The point was truer than he knew. Nearly a third of the United States population had died in the war ten years ago. Theresa had heard that in Africa, the rate was eighty percent. She didn’t know if the figure was correct or if it was, like so much else, inflated rumor. Anything on the Net was suspect, even the news sites, and there was no other source of information any more.
She said to Madison, “To get you to your families, we’ll have to find them first. A lot of people have been dislocated. Scott, it’s dangerous to stay here, they’re predicting another storm. I’m going to drive back to the farm.” And leave you to explain. He gave her a look that would wither a cactus.
Theresa slipped behind the wheel. They were going to be lucky to have Scott: a doctor, a good man. He had shown up at the farm last night, the only one to respond to the pribir’s message. Well, maybe the others, now scattered God knew where, had never smelled it. Theresa had happened to live close to the landing area. What would have happened to these children if she and Scott hadn’t come? They would have died out here, that’s what.
These children. Who had been part of her own childhood, long ago in a different world.
The bus was noisy. Modified to run on methanol, it was anachronistic, inefficient, falling apart, and highly illegal. But the fuel-cell-powered electric car, also falling apart, could not carry twenty-one people. The bus’s tires were so patched it was a miracle they held together. God knew how much unlawful emission they were putting out this very minute.
Theresa couldn’t hear Scott over the engine noise. What was he saying? How could he possibly explain?
Global warming took off, Scott could tell them, and accelerated in a feedback loop, more than anyone ever imagined. We reached a tipping point, where even a tiny additional increase could throw the system into violent change. And it did. He could tell them that, but how could they understand what it had meant?
The Earth’s temperature had risen fifteen degrees Fahrenheit in forty years. Peat bogs and Arctic permafrost had released their stored methane, trapping yet more heat in the atmosphere. Polar caps melted, coastal areas flooded, farmland became dustbowls, deserts became farmland. Entire island archipelagos disappeared under water. The weather became the enemy: crazy storms, wildfires covering half a state. Tropical diseases spread as fast as famine. People migrated, people died, people dug into places that were still livable and shot refugees who tried to move in. Governments collapsed. Technology slid backward, except among the rich in defended enclaves that have somehow kept the Net going through aging satellites. Conservative backlashes developed, and weird religions, and a dozen other means for people to make sense of the senseless. And then, in rational response to all of this, we had a biowar with China and nobody won.
Somewhere behind her, one of the kids cried out.
Where were they all going to go? Trains still ran, sometimes, if no eco-groups sabotaged. The Net might be able to track down these kids’ relatives, or it might not. The farm couldn’t feed nineteen more people, twelve of them probably pregnant.
Behind her, the bus had fallen deadly quiet.
Two hours later, Theresa stopped the bus, which had —miracle, miracle!—held together, in the space between the barn and the farm wellhouse. Her practiced eye ran over the farm; everything looked all right. Her three sons were out with the cattle, following them around on summer forage to check that their GPS collars still worked, and to make sure nobody stole a cow. Her daughter Senni had shifted the garden-guards against the hot wind. The huge rain cisterns were still half full; the windmills whirred frantically. Behind the chicken coop, their current and temporary farmhand, Ramon, was slaughtering a chicken.
Senni came out of the house onto the porch, expressionless, as the kids got off the bus. The hot wind whipped Senni’s short hair into a dirty froth. Hurriedly, squinting, the pribir children covered the distance from the bus to the doorway.
“The pribir children.” How long since Theresa had said that phrase? Or even thought it?
Inside, they looked around at the large adobe-walled great room, as wind-tight as Theresa could make it, lit at this hour only by light from the small windows. Some of the kids looked bewildered, some angry, a few in shock. Well, Theresa couldn’t blame them.
“Sit on the floor,” she said gently. “We don’t have enough chairs. This is my daughter Senni and my granddaughter Dolly, who’s almost two.”
Lillie’s face turned slowly toward the baby.
“I guess the next thing is food,” Theresa continued. “Are you hungry? Senni, did you make that soup?”
“Yes,” Senni said sullenly. They’d argued about it before Theresa left. Silently Senni ladled out steaming bowls. Lillie got up and passed a bowl to each kid. She’d always been sensible, Lillie had. Solid. A few children started eating, but most did not.
Scott said, “Where’s your computer, Tess?”
Senni started. No one had called Theresa “Tess” for forty years.
“I’ll get it,” she told Scott, and fetched the ancient thing from the bedroom. Carlo kept it running, the only techie among her four children. She put the computer on the long wooden table.
“Good God,” Scott said, “does it work?”
“Not for me,” Theresa said. “You any good at tech, Scott?”
“I can manage. Voice control?”
“Only Three-A. You’d best use the keyboard except for simple stuff.”
Scott sat on a chair and turned the computer on. Abruptly Rafe rose from the floor and stood beside Scott. That’s right, Rafe had always been interested in machines. Theresa watched them, the sun-wrinkled middle-aged man (there was no other kind, now) and the young boy, who had been born in the same year.
Scott linked the computer to the wireless Net. Rafe said, “Basic information search. Rafael Domingo Fernando,” and Scott looked up at him.
“Not your name, Rafe,” he said gently. “You’ll be listed as dead. Your parents’ names.”
Rafe said, “Angela Santos Fernando and Carlos Juan Fernando.”
Scott entered the names. Theresa saw that he was trying to shield the screen from Rafe, who saw it anyway. Rafe said in a flat voice, “Both dead.”
“Do you have any siblings?”
“An older brother. Maximilliano Fernando.”
“Do you know his citizen I.D. number?”
“No.”
“Birthday?”
“September 7, 1996.”
“Okay. This is him… he’s living in Durham, North Carolina. There’s an e-mail address listed. Do you want to mail him?”
And say what? Theresa thought. Here I am, back from the dead, a fourteen-year-old kid?
Rafe said, his voice finally unsteady, “In… in a minute. Do someone else first.”
Theresa couldn’t stand it. All right, she was a coward, she couldn’t watch. She picked up Dolly. “Her diaper’s dirty. I better change it.” She carried the baby into the bedroom.
Senni followed her. “Mom, what the hell are you doing? Where are these kids supposed to go?”
Theresa turned on her daughter, glad to have someone to yell at. “I don’t know! But I couldn’t just leave them out there! These are—were—my friends! Lillie…” But there was no way to explain to Senni what she and Lillie had once been to each other, in those extraordinary circumstances that could never come again. “Senni, whatever the others do, Lillie at least is staying here. I know she hasn’t got anywhere else to go.”
Senni flounced out of the room. She, too, was pregnant, with her dead husband’s last legacy. Theresa sighed.