Flood (60 page)

Manco, orphaned at aged twelve, was inconsolable.

Kristie had kept her little pink kid’s backpack from London, and Lily went through it. Inside there were a few cheap plastic accessories, Kristie’s handheld computer, her ancient teddy. Lily decided to keep the handheld. She offered Manco the teddy, but it was too babyish for him. He kept a necklace of amberlike beads, however. He wore it wrapped around his wrist.

There had been no peace between Kristie and her aunt, even to the end. When she learned what had happened at Cripple Creek, Kristie hadn’t been able to accept that Lily had wangled a place on Ark One, whatever it was, not for Manco, her own blood, but for Grace, a relic of her hostage days. It was no good for Lily to protest that they probably wouldn’t have taken Manco anyhow, and that Nathan certainly wouldn’t have supported him. Lily hadn’t even
tried
, and that was enough of a betrayal for Kristie.

One way or another Lily’s captivity had come between them most of Kristie’s life, and now it pursued them to her death.

That night, when Manco was sleeping, Lily took a look at the handheld.

It had a calendar facility, but no satellite or radio link. And it had an extensive database that Kristie called her scrapbook. Lily remembered how she had started this thing on her mother’s dining table in Fulham, with an observation of an old man who couldn’t get to the football because of floods in Peterborough. That snippet was still here. She scanned through more items. They were selected judiciously, and written up with a hasty grace. Kristie could have been a writer of some kind, maybe a journalist, in a more forgiving age. In the last couple of years, after the Ark was gone and they were on the rafts, Kristie’s access to global news had pretty much vanished, aside from scraps she heard over Nathan’s clockwork radios. But her own world widened, oddly, as the raft communities crossing the world’s oceans converged and dissipated, and bits of news were passed on among them, and she had recorded them on her handheld.

Curious, Lily scanned to the very last item Kristie had recorded. It was a bit of gossip, written up by Kristie a few weeks ago. The witness spoke of a time only a few months after Lily had deposited Grace in Colorado. She had been in the drifting communities in the ocean east of the Rockies. One night she had been sitting on her raft braiding her eldest daughter’s hair, when a light sent shifting shadows across her lap. At first she thought it was a flare. She turned to see.

She made out a brilliant pinpoint of light that rose up into the western sky, trailing a column of smoke that was illuminated by the glow of that leading fire. As it rose it arced, tracing out a smooth curve across the face of the heavens. And then sound reached her, a soft rumble like a very distant storm. The spark of light receded in the sky.

Grace, Lily thought immediately. Grace. What else could it be?

Hastily she scanned the database. It was only a bit of gossip Kristie had picked up from somebody on another raft, who in turn had heard it from somebody else, who . . . And so on. It was unverifiable. The source didn’t even have a name. Lily was never going to know if it was true. She read the entry over and over, trying to squeeze more information out of its few words, until Manco called for her in his sleep.

Later, spurred by curiosity, she looked up the second to last entry. It was a report out of what was left of America, relayed by radio, that the horse was believed to be extinct.

In the morning Lily prepared the body as best she could. She stuffed the teddy inside the backpack, and slung the pack around Kristie’s neck.

Then she got help carrying Kristie’s body to the edge of the raft. It was a big construct by now, nearly a hundred meters across, a floating village built on a substrate of Nathan’s gen-enged seaweed algin products. Aside from her pack, Kristie was sent naked into the sea. They couldn’t spare the clothes. At that they had to run a gauntlet of some of the raft crew, a younger set who didn’t believe in sea burials. There was no cannibalism, but Kristie’s body represented too valuable a resource to waste in the sea. That was their view, but Lily begged to differ, and as an elder from the Ark she wasn’t impeded.

She didn’t even have anything to weigh down the body. Kristie’s grave would be the sharp teeth of the ocean.

So Lily and Manco were left alone together. They were from different worlds, strangers. They fought and cried.

94

March 2044

W
hen 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 . . .”