Clarkesworld: Year Six

by Aliette de Bodard

  I looked around at the faces of the people who hated my family. They seemed foreign, and at first I didn’t know why; of course I had little interaction with them, but I knew their faces. I saw their houses on the hill.

  Then it struck me. I had never seen the flicker of hope in their eyes, and now they watched Enah as though he were the word of God. I thought back to François, and felt that I was standing on the edge of a cliff. I stepped up.

  “Have you ever heard the words ‘watershed management,’ Miss Wolfe?” Enah asked. I shook my head. “Do you know what a water table is? A kund?”

  “I know the aquifer is drying,” I said. A rumble passed from mouth to mouth in the crowd.

  “That’s because this place,” Enah said, and gestured over the village, “is designed to waste water. It rains, and the water evaporates again. With bunds and kunds and ditches, we can train it to go back into the aquifer, and capture it from this whole land surrounding your village—”

  He was interrupted by screaming.

  Enah seemed confused, but the villagers knew their screams. They broke and ran, ready to help someone bit by a snake or trapped under an ancient, crumbled wall, but what they found was Jaime, his wife crouched over him and keening, his radio smashed. My heart caught and I stepped forward, knowing what I would see—and I saw that his head was lying separately to his body, the two of them connected by a sweep of bright blood.

  Then it was my turn to break away from them and run. It took the villagers a moment to work through why I was running away from them, and then a yell went up. I heard Enah’s voice, nasal and rising, and then a rock crashed into the ground by my ankle. I ran faster, down into the riverbed, to the safety of the guards and Papa’s dogs.

  They came to the house in numbers that night, carrying fire. I could taste their anger on my skin. From the pumpyard the guards readied their weapons, unsure whether to run to the defense of the house or to protect the water, and Papa flogged the dogs to get them growling. “Where is François? That worthless man! He can put down what he’s stirred up or I’ll have his hide nailed to my wall!”

  Something crashed against our window, and I jumped back. Papa grabbed his rifle and checked it, then made it ready to fire.

  Papa had had people murdered before. We never talked about it, but there was no secret. When I was ten, he had François kill the bonesetter’s son, and everyone knew it was him. Papa had guards and dogs and Papa had the water; the whole village hated him, but no one dared cross him. Now they dared.

  Outside the window, something was happening in the crowd. Enah ran in front of them, raising his hands. I couldn’t hear his words but just his voice was beautiful, melodic like a violin, fanning the fires and banking the coals until the entire mob was singing their agreement with him, and the chant started up: Enah! Enah! Bring the river! Flood them out!

  When the crowd was his, he turned to our house and waved his hand until I stepped up and opened the window.

  “Mr. Wolfe,” he called. “It’s true that Jaime raised me on the radio, but you’ll have to do more than kill him to drive me off. You’ll have to kill me. And you’ll have to kill all the people I am teaching, and you’ll have to teach them not to kill you. Invite me in, Mr. Wolfe.”

  Quite a thing to say, for someone who had just told my father to kill him. But Papa walked to the door, and—quickly, as though the doorknob was a snake—yanked it open. He invited Enah in.

  No ancient and carefully maintained gun from the crowd shot him. No fist-sized rocks came hurtling at his head. Enah approached and the mob behind him rumbled like a single, huge beast, with fire in its many claws.

  Enah walked in, and Papa shut the door behind him.

  They stood watching each other for a moment, these two men, Enah strange and unworldly with fire glowing on his skin, Papa holding his ground like the rocks on the riverbed. Then Enah spoke.

  “All the corpses you’ve planted by your pumps,” Enah said. “How long, tell me, will it take them to bloom? Will they feed your family when they do?”

  Papa frowned, confused. He wasn’t a good man to confuse—he got angry. But instead of striking Enah or taking him by the neck, he showed his hands.

  “Why do you want to destroy me?” he asked. “I want to leave something for my daughter. I want to leave my wealth when I’m no longer here to take care of her.”

  “You can leave her a better wealth,” Enah said, and gestured to the dry riverbed.

  “It will dry up. You don’t understand this village; people don’t learn. If they’re given abundance, they’ll bleed it dry. If I control the water, everyone gets what they need; no one takes more than their fair share.”

  “People learn when they are taught,” Enah said. “When they create with their own hands. They will love the river even as you love your daughter.”

  “You are naive,” father said.

  “And you are stubborn,” said Enah.

  Papa brushed off his hands. “I would rather be stubborn,” he said, but there was a moment when he seemed to consider it. The costs, and the risks, and the damages. But Papa has never been one to back down. “I’m done arguing with you. With a word I’ll have my guards open fire on your mob. Get off of my land.”

  Papa went into his office before Enah could say another word, and I caught Enah’s arm before he left our house. “Why hyacinths?” I asked. I kept my voice at a whisper, so Papa couldn’t hear.

  Enah turned to look at me. “Because this,” he said, gesturing to the riverbed, “is fear in a handful of dust. Have you heard that poem? The Waste Land?”

  I hadn’t, but if there was ever a wasted land, this was it.

  “How much of that world we have forgotten,” Enah said, and shook his head. I understood why people crowded around him like a prophet: he promised beautiful things, and kept them in mind of how strange he was, how little they knew.

  I followed him to the fence around the property, where he went out by the gate and faced the crowd. The mob watched, ready to burn me, but I felt safe in Enah’s shadow. A girl guided through a lions’ den.

  “Those of you who’d see the river run,” he called. “Come at midnight to the highest part of the bank. We’ll gather there and begin: with your own hands and your native rock, we’ll build tanks and dams and bund walls. Little by little, the water will rise. We will name the first wall ‘Jaime’.” He turned, faced our house, and seemed to speak straight to Papa. “And the water will rise.”

  He looked at me, and I ran back inside.

  Papa must have heard him through the walls. He was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands, and his face—what I could see of it—was red.

  He looked to me, eyes dry and veined. “If they gather I’ll have François and my boys cleave them apart,” he said. “It’s not right that they should try to take the river. There was no law here so our family made the law. May you never have to make such a decision.”

  We were both silent for a while, and I said, “Hyacinths don’t grow on clay.”

  Papa’s eyes bugged. “What is this?” he demanded. “What sort of nonsense have they put in your head? Hyacinths!” He stood. “I’ve raised a beautiful girl on this land, and by God I’ll leave my wealth for her when I die. Wealth is all you can ask for in a God-forsaken place like this.”

  I bit my teeth. My mind was full of blood and flowers, and the back of my tongue was dry. Papa glared for a minute, then the heat went out of him.

  “Apologize to me, Lena,” he said. “I’m only trying to protect you.”

  I’d lived long enough that I knew there’d be no peace in the household until I did.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He nodded. For a while he stared out the window, into the distance, his dogs at his ankles.

  “Water,” he said.

  I went into the kitchen.

  I pulled a quart down from the cupboard, and felt the clean weight of it. Wealth, here, sucked out of the dirty riverbed.

  I brough
t it back to the office, and Papa drank like a man thirsty since the days of the Flood. I watched the water disappear into his body.

  He set it down and looked at me.

  “Lena,” he said. “Drink up and go to bed. Keep your eyes closed. I’m going to roust the boys.”

  I went into my room and closed my eyes, and imagined blood sprayed across the riverbed. Papa went out to the pumps, and I could hear his voice, and then the rasp of stones sharpening machetes. I counted my breaths. Fifty, eighty, and the guards began to speak to each other, binding their resolve in boasts and quiet banter.

  Then, I snuck outside.

  The sky was dark, and the electric lamps from the pumpyard didn’t cast light as far as the door. The riverbanks reared high above me to either side.

  I thought, What happens if the water rises?

  But then, that wasn’t the right question.

  What happens if the water never rises?

  The ground cracks. Skin cracks. Bones crack.

  On my birthdays I was allowed the extravagant gift of a bath. When Mama was alive, she’d sit at the side of the tub and wash my back. My entire body felt light, then. I think buoyant is the word—a word I had little use for. I wanted the river to roll down from wherever it was hiding, to catch me, carry me away. I wanted buoyancy.

  I ran for the bank.

  Not far from my door a figure stood up from the shadow of my fence. I stopped quick and saw François, silhouetted against the wide white light of the moon.

  “François,” I said. My voice cracked. I wondered: if he hacked off my head, how long would my blood stain the riverbed? Would Enah bring the waters and wash it away?

  François offered his left hand. In his right, his machete gleamed.

  I took a step back, but I gathered my courage and looked toward the high part of the bank. I kept my eyes on the gathering lights there as I said, “Are you going to tell Papa, or just cleave me?”

  François was silent for a moment. Then, “I said that my parents would not be proud of what I do,” he said. “Lena, I am not proud. God is not proud. I hardly know him, even when I want to pray.”

  I swallowed. In all the years Papa had paid him, he had never called me by name. “I don’t have anyone to pray to,” I said.

  He offered his left hand. Again, I hesitated.

  “François,” I said. “What will happen if the water rises?”

  “Life will return to the river valley,” he said. “And if I’m lucky, I will never again cleave off anyone’s head.”

  My heart raced. “So you want the water to rise?”

  He offered his left hand.

  I stepped forward, this time. Close enough to see that his eyes were rimmed with salt, like the blood on Mogul’s nose.

  Our blood will crack. Our tears will crack.

  I ran forward and wrapped my hand in his.

  His hand closed around mine, larger than mine, warmer, strong. “Your father will have us hunted,” he said. “If you’re afraid, you shouldn’t come.”

  I was afraid. Of him, of the guards, of the villagers, of the flood. Of Papa, of Papa’s dogs, of being cut off from the pumps. Of dying like Mogul. Of dying like Jaime. But I went up on my toes and kissed François on the cheek, and he accepted it like a man made of stone.

  Then he said, “Come,” and we walked up the bank. Toward the lights, where the wind scattered Enah’s lilacs, and I imagined hyacinths on the breeze.

  From Their Paws, We Shall Inherit

  Gary Kloster

  Monkey waited until the sky over the Gulf had gone all black and empty except for a billion stars before he pulled himself back onto the sailboat.

  “Ceegee’s roughed your stuff,” he said, perched dripping on the rail. “They rough you too, Cesar?”

  I spit in the ocean. When the cutter caught me, the ceegee boys had swarmed aboard and slammed me down so that some officer, all pretty in her white and brass, could question me.

  Who’re you, where you going, where you been? Where’s the sugar? Over and over she’d asked, while her boys tore the boat apart. She hadn’t liked my answers. She knew I was lying, even when they couldn’t find anything. Finally, she had her boys rip my shorts off and gave me to her machines.

  The ceegee robots had tentacles, reeking of rubber and lube. Those thin limbs had pushed between my teeth and down my throat, burrowed up my nose and shoved themselves deep into my ass. Searching all my hidden places.

  They had wrecked my boat, and then they wrecked me. Those slick machines had left me choking, shitting, bleeding, puking. Sobbing. For all that wreckage and pain though, they hadn’t found one speck of sugar.

  Because a little monkey I’d found floating in the middle of the gulf days before had looked at the empty horizon and told me the Coast Guard was coming.

  “Ceegee assholes,” I said. “Course they’d rough a South Padre boy.”

  “You want to rough them back?” Monkey’s eyes, glittering with starlight, met mine.

  “How?”

  Monkey curled his tail in and untied a thin white rope from it. “Haul this up.”

  “The sugar?”

  “Yes. Plus something I took from their boat while they were busy with you.”

  “A gun?”

  “Gun’ll just get you killed,” Monkey said. “Got you something better.”

  The rope ended in my drybag, and I opened it up. Three sealed boxes of sugar. Illegal pharma, or nano, or data or who-knows. South Padre pirates just called it all sugar, and gave dumbasses like me boats and money to haul it. Something else nestled between the boxes, a thin tablet of glass and aluminum.

  “What am I suppose to do with a ceegee computer?” I could feel the rawness in my throat, in my ass, the ache deep inside me from being helpless and naked and violated while that ceegee officer and her boys had watched. A gun seemed like a better gift.

  “Rough them,” Monkey said. “I can teach you.”

  I frowned, turning the thing in my hands, not sure. Just a computer, encoded, locked, useless to me, but Monkey gave me a grin.

  Why should I argue with the magic talking monkey? He’d saved me from either being sent to a work camp by the ceegees or being crucified by the pirates back home. So I held the computer and listened to him talk, and slowly the hurt and fear curled up inside me into a knot tight enough to ignore.

  Excerpted from the astronomy site, Constellation Prize:

  Really? Unexplained astronomical phenomena? Possible supernova? Really?

  Worst. Cover up. Ever.

  Sure, most of the sheep don’t know. They’re too busy sucking off the media streams to notice anything, even lights in the fucking sky. But they’ll know soon enough. We’ll force those apes to look up for once.

  We’ve got pictures of the flare, and the tracking data before and after. So what if the gubmint has shut the hell up? We don’t need their fancy toys for this. We’ve already plotted the flight paths for Bogies 1 and 2. We can watch them ourselves—Big Brother gets my telescope when he takes it from my cold, dead hands.

  We just have to agree on the narrative. We know what’s happening—a ship is tearing ass through our system right now, and last night it fired something off in our direction.

  We know that. We can’t be mealy-mouthed. Maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that, can’t be sure, yadda yadda fuck you. We know. Second guessing now is just helping the cover-up. (Yeah, and I know some of you guys in the comments are plants. Eat shit and die, federal sockpuppets!)

  Possible supernova. Unexplained phenomena.

  ALIENS, MOTHERFUCKERS!

  We know.

  How stupid do they think we are?

  Well, I guess we did vote for them.

  “Can I pet your monkey?” my sister Sophie asked, sitting on the balcony next to me, her back against the rust-rotted rail.

  “He doesn’t like kids,” I said, but Monkey scampered down from my shoulder into her lap.

  She smirked and ran her fingers through his f
ur. “See? He knows I’m not a kid, Cesar.”

  I tapped the tablet in my hands, marking my place in the trojan wiki Monkey had me reading and set it down to stare at my sister. Thirteen, and scary tall all of a sudden, with unexpected girl curves rounding her skinny body. No, she wasn’t a kid anymore. That’s why she spent so much time in our rooms now, so the pirates down below wouldn’t notice her.

  Hurricane Mindy had torn the south Texas coast to shreds, and only the newest and toughest of the resorts and condos on our barrier island had survived, broken teeth jutting from sandy gums that shifted and bled with every new storm. The mainlanders had given them up, and now they belonged to the squatters who’d refused to leave, like my mother, and to the pirates. With broken ships and garbage they had built a raft city between the towers, a port for the sugar trade, a rat hole where they could hide from the ceegee patrols circling out in the gulf.

  It’d been rumored for years that the mainland would bomb us someday and send South Padres’ towers finally crashing into the sea. Looking at the gull-picked corpses the pirates had chained to the balconies of the Hilton across from us, I wondered if they’d ever bother. If the hurricanes didn’t finish us soon, the pirates would, and then they’d just eat themselves.

  “You thinking about going out again?” Sophie said, her eyes following mine.

  “No.” My cut from that sugar run would pay our squat rights for two more months. By then, Monkey said I wouldn’t need to risk my ass out on the ocean any more. Touching the tablet beside me, thinking of all I’d learned in the past few weeks from him and this little window into such a strange, wider world, I believed him.

  “Good,” Sophie said. Then, “Mom worried.”

  “Mom noticed?”

  Sophie’s fingers traced Monkey’s back. “She cried.”

  “She wouldn’t have had to, if she’d sobered up long enough to do her job and paid our rights. Then I wouldn’t have had to go.”

  Sophie blinked back tears, and my throat went tight. “Christ,” I sighed, staring at Monkey. He stared back at me, big eyes innocent.

  “What are you looking at, furball? You keep saying it’s almost time, well, I say it’s past time. Start talking. Teach her. She needs this.” Monkey stayed silent for a second, and I added, “You make me look crazy, and I’ll throw you out for the gulls.”