Blue Mars(83)

“That Chinese gang?” a toothless old man cried. “Gone up to Pig’s Bay they have! Gave us a greenhouse! Some kind of church.”

“Pig’s Bay’s just the next pier,” Bly said, looking thoughtful as he wheeled them away from the dock.

So they motored north. The coastline here was entirely composed of drowned buildings. They had built so close to the sea! Clearly there had been no reason to fear any change in sea level. And then it had happened; and now this strange amphibious zone, an intertidal civilization, wet and rocking in the mist.

A cluster of buildings gleamed at their windows. They had been filled by the clear bubble material, pumped out and occupied, their upstairs just above the foamy waves, their downstairs just below. Bly brought the boat in to a set of linked floating docks, greeted a group of women in smocks and yellow rain slickers mending a big black net. He cut his engine: “Has the Asian lady been to see you too then?”

“Oh yeah. She’s down inside, there in the building at the end.”

Nirgal felt his pulse jarring through him. His balance had left him, he had to hold on to the rail. Over the side, onto the dock. Down to the last building, a seafront boardinghouse or something like, now much broken up and glimmering in all the cracks; air inside; filled by a bubble. Green plants, vague and blurry seen through sloshing gray water. He had a hand on Bly’s shoulder. The little man led him in a door and down narrow stairs, into a room with one whole wall exposed to the sea, like a dirty aquarium.

A diminutive woman in a rust-colored jumpsuit came through the far door. White-haired, black-eyed, quick and precise; birdlike. Not Hiroko. She stared at them.

“Are you the one came over from Vlissingen?” Bly asked, after glancing up at Nirgal. “The one that’s been building these submariners?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “May I help you?” She had a high voice, a British accent. She stared at Nirgal without expression. There were other people in the room, more coming in. She looked like the face he had seen in the cliffside, in Medusa Vallis. Perhaps there was another Hiroko, a different one, wandering the two planets building things. . . .

Nirgal shook his head. The air was like a greenhouse gone bad. The light, so dim. He could barely get back up the stairs. Bly had made their farewells. Back into the bright mist. Back onto the boat. Chasing wisps. A ruse, to get him out of Bern. Or an honest mistake. Or a simple fool’s errand.

Bly sat him down in the boat’s cabin, next to a rail. “Ah well.”

Pitching and yawing, through the mist, which closed back down. Dark dim day on the water, sloshing through the phase change where water and mist turned into each other, sandwiched between them. Nirgal got a little drowsy. No doubt she was back on Mars. Doing her work there in her usual secrecy, yes. It had been absurd to think otherwise. When he got back he would find her. Yes: it was a goal, a task he gave himself. He would find her and make her come back out into the open. Make sure she had survived. It was the only way to be sure, the only way to remove this horrible weight from his heart. Yes: he would find her.

Then as they motored on over the choppy water, the mist lifted. Low gray clouds rushed overhead, dropping swirls of rain into the waves. The tide was ebbing now, and as they crossed the great estuary the flow of the Thames was released full force. The gray-brown surface of the water was broken to mush, waves coming from all directions at once, a wild bouncing surface of foamy dark water, all carried rapidly east, out into the North Sea. And then the wind turned and poured over the tide, and all the waves were suddenly rushing out to sea together. Among the long cakes of foam were floating objects of all kinds: boxes, furniture, roofs, entire houses, capsized boats, pieces of wood. Flotsam and jetsam. Bly’s crew stood on the deck, leaning over the rails with grapnels and binoculars, calling back to him to avoid things or to try to approach them. They were absorbed in the work. “What is all of this stuff?” Nirgal asked Bly.

“It’s London,” Bly said. “It’s fucking London, washing out to sea.”

The cloud bottoms rushed east over their heads. Looking around Nirgal saw many other small boats on the tossing water of the great rivermouth, salvaging the flotsam or just fishing. Bly waved to some as they passed through, tooted at others. Horn blasts floated on the wind over the gray-speckled estuary, apparently signaling messages, as Bly’s crews commented on each.

Then Kev exclaimed, “Hey what’s that now!” pointing upstream.

Out of a fog bank covering the mouth of the Thames had emerged a ship with sails, many sails, sails square-rigged on three masts in the archetypal configuration, deeply familiar to Nirgal even though he had never seen it before. A chorus of horn blasts greeted this apparition— mad toots, long sustained blasts, all joining together and sustaining longer and longer, like a neighborhood of dogs roused and baying at night, warming to their task. Above them exploded the sharp penetrating blast of Bly’s air horn, joining the chorus— Nirgal had never heard such a shattering sound, it hurt his ears! Thicker air, denser sound— Bly was grinning, his fist shoved against the air-horn button— the men of the crew all standing at the rail or on it, Nirgal’s escorts as well, screaming soundlessly at the sudden vision.