Bishops. I was the only one left whod actually lived here before the war. Id been away on a visit when it came. Afterward, my Aunt and Uncle Bishop from Birmingham came down to take over the old family propertyto save it from being homesteaded on, under the new Federal Reconstruction Acts. Theyd taken me in, and Id thought of them as Mom and Dad. Wed all had the Bishop name, after all. So I was a Bishop, one of the few natives whod made it through the bombing and nuclear autumn and all. Peopled point me out as almost a freak, a real native, wow.
Yes, maam, I said neutrally.
Thought so.
Youre?
Susan McKenzie.
Ah.
We had done the ritual, so now we could talk. Yet some memory stirred.
Something bout you She squinted in the glaring sunlight. She probably wasnt all that old, in her late fifties, maybe. Anybody whod caught some radiation looked aged a bit beyond their years. Or maybe it was just the unending weight of hardship and loss theyd carried.
Seems like I knew you before the war, she said. I strictly believe I saw you.
I was up north then, a hundred miles from here. Didnt come back until months later.
Sod I.
Some relatives brought me down, and we found out whatd happened to Fairhope.
She squinted at me again, and then a startled look spread across her leathery face. My Lord! Were they lookin for that big computer center, the DataComm it was?
I frowned. Well, maybeI dont remember too well.
Johnny. Youre Johnny!
Yes, maam, John Bishop. I didnt like the little-boy ending on my name, but people around here couldnt forget it.
Im Susan! The one went with you! I had the codes for DataComm, remember?
Whyyes. Slow clearing of ancient, foggy images. You were hiding in that centerwhere we found you.
Yes! I had Gene in the T-Isolate.
Gene That awful time had been stamped so strongly in me that Id blocked off many memories, muting the horror. Now it came flooding back.
I saved him, all right! Yessir. We got married, I had my children.
Tentatively, she reached out a weathered hand, and I touched it. A lump suddenly blocked my throat, and my vision blurred. Somehow, all those years had passed and Id never thought to look up any of those peopleTurkey, Angel, Bud, Mr. Ackerman. Just too painful, I guess. And a little boy making his way in a tough world, without his parents, doesnt look back a whole lot.
We grasped hands. I think I mightve seen you once, actuly. At a fish fry down at Point Clear. You and some boys was playing with the netsit was just after the fishing came back real good, those Roussin germsd wore off. Gene went down to shoo you away from the boats. I was cleaning flounder, and I thought then, maybe you were the one. But somehow when I saw your face at a distance, I couldnt go up to you and say anything. You was skipping around, so happy, laughing and all. I couldnt bring those bad times back.
II understand.
Gene died two year ago, she said simply.
Im sorry.
We had our time together, she said, forcing a smile.
Remember how we And then I recalled where I was, what was coming. Mrs. McKenzie, theres not long before the last bus.
Im waiting for Buck.
Where is he?
He run off in the woods, chasing something.
I worked by backpack straps around my shoulders. They creaked in the quiet.
There wasnt much time left. Pretty soon now it would start. I knew the sequence, because I did maintenance engineering and retrofit on US3s modular mirrors.
One of the big reflectors would focus sunlight on a rechargeable tube of gas. That would excite the molecules. A small triggering beam would start the lasing going, the excited molecules cascading down together from one preferentially occupied quantum state to a lower state. A traveling wave swept down the tube, jarring loose more photons. They all added together in phase, so when the light waves hit the far end of the hundred-meter tube, it was a sword, a gouging lance that could cut through air and clouds. And this time, it wouldnt strike an array of layered solid-state collectors outside New Orleans, providing clean electricity. It would carve a swath twenty meters wide through the trees and fields of southern Alabama. A little demonstration, the Confeds said.
The buslook, Ill carry that suitcase for you.
I can manage. She peered off into the distance, and I saw she was tired, tired beyond knowing it. Ill wait for Buck.
Leave him, Mrs. McKenzie.
I dont need that blessed bus.
Why not?
My children drove off to Mobile with their families. Theyre coming back to get me.
My insteted radioI gestured at my radiosays the roads to Mobile are jammed up. You cant count on them.
They said so.
The Confed deadline
I tole em Id try to walk to the main road. Got tired, is all. Theyll know Im back in here.
Just the same
Im all right, dont you mind. Theyre good children, grateful for all Ive gone and done for them. Theyll be back.
Come with me to the bus. Its not far.
Not without Buck. Hes all the company I got these days. She smiled, blinking.
I wiped sweat from my brow and studied the pines. There were a lot of places for a dog to be. The land here was flat and barely above sea level. I had come to camp and rest, rowing skiffs up the Fish River, looking for places Id been when I was a teenager and my mom had rented boats from a rambling old fishermans house. I had turned off my radio, to get away from things. The big, mysterious island I remembered and called Treasure Island, smack in the middle of the river, was now a soggy stand of trees in a bog. The big storm a year back had swept it away.
Id been sleeping in the open on the shore near there when the chopper woke me up, blaring. The Confeds had given twelve hours warning, the recording said.
Theyd picked this sparsely populated area for their little demonstration. People had been moving back in ever since the biothreat was cleaned out, but there still werent many. Id liked that when I was growing up. Open woods. Thats why I came back every chance I got.
I shouldve guessed something was coming. The Confeds were about evenly matched with the whole rest of the planet now, at least in high-tech weaponry. Defense held all the cards. The big mirrors were modular and could fold up fast, making a small target. They could incinerate anything launched against them, too.
But the U.N. kept talking like the Confeds were just another nation-state or something. Nobody down here understood that the people up there thought of Earth itself as the real problemeaten up with age-old rivalries and hate, still holding onto dirty weapons that murdered whole populations, carrying around in their heads all the rotten baggage of the past. To listen to them, youd think theyd learned nothing from the war. Already they were forgetting that it was the orbital defenses that had saved the biosphere itself, and the satellite communities that knit together the mammoth rescue efforts of the decade after. Without the antivirals developed and grown in huge zero-g vats, lots of us wouldve caught one of the poxes drifting through the population. People just forget. Nations, too.
Wheres Buck? I said decisively.
Hethat way. A wave of the hand.
I wrestled my backpack down, feeling the stab from my shoulderand suddenly remembered the thunk of that steel knocking me down, back then. So long ago. And me, still carrying an ache from it that woke whenever a cold snap came on. The past was still alive.
I trotted into the short pines, over creeper grass. Flies jumped where my boots struck. The white sand made a skree sound as my boots skated over it. I remembered how Id first heard that sound, wearing slick-soled tennis shoes, and how pleased Id been at university when I learned how the acoustics of it worked.
Buck!
A flash of brown over to the left. I ran through a thick stand of pine, and the dog yelped and took off, dodging under a blackleaf bush. I called again. Buck didnt even slow down. I skirted left. He went into some oak scrub, barking, having a great time of it, and I could hear him getting tangled in it and then shaking free and out of the other side. Long gone.
When I got back to Mrs. McKenzie, she didnt seem to notice me. I cant catch him.
Knew you wouldnt. She grinned at me, showing brown teeth. Bucks a fast one.
Call him.
She did. Nothing. Must of run off.
There isnt time
Im not leaving without ole Buck. Times I was alone down on the river after Gene died, and the water would come up under the house. Buck was the only company I had. Only soul I saw for five weeks in that big blow we had.
A low whine from afar. I think thats the bus, I said.
She cocked her head. Might be.
Come on. Ill carry your suitcase.
She crossed her arms. My children will be by for me. I tole them to look for me along in here.
They might not make it.
Theyre loyal children.
Mrs. McKenzie, I cant wait for you to be reasonable. I picked up my backpack and brushed some red ants off the straps.
You Bishops was always reasonable, she said levelly. You work up there, dont you?
Ah, sometimes.
You goin back, after they do what theyre doin here?
I might. Even if I owed her something for what she did long ago, damned if I was going to be cowed.
Theyre attacking the United States.
And spots in Bavaria, the Urals, South Africa, Brazil
Cause we dont trust em! They think they can push the United States aroun just as they please And she went on with all the clichés heard daily from earthbound media. How the Confeds wanted to run the world and they were dupes of the Russians, and how surrendering national sovereignty to a bunch of self-appointed overlords was an affront to our dignity, and so on.
True, some of itthe Confeds werent saints. But they were the only power that thought in truly global terms, couldnt not think that way. They could stop ICBMs and punch through the atmosphere to attack any offensive capability on the groundthats what this demonstration was to show. Id heard Confeds argue that this was the only way to break the diplomatic log-jamdo something. I had my doubts. But times were changing, that was sure, and my generation didnt think the way the prewar people did.
well never be ruled by some outside
Mrs. McKenzie, theres the bus! Listen!
The turbo whirred far around the bend, slowing for the stop.
Her face softened as she gazed at me, as if recalling memories. Thats all right, boy. You go along, now.
I saw that she wouldnt be coaxed or even forced down that last bend. She had gone as far as she was going to, and the world would have to come the rest of the distance itself.
Up ahead, the bus driver was probably behind schedule for this last pickup. He was going to be irritated and more than a little scared. The Confeds would be right on time, he knew that.
I ran. My feet plowed through the deep, soft sand. Right away I could tell I was more tired than Id thought and the heat had taken some strength out of me. I went about two hundred meters along the gradual bend, was nearly within view of the bus, when I heard it start up with a rumble. I tasted salty sweat, and it felt like the whole damned planet was dragging at my feet, holding me down. The driver raced the engine, in a hurry.
He had to come toward me as he swung out onto Route 80 on the way back to Mobile. Maybe I could reach the intersection in time for him to see me. So I put my head down and plunged forward.
But there was the woman back there. To get to her, the driver would have to take the bus down that rutted, sandy road and risk getting stuck. With people on the bus yelling at him. All that to get the old woman with the grateful children. She didnt seem to understand that there were ungrateful children in the skies nowshe didnt seem to understand much of what was going onand suddenly I wasnt sure I did, either.
But I kept on.
Gregory Benford
A professor of physics at the University of California in Irvine, Gregory Benford is regarded as one of science fictions killer Bs for the award-winning novels and short fiction he has written since 1965. He is considered one of the preeminent modern writers of hard science fiction for such novels as Eater, which works cutting-edge astronomy into its story of mankinds first contact with aliens in the twenty-first century. However, Benford has also been praised for his explorations of humanist themes, notably in his Galactic Center sextet of novels of human-alien contact and human-machine interface comprised of In the Ocean of Night, Across the Sea of Suns, The Stars in Shroud, Great Sky River, Tides of Light, and Furious Gulf. His short fiction has been collected in In Alien Flesh. He is the author of Foundations Fear, a novel set in Isaac Asimovs Foundation series; has collaborated on Beyond the Fall of Night, a sequel to Arthur C. Clarkes Against the Fall of Night; has written a medical thriller, Chiller, under the pseudonym Sterling Blake; and has written a popular science book, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia. His work as an anthologist includes Nuclear War, the alternate history compilation Hitler Victorious, and four volumes in the What Might Have Been series. The publication of his novel The Martian Race, about the first manned mission to the Red Planet, was timed to coincide with the 1999 touchdown of the Mars polar lander.
WOLF TIMEWalter Jon Williams
SPEAKERS IN THE HOSPITAL ceiling chimed a series of low, whispery, synthesized tones, tones that were scientifically proven to be relaxing. Reese looked down at the kid in the hospital bed and felt her insides twist.
The kid was named Steward, and hed just had a bullet removed that morning. In the last few days, mad with warrior zen and a suicidal concept of personal honor, hed gone kamikaze and blown up the whole network. Griffith was dead, Jordan was dead, Spassky was dead, and nobody had stopped Steward until everything in L.A. had collapsed entirely. He hadnt talked yet to the heat, but he would. Reese reached for her gun. Her insides were still twisting.