“You’re all talk!”
An old song played from the speakers.
. . . Young friends, us young friends, are gathering today
Rowing the boats as the warm wind blows. . . .
Flowers sweet, birds a-tweet, spring sun to get you drunk
And laughter flies ’round the clouds in circles. . . .
The melody, which was so cheerful that it verged on the absurd, pierced the glass. The children began to move to the music, following the clown in his gymnastics. They laughed unabashedly, singing, dancing, crowing, every bare face shining golden.
Lao Sun looked up at the sky. The smog seemed to be thinning too.
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHEN QIUFAN (a/k/a Stanley Chan) was born in Shantou, Guangdong province. Chan is a science fiction writer, columnist, script writer, and a technology start-up CMO. Since 2004, he has published over thirty stories in Science Fiction World, Esquire, Chutzpah!, many of which are collected in Thin Code. His debut novel, The Waste Tide, was published in January 2013 and was praised by Liu Cixin as “the pinnacle of near-future SF writing.” Chan is the most widely translated young writer of science fiction in China, with his short works translated into English, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, and Polish, and published in Clarkesworld, Interzone, and F&SF. He has won Taiwan’s Dragon Fantasy Award, China’s Galaxy and Nebula Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award along with Ken Liu. He lives in Beijing.
* * *
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
KEN LIU (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was released in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories later in 2015.
CARMEN YILING YAN was born in China and currently attends UCLA. Since starting out as an amateur translator, her translation work has been published by Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Galaxy’s Edge. Her writing has been published in Daily Science Fiction. Her other interests include drawing, mineralogy, and ancient Chinese history.
RACING THE TIDE
CRAIG DeLANCEY
“Gramma Tara, we gonna get a new house today?”
Tara looked at her granddaughter, who sat on the edge of the front deck, dangling her feet over the water. Her toes could just touch the sea as she swung her legs back and forth. The flow of the ocean swirled around the house’s support beams as the tide hurried in. The water would touch the deck soon. A good wave would curl right over into the living room. No doubt about it: The house was sinking. Or the sea level was still rising. Probably both.
“No, Emma,” she said. “That’s gonna take a long time. The company is just sending out an engineer today to talk with us.”
“But we won’t have to move up north? We can stay?”
“That’s the plan.”
“And my room won’t be wet? There was water in there yesterday. My shoes got squishy.”
Tara looked back through the screen door at the hallway floor, trying to assess the slope of it. The back of the house was lower than the front. “The company has big machines on barges that’ll put down big pillars, real deep. Then they’ll bring our houses out on barges, too, and just set them on the pillars, way up high off the water.”
Emma peered to the northeast, squinting, as if hoping to see a barge out there now, already on its way. Shimmering water stretched to the horizon, broken only by the gray spires of drowned trees. Nothing moved out there but the languid flapping of herons and the white wake of a single boat moving north. Probably a fisherman.
“Gramma,” Emma said very softly. She looked down at her feet. “Tommy called.”
Tara froze, mouth open. After a while, she managed to ask, “What did he say?”
“I didn’t talk to him. He left a message.”
Tara nodded, relieved.
“Can he come over?” Emma asked, her voice pleading. “Is he coming over? Let’s call him. Please, Gramma.”
Tara sighed. “I can’t call Tommy now, honey. I just can’t.”
“Why not?” Emma asked.
Because I’m exhausted, Tara thought. Because I’m done with him, even if he is my son and your father. Because he can’t be helped. Because he never takes advice; he only takes money. Because he can’t make a good choice, only a bad one.
But what she said was “Because the company people are coming.” She pointed. A wake parted on the horizon, and a boat skipped on its edge, speeding toward them.
“You stay here, honey. I’ve got to go over to the barge. Be good. Aunt Grace is gonna check up on you soon.”
Tara turned and backed a rung down the deck’s ladder. Her phone began to buzz on her wrist, but she ignored it as she took the long step into the bow of their boat, which had turned to point at the rising tide.
* * * *
Tara recognized immediately that the approaching boat was bringing them trouble. It was a cigarette boat, long and lean and ostentatiously pre-flood, with a thundering engine burning gasoline. The woman sitting by the captain looked old-school Florida: blonde, with sun-dried skin and a too-tight dark suit. Tara caught the rope tossed by the captain and tied a clove hitch over one of the barge’s bollards. The woman hurried forward, heels clacking on the fiberglass bow. She leapt to the barge.
“Mayor Orton?” she asked, offering her hand. After they shook, she passed Tara a card that read KELLY LUCY, JD. In her other hand she held an aluminum tube of the kind people use to protect blueprints or maps.
Tara frowned. “Just call me Tara. The company had promised to send an engineer.”
The woman nodded. Behind her, the boat went silent. The fumes of its engines drifted over them.
“Mayor, we have a proposal.”
Tara sighed. “You want to dredge.”
“How did you know?”
Tara walked over to the southern edge of the barge. The lawyer followed. Hand on the safety line, Tara said, as calmly as she could manage, “No. We won’t dredge. There are engineers among us. I’m an engineer. We’ve thought very hard about this; we pooled our money—and we don’t have any money, let me tell you, so that wasn’t easy, but we pooled our money and we had a study done. Our plan will work. We don’t have to dredge.”
“Mayor Orton, I’m convinced that you’ll agree with us that our plan is better, if you can just hear me out, learn all its details. You see, you’re ten miles across water from the Big Bridge.” The “Big Bridge” is what they were now calling the project to elevate I-95 above the water. They’d finished connecting all the way to what remained of Miami, and extended it down a bit farther south, to serve the homes still above water in Kendall and Cutter.
The lawyer pointed east. “No spur is going to come out here, not for thirty-seven houses up on stilts.”
Tara nodded. “That’s why our village has to be self-sustaining. Ms. Lucy, if you’re not willing to do the work as we want, then we’ll just hire someone else.”
“You know, many municipalities have been disbanded by their counties for being too small,” the lawyer said. She turned and leaned back against the safety line so that she faced the houses that stood on ramshackle supports formed of cinder blocks or heaped stones or hastily dropped concrete pillars. “Some had twice as many homes as you have here.”
“Are you threatening us?” Tara asked.
“No,” the woman said. She did not take offense. Her tone remained matter-of-fact. “No. But nearly a million homeowners in Florida will file claim to Rising Waters Disaster Funds. Here you have thirty-seven houses, ten miles across water from anything—that’s not how they want to hear the relief funds are being spent. They could force on you a buyout and
spend the savings elsewhere, hoping to accomplish something.”
“We consider this something,” Tara said. “This will all be the Everglades in a dozen years. And we’ll live in it.”
The woman nodded. “Okay. But you can do that on an island, right?”
Tara pointed down at the water. “You make a sandbar here, you’ll have to dig a trench all around it to get the sand to pile up. Any island you make is going to sit in a lake.”
The lawyer paused, considering the course of her argument. Finally, she held up the tube. “Please, just look at the plans.”
Tara sighed. She looked at the municipal building, which sat at the center of the barge. Inside, Pat Cosby, the town secretary, pressed against the glass door, shamelessly gawking at them both. Tara would like to send the lawyer away and call another company. Perhaps she should. But they both knew that there were few contractors willing to work this far out. And she owed it to the people of her town to hear the whole pitch. “Let’s go in,” Tara said.
The phone on Tara’s wrist began to buzz incessantly.
“If you need to take that,” the lawyer said, smiling, “I won’t mind. I can wait for you inside.”
“No,” Tara said. “It’s just my son, calling to tell me he’s dying again, and that only I can save him.”
* * * *
“You busy?” Pat asked Tara.
Tara sat, staring at the wall, as she listened to the calls recorded on her phone. She moved her hand back and forth over the maps that the lawyer had left spread out on the table. All but one of the messages had been left by her son. His voice seemed to warble like a bird. In broken phrases, he pled for money and promised to pay her back. There was also a single calm message from a nurse at the clinic where Tommy lived now, leaving an address.
Tara tapped her watch to stop the playback. “I’m done, Pat; thanks.”
Pat pointed at the maps. It was only an hour after noon, and the sun fell from the skylight and down on the table, making the maps seem to glow. “Well. What d’ya think?”
Tara frowned. The last vote had been contentious. And before the vote, everyone in town had argued for weeks, argued on front decks as the sun set over the water, argued across the bows of boats tethered together while they fished, argued in tentative but loud voices at the weekly town meetings. It had not been easy to come to a decision. Of the fifty-five residents of voting age, only thirty-two had supported her plan in the end. The others wanted to pay for a dredge, to have a sandbar built. They wanted to set their feet on dry land once in a while. And who could blame them?
“I think it’s bad news,” Tara said. “This is going to start the whole debate over again.”
And not in their wildest dream had they imagined this: a huge dredging project, to create not a sandbar out here but an island. A big island. Too big.
“Only if people see these plans . . .” Pat said.
“You let people in to look it all over, whoever wants to look. It’s gotta be done.” Tara stood. “Listen, Pat. I gotta go to Orlando tomorrow. You think your boy Pauly would be willing to sail me out to the train stop on the Big Bridge?”
“I’m sure he would,” Pat said.
“Well. You’ll have to try to keep things together here while I’m away.”
“You need someone to watch Emma?”
“I might. I was going to ask Grace to keep Emma for the night tomorrow. But I’ll tell Grace she can count on you to help out, if that’s okay. Thanks.”
“It’s for Tommy, isn’t it?” Pat asked, her voice soft. “You going to see another doctor? Some kind of expert?”
“None of them are experts,” Tara said bitterly. “They’re just tinkering. Using up brains the way we used to burn up the oil.”
* * * *
It took the whole morning to tack to the Big Bridge. She and Pauly sat in the cockpit of the boy’s six-meter sailboat. The lines rang against the aluminum mast. Pauly was fifteen, quiet to the point of brooding, but proud of his skill on the water. He watched the telltales on the sail and kept the boat moving as fast as the winds allowed. Finally, the bridge rose before them, and Pauly trimmed a tight beam reach that shot them under the dark shade of the two highways. A little building hung down between the lanes, and a strip of sunlight fell through, seeming somehow dirtied by the sound and smell of the cars that roared overhead. Pauly dropped sails and deftly turned, stalling right next to the small dock. Tara thanked the boy for the lift. They did not bother to tie up. With only a nod, Pauly lifted his mainsail as soon as she stepped off. It snapped taut with wind, and the boat leaned away toward open waters.
Tara climbed the stairs to the train stop, just a row of benches between the two train tracks, flanked by the lanes of I-95. She sat alone in the shade of a big sign showing endless advertisements. After an hour of cringing from the roar of passing trucks, she saw the train loom in the distance. She waved, afraid it might pass by if she didn’t show them that someone waited. It squealed to a stop, as if pained to be forced to slow, and Tara leapt through a door that shuddered open reluctantly.
She ignored the other passengers who tried to strike up a conversation with her—the South would always remain the South, she thought, polite and conversational. But she didn’t have the energy for it. She only smiled sadly and turned back to the glass, to watch the tide back out into the Atlantic. Patches of ground, some black with cracked tarmac, others still holding up the cinder block wall of some box store or fast food joint, peeked up through the shallower places. But that wasn’t land. The land was gone. The sea had taken it. Florida had shrunk to a narrow, blunted knife of sand and trees.
The train climbed up away from the sparkling water when they neared Port St. Lucie. Tiredness overcame her then, as if the green-and-brown land lay heavily on her. She watched, half asleep, while the train passed hotel after hotel, their parking lots fringed by pools and swing sets.
Two hours brought her to Daytona Beach. She wrestled with the clunky municipal internet to navigate incomprehensible bus schedules. Eventually, she discovered a way to string together three trips to get to her destination in Orlando. She bought an exchange ticket online and boarded a noisy, dirty bus waiting in a covered lot behind the station. Two hours later, bus doors parted with a sigh and she clomped down before a brick building with GRACE CLINIC printed over its entrance.
She did not go in immediately. An old bench stretched out beside the door, its wood slats carved all over with inscrutable graffiti. Exhausted and bone weary, she flopped down on it. She had thought the air on the bus oppressive and close, but now she discovered it was just the landlocked air, still and hot. Her body longed for the ocean breeze.
She turned on her phone and told it to call home. “Emma?” she shouted, feeling she needed to be loud to reach across the distance.
“Gramma?”
“How are you, honey?”
“Are you with Tommy?”
“Not yet, honey. But I’m almost there. I’ll see him soon.”
“Call me back and turn on the camera,” she said.
“Honey, I been meaning to tell you. Your daddy might be asleep. Okay? So, he might not be able to talk on the phone. Sick people have to sleep a lot sometimes.”
“Wake him up,” Emma said. “Shake him so he wakes.”
“We’ll just have to see. I’ll call you when I know.”
When she passed inside, she realized that she had come in a side door, or a rear door, of the clinic. It was crowded and busy inside. A long hall with a scratched but shining floor stretched to big glass doors in the distance that parted again and again as people came and went. Stretchers lined the halls, with patients sleeping on them or just lying there, staring at the ceiling and gasping in the close heat. The smell was a mixture of harsh antiseptics and urine.
Tara passed rooms filled with rows of beds, some of them bunks. She understood then that it was not much more than a homeless shelter. A shelter for the indigent ill. At the end of the long hallway, she came to a
desk where a nurse stood, impatiently swiping at an old tablet computer with a sputtering screen.
“Excuse me; I’m looking for Tommy Ortey.”
“And you are?”
“I’m his mother.”
The nurse nodded, paged through screens, and poked at the pad vindictively, and finally said, “Room 154. That way.”
“Thank you.”
It was one of the rooms that she had passed. Inside, six beds were arranged in a space not much wider than the hall. Tommy lay in the bed against the far wall. Walking sideways, Tara worked her way to him, squeezing between the beds. Tommy lay on his back, sweating atop the covers, eyes closed, breath uneven. He wore a pale aqua gown, and his naked limbs were thin, like sticks, so that his knees and elbows were knobs. Fresh scars left pale lines on his shaved head. He twitched while he slept.
“Tommy?” she said softly. He did not open his eyes. A chart hung on the end of his bed. She lifted it and read, but nothing there meant anything to her.
The room lacked any chairs. She gently lowered herself on the corner of his bed and let her weight sink down into the mattress. He did not stir, other than his frequent twitches.
“Tommy?” she said, a little more loudly. “Tommy? Tommy?” She touched him. His skin was hot.
Tommy opened his eyes. He looked around in panic for a second, then focused on her. The twitching grew worse. He lifted a shaking hand, dropped it back onto the bed. “Mama?” he warbled.
She nodded, trying not to cry.
“I can . . . har . . . har . . . hardly . . . talk,” he said.
“That’s okay, Tommy; that’s okay. You don’t have to talk.”
But that upset him more. His limbs shook violently now. He lifted his hand but seemed uncertain about what to do next.
“I . . . I . . . I . . .” he said. “I . . . I . . . I . . .”
“Shh. I’ll talk to your doctor. Okay? I’ll talk to your doctor.”
He trembled a long time, and she sat with him till his eyes closed again and he fell asleep.
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