Directive 51

by John Barnes

“Depends on whether you think of canned tuna, tomatoes, and chicken soup as capital.”

  Marx laughed. “Guess it does. What I was thinking about, though, is this. This town needs a paper. I need work. You need to get a paper out there. That sounds like a good bet to me. So instead of worrying about the bill, how about, you put it together, I print it, and I’m say forty-percent owner of the paper?”

  “Deal.” I’ d’ve given him forty-nine if he asked.

  “You happen to have a place you’re staying?”

  “Not yet, I’m here with what I walked into town with.”

  Marx grinned at him. “My mother owns this building. There’s an office next door that could make a good newspaper office, I guess, get a few desks in there, and we have at least four up in storage, you and me could move them down there. And there’s a little one-bedroom apartment up there that might work for a man who doesn’t have too much, you know, specially since they got city water coming back on in a week or two they think, and water’s included. Got a old woodstove we can drag up there, you could even heat a couple big pots of water on it and have yourself a bath now and then.”

  “Mr. Marx—”

  “Call me Abel.”

  “Abel, then. And I’m Chris. Uh, what field were you in before Daybreak? I mean, you said you liked printing because your father and grandfather were printers, you didn’t say you were one before now, so, I was just wondering—”

  Abel grinned at him. “Up till Halloween, I was a car salesman. Best in the city, four years running.”

  They both laughed. “All right,” Chris said. “No sense fighting it when I can see how it’s going to go. How much was your mom thinking of asking for rent on that office space plus that apartment?”

  “Well, now, the apartment will be furnished—”

  “Abel, how much?”

  “Well, cash or canned goods, might be more than you can carry, but if Mom could invest in your paper . . . say, for the office and the living space, both furnished . . . twelve percent?”

  “Hmm. That would give you controlling interest.”

  “If you think I can control my Moms, you got some learning to do.”

  “Nonetheless, what if I offered her six percent? Six percent of what is going to be the most influential paper in America?”

  “Who reads newspapers anymore? And it ain’t like America is really, you know, America, anymore, not as we knew it, you know . . .”

  “But your descendants will be major stakeholders in the country’s next big media empire.”

  “Maybe you have a point. I’d come down to eleven. But you know, we’re fronting everything but the content, and yeah, we need content, but—”

  “Now here’s a thought. Maybe I could come up to seven for this. Every paper in the world makes most of its money on advertising, you know. And I can write decent ad copy”—Chris hoped that was true, not having tried yet—“but I don’t know about selling ads to local businesses, that takes a salesman and someone who knows local people—”

  “And in between printing, you think . . . hmm. What’s a normal commission on an ad?”

  “Ten on the little ones, twenty on the quarter page or bigger—”

  “Call it fifteen and thirty and Mom’s share could go down to nine—I think I could talk her into that.”

  “So fifty-one, forty, and nine, and you get fifteen and thirty in commissions?”

  Marx nodded.

  “Done,” Chris said, sticking his hand out.

  After a meal of canned tuna and beans, smeared onto fresh homemade bread, they began shifting the furniture around, as Abel filled Chris in on what his improvised press could and couldn’t do (actually I bet eventually it can do whatever he really wants it to, Chris thought) and Chris explained the news business (based on my two months in print journalism—but then, I’ve at least written most of a paper, and he hasn’t printed one yet. We’ll make it work. And I’m gonna have hot baths!)

  ONE DAY LATER. CASTLE LARSEN. (JENNER. CALIFORNIA. ) 3:18 P.M. PST. TUESDAY. DECEMBER 10.

  Bambi had been trying the old tack of deliberately getting off the topic and talking about something the subject liked to talk about, to distract the subject with her own interests, get her to really enjoy talking and having the interrogator’s attention, and then see what she might blurt out.

  Ysabel seemed to have the same problem as she’d had on the day of her capture; consciously she wanted to spill everything, but whenever she tried, her nervous system went into spasm. So Bambi had steered Ysabel into talking about the year her parents had worked with creating community-based businesses in a fishing village in Chile. It sounded kind of stupid to Bambi—her parents had put a year of their lives into trying to organize small, occasionally profitable fishing operations, where the boat owner made all the decisions and made all the money, into something where many people participated in the decision and making money was only one consideration. “It doesn’t sound like all that voting and all those meetings would produce much in the way of profits, or fish,” Bambi said, trying to get Ysabel lathered up about defending it.

  Ysabel surprised her and laughed. “I was a rebellious fourteen-year-old at the time and I said that to my mother constantly. She about had a fit. For her the fishing business wasn’t about business and wasn’t about fishing, it was . . .”

  She froze.

  Oh, crap, how could this trigger a seizure? I didn’t even say the word—

  But Ysabel’s tense muscles and mad stare were not a seizure, or at least not yet. She swallowed hard and barked, “Daybreak. Daybreak! Fucking Daybreak. Daybreak was just like that. Daybreak didn’t care what happened to people, it just wanted to be right, like my damn stupid parents who were so busy being right—like the fishing! The fishing village . . . you know what Daybreak destroyed in that village, you know what’s gone now?”

  Well, at least it’s not a seizure, but I have no idea what she’s so worked up about. “Uh, I guess you’ll have to tell me—”

  “Three things—radio, outboard motors, and nylon fishing nets! No weather forecasts to keep them off the sea when bad crap is blowing in, and no way for a boat that hits a big school to help anyone else find it! And without a motor, a fishing boat spends hours and hours just getting in and out of harbor—so they get less hours to fish! And nets that rot—that’s a day or two every week just to keep pulling out the rotten strings and putting in fresh hemp or jute! Probably a lot of villages don’t even have anyone who knows how to make a net by hand anymore! Oh, Christ, what did Daybreak do? What was I thinking?”

  Bambi saw a couple of small muscle twitches, but it looked like Ysabel was going to remain conscious. “Tell me more.”

  “Don’t you get it? More fishermen drown in storms, more days with no fish because they don’t find a school, if the wind’s not right it could be three hours to get out in the morning and three hours to get in at night and no fishing in all that time, and maybe a third of their days on shore hand-fixing a hemp net that rots, because their nylon one fell apart—that’s if anyone even remembers how to make the hemp net. More work for less fish! They’re gonna starve, Bambi, that’s what me and Daybreak did to them, those fishermen are gonna starve!”

  Ysabel’s sobs were terrible, wracking sounds, as if she were being punched in the gut on each one, but, Bambi thought, as she rubbed the girl’s back, there was something strangely healthy there, like the bursting of a boil.

  After many long minutes, not looking up, Ysabel said, “When Daybreak had my head, I couldn’t see that that was what it was about.”

  “About what?” Bambi asked.

  “Daybreak was about killing the fishermen. It wasn’t an accident at all, it was deliberate. Daybreak was about killing the fishermen and their families to punish them for liking what they liked and wanting what they wanted. I wanted to force those fucking fisherman bastards to stop having time to sit around and watch old American soap operas and drink German beer, like they wanted to, and not to send
their kids to school to become all engineers and lawyers and shit, because that was like a plaztatic life, and they were supposed to reject it and hate it, like I did. It was their, like, job, they were peasants, they owed it to me to be peasants, all close to the Earth and in harmony and everything, not . . . not . . . I needed them to be real.”

  Ysabel’s fists were sunk deep and knotted in the couch cushions. She was breathing shallowly and fast, pupils dilated, and then she sagged, all at once. She sat with her head down in her hands. After a few seconds’ pause, she said, “Right there, did you hear that, I slid right over into being all Daybreak again. It just grabbed me. Now, here with you, isolated from it, I came right out of it, but back when I had Internet, I’d’ve plugged in, and the Daybreak newsfeed would’ve fed me like fifty stories that hit me right where I most hated the Big System, and all my friends would’ve been there yelling, yeah, that rocks, and I’d’ve been moving deeper into it, thinking more about how the Big System had to come down and death to the plaztatic people, and telling myself it was because I loved the peasants so much. See? That’s what hits me when I have the seizures, only it hits so hard and fast I can’t tell you about it . . . but I guess I just did.”

  She looked drained and exhausted, and Bambi said, “I should write this up and send it to Arnie Yang; are you okay?”

  “Okay? Yeah. Maybe for the first time in a few years. I gotta sleep, though, I really do.”

  Bambi left Roth tucked in, with a nurse/guard from town watching, and went to talk things over with Larry Mensche. She was going to miss the FBI agent—he’d be headed north to the Coffee Creek prison, to try to find his daughter, Debbie, and make sure that she was all right. That was his real mission, as far as Bambi, Larry, and Quattro were concerned; officially, he’d be gathering intel about the Castles between here and Canada, how they actually leaned politically, how much they had taken over their regions, whether they were still just well-prepared rich nuts, or a base for the temporary national government to organize from, or a nascent enemy to be suppressed.

  Between his official and his unofficial duties, she wanted his thoughts about Ysabel. He’d said he loved backpacking in the old days because it gave him time to think things over; perhaps a week of walking north would give him time enough to see into this riddle, and maybe he’d find a way to send her the answer.

  THE NEXT MORNING. FORT BENNING. GEORGIA. (DRET COMPOUND. ) 8:09 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBE R 11.

  Bambi’s report on Roth’s interrogation was on Heather’s desk when she came in. Oh, man, this is going to be another report where Roth’s interrogation turns up results not consistent with anything except a system artifact, Cam isn’t going to like that, he’s going to think Bambi’s leading her into that instead of pursuing the information about the enemy—trying to head off trouble, she scribbled a note that it looked like even a medium-high-level member of the conspiracy like Roth must have been carefully kept away from any knowledge about who she was actually working for.

  Yeah, that ought to keep Cam off her case; she didn’t need another fight with him. Cam said he talked to Graham daily, so I bet he’s getting an earful. Wish I could be there, but I understand, if Cam’s afraid that there will be a nuclear attack again, he’s got to keep the President hidden.

  She tossed her hand-scribbled memo into the out basket, grimacing at her childish scrawl. It still beat the manual typewriter they’d assigned her, despite the bottle of Lock-Ease she’d applied to the ancient contraption.

  Okay, what else have I not done in weeks? Maybe on my calendar—

  Well, there. She hadn’t torn off a calendar page; she had never really used a paper calendar before Daybreak, but when she and Lenny had started talking about having a child, she’d tried to start tracking her cycle. And then they’d realized that from a fertility standpoint, there’s no benefit to knowing the fertile days if you have sex every day anyway, so—

  Hold it.

  The calendar was still reading November 11, the date she’d taken it from its box, here in her new office, and hung it. She tore back through the pages to make sure—

  Hunh. Her heart leaped up.

  They hadn’t had long to try, but she and Lenny had really tried. (The memories made her smile so much.) And since her teen years, Heather had always gotten her period right on time, bang, set your watch by it. But in the frantic environment of DRET, with so much going on all the time, she’d lost track. She’d been overdue by ten days on the day Lenny died . . . and I’m about to be overdue for the next one.

  She thought about running to the infirmary but wasn’t sure whether you were allowed to run in . . . “my condition.”

  She walked, briskly, to the infirmary.

  ABOUT AN HOUR LATER . FORT BENNING. GEORGIA. 9:45 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 11.

  The first non-medical person to hear the news, besides Heather, was Sherry, which just seemed right; this particular infirmary liked her as a gofer, so she was frequently their runner and gradually picking up nursing, record keeping, and all the other things that might make her useful, to add to her old social-work skills. When Heather saw her rocketing by the door, she just stopped her and told her.

  Sherry grinned. “Wow. And you didn’t know?”

  “I didn’t get morning sickness, but I now know that a lot of people don’t. And I’m a big girl, as you may have noticed; Lenny was small because of his condition but he said his whole family was short and skinny, so it’s probably not a real big baby, and even if it is, there’s plenty of room anyway. I might not even start to show for another few weeks, the doctor says. But he had enough working gadgets to be able to tell me, yep, I’ve got a healthy little person inside me.”

  The younger woman hugged her. “Heather, I know for you it’s probably a pain in the ass—”

  “Or somewhere around there. Eventually.”

  “Pbbt. You are walking proof that the world is going to go on, and the human race isn’t beat yet, and that’s how I’m going to look at it. Listen, I’ve been seeing a nice guy named Everett, he’s a civilian contractor guy, used to be part of base security, and him and me just got quarters together—we were thinking of throwing a housewarming—can we throw you a little party? Just something to celebrate, because there’s something to celebrate? Here it is two weeks before Christmas; why don’t we let a little happiness into the world? Say yes or I’ll keep talking till you do.”

  Heather said yes. On the way back to her office, she noticed that Benning was kind of pretty, this time of year, when the sun was shining.

  TWO DAYS LATER . COLUMBUS. GEORGIA. 7:15 P.M. EST. FRIDAY. DECEMBE R 13.

  “Car bearings work okay with corn oil, especially if you never go faster’n twenty,” the driver explained, “and it turned out that the historical-re-creation guys had a guy who knew wheelwrighting. So he put the wheels on this old school bus—’scuse me—” He reached up with the long pole and lifted the grapple off the tow rope; momentum carried the old school bus forward, and he set the grapple down on the next eastbound cable. “And took off the cab roof so I could use this here pole, and the only steering we need to do is to not hit the posts and not hit the other buggies. And the old thing rolls along like a kid’s quacky duck.”

  Heather watched idly as the operator kept the cable buggy moving; he’d become good at a craft that hadn’t existed two months ago and wouldn’t have existed if an engineer who volunteered at a museum hadn’t happened to be the main restorer on an old steam thresher, and realized it had an engine big enough to drive the cable system. Allie and Arnie were chattering away, talking and pointing at things, in the seat behind her; at least it looked like they were happy with each other again. Could be the problem was all in Arnie’s mind.

  I feel pretty good myself. Their first trip out of the DRET compound since getting here, and it was for a party.

  The party itself was pleasantly, predictably dull; everyone congratulated Heather and looked for a nice way to say that it was a shame Lenny couldn’
t be here for this. She was asked if she was hoping to have a boy or a girl (“Yes,” she would say, “it would be so much easier than having a monkey or a platypus”); if she had thought about names (“Leonardo if it’s a boy—that was Lenny’s full name—and Riley if it’s a girl—that was my mother’s name”), and if she felt well (“Strong as a moose, let’s not start pretending I’m a blushing flower now!”)

  Most of the conversation, though, was about the upcoming move to Athens. The state of Georgia was donating the new TNG District, and the campus of the University of Georgia would be the capital buildings for the foreseeable future. The move was already under way now that the Corps of Engineers, under the hasty tutelage of Georgia’s dozens of old railroad buffs, had pieced together a viable pathway for the three operating steam locomotives that they’d managed to find. Conveniently, the line that hauled coal to the U of Georgia power plant was still in business, so there would be access directly to the campus/government buildings.

  They were using the lines through Atlanta, because they needed only minor repairs for the moment. Given that Atlanta might not be re-inhabited for generations, the Corps was planning to rehab the connection from Bishop to Madison, because rail traffic between Benning and Athens, a major military base and the new national capital, with a war on, was anticipated to be very heavy.

  There were two other good reasons for doing the project, according to one pleasantly drunk young engineer that Heather found herself talking to—it cut a hundred or so miles out of the trip, and whereas Atlanta was dead and couldn’t possibly do any legislators any favors to get the rail traffic, Macon was functioning pretty well.

  Everett’s bread and hummus were delicious, and a French chiropractor did talk Heather into the single glass of red wine “for the iron, to be sure, it’s just for the iron, and you don’t have to enjoy it even one little bit, if you are too American for that!”

  She’s probably right, but how will I ever explain it to Lenny if I give birth to a Frenchman?