Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 (44 page)

Leslie Tjakamarra's not a big man. He's not a young one, either, though I wouldn't want to try to guess his age within five years on either side. He's got one of those wiry, weathered frames I associate with Alberta cattlemen and forest rangers, sienna skin paler, almost red, inside the creases beside glittering eyes and on the palms of big thick-nailed hands. He doesn't go at all with the conservative charcoal double-breasted suit, pinstriped with biolume, which clings to his sinewy shoulders in as professional an Old London tailoring job as I've seen. When London was evacuated, a lot of the refugees found themselves in Sydney, in Vancouver—and in Toronto.

God rest their souls.

He shoots me those sidelong glances like they do, trying to see through the glove to the metal hand, trying to see through the jumpsuit to the hero underneath.

I hate to disappoint him, but that hero had a hair appointment she never came back from. There's nobody under here but Jenny any more. “Well,” I say, to fill up his silence. “That'll make your job easier, then, won't it?”
What do you think of them apples, Dick?

Richard grins inside my head, bony hands spread wide and beating like a pigeon's wings through air. The man's brains would jam if you tied his hands down, I think. Of course, since he's intangible, that would be a trick. “That's got the air of a leading question about it.” He scrubs his palms on the thighs of his virtual corduroys and stuffs them into his pockets, leaning back, white shirt stretched taut across his narrow chest, his image in my wetware fading as he “steps back,” limiting his usage of my implants. “I'll get in on it when he talks to Ellie. No point in spoiling his chance to appreciate the view. I'll eavesdrop, if that's okay with you.”

It might be the same asinine impulse that makes English speakers talk loudly to foreigners that moves me to smile inwardly and stereotype Dr. Tjakamarra's very smooth, very educated accent into Australian Rules English.
No worries, mate. Fair dinkum.

Richard shoots me an amused look. “Ouch,” he says, and flickers out like an interrupted hologram.

Dr. Tjakamarra grins, broad lips uncovering tea-stained teeth like a mouth full of piano keys, and scratches his cheek with knuckles like an auto mechanic's. He wears his hair long, professorial, slicked back into hard steel-gray waves. “Or that much more difficult, if you prefer.” His voice is younger than the rest of him, young as that twinkle in his eye. “Talking isn't the only species of communication, after all.”

He presses the hand flat against the glass again, and peers between his own fingers as if trying to gauge the size of the ships that float out there, the way you might measure a tree on the horizon against your thumb to see how far you've left to walk. His gaze keeps sliding down to the dust-palled globe of the Earth, his lips pressed thin, his eyes impassive, giving nothing away.

“How bad is it in Sydney?” I press my steel hand to my lips, shoving the words back in with the leather of the glove, and cover my face as if entranced by the turning lights outside. Dr. Tjakamarra's head comes up like a startled deer's. I have to pretend I don't see it.

“We heard it,” he says, as his hand falls away from the glass. “We heard it in Sydney.” He steps back, turns to face me although I'm still giving him my shoulder. He cups both hands and brings them together with a crack that makes me jump.

“Is that really what it sounded like?”

“More or less—” A shrug. “We couldn't feel the tremors. The only fallout we got was dust, and who notices a little more dust? It wasn't all that loud, fifteen thousand kilometers away; I would have thought it'd be a sustained rumble, like the old footage of nuclear bombs. You ever hear of Coober Pedy?”

“Never.”
Person, place, or thing?

He answers it in the next sentence. “There were bomb tests near there. Over a hundred years ago, but I know people who knew people who were there. They said the newsreels lied, the sound effect they used was dubbed in later.”

I have no idea where he's going with this. I lean my right shoulder against the cold cold crystal, fold my left arm over my right arm, and tilt my head against the glass. I've got four or five inches on him. He laces his hands together in the small of his back and lifts his chin to look me in the eye, creases linking his thick, flat nose to the corners of his mouth.

Surreal fucking conversation, man.

“So what does a nuclear explosion sound like, Les?”

His lips twist. He holds his hands apart again, and swings them halfway but doesn't clap. “Like the biggest bloody gunshot you ever did hear.
Bang
. Or like a meteorite hitting the planet, fifteen thousand kilometers away.”

He's talking so he doesn't have to look. I recognize the glitter in his dark brown eyes, blacker even than mine. It took me too, the first time I looked down and saw all that gorgeous blue and white mottled with sick dull beige like cancer.

It takes all of us like that. All that I've seen so far, any way. “A bullet is a bullet is a bullet?”

He licks his lips, and looks carefully at the Benefactor ships and not the smeared globe behind them. “The shot heard ‘round the world. Isn't that what the Americans call the first shot fired in their Colonial revolt?”

“Sounds about right.”

“May something more than—dust—grow out of this one.” He sighs, rubbing the back of his left hand with his right-hand thumb. He reminds me of my grandfather Zeke Kirby, my mother's father, the full-blooded one; he's got that same boiled-leather twist of indestructibility, but my grandfather was an ironworker, not a professor. His mouth moves again, like he's trying to shape words that won't quite come out right, and finally he just shakes his head and looks down. “Big universe out there.”

“Bloody big,” I answer, a gentle tease, and he smiles out of the corner of his mouth, gives me a look out of the corners of his eyes, and I know we're going to be friends. “Come on,” I say. “That gets depressing if you stare at it. I'll take you to meet Ellie if you promise not to tell her the thing about the bomb.”

He falls into step beside me. I don't have to shorten my strides to let him keep up. “She lose somebody in the—in that?”

“We all lost somebody.” I shake my head.

“What is it, then?”

“It would give her nightmares. Come on.”

1300 Hours
Toronto Evacuation Zone
Ontario, Canada
Thursday 27 September, 2063

Richard habitually took refuge in numbers, so it troubled him that when it came to dealing with the Impact, all he had was a series of approximations. The number of dead had never been counted. Their names had never been accurately listed. Their families would never be notified; in many cases, their bodies would never be found.

The population of Niagara and Rochester, New York, had been just under three million people, although the New York coastline of Lake Ontario was mostly rural, vineyards and cow pasture. The northern rim of the lake, however, had been the most populated place in Canada: Ontario's Golden Horseshoe, the urban corridor anchored by Toronto and Hamilton, which had still been home to some seven million despite the midcentury population dip. Deaths from the Impact and its immediate aftermath had been confirmed as far away as Buffalo, Cleveland, Albany. A woman in Ottawa had died when a stained-glass window shattered from the shock and fell on her head; a child in Kitchener survived in a basement, along with his dog. Recovery teams dragging the poisoned waters of Lake Ontario had been forced to cease operations as the lake surface iced over, a phenomenon that once would have been a twice-in-a-century occurrence but had become common with the advent of shifted winters, and which would become more common still. For a little while, until the greenhouse effect triggered by the Impact began to cancel out the nuclear winter.

An icebreaker could have been brought in and the work continued . . . but things keep, in cold water. And someone raised the spectre of breaking ice with bodies frozen into it, and it was decided to wait until spring.

The ice didn't melt until halfway through May, and the lake locked solid again in mid-September.

The coming winter promised to be even colder, a savage global drop in temperatures that might persist another eighteen to twenty-four months, and Richard frankly couldn't begin to say whether the death toll worldwide at the end of that time would be measured in the mere tens of millions or in the hundreds. Preliminary estimates had placed immediate Impact casualties at thirty million; Richard was inclined to a more conservative estimate of something under twenty, unevenly divided between Canada and the United States.

In practical terms, the casualty rate was something like one in every twenty-five Americans and one in every three Canadians dead by January first, 2063.

The fallout cloud from the thirteen operant nuclear reactors damaged or destroyed in the Impact was pushed northeast by prevailing wind currents, largely affecting New York, Quebec, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Newfoundland, the Grand Banks, Prince Edward Island, Iceland, and points between. The emergency teams and medical staff attending the disaster victims were supplied with iodine tablets and given aggressive prophylaxis against radiation exposure. Only seventeen of them became seriously ill. Only six of those died.

It was too soon to tell what the long-term effect on cancer rates would be, but Richard expected New England's dairy industry to fail completely, along with what bare scraps had still remained of the once-vast North Atlantic fisheries.

And then, after the famines and the winter—

—would come a summer without end.

Colonel Valens's hands hurt, but his eyes hurt more. He leaned forward on both elbows over his improvised desk, his holistic communications unit propped up on a pair of inflatable splints and the hideously un-ergonomic portable interface plate unrolled across a plywood surface that was an inch and a half too high for comfort. “Yes,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck with an aching palm, “I'll hold. Please let the prime minister know it's not urgent, if she has—Constance. That was quick.”

“Hi, Fred. I was at lunch,” Constance Riel said, chewing visibly, her image flickering in the cheap holographic display. Valens smoothed the interface plate between his hands, cool plastic slightly tacky and gritty with the dust that was never far. The prime minister covered her mouth with the back of the first two fingers on her left hand and swallowed, set her sandwich down on an unfolded paper napkin, reached for her coffee. Careful makeup could not hide the hollows under her eyes, dark as thumbprints. “I was going to call you today anyway. How's the situation in the Evac?”

“Stable.” One word, soaked in exhaustion. “I got mail from Elspeth Dunsany today. She says the Commonwealth scientists have arrived safely on the
Montreal
. One Australian and an expat Brit. She and Casey are getting them settled.”

“—Paul Perry said the same thing to me this morning,” Riel answered. Her head wobbled when she nodded.

“That isn't why you were going to call me.”

“No. I have the latest climatological data from Richard and Alan. The AIs say that the nanite propagation is going well, despite the effects of the—”

“—Nuclear winter? Non-nuclear winter?” Valens said.

“Something like that. They're concerned about the algae die-off we were experiencing before the . . . Impact. The nanotech is working on keeping the algal population stable, but Alan and Charlie Forster suggest that once the global cooling effects are over, it might be less catastrophic to consider seeding the oceans with iron to boost algae growth—” The Prime Minister's voice hitched slightly.

“Like fertilizing the garden.”

“Exactly. More algae means less CO
₂
left in the atmosphere from the Impact, which in turn means less greenhouse warming when the dust is out of the atmosphere and winter finally ends—”

“—in eighteen months or so. Won't we want a greenhouse effect then?”
To counteract the global dimming from the Impact dust.

“Not unless 50 or 60 degrees Celsius is your idea of comfort.”

“Ah . . .” Valens shook his head, looking down at the pink and green displays that hovered under the surface of the interface plate, waiting only a touch to bring them to multidimensionality. He shook his head, and ricocheted uncomfortably to the topic that was the reason for his call. “We've done what we can here, Constance. It's time to close up shop and come home. Do you want to tour the exclusion zone?”

“Helicopter tour,” she said, nodding, and took another bite of her sandwich. “You'll come with, of course. Before we open the Evac to reconstruction and send the bulldozers in—”

“You're going to rebuild Toronto?” Valens had years of practice keeping shock out of his voice. He failed utterly, his gut coiling at something that struck him as plain obscenity.

“No,” she said. “We're going to turn it into a park. By the way, are you resigning your commission?”

Valens coughed, hand to his throat. Riel's image flickered as the interface panel, released from the pressure of his palm, wrinkled again. “Am I being asked to?”

The prime minister laughed. “You're being asked to get your ass to the provisional capital of Vancouver, Fred. Where, in recognition of your exemplary service handling the Toronto Evac relief effort, you will be promoted to Brigadier General Frederick Valens, and I will have a brand-new shiny Cabinet title and a whole new ration of shit to hand you, sir.”

He coughed into his hand. “I'm a Conservative, Connie.”

“That's okay,” she answered. “You can switch.”