John Barnes - The Last President

Rollings said, “Moonrise was going to be just before midnight, and there’s not even a glow on the horizon yet. So it’s not late. I don’t think we should chance a light till we’re further out to sea and we’re running before a good stiff breeze.”

“Well, we’re all safe for the moment. Sorry we lost the business, Jamayu, but that’s the world nowadays.”

Rollings laughed. “Heck, ’Tildie, if I start worrying about the past I’ll soon be sorry that I’ll probably never do another root canal. We got the fam, we got Ferengi , we got skills and our health.”

“Yeah, that’s a cargo of blessings, isn’t it? Well, then, has anybody thought about where we’re going, yet?”

“There’s nothing north, Europe’s too far away and a bigger mess than here, that leaves south,” Rollings said. “We could probably live okay in the Christian States, but we’ve got the range to go farther. If we can trust Whorf’s last letter, St. Croix sounds like a decent place to do a little trading, shipping, and salvaging. What do you all think?”

“I think whether we’re going to Savannah, St. Croix, or Rio, we sail exactly the same for the next week,” Geordie said, “and come dawn, I’m going to want someone to relieve me at the helm, which means somebody ought to get some sleep, right now, and we have a week to talk all this out.”

“Nothing to argue with there,” Rollings said.

“I’ll stay up for this watch with you,” Uhura said. “We can figure out rotation later. Pops, Mom, you’ve had a day and I think you ought to go sleep.”

In the skipper’s cabin, as they settled into their familiar, beloved bunk, Rollings asked his wife, “How come we’ve got such great kids?”

“Proper culling,” she said. “You just never heard the splashes when I’d toss the dumb, mean, ugly ones over the side.”

It was an old joke, shared as comfortably as the bunk itself, and with half a thought more about how lucky he was, he fell asleep.

“Now, heave, heave, heave! ” Nathanson shouted, and the old phone pole moved forward and under the trip bar. “Trip her!”

The other crew hauled on their lines, dragging the trip bar down and pushing the tall pole’s tip down into the hole.

“And heave! ”

The pole seated in its hole, slid a little in and down, and rose as the main line hauled it upward. With a thump, it slid into place, and while the guy lines still held it, the crew dumped rocks and dirt around the base; in a minute or so, it was secure enough to stand for years.

Nathanson turned and waved to the men standing by the big bonfire, who hurled in shovels and buckets full of ripped-up books from the town library and school. The fire roared up in a great burst of blazing pages, wiping the stars from the sky and sending orange light dancing up the pole to where General Phat’s body was attached by many wrappings of old electric wire.

The drums boomed out a quick, infectious rhythm, and the crowd cheered and sang. Others ran forward to help throw all the paper into the bonfire, making it blaze higher and prettier still, and a huge circle of dancers wove around the immense fire until it burned down, and at the urging of the leaders, they sat down to listen to Lord Robert.

He stood on the high platform with the fire lighting him from the side, and began, “As you all know, True Daybreak and traditional Daybreak have joined forces, and we have made the country from the Wabash and the Ohio to the Lakes all ours. The enemy army is now only trying to find their way out, trying to run away while they still can. They are shattered. I proclaim that this is now the Domain of Lord Robert!”

When another long burst of drumming and dancing had subsided, and he was growing impatient, Robert continued, “Now, there was a condition attached to this. Traditional Daybreak has said to us, via Glad Ocean here”—he actually embraced the old bony bitch, and smelled her unwashed body as he did, to make his point, and she beamed up at him—“that it would send tens of thousands of fighters, and it has. It pledged to make this victory possible, and it has. And now… traditional Daybreak says, their price for their help has been, now throw it all away. Let us not have what we have fought for.”

The crowd moaned, some with the onset of Daybreak seizures, some old-school Daybreakers booing him, and many of his own True Daybreak people excited and getting ready.

His arm slipped from an embrace of the woman to a forearm wrapped around her throat, and he began to squeeze. “Glad Ocean here, Glad Ocean is the teacher of the Daybreak that does not work , the spoiled and ruined Daybreak that will rob you all —” Robert was squeezing her neck and she was beginning to struggle desperately. “And I say, that is a bargain we don’t need to keep. We needed this victory, and so did Daybreak, and now we are done with each other!”

The crowd was milling; fights were breaking out, some people were trying to flee, others suffering seizures.

“The old Daybreak of your old tribes demanded that if you came here to fight by our sides, I would then lead you on a huge fucking raid from here all the way across the plains, to break and shatter plaztatic civilization wherever we find it—and then die!

“You all know that Daybreak tells you to kill as many people as you can and then die yourself! They want us to clean out the plaztatic assholes, scrape them off the world, and then lie down and die on top of them and free the planet. Never have kids, never raise a family, live out your life as a slave or a soldier, die for Daybreak! Die for Mother Earth because… because it’s a lie !”

He nodded at Bernstein and Nathanson. Bernstein went to grab Glad Ocean’s master, super-duper extra powerful spirit stick from the slave carrying it; when the slave resisted, Nathanson felled him with a hatchet chop to the face. Bernstein wrenched the spirit stick away and hurled it high into the air like a javelin, so that it came down in the very center of the bonfire. “Daybreak is broken!” he shouted. “Long live True Daybreak!”

Robert was screaming his message over the uproar, not worrying because his own side knew it and was shouting something similar as they fought back and forth with their tribal allies. “True Daybreak says—live in the beautiful world you have made! True Daybreak says—fish in those streams when they run clean again! True Daybreak says—sit by a warm fire and enjoy your freedom! No slaves! Keep your babies and raise them! Clean Earth and real freedom!”

Glad Ocean had been a small woman before, and though she’d probably toned her muscles in the last year, much of it had been a year of slow starvation and struggle to stay warm and not die of flu or a cold. He had worked his forearm down into the crease of her neck, with his wrist biting into her carotid, and now he lifted her up onto her tiptoes and shook her like an old towel, letting her have just enough air not to pass out yet.

“That is what True Daybreak says. I say, I want True Daybreak! True Daybreak and I want peace! No more war! No more deaths! No slaves, everyone equal! Families to raise and corn to grow, living the good life on the good clean planet, because we fought for it and it is ours and we deserve it! I want you to join True Daybreak, join me, join us tomorrow when we return to Castle Earthstone. All you tribes who have fought and bled beside us: come and live with us too. The Domain is big and wide and open, it’s the best hunting ground, the best place to raise corn and make whiskey, the best place to make babies and raise kids, to fight and fuck and love and dance and live the life a natural man was meant to live—”