Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

“Oh, yes. I remember,” Ms. Rosenblatt assured him. “I didn’t say you could have taken the course, then. I just said, if you had. Then you switched majors, of course, and your breadth requirements changed. You timed it well.”

“Huh?” Marshall aimed to play innocent as long as he could.

“You timed it well,” she repeated, with no rancor he could hear. “And what have you got in mind for today?”

Encouraged, he answered, “Well, I was thinking of changing majors again.”

“To what?” Again, only curiosity in the advisor’s voice-Marshall hoped.

“Creative writing,” he answered brightly.

“Well, let’s see how that would work. We’ll stack the requirements up against what you’ve already taken…” Ms. Rosenblatt punched a few keys. Marshall didn’t have her software, but he’d already gone through the same arcane calculations. Now he had to hope he’d done them right. She studied the monitor. A slow smile spread across her face. It didn’t seem to want to take up residence there, but there it was. “Yes, that may keep you enrolled a couple of quarters longer than sticking to film. I gather you’re not paying for your stay here?”

“Uh, no,” Marshall admitted. He was chuffed-he’d worked it out exactly the same way her program had.

“We do try to get people on their way. Some students are more diligent in their efforts to stick around than others, though,” Ms. Rosenblatt said. “And it may be better for the state’s poor, abused balance sheet to have you here paying in rather than out there collecting unemployment or welfare.” She studied Marshall. “Who knows? Maybe you will turn into a writer… and maybe the horse will learn to sing.”

“Herodotus!” Marshall exclaimed. He remembered the story, read in translation. If only he weren’t such a hopeless goof at languages.

“Very good. I was a history major once upon a time, too-and look where I ended up.” Ms. Rosenblatt hit a few more keys. “The change is recorded. Now get out of here so I can take on someone who really needs advice.”

“What do I need, then?” Marshall asked.

“You need your head examined. But then, that’s one of the reasons you come to a university. Or you’re missing something if it’s not.” Selma Rosenblatt pointed to the door. “Scoot. You’ll probably piss off your folks doing this, but then you’re probably doing it to piss them off.”

Marshall left. Another more than reasonably pretty girl was sitting there waiting for the advisor. UCSB could spoil you that way. But she also ignored his experimental smile as she went in to do whatever she was going to do.

Every once in a while, adults made you wonder if maybe they did know what they were up to after all. Marshall’s dad could pull that off sometimes. And Ms. Rosenblatt had the same kind of mojo. She saw right through him. How many college kids had traipsed into her office, to give her the knack of reading at a glance what made them tick?

She was damn good at it. Damn good, but not quite perfect. Mom wouldn’t care that he had a new major. Mom cared about Mom, and about Teo, and, now and again, about Vanessa. Mom and Vanessa were going through the same adventures at the same time, which gave them a bond they hadn’t had before. Sons? Mom remembered she had them and everything, but all they did was remind her of Dad. The way things were there, that was news as bad as it got.

Even Dad wouldn’t be too bent out of shape. After all the other changes Marshall had made, Dad would just roll his eyes and wonder out loud if his kid thought his initials were ATM. (Marshall did think so, but he’d learned long before he got to UCSB that saying as much was one of the really bad ideas.) Dad would also wonder-pointedly-if Marshall thought he could get a job with his new major in the unlikely event that he graduated. Marshall could hear the whole thing already, inside his head. He didn’t even need to go home for it.

He hustled down the stairs and escaped air conditioning and fluorescent lights. The sun smiled on him. The sun smiled on all of Santa Barbara almost all the time. It was May. L.A. was sweltering under a heat wave. Even San Atanasio, which caught a lot of sea breeze, would be up in the eighties. The Valley, Riverside, places like that… Marshall didn’t want to think about them.

Here, he didn’t have to. It was seventy-three, maybe seventy-four. It might climb to eighty on the hottest days of summer. It might sink down to sixty on the coldest days of winter. The campus had its own lagoon, full of reeds and ducks and shorebirds. How awesome was that?

Guys and girls went by. Some wore shorts and T-shirts, some jeans and T-shirts. About one in three was talking into a cell phone or texting and trying not to bump into anybody. Bicycles wove in and out among the people on foot. Some of the riders were talking on cell phones, too. And yes, some of them were texting. Even Marshall didn’t think that was exactly brilliant. It wasn’t that he’d never done it, but he didn’t do it a whole lot.

A girl smiled at him. He waved back. They’d been in a class together… last year? Year before? He couldn’t remember, any more than he could remember her name. She wasn’t anyone special, just someone vaguely nice. He supposed she thought he was somebody vaguely nice, too.

He was a creative-writing major now. What kind of story could you make out of a couple of people, each thinking the other was vaguely nice? How would you even start? Or maybe that was the wrong question. How would you end the story? What would you be trying to say? You had to say something about life, the universe, and everything, didn’t you? Otherwise, why would you bother to write?

Those all struck him as pretty good questions. He didn’t have answers for any of them. How did you find answers for questions like those? By writing? Would you-or somebody-see what was wrong with what you did and how to fix it? Wouldn’t you get awful tired of turning out crap? Sooner or later, you were supposed to stop turning out crap, weren’t you? But how?

Those struck him as good questions, too. The person he knew who came closest to being a writer was Vanessa, and cranking out reports and proposals and editing other people’s garbage didn’t seem awful goddamn creative to him.

Maybe I’ll learn, he thought. Or maybe I’ll switch majors again, even if Ms. Rosenblatt does laugh at me.

Berkeley. Colin Ferguson always felt he needed a passport when he came up here. The People’s Republic of Berkeley, cops called it. Cops called Santa Monica, the L.A. beachside suburb, the People’s Republic, too. Damn few cops had an idealistic view of human nature. Jerks and assholes-that was what their world boiled down to.

“Holy shit!” he said happily. That was a parking space, right around the corner from Kelly’s apartment building. Parking spaces in Berkeley were even harder to find than Republicans. He had to parallel-park to get into this one, but he did it. It wasn’t even a two-hour zone; he could stay as long as he wanted. He put on the Club and got out.

There wasn’t any secure entrance at her building. People just went in and out. Most of the ones who did looked like college students. That didn’t automatically make them princes among mankind, as Colin had reason to know. But Kelly said she’d never had her apartment broken into, and her car only once. Plenty of folks in places with better security had worse luck.

A girl-well, she was around Vanessa’s age, which made her a girl to Colin-coming down the stairs gave him a curious look as he climbed them. She didn’t say What’s an old fart like you doing here? — her eyes did it for her. But as long as Kelly thought Colin belonged, he could suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous near-adolescents just fine.