She slid out the map table from under the big desk; what was on it was not a map, but her version of a critical path chart, almost three feet by six feet across. No one saw the whole chart except herself, and only half a dozen trusted senior agents and analysts even knew it existed.
At the bottom was the word DONE, dated January 20, 2027; that and a few other Constitutionally fixed dates were the only things written directly on the chart itself. The rest was a tangle of pinned-on index cards, colored with stripes of watercolor and heavily scribbled and rescribbled in India ink, with the stripes linked by strands of cotton yarn of the same color. The software of 1950 melded with the hardware of 1850, she thought, in hopes of getting us to 2050.
Paths where bad things were developing were in yellow; paths where necessary good things had to happen were in green; the places where they crossed were underlaid with pieces of red construction paper, and the red construction paper sheets were sometimes linked in red thread. The branching paths spread upward from DONE like a messy, branching tree until the tips of the branches—representing today—were a tangle of yarn and cards, a few green, more red, most yellow.
She studied the chart and reminded herself of a few issues for today: whether to promote the tribes from minor to major nuisance (but General Grayson’s expedition against them, down the Youghiogheny, seemed to show that they could be overcome with some effort); whether the rapidly expanding Post Raptural Church was a force for stability, a force for chaos, or just a force; whether the peace she’d brokered between the Provisional Constitutional Government in Olympia, Washington, and the Temporary National Government in Athens, Georgia, was deepening and taking root, or tearing and weakening as the Provis and Tempers alike enacted mostly symbolic policies that seemed mainly intended to irritate each other.
The green strip that said EMERGENCE OF A UNIONIST, MODERATE CENTRALIST CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT still did not reach back to the present day. Every reasonable candidate was needed elsewhere, like Quattro Larsen, or politically tainted to some important faction, like President Weisbrod of the Provis or Natcon Nguyen-Peters of the Tempers. There were some unknowns she could push her propaganda people to promote, but no very promising ones. Her best-qualified candidate, General Lyndon Phat, had pissed off the Provis almost as much as the Tempers who now held him under house arrest in Athens.
Well. Gloomy picture established, time to see how it changed. She reached for her inbox.
Arnie had fired up the EMP-trap again—new green card for the DEFEAT MOON GUN pathway. That was good, but better still it meant WTRC was back on the air, and she could have something to listen to this morning.
She pulled her headphones down from the peg and flipped on the grounding and antenna switches. Nothing.
The old LED Christmas tree bulb, which acted as the crystal, looked fine through the clear glass of the protecting Coke bottle, but inside the coil enclosure the capacitor contacts were crusted white. The signal from WTRC, twenty times the power of the big old Mexican “outlaw” stations, had induced enough current in the coil to grow nanoswarm overnight. Wrapping her hand in a dry towel, she laid the metal of a wooden-handled barbecue spatula across the contacts, discharging the capacitor with a bang like a pistol shot, then cleaned the poles and contacts with sandpaper and lye.
Back in her chair—If I get any bigger I’ll either need a full-time assistant or a tugboat—she tuned in WTRC immediately. She smiled to hear Elwood Debourrie, who played easy-on-older-ears coustajam with lyrics that were militantly anti-Daybreak. If putting that message in their kind of music doesn’t provoke them, I guess we’ll have to put on a game show called “Who Wants to Electrocute a Bunny?”
The music so improved her mood that she took the next note off the top of her inbox with near optimism, till she saw:
Emergency Channel Listening Post Pueblo/RRC.
Header. Received At 10:36 PM MST on 7-9-25, CRYP: Clr. SIG: TCAR-NW-9.
Shit, TCAR—Transcontinental Air Route. Flight NW 9, the one that left Pueblo headed northwest on the 9th of the month.
Bambi Castro.
And pilots only radioed if there was trouble, such as:
forced off rte @ BkC BRK
no fuel BRK
safe ldng @ US 95 1/2 mi N of ID mi mkr 178 BRK
Plane OK BRK
Me OK BRK
RqInst BRK
B Castro
EOM
“Request instructions,” Heather said aloud. “How about, come home safe with the plane?”
As if to mirror her mood, the radio program changed from Elwood Debourrie to A Hundred Circling Camps, a Civil War divided-family drama which Arnie had packed so full of symbols of national unity that sometimes after listening, Heather felt John Wilkes Booth had been unfairly maligned.
At least Bambi said she and the plane were okay. Maybe Larry Mensche was somewhere nearby and could be put on the job? Last she’d known, her most effective and least obedient agent had been near Ontario, Oregon, still looking for his daughter Debbie, who had escaped from the Oregon women’s prison at Coffee Creek the day after Daybreak hit, headed into what had quickly become tribal territory. I wish Larry would check in more often.
At the Main Street messenger stand, half a dozen teenagers surrounded a pot of hot soup on a hibachi. “Ration coupon, four meals, at the main kitchen, to get this to Outgoing Crypto,” Heather told Patrick, her personal bolt of lightning.
He was deep-brown skinned, all bony legs, gangly arms, appetite, and energy—the delight of some high school track coach, pre-Daybreak. His father had been on occupation duty in Tehran when Daybreak hit, and his mother had started out for her job in Colorado Springs on October 29, and never returned; that thirty-five miles of I-25 was now a litter of abandoned cars and decaying bodies.
She handed the teenager the folded message, which he dropped into the pouch around his neck, and the ration coupon, which he tucked into a leather wallet and dropped into his pocket. Whooping “The mail must go through!” (Orphans Preferred, Arnie’s Pony Express radio drama to make national unity cool for kids, had seemingly taught every kid in the United States that phrase) Patrick shot off, ragged shirt tail flapping over his baggy shorts, hard-soled moccasins slapping pavement.
Man, I wish I could still run. Heather’s next stop was Dr. MaryBeth Abrams, half a mile away; yet another reminder of how different her body was now. Oh, well, forward waddle.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ONTARIO, OREGON. 6:15 AM PST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.
Larry Mensche got a radiogram at the first real breakfast he’d had in three weeks, which followed the first real hot bath and the first real night sleeping in clean sheets. It canceled his first chance to do laundry and his first full day of meals eaten at a table.
He was grateful that the radio staff in Ontario had not checked to see if he was in the Reconstructed Radisson Ontario, as the place styled itself, last night when the message from Bambi came in; he couldn’t have done anything effective till this morning anyway.