Читать книгу The Drowned World - J. G. Ballard, John Lanchester, Robert MacFarlane - Страница 7

SCREECHING LIKE A dispossessed banshee, a large hammer-nosed bat soared straight out of one of the narrow inlets off the creek and swerved straight towards the cutter. Its sonar confused by the labyrinth of giant webs spun across the inlet by the colonies of wolf spiders, it missed the wire hood above Kerans’ head by only a few feet, and then sailed away along the line of submerged office blocks, gliding in and out of the huge sail-like fronds of the fern-trees sprouting from their roofs. Suddenly, as it passed one of the projecting cornices, a motionless stone-headed creature snapped out and plucked the bat from the air. There was a brief piercing squawk and Kerans caught a glimpse of the crushed wings clamped in the lizard’s jaws. Then the reptile shrank back invisibly among the foliage.

All the way down the creek, perched in the windows of the office blocks and department stores, the iguanas watched them go past, their hard frozen heads jerking stiffly. They launched themselves into the wake of the cutter, snapping at the insects dislodged from the air-weed and rotting logs, then swam through the windows and clambered up the staircases to their former vantage-points, piled three deep across each other. Without the reptiles, the lagoons and the creeks of office blocks half-submerged in the immense heat would have had a strange dream-like beauty, but the iguanas and basilisks brought the fantasy down to earth. As their seats in the one-time boardrooms indicated, the reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life.

Looking up at the ancient impassive faces, Kerans could understand the curious fear they roused, re-kindling archaic memories of the terrifying jungles of the Paleocene, when the reptiles had gone down before the emergent mammals, and sense the implacable hatred one zoological class feels towards another that usurps it.

At the end of the creek they entered the next lagoon, a wide circle of dark green water almost half a mile in diameter. A lane of red plastic buoys marked a channel towards an opening on the far side. The cutter had a draught of little more than a foot, and as they moved along through the flat water, the sun slanting down behind them opening up the submerged depths, they could see the clear outlines of five-and six-storey buildings looming like giant ghosts, here and there a moss-covered roof breaking the surface as the swell rolled past it.

Sixty feet below the cutter a straight grey promenade stretched away between the buildings, the remains of some former thoroughfare, the rusting humped shells of cars still standing by the kerb. Many of the lagoons in the centre of the city were surrounded by an intact ring of buildings, and consequently little silt had entered them. Free of vegetation, apart from a few drifting clumps of Sargasso weed, the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original.

The bulk of the city had long since vanished, and only the steel-supported buildings of the central commercial and financial areas had survived the encroaching flood waters. The brick houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely below the drifting tides of silt. Where these broke surface giant forests reared up into the burning dull-green sky, smothering the former wheatfields of temperate Europe and North America. Impenetrable Mato Grossos sometimes three hundred feet high, they were a nightmare world of competing organic forms returning rapidly to their Paleozoic past, and the only avenues of transit for the United Nations military units were through the lagoon systems that had superimposed themselves on the former cities. But even these were now being clogged with silt and then submerged.

Kerans could remember the unending succession of green twilights that had settled behind them as he and Riggs moved slowly northward across Europe, leaving one city after another, the miasmic vegetation swamping the narrow canals and crowding from roof-top to roof-top.

Now they were to abandon yet another city. Despite the massive construction of the main commercial buildings, it consisted of little more than three principal lagoons, surrounded by a nexus of small lakes fifty yards in diameter and a network of narrow creeks and inlets which wound off, roughly following the original street-plan of the city, into the outlying jungle. Here and there they vanished altogether or expanded into the steaming sheets of open water that were the residues of the former oceans. In turn these gave way to the archipelagoes that coalesced to form the solid jungles of the southern massif.

The military base set up by Riggs and his platoon, which harboured the biological testing station, was in the most southerly of the three lagoons, sheltered by a number of the tallest buildings of the city, thirty-storey blocks in what had once been the down-town financial sector.

As they crossed the lagoon the yellow-striped drum of the floating base was on its sun-ward side, almost obscured in the reflected light, the rotating blades of the helicopter on its roof throwing brilliant lances across the water at them. Two hundred yards down shore was the smaller white-painted hull of the biological testing station, moored against a broad hump-backed building which had formerly been a concert hall.

Kerans gazed up at the rectangular cliffs, enough of the windows intact to remind him of the illustrations of sundazzled promenades at Nice, Rio and Miami he had read about as a child in the encyclopaedias at Camp Byrd. Curiously, though, despite the potent magic of the lagoon worlds and the drowned cities, he had never felt any interest in their contents, and never bothered to identify in which of the cities he was stationed.

Dr. Bodkin, twenty-five years his senior, had actually lived in several of them, both in Europe and America, and spent most of his spare time punting around the remoter water-ways, searching out former libraries and museums. Not that they contained anything other than his memories.

Perhaps it was this absence of personal memories that made Kerans indifferent to the spectacle of these sinking civilisations. He had been born and brought up entirely within what had once been known as the Arctic Circle—now a sub-tropical zone with an annual mean temperature of eighty-five degrees—and had come southward only on joining one of the ecological surveys in his early 30’s. The vast swamps and jungles had been a fabulous laboratory, the submerged cities little more than elaborate pedestals.

Apart from a few older men such as Bodkin there was no-one who remembered living in them—and even during Bodkin’s childhood the cities had been beleaguered citadels, hemmed in by enormous dykes and disintegrated by panic and despair, reluctant Venices to their marriage with the sea. Their charm and beauty lay precisely in their emptiness, in the strange junction of two extremes of nature, like a discarded crown overgrown by wild orchids.

The succession of gigantic geophysical upheavals which had transformed the Earth’s climate had made their first impact some sixty or seventy years earlier. A series of violent and prolonged solar storms lasting several years caused by a sudden instability in the Sun had enlarged the Van Allen belts and diminished the Earth’s gravitational hold upon the outer layers of the ionosphere. As these vanished into space, depleting the Earth’s barrier against the full impact of solar radiation, temperatures began to climb steadily, the heated atmosphere expanding outwards into the ionosphere where the cycle was completed.

All over the world, mean temperatures rose by a few degrees each year. The majority of tropical areas rapidly became uninhabitable, entire populations migrating north or south from temperatures of a hundred and thirty and a hundred and forty degrees. Once-temperate areas became tropical, Europe and North America sweltering under continuous heat waves, temperatures rarely falling below a hundred degrees. Under the direction of the United Nations, the colonisation began of the Antarctic plateau and of the northern borders of the Canadian and Russian continents.

Over this initial period of twenty years a gradual adjustment of life took place to meet the altered climate. A slackening of the previous tempo was inevitable, and there was little spare energy available to cut back the encroaching jungles of the equatorial region. Not only was the growth of all plant forms accelerated, but the higher levels of radioactivity increased the rate at which mutations occurred. The first freak botanical forms appeared, recalling the giant tree-ferns of the Carboniferous period, and there was a drastic upsurge of all lower plant and animal forms.

The arrival of these distant forbears was overlayed by the second major geophysical upheaval. The continued heating of the atmosphere had begun to melt the polar ice-caps. The entrained ice-seas of the Antarctic plateau broke and dissolved, tens of thousands of glaciers around the Arctic Circle, from Greenland and Northern Europe, Russia and North America, poured themselves into the sea, millions of acres of permafrost liquefied into gigantic rivers.

Here again the rise of global water-levels would have been little more than a few feet, but the huge discharging channels carried with them billions of tons of top-soil. Massive deltas formed at their mouths, extending the continental coastlines and damming up the oceans. Their effective spread shrank from two-thirds of the world’s area to only slightly more than half.

Driving the submerged silt before them, the new seas completely altered the shape and contours of the continents. The Mediterranean contracted into a system of inland lakes, the British Isles was linked again with northern France. The Middle West of the United States, filled by the Mississippi as it drained the Rocky Mountains, became an enormous gulf opening into the Hudson Bay, while the Caribbean Sea was transformed into a desert of silt and salt flats. Europe became a system of giant lagoons, centred on the principal low-lying cities, inundated by the silt carried southwards by the expanding rivers.

During the next thirty years the pole-ward migration of populations continued. A few fortified cities defied the rising water-levels and the encroaching jungles, building elaborate sea-walls around their perimeters, but one by one these were breached. Only within the former Arctic and Antarctic Circles was life tolerable. The oblique incidence of the sun’s rays provided a shield against the more powerful radiation. Cities on higher ground in mountainous areas nearer the Equator had been abandoned, despite their cooler temperatures, because of the diminished atmospheric protection.

It was this last factor which provided its own solution to the problem of re-settling the migrant populations of the new Earth. The steady decline in mammalian fertility, and the growing ascendancy of amphibian and reptile forms best adapted to an aquatic life in the lagoons and swamps, inverted the ecological balances, and by the time of Kerans’ birth at Camp Byrd, a city of ten thousand in Northern Greenland, it was estimated that fewer than five million people were still living on the polar caps.

The birth of a child had become a comparative rarity, and only one marriage in ten yielded any offspring. As Kerans sometimes reminded himself, the genealogical tree of mankind was systematically pruning itself, apparently moving backwards in time, and a point might ultimately be reached where a second Adam and Eve found themselves alone in a new Eden.

Rigg noticed him smiling to himself at this conceit. “What’s amusing you, Robert? Another of your obscure jokes? Don’t try to explain it to me.”

“I was just casting myself in a new role.” Kerans looked out over the ramp at the office blocks sliding past twenty feet away, the wash from the cutter splashing through the open windows along the water-line. The sharp tang of wet lime contrasted freshly with the over-sweet odours of the vegetation. Macready had taken them into the shadow of the buildings and it was pleasantly cool behind the breaking spray.

Across the lagoon he could see the portly bare-chested figure of Dr. Bodkin on the starboard bridge of the testing station, the Paisley cummerbund around his waist and the green celluloid shade shielding his eyes making him look like a riverboat gambler on his morning off. He was plucking the orange-sized berries from the ferns overhanging the station and tossing them up at the cluttering marmosets dangling from the branches above his head, egging them on with playful shouts and whistles. Fifty feet away, on a projecting cornice, a trio of iguanas watched with stony disapproval, whipping their tails slowly from side to side in a gesture of impatience.

Macready swung the tiller, and they pivoted in a fan of spray into the lee of a tall white-faced building which lifted a full twenty storeys out of the water. The roof of an adjacent smaller block served as a jetty, next to which was moored a rusty white-hulled power cruiser. The raked perspex windows of the driving cabin were cracked and stained, and the exhaust vents leaked a scaly oil on to the water.

As the cutter jockeyed in behind the power cruiser under Macready’s expert hand, they clambered over to the wire door, jumped down on to the jetty and crossed a narrow metal gangway that led into the apartment block. The walls of the corridor were slick with moisture, huge patches of mould feeding on the plaster, but the elevator was still working, powered by an emergency diesel. They rose slowly towards the roof, and stepped out on to the upper level of the duplex, then walked down a service corridor to the outer deck.

Directly below them was the lower level, a small swimming pool with a covered patio, bright deck-chairs drawn up in the shade by the diving board. Yellow Venetian blinds masked the windows around three sides of the pool, but through the vanes they could see the cool shadows in the interior lounge, the glint of cut-glass and silver on the occasional tables. In the dim light under the striped blue awning at the rear of the patio was a long chromium counter, as inviting as an air-conditioned bar seen from a dusty street, glasses and decanters reflected in a diamond-paned mirror. Everything in this private haven seemed clean and discreet, thousands of miles away from the fly-blown vegetation and tepid jungle water twenty storeys below.

Beyond the far end of the pool, screened by an ornamental balcony, was a wide, open view of the lagoon, the city emerging from the encroaching jungle, flat sheets of silver water expanding towards the green blur along the southern horizon. Massive silt banks lifted their backs through the surface, a light yellow fur along their spines marking the emergence of the first giant bamboo groves.

The helicopter rose from its platform on the roof of the base and arced upwards into the air towards them, the pilot swinging the tail as he changed direction, then roared overhead, two men in the open hatchway searching the rooftops with binoculars.

Beatrice Dahl lay back on one of the deck-chairs, her long oiled body gleaming in the shadows like a sleeping python. The pink-tipped fingers of one hand rested lightly on an ice-filled glass on a table beside her, while the other hand turned slowly through the pages of a magazine. Wide blue-black sunglasses hid her smooth sleek face, but Kerans noted the slightly sullen pout of her firm lower lip. Presumably Riggs had annoyed her, forcing her to accept the logic of his argument.

The Colonel paused at the rail, looking down at the beautiful supple body with ungrudging approval. Noticing him, Beatrice pulled off her sunglasses, then tightened the loose back-straps of her bikini under her arms. Her eyes glinted quietly.

“All right, you two, get on with it. I’m not a strip show.”

Riggs chuckled and trotted down the white metal stairway, Kerans at his heels, wondering how he was going to persuade Beatrice to leave her private sanctuary.

“My dear Miss Dahl, you should be flattered that I keep coming to see you,” Riggs told her, lifting back the awning and sitting down on one of the chairs. “Besides, as the military governor of this area”—here he winked playfully at Kerans—“I have certain responsibilities towards you. And vice versa.”

Beatrice regarded him briefly with a jaundiced eye and reached out to turn up the volume of the radiogram behind her. “Oh God…” She muttered some further, less polite imprecation under her breath and looked up at Kerans. “And what about you, Robert? What brings you out so early in the day?”

Kerans shrugged, smiling at her amiably. “I missed you.”

“Good boy. I thought perhaps that the gauleiter here had been trying to frighten you with his horror stories.”

“Well, he has, as a matter of fact.” Kerans took the magazine propped against Beatrice’s knee and leafed through it idly. It was a forty-year-old issue of Paris Vogue, from its icy pages evidently kept somewhere in cold storage. He dropped it on the green-tiled floor. “Bea, it looks as if we’ll all have to leave here in a couple of days’ time. The Colonel and his men are pulling out for good. We can’t very well stay on after he’s gone.”

“We?” she repeated dryly. “I didn’t know there was any chance of your staying behind?”

Kerans glanced involuntarily at Riggs, who was watching him steadily. “There isn’t,” he said firmly. “You know what I mean. There’ll be a lot to do in the next forty-eight hours. Try not to complicate things by making a last emotional stand.”

Before the girl could cut back at Kerans, Riggs added smoothly: “The temperature is still going up, Miss Dahl, you won’t find it easy to stand one hundred and thirty degrees when the fuel for your generator runs out. The big Equatorial rain belts are moving northward, and they’ll be here in a couple of months. When they leave, and the cloud cover goes, the water in that pool—“he indicated the tank of steaming, insect-strewn fluid—” will damn’ nearly boil. What with the Type X Anopheles, skin cancers and the iguanas shrieking all night down below, you’ll get precious little sleep.” Closing his eyes, he added pensively: “That is, assuming that you still want any.”

At this last remark the girl’s mouth fretted slightly. Kerans realised that the quiet ambiguity in Riggs’ voice when he asked how the biologist slept had not been directed at his relationship with Beatrice.

The Colonel went on: “In addition, some of the human scavengers driven northward out of the Mediterranean lagoons won’t be too easy to deal with.”

Beatrice tossed her long black hair over one shoulder. “I’ll keep the door locked, Colonel.”

Irritated, Kerans snapped: “For God’s sake, Beatrice, what are you trying to prove? These self-destructive impulses may be amusing to play with now, but when we’ve gone they won’t be so funny. The Colonel’s only trying to help you—he doesn’t really give a hoot whether you stay behind or not.”

Riggs let out a brief laugh. “Well, I wouldn’t say that. But if the thought of my personal concern worries you so much you can just put it down to duty.”

“That’s interesting, Colonel. I’ve always understood that our duty was to stay on here as long as possible and make every sacrifice necessary to that end. Or at least”—here the familiar gleam of sharp humour crossed her eyes—“that was the reason my grandfather was given when the Government confiscated most of his property.” She noticed Riggs peering over his shoulder at the bar. “What’s the matter, Colonel? Looking for your punka-wallah? I’m not going to get you a drink, if that’s what you’re after. I think you men only come up here to booze.”

Riggs stood up. “All right, Miss Dahl. I give in. I’ll see you later, Doctor.” He saluted Beatrice with a smile. “Some time tomorrow I’ll send the cutter over to collect your gear, Miss Dahl.”

When Riggs had gone Kerans lay back in his chair, watching the helicopter circle over the adjacent lagoon. Now and then it dived along the water’s edge, the down-draught from its rotor blades beating through the flapping fronds of the fern-trees, driving the iguanas across the rooftops. Beatrice brought a drink from the bar and sat down on the chair at his feet.

“I wish you wouldn’t analyse me in front of that man, Robert.” She handed him the drink and then leaned against his knees, resting her chin on one wrist. Usually she looked sleek and well-fed, but her expression today seemed tired and wistful.

“I’m sorry,” Kerans apologised. “Perhaps I was really analysing myself. Riggs’ ultimatum came as a bit of a surprise; I wasn’t expecting to leave so soon.”

“You are going to leave, then?”

Kerans paused. The automatic player in the radiogram switched from Beethoven’s Pastoral to the Seventh, Toscanini giving way to Bruno Walter. All day, without a break, it played through the cycle of nine symphonies. He searched for an answer, the change of mood, to the sombre opening motif of the Seventh, overlaying his indecision.

“I suppose I want to, but I haven’t yet found an adequate reason. Satisfying one’s emotional needs isn’t enough. There’s got to be a more valid motive. Perhaps these sunken lagoons simply remind me of the drowned world of my uterine childhood—if so, the best thing is to leave straight away. Everything Riggs says is true. There’s little hope of standing up to the rainstorms and the malaria.”

He placed his hand on her forehead, feeling her temperature like a child’s. “What did Riggs mean when he said you wouldn’t sleep well? That was the second time this morning he mentioned it.”

Beatrice looked away for a moment. “Oh, nothing. I’ve just had one or two peculiar nightmares recently. A lot of people get them. Forget it. Tell me, Robert, seriously—if I decide to stay on here, would you? You could share this apartment.”

Kerans grinned. “Trying to tempt me, Bea? What a question. Remember, not only are you the most beautiful woman here, but you’re the only woman. Nothing is more essential than a basis for comparison. Adam had no aesthetic sense, or he would have realised that Eve was a pretty haphazard piece of work.”

“You are being frank today.” Beatrice stood up and went over to the edge of the pool. She swept her hair back off her forehead with both hands, her long supple body gleaming against the sunlight. “But is there as much urgency as Riggs claims? We’ve got the cruiser.”

“It’s a wreck. The first serious storm will split it open like a rusty can.”

Nearing noon, the heat on the terrace had become uncomfortable and they left the patio and went indoors. Double Venetian blinds filtered a thin sunlight into the low wide lounge, and the refrigerated air was cool and soothing. Beatrice stretched out on a long pale-blue elephant hide sofa, one hand playing with the fleecy pile of the carpet. The apartment had been one of her grandfather’s pieds à terre, and Beatrice’s home since her parents’ death shortly after her birth. She had been brought up under the supervision of the grandfather, who had been a lonely, eccentric tycoon (the sources of his wealth Kerans had never established: when he asked Beatrice, shortly after he and Riggs stumbled upon her penthouse eyrie, she replied succinctly: “Let’s say he was in money”) and a great patron of the arts in his earlier days. His tastes leaned particularly towards the experimental and bizarre, and Kerans often wondered how far his personality and its strange internal perspectives had been carried forward into his grand-daughter. Over the mantelpiece was a huge painting by the early 20th-century Surrealist, Delvaux, in which ashen-faced women danced naked to the waist with dandified skeletons in tuxedos against a spectral bone-like landscape. On another wall one of Max Ernst’s self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles screamed silently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious.

For a few moments Kerans stared quietly at the dim yellow annulus of Ernst’s sun glowering through the exotic vegetation, a curious feeling of memory and recognition signalling through his brain. Far more potent than the Beethoven, the image of the archaic sun burned against his mind, illuminating the fleeting shadows that darted fitfully through its profoundest deeps.

“Beatrice.”

She looked up at him as he walked across to her, a light frown crossing her eyes. “What’s the matter, Robert?”

Kerans hesitated, suddenly aware that, however brief and imperceptible, a moment of significant time had elapsed, carrying him forward with its passage into a zone of commitment from which he would not be able to withdraw.

“You realise that if we let Riggs go without us we don’t merely leave here later. We stay.”