The Last President d-3

by John Barnes

  “Sir.”

  She turned. She might have reprimanded the messenger’s extremely sketchy salute, but considering the boy looked about eleven, she simply returned it very properly. “Message?”

  “Sir, Darren at First Platoon says they found a high priority prisoner and—”

  “Take me there.”

  The boy saluted again, with considerably better form and exuberant energy. Hah. Maybe Abby has a point about the power of example.

  At First Platoon, she found Darren with an emaciated woman with weather-beaten skin. “Carlita,” Darren said, “this is Captain Highbotham. She’s the one who will be taking us all back to St. Croix to live. She’s very nice and you’ll be safe telling her everything.” His voice was high and a little singsong, the way people who don’t have much experience talk to a frightened child.

  Carlita nodded, tears streaking down her cheeks. Highbotham realized this was a frightened child, just one who had been kept outside, starving and terrified, for two years. Darren said, “Carlita was here on Daybreak day.”

  The girl wiped her face, nodding. Highbotham squatted down—Abby had taught her to do that with kids, get to their eye level. She waited for the tentative eye contact, and smiled a little, just enough, she hoped, to signal someday I’ll be your friend. “You know Darren needs you to tell me something, right?” she asked. “Just let it tumble out; don’t worry how you say it.”

  “We were okay, right after Daybreak. We were. It was gonna be okay.” This was not grief but helpless rage. “Plenty to eat from the lagoon, and stuff still working ’cause we wiped everything good. Dad-daddy was making a thing for fresh water, a thingie, it was a still, that’s what the word was. And we were gonna, gonna grow vegetables, he said we’d be okay. And then they saw the ship with the red cross, and it was coming in, and our radio still working and they directed it in, and everything, they helped them come in through the reef, and soon, soon, soon as it came up on shore—they were yelling, nobody knew why it kept coming up onto the beach—all those people jumping out, over the sides, swarming out, they killed a lot of people, they said we were all plaztatic, they made us burn all the books and everything, and they dumped stuff from jars all over—”

  “I knew you wanted to know what the story was behind that ‘Red Cross’ ship,” Darren said, very softly.

  “You were right,” Highbotham said, folding the girl within her arms. Into the girl’s ear, she murmured, “You’re coming with us, and you’re going to grow up and help us push Daybreak back.” She pressed her hand against the girl’s cheek. “I hope you like math, sweetie.”

  2 DAYS LATER. CASTLE EARTHSTONE. 5:45 AM LOCAL SOLAR TIME. SUNDAY, APRIL 26, 2026.

  Lord Robert stood on the platform they had built over the gate in the main wall of his Castle, and raised his arms to salute the sunrise. Corny as hell, he thought, but this new world is pretty corny too.

  On his right, the gathered armies of the tribes stood in their long, silent files, waiting his orders. Directly east of his platform, signaling their privileged position in his kingdom, three thousand of the Lake Erie tribals, who had made the brisk march overland from Luna Pier, raised their weapons as one. South of the platform, the main body, almost ten thousand strong, saluted as well.

  He turned west and saluted toward the Old First—a handpicked five hundred of his own Castle Earthstone troops, whom he had built up into some kind of magic sacred band, Jedis, call them whatever you want, but he could sleep safely in the middle of them, and the rest of the tribal army was more afraid of the Old First than they were of the enemy.

  Inside Castle Earthstone, the freed slaves and the remaining soldiers sat tensely alert, staying out of sight of the army outside, both to avoid provocation and to hide their numbers; another fifteen hundred Earthstoners would join the combined army as a rearguard, but only once most of it was safely away and headed downriver. It was never far from Lord Robert’s mind that Daybreak might yet betray him, and even if they did not, surely in the ranks of his new army of thirteen thousand there might be another Daybreak-immune person with ambitions.

  Makes it real important not to snicker while I’m showing’em all my armpits, too. He stretched out his arms for a few more invocations.

  Beside him, Nathanson stood solemnly at attention. It was one of the man’s chief talents. Glad I’ve got Bernstein to leave in charge.

  “Soldiers!” Robert cried, trying to sound like the barbarian king in one of those silly old computer games. “Soldiers of Daybreak! Hear me!”

  They cheered like a bunch of idiots. Wonder if back before these were the people that used to cheer for sound checks.

  “Daybreak has brought you to me to be freed!” he shouted. “Freed into the True Daybreak, the Daybreak of Castle Earthstone, and because of what we will teach you, you will be victorious in battle, and free in spirit, and you will not just make the clean and healthy world of Daybreak, you will be blessed to live there! You were told you would build paradise, but I tell you now you will live there!”

  Now the cheers were wilder and louder, and he had to wait for a while for it to subside. “You have been commanded to follow me and to do as I say, and I say, come and be free. Come and follow willingly, and when you return to your tribes, you will live the life Daybreak promised you.”

  Robert had read the phrase “deafening applause” a few times; here it was in real life. He wondered if the people in the back rows were even hearing him, or just cheering to cheer.

  After a few more shouts and blessings, with the sun full up, he proclaimed, “Follow me, and let’s free Mother Gaia once and for all! Follow me!”

  A summer of war, be back in time for deer hunting, and then the world the way I always wanted it, he thought, the way I wanted it before I even knew what I wanted. Some times, Robert just had to believe some power had grabbed hold of him and was working through him.

  The deep blue sky and the green sparkle in the air were like echoes of his soul as he raised his arms over his head, again and again and again, accepting cheers so loud he could feel them pulse against his face and his outspread palms.

  THE NEXT DAY. RAS JEBEL (FORMERLY TUNISIA). 8:25 AM CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME. MONDAY, APRIL 27, 2026.

  The officers and social scientists of Discovery had thought it was a lucky thing to be invited to a major Monist public service last night; Ras Jebel was a center from which Monism was spreading around the Mediterranean, and here was a chance to hear several of the best-known Monist speakers, teachers, testifiers, and preachers, and to see how the new religion was presenting itself to the world.

  Captain Halleck had suggested that anyone who was comfortable with the idea should attend, though after the experience of Menorca he also made sure there was a substantial guard on both the ship and the pier, with enough reserve for a rescue mission to the stadium if need be. But there had been no need. The evening service, lit by bonfires, torches, and lanterns, had been innocuous; the preaching about the love, peace, tolerance, and kindness of the One God, had been more calming than agitating; and the actual applications and commandments that might have roused any passions had been minimal. Most of the crew had been pleasantly bored, tuning it out and just enjoying being in a big public space with occasional music.

  Whorf and Ihor, due to their anything-but-exalted position, had been expected to stay attentive and make note of everything. Now, at the breakfast meeting that was part seminar, part debriefing, on deck because the day was beautiful, they were trying to explain a few of the more surprising features.

  “Well, we don’t really understand how it’s organized, but it’s more like a network than a hierarchy, and more like a tight-knit community than true anarchy,” Whorf said, feeling a bit foolish because he was sure he was wrong somewhere, but not at all sure where. “There’s a huge amount of communication going through Monist channels, compared to every other way, from western India and Pakistan all the way to the Atlantic. A lot of it is about conversions and ceremonies that went w
ell and miraculous healings, like you’d expect, but there’s also a fair bit of information about everything from soccer and pop songs to epidemics and Daybreak-proof tech. Many people who are not Monist—at least not yet—are hanging around Monist Houses of the One just because it’s the best source of business and political news, and fashions and music, that there is.”

  Ihor took over at that point, as they’d planned, and held up a brownish-yellow pebble of glass. “This is a Jerusalem Tektite.” He read a little stiffly from the paper in front of him: “When the Jerusalem superbomb went off, vitrified chunks of Jerusalem rained down all over South Asia. Because of how small atoms are and how thoroughly it was all mixed, a Jerusalem Tektite probably has a few atoms from the Wailing Wall, the Holy Sepulcher, and the Dome of the Rock, and all those other religious sites too. Every good Monist always has his Jerusalem Tektites with him, because they hold one in their right hand when they pray. The market for Jerusalem Tektites might actually be bigger than the coffee or tobacco trade—”

  “I would like permission to come aboard and talk to your captain,” a voice said, politely enough but quite loudly. They turned to see a bearded, olive-skinned man in a worn-out three piece suit, standing by the guard on the gangplank. Just behind him, a quiet Asian man in a sweatsuit appeared to be staring into space. “Also I could not help overhearing and I wanted to correct something; you hold the Jerusalem Tektite in your dominant hand, left if you are left-handed, alternating if you are ambidextrous.” The three short, thin stoles, red, blue, and yellow, attested that he was Monist clergy. “I have a matter of some urgency to discuss with your captain. And if it is permissible, I would like to bring my student with me.”

  “I’m the captain,” Halleck said. “Perry, you and these two young guys come along; I need some guidance if this is a religious matter.”

  In Halleck’s cabin, the Monist preacher introduced himself as Samar Rezakhani. “I am in fact a Monist preacher and that is how I have supported myself as I walked and sometimes caught ships to move westward. But it is not about Monism that we need to talk. I was an engineer on the Iranian-Chinese lunar expedition project in 2019, and after Daybreak, until Teheran government collapsed about a year ago, it was my job to investigate whether our expedition was infiltrated or taken over by Daybreak, since so many nations have accused us of this, and since we had found evidence of Daybreak among some of the engineers and scientists.

  “My colleague here, Tang Qan Qi, has traveled even farther, from the research center on the island of Hainan, overland through India, because he was trying to find me; before the Shanghai superbomb put an end to them, the Chinese government was very anxious to know if their moon expedition had been corrupted by Daybreak, and because Tang had been the liaison to the Iranian team, he was sent to see what he could find out from us. Alas, we had been shut down and dismissed by the time he arrived.”

  “I do not actually require you to speak for me,” Tang said.

  His accent was different from what Whorf had heard; it took him a moment to realize. “You must’ve gone to school in California.”

  “Stanford,” Tang said. “Yes.”

  “In any case,” Rezakhani continued, apparently trying to take the conversation back, “the important thing is this: the moon expedition did in fact conduct experiments with robotic prospector/samplers, but they were essentially just moving mechanical pigeonhole desks, which loaded a rock into each chamber and recorded where they got the rock. Nothing that was remotely capable of smelting, forging, casting, cutting, or making anything, let alone of self-replication. They were just rock gathering machines that could detect and pick up lumps of something valuable and ignore other rocks. Nothing like that could possibly have built the moon gun, unless it was completely reprogrammed and there were half a dozen other machines for it to work with.

  “But the strange thing is, we did find a Trojan horse in the software. After the expedition left the little sampler-miner-prospectors on the moon, and they started roving around looking for resources and bringing things back to the assay labs, we were going to announce that we had a resource map once enough data had come in. But long before we got the chance, something took over the little robots, and they locked us out. And you know, if you look at the mass of one of those EMP bombs, and how often they seem to be able to drop them, it does sort of look like the robots are carrying the rocks to make it out of—the capacities are just about right. Except they couldn’t make a moon gun. A hundred good engineers—human ones, anyway—couldn’t make one.”

  “What do you mean, human?” Halleck asked.

  Rezakhani shrugged. “Just that. Back before, no power on Earth even had pure-fusion bombs working.”

  “Let alone being able to build them via robots 400,000 kilometers away,” Tang added.

  “None of us on the team had ever done anything one tenth as hard as a complex assembly from raw materials on another world. But something apparently could, and did. And it might have hijacked our robots to do it. At least five years before Daybreak day, too.

  “Well, we had learned from picking up a couple of radio broadcasts that you have a Doctor Arnold Yang in the States, in the city of Pueblo, Colorado, who is also working on identifying and understanding the moon gun, and since neither of our governments nor our research institutions are still there, and the human race needs this problem figured out… here we are. We are quite prepared to work for our passage in order to see Doctor Yang and pool our knowledge with him.”

  Halleck looked genuinely sad as he explained that Arnold Yang had been corrupted by Daybreak, committed treason on its behalf, and been executed.

  Tang frowned. “That is amateurish.”

  “Amateurish?”

  “To have captured a brilliant person with deep knowledge who has been corrupted by Daybreak, and then to execute that person like a petulant child angry at a toy, rather than to keep them and try to turn them and harvest the information. I do not think our political police would ever have made so amateurish a mistake.”

  Ihor nodded eagerly. Whorf was still trying to decide whether having amateurish political police was a good thing or a bad thing when Halleck said, “Either this is the most outrageous con game and tall tale in the history of Earth, or you’re telling the truth. And anybody who could lie that well wouldn’t tell this lie, I don’t think; a thousand more convincing and simpler ones are available that would also have gotten me to take you on board.”

  “So we’re in?” Tang asked.

  “You’re in. Whorf, Ihor, I think you probably have two more math tutors. Mister Whorf, find Mister Rezakhani some bedding, and put him in berth 104; Mister Reshetnyk, same thing for Mister Tang, berth 88.”

  2 DAYS LATER. ABOVE THE INTERSECTION OF THE FORMER INDIANA HIGHWAY 14 AND INDIANA HIGHWAY 17. (DOMAIN OF CASTLE EARTHSTONE/NEW STATE OF WABASH). 12:30 PM LOCAL SOLAR TIME/1:15 PM EASTERN TIME. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 2026.

  The continuing cold and soggy spring had grounded Nancy Teirson for a couple of days, but today was bright and clear, and there was plenty to see. Two miles below her Acro Sport, Highway 14 was a river of tribals pouring west. She guessed that they extended a little less than seven hundred yards along the road, in loose ranks of six to ten abreast. She circled lower for a better look; rocks and arrows rose toward her, dropping back far below. The tribals were pumping their spears and axes up and down in rhythm; sorry, guys, the engine’s a little loud for me to appreciate all that ooga booga you’re doing.

  She thought about buzzing them for fun, but the Acro Sport was unarmed and unarmored, and there was no sense pushing her luck. In the months after Daybreak, it had occurred to her that her old expensive hobby of building kit airplanes might be highly relevant to becoming rich in the new world, and she’d had the kit already, though she’d had to copy many parts in materials that stood up to biotes.

  Her “all natural materials” Acro Sport was a great aerobatic biplane, a short-landing tail dragger she could set down on a short stretch o
f dirt road or even a large building roof, but building it without synthetic fabric, fiberglass, plywood, or plastic had added weight and cost structural strength, and her version of a bio-diesel flathead 8, running on modified kitchen grease in a fog of spraying lye, was badly underpowered. Poor old Acro, stuck as a mailplane with a part-time job in reconnaissance, she thought. Besides, right after Daybreak day, who knew I’d even want a mount point for a gun, let alone a bomb bay?

  She circled, staying up out of arrow range, taking a good look before she turned away from them and headed back to the makeshift airstrip at Terre Haute.

  Affectionately, she patted the cowling on the Acro Sport. This coming winter, she was supposed to spend a few months down at Castle Newberry, helping them start building the next-generation copy. You’re going to have grandchildren, she thought to her plane. Don’t you mind that you’re not a war bird; we’re going to win the war, get some peace, and go back to being a country where the mail must go through.

  AN HOUR LATER. TERRE HAUTE, NEW STATE OF WABASH (FORMERLY INDIANA). 3:20 PM CENTRAL TIME. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 2026.

  “What did something like this?” Neville Jawarah asked Jimmy. Most of the old frame houses were burned down to the foundations, and the streets were a tangled maze of wind-drifted debris heaps higher than a man’s head with blown-clear pathways between them. The reek of the rotting asphalt was everywhere. But directly in front of them, a circle seemed to have been scoured, with an almost-neat edge; dunes of debris encircled it like rings around a black carbon bull’s-eye.

  “Firestorms look like this sometimes,” a voice said behind them; they jumped into salutes, because it was General Grayson. He returned their salutes absently, talking to the officers around him.

  Neville thought, Please God, don’t let anyone notice a general and ten other guys could just walk right up behind us. Also please don’t let me be that absentminded when we’re fighting. Also please let me get home. Especially also please help Jimmy keep his stupid wiseass mouth shut.