The Future Fire: 2025.72 fiction water

[Issue 2025.72]

‘All That Water’, Eris Young

Sanga tensed. Violence was rare on first contact, but not unheard of. The woven surface of the platform creaked as Sanga, along with the rest of the interpreters, made ready to leap aside into water rutilated with protective reed and root.

But the interlocutor took a step back, and Sanga realized xyr mistake. The threat was not a threat at all, but adrenal vasoconstriction. An autonomic response. One that, by necessity, Sanga’s people had long ago discarded. The yellowgreen beating in xyr chest receded.

And it was shocking, wasn’t it? Since the very earliest of the histories, that bright road painting the night sky had brought them visitors of every stripe imaginable. Each stranger-species came bearing information—news of policy changes, trade agreements, distant wars on the frontiers of Unified Space. News that the benefactors, confined as they were to their own vast domain, could not access without the likes of Sanga. In return, these stranger-species, many and various as the stars in both physiology and language, asked for minerals, dyes, basketry. Gene- and medtech, clean water.

So by what providence, what infinitesimal chance was it that these aliens, these stranger-species, should also be bipeds and walk erect? Should also have hairless bodies, smooth skin in shades of umber and sienna? To Sanga, seeing the interlocutor was like glimpsing xyr own reflection off a still pool: a limpid green surprise, breath-taking.

The interlocutor glanced behind it—behind her, at a safe guess—towards the massive old ruin, twenty lengths away, already teeming with her people and their makeshift dwellings.

No one had lived in that haunted, half-sunk place for a thousand years. But no reed platform was big enough to contain the multitudes streaming each day from the huge patchwork hull of the stranger-ship, faintly visible even now through the daytime atmosphere. They poured downwell like water from a burst levee. It seemed almost fitting, too, that these dwellers-in-metal should make that place their temporary home.

Metal-dwellers clumped, watchful, at the edges of the ruin, clinging to the vine-strewn curve of its side and shy of the dim tangled water all around. The interlocutor’s hair swung in a sheet as she turned, draping her skull. It caught the sunlight like falling water, and made Sanga want to touch it.

<?????,> the interlocutor said, pale-voiced. A vocal communicator, then: Sanga’s specialty. Protocol dictated that the stranger-species initiate, but Sanga took a breath and stepped forward from the gathered knot of xyr fellow interpreters. Xe heard someone suck their teeth in disapproval.

Sanga knew the sense of trust xe felt was an artefact of evolution, nothing more. The impulse to relax xyr muscles, allow xyr heart rate to slow, dangerous temptation: a muddy, deceptive orange. The interlocutor was still an alien, stranger-species, however familiar her physiology.

But negotiation, trade, must begin one way or another. And trade couldn’t occur without communication.

Sanga tried customary greetings in four vocal linguae francae common to the system. Nothing.

The interlocutor pointed at her own chest. <?????.>

Xe mirrored her, saying, <Sanga,> and they began.

It took only seven rotations—and one neural-plasticity soak—for Sanga to learn <Pidin>, the language of the metal-dwellers. This was a mellow-gold, wise number of rotations, but it was small reassurance compared to the language itself, which was flat, greyish and sparse. Pidin was atonal, and utterly devoid of gesture, even nonmanual expression. It made Sanga wonder if the aliens even looked at each other while speaking.

<Rajih> called herself a <xenoanthropologist>. She was the only one on her entire vessel. Sanga wondered what it would mean to be alone in this way.

Rajih was taller than Sanga and most reed-dwellers, and less melanated. Though Rajih’s hair was black and shiny as the surface of a bog pool, some of her people apparently shared Sanga’s hair texture. Sanga was startled to notice no webbing between Rajih’s fingers and toes. Rajih laughed when xe pointed this out, a greeny-brown sound like water splashing through the roots of a tree:

<Well, we don’t need it…>

Then her eyes slid, again, to the water surrounding the platform, her face falling back into the greyish, tired expression it assumed at rest.

Again, again, Sanga felt it: the dense, yellowy jolt, like stepping through a hole in the mat at night, at the metal-dwellers’ familiarity and strangeness. They had not come here under the auspices of a Union commission, and that alone was enough to mark them out.

If their physiology was any indicator, then their mode of travel was a distant cousin to what the reed-dwellers’ ancestors had used. But in the histories the ancestors had settled here, in the land of reeds, at the end of a long, desperate flight from a dying planet. So how—and where—had the metal-dwellers survived for so long?

Nevertheless, they had survived, and without guidance from any established species. This explained Rajih’s ignorance of protocol and the ugliness of their vessel.

Rajih would stare at the water, mouth slightly open in a pinkish expression, like she didn’t quite understand what she was seeing. She’d find an imperfection, a bump in the mat where one reed split into two, and rub a finger absently over it, while she and Sanga conversed in her grey, lifeless language.

Sanga was overcome with a sudden urge to teach her. Not the benefactors’ rarefied, ephemeral speech, but the reed-dwellers’ everyday tongue, which fit their shared physiology like a well-tied wrap-skirt. Xe wanted to see if Rajih could produce its eight tones, its facial gestures. Xe wanted to shake that grey stillness from her face.

But it would take Rajih far longer to learn Sanga’s native tongue than it had taken xem to learn Pidin. And, Sanga thought with a purplegreen flush of guilt, that was not the work of an interpreter. Their shared anatomy, that deceptive sense of kinship it triggered, had already eroded so much of the necessary distance. If Sanga spoke for xemself, negotiations could—would—be compromised: it had happened before, in living memory, once or twice. If Sanga spoke for xemself, xe could not speak for the benefactors.

So xe stilled xyr face, controlled xyr vocal cords, and did not ask to touch Rajih’s shining hair.

Finally, Sanga was fluent enough in Pidin for communication to begin in earnest. Wearing xyr beautiful speaking garments, xe hefted the calling stone: a chunk of silver-flecked granite as big as xyr head, strung on a rope tied to the edge of the platform. A historian—Tilang, a third cousin of Sanga’s—knelt on a neighboring platform, with a clear view of both Sanga and the carefully-chosen stretch of water between them: clear of reeds, with clean sand on the bottom and no surface glare. With a nod from the historian, Sanga tossed the stone into the water.

Splash, splash, splash! Stones were thrown from neighboring platforms, one after another, away into the distance. Rajih’s face, her wavering question lost under the music of stone and water, was a tender yellowpink interrogative.

And then, too late, Sanga understood.

In a yellowgreen flush, xe realized that Rajih did not yet know about the benefactors. She had lived, after all, with only her own species for company. Did she even suspect that anyone else might live in the land of reeds? But before Sanga could warn her or reassure her, the benefactor arrived, its dark, soft bulk appearing silently beside the platform, just below the surface.

Once again, the color drained from Rajih’s face, her fists clenching in a visible fight-or-flight response. Sanga heard a snort of disdain from Tilang on the other platform, but if the benefactor itself noticed, it took no offense.

Indeed, the first thing it expressed was surprise and delight: a warm rill of excited pulses directed at Sanga. In the flowing, golden-brown tones of an elder addressing a younger, the benefactor exclaimed at the luck that had brought the new bipeds. These metal-dwellers must at least be the same genus as the reed-dwellers: they might expand each other’s gene pools nicely! Perhaps, it suggested—the gold in its tone shading into a canny orange, its patterns delicate and oblique like a matchmaking auntie—Sanga might like, with this shiny-haired emissary…?

Sanga’s heart leapt even as xyr ears burned with unexpected, muddy-purple embarrassment. Xe was relieved Rajih couldn’t understand the benefactors’ language, and doubly relieved when the benefactor signaled its desire to begin speaking.

Xe shook out xyr arms and legs to make sure the speaking garments were draping right, and planted xyr feet, bending at the knees in a neutral position. One deep breath in, one out. In, out.

The benefactor started speaking, and Sanga began to move.

At once, xe felt xyr sense of self start to slip away, as it was edged out by the demands of xyr augmented working memory.

It was always like this, like plunging into an algal pool. Eyes, ears, whole body occupied entirely by a vivid, enveloping medium, and no thought to spare for what might be going on above the surface.

At the end of the exchange, Sanga emerged from xyr interpreter’s trance, aching limbs and rasping throat, speaking garments heavy with sweat. Xe could just see a faint ripple to the southwest: the benefactor making its way back out to sea. Tilang had gone home.

Sanga’s brain contained only a pale, buzzing residue of the words that had passed through it: waste water, phytoplankton. Twelve months—two months—six months. Please.

Xe slumped onto the platform and chewed a cake of seaweed jelly, sighing as xe felt it replace protein, electrolytes, carbohydrates. Reed creaked behind xem, and Sanga jumped. Rajih still stood there. She stared overwater at the ruin where her people were living, teeth worrying her lower lip. Judging by her expression, the first round of negotiations had not gone especially well. A mauvish, sympathetic twinge: Sanga had grown up with the benefactors, and xe still found them intimidating sometimes.

<Is something wrong with your raft?> Sanga croaked.

<No.>

Rajih drew a shaking breath. She spun to face Sanga, eyes suddenly alight. She said, all in a rush, <I want to go back your way.> You-plural-possessive: the way of the reed-dwellers. <Can you show me?>

Sanga blinked. Washed-out with fatigue, limbs weighted a dense redbrown, xe wanted to lie down and sleep right on the platform. But, with a little mossy trickle of surprise, Sanga found xe wanted more to swim with Rajih.

A tight-weave basket had to be found for her bracelet, which couldn’t touch the water. On close inspection, what Sanga had taken for a knotted piece of fabric was actually a strip of material clasped by a thin, highly-polished stone, black and square. Rajih was anxious of this ornament, but struggled to explain why:

<It’s very valuable—um, useful, to my people. Very… hard to make?>

Rajih shrieked—gasped, laughed—as she lowered herself into the water. The floating basket trailed behind them as they swam, tied on a cord to Rajih’s wrist. She ducked and splashed, smoothed her hair back from her shining face, round and alive as a child’s, as if they swam not in a brackish lagoon but in a telomere soak, the water rejuvenating her.

At Rajih’s smile, Sanga felt a mirroring tug on xyr own mouth—evolutionary programming or not, it was irresistible.

Rajih moved frog-style through the water, haltingly. Sanga had to take her shoulders to guide her around obstacles. Her smooth hair brushed xyr hand like fine seagrass. She dawdled, gazing around at floating algae mats, raised grain paddies with their rich, dark loam. And down at their limbs, intertwined under the surface, dappled in shifting patterns of light and shade.

Sanga darted a glance up at Rajih’s face, and startled yellowgreen: Rajih’s eyes were closed, her smile clear-gold, beatific. Her face, upturned, had dried in the sun, save for two tracks of moisture, welling and falling from the corners of her eyes.

Rajih climbed, reluctantly, back up the side of the ruin, gripping the crumbling rungs of an old service ladder half-covered with thick vegetation. Then she turned and held out a hand to Sanga.

Xe hesitated. Protocol, and practicality, demanded that parties keep apart during negotiations, which hinged on each side taking the other at face value, offering only what they were comfortable offering, regardless of what they had.

But Rajih knew nothing of custom, or the practicalities of contact. It was easy—too easy—for Sanga to simply take her hand.

The noise, crowd, and smell were unbelievable: a pulsing, frantic redyellow. The metal-dwellers must have been packed like salted shrimps into their patchwork vessel, creeping through that boundless void of sky, generation after generation.

People shouted greetings to Rajih and gazed at Sanga, their curiosity a soft, naked russet, like the inside of an ear. There were nearly as many desalination-filtration setups as people: at least one beside every dwelling—flimsy pale things that had popped up quick as mushrooms after a monsoon. Plant life, enclosed in tents made of fabric transparent as water, carpeted every surface, even atop some of the sturdier dwellings.

The metal-dwellers had put up incomprehensible grey spires, too: bristling metal, high enough to pierce the sky and strung together with smooth, black ropes. No stranger-species had stayed here long enough to build before: Sanga’s curiosity burned a hot and vivid magenta.

Every effort seemed to be in service of creating the most basic food and shelter, and every built thing was a threatening white or lifeless grey.

Sanga wondered if Rajih’s people weren’t totally colorblind: had they given it up? Had they spent so long in their cramped metal vessel that they somehow no longer needed color? That thought brought a muted-red wavelet of sadness.

The metal-dwellers were taller than the reed-dwellers. They appeared sexually dimorphic, though Sanga spotted one or two who might be like xemself. Their skintones and eye colors bespoke genetic diversity, yes, but they were skinny, too, lacking muscle. Most had a pallid, uneven cast to their skin that hinted at multiple vitamin deficiencies.

A wash of yellow unease, brush of a sea-snake in the dark, raised the hairs on Sanga’s neck.

Maybe Rajih didn’t know that she was undermining her people’s position, compromising negotiations, by bringing Sanga here. But it was obvious to Sanga, seeing this place and what they had made of it, that negotiations had been unequal from the start.

Rajih’s people might be interstellar travelers, but this was no diplomatic or trade delegation: there were too many children and elders, too many unhealthy, and they’d brought no news or knowledge to trade. The metal-dwellers were not explorers or merchants, they were refugees.

[ Waterworld © 2025 Barbara Candiotti ] Sanga didn’t see Rajih for four rotations. Negotiations, if they could still be called that, ground to a halt. Rajih simply stopped coming—or her people had stopped sending her. The benefactors, for their part, kept to their great cities in the deeper water. Sanga imagined them conferencing silently together in their kaleidoscope language.

A net-filter perimeter was set up. The metal-dwellers were allowed to fish, and to occupy three nearby reed-platforms. The magnitude of these concessions seemed lost on the metal-dwellers. Only three percent of the planet’s surface was above water: an archipelago of marshy islands used for growing rice, lotus, malanga, water-spinach. Platforms, such as the reed-dwellers lived and worked on, needed a natural bed to anchor them, and most were occupied already.

To house the metal-dwellers for any length of time, to convert their waste, feed or teach them to feed themselves, to say nothing of the nutritional soaks so many of them clearly needed—? Well.

A handful might indeed strengthen the reed-dwellers’ gene pool, and that wasn’t nothing. But just those settlers occupying the ruin would soon outnumber the reed-dwellers entirely.

The truth, brittle and pale as bleached bone, was that these people had nothing to trade in return for their lives.

It was raining when Rajih finally reappeared. An awning had to be erected over the platform. Through the dim, wavering air, Sanga could see the metal-dwellers raising great grey cones of tarp between the tall metal spires, like dying flowers, to catch the water as it fell.

Rajih carried smudges under her eyes the color of grief: the sight started a pale tightness in Sanga’s chest. Rajih clutched a rigid translucent box, something dark clattering inside. She gazed at the platform surface, avoiding Sanga’s eyes. Xe hesitated, then bent to pick up the calling stone.

<Wait—> The words were tired, heavy as stiff orange clay.

They sat, side-by-side, their feet in the water. Sanga’s brown, webbed ones beside Rajih’s, pale and small.

<It took me a while to figure it out.> She nodded at Sanga’s speaking garments, each panel richly dyed with snail, weed, root, and beetle. <How you talk to them. It’s like a dance.>

Water whispered down all around them.

<It’s joyful. Until I came here, I never knew what joy was. I knew relief, when we found this place, after so long. Satisfaction, that I’d be able to do the job I’d trained my whole life for, that my mentor, and her mentor before her, never lived to do.>

Rajih was paddling in circles, working her way towards something.

Sanga waited.

<I know my history. My ancient history. That first day, when I saw you standing on the platform, your people all around watching us come, I think I knew it would come to something like this.> Her words were thin, squeezed out through a tightened larynx.

<Rajih—>

<They’re making me do it,> she choked out, with a hollow, pale laugh. <That’s the worst thing. I’m the anthropologist, I have a rapport with the—with you all. So it has to be me.>

She looked at the box in her arms like she wanted to fling it into the water. Sanga held out a hand, xyr heart tapping out a running, pinkgreen beat.

<I told them, Sanga. What it would mean for us to interfere like this—to offer you this as a trade. Your whole way of life is going to change.> You-singular-possessive: Sanga’s life.

Xe thought, It already has.

Rajih’s face was wet, her hair plastered down with rain like dark seaweed.

Inside the box: a wide, flat piece of stone, the size of Sanga’s hand with the fingers spread. Polished and thin, like Rajih’s bracelet. She pressed something on the side. The thing made a chirp, like stone striking stone.

But even before Rajih began to work the object, Sanga knew what it meant. Because it was a deep, fertile black. The color of rich soil, of the sky. The color of potential.

First published in BFS Horizons #14, British Fantasy Society, 2022.

[Issue 2025.72]

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