Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [103]
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.