Authors: Walter Jon Williams
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Post-Apocalyptic
“Have you apologized?” said Frank Adams.
This was not the initial response that Jason had hoped for. “Let me tell you what it was about,” he said.
“Okay.” Frank sounded agreeable enough, but over the phone connection Jason could hear his father's pen scratching. The pen was a Mont Blanc, and had a very distinctive sound, one loud enough to hear over a good phone connection. Frank was working late at the office, which was normal, and Jason had called him there.
“Mom says I have to restrict my Internet access to one hour per day. But the Internet is where all my friends hang out.”
“Okay.”
“Well,” Jason said, “that's
it.”
“That's what the whole fight was about?”
“There was a lot more about karma, and how yours sucks so bad you're going to get washed out to sea along with my friends, but keeping me offline is what it all came down to.”
“Uh-huh.” There was a pause while the pen scratched some more. Then the pen stopped, and Frank Adams's voice brightened, as if he decided he may as well pay attention, “It wasn't about your grades or anything?” he asked.
“No. My grades are up.” The Cabells Mound school was less demanding than the academy he'd been attending in California. Also far more boring— but that, he'd discovered, applied to the Swampeast generally and not just to school.
“So if it's not interfering with your schoolwork, why is she restricting your Internet access?”
Jason's dad was very concerned with grades and education, not for themselves exactly, but because they led to success later on. Frank was big on hard work, dedication, and the rewards the two would bring. Jason's mom, by contrast, thought of this goal-oriented behavior as “worshiping false, non-integrative values.”
“She wants me to spend more time doing stuff here. But there's nothing to do here, so—”
“She wants you to try to make friends in Missouri.”
Jason could not understand how his parents knew these things about each other. Were they telepathic or something?
“Well, yeah,” Jason said. “But there's, like, no point to it. Because the second I'm eighteen, I'm checking out of this burg.”
“You've got a few years till then,” his father pointed out.
“But I'm going to be spending as much time in L.A. as I can between now and then.”
“Jason.” His father's voice was weary. “Where are you going to be spending most of your time between now and your graduation?”
Jason glared out the window and realized he was trapped. “Here,” he said. “In Missouri.”
“So isn't it, therefore, a good idea to get to know some people where you live? Maybe date a few girls, even?”
Jason never liked it when his father started using words like
therefore.
It meant he was doing his whole lawyer thing, like he was talking to a witness or something. It was as bad as when his mother talked about negative thoughtforms.
“I don't
mind
making new friends,” he said. “But I want to keep the ones I've got, too, and I can't do that unless I stay in touch with them.”
“I will speak to your mother about your Internet privileges, then. But I won't do it for another week or ten days, because I want you to soften her up between now and then, okay? Try to make an effort? Take someone home? Play a game of baseball? Something?”
Jason glared at his reflection in the blank computer screen. “I'll see what I can do,” he said.
“Good.”
Jason made a grotesque face into the computer screen. Snarled, bared his canines, made his eyes wide. His distorted reflection grimaced back at him like a creature out of a horror film. “I was wondering,” Jason began, “if I could come and stay with you after you and Una get back from China.”
Jason heard a page turn over the phone, and then heard his father's pen scratching again. “I don't think that's such a good idea,” Frank said. “I'm going to be working sixteen-hour days to catch up on the work I've missed. I wouldn't really have a chance to spend time with you. It wouldn't be fair to Una to have to spend all her time looking after you.”
“I wouldn't bother her. I can just hang with my friends.”
“You'll still be able to visit in August, like we planned.”
“I could house-sit for you, while you're gone.”
Frank's pen went
scratch, scratch.
“I don't think so,” he said. “I don't want to leave you alone in the city all that time. What if you got into trouble?”
What if I didn't?
Jason wanted to respond. “Or I could fly to China and join you there,” he said instead.
His father gave a sigh. Jason could hear the pen clatter on the desktop. “This is my first vacation in almost ten years,“ Frank said. “I'm a partner now. It used to be that partners took it easy and waited for retirement, but that's not how it works anymore. Partners work harder than anyone else.”
“I
know,” Jason said. He remembered the last vacation, ten years ago in Yosemite. He didn't remember much about the park, he could only remember being sick to his stomach and throwing up a lot.
“Una and I have never had much time alone together,” Frank said. “We're going to be meeting her family, and that's important.”
And a step-kid,
Jason thought,
would just get in the way.
Una, whom Frank had finally married a few months ago, was half Chinese. The Chinese part of the family was scattered all through Asia, and Frank and his new bride were going to travel to Shanghai, Guangzhong, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur, seeing the sights and meeting the relatives.
Jason made another grotesque face into the computer screen.
He did not dislike Una, who had made a determined effort to become his friend. But she troubled him. For one thing, she was young enough, and pretty enough, for him to view as desirable. That she sometimes figured in his fantasies made him uncomfortable. For another, her moving in with his dad made it that much less likely that Jason would himself be able to move in with Frank.
And thirdly, she was monopolizing Frank's first real vacation in a decade, and going to places Jason very much wanted to see.
“I wouldn't get in your way,” Jason said. “I'd just go off and, like, see stuff.”
Frank's pen kept scratching on. “You don't
do
that in Asia,” he said. “You don’t just
go off.
Besides, we're going to be spending most of our time with a lot of old people who don't speak English, and you'd be bored.”
“No way.”
Frank sighed again. “Look,” he said. “We
need
this trip, okay? But we'll go to Asia another time, and maybe you can come along then.”
In another ten years maybe, Jason thought. He made a screaming face into the video monitor, mouth open in a hideous mask of anguish.
“Okay,” he said. “But you'll talk to Mom about the Internet, okay? Because if I can't visit China, I want at least to visit their homepage.”
“I'll do that,” Frank said. His tone lightened. “By the way, I bought your birthday present today. It's sitting right here in the office. I think you're going to like it.”
“I'll look forward to seeing it,” Jason said. Perhaps the only benefit of the divorce had been that, in the years since, the size and expense of Jason's presents had increased. “I don't suppose you're going to tell me what it is.”
“That would spoil the surprise.”
Jason could hear his father's pen scratching again, so he figured he might as well bring the conversation to an end. After he hung up, he sat in his chair and stared across the sodden cotton field to the line of trees on the distant northern horizon.
No Shanghai, no Hong Kong, no Internet. No California till August.
The Cabells Mound water tower stood beyond the line of trees, the setting sun gleaming red from its metal skin.
Jason looked at the tower for a moment, then at the Edge Living poster on the wall, the extreme skater, armored like a medieval knight, poised on the edge of a gleaming brushed aluminum rail. He turned his eyes back to the water tower.
Yes,
he thought.
If he couldn't escape his fate, he could at least make a name for himself here.
TWO
By a gentleman just from Arkansas, by way of White river, we learn that the earthquake was violent in that quarter that in upwards of 500 places he observed coal and sand thrown up from fissures in the earth, that the waters raised in a swamp near the Cherokee village, so as to drown a Mr. Carrin who was travelling with his brother, the latter saved himself on a log.
—
In other places the water fell, and in one instant it rose in a swamp near the St. Francis 25 or 30 feet; Strawberry a branch of Black river, an eminence about 1-1/2 acres sunk down and formed a pond.
St. Louis, February
22,
1812
The ringing signal purred in Nick Ruford’s ear. He felt adrenaline shimmer through his body, kick his heart into a higher gear. He felt like a teenager calling a girl for the first time.
It was Manon who answered. His nerves gave a little leap at the sound of her voice.
Stupid, he thought. The divorce was two years ago. But he couldn’t help it. She still did that to him.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s me.”
“Hey, yourself,” she said. There was always that sly smile in her contralto voice, and he could tell from her intonation, the warmth in her tone, exactly the expression on her face, the little crinkles at the corners of her eyes, the broad smile that exposed her white teeth and a little bit of pink upper gum. With the gum exposed like that it should not be an attractive smile, but somehow it was.
“You finished with the move?” Manon asked.
Nick looked around the room with its neatly stacked boxes under the eye of Nick’s father, who gazed in steely splendor from his portrait on the wall, and for whose spirit no stack of boxes would ever be neat enough. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’m moved in. I just don’t have a place for everything yet.”
Don’t have a place for myself
yet,
he thought.
That’s the trouble
.
“Is it a nice apartment?”
Nick looked out the window at the crowded sidewalk, the people hanging out on the streets. The windows were closed, and the air-conditioning unit in the window turned up high, so that Manon couldn’t hear the boom box rattling away from the front porch. “Well,” he said, “it’s
urban,
you know, but it isn’t squalid. And my building is nice.”
And would be nicer. Once he finished wallpapering Arlette’s room, he could move her furniture in there, the mattress and frame that were now occupying most of the living room.
“It was Viondi found it, right?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“I can just imagine.”
Sudden resentment sizzled along Nick’s nerves. Manon always knew how to get to him.
I can just imagine.
His friends weren’t good enough, his apartment wasn’t good enough, his job wasn’t good enough.
He
wasn’t good enough.
And it wasn’t like she even meant to put him down, not really. Her damn spooky family had been royalty so long in their little part of Arkansas that it was natural for her to judge other people, judge them without even thinking about it. There wasn’t any malice in it, not really.
“Can I talk to Arlette?” he asked.
“She’s in her room. I’ll get her.”
Over the phone he heard Manon’s heels clacking on the polished cypress floor of their old house. Nick paced up and down next to the dinette set, working off his aggravation. Was it his fault he’d been laid off at McDonnell? Or that a weapons systems engineer was a useless occupation in the aftermath of the Cold War?
He looked at the portrait of his father: Brigadier General Jon C. Ruford, U.S. Army, winner of the Distinguished Service Cross for service in Vietnam and the Soldier’s Medal for service out of it. Author of
Sun Tzu and the Military Mind
(1985), and one of the first dozen or so black men to rise in the Army to the rank of general officer, clearly destined for higher rank until forced to resign by the multiple sclerosis that finally killed him, four years later, in the V.A. hospital here in St. Louis.
You didn’t tell me, Nick silently told the portrait, that I was going to be made obsolete. That I was going to be as much a dinosaur as you are.
Arlette’s young voice brightened his thoughts.
“Allo, papa! J’ai des nouvelles merveilleux! Une situation vai a devenu libre!”
Nick tried to find his way through this torrent of half-understood words. His last real exposure to French had been years ago, when his father was stationed at NATO headquarters in Brussels. “Good news?” he said. “Uhhh ...
bien.”
“Je vais a l’école d’été apres tout! Je vais passer l’été a Toulouse!”
Nick’s heart sank as he deciphered Arlette’s phrases. He glanced into the room he was preparing for her, at the stack of wallpaper and the gilt-edged mirror . .. his hand automatically touched the pocket where he carried the gift he’d bought her today, and which he really couldn’t afford. A gold necklace in the shape of a lily, sprinkled with diamonds and rubies, and matching earrings. A real grown-up gift.
He had imagined her eyes lighting up as she opened the gift-wrapped box. He had imagined the way she’d gasp in delight and wrap her arms around his neck and breathe her warm thanks against his neck.
And now he’d never see it. Now he’d just have to give the package to Federal Express and experience his daughter’s joy only in his imagination.
“That’s great, baby,” Nick said. “That’s wonderful.” He tried hard to keep the disappointment from his voice. “When does summer school start?”
“Right after school ends here,” Arlette said, switching— Nick was grateful—to English. “The school in Toulouse doesn’t open right away, but Mrs. Rigby said she’d take some of us to France for ten days of travel beforehand.”
“That’s wonderful, honey,” Nick said. His hand clenched into a fist, and he wanted to drive it through the newly papered wall.
It wasn’t that he didn’t think his daughter shouldn’t spend the summer in France. It was a wonderful opportunity, and she would be staying with a French family and getting a lot of exposure to a world she hadn’t seen, which could only do her good after Manon decided their daughter was going to grow up as African-American royalty in some little half-assed village in Arkansas.
Manon’s family, the Davids, had been royalty for generations. Back before the Civil War they’d been Free Men of Color in New Orleans, and they’d spoken French at home, pronounced their name “Dah-veed,” and sent their sons to France to be educated. After the war the Freedmans’ Bureau had created a Utopian colony of freed slaves in Arkansas, and the Davids had condescended to be put in charge of it.
Unlike most of the colonies the Freedmans’ Bureau planted, the one in Toussaint, Arkansas, had prospered. Partly because of its isolation— none of their white neighbors really
wanted
the land— and partly because of the Davids. In Toussaint the Davids owned the hardware store, and the grocery, and the pharmacy. And the lumber yard, the feed store, and the town’s one office building. And probably the traffic light, too.
And they still gave their kids French names, and sometimes sent their kids to France for an education. Even if, as in Arlette’s case, it was summer school in Toulouse.
But Nick wanted her
here.
He craved her presence. He yearned for her. He needed his daughter in his life, not as just a tantalizing, infuriating ghost he could only hear on the telephone.
And besides, he didn’t have a job now. He could spend time with her, not like before, when he was working and barely saw his family at all.
He had rented a two-bedroom apartment, more than he could afford, so that she could have a nice room when she spent the summer with him. Along with the bed with the graceful rococo scalloped headboard, the chest of drawers, the gilt-edged mirror with the decals of roses along the borders.
All money he could not afford to spend. And now he would be expected to pay for half of the cost of Arlette’s trip to France.
“How did things go with Lockheed-Martin?” Arlette asked, almost as if she was reading his mind.
“Same story in Colorado as everywhere else.” Nick tried to keep his voice cheerful. “Over two hundred applicants for the same job, and the ones already laid off from Lockheed get priority over the ones that got laid off from Boeing, McDonnell and Hughes.”
If only,
he thought,
we could get a nice juicy war started. Not a
bad
war,
he immediately corrected,
not with a lot of casualties or anything. Just some murdering old dictator that needs removing.
It wasn’t like there weren’t plenty to go around. One lousy dictator, and the defense dollars would start flowing again.
“You’ll find a place, Daddy,” Arlette said.
“Oh yeah,” Nick said. “Sooner or later, baby, somebody’s gonna want an engineer.”
I hear Burger King is hiring,
he thought.
And with unemployment running out along with his bank account, it would probably come to that soon.
*
Omar Paxton chose to take the oath under the statue of the Mourning Confederate in front of the courthouse. It was just as well he did it outdoors: there were so many reporters clustered around that they would never have fit inside Judge Moseley’s office. Some of the boys turned up with rebel flags to provide a colorful and ideologically significant background, and Wilona was there to stand beside him, wearing white gloves, a corsage, and the pearls that her great-aunt Clover had left her in her will.
The constant whirring and buzzing of the cameras were louder than the cicadas in the surrounding blackjack oaks. Trying to ignore the sound, Omar put his hand on the judge’s well-worn Bible and swore to uphold the laws of the State of Louisiana and Spottswood Parish, and added a “So help me God!” for the benefit of his friends and of the media. Rebel yells rang out from the crowd. Confederate flags waved in the air, the sunshine turning their color a brilliant red. Judge Moseley held out his hand.
“Good luck there, Omar,” he said.
Omar shook the hand. “Thank you kindly, Mo,” he said. Moseley’s little waxed white mustache gave a twitch. Only certain people in the parish were high enough in caste to call the judge by his nickname, and Omar had just announced that he considered himself among them.
Omar put on his hat and turned to face the crowd of people. He waved to Hutch and Jedthus and a few of the others, and then turned to kiss Wilona on the cheek. People in the crowd cheered. He beamed down at the crowd, and waved some more, and encouraged Wilona to wave with a white-gloved hand. He looked into the lens of a network cameraman.
Got you all, you bastards,
he thought.
After the media storm and the court challenge and the recount, after the governor had called him a reptile and the Party had disavowed his very existence, Omar Bradley Paxton had finally taken the oath of office and was ready to begin his term as sheriff of Spottswood Parish.
“Do you plan to make any changes in the department?” a reporter shouted up.
Omar smiled down at him.
Little weevil,
he thought. “I don’t anticipate any major changes,” he said. “Maybe we’ll save the people some tax dollars by putting regular gas in the patrol cars, ’stead of premium.”
The locals laughed at this. Omar’s predecessor had been prosecuted, though not convicted, for taking kickbacks for keeping Pure Premium in all the county’s cars.
The next question was shouted up by a little red-haired lady reporter with a voice like a trumpet. “Will there be any change in the style of law enforcement here in Spottswood Parish?”
“Well, ma’am,” tipping his hat to the lady, “we
do
plan to continue giving tickets to speeders and arresting drunks.”
More laughter. “What I meant,” the woman shouted up, “was whether the department will change its racial policy?” Omar’s ears rang with her shrill tones.
“Ma’am,” Omar said, and tried not to clench his teeth, “the racial policies of the department and the parish are determined by law. You have just heard me swear to uphold and enforce that law. I would be in violation of my oath were I to make any changes upholding illegal discrimination.”
Take that, you little red-haired dyke,
he thought.
“Do you plan,” shouted a foreign-accented voice, “to resign your position as King Kleagle of Louisiana?”
Omar recognized a German reporter, one of the many foreigners who were putting their pfennigs into the local economy as they covered his story. He couldn’t help but smile.
“The voters of Spottswood Parish knew I belonged to the Klan when they elected me,” he said. “Obviously they decided that my membership in the world’s oldest civil rights organization was not an important issue. I can think of no reason why I should resign at this point, not after the voters and the courts have validated my candidacy. My family has lived in this parish for seven generations, and people knew what they were getting when they elected me.”
Rebel yells whooped up from the crowd. Confederate flags waved at the election of the first admitted Klan leader of modern times.
Up your ass, you kraut-eating Dutchman,
Omar thought, and smiled.
*
“God damn,” Judge Chivington muttered. “Where did all these good-looking Klansmen come from? Back when I grew up in Texas, none of ’em had chins, and they all had puzzel-guts and weighed three hunnerd pounds. And that was just the
women.”
The President cast a professional eye over Omar Paxton’s chiseled features.
“David Duke’s good looks came from a plastic surgeon,” he said. “He looked like a little weasel before Dr. Scalpel and Mr. Bleach made him a blond Aryan god. But this gent,” nodding at the evening news, “I believe he just has good genes.”
“The man was made for television,” sighed Stan Burdett, the President’s press secretary, and who, with his bald head, thin lips, and thick spectacles, was not.
“He was made for givin’ us
shit,”
the judge proclaimed. “That fucking weevil could cost us Louisiana in the next election.”
“We kicked him out of the Party,” the President offered.
“We’ll be lucky if he don’t take half the Party with ’im.”