by Paul Briggs
“And then some. Do you want to hear the rest of the bad news?”
“I suppose I’d better.”
“Two camps are suffering from measles outbreaks,” said al-Harrak. “Kansas Alfa and Texas Charlie. At last report, there were over three hundred victims—people with weakened immune systems, people whose vaccines didn’t take… babies too young for the shots. Two deaths so far.
“I have discovered the cause of the outbreaks. The camps bring a lot of people from all walks of life together in close quarters, and it seems not all of them chose to have their children vaccinated.” Al-Harrak was silent for a moment, collecting his thoughts.
“Mr. President,” he said, “I understand that you and your laws permit this. I respect this even though I don’t understand why. However, a lot of people in the camps themselves—especially people who are originally from Mexico or China—aren’t prepared to tolerate this kind of risk. Given that law enforcement is in short supply in the camps, they’re likely to take matters into their own hands.
“So what I’m doing is ordering immunizations of everyone. Those who refuse will be transferred to a separate camp. My original plan was to set one up in upstate New York, which doesn’t have any camps yet. But when Governor Morgan found out, she said she would fight it every step of the way. I didn’t understand why—she offered to help us build one last fall—but she said she wouldn’t tolerate us putting a health hazard on her doorstep.”
Pratt nodded. “Is there enough space in the other camps now to move everyone out of Kentucky Alfa?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Good. Do that, and then turn Kentucky Alfa into the shelter for the unvaccinated. In fact…” Pratt considered for a moment how to pose the next question. “What would be the obstacles to shutting down some of these camps and consolidating their population?”
“There would be several,” said al-Harrak. “For one thing, the cost reduction would be offset by the expense of dismantling the camps and moving all these people around. For another thing, a lot of what happens in the camps to keep them working depends on the people in them—the little informal networks and communities they’ve built among themselves. Shuffle them around, move them from one camp to another, and you destroy those networks. Most of all, we don’t know what’s going to happen this fall with the Monsoon. It may miss us completely, or it may hit us harder than last year. We might need all these camps as going concerns. We might even need more of them.”
Pratt grimaced. “The same thing is going to be true next year, and the year after that,” he said. “When are we going to be able to shut these places down?”
“Not until we’ve rebuilt every city and town north of the fortieth parallel with the kind of infrastructure that can keep going during the Monsoon,” said al-Harrak. “I’m sorry. And even then, there’s the towns losing their water supply, there’s the towns on the coast…”
Pratt gritted his teeth, clenched his fists, and breathed through his nose for a few seconds. He hated the fact that these camps existed. He hated that the TKB Foundation’s news outlets were spreading all kinds of horrifying rumors about them. He’d been looking forward to shutting them down once and for all. Instead, the camps would still be a going concern when he was running for re-election in two years, and probably for four years after that. Maybe they’d be calling them… Prattvilles.
* * *
Once al-Harrak was back at work, Pratt looked at the latest reports from Jim in Gyeongju. These were a lot more encouraging. It seemed they were close to agreeing on a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Korean peninsula. That would be hard to get through the Senate after Anchorage, but the stated reason for keeping U.S. troops in South Korea was to protect it from North Korea, which made it a little hard to justify their presence now that there was no North Korea. Also, it seemed that Park Min-young, the ROK’s foreign minister, was negotiating nonaggression pacts with Russia and China without consulting the U.S. State Department.
Which was exactly what Jim Ahn had asked Park to do. What he and Pratt really wanted was a Republic of Korea that needed very little from the United States—one strong enough that neither Russia nor China could conquer it without considerable damage to themselves, and open enough that both nations could trade freely with it. A Korea that wasn’t a U.S. ally, but could become one in a day if any of its larger neighbors made any threatening gestures. This would benefit China, and Russia if they had the wit to see it, but mostly it would benefit peace and order. The tricky part was going to be getting there without looking like that was where they were planning to go.
* * *
It was Saturday morning, but neither Isabel nor Hunter had time for Enginquest right now. Hunter was grading papers, and Isabel was still looking over the blueprints of the Conowingo Project, which she’d spent all night inspecting. Most of it was straightforward, the same sort of algae-based biofuel plant Marshpower normally designed, but on a much larger scale. Some of it—the toxic metal detectors, the phosphorus recovery system—would have to be tested before they knew how well it worked.
The only other difference was the degree of political interest, and personal interest on Isabel’s part. It wasn’t just that the state needed the fuel—it might save the Chesapeake Bay.
The Susquehanna River drained a huge stretch of Pennsylvania and upstate New York, but the mouth of the river was in Maryland at the northern end of the Chesapeake. The Conowingo Dam stretched across that river about nine miles before it reached the Bay. A hundred years’ worth of sediment and phosphorus were waiting behind that dam. Just a little of it had gotten into the Bay two years ago, and that had been enough to trigger a toxic bloom that put half the state seafood industry out of commission for months, including her father’s business. If the Northern Monsoon hit the Susquehanna basin this year and flushed that whole monstrous load of nutrients into the Bay… just the thought of it made Isabel sick with dread. Her family and the whole Shore were having enough trouble as it was. And no wonder if Governor Alpert wanted the project done this year if possible, although that would take a miracle at this point.
A notice popped up on her tablet. It was a message from Chelsey. Oh yeah… that’s today, isn’t it? Isabel clicked on it. A new window opened to fill half the screen, occupied mostly by Jourdain’s beaming face and bright blue eyes, with Chelsey in the background looking zoned out.
“Aunt Isabel hi it’s my birthday!” Her dark hair was in little ringlets, and Isabel could see chains of construction-paper rings hanging on the light fixtures behind her when she moved her head.
“Hi, Jourdain,” said Isabel. “Happy birthday. Tell me how old you are.”
Jourdain held up four chubby fingers. The math checked out, but Isabel still felt sure she’d helped change this girl’s diapers not too long ago.
“Are you having a party today?” Jourdain nodded. After another minute or so of this conversation, Jourdain went to the kitchen to get a drink of water. Another two minutes went by and she didn’t return, and Chelsey didn’t seem to notice. Isabel shrank the window to a much smaller size and went back to work, glancing at the window every few moments in case her niece came back or her sister woke up.
Then Isabel got the message from Marshpower. Sean Lao looked unusually grim.
“Are you sitting down?” he said.
Uh-oh. “Yes.”
“Good.” Sean took a breath. “The new owners are canceling the Conowingo Project. In fact, they’re canceling everything.”
“What?”
“The new owners. They’re shutting everything down. I don’t know why they’re doing it.”
“What’s ‘everything’?”
“Everything. Marshpower. Other companies in the same business.”
“Did they say why?”
“No.”
Isabel shook her head. “This is crazy.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Where’s the governor in all this? I mean, this thing was his baby.”
“There’s got to be something you can replace it with.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but it’s getting harder and harder to find investment capital. There’s just too much everywhere that needs doing—everybody wants to rebuild their house or raise their house or move their house somewhere else, and that’s just the homeowners.”
“Fuck.”
“I just wish I could tell you what’s going on. It just seems like whoever owns the company is bankrupting themselves trying to shut down the whole industry and I don’t know why.”
“Not to be crass,” said Isabel, “but is there any chance of me getting paid for the work I’ve done?”
Sean shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “If I had the money, I’d give it to you.”
On that note, the conversation ended. Isabel rested her elbows on the desk and rubbed her temples in frustration. How are we supposed to protect the Bay? And how am I supposed to get paid? She was starting to get that blah feeling you got when you realized that the wonderful afternoon nap you’d promised yourself, in lieu of the night’s sleep you hadn’t gotten because you were busy doing work that had turned out to be a complete waste of time, just wasn’t going to happen.
As far as employment opportunities went, oddly enough, her best bet was another engineering consultation firm. With every city, town, and county in the northern half of the U.S. and all of Canada wanting to know how to rebuild their infrastructure so it could weather the Monsoon, that was a growth industry right now. Just as long as nobody heard about what she’d done to Eveland-Blades.
Still, Isabel was strangely glad she’d already bought those tickets to the concert in June. If she had to do it now—assuming it wasn’t already sold out, which it probably was—she wasn’t sure she’d be able to justify spending the money.
* * *
It was warm out, easily over eighty, partly cloudy with a slight breeze. Everything smelled of rain that had just finished falling. Skies were still blue, the world was still upholstered in millions of shades of green… on days like this, you might almost think nothing much had changed from the twentieth century.
When Isabel went walking through a neighborhood in the springtime, a part of her mind always noticed the flowers. There were maybe two dozen species that she could identify by sight, but still her instincts told her to watch the flowers like a soldier in an urban battlefield scanning the rubble for snipers. It was an old habit she’d picked up in childhood. Flowers meant bees.
Even so, as she went on her walk it took her a few minutes to realize exactly what was wrong. Only when she passed by someone’s lawn and noticed all the little holes in the ground near the sidewalk did it come to her.
There were no dandelions. There were only holes in the lawn where they had been dug up, roots and all. They were famously hard to uproot, but someone had done it.
And the same thing was true in the next lawn, and the next, and the next, all the way back to the front yard of the building where she and Hunter rented an apartment. And the slender blue-green stems of the little wild onions that could be seen everywhere… couldn’t be seen anywhere. The violets also seemed to be missing. And when Isabel looked closely at the white clover, she saw how it had been stripped of its leaves.
Only now did the thought cross her mind that at some point in the last six months, she really should have Googled “edible wild plants in Maryland” and seen what was available in her own backyard. From the looks of things, somebody in this town, or several somebodies, had beaten her to it. “Treat it like a war” was a phrase she’d been hearing online more and more often. In wartime, people did things like this.
Isabel glanced around in a doomed attempt to figure out if there was an unusually small number of squirrels still around. Come to think of it, those pigeons that nested in the attic might be worth catching. Of course, she’d have to cook them very thoroughly before she ate them. They weren’t clean birds. So even though there are obviously other people around here hungrier than you, you have to get the pigeons first?
On second thought, you’re right. Pop is still bringing in oysters, and crab season is about to begin. I don’t need animal protein that badly. Admittedly, that doesn’t help Hunter and I can’t make out with him after eating it, but—
How long are you going to keep sponging off Pop? You know the problems he’s having lately.
MAKE. UP. YOUR. MIND.
GET. A. JOB.
I. HAD. ONE. THIS. FUCKING. MORNING.
When she opened the door to her apartment, she was greeted by an evil-sounding hiss. This cheered her up—Hunter hadn’t felt much like laughing lately. Isabel still didn’t get why a guy like him had a laugh that would make the Joker start edging away, but the important thing was, right now he was in a good mood.
“What’s the joke?”
“It’s a biology paper,” he said. “One of my students has gerunds mixed up with gonads.”
“I wonder if he makes that mistake on his English homework,” said Isabel, feeling a little like a hypocrite—she couldn’t remember what gerunds were, except that they had something to do with grammar.
Hunter laugh-hissed even harder.
“You know, you have the quietest laugh I’ve ever heard,” she said.
“Yeah, there’s… kind of a story behind that,” said Hunter. “When I was a kid, I sounded completely different. I had this really loud, distinct laugh.”
“What happened?”
“Well, other kids made fun of me, Mom and Dad thought it sounded fake, so… I changed it.”
“Changed what? The way you laugh? You can do that?”
“It took a while, but yeah. Only it wasn’t exactly something I could fine-tune. If I could, I’d have gone with something a little less creepy.”
“Jeez, Hunter, that’s depressing.” Isabel spent much of the rest of the day looking up jokes and comedy routines online and trying to get Hunter to laugh the way he did as a child. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to be able to do it anymore. But at least it took her mind off her own problems. And Chelsey’s problems. And the Bay’s problems. And Hunter’s other problems, the ones that weren’t exactly psychological. I brought him out of Louisiana to the Eastern Shore. As far as economic opportunity goes… there’s an old saying about frying pans and fires that applies here.
* * *
Pratt looked across the Resolute desk at Wendy Czeczelski. He was sitting, and she was standing, which put their heads at almost the same height.
“Any progress to report on the treaty?” It would be very embarrassing if, after winning the war against North Korea, getting China to stay out of it and getting a good deal in the Treaty of Gyeongju, he lost the peace in the Senate.
“All the Democrats are on board,” she said. “They don’t like giving you a victory, but in a case like this they’ll let it go. I’m working on the Republicans. Ten of them have committed—in person at least—to ratify. Another eleven have told me they won’t. That’s in addition to the three that have already denounced it in public.”
“So we’re close to where we need to be. Do any of the holdouts want anything in particular?”
“Mostly more aid to their states in the next budget.”
“I can do that,” said Pratt. “I don’t like it, but I can do it.” He shook his head. “These people who are against the treaty—I’ve heard some of them on the stump. They’re always complaining about our overseas commitments and the money we spend on them. This reduces one of those commitments and saves us money without leaving us or the Koreans worse off. I don’t understand what their problem is.”
“Mr. President, you’re thinking too muc
h. This isn’t a rational objection. This is a simple revulsion at seeing U.S. forces retreat from anywhere. Even in five years.”
“Senators aren’t supposed to make up their minds on that kind of reaction.”
“With all due respect, Mr. President,” said Wendy, “speaking as a lifelong Republican, you knew what you were getting into when you joined us. If it makes you feel any better, of the ones who haven’t made up their minds there are five that I know I can talk around, and I’m pretty sure about Turgeon, Rieck, and Brearley. One vote from one of them and the treaty makes it through.”
“Well, get out there and bring me that vote.”
“I won’t let you down, Mr. President.” She looked at him like a daughter hoping for her father’s approval… possibly. Pratt wasn’t too sure. His knowledge of children in general was strictly theoretical. He gave her a small smile as he motioned toward the exit.
As soon as Wendy was out the door, Pratt returned his attention to the Transportation Secretary’s report. Rebuilding was going slower than expected; there wasn’t enough concrete and asphalt out there, and fuel for the machines kept running short. Federal projects, and state/local projects in Minnesota, Illinois, and New York, were being further slowed down by the requirement that they be designed and built to withstand another Monsoon. The same was true of the rebuilding of Anchorage. Pratt had no regrets about this. Infrastructure spending was his least favorite thing after welfare, but that was precisely why he wanted it done right the first time—so he wouldn’t have to do it again next year.
Then Treasury Secretary Terry Walther entered for his appointment, his lined face looking particularly troubled. A little conversation showed why.
“On the tax front,” said Terry, “I expect the usual last-minute filings, but if they follow the same pattern as what we’ve already seen, we’re not going to see much revenue from the places the Monsoon hit. Or from Louisiana. In fact, right now the West Coast, New England, and the New York City area are basically keeping the government afloat. I’m talking about taxes and bond sales both, you understand.
