The Summer Prince (3 page)

He laughs and claps his hands. “I hope so,” he says, and sits back down. Auntie Isa ignores us entirely, focused as she is on restoring order and control to the event. But why should I care — the only one who matters laughed at my sign and now everyone must be staring at it, wondering who had the audacity to do such a thing. I imagine I can hear a few of the camera bots buzz a little closer overhead. If I’m lucky, this will rate a second- or third-tier gossip cast.

Gil and I grin at each other in a moment of pure triumph. But I don’t want to overstay my welcome, so we shut off the projectors just as the two security guards finally get around to asking us to leave.

Sometimes I imagine the end of the world.

Not this end of the world. The other one, four hundred years ago.

You know those pictures they show us on Memorial Day? The thousands upon thousands of tiny white crosses sticking out of the dirt like daisies. The char pits after the bodies piled too high to bury, belching clouds of black smoke that spread like oil above Rio and São Paulo. It’s strange for a boy to look at that, no matter how long ago, and not imagine how it must have been. It must have looked like Armageddon when the cold came, when the dirty bombs devastated Pernambuco. Hundreds of millions more died in the nuclear wars and the freezing and the southern migrations.

I know all that, but it’s not what I imagine.

I imagine I’m a Queen. Odete, sitting in a bomb shelter somewhere on the coast of Bahia, in a country that had once been Brazil, and trying to force a new world from the screaming mouth of the old one. What wouldn’t I do? What wouldn’t I create? Who wouldn’t I sacrifice, if it would keep the world from ever dying again?

So I take my lover, my king, and I put him on a pedestal and I cut him down. A man, like the ones who ruined the world.

I take from the world I know: Candomblé, which always respected a woman’s power. Catholicism, which always understood the transformation of sacrifice. And Palmares, that legendary self-made city the slaves carved themselves in the jungle, proof that a better world can be built from a bad one.

And so, Palmares Três. Odete’s utopia was even more improbable than my birth, and yet here we both are. Don’t you ever wonder how we came to such a strange place from the way the world was before?

When the world is destroyed,
someone
must remake the world. I think you’d call that art.

All of Palmares Três will vote for our next summer king in less than five hours, so of course our social studies teacher picked today to give us an exam. Even Bebel begged him not to, and I swear she thinks exams are only marginally less enjoyable than parties. And so my classmates and I find ourselves hunched over lesson arrays in one of the exam rooms, high cubicle partitions blocking me from seeing
anything but the tops of their heads. I tried to study, despite the extreme temptation to do nothing but stare at gossip feeds all day. My holo-sign didn’t make a huge sensation, but a few casters mentioned it. Not the great triumph made lurid in my fantasies, but I don’t mind. Just that taste of performance makes me realize how small and confining my art has grown lately. Even Gil and my occasional excursions with a can of grafiteiro spray seem tame compared with this glimpse of what I could do.

But back in the real world, I’m a student, not a famous artist. I shake my head and start to write.

Bebel finishes early. Since we aren’t allowed to leave before the period ends, my most competitive classmate leans back conspicuously in her chair and lets out a long, satisfied sigh.

“Were you coming or taking a test?” I mutter, just loud enough for Paul and Gil to strangle their laughter. The teacher looks up sharply from the front of the room but doesn’t say anything.

The ordeal is over soon enough. I’m grateful because he gave us one softball:
Explain the evolution of the moon and sun year traditions of the summer king ceremony. Why do moon year kings only have a symbolic role in reaffirming the current Queen, rather than choosing a new one?

Given all the history lessons even the low-brow gossip casters have been giving us for the past month, the answer is almost fun to write. Maybe that’s why Bebel sounded so satisfied? But no, I refuse to give her even that much credit.

I run through the standard answer — two hundred years ago, the king Luiz was the youngest king ever elected and the most popular in a very long time. In his honor, that Queen legislated that all moon kings should be wakas, or under thirty, and that sun year kings, elected when the Queens have reached their two-term limit, should all be respected adults. So they stopped the original practice of only allowing a selection “in gesture or blood,” and waited until after the sun year king spoke his choice to cut his throat. Only during the suddenly symbolic moon year did they keep with tradition; with just the current
Queen allowed in the room, her selection for the next term is an inevitable formality. I add to this some of my own speculation: that Luiz’s election coincided with the first major life-extension technologies. With grandes suddenly living fifty, a hundred years longer than they had before, wakas had even less of a voice in politics. What better time to make sure that they always had a waka king? Cynical, maybe, but it still works. I haven’t paid this much attention to politics in my life. Our last sun year, the contest was dignified and reserved — and I hardly remember any of it.

I finish barely a minute before the timer shuts off our arrays. I stretch and stand up, looking around for Gil. We have plans for this evening.

“Excited about the election?”

It’s Bebel, sounding entirely too pleased with herself. She’s a huge Pasqual fan, of course, because Bebel could only like someone as self-consciously perfect as herself.

“Enki will win if this city has any sense at all,” I say, just to annoy her.

I succeed admirably; her thick eyebrows flash upward and her shoulders rise defensively. “I think they’re all very good,” she says with her trademark touch of holier-than-thou superiority.

“Maybe Octavio will get through,” says Paul, blithely coming between us. “He ran circles around Pasqual in that debate.”

Bebel blows back an errant puff of hair, raises her flawless voice. “Pasqual is a composer, not a politician!”

Not too many people can stand up to Bebel in a passion. “Pasqual is great,” Paul says, holding up his hands. “I just think Octavio did better in the debate.”

“A summer king,” says another girl in our class, “should be good at politics
and
art.”

“Even in the moon year?” Bebel asks.

“Especially then.”

“Maybe,” Gil says, “he should respect art and understand politics.”

“Maybe,” I say, grinning, “it helps when you win the debates
and
dance like a god.”

Bebel sighs. “Yes, June, we all know you love Enki.”

“Anyone with a soul loves Enki,” I say.

Paul nods slowly. “I think they’re all great, and if Enki invited me back to his house, you know I wouldn’t complain, but … I would never declare. I couldn’t.”

“I wanted to declare,” says another boy, drawn into our conversation. “But my papai begged me not to. He said he’d miss me if I were gone. But I thought … well, I could have been a
king
, you know? It seems worth it.”

Paul shudders. “Not to me. You couldn’t pay me. I want to die old, two hundred and fifty at least.”

Bebel gives him a derisive smile. “Well, aren’t you the world’s oldest waka, Paul.”

“I’m just trying to be sensible,” he says, but he looks away. He knows everyone is laughing at him. No wonder he doesn’t like Enki. My favorite candidate might be brilliant and wild and creative, but no one could accuse him of being sensible.

Beside me, Gil has gone unusually still. I tap his shoulder, a question. “I thought about it,” he says softly, though we can all hear.

I feel something drop in my stomach — shock or fear or anger, how could I know which? He hasn’t told me this before, but maybe I should have known.

“My mamãe never said anything,” he says. “She knew what I was thinking and she never tried to stop me.”

“She didn’t care?” Bebel asks, stupid even by her own standards. Gil’s mother is young, almost a waka, and he’s put up with more than his share of derision because of it.

“She cared more than anything. She loved me enough to let me go and I loved her enough to stay.”

Bebel nods slowly. The conversation continues, thoughtful and
excited at once, but I don’t really hear it. A familiar sensation grips me: I’m getting an idea.

I think about Gil and his mother, about Queen Odete and Queen Oreste, about Enki. I think about the millions in our city all waiting to hear who will be king. I think about the mystifying, endless chain of events that brought us here. Four hundred years ago, there was no Palmares Três, no Aunties, no summer kings, no elections. Four hundred years ago, there was just plague and war and destruction. Four hundred years ago, the boys that I love would probably be dead, because at its peak, the Y Plague wiped out 70 percent of all males. They’re fine now, of course. Palmares Três is proud of its perfectly even gender demographics. But still, it’s as though I can feel the strength of all our ancestors bearing us up. They are the heavy trunk and thick boughs of a tree on which I am only the tiniest budding leaf.

I’m dimly aware of Gil steering me toward my bag and out of the exam room. But the world has fallen away. My thoughts race too far and too fast. Trees, I’m thinking, and life and ancestors written in me and across me,
yes
that’s it,
across me
, and now the way forward clears like a window wiped of frost.

I’ve discovered my next art project. Its immediate grip eases, and I realize that we’re outside. I stop in my tracks and turn to him.

“I need to get into your mamãe’s cosmetic stash,” I say.

This is a new request, and a little daring, since his mother has a cosmetic and costumer license that allows her to get regulated tech. But Gil just shrugs. “Anything for a new idea,” he says. “What is it this time?”

“She won’t miss it too much, I promise,” I say, and kiss him on his cheek.

For a moment, I wonder if his eyes are a little too distant. Did some part of that conversation back in school disturb him? Stupid Bebel implying that his mamãe was too young to care about him properly?
But then he shakes his head and does a little shuffle-dance and looks so much like the carefree, gentle Gil I love that I stop worrying.

“What’s the project?” he asks, like he always does.

I hold his hand and tell him about my tree.

Five hours later, I am watching a light sink into my skin. The knot of tiny crystalline tubes has submerged halfway, but I need more skin implant gel to finish the job. I want to implant two branches’ worth of lights today, from my collarbone to my elbow on my left side. Today’s final one glitters in the crook of my elbow. I almost like how it looks, with my hyper-permeable skin lufting gently at its edges. My skin is usually too dark to see the veins underneath, but the gel reveals their intricate tracery. Still, my skin is getting more opaque by the minute. I click my tongue and look at the door hopefully, as though that will make Gil hurry. I misjudged the amount of gel I needed, which posed a problem, given that we’d used the last from Gil’s mamãe’s supply closet. But you need a cosmetics license to buy even the most low-level body-modding tech, and they don’t give those to wakas. Gil left half an hour ago, promising to find some. I hope he doesn’t get caught. But I feel safe enough; he never does.