Si-Fi 1

14 January

Huanchaco, Peruvian Coast

14 January
Juan Narciso UcanÄan went to his fate that Wednesday, and no one even noticed.
A few weeks later the circumstances surrounding his sudden disap- pearance sent shockwaves around the globe, but UcanÄan's name wasn't mentioned. He was one of many. Too many. What he'd experienced in the early hours of that morning had been going on elsewhere all over the world.Theparallelswerestriking±onceyouknewwhathadhappened, and only UcanÄan did. Maybe the fisherman, with his simple way of seeing things, had even sensed the more complex connections, but in the absence of his evidence, the mystery went unsolved. Neither he nor the Pacific Ocean on the Huanchaco coast in the north of Peru gave anything away. Like the fish he caught in his lifetime, Juan Narciso UcanÄan stayed silent. When he next showed up, he was just a statistic. No one had time to wonder about his whereabouts: events had entered a new and graver phase.
Not that anyone had ever shown much interest in him anyway, even before 14 January.
At least, that was how UcanÄan saw it. He'd never been able to reconcile himself with his village's reincarnation as an international beach resort. For the tourists, Huanchaco was a time-forgotten paradise where locals went fishing in old-fashioned boats. But what use was that to him? To own a fishing-boat at all was old-fashioned. These days, most of his countrymen earned their living on factory trawlers or in the fishmeal and fish-oil industries. Peru's fish stock was dwindling, but its fishing industry was still one of the largest in the world, on a par with Chile, Russia, the US and parts of Asia. Even the threat of El NinÄo hadn't stopped the coastal city of Huanchaco sprawling out in every direction, the last preserves of nature sacrificed to make way for row after row of hotels. In the end nearly everyone had profited one way or another. Only
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UcanÄan was left with nothing, just his boat, a caballito de totora, or 'reed pony', as the admiring conquistadors had called the distinctive craft. But the way things were going, the pretty little vessels would soon be gone too.
The new millennium had decided to pick on UcanÄan.
His emotions were already starting to get the better of him. At times he felt as though he was being punished ± by El NinÄo, which had plagued Peru since the beginning of history and that he was helpless to prevent, and by the environmentalists, whose talk of overfishing had set the politicians searching for a culprit, until in the end they realised they were looking for themselves. So they'd shifted their focus from the fisheries to UcanÄan, who couldn't be held responsible for the environ- mental mess. He hadn't asked for the floating factories, or for the Japanese and Korean trawlers lurking on the 200-mile boundary, waiting to tow away the fish. None of this was UcanÄan's fault, but even he no longer believed it. That was the other thing he couldn't help feeling ± guilty. As though he was the one who'd pulled millions of tonnes of mackerel and tuna from the sea.
He was twenty-eight years old and one of the last of his kind.
His five elder brothers all worked in Lima, and thought he was a fool because he clung to a boat no better than a surfboard, waiting doggedly in deserted waters for the mackerel and bonito to return. 'You won't find life among the dead,' they told him. But it was his father who worried UcanÄan. The old man was nearly seventy and had set sail every day, right up until a few weeks previously. Now UcanÄan the elder no longer went fishing. Bedridden, his face covered with blotches, he had a nasty cough and seemed to be losing his mind. Juan Narciso clung to the hope that by continuing the family tradition he could keep the old man alive.
For over a thousand years UcanÄan's people, the Yunga and the Moche, had been fishing in reed boats. Long before the Spanish arrived, they had settled along the Peruvian coast from the northern reaches to modern- day Pisco, supplying the immense metropolis of Chan Chan with fish. Back then the area had been rich in wachaques, coastal marshes fed by fresh water from underground springs. Vast quantities of reed grass had grown there ± the totora that UcanÄan and the other remaining fishermen still used to make their caballitos, in the manner of their forebears. It required skill and inner calm. There were no other boats quite like them. Measuring three to four metres long, with an upward-curving prow and
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