The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

He trailed off, remembering early days, when he’d stood bodyguard behind Catherine Case as she went into meetings: bald bureaucrat guys, city water managers, Bureau of Reclamation, Department of the Interior. All of them talking acre-feet and reclamation guidelines and cooperation, wastewater efficiency, recycling, water banking, evaporation reduction and river covers, tamarisk and cottonwood and willow elimination. All of them trying to rearrange deck chairs on a big old Titanic. All of them playing the game by the rules, believing there was a way for everyone to get by, pretending they could cooperate and share their way out of the situation if they just got real clever about the problem. And then California tore up the rulebook and chose a new game.

Maria gave up and started filling. Already the price was rising. Kicking up as rich people’s automated household systems caught the price break and started pumping gallons into cisterns. Or maybe it was the Taiyang Arcology getting in on the action, accelerating the buy as it realized the surplus was worth gorging on. The numbers flickered: $2.90…$3.10…$4.50…$4.45… $5.50. $6.50. $7.05. $7.10. Order restored.

Case laughed. “If they weren’t trying to blow my brains out, I’d actually feel sorry for them. All those…fevered people, full of their”—she paused, picking through words—“faith. Their faith.” She nodded, settling on the word she liked. “And they think that because they have faith, they can wish the world to be anything they want it to be. They’re quite innocent when you think about it. All those boys and girls, playing pretend in the desert with their rifles, playing freedom fighters. Such innocent little children.”

Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They’d played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They’d pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they’d turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans—vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They’d had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming. The desert was different. It had always been a gaunt and feral thing. Always hunting for its next sip. The desert never forgot itself. A thin fall of winter rain was all that kept yucca and creosote blooming. If there was other life, it cowered alongside the banks of the few capillary rivers that braved the blazing lands and never strayed far. The desert never took water for granted.

“We can run,” Sarah had said finally. But they couldn’t. Not really. If Sarah couldn’t work the Golden Mile, she was dead. And if Maria couldn’t sell water beside the Taiyang, she was dead, too. It was all borrowed time.

But even without knowing the stories, the hyenas frightened Maria. Their yellow eyes seemed to hold ancient knowledge, as if their memories of want and drought and survival were so much more than Maria’s. As they paced her, they seemed to say that she would soon be dead, but they would last forever.

Maria glared at him. It was rigged against her. It was all rigged against her. She wasn’t supposed to make money. She wasn’t supposed to get out. She and Sarah were supposed to keep sweating and screwing and dying until there wasn’t anything left of them. And then? They’d get more Texans and do it again. She saw the world clear. For once, she realized she was seeing the world clear. No wonder Papa had kept himself pretending.

Maybe tomorrow they couldn’t pay rent and they were dead. Maybe this was the last good thing that would ever happen to her. Tomorrow would be dust and want and asking Toomie for pity and a loan that he probably couldn’t give, but tonight she was dancing dirty with a man, and then a woman, and then by herself, letting her hands run up and down her hips, feeling the beat as she moved. Bunching the fabric of her sheath in her fists, loving the way it tickled her palms as she swayed to the music. The music wasn’t loud anymore. It was inside her. She moved to it, beats and pulse. Another heart, flooding her with life.

No one wanted Zoners in their states, but they were willing to take all the sunlight the place had to offer, so Phoenix had brownouts while private companies sent their harvested solar north and east and west across Arizona’s borders and the Zoners stayed put.

“You ever read this?” he asked, offering her the book. Maria took it and read the title slowly. “Cadillac Desert? It’s about cars or something?” “Water, actually. It’s kind of how we got where we are now. There are other books. Lots came later. You can read Fleck or Fishman or Jenkins or others online.” He nodded at the book in her hands. “But I always think people should start with this. It’s the bible when it comes to water.” “The bible, huh?” “Old Testament. The beginning of everything. When we thought we could make deserts bloom, and the water would always be there for us. When we thought we could move rivers and control water instead of it controlling us.”

Toomie shifted. “The den’s over there.” He pointed farther down the street. “Are there a lot of them?” Maria asked. “At least four or five.” He was quiet for a while. “I was going to sell that place for 359,000 dollars. Now I’m trying to figure out if I can charge a bunch of wild animals some rent.”

“I don’t have kids,” Toomie said, “my wife or me. Never bothered to find out why we couldn’t…It didn’t matter.” He shrugged. “But if we’d had ’em, they’d probably be like you. Your age, maybe a little older.” He waved toward the window. “And this is the world we would’ve given them. We would have loved them to pieces, but we still would have given them Hell.”

“You ever hear about that psychology experiment, where this guy made people pretend like they were either prisoners or guards, and everyone started acting just the way prisoners and guards really act. You see that?” “Sure, the Stanford prison experiment.” Angel started up the Undaunted episode again, pointed at it. On the screen the Desert Dogs were starting to butcher Merry Perrys. “This is the same. You give people something to do, and that’s what they are. People.” He shrugged. “It’s the job that pulls people’s strings, not the other way around. Put them on the border, tell them to keep the refugees out, they turn into a border patrol. Put them on the other side—they beg for mercy and get themselves scalped and take it in the ass just like the Merry Perrys. None of them choose their jobs. They just end up in them. Some people got born in Nevada, so they play Desert Dogs; other people, they’re born in Texas, they learn to crawl on their bellies and beg. Merry Perrys, they pray and they go across the river like sheep, and the Desert Dogs, they rip into them like prey. If they were born opposite, it’d still be the same.” “You, too?” “Everyone,” he said. “You live in a nice house, you’re one kind of person. You live in the barrio, you run with a gang. You go to prison, you think like a con. You join up with the guardies, you play soldier.”

“It’s a prepper’s dream down here,” she said. Angel snorted. “Fucking preppers.” “You have issues with them?” “Just when we pump their wells dry.” He laughed cynically. “Never could figure out why people would think they could survive all out on their lonesome like that. All of them sitting in their little bunkers, thinking they’re going to ride out the apocalypse alone.” “Maybe they watch too many old Westerns.” “Nobody survives on their own.”