The Water Peddlers Read online

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.

  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.

  “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.

  “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!”

 

  >+<

  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.