3

He landed at a big airport in southern England, and was driven north and east to a town the escorts called Faversham, beyond which the roads and bridges were flooded. He had arranged to come unannounced, and his escort here was a police team that reminded him more of UNTA security units back home than of his Swiss escort: eight men and two women, silent, staring, full of themselves. When they had heard what he wanted to do, they had wanted to hunt for Hiroko by bringing people in to ask about her; Nirgal was sure that would put her in hiding, and he insisted on going out without fanfare to look for her. Eventually he convinced them.

They drove in a gray dawn, down to a new seafront, right there among buildings: in some places there were lines of stacked sandbags between soggy walls, in other places just wet streets, running off under dark water that spread for as far as he could see. Some planks were thrown here and there over mud and puddles.

Then on the far side of one line of sandbags was brown water without any buildings beyond, and a number of rowboats tied to a grille covering a window half awash in dirty foam. Nirgal followed one of the escorts into one big rowboat, and greeted a wiry red-faced man, wearing a dirty cap pulled low over his forehead. A kind of water policeman, apparently. The man shook his hand limply and then they were off, rowing over opaque water, followed by three more boats containing the rest of Nirgal’s worried-looking guards. Nirgal’s oarsman said something, and Nirgal had to ask him to repeat it; it was as if the man only had half his tongue. “Is that Cockney, your dialect?”

“Cockney.” The man laughed.

Nirgal laughed too, shrugged. It was a word he remembered from a book, he didn’t know what it meant really. He had heard a thousand different kinds of English before, but this was the real thing, presumably, and he could hardly understand it. The man spoke more slowly, which didn’t help. He was describing the neighborhood they were rowing away from, pointing; the buildings were inundated nearly to their rooflines. “Brents,” he said several times, pointing with his oar tips.

They came to a floating dock, tied to what looked like a highway sign, saying “OARE.” Several larger boats were tied to the dock, or swinging from anchor ropes nearby. The water policeman rowed to one of these boats, and indicated the metal ladder welded to its rusty side. “Go on.”

Nirgal climbed the side of the boat. On the deck stood a man so short he had to reach up to shake Nirgal’s hand, which he did with a crushing grip. “So you’re a Martian,” he said, in a voice that lilted like the oarsman’s, but was somehow much easier to understand. “Welcome aboard our little research vessel. Come to hunt for the old Asian lady, I hear?”

“Yes,” Nirgal said, his pulse quickening. “She’s Japanese.”

“Hmm.” The man frowned. “I only saw her the once, but I would have said she was Asian, Bangladeshi maybe. They’re everywhere since the flood. But who can tell, eh?”

Four of Nirgal’s escorts climbed aboard, and the boat’s owner pushed a button that started an engine, then spun the wheel in the wheelhouse, and watched forward closely as the boat’s rear pushed down in the water, and they vibrated, then moved away from the drowned line of buildings. It was overcast, the clouds very low, sea and sky both a brownish gray.

“We’ll go out over the wharf,” the little captain said.

Nirgal nodded. “What’s your name?”

“Bly’s the name. B-L-Y.”

“I’m Nirgal.”

The man nodded once.

“So this used to be the docks?” Nirgal asked.

“This was Faversham. Out here were the marshes— Ham, Magden— it was mostly marsh, all the way to the Isle of Sheppey. The Swale, this was. More fen than flow, if you know what I mean. Now you get out here on a windy day and it’s like the North Sea itself. And Sheppey is no more than that hill you see out there. A proper island now.”

“And that’s where you saw. . . .” He didn’t know what to call her.

“Your Asian grandma came in on the ferry from Vlissingen to Sheerness, other side of that island. Sheerness and Minster have the Thames for streets these days, and at high tide they have it for their roofs too. We’re over Magden Marsh now. We’ll go out around Shell Ness, the Swale’s too clotted.”

The mud-colored water around them sloshed this way and that. It was lined by long curving trails of yellowing foam. On the horizon the water grayed. Bly spun the wheel and they slapped over short steep waves. The boat rocked, and in its entirety moved up and down, up and down. Nirgal had never been in one before. Gray clouds hung over them, there was only a wedge of air between the cloud bottoms and the choppy water. The boat jostled this way and that, bobbing corklike. A liquid world.

“It’s a lot shorter around than it used to be,” Captain Bly said from the wheel. “If the water were clearer you could see Sayes Court, underneath us.”

“How deep is it?” Nirgal asked.

“Depends on the tide. This whole island was about an inch above sea level before the flood, so however much sea level has gone up, that’s how deep it is. What are they saying now, twenty-five feet? More than this old girl needs, that’s sure. She’s got a very shallow draft.”

He spun the wheel left, and the swells hit the boat from the side, so that it rolled in quick uneven jerks. He pointed at one gauge: “There, five meters. Harty Marsh. See that potato patch, the rough water there? That’ll come up at midtide, looks like a drowned giant buried in the mud.”

“What’s the tide now?”

“Near full. It’ll turn in half an hour.”

“It’s hard to believe Luna can pull the ocean around that much.”

“What, you don’t believe in gravity?”

“Oh, I believe in it— it’s crushing me right now. It’s just hard to believe something so far away has that much pull.”

“Hmm,” the captain said, looking out into a bank of mist blocking the view ahead. “I’ll tell you what’s hard to believe, it’s hard to believe that a bunch of icebergs can displace so much water that all the oceans of the world have gone up this far.”

“That is hard to believe.”

“It’s amazing it is. But the proof’s right here floating us. Ah, the mist has arrived.”

“Do you get more bad weather than you used to?”

The captain laughed. “That’d be comparing absolutes, I’d say.”

The mist blew past them in wet long veils, and the choppy waves smoked and hissed. It was dim. Suddenly Nirgal felt happy, despite the unease in his stomach during the deceleration at the bottom of every wave trough. He was boating on a water world, and the light was at a tolerable level at last. He could stop squinting for the first time since he had arrived on Earth.

The captain spun his big wheel again, and they ran with the waves directly behind them, northwest into the mouth of the Thames. Off to their left a brownish-green ridge emerged wetly out of greenish-brown water, buildings crowding its slope. “That’s Minster, or what’s left of it. It was the only high ground on the island. Sheerness is over there, you can see where the water is all shattered over it.”

Under the low ceiling of streaming mist Nirgal saw what looked like a reef of foaming white water, sloshing in every direction at once, black under the white foam. “That’s Sheerness?”

“Yeah.”

“Did they all move to Minster?”

“Or somewhere. Most of them. There’s some very stubborn people in Sheerness.”

Then the captain was absorbed in bringing the boat in through the drowned seafront of Minster. Where the line of rooftops emerged from the waves, a large building had had its roof and sea-facing wall removed, and now it functioned as a little marina, its three remaining walls sheltering a patch of water and the upper floors at the back serving as dock. Three other fishing boats were moored there, and as they coasted in, some men on them looked up and waved.

“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.”

“Eh Karnasingh, eh Bly. Lovely day out innit?”

“Yeah.”

“Care for some scrod?”

The next big room was a kitchen, and a dining area jammed with tables and benches. Perhaps fifty people had sat down to eat, and Karna cried “Hey!” and loudly introduced Nirgal. Indistinct murmurs greeted him. People were busy eating: big bowls of fish stew, ladled out of enormous black pots that looked like they had been in use continuously for centuries. Nirgal sat to eat; the stew was good. The bread was as hard as the tabletop. The faces were rough, pocked, salted, reddened when not brown; Nirgal had never seen such vivid ugly countenances, banged and pulled by the harsh existence in Earth’s heavy drag. Loud chatter, waves of laughter, shouts; the generators could scarcely be heard. Afterward people came up to shake his hand and look at him. Several had met the Asian woman and her friends, and they described her enthusiastically. She hadn’t ever given them a name. Her English was good, slow and clear. “I thought she were Paki. Her eyes dint look quite Oriental if you know what I mean. Not like yours, you know, no little fold in there next the nose.”

“Epicanthic fold, you ignorant bugger.”

Nirgal felt his heart beating hard. It was hot in the room, hot and steamy and heavy. “What about the people with her?”

Some of those had been Oriental. Asians, except for one or two whites.

“Any tall ones?” Nirgal asked. “Like me?”

None. Still . . . if Hiroko’s group had come back to Earth, it seemed possible the younger ones would have stayed behind. Even Hiroko couldn’t have talked all of them into such a move. Would Frantz leave Mars, would Nanedi? Nirgal doubted it. Return to Earth in its hour of need . . . the older ones would go. Yes, it sounded like Hiroko; he could imagine her doing it, sailing the new coasts of Terra, organizing a reinhabitation. . . .

“They went over to Southend. They were going to work their way up the coast.”

Nirgal looked at Bly, who nodded; they could cross too.

But Nirgal’s escorts wanted to check on things first. They wanted a day to arrange things. Meanwhile Bly and his friends were talking about underwater salvage projects, and when Bly heard about the bodyguards’ proposed delay, he asked Nirgal if he wanted to see one such operation, taking place the next morning—”though it’s not a pretty business of course.” Nirgal agreed; the escorts didn’t object, as long as some of them came along. They agreed to do it.

So they spent the evening in the clammy noisy submarine warehouse, Bly and his friends rummaging for equipment Nirgal could use. And spent the night on short narrow beds in Bly’s boat, rocking as if in a big clumsy cradle.

• • •

The next morning they puttered through a light mist the color of Mars, pinks and oranges floating this way and that over slack glassy mauve water. The tide was near ebb, and the salvage crew and three of Nirgal’s escorts followed Bly’s larger craft in a trio of small open motorboats, maneuvering between chimney tops and traffic signs and power-line poles, conferring frequently. Bly had gotten out a tattered book of maps, and he called out the street names of Sheerness, navigating to specific warehouses or shops. Many of the warehouses in the wharf area had already been salvaged, apparently, but there were more warehouses and shops scattered through the blocks of flats behind the seafront, and one of these was their morning’s target: “Here we go; Two Carleton Lane.” It had been a jewelry store, next to a small market. “We’ll try for jewels and canned food, a good balance you might say.”

They moored to the top of a billboard and stopped their engines. Bly threw a small object on a cord overboard, and he and three of the other men gathered around a small AI screen set on Bly’s bridge dash. A thin cable paid out over the side, its reel creaking woefully. On the screen, the murky color image changed from brown to black to brown.

“How do you know what you’re seeing ?” Nirgal asked.

“We don’t.”

“But look, there’s a door, see?”

“No.”

Bly tapped at a small keypad under the screen. “In you go, thing. There. Now we’re inside. This should be the market.”

“Didn’t they have time to get their things out?” Nirgal asked.

“Not entirely. Everyone on the east coast of England had to move at once, almost, so there wasn’t enough transport to take more than what you could carry in your car. If that. A lot of people left their homes intact. So we pull the stuff worth pulling.”

“What about the owners?”

“Oh there’s a register. We contact the register and find people when we can, and charge them a salvage fee if they want the stuff. If they’re not on the register, we sell it on the island. People are wanting furniture and such. Here, look— we’ll see what that is.”

He pushed a key, and the screen got brighter. “Ah yeah. Refrigerator. We could use it, but it’s hell getting it up.”

“What about the house?”

“Oh we blow that up. Clean shot if we set the charges right. But not this morning. We’ll tag this and move on.”

They puttered away. Bly and another man continued to watch the screen, arguing mildly about where to go next. “This town wasn’t much even before the flood,” Bly explained to Nirgal. “Falling into the drink for a couple hundred years, ever since the empire ended.”

“Since the end of sail you mean,” the other man said.

“Same thing. The old Thames was used less and less after that, and all the little ports on the estuary began to go seedy. And that was a long time ago.”

Finally Bly killed the engine, looked at the others. In their whiskery faces Nirgal saw a curious mix of grim resignation and happy anticipation. “There then.”

The other men started getting out underwater gear:full wet suits, tanks, face masks, some full helmets. “We thought Eric’s’d fit you,” Bly said. “He was a giant.” He pulled a long black wet suit out of the crowded locker, one without feet or gloves, and only a hood and face mask rather than a complete helmet. “There’s booties of his too.”

“Let me try them on.”

So he and two of the men took off their clothes and pulled on the wet suits, sweating and puffing as they yanked the fabrics on and zipped up the tight collars. Nirgal’s wet suit turned out to have a triangular rip across the left side of the torso, which was lucky, as otherwise it might not have fit; it was very tight around the chest, though loose on his legs. One of the other divers, named Kev, taped up the V split with duct tape. “That’ll be all right then, for one dive anyway. But you see what happened to Eric, eh?” Tapping him on the side. “See you don’t get caught up in any of our cable.”

“I will.”

Nirgal felt his flesh crawl under the taped rip, which suddenly felt huge. Caught on a moving cable, pulled into concrete or metal, ka, what an agony— a fatal blow— how long would he have stayed conscious after that, a minute, two? Rolling in agony, in the dark. . . .

He pulled himself out of an intense recreation of Eric’s end, feeling shaken. They got a breathing rig attached to his upper arm and face mask, and abruptly he was breathing cold dry air, pure oxygen they said. Bly asked again about going down, as Nirgal was shivering slightly. “No no,” said Nirgal. “I’m good with cold, this water isn’t that cold. Besides I’ve already filled the suit with sweat.”

The other divers nodded, sweating themselves. Getting ready was hard work. The actual swimming was easier; down a ladder and, ah, yes, out of the crush of the g, into something very like Martian g, or lighter still; such a relief! Nirgal breathed in the cold bottled oxygen happily, almost weeping at the sudden freedom of his body, floating down through a comfortable dimness. Ah yes— his world on Earth was underwater.

Down deeper, things were as dark and amorphous as they had been on the screen, except for within the cones of light emanating from the other two men’s headlamps, which were obviously very strong. Nirgal followed above and behind them, getting the best view of all. The estuary water was cool, about 285 K Nirgal judged, but very little of it seeped in at the wrists and around the hood, and the water trapped inside the suit was soon so hot with his exertions that his cold hands and face (and left ribs) actually served to keep him from overheating.

The two cones of light shot this way and that as the two divers looked around. They were swimming along a narrow street. Seeing the buildings and the curbs, the sidewalks and streets, made the murky gray water look uncannily like the mist up on the surface.

Then they were floating before a three-story brick building, filling a narrow triangular space that pointed into an angled intersection of streets. Kev gestured for Nirgal to stay outside, and Nirgal was happy to oblige. The other diver had been holding a cable so thin it was scarcely visible, and now he swam into a doorway, pulling it behind him. He went to work attaching a small pulley to the doorway, and lining the cable through it. Time passed; Nirgal swam slowly around the wedge-shaped building, looking in second-story windows at offices, empty rooms, flats. Some furniture floated against the ceilings. A movement inside one of these rooms caused him to jerk away; he was afraid of the cable; but it was on the other side of the building. Some water seeped into his mouthpiece, and he swallowed it to get it out of the way. It tasted of salt and mud and plant life, and something unpleasant. He swam on.

Back at the doorway Kev and the other man were helping a small metal safe through the doorway. When it was clear they kicked upright, in place, waiting, until the cable rose almost directly overhead. Then they swam around the intersection like a clumsy ballet team, and the safe floated up to the surface and disappeared. Kev swam back inside, and came out kicking hard, holding two small bags. Nirgal kicked over and took one, and with big luxurious kicks pulsed up toward the boat. He surfaced into the bright light of the mist. He would have loved to go back down, but Bly did not want them in any longer, and so Nirgal threw his fins in the boat and climbed the ladder over the side. He was sweating as he sat on one bench, and it was a relief to strip the hood off his head, despite the way his hair was yanked back. The clammy air felt good against his skin as they helped him peel the wet suit off.

“Look at his chest will you, he’s like a greyhound.”

“Breathing vapors all his life.”

The mist almost cleared, dissipating to reveal a white sky, the sun a brighter white swath across it. The weight had come back into him, and he breathed deeply a few times to get his body back into that work rhythm. His stomach was queasy, and his lungs hurt a little at the peak of each inhalation. Things rocked a bit more than the slosh of the ocean surface would account for. The sky turned to zinc, the sun’s quadrant a harsh blinding glare. Nirgal stayed sitting, breathed faster and shallower.

“Did you like it?”

“Yes!” he said. “I wish it felt like that everywhere.”

They laughed at the thought. “Here have a cup.”

• • •

Perhaps going underwater had been a mistake. After that the g never felt right again. It was hard to breathe. The air down in the warehouse was so wet that he felt he could clench a fist and drink water from his hand. His throat hurt, and his lungs. He drank cup after cup of tea, and still he was thirsty. The gleaming walls dripped, and nothing the people said was comprehensible, it was all ay and eh and lor and da, nothing like Martian English. A different language. Now they all spoke different languages. Shakespeare’s plays had not prepared him for it.

He slept again in the little bed on Bly’s boat. The next day the escort gave the okay, and they motored out of Sheerness, and north across the Thames estuary, in a pink mist even thicker than the day before.

Out in the estuary there was nothing visible but mist and the sea. Nirgal had been in clouds before, especially on the west slope of Tharsis, where fronts ran up the rise of the bulge; but never of course while on water. And every time before the temperatures had been well below freezing, the clouds a kind of flying snow, very white and dry and fine, rolling over the land and coating it with white dust. Nothing at all like this liquid world, where there was very little difference between the choppy water and the mist gusting over it, the liquid and the gaseous phasing back and forth endlessly. The boat rocked in a violent irregular rhythm. Dark objects appeared in the margins of the mist, but Bly paid them no attention, keeping a sharp eye ahead through a window beaded with water to the point of opacity, and also watching a number of screens under the window.

Suddenly Bly killed the engine, and the boat’s rocking changed to a vicious side-to-side yaw. Nirgal held the side of the cabin and peered through the watery window, trying to see what had caused Bly to stop. “That’s a big ship for Southend,” Bly remarked, motoring on very slowly.

“Where?”

“Port beam.” He pointed to a screen, then off to the left. Nirgal saw nothing.

Bly brought them into a long low pier, with many boats moored to it on both sides. The pier ran north through the mist to the town of Southend-on-Sea, which ran up and disappeared in the mist covering a slope of buildings.

A number of men greeted Bly—”Lovely day eh?” “Brilliant”— and began to unload boxes from his hold.

Bly inquired about the Asian woman from Vlissingen, but the men shook their heads. “The Jap? She ain’t here, mate.”

“They’re saying in Sheerness she and her group came to Southend.”

“Why would they say that?”

“Because that’s what they think happened.”

“That’s what you get listening to people who live underwater.”

“The Paki grandma?” they said at the diesel fuel pump on the other side of the pier. “She went over to Shoeburyness, sometime back.”

Bly glanced at Nirgal. “It’s just a few miles east. If she were here, these men would know.”

“Let’s try it then,” Nirgal said.

So after refueling they left the pier, and puttered east through the mist. From time to time the building-covered hillside was visible to their left. They rounded a point, turned north. Bly brought them in to another floating dock, with many fewer boats than had been moored at Southend pier.

“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.

Finally Bly let off. “What is it?” Nirgal shouted.

“It’s the Cutty Sark!” Bly said, and threw his head back and laughed. “It was bolted down in Greenwich! Stuck in a park! Some mad bastards must have liberated it. What a brilliant idea. They must have towed it around the flood barrier. Look at her sail!”

The old clipper ship had four or five sails unfurled on each of the three masts, and a few triangular ones between the masts as well, and extending forward to the bowsprit. It was sailing in the midst of the ebb flow, and there was a strong wind behind it, so that it sliced through the foam and flotsam, splitting water away from its sharp bow in a quick succession of white waves. There were men standing in its rigging, Nirgal saw, most of them out leaning over the yardarms, waving one-armed at the ragged flotilla of motorboats as they passed through it. Pennants extended from the mast tops, a big blue flag with red crosses— when it came abreast of Bly’s boat, Bly hit the air-horn trigger again and again, and the men roared. A sailor out at the end of the Cutty Sark‘s mainsail yard waved at them with both hands, leaning his chest forward against the big polished cylinder of wood. Then he lost his balance, they all saw it happen, as if in slow motion; and with his mouth a round little O the sailor fell backward, dropping into the white water that foamed away from the ship’s side. The men on Bly’s boat shouted all together: “NO!” Bly cursed loudly and gunned his engine, which was suddenly loud in the absence of the air horn. The rear of the boat dug deep into the water, and then they were grumbling toward the man overboard, now one black dot among the rest, a raised arm waving frantically.

Boats everywhere were tooting, honking, blasting their horns; but the Cutty Sark never slowed. It sailed away at full speed, sails all taut-bellied when seen from behind, a beautiful sight. By the time they reached the fallen sailor, the stern of the clipper was low on the water to the east, its masts a cluster of white sail and black rigging, until it disappeared abruptly into another wall of mist.

“What a glorious sight,” one of the men was still repeating. “What a glorious sight.”

“Yeah yeah, glorious, here fish this poor bastard in.”

Bly threw the engine in reverse, then idled. They threw a ladder over the side, leaned over to help the wet sailor up the steps. Finally he made it over the rail, stood bent over in his soaking clothes, holding on to the rail, shivering. “Ah thanks,” he said between retches over the side. Kev and the other crew members got his wet clothes off him, wrapped him in thick dirty blankets.

“You’re a stupid fucking idiot,” Bly shouted down from the wheelhouse. “There you were about to sail the world on the Cutty Sark, and now here you are on The Bride of Faversham. You’re a stupid fucking idiot.”

“I know,” the man said between retches.

The men threw jackets over his back, laughing. “Silly fool, waving at us like that!” All the way back to Sheerness they proclaimed his ineptitude, while getting the bereft man dried and into the wind protection of the wheelhouse, dressed in spare clothes much too small for him. He laughed with them, cursed his luck, described the fall, reenacted coming loose. Back in Sheerness they helped him down into the submerged warehouse, and fed him hot stew, and pint after pint of bitter beer, meanwhile telling the people inside, and everyone who came down the ladder, all about his fall from grace. “Look here, this silly wanker fell off the Cutty Sark this afternoon, the clumsy bastard, when it was running down the tide under full sail to Tahiti!”

“To Pitcairn,” Bly corrected.

The sailor himself, extremely drunk, told his tale as often as his rescuers. “Just took me hands off for a second, and it gave a little lurch and I was flying. Flying in space. Didn’t think it would matter, I didn’t. Took me hands off all the time up the Thames. Oh one mo here, ‘scuse me, I’ve got to go spew.”

“Ah God she was a glorious sight she was, brilliant, really. More sail than they needed of course, it was just to go out in style, but God bless ‘em for that. Such a sight.”

Nirgal felt dizzy and bleak. The whole big room had gone a glossy dark, except in the exact spots where there were streaks of bright glare. Everything a chiaroscuro of jumbled objects, Brueghel in black-and-white, and so loud. “I remember the spring flood of thirteen, the North Sea in me living room—” “Ah no, not the flood of thirteen again, will you not go on about that again!”

He went to a partitioned room at one corner of the chamber, the men’s room, thinking he would feel better if he relieved himself. Inside the rescued sailor was on the floor of one of the stalls, retching violently. Nirgal retreated, sat down on the nearest bench to wait. A young woman passed him by, and reached out to touch him on the top of the head. “You’re hot!”

Nirgal held a palm to his forehead, tried to think about it. “Three hundred ten K,” he ventured. “Shit.”

“You’ve caught a fever,” she said.

One of his bodyguards sat beside him. Nirgal told him about his temperature, and the man said, “Will you ask your wristpad?”

Nirgal nodded, asked for a readout. 309 K. “Shit.”

“How do you feel?”

“Hot. Heavy.”

“We’d better get you to see someone.”

Nirgal shook his head, but a wave of dizziness came over him as he did. He watched the bodyguards calling to make arrangements. Bly came over, and they asked him questions.

“At night?” Bly said. More quiet talk. Bly shrugged; not a good idea, the shrug said, but possible. The bodyguards went on, and Bly tossed down the last of his pint and stood. His head was still at the same level as Nirgal’s, although Nirgal had slid down to rest his back against the table. A different species, a squat powerful amphibian. Had they known that, before the flood? Did they know it now?

People said good-bye, crushed or coddled his hand. Climbing the conning-tower ladder was painful work. Then they were out in the cool wet night, fog shrouding everything. Without a word Bly led them onto his boat, and he remained silent as he started the engines and unmoored the boat. Off they puttered over a low swell. For the first time the rocking over the waves made Nirgal really queasy. Nausea was worse than pain. He sat down beside Bly on a stool, and watched the gray cone of illuminated water and fog before their bow. When dark objects loomed out of the fog Bly would slow, even shove the engines into reverse. Once he hissed. This went on for a long time. By the time they docked in the streets of Faversham, Nirgal was too sick to say good-bye properly; he could only grasp Bly’s hand and look down briefly into the man’s blue eyes. Such faces. You could see people’s souls right there in their faces. Had they known that before? Then Bly was gone and they were in a car, humming through the night. Nirgal’s weight was increasing as it had during the descent in the elevator. Onto a plane, ascending in darkness, descending in darkness, ears popping painfully, nausea; they were in Berne and Sax was there by his side, a great comfort.

He was in a bed, very hot, his breathing wet and painful. Out one window, the Alps. The white breaking up out of the green, like death itself rearing up out of life, crashing through to remind him that viriditas was a green fuse that would someday explode back into nova whiteness, returning to the same array of elements it had been before the pattern dust devil had picked it up. The white and the green; it felt like the Jungfrau was shoving up his throat. He wanted to sleep, to get away from that feeling.

Sax sat at his side, holding his hand. “I think he needs to be in Martian gravity,” he was saying to someone who did not seem to be in the room. “It could be a form of altitude sickness. Or a disease vector. Or allergies. A systemic response. Edema, anyway. Let’s take him up immediately in a ground-to-space plane, and get him into a g ring at Martian g. If I’m right it will help, if not it won’t hurt.”

Nirgal tried to speak, but couldn’t catch his breath. This world had infected him— crushed him— cooked him in steam and bacteria. A blow to the ribs: he was allergic to Earth. He squeezed Sax’s hand, pulled in a breath like a knife to the heart. “Yes,” he gasped, and saw Sax squint. “Home, yes.”