them could be tapped. The temperature difference was greatest in the warmth of the tropics, which was where Nathan hoped to sail his Ark for most of the year.
There was a side effect, however, in mixing up the nutrient-rich deeper waters with the surface. Around the OTEC algae bloomed in a frenzy of feeding and breeding. These algae were harvested, especially a variety called spirulina, optimal crop plants with almost their whole substance being edible, nothing wasted on such fripperies as leaves or trunks or stalks. But the algal protein needed some heavy preparation before it became palatable for humans.
There was something even more exotic going on in the old verandah bar on the promenade deck. With the dance floor covered over, the bar had been converted into a lab where more of Nathan’s pet scientists were trying to develop a radically new form of solar cell. The panels on the Ark’s sports deck, conventional titanium-coated polymer cells, had an efficiency of ten percent, but photosynthesizing algae could trap up to ninety-seven percent of the incoming solar energy. Nathan’s bioengineers hoped to be able to grow bright green solar panels like leaves, coated with the light-harvesting pigment molecules to be found in the algal cells. Nathan intended that in the long term these new solar arrays, with the support of the OTEC, could make the ship independent of resupply of uranium for its primary power plant. And in a world where sunlight was about the most easily accessible energy source of all, the new technology could be hugely commercially valuable.
But Nathan had deeper purposes in mind than trade. All these projects were facets of his greater vision.
Nobody expected the voyage to last forever; sooner or later this new Ark would come to rest on its own Ararat. But in the meantime Nathan wanted to make his floating city entirely independent of the land. He could feed himself from the sea, and collect fresh water from the rain. With the OTEC and his solar cells he hoped to harvest useful energy from the sea and the sun, and with his sea concrete and magnesium he hoped to be able to maintain the fabric of the ship herself from the resources of the sea, without resupply of any kind from the land. Lily imagined a day off in the future where every bit of the ship had worn out and been replaced by materials extracted from the sea. It would be the ultimate defiance of the flood and the damage it had wrought to human ambitions.
For all his faults, Nathan was a kind of genius of foresight, Lily acknowledged. Maybe the world needed such dreamers, as she remembered Sanjay McDonald once saying to her. She often wondered how long she could have survived without the shelter Nathan had given her since Barcelona.
Of course that wasn’t to say that his dream of his ship-city sailing endlessly on the sea was actually going to come true, any more than his Andean enclave had ultimately survived its greatest challenge.
They completed their usual twenty laps, a distance of around eight kilometers. On the last lap Kristie came out to wait for Lily, leaning on the rail.
Lily pulled up beside her. Kristie let her aunt get her breath. Piers ducked indoors, heading for his cabin and a shower-salt water, that was the only choice now. Kristie didn’t acknowledge him, didn’t even look at him. She had brought a couple of mugs of coffee substitute. Lily drank gratefully, though she would have preferred fresh water, even the vaguely chemical-smelling stuff that came out of the ship’s reverse-osmosis desalination plants.
This morning Kristie was ready for work. Over a regular AxysCorp coverall she wore a light protective suit with a hood and goggles, and had thick gloves tucked in her waistband. She worked in a plant that had been built into the ballroom, where the shells of crab, shrimp and lobster were processed for their chitin, a substance that was used as a cellulose substitute in the manufacture of paper and cardboard. It was one of Nathan’s more ingenious schemes, a product of his endless quest to find ways for the Ark and its passengers to make a living: they could sell crustacean-shell paper to other seaborne societies. Lily thought this wasn’t as good an idea, however, as the little optical workshops Nathan had set up elsewhere aboard the ship, where spectacles lenses were ground; people would need to be able to see long after they had given up writing things down.
“Wasn’t expecting you,” Lily said, recovering. “So what’s up? Manco all right?”
Kristie pulled a face.“Little bugger’s a pest this hour of the morning.” Occasionally, mostly when she swore, Kristie’s London roots showed through the vaguely transatlantic veneer she had picked up. “He’s in the jungle gym. It’s better when we’re not underway, and he can go swimming. But I have to wear him out before I can deliver him to school with a clear conscience… Lily, I came to find you. I thought you’d like to know.”
“What?”
“It was on the ship’s news. The Scafell Pike beacon was lost overnight.”
“Oh.” Scafell Pike in Cumbria was, had been, the highest point in England. “The Welsh mountains, the Scottish Highlands must still survive.”
“Yes, and full of bandits, according to the news. Britain’s still there. But England’s gone, every scrap of it. It’s astonishing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. And we were there at the beginning for England.”
Kristie smiled. “When you had to come and save us from Greenwich.”
“Well, you’d done pretty well yourselves. And now here we are at the end.”
“We went to Cumbria a few times, the Lakes, Mum took us.”
“I remember the postcards.”
“But we never climbed Scafell Pike.”
“Climbing wasn’t your mum’s thing, was it?”
“ ‘What, in these heels?’ ”
Lily laughed. Suddenly she longed to hug her niece, this damaged thirty-one-year old, an abrupt, powerful impulse. But she knew she mustn’t, this contact must be enough for now.
The problem between them was Piers. Just as her mother had never been able to forgive him for the death of Benj, so Kristie had never forgiven him for killing Ollantay. Lily had tried to talk her down out of that, but Kristie knew how much satisfaction Piers had got from gunning down his rival. She had seen it in his face, in his eyes, as he pulled the trigger. She had even come to blame Piers, it seemed, for the death of her mother.
In any other age Kristie could have got away from Piers, simply moved out. But they were stuck on a boat that felt very small if you shared it with somebody you hated. In that way, Lily thought, the Ark was like a scale model of the whole reduced world.
“Well, so much for England,” Kristie said. “Time for work.” She allowed Lily to kiss her cheek. Then they broke to begin their day. Lily headed to her cabin to change, and Kristie made for the ballroom, where the day’s batch of dead crustaceans was already being prepared for processing.
77
April 2036
With great caution, the Ark approached the coastline of Europe.
Nathan’s purpose was to reach Switzerland, where he hoped to establish trading relations with the nearest thing to a functioning national government left in western Europe. Then he wanted to pass on east to the high ground of central Asia. His destination there was Nepal: the gateway to the Tibetan plateau, a place he believed he could do good business. “It’s the most extensive upland in the world,” he declared. “And the pivot of the future for mankind. That’s why we’ve got to be there.” But the news out of the region had been fragmentary since reports of a disastrous three-way war between China, Russia and India over the precious high land-a war that was rumored to have gone nuclear before it was done. A number of the crew were concerned about what they would find, if they ever got there. But that was far in the future.
The ship passed from the ocean into the Westerschelde estuary. Sonar and radar tracked the drowned landscape passing beneath the prow, and the inboard TV system relayed heavily processed images to Lily’s cabin, a ghostly carpet of houses and roads and rail tracks. This was Holland, its dykes and canals finally overwhelmed after centuries of defiance, all slowly sinking beneath a layer of ooze. The flood was now so deep, in fact, that the submerged landscape was starved of sunlight by the column of water above it. If you had stood in the submerged streets of Antwerp or Arnhem you could not have seen the Ark’s hull pass overhead, like a lenticular cloud.
But on the ship, you always knew when you were over what had been dry land. Birds fell on the ship in flocks, finches and starlings and crows, land birds deprived of their roosting territories. The children earned extra food rations by going up to the sports deck and knocking the birds away with brooms. And a thin scum of oil and rubbish coated the waters, still seeping up from the wrecked cities below. Much of it was plastic, brightly colored and as
