Lily stepped closer to hear for herself. Lammockson was trying to bargain with technology, his advanced manufacturing techniques, his Norwegian seed bank. But Sixsmith said the Maoists cared nothing for seed banks. The tithe would be in drugs, weapons, women. And “underclass.”
Lily asked, “Underclass?”
“There are rumors of still more drastic tithes imposed on the refugees,” Jang said.“This is a poor place, crowded with people. How are they all to be fed?” He looked at her steadily.
“Cannibalism? We’ve heard of this. Desperate communities stranded on high-ground islands-”
“There is no desperation here, not among the rulers. The Maoists have borrowed notions of castes from the Hindus for a theoretical justification. Here the farming of people is systematic.”
Lily stared at Sixsmith.“Jang, why didn’t you tell us any of this before we came here?”
“You did not ask. I am a mere sherpa. In any case you might not have believed it if you did not see it for yourself.”
“But you knew.”
He smiled. “We Nepali imagine the future. The sea-level rise is over a hundred meters a year. Kathmandu is only four hundred meters above the sea now. In four years, or five or six, where am I to go? Perhaps I will be standing here, with my mother’s scarf over my mouth, begging for entry into this ideological Utopia.”
Nathan came away from Harry Sixsmith.“Jesus Christ on a bike,” he said, glowering.
“We heard enough,” Piers said grimly.
“Harry risked his own neck to come and warn us off. And he risked his neck again to persuade those guards to let us go. I never imagined anything like this.” He was pale, trembling, the muscles in his cheeks working. He glared around, at the arid ground, the mountains. “Maybe this is where the last act of humankind will be played out. The last survivors fighting over human bones, while the sea laps around their feet. Christ. Well, we can’t stay here.”
Piers said,“Nathan, I had a message. There’s trouble at the Ark. Some kind of mutiny. An attempt to scuttle the ship, so we would have to disembark.”
“They’re forcing my hand. What’s that prick Villegas doing about it?”
Piers’s face darkened. “According to the captain, he’s leading the revolt.”
“Christ, Christ.” Nathan shook his head. For a moment he looked utterly weary, his shoulders hunched, his head dropping, as if he couldn’t take another step. But then he straightened up, glanced around as if figuring out where he was, which way to go. “No time to waste. Piers, get these fucking sherpas lined up again.” He strode off.
As they moved away, Piers walked beside Lily. “It’s like a concentration camp,” he said.“The whole plateau. Worse than anything the Nazis dreamed up.”
“There has been so much horror in the world, Piers. We’ve been spared it, mostly, haven’t we? The drowning, the starvation, the plagues, the utter desperation-”
“That’s true.”
“Why? Why us?”
Piers looked at her. “Lammockson’s strong arm, and blind luck that we found ourselves in his shelter. And if we hadn’t been spared, we wouldn’t be here to ask the question, would we?”
Lily glanced back at the Maoist border. The big gates opened to allow Harry Sixsmith back inside. A road led away from the entrance, through whitewashed, flat-roofed buildings. The road was lined by posts, on each of which had been placed a human skull, jawless.
81
October 2037
F rom Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:
The rise of the sea past a kilometer seemed to change the attitude of the Ark crew to the flooding.
In the year after the Ark sailed away from Nepal, the seas rose another hundred and fifty meters. The crew watched Nathan’s animated maps as one by one more lights were extinguished. Tehran. Cabramurra, Australia’s last surviving town. The great cities of southern Africa at last coming under threat, cities like Harare and Pretoria. Even South American cities like Caracas. Nathan’s onboard news services still picked up broadcasts from wherever he could find them, notably Denver, and other surviving high-altitude enclaves. But the logs showed that the crew were tuning in less to the images of human suffering, the endless migrations, the raft colonies, the petty wars, and more to altitude records and graphical summaries of the tremendous event unfolding around the world. As it approached its terminal phase the flood was becoming an abstraction in people’s minds, a thing to be tracked through numbers and grisly milestones.
Lily Brooke and Piers Michaelmas held a kind of private wake when the beacon from Avila was lost and Spain fell silent, and the Fathers of the Elect were defeated at last.
82
May 2038
The prow of the Ark plowed into the crust that covered the sea.
Lily stood with Piers on the foredeck, watching. It was as if they stood on an icebreaker pushing its way through the pack ice of the Arctic. But the crust on this ocean was not ice but garbage. Lily had small binoculars, and through them the surface scum resolved into a mess of plastic netting, soda bottles, six-pack rings, bin liners, supermarket bags, bits of polystyrene packaging. In the watery sunlight the colors were bright, red and orange and electric blue, artificial colors characteristic of a vanished world. Lily thought she could smell it, a stink of rot and mold and decay, but that was probably her imagination; this far from land not much would have survived the hungry jaws of the sea but indestructible, biologically useless plastic.
Lifted gently on the ocean’s swells, the rubbish stretched all the way to the horizon, where a small, ragged fleet of boats prowled. And beyond that was a band of dark cloud, ominous.
The sun was high, the sea warm. The Ark was in the Pacific, between Hawaii and California. This was the middle of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a huge swirl of ocean currents that ran so deep that even the drowning of the land hadn’t made much difference to them. And this was the place where all the trash that got swept down all the drains into all the rivers into all the seas finally ended up.
“The world’s rubbish bin, two thousand kilometers across,” Lily said.
“Yep,” Piers said. He looked out, his prominent nose peeling from sunburn, his much-patched AxysCorp coverall shabby and faded.“What we see isn’t the sum total of the waste, actually, not even a fraction of it. Plastic itself is indestructible, but a plastic bag can be reduced, shredded, chewed and eroded, ripped to bits. It ends up as a cloud of particles in the water, all but invisible, passing through the stomachs of fishes and out again but never reduced or absorbed. Almost all the world’s plastic produced since the 1950s, a billion tons of it, is still in existence somewhere in the world.”
“Amazing. Well, it’s outlasted the civilization that produced it.”
“Oh, easily. It will outlast mankind, no doubt. A million years, maybe, until some bug evolves the capacity to eat it. What a contribution to the biosphere!”
“And here we are sailing into the middle of it.”
“Needs must, my dear,” Piers said. “Needs must.”
She glanced around. The Ark was accompanied by other craft, a small flotilla of sailing ships, solar-cell power boats, and rafts cobbled together from detritus, old tires and bits of corrugated iron, sailing under tattered blankets and sheets. Some of these vessels were so ramshackle they were barely distinguishable from the garbage through which they sailed, as if they had accreted out of it. “We could do without our escort. Following us like sea gulls after a whale. Kind of embarrassing.”
“Well, it’s not us they’re following but the typhoon.” Piers pointed to that black smudge on the horizon.
