Stephen Baxter - Scrapbook

From the Scrapbook of Kristie Caistor (2005-2043)

September 2043. Lammockson Raft.

Kristie died.

It was something she ate, something from the sea that wasn't as familiar as it looked. It was a common way to die on the rafts. She was thirty-eight. She had survived on the rafts two years since the sinking of the Ark.

Her son Manco, orphaned aged twelve, was inconsolable.

There had been no peace between Kristie and her aunt. One way or another Lily's captivity had come between them most of Kristie's life, and now it pursued them to death.

That night, when Manco was sleeping, Lily took a look at Kristie's old handheld.

It had a calendar facility, but no satellite or radio link. And it had an extensive database that Kristie called her scrapbook. Lily remembered how she had started this thing, on her mother's dining table in Fulham, with an observation of an old man who couldn't get to the football because of floods in East Anglia. That snippet was still here.

She scanned through more items. Some were snippets from the net, or taken from the records of others, from handhelds or phones, including Lily's own. They were selected judiciously, and recorded verbatim, or written up with a hasty grace. Together they made up a kind of fragmented oral history of the flood. Maybe Kristie could have been a writer of some kind, maybe a journalist, in a more forgiving age.

One of the first entries was a kind of interview with Lily herself, which Lily vaguely remembered giving ...

July 2016. London.

At Amanda's insistence Lily stayed the night at the old family home in Fulham, rather than slog back to her hotel.

After the flash floods in the spring, Amanda and her two kids effectively lived on the upper floor now. They had installed sofa beds and foldaway shelves so the bedrooms could double as living spaces, and one spare bedroom had been made over as a backup kitchen. Above that the loft had been made into a kind of refuge, with two-litre milk bottles full of fresh water, tins of food, blankets and spare clothes, torches, a wind-up radio. Amanda's papers, her passport and bank books, the kids' birth certificates and National Health cards were all stored up there in a fireproof iron box.

Lily was to sleep on the floor of Kristie's room. Officially Lily was supposed to have got the bed and Kristie the mattress on the floor. But the girl had looked so distressed at the thought of being turfed out of her bed, a pink nest festooned with teddy bears, that Lily relented. Anyhow she found she couldn't sleep on beds that were too soft; she'd had to ask for a thinner mattress at the Savoy.

It took a while for Kristie to settle. She was full on. She talked fast and hopped around the room and pulled one gadget after another out of her little pink backpack. She'd kept all her old mobiles because of the pictures and videos stored on them; Lily gazed at blurred images of nine- and ten- and eleven-year-olds mugging into the tiny lenses.

And Kristie let Lily try her Angel. The music sounded in her head, as if her skull had been hollowed out and a miniature stage set up inside. But the music, made by boys with guitars and drums just as it had been for sixty years, was surprisingly much to Lily's taste. Kristie showed no real curiosity about Lily and her experiences, and that was fine by Lily; it was the way things should be. And then Kristie crashed, all of a sudden. She kissed Lily on the cheek, rolled up under her duvet, and was gone, her breathing an even tide.

Lily, lying there on the floor, felt warm and oddly safe, probably because that was the way Kristie felt. But she could hear the rain hammering on the roof and gurgling in the drains, and even in this upstairs room the stink of damp plaster was strong.

She slept deeply.

Benj said, 'You missed the Olympics, Aunt Lily. You know, 2012.'

Amanda said, 'He went for the hundred-metres final. It was scrapped when all but one of the finalists failed his DNA test. Actually Benj is keener on the Free Olympics, aren't you?'

'Free Olympics?'

'They let you take drugs,' Kristie said brightly.

'And muck about with your DNA,' added Benj. 'It's well exciting. The hundred-metre record is under eight seconds now. You should see those guys go, especially the ones with augmented legs.' He made a rocket mime with his hand. 'Whoosh!'

'But isn't it dangerous?' Lily asked. 'All those unregulated drugs -'

But Benj just repeated, 'Whoosh!' He smiled at her.

Lily looked down on what was becoming of the south of the river, from Southwark through Waterloo to Lambeth. The river was seeping over the land, an oily black stain that spread visibly over Jubilee Gardens and around the Waterloo train station. From there it was flowing deeper inland along the Waterloo Road, channelled by raised railway embankments, gradually joining with flows along the other main routes that led inland from Central London's bridges, a traffic of water that came to a mighty confluence at the Elephant and Castle, a swirling inland sea that surged around the roundabouts and high-rise blocks of flats and the new glass towers.

Amanda sat with her arms around her children. Kristie had her face buried under her mother's blanket; she had said little since being reunited with Amanda. But she had her handheld in her lap, always recording. Benj, though he submitted to his mother's embrace, was staring at his own gadgets, his angel and his phone. Lily could see screens glowing, and Benj stabbed at keys with his thumb, but his scowl showed he was not getting the response he wanted.

Lily leaned to Amanda. 'You think he's OK?'

'Traumatised,' Amanda said. 'Phone amputation. You know, he handled things well when I was in a panic back at the Dome. I was quite proud of him, he coped better than I did.'

'I know.'

'He's demanding first use of the land line once we get home to Chiswick. Not as good as his mobile but -'

'He might be unlucky,' Lily said. 'I heard the pilots saying the big BT exchange at Waterloo has flooded out. That's half the lines in London gone.'

'Great.' Lily could see her anxiety deepen, new lines creasing her forehead.

May 2019. Dartmoor

Lily told Amanda about the state of Britain as a whole. Amanda, immersed in her local situation, lacked her sister's helicopter view. Kristie listened patiently, trying to understand.

'It's a mess, as you'd expect,' Lily said. 'The north-west coast pretty much drowned. In the east that inland sea that's pushing its way in through the Humber Valley has drowned much of Yorkshire, and is threatening to join up with a similar inundation spreading up through Lincolnshire from the Wash. London - well, you know about that. On the south coast we've lost Ramsgate, Eastbourne, Portsmouth, Bournemouth. Oh, and the poor soggy farmers are reeling from a foot and mouth outbreak. Contaminated water from a vaccine research laboratory was washed the wrong way down a flooded drain, and found its way into the environment ...' She ran down. 'It's hard to take in, isn't it?'

'Yes.'

'Well, one must do what one can, I suppose.'

But it wasn't all bad, Amanda thought. Britain still worked as a nation-state. In the north, the great industrial cities around the Pennines like Manchester, Sheffield, Bradford and Leeds still functioned, and were forming a new hub of manufacturing industry and power generation. The government itself had relocated to Leeds from a largely abandoned London. Traffic still flowed on the high roads, unifying the country, even some train lines were still operational, and there was always the river traffic on the new waterways that stretched to the heart of the country. The winters seemed to be mild now, and essential imports of oil and coal kept the lights burning. Though many land lines were down, mobiles worked thanks to constellations of satellites hastily thrown into orbit, and the main TV services were on a few hours a day. There was even a patchy internet coverage.

It wasn't a time when you could order a takeaway pizza or a book via the internet or even expect to find new clothes in the shops, and Amanda did miss all that. It was a time of survival, of massive and ongoing reconstruction on a national scale, as a shrunken, crowded country struggled to ground whole cities of refugees from the lowlands - and to prepare for the further flooding that most people thought likely. Of course there were tensions, flashpoints all over. Thousands had died in the floods, and even more tragically of hunger, a lack of clean water, disease. But the country was still as one, the government still functioned locally and nationally, you got visits from doctors and education advisors and agricultural experts and water engineers. There was much brave talk of how the British would get through an emergency even harsher than the Second World War ...

Lily knew something about the global picture.

'In what's left of the old UN they're coming up with a grand new plan. The average elevation of the continental land above the old sea-level datum was eight hundred metres - although only around a sixth of the global population lived above this altitude. Surely to God the water won't keep rising to a level like that, and even if it did, you're looking at decades before it gets so high to threaten such extreme altitudes. So that's what they're aiming for now, relocating and re-establishing as much as possible above that average line, while we still have the capacity to rebuild. There's feverish activity in western North America, in the Andes, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Afghanistan, the Himalayas. Geopolitics has a new form. But there are wars everywhere, like brushfire. Battles for the high ground.'

'Well, that's predictable,' Amanda said.

'And of course we still have wars of the old sort. Have you heard about Jerusalem?'

August 2041. Ark Three.

'The map is so strange,' Kristie said, looking at the real-time image. 'It doesn't look like America at all. I guess we'd get used to it, if we had time.'

And if the flood ever gave them a chance, Lily reflected. For the relentless rise continued, covering the steep slopes of the world's few remaining scraps of dry land, and forcing the huddled remnants of mankind to retreat further.

Certainly it was an unfamiliar image of land and sea that covered her cabin wall now, all that was left of the western US - indeed, all that was left of the US at all. When the map was stable she was able to recognise the long stripe of the Sierra Nevada, and the high country of Nevada and Idaho surrounding the steel grey of the Great Salt Lake Desert inland sea. Further to the east much of the high ground in the Rockies still survived, from Montana down through Wyoming and Colorado and down to New Mexico. But it was deeply incised by valleys flooded so deeply they had become more inland seas. Even the Grand Canyon was flooded now, and Lily had seen images returned by a low-flying drone aircraft processed and returned to her by Thandie Jones, of the complicated landscape above Lake Mead, the scraps of land that the Sanup Plateau that still protruded above the water that now concealed the Canyon's deep geological drama ...

September 2043. Lammockson Raft.

Once the Ark was gone and they were on the rafts, Kristie's access to global news had pretty much vanished, aside from scraps she heard over Nathan's clockwork radios. But her own world widened, oddly, as the raft communities crossing the world's oceans converged and dissipated, and bits of news were passed on among them.

Curious, Lily scanned through the last item Kristie had recorded. It was a report out of what was left of America, relayed by radio, that the horse was believed to be extinct.

Kristie had kept her little pink kid's backpack from London, and Lily went through it. Inside there were a few cheap plastic accessories, her ancient teddy. Lily offered Manco the teddy, but it was too babyish for him. He kept a string of amber-like beads, however. He wore them wrapped around his wrist.

In the morning Lily prepared Kristie's body as best she could. She stuffed the teddy back inside the backpack, and slung the pack around Kristie's neck.

Then she got help carrying the body to the edge of the raft. Aside from her pack, Kristie was sent naked into the sea. They couldn't spare the clothes. They didn't even have anything to weigh down her body. Her grave was the sharp teeth of the ocean.

So Lily and Manco were left alone together. They were from different worlds, like strangers. They fought and cried.