She shook her head at that again.
Their property.
The previous owner, a minor Saudi prince, had lost the farm during the "resettlement" period in the year after the Disappearance. Caitlin's mouth quirked downward at the bloodless euphemism. "Pogrom" would be more accurate: ethnic cleansing on a scale to put into the shade the earlier atrocities in the Balkans. The prince had not complained, however. He'd been at a wedding in Damascus when the Israelis nuked the city.
She shook off the grim memories and took off again, shortening her stride as she dropped down a hillside where long summer grass covered the tangled roots of chestnut and elm and holly oak trees. She didn't need a sprained ankle or worse to teach her not to run blindly over treacherous ground. Small families of birds took flight at her approach, starlings and robins as best she could tell. They'd experienced something of a population boom earlier this spring, rebounding from the collapse of their populations after the pollution storms. Turning onto Thicketts Road, which wound down through the hills toward the village of Mildenhall, Caitlin settled into a long, loping stride. She felt good this morning and decided to add another couple of miles to her course by circling the village a few times. That way she might even catch Bret and Monique on the way home if he was cycling up to Swindon as planned. She played her thumb over her wedding ring. It was still so new, she hadn't built up a callus on her palm beneath it. Just as her mother and father had. She remembered the feeling of their hands as though she had just let go of them, a tactile memory so sharp that she had to wonder whether it had anything to do with the tumor that had been cut out of her brain. The doctors had said there would be side effects from the treatment.
She pushed away the troubling idea that her mind was not quite right and never would be again, preferring to concentrate on her breathing and balance as she powered along the country road.
She and Bret would build up their own calluses, their own family history, here or back home in America, with Monique and any more children who came after her. She knew they would. There would be a long time ahead of them for all that.
4
New York Culver took a spot at the back of the press conference in Castle Clinton, the old sandstone fort at the northern end of Battery Park. It was possible, standing on the freshly raked gravel and staring over the heads of the reporters, to look at the skyline of Lower Manhattan and imagine that not much was wrong in the world. You merely had to ignore a few scorch marks and broken windows, maybe squint your eyes a little to fuzz up the details, and you could have been standing in the New York of old, with life teeming around you, ten million people, seemingly twenty million cars, the subway rattling and roaring underfoot as you walked downtown, the smoky, earthy fragrance of frying meat from a hundred street carts, the clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages around the park. It was almost as though he could close his eyes and be back there, strolling up to Redeye, his favorite bar and grill, for a perfectly cooked fillet of Chilean swordfish with San Moriglio sauce.
Instead, the thump of two Blackhawk helicopters circling the southern tip of the island drowned out what little ambient noise there was, mostly distant gunfire or the crash, rumble, and grind of salvage work.
The White House chief of staff folded his arms and pushed the pleasant daydreams away. It would be a long time before anyone in this country could indulge in daydreams again. While Karen Milliner warmed up the audience by taking questions on the issues of the moment-Jackson Blackstone's antics down in Fort Hood, the Indo-Pakistani wars, and the congressional hearings on the Lands and Homesteading Act-Culver contented himself with scoping out the scene. The colonnaded cloisters of the roughly circular fort were deep in shade with the sun climbing high overhead, and he could make out Secret Service details stalking through the shadows, ever watchful. The reporters were arrayed on plastic chairs in front of Karen Milliner, who spoke from a plain black podium.
Jed turned his attention to the reporters who were going back and forth with Karen as prelude to the main game, Kipper's appearance in a few minutes. The national networks, for want of a more accurate term, had sent their heavy hitters; the bloggers were a bit of a rabble, as always, and the news sites and daily papers had assigned their national security guys rather than their Seattle correspondents. That told him right away how they were going to play the resettlement story: as a battle for the Wild East.
Kip wasn't going to like that.
He really did prefer to concentrate on the constructive side of nation building, or rebuilding. The uglier, more violent aspects of reclaiming the frontier were something he considered a grim necessity, best left to the experts.
Jackson Blackstone-Culver refused to refer to the man as "General," since he had been forcibly retired-was undeniably one of those experts. However, you could hardly count the elected territorial governor of Texas as one of the president's men.
The White House chief of staff suppressed a rueful grin as someone questioned Milliner about Fort Hood again.
"Ms. Milliner, my sources indicate there are significant efforts to evict and deport families vetted under the Federal Homestead Program. Does the president intend to do anything about the racists and rebels at Fort Hood?"
That had come from a blogger, of course, Krist Novoselic from the Seattle Weekly. Culver still didn't know why Kip had insisted on accrediting any of those assholes. They had zero respect for the conventions of the old press corps. You couldn't even leak to them without the fact of it appearing in the opening paragraph of any resulting story, as he had discovered to his undying chagrin very early in the administration.
"We are monitoring the situation in the Texas Territory, Krist. The president isn't pretending to be happy about it. But he's not about to go hauling out the big stick to beat on Mister Blackstone just to prove that he's a tough guy. Frankly, President Kipper is a busy man, Krist, and Fort Hood is a tenth-order issue at best. I probably shouldn't have to remind you, either, that Mr. Blackstone is not a rebel. He was actually elected. So no, we won't be sending the cavalry. And if that's what you were hoping for to boost your traffic stats, I'd suggest you prepare for disappointment."
A ripple of amusement ran through the arena. Milliner was famous for her refusal to coddle the press. It was why Kip had chosen her for the job and kept her on in the face of some frenzied back-channel protests from the surviving old school media.
Culver winked at her as she gave the blogger a taste of her own big stick, but she was professional enough to ignore him, of course. A small flock of starlings zipped overhead, and he watched them disappear out over the water. The birds were one of the first things he'd noticed on getting back. There seemed to be a lot more of them than he remembered. More birds. Fewer rats. He was going to have to ask somebody about that one day.
"Is the president planning on talking to the Commonwealth prime ministers about speeding up the repatriation process, do you know, Ms. Milliner?"
That question came from Ted Koppel at National Public Radio, and Culver winced as soon as he heard it. Two million of the estimated fifteen million surviving Americans had made the choice to stay in the foreign refuges, mostly in the other English-speaking democracies. They were a real point of friction with the country's surviving allies. Hell, Koppel himself didn't even live in the United States, preferring to stay at the NPR field office in London, which made him a bit of a hypocrite in Culver's book for even asking the question. But Jed couldn't really blame Koppel or those two million others. Those people were desperately needed back home, but home wasn't nearly as friendly a place as it had been once upon a time. The hungry time after the Wave was still fresh on everyone's mind, and many were convinced they had not yet turned the corner on food production and distribution. Food shortages were still a very real problem.