by John Barnes
“Have you changed your mind? Have you decided that Directive 51 trumps the Constitution, too?”
He isn’t pulling off the et-tu-Brute/must you betray me with a kiss act nearly as well as he thinks he is. Crap, now he’s little old lost King Lear asking me to prove I love him the most.
She forced her voice to stay low and even. “Graham, we threw Shaunsen out for suppressing a journalist. Now you’ve done it—the same one that Cam jailed—and you’ve all had the excellent reason that the country needed to be secure, so the leader needed to be secure, and after all this was just going to be temporary, and all that. I’m still in the intel loop. I know you’re slowly moving troops forward, a station at a time, along the transcontinental rail lines, and Cam’s doing the same thing from the other side; you’re both deliberately running the risk of having American troops killing other American troops to establish who gets control of Jesus Junction, South Dakota. We’ve already had a skirmish between the Army and the Marines. Cam is turning the Southeast into one big Army base—”
“And I’ve sent letters of protest—”
“And you’re turning the Northwest into one big social services bureau or maybe high school. You’re both trying to nail down your pet things before the new government can make any decisions, sending every signal that they’ll have to abide by the decisions you’ve pre-made for them. But they’ll be elected, unlike either of you, and they should make the decisions. That’s how it works. The people are going to pick them to do what the people think should be done—not to carry out either of your sets of expert professional plans. That is, if you and Cam even permit the elections, and I’m seriously doubting either of you will.”
Graham looked like he’d been shoved backward against the wall and was trying to breathe. Well, good. Maybe I can hang out with Chris Manckiewicz in his cell.
After a moment, Weisbrod took off his glasses and cleaned them with a little glass atomizer and flannel rag from his desktop. “I suppose that I can see how it can look that way to you. From where I sit—”
“You’re sitting in the most comfortable—not to mention ego-stroking—job you’ve ever sat in. That gives you a great number of things, but perspective won’t be one of them.”
He set his freshly cleaned glasses down, blinking at her; it was one of his old manipulate-the-student tricks, and she wondered if he’d forgotten that he’d admitted to her that, since he wore bifocals, when he did that he did not see the other person more clearly but only as a blur. Finally, softly, he said, “Suppose that I were to try—fallible as I am, and subject to my own opinion and judgment—but suppose I were to just try to achieve a regularly elected, fully empowered government twenty-three months from now. Imagining that is my goal, what do you think I should do about Arnie Yang’s constant backdoor communication with the . . . with the other caretaker’s part of the government? What do you think I should do about the polarization and sense of struggle that is building daily?
“You don’t want me to try to bring Athens under our control. You don’t seem to be advocating that we surrender to them. And although ‘unite in favor of the elected government that will replace you both’ is a very nice sentiment in the long run, I don’t see that it tells me what to do this week. So let me put it squarely in your court. What should I do about the present circumstances?”
“Start with what you’re doing. Send Arnie and me to Pueblo, and give wholehearted support to the experiment, and if Cam is letting you have all those home-built radars, thank him and ask him for all the data he gets.” She leaned forward. “Expand my mission to the GPO in Pueblo, call it something like the Reconstruction Information Development Center, some broad title that lets us throw our weight behind everything that can re-unite the country, and put us in charge of getting every kind of information the country needs and getting it to everyone who needs it by every means we can. Support us as much as you can and challenge the boys in Athens to give us even more support, but let us have our independence from both of you.”
She had been surprised about her anger at Graham before, but she was double-surprised by her enthusiasm for an idea she had only thought of that moment.
He put his glasses on again, and said, “More beer for me. Do you want more juice? Pineapple again? Or I’m saving a couple small bottles of orange.”
“Whichever you’d rather give me. I take it we’re going to talk about the possibility of setting up what I have in mind for Pueblo rather than you pressing a button and bringing in people to straitjacket me and take me out the back way.”
“Yes we are.” He handed her another can of pineapple juice, opened a beer for himself, and said, “You’re behind the times, by the way. If I wanted you arrested and taken out privately, there’s no bell-and-buzzer system for me to use—too hard to maintain it. I’ve got a concealed string to a bell downstairs under my desk.”
She held the can of juice up in salute. “Modern times.”
“Modern times. May we get back to good old soulless technology as soon as we can.” They both drank reverently, savoring the remnants of the old civilization. “Actually I like what you’re proposing, but the name’s got to change—that acronym would pronounce like ridick, which would be an invitation for puns on ridiculous. We’ll call it the RRC, the Reconstruction Research Center—now there’s a golden expression, that’ll let you do anything. Anyway, a third power in the middle of the continent—one that has people’s loyalty but not an army—could be an honest broker we could call in for misunderstandings, and not only do a lot of good, but do it in a way that caused people to attribute it to the Federal government—basically build up a reserve of good will for that elected government in 2027. It would tend to keep Athens honest, and I’m sure they’d say it will help to keep Olympia honest. Maybe in the long run, it would be easier for both this government, and the Athens government, to gradually cede influence to it. I see many advantages. Futorologically—”
“Now that’s an awful word.”
“It was inevitable once we let futurology be coined.” The oil lamp was suddenly leaping high, casting bright flashes of red and yellow on his pale skin, and as he leaned forward and dimmed it, the swift-falling shadows cut deeply into his face until he seemed a million years old. She wondered whether any part of the effect was deliberate. “Look, here’s the thing. Given a real choice, the human race will rebuild technological civilization; the knowledge is widely distributed and people know they want it. But the way Daybreak has hit us, very likely there won’t be anyone left alive who really remembers our world by the time they’re anywhere near being able to make it over again. And besides the biotes are alive and the nanoswarm might as well be; we can’t exterminate them any more than we ever could cockroaches or rats. The new world will live with them all the time, one way or another.
“So the new world will have to have the idea that there can be a future, different from today, and that it can be better. A future that will be built more consciously, not because people are smarter or better, of course, but just because they’re aware. So we’re going to inject you—and a little band of ex-futurologists—into one of the early, nurturing streams of information where the new civilization will be taking root and growing. You’ll . . . I don’t know, suffuse it with the future-oriented perspective. I think that in the long run I will cast a longer, better shadow on history through that than I am apt to do through anything I do here—not that I intend to stop trying here.” His smile was as warm, wry, and welcoming as she remembered. “Or in short, Heather, I’m going to play you the dirtiest trick of all. I’m going to give you exactly what you just asked for, and more.”
“More?”
“You’re right that the President of the United States has simply no damned business at all arresting and holding a journalist without trial, which is exactly what I’ve done with Chris Manckiewicz. Absolutely right about that, you know. But on the other hand, I can’t let him run around loose in the capital, either. On the other hand, Pueblo i
s going to be the continental center for distributing information for at least the next few years; and we both know that the government ought not to have a monopoly on information, eh? So I’m going to release Chris Manckiewicz into your custody . . .”
“Oh, crap,” Heather said. “And he’ll have the whole train trip to interview me.” She clinked her juice can against his beer. “You’re a treacherous old bastard, Prof.”
“Let’s just hope I’m an effective treacherous old bastard,” he said, answering her toast.
They might have ended the conversation there, but they had drinks to finish, the lamp’s glow was warm and friendly, and they were in more comfort and safety than they had been accustomed to, so they talked late into the night, almost none of it about business.
ONE MONTH LATER . ANTONITO. COLORADO. 8:30 P.M. MST. THURSDAY. MARCH 6.
Today had been an extra-long day; Jason had gotten up at the break of dawn for a day of assigned labor on the repair project for the rail line to Alamosa. When completed, it would give Antonito a connection through Walsenburg, over on the east side of the mountains, to the rest of the country. The newly organized Antonito and Northern Railroad (in which Jason proudly held nineteen shares of stock, one for each day he’d worked) should have restored the line so that a steam engine could run at speed over it by the end of the summer, and the enthusiasts up at the Railroad Museum in Golden thought there might be a locomotive they could use on it by then.
Meanwhile, filling and leveling a roadbed with picks and shovels was hard work, but it paid well, and Jason not only enjoyed the share-per-day program, he was thinking of trading five deer hides he’d cured for another two shares. The price will go up a lot once the railroad is running, especially because by late summer the valley will be producing a lot more food than it eats, and the trains will have a good reason to come this way. Might as well buy stock while it’s cheap; that’s the time to do it.
He imagined his brother, Clayt, laughing and clapping him on the back, and it felt good but sad; he wished his brother could be here to rag him about it.
Jason came home just as Beth arrived herself, fresh from a day of teaching textile crafts at Doc Bashore’s school. Many adults wanted those classes, so they were offered late in the day, and Beth was rarely home before dark. They did their usual hi-honey-I’m-home ironies as Jason lit the pre-laid large fire in the woodstove; then he pumped three big kettles of water and set them on the back of the stove. “I’ve been working on the railroad, all the live-long day,” he said. “Hey, there’s a song idea. But while I’m thinking up the song, I want a hot soak.”
“Good plan. Soak some of that off and you might score with a hot schoolteacher, especially if you let her take a quick splash in the tub first, before it’s half sweat from you.” She pulled down the pizza pan from the warming rack they’d built over the stove; the dough had risen, and it would be ready to bake as soon as the oven was hot, in about forty minutes. Meanwhile, they each had a bottle of Coors—bottled beer was fairly durable, especially in an unheated winter, and there had been plenty of it in the area on the day of Daybreak—and a slice of black bean bread with goat cheese. As the fire caught and began to warm the small converted garage, they stripped down to underwear for comfort, and Jason contemplated a couple more beers; some elk, goat cheese, and home-canned-tomato pizza; and a hot bath, and thought, Well, this is more like what I had in mind for Daybreak. If I could ignore all the corpses I guess I might feel all right about it.
“Did you see the new Weekly Pamphlet down from Pueblo today?”
“No, there’s not a lot of reading time out there. Has someone come up with a way to make gopher meatballs taste better?”
“The people in Pueblo are geniuses, Jason, but that would take more than genius.”
The Pueblo Weekly Pamphlet was widely mocked and derided, and just as avidly read. Realizing that it might be a long time before people could reliably write to request free information, and probably even longer before an old-fashioned paper catalog could be prepared, the good scholars of Pueblo looked for anything potentially useful in surplus in the warehouse, and once a week, sent out a pile of pamphlets in rough proportion to the population of the towns that had subscribed.
The pamphlets were whatever happened to be possibly useful in the America of today, and to take up too much room in the warehouse of yesterday: how to hand-sew a shirt from scratch without a pattern, how to maintain a compost heap, and so on. People had laughed when they received “Fun Indian Crafts for Boys and Girls 10-15” until they discovered it had directions on making moccasins. Some of the pamphlets must have been eighty years old—the one on laying out a victory garden probably was—and people laughed at the silly graphics and odd social assumptions of the past, but the pamphlets were read eagerly, passed from hand to hand, and their recipes and procedures recopied into notebooks; the interpretation of some of their directions could provide a whole evening of conversation nowadays. (“When they say to cull the runts in the baby rabbits, can we still eat them, just as long as we don’t let them breed?”—Jason remembered two guys arguing about that for most of an afternoon while they dressed deer hides together.)
“This one’s from the wrapper,” Beth said. “So it’s a bigger deal.” Each bundle of pamphlets was tucked into the wrapper, a folded sheet of newsprint, on which were printed all the government announcements from both Athens and Olympia. They double-wrapped each package of pamphlets, since wrappers were printed front and back; the receiving towns posted the wrappers somewhere everyone went: the town hall if there was one, the general store for towns that had been able to maintain private commerce, the town dining hall for those which had not. People stood in line to read the wrapper with a pencil and pad at hand; there might be any number of possible things, from a call-up of reservists for a particular year to the offer of a position of postmaster in a neighboring town. Decoding the wrapper was another source of conversation—did the search for former commodities investors mean that futures markets might re-open? Did the request for information about aircraft near Austin, Texas, mean enemy reconnaissance, an eccentric inventor, or an attempt to find a person maliciously spreading rumors? Did the request for desks and chairs in the Denver area mean some Federal offices would be opening there?
“So . . .” Jason said, “what’s the news?”
“They want former Daybreakers to come to Pueblo and be studied. It says ‘No one will be investigated, arrested, or punished.’ They’re looking for people who have turned against Daybreak and would like to help undo it.”
“And that’s us. If we want to do it.”
“Yeah.”
“How do you feel?”
“I love life here,” Beth said. “I got friends, we got our own comfy place. And my wrist ain’t all the way healed yet, and it’s a long, hard, dangerous walk, and . . . but we said it, Jason, we said it ourselves, we said it all the time all winter, we said we wanted to undo Daybreak, it was all a big mistake.”
He sighed. “Yeah. Well, for tonight it’s hot fresh pizza and a hot bath.”
“And a hot schoolteacher.”
“You see what a lucky bastard I am. But, yeah, look how warm and comfortable we are. Life seems, I don’t know, more meaningful, I mean, the work we do really matters to people we care about, and I kind of find myself thinking that maybe Daybreak was a good idea after all. Except for everyone we killed, of course. And all the sadness and physical misery and people dying too young.”
“I can’t even tell if you’re being sarcastic.”
“Me either. If the oven’s hot enough, let’s put the pizza in, and open another beer. We’re not going to decide tonight.”
PART 4
ONE MONTH AND TWO DAYS
THE CRUELEST MONTH
April has always been the month of danger in the Northern Hemisphere; if you think of war, if you brood upon it all winter, if you are longing and thirsting to fight, then in April the ground is just dry enough to move upon, there has be
en just enough good weather to drill the troops, the danger of sudden winter storms is low enough, the need for men for the spring plowing and planting has mostly passed.
In more recent centuries, late summer became dangerous, because armies moved so swiftly that there was the hope to finish the fighting just as the snow fell and “send the boys home for Christmas.”
But this year, almost nothing moved any faster than it had in 1850, and as with so many things, the rhythm of war fever fell back into its more ancient pattern.
From Pueblo, Heather and her team followed the bad news that poured in from everywhere.
On April 1st, on the old Great Northern Line, a steam train dispatched by the Olympia government was intercepted on the long trestle east of Minot by pro-Athens partisans who were at least partly led by Air Force officers from the base. The train carried 250 newly-sworn-in Federal officials to be the liaison with the New State of Superior, which was supposed to combine the states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan until they could resume their independent existences. The partisans’ makeshift barricade derailed and destroyed one precious steam locomotive, and in the brief confused melee after the wreck, about forty of the Olympian clerks and administrators were killed. Some witnesses reported injured men and women being shot where they were pinned in the wreckage. Three Olympians who had returned fire during the brief fighting were hanged from the trestle. The rest were imprisoned on the former air base.
Simultaneously, in Green Bay, the capital of Superior, the Olympian temporary government was attacked by an armed mob which purported to be defending the traditional rights of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Quick action by a company of Wisconsin Guard suppressed the mob. Among those captured were ten soldiers from Fort Bragg. Treated as soldiers out of uniform on a sabotage mission, they were sentenced to death the next day, but the governor of Superior suspended their sentences.
