Flood

48

February 2025

Lily decided to talk to Amanda about Kristie. She was surprised when Piers insisted on accompanying her.

He was waiting for her at noon, when she emerged from her AxysCorp office just off the Plaza de Armas at the heart of Cusco. Piers kept his AxysCorp durable-wear coverall crisply laundered and ironed, so it had the look of the military uniforms he had discarded five years ago, when he had first come to work for Nathan and they had moved to Project City. He was forty-nine now, as she was, graying, his face gaunt, his posture so erect that his shadow under the blue Peruvian sky was like a sundial. He still had that air of brittleness about him, she thought. Like a dried-up cane ready to snap in the breeze, as Michael Thurley had observed all those years ago. Yet he survived.

“I’m not sure why you’re coming,” Lily said. “This is a family matter.”

He stiffened a bit. “Ah. And there was me thinking we are family now.”

In the five years they had lived together she had kept learning that he was extraordinarily easy to hurt.“I don’t mean that. But this is sister stuff. A mother and a daughter, an aunt and a niece. Amanda hasn’t spoken to Kristie for six months, not since Kristie headed off for the Titicaca commune.”

“Or alternatively,” Piers said, “not since Amanda moved in with Juan Villegas.”

“Well, there you go,” she said. “There are two sides to every story, aren’t there? All I want is for my sister and my niece to start talking to each other again. And if you go implying that this is all somehow Amanda’s fault then you won’t be helping.”

“But it is Amanda’s fault, as you put it. Through her own vanity she has taken up with this man and driven her daughter away.”

“Piers, Kristie’s twenty years old. She’s entitled to make her own decisions. I mean, what were you doing when you were twenty? Not living with your mother, I’ll bet.”

He shook his head. “That’s irrelevant. These are not normal times-things are not as they were. The old rules don’t apply.”

“Hm,” she said. “Look-just leave Amanda to me. All right?”

But Piers stayed silent, making no such commitment. He smiled at her, and offered her his arm.

They set off to walk to Amanda’s-or rather to the house of Juan Villegas, the criollo Lily’s sister had moved in with. You walked everywhere in Project City, or you rode a bicycle or maybe a horse if you could get hold of one. Even Nathan Lammockson walked. There wasn’t the fuel to spare for non-essentials.

They crossed the expanse of the Plaza. This was Cusco, once the capital of the Inca empire, later a Spanish colonial city, and in the twentieth century a tourist haven. Now Cusco was the center of Nathan Lammockson’s Project City, his high-altitude enclave. But this sprawling square of paving and floral displays and streetlights remained the heart of the city, just as when it had been the center of a continent-sized empire the Incas had called Tahuantinsuyo, the Four Quarters of the Earth. They passed colonial churches full of vivid imagery in blood and gold, and climbed steep streets crowded with people in AxysCorp work suits, but also with locals, some of them Amerinds in bowler hats and ponchos. One woman pushed a huge barrow-load of yas. When she had first come to work for Nathan here, Lily had soon realized that despite his vast reengineering of the city and its environs-diverting the trans-Andean water pipeline that had once supplied Lima, for instance-Lammockson’s vision, or madness, could never overwhelm the essential character of this place, any more than had the ideological drive of the conquering Spaniards, who, unable to demolish the Inca city, had built their own town on its monumental foundations.

She looked up into a sky as rich and blue as porcelain, and she drank in air like wine. She was three kilometers above the old sea level, three kilometers up in the sky, so high that even the flood, which it was said was now approaching two hundred meters above the old datum, made no difference to the character and the quality of this place.

At Villegas’s home, Amanda greeted the two of them. “Lil, lovely to see you-and Piers, I wasn’t expecting you.” She gave them fluttery kisses on both cheeks.

“I hope I’m not intruding,” Piers said politely.

“Not at all, you’re always welcome, you know that. Do come in-it’s turning into quite a party.” They followed her in. Amanda looked good, Lily had to admit, her rich black hair tied back in what Lily thought of as an Eva Peron style, and wearing a black dress that was just a bit too low cut for noon. Her face was still beautiful but in a wistful, transient way, for she showed her age, mid-forties now.

She showed them into the living area. It was immense, having once been a hotel lobby. Juan Villegas welcomed his guests, raising a glass.“Join me in a drink.”

Lily was surprised to find Nathan Lammockson himself sitting here, a glass of wine cradled in his right hand. He glanced up at Lily and Piers, then turned back to the flatscreen TV he was watching. It showed news from scattered locations across Peru, a broadcast provided by a division of his own AxysCorp.

A butler silently approached Lily and Piers with a tray of glasses and a wine bottle. Lily took a glass, but Piers waved it away. “It’s a little early for me.”

“Oh, I insist,” Villegas said. “It’s a very good vintage.” Dressed in a crisp suit, his tie perfectly knotted, he stood poised as if for a society photoshoot beside the room’s best feature, a two-meter-high stretch of original Inca wall, the stone blocks cut to a laser fineness. This small former hotel had been Villegas’s reward for his part in the complex and shady dealings that had led to Nathan essentially buying up a Peruvian city.

“Juan’s right about the wine,” Nathan said, knocking back a slug of it himself. “Chilean. None of your Peruvian shit. And preflood. We send the subs down for it. If we go to all that trouble the least you can do is drink the bloody plonk.”

“Come on,” Villegas said, his smile broad, his teeth perfect. “If your boss says it is OK, how can you refuse?”

Piers accepted the glass reluctantly. He and Lily sat down on a small, leather-clad sofa.

Amanda fussed among her guests, bearing trays of nibbles, a paste of spiced meat on crackers. “Of course we should turn the TV off. Forgive me, Nathan.” She clicked her fingers at the TV, and it died.

“Good riddance,” Nathan said.

Piers took a sip of his wine, barely lowering its meniscus by a millimeter. “I thought you were encouraging everybody to sit at home and watch TV, Nathan.”

“Well, so I am. I’m also encouraging them to exercise and eat vegetables. Doesn’t mean I need to do it myself.” He emptied his glass and held it out to the butler.

Lily knew the theory. Cusco was crowded, and, frankly, there wasn’t much to do, nor spare power to do it with. Nathan had deliberately promoted a trend to stay at home, to consume movies and TV shows and games on big high-definition screens, to chat and mail and blog-to have a social life that was electronically mobile but physically static. “Battery humans,” he had once called his cooped-up, interconnected citizens.

“And I,” Lily said to him, “came to talk to my sister about Kristie. Didn’t know you cared so much about our domestic life, Nathan.”

He grunted. “You know I’ll always care about you Barcelona folk. But you’re right.” He grinned, self-deprecating. “I’m not too good at girlie chat.”

“Nor am I,” Lily said ruefully. “So why are you here?”

“I needed to talk to Juan. We may have a problem.”

“A diplomatic incident,” Villegas said more smoothly.

“The Prince of Wales has come steaming into Amazonia,” Nathan said. “Followed the old river course in from the Atlantic. Right now it’s anchored somewhere over Iquitos. Word is the British are coming ashore and are talking to the Amerindians in the cloud forest.”

The Prince of Wales was one of Britain’s two CVF-class aircraft carriers, hastily fitted out even as the floodwaters rose, nine decks, forty aircraft, sixty-five thousand tonnes of projected military power. On the effective abandonment of Britain after the 2019 tsunami the British government had set up a seat in exile in Labrador, Canada. The Americans had kicked up a fuss about having the old imperial power back on the continent. But in an increasingly threatening world the transferral of much of Britain’s military assets across the Atlantic had swung the argument for the Canadians. And with the Americans occupied with their own problems, there was nothing much they could do about it.

“It’s a remarkable fact of the new geography,” Villegas said smoothly, “that it is now possible for a ship the size of the Prince to sail by sea from the old Atlantic coast into the heart of the South American continent, all the way indeed into Peru.”

Piers Michaelmas said smoothly,“I’m sure the incursion of the Prince is just a probing. As the world changes, the governments have to test new dispositions.”

Lammockson grunted. “Well, the British can go test somebody else’s disposition. As far as I’m concerned governments are now part of the problem, not the solution. Anyhow I’m going across the mountains later today to get rid of Admiral Nelson. Maybe you should come along, Piers.”

“Then you can give me a lift to Titicaca,” Lily said impulsively.“I can visit Kristie.”

Amanda looked at Lily sharply.

“It’s out of the way,” Nathan said.“But-ah, the hell with it, why not? We leave at four.”

Lily said, “I’ll be ready.”

The conversation turned back to the British. Villegas said smoothly, “I am sure we will find a reasonable solution…”

Lily expected he would. While he lacked Piers’s experience and indeed Piers’s sharp intelligence, he exuded a terrific air of competence. Amanda’s latest man was quite a contrast to Wayne in Dartmoor. Juan Villegas was a widower, childless, aged forty-seven. He was known locally as a criollo, once one of the richest of the rich in Lima, with a family said to have descended from the conquistadors. If he had been fortunate in his birth he had made the right decisions in his later life, in supporting Nathan Lammockson as Peru’s institutions disintegrated. As such he had been exactly the sort of man Amanda would be attracted to here. And she, still beautiful, with her bright and brittle social skills, and her connection with Lammockson dating back before the founding of Project City, had been a useful acquisition for him too. But Lily had detected some genuine affection between them. Amanda could have done a lot worse.

When the conversation stalled, Lily put down her wine. “I’d better say thank you and run. Sorry, Amanda, I know I said we’d have some time, but I want to try to talk to Benj before I go see Kristie.”

Again Amanda’s eyes flashed.

Nathan grinned maliciously. “Why? Isn’t he talking to his mother either?”

“He’s staying out of the feud,” Lily said. “Which is why he may be able to help.”

“Ah,” Piers said with a surprising edge of bitterness. “That’s Benjamin Caistor all right. Always trying to help. Always in the damn way.”

Amanda flared at that. “He’s a good boy, and always has been.” She glanced at Villegas, evidently uneasy at this display of complicated family conflict.

He just smiled at her, indulgent.

Amanda followed Lily into the short hallway. Her face was a mask of anger, unrecognizable from the expression she had presented in public. She hissed, “What the hell are you doing? I invited you here to talk over this business with Kristie, at your insistence you’ll remember. Now you’re just taking over, are you? It’s Dartmoor all over again.”

Lily spread her hands. “I don’t mean it like that. I just want-”

Amanda said furiously, “You want to meddle in my life because you don’t have a life of your own. You want to screw around with my relationship with my kids, because you don’t have kids of your own. That’s all there is to it. This isn’t about my needs, Lily. It’s about yours. It always is.”

Lily was stung. “Amanda, for God’s sake-”

“Just go,” Amanda said. She practically shoved her sister out of the heavy front door, into the Andean sunshine, and slammed it closed.