But I came back on contract, and things weren’t so bad as everybody thought they were going to get with the locals in charge, and eventually I settled again.” He turned. “Tom, go get these folks some water.”
Tom looked doubtfully at the newcomers. But he went back to the boat, his automatic held loosely in one hand, and returned with a clutch of canteens suspended by neck straps which he passed to Gary. Gary shared them out, and gratefully sipped clean-tasting water.
“And you stayed here when the flood came,” Grace said.
“Nowhere else to go. This is home, for me and my family. When the sea started rising over the lower locks, and the canal got screwed up, the Panamanians just abandoned the place. Could have been kept working long after that, but once it was given up, without maintenance, it didn’t take long to fall apart.”
He pointed over his shoulder, to the Darien area. “Big dam up there called Madden, bottled up the river Chagres and created the old Alajuela Lake. When the Madden dam failed it was a real torrent that came down the valley and poured into Gatun.” He gestured at a landscape now drowned. “Gatun flooded its locks, undermining them, and eventually broke its own dam on the Atlantic side. Then river Chagres came curling down through the wreckage, and found its old path back to the sea, on the Pacific side.
“But then the sea rose up further, and covered everything over. Now you’d never know it was ever there. Damn shame. But we always had to work hard to stop the jungle from taking it back. The canal was a wound in the Earth that was always trying to heal, my daddy used to say.”
“And now you make a living off your boat?”
“We fish. Me and my family, my boys.” His eyes narrowed, still suspicious. “There are a whole lot of us, all around this shoreline. Boats and rafts and houses on the coast. We look out for each other.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“So what is it you want? Passage to the other side of the strait?”
“That’s about the size of it, if you can do it. There are a lot of us, however.”
Again that suspicious frown. “How many?”
“A thousand.”
Moore’s mouth gaped. “A thousand. Are you kidding me?”
“There used to be a lot more.”
Walker City had still been tens of thousands strong when they started their long walk south from Lincoln, though many had followed Thandie Jones’s footsteps to Denver, and others had gone to try to find refuge in Utah. As they had walked south, more had split off when they had found somewhere permanent to stay, often following spur roads off the route of the Pan-American Highway. On the other hand others had joined the marching community, people displaced or simply unhappy, seeking a kind of order among this exodus of Okies.
Many had been born, many had died. Slowly, over the years, the numbers had dwindled. But there were still a thousand of them, a mobile township still run out of the mayor’s office with its guards and doctors and daily rotas, all following Gary’s vision of Project City, an enclave at the roof of the world where there would be room for them all.
Moore said,“Can’t be easy lodging all those people in the damn rainforest. Well, a thousand’s more than can fit in my little boat.”
“You can manage,” Domingo said.“Fifty, even a hundred at a time. It isn’t so far. You can run a ferry service.”
Moore’s suspicion was replaced by calculation. “Well, hell, I suppose I could. But why would I want to?”
Gary kept his voice pleasant, his expression relaxed.“We don’t expect charity. We’ll pay.”
“What with? Diet Coke?” Moore laughed.
“Yes,” said Gary frankly.“We have other goods. Otherwise we’ll work. There are a thousand of us; we have skills, tools.” He looked around.“We could transform this place for you. Make it future-proof. You need to think about what’s to come. I used to be a climatologist, I know what I’m talking about. We can give you a better chance of surviving the sea-level rise.” He glanced uphill. “Such as by building wharves further up, a hundred meters, two. Ready for when the sea reaches that altitude.”
Moore seemed uncertain, and that was a look Gary was familiar with; even now people didn’t wish to believe in the flooding.“You think that’s going to happen, it’s going to get that far?”
“Oh, yes. And you need to plan for it, right? Let us help you.”
Moore eyed him, calculating again. He stepped closer, so his son couldn’t hear. “Tell you what I got a need for. Women. Wives for my boys. You understand?” He cast a sideways glance at Grace. “A couple of my boys are too young yet, but maybe you got some little girls you can leave here to ripen, so to speak. Take ’em off your hands. Or failing that”-he tilted his hand back and forth-“a little action. We are kind of isolated up here. You see what I’m saying?”
Gary said evenly, “We don’t run brothels. And we don’t sell people.”
“Seems to me I got the boat you need.”
“And it seems to me,” Domingo said, smiling broadly, “that we are a thousand strong, and you are a handful. You could kill the three of us, you could kill ten times our number, and you would still lose your lives. And your boat.”
Moore stepped back. “So is that the game? You said you were no threat.”
“So we lied,” Domingo said.
Gary said firmly,“We’re not bandits. We want to trade or work, Sam. We think of ourselves as Okies.”
“Had a great-great-uncle was an Okie in the Depression.”
“Yes. It’s not dishonorable. But the bottom line is-”
“We have no choice but to go on,” Grace said unexpectedly. “We have to cross this strait.”
Moore looked at her. “And that means I have to do business with you.”
“You’ll get a good deal,” Gary said. “But, yes, you have to do business with us.”
“Sorry, man,” said Domingo. “Hey, it could be worse.”
Moore seemed to accept the reality. “All right. Come back here tomorrow, talk terms and work out some kind of schedule. There’s more you need to know, as well.”
“Like what?”
Moore gestured at Darien. “Tough country there. Always was. Now you got indigenous types, and paramilitaries, and a bunch of Marxists from that Commie group that mounted the coup in Colombia. You don’t want to be caught in the crossfire.”
“I hear what you say. Any help you can give us we’ll pay for.”
“Fine. Tomorrow.” Moore and his boy turned and went back to their rowboat.
Gary blew out his cheeks. “I hate this horse-trading, Domingo.”
“You’re good at it, man. Hey, nobody got shot today. That’s a result!”
Gary looked down at the strait, the single boat moored to its drowned tree. “No more Panama. You know, some geologists used to say that the formation of the isthmus was the single most important geological event since the end of the dinosaurs. It changed the pattern of ocean currents, globally. Instead of the old equatorial flows, water exchanging between Atlantic and Pacific, now you had great interpolar streams. Ice caps formed, and the Ice Ages began. Without the cooler climate forcing us out of the trees and onto the savannah, no humanity, probably. All because of a sliver of land. But now it’s drowned again, and everything’s going to change.”
But Grace looked at him blankly.
And Domingo couldn’t care less about global ocean currents. He grumbled, “I hope they take the girls and leave the Diet Cokes. I myself like Diet Coke, and don’t want it all given away! Is it a sin to wish for that?”
They climbed back toward the line of trees, and the relative cool of the forest.
64
Later on the day of Lily’s last visit to the Nazca raft, Nathan Lammockson held what he called an “equator- crossing party” at Chosica, in a lounge of his still-unfinished ship. Lily was drained after the jaunt to Nazca. But it wasn’t the sort of event you could get out of, if you were as close to Nathan as she was.
Nathan played host beneath a huge animated wall-map of the world, which showed the rising sea and the
