The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  She picked through her belongings, deciding what to bring and what to leave. The keepers she bundled inside triple layers of old plastic bags, hoping they wouldn’t soak through. Cash that Toomie had given her. A few changes of clothes. Clearsacs and energy bars. The old heavy paper book that Mike Ratan had given her and that she’d taken on impulse.

  She weighed the book in her hand. It was heavy, and the swim was far.

  Really, she should have tried to sell it. Ratan had said she could sell it. Money she could carry—a book she couldn’t.

  She squatted on the banks of the water, looking across. Somewhere over there people would be waiting for her. People whose job it was to try to catch her.

  She stared at the distant shore. They’d be wearing black, too, she thought. They’d try to blend in as well.

  She squatted down to watch the shore.

  I’ll look for an hour. If nothing moves in an hour, I’ll cross.

  CHAPTER 43

  “So you just handed over millions of dollars’ worth of water rights.”

  “Billions probably. Imperial Valley agriculture is worth that much alone.”

  “And you just let her walk right out with it,” Lucy goaded.

  “I had Calies on me at the time. I wasn’t worried about some paper book.”

  Lucy laughed. “No wonder your boss is trying to drop missiles on you. It does sound like a fake excuse.”

  They were staked out just outside the Taiyang as a dust storm blew in and shook the rusted truck that Angel had insisted they trade Charlene for, after heisting the Calies’ SUV and leaving them marooned in the distant subdivision.

  He was slumped against the door, eyes closed, cradling a sac of medical nutrients. He breathed shallowly as the growth stimulants slowly trickled into his veins.

  “You would have let her walk out with the book, too,” he said. “It’s wallpaper. Every water manager, every bureaucrat—even you got that damn book. All of you with your nice hard-copy first editions, all of you pretending you know shit.” He opened his eyes blearily. “Acting like you all saw this shit coming.”

  He closed his eyes again and slumped back against the door. “That guy Reisner, now. That man saw things. He looked. All these people now, though? The ones who put that book up like a trophy? They’re the ones who stood by and let it all happen. They call him one of their prophets now. But they weren’t listening back then. Back then no one gave a shit about what that man said.” He squeezed the sac dry and detached it from the needle in his arm. “We got any more of these sacs?”

  “You’ve already pumped three.”

  “I did?”

  “Christ. You’re a mess. You need to rest.”

  “I need to find those rights. Just keep your eyes out for the pupusa man. The girl said she had a friend who was a pupusa man.”

  “You can’t just jack up on growth stimulants and think you’re going to heal.”

  “I can’t let that girl go and think I’m going to live.”

  “Don’t you find it kind of ironic that a Texas refugee holds the key to your survival?”

  Angel gave her a dirty look. “Are you enjoying this?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  There had been times as a journalist when Lucy had felt that she was scrabbling around on the outside of a story, trying to ascertain truth through dust-caked windows, but all she’d been able to discern had been the shadow play.

  She could make guesses as to what all the power players were doing, and why, but she had never known. And in many cases she came away without any sense of meaning at all.

  Someone like Jamie died.

  A politician sold his stock in the Taiyang.

  Ray Torres told her to walk away from reporting about a certain body.

  She often reported events but seldom saw through the dust-caked window to the underlying motivations. She’d always assumed that there was more to the story and that the power players were just too good at hiding it from her.

  But now as they sat outside the Taiyang in a gathering dust storm, she was getting an entirely different sense of the world.

  They have no idea what they’re doing. These are the people who are supposed to be pulling all the strings, and they’re making it up as they go along.

  “Wake me up if you see the pupusa guy.” Angel closed his eyes.

  Pupusas. The fate of states and towns and cities and farms hung on whether a pupusa man showed up for work in the middle of a dust storm.

  It was as strange and bizarre as the story of the charred neighborhoods south of Phoenix, all razed because of an assassination gone wrong.

  Fires still guttered in the hills of South Mountain Park, old saguaros that should have been impervious to fire, burning merrily away. All because some bureaucrat up in Las Vegas had decided that one of her water knives had double-crossed her.

  And then there was Angel. Half-mad with fever and the conviction that if he could just find the right gift for the Queen of the Colorado, he could return to her good graces.

  It would have been a comedy, if so many people’s lives hadn’t hung in the balance.

  “You know, it’s probably burned up by now, and all the papers with it.”

  Angel opened his eyes. “I’m trying to be optimistic here.”

  “What are you going to do with those papers when you get them?”

  “Get them to my boss. Why?” His face was flushed and sweaty as he peered through the muddy air to where a bunch of vendors were setting up carts.

  “You’re seriously going to give them to the lady who dropped a missile on your head?”

  “Two missiles. That wasn’t personal.”

  “You know, if you had those rights, you could give them to Phoenix.”

  “Why the fuck would I do that?”

  Lucy waved out at the shredded city, enveloped in increasing dust haze. “They could use the help.”

  Angel laughed and closed his eyes again. “Phoenix is dead. Anyway, Catherine Case will hunt me to the ends of the earth if I don’t come up with those rights. No way I’m taking a bullet for Phoenix.”

  “Even if it would stop all this suffering?”

  “I ain’t Jesus Christ. I got no need to be a martyr. And definitely not for Phoenix. Anyway, everyone’s suffering. Everywhere. That’s just the way it is.”

  “What about these people here, though?”

  But he was already asleep, hunched around the last sac of nutrient formula. Asleep, he looked shockingly harmless. Just a tired man who had been through the same meat grinder as everyone else.

  Lucy remembered how doubtful Charlene had been when they’d shown up in the Calies’ SUV looking to trade it out. Warning her that they weren’t doing her much of a favor, because Angel was sure there would be trackers in the vehicle, and as soon as the Calies made contact with their bosses, they’d be hunting for it.

  That hadn’t bothered Charlene at all, but still, she’d had questions. “Are you sure about this?” she’d asked Lucy. “Is it worth it?”

  She’d been covered with soot from a salvage operation, trying to put together more new housing after the burnout of the riots, and when she asked, she acted as if she were talking about the trade. But Lucy knew she was really talking about Angel, who had already crawled into Charlene’s truck, where he’d jammed the first needle of medical growth stimulant into a vein and was now slumped over in the seat, nearly unconscious, cradling the sac as it dripped into him.

  Is it?

  The biggest story of her career. Was it worth the risk?

  But God, what a story. Just the tick-tock eyewitness account of how half of Phoenix had burned because of a failed assassination was gold. Let alone the rest of it.

  And yet here was Charlene, still in her head, asking her if it was worth it. Another story. Another scoop. More hits. More click-thru. More revenue. And for what?

  #PhoenixDowntheTubes?

  “He’s dangerous,” Charlene had observed.

  “He�
�s not all bad. Anyway, he can barely lift his arms right now.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You and him…”

  “I’m a big girl. Trust me, I can handle him.” Lucy had shown Charlene the pistol she’d taken from the Calies. “I’m armed and I’m dangerous.” Which had made Charlene grin wide, showing her missing front teeth.

  “Now I feel better.”

  The gun made Lucy feel better, too, sitting beside the sleeping water knife. The dust storm buffeted the truck, and as it thickened, it felt as if she were in a strange cocoon, wrapped away from the storm. The dust filters wheezed quietly, cleaning the air. After all the bags of medical nutrients, he looked almost human. Drawn but functional.

  “Gotta love modern medicine,” he’d said as he’d squeezed the first sac dry. “If I had this juice back when I was younger, I bet I wouldn’t even have scars.”

  Another gust of wind shook the truck. Outside it looked as if Phoenix were about to become the next Hohokam civilization.

  Above them on the street, a PHOENIX RISING billboard glowed, but the winds seemed to be short-circuiting the screen. It kept flickering—some kind of electrical short. It was irritating, because the flicker occurred without pattern. On for a moment. Then dying. Then back on again, blazing, before going into a dim-flicker flutter for a few seconds.

  Behind the billboard the Taiyang Arcology rose, banks of glass offices and the bright lights of full-spectrum grow lamps blazing over its vertical farm sections. None of the lights in the Taiyang flickered. The people who lived and worked in there might not even know the storm was brewing. Cool and comfortable behind their air filters, with their A/C and water recycling, they might not even care that the world was falling apart outside their windows.

  The Taiyang had survived the fires and riots, and even now it continued its construction expansion, despite the dust storm that enveloped it.

  A girl stumbled past in the storm, delicate, leaning against the winds. Hispanic. Her face covered by salvaged cloth, squinting against the dust.

  “Is that the girl you want?” Lucy nudged Angel.

  He opened bleary eyes. “No. Only if she’s with a pupusa man.”

  “If he shows up at all today.”

  “He’ll show.” Angel waved out through the windshield to the Taiyang’s construction, where headlamp beams played wildly in the storm. “As long as those workers show up, he’ll show, too.”

  All the workers would be wearing full-head dust masks today, breathing wet exhalations over and over, but Angel was right. They were all here, despite the storm.

  “You’ll see,” he said. “He’ll come. The man’s got to eat.”

  “We just got dug out of the last one, and now we’ve got another,” Lucy said. “You’d think at some point we’d catch a break.”

  “I don’t think we get any more breaks. From here on out, it’s just one big dust storm.”

  “Hohokam,” Lucy said at the same time as Angel said, “All used up.”

  They exchanged wry glances.

  “It makes you wonder what people will call us when archaeologists dig us up in another couple thousand years,” Lucy said. “Will they have some word for us? For this time period? Will we be Federalists, because the country was still working? Or is this the Decline of the Americans?”

  “Maybe they’ll just say this was the Dry Time.”

  “Maybe no one will dig us up at all. Maybe there won’t be anyone left to name us.”

  “Don’t got much faith in carbon sequestration?” Angel asked.

  “I think the world is big, and we broke it.” She shrugged. “Jamie used to go off on this all the time. How we saw what was coming and didn’t do anything about it.” She shook her head. “God, he had a lot of contempt for us.”

  “If he was so smart, he should have seen what he was getting into. Maybe he’d still be alive.”

  “There are different kinds of smart.”

  “Alive smart. And dead smart.”

  “Says the man who’s been dodging Hellfire missiles.”

  “Still alive, though.”

  “Jamie always complained that we didn’t do anything when it was obvious what we should do. Now”—she paused—“I’m not sure we really know anymore. It would be easier to prepare if we had some kind of a map that told us what was going to hit us next, except we waited so long, we’re off the map. It makes you wonder if anyone is going to actually survive.”

  “People will survive,” Angel said. “Someone always survives.”

  “I didn’t peg you for an optimist.”

  “I’m not saying it’s going to be pretty. But someone…someone will adapt. They’ll make some kind of new culture that knows how to—”

  “Be smart?”

  “Or how to make a Clearsac for your entire body.”

  “I think that’s called the Taiyang.”

  “There you go,” Angel said. “People adapting and surviving.”

  The Taiyang glowed in the muddy darkness of the storm, seductive. From this angle Lucy could make out the silhouettes of atriums and perhaps even greenery within. A lush place where everyone could go inside and hide. It might be too hard to live outside, but indoors life could still be good.

  With A/C and industrial air filters and 90 percent water recycling, life could still be good, even in Hell.

  Maybe that’s what the archaeologists will call us. The Outdoors Period. For when people still lived outdoors.

  Maybe in a thousand years everyone would be living underground or in arcologies, with only their greenhouses touching the surface, all their moisture carefully collected and held. Maybe in a thousand years humanity would become a burrowing species, safely tucked underground for survival—

  “There’s our man.” Angel pointed.

  Across the street an old guy was limping toward the mouth of the under-construction section of the Taiyang, pushing a pupusa cart, hunched against the flying dust.

  “How the hell is he going to sell pupusas in this?”

  But Angel was already pulling a shirt over his face and climbing out of the truck, letting in a blast of gritty air.

  Lucy grabbed her own mask and climbed out with him, hurriedly strapping it on as Angel hobbled across the street. Lucy caught up and slid an arm under him. She thought he’d fight for a moment, but then he was leaning against her.

  “Thanks,” he gasped through the shirt. He started coughing.

  “Use my mask,” she shouted.

  Before he could argue, she stripped it off her own face and settled it on his. Pulled the straps tight.

  Quite a pair, she thought. Me with the goggles, him with the mask.

  They made their way over to where the vendors were clustered, all of them wearing filters and goggles of their own, looking at her and Angel bug-eyed through lenses. Strange alien creatures all watching them, hoping for a sale.

  Lucy helped Angel limp to where the pupusa man was setting up his cart, pulling out flapping plastic and struts that looked as if they were designed to cocoon his cooking space.

  He turned at their approach. Cocked his head as Angel tried to shout through his mask. The man shook his head, uncomprehending, and lifted his own mask, squinting at them.

  “What did you say?”

  “We’re looking for a girl!” Lucy shouted. “We heard she was staying with you!”

  The man looked suspicious. “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “I helped her out,” Angel said.

  When the man didn’t seem to understand, he lifted his mask and shouted into the man’s ear. “I helped her out! Couple weeks back! She told me about you. She said you’d keep her safe.”

  “She said that, huh?” The man seemed sad. He turned away. “Help me get this set up! Then I can talk.”

  They all struggled in the winds with the tent poles, getting them inserted, and then strapped the Gore-Tex liner to the hoops. Once it was set up, there was a small space where they could all shove their heads underneath and where t
he man could stand over his griddle. They all pushed up masks and goggles.

  “Is that girl here? I need to talk to her,” Angel said.

  “Why?”

  “She’s got something valuable,” Lucy said. “Something extremely valuable.”

  The man laughed. “I doubt that.”

  “There’d be a reward,” Angel said. “Big one.”

  The man gave Angel a cynical look. “Oh yeah? What’re you offering?”

  “I can get you both across the Colorado River and put you in a Cypress development in Las Vegas.”

  The man laughed right in his face. When Angel didn’t laugh with him, he stopped. Then looked surprised. He turned to Lucy.

  “He serious?”

  Lucy grimaced. “Yeah, I think he could do that. If you can help, you can probably get more than that, too. A lot more. Don’t take his first offer.”

  “So can I talk to her?” Angel asked.

  “Sorry.” The man looked sad. “She’s not here anymore. She left days ago.”

  Angel’s face fell.

  “Gone where?” Lucy asked.

  “She was hitching to the border,” the man said. “She was going to cross the river.”

  Angel leaned over the cart, his expression feverish. “Where? Do you know where she’s crossing?”

  “We looked at the maps. We thought her best chance was outside Carver City.”

  Lucy couldn’t help but laugh, even as Angel cursed beside her.

  CHAPTER 44

  “You’re sure she had the book with her?” Angel asked as he shifted position in the cramped truck cab.

  Between the pupusa guy named Toomie and Lucy driving, there wasn’t much room to get comfortable, and after three hours of steady driving Angel’s stitches pinched and ached.

  He wondered if he would have hurt as much if the day were clear and they’d been driving fast. Instead they were inching through blowing dust, with everyone staring out at billowing muddy brown air that cut visibility to fifty feet.

  Lucy shifted into a low gear as they started winding up an incline.

  Refugees emerged as shambling ghosts in the brown haze, illuminated by the truck’s storm lights. Bizarre hunched forms stumbling away from the destruction of Carver City and toward the dubious refuge of Phoenix, a steady stream of destitution that slowed their progress to a crawl.