The crew’ sat in the wheelhouse, talking very little, listening to the buzz and crackle of the radio. The local had devised a crude code, but under pressure of combat the militia leaders were reporting their predicaments in clear. After listening for a while, Iinar got up.
“I am too worried. I must go to see Sam.”
“You’re not likely to find him,” said Kirstie. “He’ll probably be with the local executive, wherever they are. The wrong side of the soldiers, anyway.”
“I will go at least to his house. It is not so far. If he is not there, I come right back.”
As Einar stepped onto the dock, the popping of distant gunfire sounded clearly.
“What happens if we lose?” Morrie asked Don.
“God, I don’t know. Run like hell back to Vancouver, I guess. Or to some surviving local. But I’d be damned angry, after we’ve got this far.”
“Personally, after what I’ve seen of California so far, I’ll be damn glad to be home again. This is a scary place.”
“Not as scary as it’ll be if the army wins,” Kirstie said.
The radio let them follow the soldiers’ assault on the campus and their sudden defeat by the Hunter’s Point militia. Don grabbed Kirstie, hugging her and yelling; Chief and Bill howled at each other, and Morrie slumped relievedly into a chair. In the trailer at the foot of the dock, people started cheering. The twilight turned to darkness, and men and women and children seemed to materialize out of the wreckage zone, laughing and shouting.
The Kennards and the rest of the crew joined in the celebrations, drinking neat gin with the harbourmaster and her family. The sky over Berkeley glowed from scattered fires; across the bay, more fires burned in San Francisco.
Einar appeared out of the darkness, his face grim in the candlelight of the harbourmasters office.
“What is it?” Don asked.
“I found Sam. He was shot dead on University Avenue.”
Kirstie snatched up an empty gin bottle and flung it through a window. The sound of shattering glass was loud.
With the civic centre burned to the ground, the local executive moved its offices to the high-rise student residences south of the campus; that at least made it easier for Don and Kirstie to commute to the endless meetings that followed the battle of Shattuck Square. Morrie, concerned with Squid rather than the politics of launching the salvage operation, shared Sam’s old house with Einar and walked down to the harbour every night.
No one knew for sure whether the Joint Chiefs’ coup had succeeded elsewhere; it had certainly failed in central and northern California. But the Bay Area locals were faced with worse problems than ever: most of the city had no electricity at all any more, and those portions that did got no more than thirty minutes a day. The crowded hospitals were turning away the typhoid and typhus cases, and something like cholera was beginning to appear. Antibiotics were unavailable. Yet somehow a kind of calm hung over the region.
Equipping Rachel for salvage and recruiting a team took longer than Don had expected. Week after week passed while he lobbied the local for one job or another to be done; often he ended up doing the job himself. Even when workers, raw materials and tools were all available, work went slowly: people were too hungry, and often too sick, to work quickly and efficiently.
After a long night of work on Squid, Don bicycled home, dead tired. It was just past five on a beautiful July morning, and the sun was not yet high enough to be a hazard to unprotected eyes; Don took his sunglasses off and enjoyed the natural colours of the city. Green was rare these days, and all the more precious. Even a patch of weeds gave pleasure through its rank vitality.
Kirstie was already home, after a night of committee meetings, and as tired as he was; they ate a silent meal of rice and onions, and prepared to go to bed.
A car horn honked outside, loudly and insistently. Surprised, Don went to the living-room window and looked out. A Ford van was parked in front of the house, the first car on Alvarado Street in weeks. The honking stopped, and out of the van stepped Dennis Chang and his wife Mei Ming.
‘“Gene power!” Dennis chuckled as they sat down in the kitchen. Mei Ming set up a two-burner camp stove and proceeded to boil water for tea. “We’ve come all the way from Palo Alto on home-brew methane, the same stuff we’ve got in the camp stove.”
“It’s weird to be driving,” Mei Ming said. “Sort of like the old days, except there’s no traffic and the roads are getting awful. And Dennis has forgotten how to drive.”
“Does this mean you’re ahead of schedule?” Don asked. “Just the reverse. I need more help and more time. We thought a live demonstration would encourage the locals to find some more people for us.”
“What’s the problem?” Kirstie asked.
“Viability,” Dennis snapped. “After a few dozen divisions, the cultures start to die off. I know what’s causing it, I think. It’s just going to take a few more months to confirm the cause and design a way around it.”
“How long?” asked Don.
“It’s almost August now… call it November. By Christmas we’ll have methane to burn. So to speak.”
“Damn.” Don shook his head. “We’ve been delayed by all sorts of problems, mainly transport. And God knows how much longer it’ll take to get us underway.”
Dennis nodded. “Tell us about it. We’re short of all kinds of things in Palo Alto — food, drugs, chemicals and fuel.”
“It’s worse than that,” Mei Ming said. “People are starving. Kids are getting sick and dying. People are killing themselves because they just can’t handle it.”
“Have you got any gangs?” asked Don.
“No, thank God,” Dennis answered. “We didn’t even have to deal with the feds the way you people did. Palo Alto’s pretty quiet. But Mei Ming’s right — people are committing suicide because they can’t cope. Whenever it gets me down, I tell myself it could be worse. We could be in San Diego with radiation sickness, or getting butchered in Monterey.”
“What’s happening in Monterey?” Don asked, surprised.
“Didn’t you hear? Apparently the army went crazy down there, after the great coup. Deserters were running around all over the place, shooting people, raping, the works. Now they’ve got some soldiers and civilians running things, but it doesn’t seem to be a whole lot better. They have mass executions all the time. The lucky ones get kicked out.”
“That’s daft,” Kirstie said. “We need every person we can get — even those bloody soldiers who tried to take us over, we’ve got them working. We’ve too much to do.”
Dennis shook his head, smiling cynically. “The Monterey mob are just looking after themselves. They don’t need a whole lot — hey, what’s that?”
The wind chime outside the back door was tinkling, without a breeze. The joists beneath the floorboards began to squeak. Then the whole house was vibrating, shuddering. The big kitchen window shattered in a cascade of glass fragments.
“It’s an earthquake,” Don said. “Quick — out the back door.”
They bolted out into the back yard and ran round the side of the house into the street. The ground jerked violently; Dennis staggered against the side of the van. A cypress swayed and fell across the driveway with a thump. A low, almost subsonic rumble filled the air; shouting, people began to pour into the street.