Altered Seasons_MONSOONRISE

by Paul Briggs

  This was going to take some careful planning. Hunter was a good guy, but he had his mood swings. When he did something right, he’d do his victory dance and swagger around the apartment until there was no putting up with him. Actually, no—putting up with him at times like that was easy and fun, compared to the times when he’d collapse into a puddle of self-loathing and start beating himself up. Isabel beat herself up a lot too, but not where other people could hear her doing it.

  “Good morning,” she said brightly, handing him the cup.

  “Good morning,” said Hunter. “Gosh, you’re looking… well, good, obviously, and… um…”

  “I think ‘frisky’ is the word you’re looking for.”

  Hunter took another sip. “Are we out of this?”

  “We got enough for another pot.”

  “Good… I hate to worry, it’s just everything’s so expensive these days. The other day I spent ten bucks on a two-liter bottle of Coke and I got back three Red Rons and change.”

  “That would be the high-fructose corn syrup.” You never realized how much stuff had corn or soybeans in it until those crops failed big. “Chyq’s still pretty cheap.”

  Hunter finished the cup and set it aside. “I’m really starting to worry about the shop,” he said. “I think we might be in for another round of cutbacks. See, some of the chemicals we use—the plastics—they were made in those plants near New Orleans, the ones by the river. Jane’s trying to get hold of another supplier, maybe a bioplastics company, but demand’s pretty steep right now.”

  That wasn’t good. As far as Isabel knew, Hunter was a good employee, but he’d only been working there four months—not exactly irreplaceable. Maybe you should have thought about this stuff before you threw away your career.

  Oh hell no. You are NOT going to get on my case for that.

  Everybody else at Eveland-Blades is going to be looking for a job too. You ever think about them?

  Okay, suppose I’d lied. Or suppose I’d just kept my mouth shut. Even if it didn’t change anything, what would you be saying right now?

  So you did what people are supposed to do. What do you want, a cookie?

  I lost my job because I spoke up. The people I was trying to help have probably forgotten I exist. So yes, I would very much like a fucking cookie. Or at least for you to stop riding my ass. One of these days you’re going to ask me to do the right thing and I’m just going to say no.

  “Something the matter?” said Hunter.

  “I was just thinking there’s other places we could go, if you’re feeling up for a big change of scenery.” She smiled at him.

  “Yeah?” Hunter smiled back. Encouraged by this, Isabel crept into the bed with a sinuous and sensual motion. Well, semi-sinuous. Definitely sensual though.

  “Mom says they’re talking about building biodiesel plants in Maryland,” she said. “I’m going to see if there are any positions available.” (Although from the point of view of someone who couldn’t eat shellfish, Maryland wouldn’t be much of an improvement over Louisiana.) “Until then… I’m just going to have to be your kept woman.”

  “I thought that was when you pay all your girlfriend’s bills, but she doesn’t live with you.”

  “Okay, then, your concubine.” She slid the blanket off him.

  “Isn’t that like a really high-class hooker?”

  “You’re thinking of ‘courtesan’.”

  “I thought a courtesan was somebody who worked for a king.”

  “That’s a courtier.” She unfastened his pajamas.

  “Aren’t those guys who make jewelry and watches and stuff?” Hunter smirked. “I can keep this up all day, you know.”

  “Let’s see what else you can keep up.” She brushed the tips of her hair back and forth over his groin, taking care to hit that particular line of nerves right… there. Yep. Hello. Worked every time.

  * * *

  A President of the United States—at least a good one—didn’t get a lot of leisure time, particularly when the nation was in crisis. Henry Pratt had been working on one thing or another from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. with only a couple of breaks for meals.

  Pratt made the most of the few hours he did have. At 9:45 p.m. he was in bed with an e-reader in his left hand and Claire curled against his right arm. On the nightstand was a wineglass holding the last of a smoky ’94 Oregon Pinot Noir, aged to a deep russet and mellowed to a velvety smoothness, that they’d shared over dinner.

  An old Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughan jam session, likewise mellowed to a velvety smoothness, was playing on his earpiece. Someone had once told Pratt that the Duke of Wellington had wanted to be a violinist before going into the army and making history. Pratt himself had once dreamed of being a blues guitarist and singer, but he had never been better than mediocre as a player and the same voice that served him so well at public speaking had sucked the life out of every song he’d ever tried to sing. So he’d had to settle for becoming President of the United States.

  Pratt set down the book for a moment, picked up the glass and took another sip. The wine was almost perfectly balanced. Perhaps it was a little on the woody side—not enough to make it unpleasant, but enough to make him glad he and his wife had drunk it today. He tried to detect all the aromas and flavors the wine guide had promised, but, like his fingers and his voice when it came to the blues, his nose and palate could never quite capture all the notes. Not that he would ever stop trying.

  The music made him feel sadder than usual. Claire had never been able to have a baby, and while they could have raised a dozen without straining their finances, they had both been so busy that it seemed wrong to seek out and adopt children that neither of them would have been able to spare the time and attention for. Listening to an older musician guiding and encouraging a younger one, Pratt felt that he’d missed out on something.

  He took the earpiece out and tried concentrating on the book, but even that troubled him now. His wife stirred a little and looked up at him.

  “What are you reading?”

  “A biography,” he said.

  “Something bothering you?”

  “You could say that.” He tapped the screen of the e-reader. “This man I’m reading about… he was everything you could ask for in a leader. Successful engineer, successful businessman. His career took him all over the world. A war started, and he led a volunteer effort to get Americans out of the war zone. Then he started helping refugees from the war. Then the war ended, and he led a relief effort that saved millions of lives. He was in the president’s cabinet when a massive flood hit the U.S., and he did a lot to help people there too.

  “At this point, everybody thought… not just that he’d be president someday, but that he’d be a great president. I mean, if you tried to imagine the perfect man to become POTUS at a time of crisis and get the country through it, this would be the man.”

  “So who is this guy, and why have I never heard of him?”

  “You have, actually. Herbert Clark Hoover.” Pratt set the e-reader down on the nightstand, next to the wineglass and his cell phone.

  “It’s not that he did nothing,” he said. “He did try to deal with the situation. If he’d just done a few things differently—vetoed that stupid tariff, gone off the gold standard when deflation hit, treated the Bonus Army with a little basic human decency…” Claire leaned her head on his shoulder and patted his arm. She could tell he wasn’t really worried about Hoover.

  “I can’t fail, Claire,” he said. “I can’t become another failed president. Not now.”

  Claire squeezed his arm. “All you can do is… all you can do.”

  “I know.” He rested one of his large, wrinkled hands on her small, wrinkled hand. Her glossy white hair was falling onto his chest. It hit Pratt how old everything in the room was—the furnishings, the wineglass, the wine, his wife, himself. Only his phone, earpiece, and e-reader belonged to the twenty-first century, and the earpiece was playing music from the 1980s while the e-rea
der was showing a book about a man who lived a century ago.

  It felt like he was trying to take a break from this year. While he was enjoying the comforts of the White House, right now thirty million Americans were in mobile homes and tents and hastily built cabins, and most of them were likely to stay there for at least the next six months. From what NWS was telling him, north of the 45th parallel it wouldn’t even be possible to start rebuilding until spring. And even though the emergency housing shelters were supposed to be for refugees from the Northern Monsoon, they were becoming magnets for others—people made homeless by wildfires in the West and South, or people from towns in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico that were being gradually abandoned because their water supply had dried up… and of course plain old homeless people.

  The worst thing about the Monsoon was not knowing when or where it would happen again. If it was going to hit the U.S. every ten years, or five years, or three years, they could at least plan around it, but how many years would it take to get a sense of how likely it was to hit in any given fall? And what were they supposed to do in the meantime?

  What was it he’d said about climate change? A healthy economy is the best defense. He still believed it. Unfortunately, the economy had been washed into the Gulf of Mexico. Now people were looking for the second-best defense, and he didn’t have one.

  And then there was the Norfolk Plan, which was a proposed solution to an entirely different and much more long-term problem, and which had arrived on the front steps of Congress all wrapped up with a neat little bow and a note on it saying PLEASE SOMEBODY FIND A WAY TO PAY FOR THIS. The U.S. had over twelve thousand miles of coastline. The only way to buy all of it without breaking the budget would be to declare eminent domain and offer bargain-basement compensation. Not only did this go against everything Pratt believed in, but it would ruin every property owner on the coast. Which would defeat the entire purpose of the Plan.

  Pratt’s thoughts were interrupted when his phone began playing “Isfahan.” The Secretary of Defense was calling. He reluctantly disentangled himself from Claire, got up and sat behind the desk with his head turned away from his wife. He trusted her, but need-to-know meant need-to-know, and there was nothing Swanston was likely to call at this hour to say that she needed to hear.

  “Hello?”

  “CASSIUS is ready, Mr. President.” Pratt had never cared much for operational names like “Infinite Justice,” “Enduring Freedom” or “Mighty Hand.” They sounded like something a totalitarian regime with a very crude propaganda arm would come up with. He preferred names that sent the message: this will do something, and if you can’t tell what, neither can the enemy.

  “How long can we keep it at readiness?”

  “Three to four months.”

  “Thank you, Simon.”

  “I’m having someone place the envelope in the football tonight,” he said. “I hope to God you never need it.”

  “So do I.”

  “In case you do, remember… the green bird.”

  “Say that again?”

  “The green bird. That’s the rune. Remember it.”

  CASSIUS. The green bird. Pratt shut his eyes and took a few minutes to commit it to memory. CASSIUS. The green bird. CASSIUS. The green bird. CASSIUS. The green bird.

  With the snarling of ocean currents, Europe west of Helsinki, Lviv, and Istanbul experienced the worst winter in twenty years. Heavy snow alternated with subzero temperatures everywhere north of Madrid and Naples.

  Some speculated that this would be the beginning of a major cooling trend for Europe, or perhaps even for the whole world. They pointed to sudden drops in temperature 8,500 and 12,000 years ago, also believed to have been caused by intrusions of glacial meltwater into the North Atlantic. But those events had happened on an immeasurably larger scale, and in a very different world—a world only just emerging from the depths of the last ice age. No one could really say what effect this would have now.

  As it turned out, they weren’t even asking all the right questions. An equally valid question would have been “What effect would slowing or stopping the Gulf Stream have at the other end?” After all, the only way the Gulf Stream had ever warmed Europe was by cooling the tropics. The breakdown in the North Atlantic Drift was like closing off two lanes of traffic on a busy highway. As the Gulf Stream slowed, warm tropical water backed up all along the east coast. Some of it turned east further south, to Madeira and North Africa, bringing unexpected heat to the Canary Current and heavy rains to the normally arid lands.

  But most of it just stayed there, a swelling in the water that raised the high-tide mark by three to thirteen inches along the coast from the Outer Banks to Key West. The warmer water allowed tropical storms to form well past the end of November. A Category 1 hurricane hit the city of Charleston on Christmas Day.

  What truly occupied the minds of world leaders was on the other side of the planet. In the last few weeks of December, U.S. and South Korean military intelligence began to receive reports of numerous incursions by the North Korean army into the Korean Demilitarized Zone. All these incursions were small-scale—sometimes whole squads, but more often pairs or trios of soldiers, bearing nothing but small arms. They didn’t seem to be concentrating on any one area—the incursions were taking place all along the border. And if confronted by South Korean forces, they would always retreat at once.

  Experts in Seoul and the Pentagon puzzled over this behavior, trying to determine what strategy lay behind it. Was North Korea testing for weaknesses in the American and South Korean defenses? Laying the groundwork for a major attack? Or simply trying to keep up an appearance of strength in the midst of the worst food crisis in its history?

  The truth was far more mundane and less directly threatening, but more frightening in its implications. It was discovered on December 27 by a company of South Koreans who ventured into the DMZ following the sound of gunfire. They caught two malnourished North Korean soldiers carrying the carcass of a musk deer.

  It was really that simple. The army—or rather, the soldiers in the army—were acting entirely without orders. The DMZ, simply by being off limits to human habitation for decades, had become one of the great wildlife refuges of the world’s temperate zones. The soldiers were going into it, guns in hand, to hunt for game.

  Pyongyang had always had trouble feeding its people. Now it could no longer even feed its own army.

  There are two kinds of bad weather generally associated with winter—extreme subzero temperatures, and heavy snowfalls. Fortunately for the well-being of mankind, these are rarely seen in the same place at the same time. The heaviest winter storms are those that happen when the air is just above or just below freezing, and moisture-laden winds blow in from some warmer part of the world.

  By January a blanket of snow, four to seven feet thick, lay over most of Canada and the United States north of Wyoming, Nebraska, and the Great Lakes. It was widely compared to lake-effect snow, except that the “lake” in question was the Arctic Ocean and Hudson Bay. Within this blanket, the people who had stayed through the Northern Monsoon now survived as tight-knit communities, living off whatever they could salvage from empty, flooded homes and whatever meager federal aid made its way to them.

  But the Gulf of Mexico was warmer than ever, and moist tropical winds came north and northeast over the United States. Where they met the blanket of snow and the pool of cold air above it, blizzards and ice storms formed. They slashed across the map like razors from the upper Midwest to New Jersey and southern New England.

  The ice storms were the worst. Roads quickly became impossible and deadly to drive on. Ice built up on the power lines, the few remaining telephone landlines, and the cell phone towers. Blackouts struck the Chicago area, then Indianapolis, then a dozen places in Ohio and Pennsylvania. For forty terrible hours, New York City lost power entirely. Mayor Lopez ordered the dark and silent subways to be opened as shelters for those who had no heat at home. With salt and sand beginning to run
low, FEMA had to requisition fresh supplies from Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina to help the northern states keep open ice-free paths between the cities.

  All over the High Plains, oil pipelines ruptured in the storms. With so many places where the roads had collapsed or been buried under snow, repair crews were sent out in snowmobiles to fix the pipes before the spring thaw.

  * * *

  Isabel stood at the front of the meeting room and gestured at the blueprints. “A heliotrope array and fiber optic cable are definitely the way to go,” she said. “First of all, you’re trying to maximize photosynthesis, and natural sunlight is the best. Second, I don’t care how good solar panels get, turning sunlight into electricity and back into light again is never going to be as efficient as using sunlight directly—the laws of thermodynamics are pretty clear on this point.”

  The director looked a little skeptical. “What about the energy cost of the array tracking the sun?”

  “That’s negligible. We’re talking about incremental movements over a twenty-four-hour period. Sunflowers do it without running a loss—that’s where the designers got the idea.”

  The director, Sean Lao, steepled his fingers for a moment.

  Then he nodded. “I like it,” he said.

  The meeting was in the office of Marshpower Biofuels, Inc., an anonymous little suite of offices in a business park near Annapolis, miles from the construction site where the plant was already being built. Marshpower was one of several companies building new stormwater-and-sewage treatment and biofuels plants up and down the East Coast. Their business plan looked something like this:

  • Say what you will about them, long-chain hydrocarbons are a very effective way to store a lot of energy in a convenient package of whatever size you may need.

  • Burning them, of course, releases all that carbon into the atmosphere. But in the case of biofuels, the carbon was removed from the atmosphere to make them in the first place, so no harm, no foul.