The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  Billboard promises of shows and parties and drinks and money filtered through military glass, and became attack and entry points. Close-packed urban canyons designed to funnel desert winds became sniper alleys. Iridescent photovoltaic-paint roofs became drop zones. The Cypress arcologies became high-ground advantage and priority attack zones, thanks to the way they dominated the Vegas skyline and loomed over everything else, bigger and more ambitious than all of Sin City’s previous forays into the fantastical combined.

  Vegas ended in a sharp black line.

  The combat software started picking out living creatures, cool spots in the dark heat of millennial suburban skeleton—square mile after square mile of buildings that weren’t good for anything except firewood and copper wiring because Catherine Case had decided they didn’t deserve their water anymore.

  Sparse and lonely campfires perforated the blackness, beacons marking the locations of desiccated Texans and Zoners who didn’t have enough money to get into a Cypress arcology and had nowhere else to flee. The Queen of the Colorado had slaughtered the hell out of these neighborhoods: her first graveyards, created in seconds when she shut off the water in their pipes.

  “If they can’t police their damn water mains, they can drink dust,” Case had said.

  People still sent the lady death threats about that.

  The helicopters crossed the last of the wrecked suburban buffer zone and passed out into open desert. Original landscape: Old Testament ancient. Creosote bushes. Joshua trees, spiky and lonely. Yucca eruptions, dry washes, pale gravel sands, quartz pebbles.

  The desert was entirely black now and cooling, the scalpel scrape of the sun finally off the land. There’d be animals down there. Nearly hairless coyotes. Lizards and snakes. Owls. A whole world that only came alive once the sun went down. A whole ecosystem emerging from burrows beneath rocks and yucca and creosote.

  Angel watched the tiny thermal markers of the desert’s surviving inhabitants and wondered if the desert returned his gaze, if some skinny coyote looked up at the muffled thud-thwap of Camel Corps gunships flying overhead and marveled at this charge of airborne humanity.

  An hour passed.

  “We’re close,” Reyes said, breaking the stillness. His voice was almost reverent. Angel leaned forward, searching.

  “There she is,” Gupta said.

  A black ribbon of water, twisting through desert, cutting between ragged mountain ridges.

  Shining moonlight spilled across the waters in slicks of silver.

  The Colorado River.

  It wound like a serpent through the pale scapes of the desert. California hadn’t put this stretch of river into a straw yet, but it would. All that evaporation—couldn’t let the sun steal that forever. But for now the river still flowed in the open, exposed to sky and the guardies’ solemn view.

  Angel peered down at the river, awed as always. The radio chatter of the guardies ceased, all of them falling silent at the sight of so much water.

  Even much reduced by droughts and diversions, the Colorado River awakened reverent hungers. Seven million acre-feet a year, down from sixteen million…but still, so much water, simply there on the land…

  No wonder Hindus worshipped rivers, Angel thought.

  In its prime, the Colorado River had run more than a thousand miles, from the white-snow Rockies down through the red-rock canyons of Utah and on to the blue Pacific, tumbling fast and without obstruction. And wherever it touched—life.

  If a farmer could put a diversion on it, or a home builder could sink a well beside it, or a casino developer could throw a pump into it, a person could drink deep of possibility. A body could thrive in 115-degree heat. A city could blossom in a desert. The river was a blessing as sure as the Virgin Mother’s.

  Angel wondered what the river had looked like back when it still ran free and fast. These days the river ran low and sluggish, stoppered behind huge dams. Blue Mesa Dam, Flaming Gorge Dam, Morrow Point Dam, Soldier Creek Dam, Navajo Dam, Glen Canyon Dam, Hoover Dam, and more. And wherever dams held back the river and its tributaries, lakes formed, reflecting desert sky and sun: Lake Powell. Lake Mead. Lake Havasu…

  These days Mexico never saw a drop of water hit its border, no matter how much it complained about the Colorado River Compact and the Law of the River. Children down in the Cartel States grew up and died thinking that the Colorado River was as much a myth as the chupacabra that Angel’s old abuela had told him about. Hell, most of Utah and Colorado weren’t allowed to touch the water that filled the canyon below Angel’s chopper.

  “Ten minutes to contact,” Reyes announced.

  “Any chance they’ll fight?”

  Reyes shook his head. “Zoners don’t have much to defend with. Still got most of their units deployed up in the Arctic.”

  That had been Case’s doing, greasing a bunch of East Coast politicians who didn’t care what the hell happened on this side of the Continental Divide. She’d gorged those pork-barrel bastards on hookers and cocaine and vast sloshing oceans of Super PAC cash, so when the Joint Chiefs discovered a desperate need to defend tar sands pipelines way up north, coincidentally, the only folks who could do the job were the desert rats of the Arizona National Guard.

  Angel remembered watching the news as they deployed, the relentless rah-rah of energy security from the feeds. He’d enjoyed watching all the journos beating the patriotism drums and getting their ratings up. Making citizens feel like badass Americans again. The journos were good for that, at least. For a second, Americans could still feel like big swinging dicks.

  Solidarity, baby.

  The Camel Corps’s two dozen choppers dropped into the river’s canyon, skimming black waters. They wound along its serpentine length, hemmed in on either side by stony hills, sweeping up the liquid curves of the Colorado to the target.

  Angel was starting to grin, feeling the familiar rush of adrenaline that came when all bets were made and all anyone could do was find out what lay in the dealer’s deck.

  He clutched the court’s injunctions to his chest. All those seals and hologram stamps. All that ritual of lawsuits and appeals, all leading to a moment when they could finally take the gloves off.

  Arizona would never know what hit them.

  He laughed. “Times they do change.”

  Gupta, riding the belly gun, glanced over. “What’s that you saying?”

  She was young, Angel realized. Young, as he’d been when Case put him in the guardies and got his state residence approved once and for all. Poor and desperate deportee, looking to find some way—any way—to stay on the right side of the border.

  “How old are you?” he asked. “Twelve?”

  She gave him a dirty look and brought her focus back to her targeting systems.

  “Twenty. Old man.”

  “Don’t be cold.” He pointed down at the Colorado. “You’re too young to remember how it used to be. Used to be that we all sat down with a bunch of lawyers and papers, bureaucrats with pocket protectors…”

  He trailed off, remembering early days, when he’d stood bodyguard behind Catherine Case as she went into meetings: bald bureaucrat guys, city water managers, Bureau of Reclamation, Department of the Interior. All of them talking acre-feet and reclamation guidelines and cooperation, wastewater efficiency, recycling, water banking, evaporation reduction and river covers, tamarisk and cottonwood and willow elimination. All of them trying to rearrange deck chairs on a big old Titanic. All of them playing the game by the rules, believing there was a way for everyone to get by, pretending they could cooperate and share their way out of the situation if they just got real clever about the problem.

  And then California tore up the rulebook and chose a new game.

  “Were you saying something?” Gupta pressed.

  “Nah.” Angel shook his head. “Game’s changed is all. Case used to play that old game pretty good.” He grabbed his seat for support as they popped up over the canyon rim and bore down on their target. “We d
o okay with this new game, too.”

  Ahead, their objective glowed in the darkness, a whole complex standing alone in the desert.

  “There it is.”

  Lights started winking out.

  “They know we’re coming,” Reyes said, and began issuing battle instructions.

  The choppers spread out, picking likely targets as they came into range. Their own chopper plunged lower, joined by a pair of support drones. Angel’s military glass showed another cluster of choppers running ahead, opening up airspace. He gritted his teeth as they started dropping and jigging, keeping their movement random, waiting to see if the ground tried to light them up.

  Off on the far horizon, he could see the orange glow of Carver City. Houses and businesses bright and shining, a halo of urbanity blazing against the night sky. All those electric lights. All that A/C.

  All that life.

  Gupta fired a couple rounds. Something lit up below, a fountain of flames. Their gunships swept over the leading edge of the pumping and water-treatment facilities. Pools and pipes running all over the place.

  Black Apaches settled on rooftops and parking lots, dropped to pavement, and belched forth troops. More gunships thudded down like giant dragonflies alighting. Rotor wash kicked up quartz sands, scouring Angel’s face.

  “Showtime!” Reyes motioned at Angel. Angel checked his flak jacket a final time and snapped the chin strap of his helmet.

  Gupta watched, smiling. “You want a gun, old man?”

  “Why?” Angel asked as he jumped out. “That’s why I got you coming in with me.”

  Guardies formed around him. Together they dashed for the plant’s main doors.

  Floodlights were coming up, workers rushing out, knowing what was coming. Camel Corps had their rifles up and ready, keeping sights on the targets ahead. Amplified orders blasted from Gupta’s comm.

  “Everyone on the ground. Down! Get DOWN!”

  Civilians hit the deck.

  Angel jogged up to a huddled and terrified woman, waved his papers. “You got a Simon Yu in there somewhere?” he shouted over the shriek of the choppers.

  She was too scared to speak. Sort of pudgy white lady with brown hair. Angel grinned. “Hey, lady, I’m just serving papers.”

  “Inside,” she finally gasped.

  “Thanks.” Angel slapped her on the back. “Why don’t you run all your coworkers out of here? In case things get hot.”

  He and the soldiers rammed through the treatment plant’s doors, a wedge of weaponry with Angel striding at its heart. Civvies slapped themselves up against the walls as Camel Corps stampeded past.

  “Vegas in the house!” Angel crowed. “Grab your ankles, boys and girls!”

  Gupta’s amplified orders drowned him out. “Clear out! All of you! You got thirty minutes to evacuate this facility. After that you’re obstructing!”

  Angel and his team hit the main control rooms: flat-screen computers monitoring effluence, water quality, chemical inputs, pump efficiency—along with a whole pack of water-quality engineers, looking like surprised gophers as they popped up from their workstations.

  “Where’s me some supervisor?” Angel demanded. “I want me some Simon Yu.”

  A man straightened. “I’m Yu.” Slim and tanned, balding. Comb-over. Scars of old acne on his cheeks.

  Angel tossed papers at him as Camel Corps spread out and secured the control room. “You’re shut down.”

  Yu caught the papers clumsily. “The hell we are! This is on appeal.”

  “Appeal all you want, tomorrow,” Angel said. “Tonight you got an order to shut down. Check the signatures.”

  “We’re supplying a hundred thousand people! You can’t just turn off their water.”

  “Judges say we’ve got senior rights,” Angel said. “You should be glad we’re letting you keep what you already got in your pipes. If your people are careful, they can live on buckets for a couple days, till they clear out.”

  Yu was riffling through the papers. “But this ruling is a farce! We’re getting a stay, and this is going to be overturned. This ruling—it barely exists! Tomorrow it’s gone!”

  “Knew you’d say something like that. Problem is, it’s not tomorrow right now. It’s today. And today the judges say you got to stop stealing the state of Nevada’s water.”

  “You’re going to be liable, though!” Yu sputtered. He made a heroic effort to calm himself. “We both know how serious this is. Whatever happens to Carver City is on you. We have security cams. All of this is going to be public record. You can’t want this to be on your head when judgments start coming down.”

  Angel decided he kind of liked the balding bureaucrat. Simon Yu was dedicated. Had the feel of one of those good-government guys who got a job because he wanted to make the world a better place. Genuine old-school civil servant genuinely dedicated to the old-school benefit of the people.

  And now here the guy was, cajoling Angel. Playing the let’s-be-reasonable, don’t-be-hasty game.

  Too bad it wasn’t the game they were playing.

  “…This is going to piss off a lot of powerful people,” Yu was saying. “You aren’t going to get off. The feds aren’t going to let something like this happen.”

  It was a bit like meeting a dinosaur, Angel decided. Kind of icy to see, sure, but really, how the hell had the man ever survived?

  “Powerful people?” Angel smiled gently. “You cut a deal with California I’m not aware of? They own your water, and somehow I don’t know? ’Cause from where we stand, you’re pumping some crappy junior water right that you bought secondhand off a farmer in western Colorado, and you got no cards left to play. This is water that should have come to us a long time ago. Says so in those papers I just gave you.”

  Yu gave Angel a sullen glare.

  “Come on, Yu.” Angel lightly punched the man in the shoulder. “Don’t look so down. We both been in this game long enough to know someone’s got to lose. Law of the River says senior rights gets it all. Junior rights?” Angel shrugged. “Not so much.”

  “Who did you pay off?” Yu asked. “Stevens? Arroyo?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It’s a hundred thousand people’s lives!”

  “Shouldn’t have bet them on such crappy water rights, then,” Gupta commented from across the control room, where she was checking out the flashing lights of pump monitors.

  Angel hid a smirk as Yu shot her a dirty look. “The soldier’s right, Yu. You got your notice there. We’re giving you twenty-five more minutes to clear out, and after that I’m dropping some Hades and Hellfire on this place. So clear it out before we light it up.”

  “You’re going to blow us up?”

  A bunch of the soldiers laughed at that.

  Gupta said, “You did see us come in with the helicopters, right?”

  “I’m not leaving,” Yu said coldly. “You can kill me if you want. Let’s see how that works out for you.”

  Angel sighed. “I just knew you’d be stand-up that way.”

  Before Yu could retort, Angel grabbed him and slammed him to the floor. He buried a knee in the bureaucrat’s back. Grabbed an arm and twisted it.

  “You’re destroying—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.” Angel wrenched Yu’s other hand behind his back and zip-cuffed him. “A whole fucking city. A hundred thousand lives. Plus somebody’s golf course. But like you noticed, dead bodies do make things complicated, so we’re taking your bald ass out of here. You can sue us tomorrow.”

  “You can’t do this!” Yu shouted from where his face was mashed into the floor.

  Angel knelt down beside the helpless man. “I feel like you’re taking this personally, Simon. But it ain’t that way. We’re just cogs in a big old machine, right?” He jerked Yu upright. “This is bigger than you and me. We’re both just doing our jobs.” He gave Yu a shove, propelling him through the doors. To Gupta, he called back, “Check the rest of the place, and make sure it’s cleared. I want this plac
e on fire in ten!”

  Outside Reyes was standing at the chopper door, waiting.

  “We’ve got Zoners, incoming!” Reyes shouted.

  “Well, that ain’t good. How long?”

  “Five minutes.”

  “Fucking hell.” Angel made a twirling motion with his finger. “Spin us up, then! I got what I came for.”

  Chopper blades came alive, an angry shriek. Their whine drowned out Yu’s next words, but his expression was enough for Angel to understand the man’s hatred.

  “Don’t take this personally!” Angel shouted back. “In another year we’ll hire you up in Vegas! You’re too good to waste here! SNWA can use good people like you!”

  Angel tried to tug Yu into the chopper, but the man resisted. He was glaring at Angel, eyes squinting against the dustwash. Guardie choppers started lifting off, locusts rising. Angel gave Yu another tug. “Time to go, old man.”

  “The hell you say!”

  With sudden surprising strength, Yu tore free and bolted back toward his water-treatment plant, stumbling, hands still zip-cuffed behind his back but running determinedly for the building from which the last of his people were fleeing.

  Angel exchanged a pained look with Reyes.

  Dedicated bastard. Right down to the end, the pencil pusher was dedicated.

  “We’ve got to go!” Reyes shouted. “If the Zoners get their choppers up here, we’ll end up in a firefight, and the feds will be all up on our asses then. There’s some shit they won’t put up with, and a state-to-state gun battle is definitely one of them. We need to clear out!”

  Angel looked back at Yu as he fled. “Just give me one minute!”

  “Thirty seconds!”

  Angel gave Reyes a disgusted look and charged after Yu.

  All around him choppers were lifting off, rising like leaves on hot desert winds. Angel pelted through the flying grit, squinting against sand sting.

  He caught Yu at the door to the treatment plant. “Well, you’re stubborn. I’ll give you that.”

  “Let me go!”

  Instead, Angel flipped him hard onto the ground. The landing took Yu’s breath away, and Angel took advantage of the man’s paralysis to zip-cuff his ankles, too.