Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [68]
Out the lower window they caught a glimpse of the dike when they were just above its height, and there was the sea right there beyond it, lipping at the very top of the berm. The uncanny sight remained burned in their minds as the helo banked and they lost the view.
They made a rising turn over the island, and the view came back and went away, came back and went away. Joe leaned from Anna’s arms to the window, trying to see better. Nick was looking out the same window from the seat behind. The sea was a dark brown, and on the island everything was soaked, gray-green fields lined with standing water—trees, rooftops, the plaza with the reflecting pool, all deep in shadow; then the ocean again, clearly as high as the dike. “There’s where we were staying!” Nick called, pointing.
They banked in a gyre that cut through the bottom layers of the clouds. Dark, light, rain, clear, they flew from one state to the next. Rain skittered across the outside of the glass in sudden streaming deltas. They saw the ferries at the dock on the north side of the island; they were casting off, and Drepung shouted something up to the pilots. He gave the Quiblers a thumbs-up. Then the helo continued its curve, and they saw other outer islands of the Sundarban archipelago, many of them submerged by the flood already and no more than shallow reefs. The channels between these were a pale brown, flecked with dirty white.
They curved back over Khembalung and saw that the dike had been breached on its southwest curve, where it faced the battering of the storm surf. Brown water, heavily flecked with foam, poured whitely down onto the fields below the break, in its rush clearly ripping the gap in the dike wider. Soon Khembalung would look like all the other Sundarbans.
Now Joe crawled onto Charlie’s lap and took a death grip on Charlie’s neck, moaning or keening, it was hard to hear in all the racket, but somehow the sound of it cut through everything else. Charlie forced the hands on his neck to loosen their grip. “It’s okay!” he said loudly to the boy. “It’ll be okay! They’re all okay! They’re on the boats. Big boats! The people were on the boats! All the people were on the boats.”
“Da, da, da,” Joe moaned, or maybe it was “Na, da, na.” He put a hand on the window.
“Oh my God,” Charlie said.
Over Joe’s head he could see again the gap where the ocean was pouring in; it was already much wider than before. It looked like the whole southwest curve would go. Already most of the interior fields were sheeted with foamy water.
Ahead of them the pilot and copilot were shouting into their headsets. The helo tilted, spiraled higher. Clouds interrupted their view below. A loud buffeted ascent, then they caught sight of Khembalung again, from higher than before; through a break in the clouds it looked like a shallow green bowl, submerged in brown water until only an arc of the bowl’s rim remained in air.
Charlie said, “Don’t, Joe! I have to breathe.”
“Ah gone! Ah gone!”
Abruptly the helicopter tilted away, and all they could see outside the window was cloud. The Sundarbans were gone, all their mangrove swamps drowned, all their tigers swimming. The helo flew off like a blown leaf. Joe buried his face in Charlie’s chest and sobbed.
No one thinks it will ever happen to them until suddenly they are in the thick of it, thoroughly surprised to be there.
A tornado in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the third and catastrophic year of drought in Ireland; major floods on the Los Angeles River: these kinds of anomalies kept happening, at a rate of more than one a day around the world. Sooner or later almost everyone got caught up in some event, or lived in the midst of some protracted anomaly, for the weather events were both acute and chronic, a matter of hours or a matter of years.
Still it was hard to imagine it would ever happen to you.
At the poles the results were particularly profound, because of major and rapid changes in the ice.