by John Scalzi
Not inconceivable, even for William Silas Crown, but damned if he could see the value proposition of such an effort.
He had a much nastier feeling about the business, too. A hundred thousand acres of heavy timber didn’t get nuked just for the entertainment value.
“Streeter!”
It wasn’t her shift, he realized a moment later. A clerk would be covering, but he didn’t want a clerk. He wanted Streeter. She was old school. Maybe the oldest. Good people stayed bought.
More reports—old recon and traffic records for Highway 20. Rumor mill stuff off the nets, all three generations. Correlations of arrest records, at least where those were still used.
Had the greenfreaks been building another city a hundred miles south? Cloning Cascadiopolis, maybe. He’d known for a long time that was possible, even reasonable. Trying to capture their tech was like trying to capture minnows. Every now and then you got something, but most slipped away like moonbeams.
But burning out an entire city by air express?
Short of pure, unreasoning hatred, he didn’t see the point. And hatred didn’t pay a lot of bribes in Colorado Springs.
SEQUENCE
TYGRE lets his voice flow outward. Like the morning mist rising off the damp loam to fill the spaces between the massive trees, so his singing fills the space between the tired voices of the people of Cascadiopolis.
It is an old song, almost the oldest most people know. The doxology, unmoored from the trappings of Church and Eucharist in this post-denominational community, still holds great power among the people. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” The tune is simple and old as the modern English that they share. And no one who lives on the shoulders of the Cascades can avoid the infusion of spirituality which seeps with the glacier melt out of the cracked basalt rock faces.
His singing weaves through theirs, carrying a strange contrapuntal rhythm to undergird their threading melody.
It is not the habit of Cascadiopolis to sing a sunrise hymn. It is our habit to rest uneasy during the time of transition, then for most working shifts to lie quiet during the hours of daylight. Some jobs require the sun’s presence—Anna Chao and the other masons would not cut stone in the dark for fear of simple attrition of fingers. The Security Subcommittee likewise never sleeps easily.
But today the people are out, as they have been since his arrival. Today they sing with a strange sense of liberation about them, as if the burden of being free and green has fallen away and they are merely innocents in the forest.
Gloria storms through the group, enraged. She lashes back and forth with an old lacrosse stick made heavy at the tip with tire weights, shouting: “Shut the hell up, you stupid bastards. They can probably hear us down in Estacada. Idiots! Everybody in this place is going to get a goddamned extra work detail if you don’t move it right now.”
The song dies a rippling death. People scurry away, vanishing amid the heavy green leaves, the bright ferns, the deeper shadows, all to their various lairs and dens with a renewed sense of purpose—stung, shamed, regretful.
In moments there is only Tygre with his escorts of Bashar and Anna, facing Gloria’s quivering indignation. A few others loiter close by, either bravely eavesdropping or foolishly slow to remove themselves.
No one from the Citizen’s Executive is present except for the two of them.
“What do you want here?” Gloria demands, brandishing her lacrosse stick.
“What everyone wants,” says Tygre. By daylight he is rendered strangely prosaic. “Food. Shelter. Freedom.”
“You will destroy us.”
Bashar stirs now. He has tired of defending this man who is not his, but no one has asked the right question yet, issued the correct challenge. “We’re not down inside Symmetry now,” he tells Gloria quietly. Anna Chao looks uneasy.
The edge in Gloria’s voice turns on him like a swallowed razor blade. “What do you mean by that, Bashar?”
“I mean you are not interrogating this man.” Bashar lacks the grace to look uncomfortable, but he forces a frown for the sake of diplomacy. He has never liked Gloria. Still, visible glee at her discomfort would suit no one’s purposes. “He was released from your custody.”
“He walked out.”
“And you let him,” Bashar reminds her. “Out here is my domain. Who stays or goes is up to me.” He glances around at the watchers, the listeners, frowns at the woman who seems familiar but isn’t. A question forms on his lips, but Tygre interrupts again.
“I destroy no one,” he tells Gloria. The big man steps from behind the hot line and drops gracefully into a lotus position, bringing his eyes almost level with hers. It is somehow incredibly dignified and horribly patronizing all at once.
Bashar knows this woman has killed for lesser offenses.
“You are walking death,” she breathes. “The Lord of Bones.” She begins to shake, something coming loose inside her.
He reaches an impossibly long hand out and touches her forehead. “You do not know me. No man knows me. But I am here for all of you. Even you who would spear my side and leave me behind cold stone forever.”
Bashar wonders what the hell is happening. Anna Chao looks no more enlightened than he feels.
Gloria slaps Tygre’s hand away. “I’ll stop you, you big buck bastard.” She turns her back and walks. There is a sobbing sound, but it cannot possibly be her.
Looking for the woman he does not know, Bashar finds everyone but Anna Chao has made themselves scarce.
“I’m going to patrol the perimeter,” he announces.
She nods, too overwhelmed to speak.
Tired as he is, Bashar can still walk like a hero into the rising sun, and so he does.
PART of a retrospective report from the Security Subcommittee to the Citizen’s Executive, compiled from notes made during Tygre’s stay in Cascadiopolis:
Subject joined in several work details during his first days in the city. He demonstrated considerable physical skill in aiding the Labor Subcommittee, but also displayed craft skills. He was able to braze the leaky Lyne arms on the Recreation Subcommittee’s number two and three stills. This act alone won him general acclaim.
The unusual social effects seen on his entry to the city were not noted again in those early weeks. Gloria Berry continued to agitate against the subject, until she was advised by the senior directorate of this subcommittee to cease her activities and resume her ordinary work assignments.
In this same period news came of the bombing of Jack City. No verifiable rumors or hard data accompanied the reports, though the social chatter was overwhelming. Subject’s arrival was timed very close to the date of the attack, such that certain members of this subcommittee were concerned about his role as a spotter or spy. Ms. Berry herself cleared that issue, showing that the last data netted from Jack City via smartdust was far later than the subject’s possible departure time, given his known presence in Cascadiopolis. Subject’s general invisibility in the datasphere has never been properly assessed, but Ms. Berry’s analysis presumes that had he been present in Jack City, his data trail would have been available to us, just as it is in our own systems here.
AFTER several weeks in Cascadiopolis, Tygre joins the unarmed combat circle. They meet each day under the aegis of Bashar or one of his lieutenants in the hours after dusk. The goal is to provide a training regimen and support for anyone tasked with security, but also for anyone interested in fitness or defense.
Large as he is, the newcomer draws immediate challenges from several middle-rankers—those who have risen high enough in the standings to feel the need to make a show against him, but not so high as to be secure in their position.
Tygre just laughs. “I do not attack,” he says. “I come to watch you defend.”
With a nod from Bashar, Reynolds rushes Tygre. He steps into the attack with a smoothness unlikely in such a large man. Hands slide slowly, far too slowly to anyone’s view, then Reynolds is over his hip and windmilling into t
he loam.
No one has thrown her in at least two months.
The man turns, arms wide, and smiles at his watchers. “I will not challenge, but I will not be taken down.”
That, of course, is the worst challenge of all.
One by one they step into the circle. The affair quickly assumes the aspects of capoeira more than the mill-and-kill of defense-grade unarmed combat. There is a dance, a measure of beats and moments which passes between Tygre and each opponent in turn. By the time he has thrown his third, the others are softly clapping tempo.
They dance, deadly and beautiful in the moonlit darkness at the edge of an old burn clearing.
Tygre effortlessly works his way through the juniors, then the other middle-rankers who should have stood with Reynolds. After twenty minutes, he has not even broken a sweat. Moments later, it is over except for Bashar himself.
And Anna Chao, who steps into the circle.
She has been alternately stewing with an inexplicable crush on this man and sparring with Gloria Berry, whose anger has grown boundless. During her days she has cut more rock lately than any mason in Cascadiopolis’ brief history. Slab after slab of basalt has come down in recent days as if sliced away by some godlike knife. Frustration in the fracture lines. Unrequited passion amid the dust and splinters.
Now she is covered with gray from another shift on the slopes. Tiny beads of blood glisten black in the pale silver light of the late evening. She is almost a revenant, a ghost from beyond.
The gentle clapping picks up the tempo. These people know they are about to see a battle. Anna is one of the few who can stand against Bashar, and he has been known to defeat a moving truck with his bare hands. Her mason’s muscles and torturer’s ruthlessness combine to make her unstoppable.
Her infatuation with Tygre is a seam painted on her armor with bright lines.
He clasps his hands and bows to her.
She does the same, and begins to circle. Tygre does not respond in kind. Instead he merely stands, arms loose at his side, smiling slightly as she passes behind him. The profound vulnerability of his exposed back combined with his proud, uptilted chin inflames everyone’s passions.
Anna feints from behind. Tygre knows it, he must know it, but he stands still as the Douglas firs as if to take the blow. A headstrike from her could be carelessly fatal.
Now she passes to his left. Frustration makes her quiver. His smile widens slightly, just enough for all to see.
It says: Come to me, woman. Be mine.
She spins toward him in a classic tae kwon do strike, foot flying toward the unprotected side of his knee, fists arcing for a follow up. He steps in so close to her they might have kissed in passing. The knee blow misses completely. Tygre stops her fists with the broad grip of his own hands.
Anna grunts as one of her wrists snaps. Someone among the onlookers keens in sympathetic pain. She just stares at him.
“Impossible,” she says.
“Nothing is impossible,” Tygre replies. He takes her wounded arm in his hands and sets the bone with a nerve-rending scrape. Her breath passes her lips like fire in an oxygen line, but she holds steady. “You should have that seen to,” he tells her, releasing her bad arm to the care of the good.
With a bow that turns to include them all, Tygre walks away.
Bashar has had enough. “You are not finished,” he tells the big man.
Red mist is rising in his vision. Bashar knows what this means. He once killed an entire town when the red was upon him. Cascadiopolis is a place where the red stays far away, exiled from the country of the green. Tygre is a man who soothes some part of his soul that Bashar did not even know was damaged.
But still, to so casually break one of his city’s strongest people—that is a cruelty to which cats could only aspire.
Tygre looks over his shoulder. “Yes, I am.”
All Bashar sees is red mist and an exposed, retreating back. He begins to run, toward Tygre, then past him, into the darkness beyond where night swallows all sins and regret is invisible.
He will have to kill this man, and soon, if something does not change. Bashar hates himself most of all for the realization.
How It Works: The Newcomer’s Guide to Cascadiopolis:
Cascadiopolis is a self-organizing anarchist collective which aspires to the self-actualization of all citizens in accordance with green principles. Welcome to your community.
When decisions must be made outside of the context of the collective consensus, the Citizen’s Executive sits in proxy for the will of the whole. Subcommittees of the Citizen’s Executive in turn manage specialized tasks which might require unusual knowledge, special experience, or organizational efforts beyond community norms.
Any citizen of Cascadiopolis is free to volunteer for the Citizen’s Executive, but the coordinators are appointed by the will of the whole. An election may be called at any time, for any reason, by any citizen, so long as a minimum of ten percent of their fellow citizens agree.
This practice is a compromise between our anarchist principles and the unfortunate realities of existing in a world of governments, corporations and capital-intensive infrastructure. Every citizen’s core aspirations should include a dedication to the day when the Citizen’s Executive will wither away and we are all self-actualized without interference from each other or the city as a whole.
TYGRE arises from his bed of heather and ferns and muslin. He has been sleeping in the higher slopes, where the elk browse. This is well within Cascadiopolis’ perimeter, but far away from most dosses inhabited by his fellow citizens.
Privacy is a limited commodity in the green city. Tygre has his reasons, two of which are yawning themselves awake now in the little hollow he has just left behind.
A little mystery is good for the soul. It does not follow that a lot of mystery is better.
He knows better than to silhouette himself against the skyline, but there is a rock knee he climbs halfway up every day to crouch in a niche and look west into the failing light of dusk, toward the Willamette Valley, the Coastal Mountains, and somewhere beyond, the limitless depths of the Pacific Ocean.
This place has a smell and sense of home beyond anything Tygre has ever experienced. It saddens him that his project here will almost certainly fail. In the short term, at least. But the game is long, lifetimes long if one takes the most enlightened view.
He has come from a very hard school, hidden deep within the folds of the culture since long before this latest round of collapse-and-apocalypse was played out. Heresies within heresies, ancient wisdoms hiding in plain sight.
The school, nameless as the wind, had gone to a great deal of trouble during the last century to make itself and its precepts a cliché. No one would know to look, think to question, or believe what they found.
Tygre stretches in place against the rock. His skin seems to blend in to the lichens, so even his two lovers of the night before don’t glimpse him as they scowl and stare about.
Go on, boys, he thinks. The day is just starting.
Fuddled, they do just that, the two young men gathering their clothes and heading down into the deeper trees, unselfconsciously holding hands. Even now, especially now, that is difficult in the cities.
He watches them with a tinge of sadness. So many never find what life intended for them. Or who.
In time, his thoughts turn to the woman who came late to the singing the night he arrived in this place. Bashar was obviously concerned about her, but she has vanished into the shadows. This is Cascadiopolis. No one carries an ID. Subcutaneous chips are pulsed to ash. It is a reputation economy, assisted by labor traded for value without the intermediation of State authority or capital markets.
That’s what they tell themselves, anyway.
The result is that a woman who doesn’t make trouble, gets along well, and moves quietly among the dripping night-dark trees can vanish in their midst. Tygre is fascinated by this. Those crafts are not unknown, but they are rare. Even
in a place as populated with exceptions as Cascadiopolis.
He has thought since the beginning that either Gloria Berry or the man Bashar would be the one who turned him. Now Tygre is beginning to wonder about this woman-who-isn’t-there.
It would be nice to talk openly with her awhile. They could stand in the center of some chuckling stream, in an open space where passive listeners or ordinary eavesdroppers would be unlikely, and mutter to defeat distant lip-readers. He can imagine the conversation, the ground they might cover, the common interests their divergent agendas ultimately represent.
Collapse will kill everyone, eventually. His school sees that as clearly as the die-hard defenders of capital do; as clearly as the generals in Colorado Springs; as clearly as the muftis in Baghdad and Mecca. The days of denial are long gone, swept away with the collapse of American politics and Wall Street. The days of agreement will never come.
But still, they have common interests: survival, prosperity in some form, clean air and water. Children, even. A future that will arrive no matter what.
Tygre knows full well he will never speak with the woman. She may be the knife in his back, she may be no one at all. It does not matter. He is a culture-bomb in search of a fuse. She is hiding from Bashar and the Security Subcommittee.
Everyone is who they must be.
In time, he climbs down from the rock, gathers up his clothing, and wonders yet again if this will be the day.
OFFERTORY
HAPPINESS Cardoza has come to hate this city with a passion. She is a hunted animal. Not in actuality, of course, for the greenfreaks could have run her down in the first twenty-four hours if they’d been willing to call a general assembly, then have security beat the bounds while most citizens were locked down.
That isn’t the way Cascadiopolis minds its business. Not inside the perimeter. Instead of the ruthless efficiency of corporate security, or the brutal force multipliers of the military, Cascadiopolis wars with weapons of rumor and shadow. The same people who would gut her like a line-caught salmon if they found her outside don’t even look twice at her on the inside.