Fireworld

Lad knew right from the dawn that the day would go wrong.  When Ara’s baby awoke him, his nightshirt and tangled beard were heavy with sweat.  The air in Ara’s small cabin was stuffy and redolent with burning wood, and outside a dull roar widened, like a tributary rushing into a sea. Nothing new. Fires were always ubiquitous, as if they sought to evict life from the planet.   

Ara put her fingers to Cela’s trembling mouth to shush her, but Lad was an early riser anyway.  “I fixed your air purifier,” the hired hand called out from his minuscule bedroom as he decorously buttoned his only workshirt. He was thirtyish, rough-faced and gangly.  “But we need to go. A wildfire crossed the break. The detector went off an hour ago.” 

“Saz should be home anytime now,” Ara said.  Her husband.

“Let’s leave a note on the door.”

Someone was hammering with both fists on the door.  Verna, Ara’s younger sister, who lived next door. “Saz is missing,” she quavered, dabbing at emerald eyes.

Ara stared blankly until her spluttering baby bawled.  “Oh, I’m a mess,” she explained to Cela.  She glanced at Verna, then regarded herself in the hall mirror. Her hair was disheveled, her mouth too wide, her lips shredded by her nervous nibbles.  Clearly inferior to her sister.   

“You look fine,” Lad said gruffly.

She smiled tentatively.

Verna hooked her thumbs in her fashionably torn Earthjeans and looked at Cela with dainty disgust.  Behind Verna, the bright moon was burning a hole through the smoky sky, like money in the pocket.

Lad fetched his jacket, which had more holes than fiber, from his closet crammed tidily with used but clean tools, accounting records, and heavily underlined paperbacks. In the back was a cellphone jammed with textbooks. “We’ll be back this afternoon to pack up,” he said to Ara. “We’ll find him.” He touched Ara’s moist hand and chucked the child under her chin.

Ara pouted. “Why don’t we all look for Saz? We’ve got to leave, anyway.”

“It’s complicated,” Verna said. Both sisters turned to Lad, who preened in their attention. “Let’s go, girls. No time to argue.” Smirking at her sister, Ara wrapped Cela in a serape, packed a colorful valise, and headed out. Verna balked, then followed.

The air swam with ashes. Lad fastened a mask over Verna’s perfumed mouth, then put on his own. Ara waited for him to fasten her own mask. When he didn’t, she grabbed it from the pocket of his jacket, adjusted it haughtily, and held Cela’s mouth to her breasts. They walked down the meandering sere path away from the cabin and to Brin County’s only paved road. Brown rodents stood on their hind legs along the dirt path, sniffed the wind, and fled to their burrows.

Although they were neighbors, Lad hadn’t seen Verna for months.  The sisters rarely called upon each other.  He couldn’t help staring now.  She was taller but younger and slimmer than he, fresh-faced and bosomy. Her amber hair cascaded down her bare back, and her lips were full and red.  “Where did you and Saz go?” he said.

“To Alban.  The security county for Mid County.”

“The what?” He knew the answer but wished to flatter her.

“Security county.  Fires break out at random, so each county pairs with one that can come quickly to its aid.  Mid caught fire yesterday.”

“Alban will lend its firefighters and host refugees?” Lad said.

“Yes, we were arranging that. This month we’ve been working for Mid.  It’s a good deal. We work three days a week, not the usual four. Daddy set it up before he died. He was the governor, you know.  He gave us little girls whatever we wanted.”

“One little girl, anyway,” said Ara.

 “Daddy was a real übermensch,” Verna said.  He had become rich through a Fireworld ritual, occurring once every fifty years, in which a man could walk along the fires for a day and claim all the land beneath his step. 

“Dad was always thinking about the family’s future,” Ara said.

“And your mom teaches school,” Lad prompted.

Verna turned up her nose. “The only thing she ever taught me was Hide and Go Seek. Ara was the damned star student.  Calculus and something.”

“English literature,” Ara said, “with a minor in obnoxious sisters.”

Verna coughed fitfully. Lad gave her his last bottle of water.

“The warehouse manager came up to Saz and whispered in his ear,” Verna said hoarsely. “Saz followed him outside. I thought that they were cutting a side deal. But this guy returned to me alone. He said Saz left to get a bite.  Which was strange, because we had eaten lunch just an hour before.”

“A liquid lunch?” Lad said.

“Hear, hear!” said Ara.

Verna sighed with exasperation. “Ara, we don’t drink. And we don’t scarf down the fat like some people.  Anyway, I never saw Saz again.” She handed Lad his empty bottle without a word or glance.

They walked down the middle of the empty narrow road, as if they owned it. In the shadowed near distance, fitful gusts pushed forward the high red flames like nervous soldiers.  “What are you reading these days?” Verna said to Lad.

“Reading? Kierkegaard.”

“Kier—what?  Oh, never mind. I guess you’re not a big reader.”

“Don’t you remember Fear and trembling?” Ara said to her sister. “The classic guide for Fireworld.”

 “Saz reads everything,” Verna said to Lad. “Stephen King, Dean Koontz, you name it.  Didn’t you go to college?”

“Couldn’t afford it.”

            “Daddy would have given you money.  Anyway, Saz and I were friends at Princeton.  That’s on Earth.”

“So I hear.”

“I majored in drama.” From her purse, Verna fished out a holograph of herself and Saz on a pocket-sized stage, locking arms and simpering.  Saz was blue-eyed, tanned, and carefully tousle-headed.  He wore a sailor’s cap at a raffish angle. 

“The best years of my life,” said Verna, 22. “Why don’t you ever smile?”  

Lad looked down.  “I don’t know.”

“Such a deadhead. Look, there’s the airport,” she said, ignoring Ara’s glare. Above the basso profundo of the fire, they heard the crescendo of an inhuman grumble from the air terminal. A sixty-foot dragon ascended, carrying on its back a copper-colored cabin with a dozen passengers in slumber.  Its flashing red eyes were protected from flames by thick eyelids with a tiny hole for vision. It zigzagged a few meters above the tongues of fire.

“Don’t worry. That’s not our flight,” Verna said.  “I booked the puddle-jumper. Cheaper. Saz and I go on trips sometimes. But we have to be careful about the passengers, because he hates children.”

“All I do is work,” Lad mumbled. He supported his parents. His father was bedridden with cirrhosis of the liver.  A silent, honest, undemonstrative man, as gloomy as a moonless night, the victim of his own ambition. He had advised the governor on the science of fires, which were growing in volume and peril with the passing years and were therefore, in the governor’s eyes, evidence of the scientist’s incompetence.  It was 2066—two decades after discovery of the Singularity, the point at which time required for interstellar travel collapsed to near zero.    

The terminal was half-empty in the gathering dawn. Few cafes were open yet, and the intoxicating aroma of brewing coffee could not cloak the sweaty stench of the dragons in the hangars.  Their random roars punctuated the giddy canned music of the terminal.  Or maybe they were chatting. Depending on the temperature, they sometimes fell into communal peeves and refused to fly, shutting down the regional economy.

Lad and the two sisters boarded a twenty-foot dragon as it hissed and stamped its cloven feet.  “Is this flight safe?” Ara asked.

 “This little tyke flew 500 miles yesterday,” said the smiling flight attendant. She gave each of the three new passengers an extra bag of peanuts. The sisters sat on either side of Lad, who devoured the nuts and stacked the shells. “You are a neataholic,” the attendant said.

The dawn broke with streaks of marble, mauve, and green, bringing the runway into view.  When a worker at the intersection waved a blue flag, the dragon dashed down the runway bellowing, spreading his pendulous leathery wings at the last moment. He lumbered high into the ashen skies and leveled off, purring in the buoyant wind. 

Below them, the piebald hills slipped by.  One mile charred, the next verdant. That was typical for the boreal zone, south of the Second Arctic. In thunderstorms, the crackling lightning engendered flames fed by the wood dried in the dry season.  The zone teemed with taiga of conifers, poplars, spruce, and birch as white as wedding silk, planted by desperate young immigrants from dying worlds. This was the only zone on the planet with artisans of water, where life could survive. The scarcity of land that could be developed led to skyscrapers rather than flats, especially in Scorpus, deep in the South, which had two security counties due to its heightened risk of death from towers on fire.

An hour later, they were in Alban County.  The flames had not reached its borders, and the air was deliciously cool. Lad took Verna’s elbow to guide her to the airport exit, but she swatted him away. Ara extended her own hand timidly to Lad but withdrew it when he looked at her.

“My needs are simple: a good book and a quiet kid,” Ara said to the molten sky. “And, well….”

“A hubby with a six-pack, and I don’t mean beer,” Verna said.  “Too late, Ara. This one’s mine.” Verna grabbed Lad’s hand. He pretended not to notice.

*** 

Lad and Verna conversed as they waited for a cab, while Ara, sitting several rows away, tended to her caterwauling child. When Cela finally drifted to sleep, Ara felt a gossamer of guilt at her pleasure in the sudden solitude. She picked up Pride and Prejudice but set it back down in her lap and thought idly of whether Saz was alive. On her left hand was a band of whitened flesh on her fourth finger.  But she examined instead her college ring, although she could not have explained why she still wore it. Her father had insisted that she attend Princeton—her sister had followed out of jealousy—but the school had been a hassle for her.  She and Verna became known as, “the Brontë sisters,” so she had to seek out her few old friends from Fireworld for support.  She had met Saz at a frat party, which she had attended because she knew her sister wouldn’t. “Hello, I’m Saz.  I make straight A’s. How large is your allowance?” A stranger to booze, and urged on by Saz, she drank too much, too quickly, with predictable results.

A few months later, she turned down her ideal job, teaching Shakespeare on Earth, to return pregnant to Fireworld, as Saz had demanded. Now he spent most nights with Verna, who removed the bedroom curtain on the window facing Ara’s cabin.

Ara remembered her own last evening with her husband, on her 23rd birthday, a few days before Cela’s birth. He was only slightly drunk, which meant that he had lost less money than usual at the casino.  “Dreamboat!” he said, wiping away a slight drool.  “So good to see you.  Even if you have put on twenty pounds since our last rendezvous.”

“I’m pregnant.”

“Your option, your problem.  Where’s the whiskey?”

“I poured it out.”

He slammed the pantry door.  “Maybe I’ll pour myself out, too. Right out the front door.”

“Saz, we need to pay for groceries.”

“You need to pay. You’re the one with a father’s wealth. I grew up in an orphanage.  All I have is government insurance.”

“Dad’s money is for the baby when it grows up. I promised him.”

“Then find some other way to pay the stinking landlord. I don’t partake of the home pleasures any more.  Or haven’t you noticed?”

She looked away.  “Let’s prepare dinner.”

“Soup for one, Dreamboat.  Why don’t you take up with that numbskull handyman of yours?”  He put on his sailor’s cap, looked approvingly in the hall mirror, and slammed the door twice on his way out.

She sat still for five minutes, in case he returned. Then she got up and scrubbed away his muddy bootprints in the hall. The cabin was so small that the hall was visible to both bedrooms.  Upon her father’s death, as the older sister, she could have taken the family mansion next door. But Verna insisted on it for herself, so Ara moved into the shotgun cabin that Lad, as the family’s handyman, had occupied. 

***

In Alban City, the threesome took a jitney to the warehouse where Saz had last been seen.  On the leafy road, left and right, they passed trim fields fecund from several inches of accumulated ashes. Obscured by the fronds of the wet season, the fields bore grupa, the sweet purple fruit that provided the planet with most of its export revenues. Redfoot plodders dove into the subtle rows of soil, snatching loose fruit from the jaws of serpentine rivals and escaping to their mile-high nests.

The fields gave way to rows of pure-stone buildings.  They were insurance agencies—the planet’s leading industry, thanks to the unpredictable, damaging fires. Lad had read in The Global Times that the dominance of the insurance sector explained why the economy was stagnant.  People sought not affluence but peace of mind. So they took no entrepreneurial risks, like creating industries.  And virtually everyone held life insurance against death by fire—even the fire-life policies against murder by fire, a common occurrence since killers knew that flames would obliterate the evidence.  The planet’s docility, and the monotonous conflagrations, drove away the young and adventurous, according to the Times. Of course, you could never believe the newspapers.

As Ara dozed, the taxi skirted the downtown, passing Calvinist churches, panic clinics, and funeral homes advertising same-day incineration services. Lad’s eye lingered on the glistening windows of high-fashion stores for youths.  “Those stores are nothing special,” Verna said. “Saz and I window shop when we work the security counties.  He can’t relax at home.  My so-superior sister tortures him.”

“He owes the mob money,” Lad said. “And he cheats at taxes and cards.  He’s as aggressive as your father was.” That one just slipped out.

She took out a pocket mirror and freshened her lipstick. “Why do you stare at me so?” she said, her eyes still on the mirror.  He reddened and looked away. She smiled to herself.

They passed a sports stadium, one of only two on the planet, and the famous Lake of Eternal Flames, glowing orange and blue behind the Lagniappe Restaurant.  Against the background of the trim downtown, the warehouse was awry and crude, like an overstuffed trash bag abandoned in a garden of cherry blossoms. When the taxi shuddered to a stop in the parking lot, Ara awoke and left to change a diaper.

“You’re back!” said the cheerful manager to Verna. He was checking the inventory of cheap ornaments, and his fingers were smudged with bronze dye.  Blonde and chubby, he wore a short loud tie that stuck out like a bull’s tongue.

“Did Saz return?” Verna said. She stood on her tiptoes, scanning the loft.

“Not here.”

She scowled. “You know where he is.”

The manager seemed all too puzzled. “Sorry, I’m not acquainted with him.  Why don’t you try the police?”

“I might sic the K9s on you.” She stalked away.

“She’s distraught,” Lad said.

“She thinks I did away with him.  Why don’t you talk some sense into her?”

“Where did you last see him?”

“Outside of the Lagniappe Restaurant, right across the boulevard. The only po’boys on the planet.”

“Verna said they had already eaten.”

“You haven’t truly eaten until you’ve chomped down on a po’boy.”

“Then why didn’t he fetch Verna?”

“Maybe they were on a break.”

“Liar,” Verna said, returning. “Here’s my beau.” She looped her arm into Lad’s.

“She’s feeding you a line,” the manager said to him. As far as Lad was concerned, she could feed him all day.

“The truth,” Verna said to Lad, gripping his arm, “is that he chucked Saz into the Lake of Eternal Flames.”

“You’re the liar!” The manager turned purple.

“The whole town knows it.  Saz found out about his black-market sales. He checked the inventory records in the Statehouse.”

“My records are perfect.”

“Saz found a discrepancy of two million dollars for this month alone,” Verna said. Lad glowered at him.

“Impossible,” the manager said, wiping sweat from his eyes.

“Is murder impossible?” Verna said.

“What do you mean?”

“Your conviction.”

The manager gaped and hurried away.

“The warehouse industry is corrupt,” Verna said to Lad. “We learned that at Princeton. Just a few firms dominate. They don’t have rivals, so they do whatever they want. Raise prices, take bribes, snuff investigators. They don’t deserve your attention.” She pressed his hand.

He pressed hers. “What should we do?”

“Report the manager to the police.  He’s violating his probation.  You could sign an affidavit.”

“And Saz?”

“Dead.” Her voice shook. “We’ll have to break the news to Ara. After we go to the cops.”

To get the police to investigate, they would need to document the manager’s crimes. Lad turned to Verna, but she was already at the front door. “I must make a phone call,” she said with a professional smile. “See you at Lagniappe.”

Ara returned to the warehouse, clean swaddling clothes in hand, but Lad couldn’t bear to tell her about Saz. “We’re going to the Statehouse,” he said.

Ensconced in a rose garden, the somber Statehouse was a brief walk from the warehouse.  The inventory archives were in a ramshackle hut behind the ayuntamiento and the Senate chambers, next to the grimy police substation devoted to insurance fraud. This was the most common crime on the planet, since validating the claim for fire-life insurance required only one affidavit from an observer of the death, and the policy paid off anywhere in the universe. 

“This month’s records for Alpha Warehouse,” he said to the clerk, perspiring in the humid hut.  Lad ran his finger down the long columns of figures and stopped, puzzled. “Did you see any discrepancy?” he said to Ara.

“Alpha always balances its books,” the clerk said. “We have problems with Beta and Gamma.  They report losses for fire-fighting equipment that they actually sell on the mob’s black market.  But Alpha is clean.”

“Even though its manager is a murderer?”

“Murder? Oh, the traffic accident.  A pedestrian darted beneath Jerome’s hovercar as he was descending. He was inconsolable for months. But that was 10 years ago.”

Lad emerged from the dank archives into sparkling sunlight, brooding.

“My sister is usually a stranger to the truth,” Ara said.

Lad shook his head.

Outside the Lagniappe, Verna waited with a seductive smile.  “Did you find the evidence?”

“No evidence,” Lad said. “Alpha’s books account for all the equipment. The clerk said the manager was clean.”

“More lies,” Verna said, shaking her head. “I was afraid of that. Alban is so corrupt.”

“What do you mean?”

“The clerk can be bought.”

“But you don’t have evidence of that.”

“Oh, I have evidence.  We’ve worked with that clerk for years. Wait until we get back home. I’ll show you some records.”

“In the meantime, what do we do?”

“Trust me,” she said, putting her hand on his chest. “Darling, let’s go home.” Ara grimaced.

Why go back? he thought. She’s got enough dough for the two of us to live here in luxury until the tenth of forever. But he heard himself say, “All right.”

As they returned to the airport, a thunderstorm appeared on the horizon, as if it were splensing earth from sky.  Forks of lightning threatened to squire fires that, after an exuberant youth, were as likely to retreat as advance.  Hundreds of shell-shocked passengers exited the gates for flights from Mid.  At the gate for flights to Brin, Verna stopped. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “Nature’s call. Watch my bags.” She blew a kiss and walked away.

Her handbag was chaotic.  Dozens of stamped papers jutted out, covering a well-thumbed paperback biography of an old-time politician on Earth named Trump. “Do you think that she would mind if I organized it a bit?” Lad said.

“I’ll do it,” Ara said.

With a sister’s intuition, she homed in on the unmarked package at the bottom of the bag. It contained a document naming Verna as Saz’s beneficiary for fire-life insurance—and an unsealed envelope with two tickets for a flight to Earth departing that evening an hour before the one that Lad and the sisters were to take home.

As Verna reappeared at the far end of the hall, Lad hurriedly set the bag aside.

“We have just two hours before our flight,” she said. “You should sign the affidavit now, get it out of the way.”

“Yes.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“You look pale.”

“Indigestion,” Ara said. “Po’ boys, you know.” 

Verna studied Lad’s face, then rolled her luscious eyes. She picked up her handbag.  “Back in a flash,” she said, and sashayed away.  In the corner of his eye, he saw a small figure scurry after her, hooded and wearing a sailor’s cap.

 “They’re running away from Fireworld,” Lad said with a note of wonder.

“I’m not blind,” Ara said.  Cela was feeding placidly.

“What are you going to do?” Lad said.

“What are you going to do?”

He stopped pacing, looked at Cela for a long moment, looked at Ara, and smiled.  Outside, the banking fires roared in futility.

Author’s Biography

Leon Taylor taught economics at KIMEP University in Almaty, Kazakhstan, a post-Soviet nation in Central Asia, for 17 years.  A Hoosier, he was a newspaper reporter before becoming an economist.  He has written fiction for Schlock!, Space and Time, 96th of October, 365tomorrows, kaidankai, Sanitarium, Mono blog, Spotlong Review, The Quiet Reader, The Unpleasantville Anthology, Samjoko, Made of Rust and Glass Anthology,HalfHourToKill, Confetti Magazine, DoubleSpeak Magazine, Quibble Magazine, and other publications. He lives in Baltimore.  Blog: centralasianeconomy.blogspot.com