Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  “What did you write?” Jankowitz asked, not sounding very interested.

  Jenna spoke up for the first time.

  “Me and Bob and Dave, plus two others, Dennis Rossi and Roger Weinburger, wrote Ants!” she said. Jenna had never been as ambivalent about the quality of the show as Dave and Bob had been. She had actually liked it.

  And a strange thing happened. Melanie Gold smiled.

  “You’re kidding me,” Jankowitz said.

  “Nope. Every episode.”

  “I loved that show,” Martinez said. “We used to watch it as a family, me and my wife and the kids.”

  “One of the few you could watch with your family,” Kovacs said, nodding.

  Jankowitz burst in: “Remember that episode where that scientist’s shrink ray made ’em both the size of termites? And the termites chase ’em through the woodwork, and catch ’em, and take ’em to their queen? And the queen turns out to be—”

  “—Queen Latifah!” Kovacs laughed. “And those termite suits, those were crazy, I about busted a gut.”

  “Well, we didn’t design the suits,” Bob said modestly.

  “But you wrote it. How do you come up with those wild ideas? No kidding, you really are the writers?”

  “They wouldn’t dare lie about it,” Martinez said. “I’ve got the whole series at home on DVD. Their names would be in the credits.”

  “I assure you we’re not lying,” Dave said, trying to keep a straight face.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean anything. Like he said, why would you lie about something so easy to check out? Say, I wonder if you’d mind autographing my DVDs, and I’ll bet my kids would really enjoy…” He trailed off, coughed nervously, and looked down at the table. Dave knew he had just remembered that the writers and their families were more or less on trial at that moment. It would be a little embarrassing to hunt them down in the refugee camp and ask for an autograph.

  The whole panel sobered quickly. It looked to Dave as if none of them were really sure which way their colleagues were going to vote. Gold was no longer smiling, and she had had nothing to say about favorite episodes. He had been thinking that maybe that goofy show might make the difference between admission and refusal, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  Dave glanced at Bob, and he was making a hurry-up motion. He thought Bob was right. Let’s wrap this up, there was not much point in more testimonials.

  “Ms. Gold, if I may…” Gold gestured for him to go ahead. “I think you all know us well enough now. Though I’m proud of our show”—he cringed inwardly; liar!—“and I’m glad you enjoyed it, we all realize that being comedy writers doesn’t really bring a much-needed skill for surviving after this apocalypse. Neither does being a housewife, or a social worker, or a teenager, or a retarded child. But if I may be so bold, neither does being a real-estate agent or a Web designer.”

  “Touché!” Jankowitz cried out, cheerfully.

  “I guess the only thing I want to emphasize here at the end is that we cleaned out that rat’s nest hanging over your town. We didn’t do it happily, and we didn’t do it for your town, but we did do it. I expect to have nightmares about that for many years to come, but there are plenty of other things that have happened lately to give us all nightmares, and there are probably more to come. Officer Lopez told us he expected to have to assault that biker gang soon, and he wasn’t sure they would be successful. We had some luck but we were also alert and prepared. I just ask you to think about that.

  “We want to join you, but if you turn us down we will accept that, and do what we have to do. We don’t know yet whether that means moving on to the south, or stopping here in your refugee camp. But I want to say again, I think isolation is a bad thing. I fear that you all may discover that, in a very ugly way, if you try to keep all those people out of your town for much longer. I’m not sure you can do it, against a mob of angry, hungry people. I’m sure you have guns, but remember, so do many of them. I think it’s an untenable position, and once they understand, really accept, that the government is unlikely to arrive soon and feed and house them…well, I’m sure you get the picture. I think our only hope is cooperation, all of us pulling together, including the people who have nowhere else to go.

  “Thank you.”

  The council adjourned to another room, and everyone came up to Dave for a hug or a pat on the back. He was far from sure he deserved any of it. Where did he get off telling these people what they should do? He didn’t know them, didn’t know the community, didn’t know the refugees.

  He did feel he had said what he needed to say, and that it had been the right thing to say. But deep inside he was ashamed to admit just how deeply he wanted to be let in, just how badly he needed to stop, let down his guard a little, stop worrying every second of the day about protecting his family.

  After the round of congratulations, everyone sat around without a lot to say. As the minutes dragged by he wondered how lawyers stood it, waiting for the jury to come back with a verdict.

  It was only twenty minutes, but it seemed much longer. At last the door opened and the five people filed back in. They didn’t resume their seats, but came around the table and, one by one, extended a hand.

  “Congratulations,” Ortiz spoke for all of them. “You’re accepted.”

  There was no wild cheering, but a few shouts. The atmosphere wasn’t of celebration, but relief, and a sense of solemnity.

  They all trooped outside and stood in the parking lot beside their vehicles, and looked out over the lake. How valuable water had become, Dave reflected. Without it, most of the land they had traveled through would revert to the desert it had been when Junipero Serra had arrived in 1769. Yet here they stood on the shores of the largest natural lake in Southern California. They could see its flat blue expanse from where they were standing. With the water from the lake, anything was possible.

  Dave noticed Barbara Ortiz standing near him.

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” he said, “but if it’s not a secret, I’d like to know how the vote went.”

  “I won’t tell you who voted yes or no,” she said. “But it was three to two.”

  So they were in, and by the skin of their teeth. Dave looked out over the lake again.

  There was a lot of work to be done.

  EPILOGUE: From the Journal of David Marshall

  There was a lot of work to be done.

  I wrote those words four months ago, on the completion of my account of our journey from Hollywood to Lake Elsinore. I didn’t begin it until we had settled into our new home. There was no leisure time to write during the journey, and almost none in the first months after our arrival. But I’m a writer, and a writer writes, if at all possible. I squeezed out ten minutes here, five minutes there at the end or the beginning of the long days of labor.

  I wrote it in the third person because that’s what I’m used to, and also because it helped me distance myself from the events, treating it all as fiction rather than the awful reality it was.

  I have not added to the account for almost four months, since bringing the narrative up to our arrival at Elsinore, because I am not by nature a diarist, and because life has steadied enough that little of real interest happens on any particular day. It would be a pretty boring diary. My life now is mostly routine. Daily entries would consist of how many feet of ditch I dug, how many bushels of plums or peas I picked, what the weather was like, how badly my back ached at the end of the day. The concerns of a farmer, which is what I am.

  But today is exactly one year since Colonel Warner died, which is when it all began for me. It seems like a good time to sum up what has happened here and what we have learned happened elsewhere, pieced together from unreliable sources, since our arrival.

  We never asked, and never found out who voted for us and against us. We later became friends with Barbara Ortiz, but none of the others. No one ever said whether or not our writing of that silly sitcom influenced anyone’s vote. I like to thin
k it did, simply because it’s such an amusing idea, that something so critical could be decided by something so trivial. I like to think that our battle with the Overlords got us one vote—Barbara’s—that Addison’s horse got us another, and Ants! got us the third. I may never know, and that’s fine with me.

  Another thing we never found out was if Ranger could pull a plow. We never had to. What ration of coal comes to town—the lion’s share goes south, to San Diego—is used in burners to power tractors and other farm machinery, which are put to work as quickly as Mark and some others convert them. Though they can burn wood or coal, they are very inefficient, and we don’t have enough of either fuel to spend on moving fertilizer to the fields and moving harvested crops out. So the unskilled among us hump those things on our backs, like coolies. (It turned out most of the population was classified as unskilled, as their former areas of employment were not necessary to survival.) Our horses can pull the weight of a hundred coolie-back loads on the flatbed wagons we cobbled together. Ranger took to drayage without complaint as if he’d been doing it all his life.

  Everywhere we turned we came up against limits and shortages.

  Mark and his team could have made more wood burners more quickly, but they soon ran out of acetylene. He says he’ll be able to make more. Someday. In the meantime we just worked harder, to make up for the lack of mechanical help that had, over the last century, turned agriculture from one of the most labor-intensive jobs in the country into one of the least.

  Only at harvest time, and only for certain crops, had large numbers of pickers been needed before the Collapse. Did you know that potatoes used to be harvested by machines that didn’t even need a driver? The harvesters were guided by GPS, entirely robotic. Now, potatoes are once more harvested by a lot of people with shovels and buckets. Did you know they used to keep only those of a certain size, the size that appealed to shoppers in the markets? Now, every potato is eaten. No potato is thrown away for a rotten spot; the spot is carefully cut away and fed to pigs.

  It takes a lot of labor. Luckily, labor is one thing we have plenty of.

  I could give a million examples, but what’s the point? Things that were in abundance are now rare or totally unobtainable. Acetylene is only one thing of thousands of things we need, and will have to either do without or make for ourselves for the foreseeable future.

  And yet we are eating, and that’s all that counts.

  So, to bring things up to date, I suppose I should start with my family.

  Bad news first:

  Emily died. It happened only a few days after our arrival. All through the trip we were worried sick about the roving gangs of pillagers, and as the Overlords showed us, with good reason. But in the end it was influenza that got her. It has been almost nine months now, and we all think of her every day. Her children are getting on with their lives, each in their own way, but something has gone out of Bob. He works fiercely, and doesn’t speak much.

  I doubt anyone will ever know how many died from the flu. It swept through town, and through the refugee camps, and at least a thousand died in just this little valley. It took the youngest and the oldest, the most weakened by not enough food.

  The elderly got a double medical whammy, in that many of them had been kept in reasonable health by medications for heart and blood-pressure trouble, and many other ailments. Lack of drugs and unaccustomed exertion made heart attacks almost as common as flu deaths.

  One “epidemic” is no longer a problem: obesity. The only fat people you see these days are the ones who must have weighed three hundred pounds or more before the Collapse, and they’re on their way down. In fact, anyone who stays fat is viewed with the deepest suspicion, and is certain to have his rations cut. One man was beaten almost to death when a huge hoard of food was found in his basement.

  Those of us who have survived are definitely a healthier bunch than we were.

  Jenna lost her leg. It was even more of a surprise than Emily’s death, to everyone but Lisa. She kept telling us that Jenna wasn’t out of the woods, that with the primitive treatment and aftercare she had received anything could happen. Like the virulence of the flu, another thing we had largely forgotten about in the modern world was just how hard it could be to avoid and control infection. It took us all unaware.

  One good thing was that Lisa didn’t have to operate with no anesthetic. She had done several of those when the strong dope ran out at Cedars, and no one who has ever done that wants to do it again. It was as pain-free as such a thing can be.

  The other good thing is how well Jenna has coped. She has to be the most positive personality I’ve ever met. “Glad to be alive,” that’s her attitude. If she dwells on her gang rape, she has never shown it. And she hobbles cheerfully through the day on her crutch, having rejected all the wooden legs she has tried. She expects to get a “modern” prosthetic one day, and I suspect she will, but it might be a long time. Meanwhile, she is in charge of one of our day-care centers, looking after the youngest children—under six; everyone else works—while the parents are in the fields.

  Teddy has not managed to reconnect with Manuel. He has made two trips south, attempting to enter Mexico, but the border is fortified on both sides now, and they are serious about it. Communications are still quite haphazard even within the U.S. There are bulletin boards everywhere, thick with hand-printed pleas and photos, people trying to find each other. There is an area where people can look across the border, close enough to see faces. Manuel has not shown up there. Karen and I believe Manuel is dead, but Teddy continues to hope, so we hope with him.

  Even more problematic is Bob’s son Peter and his family, who were living in England and unable to return. The Winston family has not heard anything from them since the Collapse. It could be the miserable state of communications. But letters find their way across the oceans, and the continent, though it can take many months, so there is hope there, too.

  For the other absent Winston son, George, the news was mixed. He and his family had managed to leave Manhattan, which was now apparently as much a ghost town as Los Angeles. Fire had been a problem all over the country, in cities and croplands, and several fires took out a great deal of New York City. Once started, they were terribly hard to stop if there was any wind at all. The fuel load in dense central cities was very high, and in the Great Plains there was little to stop a windblown fire if trucks could not get to it soon. The usual solution for putting out a fire was to pray for rain.

  George and his family had made it to friends in the Catskills, where they spent a very hard winter with little food. One of their children died of pneumonia. That was all Bob would tell me. He had received only two letters from his son, the last informing him that they were heading south, along with what must have been a gigantic migration from the Northeast. We all knew their prospects of being welcome there might be bleak.

  We have heard nothing from Roger or Dennis.

  The only other news of distant relatives was good news. Karen’s brother and his family are doing well, though like everyone else they are on short rations because of the number of refugees to feed. Which they do without complaint, genuinely good Christians that they are. Our invitation to join them is still open. I have no idea when such a trip might be practical, and I’m not even sure I want to go now.

  Why? Because we are all appreciating something we didn’t even know we were missing: a sense of community. And, all things considered, we are doing well. Certainly a lot better than many of places we have heard of.

  The earthquake was measured somewhere between 9.3 and 9.8. This is the difference between being the largest quake ever recorded, and the second-largest. It only matters to seismologists and record keepers, I guess. Those of us who went through it just know it was horribly big. We were lucky that the tsunami it generated moved away from California for the most part, though coastal communities to the north got six-foot to fifteen-foot waves and many died. The worst loss of life was all the way across the Pacific, in Haw
aii, the Philippines, Japan, and China. New Guinea and Australia also got hit. No one seems to know what happened on many of the other Pacific Islands. Many of them have still not been heard from.

  I can sum up my feelings about the situation in other countries succinctly: I don’t think about them. I am aware of the reports of mass starvation in many parts of the world, like Japan. I know that in some Asian and African countries people are doing better than you might expect, as they were never very mechanized in the first place. They didn’t have to go back to the eighteenth century; they were already there. Their agricultural problems tended to be in the area of converting from crops grown in massive amounts for export—such as coffee and tea and sugar—to crops to feed their own people.

  It’s not that I don’t care about the suffering of people in other countries. I do care. But there are equally bad situations much closer to home, and I can’t waste my time fretting about conditions in Australia or China. They have to handle their own problems. My concerns have narrowed to the United States, with some thought spilling over into Canada and Mexico. Everywhere else is a million miles away.

  In the U.S.A., in Canada…

  It was a terrible winter. No one knows if it was one of the worst on record; no one was gathering data and correlating it. But everyone agrees it was one of the worst. All through the Midwest and Northeast winter came early and stayed late. People ran out of heating oil and coal early, and had to travel farther and farther to chop wood. They cannibalized their homes to keep a fire burning to heat one room. When spring finally came it thawed the bodies of those who had died by freezing, or had starved and then frozen. Again, who knows how many? The body count is still going on now in early summer, and the fragmentary reports we get from back there hint that the total will be in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions.

  The big question now, for those east of the Rocky Mountains, concerns how much acreage can be planted and harvested before winter closes in again. Last year’s crop in the nation’s breadbasket was basically not harvested at all. Vast quantities of corn, wheat, soybeans, and other staple crops rotted on the ground, where it was a banner year for field mice and prairie dogs. There was no shortage of hungry mouths and willing hands, but by the time most people realized the size of the agricultural crisis it was already too late to do much about it. The great masses of people were too far away to get to Kansas or Nebraska or Iowa, and there was no transportation to get them there. Even millions of people in the field would probably not have been enough to make a serious dent in what was out there to be picked or scythed by hand, and then getting the crops out of the fields was an even bigger problem. In my mind I see endless lines of Americans, trudging down car-free interstates balancing plastic tubs of wheat and corn on their heads. That happened, and will have to happen again this fall, only there won’t be nearly as much to harvest, because plowing and planting that much land by hand is even less likely to be done efficiently on a large scale than harvesting was.