The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (74 page)

“Let me guess, we’re Prayer Block 13,” Max said.

After a moment of silence, during which the Adareans exchanged glances with one another, the gray-haired one said, “Yes.”

“Ah.” Sea duty no doubt entailed carrying rocks to the sea. Max tilted his head, looked right into the gray-haired Adarean’s eyes. “Where’s the water?”

When no one answered him, he began to think that this was an immediate death sentence as well. He shut down his senses and turned his back on the Adareans. The less he had to do with them, the more likely he was to survive.

A guard with a machine gun directed them toward the camp’s back gate. He was flanked by two deacons wearing orange jumpsuits that didn’t stink like death. Max went obediently.

At the gate, another deacon said, “Take a basket.”

Outside the gate stood a pile of wire baskets, each a half meter in diameter and not quite as tall. He grabbed one by the rim as he passed by, then saw that it had a twisted-wire strap so he could drag it by his wrist or carry it slung over his shoulder. The Adareans were slinging their baskets over their shoulders, so he did too.

In a single file, with the guard riding flank on a four-wheeled rockjumper, they climbed uphill to the meadows. Max smelled the meadows before they crossed the lip of the hill and he saw them spread out below, a shallow field of green-brown sludge in a sheltered bowl of dust and sandstone. A dirty stream flowed through the middle of the field.

“Load up!” shouted the deacon.

Max followed the Adareans to the edge of the sludge-field and loaded his basket with rocks, just like they did. Dust caked his fingers, stone chipped his nails. Sparing an eye for the Adareans working around him, he filled his basket no more than they did, then waited until they led the way, dragging their baskets single file, over the hill to the ocean. There were grooves in the exposed bedrock on either side of the path made by the weight of the baskets.

Half the Adareans were in front of Max, half behind. A tall one, with cheekbones like knife cuts and dark green veins in his light green skin, called out, “Swimmer or drowner?”

The answers came back down the line. “Drowner.” “Drowner.” “Drowner.”

One of the deacons walking along the path said, “I’m in. Cup of soup says he’s a drowner within a month.”

The other deacon and the guard laughed.

“Two cups of soup says he’s a swimmer.” The old man, the one with the grey hair.

“You say that about everyone,” Cheekbones ribbed him.

Max didn’t understand what was going on. He had grown up almost living in the water. “I can swim.”

Cheekbones chuckled, then all the Adareans chuckled, and the deacons and the guard laughed out loud again.

“
Definitely
a drowner,” Cheekbones said.

“You’re going to owe me two cups of soup,” the deacon told the old man.

More puzzled than before, Max held his tongue.

The old man looked over his shoulder, saw Max’s expression. “Everyone in camp is either a swimmer or a drowner.”

“You mean everyone’s a drowner,” the guard shouted from the back of the four-wheeler. He wore goggles like the camp minister, carried his gun across his lap. “All of you drown eventually, once you get tired of swimming. And some of you come through the gates already tired.”

Cheekbones lowered his head. “And some come in here ready to build a raft out of other people’s bodies just to stay afloat.”

Max’s basket caught on a bump in the groove, yanking him off balance. He righted himself quickly, but his stumble was noticed.

“That’s your swimmer?” the deacon asked the old Adarean, who just shrugged. The deacon laughed and rubbed his belly. “I’m looking forward to that soup – two cups, mmm-mmm!”

The next time Max’s basket caught on a hump, he let the wire cut his wrist rather than pull him off balance. He paused, tugged it over the hump, and kept on walking. He had survived worse.

Joy is infinite in its varieties but all misery is the same. In that way, every day in the camp was much like another. Max only had to learn the routine and survive the misery. He could do that.

At sun-up, the blare of a siren roused them from their narrow metal bunks. Max, as the new man, had the bunk next to the door, right beside the siren’s speaker. On the first morning, it nearly gave him a heart attack. By the third day, it was barely enough to startle him awake.

Every morning, on the way out the door, the old Adarean would stop Max and say, “How are you today?”

Every morning, Max answered, “Still swimming.”

For breakfast the camp kitchen served out a small ball of rice, plain, unseasoned, which they ate with their fingers. Every day, after breakfast, the Adareans were sent to sea duty. Sometimes the other work details joined them too, but now, at the height of summer, the minister had them seeding, weeding, and tending fields.

The stench of decomposition in the meadows choked Max on the first day; after that, it was just a constant plateau of the unbearable which must be borne. Not nearly as bad as the waste pits at the edge of the camp. By watching the Adareans, he learned the trick to loading his basket with rocks. If it was too full, you drained your energy too fast, but if it was too empty the deacons would beat you. The trick was to stack the rocks so that there were hollow spaces between them, making the basket look fuller than it was.

The dismal kilometers to the ocean ended in a long, stone jetty that jutted out into the bay. They dragged their baskets to the end and dumped them. The rocks sank out of sight in the deep water and the jetty slowly grew.

A short pontoon dock tethered to the end of the jetty rolled with the slight motion of the water. Its rhythm was matched by the undulations of the purple-brown algae that covered the bay from one side to the other. The deacons sat in a boat, using skimmers to push the algae into mounds around the end of the dock. Once you dumped the rocks, you had to fill your basket with the weed.

This was the most disheartening part of the work. There was no way to cheat on the load and the journey back to the meadows was all uphill. If you dragged the baskets, the algae would snag on every sharp rock, leak with every bump, so you had to sling them over your back and carry them or the guards would beat you. The water running down your back felt cool at first, until it chafed your skin raw. The moment you were done dumping your basket, you had to start gathering rocks again. Or the guards would beat you.

At mid-day, there was a break for a cup of tuber soup and a cup of water. Some days the soup was so thin and the water so cloudy it was hard to tell the difference between the two. Afterwards, it was back to rocks and weeds, rocks and weeds, until sunset. Back at camp, they received another cup of water and half a ball of rice, some days with vegetables from the terraced gardens close to camp. Luckily, Max was small and had been malnourished as a child, so he needed fewer calories than most men. Hunger was, if not a friend, something like an irrascible but familiar uncle.

There was variation in this routine, but it was not the stuff of joy, and so was all the same in its difference.

During his first days in camp, the sun burned his pale skin, turning his neck and forearms and ankles pink, then red. At night he peeled away the dead layers of skin, folding it into his mouth, chewing it slowly.

One day, a rock he was lifting into his basket slipped from his hands and gashed his shin, tearing his pants and banging his leg badly enough that he limped for a week.

But he survived that too.

Even slight blessings came with a bitter edge. When rain fell, as it did several times, sudden cloudbursts that scoured the rocks and then evaporated like water on a frying pan, everyone in camp, guard and deacon and penitent, ran outside to wash themselves and their clothes, to open their mouths to the sky and drink clean water that didn’t taste like sand or iron, to fill whatever cup or bowl they had for later, an extra portion that only left them longing for more.

Comparisons to others were just as bitter; for example the realization one day, as he was pretending to accidentally drop his hat in the water so that it would cool his head as he worked, that the Adareans worked without hats, with their overalls opened, because they took energy from the sun, however slight, even while it beat Max down and drained him.

Max survived that too, and survived the days when the two types of bitterness combined. He was filling his basket at the dock one day when he spotted tiny silver flashes in the green mess of algae. Minnows. Careful not to let the guard or deacons see him, he found and swallowed seven of them on the walk back to the meadow. Every load after that, he looked for them again, finding a few every fourth or fifth day.

“You spread that weed awfully carefully,” he heard a voice say one day while he was bent over the edge of the meadow.

He squinted, the glare of the sun knifing under the brim of his hat. A deacon, dressed in boots off some new prisoner, a canteen hanging from his waist, smacked a length of metal pipe against his open palm.

“Vasily,” Max said.

Vasily looked both ways to make sure no one was near. “Don’t go greenmouth on me, Max. That stuff’s poison. I already seen a guy crap himself to death.”

“Yeah, I know better.” Max finished spreading the weed, grabbed a stone, rolled it into his basket.

“That’s the way,” Vasily said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, yellow onion, and bit into it like an apple. Still crunching, he walked behind some Adareans and poked them between the shoulder blades with the pipe.

Max turned away, forgetting he was there.

His plan for survival had depended on getting help from a partner within the camp until someone outside found his messages and came for him. The first part had failed and the second had come to nothing, but he would do what he had to do to survive. He would be patient, conserve his energy, and when his chance came, he would take it.

One night, after dark when they were all lying in their bunks, the old Adarean came up and sat across from him, and asked, “How do you do it?”

Max pushed up on his elbows. “Do what?”

“How do you keep yourself apart from us, apart from everyone?”

Max lay back down, closed his eyes. “It’s easy.”

“It’s been weeks and still you stay alone.”

“A man is born alone and he dies alone,” Max said.

“Shit on that.” The other Adareans came down to his end of the bunker, quietly taking up seats on the beds and floor around him in the dark, like a convocation of ghosts. Snickering ghosts. Max, feeling threatened, snapped up.

“You have your beliefs, I have mine,” he said.

“No one is alone,” the Adarean said. “Our first experience is being connected. We spend nine months in the womb connected to our mother. You say we’re born alone, but childbirth is always an experience shared by mother and child. In even the most barbaric and backwards places —”

“Like this planet,” someone said, to more snickers.

“— a third person is there to catch us when we leave the womb and lift us to our mother’s breast. The whole experience of birth is one of connection, an affirmation of it, in spite of the pain.”

“That’s just one moment,” Max said.

“Are you serious?” the Adarean begged. “We spend the first years of our life completely dependent on others, connected to them to meet our every need. They take care of us and we return love. When we reach puberty and are driven by hormones away from our first caregivers, we are moved toward other people – mentors, friends, sexual partners.”

One of the Adareans nudged another, who grunted. Max didn’t look to see who it was, but the old man’s head turned.

“See,” the Adarean said. “When we’re wounded or hurt, our natural reflex, our inborn trait, is to make noise. We cry out, knowing that others will respond. Our natural reaction is to turn toward those who cry out in pain. The lack of empathy is a defect, a loss of the most fundamental human trait.”

“You say that, even after the way the guards treat you?”

“What? You don’t see it as a defect in
their
character?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“What are you saying?” the old Adarean asked patiently.

Max swung his legs over the edge of his bunk and sat up straight. “What are you doing here on our planet?” He pointed his finger at all of them. “Why are you here?”

The Adareans exchanged glances. As always, they seemed to be thinking it over together before any of them spoke. Max thought he detected a scent in the air, something sharp.

“We come here to trade,” one of them offered, a sandy-faced man with burr-like hair. “This is the only place in the galaxy that you can find machine-made goods. Everywhere else, things are either fabricated, the exact same every time, or handmade, individual and different. But your factories make these odd items that are at once identical and yet each of which shows some individual variation from a human hand.”

Max dismissed that with a wave of his hand. He worked in political education and knew spin when he heard it. “You could trade for that from space. I mean the real reason.”

The odor in the air turned bittersweet, then faded. “Do you have any idea how extraordinary the people of your planet are?” the old man said finally. “The settlers here spoke a dozen languages, came from countries that had been enemies with one another, and yet they united in a single purpose, to transform this desert of a world that no one else saw value in.”

“Too bad they left us to finish the work,” Max said.

The green-skinned Adarean murmured, “Amen.”

“We’re here by force,” the old Adarean said, “but those first settlers came of their own free will, with hardly any real chance of survival, and they not only survived, but thrived. What amazing faith that took. They formed human chains, every man, woman, and child, dredging life from the sea —”

“I know my own history,” Max said. “You can skip the kindergarten lesson. Unless you want to make a faith brigade and pass buckets around the room.”

The Adarean shifted, turned his head toward the others, who leaned together, without speaking. A moment later, he said, “We want to honour the spirit of the twentieth century.”