The next thing I know someone is knocking on the door again. I say, “Come in,” and it’s the crewman, the same steward. He says to come with him. I’m confused, like who are these people? Have they been looking for me and Evan for what happened back in New York State? I get out of bed and peek out the porthole. The sun is low on the horizon, about the same as when they pulled me out of the water, but I don’t know what direction it is—east, west?
“What time of day is it?” I ask.
“Evening. You’re called to dinner.”
“Did you find my friend out there?”
“Your friend?”
“There were two of us on that boat,” I say. “He got washed overboard in the storm.”
“You’re the only one we pulled out of the water,” he says.
“He could still be out there somewhere. Can they look for him?”
“We’ve been under sail all day long. We’re far away from where we came across you in the morning. Twenty leagues or more.”
My heart fell into my stomach. I just stood there staring into the floor.
“Come with me. I’ll show you to dinner,” he says.
I’m so stupefied I just do what he tells me to do. He leads me down a long passageway to another part of the ship, to a dining room, or cabin I guess you’d say, very fancy, with dark wood wainscoting and nautical paintings, luxurious furniture for a boat. The table is a lot bigger than the one in the room I slept in. It’s set for two. There are chunky candles in little glass vessels and some oil lamps in gimbals on the wall, a sideboard with squashed-down nautical decanters on it so they won’t topple over in rough water. The steward pulls out a chair for me. Before I can ask him who else is coming, he leaves the cabin. I sit down. I’m there alone for quite a while. There’s a tablecloth, ironed napkins, a bread basket and butter. I start eating these wonderful chewy rolls and I can’t stop. Plus, I’m nervous wondering who I’m waiting for. I end up eating all of them. Finally, there’s a knock and without me saying come in a woman enters.
That was the first time I laid eyes on Ms. Valerie Estridge of the U.S. government, or what was left of it. She was tall and slim, around forty years old, I thought—at least that was my first impression. Her face had a sculptural quality, clear planes and angles, that was austere at first. Her hair was a silvery-gold helmet with bangs that framed her face as if it were a portrait of a face. She wore a plain tan skirt, a white blouse with a frilly front that buttoned to the throat, and a dark blue jacket, all factory-made stuff, like what a person might wear to work in a company office of the old times. She stood at the door examining me, I thought, with a kind of mysterious smile that you were never sure signified actual amusement or just her mouth in its natural relaxed state. It was what she showed people in the political world that was her realm of action, like the grin of a shark who prowls the coral reefs among fishes of all sizes and colors.
I’m like, “Sorry, I ate all the rolls.”
She closes the door behind her. I can hear the latch click, like I’m stuck in a trap with her.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get more,” she says, and steps up to her seat at the table.
I notice she’s wearing some flowery scent. It wafts my way.
“Whose boat are we on?” I ask.
“I like to think of it as mine,” she says, “but it’s the U.S. Navy’s.”
I’m like, “There’s still a navy?”
She just smiles. The steward comes in with a cart. More goodies. Ms. Estridge sits down. The steward uncovers our plates. There’s a hunk of fish, creamed potatoes, and fresh asparagus on the plate, quite big portions.
“Do you like fish?”
“Pretty well.”
“We get a lot of it right from the lake,” she says. “They’re coming back nicely.”
“That’s a plus,” I say.
“Would you bring us some more rolls, Terry?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the steward says and leaves us alone.
“Dig in, Daniel,” she says.
I’m bamboozled. Since I came aboard, nobody has asked my name. I watch her pour herself some red stuff from a pitcher.
“Want some?” she asks.
“What is it?”
“Michigan red,” she says. “It’s not bad.”
I’m like, “You know my name.”
She pours me some of the wine, though I didn’t ask for any.
“I do,” she says. “We stopped in Buffalo to provision.”
I’m like, “This is making me kind of nervous, ma’am.”
“Don’t be,” she goes. But I’m still on edge. I can picture Mr. Farnum lying on the floor of his office in Lockport with blood all over the place. I watch her eat for a while. She has a good appetite. She eats deliberately and gracefully, like somebody brought up well. She’s an imposing presence, actually quite pretty for a forty-year-old.
“What did you find out in Buffalo?” I ask.
“Your name,” she says. “And that you shot a man on the Erie Canal.”
“And you’re serving me a fine dinner and all? How come I’m not in the whaddayacallit.”
“The brig.”
“Yeah.”
“We don’t have one on board. We’d have to lock you in a storeroom. I don’t think we’ll do that. The truth is, you saved us a lot of trouble.”
I try to absorb that.
“If I may explain, ma’am, we were about to be sold into slavery by an unscrupulous boatman. What they called an indenture, for twenty-five dollars each.”
“Exactly,” she says. “Go ahead, eat.”
I’m quite hungry, actually, so I do. It’s walleye, with a perfect crispy crust on it in a puddle of butter sauce. Delicious.
“I assume your companion was on that little boat with you.”
“You know about him too?”
“Of course.”
“He got washed overboard. I couldn’t save him.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“What else do you know about us?”
“That you left Buffalo together on that scow just ahead of the regulators.”
“I knew they were coming after us.”
“Yes, they were.”
We ate silently for a while. The tension was driving me crazy.
“Well, am I under arrest or what?”
She put down her knife and fork. “We’re against these practices,” she says, “selling people into indentures. It’s barbaric and un-American. Criminal, really. We intend to stop it. But we have limited enforcement capabilities these days. You were within your rights to resist.”
“Does that mean I’m free to get off this boat when it lands somewhere?” I ask.
“Where would you go?” she asks.
“Where are you landing next?”
She just grins her shark grin.
“Are you toying with me, ma’am?” I say.
“No,” she says. “You’re a kind of gift from the sea, so to speak. I think you might be useful to us, Daniel.”
“In what way?”
“In the Service,” she says.
“What service is that?”
“You’ll see.”
I can tell she won’t elaborate.
“Who are you exactly?” I finally ask straight up. “And where are we going?”
She tells me she works for the government, but she’s not a military officer. She’s returning from an inspection of the Great Lakes ports to the new capital that the government is setting up in a place called Huron City, Michigan. They’re going to change the name to New Columbia. They have moved their people, she says, from St. Paul, Minnesota, which was unsuitable. The future of the nation lies with the Great Lakes, she says, America’s freshwater Mediterranean Sea at the c
enter of the continent. I’m burning to know more about what is going on, but she grills me about our part of the country. She says the government has a very “poor presence” back east.
“It has no presence, ma’am,” I tell her. “Same for the state and county governments. We’re totally on our own.”
She asks about the town, about my family. I tell her how Mom and Genna met with the epidemics, and how you used to work for the computer industry and switched to being a carpenter, and all, and how things are kind of slowly grinding downhill for us back home.
“But it’s a very beautiful corner of the country, Washington County, New York,” I tell her, “and from what I’ve seen traveling west it’s not much worse off than any place we passed along the way.”
“Why did you leave home?”she asks.
“To see the country for myself,” I tell her. “I’m of the age where I remember quite a bit about the old times when I was a young child, but most of what I’ve lived is the new times. I know what we lost. I wanted to see what happened to it all.”
“Fair enough,” she says.
The steward returns with dessert: cheesecake with raspberry sauce.
“You’re really not going to arrest me?” I ask.
“Correct,” she says. She goes and gets one of those decanters off the sideboard and brings it back to the table. She pours two drinks into heavy-bottomed glasses. “Michigan cherry brandy,” she says. “Not half bad. What do you know about the recent history of our country and what’s happened around the world?” she asks.
“Next to nothing,” I say.
“Would you like to know? I think it will provide some perspective for you in the Service.”
“Am I already signed up for this service?”
“Why did you leave home?”
“To see what was going on out here.”
“What’s going on is stranger than you ever imagined. Did you not expect to have some adventures when you left home?”
“I suppose I did.”
“Well, my gift from the sea, you’re going to have the adventure of your lifetime, and we’re going to train you for it, and here is a condensed version of what has been going on in the world.”
She tells it. President Ted Sharpe made the decision to send troops into the Holy Land. Israel was surrounded by failed states and it was being pounded and harassed by jihadists of every sort. Classic fourth-generation asymmetrical warfare, she called it. Even the Israelis, who were so astute about self-defense, couldn’t contain these adversaries. They certainly couldn’t use their nukes. Against what? Egypt? Egypt was a basket case. It didn’t even have a national government anymore. All the other nation-states of the old Levant were in collapse: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria. Iran never did produce a usable nuclear weapon, though it pretended for a while. Then the Iranians made the mistake of electing the maniac Mousa Forood president and he started a civil war, which bled over to Iraq and wrecked most of the remaining oil industry in both places. Desertification was becoming extreme in the region with the annual average temperature rising. It was all about too many people in places that couldn’t support them all, Ms. Estridge said, but it expressed itself in widespread religious war, all against all and everybody against Israel. For Israel it was like being stung to death by fire ants. So we went in to help and it was Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan all rolled into one. We might have lasted longer on the ground, perhaps, but the bombing of Los Angeles kick-started the collapse of the economy. It had been running on fumes for decades anyway. Ms. Estridge said she was personally surprised that the American public did not rise up against the government even before the LA bomb, given the disastrous inflation and the gasoline lines.
Elsewhere, Europe had broken down economically. England and Scotland separated. England went fascist, she said, and tried to deport large numbers of nonwhites on ships. That only started an insurrection and then a dirty bomb went off in Birmingham, she said, which poisoned much of the country downwind, as well as the Netherlands. The Germans decided by consensus to go medieval, meaning a planned, orderly retreat to historically lower economic conditions and political arrangements, all managed by a parliamentary process. The government performed an official search for a new king, like he would be the head of a company, and divided its states into semiautonomous principalities. Russia went in a similar direction minus the orderly planning and, of course, more people died there as a result. All over the continent, old borders dissolved and new, smaller places emerged from the wreckage, run by every type of party, gang, popular savior, and despot. A lot of people froze to death. Many starved. Disease came later.
Asia was hit by everything at once and at full force: broken supply lines to the oil supply, economic collapse, ecological collapse, epidemic disease, famine, natural disaster, and war. Ms. Estridge said her people—meaning the government, I suppose—believe that China attempted to reduce its population by an engineered epidemic. The estimate was over a billion dead in the first wave. An elite received vaccinations beforehand. The population problem was solved in a few months, but the country was left with a ruined, poisoned landscape, a depleted water table, and not enough able-bodied people alive to bury all the bodies. So that brought on a second and then a third round of epidemics, the old standby killer diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever, which swept through China and killed off many of the elite. While that was still happening, an earthquake struck the port city of Tianjin and destroyed the infrastructure of the entire region, including Beijing, Cangzhou, and Baoding. She said that the stories about China putting a man on the moon are nonsense. The Chinese are heading back into the twelfth century mocked by the standing remnants of the ghost cities and highways they built in a stupendous orgy of construction that lasted only a few decades. A lot less is known about Japan, she said. When the airplanes and the trading ships stopped moving, the country went into lockdown. There are rumors of widespread starvation and radiation sickness. Nothing goes in and out of there now.
India had run out of water and attempted to seize the Indus River valley and its watershed from Pakistan. Ms. Estridge said that Indians hacked and disabled Pakistan’s nuclear launch capabilities—I’m not sure what she meant by that—and a grinding war on the ground ended in the political collapse of both nations. The test-tube epidemic in China spread across the ancient trade routes, the Great Silk Road, where stuff was still moving in the absence of global shipping and aviation. India was especially savaged by the secondary diseases because of its tropical climate. Africa was a zombie continent of ghost nations returning to the wild kingdom. The region where Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay meet retained a veneer of old-time modern life because of the vast hydroelectric capacity that was still operating, but these countries shunned contact with the distressed, deindustrialized former big countries in the north. Similarly went Norway, which still had some oil out in the North Sea as well as hydropower and incorporated the rest of Scandinavia under its administration. Its attempt to organize a Greater Federation of Northern Europe, with itself as boss, failed. Very little information was coming out of Australia and New Zealand, she said. It was thought the two countries were doing okay because of their small populations and relative isolation and just wanted to be left alone.
Then there was us. Ms. Estridge shook her head and stared into her brandy glass for a long moment before continuing. General Walter Fellowes was the army chief of staff when things went south for us, she said. He was vehemently against the War in the Holy Land, as it came to be called, and organized an opposition to it in the Pentagon. He used the bombing in Los Angeles as a pretext to shove President Sharpe out of office, along with his own boss, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Royster, and many other of Ted Sharpe’s people, and he took over the management of the nation’s affairs—a classic coup d’état, she said, like in a banana republic. It’s true that the government was paralyzed in a state of cha
os. It could do nothing about the fuel shortages and the bank failures. General Fellowes invoked the continuity of government policy and he got Congress to go along because the politicians violently opposed the war, too, including many in the president’s own party, and they didn’t see any other way out. Fellowes began to pull troops out of Israel and Lebanon right away. They put Ted Sharpe in Fort Detrick, Maryland. He turned up dead in his quarters two weeks after he arrived. Detrick was the center for the country’s biological weapons program, so they could have just dialed up room service to give him a lethal dose of something, she said. He was sixty-three years old and it was called natural causes. It didn’t really matter because a few weeks after that the bomb went off in Washington, DC, and killed off most of the rest of the government, including General Fellowes and all his people in the Pentagon, plus all the parasitical contractors and lobbyists, plus the news bureaus that covered the affairs of the nation, everything, all gone.
“Who was behind the bombs in Los Angeles and Washington?” I ask.
“Los Angeles, we think the Sinaloa Cartel.”
“What’s that?”
“Organized crime on the giant scale, initially organized around drug trafficking but by then a shadow government. It was a crude device. But effective enough.”
“And Washington?”
“Several Sunni extremist groups and Hezbollah all claimed credit. We never got to the bottom of it because the federal government was effectively disabled when it happened. We may never know. It was a more powerful bomb than the one in LA.”
I asked Ms. Estridge, “Where were you when all this happened?”
“I was in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the American embassy which we’d moved out of Moscow,” she said. “They didn’t know what to do. They decided to just stay in place and wait. They thought sooner or later a government would reorganize and issue instructions. As it happened, Speaker of the House Clayton Rhodes was back in his district, which was Nashville and its environs, when the bomb went off. He was second in the line of succession to Ted Sharpe. Vice President Corcoran was out of the picture, presumed vaporized in DC. They treated the Fellowes coup as if it hadn’t happened and invoked the continuity clause again. Rhodes organized a kind of rump federal government in Nashville. He called himself ‘acting president’ to be polite. He asked the state governors to appoint and send new congressional delegations there. It took a while. Communications were bad and the governors had terrible problems to manage in their own regions, food shortages, bank closings, failures of water, sewer, electric. Many states didn’t respond at all. The people of Tennessee were very anti–federal government and they weren’t alone. Their aspirations lay elsewhere, and all the disorder gave them a chance to act on it, as you’ll see presently,” she said.
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