rarely with Ana, who preferred to stay with her own family. Lily gave Gary fresh water, and dried fish spiced with some of the precious pepper she had been able to buy from a big floating farm in the mid-Pacific.“You should see those farms, Gary. Hanging gardens and water fountains, wind turbines and solar cells, out in the middle of the ocean. They have chickens in coops bolted to the walls, and vegetables growing in old truck tires. Even Nathan would be impressed.”
Gary, listening politely, was fifty-six. There were vestiges of the boy she had known in the old days, Lily thought. He had always kept fit, as a field scientist always outdoors, always on the move, and then as a refugee for so many years. Nothing much had changed about his life in that regard. He was well-dressed, comparatively. Where Lily wore the remnants of her AxysCorp overalls, repeatedly washed and mended, Gary was dressed in a shirt and slacks that looked barely faded, freshly plundered from some drowned American town. But his hair was drastically thinned and peppered with gray, and there was a kind of sad tiredness about his eyes. And there was a crease on his temple, the scar of a gunshot; he didn’t talk about that.
Gary had spent decades in the Andes communities, where Walker City had finally ended its long trek. In the end, though, as the situation started to crumble there, he decided he wanted to end things at home, in whatever was left of the continental US, and after an oceanic odyssey of his own he had finished up in Colorado.
And now he was here. He leaned forward and took her hands. “God, it’s good to see you, Lily, to hear you talk. It’s good of you to come all this way, to have crossed the world.”
So she had. The rafts were navigable, just, if you used rudders and caught the wind in your sails. After Nathan’s death Lily had inherited his goods, including his precious radios. She’d used them to track down Gary when he moved back to North America. And when he had told her what a significant year was coming up she had felt compelled to come and seek him out. The others indulged her. They didn’t much care where they were, it seemed to her, as long as the fishing was good.
He said,“You’re living a life a lot more alien than anything I’ve gone through yet. What do you do all day?”
“We fish,” Lily said. “We catch water. We tend to the rafts. We trade a bit. Mostly we swim and screw.”
That made him laugh.
She said, “For me more of the former, none of the latter. They’re having kids, you know, younger and younger. Manco and Ana, for instance, were only fifteen when little Boris came along. The mothers give birth in the water. Even Manco and Ana aren’t much like you and me. And the new generation, the Borises, will have no contact with us. Nothing in common, no shared memories. That’s my fear, anyhow. I tell them a lot of stories. Where they came from.”
They spoke of other friends, of Thandie and Elena and the rest of the scattered community of scientists, still holding hearth-gatherings over their surviving radios, still trying to witness the vast transformation that was overcoming the world. They spoke of Nathan, who had died bereft of his son, and of their fellow hostages, of Piers and Helen and even of John Foreshaw, who had died in Barcelona and had known nothing of the flood.
And of Grace. Gary knew even less about Ark One than Lily did. Lily had long accepted she was never going to know what had become of Helen’s daughter.
They spoke of the year coming up. “It is one for disaster connoisseurs,” Gary said. “In the next twelve months or so we’ll lose continents by the hatful. In January, Europe will finally go when Mount Elbrus in Russia is covered. In May it’s Africa’s turn, when Kilimanjaro drowns. By then the continental US will have gone too, save for a couple of mountains in Alaska. In the year after that South America, even the Andes, and there will be nothing left in the western hemisphere at all…”
She didn’t like to admit that she wasn’t sure when January was, what month it was now. You lost track out on the sea. “I wonder how we’ll mark time when the land is gone. Maybe by the great events that we experience. I’ve heard Manco and Ana talking about ‘the year of the big wave.’”
He leaned forward, interested. “What big wave?”
She described it, an immense pulse in the water that must have been a hundred meters high, spanning the ocean from horizon to horizon. It was disconcerting, terrifying. But the rafts had been in deep water at the time, and the wave hadn’t broken over them. The rafts just rode up, and were lowered smoothly down the other side.
Gary nodded. “That sounds like a planetary wave. The theory of ocean worlds anticipates such things. A wavelength on a global scale, a slosh that circles the world’s unbroken seas over and over.”
“Nothing to stop it.”
“Right. Maybe it was started off by an underwater quake, or a landslide. The weight of the water settling on the land is still causing geological kickbacks. We see it in the seismic readings, but we can’t usually tell what’s going on. No way to get down there to see anymore, of course.”
“ ‘Ocean worlds.’ ”
“Yeah. We even saw some in the sky, back in the day when we had planet-finder telescopes. When you think about it a world like Earth ought to be rare, a mix of oceans and rocky landscapes. Worlds that are all rock, like Venus or Mercury, or all water-like Titan, the ice moons, frozen oceans hundreds of kilometers deep over a rocky core-have to be a lot more common. Anyhow we’re now seeing ocean-world features emerge here on Earth, like the planetary waves, and the perpetual hypercane-strength storms like the Spot, and a simpler global ocean circulation system.”
“So what about life?”
He smiled. “Yes, what about it? Listen, I have my own theory about where we’re heading. Don’t quote me. Thandie would kill me if she could hear me.”
“Jeez, I’m not reviewing an academic paper, just tell me.”
“Actually there are precedents. In the days of Pangaea a couple of hundred million years ago, when all the continents were joined into one, you had a semi-global ocean that was an approximation of what we’re facing now. Look, the flood has made a real mess of the biological cycling of carbon…”
Carbon was drawn down from the air into the vegetable matter of plants on land and in the sea by photosynthesis, and then released back into the air through the respiration of living things, and the decay of the dead.
“Before the flood this carbon cycle was dominated by terrestrial life, the green things on land, and we’ve lost that whole major land-based mechanism. And we pretty much lost a second mechanism too, which is the weathering of surface rock-the cee-oh-two is rained out dissolved in water, the acid rain etches the rocks, blah blah. That was only a thousandth the biological component, but on a longer timescale it’s effective-or was.
“What’s worse is that even in the seas the drawdown mechanisms are failing. The rising temperatures are reducing the efficiency of the phytoplankton. The increasing acidity of the oceans isn’t helping either-carbon dioxide plus water makes carbonic acid. Also you don’t get the cold polar currents descending under the warm low-latitude waters, taking oxygen and nutrients to lower layers. That’s why you get algal blooms following storm systems; you get some mixing-up, temporary, localized.”
“We know about that,” Lily said. “We feed off it.”
“We’ve lost all these drawdown mechanisms just at a time when we’ve had a massive one-off injection of carbon dioxide into the air from the fires, and the rotting of the vegetation cover of the drowned land. It’s as if we made a bonfire of everything green on the planet.
“So things have to change. The Earth is a system of flows of matter and energy, of feedback.”
Lily whispered, “Gaia.”
“That’s the idea. The biggest pressure on her has always been a slow heating-up of the sun-the energy the sun pours onto the Earth is up by about a third since life formed. Now, Gaia’s systems adjust, unconsciously, to maintain an even temperature at the surface, a temperature at which life can survive, despite this heating up. In the early days methane was injected into the air, another greenhouse gas, to keep the temperatures up. Some time around two billion years ago the sun’s output was optimal for life on Earth. Since then it’s been getting too hot, Gaia needs to keep cool, and the main way she does this is by drawing down cee-oh-two from the air, and storing it in the rocks, fossil stores like oil, coal.”
Lily nodded. “The less greenhouse gas there is, the less heat is trapped.”
“That’s it. But that mechanism is nearing the limit of its capability. The atmosphere’s cee-oh-two tank is, was, pretty much empty. Gaia was already old, even before the flood, and the hot sun is pushing too hard.
“Some of us think that the glaciation, the Ice Ages, was a kind of experiment with a new stable state. The
