The Fall of the Republic (The Chronoplane Wars Book 2)

by Crawford Kilian

  “Well, maybe. Listen,” DeWayne said suddenly, “you like another shish kebab? On the house.”

  “I won’t say no,” Pierce said with a smile. DeWayne and his wife smiled back.

  He spent the rest of the evening drinking homebrew in a smoky, candlelit bar, talking casually to people. Then he went back outside to his camper and went to bed.

  Before dawn, someone tapped lightly at his door. “Hello?”

  “Salt of the earth folks,” a man whispered hoarsely. In the darkness of the camper, lying fully dressed under a filthy sleeping bag, Pierce grinned.

  “Enter, brother,” he said, reaching for the knob and unlocking the door. A shadowy figure, smelling of armpits and homebrew, stepped grunting into the camper.

  “Hear you met up with Brother DeWayne last night.”

  “I sure did.” Pierce found a match and lighted a stump of candle in an old saucer. The battered interior of the camper became visible. Standing by the bed was a small, wiry man in a heavy overcoat and a cowboy hat. His eyes glinted in the candlelight, above whiskers as red and stubbly as Pierce’s.

  “Where you from?”

  “Taos.”

  “Is that right. Good folks down there. We heard they all got picked up.”

  “Not quite. Pretty close, though.”

  “Same here. Say, brother, you got anything to drink here?”

  “No, afraid not. You the only brother here besides De Wayne?”

  “Shit no. We got a complete cell operatin’ here.”

  “Operating? Really operating?”

  “Taking care of business. We’re pulling together a list for the Better Dead Club.”

  “Shit. I mean, excuse me, brother, but I been making those lists all the way up here, and it hasn’t done a bit of good.”

  “Young fella, when we operate, people join the club. We already bagged us a bunch of traitors.”

  “What do you mean, traitors? You getting rid of your own people, when there’s all those Iffer pricks out there?”

  “We’ll get around to them. But first we got the people who set us up. You know they did it right here? Passed us a computer program, looked like real good stuff, what they call a virus. Damn near worked, too.”

  “I know about the damn virus,” Pierce muttered. “We got a copy.”

  “Well, it came from right here in Mountain Home. Son, you sure you ain’t got a bottle of somethin’?”

  “Come on, brother, who’s gonna live in Mountain Home and build a program like that?”

  “A coupla goddam schoolteachers. Don’t it make you sick, think of those people in charge of little kids?”

  “And schoolteachers came up with this program that got us busted? Brother, excuse me, but I kinda doubt that.”

  “Think I know a little more about it than you do.”

  “That’s all in the past. What are you doin’ now?” Pierce demanded.

  The man in the cowboy hat seemed not to have heard. “Got’em cold. Bastards was so smug they didn’t have security or nothin’. Figured we was all dog meat.”

  Pierce crossed his legs on the bed and leaned forward a little. “No security at all? Brother” — he chuckled — “you’re the best bullshit artist I met in a long time. How’d they join the club?”

  “Our top man done’em. Done’em all, not just the schoolteachers.”

  “Brother.” Pierce was solemn. “That’s the man I got to talk to. I didn’t know if I could trust you all the way until you got onto this, but now I know you’re straight and white.”

  “Hope to tell you.”

  “I have an urgent message for your man. Brother, this is an ears-only message from Brother LeRoy Krebbs.”

  “LeRoy — he’s been jail for a long time.”

  “Not as long as they’d like you to think. Our people in Leavenworth got him out over six months ago.”

  “Holy shit!” The man grinned and giggled. “Woo! Brother, that’s mighty good news. Amen!”

  “I can’t tell you much, understand. But he’s doin’ a lot of crucial work in the southwest, and we’re really lucky we got him. Now, can you get me to your man?”

  MI guess so. Shit, this sure calls for a drink. Sure you haven’t got something?”

  After the man left, Pierce handed in his key and shuffled into the mall. DeWayne and his wife were there again, selling hard-boiled eggs; Pierce bought two. He chatted affably with the couple for a while, then wandered off to join a blackjack game where the chips were mostly paid for in grain and canned goods and cigarettes. The other players were silent men who sat in for a few hands and then moved on. Pierce recognized most of them from their old files: hard-working loggers and ranchers and construction men, still trying to figure out why their world had fallen apart. They showed no sign of recognizing him, though he had been well known here. In civilian clothes, with four days’ whiskers, he did not look like a T-Colonel.

  Near noon, the man in the cowboy hat sauntered across the rotunda without coming too close to the blackjack game. Pierce played two more hands, lost, and threw his cards down in disgust. He stood up and walked out of the rotunda, past the campers and RVs. Snow was falling again, turning almost to rain. The man in the cowboy hat was across the parking lot, heading downtown through the slush.

  Near Lincoln and Eighth the man turned into an alley. He was gone when Pierce turned the comer, but the footprints were clear: they led to a door in the side of a boarded-up furniture store. The door opened easily when Pierce tried it.

  “Come on in, brother.”

  “Only where two or three of us are gathered together in Christ’s name,” Pierce answered. Like “salt of the earth,” it was a recent password, extracted from the Wabbies picked up last week.

  “Through the eye of a needle,” another voice said.

  Pierce stepped into the dusty smelling darkness and shut the door behind him.

  A battery lantern clicked on, throwing enough light to hint at the size of the room — a storage area behind the showroom, now empty except for a few battered tables and chairs and some slabs of foam rubber on the concrete floor. Behind one of the tables sat a man in a pea coat, with a watch cap pulled low over his eyes. The man in the cowboy hat sat off to the man’s left, with the battery lantern in his lap.

  “Welcome, brother,” said the man in the watch cap. “Have a seat.” He extended a hand, palm up, toward an old-fashioned chrome-tube chair. Pierce sat down and crossed his legs.

  “We’re glad to see you,” the man went on. “Every man saved is worth an army to us now. Tell us how you got here, what you’ve seen.”

  Pierce drew breath in a deep sigh and slumped into the chair. “Bus. Hitchhiking. Saw a lot of roadblocks, lot of National Guards. Lot of scared people. All I knew was they got us in Taos, and maybe there’d be somebody up north. Checked in a couple places in Denver, couple of little towns, but couldn’t find anybody, not anybody until here. I understand from the brother there that this is where it all started, where they poisoned us.”

  “That’s right,” said the man softly. “But we’re, we’re in the eye of the storm. We’re the saving remnant. They got a lot of us, but they stored up misery for the future. We’ll come back, stronger than ever, purified.”

  “Amen,” said the man in the cowboy hat.

  “And someone here struck the blow at the traitors,” Pierce said with a grim half smile.

  “They paid.”

  “I wish I’d been there. How I wish I’d been there, to see their faces.”

  The man in the watch cap grinned. “The man didn’t know what hit him. I suspect it was the woman behind it all. She was the one gave the program to one of our people. I killed her cleaner than she deserved.”

  “You were the one, brother?”

  “It was my duty.” The man in the watch cap looked down modestly, then looked up at a soft, spitting noise. The man in the cowboy hat was toppling from his chair, and the lantern in his lap rolled to the floor. In the swinging shadows and str
eaks of moving light, Pierce was a spectre with a bone in his fist, the sleek white plastic of a Mallory aimed right at the man in the watch cap.

  “I gave her the program, brother. She was one of mine.”

  The man heaved his table straight out as he threw himself backward in his chair and rolled to his right, toward the saving darkness. Pierce fired once, at maximum impact, and heard the wet sound of exploding flesh.

  "Ah, ah, ah!” the man gasped. His left thigh was a mangled, twitching mass of destroyed tissue, spurting blood across the cold concrete. The man tried to drag himself by his fingers while his shoulders swayed back and forth. In the poor light of the lantern, his eyes gleamed with a million thoughts. Pierce walked over and squatted beside him.

  “My name is Jerry Pierce,” he said. “I take care of my people.”

  He put the muzzle of the Mallory in the man’s gaping mouth and forced the man’s face up toward his own. Their eyes met.

  “I take care of my own,” Pierce repeated, and pulled the trigger.

  Twenty After his father’s funeral, Wigner drove his mother and uncle back to the house in Silver Spring. The December sky over Washington was a pale grey, with the sun a blurred glow in the southwest. It felt odd to be driving the old Suzuki, and in something like normal weekday traffic.

  “At least Woody got to see it,” Olivia said. “Everything coming back again, everything getting back to normal.”

  Uncle Henry, who was as compact and muscular as his nephew, chuckled in the backseat.

  “Normal. People time traveling, commercials on TV about Doomsday, weird new money, no more U.S. army. Really normal.”

  “You know what I mean, Henry. Food in the stores, for God’s sake. Electricity that doesn’t go out three times a day. Gasoline. Being able to go for a walk without beggars coming up to you, or muggers. At least Woody saw that much.”

  “Well,” said Uncle Henry, “I’m a loyal Iffer like everybody else, but I draw the line at calling things normal.”

  “Tell us that a year from now, Uncle Henry,” said Wigner with a smile. “When you get back from your holiday on Beulah or Eden.”

  “Holiday on Eden. Sounds like the old Club Med. Is that what your new job’s all about, Eric? Kind of a time-travel agent, buying people’s tickets for them?” Wigner laughed.

  “Pretty much, Uncle Henry. Moving people up and down. Lots of people downtime, a few people uptime. A time-travel agent.”

  “I do wish they’d come up with a better name for your organization,” said Olivia. “Agency for Intertemporal Development — AID sounds like that awful disease.”

  “That awful disease, Mother, is about to go the way of smallpox and polio. It’ll be forgotten. And five years from now, when people hear AID mentioned, they’ll stand up with tears in their eyes and salute.” Uncle Henry guffawed, and Wigner joined in.

  “No, really,” Wigner went on. “Millions of people will be downtime, building new cities, new industries, and making room here on Earth so the rest of us can live decently. And we’ll be bringing a lot of endos uptime for Training, get them working on every problem we’ve ever faced. Especially Doomsday. So when it comes on this chronoplane, we’ll be ready.”

  “You get a real gleam in your eye when you talk about it,” his mother said.

  “AID is my baby. It’s going to be responsible for — for everything. Moving people through I-Screens. Intertemporal trade. Research. Economic planning. Education. We’re going to run the greatest renaissance in history.”

  “God, Eric, is that all?” Uncle Henry protested. “I wish you’d show a little ambition.”

  Wigner turned into the driveway and braked. “You’re right, Uncle Henry. I’ll try to think bigger.” The house was full of old family Mends that afternoon: retired civil servants, some ex-military, a former secretary of state from the ancient days before the Emergency. Most of them looked thin and shabby; one or two would doubtless soon be dead also. Yet they talked and ate with animation, arguing about the new political order, the prospects for the reviving economy. Wigner circulated among them, accepting their sympathetic handshakes and quavering reminiscences about Woody and Olivia and himself as a small boy. Most tried to get him to talk about AID; he smiled and shrugged and repeated what he had said to his mother and uncle.

  After a while Wigner slipped upstairs to the computer and checked in with his new office in New York. A dozen calls had come in, demands from bureaucrats in Geneva and anthropologists in Mexico City, plus one he had been hoping for: from Jerry Pierce’s mother in Taos.

  He’s not well. He needs help.

  “Indeed you must,” Wigner muttered.

  “Pardon me, Eric?” asked the computer.

  “Never mind, Polly. Connect me with Dr. Franklin in Woodstock.”

  “Sure thing, Eric.”

  The old Agency was being rapidly folded into AID, so Jasmin Jones wasn’t surprised to find that her flight to Taos was aboard an Agency Lear. The plane waited discreetly on the edge of L.A. International, and an equally discreet young man from the Agency’s Los Angeles office drove her through a series of gates right onto the tarmac. He handed her over to the pilot and co-pilot, a man and wife team with Oklahoma accents and big smiles.

  “Take any seat you like, honey,” the wife said. “We’ll be on our way in just a couple of minutes.”

  Takeoff was at sunset; the Lear climbed through the darkening sky above a carpet of lights. It looked like the L.A. of the old days, Jaz thought, before the breakdown and the Emergency and everything else. Everyone was so happy now, so eager for the future. Old high-school friends in Santa Monica were making plans to emigrate, poring over holographs of Southern California on Ore or Luvah, dreaming of cattle ranches and oil wells and clean water.

  Her mother and stepfather worried about her: why was she home and not with the Agency, why wasn’t she looking for a new job, why didn’t she have a boyfriend, why did she only sit and watch the ghostly flicker of her computer as a passive observer?

  “I’m giving myself a holiday,” she had told them, and told them nothing else. Their knowledge of the Agency had been sketchy at best, and she had not expanded it. Sometimes she would sit with them to watch videotapes of old movies, though they were painful for a Trainable to watch: each frame was distinct, and movement from one frame to the next was obvious and jerky. But her company seemed to give her parents some pleasure, and she gained a strange sense of security from them.

  The phone call from Eric had changed all that. She could have rejected him, told him to get lost, and perhaps for any other assignment she would have. But Jerry Pierce needed help, Eric had said, and Jerry was a continuing responsibility of hers. He was a friend — not that she liked him very much, but they had been through too much together, they owned important parts of each other’s lives. Friends were like family, Jaz thought as the Lear slipped over the darkening plains and ranges of the Mojave Desert: you couldn’t really choose them.

  When she stepped from the Lear at the little airstrip in Taos, she felt exhausted, a little headachy. Altitude: the air was thin here, and sharply cold. Panting, she let herself be guided to a rented Jeep Cherokee. A taciturn young Hispanic drove her into town past darkened motels, abandoned supermarkets (one had the strange name of Piggly Wiggly), and finally to a neighbourhood of narrow streets where adobe houses stood crowded close together. A light burned outside the doorway of one; snowflakes gleamed as they fell out of the darkness.

  “This is the place,” the Hispano said. Jaz knocked. A tall woman who looked a lot like Jerry answered the door, and the Hispano walked away. The woman welcomed Jaz inside.

  “I’m Annette,” she said. “Eric Wigner said you’d be coming.”

  She put away Jaz’s coat and led her into a small living room: a tiled floor, plastered walls, a small fireplace tucked into one corner. Jaz gratefully sank into a rocking chair by the fire while Annette poured tea.

  “He got here over a week ago. For a day or two he seemed fine,
quiet but fine. Then one morning he just wouldn’t get up. He just sleeps all the time, hardly eats anything, doesn’t talk to me.”

  “Had he told you where he’d been?”

  “He said he’d been traveling around, seeing friends.”

  “You didn’t believe him?”

  “Jerry doesn’t have friends, except maybe you and Eric Wigner. He was always kind of a quiet, shy kid, but even more after he got Trained.” Annette sat very upright on an old couch, her mug of tea beside her. Her gaze stayed on the fire. “Maybe getting him into Training wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “He helped to save the country, Annette. He really did.”

  Annette looked at him, her eyes full of angry intelligence. “His country doesn’t seem aware of that. Neither does he.”

  “He’ll get better. I’m taking him east in the morning. He’ll get the best care in the world.”

  “I wish he didn’t need it.”

  “May I see him now?”

  “Sure.”

  Pierce lay on his side in a narrow bed, a comforter pulled up under his chin. The only light in the room came from the hallway, but Jaz could see he was awake. She sat down at a desk beside the bed, close enough to smell him and remember the tunnel under Riverside Park.

  “Hi, Jerry. It’s Jaz.”

  He said nothing.

  “Kind of like being in the tunnel?”

  Pierce grunted faintly.

  “Well, I was there. And I’m here. I’m going to take care of you.”

  “Take care,” Pierce mumbled. “Care of you.”

  “Would you like that?”

  “Take care of you.”

  “You did. You did a good job. I need you to take care of us some more. Take care of your mother and me and Eric and everybody else.”

  For a long time Pierce said nothing. Then he whispered: “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. We can help you to. Dr. Franklin can help you.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. You’ll see. We’ll go in the morning. Soon you’ll be fine.”