“They knew a quake was coming. There have been eight Richter-seven-plus quakes in the last century, steadily marching along the fault line toward Istanbul. That’s why the rich have been building modern quake-proof developments on the hard rock on the Asian side of the strait, and the poor, millions of them, have been throwing up shoddy illegal houses on the soft rock of the European side.” She passed her finger over the screen. “The quake itself knocked down ten thousand houses. The older buildings survived better than the modern, generally. I guess anything that has lasted a few centuries in a region like this is going to last a lot longer. Even the dome of the Hagia Sophia is intact.
“But the quake came under the Sea of Marmara, and that generated the tsunami, seven or eight meters high, which did a lot more damage when it hit the city. So now there’s yet another vast refugee flow-”
“Thandie-what ‘next stage’?”
Thandie looked up. Her eyes were hollow, unfocused, tired from staring too long at the screen. “Lily, as the oceans rise we’re going to see a shift of isostatic pressures. The sheer weight of the floodwater will depress the land it lies over-the way the glaciers of the Ice Age pushed the continental land down so hard it hasn’t finished rebounding yet. And those shifting pressures are going to stress the faults, the weak points.”
“Like the North Anatolian fault.”
“Yes. And hence the Istanbul tsunami.”
“But you can’t be sure that’s the cause.” She’d been around scientists enough the last few months, and indeed before that with Gary in Barcelona, to get a sense of how their minds worked. “It could be just coincidence. You said yourself that this has been a quake waiting to happen for decades.”
“Yes. It could be coincidence. Or the start of a new kind of response to the flooding, a tectonic response.”
“Terrific. And do you feel confident enough to say this to the IPCC?”
Thandie glanced out of the window, at fields and farmhouses and a glimpse of river that shot by as the plane made its final approach.“You’re right. I can’t be definitive. The IPCC is conservative. When they make their final report to the UN and the governments they’ll strike out anything that can’t be proven seven ways up. That’s what they did with the climate-change predictions, all those years. But I’ll flag it up even so.”
Lily felt moved to comfort her. “You must get sick of always being the one with the bad news.”
“Yeah.” Thandie forced a grin. “Especially since I can’t get a book deal after all, as nobody’s publishing books anymore.”
Lily patted her hand. “Nathan will listen.”
“Yes. And maybe that counts for more than anything else.”
The plane bumped to a landing and braked hard, the tires throwing up sprays of water from a soaked runway.
30
An AxysCorp chopper was waiting for them at the Newburgh airstrip, with a heavyset company guard already on board.
The pilot brought them back down the Hudson valley, and they descended at last over Manhattan, heading for Central Park. They peered curiously out through the chopper’s blister hull at an island encroached on all its flanks by the rising rivers. The city’s great buildings were an orderly forest of concrete and steel and glass, but you could see gaps in the forest, sprawls of rubble where buildings had fallen, often taking others down with them. Yet the city lived; away from the directly flooded areas traffic still moved, even glistening mustard-colored beetles that must be yellow cabs, and boats prowled busily along the drowned streets, drawing long wakes behind them.
Despite the rumors of the approaching Atlantic storm, the sky was clear and blue, the sun still high; it was a brilliant winter’s day. The city shone in the sunlight, millions of windows glittering like so many sequins, and even the water that ponded around the feet of the buildings looked blue and pretty. It was like a postcard view of Venice as it once was.
The chopper brought them down onto a helipad in Central Park, on the Great Lawn just south of the reservoir. The pilot said this was as far south on the island as it was safe to land right now. The three of them clambered out, Thandie, Gary and Lily, followed by the pilot and the AxysCorp guard.
While the pilot unloaded their shoulder packs, Lily walked to the edge of the helipad. When she stepped on the green grass the ground gave under her feet, marshy, full of water. She looked around, shielding her eyes. It was years since she had come to Manhattan, to Central Park, and then it had been as a tourist. Glancing around you wouldn’t think that anything had changed; here she was in this remarkable green space in the heart of the world’s greatest city, whose buildings shouldered above the tree line in every direction. But looking south she could see grubby tents and lean-tos and threads of smoke from fires. People living in Central Park, then. And there was a smell of rot and sewage, a stink she had become too familiar with in London.
The pilot called her back to the group. She was a beefy woman who might have been thirty. She said now, in a broad Bronx accent, dryly humorous, “So welcome to New York. Here’s your orientation guide.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Thandie snapped.
“Mr. Lammockson’s standing orders, so please listen up. You might notice a few changes since your last visit. The city isn’t in as bad a shape as you might think. It’s still working. But transport ain’t what it used to be. We can’t fly you any further downtown than this. And the subways flooded on day one.”
New York’s subways had been built after the sewers that drained them, and so had to run under the sewers. Even in normal times there had been an heroic, unending operation to pump water from the tunnels up into the sewers and out to the Hudson. When the flooding came the tunnels had filled up fast, and when the power to the pumps failed, there was nothing to be done to save the subways.
“So,” Thandie said,“how are we supposed to get to the Empire State Building?” That was where they were due to meet Piers Michaelmas, some twenty-five blocks below Central Park South: a typically imaginative choice of landmark by Piers, Lily thought dryly.
“You walk, or take a yellow cab or rickshaw, or in the flooded areas flag a water cab. Pick the cabs that are licensed by the city. If you’re not sure, ask a cop. You have GPS?”
Thandie lifted her arm; a GPS map, updated hourly with flood data, was projected on a patch on her sleeve.
“Use your common sense,” the guard said.“Stay out of wrecked buildings. Don’t drink anything that doesn’t come out of a sealed bottle. Don’t go swimming. Don’t talk to anybody that doesn’t look like he’s washed for a couple of days. If the smell gets too bad, use your face masks. There is said to be cholera in the Lower East Side, so watch for that, you’ll see the police tapes keeping you out. I say goodbye here, I gotta take this chopper home. But you’ll have John here with you at all times.”
The guard, John, nodded, and took a step back. Lily suspected he would be tailing them all the way to Freedom Tower, whether they liked it or not.
The pilot said, “So that’s that. Any questions?”
Gary pointed to the clusters of tents, the fires. “What about those guys?”
“Refugees from downtown. The city ships them out, mostly to the big camps they’ve set up around West Point where they can be processed appropriately. But there are always more. Central Park serves as a big holding tank. Kind of a shantytown.”
“That was what used to be here, before the city bought the land and established the park,” Gary murmured.“Back in the 1850s. Pig farms and rubbish tips. Most of what’s around us now is landscaped.”