by John Barnes
Old Joe Steiger bellowed, “Like hell we will. This bullshit is treason, blatant treason, and—”
Doubtless, the Commandant had planned it.
The Special Assistant behind Joseph Steiger whipped out a heavy, short piece of pipe and brought it down on Steiger’s head in one savage motion. Steiger fell to his knees, moaning, and the Special Assistant struck again, knocking him to his face, kicked him in the ribs, and brought the pipe down on his head so hard that the thud was audible where Rollings stood.
The crowd was silent for a moment, and then someone laughed, and then many of them did. Maybe that first guy that laughed was a plant, Rollings thought. But everyone that laughed after him, they weren’t all plants. The mob’s with the Commandant.
The Commandant said, “Now we will continue with the oath. Mrs. Sharon Steiger, if you will lead—”
Joe Steiger’s wife (or was she already his widow?) screamed a few words of denunciation before the same Special Assistant, with the same pipe, knocked her down. The way she twitched on the little stage looked more like a spasm than a struggle. The mob was still laughing, but with a nervous, hysteric edge.
The Commandant sighed with just a hint of impatience. “Since the oldest members of the family won’t lead, let’s try a younger one. Tory Steiger, please step forward.”
The girl was tiny, maybe ten years old and small for her age, and trembling. The Special Assistant stood behind her, not even concealing the length of pipe, and the Commandant said, very gently, “Sweetie, you just need to say the words.”
Tory’s mother said, “Do what the Commandant says, honey, it will be all right.”
“Yes, exactly,” the Commandant said. “And the rest of your family will speak along with you.”
They did, mumbling, and it was conspicuous that when the Steiger family left the stage (except for the oldest generation, who were carried down the steps and dumped into a cart), there were numerous armed men around them, and they went into the dark in a different direction.
At last the Commandant called for the Rollings family. Deanna had already bumped, WE SAY IT to him and he’d bumped back HELL YES. As they were led up the steps, Rollings’s wife, Matilda, and their other daughter Uhura, joined them.
It was easier than he thought it would be; he said it loudly, clearly, and firmly, just as, when drug addicts had robbed his dental practice, he had always spoken politely and clearly so that they would have no cause to harm him. It was over in no time and he didn’t even feel like he had to shower or brush his teeth afterward. I suppose if you truly understand that an oath given under duress is meaningless, then it just doesn’t matter much. Thanks for Ethics 202, Professor Blaine.
Their two militia guards (it looked like the Commandant was using militia for the more cooperative, less suspect people) had walked them back over the Brooklyn Bridge, and they were a few blocks from the house, when a voice said, “Is that the Rollings family?”
“Yeah.”
The man who stepped out of the shadow and into the lantern light wore a long coat and a black scarf around his face, and held up a Special Assistant’s badge. “The Commandant wants this asshole’s sloop searched tonight, and we want him and his family there while we do it, so they can help—and so we can remind them they want to help. Sounds like there’s a lot of stuff on there that has never been recorded for tax purposes, a lot of small valuable pocket stuff.”
The militia men, probably thinking there would be a chance to fill their pockets, were immediately, happily willing to comply. So was Rollings, but he made sure it didn’t show. Deanna bumped against him.
G?
He bumped back
HE
and contrived to rub against Matilda, who bumped
DUH IM HIS MTHR
Rollings was nervous and scared that his son’s deception might be exposed, but soon he reflected that had Geordie been a completely different person, he might have been good at Special Assisting. Within two blocks, by dint of overbearing nitpicking, Geordie had the militiamen discouraged and trudging along aimlessly as they made their way to the Brooklyn wharfs. As he pretended to rough up his family, he cut his father’s bonds and slipped a knife into his hands; after another block he quietly said, “Now,” and they heard a startled, soft cry of pain behind them. Rollings sprang forward and slid the knife into their front guard’s throat, two quick stabs that silenced him and left him dying on the sidewalk. Two years ago I’d’ve puked; but between pirates, muggers, wreckers, and that guy I think was probably an assassin, it’s kind of a technical business, like taking out a badly fractured wisdom tooth.
When Rollings looked back, the one that Geordie had knifed was lying still. “All right,” Geordie said. “Let me douse that lantern out, Pops, and you all stick close to me. Should be enough moonlight to make it to Ferengi without needing to show a light.”
As they climbed the gangplank, Rollings muttered, “I would’ve thought they’d have had a guard on this ship.”
“They did, Pops. Where’d’ya think I got the outfit and the badge?”
Ferengi had been deliberately kept fully stocked for a long voyage, and the Commandant’s men hadn’t disturbed anything. The land breeze and the tide were in their favor, and Geordie knew the harbor well; when the moon rose, just before midnight, they were well clear.
“Man, one thing I won’t miss, it’s that broken Statue of Liberty,” Matilda said. “Broke my heart every time I came over to Manhattan. Did you hear that Commandant’s got convicts out there in chains every day, cutting up the fallen-off arm-and-torch, so he can sell it for scrap? Besides being crass, and a fascist dictator, he has no sense of irony.” She drew a deep breath. “Love the smell of the air, and I don’t mean just the salt water. What time is it?”
Rollings said, “Moonrise was going to be just before midnight, and there’s not even a glow on the horizon yet. So it’s not late. I don’t think we should chance a light till we’re further out to sea and we’re running before a good stiff breeze.”
“Well, we’re all safe for the moment. Sorry we lost the business, Jamayu, but that’s the world nowadays.”
Rollings laughed. “Heck, ’Tildie, if I start worrying about the past I’ll soon be sorry that I’ll probably never do another root canal. We got the fam, we got Ferengi, we got skills and our health.”
“Yeah, that’s a cargo of blessings, isn’t it? Well, then, has anybody thought about where we’re going, yet?”
“There’s nothing north, Europe’s too far away and a bigger mess than here, that leaves south,” Rollings said. “We could probably live okay in the Christian States, but we’ve got the range to go farther. If we can trust Whorf’s last letter, St. Croix sounds like a decent place to do a little trading, shipping, and salvaging. What do you all think?”
“I think whether we’re going to Savannah, St. Croix, or Rio, we sail exactly the same for the next week,” Geordie said, “and come dawn, I’m going to want someone to relieve me at the helm, which means somebody ought to get some sleep, right now, and we have a week to talk all this out.”
“Nothing to argue with there,” Rollings said.
“I’ll stay up for this watch with you,” Uhura said. “We can figure out rotation later. Pops, Mom, you’ve had a day and I think you ought to go sleep.”
In the skipper’s cabin, as they settled into their familiar, beloved bunk, Rollings asked his wife, “How come we’ve got such great kids?”
“Proper culling,” she said. “You just never heard the splashes when I’d toss the dumb, mean, ugly ones over the side.”
It was an old joke, shared as comfortably as the bunk itself, and with half a thought more about how lucky he was, he fell asleep.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. RUINS OF PALE BLUFF. ABOUT 9:30 PM CENTRAL TIME. MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026.
“Now, heave, heave, heave!” Nathanson shouted, and the old phone pole moved forward and under the trip bar. “Trip her!”
The other crew hauled on their lines
, dragging the trip bar down and pushing the tall pole’s tip down into the hole.
“And heave!”
The pole seated in its hole, slid a little in and down, and rose as the main line hauled it upward. With a thump, it slid into place, and while the guy lines still held it, the crew dumped rocks and dirt around the base; in a minute or so, it was secure enough to stand for years.
Nathanson turned and waved to the men standing by the big bonfire, who hurled in shovels and buckets full of ripped-up books from the town library and school. The fire roared up in a great burst of blazing pages, wiping the stars from the sky and sending orange light dancing up the pole to where General Phat’s body was attached by many wrappings of old electric wire.
The drums boomed out a quick, infectious rhythm, and the crowd cheered and sang. Others ran forward to help throw all the paper into the bonfire, making it blaze higher and prettier still, and a huge circle of dancers wove around the immense fire until it burned down, and at the urging of the leaders, they sat down to listen to Lord Robert.
He stood on the high platform with the fire lighting him from the side, and began, “As you all know, True Daybreak and traditional Daybreak have joined forces, and we have made the country from the Wabash and the Ohio to the Lakes all ours. The enemy army is now only trying to find their way out, trying to run away while they still can. They are shattered. I proclaim that this is now the Domain of Lord Robert!”
When another long burst of drumming and dancing had subsided, and he was growing impatient, Robert continued, “Now, there was a condition attached to this. Traditional Daybreak has said to us, via Glad Ocean here”—he actually embraced the old bony bitch, and smelled her unwashed body as he did, to make his point, and she beamed up at him—“that it would send tens of thousands of fighters, and it has. It pledged to make this victory possible, and it has. And now… traditional Daybreak says, their price for their help has been, now throw it all away. Let us not have what we have fought for.”
The crowd moaned, some with the onset of Daybreak seizures, some old-school Daybreakers booing him, and many of his own True Daybreak people excited and getting ready.
His arm slipped from an embrace of the woman to a forearm wrapped around her throat, and he began to squeeze. “Glad Ocean here, Glad Ocean is the teacher of the Daybreak that does not work, the spoiled and ruined Daybreak that will rob you all—” Robert was squeezing her neck and she was beginning to struggle desperately. “And I say, that is a bargain we don’t need to keep. We needed this victory, and so did Daybreak, and now we are done with each other!”
The crowd was milling; fights were breaking out, some people were trying to flee, others suffering seizures.
“The old Daybreak of your old tribes demanded that if you came here to fight by our sides, I would then lead you on a huge fucking raid from here all the way across the plains, to break and shatter plaztatic civilization wherever we find it—and then die!
“You all know that Daybreak tells you to kill as many people as you can and then die yourself! They want us to clean out the plaztatic assholes, scrape them off the world, and then lie down and die on top of them and free the planet. Never have kids, never raise a family, live out your life as a slave or a soldier, die for Daybreak! Die for Mother Earth because… because it’s a lie!”
He nodded at Bernstein and Nathanson. Bernstein went to grab Glad Ocean’s master, super-duper extra powerful spirit stick from the slave carrying it; when the slave resisted, Nathanson felled him with a hatchet chop to the face. Bernstein wrenched the spirit stick away and hurled it high into the air like a javelin, so that it came down in the very center of the bonfire. “Daybreak is broken!” he shouted. “Long live True Daybreak!”
Robert was screaming his message over the uproar, not worrying because his own side knew it and was shouting something similar as they fought back and forth with their tribal allies. “True Daybreak says—live in the beautiful world you have made! True Daybreak says—fish in those streams when they run clean again! True Daybreak says—sit by a warm fire and enjoy your freedom! No slaves! Keep your babies and raise them! Clean Earth and real freedom!”
Glad Ocean had been a small woman before, and though she’d probably toned her muscles in the last year, much of it had been a year of slow starvation and struggle to stay warm and not die of flu or a cold. He had worked his forearm down into the crease of her neck, with his wrist biting into her carotid, and now he lifted her up onto her tiptoes and shook her like an old towel, letting her have just enough air not to pass out yet.
“That is what True Daybreak says. I say, I want True Daybreak! True Daybreak and I want peace! No more war! No more deaths! No slaves, everyone equal! Families to raise and corn to grow, living the good life on the good clean planet, because we fought for it and it is ours and we deserve it! I want you to join True Daybreak, join me, join us tomorrow when we return to Castle Earthstone. All you tribes who have fought and bled beside us: come and live with us too. The Domain is big and wide and open, it’s the best hunting ground, the best place to raise corn and make whiskey, the best place to make babies and raise kids, to fight and fuck and love and dance and live the life a natural man was meant to live—”
There had been a swelling noise in the huge crowd; Robert had been waiting for it. For weeks, ever since the tribal forces had come together at Castle Earthstone, his True Daybreak believers had been moving among the tribes, befriending where they could, not so much arguing as just presenting the idea over and over, pointing to the beauty of the Earth and asking, “Now that it is ours, why do you want to leave it so soon?”
His followers had been trained in the techniques for caring for people after a seizure, and for helping the victim to break free of Daybreak after a seizure. Slowly, a seizure at a time, the Castle Earthstone people had been pushing their newfound tribal friends through the process. Bernstein had guessed that they had about sixty percent of the tribal allies ready to convert; Robert figured that Bernstein had never quite recovered from being an accountant back before, and he figured that sixty percent was a SWAG for “more than half,” but good enough.
“Stand up and declare for True Daybreak!” he shouted. “Come with us! You can marry, have children, a family! You can grow the good food and work in the good Earth! You don’t have to die a dirty death out on the plains just because a few fucked up people made a mess of the Earth back before! The plaztatic world is dead, blessings be to Daybreak, and long live the Domain!”
Thousands of his True Daybreak people from Castle Earthstone, and tens of thousands of recent converts, leapt to their feet and shouted that real Daybreak was at hand. The remaining traditional Daybreakers shrieked, assaulted people near them, reached for weapons, but the preparations had been thorough; most of the True Daybreakers had brought a knife, a club, or a garotte, and most of the old tribals were unarmed, as they usually were for celebrations and ceremonies. Besides, another large part of the traditional Daybreak followers had been partly converted or were conflicted, and many thousands who might have fought for Daybreak instead fell into seizures. At Robert’s orders, his forces left the seizure cases alone for the moment; many would emerge ready to convert, and at the moment they were no more than a minor hazard underfoot.
In less than an hour, an army of 30,000 mixed tribals and Castle Earthstone True Daybreakers had become an army of 24,000 Castle Earthstone True Daybreakers. The bodies from the fighting lay in the streets, but since what was left of the town would burn tomorrow, they could just lie there, with the soldiers and the townspeople, something else to remind plaztatic America never to insult free people and despoil free Gaia again.
When the crowd had re-gathered at the fire, Robert had been amusing himself by tormenting Glad Ocean with his knife, and when he told her she was a sacrifice and ordered her to walk into the fire, to all appearances she did it willingly. A shout of joy went up as she fell forward into the coals.
“More fuel, do you think?” Bernstei
n asked, as it burned lower around the charred corpse.
“Naw. Let’s hope they get some sleep before they start walking back. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day, and then we’ve got a good month of walking to do, without the river doing most of the work this time. Meanwhile, though, life’s pretty sweet.”
He rose and stretched. “I think they were going to fix a special supper for us, and have some nice clean girls waiting, back at our main tent. Speaking of rewards we’ve earned, let’s go get ours.”
3 HOURS LATER. A MOWER SHED, IN THE ORCHARDS OUTSIDE THE FORMER PALE BLUFF. 12:30 AM CENTRAL TIME. TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2026.
Pauline Kloster slipped into the corrugated iron shed without making a sound; only the brief dark moments as her body blocked the moonlight through the crevices revealed she was there. Then Carol May Kloster felt the warmth of her niece’s shoulder next to her own, and a soft exhalation into her ear. “Aunt Carol May, they’re gonna party all night, sleep it off, and then start walking home. They’re going back to Castle Earthstone and taking all these tribals with them. How are the little guys doing?”
“So far nobody that wakes up yelling, thank the lord. How’s it look like the party is going?”
“Right now? Just getting started. They’ve still got some prisoners they’re gonna do stuff to. I kinda hurried to get back so I wouldn’t have to see none-a-that. Aunt Carol May, I want to help them but I don’t see how I can.”
Carol May put her arms around Pauline and whispered, “No, you can’t, honey. Most of us would love to be more help, but sometimes we just can’t. We’ve got five little kids to try to sneak out with, and they’re gonna wake up scared and hungry and mad at us, ’specially when we have to say they can’t see Mama right now, and we can’t go find their teddy. It was just dumb luck we found them at the airport; probably Quattro was supposed to fly them but no one told him.”
