“Thanks,” Grace said. She clutched her handheld to her chest and hurried out, pulling the flap door closed behind her.
The adults sat on lightweight fold-out seats. Thandie sipped her water, and Gary accepted a cup of coffee from Michael. Thandie glanced around the tent, at the Seminole rug that lay over the thick groundsheet, the plastic trunks and cupboards, the bedding rolls, the small kitchen area with their electric stove and grill, and the little crucifix that Michael always hung from the central pole, a symbol of his tentatively rediscovered Catholicism.
“So, welcome to our yurt,” Michael said in his dry English way, watching her.
“I’ve seen a lot worse than this.”
“I bet you have. Of course it helps that we haven’t had to move for so many years. One puts down roots.”
Thandie grinned. “And here you are in your shirt and tie, going off to work every day, it looks like.”
“Lone Elk likes a bit of formality. He is running a city here. Though he doesn’t insist on jackets, thankfully. I’ve worked my way up into quite a senior position, in what amounts to a mayor’s office.”
“Senior?”
He smiled.“Only Seminole above me. That counts for senior around here.”
“And I’m a lowly technician,” Gary said.“Mostly I work on the lumber collections, and the recycling programs. But I get to use my skills. I run a weather service for the city, of a sort.”
Thandie watched him. Gary felt faintly embarrassed. Maybe he had come across as too earnest.
Thandie sipped her water. “Anyhow I’m glad I got to meet Grace.”
Michael said, “Of course it’s been difficult for her. Until the age of five she was brought up by her father’s family, or a branch of it. An extremely wealthy family too. She had nannies, maids. They spoiled her to death. And then Gary and I took her in. I suppose we are something of an odd couple.”
“I’ll say,” Thandie said. “But I’m impressed.”
“Impressed?”
She looked at Gary.“You know, Boyle, before I came I never got why you stayed here. There’s so much science to be done out there. But now I see it. You stayed for Grace.”
Gary nodded, his feelings of defensiveness fading. “I was there at the moment she was born, in that cellar. There’s nowhere else I want to be but with her. Nothing else I want to do but see her grow up.”
“You made the right choice, pal.”
A gruff throat was cleared outside. In this tent city it was a signal that had come to serve in place of a door knocker.
Gary stood up. “We got company.”
53
Lone Elk arrived alone, though Gary suspected he would have a guard or two in the gathering shadows outside. Thandie stood to shake his hand.
The Seminole was shorter than you might expect, Gary supposed. He wore a straightforward shirt and trousers of tough artificial fabric. He was aged about sixty, his skin dark but not weathered, his black hair cut short and peppered with gray. He looked more like a Hispanic businessman than a tribal leader.
Michael served fresh coffee for them all. Lone Elk sipped his, probably out of politeness; the elders were used to better stuff than this. He and Thandie made small talk for a while. Thandie spoke of her background, sketched her career before the flooding began, and outlined what she had done since, her global eyewitness sampling. They were sizing each other up, Gary saw.
“Forgive me for prevaricating,” Lone Elk said eventually. “Actually it’s not my way. Generally I like to cut the bull and get to the point.” His accent was like a lilting Bostonian.
“A habit of a busy man.”
“But I know I’m going to have to listen carefully to what you have to tell me. I spent a small fortune in government scrip bringing you here because Gary tells me you’re just about the best in your field. We live in a world of lies, of denial, of willful ignorance. My problem is that I have to judge what you tell me not only on the content of your words, but on you.”
“Take me as you find me,” Thandie said evenly, and Gary sensed she was close to taking offense.
“Oh, I will.” Lone Elk sat back.“But what do you make of me, I wonder? You’ve seen the world. Did you expect to come home to America, and find your friend Gary in a camp run by an Indian?”
Gary had been surprised that Lone Elk and his people preferred to use that term.
Thandie shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I expect it? Everything is so mixed up now.”
“My people lived in the east, in Florida. We were among the first in North America to be confronted by the European settlers. It was not a happy experience, as you can imagine. We were hunted to near extinction in the Everglades. But we survived the dispossession, the plagues, the attempted genocides, the generations of discrimination.
“Then at the end of the twentieth century a miracle happened. Through gambling, we became wealthy-hugely wealthy. The money gave us power. We bought back, for instance, our sacred grounds which had been earmarked for ruinous exploitation by one concern or another, and we began a language reclamation project. It was the same for other tribes across the country. There was a new sort of tension between us and the whites, and between ourselves, our different nations. But we were heading, I believe, for a new equilibrium-a way of living in a new age.”
“And then the flooding came,” Thandie said.
“Then the flooding came. Again, we were among the first impacted, the first to have to move, the first to lose our lives. But money is still useful, isn’t it? God gave me wisdom, I believe, and money gave me the power to buy what needed to be bought. Land. Tents. Portaloos.” He grinned. “I used to mount music festivals. I know how to host thousands of people in a field. This is no different. A Woodstock of the flood.
“And so here we are, surviving where others have lost everything or drowned, because they were not decisive enough. And now I must be decisive again.”
“Yes.”
“Many of my family believe that this too, the flood, is the fault of the whites-if they had stayed at home, none of it would have happened. Do you believe this is true, that human agencies are to blame?”
Thandie shrugged.“There’s still no concrete proof. Things are changing too quickly; there are too few of us, too many observations to make. I have the feeling we’ll never know for sure. Anyhow, does it matter? What we have to deal with are the symptoms of this global sickness, whether we understand the causes or not.”
“Quite so.” Lone Elk steepled his fingers.“I am privy to certain confidential federal government briefings. I’m told the average sea-level rise is now around two hundred meters.”
“That’s the ball park.”
“Then what is becoming of the world, Thandie Jones? Tell me what you’ve seen.”
She nodded. She unfolded a screen.
All the world’s maps had changed.
In South America, the flooding had taken big chunks out of the continent’s familiar cone shape. The Amazon basin had been turned into an inland sea that lapped against the foothills of the Andes. In the north, lowland Venezuela and Colombia had vanished, and in the south another mighty sea was pushing in from the River Plate estuary, drowning Uruguay, Paraguay and western Argentina, and threatening to separate the Andean spine from the Brazilian plateau.
As west and north Africa flooded there was a flight to the high grounds of the south. Pretoria was emerging as a major regional player.
Australia was lost, all save high ground in the west of the continent and a fringe of mountains.
In Europe, vast populations continued to be driven from the northern plain, and were crowding into the high ground to the south and north, in Spain, the Mediterranean countries, the Alps, Scandinavia. The European Union was still functioning, just, out of a new base in Madrid, trying to cope with an unending crisis of refugee flow, shortages of food and land and water, disease.
“But Eurasia is the real cockpit,” Thandie said. “We don’t have good data on the ground; our best information comes from the remaining satellites. We know European Russia is gone, flooded from the Baltics deep into Siberia, save only for the Urals. And so there’s been a vast flow of people east and south, into Kazakhstan and Mongolia. And meanwhile lowland China is flooded east of a line from Beijing through Kaifeng to Changsha, and refugees have been driven up from that direction. The Russians and Chinese are facing each other in Mongolia. I don’t think anybody knows what’s going on there-even the respective governments, where they’re functioning.