by John Barnes
Midmorning of the next day, when he was briefed on the situation, Peter Shaunsen, Acting President of the United States, asked three questions: Was anyone interested in being on the rebuilding commission? Could some of the fire lanes be cleared and paved into boulevards or malls to beautify the city? And what was being done to ensure that everyone who was not dead was able to vote?
A Secret Service man who was at the meeting skipped his next shift to walk over to see Chris Manckiewicz at the Washington Advertiser-Gazette. He expected to be fired when he returned, but no one even asked about his absence, so he just picked up his gear and went to his post.
SIXTEEN HOURS LATER. OFF THE CALIFORNIA COAST. ABOUT TWENTY MILES WEST OF THE MOUTH OF THE RUSSIAN RIVER. 2:30 P.M. PST. SATURDAY. NOVEMBER 2.
Ysabel was “not what you could call a natural sailor,” Bambi said, not for the first time, to Mensche. The Pacific is choppy in the fall, but nonetheless, most people got some kind of sea legs after a day on the sea.
Bambi had adjusted to the constant retching noises from the girl hanging over the railing. As they had worked their way north, the waves got a little bigger, heralding a storm forming far up toward Alaska, but the prisoner seemed no worse, or at least she had no more to expel.
“At least she’s not a flight risk right now,” Larry Mensche pointed out. He had turned out to be a natural sailor; she’d taught him to hold a course by the compass, allowing her to get long naps all along the way, so that she was in much better shape than she had expected to be.
“I can see why people like this,” he observed. “But I’m guessing this is perfect weather, right?”
“About as perfect as it gets in the fall, yeah.”
A strange urking noise from the rail made Mensche scuttle forward and slap Ysabel’s back a couple of times, clearing something that hadn’t quite come out right, then wipe her face with a damp cloth, surprisingly gently. When he returned, Bambi said, “Considering how much of a pain in the ass to the whole world she’s been, you’re pretty nice to her.”
“She looks a lot like Debbie,” Mensche said. “So . . . even if it doesn’t make any sense—”
“Naw, it makes all the sense in the world.” Bambi squeezed his arm, and he nodded, appreciating the support. One more point for the man, he can tell the difference between the pretty chick being his buddy and copping a feel. “Hey, chances are that if your daughter needs the help, someone’s taking care of her. Remember that’s half the stories on KP-1—people looking after each other, communities banding together to make it through, all that. She’s probably swinging a shovel on a road crew and getting one big bowl of soup a day, but she’s got somewhere warm to sleep and she’s safe, bet you anything.” It sounded lame to Bambi even as she spoke it; she had to think, If the guards just locked them down and walked away, how long before—
“Yeah,” Mensche said, “but I can’t help worrying. Anyway, so how’d this guy end up with a name like ‘Quattro,’ and how’d your dad decide he was the man for you?”
She shrugged. “Our parents knew each other, very well, actually. When I was a lonely teenage girl, and he was a miserably lonely geek of an engineering student, we corresponded all the time, inventing codes to keep the old man baffled. It was years before I realized how much I’d encouraged the old bastard, since he thought Quattro and me must be hiding our love affair. Quattro was my lifeline; I needed someone to agree with me when I said that all the kids in my high school were stupid and worthless and superficial, especially because I was pretty and popular and a brat and a half, so I didn’t have the loser support network that so many alienated kids do. Dad’s plan for me to fall in love with the dashing older man and unite two Castles and two Castle-movement families, however, foundered on the fact that I’d sooner have married one of my pet llamas at the time.
“Quattro’s not attractive? Nice guy but no spark?”
“Nowadays he’s a damn handsome Howard Hughes type, he’s only seven years older than I am, and I occasionally think about seeing whether any sparks might happen. But back then, give me a break, he was old, not to mention a weird geek, despite being my best friend ever—which wasn’t hard back in those days, all you had to do was like having me for a friend. Hardly anyone else did.
“Anyway, so about his name. Quattro’s parents were chronic jokers. They noticed that a lot of dumbasses didn’t know that Mercedes was a girl’s name and that the car was named after a major investor’s daughter. That particular ignorance led, later on, to people naming their kids P-o-r-s-c-h-e instead of P-o-r-t-i-a, and even lamer baby names like Lexus and Avante, because the same dumbasses thought it was all classy and shit to name their daughter after an expensive car.
“So apparently the Larsens, being even more eccentric than my father, and maybe slightly richer, decided to sarcastically name their children after cars, figuring that all the friends they wanted to keep would get the irony. Hence Quattro. He says it was a compromise between Prius and Thunderbird.
“Anyway, Quattro was raised as one of those heroin-in-vending-machines libertarians, and they gave him his own Castle for his twenty-first birthday. I guess a Ferrari would have been too humdrum. So now he has a fortress outside Jenner that’s damned near as elaborate as Dad’s. You’ll like him, he’s pretty much post-political, good heart, nice guy . . . hunh. I might have to check the spark thing.”
“I really appreciate your taking me along—I know you didn’t have much choice, but I guess I’m glad it’s me. I don’t think the Federal government will last much longer.”
“Dad would agree with you.”
“Yeah, but he’s working on it, I’m just assessing. Anyway, if they dismiss me . . . well. Just a few hundred miles to walk to Coffee Creek and see what happened to Deb, or if I can’t find out there, maybe I can walk over to Reno and see if my ex knows anything. Something to do, you know?”
As they sailed on, clouds gathered to the north, and the sea rose a little every hour. Late that afternoon, the sea breeze started to blow inland. She headed the boat in toward the coast. “How exactly will you find where we’re going?” Mensche asked. “Without GPS I mean? I’m assuming that weird telescope and the windup clock have something to do with it.”
“I don’t really need to know longitude, because we’ve been sticking close to the coast. Latitude is a piece of cake with an accurate clock—like the chronometer from Dad’s collection, here—and this little gadget that you call the weird telescope is used to measure the angle between the sun and the horizon, or where the horizon would be if the water would hold still—that’s what the level on the side here is for. So I’m sailing along a line about five seconds of latitude south of the mouth of the Russian River. That should bring me in someplace along the state beach; once I spot land, I just sail north till I see the mouth of the Russian, and in we go—Quattro’s Castle is just west of Jenner, on the river, so it’ll be the first Castle on our left.”
“It’s weird how fast people got used to ‘Castles’ in America.”
“The Castle movement didn’t start till some of the fringier rich people freaked out that Obama was president, so yeah, it’s less than twenty years. Though really the house I grew up in, before Dad built the big one above the Harbor, was a Castle in all but name. Some rich guys have always built fortified big houses in isolated spots; Dad’s is only noticeable because he decided to build it so close to a big city.”
The weather held, and they enjoyed the last of the sandwiches and apples before they saw the coast, savoring the warmth of the sun and the crispness of the air. The late-fall-afternoon sun was still painting the coast in rich golds and deep blues as they turned north; it was not quite sunset on the river when Mensche said, “So, I guess this is where I say, ‘Castle, ho!’?”
“Not advisable to call me a ho, but otherwise, yeah.”
The man who met them at the pier looked like he was trying to dress as something between the Crocodile Hunter and the Veteran Surfer: khaki safari shirt, baggy knee-l
ength shorts with too many pockets, old-style leather boots. He wore an immense hogleg of a revolver on one hip and a huge belt knife on the other. The effect was somewhat spoiled by his camo strap cap held together with a piece of shoelace where the plastic strap had been, and by a straggly brown-and-gray ponytail that would have been more in keeping with an old-school software developer or a trustafarian venture capitalist.
“Right when I thought you’d be,” Quattro said, smiling. “How was the trip, Bambi?”
“Not too different from the usual except for having to dust off a tiny bit of my celestial navigation skills. This is Special Agent Larry Mensche; and this is Quattro Larsen. And this is our prisoner, Ysabel Roth.”
“Kind of a harsh introduction, isn’t it? Young lady, can we parole you while you’re on the grounds here? Will you give your word and keep it that you won’t run away?”
Ysabel gasped, “Promise me that the world will stop bucking and rolling, and I’ll do whatever you say.”
As they walked up the pathway to the big house, Bambi noted dugouts, trenches, and walls to cover troops moving out from the house; two garden sheds that would make good blockhouses; and a wide-walled patio with a loopholed wall that would allow small artillery to cover the mouth of the Russian River. “You’re a lot less public about your Castle than Dad is about his.”
“Remember the silly commercials when we were kids? He’s a PC, I’m a Mac. His fortress looks like a fortress and it’s all built around its fortress-ness. My fortress just works.”
Larry stopped dead and whistled. “Is that your airfield?”
“Yeah. Cool, hey?”
“I loved classic planes when I was a kid. Pre-jets, I mean. So, yeah, I built models of several of those. But aren’t they falling apart just like everything else?”
“Parts of them are, and avgas is going to be a problem. But the really old birds are less electrical and less plastic than present-day airplanes, and their engines were built for unreliable cruddy fuel. I’ve had that DC-3’s engines up and running on biodiesel, even long before Daybreak, because I thought regular fuel sources might be cut off. And the only thing electrical in that engine is the ignition, and I think I’ll be able to replace the plastic and rubber with wood, glass, and metal. Back before there was vulcanized rubber, when they needed airtightness, they used different kinds of shellacs and oils on silk and linen, and there was the stuff called goldbeater’s fabric that was basically treated gut. And as of last night, when Arcadia made it back here safely, I’ve got a couple materials scientists from Cal Poly, who are very glad to have their families safely out of the chaos, working on what we can make tires out of. I really want it for the planes, but I’m not opposed to the idea that being the re-creator of the pneumatic tire might make me richer than God.”
“I can see the viewpoint,” Larry said. “I don’t suppose, while we’re here—”
Quattro grinned. “Hey, my inner teenage geek always needs other guys’s inner teenage geeks to hang out with. First chance, you and me are doing the extensive hangar tour—starting with that DC-3, and I’ve got about almost all of a Lockheed Electra 10, most of the guts in boxes. That one’s kind of iffy for getting to fly again. I’ll probably never have the shops and tech to refit my P-51 from the Dominican Air Force for post-Daybreak, and I’m not sure how much I can knock together from one fairly complete DC-6, three spare engines, and one DC-6 airframe. The real thing I’ve got my hopes pinned on is that I have—brace yourself . . . ta-da! Most of three Stearman Kaydets, one of them that I actually had flying before Daybreak.”
“I think our inner ten-year-olds are going to be best buddies,” Mensche said, “especially if yours likes to hear mine say, ‘Wow.’ ”
THE NEXT DAY. CAMBRIDGE.MASSACHUSETTS. SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT EST. SUNDAY. NOVEMBER 3.
Building a radio station out of things you could find in the kitchen or the hardware store, plus scrap parts from everywhere, was the sort of interesting problem that MIT students enjoyed; it was a way to take their minds off the mess that surrounded them. Digging through the old paper library was fun in a nostalgic way, the trip out to off-campus storage with ROTC armed guards was a romantic adventure, and when finally they had a voltage controlled oscillator, built around five tubes that had been hand-built into test tubes and pickle jars, up and running, it felt like a major victory.
The crystal receivers for AM radio had been pulling in stories from KP-1 and Blue and Gold for a couple of days, so they had plenty of material for rebroadcast, and a couple of student reporters from the Tufts newspaper had managed to put together a local news report as well. FM radios that hadn’t been turned on or plugged in typically had not attracted many nanoswarm, and as word went from neighbor to neighbor, people dug out batteries and long-unused radios, wiped them with Drano and hydrogen peroxide, and heard the first news in several days.
So a surprising number of people were tuned in at two A.M. on Sunday, listening to the rereading of the day’s news, when the west wind began to rise. The hand-built anemometer at the improvised weather station on top of MacGregor jammed when nanoswarm from its bicycle-generator sensor penetrated the main bearing; two engineering students who climbed up to the roof to wipe and lubricate the anemometer looked southwest and saw the flames in Brookline.
The student announcer at WMBR broadcast the news immediately; within an hour, citizen volunteers were clearing fire lanes along Fisher Avenue and Lee Street, dragging wrecked cars out of the space, wetting down storefronts with water from the reservoirs, dousing the sparks that crossed the line, and helping fleeing residents find shelter.
Dawn came and the volunteers worked on in greater and greater numbers; at midmorning it began to snow, and the fire retreated.
By noon, the fire lanes were secure. Most people drifted away, but many lingered because of a rumor that they might all be paid, in food, or perhaps in a bus ride to a better location, or in an allocation of an abandoned house that had a woodstove—with something, at least, for their hours spent saving the city, sweating and hungry in the icy dark. Someone said that since the radio station at MIT had spread the word, probably the people who would pay them were there, and although most people didn’t want to walk that far, a few hundred made the trip, all the way across Harvard Bridge, marching in the thick snow, gaining determination to demand payment as they went.
The fighting may have started with nervous or overzealous ROTC guards, or perhaps the crowd, by the time it got there at around four in the afternoon, was simply too far gone into its desire to smash something. But by the time the so-called Battle of MIT was done, a dozen buildings were wrecked, much of the library had been carried off for fuel or burned in bonfires, and the radio station was off the air for good. When the National Guard arrived in the early hours of Monday morning, the campus was deserted, and there wasn’t much to do except catalog the damage.
LATER THAT EVENING. WASHINGTON. DC. PITTSBURGH. PENNSYLVANIA. AND MOST OF THE UNITED STATES. 7:00 P.M. EST. SUNDAY. NOVEMBER 3.
Chris Manckiewicz’s introduction for the radio presidential debate stressed that despite everything, voting would still take place on Tuesday, and added, “Because our Republic is stronger even than this.” He went on to explain Vote Where You Are, the system Shaunsen had worked out for people to vote on a simple honor system: find any State, Federal, or local official on election day, no matter where you were, give them your address and as many preferences as you could, and the votes would be passed up the chain, exchanged around among the states, until every vote came home to its proper roost.
“It’s the only thing about him that doesn’t make me gnash my teeth. It’s sort of weirdly magnificent,” Lenny said. “Shaunsen is a corrupt old idiot, but he’s so much a politician that he can’t imagine canceling an election. Heroic lack of imagination.”
“Shh,” Heather said, adjusting to hold him closer. “Shut up so I can hear the history getting made.”
His good hand ran gently down her flank, and she
thought, Well, there’s something even more distracting. But she focused her attention and waited to hear the two candidates, sharing a moment with the rest of the country.
KP-1’s Tech Tips had broadcast directions on making workable crystal radios using Christmas LED bulbs as the crystal, which allowed you to add amplifying power from a battery, so it was hoped that a majority of surviving Americans would find a way to hear this broadcast; after all, it wasn’t as if there was a lot of competing entertainment.
Norcross spoke first, and surprised them by not mentioning religious faith at all; he simply said that he wanted the job of putting the country back on its feet, and he knew what a big job it would be.
Shaunsen repeated his long list of something for everyone, suggested that Norcross was apt to impose religious tyranny, and gay-ron-teed! that everything would be back to normal in two years; he reminded everyone to simply hand whatever public official they could find on election day, “Your name, your address, and the big bold words STRAIGHT DEMOCRAT!”
Manckiewicz asked about several subjects; the answer from Shaunsen was always a list of where they were spending money, and “Be sure to vote STRAIGHT DEMOCRAT!” After the third such conclusion, Lenny muttered, “Wonder how many gay Democrat votes he’s losing?”
“About like everyone else, straight, gay, male, female, black, white. Everyone with a brain who hears him,” Heather said.
