Things Fall Apart

by Harry Turtledove

  After a hug that stamped her against him, a fierce kiss, and murmured endearments in English and Serbian (he liked her learning bits and pieces of his language, even if the way she pronounced it could make him LOL), he set the package on her kitchen counter.

  Blood leaked through the newspaper here and there. “What is it?” Vanessa asked eagerly. He was a good cook, a better cook than she was. And truckers got things and swapped things that didn’t show up on their official cargo manifests. Americans didn’t call the informal economy a black market, which didn’t mean it wasn’t one.

  “Croat spareribs,” he answered, deadpan. For a split second, she wondered if he meant it. Then he let out a harsh chuckle. “No, is not what you call long pig. Is only ordinary pig. I hear long pig and ordinary pig taste a lot alike. I hear, but I do not know of myself—for myself.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Vanessa did her best to make a joke of it.

  But Bronislav wasn’t joking. Or he didn’t sound as if he were, anyhow. His voice was serious, even grim, as he answered, “In Yugoslavia, I knew people who could say because they did it. They said they did it, anyhow. Me, I believed them. People on the other side did it, too—oh, yes. Ethnic cleansing.” He mimed picking his teeth.

  “Gross!” Vanessa exclaimed. She hadn’t thought she’d lived a sheltered life till she met him. She still wasn’t sure how much to believe from his stories. If they were even a quarter true, though, a pretty good first draft of hell on earth had shown up in disintegrating Yugoslavia in the last decade of the last millennium.

  “Too many things are,” he said. The depth of sorrow in his dark eyes kept her from pushing him any more.

  Instead, she asked, “What will you do with them?” She assumed he would fix them. She hoped he would, in fact. She appreciated what he did with food without worrying about matching it.

  “You have prunes, yes?” he said. “And onions? And chilies?”

  “Sure,” she said. Onions she probably would have had anyway. The other ingredients she kept around because he liked them and used them. They wouldn’t have been on the pantry’s shelves if she’d been hanging out with someone who had different tastes.

  “Good.” His nod was all business. “I use pressure cooker, then. I get things done fast.”

  “Okay,” Vanessa said as he fell to work. She also might not have had the olive oil in which he browned the ribs if she hadn’t known him. She’d always thought it tasted medicinal. She didn’t any more. That might have been love, or it might just have been better olive oil.

  A wonderful smell filled the apartment. Bronislav grunted in satisfaction. “Now we are getting somewhere.”

  “When I had Pickles and I was making something that smelled good like this, he’d come in and try to scrounge.” Vanessa sighed. “I miss Pickles.”

  “I am confused.” Bronislav sure sounded confused.

  “Oh.” Vanessa explained: “Pickles was my cat. When I got to a shelter in Kansas right after the supervolcano, they made me turn him loose. He couldn’t have lasted long, poor thing, not with all the ash and dust coming down.”

  “That is hard,” Bronislav said. “Why do you not get another cat? I have seen some people in this building have them.”

  “I thought about it. I couldn’t stand it,” Vanessa answered. “What happens if—no, when—I have to do something horrible to this one, too?”

  “You mourn. Then you go on. What else can you do? Sometimes life is hard. Always, in the end, life is hard. No one except our Lord ever got out of life alive. So do best you can while you are here.”

  Vanessa didn’t believe Jesus had got out of life alive, either, not the way Bronislav did. She did believe avoiding pain was better than charging it head-on. Bronislav had a different opinion. They didn’t argue about it. He rarely argued, which made him as different from Bryce as dim sum were from doorknobs. He knew what he knew (not all of what he knew was true, but he didn’t give a rat’s ass about that). And he didn’t much care what you imagined you knew.

  He put the lid on the pressure cooker and twisted it to seal it. Pretty soon, the steam-release valve in the lid started hissing away—chuff, chuff, chuff! Every chuff smelled great.

  Pork ribs with prunes and chopped onions weren’t something Vanessa would have come up with on her own. Bronislav waved her praise aside. “It is home cooking for me,” he said. “My mother would have got angry because I do not have all my spices just right.”

  By just right, he no doubt meant exactly the way his mother and grandmother and great-grandmother and all his female ancestors for the past thousand years had fixed the dish. He was still a part of that ancient tradition, still involved in keeping it alive. Vanessa envied the rootedness that gave him. Nothing in her own life reached back further than the stuff her mother had told her when she was little.

  She said so. Bronislav looked at her with those eyes out of a church mosaic. “You are American. That is how things are for you. I am Serb. This is how things are for me.”

  “But I don’t want things to be like that!” she blurted.

  “Life is not about how we want things to be. Life is about how things are.” He sounded certain. He almost always did. After a moment, he went on, “I want things to be so I can open little restaurant, even if my spices in things are not just right every time. But I have not got money to do this. So I do not worry. Maybe one day I have money. Maybe I keep driving truck.”

  “Okay, sweetie.” She put the dishes in the sink. Sooner or later, she’d do them. Odds were on later. She sent him a sidelong glance. “You aren’t driving a truck right now.”

  The look he gave back said that, if she were a Serb, she would have been a slut. Since she was an American, he could make certain allowances. He got up and slipped a strong arm around her waist. They walked back to the bedroom together.

  • • •

  When everything worked right, Kelly Ferguson could sic one of the world’s most potent computer networks on the climate changes and resulting ecological changes the supervolcano eruption was creating. She sometimes thought, though, that it preferred to remain a creature of mystery. One of its more obnoxious changes was playing merry hell with the North American power grid. Things didn’t work right nearly so often as she wished they would.

  When they didn’t—and when she wasn’t riding herd on Deborah, which also ate ridiculous amounts of time—she used what workarounds she could. She had a good scientific calculator. It ran on batteries. Its electronic brain was smarter and faster (and probably cuter, too) than a PC would have been a generation earlier. Next to the computer network she couldn’t access at the moment, however, it might as well have been a retarded hamster.

  Swearing, she ruthlessly simplified her assumptions and tried the regression analysis again. And the oh-so-clever scientific calculator choked on it again. Swearing louder, Kelly did some more simplifying. Not just regression for idiots this time. Regression for imbeciles. She hit the red button with the = sign on it. The calculator still choked.

  “Fuck you!” she snarled, and drew in a deep, furious breath so she could really tell the stinking gadget where to go, how to get there, and what to do once it arrived.

  Across the dining-room table from her, Colin was reading by the light of the same candles that shone on the uncooperative calculator’s little screen. Before she could fire off all the ammo she’d stacked up, he shook his head. “Don’t,” he told her.

  She glared at him. “What do you mean, don’t?” He might be the man she loved. When he told her not to do something she damn well intended to do, though, he could take his chances like anybody else. And if he got in her way, she’d fire some of that ammo at him.

  Or she thought so, till he answered, “I mean don’t, that’s what. If you cuss that thing the way you were fixing to cuss it, you’ll wake the baby. Do you want to do that?”

  Kelly opened her mouth. Then she closed it. After a few seconds, she said “Oh” in a small, sheepish voice. She si
ghed. “Well, you’re right. How about if I throw the stupid thing against the wall, or maybe whack it a good one with a hammer?”

  “Those’d make noise, too. Here. Wait.” Colin got up. He picked up one of the candlesticks and lit his way over to the kitchen with it. Setting the light on the countertop, he rummaged deep in the bowels of the miscellaneous drawer. The drawer was extremely miscellaneous. Except for maybe the Lost Chord or the Holy Grail, Kelly wouldn’t have been surprised at anything he hauled out of there. He’d recently produced a pair of polished-brass opera glasses whose existence she hadn’t even suspected.

  He let out a sudden, pleased grunt and pulled out something in a leather sheath. “What have you got there? A vorpal blade?” Kelly said. “If I can go snicker-snack on the calculator with it, bring it on.”

  Bring it on he did, or at least back to the table. He laid it next to the offending piece of electronica. “Not quite a vorpal blade. It was out of date by the time I went to high school, but hey, the high school I went to was out of date, too, so I ended up using it a lot.”

  Kelly opened the flap and drew out the enameled-aluminum body. “A vorpal slide rule!” she exclaimed. “Wow! This is retro like Marshall’s typewriter.”

  “Uh-huh.” Colin nodded. “The other way it’s like Marshall’s typewriter is, it still works and it doesn’t need a plug, or even batteries.”

  “It still works if you know what to do with it.” Kelly aimlessly moved the slide back and forth. “Hate to tell you, but this is the first time I ever tried.” She was fifteen years younger than her husband. When she went to high school, slide rules might as well have been buggy whips. Well, buggy whips were probably staging a comeback these days, too.

  “I can show you,” Colin said. “Some, anyhow.”

  Multiplying and dividing seemed pretty simple . . . till Kelly said, “Wait a minute. How do I keep track of the decimal point?”

  “Um, in your head,” he answered.

  “Tell me another one,” Kelly said. “That’s great for three times two equals six, but you start going batshit when it’s 3.191X104 times 4.867X107.”

  He got a faraway look in his eyes. “That’d be about, uh, 1.5X1012.”

  She punched the scientific calculator. She felt like punching it a different way altogether, but refrained. Sure as hell, it told her the answer was 1.5530597X1012. “How’d you know that?” she yipped.

  “Trick my uncle taught me. He’s the guy who gave me the slide rule. This baby cost like thirty-five bucks, and that was a lot of jack back in the day. Me, I woulda bought an el-cheapo plastic job, but he wanted me to be an engineer like him, so I got this fancy one.”

  “The trick,” Kelly said with the air of someone holding on to her patience, which she was.

  “Oh, yeah. Your first number was about 3X104. Your second one was about 5X107. Multiply those two together and you get 15X1011. That’s the same as 1.5X1012. You do the same thing whenever you work something on the slide rule. It’s the best way I know to keep the decimal point straight.”

  “I guess it would be,” she said slowly, and looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. “If you knew stuff like that and you remember it all these years later, how come you weren’t an engineer?”

  “’Cause I couldn’t stand high school. I did okay, but I hated every minute of it. It was like being in jail, only I hadn’t done anything to deserve to be there. Soon as I graduated, I joined the Navy—but you know that.”

  “Uh-huh.” Kelly eyed him again, not the same way this time. “And the Navy wasn’t like being in jail?”

  Colin let out a small, very dry chuckle. “As a matter of fact, it was. More like jail than high school was, a whole lot more. I didn’t know that going in, though. I was eighteen. I was dumb. But I repeat myself.”

  “Oh, boy, do you ever.” Kelly thought back to some of the things she’d done when she was that age. And she didn’t even have the excuse of testosterone poisoning.

  “Yup.” Her husband nodded. “I got used to it, though. After a while, I got to where I kinda liked it. Well, except for the living and sleeping arrangements. So when I took off one uniform, I put on another one. I’m what they call an institutional man, same as any other lifer.”

  “No, you put the bad guys in the institutions,” Kelly said.

  “Less difference than you’d think sometimes.” Colin made a point of changing the subject: “Want to take a shot at square roots and cube roots and waddayacallems—trig functions?”

  “Sure,” Kelly said. If he didn’t want to talk about it, he’d clam up bigtime if she pushed. He’d already come out with some things about his past she’d never heard before.

  Square roots and cube roots seemed pretty straightforward. So did trig functions. You slid the center piece. You moved the transparent piece with the hairline. You read the answer. It wouldn’t be anything like 1.5530597X1012, or even 4.867X107. You were kind of guesstimating the third significant figure, let alone any past that. In a way, that was cool. No one could accuse you of trying to be more precise than the data allowed.

  But Kelly did wonder why no one had ever taught her the neat truck Colin used. Then she quit wondering. By the time she came along, nobody needed to keep track of decimal points in her head. The machines automatically took care of it. And if the machines screwed up, or—more likely—if some dumb human entered the wrong number somewhere, nobody would notice that the answer was also screwed up till something went horribly wrong. Every so often, something did. Maybe it wouldn’t if people checked a little more.

  If the scientific calculator was retarded next to the computers Kelly couldn’t access, the slide rule was dumber yet. Trying to set up her problems so she could use it to work, Kelly feared she was simplifying so much that whatever answers she got wouldn’t mean anything.

  When she said so, Colin observed, “They built the first A-bomb off calculations from bunches of those babies.” She grunted. She might have been playing with more variables than the Manhattan Project had. Then again, she might not have. She didn’t know one way or the other.

  After a while, she asked, “How do I raise, say, three to the 2.5th power?”

  “That’s what the log-log scales are for,” Colin said.

  “The who?” Kelly said blankly. He might as well have been speaking Cherokee.

  “The LL scales. Here, I’ll show you.” And he did. It made sense once you saw how to do it. Well, damn near everything made sense once you saw how to do it. Kelly began to understand how there’d been science in the ancient, primitive days before computers and even calculators.

  She had more fun twiddling the slide rule than she would have punching buttons on the HP. She knew she would have to refine her results once she could get on the computer again, but she would have had to do that with results from the scientific calculator, too. Then Deborah woke up and started to cry. She’d made a mess in her diaper. For the next little while, geology took a back seat to motherhood.

  • • •

  Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles tuned their instruments near the altar of Guilford, Maine’s, Episcopalian church. Rob Ferguson sighed. Even inside the crowded church, his breath smoked. “One more acoustic set,” he said quietly. “There are times when I really miss cranking it up.” He did some impassioned air guitar. You really couldn’t impersonate an electric bass without, well, another electric bass.

  “I miss all kinds of things from the old days,” Justin Nachman said. Lead guitar was easier to do without a power cord than bass was—not always easy, but easier. He was also responsible for most of the band’s vocals. Those didn’t change a whole lot even if he wasn’t miked.

  But lack of electricity wasn’t all he was mourning. He patted his hair. It was long and curly. It wasn’t the aggressively permed Brillo fright wig—Dylan with his finger in the electric socket—he’d once worn to mark his status as a rock-’n’-roll not-quite-legend. Perms were ridiculous luxuries everywhere these days. In Maine north and wes
t of the Interstate, which enjoyed very intermittent power a couple of months a year, perms were flat-out impossible.

  Biff Thorvald, the rhythm guitarist, said, “Wish we had some dope, is what I wish.”

  “Amen, Brother Ben!” That was Charlie Storer, whose drums missed amplification less than anybody else’s pet instrument. Just because Charlie said it first, though, that didn’t mean Rob didn’t agree with him. It didn’t mean Justin and Biff didn’t agree with him, either.

  The only trouble was, Rob couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen weed in Guilford, much less smoked any. It wasn’t that he couldn’t remember because he’d got too wasted to think straight. It had been a hell of a long time ago, if he’d ever seen any here at all.

  Since the eruption, Cannabis sativa would not grow here. It wouldn’t grow here even in greenhouses, which stretched the growing season from essentially nonexistent all the way up to ridiculously short. The only things that would—sometimes—grow in local greenhouses were the kinds of food plants that had been eaten in the Far North since time out of mind: turnips, parsnips, a few extra-hardy varieties of Andean spuds, cabbage, rutabaga, and the ever-unpopular mangel-wurzel. Rob had never heard of the mangel-wurzel before the supervolcano blew. Now he’d eaten it stewed, boiled, baked, steamed, fried. . . . If he never ate it again—that would mean he’d moved away from Maine.

  Two or three months a year, enough snow melted to make road traffic possible if not easy. During what passed for summer up in these parts, the rest of the USA dimly remembered Maine north and west of the Interstate still existed. Food and machinery and some fuel came in. People who’d got sicker than the local quacks could fix or who couldn’t stand living in these parts another second got the hell out.

  The authorities reckoned that, next to food and machinery and fuel, dope was nonessential (to say nothing of illegal). Nobody seemed to see enough profit in this little tiny market to flout the authorities and bring some up here anyhow. Where were the Mexican drug cartels when you really needed them, dammit?