Firewalkers

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Found where some of our power’s going, boss,” Hotep said. She was pointing to a big old cross stuck up in the open area the church’s hood pointed at. It was all over with bulbs and strip-lights, and cables running from the church, but it was a drop of spit in the desert compared with the power that should have been reaching Achouka. This was just Hotep being Hotep, because God-talk upset her.

  The meteorological station was a squat building roofed with solar, backing onto the church. Antennae and instruments reached out around the panels like weeds breaking through old tarmac. At Mao’s “Awe!” the door opened a crack, revealing a Bantu woman in a worn red dress with floral patterns. One of her eyes was milky and the skin around it was scarred by the sort of cheap surgery most people had to resort to when the cancer started to show. Just peel everything away until whatever you found underneath looked healthy.

  “Mme. Ironsi?” he asked.

  “Doctor Ironsi,” she corrected frostily. “You’re the Firewalkers.” Whatever her expectations, apparently Mao came in somewhere below them, though he reckoned that anyone with a Doctor in front of their name, and who was stuck out in Sainte Genevieve, probably had a lot to be disappointed about.

  She took them in, though. Her three-room dwelling vibrated to the tooth-jarring rattle of an antique cooling unit and the walls were lined with pipes trying futilely to shift the heat elsewhere against the inexorable pressure of physics. Lupé was all over it at once, because she loved innovation like that, no matter how much work had produced how little result. Before Mao could talk business, she was pattering on about where she could tighten it up, how she could tune the system, and Doctor Ironsi was thawing dramatically because quality of life was about as thin on the ground as free water in Sainte Genevieve.

  Mao gave her the nod, and Lupé sat down to tinker. Hotep was bored already, peering through the dust-screens on the window and making gun noises to herself while staring at the church. To Mao’s surprise, a bunch of people had gathered out there in the noonday sun, where the cross was.

  “Funeral, or…?” he asked.

  “Just everyday around here,” Ironsi told him, shaking her head. “Brings them closer to God, they say. Day and night, out under the sky. Night, I can understand.” Her shoulders rose, slumped, as though a proper shrug would be too much effort. “The Estate, Attah said. So you’re crazy, then.”

  “I’ll tell you when we come back,” Mao said shortly.

  “Solar yield’s been down for years. And who’s surprised, when things are like they are?”

  “They built it for the heat, though,” Lupé said, still bent over the generator. “For how things are there. Top of the line tech.”

  “They built it for how things were when they built it. Then things got worse,” Ironsi said disgustedly. “Still, lucky them, they have kids like you to go fix it. And you have dust storms on the way, next four days at least. Your car good for that, is it?”

  “Have to be,” Mao said. “Show me.”

  Her tablet had a crack through the screen, bleeding rainbow colours across the map she called up. He watched accelerated simulations of the storm ebb and flow. South of here the land was patchy black with the vast fields of sun-drinking panels, where they hadn’t been buried so deep in sand that there weren’t robots enough in the world to excavate them. Little rectangles were the grand, abandoned houses of the rich, from when they’d lived out here to oversee the research. The actual Estate itself was like a pale bean, insignificant, most of it below ground.

  The worst of the storm was west and heading westwards. Mao was already plotting a curving course through dead farmland, following the dry irrigation channels where he could see them on the satellite map, to avoid the worst of the weather.

  After they’d slept a couple of hours, just kipping on her floor because it was better than roasting in the ’Bug—after dusk had started to come in and cart away the malevolent hammer of the sun—Mao sat up with Doctor Ironsi and asked cautious questions about what it was like south of here.

  Lupé had the coolant system in pieces by then, and was reassembling it into something that would work better and make less noise; or, at least, that was the plan. Ironsi was taking that as the wages for wasting her words on the ignorant bruiser she’d plainly written Mao off for. Hotep had gone out to try and score some beer, despite Ironsi saying the congregation were abstainers. Despite there being beer in the ’Bug, a little. Hotep was just going stir-crazy mostly, and needed to run around a bit, like a five-year-old.

  “No Firewalkers going this way for two years,” Ironsi told him. “No Firewalkers coming back for five years. But seven months back, these treasure-hunter types came from long-ways south, two of them, all cut to hell. One didn’t make it back to the Ankara, the way I hear it.”

  A weird light was playing through the open windows now. Mao glanced out and saw they’d turned the cross on. Half the lamps on it weren’t working and the rest flickered and strobed out of sync, oddly disquieting, as though he was watching a radiant living thing trying to get free.

  “They came through here on their way in?” he clarified.

  “They came back here on their way out,” Ironsi corrected. “I don’t think they planned to, but they’d lost half their team and they needed help. I helped the pastor’s people patch them up. Learned a few things for you. First, there’s still something worth taking, out there. When they abandoned the Estate for space, they didn’t bring all their toys. Second, there’s still people living out there.”

  “Impossible,” Mao said automatically.

  Ironsi just did that broken-down not-quite-shrug again. “Well, you’re apparently the expert. No doubt you’re right. But that’s what they said anyway, and I’m telling it because I like your fix-it girl there. People on the Estate, still. Sonko people, they said.”

  “Crazy.” But ‘crazy’ was way closer to where he lived than ‘impossible’ was. “So what got their friends killed?”

  Ironsi’s eyes slid off his uncomfortably. “Bugs, they said.”

  Since the windows had been opened, bugs had been much in evidence. They were just about the only things that seemed to be able to survive the dry. Flies were crawling drunkenly about the ceiling, beetles battering at the walls. Out there, the half-lit cross was probably calling the insect faithful to prayer from miles around. Mao was only glad that they didn’t have the mosquitoes his granddad had talked about; the plague-spreaders needed standing water to breed.

  “Bugs,” he echoed.

  “They were half mad of heat-stroke,” Ironsi said. “One of them had wounds so septic we had to take the leg off. Talking all kinds of crazy. Even went full-on confession with the pastor. People like that, they see bugs where there aren’t bugs.”

  Mao shivered. “Sure,” he agreed. “Crazy talk.”

  “I hear Hotep shouting,” Lupé half-sang. “She’s out making friends.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  LET GOD SORT THEM OUT

  HOTEP WAS STANDING in front of the haphazardly lit-up cross, which meant she was also standing in front of both priest and congregation, who had come out for what Mao guessed was some kind of sunset mass. For a moment he was picturing torches, pitchforks and being run out of town or beaten to death, because you didn’t go to someone’s place and piss on their church and expect to get away with a whole skin. Once his eyes had got used to the flicker of the electric cross, he reckoned any mob riled up here would take a while to get going. These were people of his parents’ generation at best, and more towards his grandparents’. He saw lots of grey hair, dark skin wrinkled with lines and pocked with scars. Plenty of eyes clouded with cataracts or even sewn shut where the orb had been taken out. The priest himself looked about seventy, hair just white curly wisps about his dark scalp. He had spectacles on. Mao hadn’t seen spectacles beyond the pair his folks kept, that had been his great-grandad’s and become a kind of family relic, stuck up on the shelf beside the statuette of Bà Chúa Kho, Lady of the Storehouse, wh
o didn’t lend herself to this kind of grand religious theatrics these days.

  Still, there were about thirty of them, and that was enough to lynch one skinny white girl done up all over in bandages, but Hotep was in full-on crazy mode right then, and Mao had no idea how she’d gone from nought to rabies in so short a time.

  “You think they’re coming to take you up?” She was full-on shrieking at the priest and his followers. “You think they’re making your rooms ready up on the Grand Celeste? Goddamn, so you worked to build their hotel and their anchor, you and your folks and their folks? You think that buys you a golden ticket, that they’re going to bring you up to that Heaven they got going on there?”

  “Ah, shit,” Lupé said. “She’s been drinking surgical spirits again?” Because there was that one time Hotep had been reduced to sucking the alcohol from medical swabs after an epic bender that left nothing else within a dozen streets. Mao knew her better, though: this was sober Hotep, not drunk Hotep talking. This was the reason Hotep drank in the first place.

  “And this is what you do with what’s left of your lives?” Hotep went on, advancing on the lot of them—and they were actually backing up. “You go pray to the big man in the sky, tell him how good you’ve been? He doesn’t care. He just wants to keep you praying and nodding while he gets in his magic sky bus and goes somewhere the hell better than this!”

  “Hotep.” Mao approached her cautiously. “Hey, hey, listen to me. Hey, Cory!”

  She rounded on him, as though her real name was her secret weakness. “Fuck you! Who the fuck are you to—Mao? You ever hear the shit they’re spooning out here? Did you? That they’re all going up, boss. Gonna get taken into the sky by the big man up there. Salvation, boss! Divine rewards of a life of earthly toil, amiright?” And her patois was shifting, more and more English shouldering its way in and out, her accent sailing past all compass so that Mao wrestled with her words like they were a snake.

  “Hotep,” Lupé snapped, “that’s how all the godly types talk: taking up, rewards, all of that. How my grandad told it from the pulpit, way back. That’s just how it is. Doesn’t mean they’re talking about going into space, you mad skommer.”

  “You didn’t hear them!” Hotep yelled into her face, and Lupé flicked her goggles hard, right on the nose-piece. Hotep sat down then, as though she’d been punched in the face, sudden enough that the breath whomped out of her. Between her wheezing and the crowd, all standing aghast, the near-silence that followed was almost reverent.

  “You didn’t hear them,” she said again, plaintively. “Goddamn, can’t you see I’m trying to tell them the truth? Why won’t anyone listen? I’ve been there. I’ve seen those people. I know.” The proverbial prophet, honoured nowhere, save that this wasn’t even her own country: no place on Earth was.

  “It’s god-talking,” Lupé said, not unsympathetically. “I sat through it every Sunday until Grandad died and my folks let me off.”

  “She has to leave.” Abruptly the pastor was there, recovered from his shock now Hotep’s momentum was gone. “There’s no place for her here. There’s a devil in her.”

  Mao had to concede that the man had fair reason to believe it. “We’ve outstayed our welcome, right, sir. Sun’s down now, past time we were moving.”

  The pastor glowered at him, spotting another non-believer, but Mao had his hands up, all conciliatory, and was also built broad and heavy enough to break some old bones if anyone decided to escalate matters.

  “Get her in the ’Bug,” he said, and Lupé hauled Hotep to her feet.

  “You didn’t hear them,” came a mumble from behind the girl’s mask. “Isn’t anyone coming to save them, pray all they like.”

  “I’m telling you…” Lupé said wearily as she hauled Hotep off towards the vehicle, but Mao wasn’t entirely sure she was right. He could see the cross better now, past the glare of its surviving bulbs and the wheeling clouds of moths and flies and beetles. There were designs carved into the wood, of spheres and orbs passing by one another. There were drawings and photographs and old clippings: artist’s renditions of the Celeste, promotional flyers, covers torn off old sci-fi novels, even a torn vintage poster for Star Wars. He wondered, he really did, what had crept into the creed of this doomed little church on the very edge of the Ankara’s influence, and what salvation they were preaching.

  But it wasn’t his business what they did with their lives, or how they ended them.

  On his way to the ’Bug, Ironsi intercepted him, scowling. “Thank you for riling up the neighbours.”

  Mao grimaced, but shrugged. What could he say?

  “I sent the latest storm data to your vehicle’s system,” she told him. “For what it’s worth. You’re cutting east to dodge the worst, but if that doesn’t work for you, there’s a beacon you’ll pick up, if it’s still working.”

  “What’s that, then?”

  “Kandjama Protein Complex. What’s left of it.”

  Mao wrinkled his nose. “Bug farm.”

  “Was one of the biggest once, but they couldn’t keep it going in the heat. Something still running there, though. Some shelter. Maybe water.”

  “We have water.” But the ’Bug’s filtration plant was a patch job, and if they didn’t have to lean heavily on it right at the start, all the more chance it would still be working at the end. Bug farms creeped Mao out, though. He’d nearly ended up working on one, something with brine shrimp off in Mékina back when he was ten and his folks had some spare money to buy an apprenticeship. He’d had nightmares about tanks of leggy things—far bigger than they could ever get in reality—of falling in, of all those seething bodies choking the water around him, all kinds of nasty stuff, so that he almost just ran away from home. Then the apprenticeships turned out to cost twice as much as advertised—people paying for their kids to become next to slave labour because they thought it was a future. So he’d been saved to become a Firewalker, and most likely not have a future, but at least not get eaten by shrimp.

  But shelter was shelter, maybe-water was maybe-water, and bugs were what everyone who could afford it was eating over at Ankara Achouka. Beggars, as the wabenzi said, couldn’t be choosers.

  He found Hotep in the driver’s seat when he got there, a determined set to the way she held her head. Lupé, riding shotgun still, shrugged.

  “Fine. I’ll sleep in the back,” he told them both. “You’ve got the met data onboard. Try not to get us buried in sand.”

  THE LAND SOUTH of Ankara Achouka had been forest once, had been rivers, timber concerns, game reserves. Green as far as the eye could see, someone had told Mao. He’d seen photos, sometimes, taken from planes. He still wasn’t sure if they’d been real or just computer imagery. All those trees: it had just looked copy-pasted after a while.

  Still, he dreamt of them, being lost in the eternal dimness under that unrelieved roof of leaves, exactly the same, every way he turned, no landmarks, no trails, no way out. In his waking days he had walked out of the desert all the way to the Ankara. They called him Wild Thing after that, BunduBoy. The next generation of Firewalkers—kids two, three years his junior—told stories of the Vietnamese hero who’d conquered the sand and the dust. They said he wasn’t scared of anything. None of them understood how he was scared of all of it. There wasn’t a damn thing out there that couldn’t kill you, and the absence of things would kill you most of all. All the trees were gone, mostly gone even back when Grandad came to build the Anchor. All of the rivers were dry.

  He woke to find the weather had stolen a march on them, and everything outside the Rumblebug’s shaded glass was dust, solid walls of swirling particles blotting out the sun. He heard Lupé and Hotep, and for a moment his mind turned their voices into an argument and he knew they were going to die. Then his mind cast off the nightmares and he understood they were only shouting because of the boom and rattle as the wind tried to snatch at the ’Bug and turn it over. They were following the plan; they’d picked up the bug farm beacon and w
ere homing in on it, because even Firewalkers couldn’t keep moving in this, and if they tried it, the dust would block all the vents and intakes, smother the solar panels, kill the vehicle and then kill them.

  “Fukme,” Mao swore, one of the English language’s more persistent insertions into Achouka patois.

  “Why they pay us the big bucks, chommie,” Lupé told him. She was driving now, he saw, with Hotep in the passenger seat and the comms apparently half-disassembled on her lap. At the sight of that, Mao bolted upright, all sorts of bad words leaping to his lips, but they were definitely picking up the signal. He had to take it on faith that Hotep had been fixing a problem and not making one.

  She looked over her shoulder at him. She had her bandana down, her bandages up, the goggles still in place, trusting to the ‘Bug’s dark glass to keep the sun from boiling her skin like a lobster. He still had no idea what her eyes looked like, but her face seemed like it had been over-enthusiastically whittled from white wood: sharp nose, sharp chin, thin ginger arches for her eyebrows.

  “So what’s—” she started, but the witticism would have to wait because Lupé yelped in surprise and hauled the ’Bug sideways to avoid what looked like an enormous rib-cage, looming two storeys up out of the dust.

  “Dzam!” Abruptly there were structures rearing up all around them—just appearing out of the skirling dust, but at their speed the beams and sand-blasted girders looked like they were thrusting out of the earth even as they passed, curving overhead like monstrous fingers trying to pin the rattling vehicle down.