by John Barnes
Several images of the moon danced in the mirrored exterior of the old farmhouse. The gray plains around them, a mixture of scrub and grass waving in the stiff wind, glowed dim gray-green. They stopped short of the porch to finish their conversation, away from the others.
Trish was standing very close now. “So I don’t screw things up by accident—how much does Heather know of what you’re up to?”
“Well, every time I try to talk to Heather about it, she freaks out and tells me not to waste resources on a question that doesn’t matter. So, this time… as far as she knows, it’s to help settle the Provi/Temper argument.”
“So she doesn’t know.”
“Not really.” He felt embarrassed to admit this was all behind the back of his friend, mentor, and leader. “Sooner or later I’ll have enough to make her listen and see why this is important. But I won’t get the chance if I tell her what I’m doing right now.”
“Thanks for trusting me,” Trish said quietly. “Let’s talk more tomorrow—after I’ve heard the new Orphans Preferred. Don’t tell me if Lewis makes it back alive!”
“I haven’t listened to the whole thing myself,” he admitted. “I gave them text to insert, but I didn’t want to know any spoilers. Are we a pair of geeks or what?”
She giggled and fist-bumped him. “Hey, geeks rule. Let’s try to have lunch, just us, soon, so you can tell me about the rest.” She went inside with a little wave; he stopped briefly to talk to the security guard and make sure everyone was locked in for the night.
His bedroom on the second floor, at the opposite end of the hall from the men’s and women’s common bunkrooms, didn’t seem as lonely tonight. I really can’t keep pretending I don’t know Trish likes me. Quite probably That Way. This stuff is always so confusing. Maybe I should call Heather and talk it over—
He laughed at himself. Whenever something got really scary, whether it was the end of civilization, atom bombs from the moon, or girls that liked him, he wanted to talk to Heather O’Grainne.
5 HOURS LATER. NEAR PINEHURST, IDAHO, ON US ROUTE 95. 4:15 AM PST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.
Bambi woke at dawn, pulled on her pants and boots, and transmitted again. While she listened on the headphones, she ate another cheese and jerky sandwich; she heard nothing. After this meal she had material for about four more sandwiches.
She washed up in a steel bucket of icy water from the pump behind the building, used the toilet, and flushed by pouring her washwater in. Can’t say much else for the place but there’s mostly-indoor plumbing.
A pile of outgoing mail bore the letterhead:
BIG RANGE OUTDOOR ADVENTURE CENTER
CANOE TRIPS * HORSEPACKING * OUTFITTING
She was glad she’d been warned. In her improvised hangar, the Stearman was fine, just damp around the forward edges—an hour of morning sun would fix it.
But last night’s mystery odor was mummified horses. They lay with heads propped against the automatic watering troughs, which would have failed whenever the electricity did. The barn had protected them from larger scavengers who might have torn the bodies apart. Rats and mice had tunneled them, and insects had eaten the soft parts of the faces, leaving skull or patches of skin. For the most part hide still covered the bones and the remaining desiccated flesh.
She could smell that with the big door open, water had blown in to moisten the dry flesh and start the rot afresh. Later today the barn would reek.
Bambi had grown up a horse-crazy rich girl with an indulgent father, and the sight of the horses, stretched toward their troughs, mouths open, touched her more than the unburied millions of radiation victims in Los Angeles, the three-storey-high pile of charred bodies in St. Paul, or the frozen drift of the drowned, an island of protruding hands and feet, in the river downstream from Sioux Falls.
October 28, the day Daybreak hit, would have been in mud season here, when tourist businesses shut down because it was too cold for hikers and riders but there wasn’t enough snow yet for skiers. It looked like the caretakers had never come back; the horses had died helplessly penned up.
I want out of here, soon. Bambi turned to go back to her radio.
The wide doorway framed a dozen men and women, all armed, dressed in old coats, decorated hats, immense amounts of handmade jewelry—tribals. All had weapons drawn, mostly spears and axes, but a couple of them were holding drawn wooden bows, the arrows pointed at Bambi, and one was whirling what could only be a real, honest-to-God little-David style sling.
The stout woman in the center, who wore what had probably been a homecoming tiara before it had been decorated with small machine parts and colored stones, said, “In the name of the Blue Morning People, I declare you our captive. Raise your hands over your head.”
Bambi put her hands up. The bows relaxed, the sling stopped spinning up to speed, but the spears stayed leveled. You guys’ll be in so much trouble when Heather hears about this.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PALE BLUFF, NEW STATE OF WABASH (PCG) OR ILLINOIS (TNG). 6:30 AM CST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.
Chris Manckiewicz was coming back from putting together a series of articles about life in the Temper capital at Athens, Georgia, and had caught a ride on the Gooney Express with Quattro Larsen; as always, heading back for Pueblo, Quattro had chosen to land in Pale Bluff. The main reason for choosing that route was to visit Carol May Kloster.
Carol May’s pancakes with apple butter (supposedly the orchards that surrounded Pale Bluff had been planted by Johnny Appleseed himself) would have been justification enough, even if Carol May hadn’t been one of the Reconstruction Research Center’s most important agents, and Chris’s best stringer. She handed Chris her pieces for the Pueblo Post-Times. “Got my pieces for you on the table, Chris. It’ll save the telegraph man’s finger if you just take them along.”
He speed-read as he ate; they were “the usual fine work,” he said, amused at how that made her blush.
To most people, Carol May probably looked like any other small, plump lady in a hand-sewn dress, but Chris suspected she was one of those invisible people who drives history—not that she would ever admit it.
As the Secretary of the Pale Bluff Town Meeting, she’d taken down and transcribed Graham Weisbrod’s brief speech to the Pale Bluff city council when his plane had been forced down here during his escape from the TNG’s prison. Chris had obtained a copy from her a few days later, and immediately seen that if now-Acting President Weisbrod kept his word—and if Cameron Nguyen-Peters, who ran the TNG, could see it—Weisbrod’s “Pale Bluff Address” was the basis for reunification. Chris figured it would probably enter American history alongside The Crisis, the Gettysburg Address, and “we choose to go to the moon.” And now that he had been editing her work for a while, he couldn’t help noticing that though the ideas in the Pale Bluff Address were Graham Weisbrod’s, the stirring phrases and ringing cadences were pure Carol May Kloster.
Chris turned the last page of her last article and read,
Chris, don’t look up or let Quattro know. Bambi’s plane is down in Idaho, she’s okay and has radioed in, Larry is on the way, and Heather says don’t let Quattro know till you land in Pueblo, so he doesn’t freak. CMK.
“That last piece,” he said, “really has an impact, but I can see why they don’t want word to get out.”
“Exactly,” Carol May said.
Quattro, who rarely read anything, kept his attention on his pancakes.
Carol May said, “Excuse me here, but I’m going to have to talk your ears right off, because I think we’ve got big trouble here, and it’s going to take some time to explain it. Lieutenant Marprelate, the representative from the TNG, doesn’t say much out in public, but he spends a lot of time with the town militia, and Freddie Pranger says he’s always reading the Constable’s Log. He scares the hell out of the gun-and-war kind of conservatives, and draws a lot of maps. My guess is, the TNG has this place in mind for a fort.
“And the Provi guy here is no better. Congr
essman Tornwell, our rep for the New State of Wabash in the PCG Congress, at least has to be away at Olympia, but his idiot nephew here treats Marprelate like he’s an army of occupation, and I know he’s hiring kids to put up anti-Temper graffiti.
“So if anything the Provi-Temper tension is getting worse. Definitely not what we had in mind when Heather made them make peace back in April. Tell Heather I said it’s serious.”
Chris nodded. “We will.”
“Okay, second big thing, which might just be personal. My niece Pauline, a few weeks ago, decided to go off with a tribal boy, up to the northeast of here, and there hasn’t been a word heard from her, or any of the other kids that went with that band of tribals, in six weeks now, and on their way out of the territory they trashed a little town just north of here, Wynoose.”
“Trashed how?”
“Smashed everything, killed some people, took others with them—the survivors, and there weren’t many, all moved down here. I don’t suppose the Army has any plans to do anything about the tribes?”
“It’ll be in the next Post-Times,” Chris said. “Tribals were threatening to wipe out some of the Old Amish families in Pennsylvania. That Temper general, Grayson, basically fought his way down the Yough Valley and brought the Amish out—with all that farming knowledge we’ll need. The Amish told Grayson that the tribals had been talking like Daybreakers, telling them to quit killing Mother Gaia with their plows, ordering them to liberate their poor oppressed horses, that kind of thing, and had been threatening and intimidating them.”
“Well, good on Grayson, then. When that tribe camped here, supposedly it was for peaceful trade, but we had a good number of brawls here in town because so many tribals wouldn’t shut up about how nice the world is since Daybreak, and our people who lost relatives and friends in Daybreak weren’t going to take that. Anyway, I’m worried about Pauline, and more worried that nobody comes over the border anymore, and Freddie Pranger admits he’s scared to scout in that direction—he still does, but he’s scared, and you know Freddie, that’s not natural.”
Quattro nodded. “We’ve got some things in the works, and some of our people are pushing to make the tribes a bigger priority. They don’t look as much like harmless bad cases of PTSD as they did three months ago.”
“Just so Heather knows and she’s thinking about doing something; if she’s on the job I don’t worry. I’m sure right now she’s distracted—having a baby will distract you, every time. Can I get more food into you before you go? Flying that plane looks like hard work to me.”
“Any excuse for more of the apple butter,” Quattro said.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 6:30 AM MST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.
Heather O’Grainne always ignored her alarm; she was too large and heavy, this far into the pregnancy, to go downstairs to her living quarters, the antique wind-up alarm clock would run down in a couple of minutes, there was no one else in the building at this hour, and she had just climbed up here to her office anyway. It had only been this last month when she’d gotten really big, with this great whacking thing in front of her; a lifelong athlete and only reluctantly a bureaucrat, she felt as if this were some terrible prank of nature. She rested a hand on her belly and thought, Get big and healthy before you come out, kid, but don’t waste any time.
She slid out the map table from under the big desk; what was on it was not a map, but her version of a critical path chart, almost three feet by six feet across. No one saw the whole chart except herself, and only half a dozen trusted senior agents and analysts even knew it existed.
At the bottom was the word DONE, dated January 20, 2027; that and a few other Constitutionally fixed dates were the only things written directly on the chart itself. The rest was a tangle of pinned-on index cards, colored with stripes of watercolor and heavily scribbled and rescribbled in India ink, with the stripes linked by strands of cotton yarn of the same color. The software of 1950 melded with the hardware of 1850, she thought, in hopes of getting us to 2050.
Paths where bad things were developing were in yellow; paths where necessary good things had to happen were in green; the places where they crossed were underlaid with pieces of red construction paper, and the red construction paper sheets were sometimes linked in red thread. The branching paths spread upward from DONE like a messy, branching tree until the tips of the branches—representing today—were a tangle of yarn and cards, a few green, more red, most yellow.
She studied the chart and reminded herself of a few issues for today: whether to promote the tribes from minor to major nuisance (but General Grayson’s expedition against them, down the Youghiogheny, seemed to show that they could be overcome with some effort); whether the rapidly expanding Post Raptural Church was a force for stability, a force for chaos, or just a force; whether the peace she’d brokered between the Provisional Constitutional Government in Olympia, Washington, and the Temporary National Government in Athens, Georgia, was deepening and taking root, or tearing and weakening as the Provis and Tempers alike enacted mostly symbolic policies that seemed mainly intended to irritate each other.
The green strip that said EMERGENCE OF A UNIONIST, MODERATE CENTRALIST CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT still did not reach back to the present day. Every reasonable candidate was needed elsewhere, like Quattro Larsen, or politically tainted to some important faction, like President Weisbrod of the Provis or Natcon Nguyen-Peters of the Tempers. There were some unknowns she could push her propaganda people to promote, but no very promising ones. Her best-qualified candidate, General Lyndon Phat, had pissed off the Provis almost as much as the Tempers who now held him under house arrest in Athens.
Well. Gloomy picture established, time to see how it changed. She reached for her inbox.
Arnie had fired up the EMP-trap again—new green card for the DEFEAT MOON GUN pathway. That was good, but better still it meant WTRC was back on the air, and she could have something to listen to this morning.
She pulled her headphones down from the peg and flipped on the grounding and antenna switches. Nothing.
The old LED Christmas tree bulb, which acted as the crystal, looked fine through the clear glass of the protecting Coke bottle, but inside the coil enclosure the capacitor contacts were crusted white. The signal from WTRC, twenty times the power of the big old Mexican “outlaw” stations, had induced enough current in the coil to grow nanoswarm overnight. Wrapping her hand in a dry towel, she laid the metal of a wooden-handled barbecue spatula across the contacts, discharging the capacitor with a bang like a pistol shot, then cleaned the poles and contacts with sandpaper and lye.
Back in her chair—If I get any bigger I’ll either need a full-time assistant or a tugboat—she tuned in WTRC immediately. She smiled to hear Elwood Debourrie, who played easy-on-older-ears coustajam with lyrics that were militantly anti-Daybreak. If putting that message in their kind of music doesn’t provoke them, I guess we’ll have to put on a game show called “Who Wants to Electrocute a Bunny?”
The music so improved her mood that she took the next note off the top of her inbox with near optimism, till she saw:
Emergency Channel Listening Post Pueblo/RRC.
Header. Received At 10:36 PM MST on 7-9-25, CRYP: Clr. SIG: TCAR-NW-9.
Shit, TCAR—Transcontinental Air Route. Flight NW 9, the one that left Pueblo headed northwest on the 9th of the month.
Bambi Castro.
And pilots only radioed if there was trouble, such as:
forced off rte @ BkC BRK
no fuel BRK
safe ldng @ US 95 1/2 mi N of ID mi mkr 178 BRK
Plane OK BRK
Me OK BRK
RqInst BRK
B Castro
EOM
“Request instructions,” Heather said aloud. “How about, come home safe with the plane?”
As if to mirror her mood, the radio program changed from Elwood Debourrie to A Hundred Circling Camps, a Civil War divided-family drama which Arnie had packed so full of symbols
of national unity that sometimes after listening, Heather felt John Wilkes Booth had been unfairly maligned.
At least Bambi said she and the plane were okay. Maybe Larry Mensche was somewhere nearby and could be put on the job? Last she’d known, her most effective and least obedient agent had been near Ontario, Oregon, still looking for his daughter Debbie, who had escaped from the Oregon women’s prison at Coffee Creek the day after Daybreak hit, headed into what had quickly become tribal territory. I wish Larry would check in more often.
At the Main Street messenger stand, half a dozen teenagers surrounded a pot of hot soup on a hibachi. “Ration coupon, four meals, at the main kitchen, to get this to Outgoing Crypto,” Heather told Patrick, her personal bolt of lightning.
He was deep-brown skinned, all bony legs, gangly arms, appetite, and energy—the delight of some high school track coach, pre-Daybreak. His father had been on occupation duty in Tehran when Daybreak hit, and his mother had started out for her job in Colorado Springs on October 29, and never returned; that thirty-five miles of I-25 was now a litter of abandoned cars and decaying bodies.
She handed the teenager the folded message, which he dropped into the pouch around his neck, and the ration coupon, which he tucked into a leather wallet and dropped into his pocket. Whooping “The mail must go through!” (Orphans Preferred, Arnie’s Pony Express radio drama to make national unity cool for kids, had seemingly taught every kid in the United States that phrase) Patrick shot off, ragged shirt tail flapping over his baggy shorts, hard-soled moccasins slapping pavement.
Man, I wish I could still run. Heather’s next stop was Dr. MaryBeth Abrams, half a mile away; yet another reminder of how different her body was now. Oh, well, forward waddle.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ONTARIO, OREGON. 6:15 AM PST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.