INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014

by Andy Cox

  “Got a toolbox?” asked Narong.

  Angela looked at the driver.

  “Must be jack and wrench somewhere,” he said.

  “He said a toolbox, Gehng. It’s a bust gearbox, not a flat tyre.”

  As she rounded on Gehng, Narong saw pearls of sweat gathered across her shoulders. How much water must she drink in this climate? He winced at the volume he estimated.

  “In this make, it’s usually under a panel behind the cab,” said Narong.

  Angela looked at Gehng, who showed no sign of knowing if there was a panel, let alone a toolbox. Narong reached for the knot tying the tarpaulin to the cleats along the side of the truck. Gehng seized his wrist.

  “It is not good to look underneath.” The hard edge in Gehng’s Thai contrasted with his deferential English.

  “Oh for God’s sake, Gehng, let him look.” Angela may not have understood Thai, but Gehng’s body language was unambiguous. “He seems to have some idea of what he’s doing.”

  “I call headquarters in Bangkok.” Gehng pulled a phone from the pouch on his belt. “They send…”

  His voice faded.

  “Where there’s no water, nobody repairs the roads.” Narong returned to the knot. “Where the roads are bad, there are no maintenance trucks. Where there are no maintenance trucks, there is no signal.”

  The rope was so new it was slippery. Whoever tied it knew nothing about knots and had tried to compensate by tying several of them. Narong’s fingers weren’t as nimble as they once were.

  “Narong. I know your name.” Gehng returned to Thai. “So if you ever speak of what is in the truck, it will not be good for you and your village.”

  Narong tugged the last knot apart. He stepped back and looked at Gehng. He was more irked by Gehng’s omission of the respectful pee, the right of an older man, than by his empty threats. If whatever was under the tarpaulin was that important, Gehng wouldn’t admit he’d allowed Narong to see it. If Gehng reported to anyone who cared who said what in Ubon Ratchathani, he’d leave Narong out of the report.

  He looked at Angela with the secret surname, letting Gehng know it was obvious who was in charge here.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  Narong allowed himself a trace of a smirk when he looked back at Gehng. A look that said if he was trying to impress Angela into giving him a bonus, he wasn’t doing very well so he could stop acting the phoo yai big man. Gehng’s eyes replied that he read the message and hated Narong for it, but realised his mouth would serve him best by staying shut.

  Narong glanced at Angela, whose expression hadn’t changed. She had seen nothing that passed between him and Gehng.

  Narong couldn’t resist a flourish when he threw back the tarpaulin, revealing the load to the children. The rock on the truck’s bed was matt grey. Its surface was bubbled as though it had been almost melted and then solidified. He touched one of the bubbles. It was as hard as stone. Some sort of polymer, he guessed. He looked up to the holes bored into the top of the rock and understood Gehng’s unease.

  Angela gave him a smile that didn’t quite touch her eyes. She obviously hoped an old man pushing a water barrow wouldn’t know what he was looking at.

  “Pity we can’t see it without the heat shield,” he said. “The children would appreciate the sparkle of enriched platinum ore. From an M-type asteroid.”

  Angela said nothing. Even though asteroid mining had produced enough metal to drop prices, he was looking at no less than five million dollars.

  “So that’s a crane in the trailer, and the parachute that was bolted to it?” he asked.

  Angela’s nod was minute. If she was trying to hide her thoughts, she wasn’t very good at it. She was wondering how an old peasant understood so much and wished he didn’t. She wouldn’t know Ubon Ratchathani had been a wealthy province twenty years ago. If the world had retreated from Ubon Ratchathani with the water, Ubon Ratchathani had not forgotten the world.

  The curved edge of the asteroid didn’t cover the toolbox panel, so they wouldn’t need to unload it. Still, some temptations couldn’t be resisted.

  “I’m not as young as I used to be,” he said to Angela. “Perhaps you could have your driver get the toolbox out?”

  Angela nodded. “Gehng.”

  The look on Gehng’s face gave Narong a memory to treasure.

  He turned back to Angela. “Your company sent you to recover it?”

  For a moment, her face showed the need to avoid the question battling the need to ingratiate herself with a possible rescuer. He waited until she nodded uneasily. “It was supposed to go into the Gobi Desert. That’s…”

  She waved a hand, wondering how to explain the geography.

  “In Mongolia,” he said.

  “Yes. Um. Well, something went wrong and it ended up in Thailand, so they sent us to get it.”

  “And take it to Cambodia,” said Narong.

  “Uh, no, I mean…”

  “You’re going the wrong way for Bangkok.” Narong was enjoying himself a little too much. “No airport ahead of you till you get to Phnomh Penh.”

  The sound of a tearing shirt and a very Anglophone expletive drew Narong’s attention to Gehng falling out of the truck with the toolbox.

  “Thank you, Neung Gehng.” Narong deliberately addressed him as a younger man.

  He opened the toolbox. The shine of stainless steel assailed him. For the first time since he’d seen the truck, he wanted something. Rows of screwdrivers and spanners cried out to him, pleading their supremacy over his own rusty toolkit that he kept wrapped in an old shirt.

  He called himself a foolish old man. Tools like these belonged to his past. Narong’s knees cracked as he eased himself on his back. He pulled himself under the truck. There wasn’t a speck of rust on the chassis or the suspension, which was reinforced to take the load. It was a youthful vehicle compared to the doddering old wrecks he was so often called to resurrect, but he doubted it was treated with a fraction of the care people lavished on their vehicles in Ubon Ratchathani. This truck was owned by people who could afford to hand it off to a driver who didn’t realise he was invested in it until it broke down. It was painful to look at.

  “You should be careful on these roads,” said Narong. “The dirt tracks aren’t too bad, but a lot of the roads round here are just tarmac that broke up for want of maintenance. They’ll rip your truck to pieces with this load.”

  The answering silence told him Angela was glaring at Gehng and Gehng was looking anywhere but at Angela. Gehng must have bored her because her feet moved behind the front wheel until they were level with Narong’s head. Her face appeared as she squatted down to watch him.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  She wanted him to say he’d have it fixed in five minutes, no problem.

  “I’ll know in a minute.”

  She was leaning forward to see under the truck, giving him an interesting view down the front of her top. He hauled his eyes back to the gearbox. He was too old for such things, he told himself sternly. But he couldn’t resist snatching another look.

  “What company do you work for?” he asked.

  “One of the small ones.” Her eyes shifted away. “You probably haven’t heard of it.”

  He’d heard enough to know there were no small companies able to afford the investment needed to mine asteroids. He also knew that while the UN Outer Space Treaty said nothing about exploitation, it didn’t allow for staking ownership of asteroids. If a chunk of asteroid happened to fall on Thailand, it became the property of the Thai government. Angela and Gehng couldn’t have made it more obvious that removing the asteroid was illegal if they had shouted it at him. No wonder Gehng was nervous.

  It occurred to Narong that he was helping Angela steal from his country. Still, if the government cared whether people in Ubon Ratchathani followed its rules, it wouldn’t have left them to desiccate.

  “You seem to know a lot about mechanics,” said Angela. “And you speak ve
ry good English.”

  Narong managed to restrict himself to studying her face. She didn’t see what she was doing as stealing. She was going where her company had sent her, doing an unpleasant job that involved heat, dust and keeping the company’s business a little more confidential than usual. Gehng looked like a junior employee of a local subcontractor, who would be in Thailand long after Angela had left for good. No wonder he didn’t want anyone seeing the asteroid.

  “I used to be a professor of engineering at Chulalongkhorn University,” he said.

  “Chula…I’m sorry, I haven’t heard of that.”

  “It closed five years ago. When the Chinese built their dams upstream of us, well, a country lives on water as much as a man or a woman does. We shrivelled up. We couldn’t afford all our universities.”

  Angela sat down in the dusty road. Farang could never squat for very long.

  “So you came here?”

  The incredulity in her voice drew another look from him. Her head was tilted to one side and her brow was furrowed. She really didn’t understand.

  “I grew up here. Of course it was greener then.”

  “But it’s…” She waved her arm. “It’s so dry. It must be so hard. Is there nowhere else you could go?”

  As if companies like hers were always taking on unemployed academics past retirement age. He’d applied all over the world when the department closed. He’d still had ambition then.

  “It’s better than the slums in Bangkok,” he said.

  Her expression didn’t change. For her, Bangkok meant air-conditioned hotels and restaurants on Sukhumvit Road. The new slums sprawling outside Bangkok’s dykes were as alien to her as the people of Ubon Ratchathani had been until the gearbox screamed. There was no point in trying to explain how the slums flooded every time it rained on a high tide, and how they would need to be abandoned altogether if the sea level kept rising over the next decade or two

  He changed spanners.

  “I used to work on monofilament dew collectors. When I came here, I set them up on every hillock we can get a barrow to,” he said. “They give us enough water to grow GM cassava, and a few other things.”

  He felt the cadence of his voice slip into the turns of the spanner. “We’ll do what we can with what we have for as long as we can.”

  It was a beautiful spanner.

  “The longer we can keep our children away from the slums, the better. Do you have children, Khun Angela?”

  “Two girls.” Perhaps her voice had known laughter after all. “It’s hard being away from them. Sometimes you have to do what the company says, you know?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Their names are Jasmine and Rebecca. I haven’t even been able to call them for the last couple of days.”

  Narong saw the anecdote he would become, the old peasant pushing a barrow who turned out to be a professor and rescued mother in the wilderness. Her eyes sparkled as she spoke of her girls, looking forward to telling them about him. He concentrated on the gearbox, giving the odd grunt when Angela paused for breath. It was as though Angela had been keeping all her talk behind a dam he’d breached when he mentioned her favourite subject. Narong smiled. Any thought that involved breaching dams was worth smiling at.

  “I never married,” he said.

  Neither of them had much to say after that. He worked in silence for the next half hour. When he pulled himself from under the truck, Gehng was in the driver’s seat with his feet dangling outside the cab. His disconsolate expression made him look very young. Angela paced up and down, her exposed skin already tinted pink.

  She turned to him with a pleading look. “Could you fix it?”

  “Partly,” said Narong. “It will run in first and second gear, but no higher. It should get you to Phnomh Penh. You’ll be able to get a proper repair there.”

  Angela bit her lip. “It’ll take, what? Ten, twelve hours to get to Phnomh Penh in second gear?”

  “At least. You are welcome to stay here if you wish. Gehng could send another vehicle when he gets there.”

  Angela’s hair was lank with sweat. She wouldn’t know how to wash without using water as though it came from an unlimited reservoir. He would have regretted the offer if there was any chance she would accept it.

  “That’s very kind of you,” she said, “but I need to stay with the load.”

  She was determined to annihilate every kilometre between her and an air-conditioned room with a phone she could call her children on.

  “Of course.”

  Narong handed the toolbox to Gehng. He felt a morsel of pity as Gehng scrambled under the asteroid fragment. He wasn’t looking forward to the next ten to twelve hours.

  He stood with Angela, watching Gehng replace the tarpaulin.

  “You should keep the revs low,” he said in English. “I did what I could, but too much strain will drop it again.”

  Gehng didn’t react, but Angela nodded. Her eyes wouldn’t leave the rev counter all the way to Phnomh Penh.

  “We’ll be careful,” she said. “I really appreciate your help, sir.” She hadn’t caught his name. “How much do I owe you?”

  “There is no charge. It cost me nothing.”

  She had made his day more interesting. It would cheapen the memory if it became a transaction.

  “There must be something I can do. You saved our lives.”

  Narong managed not to laugh at the dramatic statement. He watched her watching him, wanting to pay off her sense of obligation. Her body was already poised as if to run for the cab. From some dark corner of his mind, the idea of asking for another look down her top jumped into his consciousness.

  “Next time you lose a rock, could you drop it on one of the dams blocking the Mekong?”

  She laughed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  He’d given her the punchline to the story she’d tell her daughters.

  Gehng finished his idea of tying down the tarpaulin. He made a wai in Narong’s direction. Angela was oblivious to the disrespect in the minimal dip of his shoulders. Narong sent them on their way with a straight back and a smile that would be a friendly parting for Angela and an insult to Gehng.

  The note of the truck’s engine rose, fell as Gehng engaged second gear, rose again and fell abruptly. Narong laughed aloud, imagining Angela ordering Gehng to keep the revs down and Gehng’s stifled sigh.

  He picked up the socket set and spanner he’d left under the truck. An old man should not be a slave to temptation, but it could be years before anyone even looked in the toolbox again. He put the tools on top of the water barrow and pushed it toward the dew collectors on the hillock.

  •••••

  D.J. Cockburn hase been publishing occasional stories for several years now, in between receiving a long monologue of rejections and earning a living through medical research on various parts of the African continent. Other phases of his life have included teaching unfortunate children and experimenting on unfortunate fish. His website is at cockburndj.wordpress.com.

  CHASMATA

  E. CATHERINE TOBLER

  You don’t remember, but this is where we began. (I think this is both true and not – just listen.)

  This sepia waste of a place, just you and me, and all those wind storms. You wished for rain – eventually it came, flooding Valles Marineris the way you flooded me. You don’t remember, but right now I do, and I will show you again.

  •••

  You wanted to know what he would have made of this place – though he made many things in his fictions, you pictured him here, actually on the planet, crafting things that no one else could ever think of, or would ever dare. Surely we had dared amazing things – we were here after all, but there was something special about him, whether young or old, dead or alive, bound to Earth or elsewhere.

  Your gloved hands cradled rocks we brought from the surface and you wondered what Ray would have made of them. They were only rocks after all, but of course they weren’t. They we
re somehow special on this planet, just as every other thing was, just as every other thing became. Ordinary things took on new meanings – clocks were different here, showers were different, and always there was the lack of rain. My lips would grow dry until your thumb brushed over them – papery prelude to a kiss which restored them. Restored me.

  I kiss you now and there is an echo within your lips. Your chin tips up. This silent pressure you remember.

  •••

  The first time wasn’t sweet. It shouldn’t have happened at all.

  You suppose they should have known – in the end you know they did, and they wanted this specific pair (us, oh us) for this specific reason. They knew how it would go, what we would bring to this place, the child (children) we would create on this new world. How many years before others came? Before they joined our family unit? Too many. Not enough. There were others already, but flung so distant across this planet that they didn’t matter. Not here and now.

  But, the first time.

  Valles Marineris stretches farther than anyone can rightly imagine; Ray knew, you said, when we stood on the edge of the abyss and looked until we could look no more. Ray looked up and imagined this very place, the people it once held, the ghosts it still did. Four thousand three hundred and twenty-two kilometers, that was how far we had measured across. Twenty three thousand feet down? Twenty three thousand and two. We would go down there – not this time – but we would love it at the bottom, in the sepia-black where all things became possible. Where one of the worst things happened.

  We wondered if this valley were related to another, to the Mariana Trench which stabs its way into Earth’s gut. You told me Marineris and Mariana weren’t related at all – Marineris was Latin for a long-ago spacecraft that had visited this place. How deep was the trench on Earth? We couldn’t remember, had to pore through computers and tablets when we got back to our base – but that didn’t stop us from guessing. Deeper than Valles Marineris, you said. Surely not, I argued. One could fit inside the other, you said, and showed me, cradling my hand inside your own. Maybe it was less long, you said as your long gloved fingers enclosed mine; maybe it was deeper – and here your hand cupped around mine, flesh sucking to flesh despite these gloves – and that was when we knew.