Kevin Anderson - Ill Wind

Some of the people snickered, others didn’t get the joke. “Listen to me,” said the man claiming to be Casey Jones. “We got this train running again. Wood-burning locomotives were used long before we became dependent on plastics and fossil fuels. We had to refit some parts, but it was nothing that a little know-how and persistence couldn’t do.

“We’re traveling through central California to collect your extra food, the stuff that’ll decay in your fields. We intend to take this train down to Los Angeles and bring relief to the starving people there.”

“Boo!” someone shouted. “What about ourselves, man? LA deserves what they got—polluting the air, squandering water!”

Casey Jones glared at the audience from his high position on the Steam Roller ’s steps and began to speak with the fervor of a revivalist preacher. “They’re cut off down there! They need the supplies. They’re starving. Starving . You’ve got too much here. You can’t use everything in your fields, and you know it.” He held his hands out, pleading, as if he needed this mission to succeed more than the people in Los Angeles did.

“Give me your surplus. We’ll take it down to feed the people. It’s the least we can do. Consider it the first step to reconnecting the United States. How can you argue against that?”

“Screw the U.S! What have they done for us?”

“What will they give in exchange?” the mayor of Tracy asked.

“Who knows?” Casey Jones said, as if angry at the suggestion. “What’s important is we’ll be helping them. On my trip back up, we can haul industrial supplies, things they can’t use. We’ll try to barter as best as we can. How would you like new pieces of sheet glass, or metal, clothes, ceramic parts,?”

“How do we know you’ll bring anything back?” the mayor said.

“You don’t! You’re missing the whole point.”

“I’ll give you some,” a tall, thin man said. Todd recognized him as Marvin Esteban, one of the local farmers. “I’ve got cabbages. I’m already sick of cabbages. We’re going to be eating sauerkraut all winter.” People chuckled.

As a few others chimed in with offers to donate bushels of almonds or tomatoes or fruit, Todd found his mind wandering. This train was making a bee-line down the Central Valley toward Los Angeles… toward Pasadena and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

And the solar satellites.

Todd leaned over to pat Ren’s neck, his face burning with excitement. This just might be a chance to do something worthwhile, something that could really make a difference—besides acting as a technical liaison for Doog’s commune. He didn’t know if that crackpot solar-power scheme would work, but just having the chance made it worth the trip. And the fact that it seemed so impossible made it all the more desirable to do. Anything was better than sitting around and growing sprouts.

He grinned and yanked on Ren’s bridle as the horse began to sniff the ground. Todd wondered what he would have to do to talk Iris into going with him.

Back at the Altamont commune, Todd and Iris’s trailer sat on four wheel rims, leveled with concrete blocks. Todd had meant to move out as soon as he found another place, but he never seemed to get around to it.

The trailer had once been hauled around the country by a retired couple from Alexandria, Louisiana. Abandoned in the Altamont and scavenged by Doog, the trailer had begun falling apart long before the petroplague hit. Its sides were white aluminum, bent in places, stained with green traces of moss.

After Todd and Iris had patched the cracks and stuffed rags into the holes left by dissolving insulation, the trailer remained cozy even in the evening chill. Remembering that first night together by the campfire, Todd had suggested they sleep in separate beds. Iris had shrugged, not pushing the issue—and Todd kicked himself, too embarrassed to raise the issue again.

Now, snug inside their trailer with the door closed and the windows shut, Todd and Iris argued far into the night.

Iris talked, her words growing sharper. “Todd, you’re just excited. You’re like a little kid in a toy store and you’re going off half cocked. You can’t save the world by yourself. And all you’d be doing is running away when we need you here.”

“But we’re not doing anything here,” he said in exasperation. “We’re like a bunch of old soldiers who never saw battle, sitting around talking about the war. You worked so hard at Stanford, trying to stop the spread of the petroplague. And now that the world has changed, you just want to roll over and play dead. There’s still a lot more things we can do, and this is one of them! Casey Jones and his train are proof that it’s not as hopeless as we thought. Let’s at least try it.” He hesitated, and said almost as in afterthought, “We can always come back here if it doesn’t work.”

Iris rolled her eyes. “Casey Jones!” She sat forward on the edge of the small bed. Anger vibrated from her. “Get a grip , Todd. Look at a map for once. We don’t have any real transportation. We can’t just think of ourselves as the jet-setting crowd like before. You don’t leave San Francisco, jaunt down to Los Angeles, pick up some satellites, hoof it over to New Mexico, and then trot back here if it doesn’t work.”

“Don’t you feel any responsibility for what happened? Remember spraying Promethus? Well, I do.”

“But there are so many important things we can do here. I agree that the world is going to have to pick itself up, but it has to be a grassroots movement, in small places like this. We have to build from the bottom up, not the top down. We don’t have a foundation anymore, that’s what we have to work on.”

Todd thought of the days he spent aimlessly riding around the hills, just talking to people, shooting the breeze, carrying news and gossip from one group to another. What point did that serve? He tried to keep from snorting. “Like what?”

“Like fine-tuning trade between the communities surrounding us. Like working on getting those electrical lines laid from the windmills out to Tracy, or back down into Livermore. You said yourself the Lab people there have come up with ways to refurbish substations and bring back limited electricity. Think of what that would mean in rebuilding the world.”

Todd didn’t see how that was different from using the solar-power satellites. Besides, once the smallsats were functioning they could serve a much wider area than just a limited island up in the hills. But that wasn’t the main reason he wanted to go.

“Everything that we do here sets an example. It has an impact, Todd. Just stick with it and you’ll see.”

“Yeah, like your music concert. Tell me how that’s more important than getting an entire solar-power farm working. Explain to me how finding a way to play rock-and-roll is going to help a lot of people.”

Iris looked stung. “You’ve got to have a dream, Todd.”

“Sounds more like a nightmare to me,” Todd muttered, his own anger growing… he couldn’t reign it in anymore. “Bringing back drugs and noise and juvenile delinquents—that’s one thing I’d rather leave behind with the old society. Iron Zeppelin and Visual Purple and Neon Kumquats or whatever those bands are called. You can keep them.”

Appalled, Iris actually giggled. “Todd, you’re so stupid sometimes.”

Todd knocked the wooden chair backward as he stood up. The chair would have tipped over, but the trailer was so cramped it merely bumped against the wall and righted itself again.

“Fine, Iris,” he said. “If trying to make the world a better place makes me stupid, I’ll just go on being an idiot. But at least I’ll be helping a heck of a lot more people then these wackos we’re living with.” He opened the door.