantay had his own private army with him, Inca-costumed thugs armed with rifles. He simply ignored Piers’s squad of AxysCorp troops with their formidable-looking weapons. And behind Ollantay, sitting on the ground in rank after sullen rank, were the workers who had blockaded the smelting plant. Ollantay looked magnificent, Lily thought. He was in his mid-thirties now, a man in the prime of his life. He wore the clothing of an Inca noble: feathers in his tied-back hair, a huge, elaborate gold plug in each pierced ear, and a tunic of dyed vicuna wool embroidered with some kind of heraldic symbol.

And Kristie was at his side, in vicuna-wool clothing of her own, her child in her arms. Manco, her half-Quechua boy now nearly four years old, was almost too big for her to hold. For all the longing glances Amanda gave her, Kristie looked as if she belonged here, at her man’s side.

Ignoring Ollantay, and very obviously keeping his distance from Kristie, Piers walked up to the workers and their families on the ground. He put his hands on his hips and spoke in clear, clipped English. A couple of the AxysCorp squaddies stepped forward to interpret for him in Spanish and Quechua. “Now look here—this is all unnecessary, and very unhelpful. I know things are difficult for you up here, but then things are difficult for all of us.

“And what you do is very important.” He waved a hand at the smelter, which would be idle soon, when the AxysCorp management team running the blockaded plant ran out of feedstock. “Refining your arsenic, lead, cadmium, copper, you are an essential link in the industrial infrastructure of Project City and its environs. Without you, the high-technology civilization we’ve been able to maintain here will fail. As simple as that. And if that happens it will affect all of us. Why, right now on the other side of the world, the final battle for Jerusalem is being fought out between Christian, Jew and Muslim with wooden clubs and chunks of rubble from the smashed holy monuments. Is that what you want to see here?”

A woman stood. She held up a child, an infant maybe two years old. It hung limply, its head lolling. “Lead in baby,” she said in heavily accented English. “In bone, liver, kidneys, brain. Doctors say.” She pinched the child’s leg. “No feeling in legs, arms. No speak. Lead in baby.”

“I’m sure there are treatments—solutions, filters, facemasks—”

Ollantay said,“There were pollution problems even before the flood, when this place was owned by a US corporation, before Nathan Lammockson bought it up. It’s one reason Lammockson came to Peru, isn’t it, Piers, for the high-altitude mining facilities that were already here? Back before the flood, at least they used to save the worst of their emissions for overcast days, or nights. Now they don’t care; there is no law, no environmental legislation, no government to stop AxysCorp polluting as it likes.” Piers tried to interrupt him, but Ollantay shouted him down. “And the population affected is so much larger now, with the refugees crowding from the lowlands into the valley, begging for work . . .”

While they argued, Lily approached Kristie. “You shouldn’t be here,” Lily said. “Ollantay’s just making trouble.”

“He’s a leader,” Kristie said confidently. “The Oroyinos respect him. Everybody in the high valleys respects him, all the way to Puno, even the
mestizos
and Spanish.” Thirty now, there was nothing left of the English girl who had first come here, Lily thought, save her trace of accent.

Amanda could barely look at her daughter, or her grandson. “You’re an idiot, and so is he.” She still wore the black dress she’d donned for Nathan’s party, under a waxed coat and incongruous rubber boots.

Kristie hissed, “And you think speaking to us like that is going to help, Mum? Listen to me. You, and Piers and Lily and Nathan, you’re all going to have to take the feelings of the people up here more seriously. What do you think is going to happen—that you’ll be able to force people to work at the smelting plant, and in the shitty mines at Puno, at gunpoint? How long do you think that will last?”

Lily felt utterly dismayed at the scene, the filthy air, the people sitting in the dirt, the limp, damaged child. It was the sort of place that, unconsciously or not, she kept away from in the course of her work for AxysCorp. “No wonder people are drawn to Ollantay, if they have to live like this.”

“Yes,” Kristie said in triumph. “And Ollantay represents history, Lily—it’s personal for these people. Despite all the Spaniards and other colonials could do, it’s a history that never went away. Ollantay calls me his
aclla
.”

“His what?”

“His chosen woman. His holy companion, like the Vestal Virgins of Rome.” She hefted her child.“Though less of the virgin in my case . . . And maybe I will become his
coya
, wife of an emperor.”

“A holy companion,” Amanda said. “An emperor’s wife. Oh, for God’s sake, Kristie, you bloody little fool!”

There was trouble. Somebody got up and swung a punch at Piers. The AxysCorp guards dived in to protect him, and Ollantay and his men rushed in after that. Lily hurried over, hoping to separate the men before any shots got fired.

66

F
rom Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

Nathan’s Ark Three project was supported by a global organization of like-minded individuals that had evolved out of the old LaRei rich man’s club into a survivors’ network of resource flows and shared information. And, just as Nathan was supported by his colleagues, so he supported other initiatives. Kristie, curious about this and the other LaRei projects underway around the world, tried to hack into Nathan’s systems, and scoured his in-house news channels for snippets of information.

She was intrigued by a feed from an astronomy camp on a peak in the Chilean Andes called Cerro Pachon. In the clear air up here, no fewer than three great telescopes had been operating since the beginning of the century, known as Gemini South, SOAR, and the immense Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which was capable of taking a survey of the entire sky several times a week. As the site was a relatively near neighbor of Nathan’s, he undertook to maintain support chains to the astronomers, adapting and improvising as the flood washed out lowland roads, airports and rail links.

Kristie, more interested in other arks, didn’t linger long over her images of bundled-up astronomers, laboring under spectacular skies framed by glacier-topped peaks. She did wonder briefly why a community of the rich in a time of global flood should devote resources to searching the sky.