Drowned Worlds

by Jonathan Strahan

  I felt like crying, except that I couldn’t find enough moisture inside me. I didn’t know what to say to the people who were on my side. I was too scared to speak. I wished Joconda would wake up and tell everybody to quit it, to just get back to work and play and stop fomenting.

  The next day, I went to the dining area, sitting at the other end of the long table from Miranda and her group of supporters. Miranda stood up so fast she knocked her own food on the floor, and she shouted at Yozni, “Just leave me the fuck alone. I don’t want you on ‘my side,’ or anybody else. There are no sides. This is none of your business. You people. You goddamn people. What are you people even about?” She got up and left, kicking the wall on her way out.

  After that, everybody was on my side.

  6. THE HONEYMOON WAS OVER, BUT THE MARRIAGE WAS JUST STARTING

  I REDISCOVERED SOCIAL media. I’d let my friendships with people back in Fairbanks and elsewhere run to seed, during all of this weird, but now I reconnected with people I hadn’t talked to in a year or so. Everybody kept saying that Olympia had gotten really cool since I left, there was a vibrant music scene now and people were publishing zootbooks and having storytelling slams and stuff. And meanwhile, the government in Fairbanks had decided to cool it on trying to make the coast fall into line, though there was talk about some kind of loose articles of confederation at some point. Meanwhile, we’d even made some serious inroads against the warlords of Nevada.

  I started looking around the dormitory buildings and kitchens and communal playspaces of Bernal, and at our ocean reclamation machines, as if I was trying to commit them to memory. One minute, I was looking at all of it as if this could be the last time I would see any of it, but then the next minute, I was just making peace with it so I could stay forever. I could just imagine how this moment could be the beginning of a new, more mature relationship with the Wrong Headed crew, where I wouldn’t have any more illusions, but that would make my commitment even stronger.

  I sat with Joconda and a few others, on that same stretch of shore where we’d all stood naked and launched candles, and we held hands after a while. Joconda smiled, and I felt like sie was coming back to us, so it was like the heart of our community was restored. “Decay is part of the process. Decay keeps the ocean warm.” Today Joconda had wild hair with some bright colors in it, and a single strand of beard. I nodded.

  Instead of the guilt or fear or selfish anxiety that I had been so aware of having inside me, I felt a weird feeling of acceptance. We were strong. We would get through this. We were Wrong Headed.

  I went out in a dinghy and sailed around the big island, went up towards the ruins of Telegraph. I sailed right past the Newsom Spire, watching its carbon-fiber cladding flake away like shiny confetti. The water looked so opaque, it was like sailing on milk. I sat there in the middle of the city, a few miles from anyone, and felt totally peaceful. I had a kick of guilt at being so selfish, going off on my own when the others could probably use another pair of hands. But then I decided it was okay. I needed this time to myself. It would make me a better member of the community.

  When I got back to Bernal, I felt calmer than I had in ages, and I was able to look at all the others—even Mage, who still gave me the murder-eye from time to time—with patience and love. They were all my people. I was lucky to be among them.

  I had this beautiful moment, that night, standing by a big bonfire with the rest of the crew, half of us some level of naked, and everybody looked radiant and free. I started to hum to myself, and it turned into a song, one of the old songs that Zell had supposedly brought back from digital extinction. It had this chorus about the wild kids and the wardance, and a bridge that doubled back on itself, and I had this feeling, like maybe the honeymoon is over, but the marriage is just beginning.

  Then I found myself next to Miranda, who kicked at some embers with her boot. “I’m glad things calmed down,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean for everyone to get so crazy. We were all just on edge, and it was a bad time.”

  “Huh,” Miranda said. “I noticed that you never told your peeps to cool it, even after I told the people defending me to shut their faces.”

  “Oh,” I said. “But I actually,” and then I didn’t know what to say. I felt the feeling of helplessness, trapped in the grip of the past, coming back again. “I mean, I tried. I’m really sorry.”

  “Whatever,” Miranda said. “I’m leaving soon. Probably going back to Anaheim-Diego. I heard they made some progress with the nanomechs after all.”

  “Oh.” I looked into the fire, until my retinas were all blotchy. “I’ll miss you.”

  “Whatever.” Miranda slipped away. I tried to mourn her going, but then I realized I was just relieved. I wasn’t going to be able to deal with her hanging around, like a bruise, when I was trying to move forward. With Miranda gone, I could maybe get back to feeling happy here.

  Joconda came along when we went back up into Marin to get the rest of the food from those farmers, and collect Weo and the two others we had left there. We climbed up the steep path from the water, and Joconda kept needing to rest. Close to the water, everything was the kind of salty and moist that I’d gotten used to, but after a few miles, everything got dry and dusty. By the time we got to the farm, we were thirsty and we’d used up all our water, and the farmers saw us coming and got their rifles out.

  Our friends had run away, the farmers said. Weo and the others. A few weeks earlier, and they didn’t know where. They just ran off, left the work half done. So, too bad, we weren’t going to get all the food we had been promised. Nothing personal, the lead farmer said. He had sunburnt cheeks, even though he wore a big straw hat. I watched Joconda’s face pass through shock, anger, misery and resignation, without a single word coming out. The farmers had their guns slung over their shoulders, enough of a threat without even needing to aim. We took the cart, half full of food instead of all the way full, back down the hill to our boat.

  We never found out what actually happened to Weo and the others.

  7. “THAT’S SUCH AN INAPPROPRIATE LINE OF INQUIRY I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO DEAL”

  I SPENT A few weeks pretending I was in it for the long haul on Bernal Island, after we got back from Marin. This was my home, I had formed an identity here that meant the world to me, and these people were my family. Of course I was staying.

  Then one day, I realized I was just trying to make up my mind whether to go back to Olympia, or all the way back to Fairbanks. In Fairbanks, they knew how to make thick-cut toast with egg smeared across it, you could go out dancing in half a dozen different speakeasies that stayed open until dawn. I missed being in a real city, kind of. I realized I’d already decided to leave San Francisco a while ago, without ever consciously making the decision.

  Everyone I had ever had a crush on, I had hooked up with already. Some of them, I still hooked up with sometimes, but it was nostalgia sex rather than anything else. I was actually happier sleeping alone, I didn’t want anybody else’s knees cramping my thighs in the middle of the night. I couldn’t forgive the people who sided with Miranda against me, and I was even less able to forgive the people who sided with me against Miranda. I didn’t like to dwell on stuff, but there were a lot of people I had obscure, unspoken grudges against, all around me. And then occasionally I would stand in a spot where I’d watched Weo sit and build a tiny raft out of sticks, and would feel the anger rise up all over again. At myself, mostly.

  I wondered about what Miranda was doing now, and whether we would ever be able to face each other again. I had been so happy to see her go, but now I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  The only time I even wondered about my decision was when I looked at the ocean, and the traces of the dead city underneath it, the amazing heritage that we were carrying on here. Sometimes I stared into the waves for hours, trying to hear the soundwaves trapped in them, but then I started to feel like maybe the ocean had told me everything it was ever going to. The ocean always sang the s
ame notes, it always passed over the same streets and came back with the same sad laughter. And staring down at the ocean only reminded me of how we’d thought we could help to heal her, with our enzyme treatments, a little at a time. I couldn’t see why I had ever believed in that fairytale. The ocean was going to heal on her own, sooner or later, but in the meantime we were just giving her meaningless therapy, that made us feel better more than it actually helped. I got up every day and did my chores. I helped to repair the walls and tend the gardens and stuff. But I felt like I was just turning wheels to keep a giant machine going, so that I would be able to keep turning the wheels tomorrow.

  I looked down at my own body, at the loose kelp-and-hemp garments I’d started wearing since I’d moved here. I looked at my hands and forearms, which were thicker, callused, and more veiny with all the hard work I’d been doing here—but also, the thousands of rhinestones in my fingernails glittered in the sunlight, and I felt like I moved differently than I used to. Even with every shitty thing that had happened, I’d learned something here, and wherever I went from now on, I would always be Wrong Headed.

  I left without saying anything to anybody, the same way everyone else had.

  A few years later, I had drinks with Miranda on that new floating platform that hovered over the wasteland of North America. Somehow we floated half a mile above the desert and the mountaintops—don’t ask me how, but it was carbon neutral and all that good stuff. From up here, the hundreds of miles of parched earth looked like piles of gold.

  “It’s funny, right?” Miranda seemed to have guessed what I was thinking. “All that time, we were going on about the ocean and how it was our lover and our history and all that jazz. But look at that desert down there. It’s all beautiful, too. It’s another wounded environment, sure, but it’s also a lovely fragment of the past. People sweated and died for that land, and maybe one day it’ll come back. You know?” Miranda was, I guess, in her early thirties, and she looked amazing. She’d gotten the snaggle taken out of her teeth, and her hair was a perfect wave. She wore a crisp suit and she seemed powerful and relaxed. She’d become an important person in the world of nanomechs.

  I stopped staring at Miranda and looked over the railing, down at the dunes. We’d made some pretty major progress at rooting out the warlords, but still nobody wanted to live there, in the vast majority of the continent. The desert was beautiful from up here, but maybe not so much up close.

  “I heard Joconda killed hirself,” Miranda said. “A while ago. Not because of anything in particular that had happened. Just the depression, it caught up with hir.” She shook her head. “God. Sie was such an amazing leader. But hey, the Wrong Headed community is twice the size it was when you and I lived there, and they expanded onto the big island. I even heard they got a seat at the table of the confederation talks. Sucks that Joconda won’t see what sie built get that recognition.”

  I was still dressed like a Wrong Headed person, even after a few years. I had the loose flowy garments, the smudgy paint on my face that helped obscure my gender rather than serving as a guide to it, the straight-line thin eyebrows and sparkly earrings and nails. I hadn’t lived on Bernal in years, but it was still a huge part of who I was. Miranda looked like this whole other person, and I didn’t know whether to feel ashamed that I hadn’t moved on, or contemptuous of her for selling out, or some combination. I didn’t know anybody who dressed the way Miranda was dressed, because I was still in Olympia where we were being radical artists.

  I wanted to say something. An apology, or something sentimental about the amazing time we had shared, or I don’t even know what. I didn’t actually know what I wanted to say, and I had no words to put it into. So after a while I just raised my glass and we toasted to Wrong Headedness. Miranda laughed, that same old wild laugh, as our glasses touched. Then we went back to staring down at the wasteland, trying to imagine how many generations it would take before something green came out of it.

  Thanks to Burrito Justice for the map, and Terry Johnson for the biotech insight

  THE COMMON TONGUE, THE PRESENT TENSE, THE KNOWN

  – NINA ALLAN –

  GAIA: You can get the fuck out of my bed, that’s what.

  GOD: What the hell did I do?

  GAIA: You didn’t do anything, that’s the whole frigging point. Droning on about the life to come all the time, all that dying that they might live sack of shit whilst never a thought for what was going on in your own back yard. You thought there’d always be time to clear up the mess, didn’t you? It was always fucking mañana. Well, some of us have work to do. Time is up, big boy. Time to get your sorry ass out of my place so I can do my job.

  —From Mañana, by Kerry Udomi,

  premiered at the Donmar Warehouse, May 12th 2027

  THE LAST THING my mother told me before the Severins took me with them to Strasbourg was that she was proud of me. Not that she loved me—words she hardly ever used even by accident—but that she was proud. Pride counted for more than love, in my mother’s eyes. “I’m proud of you, Melodie,” she said. She held me at arm’s length to look at me, then pushed me away. I believe she thrashed out the possibilities in her mind for a long time, but in the end the decision came upon her in less than a second. She didn’t abandon me, she relinquished me. I was fourteen.

  My mother’s name was Bella, which means beautiful. The only time I remember her smiling is in old photographs: ghostly, faded snapshots that she would always snatch away if she caught me looking at them. In the photos, she is with my Aunt Chantal, and later my father. Bella is small and dark, with a slightly upturned nose and short wavy hair. In the photos, she is often laughing. The Bella I knew had a face creased with worry lines, her whole attention bent inwards towards some private or not-so-private anxiety. She cared for me rigorously, devotedly and entirely without sentiment. I never once heard her laugh.

  Dad didn’t laugh much either but he smiled a lot. He looked the same to me as he did in the photos: well-meaning, rather handsome and vaguely flustered. They’re both dead, I suppose. I still have the letter Dad wrote to me after La Palma. I read it once, then put it away. It’s like the gateway to another world, that letter. Things aren’t good there, but Dad is still alive, still thinking of me, still talking about things I recognise from the world I grew up in. That world is gone now. But thinking about Dad’s letter brings it back, at least for a while. I imagine it cupped in my hands like a snow globe. All that glitter.

  MY NEW FRIEND Noemi doesn’t talk much, she prefers to swim. For a while after I first met her I thought she was mute. Later I realised it was just that she found words difficult to trust. Noemi’s long toes grip the wet rocks as she slopes along the tide line, scavenging for beach finds. For shellfish, mainly, for whelks, which are particularly large close to the inlet, though she finds other things, too: remnants, fragments of history, snapped off like twigs from this particular branch of time. Some of them are even useful.

  When I first asked Noemi how old she was, she looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

  “I can’t remember,” she said. “Does it matter?”

  “I don’t suppose so,” I said, then asked her how her name was spelled instead. She took a broken-off piece of birch twig and scratched the five letters into the lower part of the vast mud bank that has formed around the concrete buttresses of the old motorway bridge. N.O.E.M.I., as if her name were an acronym for something. No One Ever Mistakes Irony. Never Overturn Everything Move Instead.

  There are deep scars on her shoulders and arms. She doesn’t speak about them and I don’t dare ask, not yet anyway, perhaps not ever. Noemi is my friend and I don’t want to drive her away with unwanted questions. I remember what it was like to have friends, running into school on the first day of term with all the other kids, terrified at not knowing anyone, understanding that by the end of the week I’d know them all, by name anyway, that I’d like some of them and hate the guts of others, and that somewhere seated among them was my friend.


  I first met Noemi down by the shore. She was wet from swimming, naked from the waist up, her hair shaved close to her scalp, like a soldier’s. I thought at first that she might be a soldier, then realised from the wary way she looked at me that she was no such thing. She is younger than I am, I think, though not by much. She can hold her breath underwater for almost six minutes. I know, because I timed her. When I asked her how she learned to do this, she shrugged and said it was just practice.

  “How do you practise something like that?” I asked.

  “Fill your lungs slowly. Then think of something else, think of anything except breathing. By the end it’s as if you don’t need to breathe any more. That’s when you know it’s time to come up.”

  Oxygen starvation, which causes hallucinations, then nitrogen narcosis, then death. I worry that Noemi might drown herself accidentally, then tell myself it’s stupid to think like that, she knows what she’s doing, she’s more at home in the water than she is on land.

  She makes me realise how much of a land-thing I am, in spite of my training, and always will be. I’ve been growing potatoes this year, on the patch of waste ground behind the bungalow. The land took months to clear but it was worth it. I keep some of the crop for myself, for eating and for replanting, exchange the rest for eggs and milk at the town market. That we can still call this place a town feels like the highest kind of achievement. There is even a school. I have been there to talk to the children about the La Palma tsunami as part of their summer essay project. They took notes and gawped at me as if I were a living fossil, the same way I once looked at the old man who came into our class to tell us about his grandfather, who had fought in World War Two.