Things Fall Apart

by Harry Turtledove

  Susan waited for him outside the library. She never would have done that during the winter. They hugged and briefly kissed. “Find what you were looking for?” Bryce asked.

  “Some of it.” Susan sighed. “I’ve filled out an interlibrary-loan slip for the rest. Will you come in and sign it for me?”

  “I’d better.” Being on the faculty, Bryce had the power to call spirits from the vasty deep and obscure journals from libraries around the country. Susan, a mere spouse, didn’t. That never failed to irk her.

  They bicycled back to town after he put his John Hancock on the paperwork. In due course, the journals would arrive, scholarship would advance, and all would be well with the world—except the article still wouldn’t win Susan a job.

  Something was different when they got to Wayne. Several buses were letting people out at a stop not too far from their apartment. The buses were not the usual, ordinary but elderly, wheezers and groaners that hauled people around this part of northeastern Nebraska. These were elderly, but a long way from ordinary. One was olive drab. Two more were painted in faded desert camo. And a couple of others, while they sported ordinary paint jobs, had bars on the windows that suggested their intended passengers might not be thrilled about staying aboard.

  “Hello!” Bryce said. “What have we got here?”

  People were getting off the buses and milling around near them. By the expressions on their faces, a lot of them were getting their very first looks at Wayne, and were thinking pretty much what he’d just said. Either that or What the fuck?, which came close enough for government work.

  And government work it was. The milling people sometimes hid and sometimes showed the paper banners taped to the sides of their buses. NEW HOMESTEAD ACT SETTLERS, Bryce eventually read. “Wow!” he exclaimed. If he sounded amazed, well, he was. “It really is gonna happen! How long since they passed that bill?”

  “A year and a half? Two and a half years? Something like that,” Susan answered. Bryce remembered seeing on the news that the bill had finally passed, but he couldn’t recall how long ago it had been, either. Since it passed, there’d been more frantic wrangling in Congress about whether to appropriate any real, live money for it.

  They must have finally coughed up the cash, because here were these buses of new homesteaders. Some of them looked as if they might possibly know something about living on a farm or in a small Midwestern town. Others seemed stunned. Bryce could read their faces with no trouble at all. When I volunteered for this, I figured anything beat staying in that goddamn camp one more minute, they were thinking. That’s what I figured, yeah, but maybe I was wrong.

  Locals were coming out of houses and shops to give the newcomers a once-over. They didn’t act much happier about what they were seeing than the homesteaders did. And Wayne was a big small town, at least by the standards of this part of the prairie. People who lived here were used to the college students who came and went. Some of the smaller places in these parts, there were no strangers who came and went. Stephen King knew what he was doing when he set horror stories in tiny towns like that.

  So how would those people react when buses dumped loads of new homesteaders on their doorsteps? You could recognize people just out of camps from a mile away. They were the ones with the worst clothes in the world. Polyester? In colors that would gag a K-Mart buyer? A little too big? A little too small? Somebody’d felt good about him- or herself by donating it to help the supervolcano refugees. And the poor, damned refugees had to wear it or go naked. Late-night talk-show hosts had been getting laughs from them for years.

  One of these homesteaders, for instance, had on a sweater that looked as if it were made up of ragged vertical stripes of vomit in assorted colors. Once upon a time, someone had designed it. Factories had turned out the style by the thousands, in assorted sizes. Some tasteless fool had bought this one and given it to a friend—or possibly to an enemy. And the recipient had sent it to a camp, where this poor fellow got stuck with wearing it.

  The truly scary thing was, he might have pulled something even worse out of a bin.

  Two Hispanic kids, a boy maybe four and his sister half his age, stared at everything in Wayne with wide-eyed wonder. They clung to their mother the way a limpet clings to a rock. They’d been born in a refugee camp, Bryce realized. Till the bus ride that brought them here, they’d never known anything else. The outside world was an idea they’d have to get used to a little at a time.

  Quietly, Susan said, “Watch what happens. The first time anybody who’s lived here a while has anything stolen, he’ll blame the homesteaders.”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised,” Bryce agreed, also quietly. But he also wouldn’t be surprised if the homesteaders did some boosting to get things they didn’t have. The camps were full of that kind of petty—sometimes not so petty—crime. No surprise that they should be; there just wasn’t enough stuff in them to go around.

  And he’d spent a lot more time listening to Colin Ferguson tell stories than Susan had. Maybe that had rubbed off on him more than he’d thought while he was doing the listening. Or maybe his wife made a better liberal than he did. It wasn’t against the law to be a conservative in a college town, as long as you did it discreetly and washed your hands afterwards.

  But he wasn’t really a conservative, either, at least not one of the Know-Nothing variety that trumpeted out of the elephant’s trunk these days. He was just a cynic. Could you be a cynical liberal? It wasn’t easy.

  A man in a nice wool topcoat—plainly not someone newly escaped from a camp—called, “Attention, homesteaders! Attention, homesteaders! Please form a line and follow me to the Wayne city hall. You will receive your homesteading allotments there.”

  They queued up with a speed and smoothness that would have impressed Brits, let alone a watching American like Bryce. That, by God, they knew how to do—they had it down solid, in fact. How many times a day for how many years had they lined up for food, for clothes, for complaints, for the chance to charge their cell phones, for everything under the watery sun? Often enough to get really, really good at it: that was plain.

  The homesteaders tramped off toward City Hall. Bryce and Susan rode back to their apartment building. The mail was junk—well, junk and a utility bill. The bill would be horrendous, or whatever was worse than horrendous. As soon as they got inside, Bryce locked the dead bolt. He didn’t always bother, but he did it often enough so Susan didn’t call him on it this time. Have to get better about remembering, he told himself. That was definitely cynical. He intended to do it anyhow.

  • • •

  Vanessa Ferguson remembered the days when the post office on Reynoso Drive wasn’t fortified like something in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The post office had been that way for a while now: since long before the supervolcano blew. That she could recall how it had been in less paranoid times only proved she wasn’t getting any younger.

  She made sure she did a proper job of chaining her bike to the steel rack outside the building. Then she took the manila envelope from the carrying basket and went into the post office.

  Her heart pounded as hard as it had when she discovered Bronislav had ripped her off. It might even be pounding harder now. But this wasn’t rage—it was fear. It wasn’t far from panic.

  If this worked, it was also her revenge on the tattooed Serb pig. She had no idea—none!—what she’d ever seen in him. She must have been crazy to let him into her heart, and into her bed. She always felt like that about her ex-boyfriends. She had an extra-strength dose of it this time around.

  She had such a dose of it, in fact, that she’d finally finished the story he said he’d been reading when he was really plundering passwords from her laptop. Not only had she finished it, she was going to stick it in the mail. That was why she was here. She’d mail it off. She’d sell it—first try, of course, because it was great. And, when she cashed the check, she’d do a fuck-you dance on the miserable, rotten memory of Bronislav Nedic.

  God, this was
scary, though! She didn’t think Bronislav could have been more frightened when he fought the Croats and the Bosnians. (She also didn’t think the Croats were Nazis and the Bosnians were al-Qaida clones any more. If Bronislav had thought so, the truth had to be something different.) Yes, part of her was sure the story would sell first time out. But she was . . . submitting . . . to . . . an . . . editor? What if he was jackass enough not to like it? He’d send it back. She didn’t think she could stand that.

  She hoped the line would be short. Hell, she hoped there’d be no line. Then she could get in and get out without spending time worrying about what she was doing. Yes, other people’s bikes were already in the rack, but maybe those belonged to post office employees.

  Forlorn hope. It was Saturday morning, the only time she could get here while the post office was open. Saturday morning was the only time most folks could get here. Seven or eight people stood in front of her. Only two windows were open. She’d be here a while.

  And she was. When she got to a window at last, she started to explain about the return envelope inside the envelope, and how it would need postage, too. She’d worried about that along with everything else, and hoped the clerk wouldn’t be too big a moron. But the woman smiled and nodded. “Oh, you must be a writer, too,” she said. “A young man who writes comes in here all the time. He sold a story to Playboy not too long ago. Playboy! Isn’t that something?”

  “Right.” Vanessa fought the urge to grind her teeth. The damned woman was talking about her own brother. The unfairness of Marshall’s selling stories while she had to nerve herself to finish one and nerve herself all over again to put it in the mail gnawed at her.

  She paid for the postage and stuffed the receipt into her purse. When the story sold, she told herself, she could write that little bit off her taxes. Then she almost ran out of there. She didn’t want anything more to do with the perky clerk.

  The post office was her last stop for the morning. She could have dropped in at her dad’s house—it was only a few blocks away. She went straight home instead. She didn’t like Kelly, and Kelly didn’t like her, and that was the way that worked. Dad always sided with his new wife, too, which also struck Vanessa as totally unfair. After all, she was his flesh and blood.

  And she didn’t see much in Dad’s new flesh and blood, either. Why he wanted another kid when he was as old as he was . . . Vanessa didn’t get it, not when he already had three. At least Mom’s little boy was an oops. Not Deborah. They’d gone and had her on purpose.

  That Kelly might have wanted a child with Dad never crossed Vanessa’s mind. After discovering they mixed like water and sodium, Vanessa thought about Kelly as little as she could.

  She flicked the light switch by the door as soon as she walked into her apartment. When nothing happened, she said, “Shit!” Then she said something filthier in Serbo-Croatian. Then she said something filthier yet in English. She needed some mental floss to clean Bronislav out from between her ears.

  Her nose wrinkled. That had nothing to do with the thieving Serb. The dishes were piled high in the sink. She’d let them slide for a while. Now they were telling her she couldn’t get away with it any more.

  “Shit!” she said again. If the power was out, the hot water would go in a hurry, too—as soon as whatever was in the heaters now ran out, it would be cold all the time. Doing dishes—especially dishes that had spent some time sitting around—with cold water was a pain in the ass.

  Well, so was living in a smelly apartment. She plunged in. Anything would come clean with enough soap and water and cleanser and steel wool and elbow grease. For sufficiently large values of “enough,” she thought as she scrubbed away at an extra-dirty frying pan.

  She swore again a moment later. Bronislav wasn’t the one who’d come out with foolishness like that. No, it could only have come from Bryce. People you’d known and loved (or thought you loved) once upon a time didn’t want to get out of your head, no matter how much you wished they would. No. They stayed in there like unwelcome guests, and every so often one of them would pop up and yell Boo!

  The place did smell fresher once the dishes were out of the sink and in the drainer next to it. But that was a fight you couldn’t win, not permanently. They’d start piling up again all too soon. And she’d start ignoring them again, till she couldn’t ignore them any more.

  Monday morning meant a return to the widget works, and all the joy that went with it. The atmosphere was tense. There’d been waves of strikes back East and in the Silicon Valley because wages weren’t coming close to keeping up with skyrocketing prices. Nick Gorczany hadn’t given anybody a raise in quite a while. Everyone knew it.

  Everyone also knew that doing anything about it would put you out on the street. Plenty of unemployed programmers and engineers and bookkeepers would figure low wages whaled the snot out of no wages at all.

  And so people at the widget works grumbled and muttered and met in small groups for lunch. But that was all they did. Vanessa had always grumbled and muttered. She hadn’t always bothered to keep her voice down when she did it, either. That made her more popular with the other hired peons than she’d ever been when things looked better.

  There had been times when she’d wanted to be popular but wasn’t. Now that she was, she discovered she didn’t care. All she cared about was the electric jolt she seemed to feel—regardless of whether the power was on—when she put her key in the lock to her apartment mailbox. Every day she didn’t hear back from the magazine to which she’d submitted was another day with a letdown in it.

  She understood the mails were slow. She understood editors had to find time to sift through their slush. Intellectually, she understood all that. As far as she was concerned, intellectual understanding was for dweebs like Bryce. She wanted that acceptance letter now, dammit! She wanted the check that would come with it, too.

  Some of her coworkers tried to draft her to tell Nick Gorczany they all needed more money. As politely as she could—and as rudely as she needed to—she declined the honor. She felt more than she thought, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t think. The messenger who brought the king bad news was the one who got it in the neck, not the people who’d sent him (or even her).

  Mr. Gorczany did give people a raise: about a quarter of what they thought they were entitled to. In a note, he said I wish this could be more, but the economy is tough on everybody, I included. Vanessa curled her lip. That sounded just like him, all right. And, tough economy or not, he still drove his BMW from Palos Verdes Estates almost every day.

  She started getting righteously pissed at the numbnuts editor who was sitting on her story. What did he think he was gonna do, hatch it? Only a small sense of self-preservation kept her from firing off a snotty query. If you made an editor mad, he’d reject you, not your story. The bastard.

  Then, when she was starting to do her best to pretend to herself she’d never submitted in the first place, the return envelope showed up in her mailbox. Seeing it was such a rush, she forgot something Marshall had said. His words of wisdom were It’s the opposite of applying to college. Big envelopes are bad. Small ones are good.

  Vanessa tore the envelope open, right there in the lobby. Inside sat her story, with a sheet from the magazine paper-clipped to it. She pulled it out. It was a Screw you very much for submitting form rejection. Under the printed crap, somebody’d scribbled Way too emo for us. Try the women’s mags.

  “Emo? Emo?” The word tasted even worse the second time she spat it out. She’d sweated blood to show emotions honestly, and this was what she got for it? “Fucking emo?”

  She stomped up the stairs. She slammed the door to her apartment hard enough to rattle half the building. Then she tore the rejection into a million pieces and flung them in the wastebasket. After a moment, the SASE and the printout of her story went in, too.

  If she’d had the laptop on the kitchen table, it might have followed the papers into the trash. “Emo!” she snarled one more time. “Women’
s mags!” She made that sound filthier than any porn on the Net. “Cocksucking sexist shithead!”

  She didn’t usually drink by herself. Today, she poured a stiff shot of slivovitz—another leftover from Bronislav—and chugged it. It went off in her belly like a bomb. In minutes, the alcohol built a wall against the slings and arrows of outrageous editors.

  All the same, she doubted she’d submit again. Certainly not any time soon. She wasn’t going to try to deal with the cretins in New York City. She had to deal with too goddamn many closer to home. At least they paid her regularly—none too well, but regularly. The jerks who got paid for bouncing stories that were perfectly good . . .

  “To hell with ’em! To hell with all of ’em!” she said, and she unscrewed the cap on the slivovitz bottle again.

  • • •

  It was pouring rain when Louise Ferguson walked into the Van Slyke Pharmacy. No lights were on inside. Well, the power was out at her condo, too. She’d do what she could do by hand, and she’d have things organized so she could quickly get the data into the computer if and when electrons started chasing themselves through wires.

  “Good morning, Louise,” Jared Watt said from behind the counter.

  “Good morning, Jared,” Louise answered, shrugging off her rain slicker. “Good and wet.”

  “It is. It is.” The pharmacist nodded. Even in the indoor gloom, the lenses of his glasses made his eyes look almost as big as eggs sunny side up. “Back before the eruption, either we would have said the rain killed a drought or we would have complained because half of L.A. was washing into the Pacific.”

  “Well, we don’t need to worry about it so much any more,” Louise said. “Everything that could wash into the Pacific has gone and done it by now.”

  “And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Jared said.

  You could always complain about the weather. They spent another few minutes doing it. Then a customer came in with a prescription. Jared filled it for her. He rang it up on a massive brass cash register that was almost certainly older than he was. The receipt book with carbons was new, but it was an old way of doing things making a comeback because the newer, niftier ways had turned unreliable.