Tales of Downfall and Rebirth

by S. M. Stirling

  They wouldn’t get them. Jared wouldn’t get his computer. No one under forty had any idea what the Internet was, or had been. The record would play as well as it played on this windup piece of junk. This was the way the world went on, not with a bang—explosives didn’t work any more, either—but a whimper. Tough shit, Eliot.

  Shoes scrunched on dead leaves and dry grass outside. Jared’s mouth twisted again. Here was Connor, nineteen now and home from patrol. This brave new world was the only one he knew. He had all the answers—he was sure of it. At nineteen, who didn’t? Fathers and sons had butted heads since the beginning of time. The Change, the chasm between Before and After, between who remembered and who didn’t, only made things worse. And they said it couldn’t be done . . .

  * * *

  Oh, for Christ’s sake!

  Connor Tillman shaped the words without saying them. His old man was listening to music again. That was always a bad sign. Whenever Dad started playing records, he fell as far back into what his generation called the Good Old Days as you could now.

  Get over it, Pop. Connor didn’t say that, either.

  He’d yelled it often enough when he and his father brawled. It was an easy rock to grab and hit with. The world was what it was. You had to roll with it. The Good Old Days were over. Finished. Done with. Done for. Kaput.

  Connor was tempted to believe things couldn’t have been all that great. He was tempted, yeah, but he couldn’t. Too much remained behind that nobody now could or would match: everything from dead cars to the crumbling paved roads they’d run on to the incredible warren of empty houses and shops and who knew what that filled the Valley.

  Even Connor’s pants were pre-Change Levi’s, patched at the knees and butt with leather. His boots and sleeveless leather vest and his broad-brimmed straw hat all belonged to here-and-now. But the zipper and copper rivets on the pants spoke of other times. And no one now made binoculars like the ones on the strap around his neck.

  He turned the doorknob. The lock had failed; a bar secured the door at night. The locksmith might have fixed it, but putting in the bar had been easier and cheaper. Dad did it himself. He could deal with the real world when he decided he wanted to.

  “Hey,” Connor said. Electric guitars sounded funny to him. No instrument that still worked was anything like them.

  “Hey,” Dad answered, nodding. His eyes were a million miles and a million years away. They always got like that when he started listening to records. With an obvious effort, he came back to the present. “How’d it go?”

  Connor shrugged. “I climbed up to the high ground. Saw some rabbits and some quail and a coyote. Nothing got close enough for the blowgun.” He had a green-painted aluminum tube on his back and a pouch of darts by the short sword on his belt. “Oh, and there were a couple of deer way off in the distance. Nothing much going on on Old Topanga Road.”

  “Surprise!” Dad said. “There never was.” Old Topanga Road ran into Topanga Canyon Boulevard from the west right here, where Topanga village lay. Even back before the Change, Old Topanga Canyon had been sparsely settled compared to Topanga Canyon proper.

  “I know, I know,” Connor said impatiently. “Gotta keep an eye on it, though. It’s our back door, like. The Lancers have come that way before. Don’t want ’em doing it again.”

  “Nope.” Dad nodded again. “The Chatsworth goddamn Lancers! Is that funny, or what?”

  “Not funny when you’ve fought them.” Connor had a puckered scar on his left arm from a skirmish with the Lancers a couple of years before. That had been his first fight, and came too close to being his last.

  “I’ve done it.” Dad had a scar, too, an old pale white one, in almost the same spot as Connor’s. “But still . . . When I was your age—”

  “Spare me,” Connor said. He’d heard Dad’s rap too often. Back before the Change, when everything was wonderful and it was all one country, Chatsworth had been far enough out in the boonies that a lot of people there kept horses. Because they did, now they ruled the west end of the Valley. Petty lords in places as far away as Pacoima and Studio City had a healthy respect for their fighters. So did the Topangans. Chatsworth dreamt of conquering the canyon and reaching the Pacific. For Topanga, that dream was a nightmare.

  “Right,” Dad said tightly.

  “What’s to eat?” Connor asked. “I’m starved.”

  “Still some of the dried, salted grunion left,” Dad answered. “Olives. Cheese. Oranges. The porridge is cold, but it still smells okay.”

  “Cool,” Connor said. The porridge was beans and peas from the garden in what Dad still called the backyard, with garlic and onions and wild mushrooms thrown in for flavor. Boil it into mush, and it was . . . food. Connor’d been eating the same kinds of things his whole life. He took them for granted.

  Dad had been eating this stuff even longer—ever since the Change. He let out a sigh, the way he did every once in a while. “What I wouldn’t give for a Double Whopper with cheese, onion rings on the side, and a big old chocolate shake,” he said, and sighed.

  “Yeah, Pop,” Connor said patiently.

  Chocolate was good, but he could count the times he’d tasted it on the fingers of one hand. Onion rings were fried. Who had oil to waste on such luxuries? Nobody in these parts, that was for sure. Olive oil and a little butter—that was about it. What didn’t get eaten went into lamps . . . when there was any that didn’t get eaten.

  Connor fed his face. He was still a little hungry when he finished. Most people, at least in these parts, were a little hungry most of the time. His father stood just under six feet. His mom had been five-nine. He was barely that himself. Food had been something you took for granted when his folks were kids. There’d been times when the only meat in his stew came from the big green caterpillars that chewed up tomato vines. The scary thing was, they hadn’t been too bad. Hunger made you not worry about such things.

  The sun set not long after they finished. He and his father went to bed. No need for a blaze in the fireplace. It wouldn’t get cold. It hardly ever got really cold, even in the winter. A blanket, maybe two on a bad night, and you were okay. You could easily starve or die of thirst. Millions of people around here had in the years before Connor was born. As far as he knew, though, not a single one of them froze.

  * * *

  Sherman’s hooves clopped dully on the faded, potholed asphalt as Bruce Delgado rode south down Topanga Canyon Boulevard toward the Ventura Freeway. Just past the freeway lay Ventura Boulevard. A couple of miles south of the Boulevard—a Valley phrase that had connoted money back in the day—his Chatsworth Lancers no longer ran things. The hippie freaks from Topanga took over.

  Bruce scowled behind his catcher’s mask. His armor wouldn’t have made the SCA cream its jeans. Covering the rest of his head wasn’t some blacksmith’s finest creation. He wore a German helmet his grandfather’d brought back from Europe after World War II. Good luck making manganese steel like that these days! He’d sanded off the swastika decals. They would’ve given too many people the wrong idea of what the Lancers were all about.

  Thick leather gauntlets covered his hands. His pre-Change work boots had steel toes. Greaves and armguards had started life as sheet metal on one dead car or another. His Kevlar flak jacket had steel under it, front and back. The shit had been bulletproof, but that didn’t mean it would keep out arrows or sword points. Quite a few people had made their last dumb mistake trusting it too far.

  Once upon a time, the aluminum tubing that formed the shaft of his lance would’ve had a broom on the end so some guy home from work could sweep the bottom of his pool. A blacksmith had forged the point topping the lance, and put a little lead in the other end to improve the balance. For now, the lance sat in a boss on the right side of his saddle. He was still well within Chatsworth territory; he didn’t expect trouble.

  He especially didn’t expect trouble with f
our other Lancers along. Their armor, and that which covered their horses, was of the same catch-as-catch-can style as his own. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue ran through his mind. The rhyme fit, every bit of it: the nylon fabric covering his Kevlar was cop-uniform blue, somewhat faded now from years of sun.

  They ambled past a long-dead 76 station. “You ever gas up here before the Change, Eddie?” he asked one of his comrades.

  “Couple times, maybe,” Eddie Epstein said. “I hadn’t had my license long. How about you?”

  “Same deal,” Bruce said. He leaned forward and laid a hand on Sherman’s neck. The gelding was named for the old tank. These days, a mounted lancer was the nearest equivalent. “Who woulda figured cars would crap out and horses’d be the real thing?”

  “Not me, that’s for goddamn sure,” Eddie said. “I didn’t give a rat’s ass about ’em till the Change, I’ll tell you that. We lived in Chatsworth ’cause my mom and my sis were horse people.”

  “My dad bred ’em—but he got the dough to buy ’em from his used-car lot,” Bruce said. “Just goes to show you, don’t it?”

  The other three Lancers rolled their eyes. They were young bucks, born since the Change. Listening to old farts yatter on about bygone days bored the crap out of them. But they had the sense not to show it too much when one of the old farts was the ruler of the west end of the Valley and the second was his right-hand man.

  West of the defunct gas station, some fig trees had been planted on ground cleared after the power died. They looked peaked. There wasn’t enough water to keep them happy. There was barely enough water to keep the people who took care of them happy. Cisterns, catch basins in the concrete-bottomed L.A. River, using pipes and lining canals with old plastic sheeting wherever possible . . .

  In dry years, none of it was quite enough. You got through as best you could. The Lancers and their kin and the warhorses had first call on what there was. The rest of the people took their chances and prayed for rain.

  The freeway sat above the usual street level. A watchtower built atop it gave the Lancers a long look to the south. Semaphores—fire signals at night—could relay news north the half-dozen miles to Chatsworth proper in a matter of minutes. As modern as last week, Bruce thought sourly. But with radios and phones and even telegraphs dead as Stalin, it was the best system he’d been able to dream up.

  He muttered to himself when he rode under the 101. He’d been starting high school when the Northridge quake rocked the Valley in ’ninety-four. One of these years, a new one would bring down the overpass. If you happened to be below it just then . . . well, at least everything would be over in a hurry, anyhow.

  A wagon pulled by a two-horse team came along Ventura Boulevard. Front and rear axles had been taken from a car. The wheels were wooden, with iron tires, and bigger than the old rubber tires would have been. The teamster on the wagon doffed his straw hat—not quite a sombrero, but close—to the Lancers.

  Gravely, Bruce returned the salute. He demanded respect from his subjects. But you had to show you deserved it. He’d learned that playing Pop Warner football a million years ago. A coach who was an asshole might get the outward trappings of respect, but people would tell jokes about him behind his back. Bruce didn’t want that happening to him. So when he got, he gave, too.

  A couple of blocks south of Ventura lay what had been a shop that sold cameras and telescopes and binoculars. Some of its products extended the range of the signal towers. What had been the parking lot next to it was a field now. Opium poppies, redder and darker than their native cousins—which had been the state flower when California was a state—nodded in the breeze. Pre-Change painkillers were hard to come by these days, and of uncertain worth. You fought pain any way you could; it was everybody’s enemy.

  The land to either side of the road rose as you got deeper into the canyon. The Valley’s street grid disappeared; the little streets that branched off from Topanga Canyon Boulevard wandered every which way. The land got greener as the Valley floor gave way to the Santa Monica Mountains—not green, but greener.

  Then the ground dropped away from the west of the main road, down a slope that had made many a drunk driver in the old days go Oops! or Shit! just before he hit bottom. Even on horseback—hell, even on foot—getting down there or back up again was a bastard and a half. No wonder the Topangans chose that Glenview stretch to hold as their frontier.

  Well before he got there, Bruce held up a hand and reined in. The Lancers with him also stopped. The Topangans had a watchtower there. Somebody with binoculars or a spotting scope would be keeping an eye on them right now. The road was open—trade mattered to Chatsworth as well as to the hippies down the canyon. But the Topangans could close it in a matter of minutes, and have the closed stretch as strong as the rest of their works inside of an hour.

  “So what you got in mind, boss?” Eddie asked. He figured Bruce had to have something on the fire.

  “We can’t go through ’em. It’d cost us too much. We’ve got to find some way to slide around ’em.”

  Bruce had less in the way of a scheme than he wished he did. But he knew he was right about that. He had more people to draw on than the Topangans, but they would enjoy the defenders’ advantage. They had catapults by their walls, too. They wouldn’t just throw man-squashing boulders. They’d throw big pots full of pre-Change oil and gasoline: homemade napalm. If that stuff clung to you, you begged somebody to cut your throat. And you thanked him with your dying breath when he did it for you.

  “Go down Old Topanga?” one of the younger Lancers suggested.

  “We’ve tried it before, Garth,” Bruce said. “It wouldn’t be a surprise even if we hadn’t. They’re ready for it—and they hold the high ground.”

  “You wouldn’t have come all this way if you were just gonna do the peaceful coexistence thing,” Garth Hoskins said.

  All this way. They’d ridden maybe eight miles, and they’d ride back before the end of the day. With the horses walking, an hour and a half or so in each direction. Probably two hours on the way home—take it easy on the beasts in the heat of the afternoon. By modern standards, it was a long way. No hopping in the car now. Too bad.

  But Garth wasn’t wrong. He was only about five-seven, but he was built like a brick. When he wasn’t practicing with sword and lance and ax and mace, he was pumping iron. He got off on exercise the way stoners got off on pot. He wasn’t stupid, either. Not subtle, maybe, but not stupid.

  He sure did have the post-Change view of distance, though. In Bruce, it still warred with what he’d known as a kid. He’d flown in an airliner. He’d seen the ground from six miles up. Garth never had. He never would.

  “We’ve got to have the right approach,” Bruce said. He might have been channeling his old man. Nacho Delgado had got rich unloading clunkers on suckers with bad credit. His son cared little about money. Power was a much headier drug as far as Bruce was concerned. He wanted that outlet on the Pacific so bad he could taste it. It would put the Valley back into direct touch with the rest of the world, make it a force to be reckoned with.

  It would . . . if only the Topangans weren’t in the way. They didn’t want to follow his orders. They didn’t want to follow anybody’s orders. Rotten hippies! What were you supposed to do with people like that?

  “We’ll smash ’em for you, boss,” Garth said confidently. “Just tell us what to do, and we’ll take care of it.”

  Listening to him made Bruce feel good. Garth was a human pit bull. Point him at something and he’d bite chunks out of it for you. With enough guys like him at your back, you could really accomplish something. And if the hippies stood in your way, hey, that was just their bad luck.

  * * *

  Jared and Connor trudged north up Topanga Canyon Boulevard toward the Theatricum Botanicum, where the Topangans’ assemblies had met since not long after the Change. The littl
e outdoor theater held maybe three hundred people. Most of the time, that was plenty.

  A redtail lazily circled overhead, peering down at the grassy hillsides in hopes of spotting a rabbit or a ground squirrel. A neighbor rode by on a bicycle. He lifted a hand from the handlebars to wave. “Hey, guys!” he called.

  “Hey, Stu,” Jared answered. Connor nodded. Stu pedaled on.

  “Lucky bastard,” Connor muttered once Stu was out of earshot. Jared nodded. Bicycle tires were something for which the Topangans had found no good replacement. Time and bad roads had done in most of the ones from before the Change. Jared and Connor had bikes that sat under tarps from lack of rubber. Connor went on, “Ought to go into the Valley and scavenge.”

  “The Happy Hunting Ground—if you’re lucky,” Jared said. The Valley was square mile upon square mile of houses and shops, almost all abandoned, almost all crumbling. Even this long after the Change, you could find almost anything there. Fancy booze, medicine, clothes from fabrics bugs wouldn’t touch, bicycle tires, tools, books, spectacle lenses . . . You could, yeah. But— “The Lancers don’t exactly love foreigners on their turf.”

  “Fuck ’em. In the neck,” Connor said.

  “That’s what they want to do to us,” Jared said. “That’s what the assembly’s about. Bruce is cooking something up.”

  “We ought to have spies up there so we’d know what’s going on,” Connor said.

  “My guess is, we do,” Jared answered. The Valley was a big place. You could be inconspicuous there. In Topanga, strangers stood out more.

  “Yeah, but they’d have to do, like, what Bruce’s stooges told ’em to most of the time, wouldn’t they?” Connor might have been describing the ultimate perversion. Chances were, he thought he was.

  “If we aren’t careful, we’ll all have to do what Bruce’s stooges tell us all the time,” Jared said dryly.

  “In his dreams!” Connor exclaimed. He didn’t really grok that some people did dream that way, and that some of the dreamers made others dream along with them. Bruce Delgado was one of those. He wasn’t a monster like that guy up in the Northwest sailors had talked about in the early post-Change years. He was only—only!—a hard-nosed, power-hungry SOB. Whether that made him less dangerous or more was an interesting question, but not one today’s assembly would debate.