by Larry Niven
“No electricity,” Johnny Baker said. “What about nuclear plants? The one near Sacramento?”
Wilson shrugged. “Sacto used to be about twenty-five feet above sea level. Things got shifted in the quakes. That plant could be underwater. Maybe not. I just don’t know. There’s better than two hundred and fifty miles of swamp and lake between here and there, and most of the valley’s under deep water. Got that locked up? Let’s go.”
They walked up the hill toward the farmhouse. When they got closer, Baker saw the sandbags and foxholes dug in around the buildings. Women and children worked to add to the fortifications.
Wilson looked thoughtful. “General, you ought to be doing something better than digging foxholes, but I don’t know what it would be.”
Johnny Baker didn’t say anything. He was overwhelmed by what he’d seen and learned. There was no civilization here at all, only desperate farmers trying to hold a few acres of ground.
“We can work,” Rick Delanty said.
“You’ll have to,” Wilson said. “Look, in a few weeks we’ll hear from the Senator. I’ll give word that you’re here. Maybe he’ll want you. Maybe he’ll want you bad enough to think he owes us for sending you. I could use him owing us.”
Fourth Week: The Prophet
Of all states that is the worst whose rulers no longer enjoy an authority sufficiently extensive for everyone to obey them with good grace, but in which their authority over a part of their subjects is sufficiently large to enable them to constrain others.
Bertrand de Jouvenal, Sovereignty
There had been a crazy world. It was vivid in Alim Nassor’s memory. Once the honkies had poured bread into the ghettos, bribes to stop riots, and Alim had taken his share. Not just money; there was power, and Alim was known in City Hall, was headed for something bigger.
Then a black Tom was Mayor, and the money stopped, the power vanished. Alim couldn’t stand that. Without money and the symbols you could buy with it, you were nothing, less than the pimps and the pushers and the other garbage that made their living out of the ghettos. He’d lost his power and had to have it back, but then he was caught ripping off a store, and the only way to get off was to pay a bondsman and a lawyer, both honkies. They got him out on bail, and then to pay them he had to rip off another store. Crazy!
Then hundreds of the richest honkies had run for the hills. Doom was coming from the sky! Alim and his brothers had been set to make themselves rich forever. They’d been rich, they’d had truckloads of what the fences paid money for, and then…
Crazy, crazy. Alim Nassor remembered, but it was like a dope dream, the time before the Hammer. He’d done his best to protect the brothers who would listen to him. Four of the six burglary teams had made it through the rain and the quakes and the refugees, all those people! But they’d made it to the cabin near Grapevine. The engine in one of the trucks had a death rattle. They’d stripped it and siphoned off the gas and ditched it. They’d dumped all that electrical stuff, too: TVs, hi-fi’s, radios, the small computer. But they’d kept the telescope and binoculars.
And they’d been all right for awhile. There was a ranch not far from the cabin, and there’d been cattle and some other food, enough to last two dozen brothers a long time. They hadn’t even had to fight for it. The rancher was dead under his collapsed roof, leg broken, and he’d starved or bled to death. But then a lot of honkies with guns came and took it away, and eighteen brothers in three trucks had to take off into a howling rain.
Then things really went to hell. Nothing to eat, no place to go. Nobody wanted blacks. What were they supposed to do, starve?
Alim Nassor sat cross-legged in the rain, half dozing, remembering. There had been a crazy world, with laws drawn up by gibbering idiots, and unbelievable luxuries: hot coffee, steak dinners, dry towels. Alim wore a coat that fit him perfectly: a woman’s mink coat, as wet as any sponge. None of the brothers had anything to say about that. Once again, Alim Nassor had power.
There were feet in his field of view: stolen boots burst at the seams, the soles worn thin by walking. Alim looked up.
Swan was a lightweight who carried all manner of sharp things on his person. He’d looked lean as a dancer, cool and dangerous, when Alim went to him with the burglary proposition. Now he looked half starved and diffident. He said, “Jackie been messing with Cassie again. Cassie don’t like it. I think she told Chick.”
“Shit.” Alim stood up.
“We should kill that Chick,” Swan said.
“Now you listen good.” Alim was dismayed at the lack of force in his voice. He was tired, tired. He leaned close to Swan and spoke low, letting the threat show. “We need Chick. I’d kill Jackie before I killed Chick. And I’d kill you.”
Swan backed up. “Okay, Alim.”
Alim savored that. Swan hadn’t gone for a blade. He’d backed off. Alim still had power. “Chick’s the biggest, strongest brother we got, but that isn’t the reason,” Alim said. “Chick’s a farmer. A farmer, you got that? You want to do this the rest of your life? Man, we were on foot for ten days, did you like that? There’s gotta be a place for us somewhere, but it don’t matter if we can’t farm—”
“Let somebody else do the fucking work,” Swan said.
“And how do you know if they do it right?” Alim demanded. “We…” He was on the verge of letting desperation show. “Where’s Chick?”
“By the fire. And Jackie isn’t.”
“Cassie?”
“With Chick.”
“Good.” Alim walked down toward the fire. It felt good, to know he could turn his back on Swan and nothing was going to happen. Swan needed him. They all needed him. None of the rest could have got them this far, and they all knew it.
The first week after Hammerfall it rained all the time. Then it dwindled off to a drizzle, and that went on and on until nobody could stand it and still it went on. Now, four weeks after the Hammer of God, it drizzled more often than not, and it always rained, hard, at least once every day.
Today it had rained three times, and the drizzle kept on. The rain was hard on everybody. It rasped nerves. It rotted feet in their boots. Everything was hopelessly wet, and people could be killed for a dry place. The drizzle stopped, almost, at midnight. Now everyone was huddled around the fire under a sheet-plastic lean-to. Tomorrow Alim might regret letting them use gas for a fire, but shit, they’d probably run out of road before the truck they’d ripped off in Oil City ran out of gas. Most roads ended at a low spot, underwater, and you had to backtrack for miles to find a way around a stretch only a few dozen yards across. Crazy.
Where the roads did get across low spots there was often a roadblock, farmers with guns.
And they needed a fire. The gasoline had dried out enough wood to make it burn, but it smoked horribly; twenty brothers and five sisters were all crouched in a crescent, upwind they hoped, under a billowing plastic sheet, while the smoke curled around and sometimes sought them out. Alim heard laughter and was glad.
It was bad to have women in a gang like this. Worse to have no women. Alim wondered if he’d made a mistake, but it was too late now. Shit. Alim Nassor’s mistakes could kill them all, and that, if you liked, was power.
They’d come down into the valley with eighteen brothers, no women. The people they’d met had been mostly white, mostly starving, mostly unable to fight. Alim’s band had looted for food and dry places, and killed where they had to. When they met blacks, they recruited. There were damn few blacks this far north, and most were farmers, and some didn’t want to join. That was good for Alim — fewer mouths to feed — and bad for them. Blacks would not be popular where Alim’s band had passed. And as always they moved on. They had found no place they could hold and defend. There were never enough brothers, and always behind them were farmers with guns, the remnants of police forces, survivors with nothing left to live for except killing Alim Nassor’s people…
And now there were five women and twenty men. Four men had died fighting
over women. Three had been the husbands; one of the widows had killed herself that same day. Alim was grateful. It had cooled things for awhile.
But not for long. Mabe’s husband had been knifed in his sleep, and now Mabe was sleeping around, but in a strange fashion. Where she went, there were fights. Maybe she was taking revenge. But what could Alim do about it? If he killed her it would have to look like an accident. You can’t kill the only pussy the brothers were getting. Maybe at the right time? If there was another big fight and everybody knew she caused it?
Chick and Cassie were a different problem. They were farmers. Their farm was part of an ocean now, the ocean that had been the San Joaquin Valley. They talked like redneck honkies; they didn’t understand the speech of the city blood. Cassie was willowy, dignified, strong and lovely. Chick was a burly giant who could lift the back end of a car, or pick up a brother like Swan by one ankle and throw him pinwheeling a dozen feet through the air, and he’d done that.
They’d lost two kids under the water.
If the kids had been saved… Alim shook his head. Kids were the last thing this gang needed now! But in another sense… If Cassie had come on as a mother with two kids, maybe the brothers would think more about protecting her, less about getting into her.
They looked up as Alim strode into their midst, and Alim saw smiles. Yeah, the fire had been a good idea. Chick and Cassie were sitting with their arms around one another, staring broodingly into the fire. Alim squatted down before them and said, “Do we want to talk about somethin’?”
Chick shook his big head. Cassie didn’t move.
“You sure?”
Chick said, “Keep your thieves away from my woman.”
“I’m tryin’. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way things are. Anyone special?”
“Jackie. You know that son of a bitch pulled a knife on her?”
“He just showed it to me,” Cassie said, “but it scared me.” “You’re not scared of guns,” Alim said. She had a tremendous revolver, and half a dozen kinds of hand loads, from birdshot to a slug that would stop a bear. Alim had never dreamed a revolver could do so many things at once. “Why knives?”
She just shook her head, and Chick glared.
Alim stood up. “I’ll try to fix it. Where is he?”
“Hiding out.”
Alim nodded and went.
Now, should he just hang around, or try to track Jackie? Hang around. He moved among the brothers and sisters, making himself visible in the firelight. Tomorrow they’d remember.
But time wore on, and the brothers and sisters spilled into the truck in twos and threes. The drizzle was winning out over the fire, and Jackie still hadn’t come in. Alim had already decided where he must be.
To one side was the shoreline they’d been following for a week. Alim had wondered if they ought to strike off into the hills… but for what? The world the honkies built was dead, and somehow they would have to start over. A patch of farm, and a few like Chick and Cassie to show them how to work it, that was what they needed. The farmland was all there, under the water. If the water ever withdrew… But the drizzle went on and on, the fire was almost out, and the freshwater ocean was still there, too dark to see, but still there, with its floating garbage and drowned corpses of cattle and men.
And behind was a single hill, the only place from which Jackie could watch the fire. Alim went up the hill. He moved like a blind man, feeling for branches and pushing them aside, shuffling so as not to break an ankle. Presently he said, “Jackie?”
The voice was close. “Yeah, Alim.”
Alim climbed the rest of the way. Jackie was right at the peak, a man of average size in a coat three sizes too big, with his back turned. Alim said, “Why can’t you leave Cassie alone?”
“I tried.”
“You tryin’ to get me killed?”
“I tried, Alim. I even went to that Mabel She’s got nothin’ but a cunt, that woman, but I went to her, thinkin’ I could ease my mind. She turned me down. Set Swan on me. Said it was his turn. She sleeps with three a night, any prick that asks, but she pushes me off. Me!”
“She wants your head fucked up.” Alim began to see the right way to go. “She likes fights. She don’t know who stuck that knife in James, so she’s gonna get us all to kill each other. She fucks with Elliot and tells Rob she was raped. She don’t spread her legs for you so you’ll fight Chick. If I say so, she’s got six men want my blood. Jackie, what do I do?” Get him to think with his brain now, instead of his click.
“What we need,” Jackie said, “is somethin’ to take the brothers’ minds off women.” He said that as if he thought it was funny and sad at the same time.
“That’d take some doin’.”
“Alim, where we going? What happens to us?”
“Hard to say.” He could talk with Jackie, but he couldn’t tell anybody that he didn’t know what they’d do, where they’d go. And Jackie was smart. Jackie had been big in the Panthers once, political like Alim. They’d worked together, Jackie to stir up the ghetto until Alim got what he wanted from City Hall, then quiet things so it looked like Alim’s doing. Get Jackie thinking, but don’t tell him, don’t tell anybody, that Alim Nassor was scared and wet and miserable and all fucked up and just about out of control…
“Black power’s finished,” Jackie was saying. “Not enough blacks, not enough power.”
“Yeah, I’d got that figured out,” Alim said.
“And there ain’t enough of us,” Jackie continued. “Not enough to hold on anywhere. Chick says it’ll take a couple of acres each to live on. A hundred acres could keep us alive, but it won’t. Not enough of us know farming. Need people to do some of the work. Two acres for each one of them, too. Takes a big spread, and we can’t hold a big spread—”
“We can’t hold a little one,” Alim said.
“Right on. So what we have to do is link up, find a honky outfit we can work with. Politics, not blood.” Jackie was staring off into the night, his voice quiet, but Alim could feel it, Jackie had been brooding about this a long time. “Damn system’s been smashed,” Jackie said. “What we always wanted, system’s gone, got rid of the pigs and City Hall and the rich bastards… and it don’t do us any good at all, ’cause there ain’t enough of us.”
“Shit. I brought out all I could,” Alim said. “You sayin’ I didn’t?”
“New, you did all you could,” Jackie said. “Not your fault it wasn’t enough. Alim, step up here and look down.”
Through the drizzle there was a blur of light. It had to be a campfire, somebody’s campfire, glowing beside the shoreline to the north.
“I see better than you,” Jackie said, “so maybe you don’t see that it’s two fires. Two. How many people does it take before it’s worth making two fires?”
“A lot. Think they saw ours?”
“New. Nobody’s come up this way. And they don’t give a shit whether somebody sees them or not. Think about that.”
Power. That group didn’t have to hide. It had power. “A posse? After us? Naw, we haven’t gone north of here, nobody up that way has any reason to be after us.”
“Maybe this’ll take Chick’s mind off killin’ me,” Jackie said.
“How you gonna distract me? You saw those fires and didn’t come tell me.”
“I had to keep watch. And nobody’s come up here. I watched.”
He’d been scared of Chick. “All right You stay here. You watch. I’ll send Gay back with the binoculars.”
In gray morning light Jackie came down the south side of the hill. Alim already had his people up and their gear stowed, and the brothers stood around waiting with guns uncomfortable in their hands.
Jackie went first to Chick and Cassie. Alim didn’t hear what they said, but Chick had a shotgun in his hand, and he didn’t use it. Then Jackie turned aside and came to report.
“They’re up. And they’re organized. Fifty, sixty, maybe more. Maybe a lot more, they don’t all get to one
place at once. There’s women, and a honky that’s half rabbit and he’s wearing what’s left of a business suit and a tie. The rest is Army.”
Jackie waited for that to sink in.
“Army? Aw, shit,” Alim Nassor said.
“Funny thing about them mothers,” Jackie said. “They got Army uniforms and little mean-looking rifles, but they don’t act Army. And there’s others in civvies.”
Alim frowned. Jackie went on: “They got more than the rifles, Alim. They got machine guns, and things like stovepipes—”
“Bazookas,” Alim said.
“Yeah. And a thing about as big as a cannon except two men carry it. They can blow a house apart with those things, I think. I saw ’em on TV once. And I think they’re headin’ north.”
Alim digested that. It meant this group had to have come from the east, since they’d never seen them before. They certainly hadn’t come from the west, out of the lake that covered the San Joaquin.
“Maybe we better follow them,” Swan said. He’d been listening. “They sound like tough mothers.”
“And everything’s picked clean before we get to it,” Alim said. He didn’t want to say much. He didn’t know what to do; it would be better to hear what the others thought before he said anything at all. “I best go up there and have a look.”
He left Swan in charge, with instructions on where to run if the Army outfit moved toward them, and let Jackie lead him up the hill. Shit, he thought he’d had troubles before! Just what he always wanted, to go up against Army guns with a dozen Saturday-night specials and some shotguns. “Now we know,” he said. Jackie looked at him. “Why everybody been hidin’,” Alim said.
No food anywhere. Two days ago they’d taken a raft out to a half-sunken supermarket, and it was already looted. All they could find was weird stuff like canned salmon and anchovies, and not much of that. That Army outfit must have picked it clean.
It was getting lighter when he reached the top of the hill. Jackie motioned and Alim went to his belly and crawled forward through the bushes until he found Gay. Alim’s fur coat was covered with mud from crawling, but those Army guys had to have binoculars too, and they had to be keeping watch or they wouldn’t have lived this long.