“We control it, Shone,” she whispered. “We can make the world any shape we want it to be. We can make a home for ourselves.”
Most High laid his hand on her shoulder.
“Enough, child. Enough. It can make itself now.”
Ten nodded. She broke the spell. Ten rolled onto her side, gasping, shivering.
“It’s finished,” she whispered. “Shone…”
She still could not say my name right. I went to her, I took her in my arms while around us Gichichi rose, unfolded roofs like petals, grew gardens and tiny, tangled lanes. No words. No need for words. She had done all her saying, but close at hand, I heard the delighted, apprehensive cry of a woman entering labor.
We begin with a village, and we end with a village. Different villages, a different world, but the name remains the same. Did I not tell you that names are important? Ojok, Hope’s child, is our first citizen. He is now two, but every day people come over the pass or up from the valley, to stay, to make their homes here. Gichichi is now two thousand souls strong. Five hundred houses straggle up and down the valley side, each with its own garden-shamba and nanofactory, where we can make whatever we require. Gichichi is famous for its nanoprocessor programmers. We earn much credit hiring them to the towns and villages that are growing up like mushrooms down in the valley of Nyeri and along the foothills of Mt. Kenya. A great city is growing there, I have heard, and a mighty culture developing; but that is for the far future. Here in Gichichi, we are wealthy in our own way; we have a community center, three bars, a mandazi shop, even a small theater. There is no church, yet. If Christians come, they may build one. If they do, I hope they call it St. John’s. The vine-flowers will grow down over the roof again.
Life is not safe. The KLA have been joined by other contra groups, and we have heard through the net that the West is tightening its quarantine of the Chaga zones. There are attacks all along the northern edge. I do not imagine Gichichi is immune. We must scare their powerful ones very much, now. But the packages keep coming down, and the world keeps changing. And life is never safe. Brother Dust’s lesson is the truest I ever learned, and I have been taught it better than many. But I trust in the future. Soon there will be a new name among the citizens of Gichichi, this fine, fertile town in the valleys of the Aberdares. Of course, Sean and I cannot agree what it should be. He wants to call her after the time of day she is born, I want something Irish.
“But you won’t be able to pronounce it!” he says. We will think of something. That is the way we do things here. Whatever her name, she will have a story to tell, I am sure, but that is not for me to say. My story ends here, and our lives go on. I take up mine again, as you lift yours. We have a long road before us.
THE CHOICE
Paul McAuley
Paul McAuley worked as a research biologist and university lecturer before becoming a full-time writer. He is the author of more than twenty novels, several collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella, and a BFI Film Classic monograph on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. His fiction has won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Sidewise Award, the British Fantasy Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His latest novel, Austral, set in post-global warming Antarctica, was published in 2017.
In the night, tides and a brisk wind drove a raft of bubbleweed across the Flood and piled it up along the north side of the island. Soon after first light, Lucas started raking it up, ferrying load after load to one of the compost pits, where it would rot down into a nutrient-rich liquid fertiliser. He was trundling his wheelbarrow down the steep path to the shore for about the thirtieth or fortieth time when he spotted someone walking across the water: Damian, moving like a cross-country skier as he crossed the channel between the island and the stilt huts and floating tanks of his father’s shrimp farm. It was still early in the morning, already hot. A perfect September day, the sky’s blue dome untroubled by cloud. Shifting points of sunlight starred the water, flashed from the blades of the farm’s wind turbine. Lucas waved to his friend and Damian waved back and nearly overbalanced, windmilling his arms and recovering, slogging on.
They met at the water’s edge. Damian, picking his way between floating slicks of red weed, called out breathlessly, “Did you hear?”
“Hear what?”
“A dragon got itself stranded close to Martham.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not kidding. An honest-to-God sea dragon.”
Damian stepped onto an apron of broken brick at the edge of the water and sat down and eased off the fat flippers of his Jesus shoes, explaining that he’d heard about it from Ritchy, the foreman of the shrimp farm, who’d got it off the skipper of a supply barge who’d been listening to chatter on the common band.
“It beached not half an hour ago. People reckon it came in through the cut at Horsey and couldn’t get back over the bar when the tide turned. So it went on up the channel of the old riverbed until it ran ashore.”
Lucas thought for a moment. “There’s a sand bar that hooks into the channel south of Martham. I went past it any number of times when I worked on Grant Higgins’s boat last summer, ferrying oysters to Norwich.”
“It’s almost on our doorstep,” Damian said. He pulled his phone from the pocket of his shorts and angled it towards Lucas. “Right about here. See it?”
“I know where Martham is. Let me guess—you want me to take you.”
“What’s the point of building a boat if you don’t use it? Come on, L. It isn’t every day an alien machine washes up.”
Lucas took off his broad-brimmed straw hat and blotted his forehead with his wrist and set his hat on his head again. He was a wiry boy not quite sixteen, bare-chested in baggy shorts, and wearing sandals he’d cut from an old car tire. “I was planning to go crabbing. After I finish clearing this weed, water the vegetable patch, fix lunch for my mother…”
“I’ll give you a hand with all that when we get back.”
“Right.”
“If you really don’t want to go I could maybe borrow your boat.”
“Or you could take one of your dad’s.”
“After what he did to me last time? I’d rather row there in that leaky old clunker of your mother’s. Or walk.”
“That would be a sight.”
Damian smiled. He was just two months older than Lucas, tall and sturdy, his cropped blond hair bleached by salt and summer sun, his nose and the rims of his ears pink and peeling. The two had been friends for as long as they could remember.
He said, “I reckon I can sail as well as you.”
“You’re sure this dragon is still there? You have pictures?”
“Not exactly. It knocked out the town’s broadband, and everything else. According to the guy who talked to Ritchy, nothing electronic works within a klick of it. Phones, slates, radios, nothing. The tide turns in a couple of hours, but I reckon we can get there if we start right away.”
“Maybe. I should tell my mother,” Lucas said. “In the unlikely event that she wonders where I am.”
“How is she?”
“No better, no worse. Does your dad know you’re skipping out?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell him I went crabbing with you.”
“Fill a couple of jugs at the still,” Lucas said. “And pull up some carrots, too. But first, hand me your phone.”