Beneath the feet of the passengers, the light buzzing of the electric motor changed pitch as the ship’s propellers awakened. The three-master rounded the watchtower erected at the end of the jetty and came to a stop inside Gabrielle Harbour. The ship hadn’t been this close to land in weeks.
They were almost there. Darrick nodded to his neighbour, the ironbearer Somptueux de Lauzon, who had never suspected he was sharing his cabin with a fellow Québécois.
“And there’s the shallop of the port police.”
Startled, Darrick turned around to greet the ship’s captain who had joined the ironbearers. She managed to look unassuming, aware that some of her passengers were nervous around uniforms. Instead of an ironbearer’s rapier, she carried a cutlass in a sheath tied to her thigh. If Darrick could believe the first mate’s tales, the captain had used the weapon to repel a dozen attempted boardings by pirates.
Darrick felt the weight of the commander’s gaze on him and he did not ask for details. He’d endured two weeks of pretending, but he was tired of dissembling. Enough.
As the ship’s captain watched, the ironbearer Darrick d’Épernon leaned on the railing, as if to observe the men straining to row the shallop.
And then he jumped overboard.
◄ ►
The Phénix-France compound sprawled along the edge of the island, just beyond the historic Parc des Braves. A four-metre-high wall surrounded the grounds, hiding the buildings inside. A few chimneys loomed over the company’s facilities, spewing coal-black smoke. And the sulfurous stink that went along with it.
When Darrick presented himself at the compound door, a squad of heavily armed guards stopped him from entering.
“Apologies, my lord. May we know your identity and that of your companions?”
“Karim de Neuilly, company shareholder. My secretary, Cavalin Rufiange. And my bodyguard.”
“You walked here?”
“I landed today. I needed to stretch my legs.”
The port was near enough for the story to be plausible. Darrick soon got to meet the director’s assistant, who checked his papers and introduced him into the director’s office.
The new factory manager was a middle-aged man, though his few blond curls were outnumbered by the white ones. His long, strong face might have seemed open and friendly when young flesh softened its outlines, but it was now a mere bony mask, whittled down by age and its pains.
“Jéconiah Jutras.”
They shook hands and kissed in the French manner. Darrick was on the lookout for any hint of distrust, but the director was treating him exactly as he should treat a visitor from France who was a major shareholder of the CPF.
The ironbearer expected nothing less. For years, he’d waited for the appointment of a manager who wouldn’t recognize him. Jutras was from Montreal, where the hydroelectric dams built across the Ottawa and St. Lawrence supplied a few factories and universities with enough electricity to function. But Quebec was best situated to trade with the French, and Montreal had dwindled into relative insignificance.
From the first words they exchanged, the ironbearer sensed that Jutras wasn’t merely loyal to the Compagnie Phénix-France, but genuinely in love with French culture. Darrick won him over with a gift of an excellent olive oil from Normandy.
“You didn’t waste any time,” Jutras said approvingly.
“Why do you say that?”
“I saw a ship come into the port earlier.”
“Yes, I was aboard. She’s leaving again in three or four days, and I expect to sail with her.”
“So soon? You’re not staying to visit then.”
“My business interests in France require my presence. I cannot stay away too long.”
“Of course. I understand. And how are things in France?”
Darrick tried to gauge his counterpart’s intentions. On the North American side of the Atlantic the question could be considered subversive. Quebec’s governor was adamant that the Laurentian Valley sheltered a civilization on par with the remaining technological societies found elsewhere on the planet.
“Nothing like here. The whole country doesn’t lack for electricity and there’s enough for everybody. Industry, transportation, city lights…”
“At home too? Is it true that you still have televisions and computers, like in the old days?”
“The age of miracles is over. There’s enough wattage to run such devices, but we no longer know how to manufacture them. You’d need rare earths that are only found in recycling centres in France. And microchips so complex that giant factories were once needed to produce enough to justify the initial investment. France alone can’t justify building a factory large enough to supply half a continent. So, yes, there are televisions, but they’re built with tubes. And the only computers belong to the government. Not that they’re telling anyone whether or not they still work.”
“What about the other European countries?”
“More like what you have here. Lots of wind turbines, a few hydroelectric dams, biofuels for vital transportation needs. France retains its nuclear advantage over the rest.”
“But what would it do without our uranium?”
The director smiled smugly, without realizing how offensive his smirk looked.
“Speaking of which, what is the current state of Canadian reserves?”
The man waxed optimistic. Canadian uranium came in part from old Saskatchewan mines, but it was also recovered from the ruins of Ontario’s nuclear power plants. And the company’s envoys were still negotiating with the Algonquin farmers of the Far North to open new thorium and uranium mines.
Farther east, the company had set a pilot project to strain out the uranium in seawater, using the electricity produced by wind farms around Rimouski.
“We could do as much in France,” Darrick commented. “What about the taxes?”
“What about them?”
“Did the governor increase them since last year?”
“Granger de Limoilou is smarter than that. He’s got a new family to provide for – his fifth – and the new relatives are grabbing all the plushy jobs. My sister studied medicine for 10 years, but she was passed over for a young niece of the governor’s new wife. She had to take a position out West. Last I heard, she’d set up shop out of a fort in the middle of the Rockies.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Darrick said in a voice that implied quite the contrary. Jutras snapped to as he realized his rashness. He inquired instead as to the reason for the ironbearer’s visit.
“I’ve come to pick up the new fuel rods.”
“Today? I wasn’t expecting it. Nothing is ready.”
“No, not today. Tomorrow morning will do. My men will show up to pick up the first load at eight sharp. The captain of the Express de Rouen promised me to clear out the needed space in the holds of her ship, and I trust her to keep her word.”
Jutras called in his assistant and gave him his instructions. When they were alone once more, the director got up to see his visitor out.
“You know I’m in your debt. Thanks to the new capital you raised, we’ve doubled the size of our facilities. Just to set up the new centrifuge chains, we had to build and hire more people than the city of Quebec had seen anybody do in over a century. And then there were the new vessels to produce uranium oxide, the vats for mixing the zirconium alloy of the cladding, the—”
“I expected no less. I just hope the final product is up to snuff.”
“The enrichment is above the minimum you requested,” Jutras asserted, visibly irked. “We took advantage of the existing enrichment of the metal recovered in Ontario to go faster, but the centrifuges still had to spin all winter to process the Saskatchewan ores. I can guarantee you that we followed your specifications for the moulds to the nearest tenth of a millimetre. Each tube contains the required number of pellets. Yes, the quality is what you asked for, and you can have my word for it… I hope it won’t be the last order of the kind.”
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p; “Labour is less expensive here than in France,” Darrick said, repeating the lie he had already used on the shareholders in Paris. “As long as we get the same price for our electricity, our profit margins will fatten like ducks before the slaughter.”
Jutras nodded, mollified.
“Don’t you wish to see our facilities?”
“That won’t be necessary. Sea air has left me with quite an appetite. I’m heading back to my inn for a real meal. The rods will be…”
“In custom-made trunks lined with lead. The radioactivity is essentially undetectable from the outside.”
“That’s great. I wouldn’t want to worry the captain of the Express de Rouen. She’s a fine woman, but there are still people who are scared of anything nuclear.”
They laughed, in complete agreement at last.
◄ ►
Twenty years later, Darrick still remembered the large house abutting the enclosure of the wind farm on the Plains of Abraham. It was a link to his childhood. Other places he had known in his youth still stood, no doubt, but the old house was the only one he associated with happy memories.
He was in such a hurry to see it again that he only stopped once on his way, by the foot of a streetlight set up by the Ancients. A black and stinking rain was falling. The drops darkening the pavement near the base stoked his hate anew, but he managed to stifle it again before he reached the house.
While memory might be more powerful than time itself, time was mightier than flesh and houses. The three-storey stone building, roofed with slate from Montmorency, bore its share of new scars. And though the ground floor was still occupied by a bicycle rental shop, the faces of the people in charge were unfamiliar. The colour of the shutters was different, too. The steps of the staircase running up the outside of the house sagged a bit more than he remembered, as well.
The passage of time had been even harsher on Réjean Lacombe. The former chancellor of the Court of St. Macaire’s Dome still boasted a full head of hair: he’d been famous for his lion’s mane, but it had gone white. His sunken cheeks and deep wrinkles testified to the years gone by. For a second, Darrick was embarrassed by his still-youthful frame, its powerful muscles and as yet unblemished skin… For a second. Only the weak believed strength was shameful. Exile had taught that lesson to Darrick.
The old man seemed surprised to see his former pupil. “You’ve returned!”
Lacombe didn’t rise to greet him, but Darrick expected it. In his youth, Lacombe had been captured by a tribe of Newfs when he had ventured west of Lake Superior. The tribals had crossed the Saskatchewan steppes to sell him to the highest bidder in the slave markets of Kananaskis.
And to make sure he wouldn’t get away, they had cut open the soles of his feet and forced him to walk on tiptoe across the grasslands, hands tied to the back of a horse-drawn cart. Walking had kept either cross-shaped gash from closing and the open wounds would have prevented him from getting very far if he had tried to escape.
He had been ransomed by the Quebec consul in Kananaskis, but Lacombe had been lamed for life. He could still walk if he needed to, but he avoided it whenever he had the chance. As chancellor, he had rarely been required to stand for anyone. Darrick glowered, unhappy with his old friend’s tone.
“You sound like you regret it.”
“You didn’t tell me you were coming.”
“I let as few people know as possible. Just Carolin and Naoufal.”
Darrick pointed to the young men with him. One was standing guard in the vestibule visible through the door. The other was in the living room with them, keeping a lookout by the window.
“Why them?”
“They’ve been my main contacts here in Quebec, and I needed them to get things ready for my return. If they had stopped receiving my messages, they would have been worried for me.”
“Wasn’t there a radio aboard the ship you sailed on? Couldn’t you have called?”
“Access to the radio was strictly controlled. And bringing all the apparatus of a short-wave radio set onboard the Expressde Rouen would have looked suspicious. Ironbearers aren’t known as radio fans…”
“Since you are here, I assume you evaded our gallant border police.”
“Fortunately for me, an outboard is much faster than a shallop. By now, my description is no doubt being typed up for every police unit on the island. Too late.”
“What are your intentions?”
“Rebuilding. Quebec has grown rich by exporting thorium and uranium to France, but what has it done with its riches? Nothing. The city is sitting on a pile of gold. The poor aren’t getting anything out of it and the rich are living behind walls, whining about taxes.”
“So, you want to bring back the glory days of the Dark Age.”
“No! Enough grovelling before the Ancients. We’ve indulged in too much of it. Let’s tell the truth: our ancestors built things halfway and half-assed, and they paid too much. They accumulated so much debt that we’re still paying the interest owed to the biosphere. If Quebec is an island, if the West is a desert, if we’re short of metal because we don’t have the energy it would take to produce more, it’s because the Ancients burned everything they could, turned the world into their private garbage pit, and willed us their leftovers.”
“I remember a young man saying the same kind of thing. But a grown man should know enough to leave naïve dreams to youth.”
“Unless he’s learned how to turn his dreams into realities.”
Lacombe shrugged wearily. Darrick stared, unable to find in his mentor’s eyes excitement to match his own. His first impression had been the right one. The former chancellor was a man as worn down by the years as the staircase outside. The ironbearer suddenly felt absolutely certain that not one hopeful word, not a single animating ideal would shake the inertia weighing down his friend. He turned to Naoufal.
“I was wrong. I shouldn’t have come. Let’s go.”
Naoufal left the window. Darrick had reached the door when Lacombe hailed him. “Tell me, Darrick, were you happy in France? Do you have a wife and children? Did you start a new life?”
“I’m an ironbearer,” the traveller answered coldly. “I did not demean myself. I never begged, if that’s what you want to know.”
“You should have stayed over there.”
“Until recently, I fully intended to.”
“So what happened?”
“I discovered the reason why my father’s Court is next to St. Macaire’s Dome.”
The man nodded slowly, as if against his will. “What do you hope to achieve? Make a great public fuss?”
“Much more than that, old friend. My father’s reign of terror must end. Even in exile, I’ve managed to follow what’s happening here. Letters from my friends countered every happy radio bulletin broadcast from St. Macaire. My father no longer tolerates any check on his power. I was crazy enough to hope that my exile would at least allay some of his fears. But no! Don’t deny it. His rule has become a reign of terror. I’ve seen with my own eyes the cages hanging at the crossroads, dripping with the rotting flesh of his victims or rattling with their bones. And what about the crosses drawn on the walls where his thugs beat or killed innocent bystanders? I knew what they meant before landing, thanks to the letters of Naoufal, but they still gave me the shivers. Isn’t it past time to put an end to it all?”
Lacombe refused to be moved.
“Those so-called ‘victims’ of your father were criminals and troublemakers. You have to keep a strong grip on the rabble to have law and order.”
“That’s not what you taught me once upon a time! What about the consent of the governed? And the respect of basic rights?”
Lacombe shrugged.
“I got old.”
“Me too,” Darrick replied. “And I saw in France that it was possible to do things differently. We just need to wake up and give change a chance. It’s not because we live on an island that we must cut ourselves off from the rest of the world.”
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br /> “Depends what the rest of the world is like. France isn’t surrounded by semi-barbarians and lands ruled by sheer savagery.”
Despite himself, Darrick glanced at the shrivelled legs of the old chancellor. He could hardly reject Lacombe’s point. In North America, the collapse had been shattering when cheap oil had run out. The cost of coal and gas had climbed to dizzying heights. States supplied with electricity from hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants or wind farms had gone off the grid, bringing down electric lines and pylons to hoard the power they would no longer sell to their neighbours. Retaliatory raids led by hotheads had wrecked more than a few surviving reactors and wind turbines.
The electricity wars had complicated coal mining, already made tougher by the shortage of gasoline for trucks and excavators. In the larger cities, lack of heating during the winter had killed thousands. As gasoline ran out for farm machinery and natural gas for the synthesis of nitrogen-based fertilizers, crop yields dropped and prices rocketed. Since North American transportation depended on fossil fuels, famine had struck by the end of the second winter and visited time and again until the population’s dieback had matched the reduced food supply.
The powers that be, blamed for their improvidence, had withered away while cities took over essential tasks. The oldest ones retained denser neighbourhoods better suited to the new era than their younger, sprawling counterparts.
In some areas, economic migrants had tried to return home without the help of planes or cars, giving rise to wandering tribes who ended up choosing a nomadic lifestyle. The Trucker Tribe. The Newfs. The Hicanos from Mexico.
“I’m making you think?” Lacombe asked.
“Yes. And I still say that we must reject barbarism. If we do not wish to see Quebec fall as low as Toronto, we must take action. Blow up the old power structures and start over again.”
The chancellor’s shoulders slumped.
“You talk about it as if it would be easy. Building is harder than destroying. Rebuilding after blowing things up would be even more so.”
“You would be wrong to underestimate my anger.”
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