The Summer Prince Read online

  Octavio sits to Pasqual’s left, and he stares straight out at the anonymous mass of us. He’s the least affected of the three, as though he’s indifferent to his presence on the stage. I’m surprised he’s advanced this far, but then, the summer king contest is never predictable. Octavio is smaller, but not small. He rarely smiles and speaks only when the contest demands it. He isn’t particularly beautiful, though I wouldn’t call him plain. He writes, which is an unusual skill for a moon prince. Normally, they do something flash, like rivet surfing or capoeira or even just singing. He writes love poems to someone who even now remains anonymous, despite the efforts of a hundred thousand desperate girls and boys. Octavio’s poems make my heart feel small in my chest. They make me want to cry and rage at the same time.

  These two are brilliant; they are the sort of boys any waka would die to spend an evening with.

  I hate them both.

  Gil and I don’t care that it’s a moon year and none of these boys will have any real power. Let the king five years from now, the next sun year, pick a new Queen. We just want our beautiful boy, our true moon prince. We want Enki more than we’ve wanted anything before.

  Enki leans back in his chair with a bright smile, like he’s almost as giddy as the rest of us to see him onstage. Auntie Isa orates about the historic nature of our city and our unique system of king elections. Gil and I don’t pay much attention. He’s pulled out his holo projector and mine is on my lap. I’ve decided to turn them on close to the end of the event, when Enki is speaking. That way my stunt should get the most attention.

  But then Auntie Isa says a name far more interesting than the endless nattering about first King Alonso and his original selection of first Queen Odete. “The distinguished ambassador from Tokyo 10, Ueda-sama, will have the honor of asking our three finalists the first question.”

  This prompts a strange mixture of nervous laughter and frenetic clapping. I remember Auntie Yaha talking about how some people see the ambassador’s visit to the city as a sign that the Aunties might ease our restrictions on new tech. Tokyo 10 is famous for their nanotech and a new breakthrough for turning living humans into immortal data streams. I’ve read the reports, but the descriptions of Tokyo 10 might as well be a pre-dislocation fantasy for all I understand them. I flirt with our regulations for the sake of my projects, but I’ve never seen anything even approaching the technology that must seem normal to the ambassador.

  But the man who shakes Auntie Isa’s hand with a deferential smile looks strangely normal. No body-mod appendages like wings or webbed hands or antennae or the dozens of other things I’ve seen in pictures. His face has the smooth agelessness of Auntie Isa’s, which makes me think he must be very old. His voice is soft but steady, with barely a trace of an accent.

  “My thanks, Auntie Isa. It is an honor to be allowed to celebrate such an important cultural moment with all of you. My question for these three young men is simple. What plans do you have if you don’t win?”

  Gil and I glance at each other, surprised and intrigued. No one has ever asked a question like that before, not even Sebastião, our top gossip caster. It’s rude in a way I can’t quite articulate — only an outsider like Ueda-sama could get away with asking it.

  Pasqual answers first. “I want to be king,” he says. “This city is my city, and you are my people. I can think of no greater honor than to be your sacrifice.”

  Gil claps; I roll my eyes. Pasqual is such a grandstander, with this booming, theatrical voice that would make a statue shiver. He wields his charisma like a bludgeon, so it doesn’t even matter that he didn’t answer the ambassador’s real question.

  Octavio stays seated, a line between his eyebrows while he answers slowly and with great care.

  “I have thought about it, of course I have, though my chief desire is the same as Pasqual’s. But were I to lose, I certainly wouldn’t regret living out my life — though with far fewer people watching on, I’m sure.” His small, self-deprecating smile makes me warm to him despite myself. I don’t want Octavio to be king, but I imagine he would be a good friend.

  Enki stands for his response. He opens his mouth, but then closes it without speaking and walks with abrupt grace over to where Ueda-sama waits on the side of the stage.

  “We haven’t met formally,” Enki says, extending his hand. Ueda-sama accepts the gesture smoothly, which reminds me of Auntie Yaha. The skills of career diplomats. “It’s a good question,” Enki says, his eyes dancing, “but didn’t anyone tell you not to take us seriously?”

  I giggle — high and tight and brief, more to release tension than express mirth. As usual, Enki walks so close to the edge of acceptable behavior that his feet bleed. Sometimes I wonder if he could make the Aunties angry enough to disqualify him from the contest. It hasn’t happened yet, but flirting with the ambassador of the most preeminent tech city in the world might just cross that line.

  But Ueda-sama answers him before Auntie Isa can intervene. “I think,” says the ambassador from a city of immortals, “that a man proposing to die deserves the respect of that choice.”

  Enki nods. “By reminding us of the lives we will abandon?”

  Even Ueda-sama winces at the heart of his question, stripped raw beneath the bemused lash of Enki’s tongue. “You need a reminder?” he says.

  Gil squeezes my hand hard enough to hurt, and I squeeze back.

  The smile leaves Enki’s eyes, but it finds his mouth. He buries the long fingers of his left hand deep into dreadlocked hair. “No,” he says. “Sometimes I think about it. I would play peteca, because I’m not very good right now. I’d dance, of course.” He flashes a smile at the mostly bewildered wakas in the audience, which provokes relieved laughter. “Nothing special.”

  “So you’ve decided it doesn’t matter if you lose that life?”

  “Saying good-bye to it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Enki says. They are standing very close together. “But I still chose this city,” he says, addressing the darkened mass of us, instead of the ambassador. “And I hope she will choose me.”

  The cheers and stomping feet shake the floor of the stadium. Gil turns to me. I can’t hear him over the din, but I can read his lips. “Now?” he asks.

  It’s earlier than I planned, but I nod impulsively. “Three, two, one,” I say, tapping his arm to the count. On one, we both switch on our projectors and hold them high above our heads.

  I had to use two projectors to program the image because one wouldn’t have been enough to attract attention in such a large space. But the split image means Gil and I need to hold them at exactly the right height and distance from each other. From below I can’t tell if we’ve managed it. My shoulders ache; sweat traces an itchy line down my temple, but it seems that no one has noticed us at all.

  Enki basks in the rapture of his chosen audience. My grimace turns half smile. But as the noise subsides, Auntie Isa thanks the ambassador for his question with the barest hint of annoyance. Enki bows slightly from his hips and walks back to the other finalists.

  I bite my lip to distract myself from the fierce burn in my biceps and shoulder blades.

  “Damn it!” I say, loud enough in the quieting stadium for my neighbors to glare at me. I imagined turning on the holo-sign to shocked attention and general approbation. I hadn’t prepared for this — what good is public art if no one even notices? Gil glances at me, probably waiting for a sign that I’ve had enough.

  But then Enki pauses, turns his head, and squints. “Is that …” he says, peering out at us like he’s caught sight of Venus on a clear night.

  He’s seen it. The familiar floating hologram of our pyramid city, but with a ghostly, dark handprint at its heart — a clear echo of Fidel, our last moon year king, who marked Serafina with his bloody hand. At the top rotate the words The wakas of Palmares Três want Enki. The bottom of the pyramid glows green with miniature algae vats. Beneath that, the words This year, our light comes up from the verde.

  He la
ughs 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.