John Barnes - Directive 51

“Am I being arrested? What are the charges?”

The man shrugged. “You’re to come with me. I’m authorized to use force if you won’t come peaceably. So are you coming with me?”

Chris looked around. Abel. Abel’s building and business. Newsboys eating and depending on him for their meals and work. And though Chris was in much better physical condition than he was a few months ago, this guy looked young and strong and probably had a gun.

“I’m coming,” he said. “Let me just get someone to help with the printing—”

“You won’t have to do that,” the man said, “because I have an order here that says no more of this edition is to be printed, and the paper is not to bring out any more editions till further notice.”

As they walked toward the campus, the man said nothing, despite Chris’s urgent questions. I guess it’s not the accused that has the right to remain silent anymore, he thought, and then Hunh, an America where they don’t read you your rights. That made it real to Chris; for the first time, ever, he felt America is gone .

Cameron Nguyen-Peters looked around the room. Problem of balance in a democracy, he thought. You had to keep everyone loyal and on the same page in times of troubles, but you also had to give them the feeling that what they thought and felt, individually, mattered. Democracy was the greatest system ever invented for producing buy-in, but it constantly risked turning everything into a debate.

“Well,” he said, “I think the first thing to say is that the results of the investigation at least indicate we were not crazy. There is no evidence that any of the conspirators had any involvement with any foreign power, or with any domestic Daybreak terrorist organization. Absolutely none. So one reason we didn’t see it coming was that they genuinely acted on their own—but that also means we haven’t just been hit by another attack from the actual enemy, we’re just suffering from disorder in our own ranks.”

The rest of the meeting ran like clockwork and the only people who talked were the ones making reports. Vaguely, at the end, Cameron thought, I do miss the Weisbrod group; they had so many interesting ideas. But one thing to say for this team, they’ll never make me late for lunch.

“Where did they all come from?” Graham asked, looking out at the vast, swarming throng on the south side of Denver’s Union Station.

“Well, a lot of the population of Denver starved, or moved away, or was killed in the big fire a few weeks ago,” the mayor said, “but luckily for us the Front Range urban strip was narrow, so anyone who could walk either east or west was only a day or two from shelter and food. Some of them have been coming back as trade gets going again, and the state capital was always here, so a lot of the agencies we needed were too, and well, we just managed to get it going again, sort of, at least right here around the downtown. So some people have returned, maybe more than in other big cities. And then you brought in visitors from everywhere south to Trinidad and north to Laramie. People just want to see that they have a president again, I guess.”

Graham looked over the crowd and nodded toward the signs that said ONCE A DEMOCRAT, ALWAYS A TRAITOR and WHY WASN’T HE IN WASH DC THAT DAY? GOT TRUTH? “Looks like some people aren’t all that happy with what they’re seeing, but then that’s the ‘normal’ we’re trying to get back to. Well, I guess it’s time.”

The fourth attempt to build a working amp had failed earlier that morning, after a promising start, when insulation had rotted off a wire and the resulting short had fried an irreplaceable capacitor. For the moment, they were stuck with the technology that would have been familiar to Abe Lincoln: the mayor shouted for everyone to shut up. The crowd leaned in to listen, and fell silent, and except for the occasional chuff of escaping steam from a locomotive that had recently been rescued from the Denver Railway Museum, people seemed to be able to hear.

For reasons obscure even to herself, Heather had chosen to be out among the crowd. She’d told Graham, “it’s so I can shout ‘louder’ if you start to mumble like a dotty old college professor,” but she just had a feeling that she should be out among the crowd.

The Federal District Court judge who swore Graham Weisbrod in used a family Bible to do it, which he would be taking home as a souvenir; as Graham said, it was more dignified than tipping him a hundred. They weren’t sure whether the oath administered by the traffic court judge of Pale Bluff was enough, so to make sure, they were re-doing it with the first available Federal judge. After that, with the whole Supreme Court dead in DC three weeks ago, this would have to do.

They had managed to put together enough musicians proficient on band instruments for a respectable rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and found a local singer with the range; Graham had told her, “Make this the plainest one you’ve ever done; hit every pitch and every emotion, but don’t make a show out of it.” She had glared at him, but she complied, and everyone cheered at the end.

Weisbrod’s inaugural address was as brief as he could make it, which meant it was “still six times as long as Lincoln’s Second Inaugural,” as Weisbrod himself pointed out. “It’s a garrulous, bureaucratic age, you know.” He called for provisional elections in 2026, leading to a “restart” in 2027, to be modeled on the 1788/9 startup of the Federal government, thus de facto agreeing to Cameron’s publicly announced plan; he called for “immediate and thorough investigation to determine whether the recent tragedies suffered by our nation, our planet, and our species were the acts of deliberate enemies, and to find a course of action.”

For most of the speech, he outlined a plan for ongoing reconstruction and redevelopment, including research into curing, reversing, or neutralizing the effects of the nanoswarm and biotes. Arnie had pleaded with him to include a line about just learning to live with them, because, Arnie said, the odds were overwhelming that that would be what they would have to do, for decades or centuries. Graham had said he didn’t think anyone was ready for that thought yet.

There was a carefully drafted paragraph that the judge and General McIntyre had worked over, in which Graham unambiguously claimed his Constitutional role as commander in chief, but thanked Cameron for his prior execution of his duties as NCCC, and stipulated that troops who had obeyed their commanding officers had committed no offenses. As Graham said, it was difficult to express the idea of amnesty, pardon, and complete forgiveness without using any of those words, but they had managed to do it, and that was what the country needed.

The speech ended with a rousing closing about enduring the tough days ahead and emerging as a great nation.

The woman standing beside Heather in the crowd said, “Oh, well, I suppose he has a lot on his mind.”

Something in the woman’s tone of disappointment made Heather take a closer look. The woman was tall, only an inch or two shorter than Heather; slim, rangy, and muscular; perhaps thirty years old; with the sort of sharply etched, squared-off features that Heather’s father had always described as “skipped the pretty stage and went straight to handsome.” Her companion was a short, powerfully built man of around fifty, in baggy, worn clothes that suggested he’d lost some weight lately; he wore a thick wool jacket over a couple of shirts and sweaters, thick steel-framed glasses, and a ski band around his ears that exposed the pink and peeling skin of his bald scalp. Both of them had on well-worn leather boots resoled with thick rawhide, and looked so tired and discouraged that Heather blurted out, “What did you think Weisbrod missed, or should have talked about?”