Imaginarium 2013

by Sandra Kasturi

  “That’s a US Navy cargo ship—the Japanese sank it in the war,” Saufatu said.

  “Can we go out there?” Kettner asked.

  “To the ones near shore, yes, but not the big one,” Saufatu said. He threw a look at Losi. “It’s still there, though, just a little bit further under water. Someone could go out there and record it, if we had the money.”

  “This is really remarkable,” Kettner said. “I can’t believe nobody knows about it.”

  “Nobody knew about the Islands before they sank,” Losi snorted.

  “I never tried to publicize it,” Saufatu said. “It’s really just meant—for our people, you know. But if you think that this can bring some money in—make it so more of us can be involved in upgrading it . . .”

  Kettner shrugged. “I can’t promise that, but I do think a lot of people will be interested in seeing this. So much of what’s out there is so fake, you know? But this really lets you feel what it was like to live here.” He held up a hand. “I won’t do anything unless you’re sure you’re okay with it, though. This is your baby.”

  Saufatu looked over at Losi, then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  “Great—I can do a preview reel from the stuff Losi captured, and I’ll let you know when the piece is going to run,” Kettner said. “You might want to rent more server space.”

  Losi spent most of the next day locked in her room, carefully culling the footage she had recorded—Saufatu told her that Kettner would surely edit it himself, but she said she wanted him to be picking between good, better and best—only emerging more than an hour after he came home from the airport to eat a reheated bowl of mackerel and breadfruit and then crash in dreamless sleep.

  Saufatu had hesitated to tell other Islanders about this business with Kettner, unsure what they would think about a bunch of foreigners coming to the Islands, but when he saw Kettner’s “preview reel” he knew he had to share it—proud of the work he had done in conserving the Islands, of course, but also of Losi’s work in capturing it. The footage had not been stripped and sliced, unlike her usual work, so that it captured not just what she had experienced but how she had felt about it as well. It had all been as new for her as it had been for Kettner, and her joy in swimming, climbing and exploring was clear—not to mention her evident pleasure at showing off. He forwarded the preview to everyone on his mailing list, along with an invitation to join them when Kettner did his show two nights later.

  The next day was Saturday, Saufatu’s day off, and he suggested to Losi that they go out to the beach together. They had not done this in a long time, not since she tired of the calm and shallow water he preferred, but she gathered up the towels and picnic gear and brought them to the truck—stopping, he noticed, every few minutes to check her texts.

  She was silent most of the way out, distracted, and he didn’t push her to talk; the truth was that he felt much the same way, thinking about how things might change for the Islands. They spent all morning in the water, swimming and bodysurfing on the gentle waves, then lay out their lunch and tucked into their sandwiches.

  “I’m glad your friends could spare you,” he said, looking out at the clear sky and whitecapped sea.

  Losi shrugged. “They’re going to have to get used to it,” she said. “All the stuff I do for Brian is stripped and sliced, so he can replace me easily enough if he has to.”

  “Would it be nice, doing work that has a bit more meaning to it?” Saufatu asked. “More of you in it?”

  She shrugged, then nodded, and looked away; they finished their lunch in silence and then went back into the water, swimming against the waves until they were tired enough to be sure they would sleep.

  Losi spent the whole trip back leaning out the window, her right knee bouncing and her left hand tapping the seat. Before he had even turned off the engine she was out of the truck and running to the door of the house.

  Saufatu set the parking brake and drew the keys out the ignition. He was just climbing out of the truck when he heard her shouting from inside; he ran to the house, not bothering to lock the truck, and met her at the door. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “It’s Craig,” she said. “He just texted me. He wants me to be one of his scouts.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, I knew he liked my footage when he didn’t strip it, but I wasn’t sure—you know, I mean, everybody wants to scout for him—”

  “But—” Saufatu frowned. “What about the Islands?”

  Losi frowned too, cocking her head. “What about them?”

  “I thought—Kettner said he thought we could get funding to finish the Islands, upgrade them. I thought you could help me with that.”

  “I’m—I’m sorry, Uncle,” she said. “I just can’t pass this up. This is—I’ll never get a better chance. And it’s work I can do from here, I won’t be moving—not right away, anyway.”

  “And what will I tell your father? What will he say when he hears you’re just giving up on your duty?”

  “He’ll probably be glad I won’t waste my life, building some crazy fantasyland nobody but you cares about,” Losi said. She glared at him for another second, her jaw set, then turned and ran back into the house.

  Saufatu stood for a long moment, shaking his head slowly, then turned at a noise behind him. Apisai Lotoala was standing in front of his house, looking uncomfortable. “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry you had to hear that.”

  Apisai shrugged. “I have a son, you know. They’re all the same at that age.”

  “No, it’s—it’s more than that. She was never interested before, in any of it, and then when she wanted to come see the Islands I thought . . .”

  “Nobody’s interested in home, not at that age. None of us could wait to leave the Islands.” Apisai shrugged. “Maybe it would have been different if we’d known we could never go home, but I don’t expect so.”

  “But you can,” Saufatu said. “Come tomorrow night, you’ll see. And we’re going to make it even better, it’ll be just like being there.”

  “I know what that’s like,” Apisai said, then held up a hand before Saufatu could respond. “Fine, fine—I’ll be there.”

  Losi’s door was shut when Saufatu went inside, and his hand hovered over it, ready to knock; after a long moment he took a breath and let it drop to his side. What could he say to her? He had thought she didn’t care because she had grown up here, had never known the Islands, but he had to face the fact that none of the ones who had grown up there cared either. He sat down at the kitchen table and started to write a text to Kettner, to get him to cancel his visit: it felt like a fraud now, absurd to think that a virtual reconstruction could give someone any sense of what it was like to be an Islander. For the tourists, it would be nothing more than another fantasyland, like Losi had said; for the Islanders it was just a dusty photo album.

  Saufatu’s hand hesitated over his pico’s airboard; after a moment he waved it back and forth to cancel the message, then picked up the pico and took it to his room. He hooked his ‘jack up to the dreamlink and then forced himself to go to sleep and get to work.

  Saufatu walked down the Niulakiti beach to the shore, dodging tourists as they ran back and forth across the sand. He had seen them all over the Eight Islands, walking along the beaches, watching the fearless birds, swimming out to the wrecks—everything that had been in Kettner’s preview reel.

  Apisai Lotoala was at the shore, standing just ankle-deep in the water and surrounded by a knot of Islanders who were all chatting together, drinking toddy from plastic milk jugs and casting occasional glances out to sea. So far as the Islanders were concerned, this was no more meaningful than a backyard fatele; Apisai waved to him as he neared but Saufatu just nodded back, not feeling any need to be humoured.

  He spotted Kettner and Losi about a half-mile out, near where the shark attack was ins
tanced: he thought he recognized the blond boy who had been surfing with Losi out there as well. He waved, and Kettner and Losi began to make their way back to shore.

  “What did I tell you?” Kettner said as he walked out of the water. Losi followed a few steps behind, her eyes lowered. “They love it.”

  “It’s very gratifying,” Saufatu said.

  Kettner laughed. “I’m glad you think so,” he said, and shook his head.

  Losi tapped Kettner on the arm. “Listen,” she said, “I’m going to go, okay? Text me.”

  “No, wait,” Saufatu said. He took a step past Kettner, looked her in the eye. “Just stay, a little longer. Please.”

  “Uncle—”

  Suddenly there was a noise, a deep note like someone blowing on a conch shell. A ship had appeared out on the water—or rather dozens of instances of the same ship, a battered old freighter that hauled itself slowly towards every shore of the Eight Islands.

  A moment later and tourists and Islanders alike were aboard the ship, packed tight on the decks or else peering out of the portholes below. From there they could see the deep-water wharf at the north end of Fogafale and beyond to the narrow streets and concrete buildings where most of the Islands’ people had lived for the last fifty years.

  There was no water on the ground; this was no sunken city, no drowned Atlantis—only an island that had become too low and too salty to be inhabitable, just one more of the thousands of lifeless atolls that dotted the Pacific.

  Kettner was at his elbow. “This is what it was like, isn’t it?” he asked. “When you left.”

  Saufatu nodded. He saw Apisai Lotoala leaning out over the rail, his head turning in wide arcs from side to side and his eyes gleaming with tears. Of course his people hadn’t needed the simulated Islands: every one of them already had an unchanged memory of their home the way it used to be. What they had not had, until now, was a chance to say goodbye.

  The ship’s horn blew again, two sharp blasts, and it began to move away from the wharf. Saufatu turned to see Losi standing behind him. “I’m sorry, Uncle,” she said.

  “Don’t be. You were right.”

  “But you’re not—sinking it? Everything you did?”

  “No,” Saufatu said. “It’ll still be here, for people to see what it was like before—or to help people remember. But this will be the only way to leave.”

  “Listen,” she said, “I could help out for awhile, if you like. I’m sure Kettner would understand.”

  He shook his head. “Do you know, when our people left Tonga and Samoa they thought everywhere in the ocean had been settled? But they set out again into the open sea, just to see what was out there.” He took a deep breath. “Go with Kettner. See what’s out there.”

  She nodded, and they both turned back to look over the side. The wharf and the islands beyond it were moving away in accelerated time, shrinking and then finally fading from view, lost in the trackless ocean.

  honourable mentions

  Alexa, Camille. “Calamari, Baby!”Ocean Stories

  Alexa, Camille. “Children of the Device,”Here Be Monsters 7: Tongues and Teeth

  Alexa, Camille. “Drowntown,”Blood and Water

  Alexa, Camille. “Ghost Dog of Georgia,”The Old Weird South

  Alexa, Camille. “Seeds of the Lotus,”Shanghai Steam

  Armstrong, Kelley. “V Plates,”Blood Lite III: Aftertaste

  Carson, Brad. “Mr. Go Away,”Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper

  Chiykowski, Peter. “Cooking for the Dead,”ChiZine.com

  Church, Suzanne. “Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop,”Clarkesworld, Issue #68

  Clink, Carolyn. “Gaudi Can’t Sculpt . . .”Gusts

  Clink, Carolyn. “Zombie Poet,”Tesseracts 16: Parnassus Unbound

  Clink, Carolyn. “Zombie Poet Writes a Personal Ad,”Tesseracts 16: Parnassus Unbound

  Clink, David Livingstone. “Ossuary,”The Toronto Quarterly, Issue #9

  Clink, David Livingstone. “The Undead,”Crouching Yak, Hidden Emu

  Colman, Robert. “Caught,”Little Empires

  Colman, Robert. “Hunger,”Little Empires

  Czerneda, Julie. “Charity,”When the Villain Comes Home

  Das, Indrapramit. “muo-ka’s Child,”Clarkesworld, Issue #72

  Das, Indrapramit. “Sita’s Descent,”Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana

  Dawson, Robert. “The Widow,”AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review

  Dellamonica, A.M. “Among the Silvering Herd,”Tor.com

  Dellamonica, A.M. “Wild Things,”Tor.com

  Ennals, Sarah. “The Emmett,”FriendsMerrilContest.com

  El-Mohtar, Amal. “Asteres Planetai,”Stone Telling 7

  Ewan, Ann. “Ogre Baby,”Here Be Monsters 7: Tongues and Teeth

  Files, Gemma. “Gabbeh,” World Fantasy Convention Souvenir Book

  Forest, Susan. “7:54,” On Spec, Summer 2012

  Forest, Susan. “Killing the Cat,” Immunity to Strange Tales

  Gavin, Richard. “The Word-Made Flesh,” At Fear’s Altar

  Gavin, Richard. “Annexation,” Cthulhu 2012

  Gavin, Richard. “Darksome Leaves,” At Fear’s Altar

  Ghaznavi, Yaqoob. “Kin,” Poet to Poet

  Goldberg, Kim. “Codex Exterminarius,” Igniting the Green Fuse: Four Canadian Women Poets

  Hannett, Lisa L. & Slatter, Angela. “Of the Demon and the Drum,” Midnight & Moonshine

  Hannett, Lisa L. & Slatter, Angela. “Burning Seaweed from Salt,” Midnight & Moonshine

  Hannett, Lisa L. & Slatter, Angela. “Prohibition Blues,” Damnation and Dames

  Hannett, Lisa L. & Slatter, Angela. “The Red Wedding,” Midnight & Moonshine

  Hoffman, Ada. “Mama’s Sword,” Blood Iris 2012

  Hoffman, Ada. “Sage and Coco,” Kazka Press, Volume 2, Issue 2

  Janz, Kristin. “Clear Skies in Pixieland,” Nine: A Journal of Imaginative Fiction, Issue 1

  Johanson, Karl. “The Airlock Scene,” Here Be Monsters 7: Tongues and Teeth

  Johnson, Matthew. “The Afflicted,” Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine

  Kelly, Michael. “October Dreams,” Supernatural Tales #22

  Kelly, Michael. “The White-Face at Dawn,” A Season in Carcosa

  Kennedy, J.Y.T. “Fingernails,” Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper

  Keyes, David. “The House of Sleep,”I Do So Worry for All Those Lost at Sea

  Keyes, David. “Lost at Sea,” I Do So Worry for All Those Lost at Sea

  King, Barry. “Pythia,” The Colored Lens, Issue 3

  Künsken, Derek. “The Way of the Needle,” Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2012

  Lalumière, Claude. “The Secondary 4 Class of Prettygood Park High School,” Ride the Moon

  Lalumière, Claude. “The Ministry of Sacred Affairs,” Here Be Monsters 7: Tongues and Teeth

  Larson, Rich. “Like Any Other Star,” AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review

  Larson, Rich. “Strings,” Here Be Monsters 7: Tongues and Teeth

  Laycraft, Adria. “The Agreement,” James Gunn’s Ad Astra

  Macleod, Selene. “Home,” December Dead Dreamers Vol. 2

  Marshall, Helen. “Dead White Men,” Hair Side, Flesh Side

  Marshall, Helen. “In the High Places of the World,” Hair Side, Flesh Side

  Marshall, Helen. “The Mouth, Open,” Hair Side, Flesh Side

  Marshall, Helen. “No Ghosts in London,” Hair Side, Flesh Side

  Marshall, Helen. “Sanditon,” Hair Side, Flesh Side

  Marshall, Helen. “This Feeling of Flying,” Hair Side, Flesh Side

  Marshall, Helen. “Leda’s Daughter,” Abyss & Apex, Issue #41

  Matheson, Michael. “Rebirth,” Aoife’s Kiss, Issue #41

  Matheson,
Michael. “White Noise,” Lovecraft eZine, Issue #10

  Meikle, William. “Growth,” Nature (Futures) #488

  Meikle, William. “The Mill Dance,” Dark Melodies

  Meikle, William. “Out of the Black,” Fading Light

  Merriam, Joanne. “The Candy Aisle,” Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Issue #4

  Moore, Matt. “But It’s Not the End,” Undead Tales 2

  Moore, Matt. “Delta Pi,” Torn Realities

  Moreland, Sean. “Unrah, Late of Old Vegas,” The Peter F. Yacht Club

  Moreno-Garcia, Silvia. “The Performance,” Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Issue #3

  Morin, Hugues. “i-Robot,” Solaris 184 (trans. Sheryl Curtis)

  Parisien, Dominik “A Mask Is Not a Face,” Goblin Fruit, Summer 2012

  Parisien, Dominik “In His Eighty-Second Year,” Stone Telling 7

  Parisien, Dominik “My Dead Hands Lover, I’m Leaving You,” Through the Gate 1

  Perron, Kristene. “Lucky Me,” Denizens of the Dark

  Pflug, Ursula. “Casteroides,” Stone Telling 8

  Pflug-Back, Kelly Rose. “Hepatomancy,” These Burning Streets

  Pi, Tony. “The Miscible Imp,” When the Villain Comes Home

  Pi, Tony. “Remains of the Witch,” Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show #26

  Pi, Tony. “Susumu Must Fold,” Daily Science Fiction

  Rayner, Mark A. “Nude Clanking Down a Staircase,” Pirate Therapy and Other Cures

  Rayner, Mark A. “The Wonderful Thing About Tautologies,” Pirate Therapy and Other Cures

  Reynolds, Tim. “Dragons in Suburbia,” Mytherium: Tales of Mythical and Magical Creatures

  Richildis, Ranylt. “Long After the Greeks,” Postscripts to Darkness II

  Ridler, Jason S. “Rikidōzan and the San Diego Swerve Job,” FriendsMerrilContest.com

  Roberts, Angela. “A Song for Death,” Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper

  Rogers, Ian. “Autumnology,” Every House Is Haunted

  Rogers, Ian. “The Cat,” Every House Is Haunted

  Rogers, Ian. “Deleted Scenes,” Every House Is Haunted