The Water Knife (43 page)

T
he gun’s kick hurt more than Maria expected, but the woman flipped off the bike and landed in the dust.

“What the—” Toomie whirled and stared at Maria with shock.

Maria ignored him. Her wrists were on fire, tingling with the kick of the .44, but she wasn’t done yet.

She stalked toward the woman, holding the gun ready in her numbed hands, waiting to see if the lady would move.

If the lady tried to shoot back, Maria knew she’d have to put her down good. The lady was lying in the dust, a dozen yards from where the bike had finally wobbled to a crash. She didn’t seem to be moving.

Behind her footsteps came running. Maria whirled and brought up her pistol. It was the scarred guy, the water knife.

“Whoa!” He held his hands up in the air. “Easy, girl. I ain’t doing nothing. We’re on the same side here.”

Maria hesitated. “You serious about those papers getting us out of here? Going to Las Vegas.”

“Yeah.” He nodded, his expression solemn. “Yeah, I am.”

“And I’m coming with you, right? That’s the deal?”

“That’s right. All the way to Vegas. All the way to the arcologies. Cypress Four is almost done. There’s plenty of room for you.”

“You promise?” she asked, her voice hoarse.

The water knife nodded again, solemnly. “I’m not leaving anybody behind.”

“Okay. Good.” She lowered the .44.

He was past her in a flash, running to the woman where she lay in the dust. Maria came over more slowly. The woman lay limp. The water knife had her head cradled in his lap. He was making shushing
sounds to her, as if she were a little baby. The woman looked up at Maria, her pale gray eyes puzzled.

“You shot me?”

“Yeah.” Maria knelt down beside her. “Sorry about that.”

“Why?” she croaked.

“Why?” Maria stared at the woman, trying to understand what made all these people see the world the way they did. “Because I’m not going back to Phoenix. Maybe you think those papers mean something, but that place ain’t never getting better, and I ain’t going back.”

The water knife glanced over at her. “You only go forward, huh?”

“Believe it,” Maria said.

“God damn.” He shook his head, smiling slightly. “Catherine Case is going to love you.”

Before she could ask him what he meant, he was calling to Toomie and getting a phone from him, and then he was calling someone else and saying things with numbers and letters in long codes.

Toomie came up behind her and held her. Maria expected him to say something about the awful thing she’d done, but he just held her.

Maria stared down at the woman, wondering if she was going to survive. Wondering if she would feel guilty for killing someone. If the trade was all right.

She thought maybe she was supposed to feel worse that this woman was suffering, but she didn’t, and it made her wonder about herself. She wondered if something was broken inside her now, with all the things she’d seen and done, but in the end she couldn’t make herself care about that, either. All she could think about was that she was going to cross the river, and she’d see the fountains in Las Vegas where anyone could dip a cup in, and where Tau Ox drove an icy Tesla, and where everyone lived inside huge gleaming arcologies where they didn’t suck dust and burn all day long.

She shrugged off Toomie’s hands and stalked away to sit on the muddy banks alone.

Dusk was coming on.

She became aware of crickets chirping, sparrows flitting and diving, the splash of a fish. Bats and swallows windmilled and wove through the darkening air, catching insects.

Maria watched the river flow, luxuriating in the chilled breezes from where the water kissed the air.

Soft. The air was soft here, beside the river.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt a cool breeze like this.

The crunch of boots warned of the arrival of the water knife. He settled down beside her on the riverbank. He didn’t say anything, just sat beside her, looking out at the river, too.

“Sorry I shot your girl,” Maria said finally.

“Yeah, well,” the water knife sighed, “she didn’t give you a lot of choices.”

“She had old eyes,” Maria said. “My dad had that problem, too.”

“Yeah?”

“She thinks the world is supposed to be one way, but it’s not. It’s already changed. And she can’t see it, ’cause she only sees how it used to be. Before. When things were old.”

She hesitated, not sure if she wanted the answer, but compelled to ask anyway. “Is she going to make it?”

“Well, she’s pretty damn tough.” He smiled slightly. “Figure if she makes it to Vegas, she’s got a chance.”

That made sense to Maria. More than anything any adult had said to her in the last few years.

“Guess we’re all in the same boat, then,” she said.

The water knife laughed quietly at that. “Guess we are,” he said. “I guess we are.”

He stood up and brushed off his jeans and limped back up to the lady and Toomie, leaving her alone with the chirp of the crickets and rustle of the water along the willow banks.

Maria took a deep breath of evening air. It felt so cool and fresh in her lungs that she almost felt like she was breathing the river into her. Taking it inside herself and keeping it there. She listened to the crickets chirping and watched bats flutter over the waters.

Off in the distance she thought she heard a new sound, the thud-thwap of helicopters approaching, winding up the river. The echo of rotors slapping against water and canyon, drowning out the chirps and calls of the river.

A distant sound, but growing now.

Becoming real.

The Water Knife
is a work of fiction, with all the attendant confabulations and convenient alterations that come along with that label. That said, the roots of this devastated future drew sustenance from the dedicated research and reporting of a number of science and environment journalists whom I have known and followed over the years. If we want to know what our future will look like, it’s worth following the people who report the details and trends that are rapidly defining our world. Good journalism isn’t just reporting on the present, it’s excavating the shape of our future as well, and I’m grateful for the work of all the writers and reporters that I’ve had a chance to riff off of.

I’d especially like to thank Michelle Nijhuis, Laura Paskus, Matt Jenkins, Jonathan Thompson, and the newsmagazine
High Country News
, which provided much early inspiration for this book, long before I knew I would be writing about water scarcity. In particular, I’d like to thank Greg Hanscom for encouraging me to write the short story “The Tamarisk Hunter”—the seed that eventually grew into
The Water Knife
. Others I’d like to thank because I had a chance to lurk over their shoulders on Twitter include Charles Fishman
@cfishman
, John Fleck
@jfleck
, John Orr
@CoyoteGulch
, Michael E. Campana
@WaterWired
, and the water news site
@circleofblue
, not to mention the many other individuals and organizations who drop stories and tidbits into hashtags like
#coriver
,
#drought
, and
#water
.

Other people to whom I owe a debt of thanks include writer and editor Pepe Rojo, who gave me much-needed guidance with my terrible Spanish; friend and artist John Picacio; C. C. Finlay, who leaned hard on me to commit to this book; Holly Black, plot whisperer
extraordinaire, who pointed out that I had all the pieces of the story puzzle, but wasn’t assembling them in the right way; my editor at Knopf, Tim O’Connell, who provided wise counsel on the way to the final draft; and my agent, Russell Galen, who helped me find the best possible home for this book.

Most important, I would like to thank my wife, Anjula, for her unwavering support over many years.

As with all my books, if there are errors or omissions, they are solely my own.

Paolo Bacigalupi is a Hugo and Nebula Award winner and a National Book Award finalist. He is also a winner of the Michael L. Printz Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the John W. Campbell Award, and a three-time winner of the Locus Award. His short fiction has appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, and
High Country News
. He lives in western Colorado with his wife and son.