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 phrases 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.”
She looked around the room, and said, “This is the first official meeting of the governors of the Reconstruction Research Center. Both the Temporary National Government in Athens and the Provisional Constitutional Government in Olympia want me to remind you that we are funded and supported by both governments. The official minutes will show that we sat down, talked about our jobs, had lunch, and adjourned. Please
read
the official minutes Sherry gives you, because we all want to tell a consistent story.
“Unofficially, over here in reality-land, kids, this is the story.” She looked around the room and smiled. “We’re going to put our country back together. We’re going to put civilization back on its upward track, in technology of course, but also in decency, justice, and living together in peace and freedom—and in whatever it is we need to understand about the Daybreak event to ensure nothing of the kind happens again.
“Bambi Castro, Larry Mensche, Quattro Larsen—you’re my senior field agents. I will say go find this out, go do this, and you will. And I know it’ll get done. We’ll be recruiting what amounts to a small army of people to work for you; think about what kind of people you want, what they have to be able to do, and what you want them to know, because to the limits of my resources, they will be recruited and trained exactly as you say.
“Leslie, James—you’re my information people.”
“Librarians,” James said. “To be a librarian for this operation is to be at the heart of it, and I’m proud to have the title.”
Leslie added, “I promise I won’t start dressing frumpy if it’ll make you feel better.”
Heather nodded. “You’ll also have all the resources and people I can find for you; your job is twofold. One, preserve and correlate everything the field agents, scientists, and whoever else learn about our strange new world; two, find out what the world needs to know and make it available. Neither job will be easy—”
“But we will love both of those jobs,” Leslie said.
“I’ll hold you to that.” Heather nodded to Chris Manckiewicz. “You are not the first, nor will you be the last, supposedly independent news source to be subverted. I will try to use only truthful propaganda and to muscle the
Pueblo Post-Times
around only as much as necessary and only for good ends. We can be sure my success will be imperfect; your most important job may be to forgive me.
“That brings us to Dr. Arnold Yang, officially our director of research, nominally the supervisor of Mota Eliptica, and actually our specialist in Daybreak itself—what it was, or whether it still exists in some form, how to defeat it, how to build the counter-Daybreak if we need it. And he’ll be assisted by Izzy Underhill, here.”
Keep reminding myself not to call her Roth.
“Izzy’s pretty quiet, but Arnie assures me that most of the information we have about Daybreak traces directly to her.”
“So that’s what we’re really doing. Any questions?”
“Do you think we’ll undo Daybreak in our lifetime?” Larry asked.
“Undo it? If you mean, it will be like it never happened—never. If you mean, get back to the same technical level, I don’t know, but I know we’d better start.”
Arnie asked, “You don’t really believe that Graham and Cam will keep their word perfectly, do you? I know we’ll have people out in the field to watch them, but for right now, don’t you think it’s pretty likely that both of them are cheating just a little, here and there, on an a-little-won’t-hurt or technically-this-is-in-bounds b asis?”
“I’m sure that’s happening,” she said. “Furthermore, both of them will be having trouble getting some of the underlings to comply. And we’ll be nagging them all the time about it. And the next people in their positions will almost certainly not have the sort of scruples and be as sentimental as they are.”
For example Allie would’ve stared Chris down with all the sympathetic expression of a rattlesnake, and gone right ahead. And it’s not just her, there’s fifty more of her at Olympia and fifty more at Athens, any time we want to see them.
“But for right now, luckily, this country really doesn’t want a civil war, and Graham and Cam don’t have the heart to push them into it. Give most of our people a world where they can comfortably make their own way, and not think too much about abstractions, and a lot of people will find a way to be happy. That is what we have to count on.
“No, we haven’t removed the prospect of war, and we haven’t made real peace yet. But we’ve given people at least a summer away from it, and then it won’t be fit fighting weather, and after that, well, the horse may talk. So I’m not going to despair because we haven’t solved all the problems or made Right the Eternal Victor. As far as I’m concerned, we’ve just won a big victory for a lot of things I believe in, that I think most of our people believe in: good home cooking, comfy clean houses, honest work you get paid for, making things easier for the kids than they were for us, letting your neighbor go to the devil in his own way, and some time on the back porch to read the paper and drink beer and argue with the neighbors.”
Izzy cleared her throat. “You know, that’s kind of a Daybreak image.”
She shrugged. “It’s kind of a Daybreak world. I don’t like it, but they won, and we have to admit it. We’re stuck living the Daybreak program for some decades or centuries; we might as well live it fat, prosperous, peaceful, and content.” She stood, enjoying once again the subtle shift that her balance had taken. “And speaking of fat and content, I’m about to go enjoy eating for two. Anybody want to come along and help celebrate peace? You too, Izzy, my treat till we regularize paying you.”
The young woman was still quite shy, but she nodded and seemed pleased to be included, especially once she knew that Bambi and Arnie would be coming along. The four of them strolled out into the pleasant Rocky Mountain spring, mostly just enjoying a day with less fear than they had had in a long time.
Heather heard the running feet behind her and the habits of a lifetime kicked in; she turned and crouched, ready to fight. The two young people running after them froze.
It was a couple in their early- to mid-twenties, a man with a mountain-man beard and long brownish hair, and a young woman with longish red hair, a pleasant, chunky Earth-mother figure, and large brown eyes. Each wore trousers and a belted jacket that was probably copied from a karate gi, with a thin underjacket and a heavy outer one—the coarse fabric was probably home-woven—and low moccasins. Scanning automatically for identifiers in case she ever needed them, Heather noted that the young man was deeply tanned—
he must work outside
—and the woman’s left hand hung a little funny, as if she were wearing her wrist wrong.
“I’m sorry we startled you,” the young man said. “Back at your building they sent us running after you. My name’s Jason, and this is Beth, and back at the office we were told to say we had a Code Fourteen Matter for you—”
Code Fourteen.
Heather almost whooped; two heavily involved former Daybreakers for Ysabel and Arnie to study. Two more chances to see to the bottom of this.
“We were just going to lunch,” Heather said, “and it’s a special enough occasion that I feel like taking people to lunch, so why don’t you come along. Have you seen the newspaper today?”
“Peace,”
Jason said. “Yeah. That’s so great.”
“Well,” Heather said, “Dr. Yang, here, will be one of the main people you will be talking with, along with Ms. Underhill.”
Ysabel smiled nicely. “Call me Izzy. Everyone does, or they will if I tell them.”
Since “Code Fourteen Matters” could not be talked about in public, instead the group spent some time getting to know Jason and Beth, who, it turned out, had been living a carefully anonymous life in Antonito, until they had spotted the ad in the
Weekly Wrapper
. They seemed likeable enough, and after lunch, Arnie and Ysabel took them off for their first extended interview.