by John Barnes
“I was so upset when I saw him already taking off, I mean he didn’t know we were coming but we tried so hard to get there and missed him by just that much. Then… right when I thought how can we be so close and still miss it… that was terrible, wasn’t it?”
Carol May hugged her niece closer. “Yes, it was, try not to think about it, relax.”
“It looked like the whole inside just filled up, all at once, with white-hot fire. Why’d his plane blow up?”
“EMP, I’m pretty sure. Poor guy, I really liked him, and his wife is such a sweetheart, and they were only married less than a year ago. At least he couldn’t have suffered much.”
They sat in the dark and listened to the whooping, the shrieking, the occasional cries of pain and hoots of laughter, and the never-stopping drums. No one seemed to be coming back into the orchards, probably because there was no loot here, most of the trees were already burned, and nobody felt any need for privacy while copulating.
The noise went on while Carol May observed the moon moving a handsbreadth-at-arm’s-length across the sky, crossing one crack and then another; she watched that one more time, then spoke as softly as she could. “Pauline, honey, you still awake?”
“Yeah. Can’t sleep. I keep hoping they’ve killed the people they were playing with, but then I hear another scream.”
Carol May shuddered. “How’s the leg?”
“Not bad. Tired, and it gets sore when it’s tired, but it’s got some miles in it. Were you thinking of going now?”
“It’s going to take these tribals most of the night to fall down and go to sleep, I’m afraid, and then all day tomorrow before they’re even halfway started walking back to Castle Earthstone. So if we wait till tomorrow, and let it get light, we’ll have to stay under cover for most of the day and keep our little friends quiet. It was bad enough doing that all day today, and we had the help of all the noise from town, and the fires in the burning orchards, to help hide us. Tomorrow anyone who’s half curious or hears a funny sound is going to be able to walk right up to the shed and in through the door, and we won’t be able to fool them into thinking the place is already torched by burning a little junk right by the door.”
“Makes sense. Packs are still loaded, right?”
“Yep. I grabbed a pilot emergency radio kit at the airport, and that’s in my pack—”
“One of those radio in a jar things?”
“Yeah.”
“Man, Aunt Carol May, all I thought to bring was that applesauce and apple butter we’ve been eating,” Pauline said. “I didn’t even think where there might be anything useful.”
“Pauline, sweetheart, you can’t get more useful than food. Especially the kind where kids’ll eat it, and you got enough to get us a couple days down the road. And I’m glad it’s all applesauce and apple butter, because, honey, you know it’s the last thing that’s going to taste like home, ever. Aw, don’t cry on me, Pauline, please don’t cry or I’ll start. Come on, we need to wake these kids up quietly and be on our way.”
4 HOURS LATER. PUEBLO. 8:30 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2026.
“Who’s the most excellent boy in the whole stinking world?” Heather asked Leo, who was making noises that indicated he knew. She hugged him close and thought, And I do mean stinking. Well, at least Dad’ll get to know his grandson, and there are worse places to live than San Diego, and… man, we are so beaten.
The knock at the door was soft. “Ms. O’Grainne? Got an emergency message from Incoming Crypto.”
She opened the door to find Ntale standing there. “Patrick sent me ’cause it was further to Mister Hendrix’s house. And Melissa at Crypto told us both to run, run, run, she said it just like that, three times, she said you’d want this news right away.”
Heather handed Ntale a pile of meal coupons and said, “Hang around till I read it, just in case I need to send a message with you.”
She set Leo down with a final little tap of her finger on his nose, which made his eyes cross in a way that always made her laugh. She grinned at the silly boy, then got the letter opener from her desk, slipped it under the envelope flap, and drew a deep breath against the coming bad news. The horde was already on its way down the Ohio, perhaps an advance party had already attacked Paducah? The Army of the Wabash ambushed and cut off again? Another declaration of independence somewhere? The tribes that had been moving around in the Tennessee Valley and the Ouachitas had broken out again?
Whatever it is, we’ll get through it, she thought. Strange that I’m still the President, this morning, so I guess getting through whatever it is, is my job.
Then she opened it, and saw that it was from Carol May, who was alive and transmitting from a barn fifteen miles northwest of Pale Bluff, and expected to make it into Wayne City late today. She teared up; Carol May, alive!
She had to wipe her eyes before she read the even better news. When she did, she handed Ntale a fistful of meal tickets, and said, “If James hasn’t started cooking breakfast, make him start. If he needs groceries, get his order and take it to the commissary, put it on the RRC tab. And then you and Patrick go get Leslie, and the Duchess from wherever she’s staying, and Jason and Beth, and Izzy Underhill, okay? We need to meet, which means you and Patrick get us all into James’s house, quick as you can.”
Ntale grinned. “Let me show you how quick that is. I’ve been getting my growth this year and Patrick’s not the only fast one in the family anymore.”
2 HOURS LATER. PUEBLO. 10:30 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2026.
“Well, the attendants are saying he only started to move about an hour ago. He’s had time to pee and they gave him a little breakfast, and they’re saying he’s kind of drifting around, which is pretty usual the morning after a severe seizure.” James looked up and down the conference table. “So we’re agreed on the basic strategy, right? Shock him with the news and see what happens. Maybe we can get him loose enough from Daybreak to clue us in to something else. Now, any other thoughts?”
There were none. When they filed into the little room, Arnie barely looked up from where he sat on the bed, leaning forward, arms folded as if he were a small boy with a stomachache.
James said, “The horde led by Lord Robert of Castle Earthstone has converted, en masse, to the version of Daybreak that he calls True Daybreak, which preaches that the clean, natural Earth is here for human beings to enjoy, and instead of driving forward in a great raid against the plaztatic world, they are going home to plant crops, raise children, and repopulate the Earth.”
“Liar.”
“All true. Every word of it. Daybreak is betrayed. The Lost Quarter is in the hand of heretics, or whatever your stupid bush-hippie movement calls them.”
Arnie shuddered and wiped his eyes. “I can’t feel Daybreak,” he said. “It’s not reacting. It’s just me, left here, now that it’s done with me.”
“Then why won’t you believe me?”
“I don’t know.” He wiped his eyes again.
“Do you remember what we talked about yesterday? Do you remember telling me how Daybreak tricked us into playing its game, and losing the war?”
“Like it was a hundred years ago.” He rocked back and forth. “Daybreak… it’s in trouble. Or not, maybe it’s just finished what it came for. This True Daybreak, is, is, is, not yet, no, no seizure this time. True Daybreak or not, it doesn’t matter. This plaztatic world will rise no higher, this world will not… your species, this species, my species, doesn’t matter, the world will be wild and safe, no danger to anyone.” He looked up at them with a vacant stare. “James? What have I been talking about?”
“Nice fake, Arnie.”
“I can’t remember what we’re talking about.”
“Do you remember that True Daybreak is taking over the Lost Quarter, and Lord Robert has betrayed you?”
“No, I… maybe, you just told me, didn’t you?”
“Can you feel Daybreak inside you? It almost gave you a seizure. You sa
id you couldn’t feel it.”
“It lies a lot. I lie a lot. I’m sorry. Can I sleep now?”
Back in the Facility 1 conference room, James said, “Well. I think that Daybreak definitely wants us to believe that Lord Robert’s heresy is not something Daybreak approves of and it’s not the next move in Daybreak’s development. We’re being set up to believe that it’s his own particular invention, and what he has re-invented is barbarian tyranny. That’s pretty awful if you consider all his subjects were ordinary Americans or Canadians, regular people with regular jobs, two years ago. But if you consider that he’s just a plain old barbarian conqueror, not too different from Attila or Chaka Zulu or one of the Khans, and civilization has five thousand years of practice in how to deal with those, well, yeah. We couldn’t live with the tribes, but we can live with the Domain. They’ll come to us to trade, maybe not this week or this year, but soon, and they’ll want all those nice toys and a warm house in the winter and out of season food, and in a hundred years they’ll be absorbed. That’s the story it’s telling us.”
“But you don’t believe it’s true?” Bambi asked.
“Not really. It looks like classic Daybreak, the lies are just wrappers for more lies.”
Jason nodded. “That’s the way I see it too, James. Yeah, I buy that civilization can absorb some of Daybreak, but that doesn’t mean the end of Daybreak; it means Daybreak is going to be all through civilization. Everywhere, all the time, as the new world grows up, Daybreak will be there whispering that machines are wicked, knowledge is poison, and people were meant to be big hairless monkeys huddling in the bushes and dying before they’re forty. That was around before, but look at Castle Earthstone. Me and the other scouts didn’t see a city that’s going to grow and advance and change. It was a hunting cabin, a place for guys to play out their big man in the woods fantasies. If it turns into a real castle, it’s still going to be a backward, primitive, progress-and-people-hating kind of place. Kids that grow up there are gonna grow up with the idea that dirty, smelly, overworked, and sick is virtuous, and that enjoying life and comfort and having the tools and leisure to explore a long way is degenerate and wicked. Lord Robert hasn’t defeated it; he’s just driven it underground, and it’ll trickle up all around his Domain, and keep it stuck in the mud forever.”
“But he’s not burning down the civilized world,” James pointed out.
“True.”
Beth said, “I have the strangest idea.”
Heather smiled, trying to look as encouraging as she could, because Beth was often nervous around people who had a lot of schooling, big vocabularies, or impressive titles. “Well, share.”
The young woman looked down nervously. “So if Daybreak is trouble for, like, regular civilized people, and Lord Robert is trying to set up a regular civilized Domain, but it’s all made up of ex-Daybreakers or heretic Daybreakers or whatever they are… what if we gave him a shot of the original Daybreak to cope with? Something to keep him more backward, and focused on his own troubles?”
James clapped his hands. “I get it. Fighting Daybreak with Daybreak. And it gives us something to do with poor old Arnie. I’d been afraid that someday we’d have to decide he was too dangerous to keep, or all used up, and kill him. And since the research here is over… yeah, why not? Either we release him or we murder him, and the world has had enough murders.”
THE NEXT DAY. IN THE ADRIATIC SEA, ON BOARD DISCOVERY. 9:00 AM CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME. WEDNESDAY, MAY 13, 2026.
Captain Halleck thanked the watch that would still have been in their bunks, and said, “This is simplicity itself. I think we’ve all been staying up with the radio reports from home, and we know that things are in a very bad way indeed back there. Well, not surprisingly, the government in Athens, which created this mission and owns this ship, has sent us orders that we are to abandon our research and return to Savannah, there to be outfitted as a warship. They do not want us to bring back or report on our research; the ship’s company will be disbanded and members returned to their homes ‘as expeditiously as possible.’ I suspect but cannot prove that this precipitate decision is in reaction to some of our biologists having done some field studies, back in Florida, in which the word ‘evolution’ found its way into the titles.
“Now, there are two possible ways we can react to this. We can dutifully sail back to Savannah, protesting over the radio the whole way if we like, and when we get there, they’ll toss our research notes and samples into the bay and convert us to a warship. Or we can go somewhere else and place ourselves under their protection, and avoid going to ports in—now this is truly weird—the CSA. For one awful moment I thought someone had revived the Confederacy, but actually that’s the Christian States of America.
“Coincidentally, I happened to be talking by radio to Captain Highbotham in Christiansted, a place some of you may remember.”
Laughter and applause swept the deck.
“I thought we might take a vote.”
The vote was overwhelmingly for Christiansted. Only two very duty-conscious sailors, and two scholars who thought it would be more convenient to get off the ship in Savannah, voted the other way.
As Whorf returned to his station, Halleck stopped him and said, “I thought you might like to know that I have a relay, via James Hendrix at Pueblo and Captain Highbotham, addressed to you.” He handed him a sheet of paper, and said, “I assume this is some code I’m not familiar with.”
Whorf looked and grinned. “It’s my family code, sir, we all use it in the family business—which has just relocated to Christiansted. This is great!”
“You’re telling me,” Ihor said; he had been standing there quietly listening. “Now there’s someone I can bother for a job.”
9 HOURS LATER. PUEBLO. 9:00 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. WEDNESDAY, MAY 13, 2026.
“We’ve put enough food in your pack so that if you’re careful, you should be able to walk all the way to the Wabash from Wayne City, where the train will drop you off. If you cross any bridge along it, a patrol will challenge you. And then you cooperate, and they take you to Castle Earthstone, and you can decide what to do from there.”
Arnie Yang nodded. “Thank you. And if I ever come back out of the Lost Quarter, wanting to talk, what will you do?”
“Talk to you. Mostly about the Lost Quarter and what’s going on there,” Heather said. “We’re not exiling you for your ideas, Arnie—especially since they are not really your ideas and you don’t hold them voluntarily. It’s just that, while you’re infected with them, it’s better to have you keeping company with the other infected people, than out here.”
Arnie looked for a moment as if he might speak, then shrugged and hugged all of them before he boarded the train.
The next stop was Outgoing Crypto, where Heather told them, “All right, special request. Broadcast in clear.”
“You mean not coded, so anyone can read it?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. I know it’s not really crypto if it’s not enciphered, but you folks have the biggest and best radio in this part of the country, and I need to make sure everyone reads this.” It was a short note explaining her claim to be President of the United States, resigning the office without a successor, and therefore declaring the end of the United States.
“Really,” she said, as they rode in the carriage to the airfield, “it’s almost more of a relief. Now that I’m not the President, I’m not a target, or not much of one, anyway. And it will be nice, if Bambi really does make me a baroness—”
“I’m thinking at least a countess.”
“Well, whatever. I guess I should be happy it’s not waitress or stewardess. Anyway, running a feudal fief seems like a much more reasonable job in the new world. And it’ll be a decent place for Leo to grow up, if I have any say about it, and we can bring my father out to live with us, free babysitting with bonding on the side. Certainly better than the old job here.” She sighed. “Even though I’ll miss everyone.”
A few m
inutes later, James and Leslie watched the Stearman, carrying Heather and Leo in the front cockpit with Bambi behind, bound off the runway and head west.
“This place was home for both of us, back before,” James observed. “And there’s still some library work to do, getting those pamphlets and brochures out to people who need them but don’t have them already. So we’ll eat, eh?”
“If you cook, we’ll eat well.” She slipped her arm into his. “It’s funny, just when I start to see how big you grew in that job, you go and lose it. And I guess after you fail at restoring America, there’s not very many jobs that could ever have the same appeal.”
James sighed. “Just when I get a job that impresses you, I find I’m more into the job than into impressing you.”
“That’s perfectly okay. Can we take this very slowly? Long walks, complicated conversations, that kind of thing? There’s just so much we don’t know yet.”
“Actually we don’t even know what country we’re going to be in yet. Slow is fine.”
SEVENTEEN:
EVERY NEW BEGINNING COMES FROM SOME OTHER BEGINNING’S END
2 DAYS LATER. CASTLE CASTRO (FORMERLY SAN DIEGO HARBOR). NOON PACIFIC TIME. FRIDAY, MAY 15, 2026.
Dave and Arlene Carlucci, and Terry Bolton, all began by trying to tell Bambi how sorry they were about Quattro, and how much they had liked him. It was little consolation that they were simply telling the truth, but some stern glares and aggressive subject-changing from Heather shut them up gently, and after that, the luxury of really good food in abundance made them nearly as quiet as the Carluccis’ teenagers, Paley and Acey.
It was a long time before they got down to business, too, because none of them had met Leo before, and “proper baby-admiring takes time,” as Terry pointed out. He seemed to be visibly brightening with each minute spent on the broad terrace, overlooking the sea, where Bambi preferred to entertain whenever the weather was favorable.
