Flood (41 page)

“As promised. This is Juan Villegas. Juan, Maria is—”

“I know you,” Maria said, peering at him. “You used to be in the society pages, back in the day. A playboy, weren’t you? Dating pop stars and tennis girls.” Her English was good, and lightly accented with a mix of Spanish and Quechua intonations.

Juan shrugged, looking embarrassed. “That was a long time ago. In a different world.”

“Well, that’s true. But you’re surviving, evidently, aren’t you?”

“As are you,” he said gently.

A breeze whistled among the guy ropes, and a few drops of rain spattered on the plastic sheeting under their feet. They looked to the west, where, just for a moment, the light strengthened, the sun trying to break through the storm clouds. Maria pushed a stray lock of gray-black hair back from her forehead, and when the light caught the planes of her face this fifty-year-old woman was beautiful, Lily thought, with something of the look of a
mestiza
despite her Christian name. But her eyes were black with tension, her full lips pursed.

Lily had seen this all through the Andes. Maria was of a generation that had already seen one huge dislocation. Driven out of Lima as a young woman, she had come here to build a new home, and had endured half a lifetime of withering work breaking new land. But now the sea was rolling over farms established scant years before, and Maria had to move again. It was hard for people to take. Older folk felt exhausted, unable to face another uprooting. The young, conversely, resented being driven from the only homes they had known, and blamed the old for the wastefulness that may have caused this global convulsion. Even as the huge work of evacuation continued, there were family arguments, divorces, suicides, murders.

“The storm is coming,” Maria said. “You’d better leave before it hits.”

Lily felt obscurely hurt by this curt farewell. “We brought you the standard AxysCorp package. Radio equipment with backups, all solar powered. A GPS navigation suite. Fifty cellphones . . .” All products of Project City’s high-tech factories, equipment designed for robustness and longevity, though many of them were assembled from the components of scavenged older gear. This was Nathan Lammockson’s standard gift to each new raft community, a way to keep in contact with them, and maybe retain some control.

Maria glanced at the crate. “Thanks,” she said flatly.

“I hope we’ll keep in touch, Maria. There is a chopper rota. If there are emergencies, medical needs Project City can help you with—”

“This raft could not have been built without the advice of your engineers, Lily,” Maria conceded.“But let us not lie to each other. AxysCorp encourages drowning communities to build rafts because otherwise we would all become refugees and wash like a tide up the valleys, and then what would happen?”

“Come on, Maria. You know how it is. We’re already beyond the theoretical carrying capacity of the higher ground. We have to find other solutions.”

“I know, I know. But is there not room for one more town, one more family—one more child?”

“We must all make judgments,” Villegas said.

Maria shrugged. “Indeed we must.” Another gust of wind, more raindrops. That golden light faded, clouds raced overhead, and again the raft heaved under their feet, restless.

Juan glanced at Lily.“Perhaps it is wise to get moving before that pilot loses his nerve and lifts without us.”

“Go, go,” Maria said, and turned her back on them.

The raft was surging constantly now, and Juan fell flat on his face when he was tripped by a bit of plastic rope. The Nazcans were rushing, gathering children indoors, strapping down the last bits of loose gear. By the time they reached the chopper the wind was gusting, the rain coming down solidly. The chopper’s blades were already turning, and inside his rain-streaked cockpit the pilot waved at them to hurry.

As soon as Juan had the door closed the pilot gunned his engine and the chopper lifted. The raft’s muscular surging was replaced by a sharper buffeting as the chopper’s blades bit into the turbulent, stormy air.

The bird dipped, turning north, and Lily looked down at the Nazca raft. It was a ramshackle island that rose up amid the rooftops and drowned streets of this sun-bleached old colonial town, its back studded with shacks and wind turbines, every flat roof gleaming with rainwater pails and buckets. At the raft’s center topsoil had been spread out over a bed of stones, a splash of pale brown that would become a seaborne farm. Almost everything of which the raft was constructed predated the flood, Lily reflected, over-manufactured imperishable junk now lashed together to make this new home, rising like a dream above drowning Nazca.

And then the sea surge began, tall waves washing in from the west, and the raft heaved. She saw ropes break, bits of the structure splitting and separating, and people scrambled to make hasty repairs. But the chopper swept north and the raft and the drowning town receded behind her.

The pilot found some smoother air, and his confidence seemed to lift. After a few minutes’ flying he pointed down. “Last chance to see,” he called back.

Lily glanced down. Some twenty-five kilometers from Nazca, flying north away from the storm system, they were passing over a plain that once must have been arid, desolate, but was now awash with gray sea water.

Juan leaned past her to see. “The Nazca lines. They were discovered from the air, you know. Have you seen them?”

“I let Nathan fly me around up here a couple of times.”

This was the pampa, once one of the world’s driest deserts. It had been an immense sketchbook for the ancient folk who had lived here, and their scribbles, made by lifting stones to reveal the lighter earth beneath, had been preserved by the intense aridity. But now, of the strange millennium-old geometric markings trampled in the high dirt, of the monkey and spider and flower and the elaborate birds, there was no sign, all of it erased by salty ocean water.

“Another of mankind’s treasures lost,” Juan said without emotion.

The chopper rose higher still. Looking back to the south and west, Lily could see the storm-lashed Pacific surging against the foothills of the Andes. But to the north and east too she saw ocean, calmer, steel-gray, an extension of the Atlantic that had pushed across the continent and was now lapping against the mountains. Pacific and Atlantic visible in a single glance. And all along the new shorelines, to east and west of the mountains, the rafts clustered, like ghosts of the towns beneath the water.

Juan Villegas leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

62

“I
am confident,” Domingo Prado said. Moving ahead of Gary, with Grace bringing up the rear, he pushed through the green shade of the Panamanian forest. He had his machete in his hand, and his revolver tucked into the band of his pants under the pack on his back.

Domingo was around forty-five, a bit older than Gary. He was a big man but lithe, and he took the downward slope of the ground in long easy strides. Well, Gary thought, after so many years on the road they were all lithe at best, skinny to the point of skeletal at worst. But though it was still morning, only ten a.m., Domingo had already sweated through the back of his shirt and the brim of his battered straw hat, and even through his canvas pack. He sweated as he had when Gary had first met him, hundreds of kilometers to the north and years back in time.

“Tell me why you’re confident,” Grace called ahead.

“Because I know this country. Panama, the canal zone. I used to be a ranger in the Chagres national park, which is on the Colombian side of the canal, east of Alajuela Lake. You will see. Once we get over there I will guide you well. I know it like the back of my hand.”

“Sure,” Gary said. “Like you knew Guatemala and El Salvador and Honduras and Nicaragua—”

“Hey,” Domingo said, and he turned to grin at Gary. His face was so dark in the green-shadowed light his expression was barely visible.“Have I ever let you down?”

“Every fucking day, pal,” Gary said ruefully.

There was some truth in that, and some untruth too. As they had trekked south through the Americas the Okies had quickly learned that they needed guides. You couldn’t rely on the precious old maps the mayor carried in her locked trunk; even the GPS data that came down from an increasingly patchy satellite network wasn’t sufficient, for the world was changing constantly as the sea bit away at the lower land.

And then there was the politics, such as it was. As they had headed south they had soon passed far beyond the remit of the two more-or-less functioning governments in what was left of the US, the rump of the federal government still holed up in Denver and its deadly rival, the Mormon administration in Utah. Law was enforced locally or not at all. In some places you could work in return for land to set up camp in, food and clean water. In other places bandit communities did nothing but prey on passing refugees—although the walking city, still a thousand strong, was generally numerous enough to deter any but the most determined raiders. The world was a constantly changing quilt of opportunities and threats. So you needed local knowledge, somebody who knew the ground.

Domingo Prado had attached himself to Walker City at the Mexican border. There were worse than Domingo. He really did have some travelers’ knowledge of Central America. He made plenty of mistakes, mostly through his habit of bluffing rather than admitting his lack of knowledge. But at least they were honest mistakes, Gary always thought. He never spoke much of his own background, how he had lost whatever home he may once have had, if he had had a family, a wife, kids. There were plenty of people like him in the world, dislocated, survivors of a drowned past. All he wanted in return for his guiding was food, and the chance to travel, a bit of adventure.

Anyhow, stuck in this forest, he had no choice but to trust Domingo, and they pressed on.

Something scurried through the undergrowth, startling Gary—a possum maybe. And a bird flapped overhead, a flash of color, crying. He had no idea what these creatures were. This was the Panama isthmus, a place where two continents had collided only three million years before, and where biotas separated since the breakup of supercontinents had mashed together. The Great American Interchange, they called it. The result, here at the bridge between worlds, was exotic and unfamiliar to Gary. The rainforest was like a cathedral, he thought, the green canopy like stained glass, the filtered light shining on trees slim as Gothic columns. Most of the time he just had to concentrate on where he put his feet. But it was beautiful, all beautiful.

And he heard a subtler rustling, somewhere behind him. Parties of the mayor’s guards, out to shadow them. You never traveled alone.

Then, quite suddenly, they broke out of the jungle. And Gary realized that Domingo might, today, have made the mother of all his mistakes. For they faced open water.

The slope fell away until it reached the water, only ten or twenty meters below their position. You could see how the jungle had been flooded; the green carpet, broken and patchy, cloaked the slope even as it descended into the water, and some surviving trees pushed above the surface. And beyond that the water stretched away before them, gray and calm, until more green-clad hills rose, far to the northeast, kilometers away.

In the open air the sun was intense. They retreated to a scrap of shade, and wiped their brows, loosened their shirts, pulled sweat-soaked cloth away from their flesh.

“Shit,” Domingo said. He squatted down on his haunches, swatting at flies with his hat.

Grace asked, “So what is this?”

“The canal zone,” Domingo said. He gestured. “We are looking northeast, roughly. Yes? Just here the isthmus”—a word he could barely pronounce—“takes a detour. It connects North and South America, but here it curls to the northeast for a couple of hundred kilometers. So you have the Atlantic to our west, over
there
, and the Pacific to the east. This whole area was transformed by the engineering of the canal—which was more than a mere canal. It was a kind of liquid bridge, with locks to lift up the ships on either side. The Gatun Lake was right here, formed by damming on the Atlantic side.”

Gary glanced down the slope. “This isn’t Gatun Lake. Best case it’s some kind of inland flood. Worst case the sea has broken through.”

“Either way we are in trouble,” Domingo said.

“Only one way to find out which,” Grace said. She stood, fixed her ancient baseball cap back on her head, and walked cautiously down the slope toward the water.

The sun was high, and cast dazzling highlights from the water. From Gary’s point of view Grace was silhouetted, the brilliant light around her body making her seem slimmer, even taller than she was. She wore her arms bare, and he could see her muscles, the wiry biceps. She was twenty years old now; a difficult teenager had grown into a strong woman. She could not be called beautiful, Gary always thought, not conventionally anyhow. She looked like an athlete, a worker. But he recognized beauty in her health and strength and poise, a kind of Cro-Magnon beauty fitting to the world she had grown up in—a world where she had been a refugee since she was five years old.

Watching her, Gary felt proud. He could never have saved her from the flood—he and Michael Thurley, poor Michael who had died far from home of the knife wounds that had been inflicted on him in Nebraska. But they had got her through to adulthood confident, competent, healthy, equipped for a dangerous world,
sane
. There were probably a lot worse fates for a young woman growing up in this dislocated age.

She reached the edge of the water. She crouched down, dipped her hand into the lapping water, and lifted a palmful of it to her mouth. She spat it out. “Salt,” she called.

“So that’s it,” Domingo said bitterly. “The most magnificent of all mankind’s engineering creations—gone! Drowned like a sandcastle on the beach.”

“And the isthmus is severed,” Gary said. “North and South America separated for the first time in three million years. Astonishing when you think about it.”

Domingo raised an eyebrow at that. “Our problem is,” he said more practically, “if we are ever to reach your friends in the Andes we must cross the water. But how?”