Annie comes in, wiping her forehead with a tanned arm. “Don’t drink too much water,” she says. “I haven’t been able to pump. Bunch of guardies around.”
“What the hell are they doing around? We haven’t even opened our headgates yet.”
“They said they were looking for you.”
Lolo almost drops his cup.
They know.
They know about his tamarisk reseeding. They know he’s been splitting and planting root clusters. That he’s been dragging big, healthy chunks of tamarisk up and down the river. A week ago, he uploaded his claim on the canyon tamarisk—his biggest stand yet—almost worth an acre-foot in itself in water bounty. And now the guardies are knocking on his door.
Lolo forces his hand not to shake as he puts his cup down. “They say what they want?” He’s surprised his voice doesn’t crack.
“Just that they wanted to talk to you.” She pauses. “They had one of those Humvees. With the guns.”
Lolo closes his eyes. Forces himself to take a deep breath. “They’ve always got guns. It’s probably nothing.”
“It reminded me of Lake Havasu. When they cleared us out. When they shut down the water treatment plant and everyone tried to burn down the BLM office.”
“It’s probably nothing.” Suddenly, he’s glad he never told her about his tamarisk hijinks. They can’t punish her the same. How many acre-feet is he liable for? It must be hundreds. They’ll want him, all right. Put him on a Straw work crew and make him work for life, repay his water debt forever. He’s replanted hundreds, maybe thousands of tamarisk, shuffling them around like a cardsharp on a poker table, moving them from one bank to another, killing them again and again and again, and always happily sending in his “evidence.”
“It’s probably nothing,” he says again.
“That’s what people said in Havasu.”
Lolo waves out at their newly tilled patch. The sun shines down hot and hard on the small plot. “We’re not worth that kind of effort.” He forces a grin. “It probably has to do with those enviro crazies who tried to blow up the Straw. Some of them supposedly ran this way. It’s probably that.”
Annie shakes her head, unconvinced. “I don’t know. They could have asked me the same as you.”
“Yeah, but I cover a lot of ground. See a lot of things. I’ll bet that’s why they want to talk to me. They’re just looking for eco-freaks.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right. It’s probably that.” She nods slowly, trying to make herself believe. “Those enviros, they don’t make any sense at all. Not enough water for people, and they want to give the river to a bunch of fish and birds.”
Lolo nods emphatically and grins wider. “Yeah. Stupid.” But suddenly, he views the eco-crazies with something approaching brotherly affection. The Californians are after him, too.
* * * *
Lolo doesn’t sleep all night. His instincts tell him to run, but he doesn’t have the heart to tell Annie or to leave her. He goes out in the morning hunting tamarisk and fails at that as well. He doesn’t cut a single stand all day. He considers shooting himself with his shotgun but chickens out when he gets the barrels in his mouth. Better alive and on the run than dead. Finally, as he stares into the twin barrels, he knows that he has to tell Annie, tell her he’s been a water thief for years and that he’s got to run north. Maybe she’ll come with him. Maybe she’ll see reason. They’ll run together. At least they have that. For sure, he’s not going to let those bastards take him off to a labor camp for the rest of his life.
But the guardies are already waiting when Lolo gets back. They’re squatting in the shade of their Humvee, talking. When Lolo comes over the crest of the hill, one of them taps the other and points. They both stand. Annie is out in the field again, turning over dirt, unaware of what’s about to happen. Lolo reins in and studies the guardies. They lean against their Humvee and watch him back.
Suddenly, Lolo sees his future. It plays out in his mind the way it does in a movie, as clear as the blue sky above. He puts his hand on his shotgun. Where it sits on Maggie’s far side, the guardies can’t see it. He keeps Maggie angled away from them and lets the camel start down the hill.
The guardies saunter toward him. They’ve got their Humvee with a .50 caliber on the back, and they’ve both got M-16s slung over their shoulders. They’re in full bulletproof gear and they look flushed and hot. Lolo rides down slowly. He’ll have to hit them both in the face. Sweat trickles between his shoulder blades. His hand is slick on the shotgun’s stock.
The guardies are playing it cool. They’ve still got their rifles slung, and they let Lolo keep approaching. One of them has a wide smile. He’s maybe forty years old and tanned. He’s been out for a while, picking up a tan like that. The other raises a hand and says, “Hey there, Lolo.”
Lolo’s so surprised he takes his hand off his shotgun. “Hale?” He recognizes the guardie. He grew up with him. They played football together a million years ago, when football fields still had green grass and sprinklers sprayed their water straight into the air. Hale. Hale Perkins. Lolo scowls. He can’t shoot Hale.
Hale says. “You’re still out here, huh?”
“What the hell are you doing in that uniform? You with the Calies now?”
Hale grimaces and points to his uniform patches: Utah National Guard.
Lolo scowls. Utah National Guard. Colorado National Guard. Arizona National Guard. They’re all the same. There’s hardly a single member of the “National Guard” that isn’t an out-of-state mercenary. Most of the local guardies quit a long time ago, sick to death of goose-stepping family and friends off their properties and sick to death of trading potshots with people who just wanted to stay in their homes. So, even if there’s still a Colorado National Guard, or an Arizona or a Utah, inside those uniforms with all their expensive night-sight gear and their brand-new choppers flying the river bends, it’s pure California.
And then there are a few like Hale.
Lolo remembers Hale as being an okay guy. Remembers stealing a keg of beer from behind the Elks Club one night with him. Lolo eyes him. “How you liking that Supplementary Assistance Program?” He glances at the other guardie. “That working real well for you? The Calies a big help?”
Hale’s eyes plead for understanding. “Come on, Lolo. I’m not like you. I got a family to look after. If I do another year of duty, they let Shannon and the kids base out of California.”
“They give you a swimming pool in your back yard, too?”
“You know it’s not like that. Water’s scarce there, too.”
Lolo wants to taunt him, but his heart isn’t in it. A part of him wonders if Hale is just smart. At first, when California started winning its water lawsuits and shutting off cities, the displaced people just followed the water—right to California. It took a little while before the bureaucrats realized what was going on, but finally someone with a sharp pencil did the math and realized that taking in people along with their water didn’t solve a water shortage. So, the immigration fences went up.
But people like Hale can still get in.
“So, what do you two want?” Inside, Lolo’s wondering why they haven’t already pulled him off Maggie and hauled him away, but he’s willing to play this out.
The other guardie grins. “Maybe we’re just out here seeing how the water ticks live.”
Lolo eyes him. This one, he could shoot. He lets his hand fall to his shotgun again. “BuRec sets my headgate. No reason for you to be out here.”
The Calie says, “There were some marks on it. Big ones.”
Lolo smiles tightly. He knows which marks the Calie is talking about. He made them with five different wrenches when he tried to dismember the entire headgate apparatus in a fit of obsession. Finally, he gave up trying to open the bolts and just beat on the thing, banging the steel of the gate, smashing at it, while on the other side he had plants withering. After that, he gave up and just carried buckets of water to his plants and left it
at that. But the dents and nicks are still there, reminding him of a period of madness. “It still works, don’t it?”
Hale holds up a hand to his partner, quieting him. “Yeah, it still works. That’s not why we’re here.”
“So, what do you two want? You didn’t drive all the way out here with your machine gun just to talk about dents in my headgate.”
Hale sighs, put-upon, trying to be reasonable. “You mind getting down off that damn camel so we can talk?”
Lolo studies the two guardies, figuring his chances on the ground. “Shit.” He spits. “Yeah, Okay. You got me.” He urges Maggie to kneel and climbs off her hump. “Annie didn’t know anything about this. Don’t get her involved. It was all me.”
Hale’s brow wrinkles, puzzled. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re not arresting me?”
The Calie with Hale laughs. “Why? ’Cause you take a couple buckets of water from the river? ’Cause you probably got an illegal cistern around here somewhere?” He laughs again. “You ticks are all the same. You think we don’t know about all that crap?”
Hale scowls at the Calie, then turns back to Lolo. “No, we’re not here to arrest you. You know about the Straw?”
“Yeah.” Lolo says it slowly, but inside, he’s grinning. A great weight is suddenly off him. They don’t know. They don’t know shit. It was a good plan when he started it, and it’s a good plan still. Lolo schools his face to keep the glee off and tries to listen to what Hale’s saying, but he can’t; he’s jumping up and down and gibbering like a monkey. They don’t know—
“Wait.” Lolo holds up his hand. “What did you just say?”
Hale repeats himself. “California’s ending the water bounty. They’ve got enough Straw sections built up now that they don’t need the program. They’ve got half the river enclosed. They got an agreement from the Department of the Interior to focus their budget on seep and evaporation control. That’s where all the big benefits are. They’re shutting down the water bounty payout program.” He pauses. “I’m sorry, Lolo.”
Lolo frowns. “But a tamarisk is still a tamarisk. Why should one of those damn plants get the water? If I knock out a tamarisk, even if Cali doesn’t want the water, I could still take it. Lots of people could use the water.”
Hale looks pityingly at Lolo. “We don’t make the regulations; we just enforce them. I’m supposed to tell you that your headgate won’t get opened next year. If you keep hunting tamarisk, it won’t do any good.” He looks around the patch, then shrugs. “Anyway, in another couple years, they were going to pipe this whole stretch. There won’t be any tamarisk at all after that.”
“What am I supposed to do, then?”
“California and BuRec is offering early buyout money.” Hale pulls a booklet out of his bulletproof vest and flips it open. “Sort of to soften the blow.” The pages of the booklet flap in the hot breeze. Hale pins the pages with a thumb and pulls a pen out of another vest pocket. He marks something on the booklet, then tears off a perforated check. “It’s not a bad deal.”
Lolo takes the check. Stares at it. “Five hundred dollars?”
Hale shrugs sadly. “It’s what they’re offering. That’s just the paper codes. You confirm it online. Use your BuRec camera phone, and they’ll deposit it in whatever bank you want. Or they can hold it in trust until you get into a town and want to withdraw it. Any place with a BLM office, you can do that. But you need to confirm before April 15. Then BuRec’ll send out a guy to shut down your headgate before this season gets going.”
“Five hundred dollars?”
“It’s enough to get you north. That’s more than they’re offering next year.”
“But this is my patch.”
“Not as long as we’ve got Big Daddy Drought. I’m sorry, Lolo.”
“The drought could break any time. Why can’t they give us a couple more years? It could break any time.” But even as he says it, Lolo doesn’t believe. Ten years ago, he might have. But not now. Big Daddy Drought’s here to stay. He clutches the check and its key codes to his chest.
A hundred yards away, the river flows on to California.
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PAOLO BACIGALUPI is the bestselling author of the novels The Windup Girl, Ship Breaker, The Drowned Cities, Zombie Baseball Beatdown, and the collection Pump Six and Other Stories. He is a winner of the Michael L. Printz, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards, and was a National Book Award finalist. A new novel for young adults, The Doubt Factory, came out in 2014, and a new science fiction novel dealing with the effects of climate change, The Water Knife, was published in May 2015.
MITIGATION
TOBIAS S. BUCKELL & KARL SCHROEDER
Chauncie St. Christie squinted in the weak 3 a.m. sunlight. No, two degrees higher. He adjusted the elevation, stepped back in satisfaction, and pulled on a lime-green nylon cord. The mortar burped loudly, and seconds later, a fountain of water shot up ten feet from his target.
His sat phone vibrated on his belt and he half reached for it, causing the gyroscope-stabilized platform to wobble slightly. “Damn it.” That must be Maksim on the phone. The damn Croat would be calling about the offer again. Chauncie ignored the reminder and reset the mortar. “How close are they?”
His friend Kulitak stood on the rail of the trawler and scanned the horizon with a set of overpowered binoculars. “Those eco response ships are throwing out oil containment booms. Canuck gunboats’re all on the far side of the spill.”
“As long as they’re busy.” Chauncie adjusted the mortar and dropped another shell into it. This shot hit dead-on, and the CarbonJohnny™ blew apart in a cloud of Styrofoam, cheap solar panel fragments, and chicken wire.
Kulitak lowered his binoculars. “Nice one.”
“One down, a million to go,” muttered Chauncie. The little drift of debris was already sinking, the flotsam joining the ever-present scrim of trash that peppered all ocean surfaces. Hundreds more CarbonJohnnies dotted the sea all the way to the horizon, each one a moronically simple mechanism. A few bottom-of-the-barrel cheap solar panels sent a weak current into a slowly unreeling sheet of chicken wire that hung in the water. This electrolyzed calcium carbonate out of the water. As the chicken wire turned to concrete, sections of it tore off and sank into the depths of the Makarov Basin. These big reels looked a bit like toilet paper and unraveled the same way, a few sheets at a time: hence the name CarbonJohnny. Sequestors International (NASDAQ symbol: SQI) churned them out by the shipload with the noble purpose of sequestering carbon and making a quick buck from the carbon credits.
Chauncie and his friends blew them up and sank them almost as quickly.
“This is lame,” Kulitak said. “We’re not going to make any money today.”
“Let’s pack up, find somewhere less involved.”
Chauncie grunted irritably; he’d have to pay for an updated satellite mosaic and look for another UN inspection blind spot. Kulitak had picked this field of CarbonJohnnies because overhead, somewhere high in the stratosphere, a pregnant blimp staggered through the pale air dumping sulfur particulates into a too-clean atmosphere to help block the warming sun. But in the process it also helpfully obscured some of the finer details of what Chauncie and Kulitak were up to. Unfortunately, the pesky ecological catastrophe unfolding off the port bow was wreaking havoc with their schedule.
A day earlier, somebody had blown up an automated U.S. Pure Waters, Inc. tug towing a half cubic kilometer of iceberg. Kulitak thought it was the Emerald Institute who’d done it, but they were just one of dozens of ecoterrorist groups who might have been responsible. Everybody was protesting the large-scale “strip mining” of the Arctic’s natural habitat, and now and then somebody did something about it.
The berg had turned out to be unstable. As Chauncie’d been motoring out to this spot he’d heard the distant thunder as it flipped over. He hadn’t heard the impact of the passing supertanker
with its underwater spur three hours later; but he could sure smell it when he woke up. The news said three or four thousand tonnes of oil had leaked out into the water, and the immediate area was turning into a circus of cleanup crews. Media, Greenpeace, oil company ships, UN, government officials—they would all descend soon enough.
“There’s money in cleanup,” Chauncie commented; he smiled at Kulitak’s grimace.
“Money,” said Kulitak. “And forms. And treaties you gotta watch out for; and politics like rat traps. Let’s find another Johnny.” The Inuit radicals who had hired them were dumping their own version of the CarbonJohnny into these waters. Blowing up SQI’s Johnnies was not, Chauncie’s employer had claimed, actually piracy; it was merely a diversion of the carbon credits that would otherwise have gone to SQI—and at $100 per tonne sequestered, it added up fast.
He shrugged at Kulitak’s impatient look, and bent to stow the mortar. Broken Styrofoam, twirling beer cans, and plush toys from a container-ship accident drifted in the trawler’s wake; farther out, the Johnnies bobbed in their thousands, a marine forest through which dozens of larger vessels had to pick their way. On the horizon, a converted tanker was spraying a fine mist of iron powder into the air—fertilizing the Arctic Ocean for another carbon sequestration company, just as the blimps overhead were smearing the sky with reflective smog to cut down global warming in another way. Helicopters crammed with biologists and carbon-market auditors zigged and zagged over the waters, and yellow autosubs cruised under them, all measuring the effect.
Mile-long oil supertankers cruised obliviously through it all. Now that the world’s trees were worth more as carbon sinks than building material, the plastics industry had taken off. Oil as fuel was on its way out; oil for the housing industry was in high demand.
And in the middle of it all, Chauncie’s little trawler. It didn’t actually fish. There were fish enough—the effect of pumping iron powder into the ocean was to accelerate the Arctic’s already large biodiversity to previously unseen levels. Plankton boomed, and the cycle of life in the deep had exploded. The ocean’s fisheries no longer struggled, and boats covered the oceans with nets and still couldn’t make a dent. Chauncie’s fishing nets were camouflage. Who would notice one more trawler picking its way toward a less-packed quadrant of CarbonJohnnies?
Loosed Upon the World Page 55
