During the refit the onboard debate about the ship’s future intensified. The big main restaurant was used for weekly “parliaments,” as Nathan called them, where anybody could raise any issue they were concerned about. At these sessions Juan Villegas was the most senior of those who challenged Nathan’s unmodified fundamentalist vision of the future.
“Let us be realistic, Nathan,” Villegas said. “Our needs are elemental. Fresh, land-grown vegetables. Seeds if we can obtain them. Topsoil, even. Basic supplies of all kinds. And whatever we can get to refurbish the ship.”
“No. You know my philosophy, Juan,” Nathan said.“If we go back to sucking on the teat of the land the first chance we get, we’ll never wean ourselves off it. What we need is people. Engineers, biologists, doctors. Visionaries to drive forward the great project of independence.”
“We can’t eat vision! Dreams don’t float! And we do not need more people. We need the precise opposite. We need less. We must find ways to offload crew. You have seen the figures, the way our basic supply is not keeping up with our internal demand…” He produced a twenty-year-old handheld and began scrolling through tables. But Nathan wouldn’t focus on the results. Villegas grew steadily angrier.
In their time at sea, once he had got over his own shock at the events surrounding the abandonment of Project City, Villegas had grown in seniority among the barons around Nathan. Lily wondered if in some way his relationship with Amanda had actually been holding him back in Project City. Now Lily saw the insight and decisiveness that must have made Villegas his preflood fortune in the first place.
But at the same time his view of the ship and its crew, their mission and their needs, was diverging from Nathan’s. Villegas wanted the voyage to end as soon as possible, before some terminal accident befell them, as surely it eventually would. Nathan wanted it never to end at all. As time went on their differences were becoming overwhelming. Villegas and Nathan were like two dinosaurs, Lily thought, the last of their kind confronting each other. After one of these parliamentary sessions turned into a near-riot, Nathan had his loyal AxysCorp cops man the stage with him, their sidearms visible.
It was typical of Nathan that in his heart of hearts he was developing a compromise. Lily, still in his inner circle if only because of Grace, detected this shift in small hints, the tone of his conversation, subtexts of briefings he asked to be prepared. He was not about to give up on his dream of a floating city, but he was starting to accept that in the short term at least he was going to need support from the shore. But it was also typical of Nathan that he shared none of this evolution in his thinking with his most senior officer and most significant challenger, Juan Villegas.
Lily had her own subplots to deal with, meanwhile.
A day came when Grace refused to eat. Lily was twisted with guilt. She’d told Grace how she’d used hunger strikes against the Fathers of the Elect, in her Barcelona dungeons. She herself had put the idea into Grace’s head. Now here was Grace, held hostage in another floating cell, under pressure from Nathan, doing exactly that.
But Nathan wasn’t about to be beaten by a mere suicide threat. He threatened to have his doctors force-feed Grace, if that was what it would take to keep her alive. Lily spent a lot of time with Grace, trying to find a way through this mess, a way to have her come down of her own accord.
The sea-level rise topped a kilometer, another ghastly and unwelcome landmark. There were surges and lulls, but it still showed no signs of slowing from Thandie’s doubling-every-five-years exponential increase. Nobody talked about this hard fact, however.
The Ark sailed south over Istanbul and the Sea of Marmara, and through the Dardanelles to the Aegean. From there she passed over Suez and along the course of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.
Then she turned northeast to cross India, following the river valleys, heading for the frontier with Nepal. Much of India was deeply submerged, but nowhere was free of detritus, the slicks of oil, the islands of indestructible plastic garbage slowly spinning in the torpid currents, and the bodies, bloated and naked, that floated up like balloons from the rotting ruins below. Billions had once lived here; billions must have died.
Lily found it a great relief when land was sighted on the northern horizon, the foothills of the Himalayas, their summits brown and jagged. They had reached Nepal.
79
Landing craft from the Ark took ashore one of the ship’s hydrogen-fueled armored trucks, and Lily was driven in toward Kathmandu with Nathan, Piers and a few AxysCorp goons. Villegas was left in executive command of the ship.
They drove along tight, winding roads that climbed into green-clad hills. In small, crowded villages, people watched apathetically as they passed. Every so often the view would open up, and Lily glimpsed the higher peaks to the north. But these summits did not gleam white as they used to in picture postcards; now the brown streak of bare rock scarred the mountains’ faces all the way to their peaks.
Before they got to Kathmandu they were stopped at a military perimeter. Serious-looking hardware peered down at them from watch towers. A polite young man in an orange tunic introduced himself. He was a representative of Prasad Deuba, Nathan’s contact here. He apologized for the inconvenience of the security. Tense negotiations ensued, led by Piers.
Lily stayed in the truck and kept out of it. The Nepalese guards stared in at her, their faces hard, blank. Their drill looked competent, the way they held their weapons assured. Lily recalled that the Gurkhas, a main-stay of the British army for decades, had come from Nepal. Evidently the training and tradition had rubbed off. But some of these young men bore facial scars that looked like radiation burns.
In the end a deal was done. The AxysCorp troopers were not made to give up their weapons, but they had to proceed under armed guard. So they drove on, with silent Gurkha-type troops sitting composed in the rear of the truck, their own weapons cradled in their uniformed arms, and they were tailed by a couple of Nepalese army jeeps.
Kathmandu, when they reached it, astonished Lily. It was a sprawling city that had once hosted a million souls, and might still do so now-a major conurbation that had been more than fourteen hundred meters above sea level. And on the skyline the profile of the higher mountains loomed, still the highest in the world. Deuba’s polite young man acted like a tourist guide now, and pointed out memorable sights. Streets that ran between delicate pagodas were crowded with pedestrians, cyclists and peculiar three-wheeled motor cars. Holy men still lived in their ashram near the great temple complex by the river, and on the opposite bank families still gathered around the greasy smoke of the funeral pyres.
But the place had evidently become astonishingly rich. In among the temples, Hindu and Buddhist, were modern buildings, glass-fronted office blocks and villas, sprawling private residences behind tall automatic gates. The people in the streets, their features delicately Indian, wore expensive-looking clothes. Even the beggars squatting in the road, their hands held out for food as the truck passed, wore fine clothes, if dusty. Some of them even wore jewelry that glinted at their necks.
“But you can’t eat diamonds,” said the young guide.
They passed a residence of the King, guarded by carved stone elephants. A band played in the street.
“Fuck me,” said Nathan. “Bagpipes!”
Prasad Deuba, Nathan’s business contact, welcomed them to his home. It was actually a complex of new buildings, a grand villa at the heart of the old city. Lily thought its fortifications looked more formidable than had the country’s border’s. Deuba fed them tea and cake, British style, and offered them a yak’s-milk liqueur. “Very rare and valuable, now that the Russians have eaten all the yaks!”
“I bet you managed to turn a profit even out of that, Prasad, you old dog,” Nathan said with an admiring growl. He said to his companions, “You’d be lucky to get out of a deal with Prasad with a shirt on your back.”
Deuba smiled, but Lily saw his eyes remained cold. He wasn’t going to be fooled by a little flattery.
Prasad Deuba had clearly been a businessman, in the old days. Aged around sixty, he had the expansive gestures, quick smile and penetrating stare of a salesman. He wore a western-style suit, very well kept, and his hair was gelled flat against his scalp. His accent was smooth, almost British. He had been sent to England for his education.
Nathan made his pitch. By now he was not looking for trading partners, as in the deals he had struck in Switzerland. What he wanted, he said, was sanctuary.
