Brave New Love
Authors: Paula Guran
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Constable & Robinson Ltd
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First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012
Copyright © Paula Guran, 2012 (unless otherwise stated)
The right of Paula Guran to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form
of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication
Data is available from the British Library
UK ISBN: 978-1-84901-601-8 (paperback)
UK ISBN: 978-1-84901-768-8 (ebook)
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First published in the United States in 2012 by Running Press Book Publishers,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
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US ISBN: 978-0-7624-4220-1
US Library of Congress Control Number: 2011937815
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Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing
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For the young people who hold the future
in their hands and hearts.
I have faith in you.
THE SALT SEA AND THE SKY
by
Elizabeth Bear
NOW PURPLE WITH LOVE’S WOUND
by
Carrie Vaughn
BERSERKER EYES
by
Maria V. Snyder
AROSE FROM POETRY
by
Steve Berman
SEEKERS IN THE CITY
by
Jeanne DuPrau
P
AULA
G
URAN
History is not one long stretch of a single civilization, but humans have managed to maintain various civilizations for five thousand years or so. Thousands of years may be
difficult for us to conceive but when you consider dinosaurs dominated the planet for over 160 million years, five millennia is only a blink of Time’s eye. And during that blink, many
civilizations have collapsed—sometimes cataclysmically, more often after a period of decline—and new ones arisen.
The inhabitants of any fallen civilization who survived found themselves having to adapt to a “new world.” It was seldom an easy undertaking.
In the ancient world one civilization might disappear while another was emerging elsewhere. Each may have been unknown to the other. The Roman Empire declined while Mayan city-states reached
their zenith. The Anasazi thrived as Europe climbed out of the Dark Ages. Similarly, a civilization like that of the Egyptians could decline for a time, recover, eventually collapse, and then be
conquered by others.
In the twenty-first century civilization is far more singular, interconnected, and global than ever before. No civilization, in all of human history, has been as dependent on technology and the
resources that support it as we are today. We’ve never lived so clustered together in cities that can quickly be rendered unlivable by relatively minor cataclysms. Yet we still face, perhaps
more than ever, all the factors that radically changed or ended our ancestors’ ways of life: climate change, war, economic collapse, environmental problems, irrationality, disease. But in the
modern world the weapons are more destructive, disease can spread more quickly, irrationality and hatred can be disseminated more widely and immediately, discontent is growing, and we seem to be
able to create new problems much faster than we can provide solutions, which sometimes turn into new threats.
Perhaps we’ll adapt, and our civilization will not only survive but flourish. We still can’t help but wonder: What would life be like if the world as we know it ended? Who would
survive and how? Would we find ways of individually and collectively coping or would we find ourselves living under a repressive system of social control? Would we devolve into a feudal society or
something more primitive? Would there be strange new forms of humanity to deal with? Would we—or our descendents—remember what life was like in 2012? Would we even recognize the world
of tomorrow? Would it seem like some dark fantasy or something utterly surreal?
For
Brave New Love
we asked authors to wonder about what would happen if the world as we know it ended. We also asked them to consider what love—perhaps the most basic of all human
emotions—would be like in that world. Love is, after all, what makes us want to survive, to strive, to hope, to dare to dream.
Most specifically, we asked them to consider what love would be like for the young. For, no matter what tomorrow brings, it is always the newest generation—those growing out of childhood
and accepting or being forced to bear the burdens of adulthood—on whom the responsibility for any future rests. And, for the young, love sometimes really is all you need.
Their diverse answers are the stories of
Brave New Love
.
Paula Guran
J
OHN
S
HIRLEY
Los Angeles, 2044
The wind shrieked through Giorgio’s long hair as he fought for balance on the rope bridge thirty stories over the street. The swaying bridge stretched from the acid-etched high-rise behind
him to the top of the support buttress on the high tower of the old BP building. There’d been some acid rains recently, he remembered—which meant that if the protectant were wearing
off, the footbridge cables could snap. He took another three steps into a shadow-draped part of the bridge . . .
The sun was beginning to set beyond the BP building. It would be dark soon.
The teenager took seven steps more, then the rope bridge yawed sickeningly in the wind and he clutched at the twined, scavenged cables as the thick, muggy air-current roared past, bellowing like
a living creature. He staggered to the left, close to pitching over the cable. He held on, and the wind died down a little. The rope bridge sagged back, swaying, to its centerline. Only good thing
about this, he figured, was that he’d be a hard target to hit with a rifle. If Limmy were back there aiming at him he’d probably miss.
After a few moments the swaying eased and Giorgio decided to run for it, jogging the last hundred yards along the unsteady treadway of random slabs of mismatched wood to the open window at the
BP building. With a strong sense of relief he leapt from the end of the rope bridge on to the top of the steel buttress—just as a bullet cracked into the concrete by his head.
Heart thudding, he ducked through the window, into the entry hall—pressing himself to one side of the opening to be out of rifle range. He craned his neck a little to look cautiously back
out the window. He couldn’t see the shooter but he knew it was Limmy or one of his gang.
Giorgio was pretty high up—he could see a lot of Rooftown from here. The gigantic improvised shacktown built over old rooftops stretched above Southeast LA like tree branches made from
junk extending from the trunk of the old BP building. The branches were made up of shacks, several stories of them, some elaborate, others little more than tree-house-type structures. After Santa
Monica and a lot of other coastal towns had been flooded by the rising waters of global warming, and the big famine caused food prices to rocket up, a lot of people lost their homes. With the
Dissolve Depression destroying a good many banks and insurance companies, there was no money to replace them. Some people had built squat homes atop abandoned buildings creating Rooftown, high
above the worst of the social chaos below, and the rising waters that would someday lap this far inland. They were even above some of the worst air pollution.
Of course, there were luckier people. People who’d had more money, better resources—they’d bought their way into one of the dome communities.
Me, I’m not lucky.
Catching his breath just inside the window, hoping to get through the day without being shot, Giorgio thought:
That’s an understatement, hodey.
“Hey—kid!” called a gruff voice.
Giorgio turned to see Banker glaring from the other end of the hall. Banker was a hulking man in a sleeveless shirt, his beefy arms covered with amateur tattoos. He called himself Banker because
he collected the “Live Here Money” from people squatting in—and on—the old BP building.
“Ya can’t come in this building, here, ya bringin’ gunfire down on us! We don’t take in no lost teenagers nohow!”
“He’s not gonna shoot at the building anymore, Banker—I’m inside now—”
“He’s gonna shoot from
inside
ya chump—look!” Banker pointed out the window.
Giorgio looked out to see Limmy running across the rope bridge, his rifle on a strap over his shoulder—the shock-haired gangster stopped when the wind rose and clutched at the rope.
Another figure was behind him, a ways back—looked like Roman, Limmy’s second in command.
Giorgio had hoped the gangster wouldn’t risk coming to this side of Rooftown—not over him balking at a hundred-WD protection pay-off. But there they were, like they had something to
prove.
“Kid?”
Giorgio turned to see Banker pointing a large-caliber automatic pistol at him.
Giorgio sighed. “Well, crap. Seems like I’m the only guy around here without a gun.”
“Don’t get cute—just get out. The way you came!”
Giorgio thought about trying to dart past Banker—maybe Banker’d miss his shot, maybe even choose not to fire. But Banker wasn’t likely to do either one. There wasn’t a
whole lot of mercy in Rooftown, any way you cut it.
“Okay, fine, but you’re going to miss a really good joke I was gonna tell you, Banker!”