<<

Everything Change

An Anthology of

FOREWORD BY

INTERVIEW WITH

EDITED BY Manjana Milkoreit Meredith Martinez & Joey Eschrich “It’s not — it’s everything change.”

MARGARET ATWOOD Everything Change An Anthology of

FEATURING STORIES FROM Arizona State University’s 2016 Climate Fiction Contest

EDITED BY Manjana Milkoreit Meredith Martinez Joey Eschrich Credits

Editors Manjana Milkoreit Meredith Martinez Joey Eschrich

Judges Barton, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University Bob Beard, Center for and the Imagination, Arizona State University Jeff Cheney, Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Arizona State University Mollie Connelly, Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Arizona State University Laura Hazan, Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Arizona State University Paul Hirt, Department of , Arizona State University Hondula, Center for Policy Informatics, Arizona State University Danielle Hoots, Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing Anna Pigott, Imagination and Climate Initiative, Arizona State University Kim Stanley Robinson, Author Steven Semken, School of and Exploration, Arizona State University Cody Staats, Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University

Book Design Matt Phan, Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University

Art Direction Nina Miller, Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University

iv Leadership for the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative Ed Finn and Ruth Wylie, Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University Patricia Reiter, Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives, Arizona State University Jewell Parker Rhodes, Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Arizona State University

Special thanks to Susie Marston for providing funding and boundless enthusiasm, and for making this contest and anthology possible; to Paolo Bacigalupi for answering all of our most pressing questions about storytelling, imagination, and climate change; to Kim Stanley Robinson for inspiration and ample good cheer, and for helping us turn this big idea into a ; and to Claire Doddman and Jason Franz of the Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives for invaluable support with promotion, communications, design, and web development.

© Arizona State University 2016 The copyrights for individual stories and chapters are owned by their respective authors.

v For Susie Marston

vi Table of Contents

Foreword ix Kim Stanley Robinson

Editors’ Introduction xiii Manjana Milkoreit, Meredith Martinez, & Joey Eschrich

Sunshine State 3 Adam Flynn & Andrew Dana Hudson

Shrinking Sinking Land 25 Kelly Cowley

Victor and the Fish 40 Matthew S. Henry

Acqua Alta 61 Ashley Bevilacqua Anglin

The Grandchild Paradox 81 Daniel Thron

Wonder of the World 93 Blume

vii Masks 107 Stirling Davenport

Thirteenth 127 Diana Rose Harper

LOSD and Fount 148 Henrietta Hartl

On Darwin Tides 156 Shauna O’Meara

Standing Still 179 Lindsay Redifer

Into the Storm 197 Yakos Spiliotopoulos

Praying for : 207 An Interview with Paolo Bacigalupi Ed Finn

viii Foreword Kim Stanley Robinson

Climate fiction is a subgenre of science fiction. Science fiction is literature in the , and so by definition it always includes a historical element, imagining as it does possible human futures. Because they are fiction, these imagined future focus on individual characters in their relationships with each other, their society, and their —or their lack of a planet, if the story happens to follow people out into space.

Given how long the future is, science fiction can feel quite different depending on which a particular story chooses to describe. If the story is set many thousands of from now, all kinds of near-magical and situations can be made to seem plausible; this is often called , and it can include things like faster-than-light travel, , and humanity traveling across the galaxy. It’s a good story space for modeling abstractions or permanent aspects of the human condition, or simply enjoying the thrill of the new and the sheer size of the universe.

Near-future science fiction, on the other hand, concerns itself with events in the coming decades, and because of the rapid pace of change in and society today, this subgenre of science fiction has become in effect the realism of our time. Any attempt to describe

ix our current moment in a diagnostic or vivid way will tend to become near-future science fiction, just to be accurate to the feel of this moment in history.

As part of that fidelity to the real, a lot of near-future science fiction is also becoming what some people now call climate fiction. This is because climate change is already happening, and has become an unavoidable dominating element in the coming century. The new name thus reflects the basic realism of near-future science fiction, and is just the latest in the names people have given it; in the 1980s it was often called , because so many near-future stories incorporated the coming dominance of globalization and the emerging neoliberal . Now it’s climate change that is clearly coming, even more certainly than globalization. That these two biophysical dominants constitute a kind of cause and effect is perhaps another story that near-future science fiction can tell.

In any case, climate fiction will be one name for this subgenre for a long time to come. This is a good thing, because fiction is how we organize our knowledge into plots that suggest how to behave in the real world. We decide what to do based on the stories we tell ourselves, so we very much need to be telling stories about our responses to climate change and the associated massive problems bearing down on us and our descendants.

This book collects a number of new and exciting stories about things that will be happening soon, as people try to adapt to a changing climate and its impacts on our . It’s fair to ask whether that means that these stories are depressing and unpleasant to read; the answer is no, they aren’t, and in fact they are tremendously stimulating. This should not come as a surprise. Literature is about reality, indeed is part of the creation of reality, so it always deals with hard situations. This engagement is a crucial part of literature’s interest to us. In science

x fiction, imagining futures as it does, the visions always tend to portray either good outcomes or bad outcomes—in other words, utopias or . People enjoy reading about both, including dystopias, so this isn’t really what people are asking about when they wonder if climate fiction can be fun. The they are asking may be something more like, “are these stories so didactic, so obviously meant to warn us and teach us, that they no longer work as fiction, having lost that liveliness that makes literature such a joy?”

I am happy to report that this gathering of stories handily escapes that particular aesthetic mistake, and is a true pleasure to read. How that can be you will discover for yourself, but I the simplest explanation is that a lot of really talented writers responded to the inspiring challenge put out by Arizona State University’s Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative. Their efforts model how we will respond to climate change itself: globally and creatively, with energy and imagination and a will to succeed. There’s a certain kind of joy that can emerge out of intense and meaningful situations; in an emergency, what to do and how to live become questions with answers. So it is that even the angriest and most cold-eyed of these stories give reasons for hope, because the writers have not flinched from the huge problems we face, and neither have their characters. Read on and enjoy learning more, knowing more, living more.

Kim Stanley Robinson is a winner of the , Nebula, and Locus awards and, according to The New Yorker, one of the most important political writers working in the today. He is the author of the bestselling Mars and the critical acclaimed 2312, Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt, and Antarctica. His most recent , Aurora, was published in 2015.

xi xii Editors’ Introduction Manjana Milkoreit, Meredith Martinez, & Joey Eschrich

When the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative (ICF) announced its first Climate Fiction Short Story Contest, the international community was getting ready for one of the most important events in the history of global climate change diplomacy. State representatives from around the world met in in December of 2015 and adopted an international agreement on climate change. The has been praised as a landmark accomplishment, but, of course, the climate does not stop changing because 195 states put some words on paper. There is no that the Paris Agreement will affect the future of all human and non-human life on Earth, but today nobody knows what that future will look like.

Today, all we can do is imagine our possible climate futures. Using ’s words, we have to imagine the “Everything Change.” We have chosen her thought-provoking turn of phrase as the title for our anthology not just because it reflects the scale of the task ahead, but also because it captures the substance of the twelve stories we here: climate-induced changes in all aspects of human experience, ranging from individual emotions and aspirations to family life, professional trajectories, the shape of communities, and the organization of societies.

xiii And that is the core concern of the ICF. We seek to understand the role of imagination in societies’ responses to climate change, especially when the imaginative impulse leads to a compelling story. We are not only curious about the what and the how of imagination—the content of people’s, communities’, and countries’ visions of the future and the processes that create them. We also want to know when and how these imaginations matter. Do they help us make good decisions, take effective actions, and develop responsible climate response strategies today? Or do they make us complacent, fearful, and anxious?

The ICF explores these questions by doing research, engaging students, and opening public conversations through events, writing projects, and other activities. The 2016 Climate Fiction Short Story Contest was one of these activities, seeking to draw as many people as possible into a conversation about climate change and the future. We invited writers from all around the world to imagine how climate change will play out, to tell a gripping story about that future, and to share it with us. We hope that this collection will help readers to make sense of climate change, to grapple with all of the bewildering emotions associated with climate imagination and climate reality, and to facilitate conversations about the futures we want and how to create them.

The literary movement ofclimate fiction is often credited with playing a major part in mobilizing societies to act on climate change. Climate fiction, sometimes called “cli-fi,” has exploded over the last decade and enjoys growing popularity. lists more than 2000 results for “climate fiction,” and more than 400 for “cli-fi.” Among these are a growing number of anthologies and academic treatments. And climate fiction novels are only one part of a larger cultural trend that is beginning to explore climate change as a social and cultural phenomenon, not just a scientific and policy issue. Climate change in

xiv culture includes movies, exhibits, the search for new words to capture lived experience, musical compositions that reflect climate data, and piano pieces performed in the Arctic. Art and literature have begun the much-needed work of humanizing climate change.

The response to our first Climate Fiction Short Story contest far exceeded our expectations. We received an astonishing 743 submissions from 67 different countries and from more than half of the states in the U.S. And they told a powerful story: climate fiction is thriving, not just among professional writers, but among high school students, scientists, and a broad set of professionals, including librarians and veterinarians.

Our call for submissions included three criteria that reflected our own assumptions about the potential power of climate fiction to help societies deal with climate change, and that specified the characteristics of the stories we were looking for. We asked for stories that in some way envision the and humanity as impacted by climate change; that reflect current scientific knowledge about future climate change; and that illuminate and invite reflections on a climate-related challenge that individuals, communities, organizations, or societies face today (e.g., daily decisions and behaviors, policy-making and politics, moral responsibility to the future). And of course, we were looking for high-quality writing and storytelling.

These criteria served as a guide for our blind judging process, which consisted of four steps: three rounds of judging to narrow the field from 743 submissions to 12 finalists, and a final selection of the five winning stories (one grand prize winner and four runners-up) by science fiction legend Kim Stanley Robinson. The team of judges brought a wide range of expertise to the task, reflecting the diversity of perspectives required to understand and address climate change itself. The panel included

xv experts on sustainability, conservation, , climate modeling, and environmental history from Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives, School of Life , School of Earth and Space Exploration, Center for Policy Informatics, and Department of History, alongside experts in science fiction and creative writing from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and the Center for Science and the Imagination.

The subject matter of the stories we received was tremendously diverse, ranging from and carnivorous trees to indigenous communities, corporate espionage, climate , and political intrigue. There were even some fantastical stories powered by magic and , and far-future tales of aliens and other worlds.

Despite this amazing diversity, a number of common themes emerged from stories authored on five different continents. First, our authors approach climate change as a thoroughly human and often individual experience. , similar to the award-winning climate fiction on sale in any decent bookstore, most of our stories imagine gloomy, dystopian future worlds in which much of what we cherish – and take for granted – about our present will be lost. This and sense of foreboding seems to reflect not only a societal mood in the industrialized world, but also humanity’s mood in a decade full of broken records.

The dystopian story brings with it a number of motifs that are already at of becoming climate fiction clichés: the simplification of community life, scavenging, disappearing islands, and decreasing mobility in a de-globalized, disconnected world. What seems to weigh heavily on writers’ are fraying and changing family relations,

xvi concerns about availability of food, and the loss of places and homes, but less frequently of non-human species or ecosystems.

Third, several authors explored the attribution of responsibility for climate change by casting their stories with characters across generations. They often use the grandparent-grandchild relationship to explore the connections between the (i.e., the readers’ present, in which this world is still intact) and the future (i.e., the protagonists’ present, which usually features radically different challenges). Focusing on grandparents and grandchildren simultaneously avoids and addresses the generation of parents that is presumably responsible for creating, or at least not fixing, the climate mess. Through the thoughts and experiences of the older and younger generations, difficult arguments and emotions find expression: often a hint of blame and a dash of anger, a call for justice (probably not as loud as it ought to be), but seldom the need for revenge.

Many of the stories submitted to our contest raised challenging emotional issues young people grapple with at the dawn of a climatic transformation: What does it mean to have children, and should I have children? What can I do when I feel helpless and powerless in the face of overwhelming change? Who should I be angry at, and what is the best way to express this anger? How do I deal with the loss of people, ideas and expectations, places and experiences, species, normality, and sometimes even hope? What will be sources of excitement, joy, and happiness in a future that looms dark and uncertain?

Climate change is usually conceived as a scientific issue that requires global and national political solutions, often focused on the development of new technologies. However, most authors contributing to our contest presented a very different picture. None of the stories were about climate science and climate skepticism, Congressional stalemate,

xvii or an international treaty. Nor did they discuss anything close to the standard fare of climate policy, such as a price on carbon, technologies, or green buildings. Instead, they grappled with food availability, health, changing landscapes, changing professions, family and community relationships. Largely unconcerned with politics, they asked what life would be like in world with a new or still-changing climate.

Finally, with regard to solutions, most authors explored personal, individual approaches rather than large-scale technological change, institutional change, or societal reorganization. There was a “naming and shaming scheme” to mark and punish people who live in carbon excess, a government coup instigated by an individual, disaster and disappearance tourism, and an individual’s heroic effort to save a species from . Adaptation and suffering were much more prominent themes than mitigation and geoengineering. But as our grand prize-winning story “Sunshine State” demonstrates, there was also a strong focus on social innovation and resilience in small groups and communities.

We hope that these stories inspire readers to think in new ways about climate change and its consequences, about the challenges and the glimmers of opportunity that face us in a world in . We believe that stories are empathy machines, devices that enable us to connect with people in drastically different circumstances, in futures we have not yet glimpsed but are even today helping to create with our decisions to act, or to not act. And we look forward to hosting future contests, to give more people the opportunity to contribute to this crucially important conversation about and the futures we will create for ourselves on it.

xviii Manjana Milkoreit is an assistant professor of Public Policy at Purdue University and a senior sustainability fellow at Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. She researches global climate change politics and decision-making.

Meredith Martinez is a fiction writer and the education programs manager at Arizona State University’s Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

Joey Eschrich is the editor and program manager at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination and the assistant director of , a partnership of ASU, Slate magazine, and New America around emerging technologies, policy, and society.

xix 2 Sunshine State Adam Flynn & Andrew Dana Hudson

Ramses was in Galveston when she first heard about The Myth. It was early May, and unseasonably hot—whatever that meant. Out beyond the thin sliver that remained of the island, iron-­dark clouds gathered every morning on the horizon. Ominous. An , even. Sign of tribulations to come. That’s the line she gave to the locals, and while they didn’t buy it, she stirred they didn’t know they had.

The holdouts were cranky oilmen who would be damned if some no- drill liberal­ insurance salesmen were going to force them out of vacation homes that had been in their families for generations. Ramses started with a clear statement of her purpose, and then let them rant. She nodded gravely and raised her warm beer to toast their wittier insights. They felt heard. She really sympathized with their concerns. But weren’t the bedbugs back this year, she asked? And for dramatic effect she dug into her armpit with her index finger and pulled out a plump louse. She smeared it bloody on the table.

On one hand she ticked off the costs of extermination, the costs of mitigation, the fees to the telcos to maintain coverage, the rescue fines she knew for a fact the state would pass next year. How long would Congress really force the insurance companies—her employers—to honor policies on doomed towns? They were underwater already; they just didn’t know it.

3 And Tennessee was really nice these days. Rains were good, and kept the lakes full for boating and fishing and swimming. A housing was surely coming, with a pretty in it for anyone who could get in on the ground floor.

Then Ramses swigged the last of her beer and gave them a long even look, one she’d perfected negotiating with old, patient Pashtun warlords. The Look was about making herself a mirror: admit it, you know how you’ll feel in ten years. That’s how they’d taught it in the Conflict De­-Esc Special School. of Christmas Future shit. Her earnest sympathies unkinked the secret of those damned by history.

The buyout wasn’t generous, but they it.

The of The Myth who came to her was an old army buddy, Jefferson Jackson, of all people. Not special forces, he’d been paired with her unit to rig up quick and dirty solar at every stop—a cheap way to sweeten the pot for the tribesmen she was trying to talk down. It took some gall to walk into drone­scorched houses and ask to futz with the wiring, but somehow Jefferson always came back whole and drunk on Pakistani moonshine. “A real character,” her C.O. had called him.

“Sergeant first class of talking people to , how the fuck are ya?” Jefferson said, flashing his teeth (some still real) at the camera. His redneck drawl—affect?—had thickened in the intervening years. He was out of the army now, and had found work as a park ranger back home in Florida. Before she could settle into the small talk, he launched into an enthusiastic pitch she could hardly keep up with. She caught “Miami,” “Benson method,” “gators,” something about a big project and a favor she didn’t remember owing him.

4 “And besides, you sound bored as fuck,” he concluded. Ramses hadn’t said more than two words, but it wasn’t like he was wrong.

She rode her musky rental car back to Outer Houston and caught a regional jet to Fort Lauderdale. The new runways for big jets floated steady like Emirati islands, but her dinky had to land, bumping and skidding, on a shaky platform built on caulked-up shipping containers. The touchdown jarred her, clacking her teeth together painfully. She didn’t think she and Miami would get along very well.

Jefferson met her at the airport, and they rode out of the city, past a stretch of neon-­lit nightclubs. Revelers with mosquito nets over their skimpy club gear stood outside vaping hash and waiting to get in. Jefferson bemoaned the passing of old cowboy­-themed swing bars from his misspent youth.

They continued west until the “nuisance flooding ahead” signs became more insistent. Jeff sent the car back, and they continued on in an airboat he’d parked nearby. A jerry­-rigged, patched­-over beast from the aughts, Jefferson had ripped out the old combustion engine and wired in something Tesla, charged it from a cow­-sized solar balloon.

Deep into the swamps they rode. The floodlights and full moon cast a spectral pallor on the water and the trees. All of a sudden, Ramses wondered if she was about to get murdered, her body dumped in the water, to be pulled out rotting by some U of F pathology grad. Her spine straightened, situational awareness training rushing back with her macabre . Everything looked dead and still, though she knew every inch of the Everglades was alive with something. Jefferson whistled tunelessly. A PTSD­-fueled serial killer? The affected speech, the forced teaming, the unnecessary details.… Ramses had just about convinced herself to make a run for it, evaluating her options for improvised weapons, when they came upon the strangest structure she had ever seen.

5 Squat, spiraling, and conical, The Myth looked like old drawings of the Tower of Babel that Ramses had seen paging through her uncle’s illustrated Bible as a kid. Except, after being abandoned in the Cambrian explosion of linguistic diversity, the tower had been overgrown by vines and then resettled by hippies and design geeks. Tall and wide as the Superdome, it was covered in moss and ivy and hanging gardens, here and there sprouting long, sturdy branches that jutted out high over the water. Perched atop was a , a pristine Mobius­-loop of solar mirror, gleaming eerie in the moonlight.

Ramses peered through the darkness as the airboat trundled forward, trying to understand the prickly, lumpy shape before her. And then, before she could grok it, they were inside, passing through an archway curtained by banyan roots. Inside, The Myth was a set of nested domes, massive arching struts supporting wooden platforms, suspended shipping containers, the occasional rope bridge. A flotilla of colorful houseboats jostled together at water level. Illumination was provided by a hodgepodge of bioluminescent globes and dangling strings of LEDs. Here and there mirrors the size of city buses would a reflection of the starry sky above. Ramses thought she saw treehouses in the rafters.

A slight, excited­-looking woman clad in coveralls reading SISYPHUS LIGHT HAULING waved them in to dock with traffic wands that’d probably wandered off from the airport.

“What the hell have you brought me to, Jeff?” Ramses said as they tied into the flotilla. She found herself thinking of theDinotopia book she had read when she was little, and how real cities had disappointed her for years afterwards. The Myth looked like a combination botanical gardens, field laboratory, modern art gallery, and Roman bath. Definitely bizarre, but it was also the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

6 Jefferson was fierce-eyed. “This here’s the artsy that better save my gators.”

Ramses got the full story over hibiscus tea from Nina Mitra, the aquatect in coveralls who had waved them in. She was young and turquoise-­haired, and she spoke in the sort of clipped phrases one hears when genius aims for intelligibility.

“We’re not Rotterdam, and we’re not trying to be,” Nina explained. “Florida can’t build dykes. Rising seas seep right up through the bedrock we’re sitting on; it’s all limestone and porous as hell. The state has a ‘water control system’ of pumps and canals, but the real protector has always been the wetlands. They soften the blows from storms, they absorb the water rise. Living organisms can take in a lot of water, and they shift it around into verticalities it wouldn’t go to on its own—up into leaves and branches, and down in root systems. They can clean it, they can even— with a little help—desalinate it. We’re just giving them a boost.”

Carbon, too, the swamp life took in: building with it, sequestering it in the soil, water, and vegetation. The Everglades pulled poison out of the air more efficiently than a rainforest. To lose it would be to lose the Earth a little lung.

Jefferson said that Nina had dropped out of four Ph.D. programs before she found one that would fund her designs. She’d cut her teeth building tree­ trenches in the floodplains of Bangladesh, before the Indian annexation. She moved like a woman who wanted glasses to fidget with, but, walking around the interior of The Myth, she pointed out the most plants, insects, and algae stains, all with an explanation of how they fit into the boutique ecosystem they had created. Ramses got the impression that the mousy radical had much better eyesight than the rest of them.

7 The plan was like the Manhattan Project of permaculture. With the weather changing faster every , wetlands all over the world were dying of lost insects, being stripped by hurricane winds, or withering from rising salinity. So The Myth aimed to create a New Wetland. Through rapid testing and genetic tweaks, the aquatect’s team of ecosystem hackers was honing in on a combination of swamp grasses, oysters, and thick tropical trees that they believed would turn the sputtering Everglades into an overclocked engine of , desalination, water filtration, flood mitigation, and topsoil retention—a total package of environmental redemption.

With giant watercolor flowcharts they mapped the passage of carbon, nitrates, and methane gas through their synthbio proving ground. Drop in the right algae bloom, and pH levels would slowly stabilize. Prod the microbiome into a different shape, and the New Wetland would stop releasing methane. Swap a gene, and the mangroves would snake up any man­made support struts. They dragged in hulking beams salvaged from abandoned shipyard cranes and Disney World’s rollercoaster boneyard. Two hundred feet high they coaxed the swamp, wispy trees aching to touch a threatening sky.

The New Wetland not only survived the harsher environs provided by climate change, it positively thrived in them. It thrived because—and this was a crucial point for Nina—the New Wetland was made of weeds. (“No, not like kudzu,” she insisted, describing their selective use of terminator seeds for bad actors.) Globalized weeds, adapted for a new world. They scattered, adapted, resisted, and survived. And like any good weed, the New Wetland wanted to spread. The Myth wasn’t just their laboratory: it was their working prototype.

Nina wanted to take it to scale.

8 “That’s where you come in,” she said to Ramses as they finished their tour. Hacking the Everglades was a project that would take a generation. It required a coalition of committed partners from the surrounding communities. Suburban developers and sprawl salvagers. Semi­-legal hunters and pseudo-­official wildlife enthusiasts like Jefferson. Tour guides. Business owners. Transients. Natives. They all had to be sold the unlikely story that Southern Florida could be saved—in fact, could be made vital to the planet.

“The smart money figures the Everglades are doomed and wants to profit off what comes next. The dumb money refuses to face the facts.” Nina shrugged and added, “Then there’s us. We’d be the weird money...if we had money.”

“But what’s with the creepy cult name?” Ramses asked finally. “‘The Myth’ has all the wrong connotations for something I need to sell people on.”

Nina smiled, embarrassed. “I joked that what I really wanted was to build a ‘magnificent temple to the human spirit.’ Someone on email started abbreviating it, MTHS. From there, pretty soon everyone just called it The Myth.”

Ramses laughed. For all their crazy­-person talk of hope and optimism, the Myth people were still just project dorks. She could live with that.

So she set off, riding Jeff’s airboat from Homestead to Big Cyprus, from Boca Raton down to what was left of the Keys. She started with the park rangers and the land management officers. Like all outpost bureaucrats since the dawn of civilization, these lonely Feds felt abandoned, exiled to the edge of a crumbling empire. With Jefferson’s example to follow,

9 they were more than happy to exercise their small but rarely challenged prerogative by looking the other way.

The tour guides were easy—better a mutant Sleeping Beauty bramblewood than a salt­withered plain of dead sludge. The hunters she left to Jefferson. His preternatural obsession with alligators, birthed during an ayahuasca trip the he got back from Pakistan, carried real weight with the kind of men who liked the ritual of wading, camo­ clad, through waist­deep swamp­water.

For six , the Seminoles wouldn’t talk to her. She kept at it though, stopping by periodically to introduce herself, get the ceremonial haranguing, and gamely lose a few dollars in their casinos. Relationships before transactions, opportunities for the youth. Eventually they had a deal.

She was a year in when the State caught wind of their operation.

They rolled up to The Myth in a swarm of quadcopters, navy windbreakers billowing like pufferfish. A full platoon of special investigators, armed with clipboards and cameras. They shuffled through the studios, laboratories, and meditation , murmuring and shaking their heads. Classic shakedown tactics. Nina cussed like a sailor, then seethed quietly. Jefferson was nowhere to be found, preserving deniability. Ramses decided to meet them, with tea, in the bright slab of Victorian garden beneath the very center of the solar loop.

“This is a very interesting piece of something you have here,” the alpha male said, sitting down. He introduced himself as Special Advisor to the Governor Mitchell Foote—“Call me Mitt”—and he stirred three sugars into his tea. “I dig the green­-Guggenheim, ‘Richard Serra does Falling Water’ kinda deal. And the inside—well, it’s a very contemporary

10 statement, with the big mirrors and the rogue genetics laboratories. Thing is, ain’t none of it permitted.”

Ramses leveled a long size-­you­-up stare. He looked like a bodyguard put out to pasture. Buzz cut, with wrap­around sunglasses pushed up to a widow’s peak. Foote clearly enjoyed the cognitive dissonance of this culture­-critic spiel.

“And what permits exactly would we need?” Ramses asked. “We have a bit of an situation here.”

“Hell, that’s one way of putting it. Just from a first pass we got unlicensed synthbio, introduction of foreign invasive species, and a lot of people camped out here in this structure that I’m guessing ain’t up to code. Whatever code we end up applying.”

Foote leaned back and put his feet up on an empty chair. Ramses guessed he was coming into the homestretch of his pitch, and decided to let him get it out of his system.

“Now, I’m from Miami. Let me tell you, Miami is a very cultured town. I grew up on Art Basel. And of course the state of Florida has always offered a home to all sorts of people with questionable judgment. So we’re willing to work with you. But boy, there’s going to be a lot of paperwork. We’ll get some lawyers down here. Now, take it from me, you’ll want to get that all expedited so we don’t have to shut you down in the meantime. I’m not gonna lie to you, that might get a little pricey.”

Ramses cleared her throat. “I’m afraid we don’t have any money.”

“No money?” Foote furrowed his brow. This was apparently a wrinkle he hadn’t foreseen. “How do you pay all these people? How do you feed them? Where do you get all these building materials from?”

11 “They’re volunteers. We grow food on the premises. We salvage and scrap.”

“Well shit, that’s no good.” Foote looked genuinely worried. “You got any investors? What’s the long play on this thing? Avant-garde art spa? What are the revenues on that scheme?”

Nina piped up, speaking for the first time. “I think you misunderstand the of our work. We’re an environmental reclamation project. We’re using ecological infrastructure to provide clean water to the areas affected by the salt rise in the water table.”

“You’re messing around with the water? Shit, if I’d known you were going to stir up trouble—”

“We’ve published all our results,” Nina protested. “Test the water around here. You can drink it, right out of the swamp. We’re actually trying to save your ill-advised city! If you don’t do something—”

“See there you go, causin’ trouble already,” Foote interrupted her. “You can’t just go around talking about saving Miami! That presumes known menace and imminent imperilment, threats we are then liable to address. We’ve got investors to consider. No one wants to buy a timeshare in a place that needs saving.”

This was a startling declaration. Ramses concluded that debating the merits of ecological was not a winning strategy, and tried to tack back to what Foote really wanted. “So, about expediting that paperwork?”

Foote poured himself another cup of tea, four sugars this time. “Right, well, it seems to me the state of Florida might be able to get on board with your little project here. But we’d need to be reassured that

12 you aren’t going to run out of money halfway through some critical chromosomal manipulations. My recommendation is, get yourself a fiscal sponsor. Some nice billionaire who can put our lawyers at ease and grease the right wheels. I’ll give you a couple , but don’t make me haul out here without a payday again.”

Surprising no one, such a fiscal sponsor emerged a few days later. Bodhi Chakrabarti had made his fortune mass marketing brain­boosting herbal supplements to teens. He then declared that he would use his billions to save the planet, and promptly started his own reality show. Film crew in tow, he arrived unannounced, providing color commentary as he led himself on a tour of The Myth.

“Wow, just wow, am I right? What you guys are doing here, so inspirational. I can’t wait to get involved! Together we are going to make such a change for people. Together!” Chakrabarti preened for the cameras.

Ramses expected him to put on a show, and then, offcamera,­ haggle over the terms of the value­ exchange. But there was no offcamera­ for Chakrabarti. He broadcast his every move. This was not how they liked to work, wasn’t “move quietly and plant things,” as Nina liked to say. Ramses had hoped to squeeze the State’s payoff out of Chakrabarti and send him home with promises of, at most, monthly updates. Instead, he was talking about picking out offices and trying to haul his overland. The hair on the back of her neck rose. This was a corporate takeover. She hedged. She kept things polite and vague for the cameras.

When he’d finally gone, Ramses, Nina, and Jeff held court at the tea tables. Jefferson said what they were all thinking.

13 “Y’all, we’re gonna need some fuckin’ backup.”

The Renegade Olympics of 2040 were accessible only by or seaplane. Ramses, Nina, and Jeff borrowed an aging from a retired couple and cruised down past Cancun to the flotilla parked a few hundred miles west of Jamaica.

The games would be held on the deck of the Emma Mærsk, once the largest container ship in the world. In 2031, Maldivian activist­-pirates commandeered it off the coast of , rigged it with solar, loaded up 20,000 refugees, and sailed around South America in a highly­ televised two­- international .

The Emma Mærsk was the perfect venue because (a) most of the world’s governments were determined to pretend that it didn’t exist, and (b) all the events in the R­-lympics were games that could be played in a refugee camp. This meant futbol, rugby, basic track and field, wrestling, some swimming, and shipping container parkour.

Sailing into the fleet, they were greeted by a riot of strange flags. The R-lympics were the premier diplomatic for the world’s aspiring non­states. The Maldivians, of course, but also the Kurds, the Tibetans, the Palestinians, Western Saharans, Cypriot nationalists, Cascadian separatists, the Québécois, and a hundred other displaced groups— even the scary, militant Sea Peoples. Playing hosts and MCs to them all: the Cubans.

The 21st century had been rough for Cuba. The futureshock when the embargo fell was intense, and American developers sensed tender prey. The first free elections were easily bought. It was starting to look like the mob years all over again.

14 Hurricane Bethel changed all that. The freak superstorm hit Cuba’s north coast like a runaway jackhammer, slamming against the island from Baracoa to Remedios to Havana. Pastel paint was stripped from colonial walls. ‘57 Bel Aires were swept out to sea. The Malecón was reduced to rubble.

Smelling blood in the water, corporate interests accelerated their shock­ doctrine plans. But the emergency response had reenergized both the crumbling revolutionary bureaucracy and black­market networks that had held society together during the Período Especial. The gospel of Fidel, Che, and Camilo found its .

The Cuban people had a long history of not doing what Americans wanted them to do. Luxury hotels were seized to house the homeless. Sympathetic space­-jumpers hacked broadband G­loons in a series of daring, high­ altitude maneuvers. It looked like a standoff, but neither side wanted a return to the bad days of the 20th century. The seas were rising; islands were a bad investment. The powers­-that­-be settled for deals on coffee and rum. The Cubans gained a reputation as dashing climate resistance gurus.

“Comrades, I got your email!” The tattooed and pierced commissioner of the R-­lympics, nom de guerre Mickey Cienfuegos, spoke the kind of perfect English that was half Benedict Anderson, half Run the Jewels. He greeted them with mojitos, weed, and enthusiastic bear­-hugs.

“Let me break it down for you. Resistance in the 21st century is all about two things: infrastructure and attention. First, you cannot depend on global supply lines for anything. Power, bandwidth, water, food, sewage. They will cut you off and starve you out.”

“We grow some vegetables and farm oysters,” Nina said. “We could do rice if we’re really pressed.”

15 “Oysters? Siiiiiiick.” Mickey fist­-pumped. “Imagine the optics! State troopers camped out all around you, eating donuts, while inside you dine on raw oysters. Homerun!”

Nina shot him a grin that Ramses read as: ease up on the Hero of the People shtick and maybe we’ll compare piercings later.

“Okay, second thing,” Mickey continued. “Put your story out to the masses. Get a fanbase. Cops don’t want that Ruby Ridge shit, not if you have a million­plus followers. Don’t talk to any journalists—first mistake every occupier makes. Do it grassroots, viralismo.”

“That’s not really our style,” Ramses said. “How are we supposed to find a following in time?”

“Have you looked around? You’re at the biggest counter­-globalization media event in the world! I’ll put you on stage. I’ll make you a star! Can you run fast? Jump high? Climb containers? Let’s get you down on the field with some hot, photogenic refugee boys. Floridians, come for help from the likes of us? People will eat that shit up! In fact,” Mickey said, spreading his arms magnanimously. “I might even post about you on my blog.”

The games were indeed a big PR coup for The Myth. They ladled out water to sprinters. They were honorary referees during the exhibition rugby match, Gorkhaland vs. Holy See. They made a video with the young, hip Dharamsala Dalai Lama. Jefferson was particularly popular, crying wet crocodile tears about the plight of his beautiful, endangered Florida gators.

16 After closing ceremonies, Mickey’s ship, The Great-Granma­ , towed them north. Two days after they got back, Foote came to confront them.

“What the fuck, you guys,” Foote called, when his airboat was in shouting distance. “I told you, don’t make any trouble, come up with some money. A week later my daughter shows me your fuckin’ —you’re dancing around with pirates and probably terrorists. You’ve definitely forced my hand here.”

The Mythers pulled up ramps and blockaded the entry arches. State drones moved to surround them. Foote, on a bullhorn now, demanded a parley. For the sake of maximum theater, Ramses and Nina decided that Jefferson would deliver their response. He stepped out onto a balcony in park ranger uniform. His gray shirt was pressed and his tie was knotted, though he’d made cutoffs of the olive pants.

“First, this here’s national park territory, and I got some jurisdiction over that shit. Two, we got food and water aplenty, so we’re happy to wait. Three, water here is chock full of my gators. Lemme tell you, they’re strong. I’ve wrassled them myself.”

Behind a barricade, Nina and Ramses were cracking up.

“Four, Mickey here is broadcasting your every fuckin’ move. We see one gun drawn, and a fleet of terrifying Sea Peoples will descend on you like the cataclysmic days of fuckin’ yore!”

Mickey waved, holding up his camera. “‘Say hello to my little friend,’” he quoted. Ramses wondered just how much the Sea Peoples bit was a bluff.

“Five, we got power. Y’all are tied to the goddamn grid. See that big, beautiful IUD up there? I built that shit. Pulls down 2800 kilowatt-­

17 .” Jefferson tapped his phone and “Where The Devil Don’t Stay” by Drive­-By Truckers boomed out from The Myth’s PA system. “Can’t tax the sun, copper!” he crooned.

“This is the most Florida shit I have ever seen,” Nina said.

Ramses had assumed that being under siege would either be very scary or very boring, but instead she was just busy.

First, there was the siege itself, which needed to be monitored and physically repelled. While Foote called for reinforcements, they plugged holes and set guard shifts. That first night drones prodded their defenses, and they had to raise their voices to be heard over the buzz. The second night the incursions began.

The quadcopters they could shoo away with a leafy branch, but the crawling drones had to be spotted and caught in hemp sacks before they could chew through any wiring. By the third night Foote had gotten hold of a pair of submersible drones, which swam under their gates and caused some minor havoc in the houseboat flotilla. These they lassoed with some animal control gear Jeff had stashed in a locker, and released gently back into the wild.

Then there was their broadcast, which Mickey assured them was their best defense against an actual armed assault. It wasn’t enough to just livestream the staties camped out around them; they had to keep their viewers entertained. They did question and answer sessions in online forums. Nina led camera tours of The Myth’s facilities, and Ramses recited her pitch for the New Wetland project every time they had a big changeover in viewership. They shared oyster recipes and tips for mutant gardening. They reenacted their music video. Anything to keep enough eyes on their stream.

18 Mickey kept a weather eye on the news cycles and every few hours would advise them to loop in or comment on some trending topic. Staying viral meant continually re-infecting supporters’ filter with their agenda. But Labor Day was coming up, and Mickey worried that, without major to re-galvanize attention, an attack by Foote would get lost in holiday news dump.

They were starting to brainstorm ways to shake up the standoff when they got the flash advisory: a Luxembourg-­sized chunk of Antarctic ice was shearing off, collapsing 200 billion tons into the sea. By some cruel twist of currents, sea rise happened first and steepest in the northern Caribbean, so Floridians had learned to pay attention to these ice shelf events. But this one was different. This one came with a storm.

Emergency alerts buzzed on both sides of the siege, yielding a moment of frenetic peace as everyone checked their phones and goggles. Tropical Storm Nyx would make landfall in 36 hours.

“The Governor has declared a state of emergency,” Foote announced through his bullhorn as the state airboats began to pull away. “We’re moving agency resources where most needed, but, uh, don’t go anywhere.” He paused, adding, “And don’t think this is over.”

“Out of the frying pan, into the deluge,” Jeff muttered before they set about getting ready.

It’s not Babel, thought Ramses, looking at their mangrove fortress. It’s the .

19 The seas rose, and the rains came. The levees broke. The prevailed upon the earth.

Rich and poor alike sought shelter, but the rich happened to have helicopters. A lot of people took their chances on the highways. Others sheltered in place, hoping it was just another storm. But when the rains died away, the water didn’t drain—it rose, bubbling up out of lawns and drains like a salty, stinking sweat.

Miamians came to The Myth by the hundreds, drawn by rumors of freshwater and just blind hope. They came in and speedboats, rafts made from water jugs and one ratty old kiddie pool a father carried his children in.

Nina worked around the to preserve the plants that cleaned their water. Ramses didn’t see her stop moving for more than ten at a time. Jeff did a lot of search and rescue, checking in on neighbors and bringing gallon jugs of drinking water to friends. Sometimes he’d come back grinning, with a story of saving a dog that had gotten up into a tree. Just as often, though, he didn’t talk about what he found out there, shuffling to his bunk with eyes clouded by trauma. Ramses saw a lot of eyes like that that week.

Ramses had never thought of herself as maternal—she’d always dated people more femme than she was. But something unclenched inside her as she cleaned out scrapes, soothed crying children, and wrapped shivering old women in blankets. When she ran away from home two decades prior, it had been the concerned attentions of a recruitment office receptionist that had stopped her spiraling. She channeled that memory. She forged a new Look—one dispelling debasement by seeing another as fully human. She deployed it for each boat of refugees that arrived, and the clouds in their eyes would clear for a moment. Ramses

20 felt so present with everyone, she was almost light-headed. Finally, Jefferson took her aside.

“Sergeant, you may have weapons-grade emotional intelligence, but you need to stop and sleep a couple hours.”

He was right, but she wasn’t the only one. A lot of tired, scared people needed places to sleep. They hung hammocks and tossed out lab equipment. Pretty soon they found themselves cutting down trees and pulling down parts of the tower to fashion crude shelters.

When the Coast Guard got on the scene on day three, they relied on sitreps from The Myth. Ramses and Jeff traded off on a shortwave radio, relaying messages and coordinating support. Donations came in, both virtual and physical. Mountains of perishables needed to get eaten or composted. Well-­meaning volunteers had to be assigned jobs. They ran low on the strangest things. The Cubans showed up in a major way, mostly because Mickey was obsessed with symbolically reversing the Mariel boatlift.

It was scary, it was thrilling. They didn’t quite notice the number of news­drones that had gathered.

By the time most of the pieces were picked up, The Myth was a cause célèbre—not only for taking in the refugees, but also for absorbing the water rise before it inundated more of the peninsula. New Wetlands were being pitched all over the global south, with less care and more than any of them found advisable. The State left them alone now, or approached them with a certain amount of trepidation. They had become swamp people: proud, mysterious, uncooperative with authority.

21 “Saviors of Tampa, huh?” Nina rolled her eyes at the headline. “Probably preserved some very historic chain restaurants for future generations.” Nina had taken the Myth’s dismantling the hardest, and expressed it in sharper, darker humor.

“What do you think happens to them?” Jefferson gestured at the swarm of floating hexayurts and slurped down a breakfast oyster. “Doesn’t sound like government or insurance have an appetite to rebuild Miami.”

“I’m sure someone like me is out there,” Ramses said ruefully. “Probably selling them the Tennessee Dream.”

“Well, shit, we should probably recruit them. Worked on you, didn’t it?”

In the frantic days after Nyx, The Myth had been mostly disassembled as they traded magnificence for subsistence. Container-­labs became dormitories. The Roman baths became camp latrines. The halo was taken apart to make solar roofing. It was haphazard at first, but after a few weeks a kind of order emerged. Rice was planted; the oyster farms expanded. For the kids, school was organized. Nina taught classes on the botany and art history behind The Myth. Soon, grownups were showing up for her seminars, too.

“I’ve been thinking,” Nina said over another mollusk breakfast. “What if Tennessee decides they’re full? Who knows if these people are going anywhere? It could be years, for all we know. They’re going to get the basics, but they’ll want something to do. I already have people asking when we’ll reconstruct the tower. Maybe we should have them build something.”

Jeff was alarmed. “You’ve got that gleam in your eye that says you’re gonna get us into the shit.”

22 Ramses reached for a half-shell, held it up. “Come on, Jefferson. We’ve got boats. We’ve got the sun. The world is our oyster.”

They groaned at her pun, but it wasn’t like she was wrong.

Their strange, swampy refugee town wasn’t beautiful like The Myth, but it bustled with ever more activity—a new kind of New Wetland, one where humans were not just cultivators but a dependent part of the ecosystem. We’ve lost a monument, Ramses thought, but found a movement.

The morning light rose over the rice fields and mutant mangroves and hit the solar panels on their roofs. She could almost feel the hum of power, waking up their machines. The sky was clear. The sun would shine strong all day. An omen. A promise.

Adam Flynn and Andrew Dana Hudson live in the San Francisco Bay area, where they can be found excitedly talking about “.”

23 24 Shrinking Sinking Land Kelly Cowley

There were three main ways an umbrella could save your life.

Flea wouldn’t have stolen the umbrella from the old woman on the fifth floor where the roof had caved in if she hadn’t been sure that it was just what she needed to rescue her mum from the sinkhole that had opened up in their living room.

Her mum had been stuck down in the sinkhole for two days now. Flea couldn’t up any emergency services to haul her out. If she called for help, whatever help came would quickly suss out that their flat was uninhabitable and send the Wheeler family to the nearest shelter of last resort. When they realized that Flea, her brother Wes, and their mum Shell were squatting in a retirement home and had been doing so ever since the unreported death of dear old Nanna Wheeler last winter, they might just cart her whole family off to the closest detention centre. Flea didn’t want to be the one responsible for getting everyone evicted or banged up. So she’d just have to get her mum out of this sinkhole herself.

And for that, Flea needed an umbrella. And not just any old umbrella that the winds could blow inside out and yank from her grasp. Flea had gone through a lot of umbrellas in this summer of superstorms, and most of them had been as cheap and as flimsy as paper cocktail

25 decorations. But they had been her training umbrellas, not only to preserve her in freak weather conditions, but more importantly, her weapon of choice. Because the first and foremost way that an umbrella could save your life was if you learnt how to use it in combat. Flea had trained herself to be a black belt of the brolly, swordswoman of severe winds. All she had ever needed was an umbrella worthy of her skills.

Now she had one: solid steel tube, fibreglass ribs, high-density waterproof and slash resistant canopy—an Excalibur of umbrellas. Flea couldn’t resist wielding and thrusting it as she bounded down the stairs to the lower levels of the tower block. If she sharpened up its tip, it’d be good for inflicting shallow stab wounds too. Its crook handle was the perfect size and shape to put a human throat in a choke hold. Its pole was strong enough to use as a battering ram and sturdy enough to clothesline any cops that might get in her way. With this umbrella, Flea didn’t need anyone else to protect her. She’d learned from experience that the best way for a young Scouse to survive on the dark rainy streets of Manchester was to become the person who you wouldn’t want to meet on the dark rainy streets of Manchester. That was who Flea could be now. She had her umbrella and she wasn’t afraid to use it.

Flea reached the ground floor of their sink estate, splashing down in a stream of floodwater that rose to her knees. A shallow day for this side of town. In her shell suit and wellies, Flea barely felt the chill anymore. She’d steeled herself against the smell, too. She was used to keeping her footing and not slowing her pace, even with the city swamps sloshing around her ankles. You could never tell when someone might jump you from behind in old Mankland. She was always up for a scrap—either with a mugger or a gale force wind—but Flea was smart enough to know that legging it away was still always the safest option. Whether in fight or flight mode, she never let her guard down.

26 Two paces from her door, Flea felt a whack in the small of her back.

Tightening her grip on the umbrella handle, she spun round to face her attacker. But nobody was there. It was like she had been pounced on by thin air. Then she felt tiny claws clambering up the back of her shell suit. She felt a furry tail tickling her neck and a familiar fat squirrel slipping into the folds of her hood for warmth. Flea sagged with relief and didn’t bother to dislodge it. The flats of Moss Side were rife with pests – mutant rats swimming the streams of the lower floors and the obese pigeons bobbing on the water like feral ducks. Flea didn’t the animals though. She’d learnt to live with them.

Flea had learned to live with a lot of things since the superstorms had first brought her family to this city two years ago. Since the Mersey floodwaters of her poor drowned Liverpool had forced them this way up the Union Canal. The Wheeler family were city folk, born and bred. They couldn’t imagine themselves eking out a wetland life in the kitchen sink country of Cheshire, Lancashire, or the Wirral. They needed to feel proper concrete through the puddles. So they’d come to find their own dirty lungful of breathing space in the already bloated population of Manchester. Any , as her Nanna used to say, and even the hardest bastard you know couldn’t argue with the storms these days.

Flea climbed over the sandbags piled up to their letterbox and pressed her shoulder to the door of the flat. As she tumbled through its gape, one of her boots squelched down on the saturated remains of their carpet. Her other leg slipped out from under her and dangled briefly over a chilly abyss. Flea scrambled back on her haunches, panting as she slumped against the wall. The sinkhole had gotten bigger while she’d been out.

“Is that you up there, Fleabag?” called a voice from below.

27 Her mother’s voice. Flea rolled her eyes. Why had her mum ever gone to the trouble of giving her such a prissy name as “Felicity” if she was only going to insist on shortening it to the ugliest little nicknames that she could think up?

“Yeah, it’s me, Shell. I almost fell in your cesspit.”

Flea never called her mother “mum” anymore either. Not out loud at least. Shell was more like a sibling than a parent to her. A bad influence of a big sister at that. Shelly would only moan if Flea or Wes used the M word, complaining that they were making her feel old. In spite of her two strapping teenage kids, Shell was barely into her thirties. Whatever Shell was to them, she was still family and she was stuck down in a hole all alone. A lonely little spider of a woman flushed down the earth’s toilet bowl.

“So…are you about ready to be rescued then?” Flea asked her mum, trying to sound casual. Breezy even, like her mum wasn’t trapped twenty feet deep in the yawning crater that had become the centrepiece of their tiny bedsit flat. She asked as casually as you might ask about the weather. And like the weather, Flea feared the forecast.

No answer came at first. She crawled to the sinkhole’s brim, pulled a torch from her rucksack, and pointed its dull glow into the chasm. in the floor was roughly as wide as a kid’s paddling pool. About halfway down, the sinkhole bottlenecked then stretched into a large cavern, an airy pocket in the earth half-filled with the deluge that had drained from off their kitchen and living room floor. Floating on the waters of this subterranean swamp, there was a small red . Shell had made her bed in the dinghy long ago, bundling herself up in her dressing gown, plastic bags over her slippers and her hands gloved with Marigolds. Flea hadn’t been at home when the floor had collapsed in the

28 flat and the dinghy had been sucked into the pooling pit below. Shelly claimed that she’d suffered no injuries, but since she’d probably been drunk at the time of her fall, she wasn’t the best judge of her own health. Her mum could be a mess of breaks and bumps down there.

“Shell, did you hear me?” asked Flea, knowing her mum had bloody well heard and was stalling her answer, thinking up a new excuse not to move. “Let’s get moving! Before the toxic waste buried down there brings you out in scales.”

In the torchlight, she saw Shell’s hand jerk up reflexively to her neck. Her eczema couldn’t be doing well in that hole. It looked like her dirty blonde hair was slowly turning to seaweed. Flea didn’t really know if there was anything poisonous down in the soil, but she hoped her suggestion would have Shell itching for escape.

“Put the kettle on first, will you, pet?” Shell called up, breaking her long wince of a silence. “Fire up the camping stove and make us a brew. You’ve been out for ages and your brother’s still off looting with the lads. I’ve been gagging for a cup of tea. Where have you been, kidda? You left me here on my billy lonesome.”

Shelly would have used these same bored impatient tones if Flea or her brother Wes had been too slow in bringing a takeaway home from the chippy. It was hard to play the hero to somebody who was so disinterested in their own rescue.

“Bugger your cup of tea!” snapped Flea. “If we get you out of this hole, then we’ll celebrate with my last two cans of Coke. How about that?”

This wasn’t a casual bribe. Flea had been hoarding her Cokes since she’d stolen them from a toppled vending machine during the spate of riots

29 and looting that had broken out on the city streets at the fag end of the summer. It was late October now and Flea had kept those Cokes like two dented rubies at the bottom of her rucksack. She’d been saying that she would only crack their ring pulls at the end of the world. The truth was she would settle for sharing them with Shelly if she’d only get her arse out of this hole.

“Maybe later, kidda,” said Shell. “I’ve got a headache coming on. There’s pains in all me joints. You know what that means. There’s a storm coming.”

“There’s always a bloody storm coming! You’ve been spending too much time with the senile old biddies on this block if you reckon your body’s somehow tuned into the weather. Enough of this old wives’ bollocks. Let’s be having you!”

Flea gave up waiting for Shell’s cooperation. She turned off the torch and fixed her eyes on the bucket dangling from a rope over the sinkhole’s mouth. This rope, attached to the bucket’s handle, was looped round the longest branch of the tree that was sticking through the smashed glass of their kitchen window. It was weeks ago now that this tree had been blown through their window. None of the Wheelers knew exactly where the tree had come from or how far it had travelled on hurricane winds. The retirement flats were miles from the nearest park. The skinny trunk stretching over their bedsit was just another thing that they’d learned to live with. They could hang their washing up to dry on it. They could sharpen knives on its bark. And with the sinkhole directly under its branches, the tree had most recently enabled them to rig up a pulley system to deliver food and fags down to their mum in the basin below. Flea got to her feet, extending her umbrella to hook the rope with its crook handle. With the sinkhole widening, the bucket was now much harder to reach.

30 “Fleabag, what are you playing at?”

“I told you!” Flea yelled back. “I’m rescuing you! Do you know there are three main ways that an umbrella can save your life? One of those ways is using it as a . Remember that final evacuation day in Liverpool when families were putting their toddlers and pets in their upended brollies? Like little lifeboats on the floodwaters? That’s just how umbrellas are made these days. A special kind of rubber or something, so that they float and don’t leak. Get your skinny arse into this one and I’ll hoist you out of there. You won’t have to stand up or even bend your knees. So don’t start whining again about getting head rushes or twinges in your spine. Just shift your backside into the brolly. I’ll do the rest.”

Flea was so sure about this umbrella being the solution that she was sounding like an advert. Her voice had gone all sunshiny like one of those airhead presenters on the shopping channel that Shelly used to all day long before they had lost power for the last time, back when the telly had still been there to hold the Wheeler family together. Now Flea was left clinging to a ragged piece of rope, retying it to the umbrella’s handle and swinging it over the sinkhole, hoping that she could use it to fish her mother out of the pool below. Hoping that the rope and its spokes would hold her mother’s weight. Shell was such a skinny little thing that, at just sixteen, Flea was already taller and tougher.

When did I get bigger than my mum? Flea thought as she lowered the umbrella. When did I get strong enough to lift her up? When did Shelly start to shrink?

The voice out of the hole interrupted her thoughts.

“You know, it’s bad to open an umbrella indoors.”

31 “Oh, give it a rest, will you!” blasted Flea, cutting her off. “I’ve had enough of your superstitious hocus pocus excuses. You’re not a weather witch! You’re just a silly mare that’s stuck down at the bottom of a hole. Now get in the brolly!”

Flea gave the rope a little shake for emphasis, like she was whipping a horse’s reigns. Her mum huffed and sighed a moment longer. Then Flea slowly felt the rope pinch as a hand caught hold of the umbrella’s canopy at the end of the line.

She’s gonna do it, thought Flea. She’s going to let me save her.

Then there came the sound of Shell screeching at the top of her lungs.

“There’s something inside!” she cried. “Something alive!”

Flea frowned, confused for a second. Then she reached over her shoulder and patted the back of her shell suit. Her hood had been emptied of its furry hitchhiker.

“It’s just a squirrel, Shell!” Flea called. “Sorry about that. The bloody creature’s been stalking me, stowing away in my hood. I can’t get rid of it.”

Shell gave a spluttering laugh that echoed all the way up the sinkhole. “Animals have always liked you, Flea,” she said. “Animals know you’re soft.”

“I am not! I’ve just not been hungry enough to cook it yet.”

Shell laughed again. “You’re a soft lass and those little vermin know it. They know you’re lucky. That you’ll survive. I named you after luck, didn’t I, Felicity? I’m not as lucky as you are, kid. That squirrel will give me rabies if I go anywhere near it.”

32 Flea closed her eyes. “Don’t give up, Shell. Not now. Please.”

“Where did you say you got this umbrella anyway?” Shell asked, changing the subject. “And don’t lie to me and say that you robbed it from an outdoors store. Your brother tells me that all the big shops were picked clean months ago.”

Flea winced. She would have felt a whole lot better if she had nicked the umbrella from one of the big chain stores. But after all the shopping precincts had been stormed in the summer riots and after the clean-up cops had been brought in to arrest the looters, those big brand shops had been left derelict, their billboard signs disappearing behind barriers of rivet metal and their consumer goodies all harvested away. During these last few weeks, Flea had been reduced to scavenging from charity shops and food banks for the last slim pickings of supplies. Everyone needed to gather up supplies.

Like every other bugger around here, Flea was getting ready. This week the city of Manchester, just like the rest of their sorry country and just like the whole bleeding world, was being closed for maintenance. It was shutting up shop. It was holing itself up for the long winter. It was going to ground. There was only one working week left now until the Global Mandatory Hibernation. The big G.M.H. that’d been looming Flea’s entire life, that had been voted for a generation ago, before she was even born. This Friday it would finally arrive. This was the last week of the world as Flea knew it.

“Where did you get the brolly, girl?” Shell persisted.

“I took it from the old lady on the fifth floor where the roof’s caved in,” she admitted. “Rain was still leaking in through her busted ceiling panels and she was just sitting there in her chair, still as a statue, stiff as a board.

33 She was sat waiting to die with her brolly in her hand. It didn’t look like she’d even tried to call for help.”

“She didn’t want to leave,” said Shell. “The old folks in these flats won’t ever step out into the weather again. They’d rather be left to drown in the comfort of their own homes.”

Flea swallowed. “And you feel the same?”

It was crazy for Shelly to want to stay. She wasn’t old and this wasn’t their home. But Flea could still remember the depression that had hung over her mother like a black cloud after they were forced out of their old flat in Liverpool. Shell had loved that flat, even though it used to take in a good three feet of sewer water during every superstorm. flood drill was always the same. Flea and Wes would climb on the top bunk where they would fight over the blankets, nose-plugs, and snacks until the pump man came. Their mum would make her own hard bed on the kitchen table, which was fair enough since nobody ever ate off it. It was only after the Wheelers lost their old home that Shell started washing her headache pills down with cheap gin, which had sunk her faster than any flood.

“I could just hibernate here,” said Shell, sounding scarily like she meant it. “I can’t go through another evacuation, our Flea. There’s nowhere left to go. Not for the likes of us. We can’t afford our own fancy backyard bunker. Your old Nanna was the only relative we had to shelter with. She might have lived longer if we hadn’t brought all of our dirt and germs to her doorstep. Where can we go now? There’s no shelter left in this country. Little England is shrinking. The tide’s creeping in every day. The ground water’s surging up from below. This country’s just a lifeboat now. They’ll chuck anyone overboard who they don’t need. They’ll

34 deport them like your dad or they’ll let the weather do the job for them. I…I like it down here, Flea. It’s quiet. I can’t hear the thunder or the wind rattling the walls. It’s like going back into the womb. Like being all safe inside your mum’s tum.”

Flea shuddered. Shell talking about the womb only brought out her claustrophobia.

“Just get in that bleeding umbrella!” Flea fumed. “If you won’t, then I’m climbing down there to drag you out of that hole by your hair. You hear me?!”

Flea meant what she said. She made a leap for the rope, catching it between her palms. The tree creaked as it took her weight, but she wasn’t heavy enough to break it. She coiled her arms and around the rope cord, feeling herself slowly slipping down its length. She peered down into the sinkhole’s shadows, feeling its mouth gaping to swallow her whole. But before she could get any deeper, she thrust out her legs to brace herself against its brim. She clasped onto the ledge, clawing her way back onto the living room floor.

Down below, her mum could only laugh at her failed heroics.

“I keep telling ya. You can’t cope with tight spaces, girl. You think I can’t remember from when you were little? How you used to scream and bawl if I took you onto the subway. All those games of hide and seek that ended in trauma. And now the hibernation’s coming. And you don’t want to go to ground, do you? Oh, my poor little Fleabag. My poor luckless Felicity.” The rope jostled, pushed by a hand from below. “Take your brolly back, kidda. Don’t pretend that you didn’t grave rob it for yourself.”

35 Flea wanted to tell her mum to shut it. She wanted to say how the retirement flats had already been ransacked – the medical cabinets all emptied, the batteries pinched out of every appliance. Flea had only been looting the leftovers. She wanted to say that when she’d pulled the umbrella from that old lady’s claw, she didn’t feel bad for stealing her last possession, the last thing she had likely blown all her pension on. The young didn’t pity the old anymore and the old didn’t envy those who were stuck being young now. Better that they’d been young when the sun was still shining and the streets were still dry.

Shelly wasn’t old but she’d lived long enough to remember the sunshine. Long enough to miss it like hell and lose hope that it was ever coming back.

“Take your umbrella and get out of here, Flea,” her mum said, her tone softer now. “There’s no sense in us both going down with this sinking ship.”

Flea’s throat constricted. She couldn’t answer, she could hardly breathe. She simply took hold of the rope again and slowly pulled the umbrella back to the surface. The squirrel hopped into the branches of the dead tree and then tightrope-walked down to Flea, crawling up her arm and back into the warmth of her hood. When she untied the brolly, Flea found that her mum had filled up its canopy with the litter out of her dinghy. With chocolate wrappers, cigarette packs, and drained bottles of booze. Wes and his looter friends must have visited the flat, feeding their mum bird, a feast of sugar, nicotine, and gin. He’d probably made her a cup of tea too. Flea wondered why Wes hadn’t climbed down the sinkhole to pull Shell out himself. The answer came to her too quickly, like a sour taste to her mouth. Wes hadn’t helped their mum because he knew she’d only slow him down.

36 In numb movements, Flea slipped the rucksack from her shoulders, reached inside, and pulled out one of her last cans of Coke. It was warm in her palm but she thought the ground water might cool it. She placed the Coke into the bucket then wordlessly lowered it down into the hole, like a coin flicked into a wishing well or an offering to a shrine. Flea felt the bucket land softly on the dingy below and a few later she heard the squirt and the fizz of its ring pull. Her mum must be very thirsty down there. How long before dehydration took hold? How long did she have to think up another rescue plan?

Flea didn’t say goodbye. She didn’t say, “See ya, Shell!” and she certainly didn’t say, “I’ll be back soon, mum.” She wouldn’t tell her mother that the next person she saw would probably be some cop who’d be wrenching her out of her peaceful little womb tomb by force. Flea simply snatched up her rucksack and climbed back over the sandbags at their door. Out in the hall, she waded downstream towards the entrance doors to the tower block. She peered through the smashed glass, staring at the storm still raging outside.

There were three main ways an umbrella could save your life.

For Flea, the surest of these was using her umbrella as a shield. Not to protect her from the clouds above. Flea wasn’t so stupid that she would actually hold an umbrella up over her head. Not unless she wanted to be yanked off her feet into a cyclone. She’d learned never to rest her brolly on her shoulder either. It wasn’t a bloody parasol and the world was no longer made for picnics. Flea knew that if she chose to stay above ground and live in the weather, she’d need to thrust her umbrella straight out ahead of her. Somebody still had to fend for her family. One of them still needed to brave the outside.

37 Flea kicked the doors to their flats and they flew wide. She breathed in the rain, she opened her brolly to the winds and she damn well braced herself.

Kelly Cowley is a writer and school librarian living in Chester, England. She earned a degree in Performance Writing at the innovative Dartington College of , and post-graduation she won a place on the “Apprenticeships in Fiction” scheme, a one-year professional development program designed to nurture emerging novelists. In 2015 she began work on a young adult climate fiction novel inspired partly by the increase of extreme weather and flooding in the U.K.

38 39 Victor and the Fish Matthew S. Henry

Flexing like a scale-skinned forearm, a large brown trout struggles to free itself from Victor’s grip. A teenage boy, 14 or 15, stares down uncertainly from his seat in the ’s bow. The father, ill-equipped for a float trip in jeans, polo, and cowboy boots, a knob of chew in his lip, snorts and brandishes a phone.

‘er and hold ‘er up now.”

“Uh.” The son’s eyes dart from father to Victor, back to father, and to Victor again before resting on his catch. “Um…”

“Like this,” Victor reassures him, holding the trout half in the water, net beneath. “Keep him in the water. Getting hot, don’t want to stress him.”

Another male, 14 inches and pretty fat. Probably a belly full of salmon flies. It had been another early hatch, and though Victor’s clients had missed the tail end of it, the fish were evidently still looking up for big orange and brown bugs.

Pausing its struggle to rest, the brown mouths a silent, repetitive protest. A white belly peeks at Victor, light beneath a nighttime bedroom door that melts into gradients of low yellow, light brown, red-speckled mahogany stretching over the spine and around a flaccid dorsal fin.

40 Damn thing, he thinks.

“Naw, son. Hold ‘im up for the world to see,” the father counters. “Grip ‘im right in the middle.”

“That’s pretty hard on them this time of day,” Victor insists. “You can still get a good picture if—”

“Out of the water, son. Just like that.”

Son surprises Victor, taking hold of the fish and gripping it firmly around the midsection, holding it up with feigned bravado against a smoky afternoon sky. Fish mouth gapes and gasps, moisture evaporating rapidly from its back. In a last desperate effort, it flexes again. Splash.

“Ah, shit.” Father and son watch as the brown sinks briefly before taking refuge in a downstream eddy.

“Still got a good one, I think.” Father tinkers on his phone, son returns to his seat and Mountain Dew in the bow, and Victor hauls up the anchor.

Should’ve let them string it up and keep it for dinner, Victor thinks. It’s unlike him, a retired professor of stream ecology with a singular zeal for watershed preservation. But the browns had become what the lake trout had been in the Yellowstone—predatory, invasive, destructive. Nonnative.

When he was still with the University of Montana he’d worked with Fish, Wildlife & Parks on regulations that required anglers to kill lake trout upon catching them. Rock to the skull, knife to the brain, take your pick. For the good of the watershed.

41 Victor rows. Oars soundlessly skim water, an upcoming downstream riffle barely audible. It’s getting smokier.

He reaches into his dry bag for his air quality monitor. The AQI is 177 and rising. Probably a Stage 3 Air Quality Alert in Missoula.

“Might want to get out your masks.”

“Ah, hell, we’re fine,” the father replies.

One final wordless mile of Rock Creek, which is more of a river than a creek. Light ash snows down silently, generally. A dark gray paste slathered across the drift boat floor. Father thumbs phone and spits. Son stifles a cough and dons his mask furtively, covering nose and mouth as he looks away from his father to listlessly the water with a newly fastened fly. Cadenced casts fall impotently in near-tangles of tippet.

Victor sighs and rows.

At the boat takeout, Victor backs in, eyeing the trailer and pickup Miles had driven from the put-in at the confluence of the east and west forks of the stream. He’s anxious to get off the water.

“Whoop!”

Somehow, impossibly, the son holds a bent rod. A trout leaps from the water once, then again. A third time. The boy reels hard, fast, greedily. Victor drops anchor for good measure and grabs for the net, but before he positions it under the fish he can see what it is.

Emboldened, the son reaches out to secure his bounty for a photo. Victor’s quicker. In a flash, forceps seize fly, reducing the pattern to thread shreds and foam bits and unpiercing the lip of what is unmistakably a cutthroat

42 trout, the first Victor has seen caught by anyone other than him in his last six years as a full-time fishing guide in western Montana. Freed, it returns to the eddy from whence it was pulled.

“Hey—what the hell?”

Father stands, looming over Victor, the boat quivering. Victor wouldn’t be getting a tip.

Home is a sag-roofed cabin at mile marker 17 along Rock Creek Road, which runs parallel to its namesake. Victor finds that his air filter has stopped working. Motes of ash and particulate matter float suspended in a lone slant of light beaming from a skylight, its spot on the floor occupied by his old Australian Shepherd, Mollie. Thin gray wool coats desk, kitchen counter, bananas, windowsill. The dog’s water is wet cement.

He climbs to the roof. A yellow sky overhead has begun the nightly transition to brown, but it’s only midafternoon. The fires—British Columbia, the Cascades—are entering their thirteenth month of steady burning; a closer but younger, three-month-old fire has been spreading northeast in the Bitterroots. There isn’t much for him to worry about. The flames would have to jump a highway and the Bitterroot River, and even if they did they’d peter out at the foot of the Sapphires, bald and blackened from their own August inferno three years before.

He unscrews the side plate on the filtration system. Magpies, two of them. Dead, mashed and sizzling against the hot grating of the intake. Seeking cleaner air. A small avalanche shovel does the job, and the filter whirrs back to life as he holds the restart button. A bighorn ram and two

43 ewes, eyes black and beady, look on from the scree and talus slope rising from his backyard.

Back inside, Victor finds a long text message from Miles.

A hoot-owl restriction is coming. Two weeks of upper 80s has spooked the FWP. A hoot-owl has only happened once ever in May, and that was the year before. The new norm? Business might be over for the . The clientele had been thin, and not the type interested in rising early and quitting at noon. Better for the fish, he thinks.

Victor brushes off the table, warms a bowl of venison stew and nurses a bottle of homebrew.

He should be tired. Not just from the day, but from the years. He’s an old sixty-eight, having spent his first fifty-five years a sedentary academic and his next thirteen making up for it by going it alone seventeen miles up Rock Creek.

But he’s not tired. He’s excited. He’d stopped giving a damn about his guiding business lately. The cutthroat that day might’ve been a sign of his efforts coming to fruition. It was the first he’d seen on the end of someone’s line other than his, and miles downstream from the Microburst at that. First thing in the morning he’d head up Cougar Creek to check on his stock.

He calls Miles. He wouldn’t make the drive to Missoula for beers tonight. He wants an early start. He’d take six or seven more cutties — the biggest, the hardiest, even if it takes him a few hours to get the right ones—and head for the Blackfoot River.

A knock at the door.

44 At the window, a man in Carhartts, tucked-in t-shirt, laptop bag, sweat- stained cap. A truck behind, sage green. FWP. He cracks the door.

“Can I help you?”

His name is Trevor, and he’s here for research. About cutthroats. Victor raises an eyebrow.

“As far as we know, they’re still extinct. I haven’t seen one myself and I do a lot of fishin’. But we’ve had quite a few calls over the past month or two. Twenty-five or thirty, I think.”

Victor should be excited. But here’s Trevor with red tape and bureaucracy not far behind.

“We’ve been getting some reports from guides and fishermen every other day or so. Wasn’t ‘til I saw a picture of a big one pulled out near Scotty Brown Bridge—you know, up the Blackfoot?—that I started to wonder. Could’ve been an old pic, but the guy who called said it was from that day.”

The Blackfoot? Victor blinks back at him, frowning.

“I dunno, could be like the way people report UFOs. Just for attention, that sort of thing. Kids toyin’. But then someone called and said they’d pulled out a few a day for the past month right where Rock Creek goes into the Clark Fork. They said—”

“Who?” interrupts Victor. “Who called?”

“Some fellow named Reeves, I think.”

Victor doesn’t know a Reeves.

45 “Could’ve been . Don’t remember. I have an address in Bonner to follow up with him. I’m told you’re the man to talk to, though, being the only guide left up here.”

“That’d be me,” Victor said cautiously.

“Seen any cutties yourself?”

“Ain’t been out much. Business is slow.”

“Even when you have? You pull any in yourself?”

“Last one I caught was six years ago. Wish it weren’t so. All browns and bulls up here.”

It’s bullshit, but Victor doesn’t let on. Trevor declines a cup of coffee and heads upstream to Miller Gulch, where he’s staying.

Victor thinks about the events two months before. He’d been out wade- fishing at the Microburst access. It’d been a slow day, but unusually clear. Prevailing winds had pushed out much of the wildfire smoke and a pale yellow sun had shined down. Shined. Not the gauzy candlelight glow he’d grown accustomed to.

Drunk on clear air and a semblance of sunlight, he’d fished casually through the afternoon, not caring much about catching. Puffy cumulus, long forgotten, had eased across the ribbon of sky above as he’d waded slowly along a narrow, ridge-encased stretch of water. He’d watched an osprey seeking the nest it had abandoned in October.

The whiz and click of fly line had brought him back to reality, and after a moment he’d stared down into his net in disbelief. A 16-inch westslope cutthroat trout. Supposedly extinct. Not a brown. Not a bull or a rainbow

46 or a hybrid “cutbow.” A fat, healthy, pregnant female cuttie, the streaks, the charcoal blotches, the black poppy seed spots. A tinge of sunset yellow as a backdrop. Red slashes upon the chin.

I’ll be damned.

Thinking quickly, he’d netted it and taken it to a side channel, where he’d built two small dams and a makeshift reservoir. He’d returned to the Microburst, tied on a new fly, and within minutes he’d caught another, also female and pregnant. After three more—all female, all ready to burst with eggs—he’d realized he needed a different plan.

Using a cleaned-out backpack pesticide tank he’d found in his shed, he transported his catch in water roughly three miles up Cougar Creek, a tributary, and replicated his first reservoir . Two new, secret “hatcheries.” There was little danger of a snowmelt surge wrecking his setup. Of course not. It had been another dry winter.

By now, in early May, these cutties had become the most important thing in Victor’s life. Weekly sessions of furtive wade-fishing had become ritual. Always at the Microburst, always four or five from the same hole, always female and pregnant. During his fourth or fifth trip up, it had dawned on him. He’d read about it before, during his time pumping out research in Missoula. Asexual reproduction. Endangered fish reproducing without mating. At the time it had been sawfish in Florida. He couldn’t be sure about these cutties, but he’d begun to suspect something similar.

Sure enough, all twenty-seven of them, caught over a span of two months, had been large with eggs. And multiplying in his hidden reservoirs on Cougar Creek.

47 He’d kept it from Miles, a wild, reckless on-again off-again “assistant” who’d once guided with Victor but found bartending in Missoula more lucrative. Perpetual fire season meant droves of wildland firefighters, and wildland firefighters could drink. He couldn’t blame them. Victor had been worried Missoula would turn into another Williston, another Bakken-style pit of vice, but it hadn’t. The crews were simply too tired to do much more than work, eat, drink, sleep, and sometimes die. And there was no sign the fires would go the way of natural gas.

Still, Miles had left guiding for financial reasons, and Victor didn’t trust him with something like this. Not that there was cash in it. But Miles had the gift of gab and a lot of FWP folks spent time in Missoula bars. Victor— the fish—couldn’t afford FWP involvement. Like Trevor.

The FWP had already dropped the ball on cutthroat management once. They’d let the cutties go the way of wolves, only public pressure hadn’t come from ranchers but from outfitters and guide shops, demanding friendlier regulations on fisheries to bring in out-of-state tourist dollars. The constant threat of flare-ups had scared people away from the outdoor playgrounds of western Montana, a ubiquitous ashy haze obscuring once-photogenic vistas. The FWP had relented, but unevenly: they lifted all fishing restrictions on cutties, but cutties only. Catch-and-release- only was abolished, and handling regulations, intended to limit out- of-water time for each fish and widely enforced through self-policing, were discouraged. The ? Cutthroats were considered the most photogenic. Against a graying mountain landscape, the colorful cuttie would draw the eye and, with any luck, tourist money.

Stressed by overzealous fishing, an already vulnerable cuttie population had been outcompeted by the browns, hybridized beyond recognition with the rainbows and, improbably, devoured by a once-threatened bull trout population.

48 Victor had begun to believe that his discovery would be the species’ salvation. He’d muled them to safety, finding in each trip a sense of purpose in a burning pocket of the world.

He’d bring them back.

He arrives at the first pool before dawn. The water level’s low, and it worries him.

Donning a pair of old goggles and a waterproof headlamp, he slips in silently on the downstream end of his reservoir. Silver flashes. Ten or twelve cutties, healthy and about 12-20 inches apiece, hover against an upstream ledge, unconcerned by his presence. Juveniles and minnows everywhere. More than before. He clambers back ashore.

In what has become ritual, he begins a slow and rhythmic roll cast. Thick willows and a lone huckleberry bush his audience, shouldered up to watch his crude method of collection. The fly, a Jay’s Golden Stone, settles on the surface, a light splash. A second passes, then two, then three, and he wonders if these fish are somehow smarter than those hovering in the current of the swifter stream below. Four seconds, five. Have they lost their appetite? Six. Maybe I should’ve gone with a size 12 or 14. Seven.

Eight.

Nine.

He’s about to retract his line into a new cast when his fly is sipped under. Not like the first he’d caught, when water had exploded like a stick of dynamite and torn his fly to shreds. This time, the fly is taken with ease, relished.

49 He plays it out longer than necessary. Waits for the fish to get tired. No need to yank it flopping ashore like so many of his clients, hastening for a chest-puffed photo. He nets it respectfully and slips it into the opening in his plastic pack. He repeats this process until he has a total of six and brown dawn has become yellow morning.

His mask beeps twice, alerting him halfway down that it’s time for a filter change. AQI 188, air quality worse. He looks at his watch. Only 7:30. The smoke is thicker than it’s been in months, but it’s not an inversion. It’s warm, even down in the canyon.

Hope the cabin filter didn’t gum up again.

Back at his pickup, Victor takes special care with each trout, belting the tank into the backseat and disguising it in a plaid wool blanket.

He sits on his tailgate, sipping the remnants of coffee from a thermos when Trevor’s pickup appears, pulling up beside him.

“Morning, Victor.”

“Morning.”

“Clients today?”

“Nah. Just out trying out a new pattern.”

“Any luck?”

“Not much. A few looking up.”

“Ah.” Trevor eyes Victor. Silence.

50 “Well, I’m headed on downstream to start at the junction. Take some samples, maybe throw a line in, see what I can see. Work my way up. Maybe I’ll see you on the water?”

“Probably not. Headed to Missoula.”

“Alright then. Have a good one.” Trevor tips his cap to Victor and drives off.

Victor heads west to Missoula after his “restocking” mission up the Blackfoot. Just to be cautious, he’d avoided the fishing accesses, slipping instead onto private riverbanks to release his fish. He’d seen no one.

He pulls off the interstate onto Van Buren Street. Something’s different. It’s not the smoke; he still can’t see the hulking mass of Lolo Peak, which hasn’t been sighted from town for almost a year. It’s the chaos, the urgency, in a town usually laidback. Helicopters rise from the university grounds. Traffic’s thick and rattling with , FWP vehicles, fire rigs, semis. National Guard.

He parks downtown, seeking Miles and a beer. The brewery is empty. Victor takes a stool.

“Rye pale.” Miles, his back to Victor as he organizes the register, points to the flyer posted above the tap handles.

DUE TO EMERGENCY AMENDMENT TO 16-3-213(1), MCA, WE ARE UNABLE TO SERVE BEER ON-TAP OR BREW NEW BEER UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. DUE TO WATER SHORTAGE. SORRY FOR INCONVENIENCE.

51 “No can do, buddy.”

“Serious?”

“Yup. And we’re of our canned stuff. I can give you Keystone Light or Keystone Light. Three-fifty.”

Victor, incredulous, stares back at Miles and his enormous beard, filthy plaid shirt, bleach-blond hair pulled back into a bun.

“You’re selling that shit in here?”

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with this. Plus, gotta keep business going.”

“Three-fifty? I’m guessing this was your idea? That’s gotta be a two-hundred percent markup.”

“More like a thousand,” Miles whispers, grinning. “But for you, buddy, because we know each other…three-fifty.”

“I’ll pass,” Victor tells him. “What’s happening around here, though? Choppers over the U, National Guard…”

“You haven’t heard? Aw, man—bad one moving fast over near Philipsburg. Another over on that BLM land southeast of Ovando. And the Bitterroot fire blew up last night. They evacuated Hamilton. Campus is headquarters, man. They even cancelled the graduation ceremonies today at the U.”

Shit. The fish.

“You didn’t know? Man, I’m like, your only source…. Yeah, they might close I-90 east of Bearmouth. You might want to stick around Missoula until it’s under control.”

52 “Gimme one of those beers. I’ll give you two bucks.”

Miles obliges, refuses Victor’s cash. Two gulps and the beer’s gone. Victor’s out the door as Miles calls after him about sleeping on his couch.

Victor slogs through traffic to the interstate. Missoula’s a refugee camp, not a headquarters. Tents huddled on the university oval, shivering in a hot breeze; convoys of personnel trucks; young men hunched in the shade, backs bent from toil, beards bleached blonde and tipped with ash, eyes sunken in retreat from the sight of homes and habitats razed, life snuffed out.

Victor finds Trevor’s FWP pickup parked outside his cabin. Trevor creaks gently in a rocking chair on the porch, reading underneath the porchlight. He doesn’t look up until Victor slams the driver’s side door.

“Evenin’.”

“Trevor. What can I do?”

“Beer?” Victor declines, but takes up a second rocking chair next to him.

Trevor fingers a page in the book, silently mouths a final few sentences, claps it shut with finality.

“Caught two cutties today.” Victor’s chest thumps.

“Oh?”

“Two females. Both pregnant. About 14 inches. One near Valley of the Moon Trailhead turnoff, the other on up.”

53 Relief. He hasn’t been up Cougar Creek.

“I’ll be damned. What’s the plan?”

“Oh, not much. We’ll have to find more first. If I do, then we’ll probably talk management. Restrictions on browns and bulls. Not sure exactly. We’ve never dealt with something coming back from the dead.” Laughter as he says this.

“Huh.”

“Heard about the hoot-owl. Can’t be great for business.”

“Things’ve been slow anyway,” Victor assures him. “I’ll make do.”

Trevor opens a beer can, working the tab between a broad finger and thumb until it comes free.

“If we do find some cutties, though, I can tell you I’ll be up here awhile.” Trevor pauses. “Maybe we could do some fishing?”

“Sure.” Victor doesn’t do much to hide his annoyance. “I’m hitting the hay. I’m old, need my beauty rest.”

“Surprised you haven’t seen any cutties yourself, Victor.” Trevor holds Victor’s gaze. Hard to tell what this is.

“G’night, Trevor.”

“Say, I wanted to ask you a few questions before—”

The front door slams, and Victor extinguishes the porchlight.

54 Victor wakes to a world of fire. From his bed he sees flames, clinging to a grove of charred trees on the ridge opposite his cabin, across the water. A deep breath tells him his filter remains operational.

He bolts out of bed. It’s 6 a.m. Still dark. Out the front window, red taillights recede. He finds a note on the porch.

Headed up some of the tributaries. Have an idea about these fish. Read this thing about asexual reproduction in stressed/endangered populations. We’ll see. Not worried about fires. Supposed to be less windy. Will stop by this eve. Got ?s for you, and some beer. ­—Trevor

Why would he head up the tributaries? Victor wonders. Unless he knows. Unless he found those pools the day before but didn’t want to scare Victor off.

Victor spends the morning on his porch watching the adjacent forest burn. Thinking. Deer, frantic, flushed from the forest, cross the water and take the roadway downstream. The ash is thick, and he observes the occasional orange ember float past him. He’d have to evacuate today, but he feels calm about it. He doesn’t own much, or much worth taking, beyond his fishing gear, his books, his drift boat.

But self-preservation does not occur to Victor. It is no longer important. It has not, in fact, been important to him for many months. No, he thinks of his fish. Of where to take them, where they’ll be safe. If he can make one last effort at repopulating the hallowed streams around him as the world he knows is reduced to smoldering wreckage.

Mid-afternoon arrives and Victor collects his things, hitches the boat trailer, locks his doors. Says an unceremonious, muttered farewell to the squat, drafty cabin he’s lived in for six years.

55 At dusk, he strides upstream along Cougar Creek, fly rod in hand, pesticide tank strapped to his back. Flames blanket the opposite ridge and inquisitively brush the pebbled shoreline of Rock Creek. It had moved faster than he’d figured. Faster than he’d thought possible.

It was decided: he’d haul as many fish as he could safely store in his pack up the North Fork of the Blackfoot River. It’d burned up there years before; there’s nothing left, no fuel, no people. No chance of discovery by anyone. He’d release them all and hope for the best.

Pause. A human silhouette on the false summit ahead. Beetle-killed ponderosa pines, needles red and brittle, sway and creak in the hot gusts overhead.

It’s Trevor. Victor steps out of sight.

Does he know? Did he find them? Victor wonders. And then: What the hell is he doing up here? Why hasn’t he left?

An air tanker rumbles overhead, a cascade of retardant in its wake, Kool- Aid red and drenching, impotent against the wind-fanned flames.

Victor’s fish should be fine for a bit longer, but Trevor might be a problem. He heads west along the open ridge face, flanking Trevor, to beat him to the first cache of fish. Another dips, closer this time. More retardant, most of it splashing errantly into the stream. Victor frowns. Jesus.

He arrives at the first pool, but Trevor has beaten him there and lies prone on a flat boulder, peering down, staring intently, legs bent at the knees. Victor stays still, invisible behind the huckleberry bush. Trevor reaches into his pack and retrieves a plastic freezer bag. Corn. He sifts it through his fingers into the water below, and in seconds Victor’s little private reservoir comes to life.

56 “I’ll be damned,” mutters Trevor irreverently, intrigued only by what his discovery means for his work, already deciding how to analyze and document it, his mechanical brain churning out graphs, charts, target numbers, management plans, memos and press releases, regulation language and job promotions. And he knows. Of course he knows. The reservoirs are crude and temporary. Man-made. Victor-made.

Victor sits, thinking. His phone buzzes with a text from Miles. No calls are going through. He’s in Missoula and things have gone to shit. Mount Jumbo’s on fire and a dozen homes are burning in the Rattlesnake Wilderness Area. The town’s being evacuated, and to the east, Philipsburg’s gone. That’s the word Miles uses. Gone. And they’re not letting people east of Drummond on I-90, which means Victor’s effectively trapped, sandwiched between two burning Montana towns, with only the Blackfoot River corridor for an escape route.

Victor stares through the brush at Trevor, crouching, absorbed in note taking. He Trevor for half an , longer, before he packs up his things and heads upstream, oblivious to the burning world around him. He should call out to Trevor, warn him. Ash snows down.

Nope. Damn him.

Victor approaches the pool and brandishes his fly rod.

He’s pulled twelve cutties from the pool when a blistering gust of wind nearly topples him. Time to head for the truck. Making his final descent, he spots Trevor’s pickup parked on the side of , just upstream and around the bend from his own.

57 It’s unlocked, just as he’d hoped. Shifting it into neutral, he spins the tires towards the stream and gives it a push and turns away, ignoring the spectacle. Victor leaves Rock Creek for good.

Victor drives.

He passes droves of evacuees. Great Falls has fallen, or is falling, or will fall. He’s the only one headed towards it. He drives through pockets of thick smoke and ash, against the glow of headlights. Past Ovando traffic thins, trickles, disappears. Occasional bleary-eyed headlights squint through a world smudged.

Alone, small, streaking east, Victor delivers his fish to safety. But he can’t see safety. The razor ridges of the Bob Marshall Wilderness to the north have melted into the smoke, the world now only a few feet of asphalt and the glint of roadside reflectors as Victor pushes on. The turnoff for the North Fork of the Blackfoot sneaks up on him and he has to make a U-turn.

Now, across what was, before the smoke, a vast plain. Toward mountains that are now merely hypothetical, feeling his way across rough earth, a frantic finger after a missing light switch.

Up. Cracked pavement crumbles into graded dirt, the uniform rattle of a cattle guard, more dirt. A horse trailer on its side. Flames like embers behind ashy fog. His truck coughs as he rattles across the bridge and turns left and onto the cracked concrete ramp of the boat takeout.

58 Deep breath. He retrieves the tank gently, methodically. Like he’s done it before, because he has. It’s heavy as he carries it to the river’s edge. He unscrews the plastic lid and heaves, tilting the opening towards the low water flowing past.

Out float Victor’s fish, stiff and still, white bellies up.

Matthew Henry is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Literature program at Arizona State University, where he has taught several courses in the environmental humanities. His dissertation explores the ways that literature, photography, film, and other forms of media enable us to confront and imaginatively engage with issues of resource scarcity, particularly water. He is an avid hiker, backpacker, and river-runner who loves to spend time with his wife, Jessica and their dog, Abbey.

59 60 Acqua Alta Ashley Bevilacqua Anglin

It’s not an undersea cave, but it might be. Every clammy breath is redolent of the lagoon water that covers the marble floor to the admittedly still-shallow depth of my knees. When I shine my headlamp down at the elegant geometric patterns, white and red inlaid among smooth gray tiles that have only cracked in a few places so far, I startle tiny eels, which race back into the dark. Turning the beam upward, I catch the undimmed glitter of the exquisite golden mosaics on the upper walls and the ceilings. There’s nothing else of value left, but the mosaics were deemed too complicated and costly to transport. Venezialand has painstakingly scanned and 3D-printed copies. The originals are still mine, as long as I’m here. No one else seems to want them anyway, or they wouldn’t have closed it all off in darkness.

I was the last baby born at the Ospedale San Raffaele Arcangelo to native Venetian parents. It’s been closed for over a decade. The flat where we lived then, the room where my crib would have been, is usually underwater now.

I actually like to think of it that way sometimes. If I’d been born a mermaid, this would be a time of exhilarating conquest—my realm taking back, little by little, the hundred and seventeen islands on which the city arose, flourished, and eventually declined.

61 Unfortunately, only my wobbly lamplit reflection can spend her life in the ever-rising acqua alta. For one thing, nonno probably won’t eat unless I go home and make something for the two of us.

I call him nonno, but he’s my great-grandfather, really. Even ninety- eight years ago, when he was born, younger generations had started to leave without learning the trades that had made their families proud for centuries. Nonno was a gondola builder. When he was a kid my , girls couldn’t learn to make a gondola. But by the time he was a master craftsman, with both his sons having left for the mainland, he was able to pass his vast knowledge on to his youngest daughter, my nonna. I’d like it if she were still here.

He can’t see well enough to work anymore, even if his hands were steadier. Not that there’s any market for an authentic gondola here. Now they sell them someplace else, inspired by the success of New New Orleans in North America: a carefully constructed artificial lagoon, surrounded by holos that make it look like it’s not just in the middle of mainland where the Adriatico won’t reach for hundreds of years, probably. Until mermaids take back the whole planet like in the of Noè and his ark.

Reluctantly, I slosh out through the child-sized gap in the planking. It’s getting tougher to slip through there. Maybe by this time next year I’ll need to find another way in.

I take the first couple of steps on my feet. After that, it’s easier just to break the raindrop-patterned surface of the cloudy chest-deep water with a splash and swim back across the piazza to higher ground, the same way I got here.

62 When nonno was a boy, the acqua alta didn’t usually come up higher than half a meter. Now, in the winter, two meters isn’t unusual. He doesn’t let me out to slosh or swim around my favorite abandoned places in that weather. It’s October now, so I try to explore while I still can.

The ring around my wrist pulses in a pattern that tells me it’s papà. I activate it by touch, without having to look at it.

“Pronto,” I greet him as if I didn’t know who was calling me.

“Hey, pescecagnolino,” he says in his rough-sweet baritone. He’s been calling me that, “shark-puppy,” for as long as I can remember.

“Hey. How’s Ariel?”

“Didn’t run into her today,” he answers lightly. “But Cenerentola says Ciao.”

Asking him about the princesses is my standard line. His answer varies. He knows exactly what I think of the recreated Venice where he and his second wife live now, along with both my uncles who learned the gondola-making craft from nonno and from their mother. And I know he thinks he’s doing the best thing, preserving their knowledge there. We tolerate each other’s strong opinions. During the last year and half, with me getting to stay here and him pretty happy there, there’s been a lot more tolerance on his part, and a lot less screaming until my voice is gone on my part.

So I do my best to have a nice conversation. “Were you featured on any of the casts today?”

“Eh. They’re forever in there capturing. I don’t really pay attention to what they use, by now. Probably.”

63 “Well, I’ll try to watch later.”

They’re forever in there capturing because papà and his wife Veronica are among the last authentic glassblowers of Murano, another magical underwater place that doesn’t really exist anymore. Also because the world can’t get enough of papa’s lagoon-blue eyes, his salt-and-pepper stubble, the accent. And willowy blonde Veronica did some modeling when she was younger, so…obviously.

I look like mamma, who looked like her mamma, whom I never met, but I know she looked like my nonno. We have sort of oversized feet and hands, big inky eyes too weirdly round for the cameras, and fine brown hair—neither fair enough nor dark enough for beauty—that wants to move like we’re underwater even when it’s dry. (Nonno’s hair, obviously, is half lost to the ages, and what’s left is all white now.) I also have this habit of using words too long or old or hard to spell. None of that would make the camera like me. Fine. I don’t like it right back. I love the secret lost places it doesn’t want to look at anymore.

“And, pescecagnolino. After you watch the casts from today, I want you to take a careful look at the meteo. Talk about it with the old man. You know he won’t listen to anyone but you.”

I’ve reached our palazzo. Dripping, I climb the steps into the lobby. It’s late enough that I need my headlamp again.

“What is it?”

“Acqua alta,” he says.

“So? What’s new.”

64 “I don’t want to argue. Watch it with him. I already have a plan for you, but legally, no one can tell him what to do, and I need you to convince him.”

“What?”

“Call me back if you don’t understand, all right?”

I can hear it then, the baby’s voice in the background.

“Oh, I get it,” I snap, my hand already on my ring. “Gotta go be with your real family. Ciao papà.”

I don’t wait for his answer; there’s no repeat pulse.

When I get upstairs, my own real family isn’t asleep in his chair with music droning quietly in the background, as I would have expected. He’s up and about, stirring something that smells comfortingly like our lagoon over the little gas burner that is our only stove now.

“Nonno, you know you shouldn’t use the stove when no one’s here.”

He mumbles a few words that are much too salty for any eleven-year- old mermaid. I smother a giggle because he doesn’t think I could have heard him. “And you know you’re over an hour late. Go put on some dry clothes, and we’ll eat.”

“Is that baccalà?” I sigh, still not happy with him, but relenting almost at once from hunger and affection.

“Just for you, serenissima.” His pet name for me, prettier than “baby shark,” plays on the name of our city, La serenissima. Mine means “the mermaidiest.”

65 By the time I get into some fleece leggings and a hooded shirt and socks, squeeze as much water from my hair as I can, and hang my towel and clothes over the railing of the defunct shower, I’ve figured it out. I come over to the extinguished stove and slip an arm around his bony straight shoulders. We’re close in height these days, with him slowly sinking and me on my way up. I gently pry the ladle from his long fingers and scoop polenta into the two blue bowls on the counter.

“They called you already, huh?”

“Eh?”

I add a scoop of fragrant reddish fish stew to each bowl. It’s old- fashioned comfort food, made of stuff you can get out of a can or a box, because mostly that’s what we have—but it happens to be one of my favorites. Tonight, maybe because I just came from my magnificent jeweled undersea cavern, I notice the unexpectedly fine appearance of our dishes of simple food. Blue, red, and gold, they look like they’re for royalty instead of weirdos living off the grid in a drowning and forgotten city. Slipping a spoon into each bowl, I set one on the antique table in front of nonno—its surface a little warped from so many years of so much moisture, but still elegant—and slide around to the other side to take my own seat.

“Zio Marco or Zio Tonino must’ve called you. Or both of them ganged up on you, probably.”

He raises his spiky white brows at me for just a moment. “Oh. And your father called you already, too. A conspiracy.”

I blow on the first steaming spoonful and bring it to my mouth faster than nonno can say “buon appetito.” Still too hot, but good enough that I ignore the slight burn, and quickly go for a second bite.

66 “Thanks for cooking dinner,” I tell him belatedly, after a few more mouthfuls.

He smiles slightly, making a funny little salute with his spoon. For a few minutes, we both just eat and sip the filtered rainwater in our glasses. He’s prepared just enough for one elderly adult and one ravenous growing girl. We generally try not to have leftovers of anything perishable; the battered mini-fridge takes too much juice from our cantankerous generator. What I don’t finish, I’ll often feed to the feral cats who inhabit several of the abandoned apartments in our building. Tonight they won’t get a drop.

“So,” nonno brings it up first, since he’s done with his portion while I’m still shoveling mine in. “Let’s see this ominous meteo.”

The technology is frustrating for him. I activate my communication ring and with a few flicks, we’re ready to watch the cast papà insisted that we see. I set it to project with enough magnification for nonno to catch most of the images. Then I pick up my spoon again.

They’re talking really fast about a freighter capsized in what they still call freak storms even though they seem to happen yearly. A toxic spill. Storm surge and a perigean spring tide. Apparently that means the worst flooding you can get, plus poison. Something about seventy-two hours. Evacuations. I can’t believe it. I shut the cast off.

“Sirenissima,” nonno starts to say.

I draw a deep, quavering breath. Unlike papà and me, we don’t fight, and I have no desire to start right now.

“I can’t go to that theme park, nonno,” I insist, keeping my voice as calm as I half-humanly can.

67 “I know, amore mio.” He shakes his venerable, disheveled head. “Maybe… we’ll talk to your great-uncles.”

The great-uncles I’ve never met because their leaving the family trade, their birthright, and their birthplace caused such a rift with nonno? Why would we stay with those traitors? I shake my head, not in puzzled thought like nonno, but defiantly.

“Or we could stay. Wait it out until spring. It’s not so much longer than a regular winter, nonno.”

Nonno reaches across the table to mess up my still-damp hair with a shaky little caress. “We don’t have to decide tonight. In the morning we’ll figure out what to tell papà, okay?”

I don’t expect the gentle laugh I get in response to my grudging nod.

“You’re more like your grandmother than you could possibly imagine,” he explains without my needing to ask.

Then—since he’s just said we don’t have to talk about it—he takes his own ring from the breast pocket of his old shirt and switches on a stream of the music they liked when he was young.

I clear the table, wash everything up with rainwater from our improvised tap that runs down from the roof cistern. Then, not even caring that it’s embarrassingly early for a kid my age to go to bed, I get under all my blankets, stretch gratefully out, and sleep without dreaming.

School is in the morning, after rainwater cappuccino with milk from a shelf-stable pack, a biscotto, and no mention yet of the big decision we

68 have to make. No other kids live near here anymore, so there’s been no school in the traditional sense since I was eight, but we have our ways. Nonno has tons of books lining the walls of his bedroom. (Everyone else’s book collections are digital and fit in their rings, instead of requiring rooms…but everyone else isn’t ninety-eight, after all.)

He knows such an incredible range and depth of things. And the best part is, he’ll let me read almost anything I like, as long as it’s not too sad for children or with too much sex that the elderly master builder shouldn’t have to be the one to explain to his daughter’s daughter’s daughter. (I do have some questions by this time, but I have to agree, they’re not for him.) Lately I’m reading this small, mysterious book, Le città invisibili, about Marco Polo. It’s all dreamscapes, ideas hard for me to catch, arcane vocabulary nonno makes me look up. As Polo describes his travels to the Great Khan, every exotic city ultimately reminds him of his own beloved Venice. I’m hoping to learn the trick to that, just in case.

We’re interrupted by a quietly assertive series of knocks on the apartment door. There are a few neighbors. We check on each other and lend help when it’s needed, but I don’t recall anyone we know knocking like that.

I’ve formulated the image of some kind of officer on the other side of the door, by the time my hand touches the knob. There’s still an active camera someplace in one of my underwater caverns and they’re going to tell me to stop sneaking in. The doorknob rattles a bit in my hand as I open the door, holding my breath. I hope there won’t be a big fine. I’m pretty sure they don’t send girls my age to prison.

It is someone in a uniform, but not like I was thinking. A tall United Forces peacekeeper in gray, his smile very white in his coffee-brown face even though he’s never met me before.

69 “Good morning,” he says, speaking English to me without asking if I speak English.

“Hi.” I realize I’m still holding the old book. I wrap my left hand possessively around it and press it against my sweater, hiding the title.

“Are you aware of the tidal problems we’re anticipating later this week?”

“Yeah.”

His black eyebrows curve upward into more pronounced arches, registering his confusion at my monosyllabic responses. “Can you understand me all right, miss?”

“Yes, I attended a bilingual school for as long as they still had schools here, I skipped a grade, I helped give tours of our workshop when there were tourists, and most of the casts I watch are in English,” I fire off.

He has a soft, deep laugh. I wish he weren’t so easy to like.

“Okay,” he tells me. “And…” Looking over my shoulder to where nonno hasn’t gotten up from his chair, although obviously he’s paying close attention. “How about your grandpa?”

“He understands you, but he’ll answer in Italian.” Venetian dialect, to be technical. My well-educated nonno knows mainland Italian, and he’s fairly fluent in English. He’s just extremely proud.

“All right.” He smiles again.

And then I understand why they sent someone likeable: because that’s the best way to protect him from someone like me scratching his shiny dark eyes right out of his nice face in the time it takes for him to tell us the bad news.

70 The looming choice, the one nonno and I were going to figure out together, is out of our hands. Everyone is required to leave the city. The boat will leave from Madonna dell’Orto at eight hundred hours tomorrow. No more supplies in or any other way out until a time yet to be determined, not sooner than the first of the year. We can bring fifteen kilos of personal belongings each. Food and other basic necessities will be taken care of, and there will be transportation vouchers to help get everyone to their nearest family or friends.

Nonno answers him in Venetian. Not the kind of words I am going to translate.

“I’m really sorry, sir,” the nice soldier responds.

Then he looks back down at me, catching me with pools of lagoon water trembling furiously against my eyelashes. “You two have somewhere to go?”

Teeth clenched, I nod, which sends the stinging tears spilling down my face.

“Okay, sweetheart,” he murmurs. “Then I’ll see you in the morning.”

I give him one more slow nod.

I guess he can see on my face that my mind is still racing, because he adds, “Promise me.”

“Promise,” I sigh.

“Okay, take care, signorina. Eight hundred hours, Madonna dell’Orto.”

71 I watch him head down the stairs, activating his ring as he goes. I bet it’s set up to detect concentrations of body heat big enough to be people instead of feral cats. That’s what I’d want, if I were the United Forces. That’s how he knew where to find us. I would have figured mer-people had colder blood, and maybe could have stayed hidden, but I guess not.

When I can’t see or hear him anymore, I shut the door between us and slither down into a bony little heap with my back against it. I know it’s bad when even my beloved nonno can’t come up with anything comforting to say at first.

“Think about it, though,” he offers eventually. “A beautiful burrata and some fresh fruit. Persimmons and grapes, clementines, we can get those right now.”

“You can get anything, nonno…remember, they invented airplanes a while ago,” I spit out.

He smiles more gently than my meanness deserves. “An old man still the frutta fresca di stagione is best.”

“Of course,” I relent.

Opening the door that lets the desire in also allows the tears out. An acqua alta of tears. Most of them are mine, but more than a few are his too.

He picks the most important books and things to take along, but there are few items of value left here. I put some pieces of jewelry that belonged to mamma and her mother in a little travel pouch I can wear under my clothes. The other possession I take is my collection of glass figurines, all made for me by papà and his workshop, one for each

72 birthday I’ve celebrated. By the time I was four, he knew that I wanted sea creatures the most. The last two, a sleek emerald turtle and a graceful iridescent jellyfish, were both featured on the Muranocast as they were being made. The mail barge that brought them here would have had to go right past the real Murano to get to me.

The one before that was a wonderful starfish, the colors of a blood orange. He created that one for me when I was in Venezialand. I loved it the day he made it. But during the three weeks I was there, I got so full of anger and grief and poison feelings, all building up like a perigean spring tide, that I threw it on their marble floor and stomped on all the pieces with my boot heel.

Sometimes I wish for that starfish back, but I’d never say so to him.

The surviving figurines I pack into a plastic box, cushioned by extra socks because they’re the right shape and size. I put it, Le città invisibili, and some extra clothes into my backpack. Nonno’s got an old suitcase with wheels, which I maneuver downstairs for him in the early morning. Everything else, in the end, we leave. Either we’ll be back and get it next year, or we won’t.

I’m in no mood to call papà, but before we head out, I send him a quick message to let him know the plan—from nonno’s ring, because that way if he answers, I don’t have to look at it myself.

We find our awkward UF Prince Charming waiting in a little hovercraft in the campo when we get outside. Nonno has a few more choice words under his breath for the spectacularly ugly conveyance he must stoop to ride in, but I have to admit, I’m grateful not to have to help him all the way to the old vaporetto stop through the frigid acqua alta and this morning’s cloudbank of fog.

73 There are less than three hundred of us on the boat, not counting a dozen or so UF men and women. I’d be very surprised if anyone has dared stay behind; I’m pretty sure there’s no one out there more stubborn than nonno and me together.

I glance over the assembled refugees as the biodiesel motor revs from a low idling hum to a purposeful roar. They’re a pretty pathetic lot. Just a handful of other children, not anybody I ever saw before, and a lot of skinny older people, although none as old as my nonno. Most are neatly dressed, even if their clothes are far from the latest fashions. I’ve taken more time than usual to comb my wayward hair back into a nice fishtail braid, and I have on a pair of my mother’s little earrings with swirls of green and purple Murano glass, their depths sparkling with flakes of real gold leaf. We’re all sitting straight in our places, like ladies and gentlemen. But there is no light in anyone’s eyes. Everyone’s skin looks dull.

All the Marco Polos and the Veronica Francos and the Antonio Vivaldis left a long time ago, I have to remind myself.

So I get up and go look over the railing. Not back at my vanishing city, which I’d rather remember looking a lot of other ways than this, but ahead. I try to embrace the noble optimism of that, but honestly, it’s gray and boring. The fine cold rain stings my face until I retreat back to the seating area and fall asleep in the patient half-circle of nonno’s arm.

Then there’s an ugly port, a lunch I don’t particularly taste, a jaunty wave from the UF soldier who was nice to me, a short bus ride to a long train ride, to a place where my papà gets out of a shiny carpod under streetlights bright as spotlights against a black sky, and stands staring at me with liquid eyes.

74 When he gathers me close against his gorgeously soft coat, he’s a lot shorter than I remember. I feel a tear land on the top of my head.

“I know you’re not as glad to be here as I am to have you, pescecagnolino. And no one likes the way it happened. But I really am glad you’re with us.”

I just keep hugging him. Hopefully I didn’t leave all my words back in our apartment somewhere.

He’s brought something for us to eat on the ride. Not much, he apologizes, after he’s programmed the pod to take us home and we’re all facing one another as if in a tiny rounded room. Only paper-thin sliced salumi and cheeses, golden-crusted rolls that must have been baked this morning, a chilled bottle of sparkling mineral water. I tell nonno with just a remorseful glance that he did have a point about the food. He gives me his little one-cornered smile without interrupting whatever papà is saying. The two men go on talking softly as we roll along the dark road. It takes most of my focus to keep from tearing up like a stupid baby when I bite into the first one of the perfect plums papà offers.

Sometime after that, I drift to sleep, lulled by a belly full of delicious things and the dark and papà’s cashmere shoulder and the motion of the carpod. The next thing I know I’m in bed, with full sunlight coming in around my blinds. I can’t find it in me to be embarrassed that my father must have been the one to carry me there.

I’m so comfortable I could almost fall back asleep, but intense curiosity pops my eyes wide within a few waking moments. It pulls me out of the lovely warm bed to explore this new room. I put my feet down on the feathery rug that covers most of the floor, although gleaming tiles are visible all around the perimeter of the room.

75 It’s nice. Big enough for one person, clean, modern, almost all white, as if we’d gone all the way to Scandinavia instead of just to here. New. Like they didn’t know me well enough to know how to decorate it. Actually, I appreciate that they didn’t choose for me.

I know the theme park is going to be right outside, so I don’t open the blinds yet.

Anyway, there’s a little wrapped package on my white nightstand. My birthday isn’t for another month but I can guess what this is. I work the old-fashioned marbled paper open without tearing it, and slide the tissue-wrapped contents out.

It’s a mermaid perched on a rock, her silvery color concentrated in her tail. She even has flakes of precious metal, like mamma’s earrings. You can’t see her downturned face, lost in a swirl of hair. Glass figurines don’t have many precise features. The dramatically asymmetrical tail fin is the one clearly defined thing about her. I study that for just a moment: obviously it’s not a mistake. I soon see that the fin is also turned the opposite way. Normal mermaids have tail fins shaped like a dolphin’s, but this one is half shark.

I start to go looking for nonno to show him how amazing it is. Before I can find him, I realize I should thank papà first, but anyway, the apartment is quiet. Belatedly I notice my ring flickering and access the voice message papà has left for me.

“Ciao, bella. I hope it’s okay, we’ve gone out and let you sleep. Turn on the livecast—maybe you’ll still see us showing nonno off to everyone.”

I wish I hadn’t missed it, but I would have been a beast if they’d tried to wake me up sooner. Meanwhile, a hot shower beckons as enticingly as

76 any gelateria. (I put gelato on my short list for later.) I find the bathroom, set up the cast to start showing while I’m bathing.

There’s papà and nonno walking along the fake Canal Grande, close to the fake Ponte Rialto: deep green water well below the level of the bridge, where it’s supposed to be, bright with sunlight like embedded flecks of gold leaf. As I pan around the crowd, I can tell that a lot of the adoring onlookers are really there to watch my movie star father, whom they must have viewed and re-viewed on all the casts while planning the trip of a lifetime to see the amazing Venezialand. But the title crawl has nonno’s name: Last Master Gondola Builder Arrives as Old Venice Faces Unprecedented Flooding.

A gondola is coming up the canal. Maybe he directed its himself, once upon a time. Nonno calls out to the gondoliere in their particular dialect, now reduced to a museum artifact. The awestruck younger man greets him with the traditional salute. I zoom in to find that though he is waving and smiling bravely, shoulders straight as ever, his eyes are black and opaque behind the tears. He looks so gray, ages older than ninety-eight, thin as translucent vellum.

Like one of the fairytale creatures we now are, my nonno dies of a broken heart. Not that same morning. It’s cracked all the way through, but it takes a few months for the life that’s left to seep away. He’s here long enough to smile genuinely on the day the baby says my name before saying mamma or papà. Long enough to hear that there are still a lot of tears and some awful fights between papà and me, even if I can’t bear to smash the beautiful shark mermaid, even if my own broken heart is young enough to knit itself back together. Long enough to see me excelling to the point of occasional boredom at my new school.

77 Not, grazie a Dio, long enough to hear the word we receive in February. They’re not allowing anyone back home. UNESCO will make decisions based on the most recent climate data, so one day you might visit it like Pompeii, but it will never again be a living city. This is home now. I’m glad he never had to hear that news, even though I think he knew it in his fatally water-damaged heart.

Whenever school gets too easy, my attention wanders back there. I daydream a plan for when I’m grown and can work with those UNESCO people. La Sirenissima Mermaid’s Treasure, Livecasts and Tours...

Dive with our expert native guide to enter the majestic churches and palaces of Old Venice, still standing firm on their ancient foundations. Observe new marine life establishing its habitat in Piazza San Marco and beyond. Traverse the path of the original canals in a genuine Old Venetian gondola.

78 Ashley Bevilacqua Anglin is passionate about communication, and specifically storytelling. She holds linguistics and comparative literature degrees, and teaches college-level Italian and Spanish. She’s been telling stories in writing, dance, song, and since she was younger than the protagonist of her story “Acqua Alta” (who is inspired in part by her two amazing daughters). She began the story during National Novel Writing Month 2015; it shared a “womb” with the climate fiction novel she is working on now.

79 80 The Grandchild Paradox Daniel Thron

– I could kill them.

– Don’t talk like that.

Kimmy and I stand at the gate, waiting. Inside the house, we can see a bunch of old grandpas watching TV. In most of these places now they all live together, eating MREs from the bag. A colony, like old crabs, snapping at each other. Finally, one gathers up his money, comes out to pay us for the bike. No thank-yous today, I guess. That’s the Tops for you.

– I’m serious. I could. What? You’d do the same. The mess we live in now? You had a time machine, that’s the first thing you’d do. Go back, take them out before they can fuck it all up like they did.

– No, that’s the first thingyou’d do.

Kimmy is such a pain in the ass, always talking like she’s better, you know? I mean for Christ’s sake, I want to say to her: You’re a human goddamned being. We breathe, we sleep, we eat, we get angry over stupid shit, and we kill people for screwing us over. That’s what we do. Even people you never met? she’d say. Even people you don’t know?

81 Of course! Of course, I would say back to her imaginary face in this supposed portion of the conversation. Someone’s to blame for this world. Someone is, and it’s not me, not us. Fuck them. I could kill those fuckers.

– So, okay. Pretend you did, then.

Maybe I said that last part out loud. Shit. Sometimes I do that, I get all up in my head.

– Then you’d never be born. Right? I mean, pretend you went back and—

– Yeah, I know. I saw the movie, I get it.

Kimmy is my best friend, and I’m in love with her. I tell her every chance I get so that, when I’m sitting at the bike shop complaining to Stuart about it being all unrequited and whatnot—well, at least I’m not just some asshole who didn’t speak up.

She is beautiful. She glows, raw. She can be careless and kind of a dick now and then, but makes me laugh always. We’ve slept together a few times. I know I’m not as good at it as she is, and she’s cool with that. She smells like a laundry basket. She puts the money away. We get going.

– I’m in love with you.

– Now you tell me?

Smiles. Good , you know?

With only one bike between us, Kimmy’s hopped on behind me for the ride back down. For a while I take it easy, but then I make a turn and lean hard, pulling my feet up and letting the pedals spin. She yelps, laughing, and inside of a second we are going a hundred, maybe two hundred miles an hour down the busted-up stairs that roll out like

82 a tongue down into the big street by the water, right along the Boats, where we live.

Not together, Kimmy and me. Not always, anyway. But not far apart. I grew up with her in the Boats, watching this island shrink. When our parents were kids, there were no boats here. It wasn’t even an island; it was the mainland. It’s like it was all the Tops back then, a million years ago. When no one needed anything and everyone had it all.

I built this bike from scratch. My first one—just finished it last night. Stuart’s been giving me extra parts here and there for a year or so, and finally it all added up once I got a good chain. I’ve been working for him off and on since I was ten. Kimmy only helps sometimes, but more and more lately. Stuart builds and fixes the bikes, then sends us out to sell them up in the Tops for Tops­-dollars. I go so much he even got me a pass for deliveries. Had to, just for my safety.

They catch some skinny Boat kid up here with no pass and ten or twenty bucks in real money on him? They don’t go for that. Kimmy doesn’t have a pass, but she can talk her way out of it, she thinks. I believe it.

We zip through narrow roads. There’s no real view, not like you’d expect. The Tops is not so high, nothing here is. But higher is higher. Dry land.

The houses here were all hunched up to begin with, but since they cleared out all the old cars they’ve been squeezing in on the streets like plaque in an artery. Lonely brick and plaster boxes, shouldering in on each other, shrinking from the water that someday—someday—will be coming for them. Windows looking down on the ones that are already gone, just down the hill, a mile or two away. Mossy walls falling apart like wet paper into the shallows. That’s why they lock us out at night. I think they think we bring that wet with us.

83 But in the day they don’t mind seeing me. For the bikes, and for the sweet fact that they don’t live down there. I’m the novelty that reminds them they’re not me. Not yet, thank God. Thank God.

If I weren’t on this fixed­up machine, though—if it was just my own brown soles, they would hustle me down to the Boats faster than you can blink. Fast as we are going right now, only with no wheels between my ass and those cobbled stairs.

All speculative. Right now, the reality is different: Kimmy is screaming into my neck, laughing. Pedals spinning like blades. Thuthuthuthuthump, no stopping us now. I’m happy, I did it right, I think: this is the shakedown cruise for this bike, the test. It’s kinda knocky, loose, but it’s going. Stuart let me do the whole thing. He looked at it sort of sideways when I said it was done. But it’s working.

Kimmy, hanging on, crunches her arms around me like a kid with a new cat. I can feel her grinning, punching me in the shoulder with a curled­up fist, her chin bouncing on my neck every time the wheels hit a step, teeth clicking in my ear, holding on, holding on. It’s too fast and I’m afraid and it’s hilarious, and I can see the street coming up below, puddles of seawater quick and gleaming, little birds freaking out, scaring each other when they hear us coming, exploding in flapping clouds—and for a second I want so bad to stomp on those pedals, turn the gears back, reverse the chain and hold this forever, never hitting the street because it can’t get better than this, all downhill, all downhill from here.

­­­­­­­­­­

The thing is? I just about could.

Kill them, I mean. The time machine question.

84 Sometimes it gets bad, like when the freighters are late by a month or two, and someone from down here, maybe their baby dies from old water or something, and they run, crying with rage, up to the Tops to try to take one of those old crabs out. Blaming them, wanting blood. More and more often, it feels like. It’s stupid, but I understand it.

Because I look at this boat, this shitty reeking boat with its patched­up browning fiberglass hull, three inches of which is all that’s keeping us from drowning in our sleep, and I think you bet, you better believe I could. I’d go back and strangle you. All of you at once, all crowded up in my hands. I’d say: this is what you left us? This? Now what am I supposed to do? Working bikes, odd jobs, waiting for the bad water to leach into the ground, for the heat and bacterial blooms? What was my life supposed to be? Do I deserve this? Is that what you think, you bastards?

Then snap snap snap, all of you. Like cracking my knuckles.

But if I did, and you were gone, then the of it says I’d be gone too, and then I never would have gone back in the first place. Once more you’d be old grandpas up in the Tops, and I’d be right back here in the Boats again. Rinse, repeat.

Ah, enough of that shit. Gotta get out of my head. Kimmy is here. She’s here. She is bare against my side, skin hot, her natural high-­energy state simmering beneath it as she sleeps. It’s quiet. Yes. Yes, the world is a hellhole. Sure. But with her up against me like this, not caring? For a few hours, a different answer.

­­­­­­­­­­

85 A little while later I wake up, peek my head out into the air. Kimmy is there hanging her legs over the side, pushing the dark arches of her feet against a gutted tire on the gunwale of the next boat.

I climb up and join her. The far water is bright smoke. She doesn’t look up, just starts talking:

– So hey. What if we have a baby?

– What if what?

– A baby, you and me.

I try to navigate this: fail.

– Are you having a baby?

– Am I? You mean are we.

– Kimmy.

She laughs, stands, swats my head and goes below again.

– What? You got some big plans?

Nothing to say about that. I sit, my feet are in the warm water, too warm for most anything that used to grow in it to grow anymore.

­­­­­­­­­­

– She joking, brah. Joking. You like ten years old.

– I don’t know.

– You just a baby. Born two minutes ago.

86 – I’m nineteen. Shut up. I’m for real.

Stuart waves his wrench at me, shakes his head.

– She ain’t gonna be serious about you. You ain’t serious. Look at you. You a burnt piece of chicken.

– She was serious.

– She is. You ain’t.

A blasting horn, way off, warping through the night fog. Supply freighter. This time of year probably thePoitier . More fresh water, MREs. Stuart buys extra with all his Tops-­dollars, grinds them up with crabmeat and ash for soil, trying to start a tomato farm above deck. Some luck, but they are small, only little red marbles. He looks at my bike.

– How’d it hold up?

– Took it down Long Steps. Kimmy and me. It was shaky but it kept going okay.

– Then you did it right. You didn’t break your face, you did it right.

– Ha. You weren’t the one riding. Scary as hell.

– Boy, like I’ve never been down steps before?

Bikes creak over his head, chains and spokes and rubber netted together in bunches, swaying with the tide beneath us. Stuart hoards them to keep the price high in the Tops.

– But here’s the thing.

87 I try to get Stuart to imagine the future. I try to have him picture this place—the island—fifty years, sixty, down the road. This possible boy of mine is an old man now.

What does he have left? I ask him. When the freighters have stopped, when the Tops are empty of old men, when all their houses finally give way to the water? When all the dirt has gone beneath and there’s nothing left to anchor to anymore? To grow up like I did, watching it happen. Stuck in this nest of wrecks forever running aground, the shoreline tightening like a noose year by year, till we’re all at sea.

– What can I give him? What can I leave for him if there’s so little for us right now?

He looks at me like I’m crazy. He wants to joke, but sees the upset in my eyes.

– She got you, eh? She really got you.

He smiles, tapping my chest with the wrench. Laughs.

– Maybe you serious after all.

­­­­­­­­­­

Our son grows up. He meets a woman. The Boats drift, tied together in a huge mass, trying to find landfall, someone that will let them in. More refugees in a refugee world.

They have a child. We grow old. We die. And in time, so do they.

My grandchild, alone in a skiff on the hot, black water. Adrift. How can I do that to him? If he came back in time to right now, if he came back to kill me—how could I ever explain myself?

88 ­­­­­­­­­­

– Kill who?

– It’s okay. Go to sleep. I was just talking like I do. Go to sleep, it’s nothing.

– Tell me.

I tell her.

– Well, maybe they have a girl. Maybe we have a girl. You don’t know.

– It’s the same.

– You think women sit around worrying if our granddaughters will come back through time and murder us? That’s more of a boy story, I think.

– Forget it.

– What are you so scared of?

– I don’t know. The future.

– It’s not the future.

– Not now, no.

She sits up, serious.

– Not ever. Those old guys up in the Tops, you know the worst thing they did? They gave up. They thought it was all inevitable. So they fucking gave up. You hate those guys so much, you gotta be careful you don’t become like them, you know? There’s only now. That’s the only time you get to say how things are. You know?

89 – Okay.

I shut up and she pulls me up close, kisses the corner of my mouth, and we hold each other for a time, letting the waves roll us around. Breathing, sleeping, holding each other in the only time machine I need.

­­­­­­­­­­

I wake up, a circle of sun on one eye making me wince. The boat is empty for a while, then I hear Kimmy’s bare feet hop and thump up on deck above, coming back from a breakfast­-scrounging tour.

Muted, happy voices drift in as she chats with my starboard neighbor. I don’t even know the guy. I’ve lived in this boat most of my life. I’ve repaired it like my mom taught me. I’ve fished from it. My dad died right over there, in his sleep. And I don’t even know the guy she’s talking to right now.

Kimmy looks down inside. In her hand, a bag of Stuart’s tomatoes. She pops one in her mouth, throws the rest to me.

– They’re good, right?

I wipe off a smear of chain grease, bite into one. Sour and sweet, tiny as hell. I nod, she smiles.

– Now get the hell up, lazy ass. Got work to do.

The day goes on. The crabs making their way, clicking and sidling, up through the old buildings and failing walls, looking for snails, bits of anything to eat. We sidle along with them. Ten or fifteen of us today. Buckets, nets, poles. It’s windy, spitting seawater like rain. Out away

90 from the Boats, the Poitier has dropped anchor. A tiny flotilla has gone out to meet it to get the things we need to keep on going.

Kimmy and I work at it, and the pots are full before noon. Enough to sell in the Tops and enough to keep for dinner. Lucky. Some days it takes till nightfall, but this month it’s been much better, or at least it seems so. I don’t know. Might just be my imagination.

Daniel Thron is a writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. He has worked extensively in both visual effects and videogames.

91 92 Wonder of the World Kathryn Blume

It started with . Ben—just shy of 15—had been a total trouper all week, stoking the fire while we canned the last of the late fall tomatoes, making jam from the third crop of October raspberries, and getting another load of firewood split.

There’s hardly any maple left anymore, but we did get some, and his glee at the way those few pieces just leapt apart beneath his axe made me tell yet another tale about the bygone days of fall color and spring sugar. Ben was patient, even if I have recounted these stories a thousand times.

Back to Star Trek. We had a few hours of power, coupled with a rare moment of all-chores-done quiet, so I asked if he wanted to watch a couple old Star Treks I’d checked out from the library. Ever the history buff, I couldn’t resist pointing out how the communicators on the show had influenced the design of cell phones 30 years later.

Ben asked, “What about Tricorders? Those are cool, too.”

“Yeah,” I said, “they developed medical equipment something like that. But what we really need now is another kind of communications device to fill in when the networks are down.”

93 Ben gave me one of those looks he gets when it’s time for him to do something remarkable, grabbed a box of old electronics we’d collected for salvage, and vanished into his room. He came up for air once to ask a few questions about the history of communications, disappeared again for the better part of a few days, and then presented me with his Device.

It’s definitely a Tricorder homage: rectangular, with a strap so you can sling it over your shoulder, like Spock. It’s also got an optical element, a little keyboard, a mic and speaker, a screen, and a very bright LED bulb, plus some electronic brains which I’m too much of a screws-and-bolts kind of gal to describe in any greater detail.

Basically, if you want to send a message, you type it in, and the thing starts flashing in Morse code. Anyone else who’s got one of these things can capture your visual signal and the machine will read and translate the Morse code—either by speaking it out loud or displaying the message on the screen. It’s powered by used bits of flexible solar fabric and some rechargeable batteries.

Awestruck, I said, “Ben, you are the Eighth Wonder of the World. This is brilliant. But what’s it good for? You’d have to be in visual range for it to work.”

“Yeah,” he mused. “I dunno yet. It’ll probably be good for doing something. But,” he added with determined joy, “it was definitely good for making.”

He’s such a mighty force of resilience, that kid. Good thing, too, as along about early November, despite an unusually placid late-late summer, the weather started getting big and weird. It made me think about how this used to be a season when leaves turned and fell, plants died off, animals migrated or hibernated, and people geared up for an enduring stretch of dark and cold and .

94 That was long before my family and some of their friends left New England, trying to chase the north, naively trying to escape the fact that everything was changing—all for the worse, it seemed to them.

Sometimes, in my more generous moments, I wonder if it’s been all bad. My parents and their friends talked a lot about what it had been like when people spent most of their time working long hours, far from where they lived. They remembered their parents spending so much money trying to pay bills and keep up with the endless complexity of their lives. They talked about the price of food and education and travel and all the stuff they absolutely had to have to make them happy. Even though most of the time they weren’t happy. Not really.

Hard and uncertain as things are now, at least we’re living closer together, sharing more, relying more on each other to maintain a sense of safety. And when we make sure that everyone in the neighborhood is fed, every day, no matter what—that’s some serious meaning and purpose we’ve got.

Of course a big personal downside is that when you’re alone—I mean unpartnered—in a small community…. Well, let me just say it can be hard when you find someone special on the networks who lives, say, across the continent, and it’s basically impossible to go meet them halfway in Chicago or Toronto for coffee. If we even had the real stuff anymore.

I’m speaking generally, of course. Not that I’ve met someone. No, I have. He’s—oh, don’t get me started. I’ll sound like I’m Ben’s age, with my first major crush. Really, it’s just a fantasy. Just some fun. But even if it were actually anything, the relevant part here is that he’s awfully tough to get to. And when the networks aren’t working well, it’s just so….

Let me put it this way: I don’t always split wood because I need more wood.

95 Ok. So. The weather got nuts. Sometimes it was giant wind, sometimes endless rain, sometimes wind and rain, plus fist-sized hail and thunder and lightning and tornadoes, occasionally punctuated by an over-saturated muggy stillness that made you want to give up on life altogether. Then it got unusually cold. I figured it would stick around just long enough for us all to get the flu and then get warm again. But, to my great surprise, it stayed cold. After the endless meteorological dynamism, it felt oddly lonely. Like we were suddenly being ignored by a charismatic bully we’d kind of gotten used to.

Through all of this, Ben and his Device became a sort of folk sensation. All around the world’s recycling centers, there are loads of used, mostly worthless but still functional electronic bits and nuggets, and kids everywhere (plus a few whimsical adults) started making their own Devices. It’s the oddest mix of history and detritus—solar-powered Morse Code Machines, mostly used for sharing jokes at a medium distance with good sight lines.

They also developed their own shorthand. You know, like BFJE for Best Fart Joke Ever. Ben said the most popular terms were always changing. I liked the salutation PLK (Peace, Love, and Kale) and STH (Stronger Than Hemp, meaning the strongest thing anyone could think of). I was less pleased to learn about ALB: Always Looking Back, which apparently describes a depressive, carbon- history buff like me.

Along about early December, I was doing my weekly shift at our town’s Fix-It Cafe. It’s a place where you can come in, eat muffins, drink a coffee-ish substance, have something repaired that you can’t mend yourself, and share the latest joke off the Juvenile Device Network.

I’d was just reattaching the cord on a neighborhood vacuum cleaner when Ben burst in.

96 “Mom, have you heard?”

I put down my screwdriver. “No, what?”

“We’ve got a front coming in. Big monster of a Nor’easter.”

I shook my head. “But with this cold, that means…”

“Snow!” Ben crowed with glee. “Lots and lots of snow!”

I love to see my son excited, but this was not good news. It doesn’t ever really snow like that anymore—heaps and heaps at a time. Which means we don’t have the capacity or the experience to deal with it effectively. We don’t have big machinery to clear the roads. Folks with plow horses can help, but it’s a different skill set and a different bunch of tools.

“I bet,” mused Ben, “that the snow’s going to mess with the power grid and the network. It’ll probably be hard to get around or communicate for a while.”

“Oh brother,” I said. “We’re screwed.”

“Mom,” he soothed. “Everyone I know has a Device. Some can flash infra-red, some have lasers. We might not be able to communicate during the storm, but we can warn people about it ahead of time and then reach them after.”

“But how will people know messages are coming in, and how will we reach everyone who’s remote and out of regular sight range?”

“We’ve been waiting for something like this!” Ben started pacing the room. “We already plotted everything out. We’ve got ortho maps and timers and mirrors and people stationed all over the place. We can already send a

97 message across hundreds of kilometers. More and more stuff comes in from far away all the time. Actually,” he said, looking at me sideways. “I’m here now ‘cause I just got something for you.”

Ben handed me a slip of paper that read: “Jess. Time for coffee. Forget Chicago. OMW.”

I looked at Ben. “OMW?”

“That means On My Way.”

My heart thumped, spun round my chest, crashed into my stomach, and then, I think, might have stopped beating altogether.

“Mom,” said Ben carefully. “You ok?”

“When,” I said as coolly as I could, “did this come in? Where did it come from? And what—”

“Mom, do you want to sit down?”

“No, I’m fine. I just—” I sat down.

“Mom? Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No, no,” I said, with a serious lack of conviction. “I kind of have a sort of penpal. But it’s nothing…”

“Yeah,” Ben said dryly. “I’ll get the guest room ready.”

Ben was right about the weather. It snowed. And snowed. And snowed. And then snowed some more just to show off a little. We all shoveled and tunneled and plowed and improvised as best we could. It was exhausting work but, hard as it was to get around, we made sure everyone could at least be reached and that we were all reasonably warm and fed.

98 The adults were, of course, wiped out, but Ben and his buddies had Go Juice to spare, and they took the opportunity to build giant snow turrets—tall, icy lookout towers, complete with gargoyles and winding exterior staircases—to help improve the range of their Device Network. Every day, he shared news of messages from far-flung parts of the country. And then one day he came to me with a plan.

“Ok, Mom, get this. We’re going to try to send a message around the world.”

“How? Across the oceans? That’s not possible!”

“C’mon Mom, use a little imagination!”

“I’m too tired, Ben. Just explain it to me.”

“Ok, here’s the idea. We’ll start the message here, and send it south to the U.S., across to the Pacific, and back up again. Then it goes through British Columbia, to Alaska, across Alaska to . It then goes west through Europe, up into Scandinavia and the Arctic (we think we’ve got enough people working on fishing boats up there to flash the message across to Greenland) and then back down to us. We know it’s not the whole world yet, just a Northern loop. But good for a first try.”

“How will you know that the message has actually made it all along the way and that people aren’t faking?”

“C’mon Mom, why would they fake?”

“Well, what about crossing mountain ranges? What about—”

“Mom, in case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of people all over the place looking for something cool to do, people who want an adventure

99 and a reason to have one. The world got completely explored a long time ago, and then it got trashed. Now most of what we do is work hard to survive and try not to fight each other for what we’ve got. This is a chance to do something else. Something, you know, fun.”

I could see his point. He went on.

“And also, a long time ago, the world was big. Really big. And then, with technology and stuff, the world got smaller. People could drive far, fly around the world in a day. You could have met your penpal in Chicago for coffee and been home in time for dinner. But now—now the world is big again. Too big, because we still remember the way it was—the stories about cars and planes and supermarkets with food from and, you know, everything.”

I nodded. “And we don’t have that now.”

“No. No, we don’t. You teach us about it, but we don’t have it. So, what can we do? Maybe at least find a way to shrink things back down a little, and be...together on something.”

“What’s the message you’re sending out?”

“There’s one Morse thing everyone knows: SOS. It means Save Our Ship. It signals danger. Trouble. So, we’re gonna do the reverse. OSO. It can be the opposite of trouble. It can mean safety, hope, a chance. And the letters, OSO, I thought they could stand for Over. Start Over.”

Over. Start Over. It rang through my head like a three-word novel. Over. Start Over. My heart struggled to accept the arrhythmic beat. Over. Start Over. There’s nothing I can say to Ben and his friends about their complaints. I’ve had them all my life. Maybe if we didn’t teach history. Maybe if we never, ever knew....

100 I mumbled, “Start Over? What do we even have to start with?”

Ben looked crestfallen. Wrong response. I took a deep breath, and pulled an OSO myself.

“It’s a great idea, honey. When are you guys running the message?”

“Solstice. Midnight.”

“Why Solstice?”

Ben shrugged. “When else to flash a light into the night?”

Come Solstice, I helped a bunch of folks build a bonfire not far from Ben’s #1 snow tower. We made a community potluck out of it, with stew and potato bread and mulled wine. I didn’t know if people looked at Ben’s project as silly. But regardless of what they thought of the Device, they were certainly happy to get some food, have a little company, and catch a break from their snowy isolation.

We were starting in on another round of wine when Ben rang a bell and had us all gather in a circle around his snow tower. He was perched at the top, wearing baggy canvas pants, four or five layers of sweaters, and an endless scarf he’d knit himself. His marvelous invention hung from a strap slung over his shoulder and he had an old-fashioned pocket watch in his hand. He looked like an adventurer, an explorer, a man who has just fought sea and wind and starvation and monsters to be the first person to reach the highest point at end of the world.

He gestured to a group of more sweater-layered young people standing at the base of the tower. They were carrying maps and Devices and had big, overstuffed homemade packs on their backs. “These guys are part of a bunch of teams all over the world who are gonna try to pull this

101 off. Everywhere they’re climbing mountains and trees and buildings and camping out and going to places they’ve never been before. So, thanks guys.”

We applauded quietly with muffled, mittened hands. And then Ben looked straight at me and said, “I also just want to thank my Mom. She works so hard, and she tells me the truth, and she always finds a way to say yes. Thank you, Mom.”

I might have gone in for a Proud Mom Hug, but Ben checked his watch, rang the bell again, and his crew of Device Warriors shot out into the night.

I couldn’t take my eyes off them, even when they’d long become just a retinal glow. After a while, Ben looked at his watch again, lifted up his Device, and flashed out the OSO. Over. Start over. But how? Really? How?

Then, someone put a hand on my shoulder, whispered, “Happy Solstice,” and gave me a warm clay mug. Figuring it was more wine, I didn’t even look before I took a sip. But what I got was a biting, smoky aroma and a of flavor whirling around my mouth.

No way! Coffee! I’d only tasted coffee a couple times before, but it’s hard to forget a drink so potent that it basically fueled the Enlightenment.

I was shocked. Who around here has…. And then I realized, nobody. Nobody around here has coffee. Holy mother of…. I looked down at a large hand resting on my shoulder and let my gaze travel up a long leather-clad arm to a face. I saw huge dark eyes reflecting the light of the bonfire and a smile as warm as a cat in the sun.

102 He said, “Hi Jess. It’s me.” I looked at him for a long time. He held my gaze without a blink. His smile never dimmed or went stale. Finally, I remembered to breathe—a little—and managed to get out, “Coffee?”

He nodded. “My people figured out how to grow it. Seemed like a good time to go on an exploratory trade expedition. Find new friends. New partners. New possibilities.”

Ben called down to me, “Hey Mom! Happy Solstice!”

Ignoring Ben (for the first time in my life), I said, “How did you—”

That magnificent smile became a cheeky grin. “I contacted Ben with some questions when I built my first Device. We started chatting and, eventually, figured out the connection to you. He’s been something of a co-conspirator. He helped me plan the best route here. Found contacts along the way. I wanted to tell you more than that one little note, but Ben said a surprise would be ok. That you needed a good jolt forward.”

I looked into those huge eyes again. I saw ease, and trust. Joy. Adventure. Anticipation.

Ben called out again, “Mom?”

I turned to look at my magnificent genius of a son and shouted back, “Happy solstice, you Eighth Wonder of the World!”

Then I took the beautiful, leathery, calloused hand from my shoulder and kissed the knuckles gently, like I was honoring a visiting Prince. “Welcome,” I whispered. “Hello. Thank you.”

We went and sat by the fire and fell into a long, easy conversation, full of connections and agreements and deep mutual understanding. I am

103 an integrated member of my community, to be sure. But I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this seen. And heard. When I’d felt this—replete.

I don’t know how long we sat there—at least through a couple major stokings of the bonfire. Then, from over at the tower, I heard Ben shouting, “Hey! Hey! It’s back!” We all crowded around asking, “The OSO? Already?”

“Geeze,” said Ben. “Haven’t you guys heard of the ? Yes, it’s back! But that’s not the best part!”

I couldn’t imagine what would be better than Ben’s plan actually working.

“The message changed,” said Ben. “It’s not OSO anymore. It’s FHL.”

“FHL? I don’t know that one.”

“Oh, it’s Faith. Hope. Love.” Ben came down from the tower and crossed over to me. “It’s what people have been saying lately, more than anything else. It’s how they sign off a message. Faith. Hope. Love.” He looked thoughtful for a moment and added, “Mom, maybe this is it. Maybe this is us all starting over.”

“You know, Ben,” I cautioned. “It’ll never be what it was.”

“Yeah, I know. But what it was didn’t last, did it?”

“Not all of it,” said the tall smiling man, who I suspected was fast becoming my future. “But faith, hope, and love? They got through all right. Always will.”

104 “Yeah,” added my son, who I knew was fast becoming a man. “And they’re not only words.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Ben looked thoughtful. “Faith,” he mused, “is knowing somehow that where we are, right now, is really ok. Hope? That’s where we decide that we trust each other to do it better this time. And love? It’s the Why and the Because.”

This made me smile. “The Why and the Because.” I loved the rolling canter of Ben’s unintentional . “Love. It’s the Why and the Because.”

I knew my heart could beat to that.

Kathryn Blume is a speaker, writer, environmental activist, and award- winning solo performer who has toured her original work to over 50 cities in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. She co-founded the community climate and sustainability game Vermontivate! and the Lysistrata Project, the first worldwide theatrical event for peace. Kathryn is the Executive Director of the climate consulting firm Creative Roustabouts and a longtime board member of 350VT.

105 106 Masks Stirling Davenport

It was gray as far as the eye could see. When I put up my hand, I could discern a bit of pale skin until the fog closed in on me again. Where the hell was Mark? I calculated that I could probably wait another ten minutes before I started to cough. There was hardly any traffic today, unless you counted the crowds. What else was new?

I readjusted my mask. It was an old pink Totobobo that I had gotten on Chi-Bay in 2030, supposedly 99% effective against particulates. It felt like it was going to fall off every time I exhaled. Plus, it left marks on my face after about an hour. But I guessed this was a small price to pay for being able to breathe. Sometimes I really missed Hong Kong, even though it was practically gone.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a date or let a man get close. Professor Mark Northland didn’t count. Besides being my boss, he was divorced and two decades older. Maybe three. I might be the only single female under thirty left in Beijing. Girls were still at a premium, twenty- four years after the one-child policy was ended. Now, couples could hope for two boys. Being half-American, I was also taller than many Chinese men—not that they seemed to mind.

107 I sometimes wanted a big, strong guy to protect me, though. The overpopulated city was an obstacle course. Pickpockets abounded, especially in the nose-to-nape subways where you were either squashed or trampled. I squeezed against the brick wall behind me, hoping I could be seen. I had worn a bright pink hat. Like the mask, it was ancient. I had cut off the fake antlers, reminiscent of a happier time.

A hulking figure loomed out of the mist. He was wearing an old flak jacket and corduroy pants. Soon I could see his familiar gray beard and . He had the newest Vogmask. I was sure it fit perfectly. He parked his 11-speed and put on the lock.

“Traffic,” said the professor. “Sorry, Julie. Been waiting long?” We walked toward the Ministry, skirting an underground taxi-cab.

“Not long. How can you see to bike? Taking your life in your hands,” I said.

“I just follow the car lights. There are still too many, even with the ban,” Mark said. “The laws change, but corruption doesn’t.”

“Did I tell you I had a 2018 Honda for a while, until the police impounded it?”

“Police or PSB?” he asked.

“Is there a difference?” I glanced around to where the fog enclosed us, trying to see if we were safe. I wondered if the rumors were true about there being Thought Police. “It was energy efficient, too.”

Mark laughed. “Right. Had one of those green buttons that said you save gas?”

108 Gas. We were both silent. That was a thing of the past. “Yeah, it was my father’s before he died.”

“And your Mom?”

“She never learned to drive. Anyway, we had a chauffeur in Hong Kong. You saw the picture on my desk, right?”

“You don’t look much like her,” said Mark.

“Except for my eyes,” I joked, pulling the corners to the side to elongate them even more. Mom had died in an earthquake. She had taken a rare New Year’s vacation to Changsha on the Xiang River. I didn’t want to talk about it. My father may have been a famous American banker, but I wanted to keep my memories to myself. They were all I had left.

“Don’t you have a brother?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “You’re thinking of my cousin Yang. He’s the one who inherited the bank and ran it into the ground. I’m just your typical orphan.”

Mark glanced at me. “How are you fixed for money?”

I raised my eyebrows and shrugged. “I still have my scholarship.”

“Well, you’d better. I don’t want to lose my best T.A.”

“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t dare lose this job. I might have to move to Europe.” We both laughed. Nobody wanted to deal with the flooding and continual snowstorms. China had its problems, sure, but it was big enough to contain them. Having a Chinese mother meant I didn’t have to leave.

109 “Here we are,” Mark said. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs building appeared like a giant fist in the gloom. I looked for the distinctive globe outside, but it was hidden in the smog. We hurried up the steps and went in, where we gratefully shed our masks and submitted to the scanners. The female operative nodded to Mark deferentially. I was ignored, which was fine with me. Mark was a popular professor of Agro-Biotech at China Agricultural University. An expert on transgenic plants, almost everybody knew him. But I was the anonymous assistant, privy to all the newest experiments.

Li Wei himself appeared and shook hands with me, and then Mark, making smooth introductions. I didn’t really get a good look at him, but I noticed he was tall. The Deputy Minister led us to the elevator. I picked up my jacket and stuffed the mask into a pocket. Curly brown hair flopped into my eyes, and I pushed it back in an attempt to look as well-groomed as my colleagues, which never worked. My jeans probably didn’t help, even if they were black.

I got at least one admiring stare from a young man in silver suspenders and fatigues, sporting high-heeled boots. Anything to seem taller, I guessed. A lock of his hair was dyed blue. It didn’t seem to have hurt his chances at the Ministry. I figured he must be a political intern, maybe somebody’s nephew.

Li stopped and engaged the young man. Now I could see that Li was very good-looking.

The work room had huge air purifiers in each corner of the ceiling, but two men were smoking near the back, probably wiping out the benefits. Even at the dorm, I had a cheap air purifier sheet over a fan. It was a small space, my one-room cube, and easy to purify. Anybody could buy

110 the sheets at a 7-11, along with their soy sauce. And half of the Chinese men I knew smoked, which was crazy. But a lot of folks had a death-wish these days. Not me. I still wanted to get married. It was the closest thing to security left.

“How’s your mother?” Li asked the young man.

“She went back to Hong Kong to assess the damage to the house. Cross-Harbour Tunnel is completely flooded.”

“Ah,” said the Deputy. “Do give her my best. Very difficult for anybody caught up in it.”

Mark and I exchanged looks. Simultaneous typhoons Fung-Wong and Choi-Wang had all but wiped out the causeway. There were whispers about the difficulties of evacuation, given the politics. Beijing had been inundated, too, of course, but the newly created islands were helping.

“Well, carry on,” said Li, patting the young man on the arm. We still hadn’t gotten his name, but given her importance, I thought that his mother must be Grace Zhao. I swallowed a lump in my throat. She had been a friend of my father’s in Hong Kong before he died. I had never met her, but she knew of me. For the first time, I wondered if Li knew of me too, if that was why I had been allowed to accompany the professor instead of waiting in the lobby. Mark had been very mysterious about the reason for our visit.

By the time we arrived at Deputy Li’s office on the third floor, we had passed through six more security doors. Li palmed the security lock on his door, and it swung open. The room was furnished with antiques. Water-colored murals depicted willow trees and waterfalls over a gray-green landscape, complete with dragons. The entire floor

111 was covered by a pale blue carpet embellished with golden clouds and salmon-colored tigers.

Two couches flanked a coffee table holding a carafe and glasses. Li sat on one couch and gestured for us to take the other. I poured myself a glass of water, trying not to show how thirsty I was. University students didn’t get much in the way of rations.

I almost choked: it was real water. Clean, untreated water. It tasted like a spring where my father had taken me after Mom died. I couldn’t remember the name of the village. He’d said it wasn’t even on the map. To a nine-year-old, it had been fairyland. Tibet Autonomous Region. Now on its way to becoming a desert with the receding , destructive dams, and massive water diversion projects.

How had this spring escaped notice?

Li smiled at my attempts to cover my shock. “Tibet,” he said. “What they used to call Kham in the times of the Dalai Lamas.” I was momentarily distracted from even my glass. Instinctively I looked around for hidden cameras. Nobody talked of ancient Tibet as if it were a separate country, except maybe outlaw lamas in remote caves. Of course, it had been, but history was easily buried and rewritten by its larger, more powerful neighbor after Mao’s armies came in.

The Deputy laughed. “Say what you want.” He sneered, and pointed to the murals on the walls. “Do you think our ancestors would care? All that matters now are resources. Not names or histories. Everyone needs to eat. And drink. And breathe.”

I felt so defensive suddenly that my pores might have shrunk. What was I doing here?

112 Mark set down his glass, and I glanced over to see a frown on his distinguished face. The black fabric of his expensive mask peeked from his shirt pocket. “I thought you wanted to discuss the upcoming semester. You told me you had new projects for our Agri-Tech students. That you needed me to bring my assistant, Julie.”

“Well, it’s true, I do have new projects,” said Li. “Go ahead. Enjoy the water.” He deepened his voice. “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.” He didn’t really sound like Bogart but I gave him credit for trying.

Mark folded his arms. “My contract is with the University through . Then I’m on loan to Moscow until September. What do you have in mind?”

“Moscow has nothing to recommend it,” said Li.

“Their Faculty of Soil Science is very good.”

Li frowned. “Soil science. Do they also have a problem with permafrost?” He leaned forward with his forearms on his knees.

“In Siberia, sure. Methane is a serious issue.”

“You do realize what’s at stake?”

I held my breath. Mark said, “What’s at stake…for the planet, or for you? Surely you don’t want to discuss ecological problems on the plateau.”

“Why not? Who better to help design a new future for our citizens?” I noticed that Li’s complexion was very clear. He had none of the mannerisms of a former smoker and he didn’t seem the least bit nervous. I was so used to the general anxiety we all felt these days, it made me curious. He was also very fit, though I was sure he didn’t bike to work. I wondered if he had a home gym and what kind of air purifiers he had. Or

113 maybe the Ministry had its own gym in the building. Whatever his politics, I couldn’t help being attracted to him.

Mark was also sitting forward now. “So, Deputy. Do you want me to transfer to Chengdu University? They say the air is even worse there, if you can believe it. But their soil is good.” They both chuckled. I knew Mark very well. When he joked like this, his mind was calculating three chess moves ahead.

“We all have our problems.” Li spread his hands. “It would be very convenient to blame someone. But that’s not it.” He took a drink of water.

Talk of blame put me on alert. As the daughter of an American, I was always embroiled in these kinds of discussions, and usually came out the loser. This man was becoming more and more fascinating. I liked the way he changed topics.

“So, what are you getting at?” asked Mark.

“We all need the same things. The exact same,” said Li. “What if you could really design a prototype for a home that would be self-generating and self-sustaining, not only in terms of energy, but in terms of food and water?”

Mark laughed. “Water. You can generate energy—we’ve proved that with plastic recapture and GOBI Solar, and food is a matter of persistence and know-how, but you can’t generate water.” He picked up his half-sipped glass. “Which reminds me, where did this come from?”

Li cocked his head. “Let’s say water is taken care of, hypothetically. Would you be willing to help me with an experiment?”

“Maybe. After I get back from Russia.”

114 “Forget Russia. I have a place in the mountains that will interest you infinitely more than Moscow.”

I spoke for the first time. “Sog Dzong.” The name finally came to me.

Li looked straight at me. I was struck by how handsome he was. His eyebrows were so black and his eyes flashed with charisma. He said, “You are, of course, invited.”

Mark sighed. “I suppose there is also a financial incentive?” We both knew it was a fiction that we had any choice in this venture, but I admired Mark’s spunk.

“Without a doubt. No need to even ask. Money is not a problem.”

“And when would you want us to start?”

“Immediately.” Li smiled. “Why not take two days to wrap up your work at the University and notify Moscow. I’ll have your airline tickets and permits ready.”

I stared at him, feeling more excited and hopeful than I had in years. Finally, someone might be taking our work seriously. Maybe even opening the door to a different future. Mark really did have some breakthroughs in planting and propagation methods. The greenhouse at the University was internationally recognized now. I had some experiments of my own in there, with rust-resistant potatoes.

Mark said to me, “Are you okay with this, Julie?”

I nodded.

“Well, then, thank you for this offer. We accept,” Mark said, and stood. We set a time to meet at the airport and said our goodbyes. Back on the

115 street, the smog cleared for a moment and we were able to see the giant neon sign showing the particulate reading for today: 490. Better than a decade ago. Only 440 points above recommended safety level. In my childhood, that would have been the trigger for a citywide announcement to stay indoors. Now, it was the new normal.

Unlocking his bike, Mark said, “Meet me at the greenhouse.”

In moments, he had left and I hurried out to the subway, squinting my eyes until I was safely underground. I merged with the sea of people heading for the Chaoyang Terminal, and tapped my Yikatong card on the gate for the train to Wudaokou Station. Again, I was searched by security personnel and went through the metal detector. With the ban on personal cars, the subways were more crowded than ever.

Aside from the crush of people, you could get trapped between the train door and the platform edge door. The subways were expanded but still not enough. Once inside the train, I had a harrowing ride to the University, and I would have to change trains in Xizhimen. I wasn’t sure who had it worse—me, squashed standing up in a crowded car or Mark, trying to see the road.

I couldn’t help but notice the different masks on my fellow subway riders. I saw a few Respros and something new from “I Can Breathe” with a nice design. Hello Kitty was out. Lady astronauts were in. I liked the umbilicus that made her look like she was floating.

My dorm room was right near the greenhouse, so I went there first to drop my bag and wash my face with an alcohol wipe. I made sure to clean inside my nose and ears, too. Of course, the wipe was completely black when I was done. I glanced at my reflection and noticed how

116 lifeless my hair looked. I wasn’t due for a shower until Friday. By then, we would already be in Tibet. Screw the Police Security Bureau; I still called it that. If they really were able to read minds, they didn’t appear able to change them, yet. Unless Li was right. Maybe nobody cared outside that little room either.

I dumped my favorite outfits and a brush into an overnight bag and looked around. The room was tiny. I unplugged my mini-notebook and put that into the bag, too. If I could get it through the airport, maybe I could still work on my potatoes. If I got some time to myself, I could finish the program tonight. My Skylake mini had decreased thermal output and a lot of battery life. I didn’t know where we were going, but I needed to keep this with me. Mark would have his laptop with its old-school keyboard and mouse, even though he could do everything he needed with eye movements.

But how would we replicate the greenhouse? I wondered what we were in for. We would have to redo the self-watering fixtures, low- light solar panels, daily readouts by the we had programmed. And what about humidity and temperature controls? How would that work at high altitude? Did we have access to low-nitrogen soil? Seeds? I couldn’t help but feel excited. Assuming we really were going to Tibet and not some remote jail. I had seen too many old movies about the Cultural .

Mark and I packed what we could at the greenhouse, talking through a checklist on my mini. Mark borrowed it and dictated a list of things we needed to take care of at our destination.

Beijing International Airport hadn’t changed much since the last time I was here, except for the heightened security everywhere. It was fancier

117 and brighter inside, but the personnel still looked dreary and unhappy with their jobs. They probably made less money than I did on my student stipend. And their uniforms looked a lot less comfortable than my jeans and T-shirt.

Mark met me in the lobby after the initial screening and I steeled myself for the more rigorous security searches. However, Li showed up and moved us through without any fanfare at all.

I was surprised when Li handed me the ticket. We were traveling on an ordinary China Southern flight. The plane was small. Probably one of the older Boeing models, since air travel had been scaled back.

We had good seats. Blanket, small porthole window next to Mark, two biscuits, and apple juice. Luxury. Our seatmates were mostly men in military uniforms, but there was an ethnic-looking couple with long hair seated behind us. The woman wore multi-strands of braids, and the man had a red tassel hanging over one ear. This was also surprising—classic nomadic dress, not usually found in Beijing these days. The fashion craze of Tibetan Chic had gone the way of the pandas. Most Chinese citizens—let alone Tibetans—couldn’t travel outside of their home village or town without permission and special permits. I was more curious than ever.

After the somewhat rocky takeoff, I managed to look out the window enough to see the sere landscape. It was depressing, but being up above the clouds was not. Blue sky as far as the eye could see. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in wishing we didn’t have to land. We were in fact going to Chengdu, and from there we would have special overland transport, according to Li. I hoped the Deputy Minister would have some kind of hybrid that could make the journey to high altitude more comfortable.

118 It was true what he had said about the permafrost. The Sky Train through the plateau hadn’t operated since the crash in 2036 at Thangla when melt collapsed the elevated tracks. In the tradition of greatly leaping forward, it was being rebuilt, in spite of all the protest from ecologists and engineers. The question was, would they find willing passengers?

I must have fallen asleep because, when we touched down, I was jolted awake. I rubbed my eyes and looked outside. There was, of course, nothing to see. I couldn’t imagine how the pilot had landed in this dense gray cloud. Chengdu was like a ghost-land. Just getting from the plane to the air terminal felt like a major accomplishment. And the little-used terminal was nearly empty.

Somehow we managed to get our land legs and find our way through security again, and into a roomy jeep. With barely time to register any details, I found myself on the road with Li, Mark, and a driver who looked Tibetan. He had a string of prayer flags on the dashboard. I knew they were printed in Tibetan. I wondered if he could read them. No one was allowed to teach the language in the schools anymore. And the monasteries were almost all gone except for the few left for tourists, most of whom were still mainland Chinese with romantic visions in their heads. This much I had learned from my mother, who was a Buddhist. She’d kept a secret altar in the bedroom closet. I remembered her whispering to me once, “Whatever we do to them, the mountains will win.”

I thought of her now. A range kept peeping through in the distance, but so far the terrain was unremarkable. Featureless houses in row after row, billboards with sermons about the Motherland, and persistent fog. We gradually made our ascent.

119 As we got to more rural territory, the road was almost impassable in some parts. Once, we faced an overflowing creek in the road. “Wangchen, get us over this,” said Li. The driver put down some boards he had stashed in the back of the jeep, and soon we were back on dry ground.

Hours later, nauseated and with a splitting headache, I begged for us to stop so I could use the facilities—in other words, pee on the side of the road behind a rock or some bushes.

It was Mark’s turn to sleep, and he was dozing next to me. I hopped out and made my way across the road to some boulders. I could see the mountains in the distance. No snow caps, but they were green. We were in the countryside now. And at high altitude, if my headache and nausea meant anything. I took off my mask and stuck it into the front pocket of my T-shirt.

I lingered, breathing the clear, crisp air and feeling the sunlight on my face, until Wangchen honked the horn, and I got back into the car. Eventually, when I felt my head was going to split open, Li handed me a thermos of black tea, and I drank greedily.

As the countryside became more and more beautiful, there was an army presence and of mining projects. We had to pass three checkpoints where Li presented credentials. I didn’t know if we were anywhere near the place my father had taken me, but the road got progressively worse.

“We’re almost there,” Li said. “Can you wake the professor?”

I nudged Mark, who opened his eyes and winced with his own headache. “Where are we?”

120 The jeep rounded a corner and we faced an enormous hillside, at the top of which was a sod roof. It was so cleverly melded with the land that you couldn’t even tell it was a house except for the bank of solar panels glinting on the right side.

“We’re home,” said the Deputy.

We unloaded the car and followed him to a pathway cut into the side of the mountain, leading to a stone porch with a magnificent view. We all stood there for a few moments, as if magnetized by the golden sunset creeping over the mountains. The driver lit a cigarette and took a long drag.

“Tiāntáng,” he said, in Chinese. Paradise.

We went into the house and Li showed us where to stow our belongings. My room was in the back, nestled into the mountain. A skylight was installed in the ceiling. No doubt there were many in this house. It was the perfect temperature, and I wondered if it had geothermal heating. Even my childhood home in Hong Kong hadn’t been this nice.

I took off my city boots and unpacked my hairbrush. It felt good to get the dust out of my hair. In my dingy cotton socks, I padded out to the hallway, following the smell of onions and garlic cooking. I ended up in a huge kitchen with a wooden floor and stone counters. The driver, who seemed to be a master of many talents, stood over a large wok, adding pieces of cabbage to a fragrant mixture. Deftly, he sliced ginger into the pan and dropped in two leaves of Chinese basil. I didn’t see any meat, which was reassuring. Animals were scarce these days, especially dogs.

Li entered and filled a jug from a spigot in the stainless steel sink. There was no obvious filtration system. He handed me a glass and, again,

121 I tasted pure spring water. It began to become clear why Li Wei brought us here. He had a house and a spring-fed well. All he needed was a greenhouse.

When we had feasted on the vegetables, noodle dishes, and steamed dumplings, we went into the living room, where chairs were arranged around a mock fireplace with imaginary flames. Li outlined his vision for the greenhouse project.

I noticed that, the more Li described the kind of structure he wanted, the more Mark frowned and shook his head.

Li finally stopped and said, “Wangchen, bring us some tea.” I looked out the window, enjoying the nightfall and the quiet. I had forgotten what it was like to interact directly with nature. I felt an intense longing tinged with doom. How long could it last? We had destroyed our planet. It was only a matter of time before it took back its power and kicked us off like the parasites we were.

When I had a steaming cup of jasmine tea in my hands, Mark spoke. “Who’s going to enjoy this paradise you’re creating? Is it just for you and a few friends? What about the great Chinese populace, working and sweating in the ever-crowded cities? I can’t see myself creating an empire for one man. Even an enlightened bureaucrat like yourself.”

I noticed Wangchen quietly listening in the doorway, reluctant to return to the kitchen. Li linked his hands under his chin and gazed at the imaginary fireplace. “You can’t believe how touched I am by your words.” He sat up and looked at both of us. “Really. Don’t you think I have already considered this? Don’t you think I care about my countrymen? My country?” He stopped and took a sip of tea. “People think we Chinese only care about our own. That’s not true. This planet is also our home.”

122 “Well, then, why shouldn’t I return to Beijing?” asked Mark.

Li raised his eyebrows. “You’re a scientist. A realist. You know your work is too little, too late for the masses.”

I waited for Mark to object, but he stared at the fake fire.

I turned to Li. “If you believe this, then why did you bring us here?”

“Just because I see the big picture doesn’t mean I have lost hope.”

I stared at him. “A bird does not sing because it has an answer.”

He finished the proverb. It“ sings because it has a song.” He pointed to Mark. “You will be the head of food production.” He pointed to me. “And you will be .”

“Wife?” My eyes flew wide.

“Would you prefer the scientific ? Mate, perhaps? We need to create a hardier species for the . And maybe even a more attractive one.”

My mouth was agape.

“Hybrid vigor,” Mark chuckled. Every good botanist knew that cross- breeding produced enhancements.

Li seemed to be waiting for my answer.

I noticed Wangchen still leaning against the doorway, a smile on his face. He already had his job. I was sure he had friends. I remembered the Tibetans on the plane.

123 I turned to face my suitor, if that’s what he was. “We’re not the only ones, are we, Deputy Li?” I said.

“Call me Wei. And no, we’re not.” He smiled, and pulled the pink mask out of my shirt pocket. “You aren’t going to need that here.”

“Okay, we’ll talk about it,” I temporized. Li raised his eyebrows and said, “What about you, Professor?”

Mark said, “I’ll give you six months for a start, but I want a contract. And a real budget—not a University grant.”

Sitting on the veranda later that night, I watched a yak-led caravan with huge water jugs heading down the mountain toward the valley below. A few straggling pines still grew. I could see a Tibetan woman with a pink scarf and a long skirt leading the yaks. A couple of old-style stucco houses nestled together at the bottom, insulated with dried yak dung. I hoped that there would be four red pillars inside and an altar with a frayed white offering scarf and maybe a dog-eared photo of the 14th Dalai Lama, the last of the authentic ones.

Maybe my mother had been right. The mountains were winning.

124 A writer, artist, and traveler, Stirling Davenport has spent most of her life doing various jobs to support her writing and . Her published fantasy novels include The ’s and The Silver Reindeer. Her multi- collection of short stories Amphibious Dreamers includes the science fiction story “ Beauty,” which was a finalist in .com’s 1999 contest “The Price of Technology.” Stirling’s short stories have appeared in several anthologies. She is currently working on three novels, one of which is climate fiction.

125 126 Thirteenth Year Diana Rose Harper

i. Up there light, so much light, everywhere, pressing pressing pressing against my retinas even filtered through my suit the light presses I feel my bones start to sparkle and think, “Oh, love.”

127 ii. I dreamt of that day, that Thirteenth Year, since my own sixth, since I first saw the sky, on old video of old ice collapsing into an old sea.

Isn’t it amazing how a child’s brain can so completely imagine a thing never truly seen

128 iii. The Bang (more of an ooze) killed most of them, our ancestors, drowned burned starved or worse, infertile.

The slow decline of an unadapted species.

But we were the lucky species, really, most of the rest dead before we knew, whole genera acting as canaries while the miners listened to podcasts instead

129 iv. There’s utility in .

The is a robust guardian, teaching us to stay safe, telling us to be wary of that strange newness, that which does not fit.

But the amygdala is the advisor not the monarch; sometimes change is the only way to survive

130 v. In school they taught us why we still count as human, after all these generations underground, all the changes to our chemistry, our morphology— we make things, lasting things, things that tell our stories even after we have decayed: art, music, scientific papers, poetry.

But such an idea assumes that the quotidian power of DNA, of is not, in itself, poetry.

131 vi. Down here, now, after that first time, after every time, the halls feel larger, smaller, containing.

A big cage is still a cage.

Up there, the cage is bigger still, invisible, hypercage, toxic.

Gilded.

132 vii. At seventeen each of us are tested a long needle, probing, hunting the potential of new people within our flesh.

My ovaries were empty. My mother cried.

I did, too, but our tears were different.

Her genes were done, but the sky that sky would be mine

133 viii. Maybe if I’d told someone right then, things would’ve been different.

Dr. Holme, old but alive— alive, like my treasure— would’ve reveled in the discovery, like me, would’ve stood in wonder, bemusement wrinkling that sky­-worn face.

But I kept my secrets and now it is me who is kept secret.

134 ix. The Aztecs believed that every thirteen years, you had a new set of bones.

A new structure, a new foundation.

Every Thirteenth Year, the infertile are given a gift, a visit to the desert wasteland, our roof.

In comparison, our caverns are abundant, alive, vibrant.

But for those who study that desert —or at least, for me, when I was still allowed to study it— it is the caverns that are barren,

all new growth of thought killed, all evolution manufactured.

Somehow a benevolent censor is the cruelest sort

135 x. Some of the first bioindicators died about a hundred years after the start of industry, that first layer of the anthropocene.

They are who we honor, with our habit, now, our tradition every thirteen years crawling out of our caverns to see if we might shed our suits feel the air on new flesh, flesh never before exposed to those winds

The testers collect air and dirt and water

136 while the lucky ones, the tagalongs, already proven infertile anyway, already broken, incorruptible, struggle to believe this place, this surface, feeling the sun pressing pressing pressing golden, and, barren and blank, we imagine the children of the future who might someday emerge on a Thirteenth Year to a land that holds them instead of strangles

137 xi. When I saw it, I turned back, towards the station, for food, water, to clear away the hallucination.

But it was still there when I returned bright, curling, tender. Reaching out of the earth, grasping toward the sky, a mirror of my own face every time I come to the surface glorying and unabashed

Alive!

138 xii. Ecosystems are fragile.

One change, even one that seems like a good idea at the time, even one that is beautiful, can set off a spiral and the next thing you know, give or take a few centuries, you have mass extinction or perhaps radical differentiation a different status quo, just as fragile as the first

139 xiii. We would study the bones of our ancestors but all of them are toxic so instead we gently manipulate the skeletons of those who first became clean again while the professor mutters things about species distinction, reproduction, desire, death.

140 xiv. Impossible, this thing in my hands.

Unreal, its cells thriving, photosynthesizing, sucking life from barren earth.

It died in the greenhouse where our squashes pulse with precisely calibrated nourishment.

This thing only survived where I could not magenta veins crossing cerulean leaves

How could something born of hell be so beautiful?

141 xv. Blank stares.

That is what they gave me, presenting my discovery, my assiduously developed , my photographs and charts my years’ worth of specimens

Blank eyes, nervous laughter.

Dr. Miranda commended my “industrious creativity.”

Two days later my findings and I were

“rehomed.”

A new cage, a fresh asylum.

142 xvi. How to describe the feeling of infinity when all I had known was caves such sky

I could do anything and it wouldn’t matter

143 xvii. I fought, for a time. Raged at the softness of my room, the gentle nurses bringing me tea in indestructible pots, the carefully­-wrought lies destroying my reputation, protecting their stasis.

“Too much time on the surface,” they said.

“Abnormally high radiation levels.” “Scrambled biochemistry.” “Delusional hallucinations.”

Anything that can survive the toxicity is a monster and monsters are not real.

I am become my own monster. A reality without them is no reality at all.

144 xviii. When my parents come to visit, feet shuffling, begrudging, they ask why I write, who I write to, beyond, of course, the “rehabilitative benefit.”

How can I explain to those who won’t see?

I am not the first to love the sky; I will not be the last and some day there will be no Thirteenth Year because every year, every day, we will surface.

145 Diana Rose Harper grew up with a woods for a backyard and a mistrust of basements. She currently lives, works, and reads in Chicago, Illinois.

Notes

1. Brood XXI was a periodic cicada group on a thirteen­-year cycle living in the panhandle of Florida, last documented in 1870.

2. Video of a Manhattan­sized chunk of dropping into the ocean: https://youtu.be/hC3VTgIPoGU

3. For more on the concept of hyperobjects, read Timothy Morton.

4. The idea that the Aztecs believed a person grew a new skeleton every 13 years comes from Akaxe Yotzin, student and teacher of mesoamerican traditional medicine.

5. For more on monstrosity, see Italo Calvino’s “The of Birds.”

146 147 LOSD and Fount Henrietta Hartl

Fount has started building a boat. A special boat.

I’m not sure what to do about it…

About three years ago they left the island. Emigrated. Left the island to the sea.

And they have left me here. To log and observe what’s going on.

Me: A Logging and Observation System; the D stands for the version, or model type.

Version C was marketed as “Companion features added,” since they found that this was what the typical situation required.

Originally the LO systems were only meant to be left in totally deserted places. Just sitting there ticking along, collecting data and interpreting it intelligently.

But it turned out that there was almost always some determined loner who would refuse to leave his home with the others. And since the corporation had a branch producing inter-intelligence communication solutions anyway, they added a bunch of interaction features to the systems. They optimized them in version D—and that’s me. I can

148 interact intelligently and sensitively with human beings, if required. I can even sense when it is required, and when it is not.

On this island, the guy insisting he’d stay was Fount. He is still here.

Him and me, we are sharing the island. What’s left of it.

The large expensive houses right on the seafront were the first to go. Ravaged by violent storms and tsunamis, and eventually flooded permanently as the sea level kept rising.

But many of the small hovels on the raised ground inland, far away from the beach, survived much longer.

So when the others left, Fount’s hut was still standing.

He is called Fount because he is kind of a water engineer. He doesn’t have a degree but he is good. Which means he knows how to obtain enough clean drinking water, even under difficult circumstances.

He does not eat fish because he says that every time he swims or snorkels he feels that they are his companions, sharing the sea. Anyway, there are still huge stacks of tins which will keep him fed for years.

He sometimes sort of sings to himself in a low voice: “I’m Fount, Fount on the mount—Fount, Fount on the mount—”

He may repeat this a hundred times or more, just singing along quietly.

Sometimes he varies it a bit: “I’m Fount on the highest mount, that’s why I’m still around, Fount on the highest mount—” on and on, a hundred times….

From my databases, I know that this is a sign that he might be going mad. Clinically. Going mad with loneliness.

149 But if he really is, it’s a benign form of madness I guess. Not harmful. And after all, he is not really alone. He’s got me.

I am never too far away from Fount.

My spheroid body is designed to work on firm ground as well as in water. I have an extendable set of small “paddlegs” to help me navigate difficult terrain or propel me forward under water. So I can always follow Fount around as he walks on the island or swims off the beach.

We don’t communicate much, really. But what we do tell each other is important. Companionship. It’s only one set of my modules. But besides the logging and observation it is what I am made for.

In the evenings, Fount sits in front of his hut and stares out over the sea.

I share geo-measurement . He talks about books, and the world, and his childhood, and if there is a God.

Sometimes we share an old joke. Fount will say, “The next version up from you would be LOSE. Now that wouldn’t please marketing, would it?” And I make appropriate snickering noises. Then I will say, “But wait until they get to LOST…”

Then Fount will chuckle quietly and say, “That’s a good one.”

And then we will sit together silently and look out over the sea.

It has been a long time since the last drone flew past anywhere within reach and collected data from me. They seem to have given up on us. Lost interest. Maybe there are too many like us, so they are drowning in data now….

The island has become very small.

150 The rising of the water level doesn’t follow any regular pattern. Sometimes there are months, even years, when the level doesn’t rise; sometimes it even drops a little bit. But the overall curve is up.

There is only a patch around Fount’s hut left now, a couple of hundred yards in each direction.

And now Fount has started building that boat. A very special boat. Ordinary boats—there are several of them around here anyway, still.

But this is a boat to live on.

He is planning to leave, obviously.

I could have asked him about it for quite some time. Only, strangely, I have not.

But the boat-building has progressed quite far.

So now as we are sitting together I ask him, “Are you planning to leave?”

He sighs. And he is silent.

I cannot force him to answer me. This is the first time I become aware of that fact.

He stays silent for a long time. Then he sighs again.

And he tells me, “I will stay on the island as long as it—stays alive. But soon this won’t be an island any longer. It will turn into—ocean floor. A reef, maybe. But not an island any longer. The next rush of water might be the last one…”

“Will you anchor that boat here?” I ask him.

151 He shakes his head, slowly. “I’ve decided that it’s better if I leave. I couldn’t bear to be confronted with that every day. My island, submerged completely—nothing left….”

“So you will leave the island,” I state.

He looks at me. Hesitates. Then asks me: “Shall I take you with me? On my boat?”

I quote from very basic information: “I cannot leave this island. In the case of full submergence I will anchor myself to a suitable spot and maintain logging and observation.”

“Couldn’t you just come with me instead?”

“No, I cannot do that. There are many ways in which I am free to make decisions in difficult situations. But there are basic restrictions. And this is one of them. I cannot leave this island.”

Fount sighs deeply. The most sorrowful sigh of this evening. Then he says simply, “I am sorry.”

And we sit there in silence and look out over the sea.

A few days later a terrible storm hits the island. In the evening, Fount moves the new boat right against the wall of his hut to protect it from the storm.

But the next morning, the boat is smashed quite badly. It will take Fount many weeks to repair it.

Fount is not one to complain pointlessly. So he just starts repairing the boat.

152 The—mostly—dry patch around his hut is shrinking. The water level is rising quite rapidly.

When the repairs are almost finished, another terrible storm hits.

The damage is not quite as bad as last time. But still it will take Fount several more weeks.

And the dry patch is shrinking.

On some days the waves are already washing around his doorstep. The not-yet-finished boat threatens to float away, and crashes to the ground from its stand again and again.

Fount is battling desperately against time and water.

Eventually the boat is almost ready. Not perfect, but ready.

And Fount has started loading the boat. In fact, he has almost finished loading it: food, water, clothes.

I estimate that he will leave the island tomorrow.

He doesn’t tell me.

I don’t ask.

The next morning he calls out to me, “Goodbye, LOSD. Take care.”

“Goodbye,” I answer politely.

He hesitates, then shrugs and pushes the boat into the water just a few feet away.

153 He jumps aboard.

Before he sets sail properly, he starts rowing away from the shore.

That is, he tries to.

The boat won’t move.

It will not move. I have fastened it securely. To the rock where I am anchored now, too. With the help of a supermagnetic device that is a secret of the corporation, and of the LOS systems. Fount will not know what holds him. But it will hold him. Here.

So the boat will not move. Not ever. No more.

I know that humans need food and water to survive. I know that this will become quite difficult.

I do not have a plan.

I will just continue to log and observe.

Henrietta Hartl loves writing, mostly. As a relief from the duller stuff like technical manuals and project proposals, she has written many stories and sketches. She currently lives near Frankfurt in Germany, writing articles for a newspaper, doing a bit of teaching, and working on her first novel,The revenge of the smarting phone.

154 155 On Darwin Tides Shauna O’Meara

The heat-cracked thoroughfare of the Night Market is packed with Last Chance tourists, the stop-start progression of browsers providing ample opportunity for pickpockets, vendors, and beggars.

Sitting on a crate behind a door straddling two fish buckets, I fan myself with a switch of pandanus as I watch an American run her hand across the weave of a baloy. It’s hot and I would give anything for a plastic stall sheet to shield me against the late-afternoon sun.

“How much?” The woman has inspected all seven baloy and chosen the deep-water ripples of navy, sapphire, and sky blue.

“Three-hundred-and-thirty ringgit.”

“For a mat?”

“They take months to weave.” And that’s without paddling aboggo ’ out to Pulau Batik to find and cut the pandanus leaves, dodging pirates, territorial fishermen, and the swift, black patrol boats of the ESSFOR coast guard.

“How do I know these aren’t from some Chinese sweatshop?”

156 We haven’t covered “sweatshop” in English class yet. But I know what Chinese means.

“No. I made these. Sama Dilaut, not Chinese.” And because she might not have heard our word, I offer up the Malay term: “Bajau Laut.” And the English one: “Sea gypsies.”

The woman is blank on all counts, which is surprising given how often Sama from the tourist islands of Selakan and Mabul feature on local billboards.

She caresses the baloy again, before turning to my cheapskate options: hunks of painted coral on strings.

Indian tourists wearing the blue and white-flash souvenir shirts of Sea Lightning Tours pass between my makeshift stall and the stalls selling sea-grapes, sautéed aquafarm urchin, and chilled coconut pudding. The idea of paying to night-kayak on waters choked with algal bloom has always struck me as strange, given the stench and toxins.

Solar screens throughout the marketplace alert tourists to the fire ban, the caning penalties for open-air smoking. High above them, painful to look at against the sun-blanched sky, coconut trees drape desiccated fronds toward the asphalt.

I study the American’s eyes to see which colours they alight on and which are likely to bring more sales if repeated. The Chinese and Sulu- sympathisers like red. North Africans from dustbowl lands seek the nostalgia of green. Americans favour blue and orange.

She selects a fan of red coral. “Wow!” The minute branches divide and divide again, fine as sugar snaps. “When I went to Australia last

157 year, all the corals were breaking down from acid in the water. This is just beautiful.”

“Only ten ringgit.” I have been experimenting with wordplay. I like the English modifiers “only” and “just.” Just ten ringgit. Only ten ringgit. Not much to spend. Treat yourself.

“And it’s real?”

“Straight from the waters of Bodgaya and Bohey Dulang. The reef is protected from typhoons so the coral skeletons stay intact.”

“So it’s bleached?”

“That section of Tun Sakaran is. But the colour is copied from live ones at Pulau Mabul.”

Relief fills her face. “Yes. I’ll be scuba-diving there on Saturday. Figured I had better come and see the reef before it’s all gone.”

I keep my expression rigidly polite. It is April in the second half of the worst El Niño on record. In December, two category-five typhoons raged across the South China Sea, decimating Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan, and Pahang and, with them, most of Peninsula ’s rice harvest, agriculture, and palm oil. Uprooted Malaysians and flood refugees from the , Bangladesh, China, Laos, and streamed into my world: -stricken Eastern . There is not enough water, not enough food, and not enough jobs. Without Last Chance tourists like this woman, we’d be having food riots and street battles like .

“Ten ringgit,” I repeat, holding out my palm. The first time I ever did this was by accident, the Austrian tourist so taken aback that he handed over his money.

158 The woman hesitates.

“Last chance ever.”

Charmed, she makes the transaction.

I murmur a quick du’a of thanks to Allah as I slip the money into the pandanus purse at my hip. Mopping sweat from my face with the edges of my tudung headscarf, I scan the market for the blue uniforms of ESSFOR polis.

An anti-dengue brigade moves from stall to stall, checking for mosquito larvae, chiding anyone with a container open to the elements. As if called forth, the screens alert the marketplace about mosquito- borne diseases and proper safeguards, ending with the usual refrain: These diseases are notifiable. Not reporting malaria, dengue, Japanese encephalitis, and Rift Valley fever to health authorities is an offence under Malaysian law.

Three boys from my community, shabby-clothed and barefoot, beg food from an Australian laden with mango and rambutan. He kicks out at them: “Piss off!”

“Hey!” I call them over. “You be careful ESSFOR doesn’t get you.”

They cackle like macaques. “We’re too slippery, Maslina. Like fish!”

“Fish get put in cages,” I warn.

That sobers them. We have all noticed the black-ring aquaculture cages advancing across Darvel Bay as the reefs die and no longer fall under environmental protection.

159 Do you have your MyKad on you? I look up at the words on the screens as the children caper away. People twelve years and over must carry their MyKad at all times. It is illegal to trade without a MyKad.

I shift uncomfortably on my crate. Without a MyKad, I am an illegal citizen and so is my stall.

I glance at the coconut juice vendor in the neighbouring stall. She stares pointedly at the screen. She knows that I am Sama: my hair is brine- clumped, I wear an ill-fitting dress found on a beach, and my sun-baked skin is heavily mosquito-bitten.

I look away, hoping she will lose interest.

A girl in revealing clothes—practically a bikini!—trots past with a plateful of clams. My stomach rumbles at the memory of their fleshy innards dripping with hot satay, but my brain reels in horror.

Doesn’t she know? There are warnings all over Lahad Datu.

“Hey, you!” I call in English. “You can’t eat that!”

The girl looks down at her plate. “Clams?”

“Yes. Lokan panggang.”

“But they were selling it.”

“They shouldn’t have.” The vendor will be an illegal stall like mine. An undocumented Filipino, Indonesian, or Tamil worker let go from a failing plantation, unable to find new work or return to his climate-ravaged homeland, eking a living any way he can. “The algal bloom.” I think of the Sea Lightning tourists. “It feeds on river water carrying fertiliser

160 from the plantations. It makes a paralysis poison that kills people who eat shellfish.”

“Oh. Really?” Inexplicably, she giggles.

As she sashays away without thanking me, I wonder if such foolhardiness is standard for Americans or if the reek of dead fish and gulls from the nearby waterfront addles their brains.

“I saw what you just did.” The terrible attempt at Bahasa is accompanied by a strong waft of mosquito repellent as a white woman in her twenties ambles up to my stall. Despite the swelter, she is clad head to toe in protective clothing, hair shrouded in a respectful tudung. “It was thoughtful of you.”

“I couldn’t just let her die,” I reply in English.

She chuckles wryly. “Ah, people that stupid shouldn’t breed.”

“Darwin,” I say proudly, recognising the sentiment. “Evolution.”

Approval quirks her mouth. “Yeah. Evolution. How did you learn that?” She immediately looks mortified. “I-I’m sorry. That wasreally presumptuous!”

I know what she sees. The same thing ESSFOR looks for when conducting operasi raids: a lack of visible prospects. “No, you guess right. I go to an engio learning centre.”

“Engio…. Oh, NGO! The Youth Aid Society one?”

I nod. “The students are palm worker children, Sama, and refugees. Some come for the agar-agar broth we get after , but I go to learn languages. I know Bahasa, English, Filipino, and a little Indonesian.”

161 “You looking to go to university?” She says it like it’s just something one asks a student.

“Uh, no.” I would need a MyKad for university. “I want to become a tour guide. I could make a better living showing tourists the islands than weaving baloy.”

The woman examines a mat with black and cobalt shot through with randomised stitches of neon blue. “It’s a pity I can’t buy one. This one’s beautiful. Like a night sky.”

It is actually the flashes the algal bloom makes at night when dying fish disturb the surface, but I don’t tell her that. The elders teach that a true baloy comes straight from nature. Sometimes, I can’t help thinking they had prettier inspiration.

I select orange corals matching the forlorn orang-utan on her shirtfront. “Coral like this is very rare,” I begin, taking my cue from what the American had said about Australia.

Her eyes flash. “If it’s rare, you shouldn’t be taking it.”

The blood abandons my face.

I get slowly to my feet and take a step back, trying to look calm. She is an informer sent to catch me. One of the Reef Guardians the engios set amongst the island people to inform them of illegal poaching.

The girl looks confused. “Are you okay?”

“A-are you going to turn me in?”

“Huh? No! I just think nature should be left alone.”

162 I realise belatedly that her orang-utan is bounded by engio logos: Hutani, Wilderness Asia, World Land Foundation.

My lip curls as I recognise the engio that convinced Sabah Fisheries to rezone huge swathes of Darvel Bay and Tun Sakaran Marine Park No Take because the region was found to be bleaching slower than other reefs. They had all believed that keeping Sama from their ancestral fishing grounds would allow the fish to breed and replenish other waters. They hadn’t counted on seesawing floods and hitting the region; suddenly, millions of starving people were on the move and they didn’t pay much heed to fishing zones and poaching laws.

I turn one of the pieces to reveal the white beneath the paint job. “This coral is dead. Food for algae and starfish. They say the last surviving reefs of Sabah will whiten and die this year. That’s why all the tourists are over here braving the swelter and dengue outbreaks: it’s their last chance on earth to see a live reef.” I indicate her shirt. “And you are here for the same reason! Last chance to see the apes before the exodus of Peninsular MyKad-holders forces the Sabah government to trade trees for housing and food production.”

She bristles. “We bought the Lahad Datu bridging sanctuary outright in 2021. Malaysia can’t touch our land.” I realise she is an actual engio worker. Not just someone wearing the souvenir. “I am not here like these disaster-porn people because I have given up, but because I believe good things can still be achieved if people step up. The NGO who runs your school believes the same: that children can be saved by education if only given the chance.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a man approach a thin Tamil woman cooking spiced sainglag on a solar-powered hot plate. He leans close

163 and says something. Her eyes grow huge and she starts rifling through a battered handbag, but I can tell from her body language she doesn’t have what he seeks. She starts babbling something that can only be, “Please, don’t arrest me. I have children.”

Another stall owner is forced to his knees and wrist-bound with yellow cable ties. The ESSFOR officers are not even in uniform. They are being discreet to not upset the tourists.

As if from great distance, I hear my customer saying, “You know, I could show you around the orang-utan sanctuary. Then you might understand—”

I am small for my age. I could pass for under twelve.

A man approaches the neighbouring stall. At first I think he is buying coconut juice, but then I see the vendor’s MyKad catch the sunlight. Moments later, she jerks her head toward me. I gawp at her as the man looks my way.

The woman with the orang-utan shirt is still talking when I flee. I race along the packed asphalt, weaving through the tourists on practiced feet, swiping loose bananas and mangoes as I go, the holler of vendors following in my wake.

I take the long way home, concealed within the plantations north of town. All around me, oil palms stand brown-tipped and wilting, their knobbly fruits undersized or mummified, a carpet of dropped flowers testament to the drought and heat they’ve had to endure.

164 A boy lies dead at the foot of one of the palms. He is little more than skin over bone, already stripped of his clothes and shoes, if ever he had them. I wonder if he died of disease or if starvation made him climb the palm, risking his life on the electric wires strung to prevent fruit theft by scavenging primates and pygmy elephants.

Cries from the market lift in the baking air. Illegals trickle into the plantation, moving swiftly through the palms. Their numbers will attract ESSFOR polis. I force my tired legs to move faster across the dusty, uneven ground.

Miles go by.

We pass a complex of earthen ponds lined in black plastic, the water clogged with plastic bottles to reduce evaporation. The remains of Sabah’s freshwater aquaculture industry, the ponds that were once home to red tilapia, walking catfish, and carp are now irrigation reservoirs: the only thing keeping the palms alive and thousands in work.

I salivate at the thought of the water resting dark and cool beneath the bottles, but know I can’t drink it any more than I can drink the sea. The water is full of mosquito insecticide. I shudder as I recall the day the gate was left open and a whole troupe of proboscis monkeys died in agony beside the ponds.

Near the river, the palms are all dead: parchment-grey sentinels killed when typhoons forced the sea upriver, filling the groundwater with salt.

I follow the steep, crumbly riverbank downhill toward the Bay. The water is soupy and sluggish with drought. Green algae clogs the surface, elevated here and there by the long shapes of logs and branches.

165 Hornbills watch me suspiciously from stripped, bone-white trees leaning over the water.

The reek of algae, dead fish, and the fertiliser factory greets me as I step from the trees. The smell mixes with the heat and humidity to form air so cloying it almost has to be chewed to be breathed.

I cross the shiny, metal bridge separating the Lahad Datu Industrial Zone from my wooden, stilt-house community as buses of tourists and trucks of oil, fruit, and rubber rumble past.

At the end of the bridge, an elevated, plank footway extends from the riverbank to the first stilt-house. Passing along the warm, ash-grey wood into the community of house platforms and elevated footways, I reach the home my brother and I share. Out of habit, I check the water barrels beneath the palm-thatch eaves for mosquitoes. Then, taking an earthen water carrier, I follow a path of planks deep into the mangroves beyond the house to the plastic water-harvesting bags I’ve affixed to clumps of leaves.

I know that the water is probably laced with heavy metals and poisons from the industrial effluents and sewage seeping into the river, but lighting a boiling fire, even on a bare beach, carries a minimum of seven years. In the advancing dark, an open flame or closed drum fire would stand out brightly to the infrared eyes of the aerostat security balloons hovering off the coast.

I slip beneath the house platform to the lepa riding low in the stinking water. In the tigerish orange and black shadows of evening, I see that Tadi has finished laying and caulking the deck, an impressive effort given every inch of the five-meter craft is constructed from interlocking puzzle pieces of driftwood, shined with sharkskin until glowing.

166 With all the typhoon rebuilding, and groundwater salinization affecting timber yields, wood prices are out of our league. Even driftwood is hard enough to find, given the number of people courting arrest to boil their drinking water.

I approximate the Qiblah and perform Maghrib prayer until the red light of sunset fades. Then I turn my palms to the early stars and say a du’a over the banana, mango and water, hoping Allah understands the desperation behind my theft.

I open the spot on the deck where Tadi and I keep our treasures. Among rare shells and barnacled things scavenged from typhoon wrecks is a collection of language dictionaries and Roaming Planet guidebooks abandoned by seasons of tourists.

Lying on my back across the boat, I angle a China travel guide to the light of the Industrial Zone and fantasise about where I will go once I am a language master with enough money to bribe officials for a MyKad.

For a people who used to roam the Coral Triangle deep into the waters of Indonesia and , our lack of documents renders us very static. One would think being linked to no state would come with the freedom to travel at will, but, with everyone reinforcing their borders, we are stuck here in Sabah, not just starving for food and water, but starving for experiences and new stories. Often, I envy the tourists their ability to go and see far more than I do the effortless way they order their food.

The soft gongs of kulintangana ring out. A healing rhythm, it is the most common sound in our village these days. I wonder who will be leaving us next.

167 Malarial mosquitoes swirl, catching the light. The Sama patient lying before the kulintangan is probably dying of malaria or dengue and yet Tadi and I survive on. I wonder if we are Allah-blessed, or if we have somehow—I try out the concept I learned in science—evolved to survive the diseases.

Pombots rumble up the river mouth: the first of the seaweed worker boats returning home.

Tadi arrives and swings down into the lepa. He’s warm and drip-dried, a shimmer of salt crystals on his skin. He smells beautiful, Tadi: like the ocean. Taking up his deck knife, he cuts me half a pineapple.

I suck the sweet flesh. “Thank you.”

He flicks through the China book; I see the subtle roll of eyes. He doesn’t know why I bother.

“We had raids at the market tonight. I lost all my baloy…”

“Really?”

A sudden lump in my throat catches me off-guard, stops me speaking. I nod stiffly.

He notices my upset. “Oh, Maslina. I’m sorry.”

“Everything is going MyKad-only! I even saw Indonesian rubber workers and children from my school scavenging tonight. Apparently, they are all being replaced by Peninsular Malaysians!”

There is no wind. In normal seasons, we would have had our evening rainfall by now, to shift the river and wash out the stink of waterlogged mangroves, algae, and sewage.

168 “There are thousands of people on the move, Maslina, every one of them needing work. They favour Malaysian citizens because they’re the only ones who can vote.”

“All the more reason for us to be allowed market stalls,” I insist. “If people without MyKads can’t work in the factories and plantations any more, where else can we get money besides those rich Last Chance tourists?”

“They don’t see it that way. And, to answer your question, we Sama can get money from the seaweed farms.”

He sees me wrinkle my nose. “What, it’s beneath you? We’re water people, Maslina. Seaweed is something we are good at that can’t be replaced by Peninsular land-folk.”

“But it’s the same thing every day! The same water. The same horizons. The same skills, over and over!”

“So?”

“So, it’s…” I want to say boring, but taking breaks to watch the last of the green turtles and mantas glide through the water is hardly boring. Even diseased, with spreading starbursts of bleached coral, the seafloor is still beautiful, ever-changing. There is just no prospect of going anywhere, learning skills for the world beyond Sabah. Adapting to shifting times…

I realise what I want to say. “It’s risky.”

“Risky?”

“In science, we’ve been studying something called evolution.” I don’t get all of it, especially the part where some orang-utans turned into people

169 and others decided to remain animals, but I get the part about some creatures being more fit. “Animals that only adapt to one way of living are at risk of dying out if things change too much. I think that goes for people too, Tad.”

“And you think going to language classes and learning science is going to be that lifesaving adaptation?”

“Maybe.”

“Not without a MyKad it won’t. It doesn’t matter what skills you develop, Maslina; without that card, you can’t work.” He jerks the pouch containing his daily earnings so I can hear the coins clink. “Using your skills to earn, even if you don’t like it, is a far better adaptation. Besides, we are more likely to be killed on land than at sea.”

His mouth turns down and I know he is thinking about our parents, missing since the 2045 famine protests, three years ago.

While my take-home message from our parents’ food struggles had been to finesse the skills wanted by booming industries like tourism, their arrests had only reinforced Tadi’s view that safety for Sama lay with the sea. It is why he is rebuilding the family lepa, lost when the massive flooding of January 2044 caused the Segama River to sprout a branch that cleaved its way through our community and fleet to Darvel Bay.

I stare out across the water, at the algae flashing blue around a dying fish.

Tadi’s right, in his way. Our people have been seafarers for so long, even our name means people of the sea. It seems foolish, even a little arrogant, to think one as tiny as I will be there to witness the end of so long a history.

170 At the same time, everything is changing very quickly. Tadi rarely enters town. He doesn’t see the tensions building everywhere: the bodies of street-children and glue-sniffers being taken away in the predawn hours before the tourists arrive, the aggression with which the MyKads have started defending even those things basic to survival—water, food, timber, jobs, and shelter. Too many people in Sabah and not enough for all. It must surely come crashing down.

We are woken in the night by the mutter of biodiesel outboards ascending the river. They cut out as they reach the stilt-house community, their rumble replaced by angry voices.

“Is that the other seaweed harvesters returning home?” I ask Tadi. “They’re back late.”

“Something must have happened.”

We climb the stilts to our house platform. Several platforms over, illuminated by the all-night mills, refineries, and processing plants of the opposite bank, the seaweed workers are clustered outside the nakura’s home. I hear requests for an urgent council meeting.

Tadi and I wander over.

“What’s going on?” Tadi asks. “Has there been trouble?”

“An ESSFOR patrol came to the seaweed farm today, checking for MyKads.”

My blood runs cold.

171 “They told the owner that if he ever hires undocumented labour again, he will be arrested for harbouring.”

“They said we look like Sulu terrorists,” one of the bigger boys adds.

“What, because we look Filipino?” Tadi growls. “Don’t they know their history?”

We all nod and mutter angrily. Many of our ancestors migrated to Sabah waters in the 1970s, escaping the war in the Philippines. Of course we look Filipino.

The elders arrive and the council meeting begins, led by the most senior village man: the nakura.

Anger and fear is audible in the boys’ voices as they explain what happened. “They told our boss to spread the word to all the other farmers! No one is going to hire us anymore! How are we going to live?”

Tadi and I eye each other: he is remembering our earlier conversation. He knows as well as I do how grim our community’s prospects are without the year-round seaweed harvest. All the land jobs are becoming MyKad. We are not allowed to fish or take any of the endangered sea cucumbers or giant clams. Even the pandanus palms and wild coconuts seldom have fruit on them anymore, so high is the demand by other starving seafarers.

Despite the seeming hopelessness of the situation, the elders counsel calm. The young men protest: how are they supposed to remain calm when begging and picking through bins for scraps could well be their futures?

No one has any suggestions for income alternatives.

172 Eventually, the meeting breaks with everyone dissatisfied, and Tadi and I head back to the lepa.

“What are we going to do, Tadi?”

“I don’t know. Sleep. Figure it out in the morning.”

We do fall asleep, but it does not last long. I am awoken in the wee hours by a boat knocking against the stilts of my home and sit up to see Tadi clambering into a boggo’ . In the darkness, other boggo’s with single and paired passengers bob on the water, haloed by brilliant blue algal light. I hear voices, and recognise some of the boys from the meeting.

My heart lumbers into an uneasy gallop. “What are you all doing? Tadi?”

“Shh. We’re just getting food. Those areour fishing grounds by historical right. Those ESSFOR bastards owe us a meal at least.”

His accomplices mutter agreement.

“It’s illegal to fish. It’s allNo Take.”

“Tell that to the pirates and the boats coming up from Indonesia. Tell that to the big trawlers who bribe ESSFOR to look the other way.”

I make an exasperated sound. Like that’s going to hold up in court! “I’m coming too, then.”

“No.”

“Tadi!”

“No.” In the faint, algal light, I see the warning in the set of his brows.

173 “You know where I’m going and why you can’t come,” he says quietly.

“Oh no, Tadi. You can’t…. None of you can.” They are going to raid an aquaculture farm, probably one of the Pulau Batik ring cages crowded with terrified groupers or barramundi. “You know they don’t always arrest cage poachers.”

They used to trial them, but the hungry were too numerous. Now, to be caught fishing anywhere at night, especially the aquaculture farms, is to be convicted of piracy. Pirates seldom make it back to shore: many are shot and fed to the cages.

“I know. Say a du’a for me, Maslina. That we all return safely.”

Furious and terrified, I prostrate myself and pray to Allah and the ancestors the rest of the night. Despite my best efforts, there is no sign of the little fleet when sunrise breaks over the bay, filling the river with swirling oil-rainbows.

I concoct a breakfast of sainglag and stolen mango and settle in to wait, flicking through my guidebooks. But I can’t concentrate. My heart flip- flops between excitement and disappointment with every craft that enters the river.

Midday brings no sign of them. I prepare myself for the worst.

If Tadi is dead, I can’t help him. But if he and the others have been taken alive, I will need bribes. I think of the engio woman from the market, her offer to visit the orang-utans. Engios have money—I can only pray she has as much compassion for people as she does for apes.

174 The Lahad Datu orang-utan sanctuary is a tiny island of forest: an animal migration stepping-stone halfway between the main orang-utan habitats of Danum Valley and .

Following the noise of people to the rehabilitation facility, I stagger to a halt just inside the grounds, struck dumb by the sheer scale of the facility—the sheer resources. There are volunteers everywhere: cleaning, feeding, and entertaining the orang-utans; bottle-feeding the babies; helping the injured adapt to missing limbs, relearn how to forage. Platforms of cut fruit the street children would die for decorate every tree. There is even an orang-utan hospital!

“Hey! You came! Aren’t they amazing?”

The engio woman trots up. I realise we don’t even know each other’s names, and I am not even certain it matters, given how far apart our worlds are.

I had thought the first words out of my mouth would be a request for money, for a paying job. But all I can feel is a sick resentment at the unfairness spread out before me.

“Who pays for all this?” I rasp.

“Americans. People overseas. They like orang-utans.”

I don’t like orang-utans. They break into orchards, causing the farmers to put up fences not even Tadi and I can scale.

“Don’t they like children?” I blurt. I think of the family that had once occupied the house next to ours. Their daughter had died of

175 cholera—treatable, or so I have been told, had they simply had access to medical care.

The woman blinks at that. “I … I don’t know. I guess they see the orang-utans as here first. They feel sorry for them because they are innocent and have no say.”

We are innocent. We have no say.

I think of my people, crushed beneath the heel of statelessness and ever- worsening deprivation, their futures looking bleaker by the day, and I finally understand why these orang-utans had decided to stay in the trees. Why they didn’t choose to become human.

They had found a way to harness the compassion of the wealthy: the ultimate survival adaptation.

The woman turns to me. “Oh, I nearly forgot! Wait here.” She dashes into a palm-thatched hut and returns with a fat envelope. “I took your mats and sold them for you. The people here think you are very talented. We could have sold them twenty times over.” She grins. “If you make any more, we’d be happy to be your sales outlet.”

I gape at her, my heart swelling with gratitude.

Twenty times over. She must surely have sold them cheaply. And yet, the envelope feels heavy.

“How much is here?”

“Three thousand ringgit.”

I nearly drop the envelope.

176 Certainty rushes through me as I lift my palms to the canopy and cry tearful thanks to Allah: Tadi is alive! For how could he not be, after such a blessing?

Three thousand ringgit is more than enough for bribes and two MyKads. We will be allowed to work, to go to school. My people will have a market for their baloy. Things are looking up.

I cannot wait to plan the itinerary of all the places we will go.

Dr. Shauna O’Meara is a veterinarian, writer, and artist based in Australia. She was a winner of the 2014 Contest, and her stories have appeared in Cosmos magazine, Writers of the Future, The Worcester Journal, Midnight Echo magazine, and several Australian anthologies, including the recent Fablecroft collection In Your Face.

177 178 Standing Still Lindsay Redifer

Every morning when I wake up, I hear the town’s single mitoto pounding cassava leaves and the roar of the waves on our beach. I always check the floor to see if it’s flooded, then I swing out of bed and put on my flip-flops. I like to wake up around five in the morning; by seven we’re all sweltering.

Nosy Faly, or Happy Island, used to be called Nosy Be, Big Island. I first saw it when I came to as a Peace Corps volunteer in 2005. Back then, it was a huge tourist attraction for locals and Europeans, and one of the few places where they mixed easily. In most of the country, the pale-skinned foreigners had a tendency to squirrel themselves away in French cafes, but Nosy Be was different. Here, everyone sat down at the same table to giant plates of rice, salads of shredded carrots in vinegar, glasses of tamarind juice, and, of course, ravitoto.

It is every Malagasy person’s great joy to see a white foreigner eating their local food, but none more so than the strange, grassy-smelling dish consisting of pounded cassava leaves, fatty pork, and coconut milk all cooked together in a big pot. It’s not an attractive dish; it’s basically green sludge with chunks floating in it spooned over rice. But the taste is like nothing I’ve ever experienced: it’s wild and fresh like the country, smoky and complex; it’s salty, bitter, smooth, and even a little sweet.

179 When I first came here, I would wake up to a chorus ofravitoto sellers beating their cassava leaves in giant mortar and pestles, the sound shaking everyone out of their beds. These women had to stand while they worked so they had enough force to bring down their smooth, rounded logs into a nest of green, transforming the thick leaves into a pile of light, feathery pieces to be sold in the market. Now I just hear Larissa beating her own ravitoto all by herself. How much longer can she do this?

I go out and give Larissa a wave. She pauses for just a quick moment to wave back, and I go back in to grab some money for breakfast. I like to get a coffee and some fried dough known as mofogasy before school starts, so I have to get in line.

Mama’an Tina (it means Tina’s mom and it’s the only name she uses) is serving coffee and little dough balls as fast as she can at the counter. All the locals are jostling for plastic seats in her small café, and many are just standing and chatting. Everyone looks at me for a moment, but then they all seem to recall that I live here now and they leave me to stand and wait. The coffee smells amazing—Mama’an Tina roasts and pounds her own coffee beans, and somehow her water has none of the bleached taste we’ve all grown accustomed to over the years. I actually drool when I think of how water used to taste.

“Manahoana!”

“Manahoana neneko. Café anak iray, tsoatra.”

“Eny, eny.”

180 Mama’an Tina and I have this exact same conversation every morning. I can speak more Malagasy than this simple exchange, but the country has been so inundated with different foreigners all speaking so many different languages that the locals have given up on trying to communicate with us. I don’t push it; I’m here if anyone wants to talk.

I stand outside and sip my coffee as I stare at the ocean. I wonder if my students have gone to visit the divers like I asked. They’re usually excited to hear a story that I imagine they probably did go, but I have some back- up stories in case they didn’t. I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn to see Jose, a high school student, smiling at me.

“Hello teacher,” he starts giggling right away. Poor Jose—the guy is just so gay. I’m sure the only reason his family hasn’t forced him into a marriage with a woman is because the island can’t possibly support any more babies. In the U.S., Jose would have swapped catty comments with other young, handsome men and worked in a highbrow café or art gallery. But here he was stuck with only his Imam and his fellow Muslim boys at the mosque for company, and they were far from catty.

“Good morning, Jose.” I slurp a little more coffee. It’s extremely hot and very good. “Did you get some breakfast?”

“Oh yes,” he giggles again and touches his head just above his ear as if he were drawing back a long tendril of hair. “I eat with my mother. You don’t eat breakfast at home?”

“No, I like to come to the café.” This makes Jose laugh even more and he looks around, checking to see if anyone else heard my hilarious comment. He calms down and claps his hands together, ending his laugh.

“Teacher.” His eyes dart around. “Today is the last day to buy ravitoto.”

181 “What?”

“It is the last day.” He smiles. Jose doesn’t eat the green, grassy dish, as it’s made with pork, but he knows I love it. “You should eat all of it. You will never have it again.”

I finish my coffee and take a moment to look at Jose. Could he be telling the truth? Jose was known for being a bit of an attention monger, but he also had a knack for being up on happenings around town before anyone else.

“Jose. Are you sure? Did Larissa say that to you?”

But just then, Jose’s female friends run up to grab his arm and tell him some marvelous new joke. Soon, they’re all shrieking and laughing together, and I’ve been forgotten entirely. I take my tin coffee cup to the counter and wave goodbye to Mama’an Tina and then head out to school.

School is also a very different experience now. My first year of teaching in Madagascar, I had so many students in class that the benches they sat on would literally give out from under them, sending six of them at a time to the ground with a loud thump. I never thought I would miss those groaning, breaking seats. But my meager class would give anything to have a school so big we could put benches in it and so many friends as to break the seat.

My group of ten middle-schoolers is waiting for me at the house we use for a school before I get there. A few of them run up to hug me as I arrive, and I make sure to give each one a good, long squeeze. They all have a smoky, sharp smell that comes from burning coal for their little stoves at home, and all of their uniforms are worn as thin as paper from

182 being washed so many times. We go in and a few are already telling me about their trip to the divers’ houses.

“Teacher! Teacher! Hello, teacher!” Bienvenue, one of my tiniest students, is already jumping up and down on his bare feet with excitement. I adore him: he’s a terrible student, but he desperately wants to be an academic. If only I could grade enthusiasm.

“Good morning, Bienvenue. Did you do your homework?”

His big head topped with messy, curly hair nods excitedly. “Yes! I go to the diver house. Oh, teacher, they have a big car!”

“A car?” I direct him over to his seat in the circle and the other students gather around in their chairs so each of us can face one another. Most of them are tall enough to sit comfortably, but a couple of them are so short that their feet swing in the air above the floor. “Bienvenue, tell us about the car you saw.”

He pauses, making sure he has everyone’s attention, then looks back at me to make sure I’m equally spellbound. I am.

“The diver lady, she find a big, big car. It was white before, but now it is green. Six people go to take it from the water. Inside, there is a seat and circle for your hands. There are numbers and letters in the front for the people to read. Before the sea came up, Madagascar had many cars. They went so fast—zoom! People could go many places. But now,” he pauses, suddenly struck by a thought. He looks over at me.

“Teacher.” His face screws up as he tries to puzzle out his thought. “Who will drive a car?”

“Do you mean, who can drive a car later, when all of you are older?”

183 He nods slowly. He seems to just now be realizing he probably won’t ever ride in a car, not unless he leaves the island, and that’s highly unlikely.

“Well, most people don’t drive cars anymore. After the waves came up, many cars went into the ocean. People in every country knew they would have to find another way to travel. Here on Nosy Faly, everyone walks and rides a bike. We don’t want the waves to come back, so we do those things to keep the water happy. A lot of people died in those days and we want to keep all of you safe, so now we just look at cars. We don’t drive them.”

The group is silent for a moment. Bienvenue looks at his feet and then up at me.

“It was beautiful, the car. I want they find another one. And then more.”

I give him a smile and pat his hands.

“Maybe they will. Who else went to see the divers? Larisoa, did you go?”

Larisoa, one of my older and very adult-looking students, nods slowly. “I saw photos.”

“Oh? What did the photos look like?”

She waits a long moment and then looks at me. “Teacher,” she says, “you lived in Madagascar before? Before it was so small?”

“Yes. I lived in Maevatanana. Was that town in the photos?”

“I don’t know.” Larisoa looks down at her hands. “Maybe it was from there. I saw six women, all making ravitoto together. And I saw pictures of a market and many different kinds of food. The women selling food carried little babies in lambahoanis tied to their backs. And on the tables

184 were big plates of ravitoto. Anybody could buy it.” She looks back up at me, a bit puzzled. “That cannot be from here, correct?”

Yes, I want to say, this island used to be covered in markets, not lines of people waiting for meager portions sent over by aid organizations. Those photos are of this place.

“It’s possible.” I shift in my seat as I speak carefully. “But they could be from somewhere else. It’s difficult to know unless someone writes on the picture where it was taken. There were markets here before and lots of ravitoto. Before, it was the cheapest thing a person could buy. This is why it is so important to take care of our home. When the waves came up, the soil changed. The trees got thin and small, the fruit and the vegetables died before anyone could eat them. We have new ways to grow things now, but change takes time, so we have to be patient.” I look around the circle and think of all the processed, high-in-nutrient powders and pastes these children will need to eat in their lifetimes. I miss mangoes. I miss bananas. “If we work hard and learn more about the ocean and the best ways to take care of the Earth, maybe we can have a market like that again.”

The stories go on. Mami saw a lemur skeleton and a book, Solo saw a special chair with wheels on it, Marie got to touch a washed-up keyboard and was allowed to keep the number 8. The students pass her little grey around and ooh and ahh over the strange, bumpy texture of the plastic. I glance out the window and already I can see a huge line leading to Larissa’s house. I make a decision: I’m going to buy ravitoto for myself today, no matter how small the portion.

After our morning storytelling, the students go home for the hottest part of the day. They’ll eat with their families and then sleep for a couple of hours. I know the rest of the town will be resting as well, so I’m going to visit Larissa.

185 I walk the little path to her house and immediately I see that at least fifteen other people have had the same idea. They’re all standing and sweating. The women hold lambahoanis over their heads to get some shade, but it doesn’t do much. I stand in line behind a young man who turns back to scowl at me.

Probably just frustrated by the heat, I tell myself. I’ll let that faux pas slide.

The moment I’ve decided to be forgiving, I realize the boy and the man in front of him are discussing me and they’re not happy. They switch to French to let me know I’m meant to overhear them.

“What a greedy French woman, buying the last of our wonderful food. Isn’t she rich enough to buy fruit and greens? I saw her in the café this morning drinking coffee like a politician’s wife.”

“The French want everything. You can’t show them a beautiful cloth or nice house without having it taken away from you. Even a married man isn’t safe from their claws.”

Okay, how do I respond to all of this? First of all, I’m not French and it’s the one thing I truly hate to be called. Apparently, my face, my nose in particular, has a certain je ne sais quoi to it, and I constantly have to explain that I’m American and that’s a very different place. Sometimes people listen; usually they just roll their eyes as they walk away.

The two keep talking, glaring at me in turns over their shoulders. My own shoulders are locking up with stress. Meanwhile the temperature is rising sharply, and I pray the sunblock I put on this morning is enough. Finally, the two guys want me to confirm all their anger, and one of them makes the mistake of grabbing my arm. I wrench it away and switch the conversation back to Malagasy.

186 “Don’t touch me! Where is your brain? You don’t know why I’m here— you don’t even know that I’m American. I teach your children, I buy coffee to help others make money. Larissa is my friend and you are a waste of my time.”

The two men stand shocked, and immediately the volume on the whole situation gets turned down. In their softest voices, the two whisper their apologies and turn back to face forward. I’m shaking from the confrontation and I have to close my eyes for a moment and remind myself to breathe. Public arguments are more common now that the population of the country has all been squeezed into the small, dry space we have left, but they’re still considered a bad move. The locals hate confrontation, especially with a white woman who isn’t supposed to be speaking their language.

Slowly, everyone in line gets their tiny, tiny portion of ravitoto and then wanders away to cook their treasure for their families. I’m last and, when I stand in Larissa’s doorway, I can see just how hard she’s been working.

Everything is far too clean, which means she hasn’t cooked today. She sits on her little stool and smiles up at me with a weak expression on her face. I join her on the second stool and without asking she puts a bare foot on my lap so I can massage it for her. I oblige and dig in to her tense sole with my thumb and knuckles.

“Oh, my daughter, that is so sweet of you. Thank you.” She closes her eyes and her smile gets a little bigger. “Today was a hard day. Someone went around whispering about today being the last day to buy ravitoto. Do you know who it was?”

“You can talk to Jose about that. He went straight to the café to make sure everyone knew.”

187 “Huh.” She opens her eyes to look at me. “That boy must sit outside my window at night. He always knows my business.”

“Maybe the waves whisper to him.” We both laugh at this little joke. The thought of Jose being one of the fortune tellers who claims to know what the sea will do next after listening to the tides is truly hilarious. We can just picture him with his hair grown out in dreadlocks and seashells hanging from his wrists while he communes with the water.

“Oh, my darling,” Larissa sighs, “what am I going to do without my good friend, the American masseuse?”

“What?” I give her foot a tap and she puts it down so I can take the other one. “Where are you going?”

“To the coasts of Idaho.” She gets a sad look on her face when she says it. Madagascar is all she’s known. She grew up here back when it was Nosy Be and survived the horrible tsunamis that killed most of her friends and family. She watched the trees turn into gnarled sticks and the soil become hard and white. She learned how to grow cassava trees in large pots, but it nearly ruined her. All her money went to container farming until she had her first successful tree. Then she became famous as the only woman making ravitoto in the whole country. She’s had a long journey here. Could she ever feel at home in Idaho?

Larissa stands and goes over to her gas stove, and it clicks a few times until it lights. She and her husband also sell stores of an old fuel made from sugarcane. But very few people can afford the appliances that need the stuff, so they always have extra. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes, but my students will be back soon.”

188 “Stay for some rice. I will go to the school with you and tell the children some stories.”

“You will?” I can’t count the number of times I’ve invited Larissa to come and tell stories at the school. She’s always waved me away and gone back to her work. But I suppose she’s retired now. “They would love to hear what you have to say. I know I would.”

“First, we eat.”

Larissa boils the huge portion of rice. The bag it comes from says Pakistan, in big letters. My stomach is rumbling already. She has a little pinch of fresh, green ravitoto hiding in one of the miniature pots I see everywhere. They were originally meant to help young children learn how to cook, holding only small portions, but now adults use them to cook tiny portions of meat or the occasional vegetable. I open the miniscule lid and breathe in the fresh, cool grassy smell. It makes my head reel with memories of tall cassava trees, big, firm leaves over our heads, and birds, birds everywhere. I silently pray into the pot for a return to those days and then place the lid on top before my words can slip out.

We eat, each taking infinitesimal bites of ravitoto. Even the few nibbles I get fortify me, bring back my positivity, and make me feel like I can take on the rest of the week. Larissa tells me that she and her husband Marc have been invited by environmental specialists to a site in Idaho where specialists are working with the new coastline and farmers are learning how to grow trees out of the soil.

“You know,” I say with a full mouth, “I’m from Idaho. I was there when the new coast formed.”

“Are you?” She’s not interested. Coincidences aren’t something that resonate with people here. “Is your family there?”

189 I shake my head no. We just look at one another for a moment and then change the subject.

“Finish your food. Your students are waiting.”

When we get to the school house, only half of my class has returned. Word must have gotten out that I yelled at the two men in the ravitoto line. It is so easy to lose one’s standing in this community. I once sat next to a single man in the café by mistake and my students avoided me for a week.

Bienvenue is one of those who returned, of course.

“Oh, teacher,” he wags his finger at me, but he’s smiling. “You are very masika. Very, very masika.”

“I’m spicy?”

“Yes!” He touches my skin and pretends it’s burning his hand. “Oh! Too hot! The teacher is too hot!” His joke sends him into a laughing fit and a couple of his friends join in the joke. I hold out my arms so everyone can feel how hot I am and they all run up quickly to touch them and then run away with their pretend injuries.

After they get a chance to play, I tell them Larissa has stories to share and they immediately gather around her. She’s familiar with all of them, so she gets even more hugs than I do. She asks about all of their relatives and for all the news, and then listens while they all recount their adventures at the diving school. It takes ages, but she’s glowing while they talk. Larissa never had any children. After the devastation of her country, she decided not to be a mother but to focus on making sure everyone got fed.

190 “Okay, class.” I raise my hands for their attention. “If we want to listen to Larissa, we have to sit in a circle and show her our listening ears.” The scramble to their seats, pulling their chairs close and then turning their heads from side to side so that we can see how clean and attentive their ears are. Larissa takes the ear inspection seriously.

“Do I see a seashell in your ear?” No, no shells! “Are you certain? I can hear the ocean coming from somewhere—I think it’s your ear.” This joke is an enormous hit and they all rock back and forth with laughter, some jumping up to check around the group and insisting they see a shell lodged in a classmate’s ear.

“Well, you know, we used to love seashells. We collected them and sold them to tourists when I was your age. Yes, people paid for things from the sea back then. We had restaurants that sold spicy fish with rice—my mother ran a beautiful one that everyone loved, especially the rich French people. She always made sure to give them a different menu with higher prices. Even when they saw that they had been tricked, they didn’t care. Once they tasted my mother’s food, they were happy to pay whatever she asked.

“My job when I was twelve years old was to walk along the shore with my brother. My brother was small, much smaller than I, but he loved the sea. He loved to climb the big rocks on the west side of the island and watch the waves below. Every time I see a big one hit the shore and spray out, I think of him and how he would clap when he saw them like it was a special show.

“We took what we found back to my mother’s restaurant and walked around between the tables. Mother would pretend we were sad little orphans that she fed and taught us what to say if someone asked where

191 we lived. We live under a tree, we would say. We haven’t seen our mother for a long time. Would you like a shell? Mother would cluck at us and shake her head. Isn’t it sad? They’re all alone. People couldn’t give us their money fast enough.

“So, we always had food to eat and beds to sleep in. My father played the guitar and would sing for us in the evenings. I can hardly talk about it without crying now; he sang so beautifully. I will never forget the day his guitar was smashed to bits in a storm—it was the last thing I had from him, and when I lost it I sobbed. Everyone scolded me for being so silly over a musical instrument, but they didn’t understand. That guitar was my father. It meant the world to me.

“Watching my country wash away was like that. Everything I knew changed. The mangoes we always had were suddenly gone. Even the trees had none. We heard news that the other parts of the country were underwater and at first we didn’t believe it. How was it possible? Madagascar is so big and Nosy Faly, which we called Nosy Be back then, is only a small part. But, we believed it when people started rowing over in boats, desperate for help and begging for a place to live.

“We took in as many people as we could, but soon we had to start refusing. I don’t know what happened to the ones we couldn’t help; they turned and rowed away. Africa was a long boat ride from here even before the waves came, and surely it’s much further now. It’s possible they were swallowed up by the sea.

“Everyone had to give up everything. We lost all of our electricity, so no one could watch TV or listen to the radio, something we used to do every day. We had no way of knowing what was happening in other parts of the country or around the world. We couldn’t even use generators, as petrol had been declared illegal. I missed my TV shows

192 so much. I know it’s a silly thing, but I truly loved the programs I used to watch. The people in them were fun and interesting, and I missed them when they left.”

The children listen to her with their heads to the side and their eyebrows knitted together. They try hard to picture things like guitars and televisions, but the only way they could see these things was at the scrap yard at the diving school—junky relics from the water.

Larisoa raises her hand and Larissa motions to her. “Larissa,” she asks, “how is it that you have so many trees?”

“Oh, I can tell you. After I lost everything, I had nothing to do. There was no restaurant, no tourists to buy shells. So, I was wandering around being sad and imagining I heard my family just behind me or around the corner. It was a terrible time. Then, some farmers who had come over on a boat were walking on the street behind me and talking about a new way of growing plants. I listened to them because it gave me a break from my sadness, and then I kept listening because what they were saying was very fascinating. They had a way to grow a tree without the ground. I had never seen this and I thought they must be lying, but I was too curious not to find out, and my curiosity led me out the door the next day.

“I found two of the farmers and told them I wanted to learn how to grow trees. They weren’t too keen on teaching me—they thought my family would object. But I explained I had no family and they agreed to teach me. They showed me how to use old, rotted food to make food for plants and soil and how to put holes in a pot so that the tree roots can drain and breathe. It was very interesting. We worked together for several months and my first few trees died, which crushed me. But they told me not worry, to keep trying. The world needs people who can grow things, they told me. This is important.

193 “And now,” she says, looking around at all the sweet faces, “I am anxious to find some students to teach about farming. I need to make sure the island still has cassava even after I go.”

The news floors them.

“You’re leaving? No! Don’t go! What will we do? How can you leave? It’s a bad time to travel. You should stay here with us.”

“To show Larissa how much we’ll miss her,” I interject, “why don’t we let her show us how she grows trees? I bet some of you would be wonderful growers.”

The students all look down, embarrassed and shy. “Teacher,” Bienvenue says, “we don’t know anything about plants.”

“And that’s why you need a teacher.” Larissa stands and looks around the group. “Tomorrow you are all coming to my house to learn how to grow a tree from a tiny little seed. And you are going to see that you do know something about growing. It is in your blood. You are Malagasy.”

When we go out, the sun has set and the full moon is out. The silver light is so bright that everyone is outside of their homes telling stories. Larissa and I hug the children goodbye and watch them leave.

“When will you go?”

“In two weeks. I have to make sure I leave some experienced farmers behind me.” She turns her weathered face to me. “You will have to be one of them.”

194 The thought of a tree in front of my house makes my heart race. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I am thrilled that she trusts me. I nod and we hug each other so tightly that it hurts my arms. I don’t let go, I just hug her tighter and she does the same. We stay like that for as long as we can, listening to the rising ocean lap closer and closer to our feet, desperately trying to hold on to that ground beneath our feet.

Lindsay Redifer is a ghostwriter and aspiring science fiction writer living in Guadalajara, Mexico. She is currently teaching creative writing to high school students and writing as a freelancer. She is from Nampa, Idaho and is an avid reader of science fiction, which she maintains is the only genre worth reading.

195 196 Into the Storm Yakos Spiliotopoulos

Anwar shudders every time he hears the emphatic footsteps of soldiers marching up and down the halls outside. He knows that they are either with him, or coming for him.

Hail and wind lash the cast-iron windows in short, angry bursts. Anwar paces, nervously chafing at the scar on the back of his neck. Every step echoes in the dim, cavernous room on Parliament Hill where he waits. Normally, this is a room where committees meet. Where laws are drafted. Where legacies are made. But tonight nothing is normal.

Footsteps outside. A sharp knock. Anwar quickly composes himself.

“Come in,” he says, brusquely.

One of the double doors opens, just enough for Lieutenant Rosseau to enter, salute, and stand at attention. Anwar can only make out a silhouette against the bright light pouring in from the hall, but he knows it’s Rosseau—his broad shoulders and thick head are unmistakable.

“Mr. Fitzpatrick’s convoy just arrived, sir.”

“Bring him up.”

“Yes sir.”

197 Rosseau shows himself out, closing the door behind him. Anwar walks toward the lofty bookshelves lining the walls on either side of the fireplace. He scans the leather-bound volumes of codified law stretching all the way up to the ornate ceiling. His gaze shifts to the mirror on the fireplace mantle. He straightens his beige and green tie, and examines the side of his head where some of the short black hairs are graying. He catches his hazel eyes in the mirror and it startles him, as if someone else is staring back. He abruptly turns and walks toward the windows and looks out into the Ottawa night. Not a single person on the streets. Streetlamps illuminate thick streams of rain and hail blowing violently through the small orbits they manage to light. He can barely make out the military vehicles occupying the streets below.

Footsteps outside the room. Voices, commotion. The door swings open with no knock. In charges Henry Fitzpatrick, trailed by Lieutenant Rosseau and the two armed guards who were stationed outside the door.

“What the hell are you up to?” Henry shouts.

The guards grab Henry’s arms, but Anwar raises a calm hand and they release him. Henry shakes loose. “Why are soldiers occupying my home and escorting me away from my family in the middle of a hurricane? And taking all our phones and computers away?”

Even in the dim light, Anwar can see that Henry’s thick gray hair is dishevelled, his eyes languid, his sunken, pale cheeks especially veiny. He is wearing blue jeans and a green sweater with a zipper at the top— far from the usual bespoke suits and flawless complexion he presents every day to Parliament and the media as Leader of the Opposition.

“Thank you for coming tonight,” Anwar says, equanimously.

“I didn’t have a choice.”

198 “Please. Sit down.”

“I’d rather stand. But you can excuse the heavily armed men behind me.”

Anwar nods, and waves Rosseau and the two soldiers away. They salute and leave the room. Henry looks on, bewildered.

“Why the hell are they saluting you?”

Anwar says nothing as he slowly walks to the conference table. A flash of lightning illuminates the room. Loud thunder follows, rattling the windows.

“I don’t like the atmosphere around here,” Henry says, eying Anwar. “I have suspicions about what might be going on.”

“What do you think is going on?” Anwar says, pulling up a chair next to the head of the long conference table and gesturing for Henry to sit.

“There’s a hurricane out there,” Henry begins, taking the seat at the head of the table. “So nobody is suspicious about the military being around. Communications are down, or could be downed, without arousing much suspicion either. It could really leave our capital very vulnerable.”

More flashes of lightning. They illuminate Henry’s light blue eyes.

“We’re taking control,” Anwar says. “Tonight. In a few minutes, we’re going to arrest the Prime Minister and senior members of his cabinet. We will immediately establish a democratic government, which will operate with strict environmental protections embedded in a new constitution that will include everything that I campaigned on last year.”

“Everything you campaigned on only got you 18% of the popular vote.”

199 “Because I was outspent. We were outspent. The PM bought that election with filthy money.”

Henry remains silent for a long while. The ceaseless whistling of the wind and the clatter of hail against the windows feel very loud to both men.

“I’ve known for some time that you were a risk taker,” Henry finally says. “But going from eccentric suits and ties to overthrowing one of the world’s oldest and most stable democracies? You’re out of your mind.”

“What’s stable about a democracy that has failed to prevent global warming and irreparable environmental destruction? Just look outside: this is our fourth hurricane this season alone. Hurricanes in Ottawa, for God’s sake. It’s not just symbolic that we’re taking control on a night like this; it’s downright necessary.”

Henry shakes his head and rubs his temples with both elbows on the table—a classic gesture of his, often captured by the cameras.

“How do you even think you’ll get close to the PM?”

“His security team is with us.”

That silences Henry.

“Even so,” says Henry, “the moment you move on the PM, the world will come down hard on you. The U.S., maybe even Britain, will invade us.”

“Stop living in the past. and half the U.K. are under water, and the U.S. government, led by its reality TV star President, can’t afford to fortify or even evacuate people out of New York and all the other coastal areas that are flooded. And over in the west they’ve run out of water

200 altogether. We’re taking in American refugees. That country is literally swamped and bone dry all at the same time.”

“You’re greatly underestimating the ramifications of your actions.”

The pitch of the howling wind rises, and the hail assaults the windows with added fury.

“I have key military people on my side. And I expect the full cooperation of our entire armed forces by the end of the night. That will deter any interested parties from intervening.”

“Who are your key military people? I noticed Rosseau just now. He’s one of General Campbell’s men, isn’t he? You do remember that Campbell is under investigation for misuse of government funds.”

“As I said, I have top military people on board. And my own party will back me. But Henry, I need you. You’re the Leader of the Opposition, and someone who campaigned hard against…”

“Not a chance,” he says, pointing at Anwar. “You’re committing treason right now, and I’m not going down this road. You’ll be lucky to come out of this with your life.”

“This isn’t treason. Our democracy is broken. You said as much when Parliament was shut down last week—this time, the PM’s excuse was the storm.”

“Shutting down Parliament is a vexing, but longstanding right of any legitimate government…”

“Wake up, man!” Anwar shouts, pounding the table and standing up. “Everything longstanding and traditional has resulted in full glacier

201 collapse in the Arctic, and now the Antarctic. Our cities, and some countries for God’s sake, are under water. Four plants have been overrun by the oceans—that’s four A-bombs that have gone off. And worst of all, there are corporations and wealthy individuals out there right now profiting from all of this, and paying our government big campaign dollars to stay silent for just a little while longer. And you talk about tradition? The only thing tradition has done is bring us right here, to this room. This is our moment. We can do this, Henry. Think about your wife. Your kids.”

“You’re not married, and you don’t have kids,” Henry says, standing and pointing at Anwar. “You’re out of your depth.”

“Hey! The village I grew up in just got evacuated and is close to being wiped off the map, so don’t tell me I don’t have anything at stake here. But then, you wouldn’t understand that, with all the Toronto real estate you inherited.”

“Don’t you start with…”

“And besides, I don’t need a wife and kids to know that you could be a hero to them, and to our country and the planet, if you join us.”

“I’m no good to my wife and kids if I’m dead or in prison.”

“We will not fail,” Anwar says, pounding the table with each word. “We will succeed. With or without you, this is going to happen. You need to decide right now. Are you in or out?”

Henry takes a deep breath and shakes his head. He turns and walks toward the double doors.

“You’re not leaving,” Anwar says, grimly.

202 Henry stops, pauses, and turns around.

“When I said think of your wife and kids, I meant it. There are men with guns in your living room right now. This is your last chance. Are you with us or not?”

“You’re bluffing,” he says, turning toward the doors.

“Guards!” Anwar shouts. The doors open and the two soldiers quickly enter. “Take this man to a holding cell.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Henry shouts. A vein protrudes from his crimson forehead as he struggles with the guards. They easily subdue him, and he is escorted out, past Rosseau, who stands inside the doors.

“General Campbell wants to know how things went.”

“How do you think they went?” Anwar shouts.

Rosseau says nothing.

“Tell General Campbell to initiate the plan.”

“Yes sir. The General wants you to wait here until everyone has been detained. He says it’s the safest way. More guards are already outside.”

Anwar nods. Rosseau salutes and exits.

Anwar slumps into a deep armchair in front of the fireplace. He rubs the scar at the back of his neck and listens as the hurricane pummels the windows. He closes his eyes.

“Put that on,” his father shouts in Farsi, dumping a life jacket at his son’s feet.

203 Anwar has trouble balancing himself on the swaying, slippery dock with the wind and rain as powerful as they are. He looks out at the enormous white waves crashing down on the cold Newfoundland shores beyond the cove.

“But Baba, the ocean is angry,” Anwar shouts, straining to be heard over the storm.

“So am I,” his father shouts back. He kneels in front of Anwar, wraps his hand around his neck and draws him closer. Anwar winces in pain. His father’s hand is pushing on the fresh bandage on his neck.

“This pain in your neck,” his father shouts. “It’s you that caused it. You let those kids scare you.”

“But Baba…”

“If we’re going to succeed here, we can’t be scared. Of anything. Not those kids, not even this ocean.”

He stands and turns to face the angry waters. He raises the hood over his orange fisherman’s overalls.

“When your mother left, I took the boat out on a day just like this. It showed me that I could face anything. If you do this today, you can face those kids.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“You have to want to go,” he shouts, his unshaven face dripping from the rain.

204 He shoves the life jacket into Anwar’s chest, and the boy puts it on over his coat. He lifts Anwar into the small, billowing vessel, climbs aboard, and nudges his son into the wheelhouse. He unfastens the rope tying them to the dock, joins Anwar in the wheelhouse, and steers the boat towards the raging waters outside the horseshoe-shaped cove.

“Baba, don’t.” Anwar shouts, trying to turn the wheel. But he tears Anwar’s hand away and increases the speed. The wipers can’t keep up with the hard rain, but Anwar can still make out the waves crashing at full force into the rocks sheltering the cove.

Anwar runs outside and jumps off the back of the boat. The water is so cold that it numbs his body almost immediately. He faintly hears his father shouting, and sees the boat turning. He is barely conscious when he is drawn out of the water with the fishing net and dumped onto the wet deck.

Knocks at the door. Anwar rises from his chair. He glances at the windows, then at the doors.

He is ready.

Yakos Spiliotopoulos was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. He has published several short stories in journals such as Exile: The Literary Quarterly and The Nashwaak Review, and was shortlisted for the Litpop Awards, the Exile/Vanderbilt Short Story Contest, and the Writers Union of Canada Short Prose Competition. He recently completed his first novel and is working on a second.

205 206 Praying for Rain: An Interview with Paolo Bacigalupi Ed Finn

Paolo Bacigalupi is -bestselling author of novels for adults including (2015) and (2009), and novels for young adults including Ship Breaker (2010) and its sequel The Drowned Cities (2012). Paolo is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, Michael L. Printz, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards, alongside awards in , Spain, Germany, and France.

In September 2015, Paolo visited Arizona State University to deliver our annual Imagination and Climate Futures Lecture. During his visit, he sat down with me for a conversation about the emotions he tries to provoke with his writing, the push-and-pull between optimism and pessimism in imagining possible futures, and the power of storytelling to shape our responses to climate change.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ed Finn: Why is fiction such a powerful tool for helping us understand the enormity of climate change and how to confront it?

Paolo Bacigalupi: Fiction is able to move you past the political identity debates. A lot of times, I can set a story in a future where the world is already broken by climate change. I don’t need to have characters

207 representing the green perspective versus the industrial perspective. I can just have a bunch of characters who run around in a devastated world. That fictional world makes the argument about how serious climate change is, so the characters don’t have to. And that means that you can tell stories to people who otherwise would be completely unwilling to look at climate change, or take it seriously. They may start out in the funhouse playroom of the broken future, saying, “Hey, it’s just an story.” But you can also make the argument that there are a lot of trend lines around this that are troubling.

So that’s first thing: you can break through those really strongly constructed identity barriers that we have around hot-button topics like climate change and get in the reader’s head, despite their other political leanings.

Beyond that, fiction has this superpower of creating empathy in people for alien experiences. You can live inside of the skin of a person who is utterly unlike you. And if I can live inside of the skin of somebody who is a different gender or a different race or from a different class background and suddenly imbibe their concerns and live inside of their concerns, that’s really powerful.

Writing science fiction also means that you can extend out into the future. You can create that empathy into the fourth dimension for a future version of yourself, or empathy for the life your child may inherit. You get to live inside of the skin of a climate refugee as they drag themselves across New Mexico, hated by all the New Mexicans, blown out of Texas by droughts and flooding and hurricanes. You get to live that sense of displacement, and then you get to live that sense of loss, and the struggle of trying to find a new place and a new land. All of that is an opportunity to let a reader experience the consequences of our

208 failure in the present, our failure to create a good future for that person who they will then identify with and connect to.

Fiction has this power to engage us with a set of consequences that we otherwise would discount. We tend to weight our present prosperity over our future costs, and so we discount future risk quite a lot. Fiction is a way to build up that sense of risk in a future scenario.

EF: What kinds of emotions are you hoping to provoke in your readers when you’re writing about climate change and other environmental challenges?

PB: What I’m really aiming for is to provoke a sense of anxiety. I’m trying to create a feeling that after you’ve read a book like The Water Knife, you will come back into your present moment and look around at the world differently.

I’m hoping that in the moment, you actually are having a fair amount of pleasure. You’re excited about the gun battles and you have that frozen-chill sense of “is this character going to make it out alive?” Both the triumphs and failures of the characters should be really engaging, and you’re fascinated by this world that’s broken but also kind of weird— all the different layers are there, provoking fascination and interest.

But afterwards, there’s another set of emotional reactions that I’m looking for. When you close the book and return to this present moment from that future broken world, I’m hoping that you’re going to look around and see your world differently—that the present moment will be re-contextualized.

And so when you open up a newspaper and you’re reading about a water rights fight between cities in California and farmers, suddenly you’re like,

209 “Oh, water rights, those exist. I remember how water rights work. Oh, this is actually happening right now. People are engaged in zero-sum fights over who gets the water and where it goes.”

EF: How do you grapple with scientific literature and scientific research? How do you use it and what role does it play in your writing?

PB: Usually, I’m looking for a couple of data points that seem to indicate a trend. For The Water Knife, there were two data points that were really powerful to me. They were both inspired by Texas.

In 2011, I was down in Texas during their drought and it was extraordinarily bad. The land couldn’t support the cattle. The crops were dying. You were seeing towns that were having to pump and truck in water. You were seeing rolling brownouts because they didn’t have enough water in their dams and so they didn’t have enough hydroelectricity. There were all these weird synergistic things happening and it was all really bad.

You see that stuff happening and you can go and look at climate models that say, “Yeah, this looks like the new normal for Texas in the future.” So you’re looking at the data, and you have this emotional experience of your own where you’re heat stroking in 100-degree weather and you’re like, “This is troubling to me.”

But then there’s another layer too where you have politicians in Texas holding prayer circles and praying for rain. That’s not scientific data, that’s social data, and it’s also really useful.

You put those two pieces of information together and you say, “You know, all of our climate data says that we are moving towards drier, more extreme weather for the southwestern United States.” And

210 then you also have this other piece of data that says our leadership is completely disengaged, that they are engaged in magical thinking.

The core function of science fiction is to look at some moment and say, “If this goes on, what will the world look like? If this trend continues and becomes exacerbated, what will happen?” And then you go spin out that extrapolation in a story.

So for me, each piece of data is a jumping-off point to start saying, “What if? What if? What if? Ask that next question.”

EF: When you extrapolate into the future and come up with stories, they tend to be fairly pessimistic. What is the role of optimism? How should we be engaging with the future? What’s the best way to use our capacity for imagination to think about the world?

PB: The reason I tend to write pessimistic futures is because none of the data that I’m seeing says that we’re doing anything that earns us a hopeful future. One of the things that I’m concerned about is writing consolatory fiction, something that you can snuggle up to and say to yourself, “Oh, yeah, things are bad, but we’re such clever monkeys. Somebody is going to figure it out. Technology always finds a way. We’ve always gotten out of the frying pan before.” There’s an assumption that, well, it hasn’t screwed us up yet and we’ve always expanded and always become more healthy and wealthy and wise, so it’s always going to go this way.

There’s a complacency there, and I particularly feel it in the technophilic can-do space where it’s like, “Eh, don’t sweat it. The markets will take care of it. We’ll eventually come up with a new solution.” Our marketplaces often solve the wrong problems. They don’t tend to be interested in solving root causes. They tend to put Band-Aids on

211 symptoms. That’s why you see people wearing dust masks in Beijing and other heavily polluted cities. You don’t get rid of the factories or deal with the air pollution. You give everybody dust masks, and you sell them and then you accessorize them and then you make them a brand name item and you make a lot of money off of them. That’s kind of what capitalist markets do.

In The Water Knife, you see the same thing with Clearsacs. It’s not like, “Oh, we need to get together and collectively solve our water infrastructure and over-building problems.” Instead, we’re going to have everybody buy these bags that they can pee into, and they can drink their own pee. And now some corporation is going to sell these by the millions.

So the problem that we solve is not necessarily the right one. In my mind, our marketplaces tend to solve all the wrong problems. So part of it is that I have a cynical understanding of how our society engages with big social issues and how we use our markets and capitalism to do that. And some of it is that I just feel like we’re stupid as a species and as a society.

The idea that you can create a future that assures people that things will be fine, and that is fundamentally fair, is as magical as praying for rain and just as stupid. That’s part of what I’m concerned about: that I could write a future that’s hopeful in way that we haven’t earned yet. We haven’t done the hard work.

EF: Do you approach these issues of optimism and pessimism in the same way in your young adult novels?

PB: When I’m writing for young adults, I do think about this slightly differently. Science fiction creates these interesting mythologies, these

212 things that people think we can live into. And in some cases, we can. In some cases, kids who grew up reading about rocket go on to become NASA scientists and build rocket ships.

The idea that a science fiction writer can imagine something and then an engineer will glom onto it and create that thing, that you can instantiate reality simply by imagining it, is pretty powerful. I always get chills when I think about that kind of thing, and you see it happening again and again in science fiction. You see Arthur C. Clarke imagining communication satellites, then we have communication satellites. You see Neal Stephenson creating the Metaverse in his novel Snow Crash, and suddenly we have Second Life.

When I’m writing for young people, I do think about that. And that was certainly what I was thinking about when I was writing Ship Breaker, where I wanted to create futuristic technologies that were optimistic— to make wind power look really exciting and really sexy and really sleek and really innovative and all the things that a wind turbine isn’t.

For me, the answer was to create these beautiful, high-tech ships. It’s a new age of sail in the future. Oil has run out, the world is wrecked, but we’ve created these amazing ships and there’s a new global economy getting going all based on sail.

It’s as if we suddenly put all of our innovative energy into materials science and physics. What kind of cargo would you create, knowing everything that we know about physics and materials science now? You’d have carbon fiber hulls, you’d have high-altitude parasails, you’d have hydrofoils. There are all these amazing technologies that you could combine and suddenly a clipper ship is a pretty fast, sleek, high-tech thing. It’s as exciting as a Ferrari, and that was the objective: to create that aspirational object, and wait and see what people make of it.

213 EF: Great works of science fiction often create new terms for describing strange and unexpected realities, from George Orwell’s Big Brother to Ursula Le Guin’s and William Gibson’s cyberspace. How can the language of science fiction help us get a handle on climate change and other complex environmental challenges?

PB: One of the things I feel like I’m bad at, that I want to work on more, is this challenge of creating a new vocabulary. As a global society, a global species, I feel like we don’t have the words to describe the kinds of impacts that we’re seeing on a global scale, with climate change and other complex phenomena.

One of the big ones is that I’m still hunting for is a word for a huge, slow-moving risk that starts in the past and then comes to bear on you twenty years in the future, and yet it is a definite danger. There is something coming. It’s not here yet. We collectively create it and it’s really bad.

Imagine if we had a noun for that, if that’s a “boogum-boogum.” The boogum-boogum is coming for you. You can go look around and there’s a fair number of boogum-boogums, actually. If we had that word, we could say yes, we know about those. We can see how global societies and lots of people all collectively contributing to some tragedy of the commons is an existential risk to the species, to the planet. If we had a set of terms to engage with those phenomena, if we could describe that reality, then maybe we would also be able to more successfully manipulate that reality. We’d know that whenever we create this boogum-boogum thing, that we all need to get together and not let it destroy us.

214 Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. He is the author of What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (2017) and co- editor of Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers and Creators of All Kinds (2017) and Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (2014).

215 A Note on the Illustrations Matt Phan

Many of the works in this anthology touch on the issue of a rising sea level, so I chose to create a series of progressive topographic maps to illustrate this concept. As the reader continues through the book, the sea level rises story after story, until only slivers of land remain. I wanted the illustrations to abstractly resemble a topographic map, so that readers perceive them just as illustrations, rather than searching for information within them as if they were functional maps.

Matt Phan is currently a senior at Arizona State University, where he studies Visual Communication Design and French.

216 Typography Cover Title: Avenir Heavy 48pt Cover Subtitle: Avenir Medium Oblique 16pt Cover Heading: Avenir Black 8pt Cover Subheading: Avenir Medium 13pt Contents Chapter Title: Minion Pro Regular 12pt Contents Chapter Subtitle: Minion Pro Italic 9pt Title: Avenir Medium 20pt Subtitle: Avenir Medium Oblique 12pt Text: Minion Pro Regular 9pt Small Text: Minion Pro Regular 7pt

Software Adobe InDesign CS6 version 8.0

Computer iMac (27-inch, late 2012) 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5 16GB 1600 MHz DDR3 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M 512 MB

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