Brave New Love, page 1
Brave New Love
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Constable & Robinson Ltd
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First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012
Copyright © Paula Guran, 2012 (unless otherwise stated)
The right of Paula Guran to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication
Data is available from the British Library
UK ISBN: 978-1-84901-601-8 (paperback)
UK ISBN: 978-1-84901-768-8 (ebook)
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First published in the United States in 2012 by Running Press Book Publishers,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions
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US ISBN: 978-0-7624-4220-1
US Library of Congress Control Number: 2011937815
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Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing
Published by Running Press Teens
an Imprint of Running Press Book Publishers
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
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Printed and bound in the UK
For the young people who hold the future
in their hands and hearts.
I have faith in you.
Contents
Introduction by Paula Guran
HIDDEN RIBBON
by John Shirley
THE SALT SEA AND THE SKY
by Elizabeth Bear
IN THE CLEARING
by Kiera Cass
OTHERWISE
by Nisi Shawl
NOW PURPLE WITH LOVE’S WOUND
by Carrie Vaughn
BERSERKER EYES
by Maria V. Snyder
AROSE FROM POETRY
by Steve Berman
RED
by Amanda Downum
FOUNDLINGS
by Diana Peterfreund
SEEKERS IN THE CITY
by Jeanne DuPrau
THE UP
by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
THE DREAM EATER
by Carrie Ryan
357
by Jesse Karp
ERIC AND PAN
by William Sleator
THE EMPTY POCKET
by Seth Cadin
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PAULA GURAN
History is not one long stretch of a single civilization, but humans have managed to maintain various civilizations for five thousand years or so. Thousands of years may be difficult for us to conceive but when you consider dinosaurs dominated the planet for over 160 million years, five millennia is only a blink of Time’s eye. And during that blink, many civilizations have collapsed—sometimes cataclysmically, more often after a period of decline—and new ones arisen.
The inhabitants of any fallen civilization who survived found themselves having to adapt to a “new world.” It was seldom an easy undertaking.
In the ancient world one civilization might disappear while another was emerging elsewhere. Each may have been unknown to the other. The Roman Empire declined while Mayan city-states reached their zenith. The Anasazi thrived as Europe climbed out of the Dark Ages. Similarly, a civilization like that of the Egyptians could decline for a time, recover, eventually collapse, and then be conquered by others.
In the twenty-first century civilization is far more singular, interconnected, and global than ever before. No civilization, in all of human history, has been as dependent on technology and the resources that support it as we are today. We’ve never lived so clustered together in cities that can quickly be rendered unlivable by relatively minor cataclysms. Yet we still face, perhaps more than ever, all the factors that radically changed or ended our ancestors’ ways of life: climate change, war, economic collapse, environmental problems, irrationality, disease. But in the modern world the weapons are more destructive, disease can spread more quickly, irrationality and hatred can be disseminated more widely and immediately, discontent is growing, and we seem to be able to create new problems much faster than we can provide solutions, which sometimes turn into new threats.
Perhaps we’ll adapt, and our civilization will not only survive but flourish. We still can’t help but wonder: What would life be like if the world as we know it ended? Who would survive and how? Would we find ways of individually and collectively coping or would we find ourselves living under a repressive system of social control? Would we devolve into a feudal society or something more primitive? Would there be strange new forms of humanity to deal with? Would we—or our descendents—remember what life was like in 2012? Would we even recognize the world of tomorrow? Would it seem like some dark fantasy or something utterly surreal?
For Brave New Love we asked authors to wonder about what would happen if the world as we know it ended. We also asked them to consider what love—perhaps the most basic of all human emotions—would be like in that world. Love is, after all, what makes us want to survive, to strive, to hope, to dare to dream.
Most specifically, we asked them to consider what love would be like for the young. For, no matter what tomorrow brings, it is always the newest generation—those growing out of childhood and accepting or being forced to bear the burdens of adulthood—on whom the responsibility for any future rests. And, for the young, love sometimes really is all you need.
Their diverse answers are the stories of Brave New Love.
Paula Guran
Hidden Ribbon
JOHN SHIRLEY
Los Angeles, 2044
The wind shrieked through Giorgio’s long hair as he fought for balance on the rope bridge thirty stories over the street. The swaying bridge stretched from the acid-etched high-rise behind him to the top of the support buttress on the high tower of the old BP building. There’d been some acid rains recently, he remembered—which meant that if the protectant were wearing off, the footbridge cables could snap. He took another three steps into a shadow-draped part of the bridge . . .
The sun was beginning to set beyond the BP building. It would be dark soon.
The teenager took seven steps more, then the rope bridge yawed sickeningly in the wind and he clutched at the twined, scavenged cables as the thick, muggy air-current roared past, bellowing like a living creature. He staggered to the left, close to pitching over the cable. He held on, and the wind died down a little. The rope bridge sagged back, swaying, to its centerline. Only good thing about this, he figured, was that he’d be a hard target to hit with a rifle. If Limmy were back there aiming at him he’d probably miss.
After a few moments the swaying eased and Giorgio decided to run for it, jogging the last hundred yards along the unsteady treadway of random slabs of mismatched wood to the open window at the BP building. With a strong sense of relief he leapt from the end of the rope bridge on to the top of the steel buttress—just as a bullet cracked into the concrete by his head.
Heart thudding, he ducked through the window, into the entry hall—pressing himself to one side of the opening to be out of rifle range. He craned his neck a little to look cautiously back out the window. He couldn’t see the shooter but he knew it was Limmy or one of his gang.
Giorgio was pretty high up—he could see a lot of Rooftown from here. The gigantic improvised shacktown built over old rooftops stretched above Southeast LA like tree branches made from junk extending from the trunk of the old BP building. The branches were made up of shacks, several stories of them, some elaborate, others little more than tree-house-type structures. After Santa Monica and a lot of other coastal towns had been flooded by the rising waters of global warming, and the big famine caused food prices to rocket up, a lot of people lost their homes. With the Dissolv
Of course, there were luckier people. People who’d had more money, better resources—they’d bought their way into one of the dome communities.
Me, I’m not lucky. Catching his breath just inside the window, hoping to get through the day without being shot, Giorgio thought: That’s an understatement, hodey.
“Hey—kid!” called a gruff voice.
Giorgio turned to see Banker glaring from the other end of the hall. Banker was a hulking man in a sleeveless shirt, his beefy arms covered with amateur tattoos. He called himself Banker because he collected the “Live Here Money” from people squatting in—and on—the old BP building.
“Ya can’t come in this building, here, ya bringin’ gunfire down on us! We don’t take in no lost teenagers nohow!”
“He’s not gonna shoot at the building anymore, Banker—I’m inside now—”
“He’s gonna shoot from inside ya chump—look!” Banker pointed out the window.
Giorgio looked out to see Limmy running across the rope bridge, his rifle on a strap over his shoulder—the shock-haired gangster stopped when the wind rose and clutched at the rope. Another figure was behind him, a ways back—looked like Roman, Limmy’s second in command.
Giorgio had hoped the gangster wouldn’t risk coming to this side of Rooftown—not over him balking at a hundred-WD protection pay-off. But there they were, like they had something to prove.
“Kid?”
Giorgio turned to see Banker pointing a large-caliber automatic pistol at him.
Giorgio sighed. “Well, crap. Seems like I’m the only guy around here without a gun.”
“Don’t get cute—just get out. The way you came!”
Giorgio thought about trying to dart past Banker—maybe Banker’d miss his shot, maybe even choose not to fire. But Banker wasn’t likely to do either one. There wasn’t a whole lot of mercy in Rooftown, any way you cut it.
“Okay, fine, but you’re going to miss a really good joke I was gonna tell you, Banker!”
“Get out before I—”
The threat was lost in the roar of the wind as Giorgio stepped back out onto the top of the buttress. A narrow walkway without a railing was to his right. The walkway of sheet-metal-covered wood, about three-feet wide, clung precariously to the sides of the building, but that was his only route—unless he went straight down head first.
Giorgio sidled quickly as he dared onto the walkway—just as a bullet whined off the building behind him. A split second later he heard the sound of the gunshot echoing. Living in Rooftown, this wasn’t the first time he’d been shot at. But it never got easier.
Giorgio made the mistake of glancing to the left, where an abyss yawned—a long, long fall to a hard, hard street shrouded in brown-gray smog.
Suddenly dizzy with vertigo, he almost lost his balance—but he’d lived in Rooftown for the last two years, and experience enabled him to shift his attention forward, focusing on the corner of the building ahead.
Just keep moving, he told himself.
A few steps more and Giorgio reached the corner, slowing so momentum didn’t propel him off the walkway. He turned the corner—just as another bullet shrieked by overhead. They wouldn’t keep on missing.
Up ahead, on his left, was an unfathomable drop to a quick death; on his right were six windows. As he worked his way carefully past them, leaning toward the wall with the wind prying at him, he found that window after window was boarded up from the inside—impassable. Beyond them, at the next corner, the walkway ended. It didn’t turn the corner.
Two more windows—they looked to be unblocked. There was nowhere else to go except down, so his choice was to get in through one of the two windows . . . or die.
Somewhere behind him, Limmy would be reaching the end of the rope walk, would be working his own way along the walkway . . .
Giorgio moved so he was between the two windows—and had to grab at the nearest sill as the wind rose again, almost peeling him off the walkway. He winced at the ache in his fingers as he clutched at the windowsill—the wind seemed to be deliberately trying to pull him off into the void.
Then it abated—and he slipped through the shattered old window, scraped by broken glass as he went. He found himself in what appeared to be a small, empty old office—with a closed door to the corridor.
He thought: My only hope is if they think I’ve gone somewhere when I haven’t . . .
If he could get them tangled up with Banker it might keep them busy till he could figure something out. Crunching debris with every step, he reached the door, and tried it. It felt locked.
Giorgio looked around, found an old crowbar on the floor. Demolition of the building had been started but, after the Dissolve Depression, never completed. He hefted the crowbar, then swung it like a baseball bat as hard as he could, smack into the doorknob. The knob punched through the door, falling out the other side, leaving a hole. He reached through, pressed the internal lock mechanism, and the door clicked. He shoved the door hard with his shoulder and it gave way into the debris-choked hallway, open just enough to let someone squirm through. Only, he wasn’t going through.
Carrying the crowbar, he went back to the window, looked carefully out. Limmy and his pet thug hadn’t come around the corner yet. They’d be coming slowly with that wind on the walkway inching their way along so they wouldn’t fall.
Giorgio climbed cautiously out on to the walkway, holding the crowbar close to the wall so it wouldn’t overbalance him the wrong way. He went as quickly as he dared to the second window.
This window was intact, glass and all. He glanced inside—it seemed to be someone’s squat, with an old mattress in the corner, a few decorations. He used the crowbar, levered the window frame, hoping it wasn’t locked, that the window wouldn’t break. It slid reluctantly up, and he eased into the room as quickly as he could. He turned, closed the window and locked it—hearing Limmy’s voice from down the walkway.
Giorgio found an old bureau, pushed it up against the window, put a vase, a framed picture, other odds and ends on top, trying to make it look as if they’d always been there.
Then he ducked back, out of sight, pressed against the wall.
The faint light filtering through the window made a square on the opposite wall—he saw Limmy’s shadow, his rifle poking up behind it, appear in that square. Limmy was trying the window, finding it locked.
Giorgio knew he could probably knock Limmy off the walkway—but he’d never killed anyone before, didn’t like the idea, and didn’t want to make enemies of every roof-gangster associated with Limmy. Besides, there was Roman—who would be watching Limmy. Roman had that pistol handy. A crowbar wasn’t much use against a pistol.
He heard Limmy’s voice, muffled, through the window. “Thing’s locked. What? Nah, if I try to break the glass I could fall—What makes you think he’s in that one? Oh yeah?” Limmy’s voice got fainter as he moved down the walkway. “Well go on in then, dumbass! I’ll be right behind you.”
Limmy and Roman had taken the bait, for now anyway.
Giorgio turned to look around—and saw a gun pointed at him. “I swear,” he muttered. “. . . everybody but me has one . . . I got to get one of those.”
A girl about his age was pointing a rusty-looking revolver at him. She was a mix of Asian and Hispanic—that was Giorgio’s guess—wearing cutoff jeans, sneakers that didn’t match, a torn blue sweatshirt. She was compactly built, but with curves, had long, shiny black hair. But the expression on her face was no more welcoming than her revolver. She said, “Move that stuff away from the window and climb back out, now. I’m gonna give you to a count of twenty.”
“Look, there’s a couple of bangers after me, just because I told them my uncle didn’t have to pay their protection money . . .”
“Seven, eight, nine . . .”
“And they’ve already tried to shoot me twice and all I really want is just to hide for, like, twenty minutes . . . for reals!”
