Monday, January 13, 2020

Not Another Post-Apocalyptic Novel, aka "Slog"




Preface

Slog started life as a short story– basically just Part I of the IV parts below. It was one of my earliest pieces of short fiction. It ended, by design, with the main characters left hanging. So, it was fairly easy to continue the tale with one sequel and then with another and another; almost by accident I had a novel on my hands. To date, it remains my only novel-length fiction, though I have written dozens of short stories including a couple of which are almost novellas. Slog both gains and suffers, I think, from being an early youthful work. Back in 2001 I made a stab at revising the novel for publication, but found that I could do little to address its flaws without damaging the merits, too. Other than updating a few technological references, I let it stand. (The print version remains available from me directly, in case this online version stirs your interest in owning one – which, yes, is one reason I’m posting it.) Very much the same considerations restrained my reediting for the 2013 version below. So here, for better or worse, with only minor tweaks to the original, is Slog.


SLOG

Part I
Sweat

History is a pack of lies. “Bunk” was Henry Ford’s famous monosyllable. The official version flatters the powerful. The revisionist version flatters those striving for power. Politics. I should know. I made up most of the lies myself for both camps in what is now called Morrisbourg. Just for fun, here I intend to tell the truth – or at least such parts of it that don’t embarrass me too much. My name is George Custer. No, not that one. Another one. One of the advantages to these times is that only a few people know enough really old bunk to make jokes about my name.

Time is creeping up on me. The memories of my youth are much more vivid to me than what happened last week. My grandfather used to say that, which is a particularly unsettling vivid memory. It seems only yesterday that I sat by the edge of the swamp and skipped stones across the black water. Ripples on the surface flashed red from the rising sun. The temperature had cooled to 90 degrees overnight – or rather 32 on the only scale for which anyone under age 30 has a feel anymore. A five meter long alligator lay motionless in the early morning shade on a narrow strip of beach.

The flying insects were enormous by the standards of the old days. A dragonfly with a one-foot wingspan hovered over an algal mat. After the climate change, many insects reverted to ancient forms. This strikes me as odd, since it was always this hot in equatorial regions, and the bugs of last century remained small in those parts. Somehow the movement of the subtropical bands north and south triggered the change, possibly by activating dormant genes. The insects were lucky. All that human genes had to say was that they world had grown too hot.

The humidity, as usual, was near 80%. The temperature typically hit 120 at midday. Even the dragonflies seek shade. An eerie quiet descends. Then a breeze picks up in mid-afternoon, and insect wings resume their roar.

Climatologists once enjoyed arguing about the contributing factors in natural swings in earth’s climate evidenced in the geological record. They also argued over just how much human activity was warming the planet. The sun played a mean trick on them. It proved itself to be a variable star of an atypical type. While the climatologists’ theories may well have had merit as far as they went, when the sun without warning suddenly began burning hotter, it overwhelmed all other influences. The effects were devastating. Unexpectedly, disease initially was the biggest killer. Some diseases were known, such as Marburg and Ebola, but they were no less frightening for having names. Others never had been seen before. It is not known where or how they arose, but some folks harbor the dark suspicion that they were unleashed biological weapons. If so, one hopes they were loosed by accident, but it is not beyond possibility that people of apocalyptic mindset released them intentionally. One must search hard in the universe to find anything more lethal than a human being with a cause. Other deaths followed the social breakdown. Global population dropped 7 billion in a decade. Now there are too few of us to affect the climate if we wanted to. The diseases eventually burned themselves out as the population became too sparse to maintain epidemics. It no longer is a death sentence to meet a stranger. It is just unusual.

A handful of northern governments remained intact throughout the chaos enough to preserve a tiny fraction of their population and some semblance of order within a small portion of their territories. Most survivors, though, were like me: living alone in a wilderness of jungle growth and ruined cities. My jungle was New Jersey. Garden State indeed.

I made my home in Morristown, where the concrete and asphalt put up some modest resistance to the riotous growth that had engulfed the suburban outskirts. For years I had the place all to myself. Two months ago the population had risen by three. I was feeling crowded.

I turned away from the languid bayou waters and walked up the narrow path formerly known as Pine Street. I turned left onto South Street and withdrew my machete to hack my way through newly grown tendrils. Straight ahead was the old Community Theater where I had taken up residence. It was a century-old red brick edifice with white columns and steel doors. Originally a movie theater, it had been converted for live theater performances in the years prior to the disaster. Yet, oddly, stacks of movie reels remained in the old projection room. As I entered the building, Gene Kelly was singing in the rain. The colors on the deteriorating stock were awful.

I trudged up the stairs for my daily scraping chore on the roof. The solar cells powered an air conditioner and a few other circuits, but they required constant maintenance. Fungi and green plants spread rapidly over the panels. The air conditioner kept the temperature inside the theater under 100. As I emerged onto the roof, I saw Joelle standing by the edge. She was peering through the canopy.

Joelle was the first of the new arrivals in Morristown to show up. One day while I was fishing off the New Jersey Transit bridge over a flooded Morris Street, a motorized dinghy with a collapsible canvass roof puttered into view. I was astonished to see a petite young woman in immaculately clean khaki and pith helmet at the helm. Her pale countenance looked totally out of place. She spotted me at once and steered for the bridge stairway which rose out of the waters over Morris Street. She tied up the boat, clambered up the stairs, and said, “Hi there. Could you direct me to the local hot spots?”

I sat there gaping until she tried another question. “What’s your name” she asked.

“Uh, George. Miss, what are you doing here?”

“I’m Joelle. Joelle Perrault, not that you asked. I’m here because this is where it’s at.”

“Where what is at?” I asked.

“The frontier. The frontier is always where it’s at. Why, am I not welcome?”

The question diverted me from asking “The frontier of what?” A frontier presupposes the existence of something on one side of it. As far as I knew, Morristown was betwixt nothing and nothing. Nonetheless, I said, “Well. Sure. My bridge is your bridge. Grab a fishing pole.”

“Maybe later.”

What we did instead was haul her supplies back to my home. It took four trips. In addition to a cache of arms, which I deemed sensible, she had brought trunks full of more clothes and scented potions than I thought altogether necessary. She wouldn’t elaborate further on what was so appealing about this particular “frontier.” For me, it was home, and always had been, but if I ever chose to travel I expected to go north. When I pressed her about it, she simply shrugged. Those shoulders were cute and she deflected many an inquiry with them in the days that followed.

Joelle revealed little about herself. She said she was Belgian, and her accent gave the claim support. She said her father had sailed for North America when she was a little girl, hoping to find something better. Instead, he had found a shattered and overgrown world little different than what they had left behind.

“Where is he now?” I asked.

“Gone,” she said, and shrugged again.

Joelle was suitably impressed by my expertise at having made the theater habitable. There was solar electric power supplying functional appliances – and, the plumbing worked, though only because I had bypassed the sewer in a way a Health Department, if one existed, would not have approved.

I dealt with the awkwardness of negotiating sleeping arrangements that night by avoiding the subject. Though mine was the only bed and mattress, there were plenty of cushioned surfaces including sofas for her to select, so I simply told her to make herself at home wherever she chose. Against my expectation, she chose to slide into bed with me. I didn’t object. It was clear that she was more experienced than I. I didn’t object to that either. She couldn’t possibly have been less experienced than I, even though I was pushing 30. Did I mention that prior to her arrival I was the town’s only resident?

Thoughts of that first night together came back to me as I stood on the rooftop and watched her delicate form lean over the rail.

“I wouldn’t rely on that rail’s sturdiness,” I said.

“Banana trees,” she said in response.

“What? Where?”

“I mean they would grow well here.”

“Uh, yes. I suppose they would.”

“Iguanas are in the trees,” she added.

“Yes, I’ve seen them. In fact, I’ve roasted a few over the years.”

Fauna and flora were a favorite topic of hers. She once carried on for most of an evening about how many catfish were in the local waters. I hate catfish.

On this morning my thoughts were not on iguanas or catfish but on the latest arrival in Morristown. His appearance in town so soon after Joelle’s should have alerted me more than it did that I was missing something important.

To this day I am deeply suspicious of the name Ulysses S. Johnston even though the man stuck to its use tenaciously. I encountered him while examining the condition of the old post office building, located across from a former park that once was the center of town. The park was called the Green, which wasn’t ironic when originally named. Joelle had expressed interest in the building’s habitability.  To my surprise, I saw a barrel-chested man in apparently robust health striding toward me.

“Hello sir!” he shouted to me in a booming voice. He wore mud-stained cotton that was bright white in the clean patches. He carried .45 automatic in a hip holster.

When I reached out my hand and said I was George Custer, he smiled and exclaimed, “Pleased to meet you, General!”

He paused for a few moments, and then announced himself as “Ulysses S. Johnston,” thereby instantly outranking my namesake in two armies. A dark beard truly gave him a somewhat Grantean aspect. So, I later learned, did a fondness for alcohol.

Ulysses, or whatever his real name might have been, led me to his boat to meet his companion, a man who, then and later, made a point of staying in the background. The boat, tied up at Spring Street, was a 24-foot launch laden with ropes, crates, winches, and two .30 caliber machine guns. At the stern, a flagpole flew the Jolly Roger. “Excuse my playfulness with the colors,” he said. I later had cause to doubt that playfulness had anything to do with it. His companion leaned on one of the machine guns and glared at me as we approached. “Marcel, this is George Custer,” Ulysses said with a snicker. “I told him he could call me Ulysses.”

“Hi, Marcel,” I said.

Marcel nodded and grunted in reply, which proved to be his usual standard of loquacity.

“What kind of engines are on the boat?” I asked.

“Twin sixty horsepower,” Ulysses said. “More power than is useful in these bayous, of course, but they’re good to have in the open. My yacht is moored downriver. It’s too big to make it this far up the Passaic and Whippany – this boat barely could get through. Is that your dinghy by the bridge?”

“Uh, no.” I recounted to him Joelle’s arrival a couple of weeks earlier, and then instantly regretted doing so.

“Well, well,” he said. “The both of you will have to join us for dinner. I insist.”

“Why are you here, of all places?” I asked.

“I’m a salvager,” he said. “And this place is as good a place to salvage as any.”

“What sort of salvage?”

“Anything.” He reached in a pocket and pulled out a handful of pearl necklaces and sapphire earrings. “As you can see, I’ve already been ‘shopping.’ There are parts of the world where loot like this is still valuable. In places like this, it was just left behind in abandoned shops.”

“The earrings clash with your eyes,” I said.

“Now you’ve hurt my feelings,” he said with a grin.

When I returned to the theater and told Joelle about the new visitors, she insisted on frying up catfish and taking the lunch to them. “You don’t have to go, if you don’t want to,” she said.

“Oh, I’m definitely going with you,” I answered. I considered swapping my 9mm for a heavier caliber, but decided someone might make the obvious joke.

When we arrived with the basket, I thought the two men stared at Joelle rudely, but she didn’t seem to notice. I introduced them and Ulysses invited us onto the boat.

Ulysses was expansive with Joelle, while scarcely acknowledging me. He told her of his trips to the ruins of Lisbon and Cherbourg and her hometown of Brussels. He regaled her with hunting tales, vividly portraying his slaughter of birds, alligators, and wild pigs all along the Atlantic coastline. He told of a sea battle with pirates who were dispatched with machine gun fire. She listened with polite attention though she never had hesitated to interrupt me whenever my speeches hinted at self-importance. Then he made an offer to Joelle right in front of me.

“You can have your own stateroom on the yacht, Joelle. The ship is outfitted with every luxury. You can see Canada or Greenland.”

“Isn’t a yacht a ‘boat’ regardless of its size?” I said.

Ulysses ignored me. I was feeling seriously outmatched. It was with some astonishment that I heard her answer, “I’m staying.”

“Why?” he guffawed. “Because of the General here?”

It would have been nice if Joelle had said yes to this, but she just shrugged, and repeated, “I’m staying.”

Ulysses looked thoughtful. He then tossed the remaining scraps of his catfish overboard. A secondary splash indicated it had received immediate attention in the waters. “It has been a pleasure. Thank you for the victuals. I’ll be returning the favor before I leave. I’m sure the General told you about my invitation.”

To my ears, the most welcome part of those statements was the indication he would be leaving soon. Another two weeks transpired before Ulysses’ silent companion delivered RSVP cards to the door. The cards looked as though they had come from I bridal shop. I tried not to attach significance to this. The cards invited us to a farewell party at the Headquarters Plaza.

In many ways the Headquarters Plaza, part office building and part hotel, was an advantageous site, and I understood why Ulysses had chosen it. The upper floors were comfortable furnished and well above the danger and stench of the jungle. The disadvantage was that it was built on a sloped lot, and the lower levels, formerly parking garages, were flooded on the low side facing Spring Street. The waters were home to alligators and poisonous snakes. This was the reason I had decided against the structure for myself. I had no wish to encounter some dangerous creature that had found its way into the stairwell.

As I stood on the roof next to Joelle, I reminded her, “The farewell party starts just after the rains end. I guess he’s going home tomorrow. Are we going?”

“Of course we’re going. When is the next time we’ll get invited to a party? The card says he’s serving ‘gator. The tails are excellent if they’re done right.”

“Did I do it right last week?”

In reply, she shrugged. “You’d better attend to the photoelectric panels,” she added.

I was not ready to be diverted. “I don’t like him – or trust him,” I said.

“I know.”

“We should go armed.”

“We always go armed. Because of the wildlife,” she specified. “You’re not planning something stupid, are you?”

“Who, me?” Lunatic, maybe, I thought to myself, but not stupid.

My sense of foreboding was deepened by Joelle’s apparent equanimity. My namesake is best known for a spectacular loss, but I consoled myself that most of the time he won. He did it by moving faster than anyone expected and hitting hard. He knew that much larger forces could be defeated if they were caught off guard. On his last foray he failed to consider the possibility that his opponent would be very much on guard. He should have prepared a retreat for that eventuality – an “exit strategy.” He didn’t. His record both of victory and defeat is instructive.

The sky grew hazy and a distant thunder grumbled.

Ulysses had not threatened me openly. Yet, I was sure my life was in danger. Saving required taking the initiative – preparing for a rapid attack and an even more rapid retreat. He was too cunning to fall to a simple frontal assault. My only hope was something cockeyed and unexpected.

“I’ll be back before the rains,” I told Joelle. “I’ll get to the panels later.”

She nodded acknowledgment. It was out of character for her not to ask where I was going, but she didn’t. Her mind was elsewhere. A more reflective man than I might have worried where. Or maybe not. Female pulchritude makes most men thickheaded.

I hoped the supplies I needed would be at the old lumber yard on Ridgedale Avenue. Armed with a Remington 700, I left the theater. I commandeered Joelle’s dinghy to cross the intervening bayou. The chain link fences surrounding the site long since had collapse. The outside lumber piles were rotted away and grown over, but some of the metal storage sheds were intact. I found the ropes and tools I needed quickly enough, but feared that no explosives would be on site. Most yards didn’t stock them until civilization started its collapse – and, for whatever reason, they sold out quickly. I was in luck. I pried open the steel doors of a small shed in back of the main warehouse and found what I wanted: dynamite, blasting caps, fuses, and detonator boxes. Serendipity struck. An opossum peeked out of the undergrowth to my right. I dispatched it with my Remington. I intended it just for tomorrow’s lunch.

I carried as much as I could back to the dinghy, and motored toward the Headquarters Plaza. Ulysses’ launch was nowhere in sight. I guessed he was off exploring some other side channel in his quest for swag. This was a yet another lucky break. I would have a little time to set things up without fear of interruption. I was reluctant to head to the to the top floor where, according to the card, the party would be held; it was possible, after all, that Ulysses’ silent partner remained behind there. Besides, it wouldn’t do to blow up Ulysses in a room where I was in attendance. I would need to use the explosives more as diversions than as a direct assassination attempt. Besides, it was probably unwise to make such an attempt on the man and miss.

I grounded the dinghy where the building met the water and trudged around to the front entrance. The heavy pack, on my back, the long coil of rope on shoulder, the tools in my pockets, and the opossum tied to my belt sapped my strength in the relentless heat. The dead animal was extra weight, but leaving it in the dinghy was likely to attract a large predator. The glass doors of the main entrance resisted most of my full weight before opening. I forced them shut again behind me. An oppressive aroma of decay in the building made me gag. Pink and blue teddy bears stared at me from behind the cracked glass of a gift shop. At the end of the hall was the entrance to the hotel portion of the structure. To my surprise, lights shone from inside an open elevator. Had Ulysses fired up the hotel’s emergency generator and gotten an elevator working? I entered the carriage and pushed the button for one floor below the top floor. The doors slid shut. The elevator jerked and groaned, but it rose. When the doors opened, I exited and took the stairway to the roof.

On the roof were satellite dishes that might be able to transmit to one of the handful of functioning satellites still in geostationary orbit. Ulysses might use them to contact his yacht; I wanted the option to prevent that. The emergency generator was also on the roof inside a makeshift shed that was not part of the building’s original structure. I guessed it had been relocated here years ago when rising waters threatened to flood the basement levels, where one or more generators most likely initially were located. I planted dynamite under the generator connected to a timer. I didn’t set the timer since there was no way to predict a “best” time to kill the power. I hoped I would be able to get to the roof if things went sour. I tied off my rope to provide an alternate, if scary, escape route from the roof to the ground. I stored my Remington just inside the rooftop door along with capped and fused sticks of dynamite. I returned to the elevator and descended to the lobby. A random thought crossed my mind – it involved a long shot, but I seemed to have a little time to experiment.

At the lobby level I exited and forced open the door of the next elevator. I flipped the breaker switch. The power came on. As I’d hoped, the generator supplied the whole bank of elevators, but Ulysses had activated only one. I next found a broom in a utility closet, removed the handle, and got in the second elevator. I climbed through the ceiling hatch of the elevator carriage, reached down with the handle, and touched the C button. The C level, I knew, had no more than 10 or 20 centimeters of water. Water began leaking into the compartment as soon as the carriage stopped at C. I heard something large sloshing around outside the doors. The doors opened and water washed in. I dropped the possum along the back wall of the elevator, making a splash. I hoped that the sloshing I’d heard was an alligator. It wasn’t, but it was just as good. A monitor lizard, likely an escapee from an abandoned zoo, poked his head in the doorway. It was a big one, probably a Komodo, measuring close to four meters from nose to tail tip. Monitors prefer dry land generally, but something in the garage must have attracted him. Now he had his attention on the opossum. The creature hesitated and flicked his tongue. Then he lunged at the bait. I reached down with the broom handle and touched the “close door” button. It closed on the lizard’s tail and reopened. The creature hissed and spun around, but this drew his tail into the carriage. The door shut, trapping him inside. This had the makings of yet another diversion. It was worth the cost of tomorrow’s lunch.

From atop the carriage I was able to reach the outer door release to the next garage level up. I exited, found the stairs, and returned to the lobby. I left the building, feeling I had given myself a few options. Of course, if Ulysses simply shot me on arrival, none would help. I suspected he had something else in mind, though I didn’t know what. Curiosity about this was one factor preventing me from simply sniping him preemptively. Curiosity is almost as effective as lust at enticing us to make bad decisions.

The sound of outboard motors reverberated in the thick hazy air. Ulysses was returning. Droplets began fell on my head. The rain had become a torrent by the time I reached home.

Joelle had started to get ready a full hour before I did. She finished well afterward. The results were spectacular. She looked devastating in her summer frock, white boots, perfect grooming, and AR15 rifle. I immediately suggested blowing off the party, but she smiled and wagged a finger “no.”

I commented that her choice of weapon was odd for someone who thought guns were only to combat dangerous wildlife. She quoted Emerson, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I think Emerson was wrong about that, but I chose not to argue. It gave me an excuse to choose an AK47, which packs a greater punch with a 7.63 round than does the AR15 with a 5.56. I had found this particular AK when exploring an abandoned house on the other side of town. As the weapon was fully automatic, the original owner had been in violation of New Jersey law.

We left the theater after the rains had finished and reached the Headquarters Plaza at 7:30, just as the day shifted to twilight. The door pushed open easier this time. On the floor, newly painted red arrows directed us to the hotel lobby. There, the taciturn Marcel waited for us. He wore khaki and a large holstered sidearm. He had shaved and cleaned up, but that didn’t help his appearance much. I was relieved to see that the door to the un-baited elevator stood open. I assumed it was the one the Ulysses and he would use when they came back to the hotel, simply because I had left it conveniently at the lobby level for them, but there was no way to have been entirely sure. Marcel waved us into the carriage. The three of us entered. We shakily ascended to the tenth floor. I let the two other passengers exit before me; on the way out I punched the button for the lowest parking level, which I knew to be completely flooded. I was hoping this would short out the carriage, leaving only the one with the lizard operational.

Overhead florescent lights in the hallway flickered and hummed angrily. They created a disturbing pattern of brightness and shadows on the walls. A Rolling Stones album played in the background. The air smelled of cigar smoke, incense, and roasted meat. We followed the aroma. At the end of the hall, Ulysses emerged from a side door wearing a paisley tuxedo. Joelle laughed.

“Welcome, Mademoiselle,” he said with a deep bow. He kissed Joelle’s hand. “You too, Colonel,” he said glancing up at me. I had been demoted. I was well aware that that “colonel” was my namesake’s final rank. Joelle curtsied theatrically and brushed past him into the suite. I acknowledged Ulysses with a hand twitch and followed her, managing not to brush the host.

The party was larger than expected. Two strangers were inside the room. I guessed they were crewmen from Ulysses’ yacht. They wore blue denim, sidearms, and solemn arrogance. They had all the charm of militiamen from some Balkan civil war. They stood in front of a long table laden with food, drink. On the wall was a homemade banner with “Crazy Horse Saloon” written in red paint. Ulysses slapped my back as I stared at it.

The suite was large. What we were using as a banquet room opened up to a separate bedroom with a large king size bed. I walked through it and peered into the bathroom. It had a marble floor and a whirlpool tub. “The nightly rate for the suite must be killing you,” I said.

“Not at all,” Ulysses answered. “It’s off-season.” He exhaled loudly, before continuing, “Gentlemen…and lady…I can’t help noticing that all of us are armed. Only the U>S> government thought Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms belonged together. This is a social event. I must insist we put them away. Please. Just for the party’s duration.”

“Away where? Are we supposed to give them to you for safekeeping?” I asked.

“Why General, I do believe you don’t trust me. I suggest the closet in back of you. You see it has a lock. You may hold the key.” The inflection he gave “General” somehow took the re-promotion out of it. Hotel suites don’t normally have locks on closets, so I presumed he had installed it, and that he would hold a spare key.

He walked to the closet, held open the door, and nodded to his minions who without hesitation put their sidearms inside. Ulysses held open his tux jacket to reveal a pearl handled .45 revolver. He withdrew it and put it on a closet shelf. The man just had bet his life on civilized behavior from Joelle and me. Sometimes the man was almost likeable. Still, I was convinced other weapons were hidden and near at hand.

Joelle shrugged and put her assault rifle in the closet. I briefly considered delivering a lesson on the evils of gambling, but decided that multiple murder might negatively affect Joelle’s opinion of me. I added my AK to the stash in the closet. Ulysses shut the door, locked it with a key, and handed the key to me. “Now we all can relax more easily,” he said.

I began to worry that this was indeed a social event and not an ambush. If so, when the time came to leave, the lizard in the elevator might be a problem.

I hated to admit it, but the party was fun. The last one I attended was as a child, and the number of attendees at that one was smaller. The music was loud, the jokes were raw, and the laughter was genuine. A fine selection of wine and liquors flowed, though I only feigned partaking of them, instead sticking with tea and canned soda. The soda in the undamaged cans was still drinkable after all these years but flat. I wanted to keep my wits and reflexes sharp. Ulysses drank freely, but seemed oddly unaffected by the alcohol. His men drank more than moderately, but not to insensibility. They served up roasted alligator in onion sauce from large turkey pans.

Ulysses was his boisterous self. He bragged about his ranch on the Gold Coast of Greenland. He recounted numerous adventures including outrunning a Russian gunboat on a chase lasting from Murmansk to Spitzbergen. I chose not to ask what he had done to annoy the Russians so much. Joelle seemed to enjoy herself. The yacht sailors took turns dancing with her in the foot stomping style once popular in biker bars. She sang along in French to Under My Thumb when it blared from the stereo.

Hours passed, the general level of intoxication rose, and night fell on the world. When the windows turned completely black, Ulysses turned off the regular lights and switched to black light. The effect was surreal. Ulysses’ paisley tuxedo lit up in a riot of colors while Joelle’s white took on an otherworldly glow. From cross the room she herself vanished in the dark while her dress seems to hover in the air without an occupant, like a ghostly scene from the movie Topper. Huge insects fluttering against the outside of the windows also reflected an eerie light.

There comes a point in every party when there has been one too many drinks poured, one too many songs sung, and one too many jokes told. Good parties wrap up when that point is reached. Bad ones continue, often ending in drunken arguments and brutal hangovers. This one did both. Shortly after midnight, a drunk but steady Ulysses ejected a CD in the middle of Some Girls. He switched back from black light to white. The party was over. The crewmen resumed their default setting of quiet attention, though one had to brace himself against the wall to stop wavering on his feet.

Joelle and I watched with interest as Ulysses tipped a table, spilling the raining food onto the floor. From a corner umbrella stand, he retrieved a large map and unrolled it on the table.

“General, come look at this.”

My rank was holding steady for the moment. I was surprised he had addressed me instead of Joelle. It was out of character. I walked to the table, my shoes squishing in alligator marinade. The map was really a false-color satellite image. The structures preserved the shape of Manhattan, even where the streets were flooded.

New York City,” I said.

“Yes, obviously,” he answered while stabbing a finger at Times Square. “What do you think about it?”

“I don’t really think about it. Not often, anyway. It’s too crowded. I’d guess as many as a few hundred crazies still live there, fighting over the scraps. Large chunks are flooded. The steel frames are surely rusting. It’s amazing so many of the buildings and bridges are still standing. It’s a giant junkyard. Why? What do you think about it?”

“You see the obvious, but not the bigger picture,” he said gruffly.

“So, show me the bigger picture. And, while you’re at it, explain why you’re showing me rather than Joelle.”

Parlez-vous Francais?”

“No.”

“That’s why I’m talking to you instead of the charming guest in white,” he said. “Quebec is making a land grab. They’re claiming everything from Maine to the old Mexican border. There will be screams at the UN in Reykjavik but no one is in any position to interfere. The other remaining national governments can’t even control their own territories, never mind intervene anywhere else. A couple hundred Quebecois troops landed in the city earlier today if they kept their schedule, which I happened to stumble upon.”

“By ‘stumble’ you mean you bribed someone,” I said.

“Bribe? I prefer to think of it as a tip.”

I suddenly got why Ulysses was suspicious of Joelle. “Did you know anything about this Joelle?”

She shrugged. The gesture was losing its cuteness.

“Can anyone her tell the difference between a Walloons and Quebec French accent?” I asked the room at large. No one answered. “OK,” I continued. “This is all very interesting. It’s nice to keep up with current events. But what difference does it make? There is no USA. New York is still a junkyard regardless of who claims it. If Quebec wants that pile of rubble, who cares?”

“Much more of the city is retrievable than you think,” he said. “Nothing freezes anymore, so new water and sewer lines, where needed can be run over ground. What you call ‘rubble’ is a vast resource for new construction. Many of the existing buildings can be made habitable. The city could hold a population of 10,000 within a decade. I mean productive settlers and consumers, not the human rats living there now. Then the city can be a springboard to resettle the South or the interior.”

“Very ambitious,” I said, “but, once again, so what? What has this to do with me?”

Ulysses sighed in disappointment at my slowness. “Real estate, General. All cities teeter on the brink of starvation. They need constant supplies from the countryside – supplies this area can provide. We can catch enough fish, lizards, and alligators to feed those thousands. We are sitting on a treasure chest.”

I began to see Joelle’s earlier interest in bananas and iguanas in a new light. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You have a yacht and an estate in Greenland, but you want to be the proud proprietor of an alligator farm.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of “proprietor of a colony.’”

“Come again?”

Quebec is stealing a page from the original British colonization of this area. They're bringing back proprietary colonies in order to spur settlement. You must understand how the New York project will stretch their resources to the limits. The have to rely on private entrepreneurs to develop the hinterland.” He withdrew a folded paper from his pocket. “All we need is five adult residents to sign this document, to remain in occupation, and to recognize the sovereignty of Quebec, and 1000 square kilometers will become the personal property of whichever signatory delivers the claim to the Land Officer in New York. He or she can sell or lease land, fishing rights, resource rights…anything.”

“What do the other four signatories get out of it?” I asked.

“In the absence of a contract among themselves – which is their responsibility to make – they get the good will of the claimant. In this case, that means my good will. I will not agree to a contract, as you might have guessed. But don’t worry, George. I’ll cut you in. Your status as a verifiable born-and-bred resident is particularly useful, but don’t think you are indispensable. We’ll digitally record the proceedings to prove the signatures are not frauds. I’ve already recorded enough images of the town and the route here to prove our presence in the location.”

“There are six of us,” I said.

“Your math is irrefutable.”

“I take it you don’t want Joelle’s signature.”

“The accent worries me,” he said. “I don’t really know her status or what her relationship might be to the Quebec government or some member of it. I don’t know if any of that could affect my ownership claims in some way. So why take a chance?”

Joelle smiled and distractedly fingered a window against which a hat-sized moth fluttered.

“Sign, George,” he said. Don’t make me go find someone else.”

“My I ask why you didn’t bring a fifth signatory of your own? That seems unusually sloppy.”

“You may. I did have a fifth. He met with an unhappy accident: terminal greed.”

One of the sailors smiled.

“What if I should meet with an unhappy accident after signing?”

“That would be tragic. Sign the paper, George. I suggest that your options are limited.”

I looked at his three goons and at the closet door in front of which they stood. I nodded. Ulysses handed me a fountain pen as Marcel aimed a camera at us that he had picked up from somewhere. I assumed hidden guns were just as accessible to him. I signed the top line of the document. I felt like John Hancock. The three sailors signed in turn, trading off the camera as they did. Then Ulysses signed the bottom with a flourish.

“Excellent. Now, Colonel…” Ulysses choked off as he looked up.

Joelle was aiming a .32 automatic at him. I haven’t a clue to this day where it had been. “Put the camera down,” she ordered, and then waved the men back. “Pick up the camera, George. The rules don’t limit the signatories to five, they merely call for at least that many. Record me signing.” She put her gun in my free hand and walked to the table. I was ecstatic. She and I were in this together. She signed and slid the document in the top of a boot, from which it protruded.

“Give me the gun and camera, cher, and open the closet,” she said, waving the men away from the door. She slipped the camera strap over an arm.

“Right.”

I took out the key and opened the door, but as I reached for my AK, she said, “No, no. Stand with the others.” The .32 was pointed at me.

With a constriction in my chest, I backed up and stood next to Ulysses. He favored me with a sour smile.

Joelle, facing us at all times, sidled to the closet. She slung the AK over one shoulder and the AR over the other. She draped the sidearm belts over the arm with the camera. The loose .45 temporarily had her stumped, but she ended up holding it against her body with her arm. There was something fascinating about the performance.

“I think it would be best if I don’t hear any footsteps behind me,” said the heavily burdened Joelle as she backed out of the room. “By the way, General,” she added, addressing Ulysses, not me, “I’m not a spy for Quebec. I’m just an entrepreneur, like you. After I deliver the claim, I’d be happy to sell you that alligator farm.”

Ulysses was poised to lunge as Joelle exited the room, but I tugged on his sleeve to stay put. He looked doubtful but, perhaps out of curiosity, stood still as minutes passed. The crew, accustomed to following orders rather than taking initiative, waited for direction. A shriek and a clatter came from the hallway. We both hustled to the door. The hall was empty except for sidearm belts, two loose handguns, the AR15, the camera, and the document, which, I guessed, Joelle had removed from her boot while she waited for the elevator – one that contained a 12-foot monitor lizard. She must have dropped everything but the AK when faced with the lizard. This was wise. Any of the other weapons would have annoyed it. There was no rifle fire, so she was still running down a side hall, or the creature had caught her.

I ran for the elevators and grabbed the AR and the document. To my surprise. Ulysses was not behind me. He must have calculated that I would get to the AR first, and so ducked back into the room. I dove into the stairway. Rifle fire raked the door as it swung shut behind me. There indeed had been other weapons hidden in the suite. I ran up to the next landing and started up the flight toward the roof. The door banged open, but I was out of sight in this position. Multiple footsteps banged in the logical direction: down. I reached the roof door, lit fuses on two sticks of dynamite, and placed them on the top stair. I grabbed my Remington, which so far I hadn’t needed, and ran to the generator. I set the timer on the generator charges and then the one on the satellite dishes for two minutes. I heard muted gunfire beneath me, including the distinctive rattle of an AK47. I tossed the AR off the roof, shouldered the Remington, dropped the rope over the edge, and rappelled down the outer wall. On any other occasion, this would have terrified me, but my supply of terror already was being fully used. Above me I heard satisfying crumps as the dynamite sticks detonated. Lights went out on the tenth floor, and the windows went dark.

The rope ended five meters short of the ground. I lowered myself as much as I could and dropped to the ground. I landed with a splat on the muddy bayou bank next to the motor launch. Something large splashed a few meters away. I clambered onto the boat and looked for the ignition. It was a keyed ignition, but the key was left in it. This was a careless invitation to thieves. I turned the key and the engines roared to life. I engaged reverse, and the boat slid off the bank. I pushed the gear level forward and motored east. I traveled as fast as I dared in a nighttime lit only by a sliver of moon. It was nearly two fast: I was almost decapitated by an overhanging branch I had failed to see in the dark. It brushed my head and removed some hairs.

Well downriver I passed a yacht, presumably Ulysses’, but decided not to switch vessels on the off chance someone was on board. The fuel gauges on the boat looked adequate for the full trip.

I considered what to call my colony. Morristown didn’t sound quite right for a town in Quebec. Perhaps Morrisbourg would be better, I thought.

The boat entered the Upper Bay as dawn broke. The green lady still held her torch high. Beyond her were the weatherworn skyscrapers of Manhattan. Over Battery Park flew the fleur-de-lis.



SLOG
Part II: STARS

My pet monitor lizard “Luggage” posed like a statue next to the Cave Saurum sign atop the white marble steps. He didn’t stir and his eyes stared fixedly ahead, but I knew he was aware of me. He preferred the hour before noon when the direct sun bleached the steps. The length of his chain was open to doubt from the sidewalk, so he deterred idle visitors.

The tasteful masonry structure was built in 1916 in a federal revival style, when it was the main post office for Morristown, NJ, as it would remain for more than a century. It is now both my residence and the official Governor’s Mansion in the proprietary colony of what has been renamed Morrisbourg, plus grand Québec. The mansion is a building with substance, and well-suited to the sweltering climate that descended on the region when the sun went into overdrive. Oddly, Americans built grander public buildings in their leaner years than in their later wealthier ones. The last post offices built in the 21st century were flimsy aluminum and glass boxes.

I’m George Custer – no relation to the 19th century cavalry officer of the same name. I’m the proprietary Governor of much of what once was the northern part of New Jersey. My lands stretch all the way west to the Delaware and south to the South Branch of the Raritan.

After a rough start, the colony is flourishing. The tough survivors who had natural immunities to the diseases that ravaged North America are emerging from their hideouts in the hills and forests, and they are settling here where the rule of law has been reestablished. There are more of them than I ever imagined. The population of Morrisbourg already numbers nearly 400. Folks are starting farms and opening businesses.

At first I resented the loss of my solitude. I had grown accustomed to being the sole resident of the town of my birth, but the truth is that it is good to have people around again. Of course, it helps when you’re rich. I never had experienced wealth before. When you are alone, the word doesn’t have much meaning. Of course, modern notions of crowding are different from what they once were. Back before the climate disaster, this little town was home to some 20,000 people. Today there aren’t 20,000 people in all of the former New England and Middle Atlantic States combined.

I reentered the mansion. It still feels strange to me that I’m really the Governor. It wasn’t something I had planned. My wife Joelle sat in a lawn chair in the marble entry hall. She had planned to be Governor. It didn’t work out. She wore a two-piece orange bathing suit. A blue haze hovered over her. She was seldom without such a cloud anymore. A pink bong with a happy face on it stood on the floor next to the chair. On the other side of the chair was an open bottle of banana wine. She exhaled and coughed. It wasn’t hashish today. The sweet odor of opium drifted my way.

“Good morning, Joelle.”

She squinted at me and answered, “Hey.” She looked away and shook her head. I got the feeling that I once again had failed to meet her standards. “I need some more weed and more wine,” she said. “Get them today. And the photocells on the roof need cleaning. Do it now! The fans are barely turning. I shouldn’t have to ask you these things. You can be such an ass. I don’t know why I married you.”

Neither did I. There was no reason she couldn’t have taken care of those chores herself while I was out collecting the rents. Since descending into addiction, Joelle had become demanding, self-centered, unhelpful, and mean. It was a display of weakness that contrasted sharply with her former confident self-reliance. She hated to be alone these days, but her alcohol and drug induced rages and general nastiness alienated all her friends and acquaintances. They alienated me too. This wasn’t the woman I had married.

“Do you have to smoke dope right in the foyer?” I asked.

“What am I supposed to do? Hide away in some boiling hot room upstairs? I’d like to meet anyone who comes to visit. Not that anyone does thanks to that damn lizard of yours. I told you to get rid of him.”

“He’s my pet.” I didn’t add that he wasn’t the main reason no one visited.

I tried to make myself angry enough to break it off with her for good, but once again failed. We had known good times together. I had to admit, also, that Joelle’s good looks were holding up well despite the chemical battering and her general disregard of them. Am I so shallow as to be influenced by that? It seems so.

“I’ll go fix the photocells,” I said.

“Don’t break any this time! At least Ulysses didn’t trip over his own feet!”

Joelle was fond of comparing me unfavorably to Ulysses S. Johnston. He, Joelle, and I once had competed for the possession of Morrisbourg. Though my last-minute entry into the race was impulsive and slapdash, I had won. Luck had paid a large part in that. After filing my claim to Morrisbourg in New York, I had returned to town with armed guards in order to discourage a coup. Those guards still serve on the police force. Ulysses had anticipated my show of force, and left town in Joelle’s dinghy. Stuck in Morrisbourg, Joelle accepted her loss with apparent good grace, and met me with a smile on my return. We were married a week later. She didn’t object to a prenuptial agreement. I don’t mean to seem the cad, but when a woman has pointed a gun at you once, you hesitate to be worth more to her dead than alive. I wrote a Will leaving everything to her, but I kept that detail a secret; the Will is locked securely in a safe.

At first our life together was exciting and rewarding. Together we administered the colony. Morrisbourg grew rapidly by serving the food and resource needs of a renascent New York, recently re-occupied and annexed by Quebec.

English-speakers outnumber the Quebecois, and just call them “French” even though (or because) that annoys them. The French have done alright by me. They enforce my status as proprietary governor, after all. Beyond that, they’ve reintroduced the rule of law, issued a declaration of individual rights that is passably liberal, and they’ve given the locals the opportunity to raise our living standards above the level of Tarzan and Jane. We could have been colonized by worse. The real French are having a much tougher time of it under the heel of the Swiss. Still, they are a bit arrogant, and carpetbaggers from Montreal dominate the business and government in New York. The locals can’t help feeling resentful sometimes.

Morrisbourg provides New York with a variety of products including fresh meat and alligator skins. The key to our colony’s success, however, is three cash crops, and Joelle deserves the credit for promoting all three. One is hemp, a tough versatile plant from which we make paper, cloth, rope, and pharmaceuticals – and, of course, smokable hashish. Poppies are the second. We grow them not for decoration or for poppyseed bagels but for opium. The French are remarkably accepting of this, though they do restrict the trade in opium to the new territories south of the old Canadian border. Perhaps they hope to keep the southern colonies philosophical, or perhaps they just like collecting the tax. The third crop is bananas. We do sell just the fruit, but the real money is in banana wine. Labeled  Old Yeller: the Bananas that Bite, this dreadful brew explicably is a fad throughout Greater Quebec.

The danger of sitting on this three-legged economic stool soon was evinced in my own home when Joelle herself became a customer. The change in her was rapid and depressing. Joelle always had been ambitious, ruthless, and smart. She was as dangerous as a leopard, but I loved her that way. She scared me, but I loved her. Now she just wanted to stay home and addle her mind with booze and drugs. I realized full well that her substance abuse and torpor were related to the misfire of her plan to seize Morrisbourg for herself. Marriage to the Governor was a poor substitute for being Governor. After the initial stimulating years of establishing the colony, her dissatisfaction began to grow. For this reason, I felt partly responsible for her current state.

I tried to think of a solution short of signing the colony over to her. I knew Joelle well enough to know this would be hard on the colonists – and on me. I had vetoed many a harsh measure for which she actively argued. While scraping fungal growth off the photocells, I thought of a diversion. This is not the same as a solution, but it is something.

As usual, I was soaked in perspiration when I left the roof and returned to the foyer. I’ve almost forgotten what it is like to be dry.

“Joelle, why don’t you accompany the next wine shipment to New York?”

“Why don’t you go yourself? And you stink. Take a bath.”

“I can’t. Go to New York, that is. I’m going to be busy orienting new settlers and negotiating business contracts with them.”

“Don’t negotiate. Just tell them the way it will be,” she said.

“Regardless, they’ll keep me busy for a while. It would help if you met our major distributers and the politicos in New York for a few days. Hobnob. Go to parties. Personal contact of that sort does help.”

“Parties?” she said.

“Yes. Meet with the Mayor and the Military Commander. Make the society pages. It’s good for business. It might be fun, too.”

“I’ll need quite a lot of money,” she warned.

“We have money. Take what you need. The next boat leaves on Friday, though you can take a later one if you want.”

“No, I’ll go Friday. But you owe me, George.”

Joelle apparently liked the big city, because a few days stretched to a month. New York is huge. It numbers nearly 6,000 people, and immigrants arrive every day from the hinterlands and the north. It is one of the world’s great metropolises.

While she was gone, I got up, ate, worked, slept, and played entirely on my own schedule. It was relaxing and revitalizing. Yet, a part of me missed her. Perhaps that part was insane, but the fact remains. What can explain such a reaction? The answer can’t be found in books on library shelves – at least not on the shelves in Morrisbourg. I know. I’ve looked.

All vacations come to and end, even those that masquerade as work. One day I walked into my executive office and was startled to see a familiar face. Joelle had sent no warning of her return. She glanced up at me. Her eyes had regained their old fire. Something seemed to be missing; it took me a while to realize the missing element was opium smoke.

I got only as far as “Hey, great to see…” when she cut me off with a question.

“Where are the distillery accounts?” she asked.

“Under ‘B’ for banana. Why?”

“Because you’ve let the distillers cheat us of our proper percentage.”

“Well, I’m glad to see you taking an interest again. Welcome back.” I meant that in more ways than one. “Did you enjoy your extended excursion?” I queried.

“Yes. Try to enjoy yours, though I can see how you might not.”

“I have no travel plans,” I objected.

“That’s where you’re wrong, cher. Report tomorrow to Captain Le Clerc on the gunboat La Salle. She’s tied up at the Battery. I told the wine boat to wait for you until 6.”

“It doesn’t need to wait because I’m not going,” I said.

“Yes, you are.”

“How do I put this? No. That’s it: no. I have a colony to run here.”

“No,” she responded. “I have a colony to run. This colony has been placed in Trust to me for the duration of your assignment, which already has begun.”

I was beginning to recall the less enchanting aspects of Joelle’s old self.  “By whose authority? Besides,” I argued, “we have a contract and a prenup…”

“Both of which have been suspended for the duration of the Emergency – by the authority of the Regional Military Commander.”

It was beginning to look as though I was taking a trip. “What’s all this about? What emergency?”

Quebec is asserting its legitimate sovereignty over the whole of North America, exclusive of the territories substantively and usefully occupied by Canada and the Republic of Alaska. In other words, the whole of the old Lower 48, and everything south of there to Panama,” she said.

“Really? Wow. Well, it’s nice to keep up on current events, but I don’t see how that is an emergency. There is no one in any of that area capable of disputing the claim.”

“You are wrong,” she said, “which is getting to be a habit for you. Before making the announcement, the PM decided she would send a modest force to occupy Washington, DC. The place made a good symbol – taking it was a good way to demonstrate our sway.”

The “our” did not escape my notice. “What’s to occupy? Foggy Bottom started out as a swamp. The whole District must be under water,” I said.

“No, Capitol Hill is dry, more or less. Troops landed a few months ago.”

“Months? Why am I hearing about it only now, and only from you? There hasn’t been a word about it on the radio or in the papers – unless those references to survey missions count. I thought the whole point was to make headlines with this symbolic occupation.”

“They would be the wrong headlines,” she answered.

“Are ‘wrong headlines’ the emergency?”

“Yes. The entire expedition is missing. They reported landing in DC, and then went silent. A relief boat was sent. The second team reported back that the place was deserted. They made one more report, and then nothing was heard again from the second boat.”

“Well, maybe some swamp dwellers jumped both expeditions,” I speculated. “You know how dangerous some of them are. But they can’t amount to more than a band of armed bandits. The French probably sent too few troops to protect themselves.”

Joelle smiled. “You have a habit of referring to your countrymen in the third person, as though you are not one of us – and we’re not French. But yes, the PM shares your view. This time we are sending adequate forces on the La Salle, and you are going with them.”

“Why me? In what possible way can I help anything? Whose screwy idea was it to send me?”

“The ‘bandits’ as you call them.”

“Come again?” I asked.

“The bandits asked for you – by name. Remember I said we got an additional report from the second boat? The report said that a sign nailed to a pillar by the main entrance of the Capitol announced ‘a state of war now exists’ – it didn’t say between whom and whom – and further said ‘we demand Governor George Custer of Morrisbourg’ act as negotiator for a peace accord.’”

“I’m dumbfounded. That is so very strange,” I said.

“Isn’t it? I dare say the Prime Minister is suspicious of you. She had half a mind to arrest you as a spy. Her better nature prevailed, and she ordered the Regional Military Commander to employ you as negotiator, and to take whatever other measures he felt necessary.”

“Thanks for vouching for me.”

“I didn’t say I had.”

“Well, I guess I’m going on a trip to DC.”

Joelle shrugged. The gesture wasn’t as cute as it used to be.

“Oh, George? One more thing. I’m pregnant. Now hurry or you’ll miss that boat.”

“You’re…”

“I don’t want to discuss it. Don’t worry: the colony is in good hands while you’re gone. And, if anything should happen to you, under the terms of your Will the colony will stay in good hands. Don’t trust so much in safes, George. Now go!”



Harbor water lapped the hull of the warship tied up at the tip of Manhattan. The French were not underestimating their enemies this time. The La Salle was a beautiful diesel-powered coastal patrol vessel painted in blue, white and gray camouflage. She sported a 120mm main gun and several .50 caliber machine guns. She likely was the equal of any ship in any of the world’s remaining navies. Few governments can afford such toys anymore.

The organized military forces of the world consist overwhelmingly of modest infantry units with automatic rifles. The only hi-tech to which any have access is old tech. Advanced economies are such an intricate web of skills and resources, that the ability to produce advanced products – including high end electronics – effectively collapsed along with global population. Modern economies, accordingly, are a weird mix of 19th, 20th, and 21st century technologies. Blacksmiths and horse-drawn wagons exist side by side with scavenged microchips and gas turbines. No one can manufacture new “smart” missiles, but some of the old ones still work. The satellites are winking out, but for now enough are functioning to allow rapid global communication.

I introduced myself to the French marine at the gangplank. Wordlessly, he grabbed my duffel bag and emptied the contents on top of the sea wall. He stuffed underwear, soap, socks and a razor back in the bag. The rest, including books and spare clothes he left at his feet. He tossed the bag back to me and waved me aboard. I never did learn if he had kept the dumped contents or kicked them into the water.

I found the bunk room below. One sailor there pointed at the top bunk of a triple bank. My nose would be almost against the ceiling. I hoped the trip wouldn’t be too bumpy. I tossed my duffel bag on top and returned to the deck. The crew studiously ignored me. I found a place to sit in the bow in front of the main gun. Within the hour, crew untied the moorings. The engines rumbled and the ship backed away from the dock.

The sleek ship sliced through the calm harbor waters. We cruised past the statue of liberty. The fumes blended with the sea air to form a heady smell.

“Mister Custer!” barked a voice behind me. The voice belonged to the ship captain, a weathered choleric fellow who looked much older than his 32 years. I got up and walked around the gun to face him. I held out a hand. He didn’t take it.

“On this ship what I tell you when I tell you to do it. Not one jot more or less, and without delay. Do you understand?”

“Yes, captain.”

He spun on his heel and walked off, visible restraining himself. I wondered if he, too, thought I had collaborated with the bandits in DC.

I explored the deck, and tried approaching the captain again, hoping for a more cordial response.

“Excuse me, sir. I’m curious about what’s under the tarp on the back deck. It’s as big as a medium-size whale.” I added irrelevantly, “You know, the hemp ropes holding it down probably came from Morrisbourg.”

“I don’t care if you twined them yourself with your own fingers! Custer!” He spat my name. “I’ll tell you what you need to know when you need to know it! If you poke your nose where it doesn’t belong I’ll chop it off! If you try to contact anyone, I’ll throw you overboard! And don’t fraternize with my crew!”

“Contact? Whom would I contact?”

“That is the question, isn’t it? Did I make myself clear about your limits?”

Crystal.”

With 20 sailors and 40 marines aboard, the ship was crowded. If any one of them spoke English, aside from the captain and the medical officer, he didn’t reveal it. The medical officer was the only woman aboard. While she did exchange the common courtesies with me, I refrained from striking up a real conversation with her. For one thing, I was sure the captain would regard that as fraternizing. For another, the French woman already in my life was trouble enough. I spent time fishing, as did other members of the crew. Fishing is excellent what with the end of commercial fleets. Porpoises played in our wake.

When night fell I could see stars! I rarely saw them at home, because of the plant cover, hazy skies, and frequent rain. I stared at the sky for hours before finally going below and squeezing into my bunk.

We re-entered poor visibility the next day as we rounded the tip of the Delmarva Peninsula. The towers of the suspension sections of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel faded in the haze. Le Clerc did not slow the vessel on that account. Soon we entered the broad Potomac, much swollen beyond its former banks. We cut back to a more cautious speed. Sailors took hand soundings to double check whatever electronic readings were available on the bridge. Others took stations at their guns.

The ambient heat was more oppressive than in Morrisbourg. Back home the mist usually burned off by mid-morning, but down here it was still as dense as a steam bath. We rounded the bend where the Anacostia meets the Potomac, and the Capitol dome came fuzzily into view. Jungle growth on the Arlington side formed a wall of green. Much of DC was flooded. The upper floors of decaying buildings rose up out of the swamp. The Capitol and the Washington Monument stood on two islets.

We maneuvered between structures and puttered over a flooded Independence Avenue. We slipped between the Air and Space Museum and the old Smithsonian castle. Spanish moss draped the castle tower. The former Mall formed a wide channel. The hull gently touched bottom less than three meters from dray land.

Despite the brutal humidity, the marines went over the side with admirable celerity. They splashed to shore and occupied the rear veranda of the Capitol in minutes. The sailors moored the ship and stretched a walkway of rope and boards to land. We waited as the marines entered the building. Le Clerc stood by the gunners on the 120mm. Exploring such a large structure was no easy task, but after two hours, a sergeant emerged on the verandah and signaled that the building was secure. There was no sign of the members of the previous expeditions.

To marines had been held back from the assault. Le Clerc dispatched them by rubber raft to the Washington Monument. He was unhappy about sending such a small team but he didn’t want to reduce the main force further. I didn’t envy the two marines the climb up the stairs of the 550-foot (168m) tower. Before evening, however, they waved from the top windows. It was an ideal observation post and sniper position.

As night fell, the main force of marines took up positions around the Capitol. Le Clerc ordered me below, and posted a guard on me. I didn’t know whether to be insulted or flattered.

After a fitful night’s sleep, I was awakened by a marine who spoke in English, “Follow me.”

I needed a shave and even more urgently needed to attend to some basic biological functions. “Give me a couple minutes,” I said.

The marine would have none of it. “Follow me!” I followed him.

As we walked through a patch of swamp grass, I saw something strange: horseshoe tracks. Where could horses be raised around here? And who would transport them to this island? Where were they now? It was hard to see the sense of it.

We entered the Capitol through the Diplomatic Entrance on the ground floor. Our footsteps rang hollow in the dead air of the old stone corridor. We climbed a two-tiered staircase and passed through a short hallway. I looked right and saw Benjamin Franklin looking back. This was Statuary Hall, originally the House Chamber before the new wing was added in the 1850s. We moved on to the Rotunda. Even with the smell of decay and the spread of fungus, the space was impressive. On the ceiling was a bizarre painting of George Washington rising gloriously into the clouds above Roman-clad figures. Winged Victory held a sword in one hand and her red-white-blue shield in the other. Mildew had destroyed most of the paintings in the wall niches, but The Declaration of Independence in Congress and The Surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga were still recognizable.

The marine prodded me. We proceeded to a semi-circular room with a half-dome overhead. We were in the old Senate Chamber where the Senate had met until 1859. This was the site of the historic 19th century debates on freedom and slavery. I don’t believe in ghosts, but, if they do exist, surely some hang out here. Le Clerc sat at Daniel Webster’s desk. A balled-up flag lay on top. It was the Stars and Stripes.

“This was flying on the east side,” he said. The east side of the Capitol is the main entrance, even though it faces away from downtown.

“OK. The bandits are patriots. What’s your point?” I asked.

“The point is reinforced by your use of the word ‘patriots.’”

I sighed loudly. “The USA is gone. I know that, even if whoever ran up the flag doesn’t. The continent is better off united, even under the French.”

“We are not French and ‘under’ is an insulting preposition.”

“Fine. Use whatever proposition you like. I’m not political.”

Le Clerc looked at me with deep skepticism. “A colonial Governor is not political?”

“This one isn’t – and, besides, my authority is suspended at the moment.”

“Good. Let’s call things by their proper names, Custer. Your friends here are not patriots and are not bandits. They are terrorists. They asked for you specifically to negotiate with us, and they added a demand that we’ve kept secret, even from your wife. The terrorists demand that we travel upriver. You are to be present. You will be our representative, which in my opinion is a case of the terrorists negotiating with themselves. They made no mention of hostages, but we must assume they have them, which makes their demands an ultimatum Or do you already know all this?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“You may have fooled the civilians with that lie – including that poor wife of yours – but you aren’t fooling me! Custer, you and your buddies are despicable scum. Taking hostages is a coward’s way to negotiate. If it were up tome, I’d shoot you right here, bring in some serious artillery, and bombard the riverbanks with HE the whole length upstream. But the PM wants the hostages back even if it means dealing with trash. So cut the crap and tell me what you want.”

“I want to go home. Le Clerc, you are way off base on this one. Honestly, I don’t know these people. I don’t know what they want. I’m flabbergasted that they knew my name. If I had to guess, I’d say they heard it on some news broadcast about banana futures.”

Le Clerc shook his head, plainly disbelieving every word.

“So are we taking La Salle upriver?” I asked.

“Oh you’d love that: take the ship in a channel through dense jungle where your friends can blow us out of the water at will with hidden guns.”

“Well then, what are your plans besides threatening me, which, I assure you is as useless as it apparently is satisfying?”

Le Clerc reluctantly accepted that I would not speak for the bandits, even though he refused to accept that I could not. “We are going upriver,” he said, “but on my terms, not yours. Let me show you that cargo about which you were so curious earlier.”

On the way back to the ship we passed marines carrying crates of explosives to the Crypt beneath the Rotunda. “What’s that all about?” I asked.

“We are prewiring the Capitol for destruction. If we are forced to abandon the site to the terrorists again, we are leaving it a pile of rubble. We can detonate by radio from La Salle or from the Washington Monument. Your people have nothing to win here.”

Once again he assumed the bandits were my people. I often have been underestimated, which has worked to my advantage. This was the first time I had been overestimated so completely. I didn’t see an upside to it.

In a sense, the captain was right not to trust me. He had done nothing to increase my affection for the French, and the symbols of the old Republic stirred something in me. I began to wonder if we would be better off independent. The more I thought about it, though, the less sensible the idea seemed. The lower 48 were a giant disaster area where the only things more deadly than the climate, germs, and wildlife were the surviving humans. The Alaskans still had a government, true enough, but they were in no shape to intervene down here. What little law, order, and, I had to admit, justice prevailed were contributed by Quebec.

As we exited the Capitol, I saw La Salle’s secret weapon taking shape. An airship was inflating. It already hovered above the deck though only about 70% full. It was nearly as long as La Salle itself. The gondola slung below was open with no glass. I was impressed. The declining industrial capability of Quebec and the rest of the world made building new reliable fixed-wing aircraft a problem, but the manufacture of floating airbags was well within modern competence. It was a clever approach to reclaiming the sky.

“The gondola has room for four,” said Le Clerc. “She’s powered by a 25-horse gasoline engine with a three-blade prop. She’s filled with hydrogen.”

“Isn’t that awfully dangerous,” I asked.

“Helium is in short supply. We can make hydrogen from water by electrolysis. Besides, hydrogen gives 20% more lift. As for the danger of fire, I don’t mind placing you at risk. I would regret the loss of a crewman, though, which is why I’m going with you myself.”

“With me? You mean we’re going up in that thing?”

“Yes.”

“Won’t we be a very big target?”

“Oh, I don’t expect your pals will shoot at you,” he said. “Besides this is a diplomatic mission, is it not? I’m not even bringing weapons except for this.” He patted his 9mm. “And that’s not for them.” I understood that it was for possible use against me. “Listen, Custer,” he added. “If any harm comes to those loyal Quebecois held by your friends, I’ll make you pay.”

“Fly now, pay later.”

Le Clerc explained the basics of airship operation to me. They were more complex than I had thought. I learned, for example, that within the outer skin were inner bags called ballonets that served to compensate for pressure changes. These required constant attention.

A crewman approached us with two glasses and a bottle. It was Old Yeller, Morrisbourg’s horrible banana wine. He poured a glass for each of us. To my surprise, Le Clerc clinked his glass to mine. I understood this to be some expression of camaraderie at the start of a new mission, which, given his evaluation of me, was a major concession on his part to sportsmanship on his part. I clinked back and downed the glass. I hate banana wine. The crewman was unsuccessfully suppressing a smirk. I guessed he shared my opinion of Old Yeller.

We slowly rose above the sunken city. The engine started easily and we nosed the craft upriver. Teddy Roosevelt’s statue, standing ankle-deep in the Potomac, seemed to wave to us as we passed overhead. Linear breaks in the trees marked old highways. I identified a long curving one as the Capital beltway. For hours the scenery barely changed. There was mile after mile thick steamy foliage split by the river. There was no sign of bandits or of any human occupation.

“What’s the range of this thing?” I asked.

“We could make it to the Mississippi and back if we had to. Do we have to?”

“I keep telling you I don’t know.”

“So you say. Regardless, we are not turning back until we do a full reconnaissance.”

At last a change took place in the scenery below. The hills became mountains that our blimp barely cleared. We think of Maryland as a fairly level place, formerly host to horse farms and the well-to-do suburbs of DC and Baltimore, but the western counties are as rugged as anything this side of the Mississippi. At this altitude the heat was less oppressive – almost pleasant. The foliage changed with the topography. The rainforest gave way to grasslands on the upper mountain slopes. It looked like pictures of the Kenya highlands in the atlases in the Morrisbourg Library.

“We’re running out of river, aren’t we?” I asked

Le Clerc grunted and pointed at a rotted billboard below: “Welcome to West Virginia, Wild and Wonderful.” I pointed to the next bend in the river. Tied up on the bank was a line of wooden rafts. If this was the river fleet of a bandit gang, the gang was a big one. We could here distant shouting.

“Are we setting down?” I asked.

“No, because this is where you want me to set down. I’m going to look at what you don’t want me to see. There is smoke beyond that ridge.”

I wasn’t sure we had the altitude to clear the ridge, but we did, barely. Below us was a plateau covered by farms complete with fences and plowed fields. There were more shouts and the pops of rifle fire. Le Clerc full throttled the engine. I could hear bullets striking the fabric of the blimp. We passed over a white farmhouse close enough to touch the chimney. The farm looked like a Norman Rockwell painting. A village center of sorts was on our left. The smoke in the air had the acrid odor characteristic of industry. I assumed it consisted of blacksmith shops. Nothing more sophisticated seemed possible. A US flag flew on a flagpole next to a baseball field.

We were losing altitude from the bullets. We were lucky not to have exploded. People below had come outside their homes and barns to look at us. Most were dressed in blue. We reached the far edge of the plateau. Our continued to drop but the slope was steeper than our rate of descent. Jungle growth was in the valley ahead.

“Call La Salle, Custer. I’m a little busy here!”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to call La Salle. That might bring down firepower on these farmers, who probably were guilty of nothing more than defending their homes against what they viewed as an outside threat. Besides, there were the French captives to consider, assuming there were any. Calling in the marines now might endanger them unnecessarily. The request for me as negotiator was beginning to make sense, too. If they learned somehow by radio broadcast that I was a Governor of a colony of Quebec, yet not French, they might have thought I would be more sympathetic to them. They’d be right, too.

I perfunctorily fussed with the radio. “La Salle. Calling La Salle.”

“It will work better if you use the right frequency,” said Le Clerc.

“Which one is that?”

“The one it on before you changed it!”

Our descent was now alarmingly swift. As the valley floor loomed, a collision with the trees looked imminent.  I spotted a small lagoon formed by a blockage in a large stream.

‘Can you make that?” I asked.

“We’ll see.” Le Clerc revved the engine and steered toward the water. “If we survive the crash, you won’t survive a minute past it!” he shouted.

Saying as much out loud probably made Le Clerc feel better, but it foolishly gave me fair warning. I grabbed his hair and banged his skull on the steering column. Stunned, he sunk to his knees. This gave me the opportunity to slip the 9mm out of his holster and throw it overboard into the jungle. Le Clerc recovered enough to push me back and spin around. He got his hands on my throat just as we hit the water. Both of us went sprawling. The gondola submerged under the weight of the deflating fabric. I pulled myself over the side against the inrushing water and swam to shore without looking back. I knew too well the kinds of creatures that inhabit waters like this. Among them, if still alive, was Le Clerc, who no doubt was irritated with me. I hoped he was. For all of his lethal threats, there was a rough honor to the man. I almost liked him.

I grabbed tree roots at the lagoon’s edge and pulled myself out of the water and muck. I plunged into the dense foliage. Any passerby a meter away would have been hard-pressed to see me. I felt safe. As a poisonous snake slithered past my ankle, however, I decided that safe was a relative term. I needed to reach the settlement on the plateau if I planned to survive for long. I had to make the long climb up the steep mountainside. It would be best to get to the top before nightfall. There are sharp teeth in the jungle and I would be easy prey in the dark.

There is no need to recount in detail my painful ascent through vines and brush in the debilitating heat while having blood sucked out of me by more types of insects than I knew existed. Once upon a time, some folks were desperate to save the last scraps of the world’s rainforests. I hope they’re happy. By nightfall I had made substantial progress but was still in the forest. I climbed a tree to sit out the dark. I hoped not to be eaten before morning. Somehow I fell asleep.

I opened my eyelids. Sunlight leaked through the leaves. I was exhausted, dehydrated, and in pain, but there was nothing to do but continue up the slope. I dropped to the ground and slogged forward. In only 100 meters I was through the tree line. I had stopped that close to my goal. In front of me was a three-rail wooden fence and beyond that was grass pasture. Horses in the pasture grazed peaceably.

The breeze shifted a rank smell even worse than my own acquired odor wafted my way. To my left on the ground was the carcass the size of a full-grown pig, though it more closely resembled an oversize rat. I had heard of capybaras, giant rodents native to Brazil, but never had seen one. Something had killed it and I suspected I had interrupted its meal. Perhaps it was now stalking me. The horses in the distance looked suddenly alert, and then ran off. Now I was sure of it. I was too tired to run. Besides that just might trigger a chase. I regretted having thrown away Le Clerc’s gun. A peach tree stood about 15 meters inside the pasture. I climbed the fence and walked deliberately toward it. I felt eyes on my back the whole way.

Peach trees do not grow tall, but their profusion of branches makes them easy to climb. This merit quickly proved minor. As I settled in the upper branches a jaguar walked out of the forest and leapt the fence at a bound. The big spotted cat soft-pawed the distance to the tree with the nonchalance of which only cats are capable. She sat at the bottom and looked up at me.

I’ve never enjoyed, or even understood, killing animals for sport. It would be a lie, though, to say I felt anything but relief when a bullet dropped the jaguar. Ulysses S. Johnston clicked the bolt on his Springfield. The reins lay on his saddle but the horse held steady.

The resemblance to General Grant was now almost laughably close. Ulysses wore a blue uniform that recalled those of 19th century cavalry officers, though the tailoring was slapdash and the color too light. Five stars were on each shoulder, an unusual rank in any age. The uniform looked like denim and must have been terribly hot. He was accompanied by two young cavalrymen, also in denim cut to be uniforms. Between them on a donkey was a bedraggled and tied Le Clerc. One of the men dismounted and offered his mare to me. I accepted gratefully.

“Welcome to Aurora,” said Ulysses. You should have walked up Route 50. It’s an easy climb that way. I don’t know how you missed it.”

I probably hadn’t missed it by more than a few meters. “I always prefer the scenic route,” I answered.

The soldier whose horse I had taken was leading Le Clerc’s donkey from the ground. “Are you OK?” I asked Le Clerc.

He merely glared at me.

“He’ll be fine,” said Ulysses. “He led us on such a merry chase before we caught him that I know his health is good. Sorry about my boys shooting at you, but you caught them off guard. We were expecting some little motorboat on the river. When you appeared in the sky they thought it was an attack. You always were full of surprises, George. An airship! That must have been fun.”

“All but the last few minutes.”

“‘Oh, the humanity.’ We’re patching the blimp up, or at least trying to. We don’t know yet if it’s too badly damaged.”

“Is Route 50 really passable? Or is it just less grown-over than either side?”

“It is passable by horse and buggy as far east as Winchester and as far west as Parkersburg. Clearing the road is central to our plan to extend territorial control. One day it will you’ll be able to roll a wheeled carriage on it from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”

Aurora would have been a small and forgettable village in the old days, but by modern standards it was a world class city. Its population exceeded Morrisbourg and was nearly half that of New York. The appearance was largely bucolic, but, as we so often forget, agrarian scenes belong to civilization, not to nature. I was charmed by the look of the place. I was accustomed to regarding human habitation everywhere as an alien presence amid fierce jungle growth and encroaching water; here the farms, pastures, houses, and people seemed to belong in the landscape. Clothing fashion, of all things was the most jarring element. All of the men and many of the women wore blue ersatz uniforms. The children mostly wore khaki, with many sporting red, white, and blue armbands sporting bald eagles.

“I seem to have stumbled on the set of F Troop,” I remarked.

“Are you casting me as Captain Parmenter?” Ulysses asked.

“Not if you’re casting me as Wrangler Jane. What is going on here?” I asked. “And how have you managed it? I’m guessing there are a few thousand people up here. That’s a lot, but it’s not enough to support industry above the craft level. Just making all these uniforms must tax all your resources.”

“We don’t need to manufacture everything. There are plenty of malls and warehouses to be scavenged if you know where to look. Our scouts found a warehouse full of denim clothes only a few miles away, for example. It takes little tailoring to turn them into uniforms. But don’t underestimate our capacity for self-reliance. A people can achieve anything with national focus.”

“Is national focus what you have?” I asked skeptically.

“Yes. At bottom it is all we have. You need to understand what these people have experienced. After the world changed, this little community against all odds hung on. But when I arrived, everything was on the verge of collapse. This little patch of the good life had attracted human wolves. Gangs of them robbed, raped, and burned. The jungle was safer. Aurora would have been a ghost town within a year.”

“So you moved in with a tougher gang. That’s called forming a government, isn’t it?” I said.

“Is that a joke?”

“Sadly, no.”

“Are you an anarchist, my boy? I didn’t think you were so utopian.”

“I’m not. I’m sad about that too. So, are you the man on top?”

“They call me Chief, which I tolerate,” said Ulysses.

“Yes, I imagine you would. Are you still using the name ‘Ulysses S. Johnston.’?”

“Yes again, thanks to you. You are important to us, and so, therefore, is our history together. History records that name.”

“What is your real name?”

“Whatever I say it is. Right now, it’s ‘Chief.’”

“The title suddenly sounds a little less spontaneous on the part of the Aurorans. I don’t suppose you allow them a civil government,” I said.

“Now is not the time for liberal democratic tripe! That is what destroyed America in the first place. If there had been a real national government with true leadership in place when the climate crisis hit instead of a squabbling electioneering pack of puerile panderers, the country would have held together. I admire the way you run your colony like a medieval barony, by the way. Do you offer the residents of Morrisbourg a representative government?” To my silence, he responded, “I thought not.”

“So this is a military government?”

“Precisely. We are at war, after all. I’m aware that people have political instincts, George, but instead of trying to suppress them or to let them run riot, we channel them. Anyone can join the National American Party, which is the only legal political organization, and which serves the interest of the state. We can achieve anything with focus.”

“By ‘the state’ you mean these few thousand mountaineers. And you are focusing the Aurorans by picking a fight with Quebec,” I said.

“The French picked the fight! They invaded!”

“Their invasion didn’t bother you when you thought you could get them to give you title to Morrisbourg.”

Ulysses laughed. “You have firm grasp of the obvious, George. Don’t be offended. Few people have it. I’m glad you don’t buy into ideology, really. We are more alike than you think. I enjoy your honesty with me, but I must warn you not to talk like this in public. If you do, I might have to shoot you as a subversive. So keep your candor just between us.”

“What about these two?” I referred to the accompanying soldiers. “They hear you talking. Will you shoot them?” The man leading the donkey smiled at the question.

“No, of course not, George. These two are my closest guards, and I rely on their greed for their loyalty, not on their belief in any –ism. They can’t be disillusioned because they have no illusions. They simply know their best bet is to stick with me. It’s your best bet, too, George. I’ll have a uniform delivered to you.”

“Have I been drafted?”

“Yes. You and the French captain here are guests of honor at tonight’s rally. I want you both in uniform.”

“You said I was important to you,” I said. “Why? I had a theory, but I see it was wrong.”

“You are important, but not indispensable. Don’t think for a minute we can’t do without you. But it was fun scaring the French into thinking a rebellion was stirring, and that the Governor of Morrisbourg was part of the conspiracy. If they shot you, you would have been an American martyr. If they sent you here to negotiate, I knew they would do it by committing their best forces to a very vulnerable position. And if you turned-coat, as I urge you to do, you provide a high-profile inspiration to others to do the same. However the French responded, the results would favor us.”

“Well, that’s quite a Machiavellian plot,” I said.

“I can’t take credit for it. The plan was Joelle’s.”

The news of Joelle’s betrayal caused my stomach to clench. Why was a part of me proud of her?

“She just wanted Morrisbourg for herself, so she got you to set me up,” I said. “She doesn’t care about any of this.” I indicated Aurora with a hand sweep.

“I know that, George, but it worked to our benefit anyway.”

“She’ll betray you, too, the moment it is in her interest.”

“But it’s not in her interest. If she stays quiet and the French win, she’ll be the heroine who saved Morrisbourg from a traitor – that would be you. If we win, she’ll be the heroine of the revolution. She is utterly predictable, and therefore safe. I’m much less sure of you.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m not ambitious.”

“Untrue, George. You’re not diligent – you like the easy path – but you are ambitious. You’ve proved it. Ultimately, you are more ambitious than Joelle. Don’t you know that? She wants to be the big fish, but she doesn’t care if it’s a small pond. You want to be a whale in the ocean, even if you’re not the biggest whale.”

I was having trouble keeping up with the metaphors. “What is it you want of me Ulysses?”

“I want you to be my second in command. Colonel is just a temporary rank until I’m more certain about you. My plan is to promote you to four-star general in short order.”

“Second… four stars? Are you kidding? No…I can see you’re not.”

My astonishment evaporated when another question crossed my mind. “When exactly did you talk to Joelle?”

“I wondered when you would ask. I met her in New York two months ago. There are no security fences around the city, you know. I sailed into harbor on a fishing boat with a few of my boys dressed in civvies – we were doing a bit of recon. I read in the society pages of the paper that Joelle would be at an event at the Waldorf, so I arranged to bump into her. She was surprisingly happy to see me.”

I had another question about the nature of the bump, but decided I didn’t want to know the answer. Instead I asked, “What about the French from the first two expeditions to DC? Are they alright?”

“Some of them. You’ll see them tonight at the rally.”

The “some” suggested there had been casualties. That was unfortunate, but unsurprising.

“Is the rally for this National American Party of yours?”

“It is,” he answered. “It’s now your party too.”

“You might want to consider changing the name.”

“Why?”

“Do you really want to be known as Nappies?”

He glared at me with his intense brown eyes.

We approached a two-story home with a front porch that wrapped around one side. Four uniformed young people sat on the porch; they had eagle armbands on their left arms. They snapped to attention and saluted when they saw us. Ulysses knew one of the four by name.

“Weston!”

“Yes, Ch…Chief…sir,” she stammered.

“Show Colonel Custer a room upstairs. You are his attendant until further notice.”

“What about Le Clerc?” I asked.

“He is a prisoner of war. He’ll be quartered elsewhere. Until later, Colonel,” said Ulysses.

I dismounted, and responded, “Until later.” Ulysses sat motionless as though he expected more. I caught the hint and saluted. He tapped his horse with his heels. The guards and Le Clerc followed.

I climbed the stairs of the farmhouse porch. The young woman saluted.

“Please don’t do that, miss. Not around the house, anyway. Let’s keep it informal.”

“Yes, Colonel.” She opened the door for me. “Your room will be the one up the stairs, first door on the right.”

The interior of the house smelled of firewood. It was a pleasant odor. Weston followed me up the stairs. Directly ahead was the open door of a bathroom. I peeked inside. It contained an old fashioned claw tub with a shower attachment.

“Is the shower functional?” I asked.

“Yes sir.”

The thought was delicious. “If you bring me a razor I’ll love you forever.”

“Sir?”

“Please bring me a razor.”

“Yes sir.”

The shower was refreshing beyond description. The “cold” water in fact was lukewarm, but it was still more wonderful than any shower I’d had in years. Weston walked in while I stood beneath the showerhead. She placed a razor and a toothbrush on the sink and turned to face me.

“Will there be anything else, sir?”

“No, miss,” I said with embarrassment,

“Corporal, sir.” She turned slightly to show the stripes on her right arm.

“Very well. No, Corporal. I’ll be taking a nap, so go back to doing whatever you were doing.”

“Yes sir.” She picked up my clothes from the floor and left the bathroom with them.

I toweled off and peeked out the door. The hallway was empty. I scooted to the assigned bedroom. The bed was an old four poster with a thick featherbed mattress. I tentatively lay down atop it and was asleep in seconds. I remember nothing about the next several hours. When I awoke there were folded clothes on the bed next to me that bore a passing resemblance to a 19th century colonel’s uniform. There also were undergarments. Boots were on the floor by the bed.

I got up and donned the uniform, which wasn’t a bad fit. I don’t know who had guessed my size.
The boots were a bit snug, but not uncomfortable. I looked at myself in a mirror mounted on the back of the door to the hall. I felt quite soldierly. It’s amazing how much a uniform can affect your whole worldview. I opened the door. Weston was standing outside.

“Excuse me, miss…I mean Corporal. Could you come in here for a few minutes?”

“Is something wrong, sir?”

“No, just talk with me a moment.” I stepped back and sat on the bed. Weston entered and faced me. She was pretty in tomboy way with short-cropped brown hair and bright blue eyes. She couldn’t have been more than 19.

“I just arrived this morning.” I said.

“Yes, I know sir.”

“What I mean is that I haven’t yet caught up with the situation here. I need to ask you some very basic questions. They may seem dunderheaded to you, but perhaps you expect that from an officer.”

She didn’t smile, but said, “I’m here to help, sir.”

“Assume that I know nothing, which isn’t far off from the truth. What’s with the armband, for instance? I see not everyone wears it. Just how militarized is this place? How did it get this way? I‘m completely lost, even though Ulysses says he plans to bump me up to second-in-command.”

“The Chief told you that?” She was so impressed that she missed the “sir.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t repeat that, Corporal.”

“Yes sir. The armband signifies the Eagle Guard. We aren’t regular army but we fight alongside it. We’re the armed wing of the party, so we’re more committed. We act as the Chief’s personal guards and as a police force too.”

“Sounds like Blackshirts.”

“Sir?”

“Never mind. How did all this start?”

“You have to realize what this area was like before the Chief rescued us. Gangs of thugs from the outside somehow found out about our settlement. They attacked and robbed us. Vigilante groups fought back, but then they acted as bad as the thugs. My parents weren’t killed by outsiders but by vigilante neighbors when a boy I’d snubbed accused them of collaborating with an outside gang. I don’t want to tell you what they did to me.”

“The boy deserved to be shot.”

“I’m pleased to her you say so, sir. Anyway, when Ulysses and his men came into town, they packed the firepower to suppress all that. It wasn’t just the use of force – there had been plenty of that before. It was what he had to say. He inspired us to get our house in order so we can face our real enemies instead of fighting with each other. If there were scores to be settled, he settled them. That boy I told you about? The Chief handed me a gun and told me the boy’s fate was in my hands, whether I chose clemency or death the matter would end there.”

“What did you do?”

“I shot him. I’d die for the Chief, sir.”

I held back from saying she very well might.

“The rally is in a few hours,” she added. “I’m to escort you.”

The rally was held in an open field just after twilight. The stars were bright and a warm breeze blew gently. A rustic wooden stage was lit dramatically by four well-placed bonfires. A loudspeaker system was wired to car batteries. Perhaps 3000 people were gathered in the field, most of them in uniform. I’d never seen so many people in one place.

Ulysses walked on stage to a drum roll. Applause and shouts came from the crowd. He waved to me to step forward. I walked on stage and stood on his right where he had indicated. Two guards escorted Le Clerc, hands still tied, onstage and held him up on Ulysses’ left. There were boos from the crowd. Ulysses held up his hand for quiet.

“We have with us today,” he began, “Captain Le Clerc of the French naval vessel La Salle. His plans to destroy us have been defeated.” A roar of approval washed over the stage. “Also with us is George Custer, the legitimate Governor of New Jersey, now in exile. By his order, New Jersey is hereby returned to the Union.” There were more shouts. “The days of the French invaders in the United States are numbered. I have appointed Colonel Custer Commissioner of the Recovered Territories.” This was news to me. “Care to say a few words, Colonel?”

I leaned into the microphone and uttered something ambiguous. “I’m deeply impressed by what you have accomplished here. I hope not just to match but to exceed your expectations of me.”

Restrained applause came from the men and women in blue. Ulysses smiled at me and nodded toward the back. I took the hint and withdrew from the stage. The guards led Le Clerc backstage as well.

“Here in Aurora we know what it is like to have our freedom wrested from us by hoodlums,” declared Ulysses in a commanding voice. “We know what it cost to win it back. Now we face a threat from the largest outlaw gang of all: Quebec. We have paid too high a price and struggled too much to allow our way of life to be destroyed by these new invaders. We will roll back the French all the way to the St. Lawrence River and restore America to the American people!”

There were more cheers, but they seemed to me to be less than universal. This is not just a patriotic crusade, though it is that, too. It is a war for culture. It is a war for the future of mankind. The French are effete. They are dangerous to us. French art is merely decadence. Books such as this deserve on the bonfire!” He held up a copy of 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade and tossed it into the flames. “We will prevail against this corruption, and one day will link up with our Alaskan brothers in the west.”

This echo of my former thoughts put a knot in my stomach.

“This is no time for internal division. Our fingers must unite to form a fist. The French have taken our lands, corrupted our culture and oppressed our people. In the occupied territory they have destroyed American lives with a vicious trade in opium that they ban north of the Maine border. It is part of a thinly disguised plan of genocide for our people. We fight or we die. There is no other course.

“We live in the proud state of West Virginia which never failed to fly the star-spangled banner even in the dark days of the Civil War. We will not fail now. The greatest threat to our success is not the French army. I have every confidence in our brave men and women on the field of combat. The danger is subversion from within. Only Americans can defeat America. The Eagle Guard is our first line of defense against internal weakness. Give them your full cooperation and support. The Guardsmen are our best and brightest, facing enemies abroad and protecting our rights at home as political soldiers of the National American Party. The time is past when we can show mercy to our enemies or to traitors. Two of our enemies are with us tonight. Bring the spies forward!”

Two grim prisoners were led on stage by boyish-faced Eagle Guardsmen. They were the first survivors of the earlier Quebecois expeditions I had seen.

“The rules of war are clear,” said Ulysses. “Enemy combatants out of uniform are spies, and are not entitled to the privileges of Prisoners of War. Their lot is summary execution.”

One of the Guardsmen withdrew a revolver and unceremoniously shot each prisoner in the head. I was stunned. Le Clerc tried to rise to his feet but was shoved back down with a rifle butt. He glared at me with deep hatred. As the bodies were pulled from the stage, Ulysses waved forward a beautiful red-haired young woman wearing the armband.

“Please join in the singing of the national anthem,” directed Ulysses.

In a sweet voice, the redhead began to sing, “Oh say can you see…” The crowd joined in slowly, but by “the rockets red glare” was participating forcefully.

Ulysses withdrew from the stage, conceding the microphone to other speakers, each of whom hated the enemy more than the one before. As one began a denunciation of French cooking, Ulysses sat down next to me on a wooden bench.

“What was the purpose of those murders?” I spluttered. “They were just a couple of field biologists from Montreal. You say you’re worried about loyalty, but that atrocity surely shook the loyalty of most of the crowd. Can’t you see how shocked they were? Fear is the only reason they didn’t revolt right then and there.”

“Custer, I’m disappointed in you. Can’t you see that by failing to object to the ‘atrocity’ they became participants in it? They’ll justify it to themselves as being ‘for the greater good’ just to protect their own self-images. I locked in their loyalty, not undermined it. And don’t underestimate the power of fear. Besides, the French really were in civilian clothes, and therefore were spies, you know.”

“Legalistic nonsense,” I said. “I arrived in civilian clothes, too.”

“Then you may profit by their example. But enough of this. How did you like my speech?”

“Irrational. Quebec is not France, as Le Clerc reminds me repeatedly, and the citizens of Quebec are not French. They did not invade North America. Their ancestors were probably here before ours. You said they are effete and dangerous. They cannot be both. The Marquis de Sade is a giant irrelevancy who has nothing to do with Quebec, regardless of what you think of his philosophy. The legacy of the USA has nothing to do with anything you said. On the contrary, the valuable part of it is the whole notion of limited government – the idea the legitimate function of government is to protect individual rights. Quebec incorporates more of that heritage than you and your fascists do.”

“Custer, Custer, you are letting your emotions run away with you. That’s for the sheep out there, not for us. I wasn’t asking you if the speech made logical sense and I didn’t ask you to recite the Declaration of Independence. I was asking you whether you thought it was effective propaganda. When you are talking to the masses you are talking to a dumb brute. Anything more nuanced than ‘Our Side Good, Their Side Bad’ confuses them. Sense be damned.”

“You don’t believe a word of what you were saying, do you?”

“I’m not an idiot, George.”

“Then your speech was effective propaganda.”

“See? At heart you are a blackguard like me, and can see the truth of things. But you have to stop these moralistic outbursts to which you’re so prone. They are childish. Morals are whatever the ruling elite says they are. If you plan to be part of the new elite, you have to abandon those foolish ‘ethics’ that were invented to keep in power an elite now long dead. So, George, are you going to join us ‘fascists’ and help me write our own rules, or would you prefer to join the company of those Frenchmen?”

“Okay, I’m in,” I said. “I can’t affect much if I’m dead, can I?  Maybe I can moderate this whole enterprise from the inside.”

Ulysses laughed. “No weasel of a Congressman could have rationalized better. Things are going to move very fast, George. In two days we retake the Capitol. Than we sail La Salle into New York Harbor pretty as you please and take the city. Defenses there are almost nonexistent. I worked up an occupation plan when I was in New York. I don’t expect much trouble from the locals.”

I paraphrased Benjamin Franklin. “A third will support you, a third will oppose, and a third won’t give a damn.”

“There, you can be Machiavellian when you try,” he said.”

“There is a flaw in your plan, ‘Chief,’” interjected Le Clerc. It occurred to me then that Ulysses’ willingness to discuss his plans in front of him did not bode well for the man.

“And what is that, my dear Captain?”

“My sailors and marines. Not one of your barges will get within a kilometer of La Salle. Do you know what a 120mm can do?”

“Yes, I do, but I don’t think we need worry about it. Are you an oenophile, Captain?”

“What on earth does that have to do with anything?”

“I’ve explained to George about our scavenging expeditions. On one of them in Clarksburg we found case after case of chardonnay. Your marines surely have found the cases by now. They are in the Capitol basement.”

“What have you done to the wine?!”

“Yes, that would offend a Frenchman. Did you know that one of the nasty new bugs of the modern world can live in wine with alcohol content less than 15%? Mortality is 80% and the survivors won’t be in much condition to fight. How many of your crew are teetotalers, do you think?”

“If there’s only one, that’s enough! You’ll never take my ship!”

“Oh of course we will. But, if by some chance we do not, we’ll send her to the bottom. That would be a shame, but we can do without her if we must. We have alternate transport. You see there are underwater charges set all around the Capitol. We can blow a hole in La Salle’s hull whenever we wish. Thanks, for the airship, too, Le Clerc. You’ll be happy to know we repaired the hull and refilled her with hydrogen. What is the lift capacity? We haven’t yet run tests.”

“Two passengers barely,” said Le Clerc.

“Three easily,” I corrected.

“When you are up against the wall, I’ll be on the firing squad,” Le Clerc snarled at me.

Ulysses laughed. “So what shall we do with the Frenchman?” he asked.

“Take him with us. He’s a negotiating chip with any French survivors.”

“There is a small bit of sense to that thought, though I suspect you just lack the stomach to shoot him. You don’t mind if I keep him tied, do you? Also, I’d prefer you not to have a firearm for now.”

“I rather expected both conditions,” I said.

Back at the farmhouse, I tried to rest some more, but tossed fitfully instead, I have no love for the French, but hated helping to replace them with Ulysses’ fascist regime. There was a tap at the door.

“Yes? Come in.”

My attendant peeked in. “Sorry to bother you, sir, but I could hear you were awake. May I have a word?”

“Yes, Corporal. What’s on your mind?”

“You are Governor of New Jersey.”

“Morrisbourg.”

New Jersey,” she corrected, “and the Chief plans to give you the whole Northeast to administer.”

“That’s what he says,” I said.

“You’ll be needing an assistant you can trust – one who also has the confidence of the Chief.”

Weston, I realized was making a career move. “You’re at the top of my list, Corporal Weston.”

“Thank you, sir. I know you won’t regret your choice. Is there anything I can do for you before morning?” she asked.

It took me a moment to be sure the offer meant what I thought it did. “No, Corporal… What’s your first name?”

“Abigail.”

“No, Abigail. Perhaps we can resume this discussion when we’re up North, though.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I think I can sleep now. Wake me up in time for the war, would you?”

“Yes, sir.” She left, seeming quite pleased with herself.

My affection for my homicidal wife had deterred me from accepting the young lady’s offer, yet I regretted turning her down, too. These thoughts drove politics out of my head long enough for me to fall asleep.

I was awakened before daybreak. I road on horseback down Route 50, which really did pass by the lagoon where the repaired and inflated airship awaited. Ulysses and Le Clerc already were aboard. The barges, I was told, had set out much earlier in order to arrive in DC at dawn. I felt it was reckless of Johnston to put himself inside such a big target, but the man had much of the boy in him. He wanted to fly in an airship.

We dropped our mooring ropes and lifted into the sky at the sun brightened the horizon. We began the leisurely trip downriver. As we passed over Chain Bridge we could see the tops of the Capitol and Washington Monument. The sun rose red. As we passed over Georgetown, I thought to warn Ulysses of the snipers in the Washington Monument, but was startled into silence by what was missing. The La Salle was gone.

Le Clerc, sitting on the floor, smiled. “Did I neglect to mention that the crew has standing orders to withdraw if the ship seems seriously in danger?” he said. “If they started falling sick, that would have been reason enough.”

“Well, that is a setback,” said Ulysses. “It’s not fatal, however. The ship would have been useful to us, but I have agents in New York. They will sink her when she gets back, so the ship won’t pose a risk to us when we attack. Before you tell me they won’t succeed, the mines already are in place below her usual berth and several alternates.”

“Why are you telling me this?” asked Le Clerc.

“Because you no longer have any value as a negotiating chip.”

Barges full of troops were below us on the Potomac. The lead ones grounded on Capitol Hill. Troops jumped off and rushed to occupy the building.

I’m not political, but there are times when you have to make a choice. This was the last opportunity to put a stop to Ulysses and his Blueshirts. Damn it all, I had to back the stinking arrogant, miserable, nose-in-the-air French, may they all choke on their nasalized vowels!

On the theory that one should stick with a winning strategy, I grabbed Ulysses by the hair and rammed his head on the steering wheel. Johnston must have had a harder head than Le Clerc. He pushed back on me and spun around, handgun already drawn. He surely would have shot me had not Le Clerc kicked him with both feet. Ulysses stumbled against the side rail. I grabbed his feet and pulled up. He tumbled over the side. The gun discharged as he fell. The bullet struck the fabric of the blimp. This time we were no so lucky with the hydrogen. A ball of fire erupted above us. I since have learned that hydrogen burns up and away, which explains the many survivors of the famous Hindenburg crash, but at the time I expected rapid incineration. As we fell from the sky with the flames above us, I managed to untie Le Clerc’s hands just before we hit the water.

Déjà vu,” I said.

“About time you started speaking your country’s language.”

We both went over the side and dove beneath the water before the flaming fabric enveloped us. Don’t try swimming booted and in uniform. It is harder than you might think. I swam to the hillock with the Washington Monument. Eventually my hands touched mud and I dragged myself ashore. The rank smell of riverbank mud was overpowering.

Two powerful hands wrapped around my neck and a knee planted heavily in the small of my back. The world began to go black before the hands and weight lifted. Le Clerc had pulled Ulysses off of me. The two wrestled on the ground. I hoped Le Clerc could end for himself, because there was no time to waste. Bluecoats already were paddling this way. I ran toward the Monument entrance.

There are 897 steps in the Washington Monument. I had cleared fewer than 100 when a voice boomed out below me. “One of us dies today, Custer!” I suspected Ulysses was right.

My footsteps and his echoed loudly inside the masonry obelisk. I could see nothing in the dark interior, but it sounded as though he was gaining. My lungs were raw and painful, and no amount of panting was enough to catch my breath. My feet resisted every aching step. Before long I was crawling. My breath rasped worse with each breath. 897 does not sound like an overwhelming number, but I felt I had spent a lifetime on those stairs. At long last my hands pushed open a door and light washed over me, but my vision was clouded from lack of oxygen. I heard a loud wheezing behind me.

As I’d hoped, a transmitter was still in place below the observation port facing the Capitol. I made one final lunged toward it. My vision was still blurred, so I fumbled desperately for a switch or button. Almost by accident, my hand depressed a plunger.

Even with my blurred vision, I could see the Capitol dome rise noticeably. Then its 9,000,000 pounds of iron crashed down into rubble. A deafening roar from the explosion hit the Monument. Other explosions ripped through the House and Senate wings. The marines must have set charges there as well.

The wheezing behind me turned to coughing. I turned and my vision cleared. A mud-covered Ulysses lay on the floor on his back a meter from me. His face was as red as any I had ever seen. Saliva drooled from his mouth and he clasped his left arm with his right.

“The whole continent could have been yours one day, you total fool!” he coughed.

“Does this mean I’m no longer Commissioner for the Recovered Territories?”

“I’m going to get you Custer!”

“It doesn’t seem likely.”

“Then my troops will.”

“Well, you may have point there. But not before I put an end to you.”

“I so overestimated you. You’re just a sheep after all. And you’re ending nothing, least of all me. You don’t have the guts to kill me, you spineless wimp!”

I considered this. “You’re right. And you know what? I’m proud of it.”

I walked to the exit and descended the stairs, leaving Ulysses sprawled on the observation deck. My lungs hurt badly and my legs felt rubbery. Two hundred steps or so later and explosion shook the tower. Masonry blocks missed me by centimeters and light streamed in from above. A 120mm round had torn off the top of the structure. The La Salle was back.

I quickened my descent. The sound of cannon and machine gun fire bespoke of serious damage being done to the West Virginians. I felt sick.

The next day I stood next to a badly battered but alive Le Clerc on La Salle’s foredeck as we motored out of the Chesapeake Bay. It turned out that we owed our survival to the age-old dispute between marines and sailors. The marines hadn’t shared the wine.

Le Clerc said, “I’m still trying to decide whether to shoot you or give you a medal.”

“Neither. I’m no hero and I’m not political.”

“Right. The nest in Aurora should be rooted out.”

“No, they’ve suffered losses enough. Besides, fascist states are personality cults and the personality is gone. They’re not barbarians, just mountain farmers who went on a binge. They’ll go back to fighting among themselves now.”

“I suppose you oppose our reoccupation of DC too,” he said.

“There isn’t much left to occupy. But a trading post somewhere on the river wouldn’t be a bad idea, and might help promote peace – especially if it’s someplace with a different symbolism than DC.”

“Harper’s Ferry?”

“Le Clerc, that was almost a joke. By the way, what’s your first name?”

“Maurice.”

“Oh, sorry. I’ll just stick with ‘Le Clerc.’”

Thanks to Le Clerc’s support, the Morrisbourg colony was returned to me upon our return to New York. I’m transferring fee simple titles to my tenants at reasonable prices however, and am preparing an end to Morrisbourg’s status as a proprietary colony. We’ll be holding elections for a representative council and governor. I’ve grown wary of one-man rule even when I’m the one man.

Joelle accepted defeat of her schemes with equanimity. When I returned home, my monitor lizard was nowhere to be found and Joelle had a new reptile-skin vest. I didn’t ask. I could have put her in prison had I revealed the extent of her collaboration with Ulysses, but I saw little advantage to that, so I didn’t.

Several months after my return, Joelle simply disappeared. She left behind the cherry blossom I had retrieved for her from a case in an unflooded floor of the Smithsonian. She also left our newborn son. Fond as I am of the boy, I wonder about his fierce brown eyes. Mine are hazel. I can’t help but picture his face with a full black beard.
SLOG Part III: Sand

It was another warm and sunny March mid-morning in Juneau, Alaska. A gentle breeze nudged the leaves of the palm trees lining the streets. The air was clear to the eye but an acrid smell from a distant conflagration was unmistakable. The mountains restricting the city to a narrow strip of along the seafront blocked any view of the offending wildfire.

There was a festive spirit on Fourth Street. Women in sundresses stood and chatted, men in tee shirts talked to each other about the women in sundresses, and children the adults while playing games of their own making. Taking in the scene was a young woman in dark glasses carrying a Canadian passport and holding a rank of Ensign in the navy. She was not in uniform. With her hair dyed black and cut short, she would have been recognizable only to her closest friends. She didn’t have any close friends. She listened to conversations around her to get a sense of the crowd’s mood.

One unshaven fellow was expressing himself loudly to his buddy who sat on the curb next to him. Each had a beer in hand and a few more under the belt. “Hey, I don’t approve of what he done,” he said. “But shit, what did the French expect? They should have left the man alone.”

“Yeah, I know what you’re saying Bill, but that doesn’t make it right. The French are people too, sort of.”

“So give him to the French, then. It’s not our business to judge him.”

“Maybe we will, but you know they’ll just shoot him.”

“Well, that’s not our business either.”

The two men had voiced a common popular sentiment. Whether or not to extradite Aeneas Custer rather than try him in Alaskan court was, in fact, the issue being decided at this moment inside the architecturally uninspired brick building that served as the Capitol of the Republic of Alaska. The issue would be decided purely on grounds of national pride versus diplomatic expediency. There was no question at all of letting him go, and very little doubt of his guilt. In case, the legislature chose to deny extradition, a 3-judge team already was empanelled and ready to hear the case. Alaskans prided themselves on swift and rough-handed justice that relied heavily on “retribution in kind.” A reckless driver who injured or killed a pedestrian, for instance, was likely to be sentenced to being hit by a car driven by a relative of the pedestrian. A minority of the population objected to the legal system on ethical grounds, but there was no doubt the policy kept the crime rate low.

A hush fell as a Town Crier exited the Capitol carrying a bullhorn. “By a vote of 10 to 6 with 4 abstentions, extradition for the prisoner Aeneas Custer is denied!” he shouted. “Trial of the prisoner will proceed at once!”

This was the news for which the crowd had hoped, and they now awaited a chance to glimpse the most evil man in the world as he was escorted from the Capitol to the Courthouse. Aeneas, wearing no handcuffs and flanked by only four police, emerged from the building. He carried books of some kind. The Ensign heard murmurs of “There he is,” and “he looks so normal.” Bill, the beer drinker on the curb, snorted, “Four cops! I think they’re hoping someone will spare us the trouble of a trial.” The Ensign thought to herself that Bill might be right.

If so, the powers-that-be were disappointed. No one in the crowd made a threatening move. No shot was fired from some hidden vantage point. Aeneas and his escorts walked unmolested past the statue of a bear, a reminder of Alaska’s old Russian connection. Long ago, the statue had replaced an unloved abstract piece named Nimbus. They entered the Courthouse and proceeded to an ordinary courtroom. Most of the seats were taken up by members of the press and VIPs.

The three judges who would hear the case were Alfred Hirasawa, Jeanette Wilson, and Michael Maggio. Hirasawa, who presided, was a stocky man of 54 and widely known as a “character.” Several of his opinions were required reading schools for their literary merit. On this day he wore a Hawaiian shirt. Judge Wilson was 40, and best known for hosting a radio program on legal matters. She was known for insight and a sarcastic wit. Maggio was a soft spoken 84-year-old, highly respected as the primary author of Alaska’s current constitution. Both Wilson and Maggio wore traditional black robes. The prosecuting attorney was the young and ambitious Alexander Proudfoot. Custer’s assigned legal counsel was an undistinguished pudgy man who smelled faintly of scotch, and whose primary expertise was in traffic cases.

Within 15 minutes of Custer’s arrival, the bailiff called the court to order.

TRANSCRIPT ALASKA VS. CUSTER

JUDGE HIRISAWA [to prosecution]: State the charges, and keep it brief.

PROUDFOOT: Your honors, the man before us today is charged with Crimes against Humanity, a felony recognized in the national criminal code. He has committed murder and mayhem on a scale that almost defies comprehension. Further, he did so with full knowledge and intent. He in fact told his victims of his plans to murder them.

The defense surely will argue that these events took place in the context of a war. Yet, it is long established that c’est la guerre is not a license for murder. Moreover, the defendant started the war without provocation. This contributes to the charge. We are not dealing here with some rebel fighting for a noble cause. Far from it. We have here a spoiled scion of the most influential family in the Morrisbourg Territory of Greater Quebec, a region once known as New Jersey. For no other reason than personal greed and megalomania, he brought untold suffering to his country and to the world, a world that already has suffered enough. He deserves no more mercy than he meted out to his hapless victims.

HIRISAWA: My, My. How does the defense plead?

AENEAS CUSTER [cutting off his attorney]: Your honors, I wish to do without counsel.

HIRISAWA: Mr. Custer, this is a capital case.

AENEAS CUSTER: That’s why I wish to do without this…gentleman.

HIRISAWA: Do you wish a change of counsel? I may consider it.

AENEAS CUSTER: No sir. Frankly things look bleak even with the best attorney in the world. I expect to crash, but I’d rather pilot myself.

HIRISAWA: Mr. Custer, this is not a kangaroo court. You will get a fair hearing. Whether or not that is any use to you is another question.

AENEAS CUSTER: Understood. But I still wish to speak for myself.

HIRISAWA: Suit yourself. How do you plead?

AENEAS CUSTER: To Crimes against Humanity? What can I say?

HIRISAWA: Guilty or Not Guilty. Pick one.

AENEAS CUSTER: Not Guilty as charged. Your honors, I have a request, and I’m hoping the Alaskan reputation for substance over formality will prevail.

HIRISAWA: What is the request?

AENEAS CUSTER: I wish to tell a story in my own way. In a sense it is two stories: my father’s and my own. My defense succeeds or fails on the basis of this story alone. Upon hearing what I have to say, this court will exculpate me or it won’t. I have no wish to debate legal points with the learned prosecutor over there, so once I’m done, I’m done. I won’t respond to anything he has to say, and I won’t question any of his witnesses.

PROUDFOOT: Your honors, the defendant cannot structure this trial to suit himself. This is not his private theater.

AENEAS: Have you looked outside, Mr. Proudfoot? This is very much theater. The question is whether I get billed as the villain.

[Pause while judges consult] HIRISAWA: If the defendant is proposing to make a statement and then shut up, we are inclined to let him do so, provided he doesn’t intend to keep us here all day. How long will this story take, Mr. Custer?

AENEAS CUSTER: An hour, I suppose. No more than two.

[Judges consult again] HIRISAWA: That is at the outer limit of our patience, Mr. Custer, so don’t exceed your time. Your request is granted.

AENEAS CUSTER: For the first part of my story, it will be simplest to read into evidence, portions of the journal of my father, the former Governor…

PROUDFOOT: Objection! The defendant’s father is not on trial. Besides, this journal has been published in the Juneau papers.

AENEAS CUSTER: The prosecutor brought up my family in his statement, your honors.

HIRISAWA: So he did. We have granted the defendant’s request to tell his tale in his own way, Mr. Prosecutor. Besides, the media are not the courtroom…except sometimes for my learned colleague. [Hirisawa gestures at Judge Wilson.] Go ahead Mr. Custer.

AENEAS CUSTER: Thank you. I will concede to the prosecutor that that the contents of the journals of my putative father George Custer, covering the period from the foundation of Morrisbourg to the Battle of DC, are well known to the court and to readers of the newspapers. So, I’ll begin well after these events with his entries regarding the Firecracker. These have not precisely because of their relevance to the current proceedings. The copy of this portion of his memoirs, which I sent to Quebec City, contained my supposed threat which the prosecutor mischaracterized in his opening remarks. Before I read, though, I need to put what was dubbed the Firecracker in a personal context.

The event that changed my life and the lives of so many others occurred more than a decade ago when I was 16. It was the night of a beachside bonfire in Asbury Park. This was an annual tradition among English-speaking youths held on the eve of July 4, a date chosen because it annoyed the French speakers. A few French always showed up for the bonfire, though. After all, it was a good party.

That year the party was shaping up as the best ever. Flames were 10 meters high, fueled with timbers from the ruined structures of the old beachfront town. The music was loud and disagreeable enough to keep most adults at bay, except for the usual handful of past-30 hangers-on who were desperately trying to retain an illusion of youth – and, of course, the hebephiles. All of us dipped our mugs freely into kegs of Old Yeller banana wine. We carried on in the manner you might expect of rowdy teenagers. By midnight a large minority of partiers were unconscious or nearly so. The remainder continued to dance, sing, chase each other, mock-fight, and not-so-mock neck. I was no social magnet in those days, so I was an observer rather than a participant in the necking. One young lady did flash me, but then she wouldn’t talk to me. I suspect she mistook me for someone else in the dark. The party ran down over the next few hours and by 4 a.m. only a few of us were awake. I was pretty exhausted, but I wanted to see the sunrise. I had seen sunrises before, true enough, but a very pretty and very high brunette wanted to see the sunrise, too. She was my last chance for a hookup at the party, so I fought the heaviness of my eyelids and waited with her on a dune. I never did catch her name. She recited parts of poems, but didn’t finish any of them.

As the eastern sky brightened in anticipation of the dawn, the brunette stood up so I stood up, too. She walked to the edge of the dry sand, just above where the waves lapped. She sat down cross-legged and faced the sea. I did the same, but I got the impression she didn’t want to be crowded so I sat a few meters away from her. She uplifted her arms as though willing the sun to rise. She took deep breaths of the sea air. She was a beautiful sight. She took another awesome breath and raised her hands once more. So it was that I was not actually looking at the horizon when it erupted in a blinding white light. The sky overhead turned as pale blue as at midday. I looked east and saw a semicircle of light that was not the sun. I also saw a visible pressure wave rush toward us.  The compressed air hit hard enough to knock me on my back and sting me with sand, grit, and droplets of seawater. A thunderous roar engulfed us.

The brunette was sprawled in the sand. She lifted herself up on one elbow. A water wave high enough to be impressive but not enough to be truly dangerous struck the beach and washed past us. Both of us clawed at the sand against the backwash when it receded. We ran for higher ground. She was ahead of me and I lost sight of her when she cleared the dune. Most of the sky returned to darkness but a glowing mushroom cloud roiled on the horizon. Newspapers called it the July 4 Firecracker.

The explosion, estimated as 200 kilotons, was far enough out at sea to cause no casualties on land, though a fishing boat failed to return to port that morning. Nonetheless, terrified residents of New York fled the city. They feared that the Firecracker was somebody’s near miss, and that a second attack would be on target. The Quebec military mobilized. Yet, as days passed, no foreign power or credible terrorist group claimed credit. A few motley would-be insurrectionists pretended to have something to do with it, but when they were arrested and interrogated they proved incapable of delivering a weapon more sophisticated than a spitball.

A rapidly assembled Investigative Committee without a single scientist on it conducted an inquiry. In short order it concluded that the explosion was accidental. The Committee members relied heavily on the testimony of a munitions “expert” who testified that the yield of the device was consistent with thermonuclear warheads carried by some ships and submarines in the early part of the 21st century. The Committee concluded that a warhead on some aged sunken vessel had destabilized in a remarkably unlucky way and detonated. A reassured public went back to business as usual. The Committee’s theory, while reasonable and satisfying, was dead wrong.

The Firecracker set in motion a chain of events that led to the vast death and destruction for which I am being blamed.

The prosecutor is not wrong when he says I come from a wealthy family, but he leaves out the detail that my wealth was lost – or, more properly, stolen. The pampered lifestyle of my childhood came to a swift end at the same time my adolescence ended.

My father George, even after he gave up the proprietary governorship of Morrisbourg remained the wealthiest man in the colony. I don’t remember my mother, Joelle Perrault-Custer, who left when I was an infant. George provided for me, and hired nannies when I was young. One who spoke with a distinctive accent was named Abigail; I was very young and so don’t remember if her last name was Weston. Once George was out of politics, he stayed out of the public eye. When we left the colony on a supposed expedition of exploration, The Morrisbourg Daily Record didn’t make mention of it. When I returned alone and reported that my father had died at the hands of bandits in Chicago, the obituary did make the front page, but there was only superficial public interest in the story. Everyone knew the hinterland was dangerous, and George was yesterday’s news. There was strong interest in the family’s wealth on the part of my father’s trusted personal attorney, however. Since I was still a minor, he managed to get himself named executor of George’s estate by a judge who was his personal friend. Over the next year he bled the estate dry with endless administrative fees. By the time I turned 18, there was nothing left. My complaints to other judges that my inheritance had been stolen fell on deaf ears – whether they also fell on greased palms I never could determine.

George did not die in Chicago. That was a lie I told to prevent further conflict and harm, strange as that sounds today. The real story of his death would have changed nothing about the estate issues, so I said nothing more about it until a reporter named Boris Fontaine from Pierre Roulant magazine knocked at my door. Was it really only a year ago? The 30th anniversary of the foundation of the Morrisbourg colony was coming up, so he wanted to do a nostalgia piece about the founders, George and Joelle Custer. He was thrilled to find me living day to day in a one-room log cabin in a place called Jockey Hollow. According to legend, it once quartered some of George Washington’s troops. I don’t believe the legend.

With a lack of tact astonishing even in a reporter, Boris exulted, “The Custers were the wealthiest family in the Southern Colonies, and now you’re down to this. This is great! The folks will love to read about it.”

“I don’t think it’s great, and I’d rather they didn’t,” I told him. I was about to chase him away with a pitchfork when the thought of getting some cash out of Boris occurred to me. “Will you pay me for an interview?” I asked.

“No. But if you have some memorabilia, maybe we can make a deal.”

I thought of George Custer’s journals. I had made copies in the days before the money ran out. “Would you be interested in George’s journal?”

He was. And Pierre Roulant was more generous than was good for any of us.

This brings us to the relevant portion of George’s unfinished journals, which I’ll now read it into evidence. I’ll add such commentary as may be useful.



JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER:

The government dismisses the firecracker as a one-off mishap – a chance event with a decaying weapon. My gut tells me this opinion is wrong. I’m hoping the feeling is just indigestion.

I’m hardly an expert. All I know about nuclear devices comes from very general century-old books on the subject in the Public Library, originally aimed, I think, at a teen readership. The trouble is that the Investigative Committee didn’t seem to consult anyone with higher expertise. The books tell me that triggers on thermonuclear weapons consisted precisely shaped conventional charges surrounding a plutonium or uranium core. As a safety measure the charges were kept misshapen until the weapon was armed for use. That way, if the explosives went off, they would just deform the core instead of imploding it; there would be no fission and therefore no fusion. The conventional charges on unarmed devices went off on several occasions in the old days but never caused a nuclear detonation. Arming a weapon took two people with physical or digital keys.

This indicates to me that if the Firecracker was an accident, the device had been armed. It’s possible I suppose, but why? Then there is Aeneas’ eyewitness description. True, eyewitnesses are unreliable. They commonly misremember or flat out lie. But what he describes sounds more like an airburst – or perhaps a surface burst – rather than a submarine explosion. If so, the accident theory seems even less likely. Any way you look at it, something is wrong.

Assume for the moment that the Firecracker was not an accident. In that case, it either missed its target or it didn’t. But if it didn’t, why set it off close enough to shore to see, but far enough away to do little or no damage. Was it a message? If so, it is as obscure as it was loud.

For some reason the document in the safe nags at me. I haven’t looked at the frustrating thing in a year. There is no reason to draw a connection, but somehow I feel there is one. It would be megalomania, though, to conclude that the explosion was purely for my edification.

INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: Evidently it was megalomania to conclude it but not to suspect it.

“The document” to which George refers, your honors, was a note from Ulysses S. Johnston. George found in a sewn-shut back pocket of the uniform given to him by Johnston for the Battle of DC. It was inside a water-resistant plastic bag, which is probably the only reason it was readable after the events of the battle. I’ve never been clear on when he discovered it. If it was before he returned to Morrisbourg, it raises the question of why he didn’t show it to Le Clerc.

At the top of the document was Pentagram. The text in Ulysses’ handwriting read “I’m twice the man you are you two-faced panderer.” Following in very small type was an apparent cipher consisting of 50 strings of numerical symbols such as >171.74+76.23. Each was paired with ten paired sequences of letters and numbers such as QKJY4567/VCKO5489, and so on.

By the way, my eyewitness account is reliable.



JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER:

The meaning of this cryptogram continues to elude me. Quebec’s intelligence service no doubt could read it quickly, but I am reluctant to surrender it. It was meant for me. I have tried rearrangement, substitution, and using the initial statement as a key, all without results. Johnston surely intended me to be able to decode it, even if he wanted it unreadable to a casual observer. He gave me far too much credit.

Why did he give it to me at all? Was he serious about his second-in-command offer to me? Did he want me to carry on his legacy if something happened to him in the Battle of DC?  Did he enjoy our adversarial relationship? Maybe. He was a strange fellow, more complex than he appeared on the surface. I still dream about the artillery strike that killed him and nearly killed me.

Two days have passed since my last entry. I am an idiot.

INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: George had rare moments of insight, your honors.

HIRISAWA: Keep the commentary pertinent, Mr. Custer.

AENEAS CUSTER: I’ll do my best.



JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER:

The only balm for my ego is that my subconscious was on the right track. The breakthrough came this morning when Aeneas visited me in my office. Aeneas is 16 and already is bigger than I am. He must shave daily to hold back a dark beard. His robust figure easily could become rotund if he fails to exercise properly. I dare not lecture about that since middle-age spread is beginning to show on me.

Looking at him, I suddenly realized why Ulysses was interested in having me succeed him. He was securing the future of Joelle’s child. Am I really that slow? Or was I hiding the truth from myself? I wonder if Aeneas shares my opinion about his paternity.

INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: No, I didn’t. Perhaps I’m slow, too.



JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER:

Aeneas put the day’s post on my desk. I was examining the document for the thousandth time.

“What are you working on, dad?” he asked.

“Here, you might as well look at it. It’s a family secret – so secret that even I don’t know what it means. It could be a treasure map for all I know.”

Eager to be included in a family secret, Aeneas snatch up the paper and pored over it. I had been joking about a treasure map, but perhaps the remark nudged his thinking in this particular direction.

“Is this a pentagram on top?” he asked.

“I think so. Or maybe it’s just a five pointed star. Ulysses was into national symbols.”

“This is from Ulysses?”

“Yes, he gave it to me before the Battle of DC.”

“The way it’s drawn forms a pentagon inside,” said Aeneas. “Wasn’t the Pentagon in DC?”

“Arlington, across the river. It’s a thought. Maybe it would be worth exploring the ruins. Ulysses might have found something there while scavenging. But would we recognize the something if we found it?”

“Maybe these symbols are coordinates inside the building.”

“They seem awfully complex for that – too much information for a corridor map, assuming the building is still standing.”

“What’s with the insult?” Aeneas asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve been working under the assumption that it has something to do with the cipher, but maybe it’s nothing more than an insult. The man had an idiosyncratic sense of humor.”

While he peered and frowned at the document, I reached for the mail he had brought. Bills made up the bulk. It is surprising how little real mail a washed-up politician gets. Since my last electoral defeat running for Governor, I’ve largely been forgotten. I picked out and opened the one letter that looked personal. It was stained and wrinkled as though hand-carried through rain. I unfolded the letter. It was dated July 4. In block letters, it read:

HAVE I YOUR ATTENTION YET, PANDERER? NORTH BY NORTHWEST. DO I HAVE TO DRAW A MAP? BRING THE BOY. TELL NO ONE. YOU HAVE 30 DAYS. REMEMBER ULYSSES.

I was stunned. How could Ulysses possibly have survived? But who else would know about the word ‘panderer” in the document? Would I never be free of this man? He was like a case of malaria that kept coming back.

My sluggish synapses finally sparked. 

“The voters were right to reject me. I’m too dimwitted to be governor. Bring me that old Atlas on the second shelf,” I said. The Atlas was only of limited use in the remolded new world, but it was something.

Aeneas brought me the book, and I turned the pages to South Dakota.

“Why South Dakota?” he asked, reading the page upside down.

“Because that’s where Mount Rushmore has twice a two-face, and that’s where Cary Grant went. Ulysses always called politicians panderers.”

“Who is Cary Grant?”

“We’ll pursue your classic film education another day.”

I located the Monument on the map. The town of Custer and the Crazy Horse Monument were nearby. The locations shouted the humor of Ulysses S. Johnston.

INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: After, naming me Aeneas, George lost any right to complain about anyone else’s nominal humor.”

HIRISAWA: Don’t make me repeat myself.



JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER:

It had occurred to me many times before that the symbols on the document might be coordinates of some sort, but until now I didn’t know where to start. I took back the document and drew lines with a pencil on the map using the first set of symbols and Mount Rushmore as a starting point. I guessed that the > symbol meant east, + meant north, and the numbers were distance in miles or kilometers. I tried miles; Ulysses was old-fashioned.

Something didn’t look right. The line ended in a nameless place north of Bismarck, ND. It was hard to imagine there was anything of note there. I tried kilometers and still ended up in the middle of nowhere. What would Ulysses find of strategic value there? Phrasing the question that way immediately made the answer obvious. The final version of the Minuteman ICBM to be deployed was the Minuteman VI. Thanks to a series of arms reduction treaties, each missile carried a single warhead instead of the several so-called MIRV warheads carried by earlier versions of the missile. 500 were still scattered around the northern Plains States when the government collapsed – 499 after the Firecracker. Solid-fuelled and with self-contained power sources, they very well could be made operational; one definitely was.

It appears Ulysses discovered a list of missile locations – no, they would be control room locations, each commanding a squadron of 10 missiles. He’d probably scavenged it in the Pentagon. The associated pairs of letters and numbers are the access codes for arming the warheads.

The Firecracker been intended for me after all. It seems an excessive way to get my attention. Perhaps he wanted to frighten me, too. In that case, he has succeeded. He has succeeded so well that I’ve decided I need help. I don’t want to involve the authorities. If I do, the next Firecracker might not burst offshore.

INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: I wish to add, your honors, that, in the interest of social responsibility, I did not give real directions and codes when describing the document earlier. My examples merely showed the format.

PROUDFOOT: What else did you falsify?

HIRISAWA: There will be time for that later, Mr. Prosecutor.



JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER:

“Aeneas, pack your bags. We’re going on a trip.”

“Where? For how long?”

“We’ll stop in New York first. Take informal rugged clothes. I don’t know how long.”

“Informal rugged clothes for New York? Are we camping in the park?”

“Just do it. We leave tonight,” I said.

INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: George wrote the above in his regular journal, which he kept in the safe at home. I found it there when I returned to Morrisbourg. The rest of the journal that I’ll read to you now was written in a small leather-bound book that he kept tied to his belt. I’ll explain how I came into possession of it in due course.



JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER:

Captain Le Clerc, Retired, rents an apartment on the fourth floor of 30 Central Park South in New York City. The elevators do not work. Ever since climbing the steps of the Washington Monument, I have hated stairs. Aeneas waited on a park bench outside while I ascended to the fourth floor and banged on the door of 4A.

Le Clerc opened the door as far as the chain would allow, which wasn’t very far. Even through the crack I could see that he was unshaven, dirty, and was getting a paunch. His breath smelled of banana wine.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“Well enough to waver between shooting me and giving me a medal. In the end you didn’t do either.”

“George!”

The door slammed shut. Le Clerc unlatched the chain and flung the door open so that it banged against the doorstop. He grabbed my hand and shook it heartily. He pulled me inside. The apartment was messy. It was not filthy besides, but was on the road to that condition. The view out the window of the park was lovely, even in its current overgrown condition.

“To what do I owe a visit from a big-shot Governor?”

“Ex-Governor. I introduced elections and right away the people thanked me by voting me out of office,” I said.

“Excellent! You’ve restored my faith in democracy. Come, have a drink.”

“Thank you Maurice, but this isn’t a social call. I need your help.”

Le Clerc grimaced at my use of his first name. “I’m a retired man on a scandalously small pension. My superior officers were unhappy with the casualties among the marines in DC, but they didn’t want to court-martial me as long as the politicians were pretending the battle was a big victory and taking credit for it. So, they ‘encouraged’ me to resign citing personal reasons. I’m sure I’m in no position to help you with anything.”

“DC was a victory. I know there were losses, but… Anyway, you are the only one who can help. Ulysses is back.”

“Nonsense. The 120 got him. You said so yourself. The shell took the top 10 meters off the Monument. You were on the stairway below. He didn’t run past you, did he? Even if he did escape, which he didn’t, he’d be an old man by now. He’s a couple decades older than we are, and I’m feeling creaky, I can tell you. What harm can he do now?” As Maurice spoke he poured a glass of banana wine. He didn’t pour one for me.

“You don’t need to be a young athlete to push a button,” I said.

“What are you talking about, George?”

“The Firecracker.”

“You think he had something to do with that?”

“I know it. He sent me a message. And he has more nukes, Maurice.”

“Well this changes everything!” Le Clerc now was taking me seriously. He put down the wine glass. “Why are you talking to me? We need to report to the Defense Ministry.”

“No, that’s the last thing we can do. I’m sure he has agents among us, just as he did the last time – including in the government. If he thinks we’re organizing an attack on him… well that’s something we just can’t risk with his finger on a nuclear trigger. I underestimated him once before, I don’t want to do it again. Not this time,” I said.

“What do you suggest we do, then? Wag a disapproving finger?”

“I want to go meet with him. Just me, you, and my boy Aeneas. I don’t think he’ll feel threatened by us,” I said.

“There’s a reason he won’t feel threatened.”

“As you say, the man is getting on in years. I have reason to believe he wants to hand his keys to Aeneas, literally and figuratively. I propose we let him do it.”

“And why would he want to do that?”

I told him.

“You trust a teenager with such weapons?” Le Clerc asked.

“Far more than I trust Ulysses.”

“I’m still not sure why you are coming to me.”

“We need to go west – well past the Great Lakes,” I explained. “I thought you might have the connections to get us there. I was thinking maybe chartering a boat to Minnesota, and maybe taking a tracked vehicle the rest of the way if we can get our hands on one. I have plenty of money to buy what we need. And we need to get to our destination in the next 30 days.”

“Why 30 days?”

“I didn’t mention the time limit?”

“You did not. Where is the destination?”

“I’d rather be sure you are committed to the project before I disclose precisely where we are going.”

“Your boating idea is a bad one,” he said. “Pretty much everything floating on Superior and Michigan belongs to pirates. I wouldn’t sail there on anything less well gunned than La Salle. The land out there is a wilderness, inhabited only by a few crazies. I don’t think even a tracked vehicle can get through.”

“Do we have to walk? Go on horseback?”

“Just how much re you willing to spend?”

“Whatever it takes.”

“Then I have an idea. But I still say we should bring in the military, not confront Ulysses with two old fogies and a kid while hoping for the best,” he said.

“I’m telling you he’ll lob nukes before a military strike can take him out. I won’t do it. I won’t tell you where to find him.”

“Suppose I have you arrested right now and force the information we need out of you?” he said.

“You are overlooking Ulysses’ spies. They may be watching us right now. They’ll see something is up. We can’t risk it.”

Le Clerc picked up the glass of wine he had put down earlier and downed the contents. “You know, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced you’re the butt of some practical joke. The Firecracker was an accident just as the Commission said it was. Ulysses is long dead. No one has any finger on any nuclear trigger. There are no spies. If anyone sent you a note, it was probably the teenage son of a neighbor. Maybe it was Aeneas, and he’s having a good giggle at our expense.”

“Believe what you like,” I said. “If what to say is true, I’m thrilled, but I’m still heading west, with you re without you. Will you help or not?”

“Yes. I’m happy enough to spend your money and go camping in the wild west. It will be quite an adventure. I’ve been vegetating here.”

“Or fermenting.”

“Wise ass!” he barked. “So let’s go. I guarantee we won’t be meeting Ulysses, though.”

“So long as we go,” I said.

“First stop, Montreal.”

“Your hometown?”

“I’m from Drummondville.”

INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: There is a gap in the narrative here, so I’ll fill it.

After a brief stay in New York, George, Le Clerc and myself took a steamer up the Hudson. There was a short portage to Lake George. We sailed all the way to the northern tip of Lake Champlain. They told me I wouldn’t get seasick on a lake but my stomach disagreed. I spent much of the trip leaning over the rail surrendering my breakfast. We took another boat down a small river to the St. Lawrence. We switched boats one more time and finally arrived in Montreal. George and Maurice dumped me in a hotel where I slept and recovered from nausea.



JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER:

Montreal is a subtropical paradise with a climate much like that of Miami a century ago. The metropolitan area is home to an astonishing 50,000 people, making it the most populous city on earth. Only Llasa in Tibet can compete with it. On l'Île Sainte-Hélène is an industrial park where Maurice said he planned to spend a large piece of my fortune. Dirigible Fabrique Nordique (DFN) is located on the island in a modified geodesic dome to which a barrel-roofed ware-house type structure had been appended. It once was a biosphere for an environmental center – there isn’t much need for one of those these days. The company builds airships. It built the one that had given Le Clerc and I useful but alarming service in the Battle of DC.

The owners of DFN, Jacque and Charlotte Le Pen, had started the business with high hopes and good prospects. Airships could knit together a large territory with a decayed and overgrown infrastructure, and also offered a way to project military force quickly, as government and business executives immediately realized. Most important of all, their manufacture remained within the limits of Quebec’s (and the world’s) declining industrial capabilities. The Defense Ministry placed a preliminary order for a fleet, and commercial transport companies showed interest, too. The came a few accidents with bad weather, which airships notoriously don’t handle well. Most damaging of all was the Battle of DC where the craft had proved an easy target for ground fire. The Defense Ministry canceled all orders except for a few reconnaissance craft, while only a package delivery service bought any for business purposes. No one was willing to risk the lives of paying passengers in them. The Le Pens hung on, but they and their company were on the verge of bankruptcy.

A deflated blimp was under tied tarps outside the dome; it was considerably bigger than the one Le Clerc and I flew in DC. We entered the dome which seemingly was an unorganized jumble of scaffolds and aircraft parts. A half-built airship was amid the scaffolding. No workers were present.

For reasons known only to himself, Le Clerc chose to wear his old naval uniform. It was too tight. My French is all but nonexistent, so I rely on Le Clerc for the gist of the conversation with the Le Pens. The couple spotted us and approached.

“Can we help you?” Jacques asked.

Charlotte, surely because of the uniform, recognized us immediately. “You two get out of here!” she shouted.

“We wish to purchase an airship,” said Le Clerc.

“Why? So you can blow it up, crash it in a river, and destroy what’s left of our business? You are the reason no one trusts our ships!” she said.

“Ma’am, it was scarcely our fault. We were at war and we were shot at. It happens in those circumstances. I don’t think you can blame us for hydrogen being flammable.”

“I can blame anyone I choose. Now get out.”

“Wait, Charlotte,” said Jacques. “I’m curious. Why do you want an airship and how much money can you spend?”

“We plan an expedition of exploration beyond the Lakes. Do you have something that can get us there and back? We’re prepared to pay a reasonable price.”

“Does this have anything to do with Delacroix?” Jacque asked. “Is someone finally looking for him?”

“Who?”

“It seems not. Louis Delacroix was self-described entrepreneur who said exactly the same thing as you 15 years ago. He never came back,” said Jacques.

“I heard nothing about it,” said Le Clerc.

“He asked us to keep mum about his expedition. He didn’t talk to the papers before he went, as so many other explorers do. I never met his crew, if he had one. No one ever asked us about him or his expedition. I made no promise to keep silent as he asked, but… well, why would we advertise that one of ships didn’t come back from a trip? Do you still want to go?”

“Yes.”

“How soon?”

“Immediately.”

“Do you have 400,000 francs?”

I understood the question about the price. “Yes,” I said.

“Then follow me.”

“Jacques, are you insane? Don’t sell to these people! They’ll do something stupid with our machine and damage our reputation some more!” said Charlotte.

“If we don’t sell to somebody soon, that won’t matter,” Jacques answered her. “We’ll go bankrupt anyway. But my wife has a point,” he said, redirecting his remarks to Le Clerc. “Have you told the media about your expedition?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll sell to you under three conditions. One is that you tell nobody before you leave – if you go missing like Delacroix, I don’t want any more bad publicity. Second is that you tell everybody if you return – it will be a good advertisement.”

“What’s the third?”

“Your check has to clear.”

Charlotte shook her head. She still was unhappy about dealing with us, but was mollified by the conditions – at least the third one.

Jacques led us to the hanger attachment. The airship tethered inside was bigger than the one in DC. She was at least 50 meters.

“This is the P16, the most time-tested model we have. In any case it’s the only model available immediately. It originally was intended for service with the Diplomatic Corps, but just prior to delivery the government canceled the order for budget reasons… and, they said, safety reasons. The government never would sign a penalty clause, so we ended up eating the cost of construction. It’s not as big as the airships used for hauling cargo, of course, but you say that isn’t your purpose. You see the props are cowled and are mounted each side of the gondola. They pivot and swivel, giving a pilot exceptional control while eliminating the need for a ground crew when landing, though having one always helps. There’s a short wave radio. The craft contains electrolysis equipment to regenerate its own hydrogen. The engines are multi-fuel turbines; they give the best range, though not the best performance, on diesel.

“What is the range?” asked Le Clerc.

 “On diesel, you can take her to the Pacific without refueling. The craft was designed with Vancouver in mind as a destination. I feel obligated to warn you that the prototype of this same model was flown by the errant Mssr. Delacroix. How do you plan to pay?”

Le Clerc passed along the question. I knew that my deposits in two banks which had home offices in Montreal together totaled more than 400,000, so I wrote out two checks. “They should clear in a few days,” I said.

As we left the DFN campus, I said to Le Clerc, “We could use acetylene and as much dynamite as we can carry. Plus the usual survival gear.”

“You know,” he said, “I’m not even going to ask why we’re taking dynamite. We’ll need cash for it, though. No checks. So we’d better stop at your bank.”

It took three days for the check to clear into the le Pens’ account. During that time, Le Clerc led me to what must have been every bar in Montreal, including one where he spent a thousand of my francs on strippers. I was afraid to leave him alone lest he have a change of heart and contact the authorities about our mission, but that meant acceding to his whims. He did find time to have supplies, including black market dynamite, delivered to the P16. Aeneas mostly stayed in the hotel room with his nose in books.

On our last night in Montreal, I lost count of Le Clerc’s shots of vodka, but after he had enough of them he led me to a brothel. I have no objection to the business, per se, but I wasn’t really in the mood, and, besides, didn’t want Le Clerc slipping away while I was occupied. I fended off offers in the lobby by explaining I was just there to keep my friend out of trouble. The ladies were understanding about it. A half-hour after Le Clerc went upstairs with a brunette named Mona, Mona came downstairs to ask my help.

“What have you got in mind?” I asked.

“He’s passed out. Get him out of here.”

Mona helped me get him dressed. He must have tipped her well – especially since it was on my dime – but I gave her some more. We roused him sufficiently to get him to his feet, with each of us holding one arm, and Mona helped me get him down the stairs. Once out the front door, though, I was on my own with him. I struggled to hold him up as we staggered toward the hotel. Once in the room, Aeneas helped me guide him to a bed, on which Maurice dropped face-first.

“I compliment you both on your brand of perfume,” said Aeneas. I suppose the aroma had rubbed off. He must have a good nose to have smelled it over the alcohol.

The next morning, an unshaven Maurice looked miserable on the horse-drawn taxi-ride to l'Île Sainte-Hélène. He kept is eyes shut and intermittently dry-heaved. Tethered in the open in front of the dome, the silver-gray P16 waited for us. Aeneas suddenly looked as sick as Maurice. Apparently I was the only one looking forward to flying.

I bounded up the ladder. Unlike the last airship in which I flew, the gondola was enclosed, but the windows did slide open.  Aeneas looked like he was ascending the gallows as he climbed the ladder. Le Clerc, still convinced I was chasing wild geese, then wearily pulled himself aboard. The le Pens released the ropes, I started the engines, and the P16 rose smoothly into the balmy skies over Montreal. To his credit, Aeneas soon seemed to be enjoying himself. Le Clerc was as comfortable as anyone could be with a hangover of those dimensions.

As we flew west, the skies did not remain balmy. Ominous clouds loomed ahead. Rain soon batted the windshield. Before long we were flying blind, enveloped by rainclouds, and buffeted by drafts. By the time we were over Lake Erie the storm had become brutal. We had little to guide us but dead reckoning and a magnetic compass. Aeneas began to look ill again.


INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: This is an understatement of mammoth proportions. By the way, I didn’t stay in my room in Montreal but went sightseeing extensively. George never asked.



JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER:

Despite the weather over the lake, the route was preferable to overland given the unpredictability of the Canadians in Ontario. They’re twitchy about Quebec’s expansion and have fired on airships before. The risk of overflying Ohio and Indiana was unknown. I preferred not to chance it.

At length we reached the shore of the lower peninsula of Michigan, barely visible below. I took us higher into the mist until we lost sight of the ground, on the theory that, if we couldn’t see anyone down there, they couldn’t see us either. Whether or not the precautions were necessary, we survived the crossing, though it took all night. We broke into clear morning skies over Lake Michigan. Our flight smoothed out. Eventually, Aeneas felt well enough to open the larder for a snack. I’d been too occupied to look earlier, and Le Clerc was still too queasy from his nights on the town.

“Um, guys,” he said. “Much as I relish the thought of chewing on dynamite, don’t you think you should have packed some more conventional comestibles?” The food larder was empty.

I looked at Le Clerc. “I thought you had arranged for our supplies.”

“I bought the hardware,” he said. “Couldn’t you have bought the food and drink?”

“I could have, if I’d known you wouldn’t.”

“George, did you once specifically ask me to do that?”

“Guys!” interjected Aeneas. “I think the point is what do we do now?”

“There’s plenty of water below us,” I said. “We just need some containers. We should be able to find canned food in an abandoned store somewhere. If not, we can hunt. I don’t suppose there is a rifle aboard.”

“I’m so glad the two of you used the past few days in Montreal to prepare for a long trip into the wilderness,” said Aeneas.

“We had other priorities,” said Le Clerc. “And yes, there’s a Lee-Enfield wrapped in the canvass bundle in back of the dynamite. I bought it even though it wasn’t on George’s shopping list.”

We lapsed into silence. The engines droned steadily.

At last, a distant skyline came into view. “Heads up. I think that’s Chicago. It’s as good a place as any to go shopping,” I said.

“Won’t the downtown be ransacked?” asked Aeneas.

He had a point. The urban centers were heavily looted as the economy broke down and new deliveries of goods ceased. Rural and suburban stores and warehouses usually were better bets.

INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: George needn’t have been surprised that I had a point. I’ve been known to have one occasionally.

WILSON: This is not one of those occasions. Get on with it.



JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER:

“I’d like to look anyway,” said Le Clerc. “You know I think this mission is a waste of time and money. We might as well do something valuable by giving the ruins a once-over. Maybe they’re salvageable the way New York was.”

I didn’t say so, but I was curious, too, so I kept us on course.

The P16 nosed over Lake Shore Drive. Drifting sand had infiltrated the city, heaping up on the Western side of buildings and cars. This side of the lake was a dry as the opposite side was wet. There was no sign of life below. The silence of ghost cities always disturbs me. The John Hancock looked intact except for some broken glass. The old water tower still survived.

“There’s a big multistory shopping mall north of the water tower,” I said. “Let’s see if anything is left on the shelves.

As le pen had promised, the directional thrust of our props gave us very effective control. I brought us to a hover just above the street, and tossed a grapple hook to a lamppost. It caught.

“So who goes down?” asked Aeneas, plainly not volunteering.

“I’ll go,” I said.

“Wait,” said Le Clerc. He unpacked the rifle and loaded it with a stripper clip.

I rolled a rope ladder out the door and slung the rife on a shoulder. “I’ll be right back if everything has been picked clean.”

Once on the ground, I was caught in the face by a sand-laden gust. It was difficult to resist rubbing my eyes, but I feared doing so would scratch them from the sand granules.

A door to the mall was wedged open by a sand pile. Inside, the placed was a wreck. Broken glass was everywhere. I walked up an immobile escalator past the empty shelves of a chocolate shop. The clothing shops still had stock, but most others were out. In a sporting goods shop I saw two plastic water coolers. I grabbed them and hurried back toward the airship, convinced that there were no treasures to be found in this place. Besides, the mall gave me the willies for some reason.

“Where next?” asked Aeneas.

“Lake Michigan. We’ll grab some water. It’s not as though people are polluting the lake these days. Then we’ll stop outside of the city somewhere.”

We motored past the corn cob buildings. This time we grappled to the fountain in Grant Park. The fountain, of course, was dry.

“I’ll go again,” I said. “I’ll just fill the containers in the lake and come right back.”

If there is anything more eerie than the streets of a deserted city it a park in a deserted city. One almost hears echoes of children, dogs, lovers, and dope dealers. I instinctively looked for traffic before crossing Lakeshore Drive, sand-covered though it was. I filled the containers and lugged them back.

While I stood on the fountain handing up the coolers, 20 wild men emerged from the parking garage under the park. Except for green paint and the spears they carried, they were naked. They seemed upset. “Machine! Machine!’ they shouted as they charged toward the fountain. I gathered they had an eco-message about which they were quite sincere. However, the time was not auspicious for a political discussion, so I released the grappling hook and climbed the ladder. We took our leave.

INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: Your honors, George seriously misrepresents this scene. Far from displaying such nonchalance, when the men appeared he shouted, “Oh shit!” while yanking the grapple hook free. He leapt at and grabbed the ladder of the already rising P16 while shouting, “Get the hell out of here! Now!” Le Clerc took him at his word and throttled the engine. George swung below us as we accelerated away from the park. One of the men below tossed his spear, missing George by centimeters. By the time we dragged George inside, he was drenched in sweat and was shaking.

WILSON: I think you judge harshly, Mr. Custer. That is this court’s prerogative.

AENEAS CUSTER: I apologize for encroaching upon it.

WILSON: Pardoned.

AENEAS CUSTER: A full pardon?

WILSON: No.

PROUDFOOT: Your honors, may I remind the court that the defendant is charged with unspeakable crimes. This tone of levity…

HIRISAWA: …is also this court’s prerogative. And his crimes are speakable, or he could not have been charged. Do not for a moment think that we fail to take the charges seriously, even when we banter.



JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER:

We picked up speed as I clambered aboard, and quickly left the downtown skyscrapers behind. I was surprised to notice a 9mm handgun in Le Clerc’s belt.

“I thought the Lee-Enfield was the only gun,” I said.

“I never said that, did I?” said le Clerc.

While fundamentally pleased there were no casualties, even among the wild men, I can’t help but wonder why Le Clerc didn’t use his weapon when they were attacking. Perhaps he was too occupied at the controls – at least I hoped so.

Amid the sands west of the city we saw a Food Lion in the former suburb of Elmhurst. I was reasonably sure that this time we were in an area that truly was desolate. This time we lucked out. There were cans on the shelves. I waved at Aeneas to come down the ladder and set him to work stocking the airship.

On a hunch, I walked to the remains of a house on a residential street neighboring the supermarket. A heating oil tank stood against the foundation wall. Not much heating fluid was burned in the world once the sun heated up, so there was a chance some remained. I removed my shirt and used it to insulate my hand against the searingly hot metal cap. It twisted off easily. I used my belt as a dipstick, but it did need to go in far. The tank was nearly full, and #2 heating oil makes fine diesel fuel. Once the larder had been stocked, we maneuvered the ship over the tank and dropped a hose. The internal pumps did the rest. I figured that it didn’t hurt to top up our tank.

The Great American Desert stretched out ahead of us as far as we could see. The land below us once had been the world’s breadbasket. Now it barely sustains a few lizards. After hours of glaring sunlight we approached a large trench in the sand. The once mighty Mississippi had been reduces to a wadi, though sharp cuts in the banks testified to the occasional flood. On this day the only sign of dampness was a darker shade of brown in a strip near the centerline of the trench. The western sands turned a beautiful pink as the sun set. When night fell, the stars were as bright as I’ve ever seen them.


INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: Your honors, a few pages of George’s journal are missing at this point. I suspect he tore them out himself the moment we spotted live South Dakotans, just as a security measure. It would have been much safer yet to throw the whole journal overboard since it spelled out his opinion about Ulysses and the missiles pretty clearly, but somehow I like George better for not doing it.

What was removed was an account of our stop at a missile control room. Finding it was no easy matter given our primitive navigational aids, and it wouldn’t have been possible at all had George’s interpretation of “the document” been in error. His gambles frequently paid off, though. Le Clerc was visibly disturbed by the find. Only the outer steel door was locked or we could not have gotten inside. We burned our way through it with our acetylene. The inner tougher security hatches were wide open, as though the site had been abandoned carelessly. There was no power to any of the consoles, but there was bound to be some generating capacity on site. We didn’t look for it. As soon as we confirmed the place was exactly what George had thought it was, we set dynamite charges and destroyed the controls.

WILSON: Why didn’t you finish the job at the other control room sites?

AENEAS CUSTER: We didn’t have the resources. The one site had used up most of our explosives. We might not have been able to find the others. Navigation is difficult out there. It’s not like the old days when GPS could guide you through your phone from doorstep to doorstep. And, if the other sites were locked up tighter than the first, we’d never have been able to get in.

Le Clerc, though, had a similar question, and, as we rose back into the sky, he told us how to do it. “Every last one of these sites and the missiles themselves must be destroyed!” he insisted. “They are too dangerous to leave out here. I insist that we call Quebec on the short wave, and get a real expedition out here big enough to deal with them.”

“I know you well enough to know that you don’t ask my permission when you feel something that strongly,” said George, “so I must assume you already tried to use the radio at some point.”

“Give whatever part you removed from the radio to me now,” said Le Clerc.

“No.”

Le Clerc removed his handgun.

“I don’t believe you’ll use that, but just in case…” George tossed a small part over the side. “You’ll never find it in the sand down there.”

“Are you crazy?” said Le Clerc.

“Maybe, but no about this,” he answered. “Listen, Maurice, I’m telling you that at least one squadron of missiles is operational. Have you forgotten the Firecracker already? What do you think Ulysses will do if he sees Quebec’s military bearing down on him? We can’t risk it. Let’s just talk with him. If we don’t come back, I’ve made other arrangements to notify the proper people about him and about the missiles.”

Your honors, I believe this last claim was a lie George made up on the spot. As far as I know or could discover afterward, he made no such “other arrangements” at all. It mollified Le Clerc, though, which I suppose was the idea, so that he agreed to continue according to George’s wishes.

“Have you given thought simply to killing Ulysses when we meet him? If we meet him?” asked Le Clerc.

“Yes. But let’s hear what he has to say before deciding about that,” said George.




THE JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER

Something strange had happened to the Crazy Horse Monument. Erosion couldn’t have worked so quickly. It looks almost as though someone has been feminizing the features.

The faces of Mount Rushmore loomed ahead of us. There was something wrong with them, too. They were painted in colors one expects to see only in comic strips. All the complexions were shocking pink. Washington appeared to wear lipstick. Jefferson’s hair was a fiery red. Lincoln’s beard was streaked with gray. In spite of myself I laughed while wondering idly if the eye colors were right. My laughter was curtailed by what floated below TR’s chin. It was a sister ship to our P16, but painted paisley. We apparently had found the ship bought by Delacroix, who either was an agent of Ulysses or Ulysses himself.

I pointed below. “Civilians,” I said.

“I sincerely hope so,” said Le Clerc. “Are those camels down there with them?”

“Looks like it.”

The people below were garishly and colorfully attired. As soon as they saw us, the pointed, shouted, jumped, and laughed like children. We closed to within 100 meters of the other airship. A white-robed woman leaned out the gondola and waved to us. She pointed east with an air of authority.

“What do we do?” Le Clerc asked.

“Go east. Maybe we’ll see what she wants us to see.”

As we veered eastward, smoke signals went up from Washington’s noggin. I suppose it was a warning of our arrival. It seemed unnecessary. We were hard to miss.

A cluttered outpost appeared ahead. Clusters of solar panels reflected brightly on the hillside. Their arrangement seemed less efficient than artistic. The frames were painted, giving them the look of mechanical flowers. Long rows of garden vegetables were semi-shaded by semi-transparent plastic – an old 20th century desert farming technique. The effect is to create a partial greenhouse that controls sunlight and preserves moisture. Here and there were groups of picnic tables shaded by tent canvass held up by poles. Windmills churned below as well, providing, as we later learned, electrical and mechanical power. Only a few people milled about. They were dressed like those at Mount Rushmore.

“Maurice, please put away your gun.”

“It is put away.”

“I mean take it out of your belt and store it somewhere out of sight. Please.”

“My gut tells me this is a mistake, but what’s one more at this point? I’ll let you make the call.” Maurice packed the handgun away with the rifle.

We hovered over a flat area next to a hill. The dimensions suggested an old parking lot was beneath the layer of sand. Out of a tunnel in the hillside emerged scores of people with even worse fashion sense than anything we’d see yet. Their clothes included sarongs, loincloths, bikinis, togas, and gauze wraps. Many of the fabrics were bright with painted flowers, stripes, and dyed patterns. They waved, applauded, laughed, and smiled.

“They don’t look much like nuclear terrorists,” said Aeneas.

“I haven’t met enough of those to judge,” I said, though I was thinking very much the same thing. This didn’t look like Ulysses’ sort of crowd at all.

“What the hell is this place?” said Le Clerc.

“Beautiful Rushmore Cave.”

“Beautiful?”

“I’m just reading the name on the map,” I said.

We dropped ropes over the side. Several of the throng ran up and fielded the ropes as though they did it for a living. They fed the ropes through rings set in concrete posts, apparently installed there to provide an alternate mooring site for the other airship, and kept them taught as we lowered to the ground. They then tied off the ropes. I killed the engine.

The three off us slid out the door and instantly were mobbed by attractive young men and women with leis. Despite the Hawaiian theme, the ethnic mix was primarily Caucasian and American Indian, with a smattering of others, an echo of the pre-disaster regional population. A rhythmic chanting began, “Custer! Custer!”

“I see you’re expected. What is going on here, George?” asked a deeply suspicious Le Clerc.

“I really don’t know.”

“That’s what you said in DC.”

“I was telling the truth, wasn’t I?”

“Were you?”

The exchange was interrupted when the chanters picked us up and carried us. A young man sat playing the sitar by the tunnel adit.

“Is Ulysses here?” I asked one of our bearers.

“Ulysses? No, of course not.. You are joking with me, Custer. Mother is waiting for you. We’ve all been waiting such a long time, but the circle is complete now and all will be well.”

“Why do I doubt that?” said Le Clerc.

The gardens we passed were impressive. Cannabis, tomatoes, grains, potatoes, beets, turnips, and yams were cultivated under the plastic. Dates and figs grew in the open. The gardens were served by a network of PVC pipes providing drip irrigation. The pipes tied together into a main line that disappeared into the tunnel, where it ran along one wall,

We entered the tunnel, once the tourist entrance to Beautiful Rushmore Cave. It was wheelchair accessible. The walls were covered by murals in a variety of styles. Multicolored party lights strung along the ceiling lit them up in a tawdry display. We passed a naked couple unashamedly making love in the position of an illustration on the wall above them> Aeneas gawked at them. I’ll have to talk to him about that.


INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: And George leered like a dirty old man. Give me a break.



JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER

The temperature dropped as we walked. The earth is a constant 13.5 degrees Celsius at modest depths, so for the first time in years I began to feel chilly. It was wonderfully refreshing.

We entered an enormous cavity, called simply The Big Room. Though already decorated by nature with stalactites and stalagmites, the room was further enhanced by the locals who had carved many of the stalagmites into statuary. A variety of lamps and colorful fabrics hung from the ceiling. In the otherworldly light, children played while adults worked or socialized in a friendly chaos. One woman was giving a puppet show to a mixed-age audience. I heard her have one of the puppets address the other as George. I don’t think it was meant to be me, since the puppet didn’t resemble me at all.

INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: Yes it did.

HIRISAWA: Mr. Custer…




JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER

We passed a man who sat on the floor sewing something that looked like a bra with a sunflower on each cup. Toward the middle of The Big Room, an enthusiastic game of Twister was in progress.

Our bearers put us down but four of them escorted us to a side passage and through a string bead curtain. This “room” was smaller but was far from cramped. Leather living room furniture to the left gave the place a homey appearance. A bedroom set including a waterbed was to the right. Straight ahead was a large chair carved out of the rock and covered with padding. Two female guards with spears flanked the chair. They wore denim shirts and shorts, but the garb didn’t look like military uniforms as did the denim of the West Virginians; only the fact that the clothes matched suggested that they might be. Both guards wore brown cowboy boots. The spears were the first weapons we had seen among these people. On the chair – or, rather throne – sat Joelle, clothed in a white silken robe. At 40-something, she remained stunning. Her pale blonde hair had yet to gray or darken. On her head was a garland of flowers.

“Say hello to your mother, Aeneas,” I said.

“You’re my mom?” he asked.

“Mother, not ‘mom,’ she corrected.

“Mother to us all,” said one of our bearers.

“And who is this?” Joelle gestured Le Clerc.

“This is Maurice Le Clerc. In the Battle of DC, he commanded…”

La Salle. Yes, I know the name,” said Joelle with anger in her voice. “He spoiled everything! What is he doing here? He has no business among us!”

The display of ire plainly caught the locals off guard. Joelle checked herself, and said calmly, “Perhaps it will be for the best. Please leave us,” she said to the bearers. Our livery service left twittering and chattering. “You too,” she said to the guards. They looked surprised and glanced at her for confirmation. Joelle nodded. They left the chamber.

“You named him Aeneas?” asked Joelle. “You have an odd sense of humor sometimes. No matter. Why didn’t you come here earlier? My people were beginning to doubt me about you, even though they wouldn’t say so to may face. I nearly came and got you myself.”

“I came as fast as I could. Your letter was pretty cryptic,” I said. “Was it your letter?”

“Yes, of course it was mine. Someone else could have read it, George, so I couldn’t just say “Come to South Dakota, Sweetie.’ But why didn’t you come 15 years ago? The directions were in the document Ulysses gave you.”

“You read the document?”

“I told you not to put your trust in safes.”

“So you did.” I didn’t add that Ulysses and Joelle surely had discussed South Dakota during their tryst in New York, so she didn’t need to decode the document’s meaning. “I didn’t figure it out until your letter arrived. I guess I’m not as quick as you. So where is Ulysses?”

“Ulysses? Why he’s still dead, I suppose. You and sailor boy here killed him in DC. Don’t you remember?”

“But your note…”

“Said he was an honest man, not a live one. I expected you to think of the mythical Ulysses...”

“…who after a long journey returned to his wife. You’re going to have to communicate with me more simply, Joelle. I’m not a complex thinker.”

“Noted.”

“So, the mythical Ulysses killed a bunch of Penelope’s suitors. Am I supposed to…”

“No, that won’t be necessary.”

“What about Delacroix? Didn’t he finance your trip here and buy you that crazily colored airship?”

“Are you jealous, George? We don’t approve of jealousy around here. Anyway, there is no cause for you to worry. Louis Delacroix suffered a fatal accident on the trip here.”

“An accidental accident?” I asked.

“There are accidents and accidents. This was one of the second kind.”

“Madame,” said Le Clerc.

“Mother,” she said.

“Madame,” Le Clerc repeated, “I hate to interrupt this little reunion, but do you mind telling me why you dropped a 200 kiloton nuke off the coast of New York? It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Yes it was me. I wanted to get George’s attention. It worked.”

“If you’ll pardon my saying so, that’s nuts. There would have been nothing at all wrong with a ‘Come to South Dakota, Sweetie” note. I know George. He would have come. Surely you know him better than I do, so you should know it, too. So what if anyone else read it?”

“Do not call me nuts in front of my people,” she warned. “They are a kindly sort, but they won’t appreciate that at all. The explosion served two other purposes, too, Maurice. It proved the Minuteman missiles still work, for one thing. We couldn’t be sure until we tested one. You might argue we could have tested anywhere, but I opted for a show of force. I’m sure you understand shows of force.”

“But no one knows it’s you.”

“They will, Maurice. When the time comes for us to reveal our possession of the weapons to the world, we’ll have instant ‘credibility’ as they used to say in Cold War days.”

“Exactly what are your plans for the missiles?” Le Clerc asked.

“Let’s come back to that later. First I want to show you the life we’ve built.”

“The locals seem to revere you,” I said.

“Yes, almost literally. I saved them, George.”

“From what?”

“Themselves. They were scattered in settlements from here to Rapid City, and spent most of their time raiding each other and bashing heads – murder, rape, and robbery. It was as though producing for themselves and simply co-operation never occurred to them. One scraggly band without the tools or weapons to raid lived in these caves, mostly on lizards, but their numbers were diminishing day by day. You might notice there are no old people here, and only some who are middle aged. People didn’t make it to 40 before I arrived. They were desperate for someone to show them another way to live – any way to live.”

“Then you magically flew out of the sky and offered one,” I said.

“What’s more, my last name is Custer – thanks to you. You might notice that a lot of places around here are named after someone named Custer. I saw no reason to dissuade anyone that I was related. I brought with me a cache of automatic rifles, courtesy of Delacroix, so I armed the group here, and systematically captured or destroyed the other settlements. We couldn’t afford to be gentle. We killed the men who showed any signs of rebellion, and resettled the survivors in these caves.”

"How did you even know about the caves and the situation here?” I asked.

“As for the social situation, I didn’t know anything about it until I got here. I worked with what I had. But Ulysses – to give credit where credit is due – was the one who saw the possibilities of the geology and told me about them. The Black Hills are a granite outcrop surrounded by a doughnut of limestone. Over the past few million years, the water running off the granite has eroded out slashes of caverns on all sides, like lines on a clock face. They make great natural shelter and the clear skies out here are perfect for solar power.”

“…and there are missiles nearby in the desert that you and he knew how to make operational,” I added.

“So there are.”

“Your story sounds a lot like the one Ulysses told me in West Virginia, but his solution was more militarist and fascist than what I’ve seen so far in this place. I haven’t seen any of those automatic rifles you mentioned. Where are they?”

“Ulysses ultimately had a pedestrian vision, George – a little like you. Militarism has been done. He thought it was an end in itself. It isn’t – or at least it makes a pretty uninspiring end. We did have to resort to it in the beginning, of course, but once we had suppressed or absorbed our enemies, we put violence aside. We put away the rifles, to which on my private guards have access; we keep them just in case we are threatened from the outside. Once the civil wars were over, we started to prosper. There are plenty of manufactured goods, such as the solar panels and windmills, available in the ghost towns out there, and the airship makes retrieving them fairly simple. In order hold it all together, though, I felt we needed a spiritual revolution, too.”

“Hence this hippy commune with you as spiritual head,” I said. “Why do they seem so enthused about my arrival?”

“Because people are never quite satisfied, no matter how much better things are than they used to be. I promised them you would bring a reconnection with the outside – a chance to be more cosmopolitan.”

“The outside is overrated,” I said.

“I agree, but many of the people are still hopeful about what you represent.”

“I see.”

“I don’t,” grumbled Le Clerc.

Aeneas stayed silent but listened intently.

“Come, let’s take the tour,” she said.

Joelle showed us the cave. We met smiles and applause. The commune, I had to admit, was impressive. Functional plumbing and electric power had been installed, using materials ferried in by airship from salvage expeditions. Outside the cave we gave the gardens a closer look, and then rode by camel to nearby caves that formed part of the extended commune. The locals did not rely entirely on salvage. Despite a casual work ethic, they produced a surplus of textiles from their own looms, some ultimately from hemp, and also blended their own colorful dyes. One of the cave sites specialized in metalworks and ceramics, with furnaces for melting scrap and for glazing. Joelle explained that they were able, if need be, to sand cast individual parts for the airship engines or the electric generators; their technology was more robust than it might appear, she insisted.

Joelle explained that she discouraged anyone from working more than four hours per day. Because there were few personal possessions and living space was communal there was no need for higher levels of production. “There are more important things than things,” she said. Everywhere we went the people seemed happy. The sun was low in the sky when we reentered Beautiful Rushmore Cave and returned to Joelle’s chamber.

“We’ve done something new here, George,” she said. “Or maybe very old. Anyway, it’s different from the general way of the world. We’ve come to terms with the conflict within.”

“What conflict?”

“Pleasure principle and the death instinct. Eros and Thanatos.”

“Freud?”

“Ultimately, yes, but he, as Reich realized, didn’t tilt enough in the direction of Eros. Repressed people make repressive civilizations.”

“But you say you’ve come to terms with the conflict. That implies a place for Thanatos too – a place for an appetite for destruction,” I said.

“So it does. But first I think you should experience the Eros – especially you, Maurice. You strike me as a very repressed man.”

“You didn’t have to escort him around Montreal’s bars and brothels,” I said.

Joelle laughed. “Strangely enough, that’s not a contradiction, because he feels guilty about it, don’t you Maurice?”

“I never claimed to be a paragon of virtue, Madame,” said Le Clerc.

“There you see?” said Joelle. “He believes his indulgence was a moral lapse. We are not like that, Maurice. The pleasures of the flesh are a virtue here, and the highest paragons of virtue are the love priestesses. You might have noticed them: the pretty ladies in white.”

“By priestesses, you mean prostitutes,” he said.

“No such thing is even possible here, Maurice. We have no money, we have no property, and we don’t buy or sell anything. The only reward the priestesses earn is honor. Sexually frustrated young men are the most dangerous people in any society – they commit the crimes, they engage in violence, they foment unrest. We make sure they’re not frustrated. Some of them don’t do well winning female companionship based on their charms alone, so the priestesses step in. Even so, I don’t arm them. You might have noticed my guards are women.”

“Are you telling me you promote adultery and polygamy so that young men will be too complacent to bother with mischief?” asked Le Clerc.

“We do keep them complacent but, but your phrasing is packed with prejudices. We promote polyamory, Maurice. We don’t promote polygamy, monogamy, or marriage of any kind. Adultery is a meaningless word here. Without property, marriage serves no useful purpose. It merely promotes jealousy and anti-social behavior. We better off without it. Two, three, or more people are together when they want to be and apart when they wish.”

“I have a question,” said Aeneas. “Everything you’ve said so far sounds all rather heterosexual. What about the others?”

Joelle paused before answering. “It’s all very heteroflexible. We don’t draw the same kind of distinctions around here as do people back where you grew up, and we don’t think in terms of ‘others.’ People pair or multiple up any way they like. We don’t fuss about it. I’ll admit, though, there’s a young lady I’d intended for you to meet – but if you’d prefer not to…”

“Oh, I’d be happy to meet her. I was just curious.”

“We also make use of mind expanding aids, some of which grow naturally and some which don’t. We don’t brew much alcohol, though. That can kill you – worse, it dulls the senses instead of enhances them.

“I get it,” said Le Clerc. “You’re a commune of drug-addled psycho-babblers. However, your degradation is not my responsibility.”

“How open-minded of you, Maurice.”

“But you keep glossing over the missiles,” he said.

“And you keep obsessing about them, which shows me where your head was at. During the civil wars, you are precisely the sort of opponent I would have ordered killed.”

“Is that a threat, Madame?” asked Le Clerc.

“A statement of fact. Fortunately for you, you’re a guest, and I’m allowing you some leeway.

“Madame, I wish to point out that you’ve already killed with those weapons. A fishing boat never returned when the Firecracker went off. Surely you must have known that was a possibility – you must have known there was a chance the missile would come down in the wrong place and kill thousands.”

“Very unlikely.”

“But possible. It bespeaks a carelessness with lives that concerns me deeply.”

“Maurice, what you need to learn – but I fear never will – is that you and people like you are the ones who show – who always have shown – the real carelessness with lives. Who built the missiles in the first place? People just like you. But I don’t want to talk about this now. I have a surprise for Aeneas.”

Joelle clapped her hands. One of her guards peered into the chamber. Joelle gestured with her index finger, indicating “now.” The guard vanished. A few moments later she reentered escorting a pretty young woman with red hair and hazel eyes.

“George, you obviously know that Ulysses is the father of Aeneas. I want you to meet my daughter Selena. Aeneas, this is your half-sister.”

Aeneas looked thunderstruck. I’m amazed he never suspected.

“Selena? Is she…?” I asked.

“Your daughter? Of course not, George. Can’t you do math? But I want you two to know each other anyway. Before you ask me who is the father, suffice it to say he is not here.”

I suspected he was not anywhere. I wondered if the ill-starred Delacroix had red hair.


INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: Your honors, whether or not I looked ‘thunderstruck,’ George’s expression when looking at Selena was considerably less dignified. It was from this moment that George went native, and, since the motive couldn’t have been parental, it was very likely his attraction to this younger prettier version of Joelle. He may not have acted on it, but…

HIRISAWA: Mr. Custer, we agreed to hear your story, but not your armchair analysis of your father.

AENEAS CUSTER: He’s not my father.

HIRISAWA: As that may be. Get back on track.




JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER

“One of my guards will show you quarters where you can rest and clean up. We have a party tonight and the three of you are guests of honor, so you’ll want to be awake.”

We were led away to a side cavity forming a chamber equipped with beds, bedpans, and a bathtub filled with deliciously cool water. I suppose these were perquisites of being “the Custer.” Like Joelle, I apparently was “more equal than others.” I claimed the tub. Le Clerc used it next. Aeneas didn’t bother.


INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: Of course not! After two grimy old men? The room had washcloths and a pitcher of water. I made do with those.




JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER

Aeneas was sullen. Sometimes he looked at me with murder in his eyes. He was angry at me for having concealed his origins, but I did not do that out of malice. I tried to talk to him but he would have none of it.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he growled.

After a time I gave up. Le Clerc observed us without comment. I then dozed for what felt like several hours, but must have been less.

INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: It was much less.




JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER

At length, a denim-clad guard awoke us and led us outside. The sky was cloudless and starry, though a band of red still lingered on the Western horizon. A gibbous moon looked huge and gold.

The party already was in full swing. Food, drink, and intoxicants were laid out picnic style on at least 20 long cloths. There were no plates. Instead there were trenchers, slabs of hardened bread that served the same purpose but became edible when soaked in juices. The guard led us to our places on large stuffed pillows next to Joelle. The people picked and ate buffet style, but there already were full trenchers topped with delicacies in front of the four of us. The drinks were unidentifiable and I was not inclined to experiment. Joelle picked out a pitcher and filled a clay goblet for me. It tasted like carrot juice. Perhaps it was.

Sitar music and the sickly sweet smells of hash and opium filled the air. I noticed Joelle didn’t partake of either despite her history with the substances. Light-hearted sexuality pervaded the scene. Couples – and triples and quadruples – did as they pleased openly.

“Reminds me of a Grateful Dead documentary,” I said.

“Animals!” muttered Le Clerc.

“What are you complaining about now, Maurice?” asked Joelle.

“Don’t you people have any decency? There are children present here!” he said.

“Yes, precisely. They can learn the healthy loving ways adults can interact with each other, instead of learning guilt, repression, and hate. They won’t be twisted up inside the way you are. What’s more, you’ll find there is little or no child abuse here. That requires secrecy, and secrecy follows from guilt. On the very rare occasion it happens, the abuser is always found out and we deal with him swiftly. Can you say the same in your world?”

“You must have an epidemic of young teen motherhood.”

“On the contrary. Do you see any such thing around you? The young learn to be careful early, and, since they don’t hide their activities, their friends are likely to warn them before any serious lapse happens. In our family, peer pressure is almost always beneficial, not harmful.”

“What you call beneficial is disgraceful,” said Le Clerc.

I decided to shift the topic of conversation before this one grew any more heated. “What is that area next to the cliff?” I asked. “It looks like you’ve modified it to be a theater. Are we going to have a play?”

“We do have plays there sometimes,” said Joelle, “but tonight we have a sporting event. You asked about how we bring Thanatos into the balance. While we defuse destructive instincts in the ways I’ve explained, not all aggressive tendencies can be removed by a tender touch.” Joelle flicked a finger under my chin. “On holidays and special occasions we have bouts of the Champions.”

“You mean like boxing matches?” I asked.

“More like gladiators. The participants are usually volunteers – there are always volunteers – or they are criminals sentenced to fight. Champions are feasted and pampered right up to the moment of the contest. The love priestesses pay the contestants special attention. Criminals are released from further punishment if they win. The volunteers, if they win, receive the acclaim that champions of any sport typically receive. The event satisfies the remaining appetite for violence in the participants and the spectators alike, all the while weeding out the most dangerous and violent persons from our communal family.”

“I see.”

“So do I!” said an offended Le Clerc. “You said ‘weed out.’ These bouts are to the death, aren’t they?”

“Of course.”

“So we are about to witness a murder.”

“No, Maurice. We are about to witness a sporting event, and, as it happens, justice. One of the participants is a sportsman. He will face a sentenced criminal. We do have a few. Not many compared to your world, but a few. The commune does consist of humans after all. The Champion has a chance for honors, and the criminal has a chance for redemption. This is far kinder and rehabilitative than the way criminals are treated back East.”

“What was the crime?” asked Le Clerc.

“Jealousy.”

“You have condemned a man to death for being jealous?”

“No. We have condemned a man to risk death for acting jealous, not being so. Possessiveness is antisocial in spirit to be sure. No one owns another person. But we don’t punish thoughtcrimes, only actions. The man’s obsession with a young woman was unwelcome, and his behavior was threatening toward her and violent toward her other lovers.”

“He could survive,” said Maurice. “Are you telling me he will be welcomed back in your community if he does?”

“Yes.”

“And if he is still obsessed? Suppose he still acts the same way, as I deem likely?”

“We believe people can evolve, Maurice, and that they can learn from their errors. If I did not believe this, you would not be sitting there. Nonetheless, a repeat criminal will not face the arena a second time for a serious offense, but exile.”

“Exile to where?”

“Out in the desert somewhere.”

“That’s death sentence.”

“Not necessarily, but the odds are better in the arena. We don’t see many second offenders.”

The cloudless sky had turned starry, though a narrow band of red still lingered on the Western horizon. A gibbous moon rose huge and gold. A Champion took the stage and bowed to the crowd. Two female guards led the criminal combatant, hands bound, onto the stage next to him. One cut the man’s bonds. Both men were bare to the waist. The criminal was blond, tan, muscular, and somewhat shorter than average. He affected a smile that came off looking more like a sneer. His darker opponent was considerably taller, but appeared less athletic. His expression was stoic. One guard picked up a crossbow and climbed up onto the rocks. The second guard offered a bowl to each combatant turn. Each man sipped from it.

“What’s in the bowl?” I asked Joelle. “And what’s with the crossbow?”

“Mushroom soup is in the bowl. The mushrooms are the kind that will reduce pain and psychically expand the experience for them. The crossbow is just to keep the bout honest. If one of the Champions flees or refuses to fight, the guard will dispatch him.”

The two men faced each other and began to circle. At first their barehanded strikes were tentative, but they grew in force and confidence as each man got the other’s measure – or perhaps it was just the mushroom soup taking effect and making them reckless. Despite trading blows for a quarter of an hour, neither could get the better of the other. Tired of the standoff, the criminal charged the tall man, striking his waist with a shoulder. Both fell to the ground and wrestled desperately.

I winced at a shrill and unexpected noise: Joelle had blown a police whistle. In response to the signal. A guard tossed two two-meter poles into the arena. At the sound of the poles’ clatter, the men disengaged and dove for them. Now armed with the poles, the two circled each other again. They were, sweaty, dusty, and bruised, but neither man looked seriously injured. In a swift move, the darker man cracked the blond in the temple with his stick, and delivered a second blow to the man’s left ankle.. Blood flowed from the man’s ear and nose as he dropped to his knees. A pole then caught him end-first in the torso, cracking his ribs and knocking him on his back. The tall Champion moved in to finish the criminal, but overconfidence slowed his attack. The blond rolled to avoid the blow. Sensing he was about to lose the fight, the criminal tried a desperate maneuver of the type that usually fails. He staggered to the cliff face, jammed his pole in a rock crevice, and snapped the end, rendering it as pointed as a spear. He spun and faced his onrushing opponent, ducked the man’s swing, and stabbed. The sharpened point of his stick entered the Champion’s heart. The criminal’s opponent fell dead. The victor, seriously injured collapse on the ground.

The onlookers shrieked and applauded.

“Why is everyone happy the criminal won?” I asked.

“They are happy about the rousing bout. Who won is not the primary issue. Besides, the winner no longer is a criminal. He is redeemed. And even if Mr. Le Clerc’s pessimism about character reform proves justified in this case, I don’t think this fellow will be very dangerous from now on, crippled as he is, do you?”

“Barbaric! Grotesque!” complained Le Clerc.

“As opposed to what, Maurice? A firing squad or locking him away ten years in a cage? Your ways are barbaric, Maurice, not ours.”

The contest had been a real crowd pleaser, and the party resumed in earnest. In addition to feasting, the partiers passed around mushrooms, pills, and powders, while the aromatic smoke in the air thickened. Soon, people were making love in bewildering combinations of numbers and gender. Aeneas gaped awkwardly. Joelle held back from the amorous activities.

“What about you?” I asked. “Don’t you normally join in all this?”

“Don’t be jealous, George. You saw what happens to jealous men. Besides, strangely enough, I’ve been quite virtuous by Mr. Le Clerc’s standards, but not for reasons I imagine he would endorse. I rely on public perception of me as being ‘above it all’ and somewhat special. It doesn’t help to reveal myself intimately as an ordinary less-than-youthful woman who sometimes needs a bath and has bad breath.” She shrugged in her characteristic way.

“There is something sad about that.”

“Well, then why don’t you do something about it? You are ‘The Custer.’ I can stay above it all and still play with you.”

“In front of everyone? I’m not as young as I used to be, and distractions might be…well…distracting.”

“Some of what you’ve been drinking contains enhancements. But I don’t think you’ll need them.”

Whether they helped or not, I realized I was eager and physically ready. I reached for her.

“Not yet,” she said. “I have something to arrange first. Aeneas and Selena are my…our…logical successors. We need heirs if we are to preserve this culture. Have fun, kids.”

Selena took Aeneas by the hand and led him away.

Le Clerc was outraged. “Custer! You can’t allow this! This is unnatural! It’s illegal!”

“Not here, Maurice, I said. “Try to be open-minded. This was a common arrangement in the ancient Egyptian royal families. In some places it is legal to dally with a cousin while in other places it isn’t. In the old USA some states allowed kids to marry at 13. All those standards are arbitrary. These people have a right to set their own.”

“Surprisingly enlightened, George,” said Joelle.

“Dark as dark can be!” said Le Clerc. “Have you really bought into this snake pit, George?”

“They all seem happier than you, Maurice.” I looked at Joelle and asked, “Now?”

“Now,” she said.

It had been a long time. I didn’t realize until then how much I’d missed her touch. I needn’t have worried about distractions. I was conscious of nothing but the two of us for the next half hour. When we were done and I looked up, I saw we were surrounded by dozens of the locals. They smiled and applauded. For a moment I turned beet-red. They laughed at that, too, and I joined them. I understood at last the hold that Joelle had on these people. I might not be willing to die for her, as I was sure most of the South Dakotans would, but I might well kill for her.

INTERRUPTION OF JOURNAL:
AENEAS CUSTER: I wish to draw the court’s attention to this scary statement.

HIRISAWA: Attention drawn. Continue.



JOURNAL OF GEORGE CUSTER


“Where’s Le Clerc?” I asked.

“One of the white-robed love priestesses is attending to him. She told him he looked like he needed company,” said Joelle, who apparently had remained more aware of her surroundings than I.

“And he went?”

“Oh, don’t worry. He’ll wallow in guilt about it later.”

The party was winding down as revelers passed out one by one. Some folks were still getting higher. A group of four men and two women without a stitch on caught my attention as they danced and passed around a bottle of blue liquid. From the way their eyes rolled, I guessed that whatever they saw didn’t belong to this world.

END OF JOURNAL



AENEAS CUSTER: Your honors. George’s journal ends here. He must have scribbled these last entries during the night. I saw him sitting with a self-satisfied grin as Joelle dozed on the pillow next to him. Selena lay asleep next to me. I believe she partook of the various sedatives available on the picnic cloths. I didn’t. I remained awake partly from sobriety and partly from excitement over the recent activities of Selena and me.

Le Clerc reappeared at this point and sat down next to me. He had found an earthen jug and was drinking from it. From the smell, it was wine.

“Aeneas, let’s take a walk,” he said quietly.

“Alright.” I got up quietly and donned my pants. I doubt a local would have bothered, but old habits die hard. The two of us walked out of earshot of those still awake.

“Aeneas, I’m sure you find Selena fascinating, but the world is full of women.”

“The world isn’t very full of anyone, but I concede roughly half the population is female. What’s your point?”

“Back home you are young man of means with a socially noteworthy name. You live in a mansion. You have the resources to experience life to the full – to travel the world if you wish. Girls will flock to you.”

“They never have,” I said.

“Life after high school is different. Trust me. What is regarded as important changes after the teen years. You will be regarded as a catch.”

“Once again, what’s your point?”

“You are only 16. Don’t be dazzled by a party and a quick fling.”

“It wasn’t so quick.”

“Never mind that,” said Le Clerc. “Look around you. These people live in a cave. For all Joelle’s fancy talk, these people literally are troglodytes. She wants you to live in a cave too. With Selena. Forever.”

“Is that so bad?”

“Yes, when you other option is the whole world. You won’t have that option when Joelle obliterates Quebec.”

“George says she won’t do that. The missiles are just a deterrent.”

“He’s wrong. This is not Woodstock West, however much it may seem to be on the surface. You know how George always insists he is not political even though he always is at the center of political intrigue; there is a sense in which he is right about himself. He has a few notions about ethics that he picked up from somewhere, but mostly he is a pragmatist who doesn’t take any ideology too seriously. He doesn’t understand true idealists. Ulysses wasn’t one; he only pretended to be. But Joelle is. She obviously believes her claptrap in a way Ulysses never did. Idealists are ruthless in pursuit of what they regard as ‘the greater good.’ They have no trouble killing people for their own good. I understand Joelle all too well.”

“Why? Because you are an idealist?” I asked.

“Yes. The difference is that I know what the greater good really is. I served two decades defending it. Joelle’s notion of ‘good’ is perverse beyond measure.”

“That seems a narrow way of looking at it.”

“Aeneas, the point is that she will launch the missiles. I guarantee it. She will convince herself that a pre-emptive strike is ‘self-defense’ or in the higher interest of humanity. She cannot allow an alternative lifestyle to this one to persist, or sooner or later her people will defect to glitz and glitter of Quebec and the other remaining civilizations. Do you want to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of people? You will be responsible if you don’t stop it.”

“You are being melodramatic.”

“You are being cowardly.” Le Clerc sighed and said in a lower voice. “Sorry, that was uncalled for. Let me put it another way. You can be a hero. Are you up to it?”

I rather liked the idea of being a hero, especially if being one wasn’t too dangerous. Besides, what if Le Clerc was right? But why did he want me to play the part?

“Why don’t you be the hero?” I asked. You’ve been one before.”

“I would if I thought I could do it alone. I can’t. The airship isn’t well guarded, but it is guarded. Someone has to make a distraction and someone has to fly the ship.”

“You’re going to steal the P16?”

“No, Aeneas. You will.”

“No. But, assuming I did, how would this make me a hero?” I asked.

“A messenger who informs Quebec about the danger of operational missiles will be a hero.”

“How will carrying back the news help?” I objected. “The way I see it, if Quebec attacks South Dakota when I deliver the news, Joelle definitely will launch. I don’t know if she keeps people in the missile control room at all times, but, for safety’s sake, assume she does. No attack on the Black Hills can succeed fast enough to prevent a launch.”

“Which is precisely why Quebec won’t attack. Neither will Joelle. Both sides will be deterred because, once everyone knows where she is located, she can’t launch a strike without provoking a counterattack: Mutually Assured Destruction, as the strategy was called in the old days. No one gains from an attack so no one launches one. Everyone stays safe. Think of it as a way of protecting Selena, if you like.”

Maybe my mind was affected by whatever substances I ingested that evening, but Le Clerc’s arguments swayed me – admittedly the prospect of being a big man Back East was as convincing as his moral arguments.

The airship was guarded by two of the blue denim guards, one on each side. Accordingly, they couldn’t see each other – a weakness we could exploit.

“How do we do this,” I asked. “They look pretty tough. There must be a height requirement for the job. Both those women are taller than I am.”

“We’ll use their fornicating ways against them. Circle around so they don’t see us approaching together. I’ll chat up one and you try to seduce the other.”

“What if they say no?” I asked.

“They will say no. I’m an unpleasant old man and both of them are on duty. Even here that must count for something. We just need to divert their attention a little. I’ll handle the rest.”

If anyone lying on the ground at the picnic sight noticed the two of us walk on separate paths toward the P16, no one tried to intervene. It is likely no one looked.

I approached the guard on the port side of the airship. The young woman wore a headband in addition to the usual guard garb, and also had tied her shirt to bare her midriff.

WILSON: Enough of the fashion report, Mr. Custer.

AENEAS CUSTER: Yes, ma’am.

PROUDFOOT: Your honors, while I am aware of the latitude granted the defendant, may I take this opportunity to point out that he can’t possible remember these long past conversations in the precise detail he is relating them.

WILSON: The same thought occurred to me.

AENEAS CUSTER: The words are as I remember them. The content of the conversations is correct in essence.

[Judges confer in inaudible whispers.]

MAGGIO: The defendant may continue in his own way. The court will take into account the “in essence” qualification.

AENEAS CUSTER: Anyway, I approached the guard and said, “Hi, I’m Aeneas.”

“Yes, I know,” she answered. “Welcome home.”

“Thanks. It doesn’t look like you’ve had much fun tonight.”

She smiled. “Not tonight, but my job has its perks. Besides, I’m not on duty 24/7, so I’ll get my chance to kick back. Maybe Selena can spare you for a night at some point,” she said with a wink.

“You know about us?”

“I’ve known about you for years. We all have.”

“Wow. For years I’ve been famous and never knew it.”

“I’m sure the Custer had his reasons for keeping some things secret from you.”

“He is such a very good secret-keeper that he kept them secret from himself,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Jennifer.”

As we spoke I saw silhouettes inside the gondola that I took to be Le Clerc and the other guard. To this day I don’t know exactly how he got her aboard or how he kept her silent. Maybe he knocked her unconscious and carried her in. Or maybe he successfully seduced her and she boarded willingly as a lark, though I have to assume he then overpowered her somehow. All I know is that the airship started to rise. The mooring ropes had been untied at the gondola end and were sliding through past the cleats. It seemed he plan to have me steal the airship had been modified.

“Did you get to see the contest?” I asked, still hesitating while trying to decide whether to help Le Clerc further or to switch sides again.

“No, no from here. There will be other bouts.” The sound of the mooring ropes dropping to the ground caught her notice. She looked in back of her and saw open space where an airship should have been. Overhead the P16 continued to rise.

“Hey!” she shouted. She looked up and threw her spear. It passed through a gondola window but missed Le Clerc. The engines whirred to life. Two other guards with bows came running from the picnic area. There arrows fell short of the craft as it passed beyond a hillside.

Jennifer stared at me with dismay at the betrayal. Feeling guilty, I turned away and found myself face to face with Joelle. Even in the dark I could see the cold fury in her face.

“What have you done?” she demanded.

I had no answer.

“When we catch him he’ll face a Champion in the arena,” she said.

George arrived at the spot in time to hear her last remark.

“We won’t catch him now,” he said.

“We have another airship and we will catch him. You!” she pointed to a guard. “Have the ship brought here! Jennifer! You get some help and bring me my accessories from my personal cache. You know the one. If you fail me again you’ll go to the arena, too.”

Jennifer ran toward the cave entrance. The first guard Joelle had addressed by this time had climbed a rise and was signaling Mount Rushmore with a hand laser.

“We don’t know where he is going,” said George.

“Of course we do. He is headed toward the nearest missile control room, which of course is the one I powered up. I presume you mapped the locations and left the map on board.”

“Well, yes. But why would he go there?”

“To attack us, George,” she said. “How can you not know that?”

“Le Clerc said he just wanted mutual deterrence,” I objected. “He said he doesn’t want a war.”

“Look, you little idiot,” she said to me. “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand. Mutual deterrence is based on a second strike capability – and ability to absorb an attack and still hit back. If one side can obliterate the other totally, there is no deterrence. On the contrary, the incentive in that case is to strike first. Le Clerc thinks he can wipe us out with one blow, and that’s what he intends to do.”

“I don’t see how,” said George. “You need two people to arm the warheads, and he has no idea how to operate the controls.”

“He has two people! He’ll tell Sue Ann, the guard he took hostage, anything to get her to co-operate. He’ll tell her he plans to send the missiles harmlessly into the ocean and that he’ll kill her if she doesn’t help. Or maybe he’s corrupted her with promises of wealth Back East. Maybe she’d a traitor. I know he thinks he can get her to help. I have to assume he can, too. As for the controls, any idiot can operate them. This was the most sophisticated system ever installed before the disaster, but for that reason it is very user-friendly. You just type in longitude and latitude. You don’t even have to do that. You can point at any location on map and click. Enter the codes and fire. The computer walks you through it. ”

“All the same, I don’t think he is a killer,” insisted George.

“Of course he is. The both of you are. What about the Battle of DC?”

“That was a war,” George said.

“Precisely. He thinks this is war, and he’s willing to inflict collateral damage on civilians – something you always hesitate to do. You really don’t understand us, George.”

A whining of turbines grew louder. The paisley airship from Mount Rushmore lowered itself to the former parking lot.

“Both of you get in,” Joelle order George and me. Jennifer arrived laden with the “accessories” Joelle wanted. They were two M4 assault rifles and two shoulder launched rocket launchers.

Joelle replaced the love priestess at the airship controls and ordered her off the ship.

“What fuel is your airship using?” she asked George.

“Diesel.”

“Good. We’ll catch him. We’ve kerosene in ours. We’ll have better speed.” She took the ship up and pushed the throttles full forward. We flew north north east.

Despite the age of the craft and its exposure to the elements for years, the paisley ship performed flawlessly. I was impressed. The Le Pens built good aircraft.

At the start, I assumed our odds of catching Le Clerc were remote. I doubted our edge in speed was enough. If Joelle misjudged him and he was heading to Quebec, we were going the wrong way and had no chance at all. She hadn’t misjudged and my assumption was wrong. My chest constricted when something occulted the stars in the sky ahead. Joelle was right. He had made a beeline for the nearest missile control room. It was time to try to repair the damage I had done.

“Over there!” I pointed. “Le Clerc is over there.”

“Not a moment too soon. The control room is straight ahead. Aeneas,” said Joelle, “I want you to know that if you were anyone else I’d send you to the arena for what you did. I don’t believe in third chances, so don’t ever ever cross me again.”

“Yes ma’am.”

We closed slowly on the P16. Le Clerc must have seen us too.

“Take the controls,” Joelle ordered George, “and keep closing.”

She picked up the rocket launcher and leaned out the window. I don’t know if what she used had any heat-seeking capability or if it was just point-and-shoot. Either way, the rocket hit the target. Le Clerc’s P16 erupted in a fireball. A soft rumble from the explosion reached us. Le Clerc’s airship descended to the ground at a leisurely pace.

Within minutes we skimmed over the wreckage. The hydrogen already had been consumed, and what was left of the P16 smoldered below. I don’t know whether they jumped or whether they were thrown from the craft when the gondola hit the ground, but both Le Clerc and the guard had escape being burned alive. Both lay face-up in the sand a few meters from the wreck. Neither was moving. George lowered our airship to the ground. Joelle, the lightest of the three of us, leapt out, armed with an M4. The ship lurched upward but George resettled it by adjusting the gas pressure and the directional motors.

“Take the controls, and stay on board,” said George. “Keep her on the ground.”

I took over and George, also armed with an M4, followed Joelle. I countered the loss of weight by throttling the props. Turbines are not deafening engines, and I was able to hear most of what the two said on the ground.

Joelle walked first to the young woman and knelt down by her. “Sue Ann. Sue Ann!” She felt for a pulse. I could see from Joelle’s response that she didn’t find one. She stood up and went over to Le Clerc. Le Clerc was bleeding from shrapnel wounds and possibly had injuries from the fall, but his eyes opened when Joelle kicked him in the side.

“I don’t think you’ll be much trouble for an opponent in the arena in your current condition, do you?” said Joelle to Le Clerc. “I’ll ask Jennifer if she wants you. Oh, you didn’t meet Jennifer, did you? Don’t worry, you will.”

George spoke more encouragingly, “I’ll try to talk her out of that sentence, old boy. You know, this is your third crash in a blimp? With a record like that you’ll never get insurance.”

Le Clerc managed a pained smile.

“Come on, George,” said Joelle. “He’s not going anywhere. We have business in the control room.”

She strode toward the entrance, which only 100 meters away. To my surprise, she had left the place unsecured and unmanned. But then, without the map locations and codes, there wasn’t much risk anyone would find it in this desert, or be able to do any harm if he did.

As George began to follow, Le Clerc gasped out, “No! Stop her, George. She is going to fire on Quebec.”

“No, she isn’t,” said George. “I’ll bet she just wants to make another demonstration shot. There won’t be damage. Besides, she needs my help to fire a missile, and I won’t help her hit a civilian target.” Joelle stopped in her tracks to listen to this exchange.

“No, George, she doesn’t need your help. She just needs a second person. If you or Aeneas won’t help her, she’ll go back to Rushmore and get someone who will. You don’t understand us! She is going to slaughter our countrymen.”

George shook his head and took a step toward the control room.

None of us had considered that Le Clerc might be carrying an “accessory” of his own. Le Clerc rolled painfully on his side, pulled out his 9mm from behind his back, and aimed it at Joelle. A burst of fire came from George’s M4. Le Clerc ceased moving permanently.

“I’m sorry, Maurice,” said George, “but her people are my countrymen and she is my wife.”

“Come on, George,” said Joelle softly.

“Just a minute.” George walked up to the airship. “Aeneas, this is a good ship,” he said. “I hereby dub it Nearer.” (It was years before I learned the reason for choice.) More quietly, he said, “Listen, this is an order and a plea. Wait until we are both inside, lift off, and go full throttle in a straight line as far away from here as you can get. If nothing unusual happens in half an hour, come back. Don’t be early.” George looked at me a long moment, unclipped his leather journal from his belt, and tossed it into the craft. George turned away and walked to Joelle.

“What was that about?” she asked.

“Just some reminders of his family duties,” said George. I suppose they were.

As they entered the control room bunker I faced a dilemma. I suspected that following George’s instructions would expend my second chance in Joelle’s eyes, and she had made it clear there would be no third. I didn’t fancy an appearance in the arena. George, on the other hand, rarely was wrong tactically, and he never had tried to do me harm even though he had reason to resent me. I made a fateful decision. I dropped ballast and rose into the sky. I chose the direction in which I would have a tailwind and thrust the throttles full forward. No airship is a jackrabbit, but my ground speed climbed to nearly 100kph.

I was perhaps 40 klicks away when, for the second time in my life, I experienced an artificial dawn. The sky turned bright blue. The shock wave overtook me in less than two minutes. Even at this distance it keeled the airship on its side and nearly flung me out of the gondola. The windshield shattered. The radio, which hadn’t even been turned on, sparked and burned out. I could smell oil.

I have to assume that George was responsible for a point-and-click targeting their own control room. I don’t know whether Joelle really was going to attack Quebec as Le Clerc predicted or just set off another demonstration as George expected. Whatever the case, George evidently decided it was necessary to remove the threat permanently. He thereby answered the last question in his journal. He was willing both to die and kill for Joelle – just not in the way she would have wanted.

Nearer limped back to Beautiful Rushmore Cave. I desperately wanted to leave the Black Hills and return to my pampered life in Morrisbourg, but the airship was in no condition for the trip. A crowd waited for me. The fireworks in the north had been impossible to miss. As I set the craft down, several locals secured it with mooring ropes to the same rings to which the other P16 had been tied. Jennifer, new spear in hand, stood in the front rank and treated me to a murderous stare.

It seemed unwise to reveal that Joelle and George were dead. Instead, I pretended to be acting under their authority. The Dakotans were quite credulous. After all, I was a Custer and Jennifer, unsurprisingly, hadn’t explained to anyone how I had distracted her, since this would have cast her in a very bad light. I’m not normally a convincing liar, but I was inspired by the serious risk to my life. Le Clerc had been allowed to escape, I told them, as a test of his character, and as a proxy test for the general run of people Back East. He had failed Joelle’s test, I said, and bee-lined for the missiles instead of for home. He planned to destroy our commune. Joelle had anticipated such a possibility before Le Clerc even arrived, I told them, and had rigged the guidance program of the control computer so that anyone attempting to fire a missile without entering the password “Luggage” would drop the missile on the control room bunker itself and no where else. George and Joelle had given Le Clerc a chance, and he used the chance to destroy himself. This was the explosion the Dakotans had seen and heard.

“What about Sue Ann?” asked Jennifer.

“Regrettably she died with Le Clerc,” I said. “She is a heroine. She was informed of the plan to test Le Clerc, and helped carry it out. She chose to let him destroy himself, knowing she was sacrificing her own life. Joelle did not ask her to make that sacrifice, but it was a brave choice. She chose to protect the commune by letting the test reach its ultimate conclusion.”

The experience, I continued, proved that contact with the outside world was no yet wise. It must come eventually, however, but Joelle and George needed to sow the seeds of enlightenment in the so-called civilized world to prepare the way. So, they were headed east to begin the task. They had confidence, I told them, that the Rushmore Commune is advanced enough to continue without them.

“Joelle instructs Selena” I said, “to assume the role of Mother. The commune is to treat her with the respect and obedience due Joelle herself.”

Unlike nearly all of the Dakotans, Selena, I could see, was buying none of this. Nonetheless my lie had put her in charge, so she chose not to question it.’

“Joelle’s last instruction is that the airship be repaired so I can follow them and assist them in their work Back East. I shall return when the time is right.”

I had recreated the scenario for Selena that Joelle had constructed for herself. She was the Mother and I was new Custer whose return the commune would await.

The airship Nearer was ready in three days. I got the impression Selena was eager to see me go. She made no further offers of intimacy.

I flew a southerly route far from the Great Lakes. I maintained high altitude and speed on a path to Morrisbourg. This time the weather was with me. The desert below gave way to rain forest. If anyone down there took shots at me, I was too high for them. Upon arrival in Morrisbourg I reported that George and Maurice had died in an unfortunate encounter with natives in the ruins of Chicago. The report sparked surprisingly little interest. My paisley airship garnered much more comment, but no one in Morrisbourg knew that it was not the ship we had bought and flown west; as for the colors, George was known to be an eccentric who once had owned a monitor lizard as a pet. The Le Pens no doubt thought I had reneged on the sales agreement by not advertising the virtues of the craft, but, after all, it was the wrong craft. The one they sold George didn’t return, which nullified the agreement.

As I explained earlier in my testimony, I did not benefit from my return. My estate lawyers stole my inheritance. They even seized Nearer, ostensibly in lieu of unpaid fees, which they then used as an aerial pleasure yacht, mooring it at a warehouse on the outskirts of town.

This brings us to the reporter Boris Fontaine and my supposed threat to life and civilization, a threat that the prosecutor claims is evidence of my premeditation.

I spent the money from Boris and Pierre Roulant for the delivery of George Custer’s journals in order to fully equip myself for an expedition to the west. I loaded the supplies on Nearer, which I fully acknowledge stealing, though in my opinion I was just reclaiming what was rightfully mine. I knew it would take Boris a little time to read through the journals. The threat was an admittedly ill-considered addendum that, in a fit of pique, I scrawled onto the end and signed. It reads in full:

“By the time you read this I will be in South Dakota. If the Dakotans are not already manning a missile squadron at all times, I will see to it that they do. Any attack on the Rushmore commune or the Dakotan missiles will be considered grounds to launch them. I alone will determine whether the philosophy of George, Joelle, or Le Clerc with regard to the warheads is the correct one.”

HIRISAWA: Does that end your testimony, Mr. Custer?

AENEAS CUSTER: No, sir, but I’m close. The consequences of this note and of my arrival in South Dakota are crucial to my story and defense.

HIRISAWA: Then I suggest we break for lunch and resume in an hour.


Slog Part IV
Snow

TRIAL TRANSCRIPT
ALASKA VS AENEAS CUSTER (Resumed)

PROUDFOOT: Your honors, the defendant described himself as an inspired liar. I will grant him that. But the final moments of his testimony he admitted to premeditation. I ask for a summary judgment of guilty at this time.

AENEAS CUSTER: Your honors, those were not the “final moments” of my testimony, and I didn’t admit to anything. My “threat,” which is to what I presume the prosecutor is referring, was somewhere between ambiguous and innocuous. I wish to finish my story.

HIRISAWA [consults colleagues]: Ambiguous perhaps, but not innocuous, Mr. Custer. However, we already have agreed to let you complete your story and then sit down. The motion to change the defendant’s pleas is denied.

PROSECUTOR: Your honor, do we need to produce radioactive rubble as evidence to prove his threat was real?

HIRISAWA: Denied, Mr. Prosecutor.

AENEAS CUSTER:  Thank you, your honor. As I will reveal, I never had any authority over the Minuteman force. Whatever thoughts I had of acquiring any influence, much less authority, proved to be wishful thinking. None of my actions in the days after I wrote the note seemed at the time to be the slightest bit hostile, unreasonable, irresponsible, or reckless. It is easy to be wrong about such things. Your honors, Heraclitus said that you cannot step into the same river twice.

HIRISAWA: You had better make that pertinent immediately.

AENEAS CUSTER: Yes, sir. You can’t walk in the same desert twice either. I should have guessed the South Dakota I knew as a teenager would be long gone when I returned. Perhaps my nostalgia was working overtime, but it seemed to me that, whatever Joelle’s character flaws, she had created something special in the Black Hills. I didn’t understand Le Clerc’s reference to “Woodstock West,” when he made it, but I looked it up when I got back. It was an apt one. I was eagerly anticipating reuniting with Selena and the brood at Rushmore.

The engine of Nearer ran smoothly after all the passage of years. My former lawyers kept up with the maintenance. Well, why not? They had my all inheritance to spend on it. The weather over Pennsylvania was magnificent, as it had been on my previous overflight. Weather and straight lines were not my only reasons for choosing the route. West of the Poconos, Pennsylvania was wild and virtually unpopulated. Nominally part of Greater Quebec, in fact it was beyond the rule of law. The only being to express an interest in me was a hawk. For a minute or two he glided with motionless wings less than a meter off my port window. Then he veered to the left and was gone.

The airship felt like home. The very scratches on the control panel were familiar. The gondola’s aroma, rich with hydrocarbons, evoked memories of George and Joelle.
I carved the name Nearer on the rail. George would have liked that. I had learned this was one of George’s little jokes. It seems there once was a famous psychedelic bus named Further.

The succession of hills and valleys below became soporific. I nodded off at the wheel, but not before engaging autopilot. Eventually, some minor turbulence shook me awake, but a quick look around showed the autopilot had done its job. The downtown towers of Pittsburgh soared out of the green jungle looking for the entire world like Oz. Tall factory smokestacks poked out of the canopy. I couldn’t help imagining a workforce of munchkins.

The jungle gave way to savanna in Ohio. The grass shifted from green to brown as we continued west. By the Indiana line, there was barren desert below. Feeling safe, I allowed myself a longer nap as the ship flew itself over the Midwest. I awoke feeling refreshed. Below was a landscape of magnificent sand dunes. Rudolf Valentino on a white stallion would have finished the scene to perfection. As may be apparent to the learned judges, I had taken George’s advice about classic movies.

Guesstimating my position to be west of the Mississippi, I swung the ship northwest. Sunsets in the desert are fast and colorful. Sand turns blood red and then fades to gray. Stars brighten overhead like electric lights on a dimmer switch.

As the winter constellation of Orion fought a losing battle with the moon for dominion overhead, the land below grew ragged. Buttes and spires glowed in the reflected light and seemed as unreal in the bright moonlight. The range of hues reminded me of some Loony Tunes artist’s conception of Mars. These were the Badlands of South Dakota below me. Home was near.

Memories swept over me once more. I was eager to reunite with Selena and I hoped she remembered me fondly. Hours dragged as a head wind slowed Nearer. Not too soon for me, red reappeared in the sky, this time in the east.

A view of the Black Hills filled the windshield. Flying above them felt as familiar as a walk on a hometown street. The four faces of Mount Rushmore peeked over a far hill. They grew slowly as I flew closer. Abe Lincoln’s beard had acquired some gray. Whether this was deliberate aging by the local artists, or simply weathering of the paint, I couldn’t tell. All the faces looked a bit pale. The entrance to Beautiful Rushmore Cave came into view.

It was a gorgeous new day. I needed a shave and a bath but I felt strong, healthy and enthusiastic. My life, which had been interrupted for the past five years, was about to resume.

I made a low pass over the site as an announcement of my arrival. The grounds outside the cave were neater than I remembered. A handful of farmers in clothes of muted hues were tending to the sheeted gardens, while two other workers adjusted photoelectric panels. These few had started work early, but the commune members always worked and played when it suited them. So long as people completed their chores, Joelle had not been a stickler for schedules. The farmers stopped work to watch me but did not leave the
gardens. The panel workers disappeared inside the cave. I circled while news of my presence spread.

Nearly fifteen minutes passed. The farmers resumed their work, though they looked up at me frequently. No colorful merry throngs rushed out to greet me. It was still early, I reminded myself; most of the commune might still be sleeping off the effects of a party.

At last a response came from the cave, and it was not comforting. Two men dressed in desert beige uniforms scurried out. They carried deadly accurate M40A1 rifles, sniper rifles once favored by the US Marine Corps back around the turn of the millennium. They took positions by the rocks near the cave entrance. They aimed at me.

As soon as they were in position, a third young man, also dressed in a beige uniform, walked out of the cave. He strode to the large flat sand-covered area that once had been the visitor’s parking lot for this former national park. He motioned to me to land. The directional props allowed me to lower the craft with little adjustment to the ballonets. I tossed ropes over the side, which the beige man secured steel rings. The rings were rusty, which was unsurprising. Nor airship had been around here in a while. I shut down the engine.

I was shocked by the minatory response to my arrival, and by the fact the rifles were fielded by men. Something was horribly wrong. It was too late to retreat, however. So, I put my misgivings aside, opened the door of the gondola, and dropped to the ground.

“Come,” said the beige man laconically.

“I come.” The man didn’t smile, but marched toward the cave. I followed.

Two 7.62 muzzles followed my movement until we entered the cave. The familiar coolness of the cave air washed over me. The smell, however, had altered. The underlying odor of the rocks remained the same and evoked old memories, but the anticipated overlay of incense and perfume was gone. Gone also were the wall-coverings and murals of orgiastic scenes. The latter had been painted over with off-white paint. White florescent lights shone overhead in place of the party lights that once had marked the way.

The Big Room was as impressive as ever, due to its size and natural formations. The human aspects of the place had changed radically. The colorful interior lights had been replaced by white light LEDs. Gaudy tribal chaos had been replaced by understated compartmentalized order. The space was subdivided into distinctly defined areas. Carpets hung on wooden frames formed walls and offered privacy. In front of many of them were tables stacked with trade goods. The handful of people who were awake busied themselves at productive tasks. They stacked clothes, sorted items at the tables, swept up, and performed household chores. In place of the former outrageous and suggestive fashions were practical work garments. The overall population had shrunk.

Unlike the gleeful reception that George had encountered, the locals in the cave seemed only mildly interested in me. They glanced my way occasionally but none called out or approached. My attention was so diverted by the changes that I didn’t notice my guide had stopped. I walked into him and he elbowed me back gruffly. We stood before the entrance to Joelle’s old throne room, guarded by a second man in beige packing a classic 1911 Colt .45. The beads, which once separated it from the Big Room, had been replaced by a steel door set in a mortared stone wall. My guide knocked.

“Come in!” a muffled female voice answered.

The guard opened the door for me. He remained outside when I entered.

The interior furnishings had been tidied but still were as homey as before. Couches, a dining table, and a four-poster bed occupied most of the available floor space. A red runner carpet ran straight from the entry door to the niche in the wall that had been Joelle’s throne. This now looked less like a throne and more like an executive’s chair, thanks to a wooden executive desk placed in front of it. In the niche sat a trim and fit Selena. The trace of baby fat she had as a teenager was gone. She casually leaned back and tapped on the desk with a finger as she regarded me. She was dressed much like Joelle’s female guards once did: blue jeans, a crisp blue denim blouse, a wide brown leather belt, and brown cowboy boots. Joelle’s spear-wielding Amazons were nowhere in sight. She was not without protection, however. Selena was flanked by two handsome young men in beige uniforms.

“Hello, Custer” she said. “Or do you call yourself Johnston these days?”

“Just call me Aeneas.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t play Dido.”

I don’t know why I hadn’t expected Selena to be literate. “Forgiven. My namesake needed help from his mother Venus to manipulate Dido anyway. Venus doesn’t love me that much.”

“She used to, kid. She used to. Lot of good it did her. I’ve seen the blast site where Control Center 2 used to be. You killed Joelle, didn’t you? George too.”

“No. Actually, George targeted the warheads himself.”

“Really? Hmm. Well, that makes you much less interesting.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“So, why are you here, Aeneas? Why aren’t you back in Morrisbourg spending all your money? Or have you already spent it?”

“No, some other folks were kind enough to take it all and spend it for me. I’m here because I hate the East. I miss this place. I miss you. My fondest memories are of here and of you. This is where I belong. Joelle made something very special out of these Hills. She was a visionary and a genius.”

“Joelle was a fool. The whole commune scene was unsustainable. Secular communes never have had good prospects. Once the charismatic founder is gone, they fall apart because of all the usual human imperfections. She was a big cult heroine and she wasn’t reluctant to use deadly force against subversives, so she held sway. But even if she had lived, the next generation wouldn’t have taken her seriously. Teenagers already were snickering at her hokum.”

“Teenagers always do that. They prefer their own hokum.”

“You know, Aeneas, Le Clerc was the most admirable fellow of the bunch of you. He stood up to Joelle and argued with her face-to-face. I never saw anyone do that before. He helped me to start thinking for myself. A few of the things he said were even true.”

“Maybe. Everyone here seemed pretty happy though. He wasn’t. Joelle was just trying to get people to expand their minds.”

“All she did was fry their brains. That woman had a screw loose and so do you for trying to justify her. Damn! My own mother gave me opium and LSD and who knows what else? How sick is that? How can you think that was good for me? It just made me stupidly euphoric at the cost of whopping hangovers.”

“According to Paracelsus, everything is poison and everything is medicine. It is all a matter of dose.”

“The proper dose of some things is zero. Look, I don’t stop the folks here from killing themselves with drugs if that is what they want to do, but I sure don’t make it a public obligation. Economically and socially Joelle made this place a lunatic asylum. Hey, I’ll give credit where it is due. Joelle did invest in enough basic industry to make civilized life here possible, even without salvage from ghost towns. but she had no interest in encouraging productivity. In fact, she set up huge disincentives by demonizing personal material achievement. Joelle talked about freedom, but locked up everybody in her communalist prison.”

“She offered them something else,” I said.

“Oh, please. Don’t pretend to be all spiritual with me. I grew up with experts. You aren’t even an amateur. You just told me that other folks spent all your money. Would you have come back here if you still had it?”

“Perhaps not,” I said honestly.

“There you are. We all want more for ourselves, my dear brother. Freedom is the freedom to get it. I hope you noticed Joelle knew how to enrich herself well enough. She knew that the point of rules is to make the getting easier for the rulers. Joelle made herself a queen and the rest of us her serfs. Laidback, doped up, oversexed serfs, because that was how she wanted us to be, but serfs all the same.”

“I take it you are now are the rule-maker.”

“Right, and I’m not ashamed to use that position to benefit myself and my buddies, but at least I’ve made it possible for other people to benefit themselves too. Hard work can get you somewhere these days. There are lots of caves around here, and many of them now have private owners for the enjoyment of themselves and their families. Now we have private farmers, private manufacturers, and private salvagers – we called the salvagers ‘miners’ – who stake claims in the ghost towns out in the desert. If you can’t see that my way is kinder than Joelle’s, you are as blind as the cultists.”

“Cultists? Are those people who object to your new methods?”

“There always is a lunatic fringe, Aeneas, but the better classes support me and my reforms 100%. I’ll do you the favor of assuming you are not a total fool. Despite your sentimental baloney, you have come to me because you are broke and didn’t know where else to go. Well, I’m sorry, but you do not have a home here. Your presence is very destabilizing.”

“Why am I destabilizing?”

“Because of the fringe. There are always envious people who resent the success of others and who demand that the rest of us to take care of them. If they can’t or won’t get more get more for themselves, they will settle for seeing their neighbors get less.”

“You seem to be talking about class. How can that be important in a small population like this?”

“Class starts to be important when the population reaches two, Aeneas.”

“OK, maybe. But why worry about me? I haven’t roused a single rabble.”

“Because our malcontents have their political goals all mixed-up with mysticism. They turned Joelle into a cult figure, which she almost was in her own lifetime. As ‘The Custer’ you are the cultists’ obvious hero.”

“I see. So now I’m a working-class hero. All I wanted was to be king.”

Selena smiled, “I suppose that’s the dialectic of history. Quite honestly, I’m tempted to kill you, but you are as dangerous as a martyr as you are living among us. It is much better for me if you run away. So, you can be king of the road. Get out.”

“You mean get out of South Dakota?”

“Yes, I mean get out of South Dakota! I’ll tell everyone you approve of my social and market reforms and you saw no need to stay. Even the ones who don’t believe me will at least believe you are a coward. Go!”

“Go where?”

“Don’t tempt me to be crude. I don’t care. Your airship is being fitted and supplied as we speak. Be grateful I’m letting you keep it instead of making you walk. You will do me the return favor of taking three passengers with you.”

“Who?”

“Subversives: mystics who pine for the old ways and plotted to overthrow me. You should be pleased. Two of them are pretty women. You communalists can burn incense to the memory of Joelle, fog your minds with whatever dope you please, and have a love fest in the sky. Enjoy yourselves. But do it someplace else.”

“You are missing one option, Selena. I could back you up in your policies without leaving. I’m not opposed to plutocracy if I get to be a plutocrat. We could rule together”

“Please! One, I don’t trust you. Two, a relationship between us is perverse and I’m now old enough now to know it. Three, you weren’t that good.”

She rang a bell of the sort on hotel desks. The guard outside the door entered. She gently ordered, “Escort Mr. Custer to the holding room, Brown Eyes.”

He returned a crisp salute.

“Catherine the Great,” I muttered to myself while leaving Selena’s quarters.

“I heard that!” she said.

I was led to the same side chamber where George, Maurice and I once had rested before Joelle’s big party. The décor was more utilitarian, but it still contained a bathtub. It was full. A touch with my left index finger proved the tub water was hot. When the guard left, I stripped and relaxed in the tub. Selena’s efficiency had some advantages. I’m sure that if there had been any trains in her domain, she would have made them run on time.

I lost track of time, and was still soaking when a guard entered and ordered, “Come.”

“I come,” I answered again in Tarzan mode.

The guard waited impatiently as I dried off and donned my clothes. We walked back to the cave entrance. I attracted subdued attention from people we passed on the way, but none spoke to me.

The sudden rise in temperature as we exited the cave made me dizzy. The bright sun was painful. Only by squinting could I see my fellow ‘subversives.’ Flanked by uniformed men with M4s they stood by Nearer. One of my passengers was a strapping young blond man who would have been at home in an old surfer movie. Next to him were two young, dark-haired women. Selena was right. They were pretty. All three social undesirables wore bright colors and unruly hair that clashed with the current clean-cut fashions at Rushmore.

The guards wasted no time. They helped us into the gondola with rather more force than was necessary, and unceremoniously released the mooring lines. The ship rose gently and a light wind carried us away from the cave. The faces of Mount Rushmore looked on. The unattended paint would fade to white in only a few more years. This thought made me sad.

As I fussed with the controls, I felt myself being evaluated. I looked over my shoulder into the blue eyes of the fair-skinned brunette.

“You’re really the Custer?” she asked.

“Yes. Disappointed?”

“Yes,” she answered with simple, brutal honesty.

“And your name is?”

“Charlene. That’s Chester and Maggie. Where are we going?”

“I don’t know yet. We can’t go back East. I burned a few bridges there. I am open to suggestion.”

Greenland is supposed to be nice,” Charlene offered.

“Yes, but Quebec is in between. I don’t want to over-fly it and I definitely don’t want to go around the long way.”

“How about California?” asked Chester.

“It’s pretty stormy there I understand.”

“BC? Alaska?” he asked.

“Maybe. Russian pirates cause some trouble along the coasts, but Vancouver and Juneau are well defended. There is a good chance the Canadians would be hostile, though, simply because this airship is from. We’d have to go out over the sea at Oregon or someplace to avoid their airspace.”

“I want to go to Greenland,” complained Charlene.

My response was equally childish. “It’s my airship.”

“Let’s go anyplace with a coast. I’d rather be on the beach regardless,” said Chester.

“How would you know? You’ve never seen a beach,” I reminded him.

“Dakota is a beach. I’ve never seen an ocean. I would like to.”

“South.” It was the first word spoken by the woman with a rusty complexion and Native American features. The name Maggie didn’t fit her.

“What?” I wasn’t sure I heard her right.

“Go South.”

“You are aware that the sun lives down there.”

“Yes, but with the climate all twisted around, some places might be livable that you don’t expect. Besides, what if we go beyond the equator? Argentina. Maybe Chile. Let’s get out of North America. Can we make it that far in this contraption?”

“Possibly, if we loot along the way.”

“Abandoned property is not loot. It is salvage. That’s what Selena says, anyway, and she is the law.” There was undisguised bitterness in Maggie’s voice.

“You don’t think very highly of her.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact I do. But we have no choice but to leave. Hmmm… South. Well, that would be an adventure and it’s not as though I have something better to do. Okay, I am up for it. All agreed?”

Maggie nodded. Charlene was silent. Chester waved a hand non-committally.

“South it is.”

The engine responded to the throttle. There is something enjoyable about the feel of acceleration against the back of the seat. We flew toward the sun as it rose toward noon.

My passengers looked back toward Beautiful Rushmore Cave with unvoiced regret. I knew how they felt. There is no patriot like an expatriate. Chester picked up my binoculars and looked back every three or four minutes. Over the next two hours Mount Rushmore shrank to an unrecognizable bump on the Horizon. It was about that time that Chester leaned over the rail. He seemed to strain his eyes into the glasses. He grew agitated. He tapped my shoulder.

“What is that?” Chester pointed to the distant sky.

I looked, but saw nothing but blue. I grabbed the binoculars from him and looked again. Just barely I could see little dark cigar shaped objects.

“Airships! Quebec must be attacking Rushmore Cave No one else has them,” I said.

As I watched, thin vapor trails arced in the distant. My stomach turned. “Missile tracks. Shit. Shit!”

I couldn’t help feeling responsible. I hoped Selena survived the next half-hour. Boris too. For now, the task was our own survival. I pushed the craft to full speed. I hoped the French were focused on ground targets and hadn’t spotted us. Hours passed with no sign of pursuit. We tried to divert our thoughts what we had seen. That night we took up Selena’s suggestion and had an orgy in the sky. As a recently designated working-class, hero I recalled the dictum of Marx that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as comedy. Our sexual groping and panting had none of the spontaneity or sense of play that I had recalled from my last visit to South Dakota. Our sweaty task felt oddly like work. There seemed to be a sour joke in there somewhere. Afterwards we were oddly quiet, except for Chester who cheerfully muttered the occasional inanity.

In order to get my mind on something else I explained the controls to Maggie who seemed the most competent of the three passengers. She understood the principles instantly, so I let her navigate. She chose a course of SSW. We throttled down to our most economical setting and slowly churned south.

The landscape below stayed persistently Saharan. Wherever we could identify old settlements we located fuel tanks and topped up our own. Water was the scarcer resource. We tried to identify old food stores. Usually some water was to be found inside. Our biggest score was at a Shop Rite in Littleton, Colorado. Oddly, the ancients sold water in plastic bottles. The prices on the bottles were higher than the prices on nearby fuel pumps even though water in those days was abundant.

We had reached foothills of the Rockies, so I pointed out that the cooler upper slopes of the mountains might be habitable and inhabited, but I didn’t question Maggie’s quick rejection. She was determined to continue south keeping the mountains on our right. I enjoyed surrendering responsibility to someone else. My own decisions hadn’t turned out well lately. Near the New Mexican border she checked our maps, looked thoughtful, and made a sharp turn west. The mountainous terrain remained arid and uninviting. Eventually I grew curious.

“You have something in mind closer than Argentina, don’t you?” I said.

“Just a passing thought, but the idea doesn’t look promising. You took long enough to ask.”

“We trust you.”

“You do? Why?”

“Why not? So where is this unpromising place of yours?”

“We’re here.”

Low canyon walls opened up on each side of us. The canyon walls held giant caves with extensive whitened ruins.

“What an odd place to build.”

Mesa Verde. Anasazi settlements. I heard about them as a girl.”

“They look rather light on the modern conveniences, like roads and drainage.”

“No doubt. They were abandoned 800 years ago. I hoped with the climate all topsy-turvy maybe the area was getting some rainfall these days so we could start another Rushmore here.”

“It doesn’t look as though it has rained here in years. You can fry your dinner on those rocks.”

“Yes. It’s OK. I have another idea.”

“A better one I hope.”

“Me too. How high can this thing fly?” Maggie asked.

“I don’t know. My dad took one over the Appalachians once without a problem – until he was shot down.”

“Our present elevation above sea level is higher than the Appalachians. Maybe we can do a lot better. Let’s take her up and get out of this heat. Let’s see what Nearer can do. I like that name by the way.”
           
“It was George’s idea,” I said.

“Take her up.”

“Roger.”

“Who?”

Uncertain if Maggie was teasing me, I retreated behind dignity and stated, “We are going up.”

The ground fell away beneath us.

“Nice machine,” she said.

“The Le Pens would be gratified to hear your opinion. Maybe I can short wave them a message one day … if they are still alive… if there is still a Montreal.”

“Selena is a bitch.”

My instinct was to argue this point, but evidence was on Maggie’s side. There was no excuse for firing those missiles. I hoped they weren’t aimed at civilians. If they were, unless the Quebecois soldiers were almost inhumanly civilized, Selena likely wouldn’t survive their attack. This thought was depressing, too.

I spoke to Maggie. “Selena kept the missiles manned at all times>”

“Just 10: one squadron. She activated a new squadron after the incident with the first one involving Le Clerc and The Custer. I was part of a control room crew until I opened my mouth and got labeled a subversive. Now she has only her soldier boys on site. Those anal retentive robots will obey any order she gives them.”

I ignored her reference to George as the Custer instead of as the former Custer. Wasn’t I the Custer now?

“While we were waiting for you by the airship, the guards told us you lied to us when you left Rushmore years ago. Did you?”

I stole from Mark Twain, “Truth is a precious resource. One should be economical with it.”

Beginning that night, Charlene and Chester violated their free love principles by becoming a couple. They made love and didn’t invite us. Maggie ignored them. Maggie didn’t invite me either. Our flying commune was already in trouble.

Our southward flight continued with a slight western detour. The Grand Canyon was spectacular. We probably were the first tourists in a generation to see it. The jungle returned somewhere near the Mexican border. Then we were forced into strict rationing. No trace of old cities could be seen through the steam and growth.

We got a break at Acapulco where the foliage began to thin. Several seaside resort hotels looked almost as though they were open for business. We landed under a brilliant full moon. Even at night the hotel interiors were like ovens, but we were able to replenish our supplies of water, canned goods, and fuel without incident. We found a stream, allowing us to take on ballast and to recharge our hydrogen using the onboard electrolysis equipment.

We grew accustomed to a blazing sun. In the rarefied air of higher altitudes the heat was surprisingly tolerable. We proceeded southeast. The foliage below us continued to thin out until it disappeared altogether. The barren desert beneath us was not the windswept sandy sort. The ground looked hard and solid. Heat waves seemed to make the rocky surface ripple.

My desire to sightsee was outweighed by the inadvisability of lingering in the tropics. Make time we did. We kept our distance from a volcanic eruption in progress in Nicaragua but couldn’t avoid some of the airborne soot. I worried about the turbine clogging. It proved to be a very forgiving engine, however, and delivered its power without interruption. I thought I detected a slight increase in its noise, but I couldn’t be sure. I vowed silently to clean and lubricate the engine at the earliest opportunity. Even though the engine could not appreciate my thoughts, I felt more confident after making the promise. An opportunity to top our tanks appeared near the Isthmus.

“Let’s pause here,” I recommended.

“Are you nuts?” Maggie asked.

“Possibly, but we should top our tanks.”

“Where? I don’t see anything down there but dirt. Keep going.”

“See that big ditch and those chunks of concrete? I think it’s the Panama Canal. There must be loads of stored fuel around there.”

“So what? I don’t see any buildings. They must be burned to the ground.”

“Probably.”

“What if even buried oil tanks boiled over or exploded?”

“Then we’re out of luck. I think anything buried in the ground should stay cool enough though. Up North the earth is a constant 15 degrees C year round once you dig down a meter. I doubt it is much different here.”

“I’ll bet that top meter is mighty warm though.”

“No doubt. In fact, we had better wait until night to land. The daytime heat down there is a killer.”

“Land where?”

“There. See that?”

“What?”

“A broken up concrete strip. It looks like an airport runway. I’ll bet those big rectangles are hanger foundations. That smaller one is what we need. I think that was a garage for trucks. They must have had their own tanks on site.”

“All right let’s circle until night and then take a look around.”

Charlene and Chester made love again while we circled and waited. They seldom talked to Maggie or me any longer. They were getting on my nerves. Maggie took no notice of them. As the sun set, a thick fog formed at our altitude and descended to the ground. We followed it to the surface.

Chester, Charlene, make yourselves useful and try to keep this ship on the ground while Aeneas and I look for fuel.”

“OK.” Charlene took the wheel. Chester put his arms around her from behind. She giggled. Somehow these two naked people fondling each other at the controls were not reassuring.

The fog was a sauna. I kept dancing to make the ground bearable through my thick leather soles. By one foundation wall a pipe stuck out of the ground. I tapped it with my foot and smiled at Maggie. She shrugged and walked back to the gondola to retrieve the hose. I burned my fingers on the pipe cap. I returned to the gondola and asked for the toolbox while Maggie stood with the hose.

“The black tool box?” asked Chester.

“The only tool box. Yes it is black.”

A few moments later the judicious use of a hammer removed the cap. A musty petroleum smell exuded from the pipe.

“What do you think it is?” Maggie asked.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” Our multifuel turbine had a wonderfully varied appetite. It would run on almost anything, maybe even tar though I never tried it. The pump hummed as it sucked the mystery fuel into our tank. As I shifted my weight from foot to foot I grew aware of a susurration like the shifting of sand in the wind. There was no wind. I spotted the source.

“Look at those.” I pointed out to Maggie.

A mat of mushrooms pushed up through the soil. Their heads expanded as we watched. These fungi already had adapted to the brutal environment, perhaps by forming hardened spores for the day and absorbing moisture from the night fog.

“Do you think they are edible?”

“You are welcome to try them,” she offered.

“Maybe next time.”

The fungi rose around our feet. I kicked at them, and they fell over easily.

“Look at the size of them. That one is a foot high and still growing.”

“They get through their lives in a hurry though. The ones that first sprouted are rotting away already.”

The mushrooms where she pointed trembled and toppled.

“I don’t think they’re rotting.” A rustling and crunching sound grew in intensity all around us. “Something is eating them. Bugs.”

“I hate bugs.”

Maggie had a lot to hate. Beetles emerged from the ground everywhere. The oversized mushrooms all around us turned black with them. The mushrooms were eaten as fast as they could grow.

“Yuck. Are we done here, Aeneas?”

“Near enough.”

I called to Chester to kill the pump. Then I rolled the hose and lifted it up into the gondola. Behind me Maggie shrieked.

“What’s the matter?”

Then I knew.

“Ouch! Damn it!”

My legs were covered with beetles and blood. “Into the gondola now!” I lifted Maggie by the waist over the rim. I was right behind her.

“Lift out of here!”

Charlene fumbled at the controls until I pushed her aside. I dropped ballast, adjusted ballonets, started the engine, vectored our thrust, and pushed the throttle.

The only time I ever saw Maggie cry was when she was picking off beetles. I joined her. So did Chester and Charlene because some of the bugs crawled off us and onto them. They gave their lovemaking a rest for the remainder of the night.

We were able to remove all the beetles. Wherever one was present was a painful certainty. There must have been some toxin in the insect bites. I don’t remember passing out, but all of us were unconscious within the hour.

Once again, we owed our survival over the next few hours to the simple but solid engineering of the Le Pens; for when I awoke the unattended engine was purring steadily. We were over open ocean and heading south. I felt ill.

I nudged Maggie. She groaned and lifted her head. I never have seen her look worse.

“Where do you think we are?”

She groggily took in the situation. “I don’t know.

Pacific probably. Go east. Southeast.”

“We may not have been going south all this time. We didn’t engage auto-pilot.”

“You mean you didn’t. Why not?”

“I just didn’t. Look, if this is the Atlantic, going east will take us further out to sea.”

“True. But if it is not the Pacific, it is probably the Caribbean and east will take us over islands. Would you rather go west?”

Odds favored Maggie’s bet. “No.”

“Well?”

I nodded and turned our machine to the southeast. After several hours a shoreline came into view. Maggie smiled.

“We’re still in the equatorial zone,” Maggie stated. “In fact I think that’s Ecuador. There could be more of those beetles down there. Let’s follow the coast. Think we can make it to Lima without refueling?”

I was embarrassed that Maggie’s sense of geography was better than mine. “Sure, but I like to keep the tanks as full as possible. If we had run out of fuel out there we would have been in serious trouble.”

“If we hadn’t stopped for fuel we wouldn’t have gotten lost over the ocean. We should go as far as we can if that will get us past the bugs. I’m not tangling with overachieving cockroaches again.”

“Do you really think they live this far south?”

“How would I know? They probably need that awful environment at the Isthmus, but then again maybe they don’t. You know, there must be another element to the ecosystem we didn’t see. The mushrooms need to grow on something. Maybe there are heat-resistant bacteria in the soil or something.”

“Do you want to go back and research the question?”

“Pass for now. But someday, yes. The next time I’m wearing a beetle-proof suit though.”

We reached the Peruvian border and continued south. Lima appeared oddly tidy. To be sure, there was some fire damage and many roofs were gone, but most walls were standing and the streets were clean. We saw no evidence of living people. They would have kept the place messier.

There also was no evidence either of the type of erosion caused by nightly fungal blooms like those in Panama. The chances were good we were outside the mushroom beetle eco-system. The surface temperatures in this part of Peru were similar to Panama, but perhaps, I reasoned, some element in the environment might be different. A more frightening thought was that local mutations might be even worse. We accordingly were cautious. We passed the time until well after nightfall watching from overhead for anything peculiar. Maggie and I did this anyway. Charlene and Chester once again entertained each other.

The sightseeing was good. The Rio Rimac was a dry gully. We floated over the curiously named Avenida Roosevelt. I don’t know for which Roosevelt it was named or why. Steel hulks of former automobiles lined the curbs. We swung around toward the Plaza de Armas. The 400 year old bronze fountain still stood but it long since had run dry. We waited for more than an hour after dark for any sign of disturbance below. In the moonlight all remained peaceful.

“It’s the fog,” said Maggie.

“What fog? It’s clear as can be.”

“Precisely. The fog in Panama makes the mushrooms grow. There is no fog here so there should be no mushrooms and no bugs.”

It sounded reasonable to me. Everything below looked peaceful so we decided to chance a landing in the Miraflores south of Centro. This was formerly the wealthy resort district where we hoped our pickings would be easy. For once we had made a good choice. Resupply went smoothly. Maggie stayed aboard this time. I quickly found a heating oil tank. While I topped the tanks, Charlene and Chester picked up some tourist knickknacks in a hotel gift shop and gave them to each other. Before midnight we were aloft again.

“We can be in Chile tomorrow. I’m sure there are some people living in the southern regions,” I commented.

“Are we looking for people?” Maggie asked.

“I am. No reflection on present company intended.”

“Hmph. I doubt that. The Chileans weren’t at the UN were they? I mean after the climate change.”

“No, but that doesn’t mean anything. The US isn’t a country anymore either. There are still people within its old boundaries. The UN is a lost cause now anyway. Only the Russians and Scandinavians bother to show up anymore. Except for Quebec and Tibet, the world is still decaying rapidly.”

I thought of those missile tracks again and hoped Quebec remained an exception to global decline. Had my little note really destroyed a nation by triggering an attack on South Dakota? I dearly hoped Selena was not so bloody-minded as to target cities. Maybe the warheads were aimed only at military or demonstration targets.

Quebec was not really such a terrible place. I should have stayed. The cash from the sale of those journals would have put me back on my feet again.

I tried to get my mind off the calamity in back of us by considering what lay ahead. “I don’t suppose any of you speak Spanish.”

“I do a little,” answered Maggie. “Joelle used to encourage language study in case we ever expanded out of Rushmore or had to flee for some reason. The Southern Hemisphere must have intrigued her. She even talked about teaching some kids Afrikaans but she couldn’t find any textbooks.”

“Interesting woman.”

“Yes, she was. But I’m beginning now to think I idolized her just because I didn’t like Selena.”

“Honest appraisal. You’re an interesting woman too.”

“I don’t want to have sex right now, Aeneas.”

“Who said anything about that?”

“I know when I’m being buttered up and why.. I don’t think we should go straight to Chile. There is someplace closer worth a look. Let’s go inland.”

It took me a moment to adjust to the change of subject.

“Take Nearer into the Andes? Why? To put it mildly that is very dangerous, especially at night. Even in daylight we would have to pick our way through the peaks very carefully. That is if we even can maintain the altitude to do it. What are you looking for? Living space on the cooler upper slopes? We could have done that in the Rockies.”

“Maybe we should have. But right now I’m playing a hunch. Trust me.”

For no good reason I decided to trust her.

Even by starlight the landscape was breathtaking. We passed above gorges and flew by sheer cliffs. There were valleys, hills, and mountains of every shape possible. The upper slopes were rich in vegetation. The view and the occasional need to dodge a mountain kept me awake during the next several hours. My eyes complained at the lack of sleep.

A gentle glow over the mountains ahead presaged a new dawn. Just at the edge of my perception below was a frantic scurrying on the mountainside. I grabbed the binoculars in hopes of seeing people. There were no people. There were lizards. A cloudbank up ahead worried me enough to throttle back.

“Go on through it,” Maggie ordered.

“We could fly into a mountain. I’d rather go around it. South looks pretty clear.”

“This is the way!” Maggie insisted as she studied her Atlas.

“Maggie, we don’t have good charts except for North America, and even those are hopelessly out of date. That Rand McNally you are looking at was never intended for this purpose. I wouldn’t trust our navigation skills that much even if it were. It’s not as though we have GPS. This is verging on suicide.”

“Go straight through the cloud. Do it!” When this elicited no response she added, “Please.”

Do most men have a hard time arguing with women about directions?

WILSON: No.

HIRISAWA: Yes.

AENEAS CUSTER: I apologize to the court for failing to make that question sound rhetorical.

Anyhow, against all common sense we entered the cloud. For the next hour we were blind and flew only by compass. I expected to smash on something at any moment. At one point a darkness loomed on our right. It looked suspiciously like a rock outcrop. At another point I heard a scrape very much like that of a tree brushing the bottom of the gondola. Then the cloud abruptly ended and we emerged into morning sunlight. We floated high over a valley. In contrast to the desiccated region behind us, below us was a jungle oasis. Straight ahead was a steep acclivity. An overgrown but still discernible road switched back and forth across the face of it.

“Go for altitude! Head toward that cone-shaped peak.” Maggie commanded.

Nearer once more made me proud as she ascended gracefully. For vision’s sake, we circled so as to approach Maggie’s proposed destination from the direction of the rising sun. To my amazement, next to the conical peak was a mountaintop city. Even from this distance one could see the masonry buildings were sizable. Stone retaining walls formed terraces on the surrounding slopes. Spring water flowed through an aqueduct. Smoke from fires arose from the city.

“Incredible. An active, living town this close to the equator. You knew it was here. Where are we?” I asked.

Machu Picchu.”

Gesundheit.”

“Not funny. This is a very old and very special place.”

Maggie gave me a brief run down. Machu Picchu was a major ceremonial Inca city that the Spanish invaders never found. It was abandoned for unclear reasons at about the time of the conquest. There is some dispute as to whether it was abandoned before or after. The city was not rediscovered until 1911. A Connecticut archeologist followed up on old legends and local gossip. Usually such sources are about as reliable as eyewitness accounts of Nessie. No doubt to his own surprise, on this occasion they had some substance. His climb up this isolated mountain was rewarded by one of the greatest archeological finds of the 20th century.

At that time the city was extraordinarily well preserved. Little was missing except for the thatched roofs. The site had many oddities, not least of which was the startling inconvenience of the location. Also, digs of the graves revealed a ten-to-one female to male ratio. This suggests priestesses in some sun or moon cult.

In an arena in the midst of the city stood a large rock called the Intihuatana stone. This means “hitching post of the sun.” Similar stones at other Inca centers were used ritually to “hitch” the sun at the winter solstice to stop its slide north and to pull it back to the south. The stone and the area surrounding it are arranged so they can be used as a very accurate astronomical calculator.

It was clear upon our arrival that Machu Picchu was no longer an archeological curiosity. It breathed again.

“How did you know?” I asked Maggie.

“I just asked myself where I would go if I lived in Peru when everything fell apart.”

Thatch roofs were back in place. The terraces below the city were actively cultivated agricultural plots irrigated by spring water. Peasants could be seen working with hand tools. We later learned the denizens relied primarily on root crops: yams, potatoes, onions, and such. The existence of a social hierarchy was visible even from the air. One section of the city had the grimy crowded look of worker housing. The opposite end was neat and included a large decorated structure.

“The castle,” pointed out Maggie. “That’s where we’ll find the head honchos.”

We definitely caught the attention of the citizenry as we approached from the direction of the sun. They stood at attention and stared.

“Hover over the hitching stone,” Maggie ordered.

“There are a lot of flowers around the stone, aren’t there?” I observed.

“So there are. What is the date?”

“I don’t know. Early December sometime.”

“So in the Southern Hemisphere we are near the summer solstice. Maybe they celebrate that too.”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“We may as well talk to them. You can ask all the questions you like,” I said.

“That’s my plan. Let me do the talking.”

“Easy. I don’t speak Spanish.”

“I hope they do.”

I worked the tilt rotors to hold our position over the Intihuatana stone. Chester threw lines over the side but none of the Machu Picchuans made any move to take them. “Take the controls and try to hold her steady,” I told Maggie. “I’ll slide down the rope and tie us down.”

We had drawn a crowd and it was growing larger. Workers from the agricultural terraces ran into the city. None came closer to us than five meters or so. In fact, the front rank edged backwards as I moved toward them. Most of the locals were women. They wore simple brown clothing woven from some broad fiber. Jewelry of colorful stones and crystals added the only individual fashion statements. The people looked much like pictures I had seen of Peruvian mountain dwellers: a mixture of local Native American and Spanish stock with the former predominant.

The hitching stone made a convenient anchor for the primary rope. I tied three other ropes and secured the ship more firmly. The rest of the crew then slid to the ground. The crowd parted as four men in capes of wildly colored plumage marched toward us. They must have been excruciatingly hot in their heavy garments, but they looked impressive. They were followed by six women carrying a single litter. Maggie greeted the men. I have no idea what she said, but Maggie stepped into the litter as though it were her proper due. She motioned Charlene, Chester, and I to follow on foot behind her.

The caped men led the way toward the castle. Maggie was carried behind them. The rest of the Nearer crew followed at the litter carriers’ heels. The crowd watched our procession and avoided all physical contact with us.

The walls of the castle were freshly and brightly painted with rather scary looking squarish faces. A painting of the sun, which also had a face, graced over the main entrance. The walls themselves were beautifully crafted. They were made of huge mortarless granite blocks fitted expertly together. Each block must have weighed tons.

According to Maggie, the Inca had neither iron tools nor the wheel. It is hard to imagine how they did it. More impressively still, they did it on top of a mountain.

Every door and window in the castle had a trapezoidal shape with a massive lintel forming the small base at the top. While not as effective at transferring weight as a true arch, it is nonetheless superior to the simple vertical pillar and horizontal lintel that characterized Egyptian and Greek architecture in the ancient Mediterranean world. Plainly this design has stood the test of time.

Maggie stepped off the litter at the entrance to the castle. We followed the caped men into a sizable room furnished with a set of four raised large chairs against the far wall. On the wall was a sun symbol about a meter in diameter that appeared to be molded gold. My eyes were not yet adjusted to the light, however. It might have been just painted wood. We passed through a dining hall with a table of intricately carved mahogany. It was large enough to seat ten or twelve.

A hallway led to a room comfortably outfitted with carpets and pillows stuffed with feathers. The window in the room was too narrow for escape. It barely admitted enough light by which to see. This apparently was to be our guestroom and our holding cell. Maggie examined the room, and nodded at the men. She looked sternly at us. “Stay put and keep your mouths shut,” Maggie warned.

Maggie then exited with the men. A few minutes later a young local woman brought us a platter with sliced yams, potatoes, and a pitcher of water. The woman nodded and left.

Hours passed. The lack of toilet facilities engendered a growing unpleasantness. I used the narrow window opening and hoped no one was below. A grateful Chester copied me. Even in the scanty illumination provided by the shreds of moonlight that infiltrated the room, Charlene’s resentful looks were withering. They inspired me to remove a feather arrangement from a pot in the corner and hand the vessel to her. I hoped the pot had no ceremonial significance.

My ingenuity must have made Charlene happy. After some relieved sighs on the pot, she made love to Chester. She squatted over him as he leaned back on a pillow. They were at it for what seemed an exceptionally long time. I began to resent Joelle.

Some time around midnight Maggie returned to us. She carried a lamp with a candle but it scarcely illuminated more than her hand. Maggie shushed us as we all began to ask questions at once. We all shut up. Maggie started to talk, but then stopped. She stood there pensively.

I broke the silence again. “Well, I’m glad you can talk to them.”

She sighed and then responded, “Actually, that worked out well. They speak Quechua…”

“What?”

“Quechua. As an everyday language, that is. It’s a Native American tongue. They remember Spanish as a language of power and government. The bigwigs use it among themselves so they thought it was appropriate that I use it.”

She paused again and then continued to me rather than the others.

“Look, some things are going to happen in a couple of weeks that you won’t like. But we’re not in a position to stop them so there is no sense raising a fuss. Maybe next year I will be able to do more about it. Just don’t try to interfere with anything.”

“You’re advising me to do nothing. Okay, that’s easy.”

“Not as easy as you may think.”

“You underestimate my capacity for lassitude. What worries me is your ‘next year’? Are we staying that long?”

“I am. This is my home – or as close a place to it as I am going to find. Besides, you might say I have an opportunity for a lucrative career path. I am a ‘Messenger from the Sun,’ you see.”

“You are? Hmm. Fancy that. Are we?”

“No, you three are my servants.”

“Ah. So how did you swing your celestial status?”

“Politics. I didn’t give them much choice really. This is a theocracy, but the priests rely on a secular aristocracy that owns the houses and farmland. They also lend money.”

“Business leaders and bankers.”

“Something like that. They run the economy and pay the taxes. Only superstition prevents them from dispensing with the priestly rulers altogether.”

“So keeping that superstition alive is important to the current rulers.”

“Essential. That is why some of the priests didn’t like being upstaged by us. They obviously were planning something nasty in order to express publicly their dominance over these visitors from the sky. I headed them off by announcing in front of them and the leading aristocracy that I was the Messenger from the Sun. A lot of servants heard me too.”

“Why the would the priests buy that on your say-so?”

“Oh, most of them didn’t. It is hard to find more dedicated atheists than in a theocracy, but that makes them open to negotiation. The minority who take their religion seriously, who believe that they themselves understand what the gods want, are far more dangerous. They will kill you in order to save your soul.”

“That sounds a bit harsh. I’m sure there are kind priests.”

“True, but they do harm by giving the other sort a good name.”

“I’m glad you aren’t cynical. You know Selena called you a cultist.”

“That is why I understand.”

“But if the majority of the priests didn’t believe you, why did they allow you to act the part of Messenger From the Sun? What gave them no choice?”

“As I said, the secular aristocracy. True, the priests could have denounced me as a liar, but that surely would raise a question about the veracity of the priests themselves. That is just the sort of doubt they can’t afford to encourage. It was easier for them to go along with me so long as I didn’t seem to be undermining their rule. Also, a few of them were superstitious enough to wonder if maybe, just maybe, I was telling the truth.”

“Why do I get the feeling they may live to regret backing you up?”

Because they will. The adult priesthood rotates authority in a somewhat disorderly fashion. Four of them sit on the Council, one for each season. The current season’s representative has primacy; he is chief for three months. The four representatives are chosen by lot from the priestly order at the time of the summer solstice.”

“That’s in a couple of weeks.”

“Right. I intend to bully them unto making a fifth chair that is permanent. The chair will be occupied by…”

“…the sun’s personal messenger?”

“Yes.”

“Is it a problem for them that you are a woman?”

“Yes and no. Yes, they don’t like it. No, in a way it suits their mythology. This is a very religious city and women perform almost all the rites, except at the highest level. Somehow the male priests set things up so they are in overall charge.” Maggie paused, shook her head and continued, “They use sacrifice and, I suspect, simple male infanticide to maintain a surplus of women. About a third of the women in the city are ‘Maidens of the Sun.’ They don’t have children. They’re virgins.”

“Really?” asked Chester with interest.

“Don’t even think about it!” said Maggie.

“I don’t mind,” chirped Charlene, true to her own religion. “He can make love to whomever he pleases.”

“I don’t care if you mind or not. These people would mind and would kill the girl and Chester both. Maybe everyone who laid eyes on him too. There are women here who are not off limits, Chester. Two thirds of them are assigned the job to breed. You can play with them if you get the chance. They are not as socially honorable a caste, however.”

“Will I get the chance?”

“No. In fact all of you have to be isolated for now. It’s for your own good. We can’t have you walking around fumbling and belching and smelling like ordinary people after the priests accepted my quasi-divine status. Even though you are only my servants, it just won’t do. Sorry. It won’t be for long.”

“Uh-huh. Let me guess. A couple of weeks. So what exactly is happening on the solstice?”

“Well, our timing was propitious that way. They perform a sort of reverse hitching ceremony to stop the sun’s scorching southward movement and send it away back north. They offer sacrifices of course.”

“Of course. Let me make another guess. Does this have something to do with what I’m not going to like?”

“You are just full of insight today. Four male babies will be sacrificed to begin with, one for each solstice and equinox.”

“Uh-huh. Is that a traditional Inca thing?”

“No, Inca society was destroyed hundreds of years ago. Even though there plainly was an intention to resurrect a large part of it by the settlers of this place, the founding fathers or mothers weren’t university archaeologists – or if they were they still didn’t just ape the old customs. These guys made a lot of stuff up themselves as they went along. The customs differ a lot from what the textbooks say about pre-Columbians.”

“The phrase ‘to begin with’ when you mentioned those four babies did not escape my attention. Who or what gets sacrificed next?”

“You and Chester.”

“I thought so. You’re right. I don’t like it.”

“Me neither,” said Chester.

“As a Messenger of the Sun, couldn’t you tell them no?”

“I’m afraid not. I guess they didn’t like the way I bullied them into accepting the Messenger line, so the Autumn priest bullied me back. He announced to everyone that I had been sent by the sun for the precise reason of enhancing the sacrifices. He let on that the sun had spoken to him about it already so my arrival was no surprise to him. In truth, I’m sure he just wanted to deprive me of my servants. I don’t want to stretch my credibility by arguing too much with the priestly class about this sort of thing.”

“Stretch it. I am not ‘a sort of thing.’”

“No, but don’t worry. I think I figured out a way to satisfy them and you too. We even can save those four kids. Remember them?”

“What have you got in mind?”

“The traditional way they perform sacrifices is by cutting the victim’s heart out on the hitching stone.”

“I never have been a slave to tradition.”

“Good, because I think I can convince them to send the lot of you directly back to the sun in Nearer.”

“With my heart in place?”

“Assuming you really have one, yes.”

“Okay. I can live with that.”

“This is very important. If I can do this for you, when we cut you loose, you must fly directly into the sun. I’m trusting you to obey me on this. I don’t want to explain why you are going in some other direction.”

“Okay, it’s a deal.

“Cool.”

“Why do they want to sacrifice Chester and me anyway? Why not Charlene? Whatever happened to sacrificing virgins?”

“She would hardly qualify,” remarked Chester.

“Don’t try to be witty, Chester. You’ll sprain something,” Maggie admonished.

“But really,” I persisted. “What have they got against males? The guys in charge are men after all.”

She smiled sourly. “Funny how they managed to work that, isn’t it?”

“Well, I must say this is all very far removed from the dream of egalitarian free love that got you banished from Dakota.”

“I didn’t make the rules here, Aeneas. Maybe I can change them somewhat, though.”

“If not, you’ll still be Messenger of the Sun.”

“Precisely.”

“What about me?” asked Charlene who suddenly realized that Maggie’s rescue plan made no mention of her.

“They want you for a breeder.”

“Hey!”

“Of course I’d have to perform some ceremonial mumbo-jumbo in order to make you fully mortal. That would explain your human imperfections.”

“Hey!”

“Don’t worry. I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that. Just play along with me. There is a chance I can get you sent along with Chester and Aeneas as a custodian or something.”

“A chance?”

“I’ll work on it.”

“Okay, I’ll trust you. Slightly more than I trust the jungle around this mountain anyway. I don’t think I would survive long if I fled here on foot.”

The room was a boring place for the next two weeks. Our hosts fed us well enough, but I don’t ever want to see another yam. They provided only enough water for drinking, which made Charlene and Chester rather ripe. I didn’t notice any aroma of my own but it is within the realm of possibility that that my roommates did. My beard filled in nicely. Chester grew a scraggily one. I noticed Charlene sprouted a wispy mustache too. Their wrestling matches grew tiresome to me, if not to themselves. We didn’t see Maggie again until December 21 at noon.

On the day of the solstice we were brought hot water, soaps, a very dull razor, and perfumes. We got the idea and cleaned up. Shortly thereafter Sun Maidens armed with lances escorted us outside. I do not know if the warrior women were traditional or if Maggie already had introduced them as a reform.

We were led along a path strewn with wildly colored plants and flowers. Revelers lined the walkway. On a newly constructed timber platform next to the hitching stone stood Maggie wearing a dress made entirely of feathers. It looked somehow familiar. I remembered a woman on a burlesque stage in New York who had had worn something similar. This probably wasn’t Maggie’s intended association, but it didn’t make me like the dress any less. The Machu Picchuans seemed impressed by her too. Maggie spoke something incomprehensible to me and then outstretched her hands toward the sun. Nearer was at her back. Drums rumbled and flutes played a haunting tune.

Wooden steps led to the gondola of Nearer. Sun Maidens carried four wailing babies up the steps and placed them in the craft. They descended back down the stairs slowly. Our armed Maiden escorts prodded us with lance tips. Chester and I understood the point and climbed the steps. Once aboard the ship I immediately scrambled into the pilot’s seat and grabbed the controls. I heard the ropes being hacked through. The airship lurched as the last rope was cut and I fired up the engine. The people below cheered and waved. The ship swung around with its usual slow but sure responsiveness. If one can love a machine, I loved Nearer. True to my promise, Nearer soared sunward.

I turned in my seat to smile at Chester and Charlene, but Charlene was not on board. I hope she likes kids. I felt rather guilty for leaving without her, but not so guilty as to turn back and argue the issue.

As soon as I felt it safe for Maggie, I turned Nearer east toward the Amazon basin. This was the easiest path out of the mountains. I planned to make for Argentina. Tierra Del Fuego probably was lovely.

“What are we supposed to do with these bawling brats?” asked Chester. His irritable phrasing poorly masked abject fear.

“I don’t know. What do we have to feed them?”

“They loaded us with sweet potatoes. I think the white stuff in the clay pots is goat’s milk.

“Better use that first before it goes bad.”

“Use it how? I don’t think they can drink out of clay jars.”

“I don’t know. Oh, there is an eyedropper in the med kit. Use that.”

“An eyedropper? These are kids, not pet mice.”

“It will be tedious, but at least you’ll get some in their mouths. If you try just pouring the milk out of the jar you will probably drown them. Then mash some sweet potatoes and see if you can get them to eat.”

“What about you, Aeneas? Are you going to help?”

“I’m driving,” I shamelessly excused myself.

“Want to trade jobs?”

“No.”

I was pleased when the Andes were behind us. As so often on this trip, my pleasure was premature. Buffeting winds kicked up over the Amazon watershed. The environment below looked quite arid, but the sheer size of the drainage area was enough to create real rivers. Despite climbing to the maximum altitude consistent with easy breathing, we were battered harder by the wind with every kilometer we advanced. Severe gusts raised dust that obscured the ground. We shook and rattled onward. Keeping the ship on course and in one piece through the afternoon, evening and night was an arduous task. Often the ship’s fabric deformed and threatened to tear. High blown dust particles stung my eyes.

At daybreak the winds at last began to ease and I fell asleep at the wheel. Chester must have been successful with the babies. They were remarkably quiet. Then again, I may have been too soundly asleep to hear them scream. When I awoke we were over blue ocean. The light shimmered off the waves below. Chester must have fallen asleep too – or he trusted me to pilot us even when I was unconscious. If the latter is true I am flattered. I don’t trust myself even when I’m awake.

“Where are we going now?” Chester asked when he noticed me stretching.

“That depends on where we are.”

“Don’t you know?”

“No. Well, sort of. This time we must be over the Atlantic. We can’t be too far out even if we had a big tail wind. We’ll go southwest, I guess. I hope we spot some land before our fuel runs out.”

Arguably, this heading was foolish. It might have been more sensible to fly due west for the nearest land and sources of supply, but I didn’t want to face those winds again. We flew through another night over water. We had a good tail wind, so as the gauge descended near empty I throttled back to a minimum and let the ship be carried southwest.

I saw no need to communicate my concern to Chester but I had already accepted the high probability that we would be helplessly adrift by mid-morning. Landfall was a necessity for us, but, with all due respect to the Rolling Stones, sometimes try as you might you don’t get what you need.

I was reflecting on life and death just after sunrise when a hint of a form manifested on the southern horizon. It might have been a cloud or it might have been land. I gambled and throttled the engine. The form got larger and began to solidify. Ahead of us most definitely was land. It was an island or peninsula by the looks of it.

Chester, who continued to display an unjustified faith in my competence, was not excited. He had assumed I would bring us to safety somewhere. I, however, was suffused with the mellow joy of a survivor.

The land was an island, a big one. Our craft glided over dry ground. Rugged rocks outcropped from white quartz beaches. A hilly terrain followed. Subtropical flora flourished. We passed over grassland filled with moving sheep. A black and white dog herded them energetically. I was ecstatic. The island was occupied and civilized enough to support sheep farming!

After a time, the opposing shoreline came into view. A small village was situated by an inlet. The houses were well kept and whitewashed. A banner fluttered on a flagpole in front of one of them. It was the Union Jack, something of an anachronism, even before the heat. We were in the Falklands. A quick look at my map told me that the village must be Port Howard. Much as I was tempted to land immediately, I had grander plans.

I expended our last fuel reserves by accelerating across the channel between West and East Falkland Islands. We were going to the capital city of Stanley. Nearer cleared the channel rapidly. We passed Mount Usborne and the hills beyond until the capital came into view.

Stanley is a picturesque port and fishing town with low-rise wood frame buildings. It does not look at all like a capital. We picked out the building that looked the most official as the most likely candidate for the primary government building. We lowered our craft down to the street in front of it. I jumped to the ground and Chester tossed me the ropes while he worked the directional motors. As I secured the craft to a fire hydrant, a stern looking man approached. He wore a white shirt, pith helmet, shorts, white socks, sneakers and a badge. A whistle hung on a silver chain on his neck.

“Good afternoon gentlemen. You really can’t park that machine here.”

“Where should we park it?”

Something about my accent gave him pause. He looked at us carefully. Our clean-up back in Machu Picchu had not lasted. We were ragged, unshaven and dirty.

“Not in town,” he answered slowly. “Shouldn’t you be at the army barracks at Goose Green?”

“Should we? Okay, I’ll be happy to go there. We don’t mean to be any trouble. We’re a little low on fuel. If we could buy some we can go somewhere less obtrusive. Almost any petroleum product will do. Alcohol will work too.”

The officer’s suspicions were deepening. I supposed our arrest was imminent, but we hadn’t done anything seriously wrong so this did not concern me greatly. How bad could a parking violation be? After that was cleared up I was willing to bet I would be a minor celebrity on the islands. There surely wasn’t another airship there. I could open a charter passenger service between islands or even to the mainland.

“Aren’t you from the west island?” the policeman asked. “I’ve heard rumors about a secret project there. If you have compromised it you may be in serious trouble. The paint job is in pretty bad taste, isn’t it?”

This last observation struck me as an odd and somewhat snippy irrelevancy. I had grown fond of Nearer.

“The paint job? That was the work of previous owners, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. And no, we are not from West Falkland Island. I don’t know anything about a secret project there or anywhere else.”

“I see.” Then came the expected and overdue statement, “I’m afraid it would be best to take you and your machine into custody until we straighten this all out. It will be returned to you if it is your rightful property, or if you are the rightful operators.”

“It is and we are, and we certainly want to cooperate with you.”

One of the babies chose this moment to fuss. The others joined him.

“Are those babies?”

“Yes. We picked them up in Machu Picchu.”

Machu Picchu! Is that where you are from?”

“Well, South Dakota actually. Quebec before that.”

South Dakota! You mean the paint job isn’t a sick adolescent joke? This is the real one?”

“The real one?”

“Not a tarted up copy? Stay right there! We know who you are!”

He blew a piercing whistle that set the babies screaming louder.

“I’ll inform the Royal Palace!”

I had been right about my celebrity status. I was wrong about the rest of it.

The police officer ran up the steps of the building in front of us. We had chosen correctly. An old plaque on the building said “Government House.” Apparently it had been elevated to the status of a royal palace.

I already liked this place. It had an easy-going feel to it. Despite having placed us in custody, our arresting officer had just left us alone with an obvious means of escape. Clearly, he had little experience with true lawbreakers. This bespoke well of the citizenry. Fortunately for the man’s career, we were nearly out of fuel and I had no wish to leave anyway.

A number of townspeople began to gather on the sidewalk next to us. The officer emerged from the Palace and started shouting orders to the bystanders. He knew most of them personally.

“Freddie! You, Bob and Alice take those babies over to Mae’s place. Jack, call the army base. Tell them to send some men to take away this thing.” He waved at Nearer as though Jack might think he meant some other thing.

Chester handed off the babies over the railing to the three townspeople.

Several minutes later, two more men exited the Royal Palace. They were dressed much the same as the first officer except that their shirts were red. Their demeanor was much calmer than that of the policeman.

The one with lieutenant’s bars spoke up.

“Gentlemen, I understand you are short on fuel. Can this device make it as far as Goose Green?”

“I don’t know. Where is that?”

“At the isthmus. About 100 miles.”

“Yes, but not much more.”

The red shirts accompanied Chester and me in Nearer to Goose Green. Once there, I gave an army mechanic in green fatigues brief introduction to the basics of the airship. The red shirts returned us to Stanley in a horse drawn carriage. It was after dark when we arrived back at the palace.

“Please come with me, gentlemen,” said the lieutenant politely to Chester and me. We stepped out of the carriage and followed him. The sergeant remained with the horses.

My first impression of the palace was that it was pleasantly homey. The interior smelled of old wood. We climbed stairs to the second floor. The handrail rattled on its hardware. In an odd replay of our arrival at Machu Picchu we were led to a waiting room. In about ten minutes we were served tea by a woman in a white apron. She wore the stern expression of a woman confronting a neighborhood boy who had just thrown a ball through a plate glass window. My attempts to engage her in conversation fell flat. She instructed us to be patient.

“You will be sent for soon. You may wish to clean up, gentlemen.”

She put an ironic emphasis on the “gentlemen” and nodded toward a side door. Then she left. Behind the side door I found a bathroom with hot and cold running water. The electric lights worked. This was true luxury. I tried to tidy up as much as possible, but our long adventure had taken a toll on me and my clothes. Even when scrubbed, shaved, and combed the image in the mirror was neither handsome nor dapper. Chester’s subsequent efforts were less thorough than mine, but somehow he looked better. It was after dark before the guards returned.

“Her Royal Majesty will see you now.”

“Her Royal Majesty?”

“Queen Anne.”

The Queen held court in a simply decorated room sizable enough for a poorly attended town meeting. Queen Anne, wearing a tan business suit, sat behind an executive desk. She was in her fifties and had left her gray hair undyed. Her smile indicated a sense of humor. She reminded me of my sixth grade English teacher. To her right, wearing shirtsleeves and seated at a folding table, were two middle-aged men. I guessed they were her advisers. I also guessed she ignored their advice more often than she accepted it. The elaborate rituals of Royal protocol obviously had not followed revival of monarchy on these shores. If anything, the atmosphere of Anne’s Court was less deferential than Joelle’s, or Selena’s for that matter. I instantly liked Anne.

“Wait outside,” the Queen ordered the red shirts. They nodded and left.

She briefly assessed Chester and then stared at me sternly before speaking.

“Aeneas Custer, I presume.”

“Yes, ma’am … um … Your Majesty. Um…”

“Either address will do. I’m a distant cousin several times removed, from the last real monarch in the UK, I don’t take it as seriously as my fellow Falklanders do,”

“Yes, ma’am. I wasn’t aware I was famous.”

“Infamous.”

“How bad is the damage?”

“Don’t you know? The damage is horrific. In case you really don’t know, your attack was quite successful. You vaporized Montreal, Boston, New York, St. John, and Morrisbourg. The City of Quebec survived only because the warhead failed to detonate. A few missiles failed to launch – age had caught up with them. The surviving Quebecois are very angry with you, as you might imagine. Mr. Custer, you are a war criminal convicted in absentia of treason and crimes against humanity. There is a very big price on your head. Quebec brought back capital punishment just for you and you minions. Is there any reason I shouldn’t ship you back to Quebec tonight?”

“They would kill me.”

“That is not a reason. Executing you may be appropriate.”

“It is not appropriate because I did not launch those missiles. I had no authority in South Dakota whatsoever. I have no minions. In fact I was thrown out of the place. Quebec knew about the missiles and yet they attacked Selena.”

“Blaming your victims will not get you far. And where is Selena? There is a price on her head too. Did you drop her off someplace? Machu Picchu, perhaps?”

“Uh, no. That was Maggie.”

“Maggie?”

“A subversive. Messenger from the Sun.”

“Try to be coherent, Mr. Custer.”

“Sorry. Maggie was just a passenger. We left Selena back at Beautiful Rushmore Cave. I gather the French didn’t catch her. It doesn’t surprise me to hear she escaped. She is a resourceful woman. But I don’t know where she is now. Honestly. I had nothing to do with any of it.”

“Mr. Custer, I suggest you come up with another line of defense. Clearly you had something to do with it. There was a nuclear threat to Quebec written in your own hand. Then the bombs actually fell. What should we think?”

“All right. I suppose you could interpret my note as a threat, but it wasn’t really. Still, writing it was rude of me. I admit it. It was a petulant thing to do. But I was just posturing. I never seriously intended to cause any harm. In fact, I meant to deter a war by what I wrote.”

“Didn’t work out, did it? You launched the missiles, Mr. Custer.”

“No ma’am. I mean yes, I know they were launched. I saw them in back of us. But I didn’t launch them. I never killed anyone, Your Majesty, and I never helped Selena kill anyone. I am an innocent man and I throw myself on the mercy of the Court. I ask for asylum.”

“Ah. Well, that puts us in a very awkward position, young man. I’m not convinced our public would approve. The trials have been broadcast over short wave for the past few weeks, you know.”

“Trials?”

“Yes. Dakotan prisoners brought back to Quebec have been tried for participation in a criminal regime. The broadcasts are quite a hit. Go into any pub and the radio is likely to be tuned to them. None of the prisoners admits to being a member of a control room crew but all of them have opinions about you. Those journals you gave to the Pierre Roulant reporter have been read over the air too.

“The statements of the prisoners about you conflicted wildly. Some said you were a nobody and that Selena gave all the orders. Others thought you were Selena’s lover and she at least consulted you about the war. They surmised she saved you by sending you away. This story has a romantic appeal, but for that very reason it is not convincing. Still others said that you ordered the launch and then saved yourself by fleeing the scene. Then there are the cultists. They describe you as a mythic avenger of the prophet Joelle. The cultists sound chillingly satisfied about the destruction both in Dakota and Quebec. A handful of Dakotan soldiers had an even more interesting interpretation. They said you were a Quebecois secret agent and that you called in the attack on Dakota. They say you mistakenly believed the missiles were sabotaged so the attack would be safe.”

“I am not a secret agent.”

Quebec officials deny that you are too, but then they would. I suspect both you and they are telling the truth, however. There really are conspiracies in the world, but conspiracy theorists almost always miss the real ones. This idea sounds like a chimera to me. There is one element of agreement in all the testimony. You knew Selena very very personally, and you met with her the actual day the war happened. Either you or she ordered the launches. Those facts were enough to convict you. They are pretty damning here too.”

“Your Majesty, Selena despised me and threw me out of South Dakota. As for knowing her very personally, that was when we were younger. It is not a crime to have slept with a pretty girl in one’s youth.”

“Well, actually it is if she is underage and a close relation, but it is not a war crime.”

“Nevertheless I’m relieved you believe me.”

“Don’t be too relieved. I believe you are not a Quebecois agent, Mr. Custer. I said nothing about the rest of it. However, I have an open mind. I am not about to risk the safety of my people for one refugee whether he is guilty or not.

Quebec is a terrible disaster. Politically the country is falling apart. There are rumors the Canadians are going to finish the place off, but for now Quebec still can throw a few punches. I am not inclined to provoke what is left of her military. The La Salle alone could do us real damage were she to turn up off shore.

“Then there are those damned missiles of yours. Who controls them now? Quebecois? Dakotans? Canadians? Anybody? We have no way to know. We surely don’t want to offend anybody who commands them. Protecting you would be very offensive in many quarters.

“One more thing troubles me, Custer, and it should trouble you if you have any conscience at all. Even if you are not guilty precisely as charged, you are far from innocent in a broader sense. You are deeply involved in this whole sorry affair. Simply setting you free is not possible, even if you have been truthful in every word you have spoken to me tonight.”

“I don’t know what to say, Your Majesty.”

“Too bad words didn’t fail you with Boris Fontaine. So, the question remains. What are we to do with you? We have little time to make a decision. Your airship was not a very discreet means of arrival. By now news about your arrival is all over the islands. The story will get back to North America soon enough.”

“I apologize for my indiscretion.”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t help. Perhaps we can buy ourselves a little more time, though. We can’t stop rumors, but we don’t need to confirm your identity publicly quite yet. Your airship is unmistakable, but your personal appearance is not especially striking. The public does not have a clear idea of what you look like. Aeneas Custer could have gotten off at an earlier stop; you could be someone else. So, for now, reveal your name to no one.”

“Yes, ma’am. Who should I be?”

“Well now. Let us think about this. Your vowels are about as gratingly North American as can be imagined. There is no sense trying to hide that, so we might as well confuse matters instead. Why don’t you be Chester?”

“I can be Chester.”

“What about me?” asked Chester.

“You are obviously too young and blond to be Aeneas, so nobody cares about you. But I suppose you need a name anyway. Ah, how about John Hancock?”

“You are joking.”

“No, that is much too unlikely a name to seem fake.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.” She smiled at the two of us. “Don’t leave town.”

We exited. A guard outside the door of the audience room pointed the way down the hall that led back to our room. He did not escort us. At the door to the room we were met by a lovely aroma. I opened the door with high hopes and was not disappointed. Inside on a small table was the most wonderful sight we had seen in the last 15,000 kilometers: a hot meal of mutton and potatoes and fish. It was beyond delicious.

After the feast I lingered in a long shower. No one bothered us for the rest of the night. A bookshelf contained the complete works of Dickens. I actually began A Tale of Two Cities, which I had escaped reading in school by buying summary notes. Once I peeked into the hall and found it was empty. Palace security was relaxed. Of course, escape was not a real option. There was nowhere to go. I went back to my book. I nodded off by page 40 and slept deeply on the couch.

The next day after morning tea, a red shirt arrived.

“Her Majesty will see you.”

We returned to the Queen’s reception room.

“Good morning Mr. Custer,” she greeted me pleasantly. “We believe we have solved our problem. You will be shot trying to escape.”

“I’m not happy with that solution, ma’am.”

“I think you will be. Chester!” the Queen called to Chester whose attention had drifted to the window.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You have two choices. You can be sent to Quebec where you will be executed, or you can live under your false identity on South Georgia Island where you never will reveal to anyone that you are from South Dakota or that you ever knew Mr. Custer. We can assign you a job with the constabulary there.”

South Georgia sounds nice.”

“Fine. We are done with you now.”

It took Chester a few moments to realize he had been dismissed. He looked uncomfortably around him and then walked to the door. The guard outside pointed the way back to the waiting room.

“Now you. Many people saw a dark-haired, bearded man and a blond man arrive in that airship, so I’m going to ask you to shave your beard and dye your hair.”

 “Do I surmise correctly that you plan to shoot an imaginary person and say it was me? I mean I. I mean Aeneas Custer.”

“Inelegantly stated, but you have the idea. The real Chester, now Mr. Hancock, will be secreted to South Georgia. We need some of your clothing and some of your blood.”

“Blood, Your Majesty?”

“We need to identify the late Mr. Aeneas Custer convincingly to Quebec.”

“Thank you very much. I can’t begin to express my gratitude. But…”

“Yes, Mr. Custer?”

“Well, foolish though it may be to question such a good thing, why are doing this for me?”

“Might it not be a simple display of generosity on my part?”

“Yes, I suppose it might be. But it isn’t, is it?”

“No, actually. We have a job for you.”

This made me feel more comfortable as self-interest was a motive I understood better.

“I am at your service, ma’am.”

“Yes, you are. As that police officer carelessly told you when you arrived, there is a project on the western island. It is of national, perhaps of global, significance.

“We have a very comfortable life in these islands, Mr. Custer. We have not been affected much by the world’s crises. Climate change arguably has benefited us. Due to a policy of strict isolation at a crucial time, we were spared the worst of the world’s plagues. Our population declined only modestly. Stanley alone numbers more than a thousand people.
 All of this good fortune burdens us with responsibility. We need to re-engage the world beyond our beaches if humanity ever is to recover. This is especially true now that you and your Dakotan friends have set everything back so enormously. It is our duty to spread civilization and the rule of law once again.”

“A noble goal, Your Majesty.”

“Please do not be so nauseatingly obsequious. We both know you couldn’t care less about civilization, or about our plans for empire. However, you are going to help, and thus repair a small part of the damage you have done.”

“How can I help?”

“Let me first state the problem. As sparse as the world population is, there are very few places we can colonize without a fight from the natives. This is definitely true of Argentina, which otherwise would be the geographically logical place to start. In Argentina no government extends beyond village level, but so far every village has resisted any offer of aid.”

“The aid, I presume, would involve a military presence.”

“Yes, Mr. Custer. While we could force the issue in at least a few places, I have no wish to wage an endless low level war against guerrillas.”

“Understandable. It sounds as though you found someplace more congenial to plant the flag.”

“Quite right. Several months ago we launched a secret expedition from Fox Bay East to the Southern Continent.”

Australia?”

Antarctica. Already we have a secret base on Adelaide Island just off the Antarctic Peninsula. The old Rothera Point research station proved quite salvageable. As soon as the colony is more firmly established and properly defended we shall go public with the information.”

“Why would you want to occupy that desolate place?”

“Except for our colonists it is deserted, but it is not desolate. In fact it is quite pleasant much of the year. Grasses have spread. Sheep and goats are doing well. Fisheries should do spectacularly well. Our colony will soon not only sustain itself but will build an export trade. It is through settlements such as this that a global economy and civilization slowly will re-emerge.”

“This has something to do with my job?”

“We mean to secure the continent further by establishing a second colony on Ross Island at the old American McMurdo Station. This is a much more inhospitable place I should warn you. You are to join the first expedition. Your airship will be useful for transport and exploration. Your experience with the craft is valuable to us. I trust I can count on your loyalty.”

“Because I always can be exposed as a war criminal,” I said.

“There is no need to state the obvious.”

“My apologies. If I may ask, what are the conditions that far south in the Antarctic? Has the ice retreated?”

“The conditions are cold. The sea ice at the periphery has diminished substantially, but the interior ice pack seems stable. You can talk to our geologists about all that.”

“The airship will need a hanger if the weather is still very harsh,” I said..” I’m amazed it has survived what I put it through. We have been very lucky.”

“You must make do with what you find. We will supply you with what materials and manpower your airship can carry. The rest is up to you. Our interview is over.”

HIRISAWA: Mr. Custer, I must ask you. Did not your cover identity strike you as exceedingly thin? Dozens of people knew precisely who you were. She sent you back to the helm of the most identifiable craft on earth.

AENEAS CUSTER: Yes, sir. It also struck me that the thinness was intentional. The Queen is not a stupid woman. I guessed she wanted to delay my interception by my enemies rather than prevent it. That my cover identity was maintained so successfully for so long no doubt was perturbing to her. Had my disguise held out for much longer, it is likely Anne’s own red shirts would have arrested me as part of some diplomatic maneuver. But what could I do? There was no alternative but to go along with the Falkies.

HIRISAWA – I see. Are you nearing the end of your testimony?

AENEAS – Yes, sir.

After my makeover as a blond, I was sent back to Goose Green. The airship was still there. Nearer had been fitted with hinged plexiglass windows, but otherwise looked the same. There was no time to worry about my future. That very day two soldiers accompanied me on a flight to an outpost on the west island. The soldiers disembarked and three civilians got on board. After topping of the tanks, the four of us lifted off from West Falkland Island.

The civilians, a man and two women, were scientists. I learned their names (Bob, Laura, and Abigail) but adopted a gruff style towards them that discouraged personal questions. They talked among themselves and discussed nothing remotely political. I found them refreshing. I hoped nothing would go wrong with the engines because, despite my cover as an airship specialist, a mechanical genius I was not.

The flight over the Drake Passage started out pleasantly enough. Sea gulls took an unusual interest in us. One was almost tame. It flew inside, landed on the steering wheel, and then took cover behind some baggage when the trip turned harrowing. A front moved up from the South. What we hit was not a storm. It was just the Antarctic puffing in our direction. It was an unnerving omen of what lay ahead. We fought winds the rest of the way. For the first time in my life I experienced bone-chilling cold. We closed the gondola tight, but this scarcely helped. Ice formed on the aluminum struts and on my eyebrows. My companions seemed unconcerned.

The Antarctic Peninsula, much of which is north of the Antarctic Circle, is a spectacularly beautiful place. The mountains, an extension of the Andes, are majestic in height. They are mostly white with gray granite outcrops. We floated over deep fjords that lacked only fishing villages to be carbon copies of those in Norway. Queen Anne planned to add those villages in the coming years. We floated over a huge form that looked like an abstract ice sculpture of a bear. I began looking for more natural ice sculptures and found them everywhere. The snow looked pure. The cold soon stopped bothering me so much. Already I loved this place.

A medley of colors bordered the beaches. There are no trees on this continent, but in the summer flowering plants cover flourish in the lower elevations. As Queen Anne had mentioned, grasses have a firmer hold than they did a century ago. On the beaches seals played and sunned themselves. Penguins bodysurfed ashore and then swam back out to catch another wave. Large dark shapes could be seen beneath the surface further out at sea. The occasional spout identified them as whales. Marine life was rich beyond imagination. The new colonies would not starve. Fish, krill, and kelp abounded in quantities beyond any possible demand.

We arrived over Adelaide Island. Rothera Station is located on a promontory on the southeast of the island. There is a runway of crushed rock and a sizable aircraft hanger. A trawler was tied up at the wharf. Several buildings containing laboratories and living quarters were arranged tidily near the foot of a hill. Grasses and flowers covered the lower elevations around Rothera. Sheep and goats grazed in the unfenced pasture. There were scattered patches of snow. The hills had substantial quantities of the stuff.

Two dozen people assembled by the runway building to watch Nearer as we drew closer. The winds were blustery, so even with all our directional thrust we needed help to land. Not without difficulty, several Rotherans caught our ropes and helped guide us to a mooring mast that evidently had been erected just for us. The airship’s nose locked onto the mast.

I opened a Plexiglas window, swung over the side, and dropped several feet to the ground. There was a mound of snow on the ground next to where I fell. I removed a glove, reached out, and touch snow for the first time in my life.

“There is more where that came from,” said a man wearing an unfastened parka and sunglasses. “My name is Professor Watersby and I am the Chief Administrator here.”

“Pleasure.”

“You are the optimist.”

Abbie had unrolled a rope ladder and was descending to the surface. Bob and Laura prepared to follow.

“Let us go inside and plan your flight to the south,” Watersby continued. “I need to tell you that I don’t approve. It is a foolish dispersion of resources that we can ill afford. The Peninsula is more than enough to colonize and it is infinitely better suited to habitation. This is where we should be investing manpower and money. Besides, your blimp probably will not even make it to McMurdo.”

“I don’t make those decisions.”

“Nor do I. However, consider yourself warned.”

“So considered.”

“Right. So, come along then. We shall determine how to send you on your way, while disrupting our station here as little as possible.”

This greeting, including as it did a prognostication of our imminent demise, struck me as rude. My first snowball ever struck the Rothera Administrator on the back of the neck. He turned and stared in disbelief. Laura, the meteorologist member of the Nearer crew, unleashed supporting fire with a snowball that struck Watersby square on the forehead.

With enormous dignity the Administrator said, “Get them.”

The islanders scrambled for the nearest snow patches. The four of us newcomers did the same. The barrage and counter-barrage lasted the better part of an hour. The exchange ended when someone of high intelligence and good will shouted “Tea!”

The battle had been good for all of us. We entered a large structure. It was ramshackle on the outside, but quite homey on the inside. A few of the station personnel began clinking and clattering in the kitchen, while the rest of us settled down in the adjacent dining room. I hung my heavy jacket on back of the chair. The refreshments were not long in coming. We chattered, drank tea, ate muffins, drank wine, and then drank more tea. I let my guard down and joined in the conviviality.

It was all very enjoyable until Laura suddenly pointed her finger at me. My lapse in gruffness now had consequences. Laura took a verbal crowbar to my cover. “Are you who you say you are, Chester?” she asked with the knowing smile one so often sees on guests at cocktail parties who are intent on generating an effect by means of some indiscretion.

“Are any of us?”

“I shan’t be offput by that nonsense either. You are from South Dakota.”

“We all have to be from somewhere.”

South Dakota is not just somewhere. You piloted this ship all the way from South Dakota to the Falklands. Nor were you just some aerial chauffeur, were you? It makes you Aeneas’ Martin Bormann, doesn’t it?”

The tea party had turned extremely dangerous for me, even though Laura had an essential fact wrong.

“That is a disagreeable comparison if I ever heard one,” I objected. “It’s not fair either. I’m not a Nazi or even a common criminal.”

“I never used the word common.”

“Look … We all know the terrible things that happened up north. I wish I could change them, but I can’t. I didn’t make those things happen. I didn’t hurt anyone. I’m not giving you an ‘I was only following orders’ excuse. I didn’t follow any orders. I didn’t give any either. I’m sorry for the people in Quebec. I’m sorry for the people in the Black Hills.”

“Yes, I suppose you lost friends and family.”

“Probably. I honestly don’t know. I don’t want to know either. I take it you had suspicions about me from the start. Why are you bringing this matter up now?”

“Because I’m tired of tip-toeing around the subject. Don’t worry, Chester, you got away with it.”

“There was no ‘it’ with which to get away.”

“Yes, there was, but I believe you were not a key player, because no one arrested you. Instead, the authorities in Stanley hired you for this trip on account of your expertise.

“That makes him von Braun,” interjected Abigail mischievously.

 Laura smiled.

“So, it seems you are not a big enough fish, Chester, for anyone to bother about. You don’t need to look over your shoulder for assassins.”

“I’m not so sure.”

Laura swiftly aimed her index finger and mock shot me. She giggled when I jumped.

“Relax. Now if you were that horrible Aeneas it would be different. There was a man who deserved to die. You spent a lot of time with him. What was he like?”

“Over-rated. But, you know, he wasn’t as evil-minded as everyone seems to think. I’m sure he didn’t mean for things to turn out the way they did.”

“True. He meant to destroy Quebec City too.”

“I really don’t think so.”

“Then you are wrong. He fooled you. Pathological liars are good at that.”

“Pathological? That doesn’t sound right to me. I’ll admit he did lie to me more than once though.”

Laura twirled my recently dyed blond curls with a finger. Everyone in the room was listening carefully. Laura had achieved her desired effect.

“You worry me, Chester, for defending him. Maybe we should radio Quebec about you after all. Maybe there is a price on your head. A small one.”

“Is that what you want to do?”

Laura laughed. “Oh, no! Don’t take my teasing to heart. If we are going to make it down here, Chester… do you have a last name by the way?”

“No. Joelle didn’t believe in them for anyone except herself.”

“My, you must tell us about Joelle one day too. Anyway, if we are to make it down here, we all have to hang together.”

“‘Or we shall hang separately.’ Yes, I’ve read my Ben Franklin.” I said.

“Actually, only you are at any risk of hanging, my dear boy.”

“How reassuring.”

“But we might all freeze to death or something equally dreadful. My point is that none of us here want to hurt you. We need you. That is all I’m trying to say. This place can be a fresh start for you. You can count on us.” Laura asked the room at large, “Can’t he?”

All murmured assent, a couple of voices reluctantly it seemed to me..

“All of us will keep your big secret,” Laura added with a wink. “Someday, when tempers cool enough for you to go public safely, you should write about all that sex in South Dakota and about your flight here with the fiend Aeneas Custer. Call it They Hied with Their Boots On. Subtitle it And Nothing Else. Errol Flynn would approve.”

“An ancient movie buff! A woman after my own heart. About all that sex though … love really wasn’t so free after Selena took charge.”

“Love is never free at any time. Anyone who thinks so simply hasn’t received the bill yet. Anyhow, my intention simply is to say you can count on us. Can we count on you?”

Absolutely. I made a promise to the Queen.”

“Really? Personally?”

“Yes. Besides, I had better do right by the Falklands.  I have no place else safe to go.”

Watersby raised a wineglass. “That sounds like a fine reason for loyalty.”

“Here, here!” chimed in the others.

“Here, here,” I answered. No doubt the alcohol assisted the general mood of camaraderie. From that moment on Adelaide Island I felt secure among the Falkies. No secret is better than an open one. No one attaches to it enough significance to take any action on its account. I had no intention of ever publishing a book, of course. In fact, I was a little worried that the real Chester might do so one day, but the odds were that he would just settle into an obscure life on South Georgia.

In preparation for our flight to McMurdo, the geologists and climatologists at Rothera filled me in on the polar conditions. As the Queen had said, the continent’s interior ice cap appeared stable. There had been a retreat of the ice shelves, but little additional melting. This is why the ocean rise in the past century has been modest. Sea ice displaces the same volume as liquid water. Only ice resting on land adds to the ocean when it melts.

There does not seem much risk of a sudden polar disaster despite fears voiced at the turn of the century that the West Antarctic ice sheet might one-day slide into the ocean. As best we can tell, it is firmly held in place by the shape of the crustal base which forms an enormous bowl. This shape is created by the weight of the ice itself. Our scientists say it will take hundreds if not thousands of years for higher global temperatures to affect the land ice substantially. However, the continental fringes, in particular the Peninsula, are far more livable than they once were.

All too soon it was time for Nearer to go. The flight to McMurdo was cold. Very cold. Three hours out from Rothera our fuel line froze. At Adelaide Island we had filled up on kerosene. Some water must have been mixed in with it. The wind blew us off our course. Below us were the desolate, white Transantarctic Mountains. My companions discussed what our prospects might be if we made landfall and marched back. The prospects, they agreed, were not good. On the other hand, we had no chance at all if we drifted much farther.

At the best of times I am a mediocre mechanic. At 15 degrees below zero C with thick gloves (without which I would have lost my hands) I didn’t rise to the level of mediocrity. My companions were no better. The first settlers sent to McMurdo should have been electricians, plumbers, and practical mechanics instead of three theoretical scientists and a political refugee.

For once I had grounds to criticize the Le Pens; they had too much confidence in the reliability of their machine. It was not well configured for repairs, especially by novices. There was no obvious way to get at the line without causing additional damage that we couldn’t repair with the tools and parts at hand.

After persistent and fruitless fumbling, at last I had an inspiration. I snipped a length of bare #12 ground wire from a spool in Nearer’s inadequate repair kit. I removed a glove and my coat, rolled up my sleeve, and reached into the fuel tank. My hand and arm went numb in the cold kerosene but I managed to snake the wire into the fuel line. After poking and twisting the wire repeatedly in an attempt to clear the blockage, I withdrew my arm from the tank. My fingers no longer obeyed my commands but they gripped onto the wire by themselves. With high hopes, but little confidence, I cranked the turbine again. It roared to life.

Bob took the controls as I covered myself with blankets and stuck my hand between my thighs. Life returned to my hand slowly. It tingled painfully.

The engine gave us no further trouble on the trip but we were far from safe. The Antarctic is not a forgiving environment. We had failed to take the simple precaution of properly insulating the gondola. Our new Plexiglas windows proved extremely leaky, and the leaks nearly killed us. Wind chill factors are to be taken seriously in those latitudes. We hung blankets over the windows, but these helped only a little. Wind whistled around the edges and through the fabric itself. We reached Ross Island before hypothermia had taken any of us, but had our flight lasted only a few hours longer a tragedy might well have happened.

We approached our destination.

“That’s it?” Bob asked.

“It has to be.”

“How depressing.”

From the air, McMurdo Station had all the charm of some late 19th century coal town. Uninteresting industrial buildings sprawled at odd angles over gray dirt and gravel.

“Well, it’s large enough,” he added.

“They told me about 1,200 people used to live here in the summer. About 250 stayed the winter.”

“It won’t always be so bleak,” chirped our botanist Abigail optimistically. “Our hybrid grasses should take hold here. They may even survive in some of the inland dry valleys.”

“It is dark here a very long time each year,” I objected.

“That isn’t the problem. Moisture is the problem. Don’t let the ice fool you. This is a very dry place. I think there will be just enough water, though.”

“If you say so.”

We descended slowly. We passed over Hut Point Peninsula where Scott’s hut still stands. The shelves carry his original supplies from nearly two centuries ago. Beyond the Peninsula were the blue waters of McMurdo Sound. The port is usually ice-free during the summer months.

“Where do we set down?” Bob asked.

“I don’t know. Any chance of getting Nearer under cover?”

“Not unless we deflate the airbag. There are some helicopter hangers to the south, but they are not big enough for this thing.”

“Okay, let’s try landing in the open area with all the big containers below that hill.”

“Observation Hill?”

“Whatever. Maybe we can secure the ship to one of the containers.”

Bob went over the side and down a rope ladder while I tried to hold the ship steady. He tied us down. I wasn’t happy with these arrangements but they would have to do. The rest of us disembarked.

Once we were on the ground the town didn’t seem so bad. Only the absence of other people made it strange. All abandoned towns are unsettling, but the well-preserved ones are the spookiest. The sounds are wrong. A living community is dominated by clanks, rumbles, and background voices. McMurdo was filled with rustles, creaks, and whistles of wind.

We explored methodically. Most of the buildings needed little in the way of repair. In one building a bar named Southern Exposure was still well stocked with excellent ancient brands of wine, beer, and whiskey. A much larger building nearby sported the number 155. It contained a cafeteria with a working kitchen and recreational areas. We found a firehouse with equipment that, flat tires aside, looked almost new. In a multi-bay garage we found trucks and snow cats in excellent condition.

We decided to occupy an administrative building called the Chalet. There we laid out plans to bring life back to McMurdo. In addition, we each claimed homestead rights to one structure. I claimed the building containing Southern Exposure. It was a business with a future.

Our work was cut out for us. The last occupants of the station had done a very responsible job of winterizing everything before they left, so remarkably little of the mechanical systems needed replacing. Naturally, they needed servicing. Every switch and valve needed to be tested. Every door, window and shingle needed to be checked. It was slow, tedious, but satisfying work. My proudest moment came after servicing a snow cat. Bob had bet me that we couldn’t get it started. I took the bet but secretly agreed with him. Yet, after lubrication, refueling, and recharging, the machine roared healthily.

The big fuel tanks outside of town were full, but we didn’t want to squander the contents. They would be hard to replace. Fortunately, a source of power was readily available. Strong winds, called katabatic winds for some reason probably known by the meteorologist on our team, blow constantly from the interior. Wind turbine generators, with their attendant batteries and control equipment, had been shipped to the station toward the end of its previous occupation. We found several stored in crates in a warehouse near the helicopter hanger. We assembled two and were rewarded with electric power. We soon learned why they had been left in storage. The winds often blow so hard that they tear the windmills apart. We used them anyway even though we had to fix them repeatedly. They helped conserve our fuel.

The environment on Ross Island, as the Queen had warned, was far less hospitable than along the Peninsula; but the resources were as abundant as on Adelaide Island. We mounted two expeditions using Nearer to scout out the surrounding territory. The airship then was deflated and housed, lest it be destroyed by winds. We would use electrolysis to manufacture hydrogen when the time came to use the airship again. We spent the remaining summer months preparing for the long winter ahead. Laura had some success planting her grasses. We hoped they would survive. Seals and penguins supplied us with meat, but our goal was to make the land suitable for goats and sheep.

A sail-powered wooden ship arrived in April bringing supplies and more settlers. Among these were practical artisans of the sort we desperately needed. Our first dog teams arrived at this time as well. Southern Exposure turned a profit for me that month and for every month thereafter.

When it came, the winter came hard. Snowfall was relatively modest, but the temperature plummeted. The winds blew so fiercely that dustings of snow built up on interior carpets. Weather-tight as we tried to make the doors and windows, the particles found their way through. Sometimes air movement could be felt at the surface of apparently solid walls. The sea froze over and locked us out of any outside relief. It was dark. In June there was no sun at all. If you could stand the cold, however, the frequent aurora australis displays were breathtaking.

During the dark months, we still needed to hunt, work, and maintain our machinery. It was easy to make a painful error. After re-bolting a damaged wind turbine on a fairly balmy –20 degree Celsius night, Bob lost a finger to frostbite. He was lucky. On the same repair job I touched steel with an exposed bit of wrist. A patch of skin was torn off. It never did heal properly.

Despite all our difficulties, I was truly happy. Our adversary, the weather, was ruthless but not malicious. More satisfying still, we prevailed. Our colony hung on. In the Spring a ship arrived carrying more supplies and more settlers including fishermen, butchers and furriers. McMurdo rapidly became self-sustaining. Before the end of the summer we were exporting, and I ordered imports of wine and liquor.

Within a remarkably few years, hundreds came to live in our improbable place. They found their way here from the Falklands, from South America, from Australia, and from Africa. Antarctica never will be a crowded continent. However, our settlements contribute to the world economy. Trading vessels from as far away as Alaska and Greenland turn up in our port.

We were a small part of a worldwide recrudescence. Nothing could undo the tragedy of Quebec, but at least it was not fatal to the rest of civilization. On the Peninsula, Adelaide Island thrives. Up North, Canada, though still under-populated, in an ironic role reversal made a protectorate of Quebec. The Russians slowly have traders as well as pirates. The Tibetans occupy parts of the jungles of the old Celestial Empire. Functioning city states have appeared at Hobart and Capetown.

HIRISAWA: Are you arguing that the destruction of Quebec was for the best, Mr Custer?

AENEAS CUSTER: No, your honor. I merely wish to declare that I am not hostile to civilization in Quebec or anywhere else. On the contrary, I am enthusiastic about it.

My happy life in Antarctica ended with the arrival of a trading boat from Alaska. I spotted the flag as soon as the ship arrived. I looked forward to meeting the crew and passing gossip with fellow Americans. There was no doubt that they would show up at Southern Exposure.

Sure enough, that evening six sailors entered and took a table. All were dressed in parkas. One left as I approached the table. The others placed orders. Although I made an effort to chat with them, they were disappointingly laconic. The five men had some questions about McMurdo, about its export goods, and about the local prostitutes, but they had little to say about their travels or about Alaska. As soon as I gave them directions to the brothel they left. They tipped poorly. Just as the last patron left and I was closing the door, the sixth sailor slipped inside. She pulled back the hood of her parka revealing a shock of red.

“Hello, Aeneas.”

“Hello, Selena.”

She closed the door and locked it.

 “You seem to have survived your death rather nicely,” she observed.

“I work out.”

“I see. Miss me?”

“It seems a lot of people missed you. How did you get out of South Dakota?”

“By ultralight airplane. I had one hidden in an escape tunnel in case of emergency. It was a fast little thing. Even if the French had seen me fly away, they probably couldn’t have caught me.”

“You made it to Alaska in a flimsy ultralight?”

Saskatchewan. Then I worked my way under a false identity to BC. Gold was too heavy, so I brought bags of weed with me to sell. I had enough left when I reached the coast to open a head shop in Vancouver.”

“A what?”

“Head shop. You know, pot and bongs and such. If you really need to make a living, it is best to supply people’s vices. As you should well know,” she added with a wave at the liquor bottles on the shelf behind the bar.

“If you were making a living, why did you leave?”

“Things change. There was a big political push by one party to make pot illegal, if you can imagine that. All the publicity made me rather more high profile than I wanted. Reporters asked me my opinion about the new law. What did they think my opinion was? Anyway a couple of them whom I had blown off started following me. I worried somehow one guessed who I was and was working up a big exposé. It was time to go. I packed a few bags, gave my shadows the slip, and checked out the docks. There was an Alaskan boat down there. One of the sailors said they were going to McMurdo. I bought a ride. Here I am.”

“Here you are.”

“Nice bar.”

“Thanks.”

“Make a good profit?”

“I get by.”

“I thought so. That is why I took the liberty of writing up a bill of sale. You are going to sell me Southern Exposure for one pound.”

“Of flesh?”

Falkland currency.”

“I think not.”

“Then I’ll expose you.”

“You show them mine and I’ll show them yours.”

“Haven’t you learned not to play chicken with me?”

She had a point.

“Assuming just for the moment that I were to cave in to your blackmail, where do you suggest I go with my one pound?”

New Zealand. You’ll like there.”

“I hope the exchange rate is favorable. That’s 3,000 kilometers away, you know. Should I swim?”

“I advise against it.”

“Would you help me steal Nearer?” I asked more seriously.

“Don’t be so dramatic. Take the boat I came in. Don’t steal it either. It is stopping in New Zealand on the way back to Alaska. In fact, I’ll give you my return ticket.”

“Very generous. They actually wrote you a ticket? And you bought round trip?”

“It was cheaper. Don’t ask me why.”

Selena had cornered me. Murder was an option and I considered it, but somehow I didn’t have the heart for it. I also could have gone to the authorities and hoped for the best. My expectation, though, was that the Queen would express dismay that she had been taken in by my clever disguise. She would express remorse that her guards evidently had shot the wrong man. She then would arrest me and ship me off to Quebec City, or, possibly, I would be shot trying to escape again, this time for real.

If I had chosen to accept this, I could have dragged Selena down with me, but my instinct for self-preservation was stronger than my instinct for revenge. Selena had judged me correctly. I sold her the bar. She paid me the pound out of my own cash register. I packed my bags and headed for the dock.

HIRISAWA: Excuse me, Mr. Custer. You have sworn that you didn’t know Selena’s current whereabouts. Are you telling us now that she is tending bar in McMurdo?

PROUDFOOT: If I may interrupt, your Honor, I was told by the ABI that this information about Selena was given to them on the first day of Mr. Custer’s arrest.

HIRISAWA: By Mr. Custer?

PROUDFOOT: Yes. The information wasn’t made public because the agency didn’t want to tip off Selena. Instead, the State Department informed the Canadians, and the Canadians immediately shipped out their own agents to arrest her. She was gone from Antarctica when they arrived. She had sold the bar for considerably more than one pound. The best guess is that she bought a ride on a fishing boat to New Zealand or Australia.

My understanding is that Canadian agents followed up in both places, but didn’t get very far. Those are big countries and there isn’t much central authority in either one of them. The few denizens interviewed were unhelpful. In fact they were profoundly disinterested in the whole affair.

HIRISAWA: So no one knows where she is.

PROSECUTOR: Yes, sir. For all we know she could be in South Africa or Tierra Del Fuego. On this one occasion the defendant was telling the truth.

HIRISAWA: I understand. Go on, Mr. Custer.

AENEAS CUSTER: Well, your honors, you know the rest. The captain of the Alaskan ship told me he had a lucrative contract offer and was returning to Vancouver. This was a lie. Instead of putting into port there, he proceeded to Alaska where there was a premium on the reward for my capture – the Canadians must have thought it was a likely destination for me. As soon as the boat neared shore, the crew attacked me and tied me up. Selena must have told them who I was, and they were after the reward. They stuck me in a dark hold. The remainder of the trip was terrible. The sea was rough and I knew what I faced onshore. The next time I was saw light was in Juneau. I was dragged out onto the deck and handed over to the police. The crew collected the money for me and I have been in jail ever since.

HIRISAWA: Is that the whole of your defense?

AENEAS CUSTER: Yes, sir. That is what happened.

HIRISAWA: Then sit down as you agreed.


END OF DEFENSE TESTIMONY, TRANSCRIPT OF ALASKA VS CUSTER


The Prosecutor, Alexander Proudfoot, stood up to present his case. The impatient judges disallowed many of his witnesses, but in his closing argument he made an impassioned plea for justice for the victims of the missile strikes.

It didn’t take the Court long to come back with a verdict of guilty. Each judge made a brief statement. Judge Wilson chided Aeneas as she would have chided a juvenile delinquent. Hirisawa made clever jokes while concurring in the verdict. Maggio expressed disapproval of the prosecution’s presentation, but briefly reviewed the law regarding accessories as crucial to his concurrence with the guilty verdict. Any other verdict would have been a cause for war, as each of the judges well knew.

The prosecution was given a chance to present some of its evidence for the sentencing part of the hearing. The panel, however, rushed and generally curtailed the victim testimonies. The defense made no further arguments and no plea for mercy.

An element of the Republic of Alaska’s jurisprudence that alternately fascinates and appalls outsiders is its open recognition and embrace of retribution as the essence of justice. Although prisons exist, they most often are passed over in favor of a punishment more satisfying to the convict’s victims. For example, a reckless driver who has caused death or injury is likely to be released in the middle of a large open field. There his victims, or the families of his victims, are free to attempt to run him over in four-wheelers before he reaches the safety of the tree line. Those convicted of theft legally may be robbed for a period of time chosen by the court. Those guilty of domestic violence may be beaten by any citizen. Murderers may be killed. Some of the more detestable convicted criminals are lucky to make it to the bottom of the courthouse steps before citizen justice catches up with them. Whether barbaric or enlightened, the method works. The crime rate is low.

Aeneas Custer was sentenced to be released on a tiny rocky islet outside the Sitka Sound. The Republic of Alaska then offered use of the islet to the warship La Salle, now with the Canadian Royal Navy, for gunnery practice. The CRN accepted the offer.

Aeneas was held in the largely empty jail while the La Salle made the arduous journey around the Horn. Aeneas didn’t mind the wait. He read extensively and agreed to several interviews with reporters. Eventually the day came when he was escorted to the docks.

The hold of the wooden hulled boat in which he was transported was dark. The air was still. Aeneas felt neither cold nor hot. He once had read about sensory deprivation tanks. The smell of fish and the pain in his buttocks on the hard bench prevented a full parallel experience, but Aeneas did lose all sense of time. That was fine with him. He was in no hurry. He felt no relief when the hatch above opened and bright white light surged in. Two burly men entered the hold.

Four large hands grabbed both his arms and pushed him roughly out of the hatch. He babbled to them about sensory deprivation. His eyes had not yet adjusted to the light before he bodily was lifted over the side and dropped. Aeneas stumbled as he landed. His right foot splashed in a few inches of salt water. His left foot twisted painfully on a rock. He fell forward. Sharp edged rocks bit into his hands but he avoided hitting the ground with his face.

“You wanted to be king of South Dakota, Aeneas? You are sole ruler of this land! Enjoy your domain while you can!” taunted one of the large men as he returned to the boat.

The deck hand placed the end of a long pole at the water’s edge and pushed. The boat slowly backed away from the shore.

Aeneas’ vision cleared. The rocky outcrop on which he knelt was no more than 5 meters wide by 10 long. In the far distance he could see an irregularity in the horizon that might possibly be land. It just as easily could be a cloud. Swimming that distance surely was out of the question.

Aeneas climbed to the top of the highest rock and sat down. He watched the puttering boat depart. The sea breeze was mild and pleasant. Aeneas smiled.

On the deck of the La Salle a full admiral handed the binoculars to the female ensign standing next to him. Her hair was dark but red roots were beginning to peek through.

“That’s it there,” he said.

She tweaked the focus. “I see it.” It was a tiny islet with an oddly shaped rock near the southern end. “After this can we discuss my rank?” she asked.

“No, anything more would draw too much attention to you. Be satisfied you are an officer. Be satisfied with your very large bonus too. Be satisfied you aren’t on the island with your brother. I still say you just should have come to us at the beginning.”

“No, it all was too fresh then. Emotions ran too high. Your people would have locked me up, or worse. I made a better deal by staying free and waiting.”

“You are sure you still remember the control room locations and all of the codes?”

“I’ll never forget them,” replied the Ensign formerly known as Selena.

"Finish your job,” he told her.

The ensign turned to the gun crew and without hesitation shouted, “Fire!”













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