The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi Read Free Book Online

tell them about me?

CHAPTER 3

    A ragged gouge cut the face of the Red Cross/China Friendship water pump—some kind of tool dug in, furrowing carbon plastics like her daddy’s plow had once ripped San Antonio dirt, except deeper, and more angry.
    Maria wasn’t sure who had attacked the pump or what they thought they’d accomplish. Fucking hell, that pump was
armored
. She’d seen a bulldozer bounce off its concrete defenses. Sucker wasn’t going nowhere. It had been stupid of someone to try to cut it, and yet someone had.
    The price blazed through the scratched plastic:
    $6.95/liter—Y4
/gong jin
.
    Gong jin
meant “liter” in Chinese.
Y
was for yuan. Everyone who lived anywhere near the Taiyang Arcology knew that number and that cash, because all the workers got paid in yuan, and the Chinese had built the pump, too. ’Cause, friendship, right?
    Maria had been learning Chinese. She could count to one thousand and write the characters, too.
Yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, chi, ba
…she’d been learning the tones. She’d been learning as fast as she could from the disposable tablets that the Chinese passed out to anyone who asked.
    The liter price glowed in the hot darkness, blue and indifferent, blurry from the human anger that had been hacked into it, but clear enough.
    $6.95/liter.
    Every time Maria saw the ripped face of the pump, she thought she knew the person who had done it.
Dios mío
, she
was
that person. Every time she looked at the pump’s cool blue numbers, she felt rage. She’d just never been lucky enough to swing a tool that had a chanceof hurting it. You needed something special to make a cut like that. Not a hammer. Not a screwdriver. Maybe one of those Yokohama cutters that construction crews used on the Taiyang, back when her father had still worked there.
    “They turn I-beams to dripping water,” he’d said. “Turn steel to lava,
mija
. You can’t believe it, even when you’re standing right next to it. Magic,
mija
. Magic.”
    He’d shown her the special gloves he used to keep from slicing off a finger, glittering fabric that gave him a second and a half before his hand disappeared in a puff of smoke.
    Magic, he’d said. Big science. Who cared what the difference was? The Chinese knew how to make big things happen. Those
cabrones
knew how to build. The Chinese had money, and they made magic happen—and they’d train anyone to use their tech who was willing to sweat a 12/12 shift.
    Every morning as the sun was starting to burn the sky blue, her father would return to Maria and describe the miraculous things he’d seen the night before while working on the high exposed beams of the arcology. He described the massive construction printers that poured solids into form, the shriek of injection molds, the assembled pieces being craned up into the sky.
    Just-in-time construction.
    They had silicon PV sheeting that they poured over walls and windows to generate power. Dumped it on like paint, and next thing you knew, you were full electric. None of the rolling brownouts that hit the rest of Phoenix for the Taiyang. No way. Those people made their own power.
    They fed their workers lunch.
    “I’m working in the sky,” he’d said. “We’re all good now,
mija
. We’re going to make it. And from now on you’re going to study Chinese, and we don’t just got to go north. We can cross the ocean, too. The Chinese, they
build
things. After this job we can go anywhere.”
    That had been the dream. Papa was learning how to cut through anything, and soon he’d be able to slice through the barriers that kept them trapped in Phoenix. They’d cut their way through to Vegas or California or Canada. Hell, they’d cut a path all the way across the ocean to Chongqing or Kunming. Papa could work the upperMekong and Yangtze dams that kept water for the Chinese. He was going to
build
. With his new skills, he could cut through anything—fences and California guardies and all the stupid state