Chimbwi

Chimbwi

By JimHawkins (excerpt, from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois, first edition July 2011)

The ship from Libya to Dar es Salaam was crowded and filthy. Here, in the hills of Tanzania, they were not badly treated, but the work was hard. The cage went down the shaft at high speed still lurching at it braked at the bottom and the gate opened. There were twin tunnels under construction. Jason climbed with the others from the lift into a low train running up the wide water tunnel, twenty feet across, lit with bright points of LED light. He had a sudden vivid memory of the London underground. Down-slop from here the tunnel descended in a shallow gradient for sixty miles to the Tanzanian coast near the southern town of Mtwara and then a further five miles under the Indian Ocean.

Jason was working in the second, parallel, smaller tunnel, which would carry superconducting cables. This would bring current from the solar fusion plants five thousand feet up in Zambia to massive pumps along the water tunnel that would lift seawater to three thousand feet to a desalination plant in the hills above Lake Malawi. There were sixteen systems like this, each tunnel emerging into the sea, along the Tanzanian coast, and more in Mozambique. Power for water – it was a good barter.

Africa was greening again. The evaporating lakes were filling. Rivers flowed. Irrigation ducts fed the fertile fields. All of this was because a remarkable breakthrough by the Zambians converted the sun’s rays into electricity at a phenomenal 98% efficiency. They weren’t telling anybody how they did it.

Lions kill only when they’re hungry. Leopards enjoy killing (Jim Howkins, Chimbwi). Photo by Megan Jorgesen (Elena)

Jason was working in a gang of six watching them into an airtight liming, preparing for the vacuum that was needed. The other five refugee workers were German, and rarely spoke to him, not because they didn’t speak English, but because they were all suppressed by their wrist-hands. He’d hardly had anything amounting to a conversation with anybody since he embarked on his long and dangerous journey from England. He would have expected a camp of several hundred forced labourers to have a loud, violent culture, but it was more like a Sunday School camp. They didn’t sing; they didn’t shout; they didn’t fight. They’d had an emotional epidural.

A shift with sizzling blue welding arcs in his face was pretty sure to bring on a headache. He’s just finished a join and lowered the torch when he felt a tap on this shoulder. Mbanga, the site manager, gestured for him to follow.

An hour later he was showered, dressed in clean shorts and shirt, and sitting in the comfort of a high speed maglev train, eating maize and curried fish, drinking cold beer, watching out of the window for the occasional glimpse of giraffe or elephants. He was on his way to the wealthiest country in the world. As the silent train rounded a banked curve at three hundred and twenty miles per hour the towering heights of Kilimanjaro came into view to the north. The summit was no longer snowy. The land around outside the train was sandy and dry with widely-spaced baobab trees standing with their enormously wide brown trunks out of proportion to the number of branches above them