John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

Heather sighed, apologized, and soothed everyone’s feelings as best she could. When most of them had gone and she had settled down to her uncomfortable breakfast, she thought, Kid, get here soon. You’re missing all the excitement.

As Debbie Mensche told of her months with the Northwest tribes, Arnie Yang’s pencil raced through his notebook. When Debbie finished, Arnie said, “So at least four months ago, the inner circle of the Gaia’s Dawn tribe was taking orders from someone on the radio.” He looked around the room. “That would explain how the tribals from the Sangre de Cristos, Ouachitas, and Rio Grande all managed a coordinated attack on Mota Elliptica. Jeez. Orders from the moon.” He looked at his three “tame Daybreakers” and asked, “Beth, Jason, Izzy, any thoughts?”

Jason said, “Well, now I know why Daybreak encouraged me to write so much, uh, really bad poetry, and to dream about being a bard and traveling from tribe to tribe; The Play of Daybreak and other stuff like it must be part of how Daybreak keeps itself going without an Internet. And the parts Debbie could remember sound a whole lot like the Daybreak poetry I used to write—some of it might even be taken from my poems, I suppose. The tribe idea was definitely there in Daybreak for years before the big day; ‘millioners’ like me were totally all about it.”

Arnie said, “You’ll need to explain that for some people here.”

Jason shrugged. “It’s embarrassing. But I guess mass murder should embarrass people. Within Daybreak, there was a split over whether to go back to horse-drawn plows and organic wheat and like that, you know, simple and natural like in the old TV commercials. We called those guys billioners because they wanted the world to have about a billion people. The ones like me that wanted to go back to skin tents, caves, stone knives, were called millioners, because our vision of Daybreak was a planet with fewer than ten million people.”

Izzy said, “Or being blunt about it, which is the main way I keep Daybreak from taking my mind over again, the big internal debate was whether we ought to kill 7 out of every 8 people on Earth, or 7,999 out of every 8,000.”

Heather said, “Arnie, this sounds like one of those times when you try to work me gradually toward a conclusion I’m not going to like. Since you’re usually right, let’s skip to the part where you tell me that you’re now dead certain that the rise of the tribes wasn’t an accident, and we have to stop fretting about whether Daybreak really is still there and just say, it is, and we have to fight it.”

Colonel Streen said, “I thought that would have been obvious after Daybreak started bombing us from the moon.”

Arnie balanced a hand. “The analysis certainly leaned that way before, but to my mind this new material about The Play of Daybreak clinches it. The tribes are talking with the moon, which is referencing their quasireligious rituals. I don’t want to reopen anything—three months ago, we almost had a civil war because the Provis thought Daybreak had been purely a system artifact, a great big self-generated meme on the Internet, and therefore it was useless to try to find and destroy Daybreak, because it had no single physical location, it was gone with the Internet; and the Tempers thought there must be a malicious, intentional command structure someplace, marshaling resources and planning to attack us, and therefore finding and destroying Daybreak had to be our top priority. Well, it turns out, folks, we’ve got the worst of both worlds: we have a malicious, intentional enemy that has no single physical location. It can and will think of new ways to destroy us, but as for either negotiating with it or fighting it—we might as well try to propose a treaty with, or declare war on, a fashion trend or a pop song.”

Steve Ecco felt reluctant to put his pack together before going for his last meal at Carol May Kloster’s. He’d come to like Pale Bluff. The neat frame houses and little brick shops, surrounded by dense, wet apple orchards were easy on the eye. Kids here didn’t have that haunted, lost expression so many did back home. If you didn’t notice the lack of electricity and powered vehicles, you could almost imagine you were back in normal America.

This part of the mission was supposed to be a milk run, anyway. Now all he’d have to do was the part he’d been dreaming about all his life.

Shit, I’m scared.

One more time, he inventoried his pack, shuffled through the folder of coded transmissions for Carol May, and made sure he’d left nothing important in the big duffle that he would pick up here when he returned.

On his way to early dinner at Carol May’s, he had to stop twice to take info from people who had finally decided to subscribe to the Pueblo Post-Gazette , and some other people waved as he walked up Chapman Avenue.

Technically, he thought, Heather was right, that this is lousy tradecraft; you shouldn’t have a guy who has operated more or less openly under his own name do a covert op in the same area. But now that I know them, I kind of like the feeling that these are the people I’m really working for, and that what I’m doing is for all of them. And I’ll be careful. Jesus God, I’ll be careful. He wished he didn’t feel quite so concerned about losing bowel control.

Carol May had baked fresh apple sourdough bread, and stuffed and roasted a good big rabbit. “The neighbor kid knocked Mister Bunny off with a rock,” she said. “And saved at least one deserving cabbage in the process. Pegged him on the first throw, straight to the head and dead as dead , as the kids like to say. The skills the kids pick up now that there aren’t video games!”

Toward the end of that wonderful meal, Carol May said, “I know you’ll be up early, so I’ll let you get away quick to get as much sleep as you can. But I wanted to ask a favor of you. My niece Pauline went off with a tribal boy when one of the tribes came over here for about a month early in the spring.”

“With a tribal ?”

“He had two good qualities: he looked good with his shirt hanging open, and he wasn’t local.”

“She wanted to leave?”

“Like water wants to run downhill. She was only back here on Daybreak day because she’d been expelled from IU and she’d come back here to lick her wounds. Her mom died a few years back, and my brother wasn’t the kind of guy you go to when you’ve really taken a fall. I’m as much family as she’s got, but she was about due to have another run at the world, and then she got trapped here, and that bunch of bush hippies was her first ticket out of town. Anyway, it was a damn stupid choice, and I told her so. I thought she’d come back after the tribals burned and looted Wynoose on their way back across the Wabash, but maybe by the time she knew the score, they wouldn’t let her go. Or I suppose maybe she always wanted to smash up a small town. Live in one all your life and the thought occurs to you now and then.

“Anyway I wish I knew what happened to her. So—don’t take one step out of your way or one chance you don’t have to, but if you happen to hear anything about a Pauline Kloster—”

“Of course,” Ecco said. “When I get back, I’ll drop you a short note—even if it’s just to say I didn’t find anything.” Good, one more promise means one more reason I can’t funk the whole damn thing.