The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  Besides, he didn’t give a damn about the two dead people and he figured no one else would, either. He let them lie in plain sight, where the refugees could see them, while he called the fence-builders back to work.

  This time there wasn’t a riot.

  Omar watched the silent, resentful people in the camp, and he thought about what Knox had told him. Use science, he thought, turn them against one another. There were over two hundred people in that camp, and they had to be kept quiet and obedient and isolated.

  Science, he thought. Science would save his son.

  The sun hammered Omar’s head. His stomach churned. He wished he had sent Jedthus for Alka-Seltzer as well as candy. He went into his police cruiser and turned on the air-conditioning, and the cool and silence helped him to think. By the time that Jedthus returned with Omar’s bag of candy, he thought he had his plan worked out.

  The heat and the lack of food combined to keep the camp quiet. People splayed out under awnings and in the camp’s shaded picnic areas, trying to stay out of the heat. Aftershocks shivered the tops of the trees. By one o’clock in the afternoon the fence was finally finished, a shimmering twelve-foot barrier of chain link with only a single gate that led out into the parking lot and the highway. The fence-builders began stringing razor-wire along the top.

  “Five hours, twenty-two minutes,” Micah Knox said, looking at his big musical pocket watch. “Pretty neat, considering we had a riot and everything.”

  Omar got his bullhorn from his car and advanced to the gate.

  “Now you saw what happened when there was trouble,” he said. “Three people got shot, and one of them was a little girl. So I don’t want any more trouble, any more rocks or guns, because the folks who will end up paying for it will be the families here.

  “So here’s what I want. I want you to choose a council to help run the camp. Responsible folks, family folks. Ten will do. And I and the parish will deal with the council, and the council will deal with the rest of you.

  “The council will arrange for y’all’s distribution of food. I am going to leave now to get you some food supplies, and when I come back, I hope you’ll have chosen some people that I can turn this food over to.”

  He left them to think about that for a while. The two bodies were loaded into the back of a pickup truck to be carried to Tree Simpson, and Omar arranged for the fat man’s pistol—a boxy-looking Glock 9mm, weapon-of-choice for gangsters and gangster wannabees—to be bagged for evidence and brought along with the bodies.

  “I’ll be along to see Tree in just a minute,” Omar told his deputies, and sent the truck banging on its way. He himself stopped by the Reverend Morris’ wrecked California bungalow, where he found the church people waiting with the shipment of food they’d brought in for the camp’s meals. When Omar pulled into the driveway, he saw them assemble in the area between the house and the church, surging around his car before he could get it parked. They were stiff with barely suppressed hate and anger. Omar got out of his car and tipped his hat to Morris’s widow. “I’m sorry about your husband, Miz Morris,” he said. “He was a good man.”

  “Thank you.” Mrs. Morris’ tone was strained but not impolite. “But when may we bring the food into the camp?”

  “Yeah!” one of her supporters said. “The food!”

  “There are babies in the camp,” Mrs. Morris continued, “and they need their milk.”

  “There’s been trouble at the camp, Miz Morris.” He frowned at her. “And I need to ask you—do you have any reason to believe that someone may have wished your husband harm?” Mrs. Morris looked surprised. She raised a hand to her wrinkled throat. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “He was last seen in the company of a young man from the camp,” Omar said. “And now Dr. Morris is dead and the man is missing.” He waited for that to sink in, then added, “I will have Tree Simpson take a good look at your husband’s body, and we’ll see if there is any reason to suspect foul play.” He looked at Mrs. Morris, then lifted his eyes to the others, her family, and some of the church workers.

  “I didn’t see the accident site myself,” he said, “so I didn’t have any reason to be suspicious, but after what happened at the camp this morning I began to wonder. There was a riot, you see—a real riot, and my deputies were shot at, and two people were killed. And a little girl was wounded. A little girl!” He raised his voice, tried to sound outraged. “Maybe you saw my deputy taking her and her mother to the doctor.”

  He saw barely perceptible nods from several of the group.

  “There are bad folks at the camp, Miz Morris,” Omar said. “Drug dealers, thieves, gangsters. I suspect one of them killed your husband. I don’t think I can allow civilians like yourselves into that camp anymore. It would only put you in harm’s way.”

  Mrs. Morris absorbed this slowly. Her lips trembled, either with emotion or words that she hadn’t quite formed.

  “I will have the parish take over delivery of the food,” Omar said. “It’s government food anyway. You people have been good enough to volunteer to prepare and distribute it, but I can’t put you in danger any longer. Not once they start shooting at us.”

  He got on the radio and gave orders for his deputies to take possession of the food, then drove to the courthouse to meet with Tree Simpson.

  “Give Ozie a chance,” Tree said with a weary grin, “he’ll put an end to the population explosion single-handed. What is it—three dead men so far?”

  “I’m not here to talk about Ozie,” Omar said. “I want to talk about Dr. Morris.” Tree looked surprised. “What about him? I was going to send the body to the funeral home.”

  “There may have been foul play there,” Omar said. “Could you give the body another look?” Tree looked dubious. “It was burned pretty bad,” he said. “I don’t know if I could find much on my own. Normally we’d send the body to Baton Rouge for a proper autopsy, but I don’t know if we can do that in the circumstances.”

  “Just give it a look. There may be something there. An exit wound, a shank left in the body. Something.”

  “Exit wound?” Tree frowned dubiously. “The back of the head was gone, but that could have been because the brains boiled in the fire and the head exploded.” He shrugged. “I’ll see what I can find.” Omar left Tree’s office with a quiet triumph singing in his blood. Things were working out. He would blame Morris’ killing on someone who was already dead, the runaway boy that Knox and his people had killed yesterday, sent where the woodbine twineth. And then what he’d tell Spottswood Parish was that the boy was still at large, still armed, still murderous. And that would end any kind of friendly relations between the local community—particularly the local black community—and the refugees in the camps.

  What Omar intended to do next was to divide the people in the camp from one another. On his way out of town he stopped by the Commissary and bought some Alka-Seltzer, and he dropped it in a bottle of water that he also purchased and drank it off. It didn’t help. When he returned to the camp, he met with the council that the refugees had chosen to represent them. All black, mostly middle-aged people, more women than men.

  They had no experience, he guessed, at organizing and feeding hundreds of people. It would all go wrong—not enough cooked, or too much, or it would be badly distributed. And when the inevitable screw-ups came, when people got angry, it would be against their own leaders. While the food was being carried into the camp and delivered to the camp committee, the little girl who had been shot was delivered along with her mother to the camp. The bullet had hit the fleshy part of the upper arm, but it hadn’t broken the bone, and the girl was fine now that Dr. Patel had given her some stitches, some painkiller, and a tetanus booster.

  The little girl was sleepy with the painkiller and the after-effects of her fright, and her mother carried the girl in her arms as Merle walked her into camp. Omar followed with the bag of Three Musketeers candy that Jedthus had brought him, and waited till the mother was in pla
in sight of the people gathered around waiting for their meal.

  He tipped his hat politely to the mother, and addressed himself to the sleepy little girl. “This is for you,” he said, and handed out the candy. “You be sure to share it with your friends, okay?” The little girl took the candy and looked at it with an air of incomprehension.

  “Thank you, Sheriff,” the mother said.

  Omar smiled and tipped his hat again. “All in a day’s work, ma’am,” he said.

  “Pretty slick, Omar,” Knox said admiringly as Omar left the camp. “You’ve been paying attention, huh?” Omar ignored him and went to his car and turned the air-conditioning on high. He felt like hell.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  On Sunday night the 15th inst. the earth shook here so as to shake the fowls off their roosts, and made the houses shake very much, again it shook at sunrise and at 11 o’clock next morning, and at the same time the next day, and about the same time the third day after. Accounts are brought in from the nation that several hunting Indians who were lately on the Missouri have returned, and state that the earthquake was felt very sensibly there, that it shook down trees and many rocks of the mountains, and that everything bore the appearance of an immediate dissolution of the world! —We give this as we got it—it may be correct—but the probability is that it is not.

  Clarion, Friday, February 14, 1812

  The President stared at the coffin that softly gleamed in the subdued lighting of the East Room, nestled beneath a huge bouquet between the Eliphalet Andrews portrait of Martha Washington and Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of her husband. For a moment, a weird, wild grief struck him, and the President wanted to fling himself onto the coffin and wail and tear his hair. Then, just as suddenly, he was again himself, the President of the United States, standing on the polished floor in the silent solemnity of the Executive Mansion. In the morning, the gates of the White House would be opened and the public would file through the East Room, thousands of people sharing in the ritual of mass mourning. More than the First Lady would be mourned tomorrow. Many thousands had died across the middle of the nation. Some were buried beneath unexcavated rubble; some were buried anonymously in mass graves; and many would never be found.

  Tomorrow’s funeral of the First Lady, here in the White House and taking place under the universal eye of television, was only the most public of the funerals for earthquake victims. All those who lost loved ones, or who waited in gnawing uncertainty, would now have a chance to participate in the rite of public mourning. In the public mind, this funeral might come to stand for them all. That was why, over the strong objections of the President’s security detail, the public funeral had to be held in the White House, the tragedy brought fully into the national home.

  And—though even Stan Burdett was too tactful to say so—the President was enough of a politician to know that this was something of a public relations bonanza. In the past, the nation had presidents who, as in the cliché, claimed they shared the citizens’ pain. Now the tens of thousands who had lost so much in the quakes knew that the President was one of them. He, too, had lost a loved one in the tragedy. The President expected that his next set of approval ratings would be at an all-time high. He would have prodigious coattails. The Party would stand to gain in the next elections.

  The President, however, had not yet made up his mind whether he really cared about this or not.

  “Sir?” The Marine colonel who had been put in charge of the funeral arrangements stood by, the subdued lights gleaming on the buttons of his blue full-dress jacket. “Mr. President? Is everything suitable?” The colonel, the President remembered, had been reviewing the arrangements for the funeral, talking all this while. The President hadn’t heard a word.

  Well. It probably didn’t matter anyway.

  The President cleared a particle of grief that seemed to have lodged in his throat. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it’s fine.”

  The President walked across the gleaming parquet floor to the coffin and laid his hand upon its smooth surface. He made the gesture only because he knew it would have seemed odd if he hadn’t. Whatever was actually in the coffin, the burnt offerings that had been raked from the remains of Air Force Two, bore no resemblance to the woman with whom he had shared his life. For some reason the President found this a comfort. He would have been far more disturbed had he thought of the First Lady—the woman who had shared his life, his career, his bed—lying cold, still, and recognizable, in her familiar blue suit with its familiar corsage, all locked in the mahogany-and-bronze box.

  Also because it was expected, he bent his head for a moment, and clasped his hands in an attitude of prayer. In reality his mind was pleasantly numb. Whatever of the out-side world intruded on his thoughts, it seemed to come through a layer of cotton wool. Since his wife’s death he had been operating largely on automatic pilot, making decisions in a world that seemed strangely devoid of consequence or purpose. Yet he managed to make decisions. Most of them did not require a lot of thought—most situations had obvious enough answers, and when they didn’t, he was resigned to the fact that decisions taken in an emergency were necessarily taken on the fly, with incomplete information, and that consequences would have to be dealt with as they occurred.

  I say come, he thought, and they cometh; I say shove off, and they shoveth. And in the end, the world seems to spin on its axis whether they cometh or not.

  He looked up at the tactful sound of a throat being cleared. It was one of his aides, reminding him of the meeting of his foreign policy working group. He finished his prayer—his public, nonexistent prayer, his dumb-show for the peace of mind of the Marine colonel and any other onlookers who wanted the President, in his grief, to behave “normally,” whatever that meant—and as he made his way out he stopped by the colonel to thank him for the care he had taken with his arrangements, and said he would see him tomorrow. Then he walked with his aide down the length of the Jefferson Pavilion to the West Office Wing and the Oval Office.

  The foreign policy working group consisted of the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, and various representatives from the Pentagon and the Department of Commerce.

  For once, the President thought, he was able to attend a meeting without Boris Lipinsky droning on at his elbow.

  The President greeted the working group in the Oval Office, accepted their condolences on the loss of the First Lady, and seated himself behind Rutherford B. Hayes’ desk. He turned to the Secretary of State. “What’s on the agenda?” he said.

  “Firstly, Mr. President,” the Secretary said, “I’m relieved to report that Israel, Syria, the Palestinians, and Iraq have been persuaded to reduce their state of military alert.”

  “Good work. Thank you, Darrell.”

  The Secretary smiled in acknowledgment. “We’ve got alarming news from the Balkans, sir. We are receiving bulletins on the persecution by Macedonia of its Albanian minority.”

  “Which Macedonia?” the President asked. The Greeks held onto the view that their Macedonia was the real one, with the state that called itself Macedonia being made up entirely of imposters. The Greeks were more or less alone in this view, but still the distinction created a degree of uncertainty in the terminology.

  “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,” the Secretary clarified. “Though the Greek Macedonians would probably be happy to persecute their Albanians as well, come to that.”

  “And what form does the Former Yugoslavs’ persecution take?”

  “Attacks on villages by paramilitaries. Minor ethnic cleansing.” The Secretary sighed. “I regret to say that minor ethnic cleansing, unless checked, often turns into major ethnic cleansing.” And, he did not need to add an ethnic cleansing that would further destabilize a region that was already one of the most explosive places on earth. If Macedonia became unstable, Greece might very well intervene against the small nation that dared to usurp the name that Greece considered its own. The Serbs, friendly with the Greeks, might seize the
opportunity to restore their hegemony in Bosnia and Kosovo. Turks might view any larger conflict as their chance to adjust their borders with Greece. The Serbs were loathed by the Bosnians, Croatians, Kosovars, and Albanians, and the Montenegrins didn’t think much of them either. All of these might view with favor the chance to reduce the influence, territory, or army of Serbia.

  The Balkans had already graced the planet with the First World War. A certain degree of concern, the consensus considered, was definitely in order.

  The President, swathed in his strangely congenial mental habit of cotton wool, had difficulty summoning any degree of concern whatever. But he was aware that the President ought to be concerned about such things, and he made the appropriate responses.

  “What can we do about it?” the President asked.

  “There are already NATO soldiers in Macedonia,” the National Security Advisor said. “Patrolling the borders of Kosovo and Albania at the request of the Macedonian government. But they are lightly armed, dispersed through the countryside, and vulnerable to retaliation should they attempt to intervene in any local matters.”

  The National Security Agency had been created as an activist organization by President Kennedy, frustrated by the cautious diplomacy of the career diplomats at State. Traditionally the NSA was interventionist, willing to charge into any crisis with any amount of force; while the woolly minded diplomats at Foggy Bottom preferred caution, more caution, and endless talk.

  The two men in the Oval Office reversed this tradition. The Secretary of State was a bouncy activist, a kind of muscular missionary for American values who was willing to take troubles by the neck and shake them till their teeth rattled. The National Security Advisor, a military man, had always been far more cautious. The President had the impression that the general did not want to commit force anywhere in the world unless he had a million armed men, bases and supplies prepositioned, a resolution from the UN Security Council, and a forecast predicting six weeks of perfect weather. The President often thought of his Security Advisor as his General in Charge of Saying No.