John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

But then his heart returned enough to say, “Most of you are from the continental USA, so at least we’ll be getting you where you can walk home. Savannah has decent rail service to Athens, which is connected to all the TNG-controlled part of the country, with links to the central states, the PCG area, and California.

“With less need to conserve our remaining fuel and aircraft parts, as we pass within range of Africa, South America, and eventually our homes, we’ll be flying off reconnaissance missions, preserving as much data as we can about the changing world. So we’ll be busy with an important scientific and geographic mission right to the end, and I want to remind you all that until we put you ashore at Savannah, you’re still in the Navy or the Marines, and I—and the people of the United States—expect you to do your duty to the utmost.”

Minutes later, her great turbines thundering, Bush pointed her prow west, toward the Cape of Good Hope, and drove across the placid Indian Sea. In the next few days, everyone seemed to spend as much time as they could on deck, enjoying the spring weather, and just saying good-bye.

The passage down the Mohawk had been no worse than unpleasant and tiring, with some long portages around wrecked locks and dams, and a couple of fireless nights, but they had only seen three signs of Daybreak since the hanged bodies on the bridge: two bridges surrounded by trampled mud and snow where large bands must have passed, and one fortified farmhouse where the condition of the bodies piled outside suggested it had been sacked just before the big snowstorm.

From Buffalo, past Oneida, and for most of the way down the Mohawk, the biggest living animals had been spiders, and grass and moss were the only green; the radiation-killed trees and bushes had put out no leaves last spring.

But the previous day, they had seen traces of living things reclaiming the empty, dead land. The Chicago superbomb had been pure fusion, so the radioactive isotopes in the fallout were nearly all light-metal salts produced by neutron irradiation of the vaporized city. The ferocious, life-erasing energy of those isotopes also gave them short half-lives; the fallout had been far more deadly in the short run than the fission-fragment fallout from an “old school” atom bomb, but there had been less of it and it had decayed to harmlessness much faster.

Today, nearing Albany, the river contained more junk, but it had also broken through flood control in so many places that even its central channel was broad and comparatively sluggish; they found the Lock 6 dams still standing.

“We could walk to the Hudson in less than an hour from where we are,” Chris pointed out.

Larry shrugged. “But then we’d have to keep walking. There’s a perfectly good river over that way, and perfectly good canoes here, so I figure we’ll paddle up to Lock 6, portage around that chain of locks, and canoe down to Peebles Island. We’ve been seeing living trees all morning, and that squirrel came from somewhere and has been eating something. So we’re out of the worst of the fallout belt. If there are non-tribal people up here, they’re trading, because that’s what civilized people do, and if they’re trading anywhere it’ll be at Peebles Island, because it sits between the Mohawk, the Erie Canal, and the Hudson.” Larry shrugged and stretched. “And whether we make contact with anyone there or not, I’d rather ride than walk for the rest of the trip.”

Chris stood, rotated his trunk, and swung his arms in circles. “Well, I guess it won’t get any easier for waiting.”

A canal-side exercise trail with long flights of stairs made it easy to descend the four locks by lowering first the canoes, then their packs, on ropes alongside the closed lock gate.

They paddled past the empty warehouses and little houses, with yards full of junk, that had been run down long before Daybreak, and on across the slow-moving outlet of the Erie Canal, catching their first sight of the broad Hudson beyond the tip of Peebles Island.

Down here, many trees had some leaves clinging to them, which probably meant they had been green in the summer and were not dead, and as the early fall evening crept over the Hudson, they saw splashes of fish jumping.

On Peebles Island, they beached just upstream of a trestle bridge and carried the canoes up the bank. Rabbits broke from the snow-patched, thick brown grass. After weeks of seeing so little life, the long back legs kicking away, and the bouncing powder-puff tails were more miraculous than unicorns.

“I still wouldn’t eat one,” Jason said, “but at least they’re here and alive.”

Chris said, “It looks like the grass was growing all summer; I don’t think your trade fair has—”

“Sail!”

They looked where Jason was pointing.

The boat coming round the point of Peebles Island was about three times the size of Kelleys Dancer , with a much taller mast. Jason ran forward onto the beach, waving and yelling; someone in the crow’s nest waved back, and presently the boat took down its sails, dropped anchor, and lowered a small rowboat.

They walked down to meet it. The man who sat in the bow, hollering at the imperturbable rowers, had deep brown skin, close-cropped white hair, and a little white goatee hanging from his upper lip like a cocoon. He wore big wire-rimmed glasses, a billed cap tied closed with twine to replace its lost plastic strap, several layers of sweaters, and bell-bottomed canvas pants; he seemed to be on the brink of laughing out loud.

The rowboat drew near. The big man threw Jason a painter; he tied it off to a small tree, and in the gathering dusk, they all shook hands. “Jamayu Rollings,” the big man said. “Captain and owner of the schooner Ferengi , and these are my sons, Geordie Rollings and Whorf Rollings. We’ve been on a trading and salvage expedition up to Troy, and we were going to put in for the night here.”

“Larry Mensche, Chris Manckiewicz, and Jason Nemarec, Reconstruction Research Center. We’re a scientific expedition, overland traverse of the Erie Canal route.”

“Hunh. Well, that’ll cause some conversation in Manbrookstat. You guys wouldn’t be looking for anything to trade, or maybe for a ride, would you?”

Larry nodded. “We could be. We’re right where we were ordered to be; from here on, how we get home is up to us. You mean you have room somewhere for three passengers?”

“Room and then some for three paying passengers.”

“Is the credit of the U.S. government good enough for you?”

“Can you prove you have it?”

“I have letters from the RRC in Pueblo, the TNG at Athens, and the PCG in Olympia.”

“Hunh. I don’t have any way to confirm any of those, do I?”

“You could trust our honest demeanor and smiling faces.”

“I’ve been trading for a while now. I wouldn’t trust my mother if she offered me a free Thanksgiving dinner.”

Larry noted that both boys were rolling their eyes.

“Well, then, perhaps we’re stuck.”

“Maybe, maybe not. You wouldn’t happen to have any trade goods?”

“How do you define those? All we’ve got is our gear, which we need to keep if we’re going to travel, plus our two canoes and a couple big bags of canned goods.” Larry saw the flicker of attention from the two boys, and said, “How about passage for the three of us if we let you have the canoes? We won’t need them any longer, and good aluminum canoes can’t be all that common in New York Harbor just yet.”

“What’s in the cans?”

“We’ve got baked beans, sweet potatoes, peas, salmon—”