Orleans (16 page)

Fen paused. “Your datalink broken or something?”

“I was just . . . curious.”

“Well, this ain’t a tour, and I ain’t your guide.” She started off again, jouncing the baby, who had begun to cry. “I know, you hungry,” she said to the baby. Daniel swallowed hard, feeling foolish, and mentally accessed the link.

INQUIRY:
What is the purpose of a tall triangular hut on stilts in Orleans?

RESPONSE:
Further data required. Describe hut.

INQUIRY:
Slanted roof, wooden shingles. Cross of wood on top.

RESPONSE:
Orleans contains places of worship, raised on stilts to protect congregation from floods. Possible match.

The church looked like a stork standing in the marshes. As he watched, someone was lowered from the little hut on a tire attached to a pulley.

“Hurry up, now,” Fen called to him. “Rain coming.”

For the first time, Daniel noticed the skies were darkening. He scurried to catch up to Fen, who had stopped at a three-sided shack facing the river.

“Kuan-Jen,
ni hao,
brother,” Fen called into the shed.

The building was framed in signs Daniel could not read, but a drawing of a bowl of rice told him it was a food stall. Inside was a long table with two chairs on one side and a sleeping cot pulled up along the other side to serve as a bench. “Kuan-Jen!” Fen called again. There was no answer.

“Be right back,” she said, but Daniel followed close on her heels. Fen slipped between the shed and its neighbor into a small alley backed by more marshland. Behind the shed, a big black pot balanced over a cooking fire. A thin older man tended the fire. Fen bent toward the man and began speaking a language Daniel didn’t recognize.

INQUIRY:
Identify language.

RESPONSE:
A combination of French, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tagalog.

Daniel tried to read Fen’s face as she argued with the old man, who shook his head, laughing, and went back to stoking the fire.

“What’s he saying?” Daniel asked.

Fen waved him off and dropped to her heels. She lifted up her bundle to show the man the baby. The man dropped his poker and jumped up suddenly with more energy than Daniel would have thought possible. Grabbing Fen by the elbow, the man marched off, pulling her along with him. Fen turned back to Daniel and winked.

They followed the older man out of the alleyway and down to the shore, where a young Chinese man was hauling in his sails on what looked like a windsurfer combined with an old Chinese fishing boat. The body of the craft was a shallow raft on runners, carved of wood, with empty plastic milk gallons attached for added ballast. Up top, a variegated sail was being drawn up a large beam like a window blind being raised to a top crossbar. The sail itself was cloth, segmented by thick bamboolike reeds. Daniel watched in bewilderment as the older man started shouting angrily. Whatever the argument, five minutes later, the young man lowered his sails again, the old man watching with crossed arms until Fen and Daniel boarded the junk.

“Thanks a lot, Fen,” the young man complained. He looked to be about twenty, Daniel guessed. His smooth face was red with embarrassment as the wind whipped his ponytail across his mouth.

“How did she rope you into this, man?” he asked Daniel. Daniel shrugged and the man laughed. “Well, I’m Kuan-Jen. And apparently, this is my baby mama.”

Daniel turned to Fen. “He’s the father?”

“No,” she said. “That the only way to get Kuan’s dad to tell me where he be.”

“That trick only works once,” Kuan-Jen said. “And you picked a bad time to cross, Fen. Rain on the way and night falling. What Lydia got you doing up in Algiers, anyway?”

Fen’s face closed tight, making Daniel wonder who Lydia might be. “My business, not yours” was all she said.

“Something up?” Kuan-Jen asked. “I heard rumors, but—”

“But nothing. Right now we need to get across this river, get some food for this baby. Mama-san got anything I can borrow?”

Kuan-Jen shrugged and finished tying his line. “You already owe me. How much more can you afford?” He jumped off the deck of the vessel and dragged it out into the water on a series of logs that turned like rollers beneath the bow. He climbed back aboard as it drifted into the river.

“I said
borrow.
” Fen emphasized the word. “You know I be good for it.”

“Hold on tight,” Kuan-Jen said by way of reply. The boat jerked sharply as it was taken by the current. They angled down the river and Daniel could see tiny lights on the far shore. Midway, the water receded back into mudflats. Kuan-Jen tweaked the sails and the boat glided forward on its runners, tugged by the wind until it hit another deep channel of water.

“I had no idea the river was this wide,” Daniel said under his breath. But Fen heard him.

“You got no idea ’bout a lot of things. You a tourist, pure and simple.”

“Outlander, eh?” Kuan-Jen shouted from the far end of the boat. “Don’t get many of those anymore.” He turned to Fen. “This one got anything worth trading for?”

Fen looked at Daniel. “Do you?”

He thought of the things Fen said were of value—glass, metal. Useful things. With his duffel gone, all he had left were a few glow sticks, carbo food tubes for the encounter suit, and . . .

He felt inside his pockets. “Just candy,” he said forlornly, pulling out one of the snack-size Snickers bars he’d taken from the front desk of his motel on the other side of the Wall.

Kuan-Jen’s face lit up. “Candy bars? I miss candy bars. Missionaries used to bring them in, or airdrop them over the Wall.” Even Fen looked impressed.

Daniel handed the thumb-size candy over. “It’s kind of melty,” he apologized.

The boatman accepted it reverently in his callused hands. He looked up at Fen, then Daniel. “Two more will get you dinner and a change of clothes for Fen.”

Daniel reached back into his pocket, then hesitated. “What about diapers?”

Kuan-Jen gave him a suspicious look. “What about them?”

“I want a pack of diapers. And dinner, and a shirt for Fen.”

Kuan-Jen lowered his outstretched hand and frowned. “For what?”

Daniel reached into another pocket. “For this.” He held up a handful of mini candy bars. “Happy Halloween.”

“Hey, tourist, heads up,” Fen said.

Daniel followed her gaze. They were across the river now and lights stretched for a half mile in either direction. On the shore sprawled a village, covered in blue tarps and Christmas lights. Daniel looked up as a docksman waved them to a berth and the skiff bumped into the pier. Kuan-Jen threw the man a rope and they tied up to the shore.

“Welcome to the Market,” Fen said. “This be the heart of Orleans.”

18

THE RIVERFRONT WAS DEVOTED TO FISHING
craft and boating supplies. Daniel followed Fen and Kuan-Jen through a rabbit’s warren of stalls, cobbled together from driftwood, old beams, sheets of plastic, and the blue tarping that roofed it all. From above, he imagined it would look like a giant blue umbrella on a flat gray beach. The rain was starting to come down and the tiny lights of the Market—solar-powered holiday lights from the early days of the Wall, according to Fen—spread a warm firefly yellow against the slate gray sky.

Nets. Buckets. Shrimping baskets. Shucking knives. Broad hats worn by some of the denizens of Shangri-Lo. Leathery-faced men and women of Asian and less determinate race haggled in a dozen different languages with customers over their wares. This city was alive, and in such variety that it stunned Daniel. Did the government know about this? Did the military?

Fen was moving fast through the crowd. Daniel had to fight the urge to linger and observe. If he lost sight of her now, he was truly lost.

The fishing supply stalls gave way to fishmongers, long low booths with large tubs of live crab, catfish, shark, and shrimp skittering through murky water, drawn by the handful to be weighed and sold.

INQUIRY:
What forms of currency are used in Orleans?

RESPONSE:
Official currency of Orleans unknown. Barter and trade are most common. Postulating commodities to include food, tools, sexual favors, and blood.

Daniel balked at the thought, and found himself narrowing his field of vision to focus on Fen’s retreating back rather than witness any of the muddy denizens of the Market in compromising positions.

Beyond the fishmongers, the stalls turned into food stands, with the sizzling sound of cooking fires and popping grease. The smoky stench of charcoal blended with the sweet, spicy tang of stews and fried seafood. Daniel looked up from the stall of a raw oyster bar—hand-size oyster shells split and served with wedges of lemon and red pepper—to see Fen turn an abrupt corner. He chased after her and found himself in a narrow lane of stalls with a hand-painted sign overhead that echoed the one he’d seen in Shangri-Lo—a bowl of noodles with chopsticks and a curl of painted steam.

Fen was glaring at him from beneath the awning of the second shop on the right. She cradled the baby to her chest and scowled. “Keep up, man.”

Daniel ducked into the open front of the stall behind her. Low crates had been set up to form seating along a narrow plank of driftwood, planed smooth on top. A short black man, blacker than anyone Daniel had ever seen, was crouched on the far side of the table, shoveling a bowl of hot noodles into his mouth. He ignored them completely, absorbed with his food.

“This be Mama-san’s,” Fen explained. Kuan-Jen had gone through a blue tarp draped across the back of the stall. A moment later, a small Chinese woman in a yellow rain slicker came through the curtain. She observed Daniel and Fen with bright small eyes, then looked at the baby.

“
Ni hao,
Mama-san,” Fen said, and continued in a blend of languages.

Mama-san reached for the baby. Fen hesitated, then pulled her out of the sling. Mama-san gasped at the sight of the baby’s makeshift diaper, the hay gone soft with urine and Fen’s own sweat. Daniel didn’t need a translator to know that Fen was being chastised.

Fen grabbed the baby and motioned for Daniel to sit down. Mama-san disappeared and returned a few minutes later with two bowls of plain noodles.

“No,” Fen said sharply, startling Daniel. The word was in English, but the meaning was clear enough, even to Mama-san.

• • • 

THEY TRYING TO BE CHEAP WITH ME NOW,
after they got all that good chocolate the smuggler brought. No way. We be needing real diapers, not just them cloth things. A bloodhound can scent a diaper as good as blood, and we ain’t got time to stop and wash them. Best to throw them out quick. We also gonna get some hot food with meat in it. Kuan-Jen and his mama be arguing, but I don’t care. I know what things be worth.

A minute later, we get a hot pot, a clay stove over a charcoal burner, with gumbo boiling away inside, chock-full of oysters and shrimp and thick slices of okra. We keep the noodles and get cups of rice, too.

“Eat,” I say to Daniel, but he hesitate and I remember Delta food be like poison to him. He run his datalink over the pot to analyze, but it no good.

“Sorry, man,” I tell him. “You ain’t got no food on you, other than them candy bars?”

He make a face like he smell something bad. “Just carbo gel. For energy. It’s too soon for another one.”

“That a shame,” I say, and pull his bowl of rice to me.

I don’t know how hungry I be ’til Mama-san put everything on the table. Daniel look jealous, but that be his problem, not mine.

By the time I hit the bottom of the bowl, Kuan-Jen and his mama be back. They got what I need. Real diapers, the old disposable kind from before the storms, and a couple cloth ones that will last. And formula, a whole can of it, and some bottles of water to mix it with.