I looked over the elaborate Christmas display erected back there. I had to admit, the place looked like it was supposed to—I’d never seen a more perfectly traditional display in my life. The creche was amply supplied with fake animals—cows, horses, a donkey, pigs, sheep, goats, a few chickens, and the stereotypical Joseph and Mary and manger Jesus, the last complete with a cheery angelic glow. Shepherds and wisemen rounded things out. Also on display was a classic Santa Claus, with a bag full of toys and two elves joining him on the sleigh with the customary eight reindeer poised to leap into the sky. Between the two was a splendidly trimmed Christmas tree, done with remarkable taste—all bright shiny ornaments and tinsel, and just enough strings of solid white lights to fill completely without looking crowded. Holly and ivy and white candles filled out the room, and there was a roaring fire in the fireplace, and a tray of chestnuts at the ready.
I tried to ignore the sentimental feelings welling up inside of me, but it wasn’t easy. These folks knew how to decorate. I kept my mind focused by trying to find flaws in the display. After some minutes, I decided the Christmas tree was leaning just a little bit to the left, but that was the only fault I could find.
I was trying so hard not to get sentimental because it would lead me down a bitter string of memories—of parents divorced when I was young, of a cocaine-addicted mother and an abusive father, and me ultimately sent to a boys’ home at the age of six. Christmas had always been the worst for me. Though the men and women at the—hell, let’s just call it the orphanage—did what they could, presents donated by the local churches just couldn’t match up with the cool stuff the other guys brought to school with them after the holidays.
Silly? Yes. Petty? Yes. But I’d been well into my twenties before I was able to shake off the bitterness of my youth, and every lonely Christmas still found me particularly vulnerable.
“Hey! Morgan? Are you here?” The call came from around the corner back by the entrance. I went back that way and saw a stocky woman who would have looked like the Santa on the sleigh if she’d had a beard.
“Right here. And you are…?”
“Governor Wood.” Oops. “Joe” was actually “Jo.” “Sorry I’m late,” she said, “but one of my horses threw a shoe on the way over, so I had to cut her loose and let her limp home. And a one-horsepower sleigh doesn’t go so fast through unplowed snow.”
“You came in a sleigh?”
“This is Currier and Ives, remember?”
“But time is critical—” I began.
“Sonny, I would have been here to greet you upon your arrival if things had gone right. Anything with a motor can break down, too.”
I had to admit she was right about that, but how the hell did she expect us to search much of the area in a damn sleigh? “OK, fine. You know what we’re up against?”
“Sure. A mini-nuke with variable range yield, and we’ll have to assume it’s set to go off at the high end. At twelve KT that means everyone within a mile radius of where the bomb is will be in for a hell of a bang. Since it’s a pure fusion device, we don’t have to worry about radiation, and the snow will probably help put out whatever fires are lit outside of the range of blast damage. Still, all the way around we’re better off if we find the thing. Where could it be?”
She reeled off that statement almost too fast for me to follow. I guess I’d been expecting the Governor of Currier and Ives to be some backward, ignorant redneck or something, and certainly a man, but Jo Wood was far from fitting my stereotype.
“Now, I don’t want to tell you your job, you being from the System Patrol and all, but as I see it, assuming old Manny actually came to this spot and not another, he couldn’t have gotten more than a few miles from here before someone would have seen him, so that limits the area we have to search. As far as that goes, he used to live two miles down the road, so that might be the best place for us to check first.”
“Old ‘Manny’?” I asked.
“Sure. The son-of-a-bitch, pardon my French, used to live in Currier and Ives. We threw him out four years ago. I personally saw him off right from this terminal.”
“Why was he sent away?”
“ ‘Banished’ is what we call it. He was caught screwing a fifteen-year-old girl.”
“Rape?”
“Technically yes. We could have hung him at the time. No, she gave her consent, but the age for that is sixteen, and then only legal if you get married first.”
“But the age of consent everywhere else in the whole Solar Union is fourteen,” I pointed out.
“But not here. That’s why we sent him out to you folks. Under the circumstances I think we were lenient.”
“But she gave her consent—”
“Yeah, and she looked older than her age, too. So what? Even if she didn’t know better, he was supposed to. He knew what the penalty was if he got caught, and he chose to ignore it. Anyone that reckless and stupid isn’t someone we wanted to have around.”
“But—” I started again, then realized I was on my third “but” and shut up. I wasn’t here to argue with these people about how they lived their lives. “So you think maybe he would have left the bomb at his old house?”
“No. I think he would have just heaved it from the platform out somewhere into the deep snow, if he could do it when no one was looking. But if he did that, we’re never going to find it anyway. Those suckers are stealthed, so a radar scan couldn’t distinguish it from all the rocks out there under the snow.”
That was enough for me. I had to know: “How do you know so much about these little nukes?”
By this time we were on the way to the sleigh. I’d brought a coat from the High Command stores, so I was warm enough, but on the walk through the snow I realized I’d need some other footwear. “I wasn’t always a governor, you know,” Jo said. “I used to design weapons for the Patrol, as a matter of fact.” Then she fixed me with a stare. “You were expecting a backwoods, know-nothing hick, weren’t you? That’s all right. I forgive you. And just to show there’s no hard feelings, I’m even going to give a greenhorn like you my husband’s best pair of boots to wear.”
The sleigh ride was incredibly smooth, or at least it struck me that way. I’m used to flying everywhere, so I guess I’d expected the ride to be bumpy, but we glided along with our one-horsepower (her name was Nellie Sue) motor with barely a jostle.
But it was damn cold.
“Starting to shiver, Jake?” Jo asked after we’d been on our way only a couple of minutes.
“It’s the wet feet,” I said. That, and being used to a controlled environment.
She smiled and then surprised me thoroughly by reaching under the front board, pulling out a small control box, and suddenly the seat was enveloped by a Dykstra shield windscreen bubble and warm air was pouring out from beneath my feet. “I don’t get it,” I said. “This sleigh has a heater? That isn’t authentic.”
“So what? Currier and Ives is supposed to look authentic, but we’re not a bunch of ascetics. We like the pace of sleigh travel in the winter, but who wants to sit in the cold? We like the look and the feel and the heart of the old ways, but it has to be within reason.”
I was beginning to understand how badly I’d misjudged this place. Jo certainly wasn’t a nut. Maybe they had some odd laws, and archaic ways of looking at things, but it was beginning to look like they really could turn the clock back. At least in some ways. At least for a little while.
Until someone decided to blow the place up.
Jo was pointing. “See that homestead over there—that yellow house? It’s copied from a classic old Currier and Ives print. But all of the wood in that house is thoroughly treated. It’s not going to suffer from termites or dry rot.”