Asimov's SF, October-November 2011 (32 page)

"Daniel Raymond Hitchens, you are under arrest for destruction of property, trespass, and assault in the first degree. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in court. You have the right to an attorney—"

The two cops, neither from here, have come right into math class during final exams. They cuff me and lead me out, my test paper left on my desk, half the equations probably wrong. My classmates gape; Connie Moorhouse starts to cry. Mr. Ruhl says feebly, “See here, now, you can't—” He shuts up. Clearly they can.

Outside the classroom they frisk me. I bluster, “Aren't I supposed to get one phone call?"

"You got a phone?"

I don't, of course—gone long ago.

"You get your call at the station."

They take me to the police station in Fuller Corners. There is a lot of talking, video recording, paperwork. I learn that I am suspected of killing the guard in the Fuller Corners attack. The surviving guard identified me. This is ridiculous; I have never even been to Fuller Corners. That doesn't stop me from being scared. I know that something more is going on here, but I don't know what. When I get my phone call to my father, I am almost blubbering, which makes me furious.

My parents come roaring down to Fuller Corners like hounds on a deer. Along with them come more TV cameras than I can count. More shouting. A lawyer. I can't be arraigned until tomorrow. What is arraigned? It doesn't sound good. I spend the night in the Fuller Corners lock-up because I'm seventeen, not sixteen. The jail has two cells. One holds a man accused of raping his wife. The other has me and a drunk who snores, sprawling across the bottom bunk and smelling of booze and piss. He never wakes the entire time I'm there.

Dad drives me home after the arraignment. I am out on bail. More TV cameras, even a robocam. I recognize Elizabeth Wilkins, talking into a microphone on the courthouse steps. She looks hot. Everyone follows my every move, but in the truck it's just my father and me, and he doesn't look at me.

He doesn't say anything, either.

We drive through the ruined land, field after field empty of all but blowing dust. The thing that gets me is how fast it happened. We learned in school about the possible desertification of the Midwest from global warming. But it was only one possibility, and it was supposed to take decades, maybe longer. Then some temperature drop somewhere in the Pacific Ocean—the
Pacific Ocean
, for fuck's sake—changed some ocean currents, and that brought years of drought, ending in dust that blew around from dawn to sundown. Ending in grass fires and foreclosures and food shortages. Ending in Fuller Corners.

Finally my father says, “This is just the beginning.” He keeps his eyes on the road. “But not for you, Danny. You're not going to prison. If that's what you're thinking, get it out of your mind right now. Not going to happen. They got nothing but made-up evidence that won't hold up."

"Then why was I arrested?"

"PR. Yeah, you're the poster boy for this. Bastards."

On the courthouse steps, Elizabeth Wilkins said into her microphone, “The protestors are even using their children in a shameful and selfish fight to stop the pipeline that will save so many lives in the parched and dying cities of Tucson and—"

I am not a child.

"Dad,” I blurt out, “were you at Fuller Corners?"

His eyes never leave the road, his expression never changes, he says nothing. Which is all the answer I need.

I thought I knew fear before. I was wrong.

At home, Mom is frying potatoes for dinner. It's warm outside but all the windows are shut against the dust, and all the curtains are drawn tight against everything else. Ruthie lies on the kitchen floor, frantically coloring. I go upstairs and sit on the edge of my bed.

A few minutes later Ruthie comes into my room. She plants herself in front of me, short legs braced apart, hands clasped tight in front of her. “You were in jail."

"I don't want to talk about it. Go away, squirt."

"I can't,” she says, and the odd words plus something in her voice make me focus on her. When she was littler, she used to go stand on her head in the pantry and cry whenever anyone wouldn't tell her something she wanted to know.

"Danny, did you break the pipe?"

"No,” I say, truthfully.

"Are more people going to break the pipe more?"

"Yes, I think so.”
Just the beginning
.

"An ‘eviction notice’ came today while you were in jail. Does that mean we have to move right away?"

"I don't know.” Is the timing of the eviction notice with my faked-up poster-boy arrest just coincidental? How would I even know? The people building the pipeline, which is going to be immensely profitable, are very determined. But so is my father.

Ruthie says, “Where will we go?"

"I don't know that, either.” The Midwest is a dust plain, the Southwest desperate for water, the Great Lakes states and Northeast defending their great treasures, the lakes and the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Oregon and Washington have closed their borders, with guns. The South is already too full of refugees without jobs or hope.

Ruthie says, “I think we should go to Middle Earth. They have lots of water."

She doesn't really believe it; she's too old. But she can still dream it aloud. Then, however, she follows it with something else.

"It will be a war, won't it, Danny? Like in history."

"Go downstairs,” I say harshly. “I hear Mom calling you to set the table."

She knows I'm lying, but she goes.

I go into the bathroom and turn on the sink. Water flows, brown and sputtery sometimes, but there. We have a pretty deep well, which is the only reason we're still here, the only reason we have electricity and potatoes and bread and, sometimes, coffee. I've caught Mom filling dozens of plastic gallon bottles from the kitchen tap. Even our small town, smaller now that so many have been forced out, has a black market.

I turn off the tap. The well won't hold much longer. The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact won't hold, either. Lake levels have been falling for over a decade. There isn't enough, won't be enough, can't be enough for everybody.

I go down to dinner.

Exhausted from two nights of sleeplessness and two days of fitful naps, I nonetheless cannot sleep. At 2:00 a.m. I go downstairs and turn on the TV. Without LinkNet, we get only two stations, both a little fuzzy. One of them is all news all the time. With the sound as low as possible, I watch myself being led from the jail to the courthouse, from the courthouse to our truck. I watch film clips of the dead guard. I watch an interview with the guard I clobbered with a rock. He describes his “assailant” as six feet tall, strongly built, around twenty-one years old. Either he has the worst eyesight in the county or else he can't admit he was brought down by a high-school kid who can't do algebra.

Not that I'm going to need algebra in what my future is becoming.

When I can't watch any more, I go into the kitchen. I gather up what I find there, rummage for a pair of scissors, and go outside. There is no wind. Dad's emergency light, battery-run and powerful enough to illuminate the entire inside of the barn we no longer own, is in the shed. When I've finished what I set out to do, I return to the house.

Ruthie is deeply asleep. She stirs when I hoist her onto my shoulder, protests a bit, then slumps against me. When I carry her outside, she wakes fully, a little scared but now also interested.

"Where we going, Danny?"

"You'll see. It's a surprise."

I'm forced to continue to carry her because I forgot her shoes. She grows really heavy but I keep on, stumbling through the dawn. At the old horse pasture I set her on a section of fence that hasn't fallen down yet. I turn on the emergency light and sweep it over the pasture.

"Oh!” Ruthie cries. “Oh, Danny!"

The flowers are scattered all across the bare field, each now on its own little square of paper: yellow centers, white petals outlined in yellow, green leaves until the green crayon was all used up and she had to switch to blue.

"Oh, Danny!” she cries again. “Oh, look! A hundred hundred daisies!"

It will be a war, won't it
? Yes. But not this morning.

The sun rises, the wind starts, and the paper daisies swirl upward with the dust.

Copyright © 2011 by Nancy Kress

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Vampires are usually rich

Having such low food and housing costs

—

And are accordingly opposed

To increases on the income tax

—

The blood I suck is mine

Say the vampires

—

Why should the government feel free

To steal from me?

—Ruth Berman

[Back to Table of Contents]

Kij Johnson, who has won the World Fantasy, Nebula, and
Asimov's
Readers’ Award for her short fiction, currently has a short story on the Hugo Awards’ ballot and a different one is a finalist for the Locus Award. At the moment, Kij is a graduate student at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. With her latest tale, she departs from her traditional short story length to pen a captivating novella about a dangerous alien planet and the humans who attempt to tame it.

Kit came to Nearside with two trunks and an oiled-cloth folio full of plans for the bridge across the mist. His trunks lay tumbled like stones at his feet, where the mailcoach guard had dropped them. The folio he held close, away from the drying mud of yesterday's storm.

Nearside was small, especially to a man of the capital, where buildings towered seven and eight stories tall, a city so large that even a vigorous walker could not cross it in half a day. Here hard-packed dirt roads threaded through irregular spaces scattered with structures and fences. Even the inn was plain, two stories of golden limestone and blue slate tiles, with (he could smell) some sort of animals living behind it. On the sign overhead, a flat, pale blue fish very like a ray curveted against a black background.

A brightly dressed woman stood by the inn's door. Her skin and eyes were pale, almost colorless. “Excuse me,” Kit said. “Where can I find the ferry to take me across the mist?” He could feel himself being weighed, but amiably: a stranger, small and very dark, in gray—a man from the east.

The woman smiled. “Well, the ferries are both at the upper dock. But I expect what you really want is someone to oar the ferry, yes? Rasali Ferry came over from Farside last night. She's the one you'll want to talk to. She spends a lot of time at The Deer's Heart. But you wouldn't like The Heart, sir,” she added. “It's not nearly as nice as The Fish here. Are you looking for a room?"

"I'll be staying in Farside tonight,” Kit said apologetically. He didn't want to seem arrogant. The invisible web of connections he would need for his work started here, with this first impression, with all the first impressions of the next few days.

"That's what
you
think,” the woman said. “I'm guessing it'll be a day or two, or more, before Rasali goes back. Valo Ferry might, but he doesn't cross so often."

"I could buy out the trip's fares, if that's why she's waiting."

"It's not that,” the woman said. “She won't cross the mist ‘til she's ready. Until it tells her she can go, if you follow me. But you can ask, I suppose."

Kit didn't follow, but he nodded anyway. “Where's The Deer's Heart?"

She pointed. “Left, then right, then down by the little boat yard."

"Thank you,” Kit said. “May I leave my trunks here until I work things out with her?"

"We always stow for travelers.” The woman grinned. “And cater to them, too, when they find out there's no way across the mist today."

The Deer's Heart was smaller than The Fish, and livelier. At midday the oak-shaded tables in the beer garden beside the inn were clustered with light-skinned people in brilliant clothes, drinking and tossing comments over the low fence into the boat yard next door, where, half lost in steam, a youth and two women bent planks to form the hull of a small flat-bellied boat. When Kit spoke to a man carrying two mugs of something that looked like mud and smelled of yeast, the man gestured at the yard with his chin. “Ferrys are over there. Rasali's the one in red,” he said as he walked away.

"The one in red” was tall, her skin as pale as that of the rest of the locals, with a black braid so long that she had looped it around her neck to keep it out of the way. Her shoulders flexed in the sunlight as she and the youth forced a curved plank to take the skeletal hull's shape. The other woman, slightly shorter, with the ash-blond hair so common here, forced an augur through the plank and into a rib, then hammered a peg into the hole she'd made. After three pegs, the boatwrights straightened. The plank held.
Strong,
Kit thought;
I wonder if I can get them for the bridge?