Nirgal asked about Hiroko. Kama shrugged. “I never knew her name. I thought she was a Tamil, from the south of India. She’s gone over to Southend I hear.”
“She helped to set this up?”
“Yeah. She brought the bubbles in from Vlissingen, her and a bunch like her. Great what they did here, we were groveling in High Halstow before they came.”
“Why did they come?”
“Don’t know. Some kind of coastal support group, no doubt.” He laughed. “Though they didn’t come on like that. Just moving around the coasts, building stuff out of the wreckage for the fun of it, what it looked like. Intertidal civilization, they called it. Joking as usual.”
“Eh Karnasingh, eh Bly. Lovely day out innit?”
“Yeah.”
“Care for some scrod?”
The next big room was a kitchen, and a dining area jammed with tables and benches. Perhaps fifty people had sat down to eat, and Kama cried “Hey!” and loudly introduced Nirgal. Indistinct murmurs greeted him. People were busy eating: big bowls of fish stew, ladled out of enormous black pots that looked like they had been in use continuously for centuries. Nirgal sat to eat; the stew was good. The bread was as hard as the tabletop. The faces were rough, pocked, salted, reddened when not brown; Nirgal had never seen such vivid ugly countenances, banged and pulled by the harsh existence in Earth’s heavy drag. Loud chatter, waves of laughter, shouts; the generators could scarcely be heard. Afterward people came up to shake his hand and look at him. Several had met the Asian woman and her friends, and they described her enthusiastically. She hadn’t ever given them a name. Her English was good, slow and clear. “I thought she were Paki. Her eyes dint look quite Oriental if you know what I mean. Not like yours, you know, no little fold in there next the nose.”
“Epicanthic fold, you ignorant bugger.”
Nirgal felt his heart beating hard. It was hot in the room, hot and steamy and heavy. “What about the people with her?”
Some of those had been Oriental. Asians, except for one or two whites.
“Any tall ones?” Nirgal asked. “Like me?” None. Still… if Hiroko’s group had come back to Earth, it seemed possible the younger ones would have stayed behind. Even Hiroko couldn’t have talked all of them into such a move. Would Frantz leave Mars, would Nanedi? Nir-gal doubted it. Return to Earth in its hour of need… the older ones would go. Yes, it sounded like Hiroko; he could imagine her doing it, sailing the new coasts of Terra, organizing a reinhabitation…
“They went over to Southend. They were going to work their way up the coast.”
Nirgal looked at Ely, who nodded; they could cross too.
But Nirgal’s escorts wanted to check on things first. They wanted a day to arrange things. Meanwhile Ely and his friends were talking about underwater salvage projects, and when Ely heard about the bodyguards’ proposed delay, he asked Nirgal if he wanted to see one such operation, taking place the next morning — “though it’s not a pretty business of course.” Nirgal agreed; the escorts didn’t object, as long as some of them came along. They agreed to do it.
So they spent the evening in the clammy noisy submarine warehouse, Ely and his friends rummaging for equipment Nirgal could use. And spent the night on short narrow beds in Ely’s boat, rocking as if in a big clumsy cradle.
The next morning they puttered through a light mist the color of Mars, pinks and oranges floating this way and that over slack glassy mauve water. The tide was near ebb, and the salvage crew and three of Nirgal’s escorts followed Ely’s larger craft in a trio of small open motorboats, maneuvering between chimney tops and traffic signs and power-line poles, conferring frequently. Ely had gotten out a tattered book of maps, and he called out the street names of Sheer-ness, navigating to specific warehouses or shops. Many of the warehouses in the wharf area had already been salvaged, apparently, but there were more warehouses and shops scattered through the blocks of flats behind the seafront, and one of these was their morning’s target: “Here we go; Two Carleton Lane.” It had been a jewelry store, next to a small market. “We’ll try for jewels and canned food, a good balance you might say.”
They moored to the top of a billboard and stopped their engines. Ely threw a small object on a cord overboard, and he and three of the other men gathered around a small AI screen set on Ely’s bridge dash. A thin cable paid out over the side, its reel creaking woefully. On the screen, the murky color image changed from brown to black to brown.
“How do you know what you’re seeing?” Nirgal asked.
“We don’t.”
“But look, there’s a door, see?”-
“No.”
Ely tapped at a small keypad under the screen. “In you go, thing. There. Now we’re inside. This should be the market.”
“Didn’t they have time to get their things out?” Nirgal asked.
“Not entirely. Everyone on the east coast of England had to move at once, almost, so there wasn’t enough transport to take more than what you could carry in your car. If that. A lot of people left their homes intact. So we pull the stuff worth pulling.”
“What about the owners?”
“Oh there’s a register. We contact the register and find people when we can, and charge them a salvage fee if they want the stuff. If they’re not on the register, we sell it on the island. People are wanting furniture and such. Here, look — we’ll see what that is.”
He pushed a key, and the screen got brighter. “Ah yeah. Refrigerator. We could use it, but it’s hell getting it up.”
“What about the house?”
“Oh we blow that up. Clean shot if we set the charges right. But not this morning. We’ll tag this and move on.”
They puttered away. Ely and another man continued to watch the screen, arguing mildly about where to go next. “This town wasn’t much even before the flood,” Ely explained to Nirgal. “Falling into the drink for a couple hundred years, ever since the empire ended.”
“Since the end of sail you mean,” the other man said.
“Same thing. The old Thames was used less and less after that, and all the little ports on the estuary began to go seedy. And that was a long time ago.”
Finally Ely killed the engine, looked at the others. In their whiskery faces Nirgal saw a curious mix of grim resignation and happy anticipation. “There then.”
The other men started getting out underwater gear: full wet suits, tanks, face masks, some full helmets. “We thought Eric’s’d fit you,” Ely said. “He was a giant.” He pulled a long black wet suit out of the crowded locker, one without feet or gloves, and only a hood and face mask rather than a complete helmet. “There’s booties of his too.”
“Let me try them on.”
So he and two of the men took off their clothes and pulled on the wet suits, sweating and puffing as they yanked the fabrics on and zipped up the tight collars. Nirgal’s wet suit turned out to have a triangular rip across the left side of the torso, which was lucky, as otherwise it might not have fit; it was very tight around the chest, though loose on his legs. One of the other divers, named Kev, taped up the V split with duct tape. “That’ll be all right then, for one dive anyway. But you see what happened to Eric, eh?” Tapping him on the side. “See you don’t get caught up in any of our cable.”
“I will.”
Nirgal felt his flesh crawl under the taped rip, which suddenly felt huge. Caught on a moving cable, pulled into concrete or metal, ka, what an agony — a fatal blow — how long would he have stayed conscious after that, a minute, two? Rolling in agony, in the dark…
He pulled himself out of an intense recreation of Eric’s end, feeling shaken. They got a breathing rig attached to his upper arm and face mask, and abruptly he was breathing cold dry air, pure oxygen they said. Ely asked again about going down, as Nirgal was shivering slightly. “No no,” said Nirgal. “I’m good with cold, this water isn’t that cold. Besides I’ve already filled the suit with sweat.”