Location: Displaced indigenous settlement near the Nazca Lines, in the former Amazonian basin.
Time: 01.01.17 – 05:01:00 UTC-5.
Setting: A mother and her daughter face severe water scarcity.
The drought had never been worse. The heat gave no respite, not even at night. The old had gone dry; the wells exhaled only dust. The muddy water at the bottom of the last of them had vanished, while rising temperatures tightened their grip on the land.
Just before dawn, the desert relented: the air cooled to about 64 °F (18 °C) as the — the coastal fog — drifted in, bringing a breath of freshness that sent a shiver through the villagers and a faint hope that moisture might condense. The village had sunk into hunger and thirst.
Niajin looked at her mother. Though she was a native, with black hair and ochre-coloured skin, like the rocks and sand of the desert, her eyes were blue. Not completely blue, however: islands of black obsidian alternated with the blue in shifting intensity, and in those dark isles something glimmered — starlight caught in night. Those eyes hid the life of an age the world had forgotten.
Her mother always said that no one in their family had ever had blue eyes. They were descendants of ancient native tribes. Yet there were tales of a man who had come from Europe during the colonisation: he had joined the tribe, sired sons and daughters, and Niajin’s mother descended from that line. No one knew the colour of that ancestor’s eyes, though he was said to have been very tall. In any case, Niajin’s eyes were unique — their colour would have seemed strange anywhere.
“Mama.”
“Niajin, my daughter, Dawn Fire of the Dragon,” her mother replied, calling her by both her given name and her native one.
“How are you?”
“Fine.”
“No, you’re not fine.”
“Then why do you ask? You can see it yourself: there’s no more water, and buying it costs too much. We have no money, no food, no water. Rain and life have taken a holiday on this planet.”
She stepped toward the courtyard and glanced at the dew net. Beneath it, the basin was empty — not a single drop. Even the fog had stopped leaving any moisture behind.
“We are as dry as Mars. What else can we do but wait for death?”
“Don’t worry, Mama. I’ll find water. I’ll go and look for it.”
“Be careful. There are WO soldiers out there.”
“They don’t worry me. I have this.”
As she spoke, Niajin ran her hands through her black hair and, as if by magic, drew out a white feather — invisible until that very moment. She watched it: it seemed to come alive between her fingers, responding to the sunlight that filtered through the window. The feather pulsed, unfurled, and shimmered in colours bursting like a kaleidoscope. Niajin stared at it, entranced.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“It saved me once,” she whispered. “It will again, if it must.”
“Oh, not this story again. Don’t lie to your mother; you made it up. It’s only glass, cut into the shape of a feather. Your grandfather gave it to me the day you were born. He was like you — a dreamer. He never amounted to much, believed too much in old legends and our ancestors’ tales. He put far too much faith in that thing. I don’t even know where he found it. He said he’d borrowed it as the only male heir of his family, waiting for the daughter to whom it rightly belonged. It’s beautiful, yes — but it can’t protect you from the World Government’s soldiers. If they see you alone in the desert, they won’t let you run. Who knows what they might do to you. Niajin, you’re beautiful, you know. Too beautiful. But beauty fades quickly. You are twenty-four now, and there’s no one by your side.”
No one in the village, nor for many miles around, had ever seen a girl so tall and so beautiful. She had just turned twenty-four, though she could have passed for sixteen — if not for her height. Her renown in the village had grown as her body did: at an alarming and charming pace. Though her growing years should have ended long ago, she had not stopped. She believed herself barren; she had never known a cycle. In fact, she was the tallest person in the village, men included, and many thought there was something strange — even dangerous — about her. She had no friends. The girls envied her beauty; the boys feared her and avoided her. But she cared nothing for friendship — and that only increased her allure. Her indifference seemed to shield her, like an invisible, indestructible aura. Some, however, swore that she truly was surrounded by light — a faint, soft white glow that enveloped her and could be seen most clearly at night.
Within the confines of her room — a hut of bare terracotta bricks — everything changed whenever she shut the door and sat at the table on her wooden stool. Then the feather came alive, inside and outside her, stretching into fine threads that wrapped the space around her until she found herself standing in the centre of a shining white hall.
In the SAI virtual environment, generated by the implant’s core, everything was possible: sport, archery, journeys to distant places, martial arts, study. Yes — even study: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, English, Spanish, the ancient languages of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, and the native tongues of the lost Amazon. Without anyone knowing it, she possessed the best teacher and the best university in the world, all for her alone — a poor native girl deemed worthless by the World Government.
Thus Niajin grew in those years — in mind and in body. There was a perfect harmony between her bearing and the nobility of the royal palm; between the colour of her skin and that of earth darkened by the first rains or by the desert rocks at dawn; between the cut of her eyes, the arc of her smile, and the curve of a mango leaf. It was as if nature itself had sought to fulfil a luminous idea — a revelation of truth through beauty.
Thus she became the Ylang-Ylang, the flower of flowers.
To shape her, nature had gathered the darkness of the tropical night and poured it into her hair, adding the faint splendour of stars and threads of silver moonlight. To shape her body, it had used the majesty and height of the royal palm; for her breasts, it had climbed round lava hills and hidden sources of milk there, capped by a wide, dark crater from which they might spring. It had collected the fertility of forests that no longer existed and had drawn a river inside a deep, fertile, welcoming bed, so that someone — but not just anyone — would bring life back to it. The blue of the sky was mirrored in her eyes, with islands of black obsidian in which light shone like stars in the night. Her breath, skin and sweat smelled of precious spices and black pepper.
Inside her soul something burned like a fire. A fire no one could control. From the day she had been the victim of an attempted assault, a fury had grown in her heart, a refusal, sharp and total. A contempt for humankind and for the world order. She had felt their foul breath assault her exquisitely sensitive sense of smell. She had been flooded by their stench. And she had rejoiced to see them flee. She could have killed them. She made a vow to herself: she would never take an interest in any man beneath her.
They were all beneath her.
Puquios — Ancient subterranean aqueducts built by the Nazca civilisation between 400 and 600 CE. These spiral-shaped wells capture underground water and channel it to the surface through stone-lined tunnels, allowing irrigation in one of the driest regions on Earth.
Camanchaca — A dense coastal fog typical of the Atacama Desert and the Peruvian coast. It forms when cold ocean currents meet warm air, bringing brief moisture to the desert before evaporating with the sun.
Dew net — A fine-mesh net used to capture water from atmospheric humidity. In the coastal deserts of Peru and northern Chile — including the Ica and Nazca regions — these “fog catchers” condense moisture from the camanchaca (coastal fog). The droplets run down into collection basins, providing small but vital quantities of fresh water where rainfall is almost non-existent.