Brave New Love
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Synopsis
When society crumbles, can young love survive? When the young are deprived of their bright future and left to survive day to day, what bonds remain between individuals? Can young love survive a dystopian nightmare? This exciting collection of stories explores the struggles, both emotional and physical, of teenagers trying to survive as society falls apart or as they help build a new world. Compelling, emotionally charged stories of young lives lived in desperate circumstances by: John Shirley, Elizabeth Bear, Kiera Cass, Nisi Shawl, Maria V. Snyder, Carrie Vaughn, Steve Berman, Amanda Downum, Diana Peterfreund, Jeanne DuPrau, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jesse Karp, William Sleator, Carrie Ryan and Seth Cadin.
Release date: January 19, 2012
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Print pages: 400
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Brave New Love
Paula Guran
Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
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)
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
First published in the United States in 2012 by Running Press Book Publishers,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
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This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage
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information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].
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
2300 Chestnut Street
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Printed and bound in the UK
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
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
Dissolve Depression destroying a good many banks and insurance companies, there was no money to replace them. Some people had built squat homes atop abandoned buildings creating Rooftown, high
above the worst of the social chaos below, and the rising waters that would someday lap this far inland. They were even above some of the worst air pollution.
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!”
“Fourteen, fifteen . . .”
“And . . . look.” He put the crowbar gently down on the floor. “I wouldn’t hit you anyway. My name’s Giorgio, what’s yours?”
“. . . twenty.” She made a show of aiming the gun at his head and slowly cocking it. “That’s it. Get out or I pull the trigger.”
“You know what? Before you shoot me, I’m going to just sit here on the floor, and say to myself, ‘If I have to die—’ ” He sat down and crossed his legs.
“ ‘—I’d rather this really cool, good-looking girl killed me than that creep Limmy’ ”
She stared at him over the top of the gun.
“Not that I want to be shot by anybody,” he added quickly. “I’d rather skip it.”
She licked her lips, and almost smiled. “Wait—Limmy, you said? That guy? You’ve got him after you? Well that’s just really tight. That means he’s
going to come in here. And I don’t want him coming in here.”
“Naw, I got ’em following a false scent, like.”
They might well come back here looking for him, he supposed. But he decided not to mention that.
“Well, you still can’t stay here,” she insisted. “Get out!”
“I will! Eventually! But for right now I’m gonna hope you don’t kill me. If I stay, and wait till he gives up and you don’t kill me—it’ll be easier for
me to leave. I mean, if you shoot me, I’m a big heavy messy old body to drag outta here. So . . .” He shrugged and closed his eyes, made a face as if expecting the bullet. But he was
pretty sure she wasn’t going to shoot him. Not completely sure, though.
He cracked open an eyelid a little, glimpsed another flicker of a smile on her face. She lowered the gun—and he opened his eyes.
“I’m an idiot to trust you,” the girl said. Then she frowned and pointed the gun at him again. “I’m not going to trust you. I don’t know you. I’m going
to keep the gun between us. But I won’t shoot you for . . . um . . . half an hour.”
“Half an hour! Okay! Thirty minutes! I appreciate the extension. Sorry about moving your stuff around. I don’t like people messing with my stuff either. I live in Rooftown too, east
side, the Rag-ass Branch. I know how hard it is to get stuff up to your place. Man, getting a mattress up there, when I first came up—big draggle. You all alone here?”
She sighed and sat down, cross-legged like him, on the futon at the opposite end of the little room. It had once been an office; she’d converted it to an apartment of sorts. She lowered
the gun so its butt was supported by one knee, but she kept it pointed in his general direction.
She uncocked it, though. That was encouraging.
Giorgio kept his voice just loud enough for her to hear him as he spoke, now and then glancing toward the window. “Yeah, my uncle was out of money and they came around demanding that east
side pay-up. I said, ‘Naw, you got to wait, and we’ll get you what we can.’ And the guy tried to slap me with a pistol and I pushed him over . . .”
“That was dumb.”
“Yeah, true dat. And uh—he started acting like he was going to shoot me, I slammed the door—place has a big metal door, must’ve been even harder to get up there than a
mattress. He started yelling for his homeys. I went out the back window, across the roofs to the bridge . . .”
She nodded. “Should’ve tried bartering something.”
“All out of stuff to barter. I got a street clean-up job coming if the Indigent Bureau comes through but that’s not for months and—”
Giorgio broke off at shouts from the hall. He put a finger to his lips. She nodded, as he got on his hands and knees, crawled to the door, pressed his ear against it.
“I don’t care who your low-hode ass is connected to!” someone shouted, out in the hall. Banker, likely. “We got our own organization here, they set me up
as collector and that means you want to pass through you pay what I tell you to pay and you leave the guns!”
Giorgio chuckled to himself. It was working.
Then there were two gunshots. A voice yelled, “He got me, Limmy, he got me—”
Another gunshot, and the voice cut off—real suddenly.
The distinctive boom of a rifle, then a responding gunshot. Another . . .
Then a shout, “I’m going, damn it, hold your fire!”
Giorgio sat up, and smiled at her. “Looks like they took the bait, went through the wrong door, and ran into Banker. Sounds like Limmy scratched outta there . . .”
“What’re you gonna do?”
“Well . . .” He took out his little instacell. He’d bought the disposable phone from a vending machine a week before, in one of his rare forays out of Rooftown. “Only got
a minute or so left on this.”
He called his uncle Tonio, afraid he wouldn’t answer . . . or maybe one of Limmy’s bangers would answer. Which would mean they’d killed his uncle and taken his phone. But a
weary Tonio answered. “That you, boy?”
“Yeah, uh—you okay, Tonio?”
“I borrowed some money from my sister. I paid ’em the hundred.”
“Okay, that’s good, I guess. Probably they won’t come after you, since they’ll think you’re gonna be a source of money. But uh—I kinda pissed them off . . . I
don’t think I should go back there.”
“You got that right, boy. I appreciate you were trying to take care of me but . . .”
“Look, I’m gonna go to one of the youth shelters, down on the ground, till I get my job. When I get it going, I’ll send for you, we’ll get a groundhog house . .
.”
“Kid? Don’t do that. I’m gonna die up here, in my own good time.”
Uncle had gone all cold on him, seemed like. He’d been drinking a lot lately and they’d been arguing about that. “Okay whatever. I’ll call, see how you’re doing. I
just—”
“This unit’s phonetime has expired . . .” a robotic voice interrupted. Followed by a click, a buzz, and silence.
Giorgio tossed the disposable phone aside, and slumped back against the wall. “Anyway, he’s safe.”
He glanced at the girl and saw she’d put the gun aside. She was still sitting cross-legged but was now holding on to her ankles and staring at the floor. He noticed she’d taken off
her sneakers, too. Embarrassed to have two different kinds, he guessed. She had small feet, silver-painted toenails.
“My half hour up yet?” he asked.
“No. Anyway . . .” She looked at her silver-painted toenails. “I . . . you can stay until you’re sure they’re not coming back. ’Cause if you try to go back
across that bridge . . . or try to get past Banker . . . I mean, you can’t stay too long, but . . . awhile.”
“Yeah. Thanks. So—you know my name . . .”
“Um . . . okay. I’m Felice. You want some instajuice? I don’t know what the flavor is, some fakey fruit punch, but . . . It’s in that cooler.”
They drank instajuice, and sat across the room from one another, talking as the light dimmed outside and the room got gradually darker. Something about the room getting darker around them as
they talked about where they’d come from, how they’d ended up in Rooftown, was strangely relaxing. It was as if the friendly shadows were something they were sharing, along with the
juice.
He mentioned that he’d been to a roof concert of thug-juggers—contemporary jug-band/rapper crossover—and it turned out she’d been there, too. They were both fans of
thug-juggers, especially of Jerome-X. That commonality seemed to flicker like a candle between them, and Giorgio started to feel as if he’d known her forever. She told him a funny story about
her brother, who was in the Orbital Army now—if he were still alive—and a prank he’d pulled on a cop. She told it really well and he marveled at her sense of humor, living alone
in this place—alone in Rooftown. There wasn’t much self-pity in her, He liked that.
They talked thug-juggers some more and she recited a Jerome-X lyric she liked, and he finished reciting it with her, because it was one of his favorites too.
Woke up in this world,
didn’t recognize a thing
Living for years, that bell just never rings
And I still don’t recognize a thing, just don’t recognize a thing.
They both felt that way: that the world had been made for someone else, they couldn’t find a place to connect with it . . .
They talked on and on, feeling a kind of high from it—the isolation they’d both felt for a long time finally punctured, the wall cracking open. There’s someone who feels
like I do . . .
Felice told him how her parents had died in the first wave of tropical diseases that had hit LA; how she’d gotten sick too, but survived. She was living on a little bit of money her
half-brother sent to her, sometimes, but it wasn’t enough to pay for a groundhog apartment. She had to pay Banker for the right to squat here, so cheap it was almost free. Every other day she
was going to the bus-school—the bus that came around to the base of the building with a classroom inside, protected by heavily armed security guards.
He told her he did odd jobs, tried to read books when he could till he could get back in school. Told her about how his aunt had died two months before, in her sleep, and how they’d given
her the “Burial at Sea”—which in Rooftown meant rolling her up in a rug and dropping her off the edge of a roof for the robocleaners to find in groundhog land down below.
She told him about a place she’d always dreamed of going, she’d seen it in a holomagazine. A place called Missoula, Montana. Global warming hadn’t affected it much. The land
was wide open. The air clean. Then she sighed and said, “But I’ll never get there.”
They talked a lot about how life made them feel. Somehow the darkness in the room made that possible, too. He had never unburdened himself this much. There was something magical about it . .
.
During a momentary silence Giorgio winced when his stomach growled audibly. “I heard that!” Felice said, laughing softly. “Under the red plastic in the cooler, there’s
some quick’n’hots.”
He found the quick’n’hot packets, broke the seal that made them heat up on their own, and they ate the spicy meat paste slowly, not talking.
Not talking—for about five minutes. Then they started up again. Talking, talking into the night . . .
• • •
It must’ve been near dawn when Giorgio woke up on the floor. He sat up stiffly, stretching, looking around in momentary disorientation.
Oh, yeah. The squat. Felice. In the blue-gray pre-dawn glow coming through the window he saw that she’d gone. How’d she leave without waking him? He’d been lying right in front
of the door.
He went to the window, looked carefully out. No sign of Limmy. Maybe he should leave now. His being there put Felice at risk.
Giorgio went to the hallway door, put his hand on the knob—then another door opened, at the back of the room—she had hidden it behind a curtain. Felice pushed through and looked at
him in surprise. “I go off to the bathroom and check out the halls, see if it’s safe—and you’re already buggin’ out . . .”
“I just . . . thought I ought to. They might, you know, come back. I mean, Limmy, anyway. He might let my uncle go but not me. He lost a man because of me. And if you’re with me when
he comes . . .”
“Yeah. I know. But . . . I just . . . I was hoping you’d help me decide about something. I mean—I don’t have anyone else to talk it over with. I can’t get hold of
my godmother directly . . .”
“What?” Giorgio was relieved to have an excuse to stay awhile longer. Anything just to be around Felice a bit more.
“I got a text from my godmother—she’s in Dome Bel Air.”
“Dome Bel Air! You’re kidding me!”
“I’m not kidding. She says I can go there and live with her, she’s got permission for me to come . . . But I don’t think I want to.”
“What? Why not! That’s, all, like, luxury in there! You don’t have to worry about getting caught in an acid rain or a black wind—no crime, air’s clean,
plenty of food from the hydro-farms. And you don’t want to go?”
She made a face like she’d tasted something bad. “She got me in for a visit once. It’s just . . . I can’t relate to those people. They’re—Oh, god.” She
stared past him, and pointed. “There’s someone at the window!”
He turned around, saw Limmy grinning at him from the window, which was only partly blocked by the dresser. Limmy’s grin was strained, his cheeks twitching. He was on synthameth, for sure,
Giorgio figured, had probably been up all night getting tweaky Limmy’s left hand gripped the window frame; he raised the automatic pistol in his other hand into view. Grinding his teeth, he
pointed it at Giorgio—
Dive for the floor, dumbass. But Giorgio felt rooted to the spot.
But then something boomed behind him, and the window g
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
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)
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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
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
Dissolve Depression destroying a good many banks and insurance companies, there was no money to replace them. Some people had built squat homes atop abandoned buildings creating Rooftown, high
above the worst of the social chaos below, and the rising waters that would someday lap this far inland. They were even above some of the worst air pollution.
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!”
“Fourteen, fifteen . . .”
“And . . . look.” He put the crowbar gently down on the floor. “I wouldn’t hit you anyway. My name’s Giorgio, what’s yours?”
“. . . twenty.” She made a show of aiming the gun at his head and slowly cocking it. “That’s it. Get out or I pull the trigger.”
“You know what? Before you shoot me, I’m going to just sit here on the floor, and say to myself, ‘If I have to die—’ ” He sat down and crossed his legs.
“ ‘—I’d rather this really cool, good-looking girl killed me than that creep Limmy’ ”
She stared at him over the top of the gun.
“Not that I want to be shot by anybody,” he added quickly. “I’d rather skip it.”
She licked her lips, and almost smiled. “Wait—Limmy, you said? That guy? You’ve got him after you? Well that’s just really tight. That means he’s
going to come in here. And I don’t want him coming in here.”
“Naw, I got ’em following a false scent, like.”
They might well come back here looking for him, he supposed. But he decided not to mention that.
“Well, you still can’t stay here,” she insisted. “Get out!”
“I will! Eventually! But for right now I’m gonna hope you don’t kill me. If I stay, and wait till he gives up and you don’t kill me—it’ll be easier for
me to leave. I mean, if you shoot me, I’m a big heavy messy old body to drag outta here. So . . .” He shrugged and closed his eyes, made a face as if expecting the bullet. But he was
pretty sure she wasn’t going to shoot him. Not completely sure, though.
He cracked open an eyelid a little, glimpsed another flicker of a smile on her face. She lowered the gun—and he opened his eyes.
“I’m an idiot to trust you,” the girl said. Then she frowned and pointed the gun at him again. “I’m not going to trust you. I don’t know you. I’m going
to keep the gun between us. But I won’t shoot you for . . . um . . . half an hour.”
“Half an hour! Okay! Thirty minutes! I appreciate the extension. Sorry about moving your stuff around. I don’t like people messing with my stuff either. I live in Rooftown too, east
side, the Rag-ass Branch. I know how hard it is to get stuff up to your place. Man, getting a mattress up there, when I first came up—big draggle. You all alone here?”
She sighed and sat down, cross-legged like him, on the futon at the opposite end of the little room. It had once been an office; she’d converted it to an apartment of sorts. She lowered
the gun so its butt was supported by one knee, but she kept it pointed in his general direction.
She uncocked it, though. That was encouraging.
Giorgio kept his voice just loud enough for her to hear him as he spoke, now and then glancing toward the window. “Yeah, my uncle was out of money and they came around demanding that east
side pay-up. I said, ‘Naw, you got to wait, and we’ll get you what we can.’ And the guy tried to slap me with a pistol and I pushed him over . . .”
“That was dumb.”
“Yeah, true dat. And uh—he started acting like he was going to shoot me, I slammed the door—place has a big metal door, must’ve been even harder to get up there than a
mattress. He started yelling for his homeys. I went out the back window, across the roofs to the bridge . . .”
She nodded. “Should’ve tried bartering something.”
“All out of stuff to barter. I got a street clean-up job coming if the Indigent Bureau comes through but that’s not for months and—”
Giorgio broke off at shouts from the hall. He put a finger to his lips. She nodded, as he got on his hands and knees, crawled to the door, pressed his ear against it.
“I don’t care who your low-hode ass is connected to!” someone shouted, out in the hall. Banker, likely. “We got our own organization here, they set me up
as collector and that means you want to pass through you pay what I tell you to pay and you leave the guns!”
Giorgio chuckled to himself. It was working.
Then there were two gunshots. A voice yelled, “He got me, Limmy, he got me—”
Another gunshot, and the voice cut off—real suddenly.
The distinctive boom of a rifle, then a responding gunshot. Another . . .
Then a shout, “I’m going, damn it, hold your fire!”
Giorgio sat up, and smiled at her. “Looks like they took the bait, went through the wrong door, and ran into Banker. Sounds like Limmy scratched outta there . . .”
“What’re you gonna do?”
“Well . . .” He took out his little instacell. He’d bought the disposable phone from a vending machine a week before, in one of his rare forays out of Rooftown. “Only got
a minute or so left on this.”
He called his uncle Tonio, afraid he wouldn’t answer . . . or maybe one of Limmy’s bangers would answer. Which would mean they’d killed his uncle and taken his phone. But a
weary Tonio answered. “That you, boy?”
“Yeah, uh—you okay, Tonio?”
“I borrowed some money from my sister. I paid ’em the hundred.”
“Okay, that’s good, I guess. Probably they won’t come after you, since they’ll think you’re gonna be a source of money. But uh—I kinda pissed them off . . . I
don’t think I should go back there.”
“You got that right, boy. I appreciate you were trying to take care of me but . . .”
“Look, I’m gonna go to one of the youth shelters, down on the ground, till I get my job. When I get it going, I’ll send for you, we’ll get a groundhog house . .
.”
“Kid? Don’t do that. I’m gonna die up here, in my own good time.”
Uncle had gone all cold on him, seemed like. He’d been drinking a lot lately and they’d been arguing about that. “Okay whatever. I’ll call, see how you’re doing. I
just—”
“This unit’s phonetime has expired . . .” a robotic voice interrupted. Followed by a click, a buzz, and silence.
Giorgio tossed the disposable phone aside, and slumped back against the wall. “Anyway, he’s safe.”
He glanced at the girl and saw she’d put the gun aside. She was still sitting cross-legged but was now holding on to her ankles and staring at the floor. He noticed she’d taken off
her sneakers, too. Embarrassed to have two different kinds, he guessed. She had small feet, silver-painted toenails.
“My half hour up yet?” he asked.
“No. Anyway . . .” She looked at her silver-painted toenails. “I . . . you can stay until you’re sure they’re not coming back. ’Cause if you try to go back
across that bridge . . . or try to get past Banker . . . I mean, you can’t stay too long, but . . . awhile.”
“Yeah. Thanks. So—you know my name . . .”
“Um . . . okay. I’m Felice. You want some instajuice? I don’t know what the flavor is, some fakey fruit punch, but . . . It’s in that cooler.”
They drank instajuice, and sat across the room from one another, talking as the light dimmed outside and the room got gradually darker. Something about the room getting darker around them as
they talked about where they’d come from, how they’d ended up in Rooftown, was strangely relaxing. It was as if the friendly shadows were something they were sharing, along with the
juice.
He mentioned that he’d been to a roof concert of thug-juggers—contemporary jug-band/rapper crossover—and it turned out she’d been there, too. They were both fans of
thug-juggers, especially of Jerome-X. That commonality seemed to flicker like a candle between them, and Giorgio started to feel as if he’d known her forever. She told him a funny story about
her brother, who was in the Orbital Army now—if he were still alive—and a prank he’d pulled on a cop. She told it really well and he marveled at her sense of humor, living alone
in this place—alone in Rooftown. There wasn’t much self-pity in her, He liked that.
They talked thug-juggers some more and she recited a Jerome-X lyric she liked, and he finished reciting it with her, because it was one of his favorites too.
Woke up in this world,
didn’t recognize a thing
Living for years, that bell just never rings
And I still don’t recognize a thing, just don’t recognize a thing.
They both felt that way: that the world had been made for someone else, they couldn’t find a place to connect with it . . .
They talked on and on, feeling a kind of high from it—the isolation they’d both felt for a long time finally punctured, the wall cracking open. There’s someone who feels
like I do . . .
Felice told him how her parents had died in the first wave of tropical diseases that had hit LA; how she’d gotten sick too, but survived. She was living on a little bit of money her
half-brother sent to her, sometimes, but it wasn’t enough to pay for a groundhog apartment. She had to pay Banker for the right to squat here, so cheap it was almost free. Every other day she
was going to the bus-school—the bus that came around to the base of the building with a classroom inside, protected by heavily armed security guards.
He told her he did odd jobs, tried to read books when he could till he could get back in school. Told her about how his aunt had died two months before, in her sleep, and how they’d given
her the “Burial at Sea”—which in Rooftown meant rolling her up in a rug and dropping her off the edge of a roof for the robocleaners to find in groundhog land down below.
She told him about a place she’d always dreamed of going, she’d seen it in a holomagazine. A place called Missoula, Montana. Global warming hadn’t affected it much. The land
was wide open. The air clean. Then she sighed and said, “But I’ll never get there.”
They talked a lot about how life made them feel. Somehow the darkness in the room made that possible, too. He had never unburdened himself this much. There was something magical about it . .
.
During a momentary silence Giorgio winced when his stomach growled audibly. “I heard that!” Felice said, laughing softly. “Under the red plastic in the cooler, there’s
some quick’n’hots.”
He found the quick’n’hot packets, broke the seal that made them heat up on their own, and they ate the spicy meat paste slowly, not talking.
Not talking—for about five minutes. Then they started up again. Talking, talking into the night . . .
• • •
It must’ve been near dawn when Giorgio woke up on the floor. He sat up stiffly, stretching, looking around in momentary disorientation.
Oh, yeah. The squat. Felice. In the blue-gray pre-dawn glow coming through the window he saw that she’d gone. How’d she leave without waking him? He’d been lying right in front
of the door.
He went to the window, looked carefully out. No sign of Limmy. Maybe he should leave now. His being there put Felice at risk.
Giorgio went to the hallway door, put his hand on the knob—then another door opened, at the back of the room—she had hidden it behind a curtain. Felice pushed through and looked at
him in surprise. “I go off to the bathroom and check out the halls, see if it’s safe—and you’re already buggin’ out . . .”
“I just . . . thought I ought to. They might, you know, come back. I mean, Limmy, anyway. He might let my uncle go but not me. He lost a man because of me. And if you’re with me when
he comes . . .”
“Yeah. I know. But . . . I just . . . I was hoping you’d help me decide about something. I mean—I don’t have anyone else to talk it over with. I can’t get hold of
my godmother directly . . .”
“What?” Giorgio was relieved to have an excuse to stay awhile longer. Anything just to be around Felice a bit more.
“I got a text from my godmother—she’s in Dome Bel Air.”
“Dome Bel Air! You’re kidding me!”
“I’m not kidding. She says I can go there and live with her, she’s got permission for me to come . . . But I don’t think I want to.”
“What? Why not! That’s, all, like, luxury in there! You don’t have to worry about getting caught in an acid rain or a black wind—no crime, air’s clean,
plenty of food from the hydro-farms. And you don’t want to go?”
She made a face like she’d tasted something bad. “She got me in for a visit once. It’s just . . . I can’t relate to those people. They’re—Oh, god.” She
stared past him, and pointed. “There’s someone at the window!”
He turned around, saw Limmy grinning at him from the window, which was only partly blocked by the dresser. Limmy’s grin was strained, his cheeks twitching. He was on synthameth, for sure,
Giorgio figured, had probably been up all night getting tweaky Limmy’s left hand gripped the window frame; he raised the automatic pistol in his other hand into view. Grinding his teeth, he
pointed it at Giorgio—
Dive for the floor, dumbass. But Giorgio felt rooted to the spot.
But then something boomed behind him, and the window g
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