The Water Peddlers
By: Greg M. Hall
Originally Featured in Golden Visions Magazine
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 by Greg M. Hall
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This book may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided this book remains in its complete original form and proper attribution is given the author.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events portrayed in this novel are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.
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Other Smashwords Ebooks by Greg M. Hall
Traffic Control (Action)
Closure (Fantasy)
City of Light (Fantasy)
Easy Money (Fantasy)
Rick’s Hostage (Horror)
The Gig (Horror)
My Pal The Bug #1: For They Know Not… (Sci-Fi)
My Pal The Bug #2: The Haunted Drug Lab (Sci-Fi)
That Stupid Kid (Literary)
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Azad jolted awake, briefly disoriented before remembering he’d slept on the battered old sofa in his back-room workshop. The amber glow of a streetlight filtered through the workshop’s lone window, but his body told him dawn wasn’t that far away.
The sound of another man’s breathing made him start; his heart slowed when he recognized it as the grumbly snore of his older brother. Mikar had gone to sleep on the floor with his sport coat wadded under his head.
The clumsy oaf should not have been able to enter without waking him, but the feverish work of the past six days had worn Azad down. Taking his brother’s words to heart, he’d only slept when he found his fingers and mind too dull and fumbling to continue productively. That meant around four hours’ sleep a night, with a ten-minute ‘Edison nap’ at midday.
As the circuits of his mind began to engage, he allowed himself a smile. He’d gone to bed with a shred of optimism. Around two in the morning, he made his shoebox-sized test vehicle jump two meters from one table to another. Not really jump as much as blink; it started in one spot, and when he closed the switch, it was in the other.
The air still held a faint whiff of ozone, and his stomach immediately lurched in reaction. He hated being stressed out like this. The lack of sleep, the deadline—
Azad burst from the couch and in three quick steps hunched over a sink where he vomited, his stomach unable to produce anything but soupy, bile-yellowed slime. The acidity bit at the lining of his mouth, and he spat several times before cupping some water in his hand and rinsing it out. He’d wakened in this manner for the past three mornings.
“What happened?” Asked Mikar from behind, in the closest thing to a show of concern Azad could remember.
“It’s nothing.”
His brother sat up with a hmmpf and rubbed his face in his palms.
“Concerned about my progress? There’s no need. I finally had a breakthrough last night; now I need to put a rat or something live on board, and duplicate it, then—”
Mikar held a hand up. “Truly, I want you to understand how… how impressed I’ve been at your ability to operate under a deadline. If there were any way I could give you more time…”
Azad, who rarely saw sympathy from his brother, asked: “Why did you sleep here last night? Is something wrong?”
From the front of the house, a doorbell chimed.
Mikar let loose a phrase in the mother tongue, a filthy one that their uncle Rabat had taught them. “Listen to me: we must go now!”
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A month before, the brothers had been relaxing on the living room sofa. At Azad’s insistence, they watched the news.
“We’ve been talking to them for ten years”, said Mikar. “It’s no big deal anymore.”
“Yes, but it is the first time we’ve met them face to face. Please don’t change the channel.”
On the screen, the Earth ambassador offered his Gliesan counterpart a spare metal vessel. Mikar, his body shaking with condescending laughter, said: “And that’s all we give them: a jug of water.”
“You’re always so quick to belittle things. Water is perfectly appropriate. Gliese is more desolate than the Rub-Al-Khali.” His research-physicist colleagues had taken to calling it Arrakis.
Onscreen, the Gliesan ambassador accepted the bottle and lifted a reflective ingot the size of a Hershey bar from an intricately carved box. Mikar rose from the couch, walked to the TV set, and brushed his hand on the screen. He always touched things; always put his hand on people when he talked.
“Is that platinum?”
“I believe iridium. Which, as far as I’m aware, fetches a price somewhere between gold and platinum.”
Suddenly his brother turned his bulky frame, a wide grin splitting his neatly-trimmed beard. “Imagine if there were a way for us to bring them our own jug of water!”
Usually, Mikar would present one of his hare-brained schemes and the brothers would share a good laugh. Azad didn’t even smile as he watched the liquid-smooth brick change from alien to human hands. A queasy wave passed through his gut, like it did every time he had a brilliant idea that promised massive effort and potential for failure.
His brother’s grin drooped. “What?”
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Azad stared at his brother, afraid to breathe. The older man’s eyes, wide as a toad’s, darted around the room. In the front of the house, the doorbell rang a second time, followed by the unmistakable tattoo of a fist on wood.
“Who is that?”
“It doesn’t matter who,” Mikar grunted. “What matters is what they’ll do when they find us.”
That got Azad moving. He strode to the full-scale apparatus and sat in the control seat. Everything that he did to the mock-up, he’d also done to the full-scale before running a test. It had seemed the best way to ensure something didn’t get missed in fabrication.
He flipped a pair of switches, and a warbling ache from the vast amounts of power stored behind him flared in his back teeth. The superconductors had been charging while he experimented; they were the easy part of all this. He’d already programmed the coordinates into the apparatus’ processor, a nice diversion while he waited for polymers to set and adhesives to dry. The rest of it, the wiring and adjustments that he’d sweated over for the past week…
They were about to find out.
Mikar climbed into the adjacent seat while a percussive thwack came from the front of the house. There could have been a number of things that caused that noise, but to Azad it sounded like a sledgehammer blowing through a doorknob.
He swung his palm toward the red plunger to release the two-terawatt burst that would transport them fifteen light years instantaneously—
And he stopped it, inches from deployment.
“What’s wrong?” hissed Mikar.
Another bark of noise from the front of the house, this one more drawn out and splintery, announced to the brothers that they no longer had a functional front door. Mikar reached for the plunger, but Azad, in the only act of physical restraint he’d ever performed on his brother, grabbed his wrist.
“No!”
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“It must be this week!”
Mikar had that look again, the one that augured an imminent explosion.
Taking a deep breath, fighting down the stress-induced nausea that welled in the pit of his stomach and wrapped its fingers around the gut-spike of his ulcer, Azad tried once again to inject a measure of sanity into their conversation.
“I’m telling you, Mikar: if this doesn’t work, we don’t just go broke or lose a little dignity. We die!”
“Overcautious as usual,” his brother replied. “Perhaps if I described where some of our funding came from, you’d share my sense of urgency.”
“No, Mikar. Even with the testing I want, we’re taking a significant risk. Without testing, we’d be playing Russian Roulette!”
They locked dark, angry eyes for a moment. Suddenly, Mikar smiled. It was a weary, fatalistic expression, and Azad would have rather seen him shouting. “Ah, brother,” he said, ruffling a hand through his hair, “at last I see a measure of assertiveness from you. Perhaps Mother didn’t just find you in a basket in the rail yard next to the house.”
“And my testing?”
Mikar’s smile disappeared, replaced by a jutting lower lip. “Fine. You have ten days—”
“—But I need three weeks at least—”
“—Ten days. Run all the tests you want in that span. If you don’t think that’s enough time, I suggest you move the couch into the workshop.”
He’d left the room, ending the argument.
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“We forgot the water!” hissed Azad.
Voices filtered under the workshop door. The crash of something heavy and tinkly let them know they’d need a new television.
Mikar looked impotently at the empty drum against the wall. “There’s no time!”
Azad bolted from his seat, sprinted to the sink, and over his brother’s nearly noiseless but wildly gesturing protestations filled a teapot from the tap. Then he rushed back, water brimming over from the teapot, and handed it to his brother. Some of it splashed onto his leg in an embarrassing spot, but he didn’t notice: the doorknob to the workshop was turning.
In one motion Azad planted himself in his seat and hammered down on the red plunger. The contacts clicked, but nothing more happened.
The door opened with a meek squall from the hinges.
Azad felt the sizzle of fear in his loins and looked desperately at the control panel as his brother said his name, quickly followed by the colorful string of Farsi words from uncle Rabat.
“Why doesn’t it work? After the test, everything should be—”
Safety switch!
Once he’d installed that large red plunger, Azad thought it would be too easy for his brother, bumbling around the device, to press it. So he installed a second switch on the other side of the cabin. He reached for it as two men sauntered through the doorway of their workshop.
“Hey, Mickey, ol’ buddy!” said the thicker and uglier of the two. “It’s Tuesday already! Funny how quick the week goes, huh?” Seeing Azad flip the safety switch with his left hand, he raised a large pistol. “Hey, tell your sidekick here to quit fiddling with stuff. Movement makes me twitchy.”
Mikar said: “It’s not even six in the morning, Curtis.”
The thick intruder smiled. “Unless Mrs. Langley in third-grade science lied to me, the day began well over five hours ago. ‘Sides, either you got it or you don’t. Guys like you don’t magically come up with ten grand at the last minute.”
Azad, seeing the gaze of both men shift to his brother, decided that even using his device was a life-threatening risk. In the grand scheme, what was another?
He reached for the plunger. Curtis, amazingly agile for his size, swung his gun around and pulled the trigger, right as Azad felt the contacts inside the plunger close.
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This would certainly not be Jannah.
They were surrounded by an ocean of sand.
No, thought Azad, ocean was as wrong of a word as there could be.
The predominant color was dark, rusty red, but there were streaks of white, flaming orange, even small blotches of blue and green. No ocean that ever existed was such a cacophony of hues.
It was a landscape more apt to Jahannum than Jannah, but the air carried a chilly bite, and every few seconds a freshening breeze made Azad long for a jacket.
“Why were we jarred so?” asked Mikar, apparently not laboring himself with thoughts of whether or not they’d died.
“We arrived about two meters in the air. For the coordinates I could only use a geoid; Gliese is too far away to calculate precise ground level.”
“Not anymore.”
The fall had made some more of the water spill from the teapot, but it was still half full, the remaining liquid possibly more precious than gold.
Mikar said, only partially in jest, “Apparently all the extra testing you wanted to do was not necessary.”
“I now fully appreciate why you were so adamant that I worked quickly. All that’s behind us now. With what’s in that pot, we should be able to pay off your friends.”
“Hah! We can return to any spot on Earth… Let’s buy an island, hire some security goons, and see Curtis and his friends try to collect!” He chuckled, and the sand around him gobbled up the noise.
Azad wanted to laugh with his brother, but the endless, prismatic undulations that spread to each horizon were impossible for him to ignore. “Let’s first figure out how we’re going to get this water to a Gliesan who can afford it.”
Mikar looked around. “I thought your coordinates were set to a populated area.”
“They were! This was the exact spot where the Earth delegation met the Gliesans!”
Sweeping his arm across the dunes, his brother said: “All of the evidence points away from that conclusion.”
Azad stepped out of their makeshift craft, and ran to the tallest crest he could see. His feet sunk into the powdery, forgiving material, and despite the richer-in-oxygen air the world was supposed to contain, he was gasping for breath by the time he’d reached its summit.
Though he’d been a child in Iran, considered by many to be desert, he’d never witnessed a large, open expanse of nothingness. This was how he imagined the Empty Quarter in Saudi Arabia. At least, if he was colorblind, that’s how he might imagine it. The panorama was unbroken by any kind of differing geologic feature or, more importantly, building.
Uncle Rabat’s words passed through his lips.
“Azad!” his brother called from the base of the dune. “Can’t you just enter slightly different coordinates, somewhere a hundred kilometers away?”
Before responding, he had to tear his eyes away from the riot of color and the nothingness it decorated. “It would use the same amount of power that we used to get here. Distance doesn’t matter with n-space. Then we’d be stuck.”
Mikar seated himself on a patch of aquamarine grit. “Here’s what we do. We go back to earth, obviously not back home, but someplace familiar. We rethink those coordinates you used. We come back.”
Azad wanted to argue, wanted to explain that just because they made their first jump in one piece didn’t mean they could flippantly go back and forth as their whims took them. But he couldn’t. Even though he was more intelligent than his older brother, he sometimes had to admit the bisho’ur had more common sense.
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“Glad I slept in my clothes,” said Mikar. “Otherwise we couldn’t afford this bounty.”
Azad, a bite of an English muffin in his mouth, laughed. From the small wrought iron table between them, he grabbed his cup of coffee and drank. “At least you had money in your pocket. I hadn’t left the house for days; I must smell awful.”
“That’s why I asked for an outdoor table. Besides, we’re in Omaha. People here avoid anyone that looks different, especially a pair of noble Persians such as ourselves.”
Azad took another bite of his meager breakfast, watching the morning news through the window of the small sidewalk café. “We’ll have to find a library. I’ll need to get—”
The feature on the television changed, and he swallowed his food wrong and began coughing violently. Despite his struggle for breath, he bolted from his seat and ran inside the café. His graceful iron chair clattered to the pavement.
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“I… I’m still not sure I understand how they could pull it off.”
What had caused Azad to choke on his English muffin was the news footage of Lars Yngimar Feddersen, the Chairman of the International Space Agency, whisked by two dark-suited men into the back seat of a black car. The headline below: ISA Chief, Senior Executives Indicted!
“How could they do such a thing?”
“Money.”
Governments had allocated over a trillion dollars to the Gliesan mission in the past five years alone. Azad’s meager breakfast gurgled in his stomach while his ulcer stabbed at it. “To perpetrate such a hoax… I… words fail me.”
“Why be offended? Personally, I’m in awe. To think: the whole operation, even constructing the ‘ship’, filming the fake ‘meeting’ with the Gliesans… the longest of long cons!”
Azad was not in awe; he was disgusted. How a scientist could perpetrate such… fraud was unfathomable. Schools had revised their curricula; kids dreamed of growing up and discovering the next Gliese. But when he and his brother had gone, it was nothing but…
His cup slipped out of his fingers and clattered against the black metal tabletop.
“Mikar! I just realized… we actually went there. Those men were frauds, but we actually did it!”
His older brother’s smile returned as he reached out and ruffled the hair on Azad’s head. “You’re absolutely right. This is where my expertise comes into play, little brother. We’ve got a lot of money to make.” He jabbed a thumb toward the television. “Perhaps as much as those Space Agency charlatans!”
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About the Author:
In addition to the Fantasy novel Stunted and action/suspense novel Traffic Control, Greg M. Hall has a couple dozen stories published online and in print. For more of his stories, visit his website at www.gregmhall.com, his podcast at www.killbox.mevio.com, or his blog at sf.gregmhall.com. He lives in eastern Nebraska with his wife, a bunch of kids, and pet tortoise.