The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  She gasped.

  All around her, cops and techs milled, but they had their hands full fighting the storm, trying to see through their own city-issued masks and filters. Lucy pushed closer, trying to prove to herself that her nightmares weren’t real and alive and true. But even without his eyes in his skull, she knew him instantly.

  “Oh, Jamie,” she whispered. “What are you doing here?”

  A hand grabbed her shoulder.

  “What are you doing here?” the cop shouted, his voice muffled by flying sand and filter mask.

  Without waiting for an answer, he dragged her back.

  Lucy fought for a moment, then let herself be hauled behind crime scene tape that was flapping and flying as the cops unwound it:

  CAUTION - CUIDADO - CAUTION - CUIDADO - - CAUTION

  A warning she’d tried to give to Jamie just a few weeks before, right inside the Hilton 6’s bar, where all the people were now pressing their faces against the glass to get a better view of his death out here on the sandblasted street.

  He’d been so completely sure of himself.

  They’d been drinking in the bar of the Hilton 6: Lucy, grubby from a week without a shower; Jamie, so polished that he almost glowed in the low light. Trimmed nails. Clean blond hair, not stringy with grease like hers, not gritty with the desert that was drifting across the sidewalks just outside their floor-to-ceiling windows.

  Jamie could afford all the showers he wanted. He liked to flaunt it.

  The bartender was shaking something cold and green into a martini glass, the silver of the mixer clashing with skull rings of gold on his brown fingers…

  The skulls had stood out to Lucy, because she’d looked up from them to meet the bartender’s dark brown eyes and known that if it weren’t for Jamie’s polished presence, the bartender would have run her out a long time ago. Even aid workers had enough grace to scrub up before they came down to the bar to drown out the memory of their day’s work. Lucy just looked like another Texas refugee.

  Jamie had been talking. “I mean, John Wesley Powell saw it coming way back in 1850. So it’s not like no one had warning. If that fucker could sit on the banks of the Colorado River a hundred fifty years ago, and know there wouldn’t be enough water to cover everything, you’d think we’d have figured it out, too.”

  “There weren’t as many people then.”

  Jamie glanced over at her, blue eyes cold. “There are going to be a lot fewer now.”

  Behind them the low murmured conversations of aid workers and UN intervention people mingled with the surreal strains of Finnish dirge music. USAID. Salvation Army. Red Crescent drought specialists. Doctors Without Borders. Red Cross. And then others: Chinese investment bankers from the Taiyang, down out of their arcology and slumming. Halliburton and Ibis execs, doing water prospecting, insisting that they could frack aquifers into gushers if Phoenix would just foot the bill. Private security guards off duty and on. Bureaucrat-level narcos. A few well-heeled Merry Perry refugees, speaking in low tones with the coyotes who would spirit them across the final boundaries and lead them north. That odd mix of broken souls, bleeding hearts, and predators who occupied the shattered places of the world. Human spackle, filling the cracks of disaster.

  Jamie seemed to read her mind. “They’re all vultures. Every one of them.”

  Lucy sipped her beer. Pressed the glass to her dust-caked cheek, savoring the cool. “A few years ago you would have said the same about me.”

  “No.” Jamie was still watching the vultures. “You were meant to be here. You’re one of us. Just like all the other fools who refuse to see where this thing is headed.” He toasted her with his vodka.

  “Oh, I know where this is headed.”

  “So why stay?”

  “It’s more alive here.”

  Jamie laughed at that, a bark of cynical humor that cracked the muffled dimness of the bar, startling patrons who had only been pretending relaxation. “People only really live when they’re about to die,” he said. “Before then it’s all a waste. You don’t appreciate how good it is until you’re really in the shit.”

  They were quiet for a while, then he said, “We knew it was all going to go to hell, and we just stood by and watched it happen anyway. There ought to be a prize for that kind of stupidity.”

  “Maybe we knew, but we didn’t know how to believe,” Lucy suggested.

  “Belief.” He snorted. “I could kiss a thousand crosses. Fucking belief.” Again, bitterly: “Belief is for God. For love. For trust. I believe I can trust you. I believe you love me.” He quirked an eyebrow. “I believe God is looking down on us and laughing.”

  He sipped his vodka, pinching the martini stem between his fingers, turning it idly on the bar, watching the olives go round and round. “This was never about believing. You think someone like Catherine Case up in Vegas believes things? This was about looking and seeing. Pure data. You don’t believe data—you test data.” He grimaced. “If I could put my finger on the moment we genuinely fucked ourselves, it was the moment we decided that data was something you could use words like believe or disbelieve around.”

  He waved out at the dusty avenue beyond the windows: Texas bangbang girls gesturing desperately at cars cruising slowly past, party slummers in from California and fivers down from the arcology, picking off the desperate. “This should have been about testing and confirmation, and we turned it into a question of faith. Fucking Merry Perrys praying for rain.” He snorted. “No wonder the Chinese are kicking our ass.”

  He went quiet again, then said, “I’m tired of pretending we’ve got a way out. I’m tired of suing pissant water ticks for pumping out our aquifers, and I’m tired of protecting goddamn fools.”

  “You’ve got a better idea?”

  Jamie looked up at her, blue eyes twinkling. “Definitely.”

  Lucy laughed. “Bullshit. You’re in this just as deep as the rest of us.”

  “Zoner for life? That what you’re saying?”

  “If I am, you are for sure.”

  Jamie glanced back at the other tables, then leaned close. His voice notched lower. “You really think I’m going to stay here? Just keep working for Phoenix Water or Salt River Project, hope they’re going to be able to take care of me?”

  “Why, is someone hiring you? SNWA or San Diego give you some kind of offer?”

  Jamie gave her a disappointed look. “A job? You think I just want another job? Like I’m going to take some buyout from the California Department of Natural Resources or something? You think I want to work for some other water department’s legal office? I’m not going to push paper all my life.”

  “You don’t have much choice. There aren’t a lot of people offering plane tickets out of Arizona.”

  “You know, Lucy, sometimes I think you’re about the smartest person I know, and then you say something like that, and I realize how dumb you are. You think small.”

  “Did I ever tell you you have amazing people skills?” Lucy asked.

  “No.”

  “Good. I would have been lying.”

  But Jamie wasn’t deterred. He had the maddening smile of a prophet sure of his comprehension of the workings of the heavens, and it made Lucy subliminally anxious, even as they continued drinking and trading comfortable insults.

  She’d seen preachers smile the same as Jamie in Merry Perry revival tents when she’d asked them why they thought God would give them their rain when all the climatologists were predicting less, not more.

  Rain is coming, they’d say knowingly. Rain is coming.

  They knew how the universe worked. They’d unlocked all God’s secrets. And now Jamie looked the same way.

  “What have you got?” Lucy asked warily.

  “What if I told you I’d found a way to break the Colorado River Compact?”

  “I’d say you’re full of shit.”

  “How much would you pay to end up on top?” Jamie pressed.

  Lucy paused, beer halfway to her
lips. “You’re serious?”

  “Dead serious. What if I gave you senior rights that you could take right up to the Supreme Court? Rights that you could count on the feds enforcing. No bullshit. No he-said, she-said; no Vegas did-or-didn’t pump how much water; no farmer did-or-didn’t divert how many acre-feet into his field. None of that. The kind of water rights that could get the fucking Marines posted on every dam on the Colorado River and would make sure the water spilled straight down to you. The kind of rights that would let you do what California does to towns all the time.” He was looking at her intently. “What would you think of that? How much would you pay?”

  “I’d think you’re high, and I wouldn’t pay you a single Chinese yuan. Sorry, Jamie, I know you. You’re the one who had sex with me just because you wanted to see whether women were any good.”

  Jamie grinned at that, unrepentant. “But what if I were telling the truth?”

  “About being straight or about water rights?”

  “It was just an experiment.”

  “You’re such an asshole.”

  But still Jamie wouldn’t let up. “You ever wonder how a city like Las Vegas—a city that should have dried up and blown away about a million years ago—does so well, and we’re the ones flapping around like a chicken with our head cut off?”

  “They’re a hell of a lot more disciplined.”

  “Hell yes! Those fuckers know how to gamble, right? They look at their cards—their shitty three hundred thousand acre-feet of water from the Colorado River—and they know they’re fucked. They don’t lie to themselves like we did. They don’t try to bluff like they have something they don’t.”

  “So what’s this got to do with rights?”

  “I’m saying we’re all playing the same game.” He began pulling the olives off his toothpick and eating them. “I do paperwork all day long. I see the game. I dig up the underlying rights. I file the motions. And all of us are doing it. Doesn’t matter whether you’re California or Wyoming. Nevada or Colorado. All of us are seeing what we can get away with—without the feds noticing and declaring martial law on us. And if you’ve got someone like Catherine Case playing for your side, you do okay. Better than the political hacks we’ve got down here anyway.” He stopped eating his olives and favored Lucy with a speculative eye. “But what if I told you that everyone is playing the wrong game?”

  “I want to know what that’s supposed to mean,” said Lucy, exasperated.

  “I found a joker.” Jamie smiled, leaning back, looking like a satisfied cat.

  “You know, you sound like someone trying to sell real estate in New Orleans.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe you’ve been stuck in the dust so long, you can’t see the big picture.”

  “And you do.”

  Again he flashed that maddening smile.

  “I do now.”

  Except now Jamie was dead in the dust, with his eyes pried out of his head, and the big picture he thought he’d seen—gone. Lucy sought another way to return to his side, but the cops were serious about keeping bystanders at bay, and now the reality of her situation was settling in—her better judgment returning too late.

  Jamie’s body didn’t matter. The only ones who mattered were the living ones: the cops, the slow procession of drivers passing around the flares, the EMTs all hunched and bug-eyed behind their masks, waiting to be told that they could cart away the bodies. The faces in the Hilton 6 bar, pressed to the glass, watching the action.

  Among them, anywhere, there might be a person who wasn’t looking at the carnage but at her.

  Lucy started to back away. She knew this kind of killing. She’d seen it before. Everything about it was a feedback loop, building itself into something bigger and more horrifying.

  She wondered if she had already been picked out, if it was already too late to run. She fled the scene, wondering if the city was finally going to drag her down and swallow her, just as it had swallowed Jamie.

  Who did this to you, Jamie? she wondered as she fled.

  And then, the more important question:

  What did you tell them about me?

  CHAPTER 3

  A ragged gouge cut the face of the Red Cross/China Friendship water pump—some kind of tool dug in, furrowing carbon plastics like her daddy’s plow had once ripped San Antonio dirt, except deeper, and more angry.

  Maria wasn’t sure who had attacked the pump or what they thought they’d accomplish. Fucking hell, that pump was armored. She’d seen a bulldozer bounce off its concrete defenses. Sucker wasn’t going nowhere. It had been stupid of someone to try to cut it, and yet someone had.

  The price blazed through the scratched plastic:

  $6.95/liter—Y4/gong jin.

  Gong jin meant “liter” in Chinese. Y was for yuan. Everyone who lived anywhere near the Taiyang Arcology knew that number and that cash, because all the workers got paid in yuan, and the Chinese had built the pump, too. ’Cause, friendship, right?

  Maria had been learning Chinese. She could count to one thousand and write the characters, too. Yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, chi, ba…she’d been learning the tones. She’d been learning as fast as she could from the disposable tablets that the Chinese passed out to anyone who asked.

  The liter price glowed in the hot darkness, blue and indifferent, blurry from the human anger that had been hacked into it, but clear enough.

  $6.95/liter.

  Every time Maria saw the ripped face of the pump, she thought she knew the person who had done it. Dios mío, she was that person. Every time she looked at the pump’s cool blue numbers, she felt rage. She’d just never been lucky enough to swing a tool that had a chance of hurting it. You needed something special to make a cut like that. Not a hammer. Not a screwdriver. Maybe one of those Yokohama cutters that construction crews used on the Taiyang, back when her father had still worked there.

  “They turn I-beams to dripping water,” he’d said. “Turn steel to lava, mija. You can’t believe it, even when you’re standing right next to it. Magic, mija. Magic.”

  He’d shown her the special gloves he used to keep from slicing off a finger, glittering fabric that gave him a second and a half before his hand disappeared in a puff of smoke.

  Magic, he’d said. Big science. Who cared what the difference was? The Chinese knew how to make big things happen. Those cabrones knew how to build. The Chinese had money, and they made magic happen—and they’d train anyone to use their tech who was willing to sweat a 12/12 shift.

  Every morning as the sun was starting to burn the sky blue, her father would return to Maria and describe the miraculous things he’d seen the night before while working on the high exposed beams of the arcology. He described the massive construction printers that poured solids into form, the shriek of injection molds, the assembled pieces being craned up into the sky.

  Just-in-time construction.

  They had silicon PV sheeting that they poured over walls and windows to generate power. Dumped it on like paint, and next thing you knew, you were full electric. None of the rolling brownouts that hit the rest of Phoenix for the Taiyang. No way. Those people made their own power.

  They fed their workers lunch.

  “I’m working in the sky,” he’d said. “We’re all good now, mija. We’re going to make it. And from now on you’re going to study Chinese, and we don’t just got to go north. We can cross the ocean, too. The Chinese, they build things. After this job we can go anywhere.”

  That had been the dream. Papa was learning how to cut through anything, and soon he’d be able to slice through the barriers that kept them trapped in Phoenix. They’d cut their way through to Vegas or California or Canada. Hell, they’d cut a path all the way across the ocean to Chongqing or Kunming. Papa could work the upper Mekong and Yangtze dams that kept water for the Chinese. He was going to build. With his new skills, he could cut through anything—fences and California guardies and all the stupid state border-control laws that said you had to stay in a relief zone
and starve instead of going where God still poured water from the sky.

  “A Yokohama cutter slices through anything,” he’d said, and snapped his fingers. “Just like butter.”

  So maybe it was a Yokohama cutter that they’d used on the Red Cross pump. But even that tool hadn’t gotten them a drink.

  You could cut your way to China, maybe, but you couldn’t cut your way to a cool glass of water in Phoenix.

  Maria wondered what price had driven the person to go after the pump.

  Ten dollars a liter?

  Twenty?

  Or maybe it had only been $6.95, just like now, but to those people, $6.95 had seemed like their first Phoenix police baton to the teeth—something they just couldn’t accept. Maybe those way-back-when people hadn’t known that $6.95 was going to be as good as it got, forever after. Didn’t know that they should have been counting their blessings instead of taking a cut at the pump.

  “Why are we here?” Sarah asked for the fifth or sixth time.

  “I got a hunch,” Maria said.

  Sarah made a noise of disgust. “Yeah, well, I’m tired.”

  She coughed into her hands. Last night’s storm had messed with her chest more than usual, bits of dust burying themselves deep in the dead-end branches of her lungs. She was coughing up blood and mucus again. More and more, the blood was a common thing that they never spoke about.

  “I want to see if something happens,” Maria murmured, her eyes never leaving the pricing gauge.

  “Is this like when you dreamed about the fire and the man who walked out of the flames without getting burned? Like Jesus walking on water, but with fire? You told me that was going to happen, too.”

  Maria didn’t take the bait. She had dreams, that was all. Her mother used to call them blessings. Whispers from God. The wingbeat of saints and angels. But some were scary, and some didn’t make sense, and some read clear only afterward, like when she’d dreamed of her father flying, and she’d thought it was a good dream about them getting out of Phoenix, and only later found out it had been a nightmare.