I remember you. That’s about all I can do right now.
Now that he was used to Taylor’s shocking appearance, the corpse was almost company, someone to talk to, anyway, and what politician doesn’t always need that?
Taylor, he thought, I hiked and camped and visited the back country all over the planet when I was younger, and I was the most traveled vice president in history, and I had more than enough experience so that I should have been able to see what these assholes were up to, but I just didn’t, and look what it’s done to you, buddy. I sure as hell wish I could promise I’d avenge you, but I don’t think that’s in the cards.
I guess I’ll be making my apology in person pretty soon, anyway.
ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. JUST WEST OF SANTA ROSA ISLAND, ABOUT FIFTY MILES FROM THE CALIFORNIA MAINLAND. A LITTLE BEFORE 6:00 A.M. PST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
Grady Barbour wasn’t used to being up this early, though he was sometimes up this late; and he wasn’t at all used to being sober when he was up this late. But here he was, three days without a drink because Daybreak mattered, and after a long, lingering morning twilight, the sun was finally looking like it might decide to come up. That would bring on the land breeze that would make the rest of the day’s sail down the California coast a lot easier; they’d had to use the engine to get out here early this morning, and somehow that seemed wrong, just as it seemed entirely appropriate that Mad Caprice was a wooden boat that he’d re-rigged with hemp.
It was cold, but he had a nice big lidded mug filled with coffee, and the wind was light but steady. He kept a hand on the wheel, drank the coffee, and thought about Daybreak and what life together with Tracy would be like after this.
Tracy was taking her turn at launching, working as clean as possible because their electronics needed to work for a couple more weeks.
Normally, just watching Tracy could get him horny; to Grady, she pretty much defined “trophy wife.” But in the baggy jacket, rubber gloves, hairnet, and rubber boots, she didn’t look like much just now. Also, he was feeling uncharacteristically clearheaded because they’d agreed not to drink until Daybreak was actually delivered.
Yet he didn’t feel grumpy, tired, or sad at all, as he usually would, cold sober and up too early. With just enough breeze to fill the sails, the day promised to be warm but not hot, and they were on their way to a new world.
Tracy scooped out a cup of the little gelatin capsules and dumped them into a flaccid black balloon, as big as her own torso. Really, the longest and hardest part of the job had been building the glove box that let them load the gelatin capsules without spreading any of the various nanoswarm and tailored biotes around, but Grady had always been good with his hands. Tracy was always saying that he looked like a sculptor, with his craggy, weather- and gin-beaten features.
Tracy poured a cup of seawater into the balloon, enough to get the biotes going once the sun warmed it. She squirted the sealant on the surface inside the mouth of the balloon, then fitted it over the special adapter built by a Daybreaker in Seattle, sort of a friendly hippie machinist who usually made stuff for drug labs. She cranked down the gasket, opened the valve to the cylinder of welding hydrogen, and filled the balloon to its full two-meter diameter, bigger across than she was tall, enough to lift the water and capsules plus itself. She tightened the tie around the neck and released the adapter, letting the balloon rise away from the bow, carried well downwind before it was at mast height. It climbed slowly but steadily.
Grady visualized the rest of the story; in an hour or so, the seawater would dissolve a capsule containing a biote that would begin to grow and eat the balloon; while that continued, the other capsules would dissolve, leaving a gray, active breeding sludge of mixed nanoswarm and biotes, floating above the Big System inland, invisible to radar, and drifting on the breeze.
Sometime between two and five hours later, depending on whether the sun was out and how well each particular strain of biotes did, the balloon would rupture. Probably it would happen at the bottom of the puddled seawater, where exposure had been greatest. Then the escaping hydrogen would spray the solution and nanospawn into the air as the balloon whipped madly around, and a rain of ending would fall gently on the Big System below, perhaps in drips and spots across several square miles. Two hours later, the balloon itself would be gooey sludge on the ground somewhere—and another source of infection.
“Yeee-hah!” he yelled, as the balloon rose higher and caught the bright morning sun.
“Thank you for your applause,” Tracy said. “That was sixty-seven seconds, but I bet I can get it under forty before the day is out. Which will leave me the world record holder since we’ll never need to do this again.”
“I’ll brag endlessly of your record,” he said. “Just one of many things to brag about.”
She came back and insisted on a kiss before getting back to work, and that was lovely too. Daybreak was honestly the best idea Grady had ever encountered. Even being up in the morning sober would be all right if he had to do more of it, which he might, because they had already discussed that until things settled down after Daybreak, they might have to do some fishing or cargo-hauling to conceal the existence of the half ton of gold beneath the false lowest deck.
Contemplating a world where he had nothing to complain about, he grinned, and shouted, “Yeee-hah!” again.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ALONG COLORADO STATE HIGHWAY 13. 7:10 A.M. MST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
The long, winding two-lane road that snaked up into and over the mountains into Wyoming was nearly empty and Jason drove through deep tunnels of evergreens, burst into sunny meadows, and descended around the edges of wide, sunny valleys.
This road would become a track for wagons, then just a trail with the occasional traveler with a leather or canvas (never nylon again!) pack. Elk would graze on whatever popped up between the old cracked asphalt. The neat metal buildings of the ranches would fall into rusty piles. Stupid ranch houses, made of bricks hauled up here from a thousand miles away, would be dens of bears and roosts of crows. Great idea, too late to be a poem, probably. Maybe after.
Jason had taken this job because someone had to lay down the Daybreak seeds in the far back country so that, if the Big System tried to retreat from its deadly, miserable cities and spread its ecocidal madness to the clean wilderness, the nanoswarm and biotes would be here already, dug in and ready to stop the Big System from doing anything other than what it needed to do—stay in place, and die.
It was an honor to be trusted with such a vital assignment, when so many others were just out throwing biotes and nanoswarm any old place in the cities and along the highways. Besides, Jason admitted to himself, he had always loved driving in the mountains, especially in the fall, and this would probably be his last chance ever to do that.
He made his first stop in a broad meadow, about two miles across, at one of those solar-powered signs that talked to the satellites or the distant cell towers and displayed messages from the Highway Patroclass="underline" DRY & CLR THRU RIO BLANCO. During the winter it probably had more important things to say.
Nobody coming in either direction, not even a distant rooster-tail of autumn dust. He pulled on his gloves, leaving the engine running despite the added pollution and waste of gas, taking no more chances than he had to with his starter.
Jason reached in among the egg-packing cardboard and pulled out an object about the size and shape of an egg, the color of polished obsidian with a thick coating of clear varnish, except for one flat side, where a ring of white plastic surrounded a silvery spot the size of his thumbprint. From the toolbox in the back, he pulled out a caulking gun loaded with Liquid Nails, and applied a neat ribbon of the brownish glue to the white plastic, careful not to lap over onto the metal. He didn’t need the stepladder; the sign wasn’t much taller than he was.