The disaster maps showed that almost every neighborhood within an area bounded by the 5 on the east, the 405 on the west, the 118 on the north, and the 105 on the south was pretty much immobilized to some degree or other, with tendrils of crystallization extending linearly outward from all of these routes.
While surface streets provided some relief, the spillover from the network of hardened freeways had choked most of the city’s major thoroughfares. The streets were full of cars; the only reason the city had functioned before was that not every car was on the road at the same time. Now that the city was immobilized, a panic-stricken populace rushed to their automobiles to make their escape. Evacuation didn’t solve the problem, it exacerbated it. Broadcasting information on viable routes out of the city was self-defeating. As soon as a route was cleared and announced, it clogged up within minutes.
On Thursday, seven days after crystallization, as part of a larger disaster-relief package, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Insurance Emergency Relief bill, declaring the disaster an act of God, thereby freeing automobile insurers from billions of dollars of exposure. This allowed the state to declare all abandoned vehicles a public nuisance and begin the wholesale removal of freeway blockages. The outrage that followed was not limited to the survivors of the disaster.
Leaders of the Democratic party were quick to point out that the Republicans had abandoned the protection of property rights in favor of the rights of big government. While not exactly a wedge issue, it did open the door for further political divisions. The Democrats portrayed themselves as the Party of Opportunity and painted the Republicans as the Party of Opportunists. The destruction of a million automobiles was seen as a gift to an automobile industry that would clearly benefit from the need to replace those lost vehicles. The bottom line, the Democrats insisted, was that the Greedy Old Party had no heart, they had abandoned the people of Southern California in favor of protecting the interests of their corporate sponsors. The Republican Congress tried to backpedal, but the damage had already been done.
Meanwhile, estimates of the time to full recovery now varied from six months to three years. The cranes and tow trucks necessary to clear the streets would have to work their way slowly to the center of the disaster and there were no computer simulations capable of the necessary extrapolations. Where to put the extracted vehicles and how to get them there complicated the issue.
The cars couldn’t be removed from the freeways, because there was no place to put them. Trying to save all these autos for their owners’ eventual return meant finding storage space for them and logging their locations in a master database. Perhaps the surviving cars could be transported out to some wide-empty space out in the desert, from which owners could reclaim them. For a fee. Maybe. But did anyone really want to risk putting all these vehicles back into circulation where they could just clog the system again? The arguments were just beginning. (Some people advocated that this disaster represented an opportunity to remodel Los Angeles’s dependency on automobiles and replace or augment the freeways with more light rail systems. But that particular alternative was not only an expensive proposition, it was not an immediate solution to anything.)
Even though the Vehicle Reclamation teams were now authorized to pile up cars in great towering pyramids of metal and glass and plastic wherever they found a big enough parking lot, there was enormous reluctance to do so. All those automobiles represented billions of dollars that nobody wanted to discard casually, especially not the far-removed owners. On the other hand, by the time the reclamation teams reached the majority of affected vehicles most of them would have rusted into near-total uselessness.
On the brighter side, the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District announced that air pollution levels for the basin had dropped dramatically. The air was cleaner than it had been since 1955 when the county finally outlawed backyard incinerators. An awkward spokesman embarrassedly announced that this was the direct result of taking a million and a half vehicles off the road, except that of course, those million and a half vehicles were still on the road. Just not moving anymore. But this was the good news. It was now safe to breathe in Los Angeles again.
Despite that incentive, the flood of refugees streaming out of the city continued, straining the resources of surrounding counties beyond the breaking point. By now, the first waves of escapees from the zone were spreading out across the continent, bringing with them sordid tales of nonvehicular terror and enough digital camera photos, phone-camera photos, and handycam videos to keep the news agencies happy for weeks. Even after the continuing live coverage abated and regular programming resumed, the networks still scheduled ongoing special reports. This was as much an opportunity as a necessity. Universal, Warner Bros., Fox, Disney, and Paramount all had their lots within the frozen zone. The production of at least sixteen major television series—including, ironically, The O.C., were shut down. Although there were finished episodes of all prime-time series in the pipeline, once those were aired, new episodes would not be available until new production facilities were established, or until transportation to existing facilities could be resumed.
Every news and current events show from 60 Minutes to Nova began multipart examinations of the collapse of an entire city, with alarming speculations about the possibility of similar crystallizations occurring elsewhere. Real estate values in small towns and rural areas began to climb.
The days stretched into weeks as refugees continued to stream out of the zone, sometimes as many as a hundred thousand a day. The nightly news kept a running tally on the numbers; the flood showed no signs of abating; but each succeeding day, those who had successfully escaped from L.A. seemed more and more despairing and desperate. While not quite ragged, they looked hungry and haggard, thin and wan. Many had gone for a week or more without fresh fruits and vegetables, fresh milk and other perishables. They had exchanged their tan healthy presence for more sallow dispirited complexions. The surrounding counties continued to absorb as many as they could, exporting the overflow to the rest of the nation as fast as transportation could be arranged. Amtrak borrowed Pullman cars from Canada and Mexico, and converted over a hundred freight cars into makeshift passenger units. A number of Jewish families refused to board anything that looked like a boxcar.
Entering the fourth week of the disaster, as it became apparent that this was the new normal, disaster recovery teams entering the frozen zone discovered a startling fact—some people had created ways to survive their transformed circumstances. The most amazing finding was that some Angelenos had given up their dependency on their cars and learned how to walk. (No, that is not a misprint. The word is walk.) Computer analysis of urban residential zones revealed that more than 35 percent of all residential dwellings in Los Angeles had access to supermarkets, pharmacies, banks, and other essential services within a radius of ten blocks or less. For these people, walking might be an inconvenience, but it was easier than giving up their homes. Reports from the zone suggested that in some places, neighborhoods were reinventing themselves as actual communities.
Satellite maps revealed that fully 10 percent of those who were refusing to leave their homes were planting gardens in their backyards or on their front lawns. Others were creating a new economy using bicycles and motorcycles to transship goods from subway and light rail stations into the otherwise unreachable interior of the zone. Simulations projected that 20 percent of the city’s population could survive without automobile access, possibly more if enough streets could be cleared so that trucks could deliver goods to local communities—but if enough streets could be cleared, the automobiles would return.
Surprisingly—or maybe not so surprisingly—a small but growing number of people liked the new normal, and were starting to voice the opinion that they did not want the automobiles to return. They actually liked being able to see the Hollywood Hills clearly. They liked the way the air smelled in the morning. They liked working in the garden, walking to the corner store, actually
talking to their neighbors, and living at a less frenetic pace.
Teams of sociologists who studied the phenomenon—now called disvehiclization—observed that it was not simply a rejection of the automobile, but of the entire technological cocoon that had enveloped daily life. The disvehiclized person was also more likely to leave his or her cell phone off, turning it on only for limited periods each day; the disvehiclized person rarely watched television; he or she also cut back on computer time, accessing the Internet only for essential news or shopping services.
But not everybody could afford disvehiclization; it was a luxury of the retired, and of those who could work from their homes. Those who still depended on day jobs could not survive without transportation. While the subway, light rail, and emergency bus lines were able to provide some measure of service, they were simply not designed to handle the traffic load, nor did they provide the degree of coverage necessary to the entire basin. In the first month alone, over a million people emigrated from Los Angeles to surrounding counties.
In Orange County, rents soared first, demand far exceeded supply. Real estate values followed quickly. Automobile sales took off as well, both new and used; individuals who felt their lives were dependent on their mobility were quick to replace their lost cars. For the first few weeks, car dealers all across the nation were shipping as many vehicles as they could into Ventura, San Bernardino, Santa Clarita, and Orange counties.
Commentators have called this influx of additional vehicles onto the avenues and highways of the counties surrounding Los Angeles the “squeezed mud” effect. Squeeze a handful of mud, it oozes out between your fingers; squeeze Los Angeles, and the traffic oozes out in all directions across the state. Cal-Trans projects that the post-crystallization era will see at least an additional million vehicles on the highways of the four counties surrounding Los Angeles.
Cal-Trans officials are also quick to point out that the recent stoppages on the 22, the 55, and the 91 are only localized anomalies, and not representative of any larger process. There is absolutely no reason to fear crystallization in Orange County. Absolutely no reason at all.
And Tomorrow and
BY ADAM ROBERTS
Adam Roberts is a professor of nineteenth-century literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published six novels under his own name: Salt (2000), On (2001), Stone (2002), Polystom (2003), The Snow (2004), and Gradisil (2005), and is responsible for the parodies of A.R.R.R. Roberts: The Soddit (2003), The McAtrix Derided (2003), The Sellamillion (2004), The Va Dinci Cod (2005), and Star Warped (2005). Roberts is an SF critic and reviewer, and he has a wealth of short fiction and academic publications to his credit.
“‘And Tomorrow and’ is a comic piece,” Roberts said, “although not an especially cheery or giggly one. I was intrigued by the disjunction between, on the one hand, the Gordian-knot vehemence with which Macbeth unleashes violence upon the things that restrict him, and, on the other, the pedantically legalistic terms of the prophecy that is his eventual undoing. But I was more intrigued by the comic possibilities of reading this most bloody and murderous of Shakespeare’s plays as an articulation of a very modern sort of heroism, the refusal to simply crumple, the refusal to give up, the discovery of a strenuous and dark Joy in the face of extinction. I was also struck that the pedantic and legalistic prophecies that doom Macbeth wouldn’t stand up to ten minutes of cross-examination in a court of law by any half-decent contracts lawyer.”
Find more about Adam Roberts at www.adamroberts.com.
ACT I
The castle had been abandoned by almost all of its inhabitants. Its population had decided, little point in staying only to be slaughtered by the English army, and so they crept out by ones and twos throughout the night, and they made what peace they could with the enemy. Some even begged to join Malcolm’s troop, so as to be on the winning side in the morrow’s inevitable English victory. When Macbeth awoke, with only Seyton in attendance, he found his halls deserted, his battlements unguarded. “Let them fly!” he blustered, striding up the stone stairs to survey the scene from the top of his tallest tower. “I bear a charméd life. I need them not!”
He looked down upon the investing force: a mass of humanity stretching as far as the eye could see. They had thrown down the boughs and branches that they had taken from Birnam Wood, and now stood in serried ranks, their armor and their weapons glittering in the morning sunlight.
“It looks bad sir,” said Seyton, in a miserable voice.
“Nonsense!” boomed Macbeth. “We cannot be defeated.”
“But the charm, sir,” said Seyton, cringing a little as if expecting Macbeth to strike him in his furious frustration. “Has it not tricked you? It said you would never vanquished be, till Great Birnam Wood should come to high Dunsinane hill.”
“Indeed it did,” said Macbeth, with enormous self-satisfaction.
“And we need but look, sir!” said Seyton, indicating the host that lay spread before them. “Malcolm’s army has brought Birnam Wood hither!”
“Seyton, Seyton, Seyton,” said Macbeth, genially. He clasped his servant about the shoulders and gave the top of his head a little rub with the knuckles of his right hand. “You’ve got to pay more attention. The one crucial thing about magical prophecies is that they are enormously and pedantically precise. So, what—Malcolm’s army cut down a few boughs and carried them along to Dunsinane! That’s hardly the same thing as the forest moving! Ask yourself this … if you were a mapmaker—”
“Mapmaker,” repeated Seyton, nodding uncertainly.
“—yes, if you were making a map—for the sake of argument, you know—and you were making a map of Scotland, where would you put Birnam Wood? Over there on the distant hill”—he pointed to the horizon where the blue-green forest still lay like a cloud against the horizon—“the location of the trunks and roots and most of the foliage? Or here at Dunsinane, where a few thousand branches and leaves have been carried?”
“Um,” said Seyton, tentatively offering his answer like a schoolchild before a stern schoolmaster, “the first one?”
“Exactly! Birnam Wood is still on the hill. The prophecy has not been fulfilled. I am, accordingly, unworried.”
From below came the sound of repeated thuds. Malcolm’s sappers, in the unusual position of being able to work without resistance from castle defenders, were knocking down the main gate with a large battering ram. “Right,” said Macbeth. “Better put on some armor. Not that I need it. More for the show of it than anything.”
With a great crash the gate gave way.
By the time he got downstairs, armored and besworded, Macbeth’s main courtyard was filled with several hundred English soldiers. At the front of this fierce crowd were Macduff and young Siward. Siward made a rush at Macbeth, hurrying up the stone stairway to engage the Scottish king. Macbeth chopped his head off with a single stroke of his sword.
The crowd in the courtyard hissed their disapproval.
Rather relishing the theatricality of it, Macbeth cried out: “Begone, Macduff! You cannot kill me!”
The general hissing turned into a general laughing.
“Do you boast so?” said Macduff, cockily, throwing his sword from hand to hand and starting up the stairs. “We outnumber you, fiendish tyrant! Outnumber you considerably.”
“What you’ve got to keep in mind,” said Macbeth, “is that I bear a charméd life that must not yield to one of woman born. Actually.”
“Ha!” cried Macduff. “Ah! Ha! Well!” He seemed very pleased with himself. “Despair thy charm,” he said. “And let the angel that thou still hast served tell thee, Macduff—that’s me—was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped!’ He stuck his chest out.
“You were still born of woman, though, weren’t you?” Macbeth pointed out.
The courtyard had fallen silent.
“You what?” said Macduff.
“Born of woman nevertheless. Born—you. Woman—your mother.”
�
�Ah no, but Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped …”
“Yes yes, Caesarian section, named after Julius Caesar, the Roman emperor who was born via a surgical incision into the wall of the abdomen rather than through the birth canal,” said Macbeth. “Yes we all know about that. But it’s still a form of birth, isn’t it? You’re still born, and of woman.’
“No I wasn’t.”
“Yes you were.”
“Wasn’t.”
“What would you call it then? Are you really asserting that being born by Caesarian section is not being born?”
“Um,” said Macduff, a little confusedly. “Untimely ripped … um …”
“I tell you what,” said Macbeth. “Let’s pop along to the castle library, and look it up in a dictionary. That’ll decide the matter.”
“All right,” said Macduff, brightening.
So they made their way to the library, stacked floor to ceiling with dusty folios and quartos and octavos. There Macbeth pulled the Dictionarius from its resting place, plonked it on a desk and turned its heavy pages.
“Here you go,” said Macbeth, with his finger on the relevant definition. “Sectura Caesaris ‘form of birth in which the infant is delivered through an incision in the mother’s uterus and abdominal wall rather than the more conventional birth canal.’ There you are—‘a form of birth.’ In other words: you are still born of woman, regardless of whatever obstetric interventions happened to be used at the birth. You might as well say that the use of forceps meant that you were no longer ‘born of woman’!”
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