Crabtown Races

Pop and I sailed to Crabtown together for the first time when I was old enough to cut the market boat through the waves to the trade docks. The sea was broken-toothed with sunken buildings, and the riot of seaweed and sandbars they sprouted. While small boats made their way to market, zigzaging on the green surface of the sea, seagulls and cormorants skimmed back and forth from their roosts on the upthrusting spikes of masonry and reinforced concrete, squabbling sharply. I steered off the skybusting solar concentrators on Scrap Island, where they ran the smelters.

"When I was just a little older than you are now, we used to sell old pipes and car parts out there for book money. It was easier to get good scrap back then."

Like an old man's mouth, the place stank to the heavens.

"Pop, I think something here died. Ugh."

"No, honey, nothing died. That is the smell of Progress." He kept a perfectly straight face when he said it, scanning the shoreline. I squinted across the bow to thread the channel in toward the docks, and watched him out of the corner of my eye, but he was already absorbed in the newer structures near the water.

Soon we were closer to the muddle of huts, longhouses, and trade tables circling Landside. There seemed to be a lot of Crusties, even for a market day, and they were more heavily armed. The traders were wheeling the last carts down the Causeway from the Common. A salt breeze scrubbed the shore, and the sun bleached it, but they missed a spot in Crabtown, a dirty smudge rubbed in by the years. The golden dome was just visible through the haze of smoke drifting over the water. The Market Gate, gaping open now to reveal a short tunnel through the unsteady mound of mud-glued brick and cinderblock closing off the Causeway, was scorched in places from Bloom attacks. Crabtowner Crusties could just be seen on patrol, the soldiers tiny dark grains scattered along the top of the wall, between the lumpy bunkers.
 
If there wasn't trouble with the Bloom, there was trouble with the Christivists. A lot of people thought that the Bloom were all Red Christivists, but that was not true, even though some of them were. Grandma Jay told me that the Bloom rose up everywhere during the Slippage, just like a red tide. The biggest groups near Crabtown were Red Christivists, true, but it was not the same everywhere. Nor were the Red and White Christivists all the same. Just about the only thing the two had in common was that they were both convinced they had been Left Behind. And the only thing we agreed on with them was that things would be better if they hadn't.

All to the left of the docks, jumbling away along the shore, were squat metal towers, men busy around them, tubes snaking and curling, dripping and sputtering. Low glass-roofed buildings, crusted with salt and dried flies, hunched behind goat pens.

Before we unloaded the boat, Pop went over to get a better look. The stench of goat shit and rot didn't seem to bother him - he slipped right in between the pipes, running his hands over the sweating metal, cocking his ear to the dull thumping that vibrated through them, ducking and raising his head in rapid movements, muttering to himself.

"Hey! Get away from that! That's dangerous!" roared a burly man with a chest full of beard, bumping down a ladder from a nearby tower. He was as red as an onion. "Damn treehuggers." This last under his breath, but not so softly that we couldn't hear him clearly.

"Oh, is it?" asked my Pop in a quiet voice. "You didn't seal these tubes for pressure?"

Pop's voice seemed to defuse the explosive expression on the man's face. "Ferran! You sneaky bastard!" he bellowed, dropping the last few rungs of the ladder to the ground, and rushed to pull my father into a meaty hug, "Am I glad to see you, boy!" I gritted my teeth, feeling this would be the end of Pop, that he would be crushed and smothered and disappeared into this strange place of stink and noise and hard curves and angles. My eyes burned suddenly with traitorous tears, and I pressed my teeth together to grind them back.

Pop was at my side in a few strides. "Allie! It's Ok, sweetie. Gabe is a friend." But I would not speak until the three of us were back at our boat, and I wouldn't speak to Gabe at all, as much as he tried to make friends the way adults do to children - like we were stupid and drugged at the same time. He hunkered down to look at me more closely.

"You are a real cutie - you have your mother's eyes." My mother?

"She was one of my students, just like your Dad", he continued, "a long time ago, before you were born." This seemed an unlikely, but intriguing, possibility. This red sweaty man had taught my parents?

His voice changed to a slower, softer register, like there was some sly gnome in that big body, reviewing well thumbed notes, creaking back a cracked leather cover, "Your father was one of my best students, girl. A god-damned genius." Pop make a clucking sound with his tongue, and laughed. Gabe didn't take his suddenly serious eyes from me. "Not hardly. Without your grand-daddy saving The Book of Ingenious Devices, of course, we would never know about Al-Jazari. But it was your Daddy" he waved a thick finger in the air, "Your father, who showed us all how to make it work, showed us our future" He stabbed his stubby finger at my chest, "Hydraulics, little girl! Hydraulics are the key. And nobody knows 'em like your Daddy." I wanted to bite him, but the black stains and thick callouses on his fingers made me think again. I wished I had not left my bow at home.

Pop came and took my hand. "Good to see you again, Gabe. We need to get our things to the market. Good luck with the new equipment."

The older man was on his feet faster than seemed possible for a person of his size, but the gnome was still in command of his voice, softer than ever now. "We need you back, Ferran."

Pop shook his head so quickly, he must have known what was coming. "No, Gabe. I have a family now. This isn't my home anymore."

"I know. I'm serious about this. I don't have enough good engineers, never did, but what I really need is someone who can pull ideas together, make new things work. I need you."

"You will do fine. Crabtown is growing. Booming, from what I see."

Gabe looked at me dubiously for a moment, and then back at Pop, continuing in an even softer voice. "We are leaving the Common, Ferran, leaving Crabtown. The sea is rising too fast, and the purifiers are mostly broken; rainwater isn't enough for the whole town. We are moving upriver. That rail isn't for the market, Ferran." He waved toward the Causeway, where a  new structure jutted out along the Causeway from the Common toward Landside. There were workers crawling over the raw end of it, like flies on a wound. Stabbing white light flared at different points, angry little stars. "We are moving the Archives, everything. The floaters can't take the hypercanes anymore. We could lose it all. The river is all silted up by the floods."

Pop nodded thoughtfully. "Good luck."

"'Good luck'? Is that all you've got? Good luck?!?" His voice was reaching its stride, "You grew up in Crabtown, Ferran! You know the Bloom will be on us the minute they realize we are weak. We need new machines, we need new weapons, we need more fuel." He paused, and took a deep breath, looking tired, an old gnome pushing a giant's body. "We need fuel. That is why I am here. The fuel."

Pop nodded again. He didn't answer at once, studying his fingers, dyed blue from the berry harvest. When he spoke, he spoke slowly, deliberately. "Gabe, it's over. You know that. It is right in front of our faces. We can't build a civilization on the garbage of a dead one. It won't last. They screwed up, and all they left us is this." sweeping his hand across the horizon, Landside, the barnacled waters lapping at the splintered remains of the old city, Crabtown, Scrap Island. "They failed. We shouldn't go down with them."

"Is that what I tell them, then?" Gabe waved agitatedly out at the water and stabbed his finger at the clustered towers of Crabtown, "That they need to go live in the woods with you, and eat nuts and berries with the treehuggers? Is that your solution? Go live like raccoons and let the Bloom hunt us down one by one?"

Pop started to pull me away, his face tight, "Good-bye, Gabe"

The muscles in Gabe's face rippled like a pond with a fish thrashing just under the surface. I looked back and watched as he struggled to control himself, and finally succeeded.

"Ferran, please, wait." He hurried to catch up with us. "Please, I'm sorry. That wasn't fair. I know why you left. Holly was a wonderful woman. Probably the best student I ever had - and that includes you. But she is dead, Ferran, those fuckers killed her and they are going to kill all of us, and the kids, and burn everything, and I don't know when they are going to stop, when they will have enough blood, when they will be ready for their Apocalypse, but we don't want to be a part of it." My father had stopped to listen, and Gabe took a deep breath.

"Holly is gone. Come back. Bring the girls back. There is so much they can learn here. So much that they can do..."

"I can't. It was not just her - I made my choice. The girls and I are staying with our family. With the People."

"All right, you say you made your choice, I guess you made your choice, I don't know what you are doing, but your choice is made, then, isn't it? But let me ask you this,Ferran - " He was barely in control of himself, " - without us, where will the People get their glass? Metal? Steel knives? Optics? We need each other. You know we are at peace with the tree- uh, with the People. Crabtown needs time. We can't just walk away from our lives.

"We promised to stop cutting trees for fuel, and we did. Your ideas were better anyway. And we are using new materials - all the salt-water intakes are bamboo now. We can change. But we can't move Crabtown without expanding production. That means new installations, perimeter guns, extra defenses. And the rail engine needs work. We need you. We can pay you. You don't have to come back, just work with us when you can. You won't need to trade at the market, just help us."

I could see that Pop was uncomfortable. Gabriel was someone he talked about often, and someone he respected. He spent a good long time looking out at the workers on the rail, and then answered.

"Ok, I will do what I can." They shook hands. "I think I can help you with this." Pop added in a lower voice, "I will die on the barricades before I let the Bloom take Crabtown. You can count on that."

They looked at each other, like Treebeards meeting to plan the tree-clearing ceremony.

"I know that, Ferran."

So that is how it started. We spent the rest of the day walking around the towers and glass houses, them talking about pumps and "nigh traits" and "bayo dizzle". Pop and I went home late, with all the trade goods we could carry. We gave the things we had brought with us to a dumbfounded boy who normally watches our boat at the market docks. We give him half a loaf of flatbread most days. I didn't speak to Pop the whole way back, I was so angry, but I don't think he even noticed.