John Barnes - Directive 51

He swung into his vision statement with enthusiasm, and to judge by the cheering, the crowd was eating it up. “We are forced to meet here, and not in what had been our capital for 234 years, because we failed to see that the powerful engines of our collective dreams had been possessed by the will to self-destruction. We stand in the rubble of our earlier civilization, with the way back barred to us, with some unknown number of other barriers ready to spring up if we try to take that road. We must therefore rebuild with caution, with an awareness that some roads will close as we try to take them, that time after time we may have to turn back before going forward again, that our situation demands a patience and humility that we lacked the first time—but we shall rebuild.”

Corny, Heather thought. But after all, things were going to be improvisational and low-rent here for a long time. Maybe the country needed more corn. Maybe she was just getting too old and cynical.

Maybe the Graham Weisbrod who might have tsked at how overdone this was would not have been as effective a president as the one she was watching now. Is that possible? Is this really for the best?

He wound up with “… with a vision that we will again be in a position to choose a future, and we will choose wisely, and build that future—because this is America, which has always been the land of the future!”

Walking back from the ceremony to her quarters in the old Evergreen dorms, she watched the sun go down over the lake, and as she so often did these days, rested her hand on her belly and thought, Kid, I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we’ve got to find somewhere better for you to grow up.

She felt a presence moving up from her side, and glanced, half-hoping for some pathetic would-be mugger she could knock down or dismiss with a glare.

Nothing so appealing. Chris Manckiewicz.

She asked, “How’s the fish-wrapper business?”

“The Olympia Observer , at this point, has five staff members locally, nine stringers nationally, and a promising line on a printing plant. Which I needed anyway because I keep having to revise the resumé. The 24/7 News Network, the Washington Advertiser-Gazette , the Athens Free Ticket to the Pen …”

She chuckled, though it wasn’t very funny, just to show she bore no ill will. “Chris, I know you want to interview me because I’m having differences with Graham Weisbrod and I’m not altogether happy with the direction the new government is taking. Honestly, I understand that, and I understand that since I’ve been his close friend for so long, now that he’s president, it’s news. I’m not begrudging you that. But I’d rather try to bring him around in private conversation—not by arguing with him in the press.”

“I’m also working on the definitive history of our era—”

“Catch me when I’m retired. But I’m saving the hot stuff for my memoirs.” She gave him a little wiggle-finger wave and turned off toward her quarters, the former commons room of an honors dorm, which gave her the privilege of a fireplace. Yesterday’s soup was going to taste wonderful; she’d put it in the banked coals, and with luck enough fire would have stayed alive to keep it warm.

Chris Manckiewicz held it in his hands, turned it over, looked at the perfection of its plain gray cloth cover.

“That was the fabric that was cheap, but we worked in some wax and a little linseed oil, and it’ll at least shed water while it’s new,” Rob Cartland, the printer, was saying. “Title and all that went on with a big linoleum block stamp. Used a smaller stamp for the spine. Thud, thud. Twenty-two hundred times each way. You can thank my son Ephraim that it came out so neat; he’s the one that thought of that frame gadget so the stamp always hit in the same place. I know it ain’t how they do it in a real printing plant—”

“You are the real printing plant,” Chris said. He turned the book back over and read the India-ink linoleum-cut cover to himself: A Battle of Articles: how our Constitution made the struggle between Olympia and Athens inevitable, and what citizens can do about it, by Chris Manckiewicz, publisher and editor, the Olympia Observer. “And we’re ready to go for setting up and printing issue one, right?” he asked, very unnecessarily. “Because I’m sure depending on the book to get me some subscriptions.”

“Ready to go, and your credit’s still good with me,” Cartland said. “I just wish my old man was here to see this. All those years being his assistant on his silly projects, trying to make things come out just the way they did in 1880, and swearing I’d never look at a piece of paper after I got away from the son of a bitch, and… well, here I am. A living for me and probably for Ephraim, too.”

“I’ve been a printer’s assistant,” Chris pointed out, “though only for a month. But that was enough time for me to say, now, be good to Ephraim.”

“He’s a smart kid, and so’s Cassie. And this is my chance to leave a successful business to both of them, and they’re old enough and serious enough kids that I think they appreciate that—so many kids are so much older and more serious, after just these few months.”

“Gone hungry, been homeless in a world without homes, seen friends and family die,” Chris said. “I imagine that ages them pretty fast.” He turned the book over in his hands again. “Of course, if you’d like to write something up about that—maybe a feature, parents noticing how much more mature the kids are? Or an editorial about whether or not it’s a good thing? I’ll always be looking for material.”

“I doubt I will, but I’ll pass the idea on to Cassie. She’s always writing letters to friends—all the people she used to text with—the ones where she knows their street address or can find it. Mostly just trying to find out if they’re still alive, I guess. She just heard back from two of them this week. She might have some things she could tell you about.”

“Sounds like it. And there’s a whole generation of possible customers that doesn’t remember newspapers at all; I need some writers from that generation if I’m going to get the habit restarted.”

“If you could sell newspapers with coffee as a single package,” Cartland said, “I’d be your slave forever. My dad used to read the paper and have coffee, every morning. For me, it was Twitter and a Red Bull, and for my kids it wasn’t even that organized. But I remember he used to look like the most relaxed creature in the universe, feet up on a spare chair, big mug of coffee by his hand, looking for something to read out loud to all of us. God, I thought he looked like a moron . Now my definition of luxury would be to start every day off like that.”

“Well, we’ll have the newspaper, weekly at first; the coffee’s kind of a problem, of course, but at least we’re on this coast, and among my first stories in the biz section, there’s a woman here in town who bartered for five sailing yachts with a warehouse full of liquor, and had enough booze left over to hire crews; she’s billing those as the ‘coffee fleet’ and I guess they’ll be running over to Hawaii, down to Mexico, wherever, to bring in the beans. My guess is she’s going to own the West Coast in a few years.”

“Lisa Fanchion. Yeah. My guess too.”

“I have an interview with her in the notepad already,” Chris said, smiling. “Closest I can get to coffee till some of her ships come back. I was teasing her that when the coffee fleet comes back, I’ll be trading full-page ads to get some, and she just shrugged and said she figured the boats coming in would be news, which I’d have to cover for free, and once that’s in the paper, she’ll have all the buyers she’ll need. She thought it might be twenty years before she needs to advertise. She really doesn’t miss a trick.”