The Water Thief by Nicholas Lamar Soutter

Author:Nicholas Lamar Soutter [Lamar Soutter, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

As the days passed, I spent more and more time in LowSec. When someone asked where I was going, I ignored them. They assumed that I was going to LowSec, rebounding from my divorce with thrills both perverse and cheap. I always used the underground, paid cash, and never took my ledger with me.

While Kate trusted me, her friends were another matter. She had a clique of them, like Jazelle, Spag and the other two who beat me, the bald man at the rental office and a few more. None of them liked me, and they made no effort to hide it. They would come by at odd hours of the night, whispering quietly between them. Her apartment turned out to be just a block from the warehouse. They’d hold meetings, which would end abruptly when I arrived. I never asked about these machinations, and she never volunteered. She had gotten them to agree to let me see her, and that was enough.

She began teaching me to survive, how to spot dangers and keep from being seen, how to collect and distill rainwater and how to trap and skin rabbits. She even began teaching me how to cook.

My job became unbearable. I couldn’t work for Ackerman anymore, much less in Perception. My colleagues did nothing but squabble, preen, and gripe, and I wondered how I had ever tolerated it.

“People used to live to be eighty—like, average people.” Bernard would say.

“That’s a lie,” said Corbett

“It’s true. Study history.”

“Any society where the average person can live that long has real problems. If it is true, no wonder they collapsed.”

“It’s true!”

“You just want me to spend five caps looking up something that doesn’t mean anything anyway.”

“It’s true.”

“Go to hell, socialist.”

“Because I know history I’m a socialist?”

“No, it’s just one of the reasons. You’re a weak commie bastard, and I look forward to watching you get your ass handed to you.”

That was the routine, day in and day out. I worked tiny, nuisance reports, nothing more vicious than typos and the occasional dangling modifier. At night I’d make my way into LowSec, browse the shops and pick up a little lavender oil or paper tablecloths. It was all there once you knew where to look. Sometimes we’d move the dining table aside and just eat on the floor. We talked about citizens, and about governments and republics, or about ancient literature, culture, and history. Sometimes we just talked about the weather. We talked about colleagues like Corbett and Linus, friends like Jazelle and Sarah, and the family neither of us had seen in ages. She’d crank up the turntable and I’d listen to songs that I imagined hadn’t been heard in a hundred years. She showed me around LowSec, showed me old buildings, bombed-out aquifers—even a transmitter which she said had once broadcast television for free. She took me to an old flood-control channel. A sign over it read “World’s Oldest Ditch (500 years).” I wondered by what right they could claim to know that, and found myself fighting the urge to find some small, obscure place to fill it in a bit.

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