Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (22 page)

Aside from intermittent radio contact and the travels of a few hardy adventurers, trade and traffic with the East Coast had been lost. The two sides of the old country now shared no closer dealings than, say, Guatemala had with Uruguay. A moonscape desert fifteen hundred miles wide separated the two halves of the continent. John’s early dream of getting rich by helping the country dig out from under the Ash Fall had foundered on some hard realities: the central states from the plains to the mountains were a wasteland. The Praxis family might create legions of digger ’bots to unearth the buried cities and more artificers to rebuild their infrastructure, but the people were dead and the surrounding land was barren. Any investment in excavation and reconstruction would be for purely archeological purposes. It would take generations before the populations on the two coasts were ready to venture back into the interior and start building new cities and new lives. In the meantime, the Praxis family business had diversified and turned to serving the needs of the living.

The legacy of eruption and invasion on the West Coast had been two decades of chaos. Roving bands of freelancers, Chinese Irregulars and American Militia both, along with local youth gangs and for-profit hijackers, still traveled the countryside. Collectively known as “road companies,” they preyed on that part of the population which passed for civilized and lived behind barriers in small, occasionally contested communities. Susannah Praxis once compared these companies to the English mercenary freebooters who had roamed the French countryside during the fourteenth century. Civil unrest and social disorder remained so high that the Praxis Family Association had never abandoned its wartime footing, although the period of active battle had ended years ago. And there again, Callie had urged John to engage these remnants, remove them, and establish civic order. But John had refused, saying that he didn’t want to become a
de facto
government.

“Do we need a better sweep mechanism on our Hummers?” Callie now asked her two lieutenants with a sigh. “One that penetrates deeper—or sniffs for the nitrate compounds in plastic explosive?”

“Maybe it’s time to clean up the roads?” Paul suggested. “Clean up the roads, clean up the road companies. They use the broken pavement as a kind of tank trap.” He shrugged, as if that helped his argument. “Sooner or later we have to become the government around here—somebody has to.”

Callie considered the costs. “We’d have to design and build whole fleets of new machines,” she said thoughtfully. “Surveyors, Engineers, Diggers, Graders, Pavers. Plus some kind of Sniffer or Sweeper to find mines like the one that took out Pamela and John. The project would take … oh, years.”

“It’s
been
years, Aunt Callie,” he said. “And anyway, building earthmovers like that used to be the family business.”

“We’d just be handing heavy equipment over to the companies. And then they’d convert them to new kinds of war machines.”

“Couldn’t our ’bots work at night? Say, midnight to four?”

“That’s when the guerillas are most active.”

“Not if we modified the videyes on the automatons,” Paul said. “Let them work by radar, infrared, and ultraviolet instead of visible wavelengths. We could retrofit the Rovers so their weapons amplified with titanium-sapphire or some other lasing crystal. The beams would align in the UV range and become totally invisible, so you couldn’t track them back and target the source. We modify the sighting dots on the slug throwers, too, so they lase the same deep purple. Then everything proceeds under cover of darkness. We reroute our shipments and travel around these road crews. Only the uninitiated would roll through and ride into a blackout ambush.”

“What about the other ninety percent of the population?” Callie wondered.

“Hell, if people haven’t learned by now to stay off the roads at night …”

“Okay. Propose it as a project to Susannah, but make it low priority.”

“ ‘Low’—? But, Aunt Callie, it was
Grandfather
who got hurt!”

“Yeah.” She stared at Pamela. “And next time, you
fly
him.”

* * *

Antigone Wells tipped the container—gold-colored plastic with a vaguely Grecian configuration—upside down and watched the gray sand pour out, strike the water, and collect briefly like a clot of heavy cream before sinking. With it came a plume of gray dust that floated away on the light breeze and disappeared into the morning mist.

That’s all we are,
Wells thought.
Gray sand and dust. A lifetime of hopes and dreams, ending up in a cloud of nameless particles.

“Should we say some nice words?” Angela asked quietly. “I think Aunt Helen would like some words said over her resting place.”

“Dust thou art and unto dust thou return,” Well intoned her thoughts.

“Why, Aunt! That’s just an awful thing to say!”

“Yes. But it’s in the Bible.”

For all of her twenty-nine years, despite a childhood spent in hardship and uncertainty due to war and ecological disaster, and despite constant exposure to Antigone Well’s own grim and sarcastic humor, Angela had turned out a naïve, conventional, shy, and wonderfully trusting young woman. After a dozen years of watching her aunt disappear every day into the wood-floored, mirror-lined room in their apartment to practice her arcane exercises, when Wells asked if Angela would like to learn karate, the girl’s response was immediate: “Oh, Aunt! You don’t really know
karate,
do you?” But she had soberly agreed to take the training, although she never really mastered the Iron Wrist and Immovable Arm required for adequate self-defense. For years, Angela had been Wells’s sparring partner—more like a mobile punching bag—but she kept at it bravely, claiming it was good exercise. Still, she remained a sweet, old-fashioned girl.

Maybe some of that had been Helen’s influence.

After the Yellowstone Eruption, Antigone Wells had made one of her few requests of John Praxis: help her find her sister in Oklahoma, right at the uncertain edge of the great Ash Fall. Working through family members in Texas, they had found Helen still trying to maintain her apartment and her daily routine. It took some persuading, but finally she had come to San Francisco and moved into the condo on Market Street.

Adversity had seemed to strengthen Helen. Before this, with complete mastery of her life and all the miracles of medical science, Wells’s younger sister had entered her ninth decade with numerous undiagnosed maladies and a lingering sense of doom. She had made continuous reference to herself as “an old woman” who had “outlived her time.” Wells had feared for Helen’s life, and any day she had expected a message from the Oklahoma police or her sister’s doctor saying Helen was found dead in her bed. But let the world crash around her, let her be turned into a pauper and a refugee, transplanted to a city under siege, sharing a bedroom with a newborn baby, and appropriating the role of nanny, up at all hours of the night—and Helen had blossomed.

When food ran short in the stores and then disappeared, it was Helen who insisted Wells unbend her stiff neck and call on John Praxis and his family for assistance. “You owe it to Angela, who’s not even a person yet,” she had said, “even if you won’t lift a finger to keep from starving yourself.” And John and Callie had readily agreed, writing Wells into the new family association they had created under the guise of her being Alexander’s biological mother. They had graciously accepted Angela and Helen, too, as extended family. Every week a delivery man brought packages of rice, fresh fruits in season, cuts of meat, and cartridges for the food printer. When Helen noted that the baby had no formula, and that milk was something neither of the sisters was equipped to give her, the delivery man brought cartons of powdered supplement. Wells had tried it once, on a hunch, and thought it tasted something like seaweed. But Angela thrived on the stuff.

Over the weeks and months, the delivery man was at first accompanied by an armed guard and then arrived in uniform himself with a rifle slung over one shoulder. And then John had gently suggested that, for the sake of security, nothing personal, and no pressure, Wells and her small family lock up the condo and move into a house in the Fremont compound, “just until we can sort things out with the Chinese.” They had stayed for three years, and that probably saved all their lives.

What finally brought Helen down was a stroke. Not a little arterial pinprick, a pool of blood on the cerebral cortex, and an inscribed circle of brain death, such as Wells had experienced sixty—no, seventy now—years ago. Instead, Helen’s stroke had been the hammer of God, clubbing her down, dead before she hit the floor. One minute she had been telling Angela to change her shoes because one of the pair she was wearing had a scuff on its leather heel. Then she dropped in a heap, arms and legs going this way and that, like a marionette with its strings cut. If there ever could be such a thing as a good death, Wells decided, that was it—out of the blue and no time for regrets.

Helen had liked to look out at San Francisco Bay from their condo. She would comment on the color of the water, the state of the tide, the passing ships. She had never said where she wanted to be buried, but the currents from two great rivers draining inland California would take her out through the Golden Gate, into the Pacific, and off around the world. Helen always did like the thought of traveling. And already the gray murk just below the water’s surface was on its way toward Alcatraz.

“Good-bye, Sis,” Wells whispered now.

“Amen,” said Angela at her side.

* * *

Knock, knock,
came the thought in Instant Memory. And that was odd, because the IM function was where you put things you wanted to remember on a specified time delay—not a place in your cortical array that originated new thoughts and ideas. But Anastasia Praxis smiled, because she knew just one other person who had found a way to bypass the IM program’s cul-de-sac and turn it into a private messaging system.

The smile came at an awkward time, however, because Anastasia—who generally preferred her nickname, “Stacy”—was talking real-time and face-space with the Supreme Leader of the Greater Jamestown City Council. The council wanted to renegotiate the Praxis Family Association’s access to the Tuolumne River, which took part of its drainage from Cherry Creek on Praxis land. Traditionally, the PFA claimed 2,200 miner’s inches. That was the old Gold Rush unit of flow, based on a one-inch hole in a flume or conduit. In those terms, the family’s share of the river worked out to about twenty thousand gallons per minute for the Association’s use in downstream irrigation. The Supreme Leader wanted to clean up his bookkeeping by rounding the traditional measure of 9.34325332319 gallons to the inch down to a much simpler “nine,” and thereby deprive the family of some 6,865.0064 gallons per minute. And Stacy, as the family’s primary negotiator of such treaties and agreements, was having none of it.

She made a small, circular motion with her fingertip on the stud under the skin behind her left ear. That broke her wide-field reception through the family’s network of high-altitude Floaters and silenced the knock-knock joke that was to follow. It also reverted her cortical array to internal resources and limited her to short-range communication for the moment. But short-range was all she needed for what she had to do here.

Stacy glanced over her shoulder at the two skeletal Rovers standing at half-power but full-sensory mode against the walnut-paneled back wall of the Council Chamber. She then pointedly glanced at the two human enforcers flanking the Supreme Leader. The Rovers resembled an unarmed, stripped-down chassis, standing splay-footed and knock-kneed. Their ruby eyes glowed softly in their steel skulls—cartoon bogeymen from an old horror movie, which was by design. The Supreme Leader’s beefy human guards wore military fatigues, old-style ALICE belts lumpy with canvas pouches, serrated combat knives, and canteens. Each man carried an antique M4 carbine with what had to be, in their two magazines together, the last sixty rounds of 5.56x45mm NATO ammunition left in the county. Pathetic.

“I’m thirsty,” she said aloud, and gave the appropriate internal commands.

The Rover on her left danced silently across the room, without even the click of metal on metal. The machine lifted the canteen from the belt of the man to the Supreme Leader’s right, uncapped it with a flick of steel fingers, pivoted, and handed it to her. Except the Rover did all this in half a second, just a blur of silvery light. Stacy was barely able to get her hand out in time to receive the canteen, even though she was expecting it. The whole sequence made for quite a show.

She tipped its mouth toward the Supreme Leader and took a sip.

“Hey, that’s my—” the man on the right started to say.

“Hmm—whiskey!” Stacy finished for him.

The Supreme Leader winced visibly.

“We make those, you know,” Stacy said, glancing back at the Rover, which once again stood by the wall. “To order. As many as we need.”

“You’re trying to impress me,” the Supreme Leader said sourly.

“And I’m doing a good job of it, ain’t I?” Stacy said with a smile. “The Praxis family is prepared to be a good friend—or a bad enemy. Your choice. But since you guard the western perimeter of our forest lands, we’d prefer it be the friendly thing. So why don’t we leave that point-three-four-three-something of a gallon in the agreement and let the computers do the accounting, hey? In the
friendly
way?”

The Supreme Leader nodded unhappily.

“It’s always fun coming up here,” Stacy said, rising from her chair. “Clean air. Nice trees. You people sure are lucky.”

As she walked out of the Council Chamber, the two Rovers dropped to all fours and followed her like steel dogs. Once she reached the street and her parked HUMV-IX, she clicked on her Floater feed. The IM function pinged a moment later with its persistent thought,
Knock, knock.

Who’s there?

Little old lady …

Little old lady who?

I didn’t know you could yodel!
And the funny thing was, the old joke worked even in the echo chamber of her mind.