The Last President

^{6 DAYS LATER. MAÓ, MENORCA, BALEARIC ISLANDS (FORMERLY PART OF SPAIN). 11:00 AM CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME. MONDAY, APRIL 20, 2026.}

“Mister Rollings, Mister Reshetnyk, before you go, I’d like a word with you both in my cabin,” Halleck said. “Don’t worry, the boat won’t leave without you.”

Considering we’re half of the propulsion system, Whorf footnoted mentally. He glanced at Ihor, whose shoulder twitched in an all but invisible shrug. They followed the captain inside.

Halleck shut the door and turned to face them. “You are the first scholar-sailors to go ashore, and I think you should know why. One, I know you’ve got each other’s backs and you’re capable of staying focused on the mission. Two, in related news”—he winced at his habitual back-before reference—“you’re the only sailor-scholars I haven’t had to bail out of jail, rescue from a mob, or sober up after a shore leave. We’re a long way from home and something doesn’t feel right about this whole setup. Three—and mainly—you both look much younger and dumber than you really are, which may help them get careless about whatever they don’t want you to see.”

Whorf said, “Yes, sir. Is there anything we should be looking for?”

“Whatever they’re hiding. If I already knew, this wouldn’t be the conversation we’re having. Maybe I’m just bitter about the fact that this place looks so unscathed; I’m from Maine myself, and all my people and everything I remember are pretty well lost forever. I might just feel like nobody’s entitled to be that lucky, so there must be corruption or evil at the bottom of it.”

“What’s their story, sir?” Ihor asked.

“Well, according to the harbormaster, Mister Quintana, for more than a week after the North Sea superbomb, the east wind held enough to keep the Dead-Zone level fallout over mainland Spain, but not strong enough to pull much in from the stream that flowed through Provence down to Sicily, so although they had quite a bit of radiation poisoning later and many deaths, it didn’t disrupt or destroy much infrastructure. Now, that part, I believe; it’s consistent with the radiosodium and tritium that the reconnaissance planes picked up, when we had them. Then he says the town government decided not to set up a radio transmitter until their defenses were in better shape, so they were still in listen-only mode when the EMP-bombs came down, and they didn’t get hit with any up close; the nearest one to them was that one over Ireland in the spring.

“And then there’s the one that sounds really hokey. He says they were lucky that almost all the tourists and retirees found passage on sailboats back to the mainland, so they didn’t have too many mouths to feed.”

“That don’t—doesn’t seem lucky to me,” Ihor said. “Look at Christiansted, they were very lucky to get off-islanders like Henry or retirees like Captain Highbotham trapped there.”

“Yeah,” Halleck had said. “Something is not right with their definition of ‘lucky.’ I want to know what. Also, Quintana said it would be fine if I just gave leave to the whole ship’s company and let them go exploring for a couple of days. Very casually, as if it were a matter of course that we would want to and they wouldn’t mind having us.”

“Maybe we all have honest faces, Captain,” Whorf said.

Halleck laughed. “Well, that’s part of why I’m sending you two. Hide behind your honest faces, find the story we haven’t heard, and bring it back. And yourselves. Especially, and yourselves. Have as good a time as you can, but come back knowing what they’re hiding. Good luck.”

Rowing to shore was a matter of a few minutes; a local militia officer waved them through without bothering to do more than look closely at them once.

Maó was quintessentially a Mediterranean seaside town. Whorf guessed that he’d seen these sun-washed and stuccoed buildings, probably during his Euromovie phase, behind couples holding hands and babbling, or pouting girls walking away from flailing guys, below the barrel-tiled roofs and just above the subtitles. Despite the captain’s premonitions, he was delighted to spend a fine warm spring day walking along the crumbling asphalt streets between the blocky white and tan stores and houses, occasionally interrupted by older columned, gingerbreadish villas. Maó was warm, clean, sunny, and inhabited in a world that had become cold, filthy, dark, and hideously empty.

Now, after an hour of walking the winding streets of Maó, they had seen most of the city, physically, but not talked to anyone. Whorf asked, “Do you suppose the real secret is that the place is even duller than it looks?”

Ihor said, “It’s just a town, you know? We were spoiled rotten by Christiansted and Gib, I think. Do we want to climb this hill for the view of the whole port? Such as it is, of course.”

“Something to do, anyway. But I was just about to ask if your knack for languages would be up to bartering for a fish sandwich.” Whorf nodded toward the only open booth on the street, whose sign offered

Noticing their gaze, the lady behind the cart waved and smiled shyly, the first real greeting they’d had since getting off Discovery. She was late-middle-aged, with brownish skin and black eyes; her cheerful wariness reminded Whorf, slightly, of his mother.

“It looks like there will be language we communicate in,” Ihor said, “but I would like to start in Catalan.”

Ihor always said that part of his supposed linguistic gift was just that he was fearless about mispronouncing things and accosting strangers. He stepped up to the booth with a confidence Whorf could only envy and said, “Bona tarda. Meu amic i jo volem comprar dues entrepans. Acceptaria una moneda de plata d’Amèrica?”

The woman’s smile was quick and welcoming; she spoke quickly and eagerly. After a moment, Ihor translated. “The bread is fresh from the oven this morning, the cheese she bought at a farm on her way to town, the fish she got off the boat an hour ago, and her grill is ready to go. And, get this, with fresh mayo she made this morning. She says they invented it here, it’s the only real mayonnaise in the world.”

“Now, that’s a sales pitch.”

“She says she loves silver, takes it all the time, but she’ll want to weigh ours; her prices are in grams.”

Ihor and the woman negotiated as they played around with an old postal scale, vociferously but both obviously having fun, before settling on three ship’s dimes.

Trying to invent money that was spendable anywhere, the planners at Athens had coined silver into the traditional American denominations from 10 cents up to 10 dollars; they each were issued 2 dollars in silver for a day’s shore leave. “You didn’t push her too hard?” Whorf asked.

“He is very fair,” she said, in perfect, lightly accented English. “But if you want to tip, you could add one more dime.”

Ihor shook his head sadly. “And that means we’re back to the original price. Whorf, I love you like a brother but I am going to have to gag you every time I’m talking money.”

The woman grinned. “Bring him along anytime. I am Ruth. Let me show you that the sandwiches are up to the price.”

They were: the bread was fine-grained, dark, and chewy; the fish, onions, and peppers fresh; the thick slabs of tomato firm but juicy; the cheese soft and sticky but pleasantly sharp; the mayonnaise thick, creamy, and indisputably real.

“That was the best first-thing-off-the-ship food I’ve ever had,” Whorf declared, shaking her hand.

“It will even be good when you’ve been here a month.” Ruth smiled warmly; Whorf decided not to point out that this was a one-week-at-most visit.

They started up the road toward the tall hill west of town. As they ascended, the vivid hundred-shades-of-blue of Fornelis Bay, and the deep green of the trees around it, drew the eye away from everything man-made, so that the modern town and the medieval and Roman ruins near it all faded together. But the top of the hill revealed only what they had already known: Maó was unsacked, unburned, and apparently content to have life go on. In the surrounding countryside there were brown, blue, and gray streams of woodsmoke from some chimneys. Between the stone walls, crops grew in neat rows and plots, and sheep, goats, and horses stood in fields; in the sea beyond, dozens of fishing boats were out working. “Like someone asked for a painting in the style of Mediterranean Dull,” Whorf said. “Well, whatever the big secret that Captain Halleck wants us to find might be, apparently we can’t see it from this hill. Let’s go back down and see if we can get into more conversations.”

“Thanks to the tip we gave Ruth,” Ihor said, “I betcha many, many people will want to talk to us.”

The descent, facing the harbor, was also pretty in a conventional way, but they hurried. “I really want to know, too, what the secret of this place is,” Ihor said. “Maybe because I really want to be the one that finds it out for Captain Halleck. Funny how a request from him makes me try harder than my uncle yelling at me. I don’t want to come back not knowing nothing.”

“Anything. Yeah, Halleck’s got that same make-you-want-to trick my Pops does. I think they issue it to some old guys on their fortieth birthday or something.”

Back in town, they realized that an hour and a half of going up and forty minutes of coming down had left them hungry again. “I suppose we could go looking for other food,” Whorf said, “but let’s see if Ruth’s still open. I could definitely see another one of those sandwiches.”

“Adding ‘definitely see’ for ‘am in favor of’ to my English idioms,” Ihor said, “and right with you.”

They had come down a different road from the one they had climbed. In the tangle of narrow streets it took a little time for them to find Ruth’s booth again. Three large, muscular men were talking to her.

Their hair was long, worn in loose ponytails, and their beards were full but trimmed. Their baggy pirate pantaloons, tied with twine at the mid-calf cuffs, and their loose, long-sleeved canvas T-shirts were adorned, on every side they could see, with a sewn-on yellow circle-and-eight-wavy-rays sun. Their boots were heavy leather soles attached to long knit socks that continued up under their pantaloons.

“Like very clean tribals,” Ihor muttered.

“What I was thinking,” Whorf murmured. They stepped a little wide of each other, to free up space in case of trouble but keep close in case of real trouble, and approached slowly; the large men right in front of Ruth blocked her view of them.

As they drew near, one of the men shouted, “Lliurar tots els diners i menjar, o li tallaré els pits vells fastigosos.”

Ihor sped up into a fast, silent trot, and Whorf kept pace. Ihor prison-muttered, “He said ‘Give us all your food and money, or we’ll cut off your something.’ Sounds like a robbery.”

Whorf was about to urge caution—maybe the guy was just quoting some old book or something—when the three big men turned around as one, and fanned out slightly. At a scuffing sound behind him, Whorf glanced back.

Four men in the same clothes were closing in behind them. Ihor’s eyes met his. Whorf said, “Go right, get our backs to that wall.”

They did; Whorf drew the short flail from between his shoulders and Ihor slid the knives from his sleeve-sheaths. Whorf popped his trouble-whistle into his mouth and blew three-blasts-of-three as loud as he could.

The seven men facing them appeared not to know what to do for an instant, and then one of them clapped the smallest one on the back. “Digues-los que necessitem arquers.” The small man raced away.

“‘Tell them we need “arquers,”’ which I would bet means ‘archers,’” Ihor translated, softly, looking down for a moment. “Whistle again, my friend, just to be sure, and then I say that the two to our left look weak and scared; I’ll go that way, you keep the rest off me with your stick, and when I say run you follow me.”

“Got it.” Whorf blew hard, three-of-three again, and was hard on Ihor’s heels as they drove to the left. Whether or not Ihor had spotted their weak side, the first man stepped back; the second was reaching for something at his side when Ihor struck with both knives, slashing upward across the man’s right shoulder and stabbing straight at his groin, then pivoted into the cat stance, trapping the man’s thigh between blade edges.

Whorf grasped both rods of his flail at the open end, driving the chain end up under the retreating man’s jaw, and drove forward, sweeping a foot to fling the man over backwards. As he turned, his peripheral vision noted that Ihor’s knives continued their slash deep into his opponent’s thigh, then rose, crossed, to gash his throat and thrust him back; the man dropped onto the pavement, bleeding in a great gush. Finishing his turn, Whorf backhanded a figure-8 at head height, catching an onrushing man across the mouth and then on the temple, continuing the motion in a great circle to smash the flail into the side of his knee.

“Run!”

Whorf whirled and chased after Ihor; the remaining men, though they were big, didn’t seem very fast or eager. The two young men piled down the cobblestone street toward the harbor.

Whorf heard church bells ringing, other crew blowing three-of-three, and the welcome rumble of the ship’s drums beating “To Quarters,” so help was—

Turning a corner, they looked down a steep alley staircase; at the bottom of it, Jorge and Polly were surrounded by more of the men with the sun insignia. Jorge’s arm hung funny and he didn’t seem to have a weapon. Polly was swinging a baseball bat back and forth, looking for the first one to come within reach, but though they moved slowly and cautiously, the men were closing in.

Since Whorf was on the right, he moved the flail to his right hand and ran down the steps. His first stroke took a man in the back of the head, and his recovery stroke smashed a second man across the right trapezius and collarbone when he had barely begun to turn.

The free end of Whorf’s flail bounced back as if catapulted off rubber; he ducked sideways to keep it from hitting him, yanked hard and down to get control of its spin, and brought the tip around in a hard slap that opened a third man’s forehead in a gush of blood.

He could feel Ihor working beside him, striking in the throw-hip-recover-hip rhythm that they’d drilled endlessly on the deck; in his peripheral vision, two more men were down. The enemy had turned their backs on Polly, who brained one with the bat, dropping him. The remaining two opponents fled, shouting.

“Which way?” Whorf gasped.

“Blind alley down here, back up steps,” Jorge gasped. He was a very unnatural shade of gray. They hurried up, Polly and Whorf in the lead.

When Ruth popped out at them, Whorf almost let her have it with the flail before she shrieked, “Take me with you!”

“Follow us!” Ihor said.

“This way,” Jorge said, and they dropped down another steeply staired alley, Ruth running after them.

They had found the right way this time, because it led them straight to where the ship’s company had come ashore and was setting up a perimeter. Glancing behind, Whorf saw that Ruth was still with them.

As the pikemen at the perimeter let them through, one asked, “Her?”

“Maybe a defector, maybe a spy,” Ihor gasped.

Arriving just then, Halleck said, “Let her through. Whorf, Ihor, Polly, bind her. Good job. Jorge, Doctor Park is by the boats.”

Ruth held out her hands meekly for Polly to fasten the cuffs. “Just so you don’t leave me here,” she said.

An arrow rattled onto the pavement, not close, and Halleck turned to say something, but two shots had already suppressed the rooftop sniper. He said, “We’ve got whistles over east, probably near the waterfront or we wouldn’t be able to hear them, and no one’s gone that way yet. Are you three—”

“On our way,” Ihor said.

“One minute more,” Halleck said. “Corelli! Get these guys a drink of water, carbines and hatchets. Keep it to one minute, less if you can, it’s been a while since we heard the whistles—”

Ten minutes later, with three volleys from their Newberry Carbines and some hard flail and bat work, they drove the cheering mob away from the dangling bodies of their fellow sailor-scholar Felicia and Dr. Darcy Keyes, a microbiologist from Sandia; it wasn’t obvious in what order they’d been hanged and mutilated.

“Shit,” Polly said. “Shit shit shit.”

It was the first time the reverend’s daughter had sworn without apologizing, or being teased for it. The worst of the job was guarding the bodies till a bigger party could come to carry them out; it was almost sunset when everyone was finally back on Discovery. “Everyone” included two more corpses, besides Felicia and Dr. Keyes: Able Seaman Tranh had been breathing when the crowd kicking him had fled, but he died as the rescue party carried him down to the harbor. Professor Silmarrison had been killed instantly by a flung dart while he stood guard on the perimeter.

Though they could see many watchers on the cliffs above, nothing was fired at Discovery and nothing came out to intercept it. As darkness fell, in Halleck’s cabin, they interviewed Ruth. She said that the Verdad del Sol tribe had arrived in a huge sailing canoe flotilla even before December 5, and established themselves as the comfortable and pampered lords of the domain.

“Not exactly Daybreakish, is it?” Whorf asked.

“Read the Jamesgrams.” In one hard gulp, Ihor knocked back the extra whiskey ration that the doctors had prescribed to help them sleep. “Daybreak is splitting and changing and turning into many things. Someday it will just be a thing, like Jesus Christ or Communism or Ukraine or United States. It will mean so many things it won’t mean nothing. Anything. Whatever.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PALE BLUFF, NEW STATE OF WABASH (FORMERLY ILLINOIS). 5:00 AM CENTRAL TIME. MONDAY, APRIL 20, 2026.}

The MacIntosh Inn, a big old 1920s frame-and-gingerbread house, had been built to display the cider-fueled wealth of its owner during Prohibition. It had successively been the last refuge of his spinster daughters, a real estate agent’s cross to bear (and rumored to be haunted), and the retirement project of a chef and her cabinetmaker husband, who had turned it into a highly successful bed-and-breakfast back before. As Pale Bluff had become the key town on the Wabash frontier, they had served increasingly famous and important guests.

For the past week it had been Grayson’s main headquarters, and maps, lists, and charts covered every available surface in the main dining room, except for the places at the table where Grayson and Phat ate silently, sharing reverence for hot meals indoors off of plates. By firelight and candlelight, the room was cheery enough, even though the curtains were drawn and the sun had not quite come up yet.

The day before, at Grayson’s insistence, Phat had reviewed intelligence, plans, and decisions exhaustively. Once breakfast was cleared and they were savoring the privilege of hot coffee, he said, “Jeff, from everything I can see, you’ve got it right. You’ve already shown you’re a better general than I am, frankly, at least in this new world; I wouldn’t have done nearly as well in the Yough campaign and I am really not sure I could have managed the Ohio Valley at all.”

“That wasn’t a campaign, that was a series of massacres.”

“Sun-Tzu, Jeff. Best way to win is without fighting. You did so well they never had much of a chance to fight. And if they’d had as big an advantage over you, you know they’d have used it, and for what. Now, as for your attack up the Wabash, I stand by my assessment. If there’s anything you’re missing, it’s beyond me to see it too. We both know there’s no guarantee of success and no guarantee against surprise, but if things go wrong it is not going to be your fault, and if things go right it will be very fairly to your credit. If anything I say can boost your confidence, consider it said, really, with my whole heart.”

Grayson had nodded and extended his hand. Shaking it, Phat thought, People think that weird little smirk of his is contempt or not taking them seriously, but he does that because he thinks he’s a fraud and he’s fooled us, and he’s ashamed. I wish I’d realized that years ago.

It might have been a mutual dismissal, but instead the two men sat next to each other in armchairs, huddled close to the fire, holding their coffee cups surrounded by both hands, as if already out in the cold wet field.

Grayson finally said, “I don’t know whether to thank you more for coming or more for making such a public show of support for everything I did and said. You’ve certainly been more than fair and supportive.”

“The country needs you to succeed, and you needed the support, and most importantly, as far as I can tell you have been right about everything.” Phat gulped at his coffee as if afraid it might be his last cup ever. “One thing that hasn’t changed, and you’d think would have: we leaders live in an insulated world. Even in the worst of Daybreak, I don’t think any top officials ever went hungry, or even were at risk of going hungry.”

“Do you think we should have? For solidarity with the common people, or whatever you would call it?” Grayson’s expression was hard to read; he seemed to be seeing something a thousand miles beyond the fire. “I’ve given specific orders so that I’ll never eat if any of my troops have to go hungry.”

“Like any sensible man,” Phat said. “Of course you do that. No, I was just thinking. The world came to an end, people were hungry and cold and scared, they turned to the institutions that they were used to counting on—armies, churches, businesses, the government—and mostly we all did rise to the occasion, some individuals screwed up, of course, but mostly the armies set about creating order and safety, and the businessmen tried to get the wheels turning again, and cops and preachers and leaders of every kind got onto the job as much as they could. But one thing’s for sure: it has consistently been more comfortable to be one of these leaders people are counting on, than it has been to be one of the people counting on us. For good or ill we take care of ourselves first.”

Grayson nodded. “Remember airplanes? ‘If you are traveling with children, put your own oxygen mask on first’?”

“Unh-hunh. That’s part of it. Another part is like my old man always said, it’s good to be king.”

“Yeah, that too.” Grayson finished his coffee. “Most of my troops got up to big pots of venison-sausage and noodle soup, all the apple fritters they could eat, and beans-and-rabbit, which they’ve had so much that they have new lyrics for ‘Caissons,’ a cheerful thing called ‘The Bunny-fart Boogie.’ But as far as they were concerned, the soup made it a treat and the fritters were a trip to heaven. If O’Grainne and her wizards are putting the numbers together right, then if we get a decent harvest in this year, we’ll finally be growing as much as we eat in a year.”

“So you think about that too,” Phat said.

Grayson shrugged. “Have to. Bet you it’s Graham Weisbrod’s last thought before he goes to bed and his first when he gets up, too. We’re the three people most likely to be president, and our thoughts can’t get too far away from food.” Grayson stood. “Well, at least we had coffee at breakfast.”

“And no dishes to wash.”

“Amen. Thank you for coming, and for the support.”

“We have differences, and we are not friends, but I have never doubted your competence.”

“Isn’t that strange? I doubt it all the time. If you’re willing, I’d like to go out to meet the others arm in arm, smiling, and looking like the best friends in the world. Really, nobody’s ever been able to do much for my confidence, but perhaps we can do something for theirs.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PALE BLUFF. 6:00 AM CENTRAL TIME. MONDAY, APRIL 20, 2026.}

The warming sun was burning off the last mist, and the view down Chapman Avenue was lengthening by the moment from a gray void into the deep greens and frothy whites of the blossoming orchard. Carol May Kloster, hurrying back with reports from headquarters so that she could read them over breakfast and include the information in her morning report to Heather, stopped to admire the town where she had lived all her life. When people read and wrote history, would they ever just see the nice little town? There must have been people who knew Lexington or Gettysburg this way, for whom they were just “home.”

The thought made her feel like welcoming people here, and two young soldiers in the uniforms of Provi militia were shuffling up the street, looking bored and lonesome, so she stopped to say hello. One minute of pleasant conversation established that the scrawny redhead was Jimmy, the small dark East Indian boy was Neville, and they were both now farther from Pullman, Washington, than they had ever been in their lives.

Jimmy attempted to tell a tale of their particular courage and being selected for the mission based on that, but Neville made a disgusted face. “We were playing cards when we were supposed to be guarding the wall, and a Daybreaker prisoner got away because of that,” he explained. “And not just any old prisoner, either, some high-level guy they were actually holding on the Allie-train.”

“The Allie-train is—”

Jimmy smirked. “The train the First Lady takes around to different towns when she wants to be treated like she’s important. She was in our part of the country to impress some tribes and get treated like a queen by the town governments. It kind of worked out embarrassing, and we got stuck holding the bag.”

“Because we were away from our posts and playing cards on duty,” Neville pointed out, stubbornly.

“Well, yeah, but you keep forgetting, we did real good last summer, especially during the siege, so there was kind of a balance—”

“Yeah, they decided not to drum us out and to only give us a light spanking,” Neville said, stubbornly sticking to the truth in a way Carol May was beginning to like. “Just enough so our chocolate and vanilla butts have some strawberry stripes that are never coming off, which eventually stopped hurting, but we realized we’d never be trusted again, and as long as we were in our local militia, we’d be those two assholes—’scuse me, ma’am, can you make that ‘jerks’? My mom reads that paper you write for, Mrs. Kloster—those two jerks that screwed up and let the high-level prisoner escape. So when there was a chance to volunteer to come out here and serve with General Grayson’s combined army, it looked a lot better than spending the rest of our lives in the militia peeling potatoes and painting barracks. And here we are, all set to serve our country, save civilization, distinguish ourselves heroically, and meet girls.”

I suppose I could’ve found their equivalent at Normandy, or Shiloh, or for that matter at Jericho, Carol May thought.

Half an hour later she was standing on the roadside where Delicious Road led out of town to the east, watching the army pass, with a painful sense that this was more history than she’d ever wanted to see.

“Aunt Carol,” Pauline said beside her, “is it wrong that all this is giving me the creeps?”

“War’s never been nice, Pauline.”

“Not that so much, I mean, I kind of look at the weapons and I think, cool. Kill us some Daybreakers. Go to it, guys.” Two improvised caissons, hauling steel-pipe cannons, rolled by on iron-rimmed wheels. Pauline shifted her weight on her cane—though she was only twenty-two, a Daybreaker arrow had ensured she would need it for the rest of her life. “Maybe I just can’t help remembering what happened to me over there, even though I thought I was the toughest little bitch that ever lived. Or what happened to Steve Ecco, and he really was strong and tough and brave, but you know, he never came back at all.”

The TNG Regular Army regiment going by in Rorschach jammies was carrying four American flags—the plain old fifty-star ones, not the Cross and Eagle TNG flag or the nineteen-star-double-circle of the PCG. Carol May put her hand over her heart; seeing that, so did Pauline.

^{2 HOURS LATER. PUEBLO. 11:30 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. MONDAY, APRIL 20, 2026.}

“Hey, Leo, your prom date’s here,” MaryBeth Abrams said, sticking her head out the door of the delivery room.

“He seems unimpressed,” Heather said, looking down at her sleeping son. “Is this your unique Doctor MaryBeth way to say it’s a girl?”

“She is. Very fast delivery, one of those that would make the case for natural childbirth, back before. Beth’s fine but exhausted and sore, Jason is ecstatic and will probably come out as soon as you won’t see him crying, and Heather Ysabel Nemarec came out with a big gasp before I could even start her breathing, like she’d been holding her breath in there all that time, and is staring at the world like she’s totally mad freaked to be here. Don’t worry, that terrifying feeling that the world is way too weird usually wears off around a thousand months.”

Instinctively, Heather and Ysabel glanced sideways at Debbie Mensche. “Eighty-three years and four months,” Deb said. “And I didn’t just calculate it now, MaryBeth asked me this morning.”

MaryBeth grinned broadly. “I’m just a simple country doctor, and out here in Simple Country, we need a never-ending stock of corny jokes. Anyway, I’ll be back in a couple minutes and then you can come in; just want to make sure everything is fine before I let the civilians in.” She pulled up her mask and ducked inside.

“Guess she wants to make sure she gets all the tentacles snipped off,” Debbie said.

Ysabel said, “You are an awful person and we really need to spend more time together.”

Debbie nodded, accepting the compliment. “So I’m a little surprised you let them name the kid Ysabel instead of Isabel or Izzy. Aren’t you worried about being outed anymore?”

“Well, it’s a middle name, and the cover story is that they always liked the Spanish version more than the English.”

“I just keep thinking we’re lucky it wasn’t a boy,” Debbie said. “Poor kid would’ve been the only Larry of his generation. Dad would’ve been impossible, too, practically made the boy a grandson.”

“Too late on the only Larry of his generation,” Heather said. “Something Chris was telling me about. Baby names come in waves, like plant names for girls—I was in the same generation with a lot of Jasmines, Willows, Aspens, and Roses, and I knew a couple Daisies and an Amaryllis—or Bible names for boys which is why half the boys my age have names ending in –iah. And apparently we were due for a wave giving boys the names of famous people. Thanks to the buildup Chris gave some of my agents in the Post-Times, there’s a big crop of Freddies and Larrys this year, Chris says, like the late 1800s when there were all those Lincolns, Darwins, Lees, Grants, and Deweys.”

“All I can say,” Debbie said, “is how grateful I am that at least the Reverend Abner Peet turned out to be a traitor.”

^{4 HOURS LATER. TACOMA DOME, TACOMA, WASHINGTON. 3:00 PM PACIFIC TIME. MONDAY, APRIL 20, 2026.}

“I just said that your comment seemed a little ungracious,” Graham said. “Maybe I should’ve said pushy or ungentlemanly. There were two big stories today, two big events, and both on schedules it would not have been easy to change, and Chris Manckiewicz could only be at one of them, so he sent Cassie to cover the other one. And frankly it makes sense for a tough old bird without any family like Chris to go cover a war, and a young woman—hell, a girl, did you know she’s only seventeen?—to cover a political party convention. For the love of god, Allie, it’s legitimately a big day for Grayson, he’s taking his Army of the Wabash out to end the threat of the tribals, I mean, that really is news.”

“So is the first political convention in at least seventy-five years where the delegates are actually real live voting representatives with decisions to make,” Allie pointed out. “And I can’t help resenting that we loaned General Grayson’s little circus the only regiment we have that’s worth crap, Graham. Plus a bunch of our getting-up-to-decent militia. We put a big part of our own war with our own tribals on hold.” Allie was tugging his collar, straightening his tie, fixing him up. I guess every younger wife of an older man does this all the time, trying to keep your slightly-deteriorated husband from turning into an old wreck while you’re still young. Wonder if Jenny Grayson has to make Jeff shine his shoes, or if it’s easier with military guys? Reflexively, she glanced around, hoping no camera would catch him like this.

On Daybreak day the Tacoma Dome had been configured for a touring motivational speaker, which was how it had become the site for the Democratic convention: it was already arranged to accommodate a large meeting in front of a podium and rostrum, requiring no mechanical power to change it to anything else.

Of course, even with mirrors hung to reflect light from the windows down onto the stage, they still could meet only in daylight, still needed candles and lamps, and still only filled the first twenty rows at best, including spectators, demonstrators, and plain old bums. Though their fifteenth-row raised box gave her the best view there was of the whole convention, all that did was allow her to see how small it all was, as if the whole convention was huddled around its few flames at the center of a cave.

It looks so shabby, Allie thought, angrily. Aloud, she said, “This is the place where the re-founding of the Republic is really happening. Not that social-parasite-cleanup in the Midwest.”

“Allie, something we, and Grayson, and Phat, and a lot of us all agree on is that it’s all one country, and it’s all one war, and the main threats are the big forces in the Lost Quarter, and the pockets like Hells Canyon and the Ouachitas have to come after. The Lost Quarter is the only place where there are enough of them to break out and do real damage all by themselves. So we have to take that away from them this summer, before they can, so that the next president can go on the offensive and finish the war. That’ll be true no matter who the president is. It’s Hillel’s old saying about if not now, when, and if not us, who? So no more bad-mouthing the Army or the press. Some asshole reporter might hear you and make trouble for us with both, okay?”

“The only reporter here is over there.” She nodded at Cassie’s working table, in the corner seats off to the side of the rostrum. “And really, she looks like such a kid. Another note for the first real Weisbrod Administration, we’ve got to get the child labor laws back in place.”

“Don’t be so sure about that either, Allie. Seventeen was adult for most of human history, really, for that matter, thirteen or fourteen was adult, more often than not. The child labor laws came in when there wasn’t enough work for grown men supporting families, and for the next generation at least what we have is a labor shortage. We need everybody who’s willing to do something useful—even if they do look like they ran away from cheerleading tryouts.”

“Middle school cheerleading tryouts. I just don’t think someone should be a national media leader till she can prove she’s made it through puberty.”

“Allie,” Graham said, “you are perilously close to judging a person’s qualifications for a job by the size of her boobs.”

She couldn’t help it; that made her laugh at herself. “All right. Fair enough. Maybe I’ll even give her an interview and try to get to know her, since she’s going to be around.” She had long ago given up trying to get Graham to consider a licensed or regulated media for the Restored Republic anyway, despite all the obvious damage that irresponsible private media had done during the Old Republic; there were times when he didn’t just seem twentieth-century to her, but maybe nineteenth or eighteenth. Still, Americans wanted their old country back, that was for sure, and maybe Graham was right, maybe that included irresponsible media without any public information policy or regulations. Maybe a compromise? Could they launch something like BBC or NPR with special—

A sudden coalescence of attention spread outward from the podium. Bright quadrilaterals of light swept across the stage as stagehands at the upper windows repositioned the mirrors to bring the reflected light back to the rostrum; the sun had wandered a long way during the three hours of lunch. The reflected sunlight settled around the podium, shimmering vibration slowing as the mirrors were screwed down. Perkins, the chair, mounted the rostrum, waving his gavel in one hand and a sheaf of paper in the other, over his head.

“We will now commence our roll call of the states!” Perkins’s unamplified shout did not so much reach the back of the crowd as it started a wave of shushing sounds and the palm-press-down gesture that blanketed the hall in quiet.

He was an older man, close to seventy, with strong-tea-colored skin and wavy black hair. He had said he had an ancestry slightly more mixed than Tiger Woods’s. Allie had had to ask Graham who that was, and sure enough it was an old-guy reference; without Goo-22, or even Internet, she’d had to get used to not having heard of things.

Perkins began again. “We will now commence our roll call of the states. Is there a representative here from the great state of Alabama?”

No hands. No one spoke.

“We know,” Perkins said, “that this year, Alabama is probably not going to vote for our party, and we realize that they have aligned with the Temporary National Government in Athens. We wish them well and we look forward to joining as one nation with them again in January. We know that some day they will have a strong and vibrant Restored National Democratic Party of their own. Is there anyone here from Alaska?”

Another silence.

“We recognize that the great state of Alaska has exercised its commonlaw right to secede during the Constitutional interregnum, and is no longer a member of the Union. Of course we hope they’ll reconsider and rejoin our Union, but we respect their right to choose their destiny.” He hurried on, as if afraid that a second of silence might escalate. “We call on the great state of Arizona!”

The elderly man who rose in response stood erect in a way that proclaimed “ex-military,” but he looked as if he might cry. “Arizona was assigned twelve votes. The four votes I’ve been instructed to vote are from the remainder of Arizona after the secession of four areas. The County of Trans-Mojave has been assigned two votes and will vote those as part of the Duchy of California, to which its Earl and Countess have pledged fealty. The Grand Canyon Temporary Reconstruction Coalition will petition to affiliate with the State of Nevada as soon as possible, and will cast its three votes with Nevada. Apachéria plans to seek admission to the Union as a New State, and asks to cast its one vote independently for Graham Weisbrod. Naabeehó Bináhásdzo intends to seek sovereign international independence and will not cast its two votes.”

Naabeehó Bináhásdzo is the Navajo Nation, Allie reminded herself.

Perkins waited a long breath and said, “And how are you voting those four votes?”

“Sorry, Pete. Forgot to say. We’re abstaining on this ballot.”

Allie was beginning to wonder why she had not brought a book. Arkansas, like Alabama, had sent no one, and would participate in the election entirely through the TNG. Perkins then called upon, “The great state of California!”

A tall, handsome woman, perhaps sixty years old, rose, and said, “The Duchy of California, home for more than twenty-five years of Graham Weisbrod, the last President of the Old Republic, soon to be the first President of the Restored Republic, proudly casts all forty-one—sorry, Arizona, I mean forty-four—of its votes for Graham Weisbrod!”

Even people who were supporting other candidates jumped up and cheered. One tiny step toward restoring America in people’s imaginations, Allie thought. Maybe a bigger deal than I realize.

Colorado went nine for Weisbrod, four for McIntyre, and one maverick, though yelled at by the rest of his delegation, cast his vote for Lyndon Phat. But then there was, as Graham muttered to Allie, “a real string of bummers.” Connecticut and Delaware were swallowed up in the chaos of the Lost Quarter. Florida and Georgia were both TNG-only. Hawaii, embroiled in a many-sided struggle between warlords, bandits, assorted rebels, military units trying to impose martial law, and tribals, was represented by a single observer from a coalition of towns on the Big Island. She had been instructed not to vote.

At last, Idaho broke the chain of bad news with eight for Graham, one for Norm. Indiana and Illinois, the delegates were reminded, would be voted later, as parts of the New State of Wabash.

Iowa went all for Weisbrod and Kansas all for McIntyre, but then there was a ten-state streak of states that had lined up with the TNG, been totally lost to the tribes, or were being reorganized into New States. Perkins tried to hurry through them but there was no missing the sigh of relief throughout the convention when at last Montana, Nebraska, and Nevada were all present and voting. There were more long runs of lost, defected, and reorganized states, until finally they wound down through the Virgin Islands, Wabash, and Washington. When Perkins asked, pro forma, if there were any delegates from West Virginia, the room was pleasantly surprised: three men and a woman stood up.

“We’re going to take a little explaining,” the oldest man in the group said, nervously taking off the UMW strap-cap repaired with twine he wore, and twisting it in his hands. “There’s people in the hall who can vouch for us if you need’em to. We’re a bunch of counties in southern West Virginia and western Virginia that have all been holding out, just barely but we’re holding, against the tribals, with our militia, and we retook Wise and Dickinson counties from the tribes last month, which gives us a road open over to Kentucky and down to North Carolina. We’re here to announce that we’ve got a Restored Democrat party, which is hoping to have some members real soon—” Laughter rolled through the convention; grinning, the man explained, “There was about twenty of us that wanted to organize it. Our people back home should’ve signed up some membership lists while we were traveling, but we’ve been on the road a month, ain’t had communication, so we don’t know for sure they did.

“Anyway, if things are the way we left’em, then we’ll not only have Democrats, that other party is organizing there too, we’re gonna elect a state constitutional convention in November, and we’re hoping to apply for admission as a New State in the Restored Republic, if it lets there be any more New States. Last I knew most people seemed to want to come in as the state of Pelissippi, after the river, but there’s some that want to call ourselves Appalachia or Clinch River, after the same river. That’s gonna be on the ballot this fall, too. So we thought we’d just ask to have two votes, ’cause we think we can get at least enough turnout to justify that, come November.”

Perkins grinned. “Well, we’re awful glad to see you, even if it’s complicated. Maybe because it’s complicated. Where should we put your two votes down, Probably-Pelissippi?”

“Two more for Graham Weisbrod. We were instructed to just help the front-runner ’cause the party needed a leader more than anything.”

“Well, then, two more for Weisbrod, and give it up for another fine New State, people!”

In the midst of the cheering, Norm McIntyre muttered, “Did you ever think people would be excited to find out that part of the country was still there?”

Weisbrod shrugged. “Review the national anthem, Norm. Sometimes still being there is the best news there is.”

When Perkins got them quiet again, Wyoming, anticlimactically, cast its two votes for Phat.

Then the panel of judges began to scribble and add; everyone was still relearning hand arithmetic.

They had had to run through the whole roll call because they had not known exactly how many would show up until the convention started that morning. Besides the last-minute appearance by Pelissippi, and the surprise fissions of Arizona and Oklahoma (which hadn’t really been expected to attend at all, but had shown up as West Oklahoma plus the Allied First Nations), both the Utah and Texas delegations had arrived within the last twenty-four hours and then had to wait for radiogram instructions about whether to participate or not (both had been told to go ahead). Votes were assigned to each delegation according to the closest guess that could be managed about the number of voters likely to turn out in November, one convention vote per hundred thousand probable voters, and some delegations had been assigned their number of votes only that morning.

The scribbling went on. It was clearly going to take a while to check and reconfirm everything.

Allie noticed Cassie Cartland working at something. “Hunh. Something I want to check out,” she said, but since Graham was locked in conversation with McIntyre, she just slipped quietly down to the press table.

Cassie was working a soroban abacus, sliding beads, scribbling on a pad, sliding beads, scribbling, underlining a result just as Allie approached and asked, “What’s it look like?”

“Just rechecked,” Cassie said. “Surely everyone knew it was going to be Graham; he was a majority with every delegation except Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, Wabash, and Wyoming. Officially Nevada put him over, if you count those Arizona counties that voted with Nevada.”

“Actually I was more interested in the abacus.”

“Found a pamphlet about it, browsing through the GPO in Pueblo, last year while I was waiting for Chris to make it back from the Mensche Expedition. Knocked one together to have something to do, and found out how fast and accurate they are.”

“My uncles and father used to use those.”

“Bet I’m not as fast as they were.”

“With fifty years of practice like they had, maybe you will be. I was just thinking they might be a good thing in the schools.”

Cassie nodded. “Or we could just put the pamphlet out there. Lots of little businesses and farmers are either too old or don’t have time for school. I was thinking we might run a series about it in the Post-Times.”

“About the abacus?”

“Good idea too, but I meant about everyone missing some years of school. We need to figure out some way to get a lot of skills and information out to a lot of people, and you’re not going to get people who’ve been taking care of themselves in this mess to sit down at desks and fill out forms again. Eventually, maybe, but not—here we—”

She probably said here we go but the go had been swallowed in an immense hoot-to-scream of feedback, as Perkins tried to get the microphone to behave. The young tech types had rigged up a very simple amplifier using jelly-jar vacuum tubes and a treadwheel-powered dynamo; their best guess was that by constantly wiping it with a lye wash they could keep it running long enough for Graham’s acceptance speech, if he didn’t talk too long. It had bored Allie to death but the young nerds had been so proud of themselves that she had made herself pay warm attention to them.

As one of the young technicians walked inside the treadwheel; the other three crouched around the amp, wiping diligently, and the one in the treadmill signaled Perkins to try again. He announced that Graham Weisbrod was the nominee and, “After our victory, my friends, the first President of the Restored United States! Ladies and gentlemen, Graham Weisbrod!”

In a smaller hall the applause would have been thunderous; it was swallowed up in the dark here.

Graham stepped up to the condenser mike and said, “My friends,” triggering another squeal and roar of feedback. The crew fiddled frantically, then flashed him a thumbs-up.

He began again. “My friends and supporters in this room, my opponents and detractors all over the world, my fellow Americans however you feel about me, we’re gathered here today to take a long step toward restoring our republic. Of course it is difficult for many of you who have struggled and fought so long for the Provisional Constitutional Government to admit that our struggle is now over; we never attained the full agreement of all citizens that the PCG was the legitimate continuation of the government founded by the Constitution of 1789. But since we did not, a new struggle begins tonight: to establish a new government, which will take office in January 2027, under the same Constitution that was in force until December 5, 2024.

“We have pledged ourselves to work and build for the Restored Republic, beginning with the elections in November. It is fitting enough; it is our 250th anniversary as a nation, this year. Yesterday was the 251st anniversary of the first fighting at Lexington and Concord. In addition to the states that chose to align with the PCG, we have the firm and honest commitments in hand of the Temporary National Government in Athens, and of the sixteen states who have chosen to report to them, to walk with us every step of the way; we have the commitment of the Duchy of California, and we seek to bring in other states such as Manbrookstat and the Virgin Islands. We will refuse or coerce no one, block nothing, accept every territory where people choose to be Americans, sacrifice whatever must be sacrificed except our Constitution and our democratic rights, and we will forge one nation again!”

The crowd did their best to fill the hall with applause.

“More than anything,” he said, leaning into the microphone to speak softly, “we need a Restored Republic to which everyone can be loyal, not one that drives away any large part of the population. We need to embrace the idea again that we are one nation.

“And we are going to.

“We held together, in that first 250 years, through good times and bad, through a bloody civil war, through appalling crimes that shocked the world and soaring triumphs that awed it, and through a million things the Framers and Founders could not have imagined, in a great measure because of our commitment to maintain the Constitution, and because so often it called us back to ourselves when we were in danger of losing ourselves.

“So I give my word, to our rival government in Athens, to all the governors, to the Duke and Duchess of California, and to everyone and to almighty God Himself, that we will make this new republic, and make it strong and seat it firmly.

“So let us go forward. As for the Provisional Constitutional Government, let us have faith that our good decisions will be ratified, our bad ones nullified, and our choices in the few months that remain will be as wise as we can make them. I thank you.”

The band wheezed to life with “America the Beautiful,” and the crowd cheered as wildly as they could manage, a few hundred people in a space designed for tens of thousands. At least, Allie thought, they are drowning out that band.

Graham thanked them, and because daylight would not last much longer, dismissed them, urging them to be careful and safe going back to wherever they were staying. At least a third of them, Allie knew, were sleeping on floors or cots here in the building.

On their way out Cassie intercepted them. “I’m supposed to tell you that Chris Manckiewicz particularly wants me to extend his apologies; he’s covering the war in the Ohio Valley right now, I guess because old guys get to go to everything really cool and young ladies are stuck with politics.”

Graham snorted. “You do realize that you are the main correspondent for the most important news source in the country at a national political convention? And that your predecessors would have been amazed that a girl your age could do such a job?”

“My predecessors obviously were too easily amazed,” Cassie said.

Allie liked that answer, but nonetheless I’m still insulted that they decided we were second most important next to General Jeffrey Grayson’s Traveling Massacre, Part Two.