Tides From the New Worlds

by Tobias S. Buckell

  And here Toad is, on the floor of Aaron Burr’s study, making love to history, the ghost of his present.

  • • •

  The next morning Toad helps Theodosia into a boat across the water from Weehawken.

  “I don’t know if this is a good idea,” he says.

  Theodosia ignores him.

  “I want to see for myself,” she says. “I have to see.”

  Two other boats have already crossed. Toad fumbles with the two wooden oars, setting them between to pegs of wood. Then he starts the small craft out across the water. A slight mist hangs over the dark water as the oars bite and slowly pull them towards the other side.

  Theodosia leans forward and plucks a piece of foil out of Toad’s breast pocket. The tiniest edge had been peeking out.

  “What is this?” She asks.

  Toad pauses rowing and leans forward. He takes it from her fingers and puts the folded sheet back in.

  “Nothing,” he says. He’d been saving it.

  The mist gets heavier. It rolls over the water until it is all Toad can see around him. The world has become gray. Then Theodosia melts off into the air, her body turning into a memory. The boat hits ground and scrapes metal. It too dissolves, the handles of the oars leaving Toad with his hands cupped around air. The room has been turned off.

  “Get out of the exhibit,” says a voice.

  Toad sighs. He’s been caught by security. It isn’t that big of a deal, unless someone wants it to be. He has never been caught before, but he knows friends who have. As long as the guards are paid, everything is okay. Toad walks across the bare floor to the door indicated in the air. Dovert stands with a slight grin on his face, and a security guard in beige stands next to him.

  “Hello Dovert,” Toad says. His stomach flip-flops. What have they seen? What will Dovert do?

  Dovert flicks the controls. Toad turns around and looks into the one-way glass. Inside, reality rolls back in with the mists. Theodosia stands up in the boat and gasps as it hits the bank.

  The room shifts away from her, and Aaron Burr stands ten paces from Hamilton. Hamilton aims and pulls the trigger, the pistol leaping slightly. The shot goes wide of Burr and strikes a tree at the edge of the clearing, splintering a branch in half. Burr sights down his pistol at Hamilton. Hamilton stands ramrod still and looks straight at Burr.

  Burr’s pistol fires and Hamilton collapses with his hands to his stomach.

  Dovert turns the room off.

  “How much did you see?” Toad asks. He suddenly hates Dovert even more than he thought possible.

  “Everything.” Dovert has a wide smile.

  The guard leaves. Dovert looks down the corridor until the beige of the guard’s uniform disappears into the unlit recesses of the museum. Toad turns back at the gray window.

  “In eight years she will die,” Toad says. “Leaving on a ship to go visit her father in Europe. It goes missing at sea. I wonder if her husband will ever appreciate the loss.” Like Jefferson did, pacing his room for weeks. Toad looks at Dovert, his small friend from the museum. Lana’s other lover.

  “You love her?” Dovert asks. He cocks his head.

  “Who? Lana, or Theodosia?” Toad walks towards Dovert. “I love Lana. But she is lost to me.”

  Dovert shakes his head.

  “Melodrama: she loves you. She talks about you. A lot. She’s worried. I’m worried.”

  Toad runs a hand through his locks. He feels like a kid. It makes him angry. His eyes are hot from holding it back.

  “That’s an easy thing for you to say. She makes love to you alone, but I have to share the bed with you.”

  “I can talk to her,” Dovert says.

  “I don’t want concessions,” Toad snaps. “I want Lana.”

  Dovert stands silent. Toad suddenly smiles. He steps forward and punches Dovert. His fist lands smack on Dovert’s mouth and splits his lip.

  “Godamnit, Toad. She’s not something you can just have like that. Not a posession. She’s a human being.” Dovert yells, holding a hand to his bleeding lip.

  “I want satisfaction,” Toad replies. He reaches out and slaps the side of Dovert’s face with a palm.

  Dovert, frustration and anger flitting across his face, responds.

  “In the room, right? 1804?”

  Toad pauses.

  Dovert pushes him towards the door, then stops.

  “No. I can’t do this. This is crazy. You’re crazy.” Dovert pushes Toad against the wall. The blood from his lips stains the white shirt under Toad’s double-breasted coat. “I won’t.”

  But Toad, seeing the flushed anger in Dovert, is struck by the idea.

  “We’ll duel,” he says.

  • • •

  It is a cold morning in 1804. Hamilton’s second and the physician are struggling to bring Hamilton towards the boat. It is obvious the founder of the country is in great pain, but he is stoic, and hardly a grunt escapes him as he is jostled and half-pulled across the slippery grass.

  Burr has taken a step towards the fallen man, maybe slightly regretful, but now is on his way back towards his own boat.

  Toad strides over to Burr’s second. Inside a varnished wooden box are two pistols, one recently discharged. Toad takes his time reloading the recently fired piston, the acrid smoke still around it causing his nostrils to flare.

  Dovert is undecided, still walking around in circles, looking back towards where the door might be.

  Toad hands him both guns.

  “Pick one,” he says.

  “I don’t want to do this,” Dovert says. “It can’t be worth shooting each other for.”

  “I would die for her,” Toad says.

  Dovert narrows his eyes. Toad’s suggestion, that he loves her more, goads Dovert into taking a gun from Toad’s hands.

  Toad stalks ten paces away, and sees Burr walking towards him. The physician is hurrying behind him.

  “Sir,” they begin.

  Toad turns around and cuts them off. He faces Dovert and brings the pistol to bear. He remembers an image of an old Burr, locked away in his study.

  There is room enough.

  Looking at Dovert, his pistol aimed straight, Toad feels his whole body turn ice cold.

  There is...

  Dovert fires. Toad hears the bullet, far off, crack a branch. Dovert stands in front of him. This is the moment. He looks at Dovert for the eternity held in two seconds, then Toad lets go. His pistol drops to the ground.

  ...room enough.

  This was always supposed to be a way to come to a final arbitration. Not something to hide behind. And looking down the barrel, Toad finds his own emptiness. He’s hidden from that ripped out part long enough. He briefly saw himself, at that final moment, in a dark closed-off study. Alone. Dead and sad. He doesn’t have it in him to waste life.

  Toad turns and sees Burr looking at him. He can’t identify the expression, but the man is moved.

  Dovert shivers and drops his own pistol.

  “Dovert,” Toad says. “I love her too much.”

  Dovert nods.

  “Me too.”

  Hamilton is making horrible coughing sounds. The physician hurries off. Burr stands still for a good second, then slowly turns around and trudges back out of the clearing.

  A bird cheeps in the tree. Toad shivers. He wants nothing more than to be out of this place. He wants to leave it behind. It is time to move forward.

  He hopes Lana and Dovert live a good life.

  Toad has no use for his study anymore. Despite his fundamental differences, he has to go out, now, and see the world as it is. It is a place he has to be in, not run from. This he realizes as the exhibit fades from around him, and he steps into the museum corridor.

  Maybe Lana will understand. Maybe she won’t.

  Toad fishes around in his breast pocket and pulls out the piece of folded foil. He throws it into a trashcan.

  Necahual

  As I started work on the detailed outline of m
y first novel, Crystal Rain, I decided that it would be very helpful to write a story set in the same universe. I started working on Necahual, but writing it well after the events of Crystal Rain. This was so that as I wrote the novel, I’d have this story as a history guide. Something to write towards.

  Nalo Hopkinson informed me that she was putting together another anthology, this one around the theme of postcolonial science fiction and fantasy. She took this piece, however even as it was being published, I was making small changes to my universe as I finished up my first novel and started the second. Even with these small changes it’s still one of my favorite stories, as it draws on all the different themes I love weaving, much like the story that opened this collection.

  We drop out of the wormhole towards a mess of a planet by the ochre light of a dying sun. From the cant of orbit, upside down and even then through virtual portholes we can see tiny spots of white light blossom in the atmosphere.

  We’re liberators.

  Each one of those little blossoms of light is an impact. A chunk of rock with a controller vane on it, predestined for a certain point. It clears out the enemy’s ability to hit back above the stratosphere.

  I know from past experience that sunsets here on New Anegada won’t be the same for a long while. As a child I’d sat on porches near the coast to watch the magnificent sunsets of my own world for many months after The League came to liberate us.

  “Man we’re dropping the hammer on this backwater shithole,” the man across from me says. His white and blue exoskeleton wraps around his body. He looks like a striped mantis. Right now it’s plugged into the convex wall of the pod, charging and keeping him from bouncing around as we skate atmosphere.

  A single bead of sweat floats loose from his bulbous nose and hangs in the air between us.

  “You know much about the target?”

  Everyone wants to know juicy details about them.

  “Historical info only,” I say. “The Azteca of Mother Earth never even called themselves that. They were the Mexica.”

  I wonder if the black man caddy cornered to the right of me has skin-flauge painted on. Hard to tell under the blue and white he’s wearing. It’s hard not to look askance at him. No one like him on the home planet. But at least he’s human, real human, and The League today will be adding another human planet we’re told. If there are any aliens here we’ll wipe them out, every last one, like they tried to wipe The League out.

  “The warrior priests of Mexica were pretty brutal,” I explain. “They used to induce hallucination by piercing their foreskin,” all the men wince, “and dragging a knotted rope through the tear until they saw visions.”

  The woman caddy cornered on my left asks, “What is it going to be like when we hit?”

  “I got the same report you did.”

  The large island continent of New Anegada on the planet is also the name of the planet. This is confusing for conversation, but no one had consulted with the original colonists, mainly Caribbean refugees from Mother Earth after some minor alien attack a long time ago. Half the continent is New Anegada, the other half is Azteca. Large mountains split them down the middle.

  The entire system got cut off several hundred years ago, a forgotten incident, a sidenote of history. The wormhole that connects New Anegada to the rest of the worlds opens up again several weeks ago and shit hits the fan.

  We’re ordered out, to make sure The League gets here first to offer these humans membership and the Azteca contingent attacks. Now things are messy.

  This is all I know.

  All four of us are strapped across from each other in the pod, waiting as the heat builds up, looking past each other.

  The virtual panorama on the floor screen flickers off.

  The buffeting ceases. We’re still alive.

  “Hello,” says a small voice deep inside my inner ear. It’s a dry and bored monotone. “I am riding shotgun for you. Got about a minute and thirteen seconds left until you hit dirt, and congratulations, you have just passed the highest probability zone of being shot down by automated Azteca fire.”

  Which is why it is just now downloading itself into my armor.

  “Name’s Tai Thirteen Crimson Velvet. Call me Velvet. Lady on your left is Paige, man across is Steven. On your right is Smith. Smith has augmented ears for deafness. If you get hit by anything with a good electromagnetic pulse, it’ll wipe his hearing chips and he’ll be back to being deaf. Just so you know.”

  All the information we need comes to us from the Tais. Tactical artificial intelligences. Little cybernetic ghosts. They give us the real orders, the real info, so that if we got into trouble they can scramble, leave, and we won’t be the wiser for the big picture.

  These are tactics learned from many strange, alien encounters. Ones where they could just suck shit right out of your brain and figure out what the enemy’s plans were. Humanity adapted. It adopted alien tactics wholesale right back at them.

  “Take a deep breath and close your eyes,” the Tai orders. “Time to peel.”

  The pod explodes. The sides rip back and vaporize themselves. I open my eyes to see the real island of New Anegada directly below me. My heart hammers as we plummet.

  The green land rushes faster and faster toward me until the Tai whispers, ‘okay’ and the chute slides out of the back of my exoskeleton.

  There are no explosions, no shots fired at me, just a calm, blue sky and lush green forest below my feet, the rippling blue ocean up ahead. The chute canopy overhead is invisible, and not just on the visible spectrum either.

  A minute later my feet hit turf.

  I’m on the ground and I have no clue what’s going to happen next.

  • • •

  I’m expecting shots. But I only hear wind rustling through palm fronds and the distant foaming sound of waves breaking over reef. I’m expecting Aztec priest-warriors wearing gaudy colored feathers to fan out and attack us. Instead, I’m facing a large three story concrete building painted bright yellow and pink.

  It’s got terracotta shingling.

  I’m expecting anything except a man with his back against a mango tree, chewing a stem of grass, looking straight at me.

  “Is this a friendly?” I ask.

  “Okay,” the Tai says. “Your regular weaponry is locked under my command. You have a tanglegun in your left pocket, if you need to use that. This is a police action, we’re not here to kill anyone. There are no hostiles. We’re just here to talk and gather information from the locals.”

  “So this is a friendly?”

  “Yes.”

  I look down. The extendable canon I have aimed at the man is primed, but useless. I let go of the trigger.

  “Go ahead,” the Tai orders. “We’re here to gather information about who the Azteca are, where they came from, and what, if anything, these people can do to help us. I am recording everything back up to HQ. I’ll prompt you as needed. If you do this well, you’ll be promoted. So will I.”

  The canon swings back up under my arm to fasten itself to the back of my exoskeleton armor. It’s a smooth lubricated slide. A whisper.

  The man by the mango tree pulls the stem of grass out of his mouth and stands up.

  “So,” he says to me. “We been invade or what?”

  I have no idea how to respond. I stand there, still, waiting for someone besides me to do something.

  “You speak English?” The man asks. He has a deep tan that almost blends into the color of oak and short tightly curled hair. His brown eyes twinkle with a sort of Huckleberry Finn look, but he’s wearing a cream colored suit. With no shoes on.

  I nod.

  “You looking for Bouschulte, right?” He says, the words so quick they blend into each and I stumble over the accent. He ambles over to us.

  I speak my first word.

  “What?”

  “You. Looking. For. Bouschulte.” The man from the mango tree repeats himself as if I’m slow. He looks frustrated for a second. “He up
in he house.”

  “What is…” I swallow, “a bouschulte?”

  “It a name. Frederick Bouschulte. If you have a Aztec name like ‘Acolmiztli’ or some stupidness like that, and you hiding with us, you don’t keep calling you-self ‘Acolmiztli.’ Seen?”

  “Seen.” I agree out of sheer panic. The Tai in my head is still silent. I wouldn’t mind some assistance. The man’s accent is hard and I still haven’t been given any damn orders.

  The man reaches out to touch my face, then stops when I flinch.

  “You eye them, chineeman, you do that to fit in with them?”

  “It…” was done a long time ago. Far away. “An old tradition my forefathers continued.” I’d been too young to protest the removal of my eye folds.

  A tiger-striped cat tiptoes out from behind the building and sits down. It starts to lick its tail, working hard at ignoring the five people on the grass before it.

  “What you name?”

  “Kiyoshi,” I say.

  “Well, Kiyoshi, let we get on with this so call invasion, eh?”

  My Tai must be gone for good, I realize. And looking around at the panicked faces of the three other soldiers I fell out of the sky with, I realize theirs are dead too. We’re on our own. Somehow these people can jam the Tais, though I have no idea how.

  The panic attack comes and goes swiftly. Old training takes over. Yes the Tais make the decisions, but we have training. We’re still soldiers. We’re still mobile representatives of The League.

  I grab the man’s shoulders, tanglegun aimed right dead in the middle of his forehead. At this range the tanglegun is lethal.

  “What’s going on?” I hiss. “Tell me what is going on!”

  He snaps loose of me, shrugging my armored arms aside as if they were only a nuisance. The motion is quick enough I have trouble following it. There is, surprisingly enough, a small knife now shoved up between the joints in my armor.

  Smith aims his tanglegun at us, but it’s an empty gesture. Our Tais hamstrung us, took away our lethal force. Orders…

  “You conquest failing.”

  “There is no fucking conquest,” Steve snaps. “We’re here to save you from the Azteca.”

  “Yeah man, so I hear. But one thing: seeing that we been making do for a few hundred years already you might wonder what we know that you ain’t figure out yet. Second thing: you here to tell us what to do, right? Because you assume we don’t know what we doing. You want tell us what to do, how to think. That mental conquest friend. Mental.”