Things Fall Apart

by Harry Turtledove

  Geoff Rheinburg also got ready to go outside. The pilot also donned mask and goggles as the other two copters landed not far away. When Rheinburg opened the door, the first thing Kelly heard was a raven’s grukking call. Her old prof beamed—or she thought so, though the protective gear made it hard to be sure. “Something lives here!” he said.

  “Or at least passes through,” she replied.

  His feet crunched in the fine grit when he got out. He took a few steps. His shoes printed waffle patterns and small Adidas logos at each one. Kelly’s sneakers were old. Time had blurred their sole patterns: when she walked, she left no advertising for wind and rain to erase.

  Geologists were getting down from the other helicopters, too. Professor Rheinburg threw his arms wide to draw all goggled eyes to him. Then verse burst forth from behind his mask:

  “‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

  Nothing remains besides. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

  “Wow!” Kelly said softly. “Oh, wow!” The poem deserved better; she knew as much. But that was what she had in her. Shelley, of course, was writing about ancient Egypt . . . and also about everyone who thought he was unforgettably splendid. Fate did its number on Ozymandias, and now fate was doing its number on the United States.

  Daniel Olson took a picture of the dusty, grit-scarred minaret sticking up out of the ash and dust. “Well, we’re here,” he said, which also wasn’t poetry but was true enough. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  They didn’t need long to find some small rodent tracks—like Kelly’s shoeprints, without visible logos—in the dust. There were a few insects, and here and there a weed poked its way up toward the sun. It wasn’t abundance. By any standards except those of the harshest desert, it was devastation. But it was life.

  “We definitely have more going on here than we did when we went to the caldera,” Rheinburg said. “We’re farther from the eruption site, and more time has gone by. Bit by bit, the planet is healing up. A few thousand years from now, you’d hardly know anything had happened.”

  “Not on a planetary scale,” Kelly said. “But that you you were talking about, who he’d be, what language he’d speak, what he’d think and feel about what he was looking at—the supervolcano would influence all that.”

  After a moment, Rheinburg nodded. “You’re right. It’s a question of scale, isn’t it?”

  Kelly nodded back. When you looked at people and what they did, you saw one thing. When you looked deeper and wider, at plate tectonics and at magma climbing up through the crust till it burst out like pus from a popped pimple, you saw something else again. Which view was true? Was either? Did you need both—and others besides—to get some kind of feel for what was really there? Would you ever have any idea of what was really there? All you could do was try.

  They walked along. They all had printouts of street maps from before the eruption. The minaret, the capitol, and the sun oriented them. Here and there, wind and rain had cleaned the ashfall away from bits and pieces of other buildings. Glassless windows stared back at them like dead eyes.

  Rainwater had carved gullies through the ash and dust. Erosion in action, Kelly thought. Geology 101. Something glittered at the bottom of one of the larger new gulches, several feet down. “Is that a big flake of mica?” Professor Rheinburg asked.

  Kelly peered down at it. “That,” she said after a moment’s study, “is a Coors Light can.”

  “Oh,” Rheinburg said in deflated tones. “I suppose the water’s gone through some buildings—and some gutters—uphill from here.”

  The geologists took specimens from the surface. They used probes to dig deeper into the volcanic ash and dust. Eventually, scientists would collect samples from all over the ashfall zone, at varying distances from the supervolcano caldera and at varying depths. As Kelly meticulously labeled another tube full of volcanic ash, she feared that eventually would be a long time coming. The resources and the drive to gather the data just weren’t there.

  After a while, Kelly said, “I wonder how long it’ll be before people can start living here.”

  “Not in my lifetime,” Geoff Rheinburg said. Like his mustache, the hair that stuck out from under his broad-brimmed hat was gray, almost white. But he went on, “Not in yours, either. In your little girl’s? Maybe.”

  That sounded about right to Kelly. Krakatoa turned into a jungle again less than a lifetime after the roar of its eruption was a shot heard almost halfway round the world. Krakatoa had been a piddly little thing next to the Yellowstone supervolcano, but Helena was a lot farther from the eruption site than the edges of the Indonesian island had been.

  They put up tents and stayed in the buried city overnight. MREs were uninspiring, but they did fill the belly. And camp stoves let the geologists and chopper pilots fix coffee and tea.

  When morning came, they went into one of the buildings through a window. Volcanic ash and rain had done their worst inside. They found no skeletons during their brief exploration. It was a relief of sorts, but Kelly wondered if that just meant the people who’d been in there had died fleeing instead.

  Years too late to worry about that now, she thought. All the same, she didn’t like wondering about how many dead lay blanketed under the ashfall. Pompeii and Herculaneum, only spread out over the heart of a continent. She wasn’t sorry to fly back to Missoula that afternoon, not even a little bit.

  • • •

  Deborah was excited to ride in a car, even if she did have to sit in her car seat to do it. It was a rare treat; Colin didn’t take the old Taurus out very often. But, while Kelly was off in Montana, he made sure the beast ran. LAX wasn’t far from San Atanasio. Better for him to go over there and pick her up than for her to schlep luggage on the light rail line and the bus.

  He drove carefully. He was out of practice. And the people on two wheels and three, who dominated the streets these days, didn’t have enough practice at looking out for cars. Deborah’s presence inhibited him from calling some of the pinheads what they deserved. He knew one cop who’d told his kids before the eruption that cussing in the car didn’t count. He sympathized.

  The twenty-first century was still in effect at the airport. LAX had generators to keep the power running 24/7/365. You wouldn’t want the lights going out and the computers crashing when a 747 was fifty feet off the ground. The people on the plane really wouldn’t want that happening. Cell phones and WiFi worked all the time around here, too.

  And there were a lot more cars than Colin was used to seeing. If you weren’t staying near the airport, cabs would take you where you needed to go. You would pay an arm and a couple of legs for the privilege, but you paid for everything these days. Oh, did you ever!

  Still, traffic wasn’t the insane nightmare it had been before the eruption—nowhere close. And Colin easily found a space when he pulled into a parking structure. That wouldn’t have happened in pre-eruption days, either. He locked the car—one conditioned reflex that hadn’t faded—and headed for baggage claim, making sure Deborah held his hand.

  He hadn’t been there long when his phone rang. Kelly was calling. “Yo, babe,” Colin said.

  “We’re down,” she told him. “We’re taxiing to the terminal. Won’t be long.”

  “Sounds good. Love you. ’Bye.” He stuck the phone back in his pocket.

  “That was Mommy!” The idea was so exciting, it made Deborah jump up and down.

  “Nah. That was a salesman, trying to get me to buy spinach and beets.” Colin named two of Deborah’s least favorite vegetables.

  “Silly!” Deborah tossed her head in scorn. She’d never heard I didn’t come to town on a turnip truck, Charlie, but that was the vibe she gave off. “You said ‘babe.’ You said ‘love you.’ So that was so Mommy!”

  She was her own little person. She could walk. She coul
d talk. She could think. She was good at it, in fact. “Okay, Sherlock. You got me,” Colin said.

  “I’m not Sherlock. I’m Deborah! Talk sense, Daddy!”

  Instead of talking sense, Colin tried bribery: he gave her a granola bar. She chomped away. The bar declared that it was gluten-free. It was, too: the grains in it were buckwheat and oats. Wheat wasn’t so hard to come by as a good New York strip would have been, but you couldn’t take it for granted any more.

  People coming out of the boarding area started gathering at the carousel for Kelly’s flight. Colin remembered the days when you could meet somebody right at a gate. Those had vanished long before the supervolcano blew.

  “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” Deborah saw Kelly before Colin did. She streaked toward her, running a little faster than light. Colin followed more sedately, as befit his years and the small paunch he still had in spite of all the bike riding.

  Kelly picked Deborah up and kissed her. Since she already had a backpack and an overnight bag, she was handling a lot of extra weight. Despite wiggles, Colin took Deborah off her hands. “My turn,” he said. “I want to kiss your mommy, too.”

  “O-kay,” she said grudgingly—that was in the rules, even if it wasn’t too far in them.

  As they walked out to the car, Colin asked, “What was it like, going into a town where nobody’s been for years?”

  “Eerie,” Kelly said. “That’s the only word that fits. Geoff Rheinburg quoted from ‘Ozymandias.’”

  “What’s Ozymandias?” Deborah asked.

  “Not what, hon—who. He was a king in ancient Egypt—a pharaoh, they called them—a long time ago. A man named Shelley wrote a poem about the ruins of his statue.”

  “Haven’t thought of that one in a long time,” Colin said. “Not since English lit in high school.” But, once reminded, he did bring back the images of arrogance and desolation. Slowly, he nodded. “It fits, all right.”

  “I thought so, too. Maybe it fits too well,” Kelly said. “Everything we worked so hard to build . . . all ruins now.”

  They’d got to the Taurus. Colin opened the trunk. With a groan of relief, Kelly shed her backpack. Colin threw her bag in it with it. “Most of us did the best we could most of the time,” Colin said. “That’s about as much as you can expect from people.”

  He had to pay to get out, even though he hadn’t been there more than a few minutes. Like every public institution these days, LAX grabbed every nickel it possibly could. You got less, you paid more, and they expected you to thank them for it.

  “See any scavengers in there?” Colin asked. “I know Vanessa ran into some—and even into some survivors—when she did cleanup work in Kansas.”

  “That was on the fringes of the ashfall, though. This was only a hundred and fifty miles or so from the eruption,” Kelly said. “Nobody could survive there. You might be able to ski in from Missoula or something, but you’d have to take all your own supplies and you couldn’t bring out anything much.”

  “Snowmobile?” he suggested.

  “Mm, maybe,” Kelly said. “But there’s still an awful lot of dust to kick up. And if you broke down, you’d be an awful long way from a garage. I wouldn’t want to try it, that’s for sure.”

  “Yeah, Triple-A service might be on the slow side,” Colin said.

  “What’s Triple-A?” Deborah asked. With magnetic letters on the fridge, she was starting to learn the alphabet.

  “They’re people who help fix your car if it breaks down,” Kelly explained.

  “Did they help Ozymandias?” Deborah remembered the name. She’d be dangerous when she got older. She was already dangerous, in fact.

  “Ozymandias didn’t have a car. They didn’t know about cars when Ozymandias was king,” Colin said.

  “Why not?”

  “Nobody’d thought of them yet,” Colin said. How were you supposed to explain the idea of technological change to a preschooler? Hell, plenty of allegedly adult elected officials didn’t get it.

  Luckily, he didn’t have to try. Deborah didn’t start the endless Why? routine that drives so many parents straight up a wall. A few months earlier, chances were she would have. She was changing, sometimes, it seemed, every day. She was growing.

  Colin, on the other hand, was getting to the point where he wanted things to stay the way they were for as long as they could. When you saw sixty looming ahead like a giant pothole in the road, all the changes ran in the wrong direction. You got older. You got creakier. You saw your father-in-law the dentist more often, and for more horrible things. He’d retire for real pretty soon, and you’d go see some kid instead.

  He turned right off Braxton Bragg and on to the street where he lived. A few blocks later, he turned in to his driveway. He stopped the car and killed the motor. “We’re home,” he announced.

  “Yay!” Deborah said. Colin couldn’t have put it better himself.

  • • •

  Louise Ferguson walked into the Carrows on Reynoso Drive to have lunch with Vanessa. Marshall was babysitting for James Henry. That would cost more than the lunch did. If he’d known why Louise wanted him to keep an eye on his half-brother, he might not have come at all. He didn’t go out of his way for anything that had to do with his older sister.

  As the hostess led her to a table, Louise wondered why she kept coming to this Carrows. She’d had some seriously unpleasant lunches here with Vanessa and with Colin. Habit, she supposed. She’d been coming here since long before the eruption, since the days when she was still married to Colin. And the food was never too bad or too expensive. You could do worse.

  She might have known the server would put her at the table where she’d sat with Colin when she had to tell him she was pregnant and Teo had bailed on her. She’d had days she remembered more fondly. Yes, just a few.

  Here came Vanessa, on a bicycle. She chained it to the rack in front of the restaurant. That hadn’t been there before the supervolcano went off. Weeds pushed through cracks in the asphalt of the parking lot now. From where Louise was sitting, she couldn’t see any cars parked on it.

  She waved when her daughter came inside. Vanessa hurried to the table. Louise stood up. They briefly hugged, then drew apart again. “How you doing, Mom?” Vanessa asked as they sat down across from each other.

  “I’m here,” Louise answered dryly. “You?”

  “Here,” Vanessa agreed. “Still trying to climb out of the hole that miserable Balkan bastard left me in. The goddamn cops in Alabama just won’t go after him. He didn’t steal from anybody there, so for them it’s like it never happened. SoCal might as well be Mongolia as far as the rednecks are concerned.”

  “Are you ready to order?” Carrows seemed to specialize in bright-eyed, smiling waitresses. This one must have heard the end of Vanessa’s snarl, but she didn’t let on.

  “Let me have the bacon and eggs and hash browns,” Louise said. Vanessa chose the same thing, only with a slice of ham instead of the bacon. Eggs, pork, potatoes . . . You could still get those. The selection didn’t come with toast, the way it would have before the eruption.

  When the waitress took the orders back to the kitchen, Vanessa asked, “What have you been up to? Are you getting any?”

  Louise wouldn’t—couldn’t—have been so blunt if you’d put her on the rack. “You always were charming, dear,” she murmured, and sipped at her water. Water was still free. Los Angeles, these days, had more than it knew what to do with.

  Vanessa just shrugged. “Hey, why waste time beating around the bush?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am,” Louise answered, and had the satisfaction of startling her daughter. She didn’t say the man she was sleeping with was her boss. Vanessa would have had some remarks on that score, all of them no doubt pointed but none germane. She did add, “He’s very nice. It’s . . . comfortable.” She looked for the right word, and found it after a moment.

  “Comfortable!” It wasn’t a word, or an idea, to suit Vanessa. “What good is that? I want a man
who makes my heart pound, a man who’s exciting!”

  “Wasn’t it exciting when Bronislav siphoned all the money out of your savings?” Louise couldn’t resist the jab. Truth to tell, she didn’t try very hard.

  Vanessa glared at her. “That’s a low blow, Mom.”

  “Well, if you can take shots at what I’m looking for, why shouldn’t I be able to do the same thing back?”

  Vanessa didn’t answer. Louise didn’t need to do a mind-reading act to know what she was thinking, though. She was thinking she didn’t like to be on the receiving end. She never had. Unfortunately, life didn’t let you dish it out all the time. It would have been a lot more fun if it had.

  Before they could start slanging each other for real, the waitress came back with their food. “That was fast,” Louise said—talking to someone besides her daughter might take the edge off things.

  “We want to keep people happy,” the girl said. No doubt they also wanted to move as many customers as they could through the tables they had, but that didn’t sound so friendly. The waitress went on, “Remind me who had the ham and who had the bacon.”

  After they sorted it out, Vanessa said, “She’s supposed to remember that, or else write it down.” But she didn’t grumble loud enough for the girl to overhear.

  Nothing like bacon and eggs—except maybe ham and eggs—to improve your attitude. The silence in which mother and daughter ate was grim at first. It grew more companionable as their plates emptied. “That’s pretty good,” Louise said when she was almost finished.

  “It is, isn’t it?” Vanessa sounded surprised the lunch was good, and even more surprised to be agreeing with her mother.

  “I think the hash browns are from fresh potatoes. That’s what does it,” Louise said. “They’re more trouble than they’re worth to do at home. But the frozen hash browns you can get aren’t the same when you cook ’em.”