Year's Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy

by Marie Hodgkinson

  YEAR’S BEST AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

  V2 / EDITED BY MARIE HODGKINSON

  Introduction by Marie Hodgkinson

  Earlier this year, I attended a book launch – in person. Any other year, that wouldn’t have been surprising. This year? Sitting in a bar, wine in hand, listening to Claire Mabey and Laura Jean McKay talk about Laura’s new book The Animals in That Country felt like something out of a dream. Or maybe it was the past few months that felt like a dream, my brain handily packaging all those same-same days stuck in the house, treading the same path between bedroom kitchen computer desk, into one easy-to-manage zip folder. It didn’t help (or did it?) that Laura’s book is centred around a pandemic – a disease that starts with people being able to hear animals speak, and ends with them losing their minds. After months in lockdown, I could almost hear my cats telling me to eff off and let them have the house to themselves, after all.

  One thing Laura said during the launch has stuck with me: “Suddenly speculative fiction is not so speculative... And realist fiction is nostalgic”.

  Putting together the second volume of the Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy has been a fantastic (har, har) experience. It’s wonderful to see the different places local writers are being published; in genre magazines and anthologies (both here and overseas) as well as mainstream and literary publications. No matter how much I read during the year, something I haven’t seen yet always appears in my inbox during the submissions period.

  This year, though, reading and rereading stories has been a different sort of experience. Speculative fiction has always ferreted around in the pockets of the zeitgeist. In 2020, the world that shapes that geist has rapidly changed, but the ideas that change has brought to the forefront – safety/danger in connection and safety/danger in isolation – have long been part of the creative consciousness in this country. The thirteen stories in this collection all explore connection and dislocation to some extent – to/from family, history, the wider world or oneself. They explore a longing that might have become sharper under lockdown, and a pain at absence more vividly understood, but which has always been there. There are hints of nostalgia (bittersweet), but more often hope (painful), regret for a past that’s never presented in soft focus, and a feeling of making the best of what the world has thrown at the characters (or what they’ve thrown themselves into)… however bloodily.

  Closed borders and pandemic are no longer a sci-fi what-if or convenient setting for historic fiction. Isolation, lockdown, bubbles, R0 values ... our vocabulary has updated in what might otherwise seem like an anachronistic info-dump. Forget nostalgic – so-called ‘realistic’ lit should by rights now feel like what we once called science fiction, and the next book in this series might be better titled Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Stories of Easy International Travel and Breathing on People in Public.

  So I leave it to you to decide – here in 2020, or whenever it is you’ve picked up this volume – whether the stories in this collection are speculative, realist, nostalgic or serendipitously forward-thinking – and to think about what those terms suggest.

  —Marie

  Te Ara Poutini by Nic Low

  The monorail carried the tour group above the Arahura River, moving fast. Āhua sat with her nose hongi’ed to the glass. Her pale blue-green eyes didn’t blink. Even a week into the tour, she still couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.

  The carriage doors opened. “Kia ora koutou,” a familiar voice announced.

  Āhua and the other tourists turned from the windows. Tumuaki was standing in the aisle, dressed once more in his Ngāi Tahu tour guide’s kiwi-feather cloak.

  “Welcome to the last day of Te Ara Poutini, whānau,” he said. “Feel free to tune out if you’ve heard this before, but for those who’ve just joined us for this final leg, gather round.”

  About a third of the guests rose from their seats and clustered round Tumuaki. Āhua stayed put; she’d heard the story hundreds of times growing up.

  “Our story begins in a sheltered bay on Tūhua Island in the Bay of Plenty.

  “One day the guardian taniwha of pounamu, Poutini, was hiding there from his nemesis Whatipu, the guardian taniwha of grindstone. From his corner of the bay, Poutini spied a beautiful woman walking along the beach. He watched her strip naked and slip into the ocean to bathe. Poutini fell in love – or maybe it was lust. Her name was Waitaiki, and he wanted her for himself.”

  Tumuaki caught Āhua’s eye and gave a small smile. She smirked. “Poutini swam silently across the bay, and with a faint ripple, he snatched Waitaiki up and sped across the ocean with her to Tahanga on the Coromandel Peninsula. When they arrived she was freezing.

  “Poutini lit a fire on the beach to keep her warm.

  “Now, Waitaiki’s husband was the powerful chief Tama-āhua. He found Waitaiki’s discarded kākahu by the water, and knew something terrible had happened. He gathered his men and hurled his magic tekateka spear into the air. It hung quivering, pointing to Tahanga. They loaded their canoes and paddled to the mainland at full speed.

  “When they arrived, they found the cold ashes of Poutini’s fire. The taniwha had taken Waitaiki south to Whangamatā, where a new fire burned. And so a great chase began, all the way down through the North Island, and then the South Island. Poutini was finally cornered here in the Arahura at the stream we now call Waitaiki.

  “Realising he could never defeat Tama-āhua in battle, Poutini hatched a desperate plan to keep his beloved close. He transformed Waitaiki into pounamu, then laid her in the river. She became the mother, and the motherlode, of greenstone. Poutini slipped out to the coast, Te Tai Poutini, where he guards her still.

  “When Waitaiki’s husband Tama-āhua arrived he grieved over his wife’s cold and lifeless form. Before heading home, he named two mountains. The first, which you’ll see out the right hand windows in about a minute, is Tūhua, named after their island home. The second is Tama-āhua, named for himself so he could watch over Waitaiki. The great chief then returned to Tūhua, where he remarried, and his descendants . . .”

  “. . . dreamed of revenge,” Āhua thought.

  The twenty-eight-year-old martial arts expert returned her gaze to the window, looking down at the enormous taniwha scrambling up the riverbed below. Poutini’s scales glowed dark green against the wet stone. As he leapt from pool to pool his claws struck sparks off the boulders and dislodged small trees. His movements were part lizard, part fish, and wholly real. A naked woman with obsidian-dark hair clung to his back.

  Āhua had been on the luxury tour for a week now, following Poutini and Waitaiki on their mythical journey south. She’d grown tired of her fellow tourists – mostly Ngāi Tahu from the east coast metropolises – but since the first day at Tūhua Resort, when Poutini’s nostrils and gleaming eyes had surfaced from the bay, the taniwha hadn’t gotten any less magical.

  “Realistic, isn’t he?”

  Āhua looked up from the window again. Tumuaki was watching her with quick brown eyes.

  “Realistic?’ she said with a broad grin. “I was just thinking he looks magical. Grab a seat.”

  Tumuaki settled into the leather recliner opposite. For a moment they studied each other. He was young, perhaps twenty-two, with an athlete’s slim muscular build. She let her gaze drift to the faint smile on his inked lips, remembering their taste from last night.

  They both turned to the window, suddenly shy. Āhua watched Waitaiki’s naked fig
ure crouched low on Poutini’s back, rolling her hips to match the creature’s gait.

  “I still can’t believe it’s all robotics,” she murmured.

  “Even better than the real thing,” Tumuaki said. “The finale this afternoon will blow your mind.”

  “Already blown,” she said, and he had the decency to blush.

  “You done any other Ngāi Tahu tourism trips?’ he asked.

  “I’d love to go whale watching.”

  “They sighted a real whale last week.”

  She grinned at him. “Bullshit.”

  He grinned back. “Maybe they’re robots, maybe they’re not. But you could try our Luminaries tour while you’re here on the coast. We’ve rebuilt Hokitika as a perfect replica of the book.”

  “I’d rather go do The Bone People in Okarito. I’ve always loved Keri Hulme.”

  “Me too. Maybe we could . . .”

  Āhua’s phone chimed.

  It’s time, her kaitiaki spoke in her ear.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Āhua walked down the aisle, feeling Tumuaki’s eyes on her back. She passed through the boutique car with its softly lit cabinets of carved pounamu, then paused at the huge window outside the day spa.

  The monorail had slowed to give them a good look at Poutini climbing the waterfall into the narrow, steep-sided second gorge. He moved swiftly, claws gripping the enormous jumbled stone blocks. The blue river surged off his back in billowing sprays. At the top he stood with the river pouring between his legs and turned to look back down the valley, watching for Waitaiki’s husband Tama-āhua.

  The door at the end of the corridor hissed open. A man in his late forties in travelling clothes – thatched cape, gaiters, pāraerae sandals – came and stood casually next to her at the window looking out. He was short, heavily built and compact, his movements as economical as her own. Deep hand-tapped tā moko of Ngāi Tahu design and rank framed his handsome face. He wore a tour pin on the lapel of his cape, but he hadn’t been on the tour until today.

  “Ko wai koe?’ she murmured. “Tama. Ko koe?”

  “Āhua. We okay here?”

  The man looked around the empty corridor and nodded. “Brought you a souvenir.” He palmed her a beautiful long kōauau of forged steel.

  She slipped it into her kete. “Kia ora. Get ashore okay?’

  “Timed it perfectly between patrols.”

  Āhua heard hesitation in his voice. “But?” she asked.

  He grimaced, “A fisherman spotted us at the river mouth.”

  Āhua pictured the black Zodiac riding undetected through the booming coastal surf, then skimming up the wide flat waters of the Arahura River in the dark. A lantern gleaming on the bank. A figure standing abruptly, peering into the night.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Kia tūpato, her kaitiaki whispered in her ear.

  The doors at the end of the corridor slid open. Two tour guides passed.

  “Oh you know, we had a few beers . . .” Tama said.

  “Kia ora,” the guides murmured. One lingered over Tama as if trying to place him. She was reading his moko rather than his expression. Like the moko kauae on Āhua’s chin, the designs looked old, but they’d been lasered on by a corrupt southern tohunga just a month ago. They seemed to be working: the guide smiled.

  Tama nodded and smiled back. “. . . and we had a good catch up,” he continued. “You know, how his whānau are doing . . .”

  The guides entered the day spa. The door hissed closed.

  “. . . and then I shot him in the face,” Tama said quietly but provocatively.

  His eyes were cold. They’d been training together for six years. And she finally realised that what she’d taken as professional distance was actually dislike. He didn’t trust Āhua at all.

  “You?’ he said. “No issues coming in the front door?”

  “None,” she lied.

  *

  In the week spent tracing Poutini and Waitaiki’s animatronic adventure through the North Island, the tour group had stayed in five-star whare in the bush, watched sunrises over Taupō, and collected carved taonga at each of the ancient quarries along the route. On New Year’s Day 2038, they finally landed in Ngāi Tahu territory in Māwhera.

  It had been sixteen years since the New New Zealand Wars, but border security between the sovereign tribal territories was still tight. At customs Āhua had summoned all of her training to keep her heart rate steady. She stepped up to the desk for her iris scan. Her entire whakapapa lit up the screen in a glowing grid. Her mother’s lines, the ones she knew, were from her home in Tūhua, but the system automatically highlighted the branching tree of her father’s Ngāi Tahu ancestry. This was why she’d been chosen to infiltrate the tour. She tried not to hold her breath.

  The official leaned in to hongi. “Nau mai, haere mai e tōku whanauka. This your first time, eh?”

  “Yeah, here to find my southern roots!” she said, doing her best impression of a born-again.

  “Excellent,” the official said. “And your roots are . . .”

  The screen shifted. The names of Āhua’s ancestors spread across a satellite map of Te Waipounamu, showing where they had lived and died.

  “. . . in Arahura!” the official said. “Great choice with the Poutini tour. Follow the green line to Wharenui 3. Your flight’s pōwhiri starts in ten.”

  The small carved gate opened. She stepped onto Ngāi Tahu soil. She was in.

  A series of five-storey-high glass spheres dominated the arrivals concourse. Each was filled with towering sunlit kahikatea and rimu, with one of the southerners’ signature black meeting houses nestled inside. Waiting out front of number 3, Āhua breathed in the moist, earthy, strangely familiar scent of the West Coast bush. She kept her head down to avoid the roving patrols of armed guards.

  Once called on, she watched, fascinated, as the digital faces of the ancestral pou inside the whare came to life. She’d heard that Ngāi Tahu had developed the technology to simulate their ancestors. Throughout the speeches the carved pillars listened intently, nodding along, even kicking off the waiata at one point when an old man droned on too long. Above them the roof glittered like the night sky in a constellation of whakapapa showing the links between every person present. Āhua had a lot of cousins in the room. It was a nice touch, but as she and the other guests passed down the long line of locals to hongi each in turn, she felt uneasy. She wasn’t really here to find her southern roots.

  “Kia ora.”

  Āhua found herself face-to-face with one of the Ngāi Tahu tour guides who would take them south. He had warm, quick brown eyes, and wore tā moko well, though he was young to have achieved such rank. As they clasped hands and pressed noses she could feel each of them lingering, inhaling deeply of the other’s scent. Dressed flax, a hint of taramea perfume, the sweet musk of his skin. She heard muffled laughter from either side; they were holding up the line. She pulled back, grinning. He flashed her a grin of his own as they moved away.

  At the feast afterwards, as he approached through the tables, she observed an alertness and confidence of movement which seemed out of place in a tour guide. She finished her mouthful of takahē and wiped her lips.

  “Hey. I’m Tumuaki,” he said as he sat down. “So your ancestors are from the Poutini coast like mine?”

  “Hey. I’m Āhua. Some ancestors were, but I don’t know much.”

  “How much?”

  “My dad was Ngāi Tahu, but I never knew him, and beyond that, nothing. I asked Mum about it when I was about ten, and you know what she did?”

  Tumuaki raised an eyebrow, making his moko come alive. “What?”

  “Sat me down and told me how an evil Ngāi Tahu taniwha kidnapped my ancestor Waitaiki, and has kept her imprisoned up the Arahura ever since!”
<
br />   “And you’re here to see her for yourself. Are you really descended from Waitaiki?”

  “No, but I am descended from Tama-āhua,” she said.

  “Wow! So—”

  “Anyway, it’s my southern whakapapa I’m here to learn.”

  After kai, in the coach on the way to the tour group’s hotel, they pulled out their phones and traded whakapapa. Tumuaki spun the story of one Poutini Ngāi Tahu ancestor into the next, and Āhua felt herself carried along by his enthusiasm.

  “So we’re definitely cousins,” Tumuaki concluded.

  “Mmm, close but not too close,” Āhua said. “I have to ask: what do you do outside of guiding?”

  “Like you can’t guess! I see it in you, too.”

  “What’s your weapon?”

  “Mere pounamu.”

  “Close combat, eh?” she said, thinking of her own love of the greenstone blade. “I teach taiaha. We should train together some time.”

  “I’d like that.”

  She smiled and flashed out a hand so fast he had no chance to react. Rather than strike him, she pressed her fingers to his cheek. He didn’t flinch. His eyes gleamed.

  I’m supposed to act like I’m on holiday, she thought. Fuck it. “So what are you doing later on?” she said.

  *

  The day’s last light filtered through the primeval forest outside the hotel, illuminating Tumuaki’s muscular torso with dappled gold. He propped himself up on one elbow, and brushed a strand of hair from Āhua’s sweating face, then traced the pattern of the Ngāi Tahu moko kauae across her chin. Āhua felt a strange frisson at the intimacy of his touch and the dishonesty of her tattoo.

  “You know, Papakura was one of your ancestors,” Tumuaki said.

  “Who’s he?” she asked.

  “She – one of our great warriors. That’ll be where you get your combat skills from. She led war parties up and down this coast, and fought at . . .”

  Āhua nodded, but couldn’t take it all in. She lay back and stared at the ceiling, thinking, Why wasn’t I told about this?