“Decorating your new office?” said Tania.
Sig looked up. “No,” he said. “Taking it back. This office is going to stay empty. The time for chiefs is over.”
“Well, hurry up,” said Tania. “We tried to reach you guys but couldn’t get through. We need to leave. The British are coming.”
119
It wasn’t a joke.
The blue helmets came in after the Brits. French, Dutch, and Polish. The fighting was already over by the time the hovercrafts floated up the Potomac and the relief pods started dropping from the sky on big white parachutes.
It took a week for the different bands of rebels to sort out who had authority to speak for all of them. They settled on a triumvirate. A Texan from the St. Louis cell, the guy who led the Cabrini Commando from Chicago, and the Colonel for New Orleans. She took Sig with her as her bodyguard.
Nobody fucked with her.
The deposed regime was represented by the defense secretary. The Vice President had been killed, supposedly by friendly fire, more likely fragged.
A pair of senior senators and a congresswoman helped mediate the discussions.
The rebels agreed to go home. So long as they got autonomy when they returned. They won a sort of sovereignty, subject to free trade and open travel agreements, for an archipelago of territories, an idea that Sig suggested to the Colonel in a breakout, an idea he had gotten from Betty. The territories were mainly on the Mississippi—New Orleans from Bywater to the eastern edge of Echo Sector, most of East St. Louis, and some big swaths of the Tropic of Kansas—repatriated federal biofuel estates in Iowa, Missouri, and Minnesota. They threw in a couple thousand acres Walker owned in far west Texas, on a section of the Rio Grande that had gone dry. In those zones, seed-funded with what reparations they could extract, they could make their own rules. Beta-test experiments in political form that incorporated the capabilities of the network they had built, and were rebuilding, and making better.
They would need the beta tests, because the other major outcome was the calling of a constitutional convention. They would try to come up with a new national operating system, one native to the world that was emerging.
Figuring out how to let everyone in on the renegotiation of the social contract had sounded a lot more feasible when it was impossible.
One year later
Epilogue
On her way west to pitch the Californians for funding, Tania went to visit Sig. That involved a stopover in Las Vegas and a long drive out into the desert where the map went blank in the spot where they hid the Supermax.
It didn’t look like much from the outside. A cluster of shimmering buildings behind four perimeters of tidily combed DMZ. Like the White House, the real deal was underground.
It took more than two hours to negotiate her way to the visiting area, not counting the long elevator down into the earth.
They gave her twenty minutes.
They talked through three layers of bulletproof glass, over a mic.
He was keeping his hair short now. It probably was not voluntary.
“We’re working on a new deal,” she said.
He nodded.
“Don brought in some better people in Washington. Been around. Says they are really confident about it.”
“It’s okay,” said Sig.
“It’s totally not okay,” said Tania. “It’s not what we fought for.”
Sig shrugged. “It kind of is. At least you’re out there. How’s that going, anyway?”
“Okay.”
“Not good.”
“They’re carving up the country.”
“We started it.”
“I know,” said Tania. “But they’re like . . . selling it.”
“What did you expect? Bills to pay. Or didn’t you see the mess we left.”
“I just wish it would kind of hold together better. More balanced. Instead it’s like half the places are giant co-ops and the other half are going to be company towns. Hard to confederate that.”
“Walker straddles it pretty good,” said Sig.
“Utopia as real estate speculation,” said Tania.
“Better than what was.”
“It’s chaos.”
“Creative destruction,” said Sig. “It’s the future. The short-term future. The long-term future is green. No matter what we do. Nature will be better off without us, whenever that finally happens.”
“When did you get so glib?”
“Not a lot of visitors. They won’t let press talk to me.”
“I know. Don’s working on that, too. And look, I know this is fucked up to say, but four years isn’t that much longer.”
Sig gave her the finger. He looked tired.
“They treat you okay?”
“They leave me alone.”
He looked down at his hand.
“It would be good if they would let me go outside once in a while.”
Tania looked at him as he looked away, and tried to contain the pain.
“Can I get you anything?”
He shook his head. “They wouldn’t let you.”
“It’s not gonna be four years.”
“Worry about making it worth it. Your job is the hard one. This one is easy.”
Tania tried to see if she could tell if he was lying. But she knew he was right.
She wanted to talk about his mom, and how proud she would be, but it seemed corny now and anyway she had brought up enough stuff. She put her hand on the window, and tried to let him know that way.
The sky was so clear that night, you could almost see the flares coming off the shooting stars. You could actually imagine a world you would really want to live in, even as you knew you were still in America.
Acknowledgments
I was greatly aided in writing this book by the critical insights of friends and colleagues who read early drafts and excerpts, especially Allen Varney, Richard Butner, Paul Miles, William Gibson, Pepe Rojo, Anil Menon, Jessica Reisman, Nisi Shawl, Nicky Drayden, Gavin Grant, Henry Wessells, and the participants in one hot summer’s Sycamore Hill and Turkey City Writers Workshops—including Meghan McCarron, Jenn Volant, Catherynne Valente, Alice Sola Kim, Dale Bailey, Christopher Rowe, Don Webb, Derek Johnson, Dave Hardy, and Lawrence Person. I also owe thanks to Eileen Gunn, L. Timmel Duchamp, Bruce Sterling, Joe Lansdale, Christopher Priest, M. John Harrison, Kelly Link, Nathan Ballingrud, and Rick Klaw for invaluable provocation and encouragement along the way.
Thanks to the many folks who provided inspiration and information that informed the book, especially Eric Paulus, who told me what it feels like to be shot with a rubber bullet; Bill O’Rourke, who gave me a glimpse into life off of capital’s registry; and my Mexican colleagues who showed me the view from the other side of the border wall we already have, especially Pepe Rojo, Bernardo Fernández, Deyanira Torres, Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, Miguel Ángel Fernández Delgado, and Gerardo Sifuentes.
Thanks to my agent, Mark Gottlieb of Trident Media Group, whose energy and enthusiasm made it happen; to my amazing editor David Pomerico, who had the courage to take it on and the editorial gifts to help make it the book it wanted to be; and to the rest of the team at Harper Voyager/William Morrow, especially cover designer Owen Corrigan, who translated the book’s aesthetic into living color.
Family plays a big role in this book, and it did in the writing of it as well. Thanks to Bill and Sibyl for the belief. Thanks to Alex for the example, and to Billy for the feeling. Thanks to Katiti and Tristan for the love and strength. Thanks to my aunts and uncles, living and dead, for the views down other paths. Thanks to Virginia and Eliseo for sharing stories of how it can be. And most important, thanks to Agi and Hugo, whose love and support made it possible, as it does every day.
About the Author
CHRISTOPHER BROWN was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for the anthology Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of m
agazines and anthologies, including recent pieces in MIT Technology Review’s “Twelve Tomorrows,” The Baffler, and Stories for Chip. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Advance Praise for Tropic of Kansas
“Timely, dark, and ultimately hopeful: it might not ‘make America great again,’ but then again, it just might.”
—Cory Doctorow, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Homeland
“Futurist as provocateur! The world is sheer batshit genius . . . A truly hallucinatorily envisioned environment.”
—William Gibson, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Neuromancer and The Peripheral
“This stunning novel of a time all too easily imaginable as our own highlights a few of the keen-voiced, brave-souled women and men who balance like subversive acrobats on society’s whirling edges. Read Tropic of Kansas for the sheer pleasure of sunning yourself in Brown’s warm words; read it for its characters’ heart-stopping-and-starting actions in the face of crushing oppression; read it for the way this book melts through years of glacial dread you didn’t realize had accumulated. Read it to burn with the joy of realistic hope.”
—Nisi Shawl, Tiptree Award–winning author of Everfair and Writing the Other
“Tropic of Kansas is the tale of a politically desperate USA haunted by a sullen, feral teen who is Huck Finn, Conan, and Tarzan. Because it’s Chris Brown’s own imaginary America, this extraordinary novel is probably more American than America itself will ever get.”
—Bruce Sterling, award-winning author of Islands in the Net and Pirate Utopia
“Tropic of Kansas is savvy political thriller meets ripping pulp adventure—a marriage made in page-turning, thought-provoking heaven. Sig and Tania, two very different heroes, move through a dangerous America, a place fractured, stratified, and hypnotized. It’s a vision both frighteningly prescient and already too real, and a story of valiant heart and brain up against the worst architectures of greed and power.”
—Jessica Reisman, SESFA Award–winning author of Substrate Phantoms
“Eerily prescient revolutionary picaresque.”
—Reckoning magazine
“Hands down the best book I read [this year]: dark, nimble, hilarious, deeply alarming, truly American.”
—Endless Bookshelf
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
tropic of kansas. Copyright © 2017 by Christopher Brown. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover design by Owen Corrigan
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Digital Edition JULY 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-256382-8
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-256381-1
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