At least the experience was better than twenty-five years ago, when his first set of replacement molars, both sides, practically all his teeth, had worn down through the enamel and then into the dentine and the pulp cavity. Hockley and his colleagues attributed the unnatural wear to his diet at the time: minute quantities of volcanic ash and obsidian spherules consumed with every mouthful of grain over half a dozen years, until the atmosphere finally cleared from the Yellowstone Eruption. That abrasive action had destroyed the chewing surfaces. Everybody’s back teeth wore down, bled, and then rotted in their mouths. The dentists made out like bandits that year.
But what could anyone do about the grit back then? A body had to survive. They had called it the Hunger Winter.
And how had the Praxis family survived? By trading capital for food. Once again, John Praxis had reason to thank Jeffrey’s daughter Susannah—now their head of Planning and Procurement—for suggesting the family association model in the first place, which gave them an advantage in preparedness, and then for recognizing and acting on the implications of the Hunger Winter. Susannah had convinced Praxis—and all the cousins, aunts, and uncles who held shares in the Association—that money-wealth would be less important over the long haul than food-wealth. She had stood firm in her conviction that the Hunger Winter would not be an inconvenience for just a season or two but might hang on for several years, possibly as long as a decade, and herald a major change in the biosphere.
Armed with that information, Praxis had approved the immediate acquisition of Garden Resources, Inc., a Sacramento-based food processing company. It had a full-scale biotech research laboratory and bioreactor plant attached to its major business of buying, cleaning, processing, and packaging fresh foodstuffs. He ordered the lab scientists to stop designing genetic improvements to carrots and radishes, and instead set to work modifying algae, yeasts, and microbes so that they could convert waste products from local crops—the nutrients still to be found in nut husks and fruit pits, plant biomass, animal byproducts, and dung—into food supplements. The bioreactors turned this raw material into filling for the cartridges which printed sustainable family meals that might even be attractive and appetizing.
At the same time, Praxis had sent agents up and down the Central Valley before the full impact of the Yellowstone Eruption could be felt. They bought up every piece of property that was available: rice farms and row crops in the Sacramento Valley, fruit and nut orchards in the San Joaquin, ranches in the extreme south, sand lots and scrubland on the desert edges that had long since been abandoned to the weeds—which were still biomass. He paid exorbitant sums for marginal properties, then paid even more to drill wells and buy water rights, so they would not be dependent on rainfall or government allotments from river runs and the annual snowpack.
He had Jacquie Wildmon in Houston design small, nimble intelligences that could go out into the worldwide markets with independent authority to buy up broken and damaged lots of grain and other food commodities. They bought rice from the Philippines, wheat from Russia, dates and figs from Iran, olive oil from Spain, and then routed them all back to Sacramento.
He had Paul Praxis and a team of in-house intelligences design food transports that looked like ordinary hopper trucks, tankers, and trailers but were actually armor-plated and armed with high-energy weaponry and automatic thermal-sighting modules from the Rover series. He had the team design static and dynamic defenses for all of their properties—with special attention to the Garden Resources plant—and work out delivery schedules from there to various the family enclaves.
Within three months of the eruption, the Praxis Family Association had an assured food supply. Within six months, they were eating gourmet-quality dinners derived from almond hulls, rancid rice, and cow dung. The Association treasury was almost depleted, and family members might have had to plan carefully and tighten their belts at times. But none of them starved.
* * *
Callie Praxis called her nephew Paul and the bodyguard Pamela into her office in the Fremont compound, which they had long ago nicknamed “Fort Apache.” Both wore the blue-and-gray, urban-camo battle dress uniform of the PFA Defense Force. Praxis family members, who had shares, privileges, and stipends, and their paid retainers, who had only contracts and monthly wages, alike wore the family military insignia—a stylized view of the Parthenon in red with a closed fist superimposed on it in black—as well as their own unit markings and badges of rank. In Paul’s case, he bore the headquarters staff patch on his sleeve and a single general’s star on his collar tabs. As a detached retainer on special assignment, Pamela wore the uniform but without any sign of rank, just the tape on her right pocket with the name “Sheldon.”
“How did my father get injured?” Callie demanded of the young woman. Well, young in face and body, perhaps, but almost as old as Callie herself, who was 102 and feeling her age that morning. “How did you let him get injured?”
“No excuses, ma’am.” Pamela just stared at the wall beyond Callie’s head. She was probably screaming worse things inside her own skull than Callie could ever say aloud to her. Still, this was a necessary exercise, a form of catharsis for both of them.
“The accident really was unforeseeable, Aunt Callie,” Paul explained.
“Were you there?” she asked drily. And when he hesitated, “So shut up.”
“It must have been a land mine,” Pamela grated. “I should have checked—”
“They’d been down that road a hundred times,” Paul put in.
“Didn’t you have your magnetic sweeps out?” Callie asked.
“It might have been buried deep,” Pamela said. “Or plastic cased.”
“So? How many more lie under our roads—buried deep or plastic cased?”
Paul shrugged at the question. Pamela was lost again in her own thoughts.
During the second year of the Hunger Winter, an expeditionary force from Greater China had landed on the beaches of the Pacific Northwest. With the Federated Republic in a shambles and most of the remaining state authorities overcome by the scope of the disaster, the world rushed in. The Chinese used the excuse of a mercy mission, bearing foodstuffs, medical supplies, and portable housing shelters, but the contingent was armed and traveled in military transports with offshore naval and air support. By the time various Chinese units had fought their way over the Coast Range to Olympia, Washington; Salem, Oregon; and Redding, California, everyone on the ground generally understood the full military nature of the expedition.
John and Callie had organized the PFA Defense Force out of the security guards they were already using to protect their food shipments. Local people with military backgrounds, and anyone prepared to take training, signed up with the family because it meant a job with access to food, security, and stability. Paul Praxis and his youngest son John Junior—the boy had been named in honor of his great-grandfather—were put in charge. To supplement the human forces, they placed the robot factories on overtime churning out Rovers, Wardogs, and Aerobats, with Big and Little Brothers programmed to coordinate and guide them. At first, John had made light of the matter: “I never expected to become a warlord,” he once quipped. To which Callie had replied: “Only if you live long enough.”
When the Chinese Expeditionary Force reached the family holdings north of Sacramento, they never knew what hit them. The Chinese still relied on people, lots of people, holding rapid-fire assault weapons aimed with iron sights and launching grenades from underslung tubes or hurling them with bare hands. They had never encountered a mechanical wave of stealth-wraiths with visual deflectors, radar shielding, and ceramic armor, which moved three times faster than any human being and fired with deadly accuracy. The machines didn’t spray the landscape with bullets but picked off their targets with laser precision: one image, one shot, one kill, all to the head.
Order among the Chinese forces broke down, but the soldiers refused surrender and an orderly withdrawal. Why go home to the life of a peasant under state c
ontrol? Instead, they broke up into war bands that roamed the countryside, guerilla fashion, supported with occasional air drops of weapons, ammunition, and supplies. The Chinese Incursion lasted ten years, almost as long as the Hunger Winter itself, and to the present day people still heard rumors of isolated outposts in the forests of the Redwood Empire and behind the ridges of the High Sierra. And of course the Chinese government continued to maintain a treaty port at Seattle and a protectorate with cantonments around Puget Sound.
Why had the PFA Defense Force not followed up on its advantage? With their technically superior arms and easy recruitment of willing fighters, the Praxis family might have invaded the Pacific Northwest, driven the Chinese back into the ocean, and reclaimed their half of the country. Callie had certainly been in favor of such direct action. But John had resisted. His goal had always been to protect and preserve his family and their holdings, not to create a nation state, not to acquire land, power, and supremacy—and certainly not to engage in Armageddon around Seattle.
A similar incursion had been launched on the East Coast: across from Cuba, up through Florida, and into the Deep South. Who was ultimately behind it, whether the Russians and Venezuelans who bore the brunt of the fighting, or the coalition of French and Germans bankers who financed the venture, was never entirely clear to those fighting the Chinese out on the West Coast. What they did know was that the conflict finally ended when what passed for an American government on that side of the country cauterized the entry point at Miami with a nuclear bomb and established a cordon—in effect, an open-season killing field—in southern Georgia and Alabama. But parts of the Old South now spoke a kind of creole English mixed with Russian and Spanish.
Aside from intermittent radio contact and the travels of a few hardy adventurers, trade and traffic with the East Coast had been lost. The two sides of the old country now shared no closer dealings than, say, Guatemala had with Uruguay. A moonscape desert fifteen hundred miles wide separated the two halves of the continent. John’s early dream of getting rich by helping the country dig out from under the Ash Fall had foundered on some hard realities: the central states from the plains to the mountains were a wasteland. The Praxis family might create legions of digger ’bots to unearth the buried cities and more artificers to rebuild their infrastructure, but the people were dead and the surrounding land was barren. Any investment in excavation and reconstruction would be for purely archeological purposes. It would take generations before the populations on the two coasts were ready to venture back into the interior and start building new cities and new lives. In the meantime, the Praxis family business had diversified and turned to serving the needs of the living.
The legacy of eruption and invasion on the West Coast had been two decades of chaos. Roving bands of freelancers, Chinese Irregulars and American Militia both, along with local youth gangs and for-profit hijackers, still traveled the countryside. Collectively known as “road companies,” they preyed on that part of the population which passed for civilized and lived behind barriers in small, occasionally contested communities. Susannah Praxis once compared these companies to the English mercenary freebooters who had roamed the French countryside during the fourteenth century. Civil unrest and social disorder remained so high that the Praxis Family Association had never abandoned its wartime footing, although the period of active battle had ended years ago. And there again, Callie had urged John to engage these remnants, remove them, and establish civic order. But John had refused, saying that he didn’t want to become a de facto government.
“Do we need a better sweep mechanism on our Hummers?” Callie now asked her two lieutenants with a sigh. “One that penetrates deeper—or sniffs for the nitrate compounds in plastic explosive?”
“Maybe it’s time to clean up the roads?” Paul suggested. “Clean up the roads, clean up the road companies. They use the broken pavement as a kind of tank trap.” He shrugged, as if that helped his argument. “Sooner or later we have to become the government around here—somebody has to.”
Callie considered the costs. “We’d have to design and build whole fleets of new machines,” she said thoughtfully. “Surveyors, Engineers, Diggers, Graders, Pavers. Plus some kind of Sniffer or Sweeper to find mines like the one that took out Pamela and John. The project would take … oh, years.”
“It’s been years, Aunt Callie,” he said. “And anyway, building earthmovers like that used to be the family business.”
“We’d just be handing heavy equipment over to the companies. And then they’d convert them to new kinds of war machines.”
“Couldn’t our ’bots work at night? Say, midnight to four?”
“That’s when the guerillas are most active.”
“Not if we modified the videyes on the automatons,” Paul said. “Let them work by radar, infrared, and ultraviolet instead of visible wavelengths. We could retrofit the Rovers so their weapons amplified with titanium-sapphire or some other lasing crystal. The beams would align in the UV range and become totally invisible, so you couldn’t track them back and target the source. We modify the sighting dots on the slug throwers, too, so they lase the same deep purple. Then everything proceeds under cover of darkness. We reroute our shipments and travel around these road crews. Only the uninitiated would roll through and ride into a blackout ambush.”
“What about the other ninety percent of the population?” Callie wondered.
“Hell, if people haven’t learned by now to stay off the roads at night …”
“Okay. Propose it as a project to Susannah, but make it low priority.”
“ ‘Low’—? But, Aunt Callie, it was Grandfather who got hurt!”
“Yeah.” She stared at Pamela. “And next time, you fly him.”
* * *
Antigone Wells tipped the container—gold-colored plastic with a vaguely Grecian configuration—upside down and watched the gray sand pour out, strike the water, and collect briefly like a clot of heavy cream before sinking. With it came a plume of gray dust that floated away on the light breeze and disappeared into the morning mist.
That’s all we are, Wells thought. Gray sand and dust. A lifetime of hopes and dreams, ending up in a cloud of nameless particles.
“Should we say some nice words?” Angela asked quietly. “I think Aunt Helen would like some words said over her resting place.”
“Dust thou art and unto dust thou return,” Well intoned her thoughts.
“Why, Aunt! That’s just an awful thing to say!”
“Yes. But it’s in the Bible.”
For all of her twenty-nine years, despite a childhood spent in hardship and uncertainty due to war and ecological disaster, and despite constant exposure to Antigone Well’s own grim and sarcastic humor, Angela had turned out a naïve, conventional, shy, and wonderfully trusting young woman. After a dozen years of watching her aunt disappear every day into the wood-floored, mirror-lined room in their apartment to practice her arcane exercises, when Wells asked if Angela would like to learn karate, the girl’s response was immediate: “Oh, Aunt! You don’t really know karate, do you?” But she had soberly agreed to take the training, although she never really mastered the Iron Wrist and Immovable Arm required for adequate self-defense. For years, Angela had been Wells’s sparring partner—more like a mobile punching bag—but she kept at it bravely, claiming it was good exercise. Still, she remained a sweet, old-fashioned girl.
Maybe some of that had been Helen’s influence.
After the Yellowstone Eruption, Antigone Wells had made one of her few requests of John Praxis: help her find her sister in Oklahoma, right at the uncertain edge of the great Ash Fall. Working through family members in Texas, they had found Helen still trying to maintain her apartment and her daily routine. It took some persuading, but finally she had come to San Francisco and moved into the condo on Market Street.
Adversity had seemed to strengthen Helen. Before this, with complete mastery of her life and all the miracles of medical science, Wells’s you
nger sister had entered her ninth decade with numerous undiagnosed maladies and a lingering sense of doom. She had made continuous reference to herself as “an old woman” who had “outlived her time.” Wells had feared for Helen’s life, and any day she had expected a message from the Oklahoma police or her sister’s doctor saying Helen was found dead in her bed. But let the world crash around her, let her be turned into a pauper and a refugee, transplanted to a city under siege, sharing a bedroom with a newborn baby, and appropriating the role of nanny, up at all hours of the night—and Helen had blossomed.
When food ran short in the stores and then disappeared, it was Helen who insisted Wells unbend her stiff neck and call on John Praxis and his family for assistance. “You owe it to Angela, who’s not even a person yet,” she had said, “even if you won’t lift a finger to keep from starving yourself.” And John and Callie had readily agreed, writing Wells into the new family association they had created under the guise of her being Alexander’s biological mother. They had graciously accepted Angela and Helen, too, as extended family. Every week a delivery man brought packages of rice, fresh fruits in season, cuts of meat, and cartridges for the food printer. When Helen noted that the baby had no formula, and that milk was something neither of the sisters was equipped to give her, the delivery man brought cartons of powdered supplement. Wells had tried it once, on a hunch, and thought it tasted something like seaweed. But Angela thrived on the stuff.
Over the weeks and months, the delivery man was at first accompanied by an armed guard and then arrived in uniform himself with a rifle slung over one shoulder. And then John had gently suggested that, for the sake of security, nothing personal, and no pressure, Wells and her small family lock up the condo and move into a house in the Fremont compound, “just until we can sort things out with the Chinese.” They had stayed for three years, and that probably saved all their lives.
Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Page 23
