Crystal Rain

by Tobias S. Buckell

  Then Jerome offered to make dinner. John smiled and went inside. He helped him while he thought about what needed to be done outside. The garden needed to be plowed and replanted. And then he needed paper, lots of it, as he would put down on paper everything he could remember that would help them build bigger cities, better weapons.

  Could he get them to rockets in fifty years? A lot could happen in fifty years before Pepper demanded they leave in the Ma Wi Jung.

  Tomorrow he would do all these things.

  Tomorrow would be another day on Nanagada. A new day. But for now, Jerome peeled potatoes for soup, and John picked up the badly cut chunks of potato and laughed. After a few seconds Jerome laughed and slowed down, taking the time to slice only the skin off the potato.

  Till Jerome grew up, John thought with a smile.

  EPILOGUE

  It was rainy season in Anahuac. The floating gardens on the lakes were ripe with vegetables and fruits, and the cornfields grew strong. The back of the village bordered on the jungle that led up to the mountains.

  The priest had chosen several lucky children all at the same height as the corn to offer to the gods. The whole village of Anahuac gathered by the center of the town to watch the priest with his blood-matted hair offer the children to secure the health of the corn crop. Much to the shame of some parents, the children cried, gathered in a small group near the top of the village’s small pyramid.

  This was a special day, for a god had come in a divan to bless the offering. It remained under the curtains, away from the harsh sun, but the villagers were excited and honored to have it.

  A priest with a flayed cape of skin grabbed the first child. He held the knife in the air, the jewels along the hilt glittering, and pulled the child up to the center of the pyramid. Everyone grew quiet in anticipation. The bustle of those selling things alongside the street fell as all eyes looked up the steep slope of the pyramid at the priest.

  An explosion rocked the pyramid right under the priest’s feet. The knife he held shattered from a single, expert shot. The priest clutched his bloody hand in shock. He clambered off and fell down the black stones toward the ground, as if a sacrificial victim himself.

  Everyone turned around in confusion.

  The god’s divan flipped over. A horrible squealing deafened those standing around it, and several shots ended the sound. Everyone watched in horror as a curtain flipped open, and a black man with knotted dreadlocked hair and gray eyes stepped out, guns in either hand.

  He turned in a smooth circle and shot the four warriors standing by the side of the divan. He looked at the throng of people around him and they stared at him, shocked.

  He smiled.

  “Who are you?” the priest lying at the foot of the pyramid demanded, struggling to stand up and hold his wounded hand.

  The man did not answer. He walked through the villagers, his long, tattered coat swaying with him, and ran up the pyramid. Without any effort he picked a kid up under each arm, still holding his guns in his hands, and walked back down the pyramid.

  He stopped by the edge of the flagstones, near the trees, and turned around. “I am Pepper,” he told them. His deep voice echoed in the village square. “I am the man your gods will have nightmares about for the next fifty years.” He put the children down and pointed off into the jungle.

  The children looked back at the pyramid, then ran.

  He shook his hands, and clear, sticky fluids splattered down onto the flagstones by his mud-encrusted boots.

  Warrior-priests gathered at the edge of the square with atlatl, but the black man moved like a cat, his sinewy muscles exploding with energy. He ran for the jungle before a single dart was thrown.

  The bushes rustled where he disappeared. The priests’ darts clattered to the ground hitting nothing.

  All that was left of the man was a wicked laugh.

  PRAISE FOR CRYSTAL RAIN

  “Crystal Rain is refreshing and imaginative, an exotic stew of cultures, myths, and technology.”

  —Kevin J. Anderson

  “A cracking adventure yarn from an exciting new writer.”

  —Cory Doctorow, author of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

  “An alive, exciting story. Crystal Rain is a great launch to Buckell’s career as a novelist; more, please!”

  —Nalo Hopkinson, author of The Salt Roads

  “War, intrigue, and some pretty twisty SF surprises staged in an unusual cultural setting—Crystal Rain is a promising debut for Tobias S. Buckell.”

  —Janny Wurts, author of Traitor’s Knot

  “[An] enjoyable SF debut … Buckell handles his interlocking narratives well and his characters retain their humanity (even the slightly alien ones).”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Caribbean-born Buckell’s debut captures the flavor of Afro-Caribbean culture in the lilting dialog of his characters and in their customs. An original tale with distinctive characters and a fresh approach to world-building, this SF quest belongs in most libraries.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Readers who like sieges, strategies, and swashbuckling heroes will thoroughly enjoy this fast-moving tale.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Buckell’s first novel, Crystal Rain, is the sort of thing that will have readers watching for more … . Buckell has displayed a gift for imagination much greater than one book can hold.”

  —Analog

  “In this stellar debut novel, Buckell has created an amazing world that combines Caribbean and Aztec culture and religion with long-lost technology and mysterious aliens. The plot is well constructed and the writing is simply superb, particularly the dialogue, which is amazingly beautiful and evokes a people who are clearly from our world but living far, far away.”

  —Romantic Times BOOK reviews

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  They say no man is an island unto himself, and so while I’m excited about having written Crystal Rain, I had a community of friends who critiqued various versions of this novel and who cheered me along. I owe them all a debt of gratitude.

  My thanks to Mary Turzillo, Rebecca Carmi, Geoffrey Landis, Damn Bright, Pat Stansberry, Bonita Kale, Marie Vibbert, Paul Melko, Jerry Robinette, and Mark Siegel (who, sadly, passed away before I returned the favor) for critiques early in the process. More big thanks to the 2003 Blue Heaven crew who all critiqued my first fifty pages (Chris Barzack, Roger Eichorn, Karin Lowachee, Paul Melko, Nancy Proctor, Mary Rickert, Ben Rosenbaum, James Stevens-Arce, and Amber Van Dyk) with superspecial thanks to Charles Coleman Finlay and Cathy “Chance” Morrison for detailed critiques of the whole novel (and a shout-out to Robin and Marvin, our magnificent Blue Heaven hosts; if you ever have a chance to stay at the Eagle’s Nest or Himmelblau on Kelly’s Island, you won’t regret it). I also owe Ilsa J. Bick and Karin Lowachee thanks for being “writing buddies” and egging me on through various drafts.

  I am lucky to have a great agent, Joshua Bilmes, who believed in this project and me enough to ask me to write the whole thing. Thanks to all the wonderful people at Tor, and particularly to my editor, Paul Stevens, for shepherding me through to the final draft.

  And lastly, many thanks to my wife, Emily, both for being my first reader and for putting up with me during many late nights and much absentmindedness as I blundered through the creative process.

  Without you all, I would never have been able to do this. Thank you.

  Find out what’s beyond the wormhole in RAGAMUFFIN

  (0-7653-1507-6)

  TOBIAS S. BUCKELL

  Available now

  Read on for a peek …

  It had been three hundred and fifty-seven years, three months, and four days since the emancipation of humanity. And for most, it did them little good.

  Nashara walked down the dusty road of Pitt’s Cross reservation, her scaly leather boots biting into her ankle. Log houses and refugee tents dripped acid water from a recent rain, and the groun
d steamed. It was a desperate assemblage of buildings that dared call itself a city, and all that did was remind Nashara of what a city should really look like.

  People could be more than this. She flagged down a van bouncing through the wet street.

  The mud-coated van, yellow paint flaking off its sides, stopped by the bench outside a community center where a long line of ragged and desperate faces lined up for the soup kitchen. Nashara could smell whiffs of fresh bread and body odor.

  A few eyes darted her way, seeing the functional but new clothing and no doubt wondering what she was doing here. And whether she was carrying money. It was just as likely surprise at her skin, as dark as the shadows these people seemed to try to sink into. Her hair, tight and curly, but shorn military short. Old habit. Pitt’s Cross consisted mainly of the light-skinned. Or maybe, just maybe, someone was already tracking her, ready to shoot her and drag her body to the edge of the reservation for a bounty.

  She turned her back to it all and got in the van. What was done was done, and now it was time to keep moving.

  “Could rain again,” the old man driving the van commented as Nashara threw a stamped metal coin into the small bucket by his seat. “I get more passengers if I wait around for the rain, charge more when they’re desperate not to get stung by it.”

  Nashara sat down on the cushioned bench behind him and threw several more coins in. “Let’s go.”

  “Where to?”

  “Security gate.”

  The old man cleared his throat, leaned closer to the window, and looked up at the sky. Nashara tapped his back. He turned around annoyed, then flinched when she stared directly into his slightly clouded eyes. “I shit you not,” Nashara said, “I’ll break your neck if you don’t start driving.”

  He swallowed. “Right.” The van quietly lurched forward down the street, then turned an easy left. They edged past a large cart pulled by fifteen men, all yoked to it by wooden harnesses.

  How far humanity could still fall. Nashara folded her arms.

  Two years mucking about in Pitt’s Cross, building contacts, until she’d found a job that would make her enough to leave. She watched a landscape of ruined housing and people slide by the dingy windows of the van. The buildings petered out until nothing but bare, scorched ground surrounded her.

  The reservation’s wall crept into view over the horizon. The black and smooth, two-hundred-foot edifice spread for as far as she could see in either direction. Spotlights stabbed at the ground and sky. It was scalable, she’d done that to get over last night, and back over in the morning.

  Though not without trouble. Her left shoulder had a cauterized hole through it as a result of getting back over.

  “You have a pass?” the old man asked, incredulous. “Or will I be waiting at the wall for you?”

  “Are we not emancipated? Can’t we travel anywhere we want?”

  “Don’t spout that crap at me.” They both knew they needed a “human safety pass” to be allowed out there, and passes were rare around the reservation. “Even if you get through, how far can you get on two feet when all you have is reservation coin?”

  “You’d be surprised.” Nashara looked out the window. One last look at the barren landscape.

  “Waste of my time, all the way out here for one passenger.” They slowed and then jerked to a stop. The driver leaned over and pointed a small gun at her. “Hand over your coin and get out.”

  Nashara looked down at it. And snapped it out of his hands before his next blink. She casually snapped his trigger finger, and to his credit he bit his lip and bore the pain as he looked around for the gun. Reservation-born and accustomed to the pain of it all.

  “You should have shot before speaking,” she said. He might have had a chance. He stared at her, realizing his underestimation would probably cost him his life.

  “Come on, get out,” Nashara said as she opened the door. She didn’t blame him for trying. What did he have to lose? A lifetime behind the wall? A faint mist sprinkled down. It blew inside the cab and tasted acidic. It burned the tip of her tongue as she tasted the air. It would stain and then dissolve her outfit if she walked out there, so she’d take the vehicle. “I have a pass, and therefore a schedule to keep.”

  “How the hell did you get that?” the old man asked as he stepped out into the rain and turned to face in.

  “Same way I got this,” Nashara muttered. Someone had underestimated her.

  She shut the door to the van and drove on without looking back. Several minutes later she threw the gun out of the window into the mud.

  No sense in approaching a massive security perimeter like the wall around Pitt’s Cross with a gun.

  The gate groaned slowly open, responding to the presence of the pass hung around her neck.

  Several snub-nosed pipes tracked her progress through the tunnel. If she so much as twitched wrong, they’d smear her against the wall.

  The floor lit up just forward of each step, leading her onward to a set of doors that rolled aside for her. Several guards in khaki protective armor and reflective-visored helmets surrounded her.

  “Pass?”

  Nashara pulled the necklace off and handed it over. The nearest guard scanned her with a wand. Even if she were naked, it wouldn’t detect anything under her skin. Her skin bounced back the wrong signals to his crude scanner. And neither guard would find the crude slivers of gold and silver stolen from the Gahe breeder’s house. She’d cut slits in the skin of her thighs. The skin had congealed over the small bounty.

  The other guard verified the data inside the small pendant at the end of the necklace. He looked back at her. “Nashara Aji. You have twenty hours outside the reservation. After that the pass will broadcast your violation and you will forfeit any rights to travel. You will be jailed and fined. You may give up your right to emancipation.”

  He handed the necklace back to her and leaned in close. “Visiting a breeding program, eh?”

  That was what the pass indicated her business outside the wall was. Nashara ignored the guard.

  An alien stood safe inside a bombproof glass enclosure behind the guards. A Gahe, one of the rulers of everything currently around Nashara. It stood five feet high on four legs. Its bullet-shaped head, so hard to reach around to snap, Nashara knew, swiveled like an owl’s to track her. The rounded, silver eyes didn’t blink.

  The alien’s massive mouth yawned open. From inside, gray, tentacle-like tongues wormed out and flicked at a clear panel in front of it.

  “Human, stop,” the translated voice in the air around her snapped.

  Nashara froze.

  “Pause for decontamination that your stink may not infect our honorable citizens.”

  Nashara knew the routine. She stripped with her back to the human guards behind her. A biting spray and explosion of UV light later she walked out of the checkpoint.

  She was out. Out of the reservation and its starving, population-exploding sovereignty and freedom. And just ahead of the mess that would soon be after her.

  The guards were the last humans she saw for the next hour as she walked down the paved road. No vehicles passed her. What reason did the aliens have to go to the reservation? They avoided it if at all possible.

  The road led into a larger highway three hours later. Nashara’s clothes dripped sweat from the heat. She had no water; no one was allowed to bring anything out of the reservation but the clothes on their back.

  Still, she pressed on as the occasional vehicle trundled past. Each one looked completely different, from number of wheels to color to design. The Gahe prized individuality to a bizarre level.

  Seven hours later she stopped in a small town and looked around. The Gahe built their houses like their cars, every one different to their own taste. It looked like something out of a nightmare, random curves and angles jutting out every which way, dripping walls.

  Three Gahe loped toward her, tentacle tongues lolling. One of them held a gun aimed at her. Nashara held her necklace
up, showed it to them, and inserted the pendant in her ear.

  “I am legal,” she said.

  The large Gahe dropped the gun into the pocket of a biblike shirt over its chest. It thumped the ground with a hind leg and spat at the ground.

  “What are you doing here?” The pendant translated the gestures into tinny words in her ear.

  “I am waiting for the bus.” Nashara remained still. They didn’t seem like any kind of Gahe that were here to arrest or detain her.

  The Gahe sat down in front of her. Nashara waited for a translation of that, but none came. She relaxed and pretended not to see them. She stared off into the distance and waited.

  She could disappear here and no one would care, or notice. The Gahe around her knew it too. But they weren’t aware of what she’d done last night. They were just trying to intimidate the free human. Nothing to worry about, and she’d kill them too if they tried anything funny.

  Another human was on the pumpkin-shaped bus that showed up, a dark-haired, old lady in a glittering dress and complex, braided hairdo fixed around the top of her head like a crown. The Gahe clustered along the left side of the bus. They lounged in their round chairs and stared out the windows, ignoring her. Nashara thought she smelled mushrooms as she walked down the aisle and sat down.

  The lady growled at her and drummed a syncopated rhythm on the ground. She smiled at Nashara.