The O.D. (8 page)

“He’s here?”

“Over at that corner table.”

Billy looked over his shoulder. “Grey hair. I thought Pilot was in his twenties.” “He’s younger than he looks. Go introduce yourself. I’ll bring the drinks.”

A few minutes later, Lavery took her seat and added to the awkwardness of strangers meeting for the first time. Pilot felt it was his job to break the ice, but Lavery beat him to it. “After thinking long and hard about this,” she said, “I’m going to give Mr. Vaalon the benefit of the doubt… with a big
but
. No disrespect intended to you, Lonnie, but it’s a ludicrously fantastical proposal by my way of thinking.”

Before Pilot could respond, Macushla Mara appeared from the shadows and sat next to Lavery.

“You haven’t missed anything, Macushla,” Pilot said. “We’ve only just started. I’m Lonnie Pilot, this is Jane Lavery, and this is Josiah Billy.” Polite greetings were exchanged and Pilot signalled Lavery to continue where she had left off.

“Don’t get me wrong, Lonnie. We all turned up, including me. Now
that’s
something.”

Pilot laughed. “The fact that I’m not sitting here on my own is a miracle,” he said, squirming in his chair. “But our proposal is neither ludicrous nor fantastical, Jane. What exactly did Mr. Vaalon tell you about what’s going to happen?”

Lavery took a sip of wine, then gave a shorter version of the story Vaalon had given Pilot, but with her own twist. A group of international idealists, led by a Cornish teacher, strap themselves to some barges, land on an emerging land mass in the Bay of Biscay and create Utopia. “When
Vaalon
described it, it sounded believable,” Lavery said. “When I describe it, it’s the most outlandish fiction that’s ever been imagined.”

Pilot turned to Mara. “Macushla?”

“It’s the basic premise of landing on an earthquake that perplexes me,” she said. “The entire scenario is implausible, unbelievable, farfetched, unlikely and plain dangerous.”

“Then why are you here?” Pilot took Mara’s words as a challenge. He locked eyes with the woman, determined not to be the first to look away, but failed. The strength in her stare made it difficult for him to focus. “I had my doubts too, at first,” he said, softening. “But I’ve seen the computer models. It’s a huge leap of faith we’re asking of you, I admit that.”

“Bizarre is what it is,” Billy said. “I’ve made some big leaps in my life, but this is a leap too far.”

“Then I think you should leave. I don’t –”

“Hold on, man,” Billy interrupted. “I know of an empty house just a mile from here. We could start building our Utopia there tomorrow. But on an island in the Bay of Biscay that isn’t even here yet?”

Pilot’s look stunned Billy to silence. It was an expression he had recently placed in his armoury as a weapon against anyone trying to usurp his authority. In combination with the right words, it was lethal. “Don’t interrupt me again,” he said, turning his stare up a notch while trying not to blink. He could almost feel the testosterone surging through his veins. This time, it was Billy the poet who looked away first.

If they’d all blindly believed in the island, and in him as its leader, Pilot would have been worried. Both were tall orders. But, as Lavery said, they had all turned up for this meeting, and that in itself was positive. Pilot decided to ignore the first hurdle of plausibility and concentrate on laying out his own credentials. He believed that if you can converse on a subject the listener knows little about, and can do so with confidence and conviction, they will unconsciously elevate you. So, he began summarizing the theory of the Solar Tide, the magnetic pull it exerts on the magma and the effect this has on the Earth’s crust. Ten minutes into his oration, he could sense that they were beginning at least to believe the science.

“That’s what’s happening
below
us,” Pilot said. “Now consider what’s happening on the surface. Where other people see blue, cloudless skies, all I see is red. For me, there’s no escape from the mass suffering taking place on our over-populated planet.”

Pilot could sense Lavery and Mara warming to him.

“The Earth is sinking,” he continued on his wave. “Humanity has tried any number of pumps over past millennia to clear the water from the hold, but none – Christian, Communist, New Age, you name i
t−
has had the depth or the bore required to do the job. We’re losing the battle. The more people who come aboard the ship, the more bilgewater that’s created and the closer to sinking we get.

“With the raising of this island, we’re being given the opportunity, unique in world history, to build a different kind of pump. Not one based on make-believe deities, or flakey philosophy, but on nuts and bolts. To make this pump wor
k−
to make it a credible forc
e−
it has to be seen as being
outside
the existing order.”

“Anarchistic.” Mara said.

“Literally speaking, the label fits us. We’re trying to overturn the accepted order. But what happens if the accepted order is unacceptable? This same anarchist then becomes someone who is trying to overturn ‘disorder’. What’s important is being outside the existing chaos. Geographically, we
will
be
. Conceptually, we
are
, assuming you feel the same way I do.” Pilot looked at each in turn. “The priests have had their day. It’s time to bring in the plumbers.”

“
The
priests
have
had
their
day
.
It’s
time
to
bring
in
the
plumbers
,” Mara repeated. “I like that.”

Bulls eye, Pilot thought. “Your house down the road isn’t up to the task, Josiah,” he said to Billy. “The entire world, and every country, city and town in it, is a dystopia. That’s why we need this virgin territory in the Bay of Biscay. No-one can touch us there.”

“That’s bull, man. They’ll be on us like flies on shit.”

“Not necessarily. Let’s take it one day at a time, Josiah. Right now, we should be worrying about what clothes we’re going to pack.”

“We should be worrying about what’s going to happen when we get there, surely,” Lavery said. “What’s the plan, Lonnie?”

“It’s in there,” Pilot said, pointing to Lavery’s head. And in the minds of everyone else who will be landing in August. All we’re taking to the island is the raw material for this experiment, not the finished product. We’ve set ourselves a basic survival agenda to begin with – food production, shelter, drinking water, medical. We’ve identified potential obstacles and devised ways of dealing with them. An astronaut-scientist can’t get down to any meaningful work until he’s in orbit. Once
we’re
in orbit, we can start ours.”

Mara laughed. “Dizzy answer.”

“To a confounding question. The world population hit eight billion last month. Drug abuse has permeated up to the highest levels of government and business. The northern right whale became extinct last year, the Sumatran Rhino in April. And martial law has been declared in Hungary. We won’t be taking the solution to these problems with us to the island. But maybe, after five, ten, or twenty years, we’ll have created one.”

“The precedents aren’t good,” Lavery said. “Take America’s Founding Fathers. A group of spiritually aware, gutsy people flee the religious persecution and dogmas of the Old World to a new, virgin land – an entire continent no less. Ignoring the people already there, I might add. And what do they do with it? Within a blink of the Earth’s eye they turn it into a bigger, brasher and more destructive version of what they’d left behind. What chance have
we
got out there in the cold Atlantic?”

Pilot’s passion and frustration were boiling over. “Put 86 pessimistic optimists together on a slab of rock in the middle of the ocean and… Look, for the sake of a shorter and more constructive meeting, let’s assume everything’s going to happen just as Vaalon said it would. We make landfall, get up next morning… then what?”

“Make breakfast,” Billy said.

For Pilot, returning to Penzance was an anti-climax. After his years of isolation, the energy generated through interacting with the others in Dublin was new and exhilarating. After dinner, the four of them had talked in Pilot’s room until three in the morning, gradually molding themselves into a team fit for purpose. The skepticism of earlier had been superceded by guarded optimism, largely due to a power of persuasion Pilot never knew he ha
d−
because he’d never had anyone to persuade until now.

Jane Lavery stayed on after the others had left. Pilot had wanted to know more about the hydroponic growing system she’d written about on one of her blogs, and she was more than happy to expand.

“Hydroponics – suspending plants in water without soi
l−
is perfect for where we’re going and will complement the conventional growing methods we’ll also be using. Pumping the nutrient solution from a reservoir requires electricity we may not have, so we’ll be using
passive
hydroponics, where the nutrient solution is simply drawn up through the plants’ root system. I’ve persuaded Mr. Vaalon to bankroll thirty hydroponic growing tanks, most of which I plan to use to cultivate Moringas.”

“The world’s most generous tree.”

“You know the Moringa leaf. I’m impressed.”

“Five times more iron than spinach.”

“
Twenty
-five times more, Lonnie. And four times more protein than eggs; ten times more vitamin A than carrots; fifteen times more potassium than bananas. I’ve been testing a solution of nutrients specially developed for growing Moringas
−
manganese, copper, potassium phosphate, calcium nitrate, zinc, boron… the results are astounding.”

For another half hour they had talked about the challenges of food production that would soon be facing them, until tiredness overcame both. As he showed her out the door, Pilot had surprised Lavery, and himself even more, by kissing her lightly on the lips.

Like a battery losing power, Pilot’s high had begun to descend the moment his plane landed in Exeter. Now, in the cold light of his net shed, doubts were beginning to muddy his longer sight. On paper, Vaalon’s vision seemed so perfec
t−
a world of harmony, purpose, energy and life. But the reality from August would be nothing more than grim subsistence living on a naked shelf of rock – the first landfall in three thousand miles for the fearsome North Atlantic seas and freezing dagger winds.

Pilot’s experience in Dublin with Lavery, Mara and Billy had underlined the need for unity and commitment among the crew. The remaining 82 recruits were still an unknown quantity, but Pilot decided that Vaalon’s selection and screening skills had been passable so far, Josiah Billy being the only question mark, and that it was pointless worrying. He had three weeks to kill before his trip to New York and decided that the best remedy for toxic rumination was activity.

Two days later, Lonnie Pilot was boarding the Plymouth-Roscoff night ferry. He’d surrendered to a pressing need to see the waters of the Bay of Biscay for himself, feeling that in some way he might then be able to bridge the gap between possibility and probability; fiction and fact; blue printers ink and real seawater.

From Roscoff he took a train to Brest, then a bus to Le Conquet, where, at two on the afternoon of June 5th, Lonnie Pilot set eyes on the Bay of Biscay for the first time. A heat haze smudged the horizon, making it difficult to tell where the sea ended and the sky began. He was just able to make out the islands of Beniguet, Litiri, Ledenes and Molène, stringing out to the northwest towards the larger island of Ouessant, beyond which, somewhere on the floor of the Bay, he would soon be living. As he stood at the end of the pier looking out to sea he experienced a sensation similar, he thought, to what medieval seafarers felt when the Earth was still believed to be fla
t−
a strange mixture of fear and wonderment at what lay over the edge of the world. He tried to imagine standing in this same spot in three months time watching a wall of water as wide as the eye could see, charging towards him.

Pilot walked to a small, sandy cove nearby and took out the crab sticks and cidre he’d bought at the Super 8. When he’d finished eating, he opened his notebook to the entries he had made at the IGP. According to the computer models, the wave would hit La Rochelle and Saint Nazaire first, whiplash up the coast to the furthest northwest tip of Brittany and Ushant and then carry on to Cornwall and County Cork. And it would be a killer. There had been nothing in Vaalon’s files about any provision to warn the authorities and coastal populations of the impending catastrophe, and this bothered Pilot. He tried to divert his thoughts from the tsunami, but was only engulfed by another – a wave of invaders overrunning their island within hours of its emergence like Josiah Billy’s flies on shit. With the beginnings of a migraine, Pilot took out his phone and began texting.

As he waited for a reply, serious doubts were growing as to his own suitability as chief novitiate of this extraordinary colonisation. He had every intention of resigning when his phone sang and vibrated three times. The message from Vaalon acted like the antidote to a snake bite.