The Summer Prince (24 page)

“I think we can learn from what he’s done with the city’s natural AI. Some part of the city knew it was in danger from the spider bot. If technology from other cities can help us integrate her consciousness in a better way, then I don’t see how that’s a problem.”

Sebastião nods thoughtfully. My hands unclench. “So, we hear there’s trouble in paradise.”

“What?”

He chuckles and shakes his head, as though he’s caught me doing something naughty. “Poor Gil is an isolationist to his core. That can’t be easy for Enki. And now you coming between them — maybe a daring young artist like you can understand our prince better than the beautiful Gil?”

I try not to look as dowdy as I feel, when he puts it like that. Of course I could never compete with Gil for looks, but it’s never occurred to me that I have to. “I’m not coming between anyone,” I say as calmly as I can. “Enki and I don’t have that kind of relationship.”

I’m not lying, though part of me wishes I were. He hasn’t touched me since our kiss on the water. And I haven’t dared touch him.

“So you always say.” Sebastião’s smile makes me wonder just how much my expression revealed. “Well, then, at least tell us which side you come down on? Technophiles or isolationists? Enki or Gil?”

And I don’t know. I want to be like I was with Gil: pragmatic, seeing the points on both sides. But I know that this debate will never work like that. The Aunties have been so hard-line on technology because they knew they could never stop a trickle from becoming a flood. Sure, I can say that some of it’s good, some of it’s bad, but no one wants to hear that, and mostly they’re right.

Eventually you have to make a decision. Eventually you need to pick a side.

Enki or Gil.

“You can’t samba in a data stream,” I hear myself saying, and remember that Enki loves to dance too.

Enki pokes his head over my garden wall, and I shriek before I recognize him. He’s wearing his nanohook gloves and boots, and he grins like a trickster god.

“You couldn’t have pinged me?” I say, heart racing.

He drops into my mother’s gardenias, crushing a few before sprawling into the carefully demarcated path. “This seemed like more fun,” he says, and his voice sounds lucid and mod-free for the first time in days, a river bursting through a dam.

I put down my latest sheets of drawing paper and crawl over to where he lies. His eyes scan some point between the fall clouds and their reflected image on the glass. I touch his hand.

“Aren’t you cold?” The last traces of summer have surrendered to early-evening chills and gray rains, but Enki still wears short pants and a sleeveless shirt with a hole by the collar, as if it’s January in the verde.

He giggles and pushes his fingers between mine, hard against the soft webbing. I bite my cheek.

“Warm, right?” he says, and it takes me minutes, years to decipher syllables to speech to meaning. But he’s right, his skin is so hot it would be uncomfortable if I hadn’t already been shivering with autumn chill.

I let our hands rest on his chest and lie down beside him. Water from the dirt path seeps into my clothes; I don’t care.

“Which one?” I say.

He turns so his nose is less than an inch from mine. “Technophile or isolationist?” he says, and I snort with involuntary laughter.

“The mods. Which one heats you up?”

He lets his free hand tangle in my bombril hair. “Which one? All of them? None?”

“Enki, do you always have to be so —”

“It’s a side effect,” he says, and there’s not much laughter anymore. “Like the trips. Or the pain. Just something the mods do because they have to work in my brain, and they haven’t had a hundred million years of evolution to balance things out.”

“Oh.”

“June.”

“Yes?”

“Do you know how sick I am of talking about these goddamned mods?”

When I break, I feel it like a physical snap, a sharp flare of pain running between my chest and my groin as I kiss him.

My tongue slides along his teeth, the inside of his lips. His hand tightens around mine until it ought to hurt, but all I can feel is the pressure and the heat and the wet/rough of our tongues hitting, searching, finding each other again. He tastes like a summer rain on packed earth, like the wind that clears the verde for those few precious hours before the catinga comes home.

It ends, because he ends it. I don’t know how long after.

“Is it Gil?” I whisper when I can. I take my hand from his.

I can’t read him, but then I never could. His eyes are black like he’s high, but I know he isn’t. Enki never takes anything.

“No,” he says. He sits up, looks around the garden as if he’s never seen it before. My lips don’t tingle, they vibrate like a plucked string. My heart beats faster than a pandeiro.

Enki isn’t even breathing hard.

It was different, the first time. Gentle and a little confused, like he hadn’t realized he meant to kiss me until he did. A sweet press of lips on lips that demanded nothing but the acknowledgment of shared joy.

Now I am nothing but demands and frustrations and denial. I am that kiss, and I am unfulfilled. I watch him; what else can I do?

He stands and walks over to my discarded papers. For a long time, he studies them, detached and frighteningly remote. I can’t even remember what I was drawing. I’m consumed with simple, stupid things: the line of his corded bicep, the white of his teeth, the skin taut over his collarbone, the light brown tips of the dreadlocks that fall onto his forehead.

“I look like that to you?” he says.

For a moment, I think his mods have reached into my brain, seen through my fevered eyes. “Like what?”

“Like I’m dead already.”

He shows me the drawing. Gil and Enki looking at each other, only Gil’s legs are twisting like a banyan trunk, and Enki’s fingers have turned into feathers.

“You’re not dead,” I say.

“Flying away. That’s the same thing, to you.”

“It isn’t.” It is.

He smiles, sinks back to the ground, and I wonder if maybe his body does tremble, just a little. Has he finally felt the cold?

“You’ll still have Gil,” he says.

“Do we have to talk about this?”

“You love him.”

“Of course I do.”

“Gil’s easy to love, isn’t he?”

I relax suddenly. The tension that I had thought would crack me in two turns to something softer in the warmth of Enki’s rueful smile.

“Unlike the two of us,” I say.

“I love you, June.”

I dismiss this, because his mods make him love everyone. “So why won’t you …”

He pushes the drawing toward me, far enough back that there’s no chance we can touch.

“Because of this,” he says, and it means nothing, and it means everything.

You’re probably wondering why this is for you and not Gil.

So I’ll tell you a story.

Once upon a time, there lived a young spirit of a lagoon so deep in the rain forest that even now only monkeys live there. He called himself Ikne, and all the world loved him. The nearby trees grew their greenest leaves, flowers unfurled their brightest petals and exhaled their sharpest scents. If a fish was lucky enough to live in the lagoon, it grew sleek and fat and happy, and spent every
day singing of Ikne to his less fortunate fishy friends. If Ikne wasn’t always happy, he was more often than most. His life was good. Bright. He could live a long time like this, become an ancient spirit like the ones of caves and mountains, live to complain about kids these days and play arthritic peteca on the municipal courts.

And so Ikne walked away from his idyll and got a job sharpshooting for the Pernambuco guerrillas in Salvador. It wasn’t an easy life, and one day he got shot in the stomach by a lead bullet. The bullet fell in love with him, of course, but she couldn’t stop the slow bleed of his gastric cavity into his pancreas, and she felt terrible, which was too bad, since he’d known all along what would happen.

He died; he always said he would.

Someone had to take out the bullet.

Demonstrators catch Ueda-sama on his way to a private meeting with Queen Oreste. I don’t see right when it happens. I’m busy with another one of my drawings, at least the tenth this week. I’ve been wondering if they’re too simple for the Queen’s Award, but after the spectacle of this summer, maybe simplicity is my best chance.

When Mother calls me to the veranda, for once in my life I don’t argue.

“What is that?” Mother asks, pointing at something on the edge of the holo. All I can see is the crowd, thousands and thousands of tiny people milling around our floor like toy soldiers. After a moment, I recognize the location from my own exploits: the transport platform in Royal Plaza. The crowd surges toward something, but I can’t see what. They just chant and sing and stomp the ground as if they can shake the earth.

“Find some more angles,” I say.

Mother flips and flips, but all the cameras must be hovering in the same small area. Parts of the holo start to flicker, which means the feeds can’t get enough data for a full three-dimensional projection.

“Why don’t the cameras move?” she mutters.

I sit down next to her and hold her hand.

Even without the text overlay, I would know these protesters are technophiles. Plenty of Palmarinas have been trying to break us open to technology for a very long time. With more popular support than they’ve had in decades, the technophiles have been staging bigger and bigger protests for the last few weeks. Most have been in the verde, until now.

“Is that Ueda-sama?” Mother asks.

One man seems to float on top of the crowd, like a piece of seaweed atop a wave. When Mother zooms, I can see the individuals in the crowd lifting him above their heads and passing him around. Ueda-sama yells for help, but at least he doesn’t seem hurt. The air above him shimmers and darts, as if it’s filled with a thousand camera bots. Only, with the feed shorting out, there can’t possibly be so many cameras.

“What kind of bots are those?” I ask. Mother’s breath hitches. She puts her hand to her mouth.

“Oh,” she says.

“You’ve seen them before?”

She turns to me, something in her face that makes my breath stick in my throat, my heart pound.

“Find the boy,” she says, so softly her voice is barely audible over the chants of the holo-crowd.

“The boy?”

“Those bots are guarding the protesters. They might not let the ambassador go.”

“Guarding?” I ask, and then I understand what she means. That glinting swarm of metal is some kind of illegal-tech
weapon
, and it’s keeping away most of the cameras as well as any security bots.

“They wouldn’t hurt him!”

“I don’t know, June. Maybe they only want to talk to him. But maybe they don’t.”

With a ferocity that surprises me, Mother waves her hand and the miniature crowd vanishes. The absence of their noise doesn’t sound so much like silence as pressure, a held breath.

She takes my hands. Hers are cold, as they always are, and I remember a time when I would complain about it, when I was little and she would pull my hair into tight braids, and I would feel her long, cool fingers trace the parts along my scalp.