The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  Angel left the prayer tent.

  Out beside the highway another bright yellow Tesla shone in the sun, waiting obediently for his arrival. Its door slid open.

  He climbed in and checked the contents of the car. SIG Sauer in a compartment under the seat, along with three magazines of bullets. He loaded the gun and put it back. Checked his documents. A couple Arizona driver’s licenses with his picture on them. Mateo Bolívar. Simon Espera. Badges to go with them. Phoenix PD. Arizona Criminal Investigations Division. FBI. Different jurisdictions for different convenient moments. In the trunk there would be uniforms to match. Suits and ties. Jackets and jeans. Probably a full state trooper uniform, too. SNWA was thorough.

  Angel finished going through the identities and shoved Bolívar into his wallet. He turned on the car. High-performance filters kicked on, sensing dust in the cabin’s interior, cycling rapidly. Guaranteed to strip out infections. Hantavirus, valley fever, and the common cold didn’t stand a chance.

  As the cabin cooled, Angel called into SNWA, confirming on an encrypted line that he’d taken possession of the vehicle and was headed for Phoenix. He pulled out.

  A few minutes later Case called in.

  “Yeah?” Angel asked, puzzled as he let her connect.

  Case’s cool liquid voice joined him inside the nearly silent Tesla cabin. “You’re over the border?” she asked.

  “Well, I got FEMA tents as far as the eye can see, and I just passed a tipped-over Jonnytruck that I swear I saw kids trying to hijack, so yeah, it looks like I’m in Arizona.” He laughed. “The only other place this could be is Texas.”

  “I’m glad you’re entertained by your job, Angel.”

  “Not Angel.” Angel glanced at the ID he’d tossed onto the seat beside him. “Mateo, today. Mateo.”

  “Better than making you pretend you’re a Vikram again.”

  “My Hindi ain’t bad.”

  Angel cut between a long line of cars, their belongings strapped to their roofs, and accelerated, catching an on-ramp eastbound.

  The westbound lanes were choked with traffic, but almost nothing was headed his direction.

  “Huh,” he said. “No one seems to want to go to Phoenix.”

  Case laughed. Angel accelerated, burning across the flat yellow desert. Heat waves rippled the horizon. Discarded Clearsacs festooned the yucca and creosote, glittering like Christmas decorations. The gaunt refugees of Arizona, Texas, and Mexico turned away from him as he ripped past, leaving dust boiling around them.

  “I’m guessing this isn’t just a friendly call?”

  “I want to ask you about Ellis,” Case said. “You worked with him a few years ago.”

  “Sure. Setting up the South Nevada Marauders. And last year with those Samoan Mormons. Loved that gig.”

  “Did he ever say anything about feeling discontented?”

  Angel blew by a Merry Perry prayer circle, the people standing with their heads bowed, asking God for safe passage north.

  “God damn, there’s a lot of Merry Perrys over here,” he said.

  “They’re like roaches. You really can’t smash them fast enough. Now quit stalling and tell me about Ellis.”

  “Nothing to tell. He seemed fine to me.” Angel paused. “Wait. You asking me if he’s loyal? Like he’d defect to Cali or something?”

  Tents with Red Cross and Salvation Army logos blurred past. Beside them bodies lay in bags, long rows of people whose journey had ended. Rows and rows of bodies, waiting for guardies to bury them.

  “Ellis was supposed to check in,” Case said. “I haven’t heard from him. You think he would have taken a payoff to go dark?”

  Angel whistled. “Doesn’t sound like him. He’s a good church boy. All about keeping his word, being a good man, that kind of thing. Why? What’s this about?”

  “Patterns,” Case said. “It’s about patterns. Watch yourself down there in Phoenix.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Julio is losing his cool, and now Ellis is out of pocket.”

  “Maybe it’s a coincidence.”

  “I don’t work with coincidences.”

  “Yeah,” Angel said, thinking back on his conversations with Ellis. The two of them lying out under the stars, avoiding motels so no one could put a hit on them, working the river. Building militias.

  Case said something else, but her voice crackled, dropping out. “Say again?”

  Another crackle of static.

  Angel spied a brown smudge on the horizon. “Hey, you’re breaking up. I think a storm just ate your cell tower. I’m going to have to call you back.”

  Static was the only answer.

  He watched the smudge. It was definitely rising. Billowing high. Filling the horizon. Rushing toward him.

  Angel opened the Tesla wide, not caring how much battery he burned, racing down the highway, racing the storm. Refugee relief stations and guardie command centers whipped past. The storm kept coming. A wall of dust a mile high, crashing over everything in its path.

  Angel put in at the first truck stop he found and paid extra to charge the Tesla inside a tin-walled storm bay, already crowded with other cars.

  In the diner people ate burgers and avoided looking outside as the windows shook with wind gusts. Someone started up a biodiesel motor as the PV panels were enveloped in dust. Air filters chuffed and hissed.

  Outside, a water truck with a PRESCOTT SPRINGS logo pulled in. The driver hauled a pipe to the station’s cistern, a dim shadow hunched against the brown buffeting gusts. The coffee in Angel’s cup had a skin of minerals across the top. Mined water, in more ways than one.

  The storm intensified. Day turned to night. Sand and grit beat against the windows, shaking them. Conversations were muttered and desultory, oppressed by the raging elements outside.

  The murmured worries of the travelers told Angel everything he needed to know about them. Most of them were out of Phoenix, trying to get somewhere else. Some of them had passes that would get them into Nevada or else California, some all the way to Canada. All of them were wistful for what they were leaving behind. All were desperate for the place ahead to be better.

  A cascade of electronic chimes signaled the storm’s abatement as data packets finally pried between the dust motes and found their way to the phones of their owners.

  People murmured relief that the storm hadn’t turned out to be a big one. They smiled at one another and felt lucky as the waitresses rang up their tickets.

  Angel put in another call to Case but got her voicemail. Busy lady, doing busy things.

  Out in the car shelter he shook out the Tesla’s air filters as best he could and brushed off the dust that had filtered fine into the tin-walled building.

  Minutes later he was arrowing across Arizona once more, following the vague lines of an interstate obscured by drifts, leaving a rooster tail of dust in his wake.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Two bucks a pour, one yuan a cup.”

  Or fast fuck, quick buck as Sarah liked to say.

  Maria was in her groove, selling pours while pupusas fried beside her, oil sizzling on Toomie’s griddle. Money was changing hands, sweaty darkened wads of Chinese small cash that she shoved into her bra. She poured from an Aquafina bottle into a construction worker’s cup, watching the water level carefully. She was expert at judging liquid volume. Better than any bartender in the icy clubs where Sarah worked the floor.

  Toomie stood over his Coleman stove, dripping sweat. He shoveled pupusas off the griddle in a steady stream, wrapping them in Río de Sangre newsprint. The lurid murder pictures instantly soaked with grease as he handed food out to customers waiting in his line.

  Toomie. Big black guy, bald as an egg. Sweat on his brow, eyes on the griddle, big red-and-white umbrella shading him, matching the red and white of his apron. Big strong guy who could protect his business, a tower of strength that also shaded Maria as she poured water.

  “Two bucks a pour, one yuan a cup,” she said to the ne
xt customer. Cheap water made valuable, just by the act of moving it from the Red Cross pump to this dusty sidewalk beside the Taiyang Arcology’s construction side.

  She emptied the Aquafina bottle into another worker’s cup and tossed it into her wagon. More than half gone, and second-shift lunch hadn’t even started. She hummed to herself as she worked, running numbers. Adding up rent and food. Money to Damien. Money to pay a coyote who guaranteed he could get her across the border.

  Toomie looked up at his next customer, smiling. “I got meat and queso, beans and queso, or just plain queso?”

  “Cup or a pour?” Maria asked.

  Smoke hung heavy over their setup. Lots of people were wearing filter masks. Rich people wore Ralph Lauren and YanYan. Poor people wore American Eagle and Walmart. Maria wondered if she should spend a little of her savings on one for herself. The generic ones weren’t too expensive, and maybe it would keep her lungs from burning so much. Maybe she’d get one for Sarah, too. It might help her cough.

  Visibility was shrunk down to a quarter mile. The rise of the half-built arcology beside them was lost in gray haze, skeleton girders and photovoltaic sections and glass faces disappearing into the smoke-mist-heat sky. Sarah claimed you could see the whole city from the upper floors. Today, Maria guessed that even the rich fivers up high were staring at the same smoke and gray as she was down in the dirt.

  The line stayed steady, six, seven people, all waiting to give their orders. Toomie had the best location. Close enough to the Taiyang’s construction side to grab workers changing shifts. Plus, he also got some of the fivers who liked street food, slumming out from the completed parts of the Taiyang. Best of both worlds.

  Maria poured out another cup as Toomie took the order of a Chinese crew boss. “Ni yao shenma?” The crew boss smiled at Toomie’s Chinese but answered in English.

  “Meat. No queso.”

  Toomie switched to English as well. Whatever the customer wanted. That was his mantra. He’d sell pupusas in English, Spanish, or Chinese. He liked to say that if Klingons came down from space and landed, he’d learn that language, too. Toomie made people into regulars. He fried pupusas and folded perfect origami holders with his newspapers, fanciful and stylish, then popped those pupusas into their little paper packets full of the murder of the day, handing them over with a flourish.

  “Smile and style, Maria,” he liked to say. “Smile and style. A few kind words in the customer’s home language, good food, reliable, and always on your spot. No exceptions. You’re in business.”

  A few kind words.

  That was what had brought Maria to him, after her father died. She’d spent money that was almost gone to buy a pupusa, the way her father had treated her to them on his lunch shift. She’d been desperate for the memory and comfort of the huge black man with his red-and-white apron and his kind words. A face she recognized, and, for some reason, trusted.

  And Toomie, instead of taking her money, let her have a burned pupusa he would have given to Spike, a mangy mongrel dog that hung close by the construction site. Maria had wolfed down the food, starved. And now she sold water beside him, and he called her his little queen.

  “You’ll be just like Catherine Case,” he said when she’d first proposed selling water beside him, offering to split a little back in return for the chance to earn herself. She’d do all the buying and the hauling, and he wouldn’t have to, and he’d still get a cut.

  Little Queen. Mini–Catherine Case. Toomie could call her anything he wanted, as long as he gave her a place to peddle water close to the Taiyang.

  Location. Location. Location.

  The Taiyang Arcology was the place to be, for sure. Already portions of it were inhabited. People living inside triple-filter apartments. Clean air, perfectly recycled water, their own farms, everything they needed to live, even if Phoenix was going to shit right outside.

  Sarah had described it to Maria—the fountains and waterfalls. The plants growing everywhere. Air that never smelled like smoke or exhaust. It might as well have been lost Eden as far as Maria was concerned. It was almost as hard to get into Taiyang as it was to get into California. Security guards, swipe cards, fingerprints. You needed friends to get in.

  The smoke and dust of construction, Maria knew well and understood; the soft A/C interior of the five-digit lifestyle that Sarah peddled her ass to get into—that place was alien.

  Maria cracked open another bottle and checked the line. If it kept up like this, she’d be out of water in another hour or two, with more cash in her pocket than she’d had in a year. A good installment to buying her way to a better life. The cash was even better than she’d expected. Sarah would be impressed.

  “Cup or a pour?” she asked the next customer.

  Across the street, a bunch of Texans were boarding buses. A whole line of them filling up with the hopefuls who normally crowded around the construction site.

  “Where they going?” she asked Toomie.

  He glanced up from his pupusas. “Electric company. They’re taking anyone who can push a broom.”

  “What for?”

  “Solar field out west got jammed up by the storm. Now they got square miles of PV that aren’t good for anything except shading the desert. Can’t get juice with their panels under six inches of dirt.” He laughed. “Think it’s the first time I ever saw anybody happy to have a bunch of out-of-work Texans hanging around.”

  “Maybe I should sell out there,” Maria said, mostly to herself.

  Toomie cracked up. He jostled her with an elbow. “Little Queen’s getting too important to work with old Toomie, huh?”

  Maria didn’t mind the ribbing. Toomie was all right. Even when he was hassling her, she could tell he didn’t mean anything bad by it.

  Sarah had taken one look at the way Toomie gazed at Maria and declared that the man was in love, the way he mooned after her ass.

  Egged on by Sarah, Maria had tried to kiss him. Sarah said she should show she was grateful, hook the man to her, tight. Make herself into his woman. And for a second, Toomie had let her do it. His lips had been hungry on hers, before he gently pushed her away.

  “Don’t think I’m not flattered,” he said.

  “What did I do?”

  “This isn’t how it should be for you.”

  “How’s it supposed to be?” Maria asked.

  Toomie sighed. “Start by loving, instead of needing.”

  Maria had stared at him, confused, trying to understand the shape of the man’s honor. What had she done wrong? Trying to understand where she fit into a matrix of couples that ranged from Sarah selling her skinny ass in short-shorts and a crop top, all the way to some romantic ideal that Toomie seemed to hold in his head that said you didn’t touch a girl unless you were in love.

  In the end, it didn’t matter. Maria had offered, and Toomie had said no, and that was almost as good as being his girl. Maybe even better. “If all he wants to do is look, you got easy work ahead of you, girl,” Sarah said. “Give him all the looks he wants. You got that man loyal for life.”

  The first lunch shift ended, and their line dwindled.

  Maria counted the bottles still full in her wagon. Toomie straightened his back. “God damn, and I thought building houses was bad.”

  “Everything’s bad, until you find something worse,” Maria said.

  Toomie laughed. “I guess so.”

  “How come you don’t go back to construction?”

  “It’s all Taiyang and arcology contracts, these days. Not much demand for regular home builders anymore.”

  “My dad worked the Taiyang. It just got him killed.”

  “Well, nothing’s a guarantee. But still, you should be proud of him. He must have been pretty good for the Chinese to hire him. Building like they do is complicated. It’s not just two-by-fours and Sheetrock. It’s tilapia and snails and waterfalls, all linked together. Complicated, sensitive work.”

  “I don’t think that’s what my dad did.”


  “Well, he had his hands on it, at least.” Toomie looked wistful. “Working on something like that, you’re building the future. The people who do that…you’ve got to make all these models: software and water flows and population. Figure out how to balance all the plants and animals, how to clean up the waste and turn it into fertilizer they can use in their greenhouses, how to clean the water, too. You run black water down through filters and mushrooms and reeds and let it into lily ponds and carp farms and snail beds, and by the time it comes out the other end, that water, it’s cleaner than what they pump up from underground. Nature does all the work, all the different little animals working together, like gears fitted inside an engine. Its own kind of machine. A whole big living machine.”

  “How come you don’t work on it, if you know so much about it?”

  “Hell, I bid on the Taiyang when they started up. Thought I had a shot. They had to hire local to get their building permits from the city and the state. Figured I’d throw my hat in the ring. I mean, shit, I knew how to build, right?”

  “But they didn’t take you?”

  “Oh hell no, they didn’t take me. They do everything different. The big parts are all prefab pieces. Manufacture off-site, assemble on-site. Damn fast, but it ain’t building like we do. More like…factory work. And then there’s all the complicated biological work.” He shrugged. “I didn’t worry much about it at the time. There was still plenty of other building work for everyone. We were still growing then.

  “ ’Course, then the CAP got blown up, and after that all the houses I was putting up looked like a shit investment.”

  He glanced up at the Taiyang, where parts of it already shone with habitation. “The only people the CAP didn’t bother was them. Taiyang people, they just turned up their recycling and kept all their water inside. That place only needs a drip coming in.

  “If I was conspiracy minded, I’d say it wasn’t Vegas or California that sabotaged the CAP. It was the Taiyang. Just to put the rest of us out of business. All of a sudden, their expensive apartments and condos looked real cheap, when everyone else was scrambling around trying to find a kitchen tap that would still dribble out some water.” He shielded his eyes, staring up at the arcology. “Wouldn’t have minded if they’d waited at least until I got my first ten spec houses sold. I could have bought into California, easy, if I’d gotten those houses sold.”