Arthur Clarke - Richter 10

Reelfoot had been big enough to fell a giant. The main shock was an 8.5 on the scale, about as high as the scale measured. Memphis never got out from under the Mississippi, though the river continued to change course for three months after the quake. It was simply the memory of a city now, a place for divers to search for lost treasure.

Little Rock and Paducah were rendered all but uninhabitable. Nashville was severely damaged, as were Louisville and Evansville and Carbondale. In St. Louis, the river swamped the city under a huge wave, knocking the Arch onto the city itself and leveling buildings. In Kansas City, the Quay River left its banks and drowned more people than were directly affected by the quake. Lake Michigan also overflowed, and flood waters along with aftershocks in Chicago toppled the twin black Liang office towers on Dearborn.

Knoxville, Lexington, Frankfort, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, both Springfields (Missouri and Illinois), Jefferson City—all towns suffered Mercali VII or VIII damage.

Four dams in the TVA system collapsed, flooding Tennessee and cutting off hydroelectric power to a region of the continent that still used it. Levees in Mississippi and Louisiana crumbled.

The death toll reached nearly three million; a staggering ten million were left homeless. Damage ran into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Liang was a streamlined operation that matched production to natural resources. Hundreds of chemical plants, paper mills, auto factories, food processors and distributors, focus factories, and shield manufacturers went down with the quake, to say nothing of the retail outlets Liang owned to sell their products. People turned to their government for financial help, and Liang Int was put in the unenviable position of demanding restitution from itself.

They couldn’t afford it. Neither could their insurance carriers.

Corporate decided simply to try and get the flow of goods and services moving back through the area and rebuild slowly. To that end the company declared the quake region a total loss and walked away from it, leaving the Midwestern United States a poverty-and-disease-ridden dead zone of collapsed buildings and broken dreams. Revenue loss was staggering, public relations destroyed.

President Gideon had become the most hated man in America. He refused to step down because he needed the paycheck, and he was unable to put the blame on Mr. Li, where it rightfully belonged, because that would be admitting that Mr. Li had told him what to do in the first place. Gideon had become a prisoner in his own White House.

Brother Ishmael’s condor dropped to treetop level for close-ups of the motorcade as it pulled up to the Capitol. Its occupants hurried out of their vehicles and into the building.

The edited version of Jimmy Earl’s viddy, The Last Best Hope, had been the most watched show in the world in 2025, bringing him awards and fame and, parenthetically, turning Lewis Crane into the most beloved and recognizable man in the country.

Then there were the Zoners who had escaped the cataclysm in Memphis. They’d gone south and taken military control of a small town named Friars Point, Mississippi. Renamed New Cairo, the city had attracted fifty thousand refugees.

The Mississippi had always run right by the town. Now it was several miles away, but it had left behind the richest silt on the face of the planet. Quickly enough, the initial fifty thousand had been joined by a million others, disaffected southern Africks, escapees from the Zones, or any Muslim wanting a start on a new life. The original boundaries expanded, taking in more and more land, pushing out the previous landowners until finally Mr. Mui was forced to step in.

Mui regarded the spread of Islam as an inevitability. Besides that, he was not about to undertake the expense of a full-scale war to roust them from the land. What he did, in effect, was create another War Zone, larger than any other. Immense, in fact. He built a wall seventy feet high that completely surrounded New Cairo, though several miles from its front lines and not a direct threat. People were allowed to travel freely, unarmed, in and out of the walled area.

NOI set up immediate contacts with other Islamic States worldwide that supplied them with food and materials while they got on their feet. Soon after, Brother Newcombe went to Yo-Yu and struck a trade deal that gave NOI enough shields to cover the delta crops it would need to raise to allow New Cairo to become self-sufficient.

It worked. What also worked was violence, ever-escalating guerrilla and economic warfare with unrelenting confrontations with the FPF and threats or actual boycotts of Liang Int products. In the deepest inner sanctum of NOI leadership the split was more profound than ever. Martin Aziz and Dan Newcombe versus Mohammed Ishmael … neither side able to prove itself conclusively. Stalemate.

Sumi Chan sat on her lofty perch in the Senate chamber and presided over the bumptious gladhanders who called themselves congressmen. Currently they were “debating” whether or not to pass a nonbinding resolution that would, in a miracle of complex rhetoric and dazzling illogic, blame the Yo-Yu Syndicate for the tragedy at Reelfoot Rift.

“Mr. President,” said the congresswoman from New York. “I would like to allot three minutes of my time to the Honorable Senator from Arkansas/Oklahoma.”

“Noted,” Sumi said automatically. “You have the floor, Mr. Gerber.”

“Thank you,” said the gentleman, with the aplomb of a snake oil salesman.

As he began to speak Sumi drifted. She had yet to completely figure out why she was here. And the only man who could tell her was long dead. She had managed to avoid Mr. Li from the time she had taken the job until his death because she’d feared him sexually. Now here she sat, bored and alone, symbol of American political leadership since Gideon had hidden himself away in the White House.

“Mr. President!” The voice startled her. A Senate page tugged on her sleeve. “Someone wants to see you. He says it’s important.”

“Who?”

“Lewis Crane.”

“Crane’s here?” she said loudly enough to be heard in the chamber.

“He’s waiting out in the corridor, sir.”

“My God,” Sumi said. She’d had no personal contact with Crane since Reelfoot. She turned to the page, a pimply-faced federal judge’s son, and said, “Put him in the old Supreme Court downstairs. I’ll meet him in a moment.”

The page hurried away, Sumi fully alert now and excited. Crane may have been many things, but he was never boring. She turned the gavel over to the sergeant at arms to call the majority leader, and slipped out of the chamber and into the hollow, echoing halls.

She’d heard that once six million visitors a year had come here to listen to proceedings and see democracy in action. No one came now. They were all anachronisms, living out their lives in a two-hundred-year-old building that was crumbling because of George Washington’s nepotism in choosing his own inferior rock quarry for the materials to build the damned thing.

Lewis Crane had come to her territory. He must want something. But then, Crane always wanted something. Now he wanted something before Yo-Yu took power. In a government where the votes were purchased, Liang’s rival had more purchasing power. Yo-Yu could get control of the government without taking one seat in an election. She’d even been approached with bribes … and had considered the possibility. America tended to have that effect on people.

Crane waited with Lanie in the gallery of the tiny preserved eighteenth-century courtroom while the rest of his entourage toured the entire facility. The room was an incongruously small space for producing the big decisions that had been handed down there—