The Summer Prince

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “I’m here because Oreste asked,” I say, instead of hello.

  “You think that’s going to help your case?” She has a piece of cloth in her hands, and she twists it back and forth with restless, relentless energy.

  “Just thought I should be honest about it.”

  “Clever way to get back in her graces. You still want the award, don’t you? Octavio said you were ruthless.” I ignore this statement, because acknowledging it might make me run from the room. My desire for this award has started to feel very wrong if I think about it too much. She turns back to the window.

  The cloth in her hands is red and ragged around the edges. She’s too young to wear a red headscarf, so I wonder who it belongs to, why she grips it so tight her knuckles have turned pale.

  Her hair is kinky and matted — she hasn’t combed it in a few days at least. Her bloodshot eyes scan the view from her window, bleakly watching the pods shunting through transport tunnels and the water rippling by internal pylons down at the base. The view fascinates me for a moment — in my neighborhood, the only buildings with internal views are storage facilities. But I imagine that this look at the city’s apparently endless heart is more familiar to Lucia.

  “If you wanted,” I say, “could you do something to disable the weapon tech? Could you make it so we don’t have to be afraid of that silver cloud again?”

  Lucia doesn’t look at me, but she pulls the cloth, hard, between her knees. The edge of it starts to rip. “If I wanted,” she says, almost mocking me. “This is ridiculous, you have to know that. They’re Aunties. They own the whole world, and suddenly, I’m the only one who knows enough about nanotech to save them?”

  “So you could?”

  She pulls harder and the rip travels clear down its length. Lucia stares at the pieces for a moment, tosses them to the floor.

  “My contact had to give me the schematics to set up the cloud. I modified them to work with the city. Not enough, I guess. I tried to make it shoot paper bullets.”

  After the protest, I’d gotten a clear look at what was left of Regina’s body. Dozens and dozens of variously shaped chunks of metal had been hurled at her with such force they left scorch marks in the ground beneath. Some unlucky people near her had needed replacement limbs and reconstructive surgery.

  “That was some goddamned paper,” I say.

  She squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, but when she opens them again, they’re still wet. “I didn’t mean for it to hurt anyone. It was supposed to intimidate you, not …” She swallows. “I told it.”

  “Maybe you can’t tell war tech not to kill.”

  Her chin juts out a little. “You don’t know anything. The principles of propagation are the same, no matter the nano system. They don’t have an essence.”

  I shrug. “Maybe they do.”

  “If you know so much, why don’t you disable the cloud for them?”

  She’s shaking, just a little. I wonder who recruited her. Which of the respected elders from the inner circle had told her she would be doing a good deed? Which of them has abandoned her now?

  I step a little closer, remembering the look of that thing, the cool shadow of it above all of us, that sensation of it watching and waiting for violence without any particular emotion at all.

  I might not like Oreste, I might not agree with how the Aunties have handled things so far, but I can’t let anything like that in my city again. Not if there’s something I can do to stop it.

  “No one’s seen the cloud since it dissipated.”

  “Maybe it’s gone.”

  “Maybe it’s growing flowers.”

  “Whatever. Doesn’t matter. No one else can reaggregate it.”

  She’s stopped looking at me again. I shrug and kneel down; the torn headscarf lies near my feet. When I pick it up, I can see the intricate paneling, the embroidered design along the edges. This isn’t just a woman’s red scarf, it’s a matriarch’s. I think about what it means that this technophile’s prize possession is an ancient piece of cloth, probably hand sewn three generations before.

  I finger the rip. It’s along one of the seams, at least. None of the original design has been destroyed. “I know someone who can fix this,” I say. “A whiz with a needle.”

  “I’ll give it to a sewing nanopropagator,” she says, “once I get out of here.”

  I finger the gold embroidery. I think about a bot that turns paper to metal chunks, but I just shrug. “Okay,” I say.

  I hold it out to her. She snatches it back. “What would you do, June? No one is stopping your art. But the thing I love? Everyone wants to hold it back, push it down, keep a leash on it. Even before they put me here, you had all the freedom.”

  I think that she’s wrong, that Oreste has forbidden plenty already. But then, the cost of my defiance was never a detention facility or a trial. Lucia has risked a lot more than disqualification from the Queen’s Award for her passion. If I squint, I can see how this must look to her. How insufferable my visit must seem.

  I hold that in my head, like the background of a painting. Then I walk past it.

  “I haven’t killed anyone.”

  She gasps and then sucks in air with a noisy whistle, like I’ve hit her in the stomach. She swings her legs to the floor, but doesn’t seem steady enough to stand up. “I didn’t —”

  “You did. You programmed the bot. Why do you think whoever asked you asked, Lucia? No one else in this city knows more than you about nanotech. You’ve even built your own machines. None of the plan would have worked if you hadn’t agreed. And you knew where that tech came from.”

  “I told it not to! The Pernambuco guerrillas must have sent us faulty tech …”

  “That killed people. Funny, Lucia, I’d say it did exactly what it was designed to do. And you know what else I think?”

  “That you’re an ignorant, stuck-up, Tier Eight brat who doesn’t know shit?”

  I smile. “That the Auntie who put you here knew it. Sure, no problem if you could change things, but then, if it fired real bullets, if it hurt real people, so much the better, right? The cloud disappears as soon as you break up, and now we all know the technophiles can access it anytime.”

  “I’m the only one.”

  I take a step until I’m a handsbreadth away from her. Even I’m shaking now, with the horror of what happened to Regina and Wanadi. With how much worse it can get unless I can convince this stupid, selfish, naive, scared waka to help.

  “You are not,” I whisper as fiercely as I can. I imagine Gil behind me, his horror at what is happening to his city as fierce as my own. I imagine Enki, quietly aware of what he’s helped to unleash. “They would be fools not to have watched your every move. Maybe you were the only one at first, but now you’re disposable. It’s been five days, Lucia. Has anyone come for you? Are any of your important friends helping you? Two wakas are dead because of what you did. You’ll let them kill more? You’ll let that cloud hang over Palmares Três forever?”

  She opens her mouth, chokes, and presses a tight knuckle to her eyes. I wait and watch while she cries. I feel curious and empty and watchful. I pity her, but so distantly it feels frigid.

  “And what will happen to me if I do? I get to go back to the verde. I’ve already lost the Queen’s Award. If I give you our one government ally, I lose the nanotech too. I’ll just be stupid Lucia Bolana, future vat custodian.”

  I could argue with her. I could say that she has plenty of opportunities, if she’ll just work for them. I could say that maybe nanotech won’t be completely banned, maybe she could work within the system. But the choice I’m forcing on her is bad enough without defending it with such stupid, self-serving lies.

  “And you think it’s worth it,” I say instead. “Kill a few more kids, win this political debate, become famous? That’s your plan?”

  “You don’t understand —”

  “Will you help or not? You’ll get out of here if you disable the nanocloud and name the Auntie who c
oordinated this. The rest is yours to choose.”

  Her lips twist like the red scarf she ripped in two. She stares at its pieces for a moment and then hands them back to me. “Some choice,” she says.

  “Make it, Lucia.”

  “Get your person to fix it,” she says, nodding at the scarf. “It was my grandmother’s. She wouldn’t like the idea of nanotech either.”

  When I realize what she means, my knees almost buckle. Emotion comes rushing back at me like a wave. I hadn’t known how afraid I was until this moment.

  “Auntie Maria,” she says.

  She shakes her head a little and turns back toward the window, toward the bustling, pulsating, flashing heart of the city.

  When I walk back outside, my cheeks sting with the sudden smack of a few unwary camera bots. Lights flash, casters shout questions, the few passersby stop and stare.

  “Were you offering your support?”

  “Have you seen the new stencils?”

  “What do you think of Auntie Maria’s new proposal to stop all immigration to Palmares Três?”

  They talk and talk. I take a deep breath, and they pause for a moment. I have to say something. There’s no getting past them, otherwise.

  So I look down at the jagged seams of the ancient red headscarf in my hands. “I know someone who can fix this,” I say. “And she’ll use nothing but a needle and a thread.”

  “So you’ve converted?” It’s Sebastião, a sheen of sweat on his face, but otherwise perfectly composed and somehow at the front of the crowd. “Is June Costa an isolationist?”

  I smile at him. “It means … there’s more than one way to fix a tear, that’s all.”

  I push my way through them. Slowly, at first, until Sebastião helps clear a path. Eventually I’m alone again, on a pod shuttling up and up to the rarefied atmosphere of Tier Eight.

  “City?” I say. “Can you take me to the northwest corner? Near Gil’s?” I need to give Lucia’s scarf to his mamãe.

  “Of course, June,” she says. Smooth and perfect.

  “City?” I say.

  “Yes, June?”

  “I love you too.”

  Funny thing, though: Despite the effort Oreste expended to get a name, as far as I can tell, she does nothing with it. Fall makes friendly gestures to winter, parliamentary hearings drone on with Ueda-sama occasionally taken out of the strict seclusion of high security to give testimony, and still Auntie Maria sits serenely in the back of the hall. She gives public updates on the “state of security” in the city. She even personally attests to the destruction of the war-tech cloud, once Lucia’s work has finished. In public, she and Oreste and Auntie Isa are as cordial with one another as ever. When I try asking Auntie Yaha, she just shakes her head and changes the subject conspicuously.

  “But, Mother,” I say tentatively, after another evening in which we find ourselves eating dinner alone with each other. “She practically murdered two people. She invited war tech into our city and she’s the head of security. How can they just ignore it? Why bother to get her name in the first place?”

  Mother twirls the wineglass in her fingers, looking somewhere between me and the ruby liquid spiraling up the inside of the crystal. “When I was at the university, before I became president, there used to be these … wars, I guess you could call them, between the various departments. Antiquities and Environmental Studies in particular hated each other. Getting Administration on your side was always a coup. At its worst, it seemed as if everyone was some kind of spy. It tanked careers, those wars. I remember the mind-set: Assume that everyone else wants what you have, or that they’ll use you to get something better. Trust no one, except to the extent that you have something on them.”

  She trails off, still engrossed in that empty space between us. She takes a long sip of wine. I take a large, burning mouthful of my own. Mother hasn’t talked about her old work since she married Auntie Yaha. Maybe not even since Papai died. I don’t know what to make of this. She’s so uncharacteristically loquacious. She reminds me … but I can’t bear to think of who this mamãe reminds me of.

  “So sometimes we’d find out that there was a spy in the department. Some new secretary we hired, some visiting adjunct professor. You’d think we’d just fire them, right? Report the spying to the Administration?”

  “Doesn’t that make sense? That way you get rid of the spy and make yourselves look like the good guys.”

  “But we didn’t. At least, not immediately. We’d wait, June. For months sometimes. Years, once. We would wait and watch. We’d feed her false information and see what happened with it. We’d set traps and hope she’d fall into them. We made her life a living hell, and then, when we’d used her up, we pretended that we’d just found her and reported her to Administration. Best of both worlds. Sometimes, in a war, your best friend is your known enemy.”

  I understand her now. The cold calculation of the strategy takes my breath away. “But there aren’t any wars in Palmares Três.”

  “There’s politics. And that’s what your stepmother fights in every day.”

  I pour myself the last of the bottle of wine. It’s unusual for the two of us to finish a whole bottle on our own, but then, it’s been an unusual night. “So you think they’re watching Auntie Maria to see what else she plans to do? Isn’t what she’s already done enough?”

  “Maybe they’re watching her to see who else she’s planning to do it with.”

  I consider this. It makes sense, but still something about it makes me stupidly, childishly upset. “Did Auntie Yaha tell you all this?”

  She shakes her head. “She won’t tell me any more than you.”

  But it’s the only explanation that makes any sense. Unless Oreste and all the Aunties are in on the plot, and that I refuse to believe.

  “I wish … is it so hard to just be honest? To just say, no, this is wrong, and stand up for that, and not think about advantage and placement and promotion and all that other Auntie bullshit for just one second? Is that all you grandes are? Is anything real?”

  I slam my glass on the table; the wine spills warm and wet on my hand. I expect Mother to yell back at me about irresponsible wakas and accepting the world the way it is and not the way I want it to be, but instead she just puts her head in her hands. As if it’s grown so heavy it might just droop off.

  “Why do you think I left, filha? Too hard, without your papai around to keep me sane. João would always say to me, But what is right, Valencia? So that at least I’d remember, even if I went the other way.”

  It’s the first time she’s mentioned my papai since he died. At least, the first time that feels like a real remembrance, and not just a way of wounding me or blaming herself. The first time she’s said his name, and I realize he was a man we both loved.

  “What is right, Valencia?” I repeat very softly.

  She sighs. “I don’t know, June. I’m not an Auntie. I’m not even a university president anymore. I’m just a housewife, as you never tire of informing me.”

  If I blush, I blame it on the wine. “And Auntie Yaha?” I ask.

  “She tries, June. You know that.”

  I know that. But …

  “Why should the Aunties get to make such an important decision? What about Regina’s and Wanadi’s parents? What about the people who might get killed if another one of these clouds gets loose in the city? What about —”

  “I know, June.”

  “What about everyone else?”

  I’m crying. Oh, God save me, I’m crying. In front of my mother. I press my knuckles to my hot, throbbing cheeks. I try to force myself to stop, but it isn’t working.

  And then I feel her hands, cool as a rivet in winter, slip around my own. I hear her voice as I remember it: soft and comforting.

  “Querida,” she says, “this will be okay.”

  I want to believe her. But I remember that the same Aunties who won’t bring Auntie Maria to justice plan to kill Enki at the end of winter. For the
first time, I begin to think that I don’t want this Queen’s Award. Would Papai be happy to see me win like this, or would he shake his head: But what is right, June?

  “I hate them,” I say.

  “It’s a terrible system,” says my mamãe, “but it’s the best we have.”

  And I think, that’s why she’s a grande and I’m still a waka. Because she can accept that.

  I won’t.

  Gil and I huddle together for warmth on a bench in Founders Park, the fragmented, muddled strains of some new bloco echoing from the bandstand on the other side of the green. Gil said he wanted to go out and dance like we used to do, to feel normal for once, but the casters and camera bots chased us away. We hid in a pod and then snuck back here.

  Though I can’t see him very well in the distant glow from transport tunnels far above us, I feel his sadness like a coating on my skin. But he tries to smile when he turns to me.

  “Last night Ricarda said you, Octavio, and Bebel are the front-runners for the Queen’s Award.”

  I know he means this to cheer me up, but my chest tightens with confusion and a shameful rush of hope. “Enki thinks I’m stupid to care anymore.”

  Gil rests his head on my shoulder. “Think of everything you could do with it, menina,” he says. “I understand.” And I know he does. It would have taken his mamãe years longer to become a successful designer without that contest.

  “I’m letting them win, if I give it up. Even if I hate Oreste.” But I think of the weeks of silence surrounding Auntie Maria, and my justification sits uncomfortably.

  Gil surprises me when he says very quietly, “I want you to win, and no one could hate her more than me.”

  “You?” I laugh. “Gil, you’ve never hated anyone in your life.”

  “No one’s ever tried to kill someone I love before.”

  I pull away from him, astonished. He’s crying silently, and for a strange, suspended moment, I remember my verde night and the way Enki looked when he realized that someone had stabbed him.