EPILOGUE
(twenty-three years later)
JOHNNY
An older woman in a formless, wrinkled dress and worn shoes sat at the side of the road. I was panting from the fast pace I was keeping along the white strip of sandy, rutted road. She sat, silent and unmoving. I nearly walked by before I saw her.
“You’re resting?” I asked.
“Waiting.” Her voice had a feel of rustling leaves. She sat on the brown cardboard suitcase with big copper latches—the kind made right after the war. It was cracked along the side, and white cotton underwear stuck out.
“For the bus?”
“For Buck.”
“The chopper recording, it said the bus will stop up around the bend.”
“I heard.”
“It won’t come down this side road. There’s not time.”
I was late myself, and I figured she had picked the wrong spot to wait.
“Buck will be along.”
Her voice was high and had the backcountry twang to it. My own voice still had some of the same sound, but I was keeping my vowels flat and right now, and her accent reminded me of how far I had come.
I squinted, looking down the long sandy curve of the road. A pickup truck growled out of a clay side road and onto the hardtop. People rode in the back along with trunks and a 3D. Taking everything they could. Big white eyes shot a glance at me, and then the driver hit the hydrogen and got out of there.
The Confederation wasn’t giving us much time. Since the unification of the Soviet, USA and European/Sino space colonies into one political union, everybody’d come to think of them as the Confeds, period—one entity. I knew better—there were tensions and differences abounding up there—but the shorthand was convenient.
“Who’s Buck?”
“My dog.” She looked at me directly, as though any fool would know who Buck was.
“Look, the bus—”
“You’re one of those Bishop boys, aren’t you?”
I looked off up the road again. That set of words—being eternally a Bishop boy—was like a grain of sand caught between my back teeth. My mother’s friends had used that phrase when they came over for an evening of bridge, before I went away to the university. Not my real mother, of course—she and Dad had died in the war, and I dimly remembered them.
Or anyone else from then. Almost everybody around here had been struck down by the Soviet bioweapons. It was the awful swath of those that cut through whole states, mostly across the South—the horror of it—that had formed the basis of the peace that followed. Nuclear and bioarsenals were reduced to nearly zero now. Defenses in space were thick and reliable. The building of those had fueled the huge boom in Confed cities, made orbital commerce important, provided jobs and horizons for a whole generation—including me. I was a ground-orbit liaison, spending four months every year at US3. But to the people down here, I was eternally that oldest Bishop boy.
Bishops. I was the only one left who’d actually lived here before the war. I’d been away on a visit when it came. Afterward, my Aunt and Uncle Bishop from Birmingham came down to take over the old family property—to save it from being homesteaded on, under the new Federal Reconstruction Acts. They’d taken me in, and I’d thought of them as Mom and Dad. We’d all had the Bishop name, after all. So I was a Bishop, one of the few natives who’d made it through the bombing and nuclear autumn and all. People’d point me out as almost a freak, a real native, wow.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said neutrally.
“Thought so.”
“You’re…?”
“Susan McKenzie.”
“Ah.”
We had done the ritual, so now we could talk. Yet some memory stirred….
“Something ’bout you…” She squinted in the glaring sunlight. She probably wasn’t all that old, in her late fifties, maybe. Anybody who’d caught some radiation looked aged a bit beyond their years. Or maybe it was just the unending weight of hardship and loss they’d carried.
“Seems like I knew you before the war,” she said. “I strictly believe I saw you.”
“I was up north then, a hundred miles from here. Didn’t come back until months later.”
“So’d I.”
“Some relatives brought me down, and we found out what’d happened to Fairhope.”
She squinted at me again, and then a startled look spread across her leathery face. “My Lord! Were they lookin’ for that big computer center, the DataComm it was?”
I frowned. “Well, maybe…I don’t remember too well….”
“Johnny. You’re Johnny!”
“Yes, ma’am, John Bishop.” I didn’t like the little-boy ending on my name, but people around here couldn’t forget it.
“I’m Susan! The one went with you! I had the codes for DataComm, remember?”
“Why…yes….” Slow clearing of ancient, foggy images. “You were hiding in that center…where we found you….”
“Yes! I had Gene in the T-Isolate.”
“Gene…” That awful time had been stamped so strongly in me that I’d blocked off many memories, muting the horror. Now it came flooding back.
“I saved him, all right! Yessir. We got married, I had my children.”
Tentatively, she reached out a weathered hand, and I touched it. A lump suddenly blocked my throat, and my vision blurred. Somehow, all those years had passed and I’d never thought to look up any of those people—Turkey, Angel, Bud, Mr. Ackerman. Just too painful, I guess. And a little boy making his way in a tough world, without his parents, doesn’t look back a whole lot.
We grasped hands. “I think I might’ve seen you once, actu’ly. At a fish fry down at Point Clear. You and some boys was playing with the nets—it was just after the fishing came back real good, those Roussin germs’d wore off. Gene went down to shoo you away from the boats. I was cleaning flounder, and I thought then, maybe you were the one. But somehow when I saw your face at a distance, I couldn’t go up to you and say anything. You was skipping around, so happy, laughing and all. I couldn’t bring those bad times back.”
“I…I understand.”
“Gene died two year ago,” she said simply.
“I’m sorry.”
“We had our time together,” she said, forcing a smile.
“Remember how we—” And then I recalled where I was, what was coming. “Mrs. McKenzie, there’s not long before the last bus.”
“I’m waiting for Buck.”
“Where is he?”
“He run off in the woods, chasing something.”
I worked by backpack straps around my shoulders. They creaked in the quiet.
There wasn’t much time left. Pretty soon now it would start. I knew the sequence, because I did maintenance engineering and retrofit on US3’s modular mirrors.
One of the big reflectors would focus sunlight on a rechargeable tube of gas. That would excite the molecules. A small triggering beam would start the lasing going, the excited molecules cascading down together from one preferentially occupied quantum state to a lower state. A traveling wave swept down the tube, jarring loose more photons. They all added together in phase, so when the light waves hit the far end of the hundred-meter tube, it was a sword, a gouging lance that could cut through air and clouds. And this time, it wouldn’t strike an array of layered solid-state collectors outside New Orleans, providing clean electricity. It would carve a swath twenty meters wide through the trees and fields of southern Alabama. A little demonstration, the Confeds said.
“The bus—look, I’ll carry that suitcase for you.”
“I can manage.” She peered off into the distance, and I saw she was tired, tired beyond knowing it. “I’ll wait for Buck.”
“Leave him, Mrs. McKenzie.”
“I don’t need that blessed bus.”
“Why not?”
“My children drove off to Mobile with their families. They’re coming back to get me.”
“My insteted radio”—I gestured at my ra
dio—“says the roads to Mobile are jammed up. You can’t count on them.”
“They said so.”
“The Confed deadline—”
“I tole ’em I’d try to walk to the main road. Got tired, is all. They’ll know I’m back in here.”
“Just the same—”
“I’m all right, don’t you mind. They’re good children, grateful for all I’ve gone and done for them. They’ll be back.”
“Come with me to the bus. It’s not far.”
“Not without Buck. He’s all the company I got these days.” She smiled, blinking.
I wiped sweat from my brow and studied the pines. There were a lot of places for a dog to be. The land here was flat and barely above sea level. I had come to camp and rest, rowing skiffs up the Fish River, looking for places I’d been when I was a teenager and my mom had rented boats from a rambling old fisherman’s house. I had turned off my radio, to get away from things. The big, mysterious island I remembered and called Treasure Island, smack in the middle of the river, was now a soggy stand of trees in a bog. The big storm a year back had swept it away.
I’d been sleeping in the open on the shore near there when the chopper woke me up, blaring. The Confeds had given twelve hours’ warning, the recording said.
They’d picked this sparsely populated area for their little demonstration. People had been moving back in ever since the biothreat was cleaned out, but there still weren’t many. I’d liked that when I was growing up. Open woods. That’s why I came back every chance I got.
I should’ve guessed something was coming. The Confeds were about evenly matched with the whole rest of the planet now, at least in high-tech weaponry. Defense held all the cards. The big mirrors were modular and could fold up fast, making a small target. They could incinerate anything launched against them, too.
But the U.N. kept talking like the Confeds were just another nation-state or something. Nobody down here understood that the people up there thought of Earth itself as the real problem—eaten up with age-old rivalries and hate, still holding onto dirty weapons that murdered whole populations, carrying around in their heads all the rotten baggage of the past. To listen to them, you’d think they’d learned nothing from the war. Already they were forgetting that it was the orbital defenses that had saved the biosphere itself, and the satellite communities that knit together the mammoth rescue efforts of the decade after. Without the antivirals developed and grown in huge zero-g vats, lots of us would’ve caught one of the poxes drifting through the population. People just forget. Nations, too.
“Where’s Buck?” I said decisively.
“He…that way.” A wave of the hand.
I wrestled my backpack down, feeling the stab from my shoulder—and suddenly remembered the thunk of that steel knocking me down, back then. So long ago. And me, still carrying an ache from it that woke whenever a cold snap came on. The past was still alive.
I trotted into the short pines, over creeper grass. Flies jumped where my boots struck. The white sand made a skree sound as my boots skated over it. I remembered how I’d first heard that sound, wearing slick-soled tennis shoes, and how pleased I’d been at university when I learned how the acoustics of it worked.
“Buck!”
A flash of brown over to the left. I ran through a thick stand of pine, and the dog yelped and took off, dodging under a blackleaf bush. I called again. Buck didn’t even slow down. I skirted left. He went into some oak scrub, barking, having a great time of it, and I could hear him getting tangled in it and then shaking free and out of the other side. Long gone.
When I got back to Mrs. McKenzie, she didn’t seem to notice me. “I can’t catch him.”
“Knew you wouldn’t.” She grinned at me, showing brown teeth. “Buck’s a fast one.”
“Call him.”
She did. Nothing. “Must of run off.”
“There isn’t time—”
“I’m not leaving without ole Buck. Times I was alone down on the river after Gene died, and the water would come up under the house. Buck was the only company I had. Only soul I saw for five weeks in that big blow we had.”
A low whine from afar. “I think that’s the bus,” I said.
She cocked her head. “Might be.”
“Come on. I’ll carry your suitcase.”
She crossed her arms. “My children will be by for me. I tole them to look for me along in here.”
“They might not make it.”
“They’re loyal children.”
“Mrs. McKenzie, I can’t wait for you to be reasonable.” I picked up my backpack and brushed some red ants off the straps.
“You Bishops was always reasonable,” she said levelly. “You work up there, don’t you?”
“Ah, sometimes.”
“You goin’ back, after they do what they’re doin’ here?”
“I might.” Even if I owed her something for what she did long ago, damned if I was going to be cowed.
“They’re attacking the United States.”
“And spots in Bavaria, the Urals, South Africa, Brazil—”
“’Cause we don’t trust ’em! They think they can push the United States aroun’ just as they please—” And she went on with all the clichés heard daily from earthbound media. How the Confeds wanted to run the world and they were dupes of the Russians, and how surrendering national sovereignty to a bunch of self-appointed overlords was an affront to our dignity, and so on.
True, some of it—the Confeds weren’t saints. But they were the only power that thought in truly global terms, couldn’t not think that way. They could stop ICBMs and punch through the atmosphere to attack any offensive capability on the ground—that’s what this demonstration was to show. I’d heard Confeds argue that this was the only way to break the diplomatic log-jam—do something. I had my doubts. But times were changing, that was sure, and my generation didn’t think the way the prewar people did.
“—we’ll never be ruled by some outside—”
“Mrs. McKenzie, there’s the bus! Listen!”
The turbo whirred far around the bend, slowing for the stop.
Her face softened as she gazed at me, as if recalling memories. “That’s all right, boy. You go along, now.”
I saw that she wouldn’t be coaxed or even forced down that last bend. She had gone as far as she was going to, and the world would have to come the rest of the distance itself.
Up ahead, the bus driver was probably behind schedule for this last pickup. He was going to be irritated and more than a little scared. The Confeds would be right on time, he knew that.
I ran. My feet plowed through the deep, soft sand. Right away I could tell I was more tired than I’d thought and the heat had taken some strength out of me. I went about two hundred meters along the gradual bend, was nearly within view of the bus, when I heard it start up with a rumble. I tasted salty sweat, and it felt like the whole damned planet was dragging at my feet, holding me down. The driver raced the engine, in a hurry.
He had to come toward me as he swung out onto Route 80 on the way back to Mobile. Maybe I could reach the intersection in time for him to see me. So I put my head down and plunged forward.
But there was the woman back there. To get to her, the driver would have to take the bus down that rutted, sandy road and risk getting stuck. With people on the bus yelling at him. All that to get the old woman with the grateful children. She didn’t seem to understand that there were ungrateful children in the skies now—she didn’t seem to understand much of what was going on—and suddenly I wasn’t sure I did, either.
But I kept on.
Walter Jon Williams
In his eclectically varied novels and short stories, Walter Jon Williams has tried a variety of approaches, ranging from hard science fiction to comic space opera and disaster epic. He is the author of a cyberpunk trilogy formed by Hardwired, Solip: System, and Voice of the Whirlwind, and the diptych of Metropolitan and City on Fire, which relates the intrigues
that take place inside a forcibly enclosed city world powered by geomancy. He has also chronicled the adventures of irascible interstellar thief Drake Maijstral in the series of elegant farces, starting with The Crown Jewels, House of Shards, and Rock of Ages. His short fiction includes “Wall, Stone, Craft,” an award-winning novella that provides an alternate history based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the short stories collected in Facets. Williams’s disaster novel, The Rift, examines the catalcylsmic social and cultural consequences of a major earthquake along the New Madrid fault line in the Mississippi River valley.
Walter Jon Williams
SPEAKERS IN THE HOSPITAL ceiling chimed a series of low, whispery, synthesized tones, tones that were scientifically proven to be relaxing. Reese looked down at the kid in the hospital bed and felt her insides twist.
The kid was named Steward, and he’d just had a bullet removed that morning. In the last few days, mad with warrior zen and a suicidal concept of personal honor, he’d gone kamikaze and blown up the whole network. Griffith was dead, Jordan was dead, Spassky was dead, and nobody had stopped Steward until everything in L.A. had collapsed entirely. He hadn’t talked yet to the heat, but he would. Reese reached for her gun. Her insides were still twisting.
Steward had been lied to and jacked over and manipulated without his knowing it. Mostly it had been his friend Reese who had done it to him. She couldn’t blame him for exploding when he finally figured out what had happened.
And now this.
Reese turned off the IV monitor so it wouldn’t bleep when he died, and then Steward opened his eyes. She could see the recognition in his look, the knowledge of what was about to happen. She might have known he wouldn’t make it easy.
The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century Page 43