The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Arlette’s too young for this,” Manon said. “She’s my baby.” Her eyes were shiny.

  “You were going to send her to France for the summer,” Nick said. “Did you figure she’d only meet nuns over there?”

  “She’d be chaperoned,” Manon said.

  “She’s chaperoned here, honey,” Nick said. He couldn’t resist smiling. “She’ll never be more chaperoned in her life.”

  “Nick,” Manon said, “that boy is white.”

  Nick said nothing. Anxious-father voices sang an aria in his head. It’s not about race, Nick told himself, it’s really not. It’s about a boy touching his daughter, that’s what it’s about.

  “Oh hell, Nick,” Manon went on. “This is Arkansas, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “I know.” And if it was a black boy kissing a white girl, there would be fifty people here ready for a lynching, whatever Reverend Frankland might say about it. And even as things stood, there might be hell to pay, anyway.

  Arlette turned from Jason and began to move away across the field. The tension in Nick’s chest eased a trifle.

  “Certain things you don’t do here,” Manon went on. “Not where a hundred people can see you. Not if you’re young and—” She blinked tears. “Not even if you’ve been raised to think these things don’t matter.”

  Nick stepped closer to her, put his hands on her shoulders from behind. Her muscles were taut as wire.

  “I’ll talk to Jason if you like,” he said. He had the sensation that he was arguing with himself as much as with Manon. “And you can talk to Arlette. But Arlette’s an intelligent girl. I think we can trust her.” He began to massage Manon’s shoulders, trying to break the tension he felt in the muscles.

  “Besides, baby,” he said, “here’s what’s going to happen. One way or another, we’re going to get out of here. Then, for a while, we’ll be in a boat, and Arlette can’t be any more chaperoned than in a sixteen-foot boat with both her parents. And after we get back to civilization, Jason will go home to his daddy, and Arlette will be in Arkansas, and that will be that.”

  He felt Manon’s sinew resist his fingers, and then Manon gave a long sigh, and he felt her relax, lean back against his strength. “Oh, why’d you have to bring that boy here?” she murmured. “He’s going to be nothing but trouble.”

  “That’s the truth,” Nick said. He studied the nape of Manon’s neck, the loose tight curls that had escaped the kerchief in which she’d bound her hair. The sheen on her fine mahogany skin, supple as the day they were married. He leaned close to her ear.

  “Jason’s only thinking what’s natchel,” he said. “He’s not thinking anything I’m not thinking.” He felt Manon stiffen. “That’s what I’m worried about,” she said, and then, after a moment’s resistance, she relaxed again, her head lolling back against one of his hands. “Not now, Nick,” she murmured. “I can’t deal with this now.”

  “Don’t worry, baby,” Nick smiled. “We’re chaperoned.”

  There was a honk from the speakers, and then Frankland’s voice telling all work parties to assemble to the trucks.

  “There,” Nick said. “See what I mean?”

  Jessica stood with Larry Hallock next to the Auxiliary Building. Stood on dry land, her boots covered with dry dust, not river mud. A hundred feet away an Army brass band, gratefully reunited with their instruments after days of debris removal, were exercising their callused fingers on “Hail to the Chief.” Operation Island was a success. The twenty-four-hour air-lift of earthquake debris had finally produced a plausible island of twenty acres raised six feet above the river’s current flood stage. The last loads consisted not of debris, but of gravel to provide a safe surface to walk on. Army bulldozers were currently grading the surface flat. More material would be added later, but right now it was more important to get Larry’s people into the business of getting spent reactor fuel out of the Auxiliary Building and then out of the earthquake zone.

  A channel had been carved into the island just for this purpose. A little canal, wide and deep enough for a fully laden barge, ran from the edge of Poinsett Island to the end of the Auxiliary Building. There, a barge could be loaded with flasks of spent fuel, then towed to safety downriver. A barge was now being towed into place by a pair of bulldozers. Its rust-streaked hull rode high in the water, ballasted only by the three huge steel flasks into which fuel units could be loaded. Jessica felt good knowing that at least one thing had gone right. With Nature stomping on her every effort to control the river, with the evacuation she’d recommended shattered by a second major quake, this, at least, was something she could point to with pride.

  Her very own island. Built of much more solid material than anything else in the river, Poinsett Island might well last hundreds of years.

  “Looks good, General,” Larry said. “Nice piece of work, here.”

  “Thank you,” Jessica said.

  “I like the shiner, too.”

  Jessica raised a self-conscious hand to her black eye. “My husband thinks it’s kind of dashing,” she said.

  “Makes you look determined as heck.”

  They both glanced up at the sound of a helicopter. They had both grown so used to copters in Army green or Navy blue that civilian white seemed a little startling against the cloudless blue sky.

  “Here comes the press,” Jessica said without enthusiasm.

  “Bet they like the black eye, too,” Larry said.

  Despite the media’s voracious twenty-four-hour-per-day demand for information—or, in the absence of information, baseless rumor, innuendo, and sensation—Jessica had managed to keep the press at arm’s length till now. She had appointed a press officer in Vicksburg to manage the information flow—the information went not just to the media, but to politicians demanding information about their districts—and Jessica had stopped by the briefings at least once per day to add a little personal, calming dimension to the day’s news riot.

  Much of her work with the press consisted of stamping out one terrifying, sensational rumor about Poinsett Landing after another. Stories about giant poisonous radioactive clouds floating over the South, or a river of pure liquid plutonium burning its way down the Mississippi, continued to persist in the face of any data to the contrary. The biggest earthquake in human history isn’t enough for you, Jessica wanted to say, you have to have Chernobyl, too?

  As if that weren’t enough, she had to be very careful with place names. Foreign journalists had demonstrated an understandable difficulty in separating the Mississippi, a river, from the State of Mississippi, a political entity, and the Mississippi Delta, a geographical feature. As if that weren’t confusing enough to information-saturated foreigners, it was also necessary to keep straight the State of Arkansas, the Arkansas River, and the Arkansas Delta, the Missouri River and the State of Missouri, and bear in mind that much of Kansas City was not in the State of Kansas but in Missouri. Compared to that, Operation Island was simple. Operation Island was Jessica’s showpiece. The press were going to stand on the island, prove to themselves that it existed, that the panic they’d been broadcasting was baseless and that the Corps of Engineers could work wonders. Jessica didn’t know about civilian morale, she supposed, but it would sure as hell do her own morale a lot of good.

  The press landed, and were shown to their reserved area by their liaison people. Secret Service, conspicuous in neat summer-weight suits, had stationed themselves around the island. More Secret Service, equipped as snipers, stood atop the Auxiliary Building.

  The sound of helicopter rotors chopped through the air. Big Marine copters appeared over the treeline to the east.

  “Here comes your boss,” Larry said.

  Jessica looked down at her BDUs, brushed dust off the pants legs and the toes of her boots, then made sure her helmet was square on her head. The commander-in-chief was coming to give her work on Poinsett Island the official presidential seal of approval.

  The Army brass band d
id some last-minute tuning, almost inaudible in the helicopter roar. Jessica made a smart turn and marched across the gravel to the place where the presidential helicopter was expected to land.

  Offer condolences before you say anything else, she reminded herself. The poor guy’s lost his wife. Try not to talk every single minute, she told herself as the presidential party circled the island. Let the man get a word in edgewise.

  He’s a politician, she reminded herself. He’ll want to talk.

  The fact was, Larry thought, that a presidential visit lasts only a few minutes. But cleanup is a task that lives forever.

  The afterglow of the presidential visit, the presidential handshake, and the presidential compliments had lasted all of maybe twenty minutes. After that, it was back to policing the power plant. Larry stood on the fuel handling machine and watched Jameel as he rolled the big crane along its tracks. Floodlights gleamed in the murky river water of the fuel holding pond. The crane came to a stop.

  “This is where you wanted us, Mr. Hallock.”

  “Test the turret,” Larry said. “Let’s make sure everything works.” Electric motors whined. Larry, hanging his head over the edge of the platform, saw the turret rotate beneath his feet. Nothing shorted out on the instrument panel.

  “Waall.” Larry grinned. “Let’s find us a fish in this ol’ pond.” He watched as Jameel expertly lowered the pincerlike grab on the end of its double chain. The first snatch came up empty, and Jameel made modest alterations to the turret position and tried again. A light shifted from green to red on the plywood display.

  Jameel’s laugh boomed from beneath the brim of his Chicago Cubs cap. “Got ourselves a fish here, skip.”

  “Better reel her in, then.”

  Electric motors whined. Brown river silt, by now disturbingly radioactive, floated upward as the chain retracted. In the midst of the rising brown mushroom Larry could see the silver glint of a fuel assembly. An older one, fortunately, one that had cooled considerably in the decades it had been sitting in the holding pond. Larry had dropped radiation detectors into the pond to locate areas of radioactive tranquility, and this was one of them.

  With the fuel assembly still held safely below the surface of the borated water, the machine skimmed back on its tracks to the fill bay on the far end of the building. There, after three tries, Jameel managed to drop the fuel assembly into one of the slots on a thick-walled steel transport flask. The flask, when full, would then be passed out of the Auxiliary Building onto a barge, and then carried down the river, with other flasks, to the holding pond of the Waterford Three nuclear plant in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. Waterford Three was a new reactor, had only gone online in 1985, and had reserve space in its holding pond.

  Which would soon be full. But there were other nuclear facilities in the country, other holding ponds. All of Poinsett Landing’s dangerous children would find a home in the end.

  There was a little click as Jameel activated the solenoid that released the fuel assembly, then a whine of electric motors as he raised the grab on its chain.

  “Get us another fish, sir?” he asked.

  “You bet,” Larry said. “I want another dozen before the day is over.” The President sat in his suite at the rear of Air Force One and watched the clouds through his window. The clouds were far below, very white, and danced an interesting pas-de-deux with their shadows on the green land below. The President was returning to Washington from having made his inspection of Poinsett Island, and he was doing what he preferred to do nowadays, which was to stare at unexceptional things in a perfectly tranquil, uninterested way.

  The visit to Poinsett Island had been entirely symbolic, he understood that. He hadn’t a thing to do with rescuing the power station, and his presence made no difference at all to the level of safety at the plant. His appearance was just a way of telling people not to panic. If the President wasn’t scared of the big, bad nuclear plant, the public shouldn’t be, either. His appearance assured the people that things were in hand. It associated the President with a specific way that things were getting better, and therefore led to increased confidence in the country and in the economy, and of course higher approval ratings. It was his first trip out of Washington since the death of the First Lady. That had symbolic value, too. The trip told the nation that he was putting his personal sorrows behind and getting on with the business of the country.

  His visit to Poinsett Island had been both meaningful and meaningless. It was nothing in itself; it was a waste of time and jet fuel and didn’t contribute to the solution of the national crisis one iota, but on a symbolic level it stood for a great deal.

  What the President hadn’t quite worked out yet was what it all meant to him. He was beginning to suspect, however, that it didn’t mean much of anything.

  It was all clouds, floating past his window. Earthquakes, swallowing the world. Clouds and earthquakes, he thought, were almost the same thing. Sort of. Weren’t they?

  There was a knock on his door. “Come in,” he said.

  Stan Burdett’s bespectacled face peered around the door. “Urgent phone call, sir,” he said. “The Secretary of State.”

  The President looked idly at the battery of communications apparatus with which his suite had come equipped. Stan entered the room, picked up a phone handset, pressed some buttons, and handed the handset to the President.

  “Secure line, sir,” he said.

  “Oh, good,” said the President.

  “Mr. President?” The Secretary’s voice buzzed in his ear. “I’ve got a situation here.”

  “Right, Darrell. What can I do for you?”

  “The Chinese have just announced that in three days they will test-fire a number of their medium-range ballistic missiles over the island of Taiwan, to land in the Pacific.”

  “Oh,” the President said. “Oh my.”

  “This is an overt military threat, Mr. President. This is a direct challenge to our resolve and to our overseas commitments. The Chinese are testing us.”

  “Best not flunk, eh?” the President said.

  There was a buzz from another handset. Stan picked it up. “Stan Burdett.” he said. Then he looked at the President and told him the call was from the National Security Advisor.

  The President realized that the Secretary of State had been talking nonstop while his own attention had been directed toward the other phone, and said, “Hold on, there, Darrell, I have another call.” He put the second phone to his other ear and said, “Joe, I’ve just heard. Darrell’s on the other line.”

  “We cannot afford to lose Taiwan, sir,” the National Security Advisor said. “It is too completely integrated with our own economy. They produce countless small electronic components that are incorporated into American brand-names. If Taiwan is lost, a lot of American manufacturing goes with it.” Well, the President thought, his hawkish Secretary of State and his dovish Security Advisor actually agreed with one another. This was a no-brainer. “Better not lose Taiwan, then,” the President said into both phones.

  “Those bastards!” the Secretary was shouting into his other ear. “They’ve been planning this for weeks!

  I’ve got it figured out! Remember just before the big quake, when the Chinese sold a lot of dollars and sent Wall Street into a tumble? They were making a point! They were trying to show that they could fuck with our economy, and that we had better think twice before we tried to interfere with their attempt to intimidate Taiwan!”

  While this speech was going on, the President looked at Stan and said, “Stan, could you arrange a conference call? This is giving me a headache.”

  “We should mobilize the Seventh Fleet!” the Secretary said finally, when they were all on the same secure line. “Send our ships into the area of the Pacific where their missile will land, and dare them to try anything!”

  The Advisor cleared his throat. “I don’t think that would be wise, Mr. President. What if the Chinese actually fire? That would be a shooting war.”

>   “They wouldn’t dare!” shouted the Secretary.

  “If we dare them to shoot, that puts ammunition into the hands of their people who would want to shoot. And our military options are extremely limited in that eventuality. For one thing, our nearest real base is Pearl Harbor. And for another, we won’t be able to fly sufficient sorties off our carriers, not with the shortage of jet fuel that we’re experiencing.”

  “Jet fuel?” the President said in surprise.

  “Mr. President,” the Advisor said, “we’re been flying so many relief supplies into the disaster areas that there’s a worldwide shortage of aviation fuel. The refineries are cranking it out as fast as they can, but our reserves are very low.”

  “What you are saying,” the President said, “is that we have to keep the Chinese off Taiwan, but we can’t fight a war over it because all our planes would fall out of the sky.”

  There was a moment of silence. “That wasn’t quite…” the Advisor began.

  “I think you have summed things up very well, Joe,” the President said. “Now how can we accomplish what we need to do?”

  It was very interesting, the President thought, doing his job without being attached to it. He had decided he would be President when he was nine years old, and he’d worked toward that goal with every conscious moment since, until he’d finally succeeded in his ambition. He used to care so very deeply about every aspect of being the President, of working out every angle of every situation. He had loved it all, the brainstorming, the defeats, and victories. He had given it his all. His ego had been involved. But now his ego was gone. Just… gone. He was doing the same job, making the same decisions, but it just didn’t have much to do with him anymore. This situation would be fascinating, at least if he were capable any longer of being fascinated.

  In the end, he sent two carrier battle groups into the Western Pacific, though was careful to keep them out of the area where the Chinese missile was supposed to land. Both the Secretary and the Advisor seemed reasonably content with the situation.