Flood

43

The party crossed the Caucasus, heading north and east, skirting the foothills of the southern mountains. Then they descended toward the shore of the Caspian Sea, traveling over a steppe of sandy clay until they reached the lower valley of the Volga.

They lodged for a day at Astrakhan. Close to the border with Kazakhstan, this was a coastal town that sprawled across the delta of the Volga, spanning eleven islands. The Caspian Sea, cut off from the global ocean, had not yet risen, and the lands around its shore had not yet suffered the flooding experienced elsewhere. It was strange for Gary and the others to run around town and to see the cathedral, the city’s kremlin, the bridges, all eerily intact, as if nothing in the world had changed. But the city was all but drained of its people, and they saw more soldiers than civilians. The Russian authorities knew the oceanic transgression was coming, and had taken what precautions they could.

The party split up here to provide distributed viewpoints to observe the incursion. Some of them, including Sanjay and Elena, stayed in Astrakhan. The rest broke into pairs or threes and spread out away from Astrakhan up the river valley or around the northern shore of the Caspian, where some thousand square kilometers of the coastal land was below the old sea level, a great band of lowland that stretched right around the ocean shore and spread maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers inland.

Gary was paired with Thandie. They set up camp at the shore, close to a sandy, deserted beach. There they waited for the expected breakthrough.

Days passed. The weather was good, and they swam in the landlocked ocean, but it was foul with industrial waste and oil. In fact they could see drilling rigs out on the water, gaunt shapes like floating factories. They worked. They had their laptops and satellite connections, and they spoke to their colleagues, spread around the shore of the sea and in the river valley. They held a number of virtual “hearths,” where the scattered researchers sent each other webcam images of their campfires.

After a couple of days they were joined on the shore by more observers, in tents and mobile homes. Few spoke English; none seemed to be scientists. “Disaster tourists,” Thandie said dismissively.

“Like us,” Gary pointed out.

At night they discussed their lives, Gary’s captivity, Thandie’s ambitions, their shared memories, their mutual friends. And after a couple of days, in the dark of their tent as they tried to sleep, Gary dared raise the subject of Elena Artemova, and the swim at Krasnaya Polyana.

“I swing both ways, if you want to know,” Thandie said.“But I don’t swing for you. Sorry.”

“That’s OK,” he said calmly.“There’s something about Elena, though, isn’t there?”

Thandie snorted. “What, her chest?”

“No. That sadness you see in her. She reminds me of Piers Michaelmas, on his dark days. I want to make her smile. Does that sound dumb?”

“No,” Thandie said. “Since I feel the same way.”

“Good,” Gary said. “I mean it.” He thought of her lost baby, and felt warm. “If you can find happiness with Elena-”

“Shut up, Boyle.”

“Roger that.”

So they drifted to sleep, both thinking of Elena, who for all Gary knew might be thinking of both of them, or neither.

On the fourth morning they woke to a distant roar. When they climbed out of their tent the rubberneckers were already standing by the shore, binoculars in their hands.

Sanjay made an excited webcam communication; he had to shout over a noise like a waterfall. “It’s broken through! We let you sleep, we thought you’d like to discover the sound for yourselves. It was a storm in the Black Sea that did it…” The rising waters of the Black Sea, fed from the global ocean via the Mediterranean and the Sea of Marmara, had at last broken through the Caucasus barrier at its weakest point, forcing their way up the valley of the Don, flooding Volgograd, and then pouring down the Volga valley to Astrakhan. “The whole damn town’s already inundated. It’s extraordinary!”

The distant rumble continued, like a far-off war.

Thandie checked her data feeds. “The Black Sea had risen to around fifty meters above the old datum when it broke through the Caucasus. Whereas the Caspian was about twenty-seven meters below the datum. That’s about seventy-seven meters of head. No wonder it’s so damn loud.”

“We’ve work to do.”

“Yeah. But let’s go see first.” On impulse she grabbed his hand. They walked down to the edge of the sea.

All along the littoral the grubby water was advancing slowly, like a tide coming in, surging a little when a wave broke. They paced back before it, counting, timing their steps.

“At this rate it’s going to amount to a half-kilometer advance per day,” Thandie said. She pulled a handheld from her pocket and did some quick figuring. “A vertical rise of maybe ten centimeters a day.”

“It’s going to take a while to fill up to the global datum, then,” Gary said. “A year?”

“More.”

The tourists were baffled. They seemed to have expected a giant wave you could surf on. Well, if you wanted spectacle you should be in the Volga valley, Gary thought. But he had a scientist’s imagination, the capacity to understand the numbers.“The Caspian is a thousand kilometers long. A sea that could swallow Japan. And it’s filling like a bathtub. Think of the volumes that must be pouring down the Volga.” And, Gary thought, it was just going to keep on pushing back and back, eating away at the land.

They stood there and let the rising water wash over their bare feet. Thandie said, “Nobody’s seen a sight like this since the Ice Age. Do you think we’re privileged or cursed?”

“Both, maybe.”

“Listen, Gary. What’s next for you?”

“What do you have in mind?”

“More of this.” She waved a hand.“We’re going to see a re-creation of giant bodies of water that haven’t stood on the Earth since the last glaciation, when meltwater filled every hollow: the lost great lakes. From here the sea will eventually extend all the way north to the Arctic coast. In Africa, the ocean will force its way up the Niger and the Nile to re-form Lake Megachad, a sea the size of western Europe. And in North America Lake Agassiz will form again, a huge inland sea that stretched from Saskatchewan to Ontario, from the Dakotas to Minnesota. Sights not seen for five hundred human generations. Let’s go see… Why, there’s even good science to be done. Even if nobody will ever buy my book about it.”

But he had already decided what he should do. He could keep working wherever he went: in the midst of a global transformation there was data to be gathered everywhere. He would still be part of the worldwide community of watchers. But he’d decided. He would go back to America. His mother had died and he had no immediate family there. But he thought he would see if he could help Lily find Helen’s baby. At heart, he was discovering, he was drawn to people, not spectacle.

Twenty-seven years old, he wanted to go home. He tried to explain this. Thandie didn’t press him.

The sea continued to advance, rising, until it soaked the cuffs of their trousers. A rubbernecker a dozen meters away glared in disappointment. “Is this all there is to it? What a bust.”