Firewalkers

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  LUPÉ BROUGHT HOME solid cash for her fixing work, but Firewalking paid better. Hotep, though: Hotep didn’t need cash. Hotep had a goddamn allowance.

  She wasn’t wabenzi, that class of administrators who ran everything outside the Hotel, men like Attah who hired, fired and made sure things got fixed, hauled, shipped and built. No responsible wabenzi would let their kid end up like Hotep: too embarrassing. Hotep’s folks weren’t from round these parts, though. Hotep’s folks were up living the High Life, overseeing those far more compliant labourers: the robots aboard the Grand Celeste. That made Hotep one of the sonko, the rich-rich. Except here she was, pissing her days away in the township, bitter as hell about all the indignities life had doled out to her. Once every two weeks, give or take, she got so fighting drunk she tried to break in to the Hotel, punch out the guards, scream, shout. They all knew her there, and that her dad was the CEO of Lord God Almighty Incorporated. They knocked her down, but didn’t break anything. And Mao knew all she’d do, if she somehow got past all of that, would be go stand on the Anchor Field and look up to the vanishing point of the cable, where it got too small, too far to see any more. And probably scream at it, because when Hotep got drunk she got vai drunk.

  She was drinking on her balcony when Mao found her, but that was just the usual drinking, that she did like most people breathed. No danger of her going out to buy a black eye and a loose tooth from security for a few days yet.

  Hotep’s real ID called her Cory Dello. The nickname came from some old film everyone saw once, some remake of a remake that was remade back when the idea of a desert land full of ruins was somehow romantic. There had been pyramids and adventurers, and there had been a mummy all got up in bandages to chase them around. Hotep looked like that. Not an inch of her was on show. Face wrapped, save for the hole she applied the bottle neck to, dark goggles over her eyes, hair bound up in a turban and a forage cap set aslant over that like she was the world’s jauntiest burn victim. She wore gloves that were expensive tech in and of themselves, and she bandaged her hands over the gloves. When they had gone out to the fix-it job at Ayem, Mao had wondered how she didn’t just die of the heat, but Lupé said she had some flash liquid cooling gear in there somewhere, that recycled her piss and her body’s movements to offset the battering of the sun. It wasn’t overheating Hotep was worried about, but sunburn and skin cancer. Lupé said she was pale as an albino all over, under all that cloth. The thought was weird, like she was some kind of magic alien from a cartoon.

  Mao’s dad’d had skin cancer for a few years now, the kind that wasn’t going to get you tomorrow or this year, but eventually. Mao would get it too, most likely. Everyone who wasn’t wabenzi or sonko would, because they had to go out to work and there weren’t enough hats or parasols in the world to keep that sun off. Lupé was already checking herself every day, she said, because the old story that only pale, delicate people had to worry about melanomas was a convenient lie they told you, to get you to go out. Hotep was super-paranoid about it, though, and that was only one of the many delightful quirks that had ended with her down here looking up, rather than up there looking down.

  “I know,” she told the pair of them as they scrambled up to the balcony. She had more living space than Mao’s entire family, paid for by the folks who would give her everything so long as they never had to actually share an orbit with her again. “You see the news? Whole lot of people flying in to Libreville Secure International tomorrow. Whole lot of people driving their expensive cars down the Ogooué Road. Busy-busy times a-coming.” She spoke the chimera patois of the township with a ridiculous scholarly precision, clipping out slang like she was saying the Latin names of extinct deep-sea fish. “Of course they need us.”

  “Because the AC at the Hotel is bust?” Lupé asked her.

  Hotep turned her goggles, her bandages, towards them, faceless and creepy. Her wrapped hands were drumming against her knees in complex patterns; she was never completely still. “I give rocks about the AC. AC at the Hotel has been on brownout for months. Only now they’re going to have guests on top of guests at that place, all clamouring for their cool air. You not catch the news from Ecuador, dangi?” She scooped up a little tablet—crazy money worth of device just lying about, propping up one of her empties. She had it projecting pictures on the wall, though Mao had to squint against the sun to make them out. He saw… devastation. He saw water. That made him sit down next to Hotep and just stare, because there was more water there than even God had a use for, surely. Water coming through streets, water flooding around cars, water slanting down in great turbulent sheets from a heavy sky. Water scouring in two-storey-high waves across a field of overturned vehicles and broken prefabs and...

  It took him too long to identify the stump of the building there, lashed by that insane rain, as though all the water that they were lacking here in Ankara Achouka had been dumped in that other place, on the other side of the world.

  “Ankara Pedernales,” Hotep pronounced. “Storm and a tidal wave hit it. Cable just gone, though.” She shook her head. “Serves them right.” As though, if she’d still been on the orbital team, somehow she’d have stopped it.

  “And the people who didn’t get out?” Lupé asked. “Serve them right, too, does it?” Air evac from Ankara Pedernales would only have been for the few waiting for the cable ride up, plus maybe the guards and whatever they called wabenzi over in Ecuador.

  Hotep’s goggles stared at her while the fingers of her free hand continued their manic drum solo.

  Eventually she shrugged. “Went too long without answering, didn’t I?” she remarked cheerily. “Sorry. Making a note now: human better next time.”

  “This is happening now?” Mao asked. He couldn’t look away from the images.

  “Boss, this is happening yesterday. We already got plenty rich folks flying this way because they missed their golden ticket up the pipe,” said with that extra bitterness Hotep reserved for anything to do with space. “They blocked off the news, tried to stop it getting to the local net here, but there’s no data wall high enough to keep me out. So, that’s the job, boss? They need to turn on all the extra AC at the Hotel, just when there’s a power outage? That mean we’re going south at last?”

  “Vai south,” Mao agreed. Meaning further than any of them had gone “Bundu south.” Meaning the wilds, too dry for anything to live, too desolate for anyone to go. Except they were going and, by variedly mad-sounding reports, things still lived there. “All the way.” Meaning the Old Estate, abandoned to the sun and the automatic systems three generations ago, and only rumours about what went on there now.

  “Where the wild things are,” Hotep said languidly, necking the last drops of her beer and placing the bottle on its side, fussily in line with its expired compatriots.

  “Dusk, vehicle compound.”

  “I’m driving.”

  “Fukyo are you. I’m driving.”

  She shrugged, one hand leaving off slapping at her shins to spider around for another bottle. “See you there.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  COMPLAINING ABOUT THE WEATHER

  THERE WERE TOWNSHIPS south of the Ankara, just a few. They weren’t holdovers from the old days, when people had farmed this land or come to see the pretty animals; the drought had driven everyone away a generation before the Ankara was even built. And the Ankara itself was a hothouse flower, existing only because money needed it to exist. When the construction work for the anchor had begun, they’d needed so many workers they’d flown them in from anywhere that had more people than food, shipped in whole families, bussed them from the coast and the airport to the neat new prefab houses they’d built for them. For Mao’s grandad’s generation, it had seemed like magic, like the future. They had built little suburb townships and there was food you could afford and water you could drink without getting sick. There was work. There was a purpose. They’d made a place to live out here on the equator for two whole generations, long after everyone who’d onc
e lived here had been driven out by the heat and the dry. They’d reclaimed a piece of the world from the apocalypse.

  Now, just fifty years on, almost nobody lived outside the Ankara township itself—only the craziest or the hardiest still trying to scratch a living. No buses came to bring workers and work together. Solar was the only power and any decent fix-it who could keep the panels and filtration going had upped sticks to Ankara because the best work was there. The satellite townships were dying. Ankara Achouka was dying, too, but as long as they still needed the Anchor point and its elevator access to the stars, they kept the life support on. Beyond that, it was just folks clinging on because that was where they used to live, and because it was there or nothing. Mao knew damn well that of every hundred who’d left for the coast to make a new life in Libreville or Port-Gentil, ninety-nine either never made it or got turned back from the walled compounds where the last of the government wabenzi lived. Nobody was keeping the lights on outside those compounds. Temperatures around the world were still on the up, and the zone of dead earth was still spreading out from the equator. Nobody’d had any use for that land, dead of heatstroke like everything else, until they’d had the idea for the Anchors, and for space, because the mad irony of it was that if you wanted cheap access to space up an elevator cable, you needed the equator.

  Mao had seen satellite maps of his world. He had seen the little star of the Ankara itself, bang on the equator, an oasis of life in a steadily spreading desert. In older pictures he’d seen where the rivers had been: green, like some other planet entirely, as though before going off to live in space, humans had to first make their own world something alien and uninhabitable.

  Mao thought of that over the first hours of the drive, where being behind the wheel of the Rumblebug was almost like a holiday because there was at least a track going the right way, and they had the cool of the dusk, and the dust hadn’t shorted out half the vehicle’s systems. Lupé had a wind-up radio, picking up old Akendengué covers on Mademba 17, the station that two brothers ran just down from where Mao’s family lived. He could listen to Lupé sing tunelessly along and try to ignore Hotep kicking the back of his seat. Hotep had wanted shotgun, but he knew she’d end up flicking every damn switch in the cab because her hands got bored real easy, so she got to sit in the back.

  The Rumblebug was older than Mao by five years, testimony to the skills of Lupé and her predecessors that it was still running and in good shape. Every part of it had probably been replaced in that time, from its big puffy tyres to the solar cells that sat like angled wing-cases on top. Recently, one of Achouka’s better street artists had given the thing a new paint job, in bright, toxic-looking reds and greens. All the Firewalkers liked to go out in a ’Bug painted as fierce and jagged as possible. We’re poison, they were telling the world. You can’t eat us. We’d kill even you. By the time they brought it back, most of that paint job would be abraded away and half the parts would need replacing, but they made these things to last, and fix-it Firewalkers made damn sure they were always as fixed as they could get, because if your ride broke down out beyond the townships, then most likely you weren’t coming back. Mao had come back, once, that time when things had really gone to crap. That feat had made him a minor celebrity in Achouka, cemented him as a tough guy, got him Firewalking gigs ever since. As many tries at killing yourself as anyone could want. His parents had been less than impressed. His dad, his mum, his grandmother, they’d all tried to talk him out of the work, but they hadn’t said no to the money when it came in. They’d given up on the discussion by now; when he’d said goodbye this time, they’d just hugged him, then let him go.

  Firewalking was a youngster’s job. Youngsters could learn the skills quickly. Youngsters were fast and tough, not so old that their bodies were stocking up on the toxins in the air and in the water. Mao knew one Firewalker who was thirty, but he was broken, too shaky for any kind of work that brought in good pay.

  And youngsters were replaceable. Disaffected youth desperate for cash was the one natural resource Ankara Achouka had in abundance. Everyone was hungry; everyone had folks needed feeding, needed medicine. Everyone dreamt that if you get enough cash in one place, there’d be an office for you with the wabenzi, just like everyone at Attah’s pay grade was waiting for that one elevator car with a berth with their name on it, the one ticket out of the dry hell that was all that was left down on Earth.

  Which brought him back to those contraband images Hotep had shown them. Elsewhere in the world had its own problems, he knew, but it seemed crazy that there were people on this self-same equatorial line who were drowning right about now.

  “You reckon it’s better to get the water than the dry?” he threw back, knowing she’d get what he meant straight off.

  Sure enough, Hotep barked out a laugh. “Some filing system gone crazy in the sky, right? Take all the water, put it over there under ‘W.’”

  “Crazy,” Lupé sang, fitting it to the increasingly staticky music; Mademba 17 didn’t have the kit to broadcast very far.

  “Their wet, our dry, all the same shit,” Hotep said. “What’s on the menu, boss?”

  “We’ll hit Sainte Genevieve after dawn,” Mao told her. “Weather station there, we check the power, wait out the sun, get news. After that it’s just go south until we reach the farms.” He didn’t say that he wasn’t expecting there to be anything wrong with the power lines through Sainte Genevieve. Sure, the locals were probably syphoning a little, but that was built into everyone’s equations. Attah could just call, if it was that simple, get someone already on the ground to go tinker with it. The bulk of the solar fields were deeper in, though. They’d been built for the Estate, the vast compound where they’d designed the anchor tech and spaceship tech, put it all together before shipping it north to the Ankara. Back before Mao’s people had fled the flooding for somewhere dry that needed workers, the smartest of the sonko had come out here, to the land that the heat had rendered utterly vacant. They’d lived in cool chambers underground, come to design the elevator and the engines of the Grand Celeste, and they had done it here in the land of the dead so that no other smart sonko could find out what they were doing. Those old scientists did everything in secret, terrified that some other company would make the discovery first, and make all the money in the world. It made Mao wonder how things would have gone if all those clever people had just put their heads together and not worried about the money.

  But it had worked: here and Pedernales and Singkawang, bang on the equator, they’d built their Ankara points, or at least had people like Mao’s granddad build them. They’d sent the cables up into the sky and started work on the great ships that were Earth’s lifeboats. And by then, they’d abandoned the Old Estate, its labs and secrets not needed any more. They’d gone into space and left behind the land where nothing grew, where no rain fell and every drop had been sucked out of even the deepest aquifer. All they kept were the power lines, funnelling the yield from kilometres of gleaming panels that carpeted the ground around the site. Those solar fields were supposed to last, if not forever, then long enough for their builders to wring what they could from the world and then get the hell off it. They had self-repairing robots to clear the dust off the panels and fix the scouring and the breakages. Back then, the world had been able to afford that kind of luxury, rather than relying on desperate kids like Lupé. It was like that up on the Grand Celeste and the other luxury spaceships, or so Hotep said: robots to fix everything, robots to bring you breakfast, robots to polish your nails and massage your feet and warm your bed. Down here on this end of the cable, people were cheaper and in infinitely greater supply.

  Those clever, clever people who made the robots and the vast gleaming solar arrays, they’d have laughed at you if you told them what a Firewalker was. No need for that kind of homebrew measures in their perfect machine world. Except things broke down, even the robots that repaired the robots that repaired the robots. And the solution to that was to send kids t
o do a robot’s job and get things up and running. Half the Firewalkers Mao ever knew had never come back from one piece of bizna or another. There were desperate people out there. There were broken down vehicles no fix-it could fix. There was dying of thirst, of heat-stroke, of having the thing you were sent to get running explode on you instead. And then there was the Old Estate. Where the wild things are, like Hotep said. What secret science had never come out, after the scientists left their labs and then their planet? Mad experiments, monsters, human vivisection. Crazy rich people with private reservations where they hunted resurrected monster animals, hunted normal people who fell into their hands. There were films and serials about it, all kinds of nonsense Mao had laughed at louder than anyone. He wondered if he’d still find it funny in three days’ time.

  Double-triple danger pay, though. It was all on paper and digital, guaranteed wealth in rand or USD when the three of them got back.

  I hope it’s a power line gone in Sainte Genevieve.

  THERE WAS ONE big building in Sainte Genevieve. It looked kind of like a boat upside down and at an angle, so that the high end curved down like a hood and kept some shade even at noon. Around it was a little township, not the shacks and shanties of the Ankara’s dilapidated circumference, but maybe a hundred little prefab houses, most of which were long abandoned, sand-blasted, windows like eyesockets, doorways like slack mouths. Only two things kept anyone in Sainte Genevieve: the meteorological station and God.

  God got the big house.

  The heat was already fierce by the time they arrived. The inside of the ’Bug smelled like—well, probably like Mao, if he was honest about it. Mao if he’d been hot enough to cook eggs on. They pulled the vehicle up alongside the boat-looking church and took turns topping up the water purifier the way God intended. After that it was find somewhere to wait out the worst of the day. From here on, they’d have to take the light and the heat and just live with it, but no harm having some shut-eye under a roof, and Attah had sent ahead to the meteorologist to expect them.