Making History

by Rick Wilber

  Angel was moaning with her wound and Nelson took care of her, pulling out a first aid kit as he ran over. When they saw that she was all right Dexter and Bradley walked slowly down to the road. Dexter said, “Bet that’s the last big party. We’ll get strays now, no problems.”

  Bradley’s legs felt like logs thudding into the earth as he walked. He waved to Paul who was already on the road but he did not feel like talking to anybody. The air was crisp and layered with so many scents, he felt them sliding in and out of his lungs like separate flavors in an ice cream sundae.

  “Hey,” Mercer called from the transport cab. “They got food in here.”

  Everyone riveted attention on the cab. Mercer pitched out cartons of dry food, some cans, a case of soft drinks.

  “Somethin, huh?–mechs carryin food,” Angel said wonderingly. For several minutes they ate and drank and then Paul called, “There’s a boy here.”

  They found Paul standing over a boy who was half concealed by a fallen mech. Bradley saw that the group of mechs had been shielding this boy when they were cut down. “Still alive,” Paul said, “barely.”

  “The food was for him,” Mercer said.

  Bradley bent down. Paul cradled the boy but it was clear from the drawn, white face and masses of blood down the front, some fresh red and most brown, drying, that there was not much hope. They had no way to get him to cryopreservation. Thin lips opened, trembled, and the boy said, “Bad . . . mommy . . . hurt . . . .”

  Dexter said, “This ID says he’s under mech care.”

  “How come?” Angel asked.

  “Says he’s mentally deficient. These’re medical care mechs.” Dexter pushed one of the mech carcasses and it rolled, showing H-caste insignia.

  “Damn, how’d they get mixed in with these reb mechs?” Nelson asked irritably, the way people do when they are looking for something or someone to blame.

  “Accident,” Dexter said simply. “Confusion. Prob’ly thought they were doing the best thing, getting their charge away from the fighting.”

  “Damn,” Nelson said again. Then his lips moved but nothing came out.

  Bradley knelt down and brushed some flies away from the boy’s face. He gave the boy some water but the eyes were far away and the lips just spit the water out. Angel was trying to find the wound and stop the bleeding but she had a drawn, waxy look.

  “Damn war,” Nelson said. “Mechs, they’re to blame for this.”

  Bradley took a self-heating cup of broth from Paul and gave a little to the boy. The face was no more than fifteen and the eyes gazed abstractly up into a cloudless sky. Bradley watched a butterfly land on the boy’s arm. It fluttered its wings in the slanting yellow-gold sunlight and tasted the drying brown blood. Bradley wondered distantly if butterflies ate blood. Then the boy choked and the butterfly flapped away on a breeze and when Bradley looked back the boy was dead.

  They stood for a long moment around the body. The road was a chaos of ripped mech carapaces and tangled innards and the wreck of the exploded transport. Nobody was going to run into an ambush here anymore today and nobody made a move to clear the road.

  “Y’know, these med-care mechs, they’re pretty smart,” Paul said. “They just made the wrong decision.”

  “Smarter than the boy, probably,” Bradley said. The boy was not much younger than Bradley but in the eyes there had been just an emptiness. “He was human, though.”

  The grand opening elation he had felt all morning slowly began to seep out of Bradley. “Hell of a note, huh?” he said to no one in particular. Others were doing that, just saying things to the breeze as they slowly dispersed and started to make order out of the shambles.

  The snap and sparkle of the air was still with him, though. He had never felt so alive in his life. Suddenly he saw the soft, encased, abstract world he had inhabited since birth as an enclave, a preserve - a trap. The whole of human society had been in a cocoon, a velvet wrapping tended by mechs.

  They had found an alternative to war: wealth. And simple human kindness. Human kindness.

  Maybe that was all gone, now.

  And it was no tragedy, either. Not if it gave them back the world as it could be, a life of tangs and zests and the gritty rub of real things. He had dwelled in the crystal spaces of the mind while beneath such cool antiseptic entertainments his body yearned for the hot raw earth and its moist mysteries.

  Nelson and Mercer were collecting mech insignia. “Want an AB? We found one over here. Musta got caught up and brought along by these worker mechs?” Nelson asked Bradley.

  “I’ll just take down the serial numbers,” Bradley said automatically, not wanting to talk to Nelson more than necessary. Or to anyone. There had been so much talk.

  He spent time getting the numbers logged into his comm and then with shoving mech carcasses off the road.

  Dexter came over to him and said, “Sure you don’t want one of these?” It was a laser one of the reb mechs had used. Black, ribbed, with a glossy sheen. “Angel’s keeping one. She’ll be telling the story of her wound and showing the laser that maybe did it, prob’ly for rest of her life.”

  Bradley looked at the sleek, sensuous thing. It gleamed in the raw sunlight like a promise. “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Take the damned stuff away.”

  Dexter looked at him funny and walked off. Bradley stared at the mechs he was shoving off the road and tried to think how they were different from the boy, who probably was indeed less intelligent than they were, but it was all clouded over with the memory of how much he liked the rifle and the sweet grass and shooting at the targets when they came up to the crossfire point in the bright sun. It was hard to think at all as the day got its full moist heat and after a while he did not try. It was easier that way.

  Kathleen Ann Goonan is an award-winning science-fiction novelist and short-story writer and a professor at Georgia Tech University in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, where she teaches creative writing. “Kamehameha’s Bones” takes full advantage of those parts of Goonan’s childhood spent in the Hawaiian Islands. The story grew into the highly praised alternate-history novel, The Bones of Time (Tor, 1997), which Publishers Weekly called a “richly speculative” work that will “revive even a jaded reader’s sense of wonder.”

  “I must have been born under an unlucky star, as I seem to have my life planned out for me in such a way that I cannot alter it.”

  - Victoria Ka’iulani

  It was just eight in the morning, but down at Honolulu Harbor, next to the Aloha Tower, eight was hot.

  Cen, wearing a neon green bathing suit and zoris, was covered with sweat, and his arms hurt from loading crates of iced squid and mahi from a boat into the back of Lu-Wei’s ancient ‘95 Toyota Forerunner, which was more rust than car. He stopped, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, and looked around for a Coke machine.

  Lu-Wei, a short, fat man who spent most of every afternoon Mah-Jongg gambling in the seedy Chinese park on Nuuanu, said, “Hey, boy, I pay you good you do this work not laze around! My customers pay extra for wild. But not if it ain’t fresh.”

  “Fuck you,” Cen muttered, but went back to get a crate of yellowtail, still thirsty. Like hell these were wild, anyway. He could tell farm-grown, even if the customers couldn’t.

  He turned; stopped short. A young girl stood on the dock next to the boat. She hadn’t been there a moment before.

  She wore a frilly white cotton dress tied with a large bow at the side of her slim waist. Many fine pleats ran from her high, lacy collar down to her waist. He’d gone shopping with Clai once or twice, and had never seen anything like this, not even in the most expensive department in Samson Brothers.

  As he approached, the girl looked at him directly, seriously, with wonderful, enormous brown eyes, as if taking his measure. Her long black hair was held back in a ponytail. It frizzed slightly around her oval, olive-complected face, which was shaded by a parasol held in her right hand. She
wore unscuffed black patent leather shoes, which shone in the brilliant sun.

  Cen blinked. She looked distinctly old-fashioned against the backdrop of a crane unloading satellite dishes bound for Hickam Spacebase.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’ve been watching you. You are alii, aren’t you?”

  He laughed with conscious bitterness. “Sure I am. Royal blood, that’s right, a real prince. My dad, he was a prince too. A great man.” He rubbed his forehead with his hand, as if he could wipe away the web of red and black that suddenly enveloped him.

  “You remind me of my Uncle David,” she said, and he saw sunlight sparkling on the water once again, and clear blue sky above.

  “What you stopping for now, lazy son-of-bitch!” Lu yelled across two docks and rapped the side of the Forerunner with his ivory cane. “Gotta get this stuff to market! Late already.”

  Cen jerked his head back toward Lu-Wei. “Yeah, I’m special. That’s why I work for that asshole.” Then he was ashamed of saying asshole in front of this weird girl. He bent and picked up the yellowtail, walked over, and shoved the flat into the Runner.

  He wiped his fishy hands on his trunks and turned to wave at the girl

  before leaving.

  But she was gone.

  He looked down at the fish he would soon have to gut. Shimmering red blood would swirl down the drain beneath his spray; one fish eye would stare at him as he yanked out its stomach. He swallowed bile and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  As far as Cen knew, his dad had never looked for him.

  Cen had been terrified, at first, of being found. But after four years, he knew he wouldn’t turn up on the side of a milk carton. He lived in a flophouse room on Hotel Street. Whores had most of the rooms, and they looked out for him.

  He’d taken a few things with him the night he left, after his parents had had a bad fight. One thing was a photograph of his great-grandfather.

  The massive, dark man stood erect. A few palm trees cast shadows across the sand where he stood. He was naked, but his tattoos - delicate, tiny geometric patterns which didn’t go far above his hips - gave him a clothed look.

  Cen took the picture to an old-fashioned tattoo artist on Queen Street. For months, once a week, he gritted his teeth in that tiny hot room that smelled of whisky, until it was complete. Somehow he was able to forget a little more with each stab of the needle. When it was finished, his nightmares would be gone. He would be just himself. Completely new.

  That was the deal, and that was how he spent his first money, the year he turned eleven.

  The deal didn’t quite work out. But he never regretted it. Until now, when he was fifteen.

  He was pretty sure that this girl wasn’t the type that liked tattoos.

  ***

  A week later, he was standing at the window of a Thai carry-out, pouring sweet condensed milk into his iced coffee.

  “Hey, that’s enough, you greedy pig!” the woman told him, and snatched the can from his hand. She slammed the window shut.

  Cen smelled the strong sweet scent of ginger, and turned.

  “People are very rude here,” the girl said, but smiled. Her eyes were mischievous. The sun was directly behind her head and her face was dark, but the wisps of hair which stood out around her face were lit like a nimbus.

  “Do you want some?” he asked.

  She took it and drank. “Good,” she said, and drank more.

  Cen wished he hadn’t been so generous.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, as if she knew what he was thinking, and handed it back. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

  What did she want? “Sure.”

  He started to walk toward the pineapple plant, with its enormous ugly metal pineapple towering above it, where the squalor of the streets reminded him of the punk virtuals down at the arcade, scumworlds where you had to keep your wits about you to keep from getting offed. A few Filipino boys had a cockfight every afternoon in the Mongoose’s packed-dirt backyard, and he had a few hundred yen to blow.

  “No,” she said. “This way.”

  He shrugged. He’d probably just lose his money anyway. “Okay.” They started to walk toward Diamond Head instead.

  She was wearing that same white dress. You’d think that she’d be hot, but she looked as cool as the white clouds hiding the mountaintops.

  “It’s so strange here,” she said.

  “It is?”

  “I’m getting used to it.”

  In a block, they passed Huang Po’s shop - Acupuncture/Fortunes Told/ Money Loaned. Huang, who always boasted that he trafficked with certain Buddhist deities, was sitting out under the awning, fanning himself

  When he saw them, he turned white and stood suddenly, knocking over his chair. Before he ran inside, Cen saw a look of sheer terror in his eyes. The door slammed shut.

  Cen stopped and looked at her. She returned his gaze with the same intense, liquid, intelligent expression that he remembered from the first time they had met.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “My name is Ka’iulani.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “My parents have a big house down at Waikiki. They would be very angry if they knew that I was coming over to the harbor.” She giggled. “They want to keep me all locked up. Safe. But I need to know what my people are like.”

  “Your people.”

  Serenity and composure blazed from her, yet she answered a bit impatiently, “Yes. Queen Liliuokalani is my aunt. After her, I’m next in line. “She raised her chin and stared at him.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I guess you don’t believe me.”

  “Believe what?”

  “That I’m going to be the next ruler of Hawaii.”

  A nut. But a rich nut, obviously. She was very beautiful, frail, fine-boned. His exact height. He felt sorry for her. She wasn’t a tourist. She looked Hawaiian, which was about as rare as the o-o bird. And yet-

  “Your parents are right,” he said. “You shouldn’t be over on this side of town. Let me walk you home.”

  She frowned. “I can get home by myself thank you,” she said. “It’s almost time for tea, anyway, and they become upset if I miss it.”

  Tea? He was so dumbfounded by the whole performance that he let her walk away. By the time he thought to follow her, she had turned the corner, and when he rushed around Huang Po’s and looked down King Street, it was empty of people, as it often was this time of afternoon.

  The street vibrated with her absence.

  His breath came short with terror. “Don’t leave me!” he said, gazing at the old buildings, suddenly afraid that they might vanish too and leave him alone in a dark frightening void with flashes of red, the nebulous place of his recurring nightmares, where nothing was real - but that was all he had and all he ever would have. Score some pakalolo, he told himself. Forget about this girl. Be stoned all night - you got to work anyway.

  His side job right now was washing the greasy dishes of rich tourists who stuffed themselves on fish covered with macadamia nuts, macadamia nut pie, and washed it down with about ten Blue Hawaii’s. He wished he could afford to leave his job at the fish market. It physically sickened him; at least once a month, he rushed from the flopping fish and rivers of blood to puke in the bathroom, but Lu-Wei paid surprisingly well, valuing his dependability, and Cen had vague dreams of going to school. Or something.

  Stoned, he could dream of it being winter, when the surf would be big at Makaha. Life was real then. Lots of dumb tourists came out there and locked their cameras and wallets in the trunks of their cars, thinking that that would keep their stuff from being stolen. Cen could break into a trunk and be gone with the goods in about ten seconds flat. Yeah, sure - if he tried, maybe even a street kid like him could do something besides clean fish and steal. Someday. But right now, maybe the Mongoose could help him out. He usually had extra weed.

  ***

  “Have you ever read Robert Louis Stevens
on?” Ka’iulani asked one day as they sat in the park. Cen had a joint in his hand; the cops didn’t care because this was a bum park. He’d tried to steer Ka’iulani to one of the nice parks like the Banyan Tree Park with the big fountain midtown, but she insisted that she wanted to see how her people lived. “Who’s that?” He didn’t want to tell her that he didn’t read too much. Reading reminded him of his mom.

  Ka’iulani smiled. Cen loved to see her smile. Her eyes were the kindest he’d ever seen. “He’s my friend. He reads with me - Shakespeare and Plato, and he’s even teaching me Latin. He’s a haku mele.” A poet. She looked grave again. “You have to know a lot to be a ruler. You have to know just about everything there is to know. Especially you have to know a lot about politics and the world and everything. And foreign languages - French is my favorite. I hate German, don’t you?”

  He liked this crazy girl. “The only foreign language I know is English, “he said.

  “You mean that Hawaiian is your native tongue.”

  My native tongue. “Yeah.” Sometimes, like whenever he went up Waianai way, or rode Jake’s dirt bike around Kaena Point, where it was so wild, or when he was out on his board, he did think in Hawaiian. “How did you know?”

  “I told you,” she said. “I can tell you’re alii.”

  “That’s crazy,” he said.

  Then he realized: it was not.

  His mother had taught him to recite his genealogy back to the days of the ancient chiefs, but he hadn’t even remembered that until just now. Funny what you could forget. If you tried. It had mattered to her. But it was bullshit. It wasn’t important. Not these days, when they were trying to build a Moon colony, and the shuttle roared in every Wednesday from the space station.

  But what could a little pretending hurt? She made him happy. Shouldn’t that be enough?

  “Yeah,” he said, “and I know where Kamehameha’s bones are.”

  He thought that she would say, “Sure you do.”

  Instead, she jumped up from the grass and stood in front of him. Her

  Her face had a wild look.