Authors: John Barnes
THE NEXT DAY. HERKIMER, NEW YORK. 4:30 PM EST. SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2025.
The little park where the Mohawk split off from the Erie Canal had a nice old log building. A small sign told them where to call to rent it; a bronze plaque said
VETERANS LODGE
CONSTRUCTED IN MEMORY OF THE 1,131 VICTIMS
OF THE ATTACK ON USS
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT,
CVN-81
ON 4 MAY 2022
HERKIMER VETERANS LEAGUE REMEMBERS.
Below that, in smaller letters, there was a list of wars, beginning with Vietnam and running up through Iran II. “Folks were patriotic out here,” Chris observed. “Looks like they didn’t get anyone from Grenada, Bosnia, or Guyana, though.”
“Maybe those were the vets that just weren’t joiners,” Larry said. “Wonder if the chimney’s clean enough to chance a fire?” He went to the fireplace and peered upward. “Fresh swept. Figures. Every vet’s group I was ever in, some super-responsible volunteer would do something or other perfectly. I don’t know his name but I can picture some quiet guy who just decided the vet’s lodge chimney would get swept every fall.” A shadow crossed his face. “We lost a few of those in every little town.”
Jason nodded. “Along with great scoutmasters and first-rate piano teachers and people who repainted their city halls or changed the flowers in the public gardens. And we also lost whole cities full of them. But if I let my Daybreak mind slip back into my head, I see them as fat self-satisfied slobs who needed to die for thinking that all that stuff they tried to do was important, when only our duty to the Earth really matters. In one of my poems I wrote
‘No one has the right to read Auden out loud while
there is one car running anywhere
Do not fool people into thinking that anyone
can put goodness into the air.’
“For all I know they’re still quoting it, and the goal is to be quoting it when no one knows who Auden was, or what a car was.”
Chris shrugged. “You never know what words will live, if any. More than one writer has written the war cry of his deadliest enemy.”
“Was that a poem? Are you quoting something?”
“No, I’m just tired, which makes me melodramatic. Part of why I’d rather work on paper—later, when I’m not tired, I take squishy crap like that out and replace it with rock-hard bare-boned facts. Anyway, let’s start that fire and block off the windows while we still have light to do it.”
“Volunteering for fire duty: Chris Manckiewicz,” Larry said. “Jason, let’s find towels or something around to cover those windows with. Once Chris has his fire going, we’ll need to see how much smoke it sends up, but right now there’s enough wind to shred it before it goes too high.”
The sun had not quite set when they were snug inside. Hot Spam and beans, eaten at a table, tasted much better than the cold version under a canoe. Sweet potatoes cooked in the opened can was very nearly a real dessert. After dinner, Larry spread out the maps to show them the path. “From here on out it’s down the Mohawk, and the descent is steep. Busted dams, washed out levees, fallen bridges, God knows what. It won’t be rafting the Colorado, exactly, but it’s going to be a rougher ride than anything we’ve done so far.”
They all had another round of warm food, taking turns reading aloud from the copy of
Nostromo
that Jason had brought from the senior center. Jason and Larry sacked out close to the fire, and Chris took the first watch, scribbling in his pad, trying to explain just how dead and empty it was up here, wondering how many synonyms for “nothing,” “lost,” and “gone” there were, and if they’d be enough.
SIXTEEN:
TURNING THE NAVIES UPWARD ON THEIR KEELS
3 DAYS LATER. NEAR 33 S 95 W, IN THE INDIAN OCEAN, WEST OF AUSTRALIA. 8 AM LOCAL TIME. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2025.
There was no hope of keeping it secret in the relaxed discipline of an extremely prolonged voyage. CVN-77,
George HW Bush
, the last remaining nuclear carrier in the Navy and on Earth, had always been like a floating small town, and now it was a floating small town with nanoswarm. Everyone knew that at least a day before it was official.
Yet until the captain made the announcement, in the crew’s hearts the great ship was not really walking dead, even though everyone knew that all the carriers which had come down with nanoswarm, no matter how hard their crews had worked to save them, had been dead in less than a month.
When he emerged and stood on the dais before the assembled crew, many were already crying. He braced himself and said the key word first, afraid he might not be able to say any more before breaking down himself: “Savannah. We’re going home to Savannah.”
But then his heart returned enough to say, “Most of you are from the continental USA, so at least we’ll be getting you where you can walk home. Savannah has decent rail service to Athens, which is connected to all the TNG-controlled part of the country, with links to the central states, the PCG area, and California.
“With less need to conserve our remaining fuel and aircraft parts, as we pass within range of Africa, South America, and eventually our homes, we’ll be flying off reconnaissance missions, preserving as much data as we can about the changing world. So we’ll be busy with an important scientific and geographic mission right to the end, and I want to remind you all that until we put you ashore at Savannah, you’re still in the Navy or the Marines, and I—and the people of the United States—expect you to do your duty to the utmost.”
Minutes later, her great turbines thundering,
Bush
pointed her prow west, toward the Cape of Good Hope, and drove across the placid Indian Sea. In the next few days, everyone seemed to spend as much time as they could on deck, enjoying the spring weather, and just saying good-bye.
2 DAYS LATER. RUINS OF WATERFORD, NEW YORK. 12:15 PM EST. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2025.
The passage down the Mohawk had been no worse than unpleasant and tiring, with some long portages around wrecked locks and dams, and a couple of fireless nights, but they had only seen three signs of Daybreak since the hanged bodies on the bridge: two bridges surrounded by trampled mud and snow where large bands must have passed, and one fortified farmhouse where the condition of the bodies piled outside suggested it had been sacked just before the big snowstorm.
From Buffalo, past Oneida, and for most of the way down the Mohawk, the biggest living animals had been spiders, and grass and moss were the only green; the radiation-killed trees and bushes had put out no leaves last spring.
But the previous day, they had seen traces of living things reclaiming the empty, dead land. The Chicago superbomb had been pure fusion, so the radioactive isotopes in the fallout were nearly all light-metal salts produced by neutron irradiation of the vaporized city. The ferocious, life-erasing energy of those isotopes also gave them short half-lives; the fallout had been far more deadly in the short run than the fission-fragment fallout from an “old school” atom bomb, but there had been less of it and it had decayed to harmlessness much faster.
Today, nearing Albany, the river contained more junk, but it had also broken through flood control in so many places that even its central channel was broad and comparatively sluggish; they found the Lock 6 dams still standing.
“We could walk to the Hudson in less than an hour from where we are,” Chris pointed out.
Larry shrugged. “But then we’d have to keep walking. There’s a perfectly good river over that way, and perfectly good canoes here, so I figure we’ll paddle up to Lock 6, portage around that chain of locks, and canoe down to Peebles Island. We’ve been seeing living trees all morning, and that squirrel came from somewhere and has been eating something. So we’re out of the worst of the fallout belt. If there are non-tribal people up here, they’re trading, because that’s what civilized people do, and if they’re trading anywhere it’ll be at Peebles Island, because it sits between the Mohawk, the Erie Canal, and the Hudson.” Larry shrugged and stretched. “And whether we make contact with anyone there or not, I’d rather ride than walk for the rest of the trip.”
Chris stood, rotated his trunk, and swung his arms in circles. “Well, I guess it won’t get any easier for waiting.”
A canal-side exercise trail with long flights of stairs made it easy to descend the four locks by lowering first the canoes, then their packs, on ropes alongside the closed lock gate.
They paddled past the empty warehouses and little houses, with yards full of junk, that had been run down long before Daybreak, and on across the slow-moving outlet of the Erie Canal, catching their first sight of the broad Hudson beyond the tip of Peebles Island.
Down here, many trees had some leaves clinging to them, which probably meant they had been green in the summer and were not dead, and as the early fall evening crept over the Hudson, they saw splashes of fish jumping.
On Peebles Island, they beached just upstream of a trestle bridge and carried the canoes up the bank. Rabbits broke from the snow-patched, thick brown grass. After weeks of seeing so little life, the long back legs kicking away, and the bouncing powder-puff tails were more miraculous than unicorns.
“I still wouldn’t eat one,” Jason said, “but at least they’re here and alive.”
Chris said, “It looks like the grass was growing all summer; I don’t think your trade fair has—”
“Sail!”
They looked where Jason was pointing.
The boat coming round the point of Peebles Island was about three times the size of
Kelleys Dancer
, with a much taller mast. Jason ran forward onto the beach, waving and yelling; someone in the crow’s nest waved back, and presently the boat took down its sails, dropped anchor, and lowered a small rowboat.
They walked down to meet it. The man who sat in the bow, hollering at the imperturbable rowers, had deep brown skin, close-cropped white hair, and a little white goatee hanging from his upper lip like a cocoon. He wore big wire-rimmed glasses, a billed cap tied closed with twine to replace its lost plastic strap, several layers of sweaters, and bell-bottomed canvas pants; he seemed to be on the brink of laughing out loud.
The rowboat drew near. The big man threw Jason a painter; he tied it off to a small tree, and in the gathering dusk, they all shook hands. “Jamayu Rollings,” the big man said. “Captain and owner of the schooner
Ferengi
, and these are my sons, Geordie Rollings and Whorf Rollings. We’ve been on a trading and salvage expedition up to Troy, and we were going to put in for the night here.”
“Larry Mensche, Chris Manckiewicz, and Jason Nemarec, Reconstruction Research Center. We’re a scientific expedition, overland traverse of the Erie Canal route.”
“Hunh. Well, that’ll cause some conversation in Manbrookstat. You guys wouldn’t be looking for anything to trade, or maybe for a ride, would you?”
Larry nodded. “We could be. We’re right where we were ordered to be; from here on, how we get home is up to us. You mean you have room somewhere for three passengers?”
“Room and then some for three
paying
passengers.”
“Is the credit of the U.S. government good enough for you?”
“Can you prove you have it?”
“I have letters from the RRC in Pueblo, the TNG at Athens, and the PCG in Olympia.”
“Hunh. I don’t have any way to confirm any of those, do I?”
“You could trust our honest demeanor and smiling faces.”
“I’ve been trading for a while now. I wouldn’t trust my mother if she offered me a free Thanksgiving dinner.”
Larry noted that both boys were rolling their eyes.
“Well, then, perhaps we’re stuck.”
“Maybe, maybe not. You wouldn’t happen to have any trade goods?”
“How do you define those? All we’ve got is our gear, which we need to keep if we’re going to travel, plus our two canoes and a couple big bags of canned goods.” Larry saw the flicker of attention from the two boys, and said, “How about passage for the three of us if we let you have the canoes? We won’t need them any longer, and good aluminum canoes can’t be all that common in New York Harbor just yet.”
“What’s in the cans?”
“We’ve got baked beans, sweet potatoes, peas, salmon—”
Both the boys looked like they’d been poisoned.
“You won’t be able to give the salmon away. Manbrookstat eats fish three meals a day. But how many of those beans and yams you got?”
They settled on both canoes, and five cans each of baked beans, peas, and sweet potatoes. For his part, Jamayu threw in full meals while on board, and oil for a stove and a lamp in their cabin. “You’ll probably only be on board two nights, anyway,” he assured them. “Tonight, and then one farther downstream somewhere.”
An hour after coming ashore to contemplate a cold, uncomfortable camp, they found themselves sitting down to fresh grilled fish at the captain’s table of the
Ferengi
, and in celebration of having someone to drink with, he even gave everyone a small, free shot of pre-Daybreak brandy.
After dinner, that night, Jason went up on deck for some air; he could tell that the closet-sized cabin was going to be stuffy,
not to mention that I’m in there with two old guys who’ve been eating a couple cans of baked beans a day for more than a week; I don’t think I ever really grasped the expression “old fart” before now.
As he sat in the bow, Whorf Rollings joined him; the two sat together quietly for a while. Finally Whorf said, “You’re from Pueblo? Where they broadcast from? The people that ran WTRC?”
“Yep. I’ve got a wife there with a kid on the way.”
“Suppose a guy was pretty smart and wanted to work hard, but kind of showed up with nothing. Would there be a place for him there?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure there would.”
“Just thinking.” Whorf leaned back and sighed. “Here I am crew on Pop’s big stupid boat that he worked all his life to buy and that we all made fun of.”
“Yeah, what is it about old poops and boats? My family sailed all the freakin’ time. Snob appeal, you know? I mean, we were from Connecticut—oh, God, were we
ever
from Connecticut—and my dad was just a sales manager for a medium-sized electronics firm, but he wanted me and my brother to be full-bore—and I do mean
bore
—preppies.”
Whorf was laughing. “Tell me about it. Pop was a dentist. Our older sister Deanna wanted him to call this boat either the
Root Canal
or the
Gold Crown
.” They sat silently for a long while; then Whorf asked, “You okay?”
“Just remembering I used to avoid trips to New York because the folks were always reminding me they could take the train down from Connecticut and meet me. And now . . . well, they’re probably not even alive. And they’ve got a grandchild on the way, and I’d give anything to see them and talk to them.”
“Hunh. In two days I’m going to be in Mom’s kitchen, listening to Pop tell lies about this trip and . . . well. Some of us don’t know when we’re lucky.”
“If you come on out, ever, it’s lucky to be in Pueblo too. There’s always a spare bed for anyone who will work. And there’s definitely always work. Just don’t come the way I did; there’s got to be an easier path, even if you have to take the boat to Morgan City.”
They chatted idly till the night river chill set in. Jason went below. The tiny cabin was dry and warm from the oil stove, and his two companions were stretched out on their bunks, reading by the overhead oil lamp. Chris said, “We eat breakfast with the second shift, so we’re getting at least ten hours of uninterrupted sleep. Soapy water bucket on the left side of the oil stove, and warm rinse water in the other one, and we left you a clean dry towel.”
As Jason cleaned up, trying, in the narrow space, not to cast shadows on their reading or burn his buttocks on the stove, he thought to ask Larry, “How did you know to do all that bargaining with Captain Rollings to get a good deal?”
“Because his sloop is named
Ferengi
, his sons have the names they do, and . . .” He sighed. “One of those things where you had to be there. Went off the air when I was ten.”
Jason was too sleepy, and not curious enough, to pursue the question further. As soon as he was dry, he snuffed the oil lamp, climbed into his bunk, and was barely conscious long enough to relish the feel of clean sheets on bare skin.