And we’ll go see Kristie together, yes?”
“Whatever.” Amanda sipped her drink and waved her hand, making the voices of the soap opera characters swell and boom so they filled the empty room.
56
With a bit of arm-twisting by Piers, Lily got a seat on a supply chopper flying out to Lima.
The coast was draped in the low, clinging fog the inhabitants of Lima had once called the garua, so the chopper descended into a white-out. And then the complicated, boxy superstructure of an oil rig came looming out of the fog. Lammockson had established this old rig over the heart of the drowned city as a base for his continuing salvage operations.
The chopper landed on the rig’s upper deck, and Lily scrambled down.
She found she could walk to the edge of the platform, which was fenced off by a rail and sheets of Plexiglas. The sea, gray and rolling, stretched off to a horizon blanked out by the garua. She might have been in the middle of the ocean. In fact she was standing directly over the heart of a megacity, of which there was no sign at all.
An AxysCorp flunky came running to meet her, an earnest young man prompted with instructions from Piers. Sanjay was on the rig, but was supervising a deep-dive submersible descent into Lima, and she had some time to spare, maybe an hour. The flunky tried to persuade her to go down below where it was safe, to have some food, a beer even, watch some TV. She refused. She needed the air. She was given a thick coat to pull on over her coverall, and a cup of coffee, and she got away from Piers’s nanny and went walking around the rig platform.
She passed among outcroppings of machinery, like open-air sculptures, attended by engineers in hard hats and coveralls. She recognized some of the operations going on here. Most of the salvaging operations were run remotely, with cranes lowering robot machinery with manipulator arms and cutting gear down among the drowned buildings. Even after years of systematic plunder, Lima, like all the world’s lost cities, was still a tremendous lode.
But Lammockson always thought ahead, and more advanced technologies were being trialed on the rig. His surveyors told him there was gold, zinc, copper, silver and lead to be found under the ocean floor, raw materials for the long-term survival of civilization. The scientists even knew where to look, around big volcanic deposits called “sea floor massive sulphides” built up by hydrothermal vents, places where water circulated through deep cracks in the sea-floor rock, dissolving metals as it moved through the rock and precipitating them out in conical black chimneys. So Lammockson was creating an ocean-floor mining capability. He had other teams of experts working on locating undersea oil deposits. Sea mining had been frowned on in the past because of the damage the noise, sediment plumes and turbulence might do to fragile seafloor ecologies. Nobody cared about that anymore-or at least nobody was in a position to police it.
Lily was watching a fresh robot salvage machine being lowered over the side when Sanjay came up to her. “Lily! What’s a landlubber like you doing on a rust bucket like this?”
As usual when she met a face from her past, Lily felt overwhelmed by a spasm of emotion, a peculiar kind of longing. She grabbed Sanjay and hugged him. “It’s good to see you.”
He submitted gracefully enough, and hugged her back. Sanjay, short, compact, dressed in a standard-issue AxysCorp coverall, didn’t show his forty-five years save for the gray in his beard. He said, “You want to go down into the rig? There are lounges, bars. Get you out of this breeze if you feel like it.”
“Would you like that?”
“Well, I’ve been in that control room for hours, sniffing up cigarette smoke and stale beer and coca-plant halitosis. I’d rather stay out in the fresh air if you can stand it.”
“Then let’s walk.”
They continued Lily’s slow perambulation of the deck. Sanjay asked about Amanda, and he spoke of his children and their mothers in the Scottish archipelago, where an extraordinary new amphibious society was emerging among the clans.
Sanjay said the DSV dive just completed had gone well enough. “Though these days I rarely have to make them myself, thank Ganesh for that. Look, you can see the boat.” He pointed to an ungainly craft that dangled from a crane, dripping; it looked oddly like a conventional submarine cut in half, with manipulator arms, cameras and windows cluttering the cut-through cross-section.“That’s a COMRA. Developed by the China Ocean Mineral Resources R amp;D Association.”
“A Chinese design?”
“Purchased by Lammockson for AxysCorp for a huge price-along with luxury villas in Project City for its crew and engineers. One of the most modern designs from the preflood days. The dive into Lima went well. We went down to the cultural center around the Plaza Mayor, and the shops at Miraflores. San Isidro, the business district, is pretty accessible. And we got some good science data. Actually the dive was paid for by a Quechua community, up in the Andes somewhere. They had salvage targets of their own.”
That pricked her curiosity, and she wondered if it had something to do with Ollantay, but she wasn’t much interested in the mining of Lima.
He said now, “I heard from Gary Boyle.”
“Via Thandie Jones, I guess? I haven’t heard from him for years.”
“Well, he isn’t in a place it’s easy to send postcards from.”
“Where is he?”
“That’s just it. Nowhere…” He told her how Gary was now part of an itinerant community, thousands of people wandering through the crowded western states. “They’ve been on the road for years, Lily. After they were forced out of their camp at Amarillo, they have failed to find anywhere permanent to stay.” Sanjay shrugged. “It’s happening all over, from what I hear. Tremendous populations on the move, washing back and forth in search of room to live.”
“Gary still has Grace with him?”
“Oh, yes, according to Thandie. Michael Thurley too.”
“Grace must be sixteen now.”
“Yes. And a stroppy teenager, according to Thandie.”
“That’s healthy,” Lily said firmly.“I wish there was something I could do for them.”
“There’s still a bond between you all, you survivors of Barcelona, isn’t there? Gary’s OK. He’s probably wishing he could find a way to help you.”
They agreed to talk this over more later. And Lily told him she was going to visit Lammockson’s Ark Three to meet Kristie. She offered Sanjay a ride.
“I’d like that. Ark Three? I wonder what Nathan is up to now.”
“You’ll see what there is to see. Not that he tells us anything.”
He glanced at her. “You seem uncomfortable about it.”
She thought it over.“I keep away from Nathan’s more baroque efforts. There’s something unbalanced about his super-tech projects. Obsessive, you know? Here he is trying to master the world through technology. While all around us…” She gestured at the gray ocean that rolled over the drowned remains of Lima.
“I understand,” Sanjay said, thoughtful. “But maybe at such times as these we need big thinkers like Nathan Lammockson. Because for sure we need big solutions.” He grinned. “The insane as a last-resort evolutionary resource. But don’t tell Nathan I said that. I’d better go sign out with the COMRA crew. I’ll meet you at the helipad.”
“Sure.” But as he turned away she called,“Incidentally, you said a Quechua group put some funding into the dive. What were they after?”
“They guided a robot into the cathedral.” He grinned.“They brought up a coffin. Pizarro’s bones!”
57
