John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

“Yep, growing into a big healthy moose of a kid. All right, now that you’re sitting down… have you ever thought about being the Earl of the Russian River?”

“No, not for one second, and are you out of your mind?”

“I’m as sane as ever, it’s the world that’s crazy. Here’s the deal. Our sources are showing that Harrison Castro is trying to take as much of southern California as he can out of the United States.”

“He is my father-in-law, you know.”

“No offense intended.”

“None taken. I just meant you don’t have to tell me what he’s thinking about. He was talking about goofier shit than being an earl clear back when I was trying to lure Bambi into skipping out of high school and shacking up with me in my dorm room for a week.”

“I never heard about that.”

“Unfortunately, I wasn’t much of a lurer when I was twenty-one. My big seductive move was to send her a list of the Xbox games I had. Anyway, look, I know Harrison Castro, and I’m sure you’re right about his intentions.”

“Unh-hunh. And how do you feel about them?”

“Subthrilled. But you’re suggesting I might want to go into the earl business too?”

“I want you to start a League of North Coast Castles. You’re in much better shape than any of the other freeholders in your neighborhood. Extend them some aid—or launder aid from us and present it as coming from you. Cut them a much better deal than Harrison Castro gave his poor hapless knucklehead vassals, so that every Castle in trouble will want to sign on with you, and Castro’s vassals feel like idiots and resent him.”

“But you will be creating another league and I thought you didn’t want one .”

“Two leagues in a struggle with each other is way better than one league in a struggle against the Federal government. Let alone against both Federal governments. And this is temporary. As soon as you can, you’ll sensibly return everything to Federal jurisdiction and put a big hole in the Castle system.”

“Couldn’t I just do that right now and save everyone the trouble?”

“Unfortunately right now, if the Castles collapsed, California would become a second Lost Quarter. I don’t like the Castles, they’re about as un-American an institution as there is, but we can’t throw them away until we’ve got a Federal government big and strong enough to do what needs doing. My long-run plan is to just surround the Castles with a free, successful society. Then over time, the dependents and the vassals will walk off, and the freeholders will end up as romantic old poops stumping around in empty fortresses and writing letters to the Post-Times about young people with no respect. I’m just asking you to be an earl for a short while, and you and I both know it’s a joke; the objective is to make it a joke to everyone.”

“Do I get a funny hat?”

She looked pointedly at the antique leather helmet on his knee. “Do you think I can stop you?”

“ This is practical. If I’m going to be Earl of the Russian River, I definitely want something big, and white, with a plume.”

“That’s Put-in-Bay,” Rosie said. He was a heavy, solidly muscled man with stark white hair and brick-red skin; he and his wife Barbara were the crew of Kelleys Dancer . “Sorry this took so long.”

Although it was only a few air miles from Catawba Point to South Bass Island, the wind was light and variable that morning, and tacking Kelleys Dancer out of Sandusky Bay, around the point, and out to Put-in-Bay harbor itself had consumed the whole morning since dawn.

Jason asked, “Hey, is that a lighthouse or something?”

“Perry’s Monument,” Barbara said.

“Perry who?”

“Oh, man, you’d have had a hard time when I was teaching American history.” She sighed. “Oliver Hazard Perry. War of 1812. ‘We have met the enemy and they are ours.’”

“They buried him there or something?”

“No, he won the only naval battle of any size that ever happened on the lake.” She sighed. “I wonder if kids will learn more or less history now that history’s starting over. Hard to see how they could learn less, actually. There could well be a battle bigger than Perry’s next spring—over between Buffalo and Erie there’s getting to be a pirate problem, or maybe a tribals-in-boats problem, it’s hard to tell. At least we’ll have work, anyway.”

“You’d be in the battle?”

“I hope not, but we’ll probably guide them there,” Rosie said. “We know that area—actually we know the whole lake pretty well. Barb’n’me spent ten years after retirement as rental crew for old farts that cruised the lake; that’s where we got Kelleys Dancer , the owner died right after Daybreak once there wasn’t no fridge for his insulin.”

Closer to Put-in-Bay, there was more and steadier wind. Rosie said, “I’m impressed that you’re going to Cooke Castle. Gotta be the last place in North America where they still use the right fork for each course. They might dip you all in bleach before they let you in the front door.”

“They’re not that stuffy.” Barbara hugged her husband. “Just because the world has ended doesn’t mean people can’t wear a clean shirt now and then.”

Gibraltar Island sheltered the eastern half of Put-in-Bay; it looked like a nineteenth-century millionaire’s estate or a twentieth-century college campus, and had been both. “They have electric power over here!” Chris said, realizing an electric winch was pulling them into their berth.

“Some of the time, yeah, whenever they’re not wiping for nanos. Some engineers from OSU built them windmills you see over there south of town, and another guy from Tri-State U’s got a wave-power generator running.”

They had been told that Dr. Fred Rhodes would meet them at the wharf; the squat, wide-shouldered black man waiting there wore an old Ohio State hoodie, homemade deerhide trousers, wingtips, and a black crusher. His full beard probably hadn’t been trimmed for many years before Daybreak, and reached beyond his lower ribs, about as far down as his dreads reached in the back. He pumped Larry’s hand eagerly, then Chris’s and Jason’s, and said, “Everyone is so excited; the first report on an overland traverse of the Lost Quarter.”

“I was never any good at oral reports in school,” Larry said. “In fact I hated them.”

“Too late. Bet you hated field trips, too, and I’ll never be forgiven if I don’t take you around and show you Stone Lab.”

Stone had been OSU’s field limnology lab before Daybreak. Just after Daybreak, about a hundred scientists had come to Stone from Ohio State and other universities. They had ridden out the big wave and the fallout from the Chicago superbomb, the fires and the destroyed gear from the Pittsburgh EMP strike, the tribal raids across the ice in the winter and the pirate attacks a few weeks before, and they had rebuilt and gone on.

Now, after the destruction of Mota Elliptica, they were quite possibly the most advanced scientific facility on the continent. Because limnology draws on every other science, Stone Lab could do at least basic work in every field.

Gibraltar, not really much bigger than a couple of city blocks, was threaded all over with blacktop pathways that were breaking down. “We’re less than ten miles off shore,” Rhodes said. “Biotes blow right on over from all that urban area west and northwest of here.”