Free The Apex Book of World SF 2 by Lavie Tidhar Page A

figures had appeared in their midst. Most
Wakings called a few. Forty or fifty spirits was the most Katulo had seen at a
Waking. But the streets of Bujumbura were deeply scarred. Wounds that had been
closed and ignored for seven decades ripped open. Screams deafened Katulo and
all around, echoes of viciousness were reanimated. Hundreds of spectral men
appeared in the streets strangling each other, lashing bare backs with vine
whips, stabbing, shooting and rejoicing. Near one wall, a vague figure lifted a
baby and smashed its head against the wall. On the floor in front of some Azamé
villagers, a man in a soldier's uniform raped a woman with the sharp end of a
kitchen knife. The living watched with horror.
    The Waking was not
restricted to the streets. Throughout Bujumbura men and women saw
monstrosities. In a bar, laughing patrons were choked into silence when six
figures materialised in front of them. Five of them stood around a single man
and were beating him mercilessly. In one house, a couple's conversation was
interrupted by the appearance of a man kneeling on the floor with his face in a
mound of dung. Behind him, another man was laughing and pressing a gun against
his temple. There was a loud bang and the kneeling man died.
    There was blood, so
much blood. The living could smell it so strongly they could taste it. They
felt the rage and desperate lust for revenge consuming the awakened spirits.
Some of the living ran to escape the horrors they were witnessing, but in every
street they ran into there was more. Old pain and old death celebrated at being
rekindled. Forgotten cruelty ran rampant.
    Katulo stood
looking, not at the spirits around him, but at the broken body of Eyo. The
corpse lay in front of him, eyes and mouth still open. His neck bone was
exposed. Somewhere in Bujumbura, a group of terrified people watched an echo of
Katulo's father murder fifteen schoolchildren. Katulo did not care about that
memory any more. What he had done was the only thing in his mind. His body
quaked and his voice cracked. He howled like an infant, hating every person in
Bujumbura, but none as much as he loathed himself. The rampage of the spirits
continued for an hour. Katulo was blind to them. When they finally disappeared,
he, too, was gone.
    10
The murderers of
Chama were never punished. There was no trial, but there was also no slaughter.
The Azamé villagers returned home.
     
    Katulo was never
seen again. Some said he had died but no body was found. At marriages, harvests
and initiations there was no longer a Waking ceremony. Waking was now a part of
legend like rainmaking and giants.
    If Katulo had lived
on, it cannot have been for long. There were occasional rumours that he had
been seen walking alone in the streets or by a river in ragged clothes. One of
his ex-apprentices said that he had seen Katulo one morning, bent over the place
where Eyo had died. He could not be sure. The old man he had seen rushed off.
Where the old man had been, between gravel and weeds, a slender white sapling
had been planted.

 
    The First Peruvian in Space
Daniel Salvo
Translated by Jose B. Adolph
 
Peruvian Daniel Salvo is the
creator of Ciencia Ficción Perú , a web site devoted to science fiction.
He is a writer and researcher in the field of fantasy and science fiction and
has written the first survey of Peruvian SF. The following story appears in
English for the first time.
     
Anatolio Pomahuanca had reason
enough to hate whites. Hundreds of years ago they had invaded and conquered his
world and reduced his forebears to the sad condition of serfs or second-class
citizens. There were historic changes like independence wars, rebellions and
revolutions. But, be it as it may, whites were still those who ruled and
decided everything in Peru and throughout the rest of the world. "Now we live
in a democracy, we have made great progress in human rights and integration,"
they proclaimed. Anatolio smiled crookedly every time he heard such