Daybreak Zero

^{4 HOURS LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 10:40 AM MST. SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2025.}

It wasn’t Arnie’s regular hangover: he hadn’t had very much beer last night, he’d been up for hours this morning, and he’d had breakfast. Nonetheless he had a headache, queasy stomach, and painful clarity about the world’s failings.

What failings?

He was lonely but he had friends; he was frustrated but Heather was listening, and once he told her about Aaron, she’d really listen. And a cool July morning in Pueblo beat the hell out of what he was used to in DC. Clear, bright, high-altitude sunlight made everything pop out of its background. Midmorning was pleasantly warm, not the searing dry heat of late afternoon.

And the world was healing. In March a clear sky had looked like a few drops of blue food coloring in a barrel of old dishwater. Now it was slateblue again, on its way to real blue. Spring rains had washed a lot of soot out of the air and extinguished most of the fires in the old big cities, though snow might have to smother the last smolders.

Next summer or the one after, the sky will be bluer than it’s been in centuries. The world was rewildernizing—silly Daybreaker word, but still, from the train coming up from Mota Elliptica, he’d seen buffalo and wild cattle. In thirty years something big with horns would rule the plains again.

Hunh. Another note to feed to James Hendrix, over in research. Flying over the Gunnison Valley, Bambi had sighted a herd of yaks. Paul Ferrier had reported flocks of emu in Oklahoma. At Castle Castro down in San Diego someone had found a dead baby kangaroo in a bean field. What had happened to all the imported animals? Were there lions or baboons breeding on the Great Plains, tigers in Louisiana, cobras in Florida?

How would the Daybreakers feel about that? Evolution taking its course, the blasphemous mistreatment of Gaia redeemed into a new kind of wilderness? Or a gigantic replay of dogs on the Pacific islands and kudzu in North America? He could build either narrative, using Daybreaker core signs—that was an intriguing idea. If I were in Daybreak, and I wanted to embrace the hybrid wilderness—

We’ll embrace it, he realized. They’ll definitely embrace anything that makes it tougher for human beings.

Heather waddled in, less than a month to go, over six feet tall, carrying low and all in one place, and Arnie blocked a smile at her exasperated expression—the lifelong athlete having lost control of her body.

She began with the obligatory platitudes, welcoming Arnie back, sorry for the losses at Mota Elliptica, shall not have died in vain, blah blah. Everyone else on the RRC Board looked at Arnie, faking polite concern.

Heather switched to the good news: Bambi Castro had flown her Stearman to Baker City last night, and after extensive checkout and decontamination, it appeared that the plane was fine. “So is Bambi,” Heather added.

Too bad Trish isn’t, Arnie thought.

Larry Mensche had found his daughter. She’d been living as a tribal, and she wanted to come in to the RRC, and apparently the tribe she belonged to had been heavily Daybreaker. “So you’ll be getting another cooperative interview subject, Arnie, and she’s had a real different encounter with Daybreak.”

Well, that was good news; he couldn’t help grinning. “How soon does she get here?”

Heather’s scowl of frustration deepened. “She and Larry didn’t fly out with Quattro Larsen on the Gooney Express and they didn’t walk out with the President’s Own Rangers. They’re off doing one of those peculiar missions Larry defines for himself.”

Arnie said, “Admittedly he doesn’t accept direction much, but I think what he’s doing is valuable.”

Heather’s face flashed brief annoyance. “I didn’t say what Larry is doing is not valuable. I just don’t understand it. If you can tell me what Larry is doing up there in the woods, I’d be grateful. I thought he was looking for his daughter and cut him slack for that, but apparently that was only part of it.”

Arnie nodded. “Well, I haven’t spoken with him in two months, but I’ve read his reports. You want my guess?”

“Sure, what the hell. It’s got to be better than my paranoid suspicions.”

“I think it will be. The tribes are an astonishing phenomenon, Heather. Think about it. A year ago we were cruising toward a routine election in a dull, prosperous USA; the worst we had to think about was maybe a fresh terrorist strike like 9/11, the Roosevelt, or the Fed bombing. All the people who are in the tribes now were mostly ordinary citizens; they were younger than average, and they listened to a couple musicians and bands more than other people did, but they weren’t significantly different from the people you saw at work or in the house next door. Sometime after October 28th—eight months, Heather, that’s all—they turned into the murdering crazy barbarians we all know and love today.

“Everything else that’s originated since Daybreak had deep roots in pre-Daybreak society—I mean, how could it be otherwise, in just eight months? The Provisional Constitutional Government is really just the liberal-Democrat think tanks running a rump government in the old Democratic Party bastion of the Northwest. The fundamentalist churches and the Army had been drawing on the same demographics for so long that the Temporary National Government is just those two wings of the old Republicans, in their most reliable area. The Post Raptural Church is the fundamentalists who’ve been preparing for the End Times for four generations, playing them out. The Castles were there from the first Obama Administration on; they were just eccentric right-wingers in fortified houses, harboring romantic notions, until society collapsed around them and they started turning into feudal lords—which was another idea that was already around. Even we, the RRC itself, are just a bunch of intelligence, law enforcement, research, and PR bureaucrats trying to do our jobs after Daybreak. Our technical centers grew up from pre-Daybreak hobbyists who wanted to preserve disappearing arts like steam railroads, blacksmithing, and celestial navigation. You see? Everything we see around us grew out of something that was there for decades before Daybreak.

“But the tribes are—well? What are they? What were they before Daybreak?”

Heather’s head was cocked to the side. “You sound like you don’t know.”

“I don’t. But I want to know, because I think they are a major clue to Daybreak. Where they came from, how they cropped up so fast, who they really are, everything—I think that’s one of the places where we might be able to understand Daybreak. So I want to know all about them—and so does Larry Mensche. That’s what he’s doing out there—pursuing the most important issue he knows about, with you or without you.”

“Hunh. Well, Larry’s reports do read more like ethnography or anthropology than like military intel or law enforcement reports. And every time I’m forced to look at the tribal problem, it turns out to be much bigger than I’d thought.” She yawned and stretched. “We have a bunch of routine Board business to clear here, quickly, unless everyone would like to spend hours discussing budget points and policies?” She beamed at how hard all of them shook their heads. “Knew I could count on you all. Arnie, you and I are having lunch, on the government’s nickel, this afternoon, and you are going to do your damnedest to make me see things the way you and Larry do, and I’ll help.”

^{40 MINUTES LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 12:30 PM MST. SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2025.}

Since Sumer, the smart and the powerful have always met over food, somewhere discreet, where they can stretch out comfortably and decide what the rest of the world ought to do. Elizabeth I’s ministers traded barbs at the Mermaid; the Founding Fathers argued more freely in the City Tavern than in Independence Hall; atom bomb scientists drank at the Owl. When Washington DC still existed, the too-late decision to expand the Daybreak investigation had been taken in a hole-in-the-wall Cambodian diner belonging to Allie Sok Banh’s uncle.

Nowadays, in Pueblo, Johanna’s What There Is was the place to be well-fed and not overheard.

Johanna charged by the seat and served family style. She didn’t attempt a menu—she couldn’t depend on having any particular ingredient, and the big wood stove and barbecue grill in her improvised backyard cookshed were really only adequate for preparing one large common meal.

Heather and Arnie had barely taken their seats in the Mountain View Room—the most isolated room on the third floor of Johanna’s—when Johanna herself brought in a crisp field-green salad surrounding a chilled trout loaf, and a side of elk ragout over polenta.

It would have been blasphemy to talk business over such a lunch. When they had eaten all of it, Heather said, “Arnie, my problem is when I listen to you, I’m always saying, Yes, sure, the way to get good, balanced, accurate knowledge of anything is to pursue it for its own sake, but when I’m on the radio for any length of time with Cam in Athens, or with Graham in Olympia, I find myself thinking, Right, we’re losing a war here and Arnie’s doing pure science instead of figuring out what to hit and how. And I don’t like being a creature of whatever I heard last. I think you are right. Can you help me settle firmly into your side?”

“I can try. I wish I knew if it even is a war. Originally I thought it wasn’t—I thought Daybreak was more like a storm than an invasion—and then I thought that it was, because a storm doesn’t pick its targets—and now I think Daybreak is just really hard on analogies; it doesn’t behave like anything else, it’s just Daybreak. We won’t understand anything about it till we admit there’s never been anything like it before. But I do understand that we won’t get it, either, if Daybreak takes the world down into a dark age while we’re still trying to understand. We need to know enough to win, soon enough to use it, and right now we don’t even know what it would mean to know that.”

“You could be more reassuring.”

“Yeah, but you wanted the truth, as I see it.”

“I did.” Heather brought her feet up onto the couch where she’d half-sat during the meal. “Oh, man, Johanna knows how to make a room comfortable.” She groaned. “I really wish I could wait to think about this till after I get my body back, but that’s way too long to wait. So, you think the tribes are the key to… well, what are they the key to?”

Arnie spread his hands. “Maybe just to finding the right question. But as for your situation with Larry—look, Heather, this is a gift, not a problem. You’ve got a shrewd investigator who knows the territory, and who wants to look into it. And I can’t show you graphs—”

“I don’t need’em, Arn, I believe in your intuition much more than you do. If you say we have to know about the tribes, then we have to know about the tribes, and I’ll declare that to be Larry’s main mission. The biggest problem I see is that whenever he gets back with Debbie, he might want to spend some time getting reacquainted, I would think, and frankly, as much time as he’s spent in the woods since December, he’s got to be tired. And I don’t think I have anyone more entitled to a vacation if he asks for one.”

Arnie leaned back, thinking. “Well, we need way more than one investigator on the job, anyway, if we want results in time to use them. And though we’ve learned so much from Larry’s exploring the Inland Northwest, that’s kind of like looking under the streetlight for the quarter you dropped in the alley, because the light is better. I think we could learn more from penetrating the Lost Quarter, ideally from a traverse of it.”

“If anybody ever came back after going in,” Heather said.

“Oh yeah,” Arnie said. “Oh yeah, it would definitely depend on that.”

“Apart from some Army scouts who never get ten miles north of the boundary rivers, has anyone come back yet?”

“Not really.” Arnie was looking down at the table. “Two bodies have floated downstream on the Wabash, and one on the James.” He dragged some of the water from around his glass into a long thin line. “Heather, it’s got to be done, it’s dangerous, and it needs to be soon.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “All right. I’ve got an agent that was going to go out to Pale Bluff, just to see how he did on a milk run. He was going to leave late next week anyway. He’ll be about twenty miles from where the Lost Quarter starts, by the nearest approach. Ex-Army ranger, did mountain man re-creation, martial artist—”

“Is it Steve Ecco or Dan Samson?”

“Ecco. Is there a difference?”

“Not really. They’re both my friends. And I just lost a friend to Daybreak, trying to find out how it works and what it thinks, and I don’t know if I’m ready to lose another one.”

Heather nodded slowly and sadly. “Someday, I hope, RRC will be big enough so that I don’t know and like everyone who works for us. Till then, though, I’m always sending my friends into danger. One more time, Arn, is this the best way to find out what we need to know?”

He seemed to be looking at something a million miles away. “I don’t know. I can’t know. But it’s our best guess, and if we don’t take it, we might still be guessing when Daybreak burns the last book. Steve Ecco will be glad to get the assignment. I think he’s afraid that he’ll never get his chance to prove himself. And I like giving him the chance to do what he wants to do, but I don’t want to lose another friend. I know you make harder decisions than that all the time, and I’m being selfish and silly.”

“I’d say, just human.”

“I just wish being human didn’t have to be quite… so… human.”

They talked about how life hurried on, and the friends that they had made and lost, for another hour.

He had walked all the way home in the glaring Colorado summer afternoon, and was checking the temperature of his solar hot water tank with the idea of a long hot shower, before he remembered that he still hadn’t told Heather about Aaron.

But I guess now I don’t need to. The conversations with Aaron will give me insights I couldn’t get any other way—in fact, yeah. What I extract from Aaron, I can use to plan Steve’s mission, make sure he’s safe and his mission’s productive, and it will be much more believable coming from a guy like Ecco, and from first-hand observation, than it will be coming from my talking to a hippie in a blanket in the middle of the night. RRC will get independently verified information, and my friend will have a much better chance at succeeding at this mission, which is going to mean so much to him.

Besides, what the hell could I tell Heather now? That I just forgot?

^{THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 3:20 PM MST. SUNDAY, JULY 20, 2025.}

James Hendrix was lost in Great Expectations; Miss Havisham had just gone up in flames, and he was considering whether it might be worth opening the ice box for some cold roast chicken, and contemplating his tight waistband, trying not to let the idea prey on his mind. Can’t stay under fifty years old, much as I’d like to, but I’d sure like to stay under a hundred kilograms.

He was far ahead of his students in the literacy class that he taught most nights of the week. But conditions were perfect for reading: on this bright, sunny day, opening one set of drapes and laying a mirror on the floor to reflect up to his white ceiling made lovely indirect reading light where he lay sprawled on his comfortable couch. Besides, he would rather be doing this than anything else in the world. Perhaps some cold water would help him ignore his stomach? He could—

The knock at the door was followed at once by scratching, so he knew it had to be Leslie Antonowicz and Wonder. He pretended to sigh at the interruption, but three seconds later as he opened the door, he was grinning.

“Come on, old man,” Leslie said. “It’s beautiful outside but I had radio room crypto duty all morning, so I couldn’t get out to the fun part of the woods.” By “fun part,” he knew the tall, slim blonde woman meant some mixture of “scary” and “exhausting.” She was beaming at him. “I saw that one window open and knew you were lying here in the dark turning into a library fossil. Now come on, you and Wonder both need a walk.” Wonder, hearing his name, woofed once; he was a shepherd-husky cross—James always said, crossed with a moose.

“Just so you don’t expect us to use the same trees,” James said, pulling his boots on.

The morning’s rain had left the air damp and cool, and the sunlight since hadn’t warmed things much; down by the rain-swollen Arkansas River, they followed the trail away from town, watching Wonder run back and forth and smell everything. Friends from long before Daybreak, they didn’t have to talk; James knew that Leslie usually didn’t want to spend her weekends in his indolent company, so there must be something on her mind, and she knew she could take as long as she wanted about getting around to it.

He wanted to watch for the moment when she’d say something, but that was too much like watching her all the time, and he didn’t feel free to do that: years ago he’d let himself get fascinated by her grace, by the big eyes and high cheekbones, and by her lithe, muscular body, until awkwardly, angrily, she’d told him it was creepy. So he looked at the sky and the river and enjoyed her nearness.

After a while, she said, “Last night, when I was walking home from Dell’s Brew, something just slightly weird happened.” After a few more steps she said, “Arnie Yang asked me to walk him home.”

He fought down the twinge of jealousy; Arnie was their boss and close to Leslie’s age. Word had it that the girl he was courting at Mota Elliptica had died in the tribal raid there. He’d long suspected Leslie told him more about her love life than she really wanted to, just to keep him from developing hopes again, and was sorry she had to do that.

She still hadn’t spoken, and he was calm now. Keep it light. “It’s not that unusual for a man to ask you to go home with him.”

“No, it’s not, you dirty old man, but what was really unusual was, he just wanted me to walk with him. Expressed no interest in having me come inside. Really didn’t talk much, either. Now, since I always take Wonder when I go to Dell’s, it wasn’t unreasonably dangerous—after we dropped Arnie off we went on home, me and the mutt, no problems on the way and for part of it we walked along with the watch, anyway. But… well, everyone’s heard how brave Arnie was in the battle at Mota Elliptica, and everyone knows he’s pretty good with those double knives he carries. If anything, I should’ve been asking him to walk me home.”

“Maybe he’s just shy or got cold feet.”

“No, I’m sure he wasn’t trying to hit on me, James, because I have a pretty good sense of that, and because he didn’t hang around me at the bar before, and he didn’t ask like a guy who was trying to find company for the night.”

“Hunh. What did he ask like?”

“Well, that’s the weird part I wanted to talk to you about. He asked like a guy who was really scared. At least that was my first impression. But if you’re bringing along backup because you’re afraid of something, don’t you tell the backup what it is?”

“Well, I would. Maybe Arnie is weird.”

“Definitely Arnie is weird. I’ve just never seen him weird this way before—really, he was terrified. But he didn’t tell me what of. Do you know anything about him?”

“Just what I know from working with him. I archived his report on the Battle of Mota Elliptica yesterday afternoon, but it was more or less a normal action report. It’s a mystery to me, too.”

They walked for another hour and a half, and then James fixed them a light supper before Leslie went home, well before sundown because she had early morning duties. He watched the tall, strong girl and the big dog till they went out of sight around a building, then adjusted his mirror to catch the last hour of sunlight, and returned to Great Expectations.

^{2 DAYS LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 10:15 PM MST. MONDAY, JULY 21, 2025.}

Tonight was starting out like Stephen Ecco’s favorite books and daydreams did. Heather O’Grainne’s note, delivered in a neat pocket-drop by Patrick, had asked for a night meeting and specified “tell no one you are coming.” Even if it was Heather, not M or Wild Bill Donovan, and the organization was the Reconstruction Research Center, not MI6 or Mosby’s Raiders, still, it was a secret night meeting straight out of his fifteen-year-old self’s fantasies.

Central Pueblo was inhabited, but it was already dark; candles and lamp oil were expensive, and nowadays people rose early. He saw the watch only once, from more than a mile away.

Knowing himself too well, he tried to fight down his excitement, not wanting the sheer romance to affect the mission. Sure hope it is a mission or I’m gonna feel like a total fool with a headful of dreams. Which ain’t exactly unfamiliar.

Something moved.

He turned, center low, body neutral—and laughed. A gigantic possum scuttled across the road. You could be a little more romantic, dude. But then I bet you’re thinkin’, “You could be droppin’ a little more food, dude.”

The guard nodded and let Ecco pass. He ascended the dark stairs in the old courthouse; the only open doorway glowed with candlelight.

“Steve, thanks for coming.” Heather sat in an armchair with her feet propped up on a desk. “I’m claiming pregnant lady privilege and not getting up; Arnie will show you what’s up and then we’ll talk about what we need you to do.

Arnie Yang had laid out maps on an old picnic table; standing over it with a pointer, he looked like he was running some weird casino game. On the tabletop, sheets of drafting vellum covered topo maps of southern Illinois and Indiana. Pale Bluff was near the lower left corner of the map, and the upper right just reached to Fort Wayne. A swarm of different marks gathered on the left of the Wabash; penciled lines intersected in the Palestine/Warsaw area and just east of Bloomington. Bridges on the Wabash and the Tippecanoe were tagged with bits of construction paper.

“It looks like you want me to go some beyond Pale Bluff?”

“We sure do,” Heather said.

“And come back alive,” Arnie said. “That’s the tough part. There is something real bad happening east of the Wabash and the Tippecanoe, and north of the Ohio; that lobe of the Lost Quarter is much more lost than it was even two months ago, and we can’t find out what’s happening.” His strong, thin fingers walked like dividers down the line of the Wabash, tapping black arrows that pointed across the river. “Stations across the Wabash stopped reporting around mid-May. The flow of refugees dried up by early June. Since then, five different local governments have tried to send someone over onto the left bank of the Wabash, plus these two attempts to cross the Tippecanoe. Every mission disappeared completely, and those were all local guys that knew the territory and had some background. One was a force of four guys.

“But this one—we’re not supposed to know about it, but we have a source in the TNG’s Defense Department down in Athens. Three weeks ago the TNG’s Department of Intelligence sent a team of six Rangers across here”—he tapped a black arrow south of Terre Haute—“and they disappeared with no trace. One of them, too decayed for the pathologist to determine how he died, was found floating dead in the Wabash three days ago.”

Ecco tried to look imperturbable while his heart thumped. “And things are so bad over there, they think, that they’ll lose that many men trying to find out?”

Arnie’s finger traced out the arc of red crosses that paralleled the Wabash. “Assassinations since April: twenty-two. Town constables, militia officers, sheriffs, mayors, one very diligent postmaster—anybody who was making things work on our side of the Wabash. The seven black circles are the four towns—villages really, none of them had more than two hundred people—that were burned out, and the three Castles. Nineteen black squares mark farms where the family was killed and the house burned. All that’s since April first. A few of them might have been Provi or Temper partisans burning each other out, or plain old bandits. But this looks much more to me like we have an enemy on the other side of the Wabash, and it doesn’t plan to stay there. Right now the thing we need most is information. We need you to see things, figure out what’s going on, understand it all—and most of all, bring it back.”

Ecco nodded, made serious by Arnie’s evident passion. “I understand the mission.”

Heather said, “Well, we can’t define what you should look for, exactly, or where you should look for it. We know nothing once you get any distance north or east of Pale Bluff. If it’s too hot south of Terre Haute, head north, maybe try crossing the Tippecanoe. And bring back what you see. That’s the most important thing on this mission. Don’t be a brave lion; what we need is a perceptive weasel.”

“Got it.”

Arnie said, “Now, this might or might not come up. We’re making a guess that the Lost Quarter is nearly hollow—most of the tribes are right up near the edge, where they can live by looting civilization. We’re basing that partly on the photos from the surviving Navy reconnaissance planes, which we can’t fly nearly often enough now, and partly just on the fact that so much of the Lost Quarter was a radioactive dead zone for months, so it doesn’t seem like there could be enough there to keep any sizable number of people alive. So our guess is there’s a tough outside and an empty inside. If it turns out we’re right, then just a few miles past the border you might find it much easier and safer to travel than it was getting in. So here’s something I’d like you to look into if—and only if—it looks like we’re right about that.” His fingers traced many pencil lines on the vellum. “Our direction-finding operation has gotten fixes on two stations broadcasting in a code that’s not ours, or either Federal government, or any Castle’s; all these bearing lines crisscross in these two small areas. We think this one near Bloomington is just a relay or a subHQ: it only broadcasts occasionally, usually after the other one does but not every time. When it does broadcast, it broadcasts for about as long as the first station did.

“The really active transmitter, the one that seems to start conversations, both with Bloomington and with other stations in the Lost Quarter, is this one, between Warsaw and Palestine, Indiana.” He laid down a few photographs. “These air photos from February show nothing in Warsaw or Palestine, but this one from April looks like dirt ramparts and walls under construction. So if by any chance, once you’re over the Wabash and you’ve evaded whatever has already cost twenty lives, if you need something to go take a look at, this might be something to look at.”

“But you’re really figuring I should just get in far enough to see what stopped the others, and then come back?” Ecco tried for a laconic drawl, but the more he looked at that map, the more his heart hammered and his stomach sank.

“Yeah,” Heather said. “Arnie is just making sure that if you get a really lucky break it won’t go to waste. You remember your Rogers’ Rangers rules, the bastard version?”

“‘Don’t take no chances you don’t have to’? You bet. Just by going on this trip, I’ve about used up my luck.”

“Right answer.” Heather nodded to Arnie. “I see why you said to send this guy.”

“I want him back,” Arnie said. “We’ve got beer to drink and waitresses to hustle.” The two men shook hands; Arnie added, “No kidding. I recommended sending you for a whole long list of good reasons. Make sure you come back!”

“Got it,” Ecco said. “And thanks for giving me the break; I wanted a mission like this.”

After he left, Heather said, “Is he crazy or what, to want this kind of mission?”

Arnie shrugged. “He wants to be the kind of man who can do it. Men all have dreams about what kind of guy they’d like to be—usually the kind of guy that can do something. It keeps you going when nothing else will, sometimes.” He rolled up the maps. “I myself want to be the kind of guy who hangs around with tough manly types. Why do you think I always come right over when you call, boss?”

Heather stuck her tongue out and made the raspberry noise.

On his way home, Ecco kept to the centers of the dark streets. The high, dark haze, the floating ashes of burned civilization, dimmed the waning moonlight more than usual. That was fine with Ecco. Nowadays, the moon was enemy territory; he couldn’t shake the feeling that if he could see it, it could see him.

^{ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 12:15 AM MST. TUESDAY, JULY 22, 2025.}

The moon was still low in the sky and dim. Darkness wrapped the old, empty tract houses in monochrome shadow; not just a ghost town, but the ghost of a town.

Arnie wished he’d asked Ecco to walk with him. We could have gone over mission details, and I could’ve had somebody to eat late supper with.

Or he could have just taken a house close to the center of the city in the first place. I’d already be home. Why did I act like a guy who wanted to be lonely?

He could see the watch’s lantern glinting half a mile away. I could run and join them and just stay with them till they passed my house. Lots of people do that. But the time to have done that would have been to catch them on Main, in front of the courthouse; now, they’d wonder what had frightened him. They might ask. What could he say?

Deep breath. Walk and breathe like you’re going to fight; if it turns out you are, it’s one less thing to worry about, and if not, it calms and clears the—

“Doctor Yang. Doctor Yang, doctus in the doctrine, the indoctrinated doctor.”

Arnie spun one step backward into the space he’d been about to walk into, cross-drew his knives and held them at ready. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Teeth gleamed in the dark under the blanket; the eyes were black blobs around the greasy promontory of the nose. “Expecting to stab me?”

“If necessary.” Arnie shifted his weight for a better stance.

“Now, whatever happened to that civilized old academic world where everyone took the time to express mutual respect, and dallied a while in chat, and listened patiently to each other before entering into the actual business at hand, Doctor? Shouldn’t we be sipping sherry and considering—”

“Manners and respect are products of enough people having enough time and comfort; you are the ones who put an end to that.”

Aaron slowly, loudly applauded him. He was the only thing moving or making a sound in the oblong shadows of the houses and the splintered and sliced patterns of dingy moonlight. “You are thinking of holding me and shouting for the watch.”

Arnie shrugged. “Why not?”

“Because if you don’t, you might get three more questions answered. Whereas if you do capture me, you have to hope my nervous system is no more programmed than Ysabel’s was, so I have seizures only about as bad, and that my heart and arteries are in no worse shape than hers, so that I don’t have a fatal stroke or heart attack.”

“I don’t have to hope that hard. I’m thinking about stabbing you.” Arnie shifted his weight and let his rear foot rise, extending it in front of him and setting it down. About four more steps would close the gap. “But I would like your answers to some questions.”

“What is your first question?”

“What do you do, now, when you have doubts about Daybreak?”

“Daybreak forgives me because I am so powerless, and I let Daybreak fill my mind, so that I can go on and do the work.”

Arnie advanced a step; he wondered if weapons were trained on him in the dark. An arrow or a spear out of nowhere… but one lunge, tackle him, hold him down, capture a Daybreaker, think how people would look up to him, just one leap—

Teeth showed under the blanket again, and the spots of the eyes narrowed. “Exchange, Doctor Yang. Have you told your owners that you’re talking to me yet?”

Arnie swallowed hard; the question was shrewder than it looked, for either he’d have to say “yes,” and be led along; or “no,” and admit that he was conspiring with Aaron. Or I might… “I’ve told them exactly as much as I think they should know; does that make them my owners, or me theirs?”

“Ownership is always an error. Now your question.”

Another step brought Arnie close enough to spring, but Aaron was cooperating… but, dammit. He couldn’t think of what he intended to ask Aaron. He stalled with, “What is the purpose of Daybreak?”

“Purpose is so human, and therefore useless, of no value, a shame. Gophers dig; they don’t calculate angles of repose around their burrows. Geese fly; they don’t do celestial navigation. We do not need to know the relative marginal propensities to consume of the grasshopper and the ant. Daybreak will free them from human imputation, which makes all things dirty; to the pure, all things are purposeless. No thinky-thinks, no wordy-words, no math, no meaning, no purpose.” When had he closed the distance? How did his hands now press down on Arnie’s wrists, lowering the knives? “Exchange. My question. Mister Ecco’s mission has changed and he is going to the Northwest.”

Right, that’s the wrong direction, I can just say yes—Arnie’s head was turning slowly, indicating no.

“Going northeast.”

Arnie tried to keep his head still, but he had an eerie sense that Aaron was reading his thought: don’t nod, don’t nod, for God’s sake don’t nod.

“Going farther east, crossing the Wabash?”

Don’t nod. “Exchange,” Arnie croaked. His hands were down by his sides where Aaron had pressed them. They were face-to-face; Arnie could smell the dirty blanket and the foul breath.

“Ask.”

“What are you doing?”

“Daybreak only does till day is broken. After that Daybreak does not do. Daybreak is. I won’t take my final turn of exchange now; you will owe it to me.”

Arnie was alone on the street. In the distance, dogs and coyotes howled, the sharp yips mixing with the deep bellow of some hound; closer, he could hear the clatter of the watch, with all the gear hanging from their belts and harnesses; closest of all, the sound of the last breath of night wind rustling the leaves of a cottonwood.

Miserably tired, he headed home, resheathing his knives, his mind all on bed, reminding himself to record this in his journal, fighting off the question Record what?

^{2 DAYS LATER. CAMP OF THE PEOPLE OF GAIA’S DAWN, IN THE FORMER HELLS CANYON NATIONAL RECREATIONAL PARK. 9:30 PM PST. THURSDAY, JULY 24, 2025.}

It had been impossible to conceal that Larry was a Fed—“Dad, you’d have better luck trying to pass yourself off as Sasquatch”—so their story was that Debbie had converted him to Gaia’s Dawn while they were both being held by the Blue Morning People, and then the two of them had escaped during the Federal raid.

Tonight he would see The Play of Daybreak, the last part of what she wanted him to witness. The tribe performed it every Thursday; this was to be the 483rd performance by the People of Gaia’s Dawn.

“But—,” he started to say, and shut his mouth, angry with himself for that microbreak in cover.

“Yeah, I know, it’s a lot of work, but it’s really important,” Debbie said, giving him cover. The fast-calculation part of his brain had been about to object that that would have had the first performance on April 28, 2016—more than eight years before Daybreak day, and of course the People of Gaia’s Dawn were much newer than that. So even though they’ve only been here since mid-February, when Debbie was a Founder, they’re already claiming a much longer pedigree.

Debbie’s hand found his under the table and squeezed,

while she explained, “The Play of Daybreak is set up so the whole tribe have parts in it—you’ll have a part next week—but there’s only a few on stage at a time, and while we’re not in it, we watch. Since I’ve only been back for one day, my part has three simple lines, and they’ll steer me through it. Otherwise you and I can watch together.”

The communal evening meal was a small chunk of unidentified meat and a fist-sized pile of wild greens with some roots and berries. With their current level of survival skills, he guessed around a third of the tribe might make it through the winter, and they’d lose all the kids under five.

At full dark, two big fires burned brightly on each end of the playing area, a flat grassless space backed by a low, crumbling rock cliff. The tribe’s dozen slaves carried out full-length mirrors and set them up on lashed-stick frames to mask the fires and reflect the light into the sandy playing area. The reflected firelight did not quite reach the cliffs except when a fire flared up; players spoke before a dark space where rocks or bushes occasionally swam briefly into being, like a world striving to be created out of chaos.

Larry expected something like a small-town Founder’s Pageant or a high-school production of Our Town. In the first few minutes, he realized he’d underestimated the power of conviction.

The story began with the Seven Misters: Mister Clock, Mister Gun, Mister Electron, Mister Atom, Mister Chemical, Mister Medicine, and the dark god who ruled them all, Mister Smart. Each of the actors, his face and chest painted to represent the power he spoke for, boasted that he feasted on the innocent creatures of the forest, the beautiful body of Mother Gaia, and human flesh, and finished by declaring, “But Mister Smart is smarter than all of us!”

Mister Medicine finished roaring that he would cut off everyone’s body parts and poison all their blood, and finally Mister Smart moved into the light.

Mister Smart’s head was a gigantic papier-mâché skull which extended a foot above his real head and reached down onto his chest. It was nearly all brain case with a tiny bespectacled and goateed face underneath. The body was naked except for a four-foot-long pink penis, probably a cardboard shipping tube, from which dangled two deflated basketballs. Mister Smart chanted on and on about his plan to rape Mother Gaia to death.

Jesus, that’s parodized from an old 50 Cent hip-hop piece I must’ve heard back when W was president, Larry thought. Too bad 50 Cent can’t sue him for plagiarism or defamation or something.

In the next scene, Gaia despaired and the six Mizzes vowed to die defending her. Larry thought Miz Ocean was pretty cute but Miz Desert had the best voice. The six Mizzes plotted to seduce the human, temporal servants of the Misters. Each Mister apparently had a human being who was his Number One Guy; the Mizzes were going to take them all out for “fun in the bushes,” as Miz Prairie declared, “before the Misters exterminate all vegetation.” That must have been the comic relief because people laughed.

The next dance and song was, in Larry’s lowbrow opinion, the fun part of the evening. I’m sure that movie critic I used to date would use words like primal, erotic, transgressive, and body-positive, but I’m just a lowly Fed so I would say this is one great dirty show. If I had to live out in the woods pretending to be an Indian or a hippie, this would definitely be the high point of my week.

Each of the six human servants awoke the morning after the seduction to the weeping of the Miz, who then took the man or woman to meet Mother Gaia, before whom the servant fell down in adoration. When all six were in full adoration, Mother Gaia raised them up to form Daybreak, and her lover, Brother Sun, came to teach them how to make weapons for the Daybreak to come.

The servants of Mister Chemical, Mister Clock, Mister Gun, and Mister Electron danced with each other and copulated with various Mizzes to bring forth the Nanoswarm, a chorus of men costumed in lumpy gray and white rags. Mister Chemical’s servant teamed up with Mister Medicine’s servant to bring forth the thousand-headed Biotes, a chorus of women sharing one vast blanket-garment, with just their green-painted faces poking out. Debbie was one, and Larry thought it was her best work since The Three Billy Goats Gruff in second grade.

The Biotes vowed to kill the petroleum and all that came from it, the Whole Plaztatic World, by revealing its true nature and making it rot away into filth, and change it to nourishing food for all of Mother Gaia’s children.

Hunh. Well, I guess if you’re planning that your grandchildren will be cavemen, that’ll explain biotes to them.

Finally, Mister Atom’s servant came forward and proclaimed himself the protector of all. He would hurl eight mighty nuclear blows against the centers of the Plaztatic World. The first two would go amiss and leave California, the heart and center of Plaztatic World, as a broken and wounded place, but not destroy it to its utmost atoms, because so many good people lived there.

Holy crap, Larry thought. That’s why they backdated the tribe’s origins and claimed performances started so much earlier; in a few years this’ll be a successful prophecy.

Then, Mister Atom’s servant proclaimed, the next five nuclear weapons would be overwhelming and would smash down the Plaztatic World, but then in her compassion, Mother Gaia would choose to spare people of color in the Southern Hemisphere, so the fizzling of the Buenos Aires bomb would be a sign that she would never wholly sweep the face of the Earth again. The rainbow in the Noah story, Larry thought. “I love you so much that you really better not piss me off.”

The actors and the crowd went into a frenzied chant of so it was foretold, so it was to be, so it was, so we shall tell it, over and over, as the drums built up to a mighty crescendo and the dancers formed a circle around the Servant of Mister Atom.

If they win, soon no one will know that they made the “prophecy” up after the event. Anyone can clearly see California isn’t in great shape but it wasn’t completely destroyed; five huge bombs did go off; and the one in Buenos Aires fizzled, leaving Argentina basically okay. Just because Mother Gaia was such a sweet chick. Or maybe she just loved to tango.

The dance finished. The servant of Mister Atom proclaimed that he would fly to the moon, and from there, when he saw the Plaztatic World trying to come back into Mother Gaia’s sacred sphere, he would hurl his bolts against it. He would depend upon the People of Gaia’s Dawn to help him to watch, and sometimes to fight and die for Mother Gaia when he told them it was necessary.

Hunh.

No mistaking it. It claimed that they talked and worked with the Daybreak robot, or base, or whatever it was, on the moon. Thunderbolts from the moon wasn’t even a bad description for the caveman-grandchildren.

The rest of the play was a lengthy singing-and-dancing-and-fighting number. The servants and the Mizzes defeated the Misters with the help of Nanoswarm and Biotes. Mister Smart’s dick-and-balls prop was removed and ceremoniously paraded around while he cried out at the loss. Gaia buried him alive (because he could not be killed) and all the servants vowed to sit eternal vigils at Mister Smart’s tomb against his rising.

In a big erotic dance number, the Mizzes rewarded the servants by making children with them—Larry thought that the former servant of Mister Chemical, who got Miz Ocean, got one hell of a good deal. The unfortunate servant of Mister Atom had to be childless, so he said farewell, charging the People of Gaia’s Dawn with reducing the remaining population of the Earth to about ten million before ascending the ladder into the sky. I suspect that’s some cousin of the Indian Rope Trick, but it sure works well at a distance, by firelight.

This was the cue for the last big number, a dancing demonstration about how there were tens, and tens of tens, and tens of tens of tens, up finally to 8×10⁹, the population before Daybreak, which had been cut down to 2×10⁹, which now must be reduced to 10⁷.

Jesus god. They’ve killed three-quarters of the people who were alive this time last year and the Servant of Mister Atom just told them to kill 199 out of every 200 that are left.

In all the celebratory cheering and whooping, Larry grasped Debbie’s arm and squeezed:

She squeezed back:

He squeezed C.

Drifting through the crowd, agreeing with everyone who stopped them to say that it gave you so much to think about, they passed into the darkness outside the camp, and jogged away as quickly and quietly as they could. They were less than halfway up the ridge when they heard the angry cries behind them, and ran as if all hell were at their heels.