rewarded faith with wealth and material success, argued that the time to use that God-given wealth was right now, to buy up the high lands and let the less worthy drown. But the US National Association of Evangelicals led calls for the government to take various actions regarding the flood and its effects, just as it had once led calls to act over climate change, actions it claimed were entirely consistent with Christianity.
Gradually an ecumenical campaign by Catholic and Protestant leaders won traction, arguing that selfish actions conflicted with basic Christian teachings of self-denial, humility and charity. They pointed to Christ’s expression of the Golden Rule:“And as you would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise” (Luke 6:31). That was surely a mandate to help those afflicted by the flood, which was disproportionately affecting those of limited means, like the poor inhabitants of shantytowns and river deltas. Leaders of other great religions developed similar arguments.
It seemed to Kristie that the religions were in general doing a great deal to harness ethical and material backing for the vast relief efforts being mobilized around the world, and indeed to temper the thrust of some of those efforts, as some of the super-rich and the consultancies and multinationals continued to try to use flood emergencies as opportunities to extract profits and colonize fresh economic territory.
But the Third Templars had a more specific cause.
They claimed that, according to Revelation and other sources, the building of a Third Temple on the Mount in Jerusalem was a necessary prerequisite to clear the way for the coming of Christ, and put an end to this age of turmoil and disaster. So that was what they set out to do. They were joined in this purpose by a gang of Messianic Zionists.
Unfortunately the erection of the Third Temple required demolishing various Islamic monuments in place on the same site. So the mission had immediately sparked a war that involved all three of the monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The war of Abraham, they called it.
It had quickly widened out to a regional conflict involving other issues, battles over high land and water and desalination technology. The Israeli state had been a pioneer in weapons and security technology since 9/11 and before, and fought back viciously against any threat. And the Palestinians in their walled-off enclaves were making one last attempt to win back the land they believed had been stolen from them. There had been many wars fought over Jerusalem, Bennie learned, all the way back to the ancient Romans and probably beyond. But this, one way or another, was likely to be the last.
All Bennie cared about was getting into the fight. Aged nineteen, his body a mass of muscle and testosterone, he whooped as he jumped out of the plane to make his first parachute descent into the burning city.
45
June 2020
The AxysCorp chopper skimmed over the oily waters of Upper New York Bay, heading northeast toward Manhattan. The pilot banked the bird, and pointed out the Statue of Liberty. “Everybody wants to see the old lady,” he called back.
Lily leaned against Plexiglas. The day was dull, the sky a solid mass of slate cloud from which rain fell steadily, rattling on the bird’s hull. The gray of the sky was reflected in the gray of the sea, gray over gray.
And there was Liberty, tilted over by Hurricane Aaron two years ago but still standing on her submerged pedestal, surrounded by a turbulent sea. Lily didn’t imagine the grand old statue could keep standing much longer; one good storm would probably do the trick. But, according to Thandie Jones, the statue herself would survive indefinitely, submerged and buried in sediment. Even when the green patina on the lady’s copper sheeting thickened and turned to stone, her sculptor’s design would still be visible to whatever strange undersea visitors she might receive.
As the flooded cityscape glided beneath the chopper’s prow, Lily used Liberty as a reference point to get her bearings, trying to see how much had changed since she last flew in here over two years ago for Thandie’s science presentation. There was no sign of the barriers and levees hastily thrown up in those early panicky months; they were covered by the water. There was Brooklyn to her right and Jersey City to her left, the ground now entirely submerged, and only a few tall buildings protruded above the water. Grand-looking vessels lay at anchor around the shallow coasts, some the metallic gray of navy ships, but also yachts, brilliant white, floating like toys in a bathtub. The last refuge of New York’s super-rich, perhaps, lying at anchor above the wrecked city. And Manhattan was a reef, directly ahead of her, the tallest buildings thrusting out of the water like splinters of quartz.
The chopper ducked down into the Financial District, sweeping between the shoulders of battered, burned- out skyscrapers. It was like flying through a virtual-reality version of some great canyon system, simplified rectangular blocks and straight-line cliffs with the water lying in the rectilinear valleys below. The glassless windows of the buildings were dark, but there was activity on the water: powerboats raising wakes that lapped against the stained walls, and heavier, lumbering rafts. The water itself was littered with garbage, plastic scraps and bursting bin liners.
“Heading up Broadway,” the pilot called.“I’ll be setting you down at Union Square, or over it. Broadway and 14th Street. You know it?”
“I think so,” Lily said, dredging up memories of tourist excursions. “Was there a farmers’ market?”
“Yeah. Nice place, if kind of run down. That was how it was, anyhow.”
His voice was crisp in her headset. He had a New York accent but of a cultured sort; evidently he was a native. Lily wondered what he had done for a living before the flood, before he had come to do what everybody seemed to do nowadays, which was work for Nathan Lammockson. She asked, “You’re a New Yorker yourself?”
“I am, ma’am. Grew up in Gramercy, in fact. Nice place to live. My mother, she’s still alive, she’s been moved out to the Catskills. She’s talking about going to stay with her brother in his hunting lodge in West Virginia, up in the Appalachians. That’s pretty high, you know.”
“That sounds like a good plan.”
“Yeah, but AxysCorp says the hills are already full of woodsmen and survivalist types. You know, the kind of guys who loaded their pickups and set off as soon as the first raindrops started to fall. Mr. Lammockson says there have been more casualties in the US inflicted by gunshot wounds at illegal roadblocks than by the weather events themselves.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
And she wasn’t surprised to hear him quote Lammockson. As the global crisis had intensified Nathan Lammockson had taken to broadcasting regular speeches to his worldwide network of employees and business partners, a mix of pep talk, hard news and his peculiarly British homespun-capitalist philosophy. In an increasingly fragmented world it was as if Nathan Lammockson was left standing like the Statue of Liberty herself, alone but still bearing the torch of hope.
“So,” she said, “are you going to join your mother in the hills?”
The pilot snorted. He seemed surprised she’d asked. “No, ma’am. I’ll be staying as close to Mr. Lammockson as I can. Isn’t that what you’re doing?”
46
In the diffuse shadow of the Con Ed building’s clock tower a giant raft drifted over Union Square.
The raft must have been a hundred meters long. Its core was a slab, black as tarmac, bordered by barbed wire and with giant Stars and Stripes dangling limp and wet at its corners. There were shacks on its back, built of ply or plastic or corrugated iron and lashed down by ropes and cables. One of the shacks, a bit grander than the rest, rose to a couple of stories, glass-walled like a lookout tower. People seemed to be working all over the raft, hauling stuff back and forth from tarpaulined heaps of materials. Boats docked with the raft, everything from canoes and rowboats to sleek-looking launches in AxysCorp livery. The raft even had a helipad, marked by a big H splashed
