Things Fall Apart

by Harry Turtledove

  She tripped over the snow-hidden curb on the far side of the street, but didn’t quite fall. Brushing snow off the bus bench, she sat down. She hoped again the bus wouldn’t be too late—it was bloody cold out here, and the wind didn’t help. Duh! It was cold enough to be snowing. It never used to get that cold in SoCal. It wasn’t just cold enough to snow now. It felt a lot colder than that. Cold enough to freeze to death in? Her coat was pretty good, but the side of her face the wind hit was starting to go numb.

  Another guy on a bike zoomed by, head down, working hard. That would keep you warmer than just sitting around. Louise wondered whether she ought to get up and start doing jumping jacks or something. It might be a good idea, but she didn’t have the energy.

  She also had no idea the bus was anywhere within miles till it loomed up out of the snow in front of her. The fare had just gone up to five dollars. She’d never been so glad to feed a fin into the slot. She would have paid a lot more to get out of that horrible wind. The bus’ heater even worked after a fashion.

  Getting off was a lot less enjoyable than getting on had been. It was growing dark—growing dark fast. The snow danced and swirled in the air, for all the world as if this were somewhere in Connecticut, or maybe in a movie from the 1940s. God only knew what things were really like in Connecticut these days. Movies had nothing to do with anything real.

  By the time Louise made it home, she was wishing for both steaming coffee and earmuffs. I want to get out of these clothes and into a dry martini. Somebody’d said that, though she couldn’t remember who. She didn’t give a damn about a dry martini. If they’d made a hot martini, now . . .

  “It’s snowing, Mommy! It’s snowing!” James Henry squealed when she walked through the door. It was a big deal to him. Hell, it was fun to him—he hadn’t had to sit out in it or slog through it.

  Louise had. “Really?” she said. “I never would have noticed.”

  Her younger son by Colin came to the door. “I’m outa here,” Marshall said, “or I will be. . . .” He held out his hand. He didn’t even pretend he was doing this for anything but mercenary reasons.

  After she’d given him enough greenbacks to make him stick his hand in his pocket, Louise said, “Be careful when you’re going back to the house. It’s brutal out there—worse than I’ve ever seen it before.”

  “I’ll cope,” he said, but paused a moment right outside the door when the wind smacked him in the kisser. “Whoa! It is kinda rugged,” he allowed.

  “Ya think?” Louise closed the door on him—she didn’t want the storm to chill down the inside of the condo. Marshall vanished from sight even before he got to the bottom of the stairs.

  “Can we make a snowman, Mommy?” James Henry asked.

  “Maybe right in the middle of the living room,” Louise answered. James Henry clapped his hands. He didn’t realize she was joking. Outside, the snow kept blowing and falling, falling and blowing. It wasn’t freezing inside the condo, but it wasn’t what anybody would have called warm, either. When Louise sighed, she could see her own breath. She might not have been joking so much after all.

  • • •

  Before she had Deborah, Kelly Ferguson had known babies were a lot of work—labor didn’t stop once the kid popped out. She’d known, yes, in an intellectual way. In that same intellectual way, she’d had a fair notion of what would happen to the world after the Yellowstone supervolcano blew.

  In both cases, intellectual knowledge was one thing. Actual experience was something else again. The difference between the two was at least as profound as the difference between a picture of a steak on the one hand and the real steak first on a plate and then in your stomach on the other.

  With the supervolcano, the country’s work afterwards boiled down to trying to pick up the pieces. Kelly did a lot of that with Deborah, too. But her work changed a lot faster than the country’s did. Deborah was more than a year old now, toddling unsteadily on legs that were still figuring out how to hold her up and coming out with more and more words every day.

  Mama and Dada and Asha—which did duty for Marshall—had arrived very early. Dada arrived well before Mama did, which annoyed Kelly and amused Colin. “Happened the same way with my other three, too,” he told her. “That bugged the dickens out of Louise—oh, you bet it did.” He chuckled. “Marshall said her new rugrat did the exact same thing, so my guess is she got bugged all over again.”

  “How about that?” Kelly remembered saying. From then on, she tried not to complain about how Deborah was learning to talk. Being thought of as like the first wife was nothing a sensible second wife wanted. And chances were that sooner or later, no matter how she learned them, Deborah would learn to say hard words like Constantinople and Timbuktu. From boxes, Colin had pulled out most of the Dr. Seuss titles that had also taught Kelly to read.

  The biggest problem with kids was, they found ways to do dumbass things no matter how careful you were. Kelly was changing Deborah on a towel on the bed. She looked away for a split second to grab the baby powder. She looked back just in time to see Deborah, grinning from ear to ear, roll over . . . and off. Then she heard a thump, and then she heard a wail of surprise, pain, and fear.

  She grabbed her daughter. She wondered if any of the cars would start so she could rush the baby to the ER. Then she realized Deborah wasn’t badly damaged—wasn’t, in fact, damaged at all. As soon as Mommy had her, everything was fine again.

  “They’ll do it to you, all right,” Colin agreed when Kelly told the gruesome story over dinner. “Hey, I didn’t have a single gray hair—not one—before I had kids.” He ran a hand through his hair. His hairline hadn’t retreated a millimeter, but the color up there kept fading toward silver. He scowled, interrogation-room style, at Marshall. “See what you did to me?”

  Kelly guessed he intimidated suspects in the interrogation room more than he did his younger son. “Yeah, right,” Marshall said. “Like, what are you blaming me for? I was third in line. By the time I came along, I bet you were already sneaking Just for Men into the bathroom.”

  “Why d’you think I’m blaming you?” Colin rumbled. “I can’t get at Rob or Vanessa, but you’re right across the table from me.”

  “That’s how cops decide how to arrest people, too, right?” Marshall asked helpfully.

  He didn’t faze his father a bit. “A lot of the time, it is,” Colin answered. “And you know what else? A lot of the time, we grab the perp when we do it. Not always, but a lot of the time.”

  From what Colin had told her of his older son, Kelly thought Rob would have yelled Death to the pigs! or some other endearment. Marshall just shrugged and shoveled another forkful of macaroni and cheese into his face.

  Food was expensive, unexciting, and sometimes scarce. Kelly tended a backyard garden. So did most people who had back yards to garden in, in SoCal, throughout the USA, and in the rest of the developed world. Countries that had been hurting for food even before the eruption were worse off now. The messed-up weather disrupted their crops, and nobody was selling much grain across borders. Several small-scale wars simmered in Africa and Asia because too many countries had too many hungry citizens.

  Deborah, of course, stuffed literally anything she could get her hands on into her mouth. What else were hands for but grabbing things and bringing them to your mouth? It might be food, after all.

  Or it might not. Kelly discovered that the flesh of her flesh had swallowed a button when she found it as a souvenir Deborah left in her diaper. It obviously hadn’t injured the baby. The button didn’t seem hurt, either, but Kelly threw it out anyhow.

  “I don’t know where she got it,” Kelly said that night, still jittery over what might have been. “I would have taken it away if I’d seen it, and I swear I kept an eye on her all the time.”

  Colin took it better than she did: an advantage, no doubt, of this being his fourth time around the track, as opposed to her first. “Babies do things like that, is all,” he said. “Most of the tim
e, everything turns out okay. They’re tough critters. If they weren’t, none of ’em’d ever live to grow up.”

  “I guess.” Till she had one, Kelly’d thought of babies as hothouse flowers that would wilt if you looked at them the wrong way. What with her swan dive from the bed and the button sticking out of her poop, Deborah was changing her mother’s preconceptions. All the same, Kelly said, “But what if the button’d got stuck inside her? We would’ve had to take her to the hospital, and they might have needed to operate to get it out.”

  “Purple fur,” Marshall said.

  “Huh?” Kelly wasn’t sure she’d heard straight.

  “Purple fur,” Marshall repeated. “From Telly Monster on Sesame Street. He worried about everything, remember? So we’d say somebody who worried about things that weren’t worth worrying about had purple fur—like you just now.”

  Kelly thought anything that had to do with Deborah worth worrying about. But now she knew what purple fur meant—and (again, in an intellectual way) she understood what Marshall was talking about.

  Once Deborah reached the upright position, she could grab all kinds of things she hadn’t been able to get at while she was rolling and crawling. Kelly and Colin kidproofed the house as well as they could. Anything Deborah could pick up and try to eat went on a shelf too high for her to reach. All the electrical outlets that didn’t have cords sticking out of them got plastic plugs so the baby couldn’t stick her wet fingers or anything else into them.

  “This won’t be perfect, you know,” Colin said. “She’ll figure out ways to land in trouble that we can’t even imagine. They always do.”

  Kelly didn’t like that. “We’re supposed to be there for them, to protect them.”

  “Uh-huh.” Her husband nodded. “But sometimes that means sweeping up whatever’s broken and putting on the Band-Aids after it’s too darn late to do anything else.”

  She didn’t like that, either. She wanted to make her offspring perfectly safe, invulnerable to harm. The rational part of her brain insisted she couldn’t do that, but didn’t stop her from wanting to.

  Little by little, Deborah got the idea that there were things she was supposed to do and things she wasn’t. She was a good kid. Most of the time, she did what her parents wanted. Most of the time, but not always. Once in a while, she would throw things down on the ground to smash them and see how much noise they made. Or she’d try to bite the hand that kept her from doing something or going somewhere.

  Kelly and Colin yelled at her to stop. The first time Colin swatted Deborah on her diapered fanny, Kelly was appalled. It created more noise than pain, but she was appalled anyhow. “She’s a person! You shouldn’t hit her!” she exclaimed. “It’ll mess her up.”

  “I got walloped plenty when I was a little kid. I earned it, too,” Colin answered. “I spanked my older kids. I never hit them with a belt or hit them in the face, the way I got it sometimes—I thought that was going over the line. But they aren’t too warped, and I’m not, either. Little kids are a lot like puppies or kittens. Sometimes they need to know that doing the wrong thing means you get hurt.”

  “All the child-raising books are dead against it.” Like most academics, Kelly valued expert opinions.

  Colin only shrugged. “Mike Pitcavage never warmed Darren’s behind, and look what a drug-dealing son of a . . . gun his spoiled brat turned out to be.”

  “Oh, boy,” Kelly said. “If he’d scared his kid into being a law-abiding citizen, he’d still be going out there and murdering old ladies whenever he got the urge.”

  She did make Colin flinch; she had to admit that. But she didn’t make him back down. “You know what I mean,” he said.

  “I may know, but I still think you’re wrong,” she answered. “A lot of the time, people hit kids to make themselves feel better. That’s not a good enough reason, not in my book.”

  “Ha! You’ll find out!” he said, and, much as she wished she could, she couldn’t ignore the certainty in his voice. He had years’ more experience in such things than she did. He went on, “I didn’t say smack ’em all the time. I didn’t even say to do it very often. You do it a lot, it stops meaning much. But every once in a while, you’ll decide it’s the only way you can make sure they get the point.”

  “Hmp,” she said, a syllable that meant I don’t believe it for a minute. They left it there; they didn’t do much out-and-out quarreling. Time would tell which of them had it straight, or if either one did.

  VII

  V

  anessa Ferguson swore in Serbo-Croatian—in Serbian, Bronislav would have said. She certainly imitated his accent, not the one a Croat would have used. As far as she could tell, the difference between the two was about as big as the difference between Brooklyn and Alabama. She’d heard people say you couldn’t get any satisfaction cussing in a language not your own. She wasn’t so sure of that. Serbo-Croatian’s gutturals and heavy rolled R’s—she had a decent ear, and could do them pretty well—seemed made for telling other people where to go and how to get there.

  Best of all, as long as she didn’t scream out the foreign profanity, she could use it at Nick Gorczany’s widget works. Even muttering you stupid son of a motherfucking bitch would get you talked about—possibly fired, if the stupid SOB in question was the boss, as it all too often was. But the Serbo-Croatian equivalent hardly got noticed.

  She despised her job with the hopeless hatred of someone who knew how unlikely she was to find anything better. Fixing other people’s dreadful prose all day was not the kind of work that inspired you towards admiration of your fellow man—or woman. Someone had once said that people were the missing link between apes and human beings. Whoever that was, Vanessa was convinced he’d been an optimist. As far as she was concerned, her coworkers still walked on their knuckles, picked fleas from their friends’ armpits, and used sticks to hunt termites for a snack.

  The widget works was trying to land a Federal contract that would make sure it stayed in business a few years longer. With fiendish gusto, Vanessa tore the first draft of the proposal to bloody bits. She did her best to translate it into something related to English. Her red marks didn’t outnumber the black ones on the pages, but they came close. She tossed the bloodied document on Mr. Gorczany’s desk.

  Did he thank he for her diligence? Not a chance. He called her in on the carpet (the stuff in his office was softer and thicker than the industrial-strength junk the peons had to walk on). Patting the wounded proposal, he asked, “Did you have to be quite so thorough?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Gorczany,” she said, which would have been fine had she left it there. But then she added, “Which dumb parts do you wish I’d left in?”

  He had a blunt, bulbous nose. If it had been a little bigger, it would have given him the look of a blond Elmer Fudd. Elmer Fudd couldn’t flare his nostrils, though, and Nick Gorczany could. “The engineers and I worked hard on that,” he said.

  The and I told her she was in trouble. Nobody got off on having his own deathless words edited (Vanessa didn’t herself, but chose not to remember that). More cautiously, she answered, “I do think I’ve made it better. I cut out a lot of repetition.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll need to put some of that back in,” Gorczany said. “When you deal with the Feds, first you tell ’em what you’re going to tell them, then you tell them, then you tell them what you’ve told them. Otherwise, they don’t get it.”

  Vanessa’s lips moved, not quite soundlessly: “Jeben te u glavu bluntavu.” The curse meant something like Fuck you in your stupid head. Bronislav thought it was funny that she wanted to learn obscenities in his language. A proper Serb woman, he made it plain, wouldn’t come out with such things. Vanessa wasn’t a Serb and wasn’t proper, so she didn’t care.

  She wasn’t soundless enough, either. “What did you say?” Nick Gorczany asked.

  “Nothing,” she replied sweetly. “I was just trying to figure out what to uncut, if you know what I mean.”

 
“Huh,” he said. He might be illiterate, he might bring out that stupid cliché about telling things three times as if he’d just made it up, but he knew an insubordinate employee when he saw one. But Vanessa hadn’t been very loud, and she also hadn’t spoken English. He suspected, but he couldn’t prove, so he went on, “Never mind, then. Fix it up, uh-huh, but not like this.”

  “Repetitively repetitious,” Vanessa said.

  She was pushing things, but she got away with it. Her boss nodded. “That’s right,” he said. His sarcasm detector hadn’t gone off. Maybe it needed a new battery or something.

  She made the second revision of the proposal dumber than the first one. If she wanted to go on getting paid, she had to keep Gorczany . . . not too unhappy. The really scary thing was, he might have been right when he claimed the Feds needed everything spelled out more than once.

  All the same, the rewrite was the dictionary illustration for the term soul-deadening. Vanessa was swearing in English when she walked out of the widget works. She swore some more as she popped open her umbrella and trudged toward the bus stop. Nick Gorczany’s Beemer sat in lonely splendor in the company parking lot. He could still afford to drive in. Why not? He belonged to the one percent, not to the ninety-nine. Vanessa fought down the temptation to key the car. It would be just her luck to have a working surveillance camera catch her.

  The supper she fixed herself was almost as crappy as an MRE. She couldn’t imagine anything worse to say about it. That she was choking on her own bile sure didn’t improve the flavor.

  “There’s got to be a better way to make a living,” she said again and again as she washed several days’ worth of accumulated dishes. “There’s got to be.”

  Her dumb little brother sold his stupid stories. He didn’t exactly make a living with them, but he did sell. Vanessa was sure she could outwrite Marshall in her sleep. She could . . . if only she found the time.

  Here she was, all by herself in this crappy little apartment she could barely afford. If she couldn’t find the time now, when she loathed what she did every day, when would she ever?