Tomorrow’s World (16 page)

The center of the old city was spread out below us. The streets were flooded, and the upper levels of shopping centers and office blocks rose from the muddy water like man-made islands. Where once cars, buses and lorries had queued nose-to-tail, the traffic now comprised a few citizens paddling along in rowboats and inflatable dinghies on treasure-hunting or sightseeing trips.

A couple of miles away, on the other side of the river, lay Newport. It was built in the 1800s along the sloping south bank of the river. Its main road ran parallel to the water. All the houses below the road had gradually been swamped by the rising river. The houses on the hillside above the road had escaped the inundation, and from this distance they looked untouched. You couldn't see the storm damage, the missing slates and crumbling chimneys, the broken windows and rotting doors. If you shut out the dereliction on either side of you, and the flooded city center directly ahead, you could almost believe there were people living in those grand villas across the water.

While the upper village looked much as it had in photos I'd seen taken from this vantage point sixty years earlier, the land around them was very different. To the left, where the river flowed into the North Sea, the dunes and coastal pine forest of Tentsmuir had vanished without a trace, and all that remained of the village of Tayport was the top of a church spire and a lighthouse. The rolling fields of winter barley and golden wheat and the lush pastures and copses that once separated Tayport from Newport were also gone. What remained above water was nothing like the green and pleasant land I'd seen in photos of the mid 20th century. The lower reaches were salt-poisoned from the sea, and the slopes above them were covered in heather and scrubby gorse and thorn. As for the trees, most had long since been cut down for firewood by the last of the Outsiders, or toppled by the hurricane-force winds of the superstorms. All that remained were jagged stumps giving a godforsaken look to the horizon.

“It must've been so different from the community,” Paula said, looking at what was left of Newport. I didn't know if she was thinking aloud rather than talking to me, but I responded anyway, saying, “You'll have a better idea of just how different once we get there.”

While Paula kept staring across the river I turned my attention to the scene closer at hand, searching for a boat or dinghy. You find them tethered to lamp-posts and the top of bus stops and traffic lights all along the water's edge. I waded out to the nearest one, getting soaked to my knees and trying not to think about how dirty the water was. Paula was still staring across the river by the time I undid the rope and hauled the dinghy up the street to where she stood. I held the boat steady while she got in, then joined her and paddled us across to the road bridge.

The south bank of the River Tay had been joined to the north by a late 19
^th
century rail bridge and a 1960s road bridge. The rail bridge came crashing down during a superstorm in 2022 but the road bridge remained, albeit minus lamp-posts and with the look of a causeway because the river had risen so high. The access road was flooded halfway up, so when the bottom of the boat scraped against its asphalt we weren't too far short of the bridge proper.

Paula got out and watched as I tethered the boat to the railings at the side of the road.

“Won't someone take it?” she asked.

“They won't have got this far unless they have a boat of their own.”

She looked annoyed at herself for not having thought of that. “What about someone coming from the other side?” she said in an effort to redeem herself.

“Anyone on the other side will have come from this side.”

She looked really annoyed with herself now. The logic that would let her answer those questions was usually intuitive; the fact she'd asked them told me how shaken she'd been by her first sight of the old city.

Again, something made me resist the temptation to mock her, and I tried to ease her embarrassment by saying, “To be on the safe side, I'll hide the paddle somewhere. It's a good habit to get into—never leave the paddle in a boat you want to come back to. Even if you're a good swimmer, you don't want to be spending too much time in this sort of water.”

Realizing I'd stated the obvious, I waited for Paula to put me down. She started to say something but stopped herself, just as I'd stopped myself from mocking her. Some sort of understanding passed between us, unlike anything that had happened before. It was the kind of moment marked in old Meg Ryan rom-coms by simultaneous smiles, followed by an embarrassed silence, and then both people speaking at once and each stopping to let the other continue before breaking up into laughter. But this wasn't a movie, and we weren't Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. We were a Name and a Number. So there was no smiling or laughter, just the awkward silence. It was broken by Paula being practical: “We better get a move on. I'm starting to taste my filtermask.”

I could taste mine, too—a bitterness on my tongue. Before long there would be an acrid burning at the back of my throat. It would make me cough, and the mask would fall off. The membrane is designed to dry up when it's impregnated by toxins to the point that wearing it does more harm than good. When this happens you either have to slap on a new one or, better still, get back to your haven. They're not called havens for nothing.

There was something haunted and haunting about the bridge's empty tollbooths and, despite the stifling heat, I shivered when I stepped into the nearest one to hide the paddle.

We walked the first half of the bridge in silence. It took about fifteen minutes. I spent most of them thinking about the brief moment of understanding I'd shared with Paula, and the rest of them wondering if Paula was thinking about it, too. It might have been my imagination, but I thought the silence was awkward in the way it is when two people are thinking of a way to break it, as opposed to when they don't like each other.

And now we did have one of those moments when two people speak together. I started to ask if her filtermask was okay, just as she said, “Every footstep—”

We stopped and laughed, and for once we were laughing with each other, not at each other.

When we'd finished laughing I said, “What were you about to say?”

“Just that every footstep makes me feel like I'm stepping into the past.”

“You sound excited.”

“You sound surprised.”

With my usual tact and habit of speaking before thinking, I said, “I didn't think you were interested in the past.”

I could have bitten my tongue off as soon as the words were out, because I realized they'd destroyed whatever had been building between us. Sure enough, there was a familiar coldness in her expression and voice when she H said, “Do you mean ‘you' as in ‘me' or as in ‘us'?”

I had to think twice about that because of the phrasing—logical, but inelegant—and suddenly it was like we were speaking different languages and back to being as far apart as two people can be.

I tried to change the subject, saying, “We're more than halfway, now.”

She gave me the sort of withering look she'd refrained from after my last statement of the obvious, and the silence that followed
was
the awkward kind you get when two people are angry at each other. Or when one is angry at the other, and the other is angry with himself.

Before long Paula began clicking the fingers of her right hand. It's one of the things Numbers do when they get bored and fidgety. They need to focus on something and, because they're not good at dreaming or imagining or wondering, they focus on clicking their fingers with perfect regularity. It's also something they do when they want to annoy Names. I don't know why it bothers us, but it does.

So I started whistling. I'm not sure why it annoys Numbers, but it does. Come to think of it, it annoys me. Especially when it's coming through a filtermask, because the thin membrane gives a hissing sibilance.

Paula stiffened at my whistling, and I got the feeling she'd been clicking her fingers out of boredom rather than a desire to annoy me. Whatever her motivation before, now she definitely did want to annoy me. I knew that because she began clicking the fingers of her other hand as well. Loudly.

I responded in typically mature fashion, accompanying my whistling with some percussion, courtesy of the palms of my hands and the railings of the bridge.

Paula turned and glowered at me.

I smiled sweetly and said, “I do requests.”

“Here's one: go jump off the bridge.”

“Whoever said Numbers don't have a sense of humor?”

“I wasn't joking.”

“Has anyone ever told you how pretty you are when you're mad?”

I'd intended to be sarcastic, but once the words were spoken I realized I meant them.

I think Paula did, too, because her fingers froze in mid-click, and another one of those slightly bewildered, wholly bewildering looks passed between us.

There was a bit of all the earlier kinds of awkward silences in the one that followed, all jumbled together in a mix that made it more confusing than ever.

Luckily we were nearly at the end of the bridge. It made landfall halfway up the hillside, so there was no need for a boat. Once we stepped off, turned right and made our way down a flight of steps we were on the main street of the village. To our right the water lapped over the top of cottages once idyllically situated at the river's edge. On our left, derelict villas rose three or four deep up the hillside, their gardens choked with gorse, thornbush and cacti.

Each breath started burning my throat. I coughed, and raised a hand just in time to catch the filtermask as it fell off. After pocketing the darkened, desiccated membrane to hand in for recycling, I put on a new one. Paula did likewise, then we set off along the street. Once my fresh filtermask softened enough to let me talk, I said, “The library's only a couple of hundred meters along the road.”

Paula didn't give any indication she'd heard.

“Sulky bitch,” I mumbled.

She turned to me in disbelief and said, “What was that?”

“I said, the library's only a couple of hundred meters along the road.”

She gave me a look that almost had me reaching for my knockdown to protect myself.

I gave her another of my innocent, winning, boyish smiles. Well, it wasn't innocent or boyish, so I suppose it wasn't winning either. Which explained why Paula's look got more withering.

Since the smile didn't work, I tried something else. “Pick a house,” I said.

“What?”

“We've time for a quick look around a house, as well as the library. So, pick a house.”

I expected her to argue and be all focused and businesslike, so it was a surprise when she said, “Okay.” She looked past me and her gaze settled on a house about a hundred meters away. “That one,” she said. And then she surprised me again, this time by saying, “It's straight out of a Jane Austen story.”

I must have looked at Paula for longer than I realized, because she turned from the house to me and said, “What?” the way you do when you're suddenly aware someone's studying you.

“Nothing,” I said, and headed toward the villa, doubting if anything in it could surprise me more than Paula had.

“I
T'S ENORMOUS
,” P
AULA SAID AS SHE LOOKED AROUND
the living room of the old villa. “How could people be so wasteful of space?”

“Look at the beautiful cornicing,” I said, admiring the intricately carved moldings around the join between walls and ceiling. I shot a quick glance at Paula to see what she made of it. She was grimacing. “Don't you like it?” I asked.

“I can't look at it without thinking how unnecessary it is.” She looked around the room, pulling another face as she took in the fireplace with its rosebud-pattern tiles, and the line-up of porcelain figurines on the mantelpiece. “I find all the clutter so distracting and unsettling,” she told me. “It really jars on my nerves.”

“Can't you appreciate the craftsmanship? Can't you appreciate these things for their beauty?”

“Beauty comes from functionality and simplicity, Travis,” she said. It was like she was giving me a lecture, and talking about an absolute rather than something in the eye of the beholder.

As we moved through the house I spent more time studying Paula than my surroundings. I had the feeling she was looking around with detached, scientific curiosity. The notion was confirmed when we got to the kitchen. Whereas she'd barely given the beautiful ornaments and paintings of the living room a second glance, she picked up every culinary gadget she came across, no doubt more interested in determining what they'd been used for than thinking about the people who'd once used them.

After working her way through the gadgets, Paula headed for the next room. She hesitated in the doorway, and I peered past her to find out what she was looking at. All I saw was a room with a big table and half a dozen bow-legged chairs.

Then I realized what had drawn my partner up: the heavily patterned wallpaper.

“You can't imagine living here, then?” I said. I'd meant it as in, ‘It's not the sort of place you'd like to live in?'

But there was such an air of bewilderment about Paula when she sighed and shook her head I had the impression she'd taken my question literally. Her next words, and the sadness in her voice, confirmed it: “I can't hear any of those voices you talked about, Travis. I can't even hear the echo of old footsteps. I can't relate to the people who once lived here. It's not only that they're total strangers… It's not just like I've stepped back in time… It's like I'm on another planet.”

Listening to her, watching her, I wanted to put my arm around her.