Ecopunk!

by Liz Grzyb

  They are bundled into blankets and then into the helicopters, which take them up and away across the sea.

  Scott’s seat is by the window, Kara’s head against his shoulder. She feels him tense, watches as he shoves his forehead against the glass, straining to see down into the water.

  “What is it?”

  Scott gives an admiring chuckle. “Look for yourself.”

  Kara uncinches her harness and climbs over him, pushing her face against the glass.

  “See the islands?”

  At first, Kara can see nothing past the orange wash of sunset descending over the ocean. But then she makes out the white lines of waves bordering a collection of little isles. They are still flying low. “Okay, I see the islands.”

  “What colour are they?”

  “White. Sandy.”

  “Are they? Look again.”

  And this time Kara looks and she sees it, the pinkish-green hue of sand covered by samphire. And around them, the soft green ring of shallow-water seaweed, only too even and too perfect: a seaweed farm. “Whoa.” Her breath mists the glass. “They weren’t eating it. They weren’t eating it, Scott.”

  “What’s that thing about catch a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day? You shared resources they could use to farm for themselves. I’d say your rehabilitation project won, Kara,” Scott murmurs, kissing her cheek and helping her back on with her harness. “And will continue to win long after our presence has been erased from Mabul Island.”

  * * ** * ** * *

  The City Sunk, the City Risen

  R. Jean Mathieu

  Ladli dabbed at her brow with the hem of her sari. It was not Proper, but then, neither was she. A Proper auntie would not have wasted what few rupees they had on electricity from the neighbourhood’s jugaar solar install, not have wasted yet more on roadside dhaba meals so she’d have time to work, not have sent Maandhar diving into the deep on mad bright dreams instead of honest cons like the rest of the diver-boys.

  The thought had occurred to her, in the shadows of the multinationals, as she queued for water. The ubiquitous cloud of diver-boys swarmed any out-of-towners or people who looked rich.

  “Many diamonds, uncle, from the old days!”

  “Only two hundred rupees investment!”

  “Prizes from the deep!”

  Ladli’s nephew Maandhar had been somewhere in that cloud. If they were lucky, she had thought, some rich farmer from Uttar Pradesh would believe him or humour him, and pay solid rupees for promises of pre-flood diamonds and a few trinkets. That would help, especially since his father Gaurav was not bringing in fish like the old days.

  She had peered into the transparent aluminium wall of the wastewater treatment plant, all oysters and moss and bright-green politics as Delhi dictated, crouched on the edge of the water and straddling a superhighway that lead down into the shallows of the old diamond district. In the morning sun, the coral glinted in rainbow hues, reds and fiery yellows, verdant greens like the north of Gujarat after the monsoons, deep impossible blues which had not existed in nature until eighty years before. She knew why—before Padma’s death, Ladli had studied marine biology, understood the relationships between the new organisms in their handmade ecosystem.

  A ship’s bell had startled her, whirled her toward the Sea of Surat and out past the airport towers peeping out of the still waters toward the Gulf of Cambay. Where Gaurav sailed, and chewed paan, and caught no fish.

  India had risen, and Surat had sunk. India was the most populous country in the world; Surat was a ghost city. India taught the world swadeshi, democracy, jugaad, diversity, colour—but Surat was grey and brown like an American town. The diamond district lay thirty feet beneath the Bay of Cambay, the skyscrapers rotten or fallen, emerging as grey shadows from the water.

  But beneath the water . . .

  Ladli had routed twelve watts halfway across the Athwalines, had sent Maandhar diving with the wires after her project. And what a project! Chicken wire and baling wire to link the rotting steel beams that projected like sunken bones from the new sea-floor that had once been the diamond district. A twisted maze of wire, lazily loping over streets that slumbered beneath the calm, cloudy waters. She’d feared for Maandhar’s safety, even before the electricity went on, but he swam like a seal, poking his bright teeth above the water in a cheeky grin first here, then there. He kept the wiring strictly within his own patch, the square block of the old city where he and he alone was allowed to dive for imaginary diamonds.

  She’d been shocked when he wasn’t killed, after he finally had the power hooked to the metal skeleton between the ruins and the surface of the water.

  But she’d let him swim, let the grey water take him and spit him back out. And she trusted that the wiring down there would be something to behold . . . soon.

  Quietly, in the night, she clicked the power on. The batteries back in Athwalines fed the current down into the water.

  At first, nothing happened. Ladli was almost disappointed.

  Second, Maandhar grinned up at her. This was their little secret. Oh, Padma and Anaya knew, and old grey Pari, and the cook and his family at the dhaba knew that she was doing something unusual. But Gaurav did not know, that was the important thing. Gaurav could not know, he would not understand . . . not yet.

  “Come on,” she chided. “It’s getting dark. Appa will be home soon.”

  * * *

  “The boys are talking.”

  Ladli looked up from the dal with a questioning noise. Inside her head, the clock for the rice kept ticking. Among fifty or a hundred other things.

  “The diver-boys say something strange is happening,” Gaurav kept on. “They talk of white bones growing in Maandhar’s patch.”

  Ladli only smiled, and hoped Gaurav didn’t see her fear. She’d switched on the electricity just before Diwali, as Surat lit its lights and rolled out sweets, and here it was almost Gita Jayanti . . . could the accretion already be visible? How many of the boys had seen?

  Bless it, he was still making narrow eyes at her, and the silence was only getting longer. Think, Ladli, think!

  “Has your son been trying new stories out on you?” Ladli asked. “Last week he told me he was a Brahmin king in a past life, and I owed him halva for sparing me from the axe in that past life.”

  Gaurav smiled toothlessly.

  “Maandhar is the only one who has seemingly not heard anything about it,” he said. “That’s how I know he is responsible.”

  “Responsible for what?” Ladli asked, impressed that her own voice was not shaking.

  “There is little to do at sea these days. The fish do not bite, so the men chew paan and chatter. My men say their little brothers and their sons speak of white bones rising from the old city streets and floors. Some say they can see Maandhar swimming like a fish between these bones. Some say that flesh grows on the bones, like baital.”

  Ladli’s laughter was too fast, too high, too loud, like an actor’s.

  “I thought you were supposed to be an even-headed, old-fashioned Gujarati bhai.” She chuckled.

  Gaurav laughed, too. Ladli wondered if it was also too loud and too high, or if she was imagining it.

  “Let me get the rice,” she said.

  * * *

  But the secret could not stay hidden forever. Not with the waters clearing like that. By Holi, on clear bright days, you could see straight through to the bottom, even if you were an auntie with eyes that weren’t as good as they’d been once.

  And something very strange was happening down there.

  Chalk-white bones, yes, grown around the chicken wire and the steel beams. And, here and there, colour—sharp blooms of orange, spikes of impossible pink, blooms in rose-red. They emerged from the cloudy waters like lights in a distant fog, and gave rise to new charms.

  “The ghost-lights of old Surat, uncle!”

  “It is said they bring joy to your life!”

  “I can try to catch one for you! Two hundred
rupees!”

  Maandhar led the charge, and the diver-boys who copied him ruthlessly did well. Soon, this story had completely supplanted the old one, of lost diamonds and dead men’s treasures.

  Gaurav regarded the pile of dirty rupees on the table, and looked up to Ladli.

  “I’m not even forty yet. Still a householder,” he groused. “It is not right that my ten-year-old son should earn more than me.”

  Maandhar’s glowing smile dimmed. Ladli set a hand on Gaurav’s shoulder.

  “Gaurav, maybe . . . ”

  “Maybe nothing!” Gaurav shouted. “He’s ten, and getting too old for childhood cons and hijinks. It’s time he began to learn his trade.”

  Now, the boy was crying. Ladli crossed over and held him close. He wailed, between sobs and his father’s yells, that he wanted to play in the water. And he had made a living . . .

  “This is not artha!” his father shouted, slapping the table. “This is cheating honest men of their pay! Tomorrow, you will join me on my boat.”

  That started a new round of cries. Finally, Ladli had enough.

  “Sail in his patch,” Ladli said. “Cast lines out there.”

  “Next to the wastewater plant?” Gaurav sneered. Ladli cast her eyes down. “I do not have time to waste on fancies. We need fish, not lies.”

  “But there are so many fish there, Appa!” Maandhar insisted.

  Gaurav shook his head.

  “Orissa farmers might believe your stories, but I am your father and I do not,” he said.

  “He’s not lying,” Ladli said.

  “How do you know?”

  Her breath caught. It was now or never. Six months already—a longer con than any Maandhar had ever pulled. And, perhaps, the coral reef was ready, and she could break it to Gaurav in terms he could understand.

  “Because I have been keeping a secret from you,” she said. “I’m responsible for the ghost-lights. Not Maandhar, me. Well, Maandhar helped me.”

  Gaurav laughed, big and bitter.

  “A woman and a boy alone created the ghost lights in the diamond district? This is too much!”

  “Not just us,” Ladli said. “Others helped. And they aren’t ghosts or lights—they’re coral. Remember, brother-in-law, I once went to college. There, I learned how they restored the reefs off Australia and Indonesia. A century ago, they were choking to death, leaving grey bones where whole ecosystems once thrived. A little electric power and a little wire, over a long-enough time, and the corals bloom on the wire . . . even in poor waters. And they have always, always brought fish. No one had ever tried it in a city, and I thought . . . ”

  “No, no, this is too much!”

  Ladli bared her teeth. “If you will not believe me or my lessons, even-headed Gujarati bhai, believe that money on the table. Believe the poets who come to stare. Believe in the artha and kama of what we have done. Isn’t it possible for it to be dharma and even moksha, too?”

  With a surly stare, he did, stroking his chin with one gnarled hand. Finally, he met her gaze again, his eyes smouldering like coals that could leap into life at any moment. “How many rupees have you poured into this folly?”

  She told him. He cried out as if in pain, and called for her sister.

  “Just one day. There is money on the table for rent. You have had days without fish before. One more will not hurt. And the gods tell me you will bring in more fish than you can carry in two baskets.”

  Gaurav did not speak for a very long time. The soft glow of the LED lamp came on while they waited.

  “One day. One,” he spat. “Maandhar! Go to bed!”

  Ladli gave him a final squeeze. When she let go, she was almost smiling.

  “Thank you, Gaurav.”

  He glared at her.

  “I hope you have not doomed us in your folly. What exactly did you want?”

  She thought of the blooming coral of the aquarium.

  “Rasa.”

  * * *

  The next day was exceptionally bright, the waters exceptionally clear. The spectacle of a Kharva boat next to the wastewater plant, sailing, as it were, thirty feet above the city streets and rotten floors of old Surat, was enough to make boys jeer and women titter. But, as always, a crowd draws a crowd. They all felt themselves waiting for something, but no one could say what.

  And, just after noon, they saw it.

  For the first time all day, the waters came clear, and they could see the sunken diamond district for what it was.

  Bursting with colour and vibrant life, the maze of chicken wire had been replaced with solid walls and stele, lush with corals like a vertical garden after the monsoons. Schools of fish darted between them, while tiny shoals nipped through the remaining holes in the coral. The chalk-white bones had burst forth in colour; the dead city had burst forth in life.

  Maandhar cried for joy, and called to the shore, asking the boys to chase fish toward his father’s boat. With screeches and laughter, they took to the water like so many fishes themselves.

  Not that they needed the help. Gaurav was pulling up net after net, his toothless grin growing with each catch.

  Maandhar called out: “Auntie! Auntie Ladli! Come with us!”

  Ladli hesitated. The water was clear, true, but . . .

  “Come on, Auntie!”

  Ladli had always wanted to touch the coral . . .

  Gaurav met her eye. Like his son, he gestured for her to join them, out there in the water.

  “Well . . . ” she said to herself. “Why not?”

  Ladli took her first steps into the wider water.

  * * ** * ** * *

  Monkey Business

  Janeen Webb

  It had been a long, tiring night for Brunelli—a night spent crawling through the twisted, tangled undergrowth of a treacherous rainforest, a dangerous night spent hunting an enemy intent on destroying a precious, hidden plantation.

  The fire-boys were systematically stripping out the forest for grazing land, indifferent to the extinction of God-knew-how-many species of already endangered wildlife: everything from invertebrates to amphibians to higher mammals died whenever the flame-thrower crews targeted a new area. Government forces simply looked the other way: officially, the cleared land was designated for food crops, not cattle. Unofficially, meat production was still tolerated—provided that the kickback price was right. And now, desk-bound bureaucrats had banned any crop not strictly necessary for human survival, arguing that such measures would ensure food security.

  Brunelli thought otherwise. Brunelli believed in bio-diversity. Brunelli had faith in the new crop production technologies being trialled out here in the rainforest, away from prying eyes. In her experience, people always craved more than the barest of necessities. In her experience, people were always ready to pay that little bit extra to satisfy their desires. The market for the particular commodity Brunelli’s band of mercenaries was here to protect was already assured. It always would be.

  Beside Brunelli, clutching a night-vision camera in his shaking hands, was the reporter who had somehow wangled a place on this covert operation. Raphael Antony Totaro, known around the news circuit as the Rat, was currently crouched knee-deep in mud. A pale, skinny young man whose corkscrew-blonde curls never quite stayed covered by his borrowed helmet, the Rat had an unfortunate knack of getting under Brunelli’s feet.

  “Incoming!” Brunelli yelled. “Down!”

  The Rat obeyed, flattening himself further into the stinking mess of churned-up muck and rotting leaves. When he looked again, trying for an action shot, all he saw in the darkness was a gleam of white teeth as Brunelli grinned behind the tinted glass of her visor. The Rat’s helmet communicator was on: he could hear Brunelli humming softly to herself as she aimed her missile launcher at the moving shadow that had suddenly appeared above them.

  And then the stealth drone exploded in a lurid ball of orange fire that lit up the black night sky. Brunelli never missed.

  The sharp smell of burning o
il and melting metal filled the air. The Rat was still recording the scene as the drone crashed to the forest floor in a red-hot hail of branches, leaves, and debris.

  Something small and furry crashed with it.

  “Damn!” Brunelli said into her helmet mike. “Are you getting this, Raffi?”

  “Yes, boss,” the Rat replied. “It’ll make good footage.”

  “Footage be buggered! We’re not here to kill the wildlife!”

  Brunelli broke cover and raced to retrieve the victim—a baby capuchin monkey, its creamy white head and shoulders smeared with dirt. “Poor little thing’s been separated from its mother,” she said, speaking the words clearly for the report her helmet was recording. “It must’ve been hiding.” She pulled off her gauntlet and gently picked up the whimpering, hapless infant. “Here you go, little one,” she said. She unbuckled the central plate of her chest armour and tucked the little capuchin inside, where it clung at once to her sweat-soaked T-shirt.

  Sensing safety, the baby settled quietly.

  Brunelli suited up again, and went back to the serious business of protecting the most valuable cash crop on the planet. Coffee.

  * * *

  Half a world away, in the sophisticated shopping precinct of ancient Florence, another, smaller battle was taking place. Josephina-Jocetta, teenage daughter of the Duke and Duchess de Glorian and heir to their fabulous family fortune, was struggling with a shop assistant in the mirrored changing room of Valentino’s exclusive boutique.

  “Carmela!” she called. “Help me! I need you!”

  Carmela could not reply—she was lying dead on the showroom’s expensive plush red carpet, shot neatly through the temple by the dark-suited man masquerading as the floor manager.

  Josephina-Jocetta—Jo Jo to her friends—kicked the shop assistant in the shins, fighting to break free.

  The woman winced. “Your bodyguard’s dead,” she hissed. “And you’ll be dead too if you don’t stop this nonsense.” For emphasis, the woman pressed a blade against the girl’s throat. A tiny bead of warm blood blossomed on Jo Jo’s white skin, reflected from a dozen different angles in the mirrored room. “Now, be a good girl and quiet down.”