“So you’re based in Peru now?”
“Yeah. You’d think I’d be used to the sun.” He wiped sweat from his fleshy brow. “I should have glopped up. Some days you almost miss the rain. But it rains like Manchester even up in the Andes.”
Jerzy Glemp said, “Mr. Groundwater, you’re originally Scottish, aren’t you?”
“Is my accent still so strong?” But Glemp would know all about him from Nathan’s files. “Born and bred in Orkney, from an old family there. We took Holle there once. Let her crawl around in the Ring of Brodgar, just so she could say she’s been where her ancestors grew up. She was only six months old. But now the place is drowned, every last island. So we’re rootless.”
Glemp said, “As are so many of us. And your wife-”
“A local girl,” Patrick said. “Lost her a year ago, to cancer.” They looked uncomfortable. “It’s OK. Holle knows all about it.”
Holle stared up at Glemp. “Where’s he from?”
Glemp laughed. “We’ve been ignoring you, haven’t we? She has your color,” he said to Patrick. “And your charming accent. I myself am from Poland.”
“Where’s that?”
Patrick began to try to explain, but Glemp cut him off. “It is nowhere now. Under the sea. A place for the fishes to play.”
“You’re funny.”
“Well, thank you. Today, you know, we are going to try to make sure that when you are grown up, your children will have a place to play.”
“Instead of the fishes?”
“Instead of the fishes. Quite so.”
“You’re funny.”
Nathan said to Patrick, “He works for Eschatology, Inc. He’s always like this. Got to love him. Well, let’s hope he’s right.”
The public library was a collision of eras, a sandstone and glass block from the 1950s cemented to a redbrick block from the 90s: another aging structure that hadn’t been refurbished for a decade or more. They had to get through another layer of security to enter, this one operated by LaRei and a lot tougher than the police and military cordons elsewhere.
An open area on the ground floor of the library had been set out for a conference, just rows of fold-out chairs set up before a podium. It was a homely setting, Patrick thought, as if they were here for a town meeting to discuss planning applications. But shadowy figures sat at the back of the block of chairs, like Alice and Camden, guards and minders. And maybe twenty of the fifty or so chairs were already occupied, by men and women many of whose faces Patrick immediately recognized from news media and conferencing and some face-to-face contact. There were people in this room who could have bought and sold Patrick and even Nathan Lammockson a dozen times over.
This was LaRei, a secretive and exclusive society, established in the years before the flooding as a source of contacts for good schools and exclusive vacation resorts and fabulously expensive merchandise like watches and jewelery, now become a kind of survivalist network of the superrich. LaRei, where a net worth of a billion bucks wouldn’t even get you in the door; without Nathan’s sponsorship Patrick wouldn’t be here.
And at the front of the room, by the podium, stood a slim black woman of about forty, wearing a battered coverall that might once have been AxysCorp blue. She was setting up a crystal ball, a big three-dimensional projection system that showed an image of the turning Earth. Patrick recognized Thandie Jones.
Holle was distracted by the pretty Earth globe, whose blue light cast highlights from the library’s polished wood panels and the rows of books on the shelves. But she quickly grew bored, as Patrick had expected. He let her wriggle to the floor and explore the contents of his shoulder bag, pulling out books. When she got her Angel started up, before she got the gadget settled, a few bars of music wafted through Patrick’s own head. Right now Paul Simon’s “Graceland” was her favorite. Nobody was making new music now, but that made no difference to Holle; she was developing her own tastes, and was working her way through Patrick’s own collection, all of it as fresh to her as if it had been written yesterday.
Then she became aware of another child, a blond little girl of about her age, sitting on the other side of the room. They stared at each other as if the adults around them were as remote and irrelevant as clouds.
6
A portly man, white, maybe sixty, his head hairless, his face round and pale, stood up before Thandie. “You’re ready to go, Dr. Jones?” He turned to face the audience. “You all know me, I think. I’m Edward Kenzie, chair of LaRei.” His accent was a harsh Chicagoan. He spoke without amplification, but so small was the group, so quiet the empty library, Patrick had no trouble hearing him. “You may not know my little girl, Kelly.” He pointed to the kid who was playing with Holle. “But in a sense she’s the reason we are here today.” His fingers were fat and soft, Patrick noticed, and the tips were stained yellow with nicotine, a strange, atavistic sight.
Kenzie went on, “Many of us heard Dr. Jones speak to the IPCC seven years ago. Well, as a fellow Chicagoan I’ve followed her career since then, and the reports and papers she’s been filing, and I can tell you that every prediction she made then has come true, near as damn it, and every prediction many of us made about the inaction of our governments has dismayingly come true also. Now we’ve asked her to speak to us again, to give us an update on her IPCC talk, so to speak. And then I want to suggest a way forward for us, as we move on from this point. Dr. Jones.” And he sat down with arms folded, his expression intent.
Thandie glanced around the room. She looked hardy, weather-beaten, a field scientist. “Thanks. I’m Thandie Jones. My specialisms are oceanography and climatology. Formally I’m attached to the NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which fortuitously has an office in Boulder, Colorado, so still above the rising sea. I was present at one of the initial high-profile flooding events, London 2016, and since then I’ve witnessed a few more of the dramatic events that have followed-many of them hydrological catastrophes without precedent in historical times…”
She spoke of a worldwide community of climatologists and other specialists observing the rapidly evolving events. There was still formal publication, of a sort, still seminars, still something resembling the scientific process going on. But mostly all they could do was log the Earth’s huge convulsion as it happened, and try to guess what would come next.
“What I’m paid to do is produce predictive models of the ocean and the climate, to assist the Denver government in its planning for the future. What I’m notorious for, as I guess you know, is my speculation as to the cause of the global flooding event, and its eventual outcome.”
She turned to her spinning crystal ball, the turning, three-dimensional Earth, a fool-the-eye illusion wrought by spinning screens, lenses and mirrors, and multiple projectors. Patrick remembered she had used a similar display back in 2018, and he wondered if this was the very same piece of equipment. Quite likely it was. “Here’s the Earth as we knew it before the inception of the flooding, back in 2012.” It was an image of a cloudless world, with the familiar shapes of the continents brown-gray against a blue ocean. “And here’s where we live now.” She pressed a control.
The seas glimmered and rose, and the land melted away. The water erased swathes of China, and washed across northern Europe deep into Russia, and in South America took a bite into Amazonia. Patrick’s eye was drawn to Britain, from which much of southern England had been lost, and the rest of the country reduced to an archipelago of highlands.