Jules sighed at the petty, meaningless nature of it all.
One would’ve thought that people could have put aside all the silly wretchedness and just pulled together, but no. They couldn’t. Her father would have said it simply wasn’t in their nature. He was an old villain, there was no denying that, but in his own strange way he had a good heart, and he never stole from anyone who couldn’t afford it. There was even a spark of noblesse oblige in him, and he made sure that all of his children were raised to think of themselves as no better than anyone else. Because, as he so often told her, ‘In the end, Julianne, we’re all just as bad as each other.’
‘Miss Jules?’
Lee’s voice in her ear dragged her out of these reveries.
‘It is a warship, Miss Jules. On the radio. From New Zealand.’
She excused herself with a brief hand on Shah’s arm, and turned and left the funeral scene, secretly glad not to have to witness the dumping of the bodies into the deep.
‘He wishes to speak with our captain,’ said Lee, who had contented himself with just a few private words over the bodies of his comrades before everyone came together for the ceremony.
Our captain, thought Jules. How risible. ‘What does he want?’ she asked.
‘Oh, it is nothing bad. I have told him we have Uplifted Americans on board. He asks if we need assistance, and whether we will be berthing in Auckland or proceeding to Sydney.’
‘Okay, thanks, Mr Lee.’ She stopped before climbing the stairs up to the next deck. ‘What do you want to do, Lee, when we get there? They probably won’t let us keep this boat, you know. It’s not ours.’
Her one surviving friend shook his head sadly. ‘No. They will not, Miss Jules,’ he agreed.
‘And you can’t go home. Indonesia is a god-awful mess now.’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘So what will you do?’
He looked completely lost for the first time ever. ‘What will you do, Miss Jules?’ he asked in reply. ‘Maybe I come too.’
‘I don’t know either, Lee. These last few weeks, they’ve really taken it out of me. I don’t want to go home, I know that much. England looks nightmarish right now. A giant bloody jail, if you ask me, and not at all the sort of place for the likes of us.’
‘No, miss. Foreign Johnnies not welcome anymore.’
She started the long climb up towards the bridge, stopping just once to look back towards the stern and say her last goodbye. From here, against the vastness of the southern ocean, her little group of seafarers and survivors looked so vulnerable and sad. Like the last people on earth. But at least they were still alive.
Daddy would have been proud, she thought. He’d have been so proud of her, for bringing the ship and all of these people safely home, wherever that might turn out to be.
‘Don’t worry, Mr Lee,’ she said. ‘We’ll muddle through.’
ONE YEAR
The President of the United States was hunkered down over a small mountain of paperwork in the Oval Office of the newly christened Western White House. Of course, the office wasn’t oval-shaped at all, but he felt it important to retain a link with the past. Something to give people hope that they might be able to reclaim some of the advantages and even a fraction of the glory that the past had once gifted them as a nation.
He read the summation of the reports from the high-energy physics lab into the latest investigations of the Wave, but they all boiled down to the same thing: nobody knew shit.
He leaned back and rubbed at his eyes. His chief scientist and the National Security Advisor waited quietly on him, as they sat in the bright yellow armchairs arranged in front of his desk. He had no idea where the Governor of Washington had retrieved them from, just before he ‘gave up’ his accommodation for the needs of the federal government, but they were suitably hideous. A parting fuck-you of exquisite eloquence.
‘So, no change,’ said the President.
‘No.’
‘Not in the slightest, sir.’
‘Okay, thanks, guys. Send in the Secretary of State on your way out, would you? Thanks for your efforts anyway’
The two men excused themselves and departed.
The President gazed out over the gardens of the former Governor’s mansion. They had recovered well as the environment had returned to normal. Better than normal, actually. The total collapse of the world economy had given the planet a breather, but at a terrible cost. He’d actually heard that some of the deep green nutjobs in the all-powerful state legislature next door had been saying that, on balance, the Disappearance was a good thing.
Of course, they never said so on the record. They’d be lynched. But he didn’t doubt for a minute that some of them thought as much.
He tidied away the scientific reports and pulled over a tottering sheaf of folders dealing with the expatriate population. Most Americans still lived overseas, and tending to their needs and the demands of their host governments was about half of what he did nowadays. The Brits were looking for territorial concessions, pressuring him to give up US claims over the Antarctic oil fields. The Australian Prime Minister wanted him to visit to ‘discuss’ the future co-funding arrangements of the Pacific Fleet.
A dull pain was growing behind his left eye when his personal secretary burst into the office.
‘Mr President! Mr President! You have to come, sir. Right away!’
‘What’s up?’ he asked, suddenly worried.
Just then two secret service agents bustled past her into the room and urgently requested he come with them immediately.
‘No, goddamn it, I won’t. What the hell is going on?’
‘We need to get you away from here, Mr President,’ one of the men repeated. ‘We’ll explain on the way, sir.’
‘Oh no you don’t.’ President James Kipper jumped up from his desk. ‘I’m not going anywhere with anyone until you tell me exactly what’s happening, right now.’
‘It’s the Wave, sir,’ cried Ronnie. ‘It’s gone.’