by John Barnes
“And what I hear from Carol May is that there are quiet little meetings going on, people in Pale Bluff who favor Athens, or favor Olympia, getting together with like-minded citizens. Right now they’re talking about putting together political parties for the elections in eighteen months. But you know, if the war starts… my guess is you each have an agent or two in those little clubs, and that in certain circumstances, you would tell that agent to start some trouble, between all those neighbors who have sweated and worked together all that time; oh, say, think maybe of two workmates that went through the whole hard winter arguing politics together… and now you’re putting it on course for one of them to murder the other. And maybe you should think about their daughters being best friends, too, you know? But then after a few murders and some burnings, and a few hearts broken forever, well, one of you would get control of Pale Bluff. And the first thing you would do, to make it defensible, is to clear the cover around that village. That would be those orchards, you know? Regrettable of course, good-bye apples, but you have to do what you have to do.
“So that was my story, and here’s my question. Exactly what can you gain in the war that would be worth a dozen or so murders and burnings in that little town, and cutting those orchards down, so that soldiers could come in and throw out the families and fortify the buildings? Cameron?”
“I see the point and it’s a well-taken idea—”
“No, I wasn’t looking for a review. Pale Bluff might be your key to controlling the lower Ohio Valley. Now just explain why you must control the lower Ohio Valley, eh? What’s it for?”
Cameron looked down at the table. “I suppose if I don’t answer it will look even worse.”
“I have no opinion on how it will look. I’ll probably write the story, and only the people in this room will see you. Though of course many of us are your old friends. I like to think all of us are, actually.”
Cameron Nguyen-Peters sighed. “All right. If we can gain the Ohio Valley this summer…” He shrugged. “All right, this is your point, of course, it doesn’t have much to do with apples or choirs or little girls who are friends.”
“It’s your call, Mr. Coordinator. But can’t you draw the line? Aren’t you willing to say that the benefits of a united country, when we’re getting ready to fight the war for our survival, are just too important—that yes, it’s sad that two kids can’t be friends anymore because one of their daddies knifed the other one for the greater good?”
“If we’re occupied and conquered—”
“Do you believe there’s a force remaining on Earth that can come to this country and do that, right now? But let me ask that hard question in an even harder way—those people in Pale Bluff—how much of their orchards, which is what they depend on for food and prosperity, and how many of the houses they’ve labored to make work in this new world without gas or electricity, and how much of the society they’ve constructed—how much of that should go down the toilet so that you can control the Ohio and parlay that into controlling the country?” Cameron started to answer, but Manckiewicz said, “Your question this time, Mr. Weisbrod.”
Weisbrod said, “It’s the old professor in me, or maybe Cameron is a better man than I. I can at least make myself say that as a matter of principle—as a matter of principle, I don’t like having to answer that question. But I can see why you asked it. Apparently my principles are no stronger than Cam’s; perhaps I am a better man than I thought.”
Heather could see Allie was about to pop with rage, and moved to sit beside her. I’ve arrested presidents in my day, clocking a First Lady would just be dessert. The silence wore on as the two leaders sized each other up with new eyes, neither quite willing to be the man who said, Yes, on my head be it.
“In some dumb book I read as a kid,” Chris said, “someone said that people who put principles before people are people who hate people. All right, another question: Did you happen to read Cassie Cartland’s piece about the re-opening of the schools in Pueblo, and the way everyone turned out to see high-school kids running footraces? Now, you probably have never heard this, but Pueblo is a city of heroes. More Medals of Honor earned per capita than any other city in American history; if there’s time tomorrow I could show you the monument, right across from where they had the finish line for the 10k. I have to say, you should have seen how seriously those kids run, how much it means to them to be in school, and that, you know, we think of ourselves as one of the places that is re-inventing civilization, and the honor of their school actually means something besides a fund-raising slogan. Cassie’s in that school herself, and so’s her boyfriend, by the way. Does either of you have a principle important enough to blow the legs off one of those boys, or blind one of those girls, or kill ten of them by turning them into a mess that they couldn’t be recognized by their mothers? You know—those women in the bleachers that Cassie was so funny and warm-hearted about? Got any principles so strong that you could justify having them all do that to each other?”
“Now, wait a minute,” Graham said, taking off his glasses in his favorite dramatic gesture. “This is the classic move of pitting ordinary private feelings of personal decency against serious and important ideas that apply to the general good of the world as a whole—”
Chris was emphatically shaking his head. “Which is made up, among other things, of kids and mothers. So if a few mothers lose a child or two—or send a kid off to war and get a murderer back—”
“That’s just what I mean, a killing in war is not murder—”
Chris looked up at him with the mildest of expressions, and said, “You know, Roger Pendano died in a firefight over principle, which, I seem to remember, was vitally important. And by that time he was an old broken man who really just wanted to die. And was it worth it to prevent Shaunsen from ruining the nation?”
Cameron started from his thoughts. “I—well, yes, I do think so. Pendano knew the risks, he was mature, he was ready to die… and we’re talking about the whole future of a great country…”
“Mr. President, you knew him well, he was your friend for thirty years. Was the country worth the cost of the man?”
“I’d say… yes. Yes it was.”
“Would it have been worth it when he was twenty-one?”
Weisbrod glared. “This is going to be a long two hours.”
“Coordinator Nguyen-Peters was brave enough to try and answer. Are you?”
“Oh, Christ on the cross, how many times do I have to look at some life or other, some kid eating ice cream or a father holding a baby or somebody putting a roof on his house and say, over and over, ‘Yes, I’d kill him for my ideals’? I get it. I understand what you are driving at. I might even concede,” Graham said, cleaning his glasses, “that, well, yes, all right. All the fuck right. You are right. It does not make me proud of myself to say, ‘This man has to lose his life, and his family has to go hungry, and that other family must be without the shelter of the house they worked like hell to put together, and both families’ sons must kill each other… and say that all that has to happen just so we can establish that the Succession Act of 1947 takes precedence over Presidential Directive 51. And it would suck to be that man’s little boy, and that killer’s brother. There. Yes, I said it—”
“And did you mean it and believe it?”
“I—well, I guess—I said it. I can act like I mean it. And I have to think it’s the right thing to do.”
“What if you had to say that to that man’s little boy?”
“Lincoln managed to write the letter to Mrs. Bixby.”
“Dr. Weisbrod… are you Lincoln? And is the issue slavery?”
“The issue is a house divided.”
“Which could come back together in just about two years—if there’s not too much blood between the people by then,” Heather said. Everyone stared at her. “Sorry, I’ll shut up.”
“It is indeed a day for miracles,” Cameron said, quietly, and then Graham laughed, and even Chris did.
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br /> “Let me suggest something,” Chris said. “When Heather suggested this to me… well, what reporter can resist asking the questions of history? And all right, we’ve determined that I can make you both very uncomfortable—”
“Because war is wrong,” Cameron Nguyen-Peters said. He was no longer looking away, but at all of them, each individually. “Because like it or not you always end up making all those horrible decisions. Which you can always make… always…” He seemed to be finding anger somewhere deep within. “Decisions you can always make by just making them in words. ‘The principle of proper Constitutional succession is important enough to send soldiers who are stressed out of their minds and literally driven mad into an area where no one is watching them, where they may catch a mother and her ten-year-old daughter, and rape them in front of each other and leave them with their throats cut for the family to find later.’ And shit like that happens in civil wars; it’s the kind of thing that happens with half-trained troops that get thrown into battle, see their friends killed, rebuild their whole minds around hate. If you just think in words you can say, ‘Sorry, too bad for that little girl, must be hard on her mother to watch that, kind of tough on the soldiers to live with that afterward’—but when you start to think about, oh, that the little girl smiles like nobody else in the world ever did before or will again, or that she and her mother have a favorite joke that only the two of them know… Heather, this wasn’t a bad idea, but I’m not sure the world is ready for it.”
“Can’t find out if the world is ready if we never try it,” Heather said.
Graham laughed sadly, and said, “Twenty years after telling me, screaming at me really in my office, that it didn’t make any sense, my favorite student adopts Gandhian futurism.”
Cameron looked the question at Graham.
The old professor pushed his glasses up his nose and explained as if an undergrad had asked an obvious question. “Gandhi pointed out that one of the most important lessons of history is that many things happen that have never happened before. So just because something never happened or never worked or people weren’t ready… well, next time could be different.”
“Like Daybreak,” Cameron said softly.
“We’ve only been talking half an hour,” Chris said. “And I am looking at two guys who don’t look to me like they want a war.”
“We didn’t, exactly, before,” Graham said, sounding very unsure.
“Or we didn’t want to face it,” Cameron said. “If it’s all right with you, Graham, I’d like Chris to read us more stories. And ask us more questions. If we really need to have a war… considering how terrible it will be for other people—shouldn’t we be able to face an unpleasant hour and a half? I mean, actually, we should have to face a lot more, but—”
“Agreed. That we should have to face up to what we’re doing, I mean. I don’t think I’m eager for this. But I think you’re right, we should.”
In the next hour and a half, Chris introduced them to forty or so Americans, post-Daybreak, and Heather thought he’d never been better, not on television, or radio, or even in print. He probably figures lives are depending on it. Must be good to work like lives are depending on you. Chris drove on—how many victims in the crossfire would be worth it to make a given statement? how many burned libraries? how many men with hideous crimes in their memories for the next fifty years?
“The dogs of war,” Graham said after a while. “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. That’s what Shakespeare was talking about, that once you let them loose, they get… excited, they bark each other into a frenzy, they want to do more and more… they’re only safe on a leash, never when turned loose. Not even when you must turn them loose, and of course, Cam, if there is a surviving Daybreak out there for us to fight, we will have to turn them loose. But whenever you do, the dogs of war will tear up whatever they can get—your enemy, sure, but everything else too…and to turn them loose on a friend, or a relative, or someone who is just trying to do the right thing by their own lights…”
They let the question hang while Chris pushed them again, making them think about how long it takes to put a railroad line together with hand tools, and how little time it takes to put a hole in it; then about what it must feel like to be on the road, walking away from the home where you had everything, where you’ll never return, and with no idea where you’re going to go. And they talked about the strange power of words—not just the little holes and gaps in the Constitution, but the slippery points in every principle and idea, in every story all people tell themselves—
The lights went out; everyone froze, and Heather walked to the window, leaned out, and said, “Power off everywhere, that I can see.” She shouted to a runner downstairs.
A few minutes later, they had a radio that had been stored in a Faraday cage, and Heather was trying to raise Arnie at the research facility at Mota Elliptica.
The response came almost at once; he too had pulled out a spare radio from a shielded cage. “We got ’em,” he said. “We definitely got ’em. We had a great big EMP here, and Cam’s radars worked, we have a trajectory from just before it went off.”
“And have you traced it back?”
“Well, that’s the weird part,” Arnie said. “Um.”
There’s no place so terrible that I won’t be relieved to know it is where the enemy is. “Where did the bomb come from, Arnie?”
“It entered at escape velocity almost straight down, boss. So we don’t exactly know where it came from—”
“Damn, can you narrow it down?”
“Well, that’s what I’m trying not to say. We sure can. On that trajectory the one thing we know for sure is it didn’t come from Earth.”
Cam leaned forward. “Could it have come from the moon?”
“That would be my first guess,” Arnie said. “But definitely not from Earth.”
After they signed off, Chris said, “Well, your two hours expired, a while ago, but…”
“But we’ve established that whether it’s an enemy or a leftover booby trap, it doesn’t want us to make peace, and we would like to,” Cameron Nguyen-Peters said. “Shall we, Graham?”
“We shall.” Graham Weisbrod seemed to sit straighter, and some of the age seemed to fall off him. “I don’t know what we’re facing either, but whoever or whatever it is, I’d make peace just to spite it.”
Chris glanced up from the notes he was making. “And is that the only reason?”
“No, not at all,” the two leaders said, in unison, and laughed like any two men sharing a coincidence.
TWO DAYS LATER. BEGINNING AT MIDNIGHT. WEDNESDAY. MAY 1 (KNOWN AS OPEN SIGNALS DAY EVER SINCE).
It was a world of crystal sets and home-built antennae, by now. Most people did not have radios, but nearly everyone had a friend who was an inveterate listener. The EMP on Radio Perth had put an end to high-power continuous broadcasting, but stations slipped on and off the air in short bursts, and radio stations on sailing ships were beginning to move out into the world’s oceans. Radio Free Pacific broadcast two or three hours of English or Japanese at irregular intervals. Mostly it broadcast stories from the Pueblo Post-Times , or a few coastal papers in North America; now and then it broadcast grim eyewitness reports from the Asian coast. Once it ran an hour in Russian about a town in Kamchatka that seemed to be doing well.
The hobby radio listeners were people who couldn’t sleep, or had to stay awake, or were blessed somehow with time off. None of them could be sure when one or another station would open up for an hour or two on some frequency or other, so there were listeners at all hours hoping to find some news that would make the bearer the center of attention. The rest of the people counted on the obsessive listeners to fill them in, knowing that if anything interesting came over the airwaves, Rosa down the road, or Ivan who lived over the bar, would be delighted to tell them all about it at the first opportunity.
There were many stations, of course, that broadcast endless strings of numbers, or p
hrases from books, or several that broadcast strange, incomprehensible gibberish from some scrambler system. Those tended to be on the air even more briefly.
As midnight began on May 1st, several of the garbled stations began to broadcast in plain English. They gave passwords and authentications, and then, addressing agents and military units by code names (it had been decided that it would be neither fair nor desirable to use real names), they gave order after order to stand down, back away, undo the sabotage, release the prisoners, pull back to base, move back from the precipice. Radio TNG in Athens directly ordered the Pacific fleet to move out of striking range of Olympia. Radio Olympia ordered the destruction of the bottled nanoweapons and of the nanomakers. Hostile troops within short distances of each other were ordered to make contact under flag of truce and arrange for mutual peaceful policing of their areas; known political prisoners were ordered released.
As morning worked its way around the world, people were awakened by their radio-hobbyist neighbors, and as they heard the news, huge crowds formed around nearly every station and listener.
The Pueblo Post-Times brought out its first extra, and Chris dropped by Heather’s office. “Not one confidential word divulged,” he said, setting down a stack of copies. “No need for it. The headline and the story are too good to clutter up with unnecessary intrigue, anyway.”
Heather looked down; a picture of Cam, from some official document somewhere, was juxtaposed with one of Weisbrod from the inauguration. Both were smiling, and by mirror-reversing Graham, Chris had made it appear they were smiling at each other. Above them the headline said only,
PEACE!
THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO. COLORADO. 11:00 A.M. MST. THURSDAY. MAY 2.
“I’ve wanted all my life to begin a speech with ‘I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here,’” Heather said. “Let me explain who we are, and then who we really are, and let me tell Chris in front of all of you that in order to have a chance to hear this, he had to become one of us, and that means he is bound just as much by his oath as the rest.”
