Directive 51

^{THE CRUELEST MONTH}

April has always been the month of danger in the Northern Hemisphere; if you think of war, if you brood upon it all winter, if you are longing and thirsting to fight, then in April the ground is just dry enough to move upon, there has been just enough good weather to drill the troops, the danger of sudden winter storms is low enough, the need for men for the spring plowing and planting has mostly passed.

In more recent centuries, late summer became dangerous, because armies moved so swiftly that there was the hope to finish the fighting just as the snow fell and “send the boys home for Christmas.”

But this year, almost nothing moved any faster than it had in 1850, and as with so many things, the rhythm of war fever fell back into its more ancient pattern.

From Pueblo, Heather and her team followed the bad news that poured in from everywhere.

On April 1st, on the old Great Northern Line, a steam train dispatched by the Olympia government was intercepted on the long trestle east of Minot by pro-Athens partisans who were at least partly led by Air Force officers from the base. The train carried 250 newly-sworn-in Federal officials to be the liaison with the New State of Superior, which was supposed to combine the states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan until they could resume their independent existences. The partisans’ makeshift barricade derailed and destroyed one precious steam locomotive, and in the brief confused melee after the wreck, about forty of the Olympian clerks and administrators were killed. Some witnesses reported injured men and women being shot where they were pinned in the wreckage. Three Olympians who had returned fire during the brief fighting were hanged from the trestle. The rest were imprisoned on the former air base.

Simultaneously, in Green Bay, the capital of Superior, the Olympian temporary government was attacked by an armed mob which purported to be defending the traditional rights of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Quick action by a company of Wisconsin Guard suppressed the mob. Among those captured were ten soldiers from Fort Bragg. Treated as soldiers out of uniform on a sabotage mission, they were sentenced to death the next day, but the governor of Superior suspended their sentences.

On April 4th, Alpha/2 of the President’s Own Rangers arrested the pro-Athens commanding officer and many of his officers at Mountain Home AFB, taking the survivors back to Olympia for a possible prisoner exchange—or a trial if necessary. The remaining personnel on the base were given a choice of “nine minutes to swear loyalty to Olympia, or ninety days to walk to Utah.”

On April 12th, forces from Fort Bragg, having come upstream from Cairo, arrived in St. Louis and intervened in favor of the white-supremacist army to take control of St. Louis, thus severing the southern rail link between Olympia and the New State of Wabash. Simultaneously, the Ranger Regiment (Reconstituted) from Fort Stewart took control of the three key independent cities in the mountains, which had refused to align with either national government: Chattanooga, Lexington, and Louisville.

The white-supremacist triumph in St. Louis was short-lived; once the city was firmly in Athenian hands, the white leadership was put on a sealed train and sent to firmly Olympian Cedar Rapids. They were told to have all the fun they wanted as long as they never came back; the mayor of Cedar Rapids jailed them, saying, “We’ll think of a charge for it later.”

On April 13th, in Lincoln, Nebraska, an Olympian postmaster ordered the sorting room to pull mail addressed to all of the states that had declared for Athens out of the mailbags and leave it outside on the loading dock; on his own authority he imprisoned two postal workers who refused to comply.

On April 14th, Second Battalion, Third Infantry, a mechanized unit converted to horse cavalry, was dropped off by a fast steam train in Berthold, North Dakota, just after sunset. At four in the morning they hit the compound on the former Minot AFB where the Olympian officials were held, rescuing all the prisoners, and leaving seven guards dead. On their way out, they torched two workshops and four experimental planes under construction.

On the docks in Morgan City, Louisana, in early March, Navy officers loyal to Athens had attempted to commandeer SS Polyxena, a schooner from Monterey that had arrived carrying forty tons of hand-canned orange pulp and fifteen tons of beets. The crew fought them, destroying the Navy’s dinghy and killing a lieutenant, and escaped with its cargo; the bank in Morgan City canceled payment. In Jamaica the citrus and beets were bartered for marijuana, which was bartered in Caracas for beef jerky; Polyxena headed south, bound eventually around the Horn. On April 16th, the Athenian government issued a warrant for Polyxena’s crew for piracy and barratry; the Olympian government declared Polyxena to be under its protection.

On April 17th, Radio Perth (Australia) was knocked off the air by an EMP; massive fusing systems in that city limited the damage, and fire crews were ready for the many small fires that sprang up around unused water pipes, electric cables, guardrails, and wire fences.

On April 19th, Heather found herself facing two very unhappy factions of workers from the EMP Attraction Project. After some jockeying and arguing, she identified the three political agents from Olympia and the two from Athens and put them onto the next available trains under guard. With each party, she sent a letter.

While the letters were on their way, on April 22nd, Cameron sent a brief, coded radio message to the remaining carrier groups in the Pacific, ordering them to be prepared to seize Olympia; the Pueblo code room, which was now reading both sides’ codes, decrypted it on the 24th. Heather hoped her letter might get to Cam within a day or two more.

She could tell that Olympia was reading Athens’s code, also, because on the 23rd, according to a message which reached Heather through the Reno pony express on the 25th, Graham Weisbrod authorized equipping four partially rebuilt planes, and twenty small boats with their experimental diesel outboards, to carry two hundred pounds each of nanoswarm crystals packed in glass bottles. They sent a copy of the order and photographs of the machinery being used to make nanoswarm—just a simple make-and-break electric coil, not unlike an old-fashioned doorbell, powered by a windmill generator—to Cameron Nguyen-Peters, via biplane to the neutral city of Hannibal, Missouri, where a fast train picked it up for delivery the next day.

On the 27th, Arnie told Heather that there was an immense spike in communications traffic, including radio, to and from Olympia and Athens. “That’s it,” he said.

“How much time do we have?”

“At a guess, with the tech they use, and where I think the Navy carriers are, seventy-two hours before one side or the other jumps. But it could be less. They’re racing each other; the one that’s ready to go all-out first probably wins.”

Heather nodded. “Is your land line phone link up to the experiment? Could you send them something, and if you ordered them to broadcast it, could they do it?”

“Yeah, but you don’t mean—”

“Can you power it up?”

“Yeah, but none of the instruments are in place yet and—”

“Well, then. All right. I’ll build you another one, I promise, with my bare hands, if big bad EMP cooks your experiment. But tell your scientists they can take any observations they want as long as they get this sent now.” She handed him a little folio of ten neatly typed sheets. “Can they record off the phone line?”

“That was always the intention, but they won’t be happy because this is all out of order.”

“By which you mean—”

He shrugged, plainly unhappy himself. “We were going to do a set of sequential tests, starting with raw noise and then ramping up until we were broadcasting outright anti-Daybreak propaganda, and see at what point the EMP hits. Obviously if it’s for random noise, it’s a system artifact, and if they won’t hit us till we’re screaming Everybody kill a Daybreaker and cut down a forest, it’s an enemy. This broadcast, if we were following the rules for the experiment, would be the last, not the first, one we would run, because it will draw fire for sure if anything can. But you know, we’ll at least still get the observations that might let us figure out where the bombs are coming from. And I hate to be practical and sensible, but you’re right. No point waiting to run better experiments if we’re about to lose civilization to an idiotic civil war right this minute anyway.” Arnie looked down at the document she’d drafted, leafed through, and whistled. “You’re really going for broke, here. Just to make sure, this is what you intend?”

“Yep. Transmit at full power. Broadcast it in clear, then in Athens code, then in Olympia code, like a Rosetta stone, loop the recording, and keep playing it till we get replies.”

“All right, I’ll phone Mota Elliptica and tell them to stand by, then wake up Manckiewicz—if he ever sleeps—and by the time he’s practiced, they’ll be ready to record him. Just like you asked. Probably we’ll have it going out over the air within three hours.”

“You still look pretty unhappy, Arn.”

“I’ll get over it.” He let out a whew as if he’d run five miles and barely made it in time, and Heather saw that he was refusing to tell her how big a sacrifice this really was—which means he’s convinced it is necessary too, and he’s shutting up to avoid putting any pressure on me. Arnie held his hands up, palm out, in complete surrender. “Heather, it’s the right thing to do. But we are throwing away an experimental protocol that all my people worked very hard on, and I will have to soothe them about that, and of course this might not work.”

“Sitting on our thumbs for sure won’t work.”

“Like I said, I hate being sensible and practical, especially when it’s the right thing to do. I better run; if we’re doing it we need to do it now.”

^{TWO DAYS LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 2:58 P.M. MST. MONDAY. APRIL 29.}

Weisbrod arrived first, in Quattro Larsen’s DC-3. He looked like the oldest man in the history of the world, exhausted and sad, and for the first time she could remember, Heather saw no welcome in his eyes and no smile when she shook his hand. “Where to?” he asked.

“By agreement, you each get a secretary, no guards, and a side of the table in my office. You can rest and wait in an adjoining room with a bed, bath, and food till Mr. Nguyen-Peters arrives; we expect him this evening. I take it that the First Lady, here, is now your secretary?”

“You could be less sarcastic,” Allie said.

“I could. You should hear me with Cameron.”

Later that evening, Heather met the Black Express, the fast unmarked steam train that carried Cameron Nguyen-Peters to Pueblo.

She knew that both of them were men of honor; she had not worried at all about the possibility of being seized or kidnapped while meeting each of them.

The horse-drawn carriage, a replica stagecoach from some tourist spot, had been blacked out. When she, Cameron, and the quiet young man who was to be his secretary were seated, Cam said, “This is very nearly blackmail and certainly trading on our old friendship.”

“Graham Weisbrod said the same thing.”

They rode quietly for a while. Cam peeked around the blind. “How are things out here?”

“Not bad. Rail lines are up and running to Austin and Albuquerque, and even though there’s not much Denver left, the connection’s still there for east-west lines. Between that, the big post office, and the GPO, Pueblo will probably grow rich on trade.”

“I can see why you would want peace.”

“There’s something selfish about preferring to be free to build and prosper?”

Cameron made a face. He bent forward, clenching himself as if he were in a straitjacket. “You always had a knack for the awkward question.”

They said no more till at last the President and the Coordinator sat across the table from each other in Heather’s inner office.

Heather said, “I appreciate your coming today. I know I have traded on our past friendship, nearly blackmailed you—and of course I have ensured that by broadcasting a Rosetta-stone version of your codes, if you weren’t reading each other before, you are now. So now I have you both at a table you don’t care to be at. I’m just glad to see you here. And here’s your special guest.”

“Special—”

Chris Manckiewicz came in looking as if he were about to be hanged, except less comfortable.

Cameron leaped to his feet. “I didn’t think it was necessary to say ‘no press!’”

Graham rose almost as quickly, saying, “And neither did I—”

Chris looked sicker than both of them put together. “Heather has made me swear to absolute secrecy, and added that I can’t publish until she gives permission or until twenty years after both of you are dead.”

“Nonetheless—” Cameron was packing his briefcase.

“I am not here as press,” Chris said. “I may someday turn out to have been here as a historian, but that’s not the point.”

Weisbrod looked as if he’d been hit across the back with a bat. He glared at Heather. “It does seem to me, looking back, that this is far from the first time you’ve manipulated me, and that my friendship for a lost, angry girl—”

“Is still appreciated more than anything in my life,” Heather said. “In so many ways, you are the man who taught me to think. Did you expect me to give it up?”

Chris said, “Perhaps if you explain what you have me here for—”

Heather said, “Sit down, both of you, and I will tell you what Chris is doing here.”

Graham hesitated, shrugged, and sat, and Cameron hastened to sit at the same time.

Heather smiled. “I should have realized I could depend on your curiosity. Here we go. This is in the nature of an experiment, my dear friends. And I mean that. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t think about you sitting in your capitals, trying to decide what you think is going to be right, worrying about the civilization that is resting in your hands, taking on a burden too big for anyone. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t worry about my old friends, and miss you both. Believe that or not, but it’s true.”

Cameron’s nod was barely perceptible; Graham’s eyes were suspiciously damp, and he lowered his gaze to the table in front of him after whispering, “I believe you.”

“So this is in the nature of a scientific experiment that I think has not ever really been tried, though philosophers have been proposing it for thousands of years. Chris may or may not ever be the historian of the moment; you might think of him as being more like your confessor here. He is here because he tells stories well, and he asks questions well, and he’s never been afraid of a follow-up; and because, in effect, he’s not so much an expert witness as an expert at being a witness.

“So… guys… I don’t know if Chris will ever write the history, but more than any leaders before ever have, this evening you are standing before the bar of history. Chris is going to tell you some stories, ask for your reactions, and we will do that for two hours—just two hours—and at the end of that time, you may talk to each other if you wish. And after that I will give you the best meal we can manage in Pueblo and put you back on your way tomorrow.”

“What sort of stories?” Cameron Nguyen-Peters asked.

“Why don’t I just start?” Chris asked. “Coordinator Nguyen-Peters, President Weisbrod, let me explain that in my last few weeks, editing the Pueblo Post-Times, I’ve built up quite a network of correspondent reporters, all over the country, and because I think it’s important for people to get the habit of reading newspapers again, and truly nothing sells papers like good feature writing, I run a lot of features, stories from my stringers about interesting people, places, situations. I get many more than I can use, and I maintain a file of those stories. So some of these will be familiar from the paper if you read it.”

The significant pause stretched long enough for Graham to say, reluctantly, “I read each issue as it reaches Olympia. It’s important to know what’s influencing public opinion.”

“I’ve read every word you’ve published, ads included,” Cam said. “Reading’s always been what I do so I don’t get lonely while I eat, or before bed.”

“All right, then,” Chris said. “So let me tell you about Pale Bluff, Illinois. That’s where Graham gave a speech on his way to Olympia that—no, Cam, you don’t get to talk about it. Yes, I know you feel that he has not lived up to its principles. Just for the moment let’s agree that it was a speech and he gave it. Now let me tell you about something. Pale Bluff is a divided town; a beautiful little town surrounded by apple orchards, which local legend has it, quite incorrectly, were founded by John Chapman—Johnny Appleseed. They’re hoping to trade a few tons of apple butter and apple jam—and maybe some apple wine—this fall to some other towns nearby, for some things they need later on. Apples are sweet food with a lot of vitamins and they keep well in cellars, so they’re something the country needs. And all the people in Pale Bluff have all worked like absolute mules, you know, to take in about seventy-five percent of their pre-Daybreak population in refugees, and find work and shelter for everyone.

“So today, it’s not rich, and it’s not an easy life, but there’s enough fish and game, and enough gardens, and lord knows plenty of apples, with chickens and sheep and maybe goats coming on line soon. There’s a guy in town who’s trying to trap some live wild turkeys because the domestic ones need too much care, and his idea is that if he can breed enough live ones, there’ll be something special for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and everyone can at least have a few mouthfuls of tradition, you know? Also, there’s a little choir forming up, too, because people miss music, and they’ve got some good singers.”

Graham sighed. “I remember all this. Carol May Kloster’s column is what I read for dessert, after I digest the hard news stuff. I always enjoy her piece. May I ask, is this going anywhere?”

“Just getting there. You see, when Quattro and his DC-3 landed on the highway there, it demonstrated that I-64 near the village would make a good airfield. And with Pale Bluff as a center of operations, there’s real potential for getting control of the whole lower Ohio Valley.

“And what I hear from Carol May is that there are quiet little meetings going on, people in Pale Bluff who favor Athens, or favor Olympia, getting together with like-minded citizens. Right now they’re talking about putting together political parties for the elections in eighteen months. But you know, if the war starts… my guess is you each have an agent or two in those little clubs, and that in certain circumstances, you would tell that agent to start some trouble, between all those neighbors who have sweated and worked together all that time; oh, say, think maybe of two workmates that went through the whole hard winter arguing politics together… and now you’re putting it on course for one of them to murder the other. And maybe you should think about their daughters being best friends, too, you know? But then after a few murders and some burnings, and a few hearts broken forever, well, one of you would get control of Pale Bluff. And the first thing you would do, to make it defensible, is to clear the cover around that village. That would be those orchards, you know? Regrettable of course, good-bye apples, but you have to do what you have to do.

“So that was my story, and here’s my question. Exactly what can you gain in the war that would be worth a dozen or so murders and burnings in that little town, and cutting those orchards down, so that soldiers could come in and throw out the families and fortify the buildings? Cameron?”

“I see the point and it’s a well-taken idea—”

“No, I wasn’t looking for a review. Pale Bluff might be your key to controlling the lower Ohio Valley. Now just explain why you must control the lower Ohio Valley, eh? What’s it for?”

Cameron looked down at the table. “I suppose if I don’t answer it will look even worse.”

“I have no opinion on how it will look. I’ll probably write the story, and only the people in this room will see you. Though of course many of us are your old friends. I like to think all of us are, actually.”

Cameron Nguyen-Peters sighed. “All right. If we can gain the Ohio Valley this summer…” He shrugged. “All right, this is your point, of course, it doesn’t have much to do with apples or choirs or little girls who are friends.”

“It’s your call, Mr. Coordinator. But can’t you draw the line? Aren’t you willing to say that the benefits of a united country, when we’re getting ready to fight the war for our survival, are just too important—that yes, it’s sad that two kids can’t be friends anymore because one of their daddies knifed the other one for the greater good?”

“If we’re occupied and conquered—”

“Do you believe there’s a force remaining on Earth that can come to this country and do that, right now? But let me ask that hard question in an even harder way—those people in Pale Bluff—how much of their orchards, which is what they depend on for food and prosperity, and how many of the houses they’ve labored to make work in this new world without gas or electricity, and how much of the society they’ve constructed—how much of that should go down the toilet so that you can control the Ohio and parlay that into controlling the country?” Cameron started to answer, but Manckiewicz said, “Your question this time, Mr. Weisbrod.”

Weisbrod said, “It’s the old professor in me, or maybe Cameron is a better man than I. I can at least make myself say that as a matter of principle—as a matter of principle, I don’t like having to answer that question. But I can see why you asked it. Apparently my principles are no stronger than Cam’s; perhaps I am a better man than I thought.”

Heather could see Allie was about to pop with rage, and moved to sit beside her. I’ve arrested presidents in my day, clocking a First Lady would just be dessert. The silence wore on as the two leaders sized each other up with new eyes, neither quite willing to be the man who said, Yes, on my head be it.

“In some dumb book I read as a kid,” Chris said, “someone said that people who put principles before people are people who hate people. All right, another question: Did you happen to read Cassie Cartland’s piece about the re-opening of the schools in Pueblo, and the way everyone turned out to see high-school kids running footraces? Now, you probably have never heard this, but Pueblo is a city of heroes. More Medals of Honor earned per capita than any other city in American history; if there’s time tomorrow I could show you the monument, right across from where they had the finish line for the 10k. I have to say, you should have seen how seriously those kids run, how much it means to them to be in school, and that, you know, we think of ourselves as one of the places that is re-inventing civilization, and the honor of their school actually means something besides a fund-raising slogan. Cassie’s in that school herself, and so’s her boyfriend, by the way. Does either of you have a principle important enough to blow the legs off one of those boys, or blind one of those girls, or kill ten of them by turning them into a mess that they couldn’t be recognized by their mothers? You know—those women in the bleachers that Cassie was so funny and warm-hearted about? Got any principles so strong that you could justify having them all do that to each other?”

“Now, wait a minute,” Graham said, taking off his glasses in his favorite dramatic gesture. “This is the classic move of pitting ordinary private feelings of personal decency against serious and important ideas that apply to the general good of the world as a whole—”

Chris was emphatically shaking his head. “Which is made up, among other things, of kids and mothers. So if a few mothers lose a child or two—or send a kid off to war and get a murderer back—”

“That’s just what I mean, a killing in war is not murder—”

Chris looked up at him with the mildest of expressions, and said, “You know, Roger Pendano died in a firefight over principle, which, I seem to remember, was vitally important. And by that time he was an old broken man who really just wanted to die. And was it worth it to prevent Shaunsen from ruining the nation?”

Cameron started from his thoughts. “I—well, yes, I do think so. Pendano knew the risks, he was mature, he was ready to die… and we’re talking about the whole future of a great country…”

“Mr. President, you knew him well, he was your friend for thirty years. Was the country worth the cost of the man?”

“I’d say… yes. Yes it was.”

“Would it have been worth it when he was twenty-one?”

Weisbrod glared. “This is going to be a long two hours.”

“Coordinator Nguyen-Peters was brave enough to try and answer. Are you?”

“Oh, Christ on the cross, how many times do I have to look at some life or other, some kid eating ice cream or a father holding a baby or somebody putting a roof on his house and say, over and over, ‘Yes, I’d kill him for my ideals’? I get it. I understand what you are driving at. I might even concede,” Graham said, cleaning his glasses, “that, well, yes, all right. All the fuck right. You are right. It does not make me proud of myself to say, ‘This man has to lose his life, and his family has to go hungry, and that other family must be without the shelter of the house they worked like hell to put together, and both families’ sons must kill each other… and say that all that has to happen just so we can establish that the Succession Act of 1947 takes precedence over Presidential Directive 51. And it would suck to be that man’s little boy, and that killer’s brother. There. Yes, I said it—”

“And did you mean it and believe it?”

“I—well, I guess—I said it. I can act like I mean it. And I have to think it’s the right thing to do.”

“What if you had to say that to that man’s little boy?”

“Lincoln managed to write the letter to Mrs. Bixby.”

“Dr. Weisbrod… are you Lincoln? And is the issue slavery?”

“The issue is a house divided.”

“Which could come back together in just about two years—if there’s not too much blood between the people by then,” Heather said. Everyone stared at her. “Sorry, I’ll shut up.”

“It is indeed a day for miracles,” Cameron said, quietly, and then Graham laughed, and even Chris did.

“Let me suggest something,” Chris said. “When Heather suggested this to me… well, what reporter can resist asking the questions of history? And all right, we’ve determined that I can make you both very uncomfortable—”

“Because war is wrong,” Cameron Nguyen-Peters said. He was no longer looking away, but at all of them, each individually. “Because like it or not you always end up making all those horrible decisions. Which you can always make… always…” He seemed to be finding anger somewhere deep within. “Decisions you can always make by just making them in words. ‘The principle of proper Constitutional succession is important enough to send soldiers who are stressed out of their minds and literally driven mad into an area where no one is watching them, where they may catch a mother and her ten-year-old daughter, and rape them in front of each other and leave them with their throats cut for the family to find later.’ And shit like that happens in civil wars; it’s the kind of thing that happens with half-trained troops that get thrown into battle, see their friends killed, rebuild their whole minds around hate. If you just think in words you can say, ‘Sorry, too bad for that little girl, must be hard on her mother to watch that, kind of tough on the soldiers to live with that afterward’—but when you start to think about, oh, that the little girl smiles like nobody else in the world ever did before or will again, or that she and her mother have a favorite joke that only the two of them know… Heather, this wasn’t a bad idea, but I’m not sure the world is ready for it.”

“Can’t find out if the world is ready if we never try it,” Heather said.

Graham laughed sadly, and said, “Twenty years after telling me, screaming at me really in my office, that it didn’t make any sense, my favorite student adopts Gandhian futurism.”

Cameron looked the question at Graham.

The old professor pushed his glasses up his nose and explained as if an undergrad had asked an obvious question. “Gandhi pointed out that one of the most important lessons of history is that many things happen that have never happened before. So just because something never happened or never worked or people weren’t ready… well, next time could be different.”

“Like Daybreak,” Cameron said softly.

“We’ve only been talking half an hour,” Chris said. “And I am looking at two guys who don’t look to me like they want a war.”

“We didn’t, exactly, before,” Graham said, sounding very unsure.

“Or we didn’t want to face it,” Cameron said. “If it’s all right with you, Graham, I’d like Chris to read us more stories. And ask us more questions. If we really need to have a war… considering how terrible it will be for other people—shouldn’t we be able to face an unpleasant hour and a half? I mean, actually, we should have to face a lot more, but—”

“Agreed. That we should have to face up to what we’re doing, I mean. I don’t think I’m eager for this. But I think you’re right, we should.”

In the next hour and a half, Chris introduced them to forty or so Americans, post-Daybreak, and Heather thought he’d never been better, not on television, or radio, or even in print. He probably figures lives are depending on it. Must be good to work like lives are depending on you. Chris drove on—how many victims in the crossfire would be worth it to make a given statement? how many burned libraries? how many men with hideous crimes in their memories for the next fifty years?

“The dogs of war,” Graham said after a while. “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. That’s what Shakespeare was talking about, that once you let them loose, they get… excited, they bark each other into a frenzy, they want to do more and more… they’re only safe on a leash, never when turned loose. Not even when you must turn them loose, and of course, Cam, if there is a surviving Daybreak out there for us to fight, we will have to turn them loose. But whenever you do, the dogs of war will tear up whatever they can get—your enemy, sure, but everything else too…and to turn them loose on a friend, or a relative, or someone who is just trying to do the right thing by their own lights…”

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,

^{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.

“Well, that’s more progress,” Heather said. “Surprising how much of that there’s been lately. I almost feel like I’ll be able to take my maternity leave with an easy conscience.”

“Shh,” Bambi said. “Murphy hears us.”

“Oof. And so apparently does the kid who just kicked me. Hey, little person, don’t be too eager to get out here; we’re not going to be ready for you.”

As they settled into the room where they’d be staying while Arnie and Izzy debriefed them, Beth observed, “I wasn’t sure we were doing the right thing, and now I feel sure we are.”

“Ha. You’re just as tired as I am of manual labor.”

“Well, yeah, a bed and meals just to be hypnotized, and talk and talk and talk—that’s a pretty good deal,” she admitted. “There’s hot showers here you don’t gotta chop no wood for, baby. How freakin’ cool is that?”

“I may never come out until I’m one big wrinkle.”

“Let’s take our showers together, then, so we share all there is. I’ll wash your back if you’ll wash mine.”

Later, after they had made love and cuddled up in the strange bed, Beth said, “Even with peace, and being that we found our way here, and everything, I’m still kinda scared.”

“About what?”

“Just that it’s different.” She turned to press against him more firmly, and said, “But I’ll get used to it, baby, I’ll get so brave. Besides, it’s kind of cool that the big leader-lady here, what’s her name, that big lady with the auburn crew cut—”

“Heather.”

“Yeah, Heather, it’s cool that she’s totally pregnant. Means she thinks there’s hope, don’t you think?”

“Babe, of course there’s hope. This is America.”