This is the dam of Alta Aldeia. Do you hear what I’m saying? This is our glorious hydro future: this great raw building site, these dug-out banks and pent-up currents, these beasts of metal burden lumbering over sandy shores, this dam, this huge and splendid clean fuel generator, this glittering capstone of our benevolent National Development Plan S.p.A. 51055, is Alta Aldeia. Is it not the greatest hydroelectric project in the southern quadrant? (Seventy-five kilometers downriver, the sixth of seven bright new generators shuddered into action last week at Raça Dam, the leapfrogged predecessor in that title: a little close by, some might say.) Will it not generate enough power to light up five cities and a spaceport by the year 51052 CE? Did not the old man himself descend from the heavens to lay the first stone just two months ago, on that selfsame historic day our singularly brave and candid global media outlet announced he was not to stand in tomorrow’s presidential elections?
Well: this is Alta Aldeia. The machines rumble and the earth shakes and the river froths and rages in her new bed, and tucked away in a corrugated iron shed one of our industrious comrades imported from the eastern quadrant to build the dam jabs at a blueprint and says excited things loudly through a translator. His audience is looking queasy.
– Someone must have known, one of them says. Surely…
– There must be an explanation, says another. Still…
– Do you think we should mention it? says a third. Just in case?
– You can, says the first speaker. If anyone’s getting exonerated over this, it won’t be me.
Delicate, tentative, six elaborate paragraphs that took a total five-point-five hours and nine sweating men to compose, the message wings away from Alta Aldeia. It takes the initial form of an email addressed to the obscure Marandan offices of CTTH, the galactic multiglobal from the eastern quadrant contracted, in consortium, to construct the dam. CTTH has many brothers: they ship in their workforce and keep themselves to themselves and ship out again before the cracks start to show. But who are we to complain if our eastern quadrant comrades gather into their skillful hands the work our people are neither trained nor willing to do? Here the message’s arrival causes a form of agitation, a certain scurrying and consultation and several uncertain voicecomms, until finally it re-emerges from CTTH’s far from ostentatious doors in the hands of a courier headed across town.
So on the message flies to CTTH’s consortium partner. Have you heard of Emmeline Holdings Ltd.? No? You never knew Emmeline Holdings Ltd., incorporated six months before tendering, no directors listed, no accounts on file, had significant hydroelectric and construction expertise? Yet when PRC Bank, our generous benefactor from the eastern quadrant, extended a credit line of ten and a half billion B$Cash to fund Alta Aldeia, the one condition was that Emmeline Holdings Ltd., that most meritorious of companies, should share the honors with PRC Bank’s compatriot corporate CTTH. And so Emmeline Holdings Ltd. holds forty per cent of the dam consortium and, no doubt, contributes forty per cent of the labor as well as claiming forty per cent of the cash.
Let’s follow CTTH’s courier to Emmeline Holdings Ltd. As the sharp-edged skyscrapers fade away to rubble and shanty-towns, where cops hassle women selling everything imaginable from their baskets, a pair of loitering suits in dark glasses peel away from their wall and join us. Around the corner, a man on a scooter attaches himself, at an ostentatious distance, to the queue. The courier’s too busy doling out fizzy drinks money to the uniformed police to notice or care. He zips around an eastern-quadrant-built and -funded housing project shouldering up through torn-down shacks and deposits his message in an anonymous P.O. box, leaving his entourage to melt away.
Top-secret corporate communications, report the secret police to their superiors. Highly suspicious, most likely an attempt by the opposition to influence the election, and the military security man, filing his report on the secret policemen rather later, remarks that: José is cheating on his mistress with Aníbal’s wife who is certainly blackmailing him for our eastern quadrant comrades. Recommend to keep under observation.
But none of them stay long enough to see the message divide for the benefit of Emmeline Holdings Ltd.’s two shareholders, Summertide Ltd. and Purpureo Ltd., before bouncing upwards towards the palace beyond the stars.
Now we turn our faces upwards also. Perhaps you have at least walked in the shadow of the presidential palace?
The signs of the post-war boom years are all around us. We are all so proud of our splendid modern city, where the aliens who extract our abundant power crystals hide themselves in our glass towers, securely isolated. They travel in guarded convoys and shop in our single designer-clothes mall and shriek at the price of melons, and every one of them spends more on rent in a month than anyone in the slums might earn in ten years. Our city is the most expensive in the galaxy. We’re proud of that too.
Above the skyscrapers, above the clouds, in a glittering ring around the central tower, float the crystal-powered nodules of the presidential palace. How will the message get up there? Through the elevator in the tower, which our alien masters considerately left for us, when a civil war snatched them back to the western quadrant fifty years ago. We built the skyscrapers on colonial Maranda; our own civil war, which occupied us for our first thirty years of independence, destroyed everything else.
But we have power crystals. Since peace, our eastern quadrant comrades have taken our crystals and rebuilt our roads, our bridges and our dams. We like them. They don’t ask awkward questions. Their culture reminds us of our ideological past.
And we have the palace. Up the message goes.
There are many rooms in our father’s palace. Here are those the message passes on its way:
The National Assembly, not too noisy in election season, when everyone must be seen to go through the motions. On the right, the Party: voracious, scrambling, and obsequious, more interested in business than voting. Why not? You last longer loyal than ambitious. Peace taught us that as much as the war. But some of them, the brighter handful, are starting to look over their shoulders. The people down below are young and hungry and ceasing to be grateful merely for peace. What if crystal prices fall again? Something’s got to give. (Or be seen to.)
Facing them, the opposition. Twenty years ago, after their brutal, charismatic general finally caught the wrong side of a laser cannon, the losing side of our civil war emerged from its strongholds in the platinum Karande-Norte asteroid belt and reinvented itself as a political party. They haven’t won a peacetime election, of which there have been two so far, but they have settled comfortably into parliamentary routine. Chauffeured shuttles, luxury flats, a fancy foreign education for their children in the western quadrant: they have it all.
But none of them receive the message from Alta Aldeia. It flashes past the golden office where Santiago Alves, CEO of our state-owned crystal company for ten years, Vice-President of the country for six, adopted son of the First Comrade’s sister for almost all his life, smokes and drinks arangrot wine with the apex oligarchs they call the business generals, whose fingers are in everybody’s pies. But not Emmeline Holdings Ltd. or Summertide Ltd. or Purpureo Ltd., it seems. Santiago Alves sets light to another Larotan cigar and signs a deal for twenty per cent of a company that owns a company that owns forty per cent of a power crystal exploration concession alongside two alien multiglobal mining companies, and on to the next nodule the message goes.
Here is Carlos Eduardo, the First Comrade’s first child by his second wife. In his achingly modern suite, Cadu, very sharply dressed, sits beautifully upright behind his imposing desk, fortified by a gleaming array of blinking monitors and expensive pens. He got the old man’s looks and something else: three years ago, amid much fanfare, his father entrusted him with ten billion B$Cash in a spanking new sovereign wealth fund. How has Cadu invested our planetary resources? Not in Alta Aldeia, that’s all anyone knows. The message continues onwards.
You might think the next nodule was a better bet. Here Carlos Jorge and Maria Conceição, youngest children of the current First Lady, the artists of the family, joint owners of our biggest (only) broadcast network, have come together to hash out the storylines of our biggest (only) soap opera. Scriptwriters and factotums scurry in and out and Cajó is having a meltdown because Maricota disagrees about how best to show the western quadrant what a modern, progressive planet we are. He demands a transgender plotline. She says they did the gay thing last year. Neither of them is troubled at all by the message from Alta Aldeia, which has embarked on the inner spiral towards the huge central node.
The corridors here are full of aliens: accountants, lawyers, management experts, all flown in from the western quadrant at exorbitant expense. The message, which has by now undivided, passes from hand to hand until a nervous PA creeps up to the inner door.
Inside, the President is in a meeting with his daughter.
One whole wall of the central nodule is currently broadcasting footage from the final election rallies on the planet below. The distorted image of the First Comrade’s chosen successor curves from floor to ceiling: square-faced, pug-nosed, ugly as an honest man, fitting his jaws around a lukewarm Party-approved anti-corruption message. At his feet, obedient crowds cheer.
There’s a couch nearby. Slumped into the cushions, the old man watches the show.
You know the old man. Husband to three wives, father to nine acknowledged children, a shadow in the gloriously ineffective war for independence and the generous (but crushing) victor of the ensuing civil war. No one can remember when he wasn’t President. If he could make it just to his fortieth anniversary… but time wears heavily on us all, presidents included (and they say he slips off to the western quadrant for medical treatment, and maybe he has prostate cancer, and once even that he had died and his family was keeping it secret for reasons of state). So if he looks frail, if his beautiful bones are hollow and his skin has an ashy tinge and his speech is sometimes shambling, we will politely overlook it, if you please. Only those who matter get to see him anyway. He never was a public politician.
In awkward clumps around the room, an embassy from the former alien colonizers awaits an audience. They want to talk about Santiago Alves, whose business dealings on S.p.O.R. have recently become a delicate matter. Unkind words have been whispered: mockery, leonine contracts, bribery, prosecution, extradition. It has become a diplomatic sticking point, a temporary dam, if you will, in the power crystal wealth flooding back from S.p.A. to S.p.O.R. The aliens are anxious and slightly resentful. These days they need our money more than we need them. (It’s as if you turned around to find your housekeeper owns your house, I hear them say.)
The First Comrade ignores them. He might be nodding off. On the screen the well-fed crowds they get in for these things go wild for a clumsy Party catchphrase (the Shuttle Pilot, they call him, because once he’s elected he’ll just fly the old man wherever he wants to go) and in the distance the towers above the shanty towns flash sunset back into the glowering sky. They won’t show the protestors scattering before a police charge downtown, just as they never showed the riots last year when fuel prices doubled and food prices tripled and the morgues melted and another thousand children died of malnutrition. The old man prefers it that way.
His daughter is talking to one of the aliens nearby. She takes the message from the PA and sits down beside her father.
You know who she is too. The eldest, smartest child: the chosen one, the alien first wife’s daughter, the entrepreneur who says she grew up selling lemonade from her parents’ humble doorstep and now through sheer hard work has risen to become the richest woman in the quadrant. (And after all, being the President’s daughter is a form of merit.) She has round-faced girl-next-door good looks and an art-collecting husband and her companies engage in everything from telecoms to banking to hospitality to jewelry to construction. Last year her father put her in charge of the state-owned crystal company that funds everything our government does. Would it be any surprise to find she owns Summertide Ltd. and Purpureo Ltd. and Emmeline Holdings Ltd. and, through them, forty per cent of the contract for the Alta Aldeia dam?
They say she’s surprisingly normal. They say she’s just like anyone else, really. (In the shanty-towns they divide the world into five classes: the poor-poor, the normal poor, the rich, the super-rich, and “Number One”—the woman they call the Infanta.)
She scans the message and lets out an irritated exclamation. Her father wakes up with a snort.
– What is it? he says, looking up at the screen.
– The dam, she says. You remember, at Alta Aldeia? Your legacy? They forgot to include a transmission system. There’s no way to get power from the dam to the city.
– Is that all? says the old man, losing interest. How much will it cost to fix? A billion? Two? I’ll sign the decree tomorrow.
The Princess puts the message down.
– He will, you mean, she says, looking up at the Shuttle Pilot. I’ll send him a memo.
This is the message that flutters down from the celestial palace and drifts through barren fields of still uncleared civil war wreckage back to Alta Aldeia one week after the election:
Owing to initial tender irregularities, Emmeline Holdings Ltd. has been exonerated from the project by presidential decree. See Diário da República VI.b Series n.o 54. Further information to follow re: transmission system.
And even out here in the middle of nowhere, even on a building site staffed entirely by our competent, well-trained, self-contained eastern quadrant comrades, they feel the current change.
| Julia August likes history and fantasy, often together. As well as Kaleidotrope, her work has appeared in F&SF, Fantasy Magazine, The Dark, and elsewhere. She is @juliaaugust07 on Bluesky, j-august on Tumblr, and j_august7 on Instagram. Find out more at juliaaugust.com. |  |