But she caught Lily looking at the handheld, and her old pink backpack that she had brought from London and had later risked her neck to retrieve from under the nose of Wayne in Dartmoor.
The backpack and its contents meant a lot to Kristie in a way she wasn’t comfortable thinking about. Her little bag of souvenirs was a last link to her own deepest past. And she had brought it with her into Cusco, on that fateful August day. Why would she have done that if she hadn’t already sensed, on some deep level, that that day would mean another break with the past? She suspected Lily was mulling over the same ideas.
Kristie wept again that Christmas night, as she hadn’t since August. Wept for Manco and for the loss of Ollantay, wept for the arrogance and foolishness that had killed him, as she had always known it would. And she wept for London, for how far she had come, and how she could never go back.
76
March 2036
Lily came out to the promenade deck’s walkway. It was seven thirty a.m. The day was overcast, gray, drizzly, but not cold, and the Ark heaved slightly on a steel-gray sea. They were underway; she could feel the screws’ turning in a faint vibration of the deck.
Piers emerged to meet her. He wore a lightweight coverall, the sleeves rolled down. He handed Lily a John Deere baseball cap, once deep blue, now faded to a kind of gray.
She took it reluctantly. “Must I? I never liked hats, my head’s the wrong shape.”
“Precipitation over a millimeter per hour.”
“Piers, we’re under cover, for God’s sake. I can see the rain, but there’s not a breath of wind. We’re dry as bones under here.”
“Ship’s rules. Acid rain. You know the score. Better a hat on your head than a burned scalp. You’re a sourpuss today,” he said with good humor.
She grunted. “It’s just such a lousy day. The whole world is gray. Well, come on, let’s get it over with.” She put the hat on her head.
They took their places side by side. Piers set his watch and off they went, heading anticlockwise on their usual circuit around the hull, their pace not too fast, their running shoes padding over the polished wood of the deck. Naturally it was always Piers who ran the watch, who paced them, who kept control; Lily had long since given up arguing about that.
They passed a couple of walkers, people Lily knew vaguely-after seven months at sea she “vaguely” knew all of the few thousand people in this floating village. Lily and Piers broke their run as they passed the walkers, who nodded and smiled. This was friction-reducing behavior Nathan always encouraged, an excess of politeness that reminded Lily of Japan, another intensely crowded environment.
When they reached the stern Lily saw the ship’s long wake streaming behind, a highway cut across the ocean.
They turned around the stern and headed back up the ship’s starboard side, past the gangways that led to the OTEC energy plant. This was a raft in the water towed alongside the sleek flank of the ship. The OTEC was Lily’s area of work; she had senior responsibility there. Nothing was on fire or sinking, and she was content it could survive another hour without her.
She asked Piers, “Any idea where we are?” She had long lost interest in the details of the Ark’s wanderings.
“The North Sea. We’re steaming south toward the Dutch coast. Then we’re going into Europe. Heading down the Rhine valley, toward Switzerland. There might be some scenery for a change.” He glanced at her. “You’re not the only one who’s a little stir crazy.”
As if to prove the point they passed their starting line. The circuit around the deck was less than half a kilometer, and even at their modest pace they finished it in just a few minutes. Off they went again, completing their minuscule laps.
Piers was panting hard. “Finding this tough today.”
“Maybe it’s the carbon dioxide.”
The unending rise in cee-oh-two levels in the atmosphere was one undeniable consequence of the flood, though there was no climatologist aboard to explain the link. Aside from the warming pulse it caused, acid rain burned the leaves of the plants in the ship’s gardens and little farm, etched away at the solar cell panels, and, sometimes, stung unprotected human flesh.
“The young don’t seem to be bothered by it,” Piers said. “But then the young never are.”
“No. You ever wonder why we do this, you and I, Piers? Running around this stupid track, day after day? We’re such creatures of habit. Christ, we even run the same way, anticlockwise every time.”
Piers sighed. “You’re not going to get deep, are you?”
“Well, you have to face it, Piers. We spent five years in cellars. Now we’re in confinement again, and here we are, running around the walls. As if we’re testing the boundaries of our cage.”
“Or maybe we’re just trying to keep fit.”
“Kristie says we should have had more therapy when we came back from Barcelona.”
Piers snorted.“I seem to remember London was flooding at the time. It was hardly an opportune moment for long sessions on the couch, was it?”
“Maybe not, but-”
“It’s not us who have the flaws, Lily. It’s not us who are psychotic, however long we spent chained to radiators. It’s the world. The world is psychotic. I mean, is this how you imagined spending your old age? And besides, frankly, Lily, you’re one of the sanest people I know on this ship. If you’re going crazy, we’re all doomed.”
“Maybe so.” But it didn’t always feel as if she was so sane, not when she lay awake in her bunk in the small hours, alone in her head, listening to the deep groans of the ship’s hull as she forged endlessly over the deepening world ocean.
Looking back after seven months of the voyage, the first few days and weeks had been extraordinary.
The intense social life of upper-crust Project City had transplanted itself to the Ark, brittle, gossipy, somehow desperate, as if this was simply some exotic cruise. Four-course dinners had been served in the great restaurant every night, and Nathan’s pet refugee string quartet played in the verandah bar. Amanda would have been in her element in those early days, Lily thought sadly.
But that veneer of cruise-liner luxury hadn’t lasted. Lily had been able to keep her suite, but it was an awfully long time since anybody had come to fill up her mini-bar. In fact she now used it to keep her socks in. The always artificial barrier between “passengers” and “crew” had broken down in a farcical scene when Nathan had tried to discipline one of the kitchen staff for getting a passenger pregnant. They were all crew now, all of them had a job to do.
And as the relationship of the crew with each other had sorted itself out, so the internal functions of the ship had been reorganized. Nathan had ordered that a few areas be kept aside for recreation and exercise, like the promenade deck track, but others had been given over to vital functions like desalination.
One of the swimming pools was now being used as a mineral extraction area. Electrical currents were passed through sea water to make the minerals dissolved in it accrete out on metal mesh. The water was full of calcium carbonate, the relics of the shells of tiny sea creatures, which could be used to make a kind of concrete. And there was magnesium too, present at a concentration of a kilogram or so per ton of sea water. Nathan’s plan was to use these materials to maintain the fabric of the ship itself. Lily thought it was miraculous to see these substances appear out of nothing; she had had no idea that sea water itself was so rich.
Her own OTEC plant was an experiment in extracting another resource from the water: energy. “OTEC” stood for Ocean Thermal Energy Converter. There was a temperature difference of a few tens of degrees between the warm surface of the sea and the deeps where the temperature was only ever a few degrees above freezing; just as it was always dark down there, so it was cold. The idea of OTEC was to extract usable energy from this temperature difference. The floating raft topped a stalk that plunged more than a kilometer deep into the ocean. The warm surface water was cooled a little, the cold deep water warmed a little, and the flow of heat between
