Pump Six and Other Stories

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  He glanced back wistfully at the receding fat wheel, a child's toy slowly creeping toward the distant muddy line where blue sky finally touched yellow clay. Sighing, Raphel shouldered his satchel and headed for the village.

  The few scattered haci at the village outskirts quickly sidled close. They formed a tightly packed mass of thick walls and claustrophobic alleys. Streets twisted randomly, inviting invaders to stumble into cul-de-sacs and death courts. Sonic bulbs dangled overhead, their beaks gaping, eager to scream.

  Raphel wandered amongst the Jai defenses along a path of childhood memories. He recognized Bia' Giomo's haci, and remembered how she had paid in sugar rocks when he brought her water from the well. He recognized the thick blue door to Evia's courtyard, and remembered hiding together beneath her parents' bed, stifling laughter while her parents groaned and creaked above them. His mother had written to him that Bia' Giomo had passed beyond and that Evia was called Bia' Dosero and now lived at Clear Spring Village.

  Raphel turned another corner, and recognized Old Martiz squatting outside his haci. Red beans boiled over the old man's dung fire, slowly congealing into porridge. Raphel smiled and started to greet the old man, but as soon as Martiz saw Raphel, he grabbed his bean pot and scrambled backward, desperate to keep Quaran.

  Raphel hastily pulled his scarf back over his face and ducked his head in apology. Martiz softened enough to set down his beans and press his palms together. Raphel returned the ancient gesture. He could have told Martiz the source of the Quaran gesture and how it had spread during the Cleansing, but Martiz was unlikely to care. For the Jai it was custom, and that was enough. Jai observed the old ways. In Keli, people shook hands and hardly observed Quaran at all. The trading culture easily discarded careful traditions of past survival. The Jai had longer memories.

  Raphel skirted Martiz by the prescribed two meters of sunlight and threaded deeper into the village. The alley narrowed to a tight path between squeezing walls. He turned sideways and scraped through a kill-slot, its walls pressing against his chest and shoulder blades. At the far end of the kill-slot, he paused to brush ineffectually at the adobe dust that clung to his white robes.

  Children's laughter echoed. Young Jai boys, their robes bright crimson splashes against the pale yellow clay of the haci, dashed down the alley toward him. They stopped short, staring at his Pasho's white robes and attainment marks, then pressed their brown hands together and ducked their heads in careful respect. A moment later they were past him and continuing their chase, slipping through the kill-slot with the easy limberness of basin lizards.

  Raphel turned to watch them, remembering when he had dashed down the self-same alley, chasing friends, pretending that he was a hook-hand crusader, pretending he himself led the war against the Keli. It seemed a long time ago. The boys' red flapping robes disappeared beyond the kill-slot, leaving Raphel alone in the alley.

  Raphel cleared his throat and swallowed several times, trying to relieve its constricting dryness. He inhaled again, deeply, hungry for the scent of his native place. His scarf crackled and he breathed sterile air.

  "A Pasho's responsibilities are often convoluted. How can one know in advance the consequences of an action? It is a Pasho's duty to peer into the nooks and crannies of possibility and only proceed with caution. Slow change is a virtue. For a society to survive the upheavals of technology, the race and culture must adapt. It is not enough that clever fingers learn to work a plough in a few short days, the culture must also be readied for its expanding population, its shift to agriculture, the willy-nilly follow-on ripples of technology introduction. Without proper preparation, moral and philosophical, how can any culture be trusted with a technology as casually violent as a gun?"

  —Pasho Giles Martin, CS 152.

  (Lectures on Moral Change)

  "You must be very proud, Bia' Pasho." Bia' Hanna smiled at Raphel as she spoke. Gold flashed in her mouth and the crow's feet at the edges of her desert eyes deepened.

  "Proud?" Raphel's mother laughed. She took a pot of newly boiled tea from the hearth fire and turned to eye Raphel where he sat separated from them by three meters, electrostatic scarf covering his face. "Proud that my only son abandons his family for ten years? Proud that he turns from his family in favor of Keli and its thousand lakes?" She shook her head and poured tea into Bia' Hanna's clay cup. The thick black liquid, its source leaves dried and fermented over her own hearthfire, sent up smoke-laden scents as it splashed into the glazed clay.

  "But a Pasho, a Jai Pasho." Bia' Hanna's marriage bangles clinked as her wrinkled hand reached for the steaming cup. She and all her friends sat in Raphel's family home, clustered around his mother, a bright seething mass of laughing blue-swathed married women all happy and excited to be invited for the occasion of a family reunion.

  Bia' Hanna's gold teeth flashed at Raphel again. She was proud of the dental work she had received at the border of Keli and smiled willingly and widely. "Yes, you must be so proud. Your son returned to you and a Pasho already, at his age." She sipped her tea appreciatively. "You make the best smoke tea, Bia' Pasho."

  "Stop already with this 'Bia' Pasho' nonsense. I was Bia' Raphel before. I am Bia' Raphel now, whatever my foolish son has done." Raphel's mother turned to refill another woman's cup, one hand deftly holding the blackened steel pot, the other twining around the blue folds of her skirts, keeping them from dragging on the floor.

  Bia' Hanna laughed. "So modest. But look how handsome he is with his attainment marks." She pointed at Raphel. "Look at his hands, Jai Bia'. The script on his face, so much knowledge on his skin, and that only a tiny portion of what sloshes inside his shaven head."

  Raphel ducked his head and stared at his hands, vaguely embarrassed at the women's sudden attention. On the back of his left hand were his first attainment marks: the old alphabet in tiny script. From there, lettering the color of dried blood marched up his arms and stole under his robes. Denotations of rising rank, ritually applied over the years, the chanted mnemonic devices of the ten thousand stanzas, hooks into the core of Pasho knowledge, each one a memory aid and mark of passage. They covered his body in the spiking calligraphy of the ancients, sometimes a mere symbol to hook a bound tome's worth of knowledge, something to recall, and ensure that all Pasho trained later might have access to an unchanging spring of wisdom.

  Raphel looked up in time to catch the quirk of a smile on his mother's face. Bia' Hanna also spied his mother's quickly hidden pleasure. Bia' Hanna slapped his mother on the hip as she turned to pour for another woman. "Ah there! You see, Jai Bia'? You see how the mother flushes with pride at the son's accomplishment? You watch, she'll be seeking a wife for him before the sun touches the basin rim." She cackled, her gold teeth glinting in the dim light of the family haci. "Lock up your daughters, Jai Bia', she'll want to harvest them all for her tattooed son!"

  The other women laughed and joined in the teasing, commenting on Bia' Pasho's good fortune. They shot smiles and evaluating glances in Raphel's direction His mother laughed and accepted their jokes and adulation, Bia' Raphel no longer: Bia' Pasho. Mother of the Pasho. A great honor.

  "Look! He thirsts!" Bia' Hanna cried, and motioned toward Raphel's empty cup. "You ignore our new Pasho!"

  Raphel smiled. "No, Bia', I only wait to speak between your outbursts."

  "Cheeky Pasho. If we didn't keep Quaran, I'd redden your bottom. Don't forget it was I who caught you uprooting bean plants when you were no higher than my hip."

  The women laughed. Bia' Hanna played to her audience, waving her arms in outrage. "He said he only wished to help—"

  "It's true!"

  "—And what was left? Nothing but shredded greens! As though the dust devils had torn through it. It's a good thing he has a new profession, Bia' Pasho. Your fields would never survive his return."

  The Jai women all laughed as Bia' Hanna continued, recalling Raphel's childhood transgressions: rock sugar that disappeared whenever a woman blinked, electrostatic masks reve
rsed, goats with flaming tails, the tales poured out of her golden mouth. Finally, her fountain of memory apparently depleted, she paused and eyed Raphel. "Tell me, revered Pasho, do the Keli people really eat fish? Straight from their lakes?"

  Raphel laughed. "They ask if we really eat coyote."

  "Yes, yes. But custom, Raphel . . . you didn't eat fish, did you?"

  The women fell silent, watching him, their breath unconsciously held for the answer.

  Raphel smiled slightly. "No. Of course not."

  Bia' Hanna laughed. "There, you see Jai Bia'? Blood will tell. You can take the Jai to Keli, but blood will tell. Blood always tells."

  The women nodded knowingly, pretending satisfaction, but their eyes betrayed relief that he had not broken Jai custom. A Jai would die before eating tainted flesh. Jai observed the old ways.

  The women's conversations began again. Raphel was forgotten in the speculation over what day the rain would come and whether Bia' Renado's daughter had been seen too often in the company of a married hook hand.

  Raphel glanced toward the doorway. Sunlight burned in the courtyard beyond. Male voices filtered in with the heat and light: his father and his hook-hand friends. Soon he would join them. They would push a ritual cup of mez toward him, and then step back carefully, keeping Quaran. Ten heartbeats later, he would raise his cup from the courtyard stones and they would toast the blue sky, pour a splash into the dust, and drink until the harsh liquor evaporated from the baked earth. They would perform the ritual again and again, pouring and drinking, getting drunker and drunker until the sun touched the horizon and the bones of the old city turned red in the failing light.

  If Raphel listened carefully, he could make out the men's conversation. His father's voice, laughing: "He didn't get his smarts from me. It must have been his grandfather," and then all the hook hands laughing as they recalled Old Gawar, a man whose hook knives swirled like tornadoes and who spat on the graves of the Pasho he had delivered during the Keli crusade. Legendary deeds from a legendary time. Now, Keli's fat wheels wandered the Dry Basin with impunity, Jai children listened to earbuds full of Keli transmitter stations and spoke with Keli slang, and Old Gawar's grandchild was stained from head to toe with the Keli Pasho's secrets.

  Raphel remembered his grandfather: a withered skinny man who wore his red robes cut open so that the virile white fur of his bony chest tufted out for all to see. A man among men. A great Jai, even at a century and a half. Raphel remembered the old man's black hawk eyes, piercing, as he dragged Raphel close to whisper deeds of bloodshed, teaching him a Jai's understanding of life, muttering darkness into Raphel's ears until his mother caught them and dragged Raphel away, scolding Old Gawar for frightening the boy, and Gawar, sitting paralyzed in his chair, watching and smiling and content, his black bloody eyes on his descendant.

  Raphel shook his head at the memory. Even in far away Keli the old man had whispered bloodshed into his dreams. A hard man to forget. In Keli, more so. Vestiges of his presence lingered everywhere: monuments to the Keli dead, lakes poisonous with burn residue, the hackings of hook knives on marble statues, the skeletal ruins of buildings burned and never reconstructed. Where Raphel dreamed of his grandfather, the Keli people tossed in nightmare.

  Raphel stood carefully and wrapped his robes around him. The women swayed back, unconsciously keeping Quaran, three meters indoors, two meters in clean sunlight, and so it would continue for ten days or until he was dead. Tradition. In Keli, they no longer observed the old ways. Here, it was pointless to explain that the scourge was long gone. The custom was too deeply ingrained, as rigidly respected as handwashing before meals, and planting days before the rains.

  Raphel slipped into the oven heat of the courtyard. His father and the other hook hands called to him. Raphel waved, but did not join the drinking. Soon he would join them and drink himself into a mez stupor, but not until his pilgrimage was complete.

  "Mez, is, of course, poisonous in large doses, and even in small amounts the toxins build up over time, impairing a disproportionate number of the male population.

  "The Jai follow a ritual of distillation for the desert plant that renders its toxins less potent, but custom dictates that they allow a certain percentage to remain. Early efforts to reform the brewing of mez were met with hostility. If a Pasho were to seek to reform the practice, it would best come from within the community as there is too much distrust in the Jai for outside influences."

  —Pasho Eduard, CS 1404.

  (Recovered document, Dry Basin Circuit, XI 333)

  The haci was old, older than most in the village, and sat near its center, at the joining of three alleys. It commanded a good killing view of their confluence and its walls were thick, built for a time when bullets had been more than myths and blood flowed down the alleys many times each generation.

  Up close, the haci showed its age. Settlement cracks crept along its clay walls. Long lines like vines threaded across its face, breeding ruin into its structure. Its thick wooden doors were thrown open, exposing peeling sky-blue paint and silvered splintered wood. A fraying electrostatic curtain swayed in the doorway, black and red interwoven, in Jai traditional style.

  Raphel stood at the haci's curtained doorway, peering into the darkness. From inside, metal scraped rhythmically. It was a comforting sound. A Jai sound. He had grown up listening to that familiar rasp, listening at his grandfather's knee as the old man told stories. The metal continued its scraping. In his mind, Raphel was eight again, sucking sugar rocks and squatting beside his grandfather as the man whispered bloodshed.

  "I burned Keli to the ground," the old man had said and his eyes had blazed as though he could see the pillage still. "I burned Heli, Seli, and Keli. Last of all I burned Keli. Its canals were no defense. Its green gardens burned in our napalm bath. Keli's women fled before us, those silly girls with long black braids and silver belts. We burned that city and taught those soft water people what it is to rule the Jai. We are not ruled by bureaucrats. The Jai control our own destinies. We are not the dirty Kai who choose slavery and have no words. We bathe every morning, charge our sonics in the afternoon, and write dust epitaphs for our enemies under the stars." He had chuckled. "We burned Keli. Burned it to the ground."

  Raphel called into the haci's dimness, "Grandfather?"

  The scrape of metal stopped. Then started again. Over a nearby wall, children played a game with stones, trying to knock one another's casts away from a central stake. Their shrieks of pleasure and disappointment echoed in the heat.

  "Grandfather?" Raphel called again.

  The scrape of metal stopped. Raphel leaned close to the doorway's curtain. Wind rustled through the courtyard, hot breeze making the curtain sway gently. Raphel strained his ears. The slow sigh of breathing came from within. Finally a voice rasped. "So, you've come back."

  "Yes, Grandfather."

  "Let me see."

  Raphel pushed aside the curtain and slipped inside, his fingers tingling in the curtain's static. Inside, the air was cool. He tightened his scarf, pulling it close around his face as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. Shapes slowly resolved. His grandfather sat near the hearth, a slumped shadow. A hook knife and a sharpening stone glimmered in his hands. The hearth was cold and black. At one side of the room the man's pallet lay on the floor, its bedding knotted and unmade. His clothing was scattered carelessly. Only the hook knives on the walls seemed cared for. Their edges shone in the dim light, prizes from men sent beyond.

  The old man's shadow body shifted. The hook knife in his hand glinted. "A Pasho. A Keli Pasho."

  "Yes, Grandfather."

  "Your mother must be pleased."

  "Yes."

  The old man laughed, then coughed. "Brainless woman. Wringing her hands so her bangles always chime. Probably already seeking a match for you." He laughed again. "I suppose you think you are an important man now that you've committed the ten thousand stanzas to memory?"

  "No."

&n
bsp; The old man jerked his head toward a picture on the wall. "Why not? Your image comes before you."

  Raphel turned to examine the photograph, a picture of himself wrapped in Pasho robes, standing and smiling with the head of the Keli Pasho. His tattoos were newly inscribed, still dark and clear on his skin. The elder man's were faded into the folds of his skin, as though the knowledge inscribed had settled deeply into the old Pasho's being. "I don't ask the people to revere me," Raphel said.

  "And yet they do. Ahh, of course they do. The Pasho make sure of that. Your dogs go before you, spreading your pictures, telling stories of your wisdom." The old man laughed. "Everyone believes a Pasho when he speaks. The all-seeing all-benevolent Pasho. Who would beg wisdom from a Jai when a Pasho sits among them?"