A History of the Future (30 page)

The steward returns with dessert: cheesecake with raspberry sauce.

“You’re really not going to arrest me?” I ask.

“Correct,” she says. She goes and gets one of those decanters off the sideboard and brings it back to the table. She pours two drinks into heavy-bottomed glasses. “Michigan cherry brandy,” she says. “Not half bad. What do you know about the recent history of our country and what’s happened around the world?” she asks.

“Next to nothing,” I say.

“Would you like to know? I think it will provide some perspective for you in the Service.”

“Am I already signed up for this service?”

“Why did you leave home?”

“To see what was going on out here.”

“What’s going on is stranger than you ever imagined. Did you not expect to have some adventures when you left home?”

“I suppose I did.”

“Well, my gift from the sea, you’re going to have the adventure of your lifetime, and we’re going to train you for it, and here is a condensed version of what has been going on in the world.”

She tells it. President Ted Sharpe made the decision to send troops into the Holy Land. Israel was surrounded by failed states and it was being pounded and harassed by jihadists of every sort. Classic fourth-generation asymmetrical warfare, she called it. Even the Israelis, who were so astute about self-defense, couldn’t contain these adversaries. They certainly couldn’t use their nukes. Against what? Egypt? Egypt was a basket case. It didn’t even have a national government anymore. All the other nation-states of the old Levant were in collapse: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria. Iran never did produce a usable nuclear weapon, though it pretended for a while. Then the Iranians made the mistake of electing the maniac Mousa Forood president and he started a civil war, which bled over to Iraq and wrecked most of the remaining oil industry in both places. Desertification was becoming extreme in the region with the annual average temperature rising. It was all about too many people in places that couldn’t support them all, Ms. Estridge said, but it expressed itself in widespread religious war, all against all and everybody against Israel. For Israel it was like being stung to death by fire ants. So we went in to help and it was Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan all rolled into one. We might have lasted longer on the ground, perhaps, but the bombing of Los Angeles kick-started the collapse of the economy. It had been running on fumes for decades anyway. Ms. Estridge said she was personally surprised that the American public did not rise up against the government even before the LA bomb, given the disastrous inflation and the gasoline lines.

Elsewhere, Europe had broken down economically. England and Scotland separated. England went fascist, she said, and tried to deport large numbers of nonwhites on ships. That only started an insurrection and then a dirty bomb went off in Birmingham, she said, which poisoned much of the country downwind, as well as the Netherlands. The Germans decided by consensus to go medieval, meaning a planned, orderly retreat to historically lower economic conditions and political arrangements, all managed by a parliamentary process. The government performed an official search for a new king, like he would be the head of a company, and divided its states into semiautonomous principalities. Russia went in a similar direction minus the orderly planning and, of course, more people died there as a result. All over the continent, old borders dissolved and new, smaller places emerged from the wreckage, run by every type of party, gang, popular savior, and despot. A lot of people froze to death. Many starved. Disease came later.

Asia was hit by everything at once and at full force: broken supply lines to the oil supply, economic collapse, ecological collapse, epidemic disease, famine, natural disaster, and war. Ms. Estridge said her people—meaning the government, I suppose—believe that China attempted to reduce its population by an engineered epidemic. The estimate was over a billion dead in the first wave. An elite received vaccinations beforehand. The population problem was solved in a few months, but the country was left with a ruined, poisoned landscape, a depleted water table, and not enough able-bodied people alive to bury all the bodies. So that brought on a second and then a third round of epidemics, the old standby killer diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever, which swept through China and killed off many of the elite. While that was still happening, an earthquake struck the port city of Tianjin and destroyed the infrastructure of the entire region, including Beijing, Cangzhou, and Baoding. She said that the stories about China putting a man on the moon are nonsense. The Chinese are heading back into the twelfth century mocked by the standing remnants of the ghost cities and highways they built in a stupendous orgy of construction that lasted only a few decades. A lot less is known about Japan, she said. When the airplanes and the trading ships stopped moving, the country went into lockdown. There are rumors of widespread starvation and radiation sickness. Nothing goes in and out of there now.

India had run out of water and attempted to seize the Indus River valley and its watershed from Pakistan. Ms. Estridge said that Indians hacked and disabled Pakistan’s nuclear launch
capabilities—I’m not sure what she meant by that—and a grinding war on the ground ended in the political collapse of both nations. The test-tube epidemic in China spread across the ancient trade routes, the Great Silk Road, where stuff was still moving in the absence of global shipping and aviation. India was especially savaged by the secondary diseases because of its tropical climate. Africa was a zombie continent of ghost nations returning to the wild kingdom. The region where Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay meet retained a veneer of old-time modern life because of the vast hydroelectric capacity that was still operating, but these countries shunned contact with the distressed, deindustrialized former big countries in the north. Similarly went Norway, which still had some oil out in the North Sea as well as hydropower and incorporated the rest of Scandinavia under its administration. Its attempt to organize a Greater Federation of Northern Europe, with itself as boss, failed. Very little information was coming out of Australia and New Zealand, she said. It was thought the two countries were doing okay because of their small populations and relative isolation and just wanted to be left alone.

Then there was us. Ms. Estridge shook her head and stared into her brandy glass for a long moment before continuing. General Walter Fellowes was the army chief of staff when things went south for us, she said. He was vehemently against the War in the Holy Land, as it came to be called, and organized an opposition to it in the Pentagon. He used the bombing in Los Angeles as a pretext to shove President Sharpe out of office, along with his own boss, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Royster, and many other of Ted Sharpe’s people, and he took over the management of the nation’s affairs—a classic coup d’état, she said, like in a banana republic. It’s true that the government was paralyzed in a state of chaos. It could do nothing about the fuel shortages and the bank failures. General Fellowes invoked the continuity of government policy and he got Congress to go along because the politicians violently opposed the war, too, including many in the president’s own party, and they didn’t see any other way out. Fellowes began to pull troops out of Israel and Lebanon right away. They put Ted Sharpe in Fort Detrick, Maryland. He turned up dead in his quarters two weeks after he arrived. Detrick was the center for the country’s biological weapons program, so they could have just dialed up room service to give him a lethal dose of something, she said. He was sixty-three years old and it was called natural causes. It didn’t really matter because a few weeks after that the bomb went off in Washington, DC, and killed off most of the rest of the government, including General Fellowes and all his people in the Pentagon, plus all the parasitical contractors and lobbyists, plus the news bureaus that covered the affairs of the nation, everything, all gone.

“Who was behind the bombs in Los Angeles and Washington?” I ask.

“Los Angeles, we think the Sinaloa Cartel.”

“What’s that?”

“Organized crime on the giant scale, initially organized around drug trafficking but by then a shadow government. It was a crude device. But effective enough.”

“And Washington?”

“Several Sunni extremist groups and Hezbollah all claimed credit. We never got to the bottom of it because the federal government was effectively disabled when it happened. We may never know. It was a more powerful bomb than the one in LA.”

I asked Ms. Estridge, “Where were you when all this happened?”

“I was in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the American embassy which we’d moved out of Moscow,” she said. “They didn’t know what to do. They decided to just stay in place and wait. They thought sooner or later a government would reorganize and issue instructions. As it happened, Speaker of the House Clayton Rhodes was back in his district, which was Nashville and its environs, when the bomb went off. He was second in the line of succession to Ted Sharpe. Vice President Corcoran was out of the picture, presumed vaporized in DC. They treated the Fellowes coup as if it hadn’t happened and invoked the continuity clause again. Rhodes organized a kind of rump federal government in Nashville. He called himself ‘acting president’ to be polite. He asked the state governors to appoint and send new congressional delegations there. It took a while. Communications were bad and the governors had terrible problems to manage in their own regions, food shortages, bank closings, failures of water, sewer, electric. Many states didn’t respond at all. The people of Tennessee were very anti–federal government and they weren’t alone. Their aspirations lay elsewhere, and all the disorder gave them a chance to act on it, as you’ll see presently,” she said.

“Meanwhile, that new Congress convened in the old statehouse there, and because the sentiment in Nashville was so poisonous the first thing they did was vote to move the capital to Chicago. By this time the economy was in freefall. Not only had we stopped receiving oil imports, but shale oil production had plummeted years earlier and the Canadians wouldn’t send us any of their tar sand oil because they wanted it for themselves. There was agitation in this new Congress to try and seize the Alberta tar sand region, but the military was in a state of disintegration. There wasn’t enough fuel for its ships to get all the troops out of the Holy Land or to mobilize a force here in North America. Troops weren’t getting paid, or even fed, and they just walked away from their posts. Most of the command structure from the Pentagon was dead, and there was no appetite among the surviving generals for another invasion of a sovereign country. Some of them even thought Canada might kick our ass.

“The move to Chicago was a debacle. Violence had broken out there. Too many poor people were not getting food. The banks were shut. Nobody was getting paid. The gas stations were down. The place was ungovernable. Many of the invited congressional delegations didn’t even show up, mostly the ones from southern states, plus California, which was in near anarchy. The only thing that Rhodes was able to do was organize a new constitutional convention, which took place that summer, ironically right around the Fourth of July. The delegates to the convention called a special election for president to be held among the governors of the remaining states. Things were too disorderly to organize a popular vote. The governors elected Harvey Albright, governor of Minnesota, to head the new federal government. He moved the capital to St. Paul, which was one of the few cities in the country that had put a transition plan into action for a future without oil. The city had substantial hydroelectric power from the Falls of St. Anthony, the only waterfall on the upper Mississippi. Clayton Rhodes himself eventually went back to Nashville, to be part of its own special thing.”

Ms. Estridge said she got back from Russia on a chartered oil tanker ship with twenty-eight thousand tons of crude aboard that the U.S. government bought with gold held in the embassy for just such an emergency. They landed at a place called the MTX Terminal in Bayonne, New Jersey. Ambassador Peletier was a former navy pilot. They swapped the oil cargo for a Gulfstream III jet, fueled up, and flew out of Newark to Minnesota. That was the last time she was ever up in an airplane, Ms. Estridge said. What had happened those months she was marooned in St. Petersburg was the breakup of the United States. I told her I read about this thing called the Foxfire Republic in a news sheet back when we were coasting Lake Erie before the storm and the wreck. She affirmed all that. It was a southern white supremacist breakaway nation, she said, dedicated to the unfinished business of the old Confederacy. It was ruled by a woman named Loving Morrow who had been in show business before she turned to religion and politics. They were running all the black people out of the Foxfire states, committing wholesale atrocities in the process: theft of property, detention, deportation, murder, just like the Germans a hundred years ago. The blacks fled deeper into the south, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana. Some of the whites down there fled north in turn to Tennessee, the Carolinas, Kentucky, and Virginia. But many of them wouldn’t leave their property behind and, when they tried to defend it, there were violent clashes with atrocities on all sides. Eventually, the black republic formed out of those Deep South states. It was led by a man who called himself simply Sage, real name: Milton Steptoe. He had run a check-cashing and payday loan empire all over the Deep South. I didn’t understand what that was so Ms. Estridge explained it. She had to explain a number of things to me that evening. Sage had organized an African-American militia to counter the Foxfire attempts to control northern Georgia, including Atlanta. The Foxfire government was very pugnacious, Ms. Estridge said. Loving Morrow was a fanatic, a religious maniac, claiming to follow injunctions directly from Jesus Christ to expand her territory, in effect to refight the Civil War and win it this time. Ms. Estridge called her a cornpone Nazi. “Think of Hitler with a Bible, big boobs, and a guitar,” she said. They were now threatening Cincinnati in order to control shipping on the Ohio River. We wouldn’t allow that, she said, meaning the federals.