World Engine Page 6

  Mica seemed to be losing patience. ‘Oh, just get in the boat.’

  He got in.

  8

  Judging by the position of the Sun, Malenfant figured they were heading north-west, roughly. Mica assured him and Bartholomew that it wasn’t far to the Hampstead Heath island.

  They scudded through stretches of open water between gaunt remnant buildings – though Malenfant noticed that some of these seemed to be occupied, in their upper levels anyhow, and he glimpsed more concrete platforms that were evidently markers of shafts to surviving sea-bed facilities, like Bart’s.

  As the journey continued, mother and daughter talked quietly. At one point, experimentally, Malenfant tried turning his translator bangle off, with a whispered command. The language he heard sounded like a mixture of English, Spanish and Chinese. He switched the gadget back on.

  The boat was smooth, sleek. It had some kind of impeller that created a bubbling froth at the stern, but any engine was silent, and Malenfant had no idea what the operating principle was. The boat itself seemed smart. At a voice command from Mica it had simply taken them off in the direction they wanted to go. More algorithmic intelligence, no doubt. Mica kept her hand on the tiller, though, and once or twice adjusted their course to avoid obstacles: a floating tangle of wood, what looked like a recently collapsed wall.

  Malenfant did observe how worn the hull seemed to be, the seats of some type of ceramic rubbed smooth with use, a kind of detachable canopy above faded by the sunlight. And he saw initials scratched into a plate near the bow: ‘G.D.’

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘this tub been in the family long?’

  Mica looked at him strangely. ‘Of course it has. So has most of our stuff.’

  ‘Like an heirloom?’ Malenfant ventured, not understanding.

  ‘An heirloom?’

  ‘Something you hand down, one generation to the next. Something precious, significant. It’s just I noticed the initials somebody scraped in the bow. “G.D.”’ He smiled at Deirdra. ‘That you, a few years back?’

  ‘Well, no. That was Greggson Davina.’ She looked at her mother. ‘My great-grandmother?’

  ‘Great-great,’ Mica corrected her, smoothly steering the boat.

  ‘Something else you’ll have to get used to,’ Bartholomew murmured to Malenfant. ‘People don’t throw away stuff any more. Or get new stuff. Oh, they might make new stuff – Deirdra’s outfit looks hand-made to me. You might throw up a shed, a barn, even a house, from stone and wood and adobe, and reused brick from some ruin . . . But technological stuff like this boat was built to last for generations, and it’s likely to have been used for generations.’

  ‘Technological stuff, eh?’

  ‘Even I am older than I look.’

  More flooded London opened up around him. In silence, Malenfant examined what looked like a mangrove, an enormous tree dipping into the muddy water, its tangle clinging to the concrete and glass shards of an abandoned high-rise.

  If he was examining the tree, Deirdra was examining him.

  She said brightly, ‘This must seem very odd to you. Did you ever come to London, back then?’

  ‘Never. I grew up in upstate New York. We went into the city a lot, of course. Manhattan. And we lived in Houston once Emma got into the astronaut corps . . .’

  ‘Your homes will be just the same as this,’ Mica said, a touch bleakly. ‘All the lowland cities, flooded out. Manhattan, Houston.’ She glanced at Malenfant, with something like pity in her eyes. ‘Maybe you had relatives who lived through it. Descendants, I mean. Strange as it seems to be discussing it. I looked it up, knowing we’d be meeting you. The coastlines started to be lost from about the year 2100. Later, in America, there was a huge programme – they called it the Reconstruction – of withdrawal and rebuilding.’

  ‘But they ran out of oil,’ Deirdra said. ‘That’s what I read. So they burned all the coal, to build the new inland cities, the new roads.’

  Despite the heat, Malenfant felt a deep inner chill. They burned all the coal. Shit.

  Mica said, ‘Eventually, though, even the rich nations started to crumble under the pressure. In Europe, France and Germany went to war because of migrant flows – did you know about that? Made a huge mess, still not cleaned up properly. But that was the last big war, because the nation-states started to dissolve, losing power to supranational organisations like the UN from above, and below to the regions, and the aid agencies and such. Even America collapsed, in the end. The Second Civil War, they called it. Not much of a war, by then.’

  ‘Then there was the Chaos,’ said Deirdra, as if reciting a memorised list. ‘And then the Common Heritage came along and took hold of things.’

  Malenfant grunted. ‘So even in my age we had a choice, still. Burn the coal, or not. Well, we burned the stuff.’ He glared around, at the mangrove embedded in the wreck of the London high-rise. ‘And so, this.’

  ‘One teacher told me it’s like the Eocene age,’ Deirdra said brightly, enunciating the word carefully. ‘Fifty million years ago. Or fifty-five, I don’t remember. When the whole Earth was as hot as it ever got, and the seas were high, and it was like tropical jungle everywhere.’ She smiled. ‘We’ve got forests in Antarctica.’

  Malenfant goggled. ‘Really?’

  ‘Not mature yet,’ Bartholomew said. ‘But we’re getting there.’

  Now Mica seemed to show a prickly pride. ‘It’s not just your generation that achieved big things, you know, Malenfant. We’ve also got the Sahara Forest. And that should reduce the carbon drawdown from millennia to centuries. What about that?’

  Malenfant mused. ‘I guess I’m impressed. Though I’m not sure what you’re talking about.’ And, though he knew it was unwise, he countered in his turn, ‘But you’re prepared to let it all get smashed to pieces by this Destroyer that’s on the way in a thousand years’ time?’

  Even Deirdra looked shocked.

  Mica glared. ‘I wouldn’t let Prefect Morrel hear you talk like that. It’s precisely what he warned us of, concerning you.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know this Prefect Morrel.’

  Mica turned away.

  And Malenfant, sitting in this small boat over a drowned capital city, suddenly felt extraordinarily vulnerable.

  He remembered advice he’d got from Joe Muldoon, veteran Moonwalker and later senior astronaut trainer, on his second day as a rookie at Houston, when Malenfant had already got himself in trouble half a dozen ways. For now, keep your mouth shut and your eyes open, Malenfant. Good advice then. Good advice now.

  But he wondered if he would ever learn his way around this new age. Maybe not, if it meant learning to accept that the world had to die, as these people seemed to have done.

  They approached Hampstead Heath.

  All that survived now was a shallow island above the murky water. Still, Malenfant saw as they clambered out, this must have been one of the highest points anywhere near the city centre, and surely always a great viewpoint. And, he saw, there was a kind of monument here, with statuary crowding next to what looked to him like a helipad.

  As they climbed cautiously out of the boat at a perfunctory pier, Malenfant noticed a brightly coloured object bobbing in the water, among fronds of seaweed. He bent, inspected it, and fished it out. ‘A Shit Cola can.’

  The others stared, incurious.

  ‘What are the odds? As bright as if it was minted yesterday.’

  Bartholomew grinned. ‘Makes you proud, eh, Malenfant?’

  ‘You have an algorithm for sarcasm, I see.’ Malenfant looked around for a garbage bin, and, finding none, tucked the can into a pocket.

  They walked towards the centre of the island.

  The pathway led through young trees, sparse grass – and clusters of tall, deep pink flowers that looked oddly familiar to Malenfant. There was nobody else around – no people – but as they walked, brushing past the undergrowth, they disturbed mice, rabbits, even what looked like a young deer. And as they passed a low tre
e Malenfant glimpsed bats, hanging like dark fruit.

  Deirdra walked beside Malenfant. ‘I looked up all this stuff too. It’s a post-industrial flora and fauna.’

  He grinned. ‘Well remembered.’

  ‘Since the industries collapsed, the water over the cities, the dry ground, can be pretty toxic. Dump sites, decommissioned factories, power stations, oil terminals – there is all kind of stuff still down there that leaks out. The stuff that grew here first was what could tolerate all the muck and poisons. Like these pink flowers. Rosebay willowherb.’

  Malenfant snapped his fingers. ‘That’s it. Bombweed.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘My grandfather was a flyer in the Second World War. Umm, middle of the twentieth century. Fighting a totalitarian regime in Germany. Anyhow he flew fighters out of British airfields, for a while. Britain, London, was battered by bombing. And he saw this stuff growing in the bomb sites, even in the middle of the cities. Showed me pictures of those days. Bombweed, he said the Londoners called it.’

  ‘It won’t last long,’ Mica said, striding alongside them. ‘The climate here is tropical now. In a couple of centuries, all this will be rainforest, the old city lost.’

  Malenfant frowned. ‘Wouldn’t you want to save it? Preserve the old cities, I mean?’

  Mica sighed. ‘But there is no “old” to preserve, Malenfant. There was no single instant in time when everything was “perfect”. That’s one thing I thought they understood in your time. Humans changed everything they touched – everywhere, all the time. Even before the European explorers, there was nowhere that had people in it that could be called a wilderness. The South American rainforests weren’t wild; they were managed parkland. Our philosophy now – I mean, the Common Heritage policy – is to let the world heal as best it can. To help it along. Something new will emerge, a new ecology, from the big mix-up we caused. While we touch it as lightly as possible.’

  Malenfant frowned. ‘Save for farms, I guess? And mines?’

  Bartholomew murmured, ‘No farms, Malenfant. Not outside open-air museums and the like. No mines. You’ve a lot to learn yet.’

  They reached the top of the hill, near that helipad, and turned around. From here the view was more open, and pretty spectacular. Malenfant was looking roughly south, and he made out hills in the far distance, blue in the heat haze, coated in greenery. The Surrey hills, Mica told him. Closer in, a hint of how brilliant London must have become in its final days – before, Malenfant supposed, these mysterious horrors like the ‘Chaos’. Tremendous buildings loomed high above the water, some still connected by cantilevered arches, fine suspension bridges, cables. Windmills stood on some of the roofs, a rather futile nod to non-polluting sources of energy, Malenfant thought. And what looked like roadways, suspended high in the air, twisting around the flanks of the buildings. Spectacular, once. But most of this was entirely abandoned, with nothing moving on the bridges or roadways, the smashed windows like vacant eye sockets, the greenery clawing up out of the water at the buildings’ sheer flanks.

  ‘Quite a sight,’ Malenfant murmured to Bartholomew.

  ‘Indeed. But as time goes on, fewer people live here, or care about it. I think Deirdra is anxious to show you the statues . . .’

  They turned to face that statuary group Malenfant had glimpsed from below: three figures, somewhat weathered, and with what looked like vines clinging to their legs. Still, Malenfant knew who he was looking at.

  Deirdra gazed at him, wide-eyed, anticipating his reaction. ‘It was my idea to bring you to this particular landing pad, to show you this. It’s from your time, more or less. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Not the statues themselves – don’t remember that. But I know these guys, yes. My contemporaries, if you put it like that. Richard Nixon. Neil Armstrong. John Lennon. Kind of gruesome, to have the three of them up there.’ He pointed. ‘Assassinated, died on the Moon, assassinated. You know, at NASA, I once met Aldrin, who co-piloted Apollo 11. After Armstrong’s heart attack, he had to bury his buddy at Tranquillity, spend a night alone on the Moon, then fly that lunar module, alone again, up to orbit and his rendezvous with his ride home . . . Some would say he was the true hero.’

  They listened to this respectfully, Malenfant thought. Though perhaps it was a little undignified of him. As if he was bragging about who he knew on the Mayflower.

  Deirdra said brightly, ‘We remember King Nixon—’

  ‘President Nixon,’ Mica murmured.

  ‘Sorry. For inventing the stipend system.’

  ‘Well,’ Mica said, ‘not quite. He introduced a universal basic income in his own country which worked quite well, and then when the Common Heritage came along, that was an example they built on . . .’

  ‘I need to study more.’

  Malenfant pointed to Lennon. ‘But why is that guy up here? Great songwriter, I loved the Beatles. But—’

  ‘But,’ Bartholomew said, ‘he wrote the song that became the anthem of the Common Heritage.’

  Malenfant thought that over. ‘Oh. Imagine. OK. Fair point. Although, from what I remember about that song, in that case Yoko ought to be up there with him.’

  Deirdra was intent on Malenfant’s reaction. ‘Like I said, I wanted to bring you here because you’d know these people. I mean, not personally . . . I really want to know about your life, Malenfant. What it was like to grow up back then.’

  He shrugged. ‘It seemed ordinary to me – back then.’

  Mica stepped in firmly. ‘Well, that will have to wait. The Prefect’s flyer is approaching. Deirdra, why don’t you go over to the landing pad with Bartholomew here?’

  Deirdra hung back for one second. Then, evidently embarrassed and angry, she withdrew, with Bartholomew. Malenfant was reminded how young she was.

  And Mica faced Malenfant. ‘There’s a couple of things need to be said before the Prefect gets here.’

  ‘Look, it was Deirdra who came to me. But you are her mother and I respect that. If you are remotely uncomfortable—’

  ‘Her father died,’ Mica snapped. ‘When she was very small.’

  A double-take. ‘She did mention that. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It . . . hit her harder than it should have. Everybody dies, in their time. Everybody returns to the Earth. And if you need to remember, to hold on to something of a person, you can always go to the Codex.’

  Something else Malenfant had never heard of. Some kind of archive? He kept his mouth shut.

  He heard a thin whine, glimpsed a flyer like a descending chopper, high above.

  ‘It wasn’t enough,’ Mica said. ‘Not for Deirdra. You see . . . In this age we live as we like, we build what we like, or not. We do what we like. It’s not like your age, what I know of it. Nobody has to work. But everybody does something. Maybe you leave something that lasts a while, if you are an artist, if you build a house. Maybe not.

  ‘George was . . . funny. He was wonderful with Deirdra when she was small. He made her laugh all the time; he made up wonderful games. And he was an actor. We put on plays locally. Comedy, classical stuff too. We live near Birmingham – well, you’ll find that out. We would go to Pylons around the country, and everybody knew his name, before . . .’

  Pylons? Park it, Malenfant. ‘Before he died?’

  ‘There was a fire. Some of the countryside is still drying out in the heat. He went into a moorland blaze, saved some people.’

  ‘He didn’t save himself.’

  Mica’s face worked. ‘It was very sudden. The fire. We may have technically advanced since your day, Malenfant, but the fire was overwhelming. He was unlucky; he couldn’t be saved.

  ‘Now, here’s the thing, Malenfant. Once he was gone, he was gone. George didn’t build things, you see. He just was. His achievement was all in himself, and now that was lost. And the trace in the Codex wasn’t enough. Not for Deirdra. That was when she started fretting about the Destroyer.’

  ‘The end of the world.’

  She eyed him. �
��We don’t put it like that. But, yes, when the Destroyer comes, everything will be lost. Even if George is remembered for a thousand years, you see, even if the Codex survives that long—’

  ‘It’s meaningless, because one day the Destroyer, whatever the hell it is, will wipe the slate clean.’

  ‘Again, we don’t put it like that.’

  ‘She can’t be alone in thinking this way. I don’t know anything about your Destroyer. But I get the sense of doom, the threat that everything’s going to be smashed up, even if it is, what, forty generations away? Knowing that – whatever it is – is coming at all . . . And if you believe that humans can’t survive indefinitely off Earth, then I guess you believe there is nowhere to run . . . A lot of people surely must have that feeling of futility.’

  That angered her. She pressed her small face close to his. ‘Don’t you tell me how people must be feeling. You aren’t from this age. You don’t know us. You don’t know anything. Anyhow, I don’t care about other people. I care about my daughter. And this isn’t about the deep future, or your forgotten past. This is all about a child grieving for a father she lost too young – and then finding out about you, Malenfant. A man in the coldsleep vault who is still famous after four hundred years. Remembered, as she wants her father to be remembered. And a man who, as she found when she read up about you, used to speak about how humanity could cover the Galaxy, and live for ever. The psychology is obvious, isn’t it?’ She turned away. ‘I couldn’t stop her volunteering to mentor you. I wouldn’t have, if I could. But personally I despise you and your foolish dreams. Nothing is infinite – not this world, or even the future. You and your kind and your expansive greed brought humanity as close to extinction as any Destroyer. And now here you are, a relic, in my time. My home.’