“Who’s this?” one of them said as Bly 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.”
Bly 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.” Bly 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, Bly 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 reoccupied them.”
“Reoccupied them?”
“You’ll see.”
Bly 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; Bly, 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 Karna! 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, machinery 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, Bly’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.”
Nirgal asked about Hiroko. Karna 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.”