Vancouver
in 2108
(excerpts from Dance of Knives)
"I'm Canadian.
I write a kinder, gentler future urban hell."
- Donna McMahon
THE WEST END
The decrepit towers were
enveloped in vibrant green life. Planters projected precariously everywhere,
balconies and windows spilled vines and blossoms into the air, and bird
netting draped everything. Shafts of morning sunlight fell between the
jungled buildings, sending up plumes of steam from the kitchen gardens
and a cacophony of sounds: traffic, voices, music, chickens, goats,
babies. Klale looked straight down. She was on the fifth or sixth floor
of the KlonDyke, she decided; the only naked concrete tower in the area.
She looked along the street, trying to get her bearings, and caught
a glimpse of blue harbor and mountains to her right. That was north.
The street itself was a dirt
and gravel trench, half choked with vendor carts and sheds. It ran between
old buildings and piles of quake rubble overbuilt with crude shanties.
Klale remembered the cooking fires last night with a thrill of strangeness.
In Prince Rupert the Collapse was ancient history, but here she felt
as if she'd been thrown back fifty years--as if the '62 quake had just
devastated Vancouver, and the sea level was still rising quickly around
the island....
GRANVILLE STREET
Granville Street teemed with
hawkers, shoppers, addicts, tourists, guards-for-hire, beggars, moneychangers
and buskers. It was impossible to hurry through the noisy press, so
Klale stared around in fascination. Store signs and conversations were
in more languages than she could recognize, and she saw a lot of Slang,
too. The local version of sign language was clearly a lingua franca
Downtown, and she wished she could follow the speeding fingers, but
with translation available by phone, languages had always seemed like
a waste of time.
Although it wasn't yet ten
a.m., the spuddy carts were already lined up, vendors bellowing offers
of hash browns and onions for a loonie, and beer or water for another
two coins. Signs proclaimed "SAFE to DRINK! Our water filtered and boiled
ten minutes!" ...
YALETOWN
After a few blocks they emerged
near the False Creek waterfront beside a public waterstation--one of
the last relics of the '62 earthquake, erected shortly before City Services
abandoned Downtown. A line of silent, gaunt-faced people, mostly very
old or very young, stood with mute resignation in the hot sun, holding
bags and buckets. Despite the glare, few of them wore lenses or hats
and Klale wondered how many flots got cancer.
The Bloods turned down a
steep ramp onto a float lined with ramshackle boats and barges, many
as small as three meters. Some were no more than crude rafts kept afloat
with pieces of wood, ancient chunks of styrofoam, or empty jugs. The
noahs near shore were bumping bottom. At lower tides they would be grounded,
thought Klale. In some places even the floats were foundering. Pum stepped
on a corner of sidewalk and plunged to her ankles in muddy sea water,
jumping back with such alarm that Klale guessed she couldn't swim. Klale
patted her shoulder reassuringly and received a glare for her trouble.
Pum's movement had attracted
attention. Eyes watched surreptitiously from all sides and Klale felt
immensely conspicuous with her pale Zit skin. On the West Side, the
racial mix was heavily European, East Asian and Oriental, but here most
people were Afroid, with skin tones ranging from creamy coffee to black.
Even brown-skinned Pum looked out of place with her distinctly Punjabi
features.
A strange nasal chant, distorted
by cheap amplifiers, began echoing through the noahs and the Bloods
abruptly stopped at the intersection of two floats. Three of them put
down their weapons, leaving only the woman armed. As Klale watched in
puzzlement, they lifted cigar-shaped bundles off their shoulders and
began unrolling them. Prayer rugs, she realized suddenly. All around
them men emerged from noahs and lay down rugs down on decks and floats.
The female Blood gestured
them back, and they sat down a little distance away, watching the Muslim
prayers. Men's voices droned, then they knelt in a wave, rocking the
float. A hush had fallen over the din of voices, babies crying, and
strains of popular music. The floats smelled intensely of old sweat,
cooking, low tide and the inevitable chickens. Klale swatted at a fly,
then looked up to see a Longshore freight truck crossing the span of
the Cambie bridge. It was only a hundred meters away, yet in a different
world. ...
