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clouds.

6
    A portly man, white, maybe sixty, his head hairless, his face round and pale, stood up before Thandie. “You’re ready to go, Dr. Jones?” He turned to face the audience. “You all know me, I think. I’m Edward Kenzie, chair of LaRei.” His accent was a harsh Chicagoan. He spoke without amplification, but so small was the group, so quiet the empty library, Patrick had no trouble hearing him. “You may not know my little girl, Kelly.” He pointed to the kid who was playing with Holle. “But in a sense she’s the reason we are here today.” His fingers were fat and soft, Patrick noticed, and the tips were stained yellow with nicotine, a strange, atavistic sight.
    Kenzie went on, “Many of us heard Dr. Jones speak to the IPCC seven years ago. Well, as a fellow Chicagoan I’ve followed her career since then, and the reports and papers she’s been filing, and I can tell you that every prediction she made then has come true, near as damn it, and every prediction many of us made about the inaction of our governments has dismayingly come true also. Now we’ve asked her to speak to us again, to give us an update on her IPCC talk, so to speak. And then I want to suggest a way forward for us, as we move on from this point. Dr. Jones.” And he sat down with arms folded, his expression intent.
    Thandie glanced around the room. She looked hardy, weather-beaten, a field scientist. “Thanks. I’m Thandie Jones. My specialisms are oceanography and climatology. Formally I’m attached to the NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which fortuitously has an office in Boulder, Colorado, so still above the rising sea. I was present at one of the initial high-profile flooding events, London 2016, and since then I’ve witnessed a few more of the dramatic events that have followed—many of them hydrological catastrophes without precedent in historical times . . .”
    She spoke of a worldwide community of climatologists and other specialists observing the rapidly evolving events. There was still formal publication, of a sort, still seminars, still something resembling the scientific process going on. But mostly all they could do was log the Earth’s huge convulsion as it happened, and try to guess what would come next.
    “What I’m paid to do is produce predictive models of the ocean and the climate, to assist the Denver government in its planning for the future. What I’m notorious for, as I guess you know, is my speculation as to the cause of the global flooding event, and its eventual outcome.”
    She turned to her spinning crystal ball, the turning, three-dimensional Earth, a fool-the-eye illusion wrought by spinning screens, lenses and mirrors, and multiple projectors. Patrick remembered she had used a similar display back in 2018, and he wondered if this was the very same piece of equipment. Quite likely it was. “Here’s the Earth as we knew it before the inception of the flooding, back in 2012.” It was an image of a cloudless world, with the familiar shapes of the continents brown-gray against a blue ocean. “And here’s where we live now.” She pressed a control.
    The seas glimmered and rose, and the land melted away. The water erased swathes of China, and washed across northern Europe deep into Russia, and in South America took a bite into Amazonia. Patrick’s eye was drawn to Britain, from which much of southern England had been lost, and the rest of the country reduced to an archipelago of highlands.
    In North America the relentless sea had deleted Florida, and had swept inland to cover the east coast states as far as Maine, and the Gulf states as far north as Kentucky. In the west the ocean had pushed deep into the valleys of California. Great cities had been lost, abandoned: New York, Boston, New Orleans, even Washington DC. And with so much lost of the old United States east of the Ozarks there had been a massive population displacement. America was so terribly young,