by John Barnes
“You read a lot of stuff into things,” Hayley said. “My turn for dishes, and my vote is we don’t change anything we’re doing.” She stood and gathered plates.
Man, I miss Rusty. I’d’ve made her see sense and she’d’ve made them see it, I just know that. “Here’s what I was thinking. I think some of us should go down to that area to establish a new paper there. One linked to the Advertiser-Gazette, of course, and sharing stories, but I think they’ve just made Columbus, Georgia, an important city—”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s where Fort Benning is,” Chris said, trying not to think you idiot loudly enough to be heard, “and we need a bureau there, and that bureau should be self-supporting—meaning it puts out its own paper. So I was wondering if anyone wanted to volunteer?”
The stares at him were blank. “We’re barely weeks old, Chris,” Don Parmenter said. “We’re just getting people to read papers again. That just sounds to me like spreading ourselves too thin.”
Okay, Plan B. “What if I were to turn my interest in the paper over to you all—we can figure out who gets what shares—and keep maybe five percent, not enough for control or to matter much, and then go set up my own paper down in Georgia? With some kind of guarantee that you’d pay me for any stories I sent you, that you used, and I could buy content from you? ”
“I think you’re re-inventing the AP.”
“Well, it’s gone, and we’re a newspaper. Shortly to be two newspapers, with more to follow. We need an AP. It makes some sense, you know?”
“It does,” George conceded. “What worries me is that you’ll get a hundred miles south, realize how crazy you were, and come home and want your paper back.”
“Word of honor, I won’t do that. If I get a major attack of regret, I’m going to want to keep moving toward Georgia, anyway, because I’m sure not going to want to come back here and face you guys. You’re not the nice types who would give me my newspaper back and never say anything about it, you know?”
“You bet we’re not.”
That night’s production work was combined with a sort of farewell party. Chris had more to drink than he intended and gently fended off a couple of friendly offers from staffers who thought they might not mind a good-bye tumble with the ex-boss. He shook Parwin’s hand, and they drafted documents that everyone witnessed, and the next morning, for the first and only time, he was privileged to be the last one up; most of them were already out on assignment by the time he arose.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. REAGAN NATIONAL AIRPORT. WASHINGTON. DC. 4:30 P.M. EST. THURSDAY. NOVEMBER 7.
Because she was with Lenny, Heather was able to hook a ride on a biohazard Hummer to Reagan National, and they had more time to go through the antiseptic scrubs and degaussing, and for Lenny and the technicians to figure out how they could kill any nanoswarm that might be on him without destroying internal electronics that kept him alive. Eventually Heather claimed a bench inside the transport, next to where Lenny tied down his wheelchair, and they napped and cuddled, holding hands and occasionally muttering “I love you,” or “I’m glad you’re here” at each other.
“Wake up, sleepyheads.”
Heather sat up; Arnie and Allie were there, with Graham, and Sherry, who was practically beaming. “Hey, you’re not getting rid of me that easily. You’re who I want to be when I grow up.”
“Oh, god, I don’t even know who I’m going to be when I grow up. So did they get all the volunteers and assistants onto the planes?”
“Yep,” Graham said. “And all the families for everyone. Tight squeeze, but we’re all making it. It’ll probably smell way too much like us by the time the flight is done, but we’ll all be there, and apparently the commanding general at Benning, Norm McIntyre, is some kind of old buddies with Cameron and going out of his way to make us welcome.”
Lenny stretched and yawned, then put his hand on Heather’s arm. “To tell you the truth, I’m probably a coward or something, but I’ll be just as glad to get away from DC. It does feel like living in a bull’s-eye, and I’m not convinced the serious rioting is over with.”
“Not to mention Benning has occasional electricity and better access to hot water,” Allie said. “And compared to DC, a lot less freezing our asses off this winter.”
They set their newly decontaminated gear down and packed in close, making room for the many other little knots and balls of coworkers, families, and whatever other ways people had assorted themselves for the trip.
Flying through the early night, they all took turns at looking out the window to see America by night, from the air, with only candle, bonfire, and lamp light. Probably fewer than a thousand people had ever seen such a thing; and very likely, not many more would, perhaps ever.
PART 3
ONE HUNDRED DAYS
BLASTULA
Every new life begins with division: the fertilized cell splits, and the split parts split, and the split parts split again, until there is a ball of identical cells, the blastula. In the beginning there is division.
The new world grew and divided and divided again. In the next two weeks, the electric power system collapsed completely as the nanoswarm destroyed components for the control systems; biotes ate insulation and shelter; and wrecked transportation, bandits, and riots kept anyone from reaching substations and power lines. As late as November 15th, perhaps one in twelve homes had electricity; nearly everyone listened to President Norcross’s Thanksgiving prayer broadcast on an unpowered crystal set, or using carefully hoarded batteries, by candle or lamplight.
By the last week in November, Detroit, Louisville, Buffalo, Kansas City, Jacksonville, Chattanooga, and Sacramento had all suffered catastrophic fires like the first ones in St. Paul, Boston, and Chicago, spreading for many blocks, with firefighters powerless. No one knew how many died; no one looked for bodies in the rubble.
On November 11th, nanoswarm infected the nuclear aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan; by November 14th it was clear that even whole-crew round-the-clock efforts could not eradicate them. On November 17th, 18th, and 19th the ship made one last fast pass northward along the California coast. The helicopters judged to be still safe flew back and forth, off-loading crew onto any wide, flat spot near enough to a town; when the helicopters went bad, the last few hundred of the crew departed in boats. Finally a skeleton crew took her northward, hoping to keep her running long enough to scram her reactors and scuttle her in the Queen Charlotte Trench, eventually to be run over and buried several miles deep by North America itself. If the reactors did not breach in the next few decades, the ship would be under a hundred feet of bottom mud before any radioactive materials leaked. Nobody had heard from Ronald Reagan since; probably there wasn’t a working radio on board, but they had hoped that the captain and residual crew would have been able to reach shore in a small boat by now and find an operating ham or other way to call in.
The Sixth Fleet, after losing two support ships and about forty planes to airborne nanoswarm, had made the risky run through Gibraltar, and joined the Second Fleet, out in the Atlantic. The Navy ships didn’t have much of anywhere to hide; near the American Atlantic coast, prevailing winds carried nanoswarm and biotes eastward, and the Gulf Stream flowed out of extremely human-and-technology-infested waters.
To conserve precious oil, the nuclear ships towed the others, as much as possible. They spent several days on the Grand Banks because the fishing was good, and there were many thousands of mouths to feed, but those waters are rough in November, and they had to flee southward at the first signs of storms.
Satellite and cautious air reconnaissance revealed all but complete collapse in Africa, without even apparent local order; India appeared to be holding together with a couple of sizable rebellions under control and immense planting efforts under way. South America was in flux, with some local military commanders carving out chunks of territory and threatening to seize capitals, but the analysts thought it would stabilize into something like its old map, with a fe
w cities and provinces either becoming independent or switching nations; Europe was breaking down in something that looked distressingly like warlordism, and famine was worst there. Streams of refugees poured up the Rhine Valley and across the German plain from the Low Countries; without power machinery for the pumps, the sea was creeping in, and everyone knew that in a bad storm, there would be no rescues. Russia was collapsing into the hands of dozens of petty kings, each with his own transmitter, manifesto, and mission to save the world, but at least it looked like a fair amount of winter wheat was being planted; if roads to the west, especially rail lines, were re-opened soon enough, next year might be better.
After a rocky few weeks, central Mexico was regaining control of the rest of the country, and the Mexican government was in regular touch with Washington and Ottawa; there was talk of a unified continental policy, and of joint action to stabilize the Caribbean, where drug lords, local military, religious cults, criminal gangs, and American filibusteros were re-creating the Pirate’s Main of four hundred years before.
The American Midwest and East were freezing and starving; surely not all of the reports of cannibalism were true, but it seemed likely before spring. Death tolls from exposure and hunger-related diseases were high but nothing like those in Asia or Europe. The South was under “soft martial law”—local military bases providing government services—and doing fairly well, with little chafing at the lost rights so far. Mountain West city and county governments seemed to be holding together.
More than sixty different theocracies had been proclaimed in California alone, which was turning into another general pool of anarchy.
For Federal, State, and local governments, the libertarian/survivalist Castles were rapidly becoming more of an asset than a liability. President Norcross turned back a request from Harrison Castro and forty other freeholders to grant them an official status, but he did permit Federal agencies to acknowledge Castles both as locations and as local governments in his reports. “Just a matter of reality,” he assured his staff. “Yes, we’ll need to remind them that they’re large local businesses, not feudal fiefs, sometime. But for right now, most of ’em do what we need ’em to do, so don’t let’s pick any fights we can’t afford.”
The divisions went on, everything everywhere splitting into more pieces; and as the pieces began to make their own way in the world, they began to take different pathways.
Differentiation is the way a blastula becomes, eventually, a whole new person in its own right; no longer a blob, its cells become bone and muscle, hair and blood, and then arm bone and leg muscle, eyebrows and scalp hair, a pumping heart, a seeing eye; and three weeks after Daybreak, differentiation was proceeding.
CASTLE LARSEN. (JENNER. CALIFORNIA.) 11:00 A.M. PST. WEDNESDAY. NOVEMBER 27.
“Maybe we should stop for today and start again on Friday,” Larry Mensche said, “I’d still like to ask about a few things, but you’ve already had two seizures and you look exhausted.” Funny thing, he thought, with this one, you don’t do tough-cop nice-cop, you do “the nice cop who is pleased” and “the nice cop who is disappointed.” Going by what I’m seeing of her personality here and now, this little girl shouldn’t have been able to be a shoplifter, let alone a terrorist—she was only ever any kind of rebel because she didn’t want to disappoint her parents. While he waited for her answer, he filled a glass with cold water from the pitcher and handed it to her.
She drank gratefully. “Why not tomorrow?”
“It’s Thanksgiving,” he said, “and I guess Quattro Larsen has sort of a big day planned. He’s—”
Ysabel’s face crumpled and she grabbed for a fresh handkerchief from the pile beside her.
He sat beside her on the couch and asked, “Missing your family?”
“Yeah. Used to be Dad and Mom called from wherever in the world they were, no matter the cost or the inconvenience. They never had anything to talk with me about… or we’d have a really brief cold awkward conversation… or we’d argue. But it was something that happened every Christmas and Thanksgiving. But they were in backcountry Tanzania, so…” she seemed to grope for some conclusion, and settled on, “now they can’t call.”
She wiped her eyes furiously, adding, “And considering I’ve just helped a few hundred million people starve to death, I have a lot of fucking nerve getting upset about having my Thanksgiving spoiled.”
“You feel what you feel.”
“Thank you. You’re very nice to me.”
“You know things I want to know, Ysabel. And you tell me. I stay nice because you stay cooperative.”
She looked up at him with a sadly twisted little smile. “So if I ever stop talking, you’re going to get out your Taser?”
“No,” he said, “and Bambi wouldn’t either. We’d just turn you over to someone else who would.”
“That’s how things work, really, isn’t it? Daybreak used me to get you, you’ll use me to get Daybreak.”
“Would you like food, or do you just want a nap?”
“I feel like a piece of wrung-out shit, but seizures make me hungry, I guess they burn a lot of energy. If there’s any of that bread left from breakfast? With maybe some of the veggie butter? The sugar rush’ll probably knock me out.”
Mensche left her in her room, with the outside lock thrown; Larsen had put bars on the windows, but Mensche’d never seen anyone who was less of an escape risk. He found Bambi and Quattro sitting in the kitchen, drinking some of “the possibly last stash of coffee for a hundred miles,” as Quattro called it, and going over a map, trying to figure out whether the best way east would be to sail to Tehuantepec and try to cross Mexico there; walk on I-70; or wait for one of the steam trains that the railroad nuts were working on getting running.
“Of all the precious resources,” Bambi said, “who’d’ve thought our railroad nuts would be so invaluable? If we can just get the coal to them, we have at least a hundred good, operable steam locomotives, if we can believe KP-1.”
“Now that the mainstream media is basically one radio station,” Quattro said. “and we don’t have any way to check up on them, everyone believes them again.”
Mensche sliced three thick pieces of Quattro’s whole-grain concrete, which he privately thought of as “political-extremist bread”—only right-wing survivalists and left-wing granolas could possibly pretend it tasted good. He smeared it with veggie butter, more political-extremist food. “Roth’s pretty wiped. The questions that Arnie Yang has been sending all seem to hit her like electric shocks, but after she comes out of the seizure, she spills her guts. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s some kind of genius.”
“At DoF, we called him the House Genius,” Bambi Castro said. “Need someone to watch your back while you set it down for her?”
“I’m more likely to be attacked by a dishrag. This little chick is beaten.”
He lunged for the bolt, dropping the tray, and flung the door open before he was even conscious of hearing the strange, throttled noise. She had tied one corner of her sheet around the motor of the ceiling fan; she held the other end over her head, fighting the loop she had tied as if it were trying to fasten itself around her neck. Though her eyes bulged from her deep red face, only her own straining muscles constricted her throat; she held the sheet back from herself as if it were an anaconda trying to put a loop around her neck.
Mensche couldn’t break her grip, but he could hold the loop away from her head. What the hell can it be like inside her head? He remembered something Arnie had suggested. “Ysabel, your parents love you very much, and they want to see you again someday.”
Her face seemed to fall into itself like a ball of burning newspaper, she let go of the sheet and fell to the floor; a great gasp of air howled painfully into her throat. Mensche sat down next to her on the floor and pulled her over so that she could hang on to him; Bambi burst in, but Mensche just shook his head and gestured shhh.
Bambi whispered, “Hey, your daughter?”
“Yeah?”
“She had a great dad, you know.”
“Thanks.” Mensche didn’t see any reason to explain about the endless fights and screaming when Deb was a teenager, about being played against Deb’s mother into hapless veering between excessive bribes and excessive punishment, about believing Deb when she lied and doubting her when she needed his belief, about any of those awful years of too much hope mixed with too little a decade ago. Any damn idiot can look like a good dad if he only has to deal with one kind of trouble and his whole life isn’t at stake.
ONE DAY LATER. ANTONITO. COLORADO. 7:15 P.M. MST. THANKSGIVING DAY. NOVEMBER 28.
Thanksgiving Day was unseasonably warm. Jason got a day’s work from the town on the north approach crew, taking a long walk up US 285 to help bring refugees in; whenever the weather lifted enough, desperate refugees from the Front Range would leave their improvised shelter and start trickling into Antonito along 285 again, some thrown out, some because walking south had become a habit after they’d escaped the linear deathtrap of the I-25 corridor from the Springs to Fort Collins.
They had ridden out in Doc Bashore’s wagon and set up base six miles north of town at dawn. After that it had been a long day of taking his turn walking out, sometimes as much as two miles, to meet the little clusters of refugees, figuring out their immediate needs, and then flagging for a nurse, or for Doc and the wagon, or just walking them back in.
“It was great of Doc to come all the way out on 17 and give us all a ride in. That wagon’s no faster than walking, but if we stay here, I want to get one, and the horse to pull it,” Jason said. “I love the part where the horse does all the work.”
“Till you get home. Doc’s prolly still rubbing that horse down. He says you gotta always take care of the horse before you take care of yourself. How come you had to end up way over on 17?”