Things Fall Apart

by Harry Turtledove

  First things first. Vanessa wrote the cell phone company a check. Then she opened the bank statement. When she’d reconciled her checkbook the month before, she’d come out ten dollars lower than B of A thought she was. She figured the goof was likely hers, but maybe the bank had decided it was wrong. Stranger things had happened—they must have. Name two, she thought, hearing an echo of her dad’s voice inside her head.

  Because she was intent on the checking, she almost missed what was going on in her savings account. Almost, but not quite. “The fuck?” she said one more time, her voice far angrier than it had been when she was trying to figure out what was up with Bronislav. Two large withdrawals just before the statement mailed had almost drained the account.

  The only problem was, she hadn’t made them.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” she said, loud enough to scare a cat if she’d had the heart to get another one after poor Pickles. Then she swore at the bank and all the swarms of idiots, morons, and perverts who’d ever worked for it. And then she hied herself off to the bus stop through the rain to give the idiots, morons, and perverts at the Reynoso Drive branch a jagged-edged piece of her mind—and, not at all incidentally, to get her money back.

  Getting wet on the way to the bus and on the way from the other stop to the bank building did nothing to improve her mood. The line for the tellers was long, as usual. But she didn’t need a teller today. She needed a supervisor. They had desks on the other side of the line from the tellers’ stations. One of the people behind the desks had no one in front of her. Her name was Denise Yamaguchi, but she had blond hair, blue eyes, and freckles. She also had a wedding ring, which probably explained the surname.

  “How can I help you?” she asked when Vanessa sat down at the other side of the desk.

  Vanessa slammed the bank statement down on the Formica. “I’ve got close to ten grand that needs to go back in my account,” she said. It wasn’t worth anywhere near so much as it would have been before the eruption, but it wasn’t chicken feed, either, not unless the chicken was the size of an ostrich.

  Ms. Yamaguchi examined the statement. “Your problem is . . . ?”

  “I didn’t make this withdrawal, or this one, either.” Vanessa stabbed at each item in the printout with her right forefinger. Water from her umbrella soaked into the rug. Steam from her ears should have scorched the ceiling.

  “Let me see, please.” The supervisor did things with her computer. She frowned as she studied the monitor. “I don’t find anything wrong with the transactions. They were both done by computer. They used your password. It was given correctly at the first try both times. There was no reason not to release the funds.”

  “Then you’ve been hacked. You—” Vanessa broke off as a horrible fear filled her mind. She yanked her phone out of her purse and called Bronislav’s number again. She got the automated announcement that it was no longer in service. “No. Jesus, no! I think I’ve been hacked. Oh, shit!”

  He’d been looking at her laptop when she woke up that morning. He kept her story front and center to show her. Cover—it had to be cover. Up till then, he’d been snooping. If he wasn’t so dumb with computers as he claimed, he wouldn’t have had much trouble finding her password list.

  And then, when the time was right, maybe when he found a town where he could open a little restaurant, or buy into one, and needed some money for a down payment or whatever . . . She didn’t know that was what had happened, not yet she didn’t, but she sure would have bet that way.

  “Bog te jebo!” she hissed.

  “What does that mean?” Denise Yamaguchi sounded impressed in spite of herself.

  “God fuck you,” Vanessa answered absently. It sounded better, filthier, in Serbo-Croatian. Her mind raced in overdrive. “Listen—do you have the IP address of the computer or smartphone or whatever the thief used to get into my account? If you do, maybe you can find out who he was.”

  “Let me see what I can manage.” For the next several minutes, Denise Yamaguchi fiddled with her computer. When she stopped, she looked as if she also wanted to say God fuck you, but she was too professional. She did say, “I can’t access that from here, but I think our IT people will be able to run it down. Now . . . I’m afraid you’re going to have to fill out about a ton of papers. They’ll protect you, and they’ll protect us. People work out schemes to defraud banks sometimes.” She held up a hasty hand. “I’m not saying you’re one of them, but they do. Am I right that you have an idea about who might have taken the money out of your account?”

  “Oh, yeah. You’re right. My boyfriend. My ex-boyfriend, I guess I should say.” Vanessa had loved Bronislav. She’d thought he loved her back. If he didn’t . . . She hadn’t even started processing what that meant. All this was happening too fast. But you didn’t rip off someone you loved. That, she was solid on. “Let me have those forms. As many dotted lines as you’ve got, I’ll sign on them.”

  “Excuse me for a minute, please. I don’t use these very often. I have to pull them from that file back there.”

  As the banker walked over to the file cabinet, Vanessa realized that, if Bronislav had been planning for a while to steal from her, he might have been lying when he said he liked her story. Somehow, absurdly, that seemed a worse betrayal than all the money he’d siphoned from the B of A.

  • • •

  A few minutes before the bus was supposed to pick up Louise Ferguson and take her to the stop across the street from the Van Slyke Pharmacy, three eighteen-wheelers came down the street. Because their motors were the only ones she could hear, they seemed ridiculously loud. She knew she and everybody else had taken them for granted before the supervolcano blew up, but she couldn’t imagine how. Hadn’t the growling, clanking, stinking monsters driven all the people within half a mile squirrely?

  As each truck passed—slowly, to keep from mashing bike-riders and what have you—she peered into its cab. She didn’t think Bronislav Nedic would come back to L.A. any time soon, but you never could tell. She wasn’t all that sure she would recognize him in a truck, either, but, again, you never could tell. So she looked.

  Vanessa had dumped a string of boyfriends in her time. She’d never been dumped by one till now. She’d never had her bank account cleaned out by one, either. She’d made more money than Bryce Miller had, but that wasn’t the same thing.

  Now she knows how it feels, Louise thought. She’d dumped Colin, but then Teo’d dumped her. Having it done to you left a different feeling from doing it yourself. When you did it, you did it because you were—or at least you hoped you were—heading for a better place. When you were on the receiving end, it felt more as if an earthquake knocked your life higgledy-piggledy.

  Louise looked down the street. Where was the damn bus? Her boss would understand if she got in late; Jared mostly rode a bus to the pharmacy himself. But Louise didn’t like it. Living with Colin all those years had left her compulsively punctual. She hated running late, and she hated when anything in her life didn’t run on time.

  Which didn’t mean she could do squat about it. Schedule or no schedule, the bus would come when it felt like coming, not when she wanted it to come or expected it to come. Fuel shortages, the breakdowns of an aging fleet, spare-parts shortages, the problems drivers had getting to work on time . . . Oh, the Retarded Transit District had all kinds of good reasons its buses didn’t always show up when it claimed they would. Louise hated every one of those reasons. That didn’t help, either, of course.

  Half an hour late, the bus at last deigned to make an appearance. Instead of hissing open, the door wheezed and creaked. Motors and transmissions weren’t the only parts showing the strain of too much use over too many years.

  As she paid her fare, she asked the driver, “What will you guys do when the buses start dying and you can’t fix them any more?”

  The Hispanic man looked at her. “Maybe we get stagecoaches—you know, with horses. Or maybe we just pack it in on account of it’s too expensive. Then everybo
dy climbs on a bicycle, hey?”

  He was only a driver. He didn’t make transit policy. Louise had to remind herself of that as she sat down. The vinyl or whatever it was that covered the seats was wearing out, too. You could see bits of yellowish foam rubber sticking up through holes and cracks and tears.

  The whole damn country was wearing out the same way, with things breaking down and falling apart faster than people could run around and fix them. There’d been worried talk about that even before the supervolcano erupted. Back then, though, the fixer-uppers had just about managed to stay even with the breakdowns. So it had seemed to her, anyway.

  Now . . . The supervolcano had broken so many things and made so many others fall apart, the whole damn human race was scrambling to try to fix things up in its aftermath. And, for all its frantic scrambling, humankind seemed to lose ground every day.

  Such cheery thoughts occupied her till the bus shuddered to a stop at the corner of Van Slyke and Reynoso Drive. The pharmacy was already open. Jared’s bus must have shown up closer to the promised time than hers had.

  Her boss greeted her with, “Morning, Louise. Have you heard the latest?”

  “Nooo,” she said slowly, wondering whether the latest revolved around soccer, Broadway, or some incestuous combination of the two.

  It turned out to be none of the above. “The Russians have invaded Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” he said.

  “Good God!” Louise said. “Why?”

  “Well, I was listening to Radio Moscow on the shortwave this morning”—yes, Jared was the kind of man who would listen to Radio Moscow on the shortwave—“and they said it was to consolidate the historic unity of the region. I’m quoting, you understand.”

  “Uh, right,” Louise answered. “What does that really mean? Does it really mean anything at all?”

  “I think it means the cold has hit Russia so hard, nothing’s growing there at all,” Jared said. “Ukraine and Kazakhstan are a little better off, so the Russians are grabbing with both hands.”

  “That will make everybody love them,” Louise said. She’d grown up loving the Russians that way; like the pharmacist, she was old enough to remember the Cold War. To her grown children, it was as one with World War II and the Battle of Hastings and the Pyramids: something they had to learn about in school that didn’t mean anything in their own lives. Thinking back to Cold War fears, Louise found a brand-new question: “Are they using nukes?”

  “They haven’t yet, or nobody’s said they have,” Jared answered. Louise nodded in relief. With several—no one seemed sure just how many—nuclear bombs tossed around in the Mideast, that genie was out of the bottle, dammit. Her boss went on, “But Ukraine and Kazakhstan are both screaming for NATO help.”

  NATO, Louise remembered from somewhere, stood for North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Kazakhstan was one hell of a long way from the North Atlantic. Well, so was Ukraine, but it did touch the Black Sea, which was connected to the Mediterranean, which was connected to the North Atlantic.

  And the ankle bone’s connected to the leg bone, and the leg bone’s connected to the hip bone, and the hip bone’s connected to the backbone . . . Louise wasn’t even close to sure she had the old song straight. She also wasn’t even close to sure she had all her marbles right now.

  Then something else occurred to her, something that had to do with connections and that made her pretty sure she did. “When they’re yelling for NATO help, that means they’re yelling for American help. What are we doing about it?”

  “Last I heard, the Secretary of State told the Russians that attacking independent countries was a big no-no,” Jared answered, which surprised a laugh from Louise. He continued, “The Russians have told the Secretary of State that Washington needs to mind its own business.”

  Trying to picture a map in her mind, Louise said, “I wouldn’t want to have to send soldiers to Kazakhstan.”

  “Neither would anyone else with all his brains,” Jared said. Louise laughed again—he was on a roll. Then he added, “Some of the commentators are saying they don’t want soldiers. They want us to tell the Russians we’ll shoot missiles at them if they don’t go home and play nice.”

  “Urk,” Louise said. If the USA shot missiles at Russia, it wasn’t like shooting at Iran or North Korea. The Russians could shoot back. Oh, could they ever! That was why the Cold War had stayed cold. Both sides could shoot back much too well to take suicidal chances.

  “Urk is just about the size of it,” Jared agreed. “You can get to Ukraine from the rest of Europe, anyhow. Or to Russia. You can assuming you want to, I mean. The last fellow who went into Russia from the rest of Europe was Hitler, and he didn’t have such a great time afterwards.”

  “No,” Louise said. “We don’t need a war now. We’re still picking up pieces from the supervolcano, and we will be for the next fifty years.”

  “You know that. I know that,” Jared said. “I’ll bet the Russians know that—they’re picking up pieces, too. But does the President know that?”

  As far as Louise could tell, the President was a twit. He meant well, but he was a twit regardless. And everybody except maybe him knew which road was paved with meaning well.

  A little old Asian man with a fedora came in. It wasn’t a hipster’s stingy-brim. It was just a hat. He’d probably started wearing it when most men put them on every day, and somehow never stopped. He nodded to Jared. “Good morning. Is my Inderal prescription ready?”

  “It sure is, Mr. Nakasone.” The pharmacist went behind the counter and handed him a pill bottle. The Asian man handed back a credit card. Since the power was on, Jared could use the computerized system. After Mr. Nakasone signed the slip, he stuck the pills in a pocket of his windbreaker and tottered off. He wasn’t going anywhere fast, but he was going.

  He reminded Louise of the whole world these days.

  She wondered what the world would do if Russia overran those two chunks of what had been the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Then she wondered what Russia would do if it overran them. Just because you wanted something, you wouldn’t necessarily be happy once you got it. (Hadn’t somebody with Vulcan ears said that the first time?) Ukraine and Kazakhstan had been their own countries for a generation now. They’d got used to being their own countries. They wouldn’t want Moscow ordering them around again. And they were big enough that trying to hold them down might not be a whole lot of fun for the Kremlin.

  Well, that was the Kremlin’s worry. It wasn’t Louise’s. She had plenty of worries of her own.

  X

  C

  al State Dominguez Hills wasn’t the most beautiful college campus running around loose. UC Santa Barbara had a much nicer natural setting. UCLA and Berkeley both jumped all over CSUDH when it came to architecture. Dominguez Hills looked more like a nicely landscaped office park than anything else Kelly Ferguson could think of. But Cal State Dominguez Hills had one enormous advantage over all those prettier places. Unlike them, it had given her a job. She both was and wasn’t glad to be back at the State University. She was because she liked research and teaching. She wasn’t because going back to work took her away from Deborah.

  She’d looked down her nose at women who let motherhood slow down their careers . . . till she had to start making those choices herself. Then, as people often do, she discovered things weren’t so simple as they looked from the outside. She liked research and teaching. She loved her little girl, who changed faster and needed her more than the study of supervolcano eruptions did.

  But if she stayed away too long, no one but her would care if she ever came back. So here she was, and there was Marshall, keeping an eye on Deborah back home. Kelly also felt conflicted about Marshall’s progress as a writer. She wanted him to do well. But if he did very well, he could afford to say no instead of babysitting his half-sister.

  A Frisbee flew through the air. A dog ran, jumped, caught it, and proudly carried it back to the kid who’d thrown it. Most of the students looked like kid
s to Kelly—one more sign she wasn’t a kid herself any more.

  She made her way to the room where she was privileged, if that was the word, to teach Introduction to Geology: geology for people who weren’t geology majors. Some of them, by all appearances, had barely heard of rocks. There were good students in the Cal State University system, as there were in the University of California system. But there weren’t nearly so many of them.

  This lecture was about plate tectonics, and about how continents could slowly move across the surface of the Earth and, sometimes, run into one another. “India used to be a separate continent,” she said. “Then it ran into the bigger Asian land mass. The collision pushed up the Himalayas, the tallest mountains in the world. It’s still pushing them up to this day.”

  Some of the students in the room took notes. Some listened without writing anything down. Some, plainly, had their heads a million miles away.

  “For a long time, people were sure continents couldn’t move, even though the east coast of South America looks like it fits together with the west coast of Africa, and almost the same with North America and Europe. The first man who proposed the idea of continental drift, a German named Wegener”—Kelly wrote the name on the board—“got called a crackpot for his trouble. That was right after the First World War. It wasn’t till the 1960s that enough evidence came to light to make people take another look at Wegener the weirdo.”

  She outlined what the evidence was. Then, smiling as she remembered her own undergraduate days, she went on, “The older profs I studied under were in college themselves when geologists started to realize continental drift and plate tectonics were true after all. One guy told me it hit geology as hard as the idea that the Earth goes around the sun and not the other way around hit astronomy in the days of Copernicus and Galileo.”

  After the lecture, a tall student named George Chun—Chinese? Korean?—came up to her. He was one of the bright ones. He would have been a bright one anywhere. Maybe he couldn’t afford to go to a UC school. Kelly couldn’t find any other reason why he’d be here and not at one of them. She hadn’t learned all her students’ names, but she knew his, all right.