We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology

by Lavie Tidhar

  He snorts, though I’m the one who should laugh. Information. Fishing reports, maybe? Average daily rainfall? No man treks across the Pacific, dares to swim between the reefs, and subsequently avoids the local population without good reason.

  “How is it that you speak Russian?” he asks.

  I duck my head. “There was a man, many years ago. He washed ashore the way your friend did. He recovered and lived in the jungle by himself. I would visit him, bring him companionship, and he taught me to speak it.”

  He looks at my cock and shakes his head. Imaging perversion, maybe. Defending his imaginary countryman from the likes of me. The truth is much worse, of course. Those white caps, burning hot. My hair never grew back.

  “Our governors would greet you with open arms,” I insist. “They’ve kept all the records from the Before time. They know everything about the island and what was here when the world went silent.”

  Behind me, Rai struggles quietly against his bonds.

  “What governors?” Sergei asks. “Where?”

  “I’ll take you,” I tell him.

  * * *

  Sergei wants to leave Rai behind. I can’t risk it. Despite Rai’s many fine qualities, he’s terrible at keeping secrets. Sooner or later he’ll tell Irao and Husto what he’s seen. They’ll tell people at the landfill. Those people will go back to their villages and spread word. And the governors will most definitely not be pleased.

  So instead I convince Sergei that the governors despise me and consider me crazy, an insult to their masculinity. They’ll only allow us near their village if a local man guides us. Sergei looks doubtful, but it’s not hard for him to believe that here I’m an abomination. Eventually he unties Rai and lets him stand. I try to soothe over their unfortunate introduction to one another.

  “He’s Fleet,” Rai says, both angry and amazed.

  “No, not Fleet,” I tell him. “Just a fisherman lost in a storm. He come from Hawaii.”

  Of course, we haven’t had contact with Hawaii since Before Silence. Any stray fisherman would have to survive four thousand miles of open sea to reach our shore. But no one ever taught Rai geography.

  Still, he’s skeptical. “If he’s a fisherman, why did he want to kill us?”

  “He thought we killed his brother. He was afraid.”

  Sergei watches us. He can’t understand a word of Chamorro, or maybe he’s just pretending not to. Perhaps they don’t have white caps where he comes from.

  “Hawaii,” Rai muses. “We could go there. We could trade, maybe, and no one would have to dig at the landfill anymore. My children, your children—Isa, this could change everything for them.”

  “The governors will decide,” I say. “I have to take him there.”

  Rai hesitates. He’s my big brother. He used to fight bullies for me when we were dusty children. He cried the day our uncles took me away to Talofofo. He came to walk me home when they were finished burning knowledge into my head. But the mother of his children is waiting for him at Layon.

  “I’ll take him by myself,” I tell him. “Go get Angelina.”

  He frowns. “No. I’ll come.”

  “You don’t have to—“

  “I’ll come,” he says curtly.

  We circle through the jungle to avoid Irao, Husto and the men from Agat. For hours we walk along the old highway. No sentries or dog raise an alarm as we ghost through Inarajan. I wish we had water. Sergei’s careful to walk behind us, never letting Rai or me out of his sight.

  “Is there an army?” Sergei asks.

  “Not anymore,” I tell him. “Most of the military evacuated or died off After Silence.”

  “What about an army of your own people?”

  I don’t think that he wants an entire history of the militia here, how the local men trained under the Spanish and fought the Japanese and eventually became the Guam National Guard.

  “There’s no need. We only fight each other once in awhile. Do they have armies where you come from?”

  “No,” he says, but I think he’s lying.

  We trudge on. Boonie pigs trample away in the bushes when our feet come too close. To stay awake, I recite the second thousand of the names in my head. In my fatigue, some syllables slip out.

  “What are you saying?” Sergei asks tightly.

  “I’m praying,” I tell him. “For your friend. You were very close?”

  He grunts.

  “He said your name before he died. He sounded… fond.”

  “He was only a man from my—“ Sergei says, and stops. From his ship? From his base? Maybe from his bed.

  Carefully I say, “If there are others of your people nearby, they are welcome as well.”

  Nothing. I glance back. Sergei has stopped to stare at a faint orange glow in the hills. Rai glances, too, but only for a moment. Those are the lights of Layon. The last gift of the old world. There aren’t many options for garbage on an island like this. You have to pile it somewhere, otherwise you dump it into the ocean—all those car batteries and paint cans, light bulbs and lead pipes, the plastic wrap from food, the dirty diapers and soiled cat litter, generations of toxic messes.

  “What’s up there?” Sergei asks.

  “An old landfill. They burn off the gases so they can dig.”

  He swats at a bug on his neck. “What are they digging for?”

  I shrug. “Anything useful.”

  The sky is pink-gold by the time we reach the old satellite tracking station above Inarajan. It’s just a bunch of concrete buildings now, long abandoned, but Sergei pokes around in interest.

  “What was this place?” he asks.

  “Something called NASA,” I tell him. “People used to visit the moon and this place helped them not get lost.”

  “A tracking station.”

  “Do people still live up there? On the moon?”

  He kicks at an old fencepost. “If there are, they don’t answer when we call them.”

  For the first time I really think about the world Sergei comes from. Out there they’ve had the raw materials, factory resources, and technical know-how to manufacture new transformers and power stations. By now they’ve rebuilt the radio stations, the telephone systems, and maybe even the internet. They probably have medicines like aspirin and insulin, and no one dies of illnesses like appendicitis or childbirth.

  All of these things would make life on Guahan easier.

  But at a cost. Magellan taught us that.

  “Do you trust me?” I ask Rai once we’re walking again.

  “What’s kind of stupid question is that?” he asks, brushing thick green leaves from the path.

  Sergei says, “Stop talking.”

  “You must be completely honest with anything the governors ask you,” I tell him. And then, to Sergei, in Russian, “I’m sorry. I asked my brother not to let them beat me when we reach our leaders. I shame them, the men.”

  Sergei says, “If they beat you, why do you dress that way?”

  He reminds me of the villagers when I was still Magahet Joseph Howard USN. Dress like a boy. Act like a boy. Can you teach a stone to act like a tree, or a bird to act like a dolphin? The governors said many long-ago ancestors were proud to be Fa’afafine, in the manner of male and female alike. Their approval made the criticism go silent, or at least less vocal.

  “I follow my heart,” I tell Sergei. “As all men and women should. Don’t your people do that?”

  Sergei coughs. “Perhaps.”

  “Vasilly was more than your friend, wasn’t he?” And some of this is just guessing, but a name murmured in longing is hard to forget.

  His face turns hard. “It doesn’t matter. He’s gone now.”

  Several minutes later we reach the outskirts of Talofofo Park. The parking lot has long returned to vegetation, and the gondolas disassembled or left to rust. Here the governors live in the old history museum, flanked by ramshackle huts and old latte stones and the fresh waters of the Ugum River. It’s all small, unimpressiv
e, nothing to look at twice. A sentry yawns when he sees us.

  “Who comes?” he asks.

  “Rai of Umatuc,” Rai says. “And my sister the Bridge.”

  The sentry yawns again and scratches his ass. “What business?”

  “This man comes from away,” I say.

  Sergei nudges me nervously. “Tell your governors to come out here.”

  “The governors are old men who believe in tradition,” I reply. “They’ll give you all the old records here, but we have to do things their way.”

  He continues to look skittish. But the sentry shrugs as if unimpressed with our visitor and pushes open the museum door. Inside all is dim and empty. I remember being nine years old and standing here with the children of other villages, waiting for our education from the wise governors. We all thought we’d been picked for a special destiny.

  There’s no such thing as destiny. Only inevitability.

  The sentry takes us into a courtyard with woven mats circled around a cooking fire. “Wait here.”

  Sergei shuffles his feet, undecided, but I plop down and Rai follows.

  An old man in a threadbare shirt shuffles from the house a few minutes later. “Isa,” he says, a toothless smile on his face. He shakes Rai’s hand, nods respectfully at Sergei. Behind him, a hunched servant brings out tea. The old man, Kepuha, sits with a creaking of his knees.

  I introduce Sergei in Russian and explain that Kepuha, too, knew the mythical old stowaway, learned this strange foreign language.

  “We must celebrate your arrival,” Kepuha says, all kindness. “Such a momentous day.”

  “They say you can help me with information, sir,” Sergei says.

  Kepuha nods. “Yes, much information. All the old missiles. All those other terrible weapons. It’ll be a relief to be rid of them.”

  Sergei relaxes. He’s close, now, to what he came for.

  Rai can’t follow their words, but he knows some kind of agreement is being discussed. “Honored uncle, will they trade with us?”

  “A good question to ask,” Kepuha says.

  We all drink our cool, sweetened tea. More servants bring toasted bread, boiled eggs, and strips of bacon. Kepuha turns to Sergei and talks more about weapons. On the roof of the museum, another sentry appears. Some young men carry large baskets through the far end of the courtyard. The skin on my neck prickles.

  “Honored Kepuha, my brother and I have family business in Layon,” I say in Chamorro. “We should depart.”

  Kepuha waves his gnarled hand. “There’s time to rest. You must be exhausted.”

  Even as I watch, Rai’s eyes slide shut. He leans sideways and sprawls into the dust. Sergei realizes at the same time I do that our food is drugged. He leaps up, tries to dart away, but gets no further than a few feet before a guard knocks him down and kicks him in the ribs.

  “My brother—“ I say, slurred. “He didn’t—“

  “Sleep,” Kepuha says. “You did well, Bridge.”

  My ears fill with a rushing noise and the sluggish crawl of my own heart. A sweet cool river, just like the river Ugum, carries me away to darkness.

  * * *

  The next time I see Sergei, he’s screaming. The soldiers have him naked and strapped to a table, a white cap affixed to his head. I know what it’s like to writhe as knowledge is forced into neural connections. Like lightning striking the brain, over and over. But Sergei’s pain is worse because they’re not putting data into his brain. They’re yanking it out.

  The back of my throat burns with bile.

  Colonel Kepuha of the Guahan Militia stands beside me, watching through the mirrored window. Electric lights illuminate the rooms down here under the museum. Fresh, cool air circulates from pumps. The entire base runs off the power from recycled material dug out of the Layon landfill. Trash converted to fuel. One of the last great technological achievements of the old world. After Silence, our ancestors couldn’t fix the whole island. But they could fix this place.

  Sergei screams again.

  “Is this… necessary?” I ask.

  “He wouldn’t answer questions about his homeland,” Kepuha says. “But we’ll find out.”

  Take a hump of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Build a fort on it. Build another. Keep building, decade after decade, ports and airfields and depots of concrete and steel. Swap ownership during wartime. Swap it back. Add secret research labs dedicated to memory research. The future looks unlimited. But then civilization collapses, all of it, swallowed up by solar megaflares, and that hump of land has to fend for itself.

  “You did well, bringing him here,” Kepuha says. “We’ll dig up the body of the one you killed and find out what we can from it.”

  With effort, I keep my voice steady. “Who says I killed him?”

  He turns to me. “Of course you did. You learned your lessons well.”

  One foot rooted in the past. One planted in the future. The job of a Bridge isn’t to greet the Fleet, but to stop it.

  “What of my brother, sir?” I ask. “He thinks the strangers were fisherman from Hawaii. I’ll make him swear not to tell, and if he does, no one will believe him anyway.”

  Kepuha smiles indulgently and starts walking down the hall. “Your brother is a good man?”

  I follow. “Yes. Very good and honorable.”

  “Even honorable men can have loose tongues.”

  “You can trust him as much as you trust me,” I promise.

  We’ve reached another window and another memory room. The table inside is empty.

  “When you finished your training as a child, how many names did you leave with?” Kepuha asks casually.

  I rub the goose bumps on my arms. “Seven thousand.”

  “You left with one thousand,” he says. “We give you another thousand more every time you bring us someone from Fleet. A reward for good service. A way to fill the gaps.”

  “But that’s not—” I gulp against a new surge of bile. “That’s not possible. I’d remember.”

  The doors in the room open and two guards drag Rai inside. He fights them, my brother does, but they’re much stronger. They strap him down and reach for a cap.

  Colonel Kepuha says, “No, you won’t remember. You never do.”

  Remembering Turinam

  N.A. Ratnayake

  Outside, the sun was setting. Salai’s journey had started in the cold peaks of the Dorhal Mountains, at the Temple of Heremi, built where the River Khem found its source. He had descended with the Khem to the west, into the secluded valley-basin sandwiched between the curve of the Dorhal range and the Western Sea. Salai had grown nervous as he approached the the Rytari checkpoint at the bottom of the mountain pass. Brown-skinned Turians like Salai were easy to spot among the Rytari and were often stopped. But the soldiers had noted Salai’s simple robe, the orange sash at his waist, and the single small pack on his back, and waved him on without so much as a word.

  Salai had left the Khem the previous day and tracked north of the river, down from the irrigated, tea-growing communes of the foothills into the lower, rolling hills of farmland that made up the northern part of the valley. It was late summer. The grass was dry and a deep reddish brown, replaced in patches by swaths of yellow and green where Turians grew acres of corn, squash, lentils, and beans.

  After three days on foot, the end of Salai’s journey was at last in sight. His pack was lighter than when he had started, since he had been slowly eating the food carefully packed within and drinking measured amounts of water. He took a careful sip to wet his dry mouth and throat and looked to the south.

  Salai could see the main town of Turinam straddling the Khem in the middle of the valley. Turinam had served as the independent center of Turian commerce, culture, and government in the valley for generations. Now it flew a Rytari flag and served as the regional capitol for the Lord Governor, who reported directly to the Rytari Senate.

  On the far side of the town, Salai could see the new Rytari settlements,
as easy to spot against the backdrop of Turinam as his own skin was to the Rytari. Built haphazardly, with an eye towards haste, the structures paid no heed to Turian custom or the traditions that had kept the land and people in a sustainable cycle for generations. This river valley being the latest addition to a vast empire, there was plenty of land to be had—or reallocated.

  Rytari kept moving in. Every month, a transport airship arrived in Turinam from the Rytari-conquered city-state of Aish, on the other side of the Dorhal Mountains. Each landing would bring more settlers, escorted by soldiers and carrying new machinery. The airship would stay a week, then depart with Turian grains, beans, lentils and tea, as well as fish from the village of Korasca, where the Khem met the Western Sea.

  The new settlers had an insatiable need for fields to be leveled, domiciles to be built, and machine shops to be outfitted to repair their technology. Last month the Governor had ordered the construction of a new railway from Turinam to Aish, planning to bore straight through the Dorhal range. Most Turians were skeptical that anyone could accomplish this, even the Rytari with their machines. But it meant jobs, and the settlers kept moving in.

  At the top of the hill, surrounded by fallow fields and ill-used, simple equipment, Salai paused to remember a part of his childhood. Though it had been almost fifteen years since he had been to this place, and he was now a young man instead of a boy, it still caused a familiar twinge of home. He approached and entered the small farmhouse without knocking. A woman dressed in a healer’s robe looked up from the wood stove in the corner. A brown, fired-clay pot simmered with a substance to which Salai attributed the pungent odor of the room. The woman looked Salai up and down and, recognizing the sash tied at Salai’s waist, raised her eyebrows.

  “Auyashti, brother. You are in the Heremitian Anushasan, by your sash.” She looked somewhat older than he. Her face, while still smooth, bore the signs of having seen long hours of work for a long time.

  “Auyashti, sister. You must be Jaeda of the Altharian Anushasan?” She nodded, but said nothing. Salai continued, “I received your letter, but it was difficult to leave Heremi until three days ago. I am here now, and I hope I am not too late.”