“And that’s where you saw…” He didn’t know what to call her.
“Your Asian grandma came in on the ferry from Vlis-singen to Sheerness, other side of that island. Sheerness and Minster have the Thames for streets these days, and at high tide they have it for their roofs too. We’re over Magden Marsh now. We’ll go out around Shell Ness, the Swale’s too clotted.”
The mud-colored water around them sloshed this way and that. It was lined by long curving trails of yellowing foam. On the horizon the water grayed. Bly spun the wheel and they slapped over short steep waves. The boat rocked, and in its entirety moved up and down, up and down. Nirgal had never been in one before. Gray clouds hung over them, there was only a wedge of air between the cloud bottoms and the choppy water. The boat jostled this way and that, bobbing corklike. A liquid world.
“It’s a lot shorter around than it used to be,” Captain Bly said from the wheel. “If the water were clearer you could see Sayes Court, underneath us.”
“How deep is it?” Nirgal asked.
“Depends on the tide. This whole island was about an inch above sea level before the flood, so however much sea level has gone up, that’s how deep it is. What are they saying now, twenty-five feet? More than this old girl needs, that’s sure. She’s got a very shallow draft.”
He spun the wheel left, and the swells hit the boat from the side, so that it rolled in quick uneven jerks. He pointed at one gauge: “There, five meters. Harry Marsh. See that potato patch, the rough water there? That’ll come up at midtide, looks like a drowned giant buried in the mud.”
“What’s the tide now?”
“Near full. It’ll turn in half an hour.”
“It’s hard to believe Luna can pull the ocean around that much.”
“What, you don’t believe in gravity?”
“Oh, I believe in it — it’s crushing me right now. It’s just hard to believe something so far away has that much pull.”
“Hmm,” the captain said, looking out into a bank of mist blocking the view ahead. “I’ll tell you what’s hard to believe, it’s hard to believe that a bunch of icebergs can displace so much water that all the oceans of the world have gone up this far.”
“That is hard to believe.”
“It’s amazing it is. But the proof’s right here floating us. Ah, the mist has arrived.”
“Do you get more bad weather than you used to?”
The captain laughed. “That’d be comparing absolutes, I’d say.”
The mist blew past them in wet long veils, and the choppy waves smoked and hissed. It was dim. Suddenly Nir-gal felt happy, despite the unease in his stomach during the deceleration at the bottom of every wave trough. He was boating on a water world, and the light was at a tolerable level at last. He could stop squinting for the first time since he had arrived on Earth.
The captain spun his big wheel again, and they ran with the waves directly behind them, northwest into the mouth of the Thames. Off to their left a brownish-green ridge emerged wetly out of greenish-brown water, buildings crowding its slope. “That’s Minster, or what’s left of it. It was the only high ground on the island. Sheerness is over there, you can see where the water is all shattered over it.”
Under the low ceiling of streaming mist Nirgal saw what looked like a reef of foaming white water, sloshing in every direction at once, black under the white foam. “That’s Sheerness?”
“Yeah.”
“Did they all move to Minster?”
“Or somewhere. Most of them. There’s some very stubborn people in Sheerness.”
Then the captain was absorbed in bringing the boat in through the drowned seafront of Minster. Where the line of rooftops emerged from the waves, a large building had had its roof and sea-facing wall removed, and now it functioned as a little marina, its three remaining walls sheltering a patch of water and the upper floors at the back serving as dock. Three other fishing boats were moored there, and as they coasted in, some men on them looked up and waved.
“Who’s this?” one of them said as Ely nosed his boat into the dock.
“One of the Martians. We’re trying to find the Asian lady who was helping in Sheerness the other week, have you seen her?”
“Not lately. Couple of months actually. I heard she crossed to Southend. They’ll know down in the sub.”
Ely nodded. “Do you want to see Minster?” he said to Nirgal.
Nirgal frowned. “I’d rather see the people who might know where she is.”
“Yeah.” Ely backed the boat out of the gap, turned it around; Nirgal looked in at boarded windows, stained plaster, the shelves of an office wall, some notes tacked to a beam. As they motored over the drowned portion of Minster, Ely picked up a radio microphone on a corkscrewed cord, and punched buttons. He had a number of short conversations very hard for Nirgal to follow — “ah jack!” and the like, with all the answers emerging from explosive static.
“We’ll try Sheerness then. Tide’s right.”
And so they motored right into the white water and foam sloshing over the submerged town, following streets very slowly. In the center of the foam the water was calmer. Chimneys and telephone poles stuck out of the gray liquid, and Nirgal caught occasional glimpses of the houses and buildings below, but the water was so foamy on top, and so murky below, that very little was visible — the slope of a roof, a glimpse down into a street, the blind window of a house.
On the far side of the town was a floating dock, anchored to a concrete pillar sticking out of the surf. “This is the old ferry dock. They cut off one section and floated it, and now they’ve pumped out the ferry offices down below and reoc-cupied them.”
“Reoccupied them?”
“You’ll see.”
Ely hopped from the rocking gunwale to the dock, and held out a hand to help Nirgal across; nevertheless Nirgal crashed to one knee when he hit.
“Come on, Spiderman. Down we go.”
The concrete pillar anchoring the dock stood chest-high; it turned out to be hollow, and a metal ladder had been bolted down its inner side. Electric bulbs hung from sockets on a rubber-coated wire, twisted around one post of the ladder. The concrete cylinder ended some three meters down, but the ladder continued, down into a big chamber, warm, humid, fishy, and humming with the noise of several generators in another room or building. The building’s walls, the floor, the ceilings and windows were all covered by what appeared to be a sheet of clear plastic. They were inside a bubble of some kind of clear material; outside the windows was water, murky and brown, bubbling like dishwater in a sink.
Nirgal’s face no doubt revealed his surprise; Ely, smiling briefly at the sight, said, “It was a good strong building. The what-you-might-call sheetrock is something like the tent fabrics you use on Mars, only it hardens. People have been reoccupying quite a few buildings like this, if they’re the right size and depth. Set a tube and poof, it’s like blowing glass. So a lot of Sheerness folk are moving back out here, and sailing off the dock or off their roof. Tide people we call them. They figure it’s better than begging for charity in England, eh?”
“What do they do for work?”
“Fish, like they always have. And salvage. Eh Kama! Here’s my Martian, say hello. He’s short where he comes from, eh? Call him Spiderman.”
“But it’s Nirgal, innit? I’ll be fucked if I call Nirgal Spiderman when I got him visiting in me home.” And the man, black-haired and dark-skinned, an “Asian” in appearance if not accent, shook Nirgal’s right hand gently.
The room was brightly lit by a pair of giant spotlights pointed at the ceiling. The shiny floor was crowded: tables, benches, machiner-y in all stages of assembly: boat engines, pumps, generators, reels, things Nirgal didn’t recognize. The working generators were down a hall, though they didn’t seem any quieter for that. Nirgal went to one wall to inspect the bubble material. It was only a few molecules thick, Ely’s friends told him, and yet would hold thousands of pounds of pressure. Nirgal thought of each pound as a blow with a fist, thousands all at once. “These bubbles will be here when the concrete’s worn away.”