Tides From the New Worlds

by Tobias S. Buckell

  A boom shakes the air. Paige looks up at the sky. None of us can see anything, but I shiver.

  “Any of you able to contact anyone?” Paige asks.

  We all try. Shake our heads. We’re cut off.

  “Come inside with me now,” our new host says. “Drop you weapon to the ground. You don’t need them.”

  For some reason, without the Tais, the three soldiers are looking at me. Command structure has returned to our small unit. Ironic how we fall into the old patterns. This is what it would have been like in The League before the Xenowars. Only then it wasn’t The League, just spacefaring humans associated with their old national origins on the mother planet.

  I have a decision to make.

  “Do you have any way that we can communicate to our superiors?” I ask.

  Jami nods.

  “That we do,” he says.

  Into the rabbit hole I decide, and nod. We drop our tangleguns and the blade near my ribs disappears just as abruptly as it had appeared. I still want to know how it got under my armor.

  “The name Jami,” the man in the cream suit says, shaking my hand. “Jami ‘Manicou’ Derrick.”

  Jami turns around, and we follow the barefoot, dapper man into the concrete-block house. We troop past the cat, which is now working on cleaning an extended furry back leg.

  • • •

  Jami asks us if we read much. He wants to know about ‘War of the Worlds,’ an ancient text, he tells us, but with an interesting moral to it.

  None of us have read it.

  He laughs gently, takes off his tie and suit jacket and hangs them off the back of a canvas chair.

  “You’ll wish,” he laughs at us. “You should have wait and talk with everyone longer. So now, it a mess. The League trying to come in and reshape everything to be just like it wants it, and it ain’t that easy.”

  The door creaks open and we look straight into the face of the enemy.

  • • •

  The Azteca reclines in a leather chair while an elderly black lady in a bright red and yellow patterned shawl carefully snips at his flat hair. A red cape drapes around his knees where his hands rest, gently crossed over each other. The gold plug in his nose glints in the light streaming through a large opened window, and his jade earrings dangle as he slightly turns his head to regard us.

  Blue eye shadow swirls around the crow’s feet that crinkle the edges of his eyes. His black smeared lips twitch.

  “The League has arrived,” he pronounces, looking at our uniforms. “What do you think of our conquerors, Jami?” Jami is leaning against the concrete wall, arms folded, looking at the small ensemble in the room.

  “The first conquerors of Tenochtitlan arrived in small numbers,” Jami said. “They had armor and superior technology. The League only got the size and the armor correct.”

  Jami smiles sadly at us.

  “But this is not a group of Spaniards with gold lust and domination in their hearts,” The Azteca says. “The League is here to save us. Is it not?”

  His eyes are piercing. Something has wounded him. He hates us.

  “The first conquistadors thought they were saving the savages back then too,” he adds.

  I have nothing to say, but stand straight and return his restrained fury with a calm gaze of my own. I am a professional.

  “You done, then, Frederick?”

  “I miss my true name.”

  Jami sighs.

  “I guess it don’t make no difference what you call yourself now.”

  Acolmiztli stands up and gathers up the cherry bowl with his hair clippings in it.

  “I’m not much of a believer,” he says, “but the old ways are specific. You must have your hair cut in a way that does not lose tonalli. Or you risk losing the strength of your spirit.” He takes a deep breath. “In times like these, I need all the strength I can get.”

  The door slams behind him.

  “He’s bitter,” Paige notes. They’ve been taking my lead, remaining quiet. I’m in charge. I’m their Tai.

  “The League should look very very carefully into assuming,” Jami says, looking at the door with us, “that all Azteca same.”

  There are, he tells us, Tolteca. Reformed Azteca who have spurned human sacrifice and made great changes to Azteca society in the last hundred years.

  My stomach flip flops.

  “Human sacrifice?”

  Jami unfolds his arms.

  “Acolmiztli tells me he only sacrificed snake, bird, and butterfly. He say,” and Jami imitates Acolmiztli’s voice perfectly… “Because he so loved man Quetzalcoatl allowed only the sacrifice of snakes, birds, and butterflies. As he was opposed to the sacrifice of human flesh the three sorcerers of Tula drove him out of the city. The people of Tenochtitlan did not follow Quetzalcoatl. Instead, they followed the war-god Huitzilopochtli or Xipe-Totec: the flayed god. Then the fifth sun was destroyed and we lived in the sixth and it became a time of change.”

  It sends shivers down the back of my spine.

  “You said you had communications equipment,” I fold my arms. The shivering continues. “We’d like to use it now.”

  I shiver again, my knees weak. Jami catches me under my arms as I drop to my knees.

  “What’s happening?” I’m disoriented; the walls of the room seem to bend in on themselves.

  “Remember how I tell you you should have read Wells?” Jami says. “Come on.” He helps me over to a wooden bench and opens a cupboard. I vaguely recognize the device behind the wooden doors. It looks like a museum piece. But it responds to a wave of my hand and my voice.

  Static is my only reply. There is accusation in my angry stare, but Jami gestures at the device.

  “Try again. You feeling rough.”

  Sweat drips from my forehead, the shivers continue wracking my body. This time I find a carrier signal and send a voice request up. Archaic. But they reply.

  “Who is this? Identify.”

  I do, giving personal ID codes and answering questions until the voice on the other side is satisfied.

  “We give nothing away by saying we’re doing a retreat,” it says. “All ground assaults have been infected with some sort of virus, we’re losing this battle. We have your touchdown coordinates. Be outside in five minutes for a starhook. You’ll be in quarantine upon return.”

  Then it’s gone.

  My three companions are sweating and sprawled on the floor.

  Infected. Quarantine.

  “When we saw you,” I say. “You walked over to us, touched me,” my hands go up to my face.

  “Acolmiztli gave it to me, and I passed it to you,” Jami says.

  “Is it fatal?” I ask Jami.

  He shrugs.

  “Better get back up to orbit and find out, right? I look alright, but I could have antidote.” He smiles.

  I purse my lips.

  “Get up,” I order everyone. It has been interesting being in charge. I’m glad to see the end of it coming. Paige, Smith, and Steve struggle up. Smith leans heavily on Steve. “Get outside, now.”

  We’re a pathetic group that pushes through the door with Jami following us. My knees wobble, but I manage a convincing stride through what looks like a bar.

  Dim lights cast shadows, and from those shadows loom wooden tables where several men in khaki camouflage toast us with their glasses and sly grins. I see no weapons, but now I wonder if their weapon isn’t the fever raging inside of me.

  My gut spasms. The pain almost blinds me.

  “Come on.” I push my three soldiers on in front of me, shoving my hand against their hard armor, ignoring an unidentifiable chuckle from somewhere in the room.

  But halfway through the room text scrolls over my vision. My own implants are failing, no longer able to heal my body or regulate it. I’m nothing more than flesh right now. I have no soldier-sharp senses, no wired edge for combat.

  I trip over a chair, grab the table to steady myself, and when I blink everything is clear.
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  Right before me is a large aquarium. Something sinuously moves through the tank and presses against the glass. I stumble closer and a woman stares right back at me through the refracted water and solid glass with wide brown eyes. Sheets of her oak-colored hair twirl behind her head. Her super pale skin has an almost greenish tint.

  The eyes hold me until my face presses right against the glass.

  “Beautiful, isn’t she.”

  Acolmiztli grabs my shoulder.

  “She was a present. From one of my brothers. A gift from the Emperor Moctezuma the Ninth.”

  Her smooth stomach fades into the singular muscle and pilot fins of her tail’s trunk. The wide fins are splayed out. They’re delicate, yet powerful enough to drive all six feet of her through the water with a flick.

  Which she does. Out away from the glass.

  Then she turns back, looks at me, and her hands flutter.

  It’s too hallucinogenic. I walk away from the tank.

  “Keep moving damnit.” Smith looks at me, face blank. He doesn’t understand a word.

  His hearing implants have all failed.

  But we’re moving, and out the door into the sunlight. I lean back and look into the sky. Nothing yet.

  “Why are you doing this to us?” I ask Jami, who is still right behind us.

  “The Azteca doing it to you.”

  “But you knew about it,” I snap.

  “Yes.”

  “And yet you did nothing. You collaborate with them.”

  “You the one that drop out the sky and land. We didn’t force you.”

  Overhead I hear a roar, then a rumble.

  “But all those deaths…”

  “All because of you. Consider: before you came we were changing the Azteca from the bottom up, and inside out. The Azteca a hornet’s nest, and we blow some sweet smoke their way. Now you throwing rocks.”

  Thunder rolls and a small oval speck drops down out of the sky. The long carbon filament trailing behind it is strong enough to reel us all up from the ground we’re standing on into orbit and then into hold of a waiting mothership.

  “Snap in when it drops,” I order everyone. But I turn and look at Jami.

  The pod slows to a halt and falls into our midst. Smith walks over and snaps on. Paige does the same, and Steve looks at me follows suit. Three soldiers, ready to get lifted, the cable rising up from between them to rise into the heavens.

  “We have a minute, maybe two,” Steve says to me.

  I’m still staring at Jami.

  “Just because you can’t spot the power we wield don’t mean we defenseless.” He stares right back. “We study you. You machines run everything, solider-man. When the conflict came you choose to wipe out the alien threat you faced. And now you all still working on purifying The League. Only human.”

  “There was no other choice,” I say. “When the killing started, we realized it was us or them. Damnit, I was four. You can’t hold me responsible. It’s different now.”

  “You kill millions of aliens, we hear. Deport the rest. Cleanse any human not pure human, that tamper with they DNA. You almost wipe yourselves out. Yet you come here to tell us what to do? That’s hypocritical.”

  “We’d never survived if it wasn’t for adopting the Tais, like they did. We could never have matched their superior military skill.” And, despite the fever, I have a trump. “You talk hypocritical. Hypocritical is the mermaid,” I hiss. “You let that Azteca keep his slave in his tank. How dirty does that make you?”

  I might as well have struck Jami.

  “The line is tightening,” Steve yells at me.

  “You do not give natural rights to any clone in The League?” Jami says. “Any robot? The Tais? Artificial people? Because even you wouldn’t grant the person in that tank her life. Why the high ground now?”

  I walk towards the pod. In a second I’ll be yanked out of here into the stratosphere, my suit bubbling out to enclose and protect me. Back to the warrens inside the depths of a troop ship.

  “We ain’t ignorant,” Jami said. “We couldn’t make do with metal tech. When the wormhole closed, it was just us and the alien who stayed behind used a different kind of tech. If there is one thing we’re good at, it’s taking things and adapting them. All my ancestors got handed the trash of the more advanced. Technological hand me downs. Less than perfect trade agreements. Yeah, physical domination gone, but economic and political domination follow. So when we came from the islands to here, we say, never again.

  “But then came the aliens, and they created the Azteca to destroy us. We had to make do, take these things and mash them up and sent back up as something unique to us. But now you here. You League would destroy either of us for figuring out how to work with the alien. We need to be cleanse, right? You a superior force, with bigger guns. So we have something you didn’t expect. The only way you can find out how to deal with this is talk to us. That’s why the Azteca give us the antidote.”

  They want to ‘mash me up,’ take me and make me their own and spit me back out to see what changes. They want to figure out how best to handle the new situation that just opened up in their backyard. And I’m a key to a puzzle for them.

  I remember a small biological part of what being human is. The reason we fear the Ais, the alien, death, and why The League fights so hard and maniacally against everything.

  Survival.

  Smith’s ears are broken, I realize as he signs something at me. A hand flutter, like that of the woman in the tank.

  I turn to Jami.

  “Okay,” I tell him. “I want the same antidote you have, okay?”

  Jami nods.

  “The very same. I promise you.”

  Paige recognizes what is happening.

  “You can’t desert,” she shouts. “They’ll deactivate you.”

  The rest of the objection is lost. The starhook goes taught and all three of them lift of the ground and accelerate towards space.

  I drop to my hands and knees and puke. Tiny pieces of machinery I didn’t even know were in me litter the grass with the remains of pasty meals from the last day of eating.

  With a deep breath I stand back up.

  Jami helps steady me.

  “But I have a condition,” he says. “You have to help me free her.” He’s talking about the lady in the aquarium. She’s been in the bar for weeks, he tells me, as he helps me back across the lawn. Ever since The League began its bombardment and invasion. Acolmiztli took her here with him, and he won’t let her go.

  Jami can’t free her. His people are helping the Azteca change themselves, but if he were to set the modified woman free, Acolmiztli would blame him. But a rogue League solider with a soft heart, a human heart, could do it.

  The Nanagadans are setting the Azteca against The League. But some Azteca are actually Tolteca, good reformed Azteca. And they are here, but not too reformed. And Jami needs me for a sort of cultural remix experiment, and all I can think of are those almond eyes that plead with me, and the fluttering hands.

  “Oh shit,” I say, looking up at the sky. The lady in the tank is using sign language. Her hands had moved like Smith’s.

  And Smith is gone.

  I at least want to talk to her.

  “Just give me the antidote, please,” I tell Jami.

  • • •

  Acolmiztli regards me with suspicion.

  “He is back?”

  “He a smart man,” Jami says, his voice soft and guarded. “He know if a battle turn.”

  The Azteca laughs, then folds his arms and glares at the men around him.

  “Then soon I’ll be going home.”

  “Lucky us.”

  “The antidote?” I ask Jami. “Where is it?” I’m scared of another attack, of puking something really important out.

  “The antidote,” Acolmiztli says. “Come on Jami. Can’t you give this poor man the antidote? Doesn’t he know the antidote is?” Acolmiztli laughs at me and the sound makes me clench
my hands. “All those nasty little metal bits inside that talk to each other and to your ships, all those little ghosts running around inside your heads, those intelligent machines, they’re all dead. But you’ll live. Oh yes, you’re just fine. Just like Jami here.”

  I’ll live. Here. But despite Acolmiztli’s light tone I know what the result in space will be. All those battle formations, swarming back through the wormhole in retreat, their bows milliseconds away from each other.

  Collided and destroyed.

  Mass confusions. Systems failures. Those people up there were sitting ducks. No doubt the Azteca’s own ships would savage them.

  “There is a story I tell, that my father told, and his father before him,” Acolmiztli says. Reflections from the wall of water behind me dapple the wall in front of me. “Horse and Stag came into quarreling once, long ago, and Horse went to a Hunter for help in taking his revenge against Stag. Hunter said, yes, but only if you let me put this piece of iron in your mouth that I may guide you with these pieces of rope. And only if you let me put this saddle on your back that I may sit on you while I help you hunt Stag. The horse agreed and together they hunted down the Stag. After this, the horse thanked the Hunter, and asked him to remove those things from him. But Hunter laughed and tied him to a tree, then sat down and had himself a very good meal of Stag. You see what I am saying?” Acolmiztli looks at me.

  “No, what are you saying?”

  The half grin on his lips flitters away.

  “Who’s riding whom here?”

  Jami has sat near me, but at an angle so he can look at both of us.

  “You drunk,” Jami says.

  “Do either of you realize how many people are going to die today?” I yell. I’m shaking angry with everyone. Convinced I was here to land and perform a duty under the Tai’s direction, stripped of that leadership, then told I was infected. I had thought I would die, but now I’m alive. I’m a mess.

  “Yes,” Acolmiztli says. “Can I go watch?” He stands up and totters out of the room.