“This sickness changed people?” Michael asked. “Is that why people today don’t know how to make machines? Did it make us stupid?”
“No, no. Not like that. It didn’t change you like that.” Kali twisted around to look toward one of the cabin’s windows, a square of oiled animal skin that let through some of the dusk’s waning light. “Are there wolves around here, in the forest?”
“Yes.”
“And mountain lions—big cats?”
“Yes, those too.”
“Wolves live in packs,” Kali said, “while mountain lions are solitary. People are more like wolves, wouldn’t you say?”
“You mean because we live in groups? Yes, I guess so.”
“In my time we would say that humans are a social animal. The virus changed that. Not very much; just a little. Just a little adjustment. Being social creatures doesn’t only mean that we live in groups. It also affects how we think. Or rather it used to. That’s what changed, Michael. The genetic expression of social instincts has been reduced to the point that those instincts no longer carry over into abstract reasoning.”
Michael rubbed his chin. “I don’t…”
“I know you don’t understand those words, Michael. What they mean is that you—your people—don’t have the concept of belonging to a larger community—a community that includes people you don’t know, people who aren’t standing in front of you. You can’t think of people who are far away as being a part of your social group. Your brain doesn’t work that way. You can interact with people who are standing in front of you, but that’s all. Your instinct to social behavior doesn’t extend beyond that.”
There was no comprehension in Michael’s face, but Kali went on, looking down at the floor, talking more to herself than to him. “There was a brilliant purity to the solution. It was probably the least invasive thing, the smallest possible change you could make to human nature and still make war impossible. People are as intelligent, as aggressive, as passionate as they ever were, but they won’t make war. Wars happened because people thought in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’. There was an ‘us’ that was right and a ‘them’ that was wrong. An ‘us’ that was righteous and a ‘them’ that was infidel. So that’s what was erased from the human brain. After the virus, the concept of a ‘them’ was erased. But the concept of ‘us’ is gone too.”
Kali sighed, and there was a tremble in her breath. “And so … Now there is no war. And there is no science, no literature, no history, no scholarship, no learning of anything that can’t be taught by one person to another, face to face. And you will do your woodworking today and Jim will make his pots and Ann will weave cloth, and you will all go to sleep tonight and wake up tomorrow morning and go to sleep tomorrow night and wake up the next morning and the next and the next and the next, and nothing will ever, ever, ever change.”
Michael got up and hung his instrument on the wall. Standing, looking down at Kali, he said, “Things change, Kali. You came here; you came to my door. That was a change. For me at least, that was a very great change.”
* * *
Kali and Michael were married in the following spring, and in the fall she gave birth to a daughter. It was not an easy birth, and as Kali gripped Michael’s hand in her right and Susan’s hand in her left, she shouted out curses against the world, against the village, against Michael and Susan, against herself. But when the baby was finally delivered and laid on her belly, she became like all mothers, crying with joy and delight and love for the new life she’d brought into the world.
Years passed. Kali became well-liked by her neighbors; she was known as a woman who worked hard, who knew many strange things and yet was ignorant of many common things, who entertained children with wonderful stories, and who seemed to always be haunted by a sadness that she could never share or explain. Her daughter was named Asha, and as the girl grew older Kali began teaching her to make the marks of writing. She also would spend long periods talking to her daughter, asking her questions, challenging her answers, all the time her face taut and intense, perhaps even frightened.
One day when Asha was eight, as happens with all mothers and their children, Kali and Asha quarreled. Asha screamed the angriest of the few angry words she knew and threw down the slate that Kali had been using for her writing lessons. As Kali bent to pick up the pieces of the slate, tears were already welling in her eyes. That evening she sat sullenly at the table, eating nothing, barely speaking. “The virus is still active,” she said to Michael after Asha had gone to bed. “It infected me, changed my chromosomes, and so Asha’s brain is butchered, just like yours, just like everyone’s. I guess I’ve known it for a long time now, but I was hiding it from myself.”
“Our daughter is perfect,” Michael said. “She is beautiful and smart, and she’s going to grow up to be a wonderful woman like her mother.”
Kali glanced up at her husband, her face haggard, her eyes edged with red. “No, not like her mother, Michael. For whatever difference that makes. I don’t know what I was hoping for anyway. What difference could one child make, or a dozen? And what did I want? A return to the old days, with the world ready to destroy itself? No, Michael, there’s nothing of me in your daughter, and she’s better off that way. Let her be one of you. Let me be the last of an extinct species, a species that failed and died out long ago.”
Later, as her husband and daughter slept, Kali left the cabin and walked down the road that had first brought her to the village. When she reached the beach she walked out into the ocean with her clothes on and swam toward the horizon. She swam away from her family, from all the people she had come to know and feel fondness for. She swam away from the peaceful village, from the world of harmony and no war, where cups and bowls were made by a potter named Jim, where a woman named Ann wove cloth, where Susan still dispensed her medicines and her advice. Kali was a strong swimmer, and she cut cleanly through the breakers and was almost out of sight of land before her strength gave out.
Michael did not marry again. He was devoted to his daughter and lavished all his love and attention on her. As she grew older she would sometimes speak about people in the world outside the village in strange ways, almost as if they were people that she knew. Her father only smiled at this, and didn’t criticize her for her odd ideas.
Shooting the Apocalypse
PAOLO BACIGALUPI
Paolo Bacigalupi made his first sale in 1998, to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, took a break from the genre for several years, and then returned to it in the new century, with new sales to F&SF, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Fast Forward 2. His story “The Calorie Man” won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial awards, and his acclaimed first novel The Windup Girl won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial awards. His other novels include Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities. His most recent books are the novels The Doubt Factory and Zombie Baseball Beatdown. Coming up is a new novel, The Water Knife. His short work has been collected in Pump Six and Other Stories. Bacigalupi lives with family in Paonia, Colorado.
Here’s a grim look at an all-too-likely future, one not that far away, where people are a lot closer to the edge of disaster than they think that they are.
If it were for anyone else, he would have just laughed in their faces and told them they were on their own.
The thought nagged at Timo as he drove his beat-up FlexFusion down the rutted service road that ran parallel to the concrete-lined canal of the Central Arizona Project. For any other journo who came down to Phoenix looking for a story, he wouldn’t even think of doing them a favor.
All those big names looking to swoop in like magpies and grab some meaty exclusive and then fly away just as fast, keeping all their page views and hits to themselves … he wouldn’t do it.
Didn’t matter if they were Google/NY Times, Cherry Xu, Facebook Social Now, Deborah Williams, Kindle Post, or Xinhua.
But Lucy? Well, sure. For Lucy, he’d climb into his sweatbox of a car with all his camera g
ear and drive his skinny brown ass out to North Phoenix and into the hills on a crap tip. He’d drive this way and that, burning gas trying to find a service road, and then bump his way through dirt and ruts, scraping the belly of the Ford the whole way, and he still wouldn’t complain.
Just goes to show you’re a sucker for a girl who wears her jeans tight.
But it wasn’t just that. Lucy was fine, if you liked a girl with white skin and little tits and wide hips, and sometimes Timo would catch himself fantasizing about what it would be like to get with her. But in the end, that wasn’t why he did favors for Lucy. He did it because she was scrappy and wet and she was in over her head—and too hard-assed and proud to admit it.
Girl had grit; Timo could respect that. Even if she came from up north and was so wet that sometimes he laughed out loud at the things she said. The girl didn’t know much about dry desert life, but she had grit.
So when she muttered over her Dos Equis that all the stories had already been done, Timo, in a moment of beery romantic fervor, had sworn to her that it just wasn’t so. He had the eye. He saw things other people didn’t. He could name twenty stories she could still do and make a name for herself.
But when he’d started listing possibilities, Lucy shot them down as fast as he brought them up.
Coyotes running Texans across the border into California?
Sohu already had a nine part series running.
Californians buying Texas hookers for nothing, like Phoenix was goddamn Tijuana?
Google/NY Times and Fox both had big spreads.
Water restrictions from the Roosevelt Dam closure and the drying up of Phoenix’s swimming pools?
Kindle Post ran that.
The narco murders that kept getting dumped in the empty pools that had become so common that people had started calling them “swimmers”?
AP. Fox. Xinhua. LA Times. The Talisha Brannon Show. Plus the reality narco show Hard Bangin’.
He kept suggesting new angles, new stories, and all Lucy said, over and over was, “It’s been done.” And then she’d rattle off the news organizations, the journos who’d covered the stories, the page hits, the viewerships, and the click-thrus they’d drawn.
“I’m not looking for some dead hooker for the sex and murder crowd,” Lucy said as she drained her beer. “I want something that’ll go big. I want a scoop, you know?”
“And I want a woman to hand me a ice-cold beer when I walk in the door,” Timo grumped. “Don’t mean I’m going to get it.”
But still, he understood her point. He knew how to shoot pictures that would make a vulture sob its beady eyes out, but the news environment that Lucy fought to distinguish herself in was like gladiatorial sport—some winners, a lot of losers, and a whole shit-ton of blood on the ground.
Journo money wasn’t steady money. Wasn’t good money. Sometimes, you got lucky. Hell, he’d got lucky himself when he’d gone over Texas way and shot Hurricane Violet in all her glory. He’d photographed a whole damn fishing boat flying through the air and landing on a Days Inn, and in that one shot he knew he’d hit the big time. Violet razed Galveston and blasted into Houston, and Timo got page views so high that he sometimes imagined that the Cat 6 had actually killed him and sent him straight to Heaven.
He’d kept hitting reload on his PayPal account and watched the cash pouring in. He’d had the big clanking cojones to get into the heart of that clusterfuck, and he’d come out of it with more than a million hits a photo. Got him all excited.
But disaster was easy to cover, and he’d learned the hard way that when the big dogs muscled in, little dogs got muscled out. Which left him back in sad-sack Phoenix, scraping for glamour shots of brains on windshields and trussed-up drug bunnies in the bottoms of swimming pools. It made him sympathetic to Lucy’s plight, if not her perspective.
It’s all been done, Timo thought as he maneuvered his Ford around the burned carcass of an abandoned Tesla. So what if it’s been motherfucking done?
“There ain’t no virgins, and there ain’t no clean stories,” he’d tried to explain to Lucy. “There’s just angles on the same-ass stories. Scoops come from being in the right place at the right time, and that’s all just dumb luck. Why don’t you just come up with a good angle on Phoenix and be happy?”
But Lucy Monroe wanted a nice clean virgin story that didn’t have no grubby fingerprints on it from other journos. Something she could put her name on. Some way to make her mark, make those big news companies notice her. Something to grow her brand and all that. Not just the day-to-day grind of narco kills and starving immigrants from Texas, something special. Something new.
So when the tip came in, Timo thought what the hell, maybe this was something she’d like. Maybe even a chance to blow up together. Lucy could do the words, he’d bring the pics, and they’d scoop all the big name journos who drank martinis at the Hilton 6 and complained about what a refugee shit hole Phoenix had become.
The Ford scraped over more ruts. Dust already coated the rear window of Timo’s car, a thick beige paste. Parallel to the service road, the waters of the Central Arizona Project flowed, serene and blue and steady. A man-made canal that stretched three hundred miles across the desert to bring water to Phoenix from the Colorado River. A feat of engineering, and cruelly tempting, given the ten-foot chain-link and barbed wire fences that escorted it on either side.
In this part of Phoenix, the Central Arizona Project formed the city’s northern border. On one side of the CAP canal, it was all modest stucco tract houses packed together like sardines stretching south. But on Timo’s side, it was desert, rising into tan and rust hill folds, dotted with mesquite and saguaro.
A few hardy subdivisions had built outposts north of the CAP’s moat-like boundary, but the canal seemed to form a barrier of some psychological significance, because for the most part, Phoenix stayed to the south of the concrete-lined canal, choosing to finally build itself into something denser than lazy sprawl. Phoenix on one side, the desert on the other, and the CAP flowing between them like a thin blue DMZ.
Just driving on the desert side of the CAP made Timo thirsty. Dry mouth, plain-ass desert, quartz rocks and sandstone nubs with a few creosote bushes holding onto the dust and waving in the blast furnace wind. Normally, Timo didn’t even bother to look at the desert. It barely changed. But here he was, looking for something new—
He rounded a curve and slowed, peering through his grimy windshield. “Well I’ll be goddamned…”
Up ahead, something was hanging from the CAP’s barrier fence. Dogs were jumping up to tug at it, milling and barking.
Timo squinted, trying to understand what he was seeing.
“Oh yeah. Hell yes!”
He hit the brakes. The car came grinding to a halt in a cloud of dust, but Timo was already climbing out and fumbling for his phone, pressing it to his ear, listening to it ring.
Come on, come on, come on.
Lucy picked up.
Timo couldn’t help grinning. “I got your story, girl. You’ll love it. It’s new.”
* * *
The dogs bared their teeth at Timo’s approach, but Timo just laughed. He dug into his camera bag for his pistol.
“You want a piece of me?” he asked. “You want some of Timo, bitches?”
Turned out they didn’t. As soon he held up the pistol, the dogs scattered. Animals were smarter than people, that way. Pull a gun on some drunk California frat boy and you never knew if the sucker was still going to try and throw down. Dogs were way smarter than Californians. Timo could respect that, so he didn’t shoot them as they fled the scene.
One of the dogs, braver or more arrogant than the rest, paused to yank off a final trophy before loping away; the rest of the pack zeroed in on it, yipping and leaping, trying to steal its prize. Timo watched, wishing he’d pulled his camera instead of his gun. The shot was perfect. He sighed and stuffed the pistol into the back of his pants, dug out his camera, and turned to the subject at hand.
/> “Well hello, good-looking,” he murmured. “Ain’t you a sight?”
The man hung upside down from the chain link fence, bloated from the Phoenix heat. A bunch of empty milk jugs dangled off his body, swinging from a harness of shoelace ties. From the look of him, he’d been cooking out in the sun for at least a day or so.
The meat of one arm was completely desleeved, and the other arm … well, Timo had watched the dogs make off with the poor bastard’s hand. His face and neck and chest didn’t look much better. The dogs had been doing some jumping.
“Come on, vato. Gimme the story.” Timo stalked back and forth in front of the body, checking the angles, considering the shadows and light. “You want to get your hits up don’t you? Show Timo your good side, I make you famous. So help me out, why don’t you?”
He stepped back, thinking wide-frame: the strung-up body, the black nylon flowers woven into the chain link around it. The black guttered candles and cigarettes and mini liquor bottles scattered by the dogs’ frenzied feeding. The CAP flowing behind it all. Phoenix beyond that, sprawling all the way to the horizon.
“What’s your best side?” Timo asked. “Don’t be shy. I’ll do you right. Make you famous. Just let me get your angle.”
There.
Timo squatted and started shooting. Click-click-click-click—the artificial sound of digital photography and the Pavlovian rush of sweaty excitement as Timo got the feel.
Dead man.
Flowers.
Candles.
Water.
Timo kept snapping. He had it now. The flowers and the empty milk-jugs dangling off the dude. Timo was in the flow, bracketing exposures, shooting steady, recognizing the moment when his inner eye told him that he’d nailed the story. It was good. Really good.
As good as a Cat 6 plowing into Houston.
Click-click-click. Money-money-money-money.
“That’s right, buddy. Talk to your friend Timo.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection Page 22
