by Ginger Booth
“Deal? No hopeless stands on principle? We learn all we can for ourselves, and tell the American people only what we’re allowed to.”
It’s not like we had a choice. We did websites, not live broadcasts. We couldn’t leak unapproved truth by accident. Too many people had to approve the work before it went live on the Internet. By then there were no live broadcasts anymore on the big networks, either. Close, but UNC used a five minute delay. They only said it was ‘live.’
I added, “And privately, we’re very careful what we share, beyond us.”
“Very. It won’t do anybody any good for us to get caught. Like Deanna Jo.”
“Agreed. Hey, Mangal, are you still in touch across the pond?” Meaning the Atlantic.
“Yes.” His extended family and friends were scattered across Europe, Africa, and India. The censorship was extreme, to go along with the U.S. embargo of the Eastern Hemisphere. “I assume you’re still in touch across the Pacific.”
“Sure.” I’d taken a year abroad in Tokyo. It was an international program. Aside from a few Japanese friends, I kept in touch with an Australian, a couple Chinese, and one Thai. “Don’t share Wuthering Heights with them, OK? Or Gulliver’s Travels. There are plenty more books on Project Gutenberg.”
“Agreed. Dee…”
“Yeah?”
“There have to be millions doing what we’re doing.”
“Yeah.” I drummed my fingers on my desk. “Let’s not try to hook up with them, shall we?”
“Good plan.”
That’s how I joined a resistance movement, without any ties to the Resistance. A cell of two, with no connections to other cells, is hard to crack.
3
Interesting fact: When the U.S. abandoned operations in the Eastern Hemisphere as per the Calm Act, it had 2.6 million active and reserve military personnel. There were no subsequent reductions in force. The Defense budget grew.
It was a balmy day for mushroom hunting, the day Zack and I climbed Sleeping Giant, 70 degrees and muggy in mid November in Connecticut. Of course, that November followed the hottest summer on record. There were 20 hottest summers on record out of the last 23 years, before the media quit reporting the statistic.
We set out early with Zack driving, naturally. Mushrooms are a wily prey, he cautioned me. You have to catch them before someone else does. I kept Zack burbling happily about his past hunting prowess and mushroom misadventures. We gradually warmed to each other enough to compare notes on wild berry patches near home. There aren’t many berries in any one suburban patch, and this risked sharing a limited resource. I was impressed. He knew some I’d missed. I knew some he’d missed, too, but I think he came out ahead.
The trick with berry patches is to spot them out of season, and know where to come back when the season is right. Apparently it’s much the same with mushrooms.
“I think this is a con, Harkonnen,” I announced about an hour into our hike. I don’t know why some people inspire being called by their last names. They just do. “When do we reach these mythical mushrooms?”
“Patience, Baker,” he replied in kind. “My best spot is just a few minutes further. Or do you need a break?” He said this as a challenge.
Zack did landscaping for a living, tossing bags of mulch and soil amendments around like feather pillows. I sat at a computer all day. Of course I needed a break. I growled at his back as he pressed along the rocky muddy uphill trail through brown trees.
The trail dipped into a local low clearing, and he stopped. I huffed up beside him and gazed around. A short stretch of fieldstone wall suggested someone had worked a farm up here once upon a century. You see that everywhere in the woods of Connecticut, though this spot seemed inconvenient. The break in the tree cover was large enough to see the top of the ridge, still well above us.
“A lot of new trees down,” Zack murmured, pointing to a tangle ahead of us. A root ball nearly as tall as me stuck up from the ground. I stepped into the clearing and to the side to see better. Massive evergreens had fallen away from the clearing, knocking down other trees like bowling pins beyond them.
“I spy fungus,” I said, in an attempt to be cheerful.
Zack shot me a look, and refused to rise to the false cheer. “Those mushrooms are too old,” he said quietly. “I wonder if it was the heat, or a microburst.”
“Or the drought,” I added. “Cumulative effect of all three, is my guess.”
I was as moved by the fall of these strong and noble old trees as he was. I simply chose to push back against despair and resignation.
But in this clearing, halfway up the ridge, there was only the one other person, not eight billion. And he cared about the trees, just like I did. I gave in to a bit of grief, and bowed to the downed trees. As I rose, I stretched my arms up to the muggy blue sky and breathed deep. Then I let my arms fall. Thank you, great trees. Your lives and loss are appreciated.
As I broke out of that brief ceremony, I caught Zack looking at me, surprised and touched. He nodded silent acknowledgement.
I nodded back curtly, resenting the intimacy. “Mushrooms, Harkonnen,” I prodded.
He nodded, with a slow smile at me growing. I shook an empty mushroom bag at him, and he laughed.
Mushrooms grew well amidst the wreckage of the downed trees. We soon had three bags full enough, of varieties called Chicken-of-the-woods, giant puffball, and oyster mushrooms. Zack nicked the puffballs with a knife to double-check they were a safe species. He kept each variety in a separate bag, so that any accidental poison specimens didn’t contaminate other good ones. One of the rules of this hunt was that they needed to be eaten separately, too. You weren’t supposed to eat two varieties of wild mushroom at the same meal, and you had to keep an uncooked sample saved, in case you had to call poison control. I knew there was something about this wild mushroom hunting business that turned me off.
Zack caught my distrustful glance at the bags. “You don’t learn this in one trip, Dee. My grandmother taught me for years. I know what I’m doing. We have enough for now. This is all we can eat while they’re still good.”
Along the hike back, I said, “Zack, you should teach someone else. It’s important. And I don’t think I’m the right apprentice.”
He nodded. “You should teach someone the berries.”
“And share?” I quipped in mock horror.
He chuckled. “I guess it worked better having your own kids and grandkids to teach, so you had a vested interest in them. You ever think of having any?”
I shot him a look and he shrugged. I relented. “I would have liked a kid if I’d started fifteen years ago. I had other things to do at the time.”
“Really? You would have brought a kid into the world, for this?”
“If the kid could reach coping age by now, sure. Why not? Eight billion people agree, this is the greatest show on Earth. Not many volunteers to leave early.”
“More all the time.”
“Well, yeah. That’s part of the drama. But even if I didn’t supply my own fifteen year old, plenty of other people did. I wouldn’t mind fostering one.”
I refused to catch his eye after saying that. First dates – and this felt increasingly like a first date, with someone way too intense – should be quick and light. Dinner and a movie and drinks, four hour limit. By the time we got back to my house, it had been five hours, with no external diversions. And there were three bags of mushrooms to imply three separate meals of followup to top it off.
“I think you’d like the giant puffballs best,” Zack said, as he turned off the engine on his pickup truck. I wondered if he felt the same way, about too much togetherness all at once. And if so, wasn’t that kind of a good thing, that we were on the same wavelength. “I have some things I ought to do this afternoon,” he continued. “Can I make you a puffball omelet tomorrow night for supper?”
“Yeah. That sounds really good. Shall I come over about six o’clock?”
“Sounds great. See you then.
” He let me get out of the truck and into my house by myself before he drove off.
I peeled off my jeans and T-shirt and burr-ridden socks, took a hot shower, and reveled in the solitude of my empty house. Why should it feel better to be alone, than with someone I had so much in common with? I didn’t want to think about that. So I didn’t.
I drove to Zack’s Monday night, though it was only a ten minute walk. Before sunset, the cloudless sky had the strangest tinge of green, with large bluer spots. I’d never seen that before. But I’d spent my workday studying suppressed weather chaos information to specify our new web feature. That was enough to give anyone weather paranoia.
I brought a side dish for supper. “Homegrown,” I explained, as I presented the home-fries to my host at the door. “My own potatoes, onions, peppers, herbs.”
Zack seemed honestly delighted. “Smells great, Dee! Thank you. Come in, come in! Are these heirlooms?”
“F1 hybrid Carmen peppers. The potatoes and onions are Red Norland and ‘yellow’. I don’t know the pedigree.” Political correctness was not an aspect of organic gardening I admired. If he wanted to pick out his peppers, he could feel free.
He smiled wryly. “I’m sure they’re delicious. Is that… steampunk?” He admired the outfit openly with his eyes but didn’t comment further. Some woman had trained this man well. “Come into the kitchen. I’ll start the omelet.”
Yes, it was steampunk. There are so few occasions to wear it, you know? Rather than the usual overdressed or oversexed lady’s ensemble, this outfit was more of an impish girl mechanic look, form-hugging brown canvas bib overalls, rolled up at the knee, over a delicate white short-sleeved blouse. Low-slung leather belt with dangly bits and chunky jewelry suggested tools and clockwork. I only had the one pair of lace-up mid-calf boots, but replaced the lace gaiters with thick bright striped socks, mismatched and clumped low.
Zack in turn had dressed up slightly. He wore a fresh crisp blue-green gingham checked button-down shirt, tucked neatly into well-fitted bleach-blue jeans, with ragg socks. He had rubber clogs by the back door for stepping in and out of the house.
Also by the back door was a basket of eggs, with small feathers sticking to them. “You have your own chickens?” I asked, delighted.
“Eight,” he agreed. “A few goats, too. Couple turkeys.”
“Can I see?”
“Ah, the birds are tucked in for the night,” he said, peering out a window over the sink. “We could find the goats. But your potatoes would get cold.”
“Maybe later,” I agreed, settling at the table.
“Onions, goat cheese, and mushrooms on the omelet?” he offered.
“You even make your own goat cheese?”
“I supply the milk. A friend makes the cheese. She’s pretty good at it.”
She? Well, my best friend Mangal was a guy. “Sounds delicious. The omelet idea,” I added, when he looked a little flustered.
“Right,” he said, and got to chopping onions.
I would have offered to help, but there didn’t seem any need. The dining room table was set, with bread and candles and wine laid out. The table had been cleared of political paper piles by dumping them here on the kitchen table. I took a seat and leafed through a few reluctantly. One demanded a Constitutional amendment to guarantee Americans the freedom to travel and communicate across state borders. Another demanded local self-determination setting up borders and siting peacekeeping forces. Several demanded public transparency on the Calm Act, as the people’s right to know. Zack’s personal position was murky from the range of opinion expressed.
“Are you politically active, Dee?” Zack asked, guardedly.
“Not really compatible with my job,” I deflected this.
“Ah. I guess you know more about what’s going on than the rest of us, working for the news media.”
“Maybe not,” I said. I’d been thinking that not telling anyone the secrets I knew, wasn’t really Boolean, on or off, but more like a continuum. Experimentally, I flipped over one of the more numerous handouts and wrote on the back, “If I knew more, I couldn’t tell you.” I tapped the page with the pen, and gazed at Zack.
He stepped over from the stove and read it. He nodded thoughtfully and returned to sautéing onions. I rolled up the page, lit it in the gas burner, and used it as a taper to light the candles on the dining table. When the paper burned past all of my writing, I doused it in the sink and threw it away.
I was already thinking that this was a really bad idea. I’d risked what, for what? Even if Zack was in a protest group, he wasn’t necessarily a real member. If I were the government keeping a lid on public protest, I’d plant ringers in protest groups to keep an eye on them and seed confusion and ineffectiveness.
Not that Zack struck me as a fake. In fact he seemed to have a lot more integrity and inner consistency than most. But that’s what you’d want in a good agent. And whether he were ringer or ringleader, his house could be under surveillance. And would I hold it against him if he were a ringer, dedicated to public order, rather than a hopeless idealist? My few dabblings in local politics inspired me to run away, because people got into such petty squabbles. This whole convoluted line of thought hurt my head. I’m not cut out for this, dammit, Mangal.
“OK, no more politics,” Zack said, laughing softly at my expression. My face is an open book.
“Yeah, no. Sorry.” I laughed at myself with him.
“Omelet’s ready. Come out to the dining room,” he invited. He carried the frying pan to the table, cut the omelet in half, and slid the halves onto charming plates. The stoneware was a collection of deep autumn colors, orange and gold, olive and brown and red. Zack set a beautiful rustic table. “Pour the wine?” he invited. He took the pan back to the kitchen and turned the work lights down to a small glow over the sink.
Once we were settled, I rose a glass to toast. “To a master mushroom hunter. May you find worthy apprentices to your lore.”
He nodded acceptance with a smile, and added, “To a fine local feast.”
I could drink to that. The omelet was good. I would have preferred a milder cheese, but he didn’t overdo it. The giant puffballs had a slightly wild flavor, but I was grateful that the texture was pretty similar to the supermarket white button mushrooms. After a few hesitant bites, I dug in happily. “This is great, Zack. You’re a good cook!”
“Mm. Your potatoes are excellent. What did you call these?”
I shrugged. “Home fries. Oh, the potato? Red Norland. They’re pretty easy to find, but I could give you seed potatoes if you’d like. Or, do you garden?” I hadn’t seen a garden.
“Community garden in town. I have a plot. I’ll take you up on those seed potatoes.”
“Do the neighbors give you trouble about the livestock? Mine used to complain a lot about excessive farming.”
Zack tilted his head toward the neighbor on the left. “One used to. Especially the turkeys. But he shut up after a while. He quit paying the mortgage and taxes and didn’t want to make any waves, I guess. They vanished a few months ago. I keep the lawn mowed. Found the spare key, keep the heat on so the pipes don’t burst. Like that.”
I nodded. There were a couple abandoned houses like that near me. I wondered if the house to my right might not go that way soon. “I have my eye on an ex-neighbor’s swimming pool.”
“Do it,” he said. “I can help you winterize it, if you want.”
“They did that, actually. Before they left.”
“Sweet.”
“I wonder where they go.” Another downer conversation. I rallied with, “So are your grandparents still around, Zack? Parents?”
“No. My grandparents raised me, but they passed on years ago. My sister’s around. And the gang from the community gardens.” He indicated political piles with his head. “One of the turkeys is for our Thanksgiving spread.”
“Oh, nice! How long do you grow a turkey before…?”
“Catch a baby in the spring
, kill it in the fall. That’s what the neighbor was worked up about. He didn’t think it was safe, capturing a wild turkey and eating it.” He bobbed his head so-so. “I was a little worried about that myself the first time. But hey, there are all these turkeys wandering about, so, I took one. It worked out, so I do a couple every year now, one each for Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
I laughed. “That’s great! Yeah, I’d wondered whether anyone ever did anything about all those wild turkeys.”
He winked. “Now you know. You? Family?”
“I’m from here, obviously. My parents left a year ago, decided to move to Alabama before the borders closed. My sister and her kids are down there. My brother is in New Mexico. That’s it. Friends from work. And online.”
Zack nodded, then frowned slightly. “Have you had trouble reaching people interstate?”
I’d gotten the ‘circuits are overloaded’ message several times. But I also had an Internet line through UNC. “I… don’t personally have that problem, no.”
“Oh.” Message received, clearly. “It must be hard, having your family on the other side of borders that have closed already.”
“A few more months with my sister and her kids,” I grinned, “and I wouldn’t put it past my parents to join a gran caravan.”
He snorted his wine. It was never on the news. But people claimed there were these wandering Winnebago packs of ornery armed senior citizens, barreling their way through the first border crossings. It could be urban legend for all I knew. They were still building the new borders in the Northeast at that point.
“Assertive, are they, your folks?”
“Could say that,” I agreed. “My sister, too. It’s a pity she doesn’t use it more on her kids.”
“Not the kind of fosterlings you were thinking of, then.”
“Nope. They’re safely behind the Mason-Dixon line border.”
“You approve of these borders, then?” He grimaced.
I pouted at him through my wineglass. I thought we’d reached an agreement, no politics. He shrugged non-apology. I relented and answered. “I… understand the reasoning. Whether I approve or not, we’ve got more to gain than lose here in Connecticut.”
