Maj smiled. Entirely satisfactory, she thought. The whole thing. And she had gotten an odd charge out of having someone in the seat behind her for a change, someone absolutely blown out of the water by everything that was happening. Oh, eventually little Laurent would get over the novelty of it all, and calm down. But in the meantime, his unbridled enthusiasm was too cute for words.
Maj finished sorting through her mail, making sure she told everyone what she thought of them — which, today, was an unusually pleasant task since today she thought everyone in the Group was wonderful. Once that was done, she sat quietly with her tea for a few minutes, basking in the glow of the previous evening’s success.
It was not an unbroken glow, though. The sound of a somewhat lost-sounding little voice saying, I wish my father could see this…. was still very much with her.
“Computer…” Maj said.
“Ready, boss.”
“Put me together a general review of recent history of the Calmani Republic. Video, audio, and supplementary text.”
“Depth?”
“Average.”
It took the system a few seconds to assemble what she wanted from her work space’s link to the Britannica databases. “Ready.”
“Go…”
The pictures began to display themselves all around her, a little grainy at first, as the oldest flat film and holos tended to be when rechanneled for virtuality — soldiers marching down country roads, politicians making angry speeches, great crowds gathered together in city streets. Calmani was only one of the remnants of numerous countries that had torn themselves apart just before or after the turn of the millennium, due to the exacerbation of old hatreds or new tensions. Sometimes the troubles were caused by newly independent peoples using their sudden freedom to resurrect the arguments of two or three or five centuries past, old “grudge matches” interrupted by the interference of one or another of the great powers and resumed at the first possible moment. Or sometimes the rivalries that broke out involved one side or another of the old border suddenly having more money or more power than the neighbors did. While everyone had been poor together, things had been fine — but when one country suddenly started doing better than the others around it, tensions rose. For these and many other kinds of reasons, some of the local histories in that part of the world had turned unimaginably bloody.
Maj watched the images of soldiers and speechmakers unfolding around her and thought, suddenly, of the last time she and her mom had gone crabbing together. After you caught the crabs, you hauled them out of the trap and put them in a bucket before taking them home. Naturally the crabs all started trying to escape — but their preferred method for doing this seemed to involve pulling each other down in order to climb up the others’ bodies and get on top. None of the crabs seemed to notice that, as a result of all the pulling down, none of them were escaping. Now Maj thought of all those small countries, desperate, struggling, and yet succeeding mostly at keeping one another down as they struggled (they thought) up.
Elsewhere, though, power had changed hands with relatively little fuss beyond mass demonstrations in the streets and some shootings of people in high places. Romania was one of these places. After many years of truly astonishing repression under a Marxist-style dictator, the country shook him off suddenly and relatively unbloodily, and settled down into what everyone had thought would be a slow but steady process of “Westernization.” But there were still surprises in store. After the Balkan difficulties of the turn of the millennium had trailed off and a long weary quiet had settled over the area, suddenly the nationalist urge awakened in Romania, and over the space of several months the country shuddered, convulsed, and split itself in three. The southernmost and most urban part, which named itself Oltenia after its northern hills, kept the cities of Bucharest and Constante (and incidentally most of the region’s trade with the West, since it had the Black Sea ports at Constanle and Mangalia). The midmost part of the country became Transylvania as a nation as well as a region. It had stayed fairly calm and settled, even while the dust of secession was still in the air, and had continued to do a brisk business in tourism to the former haunts of Vlad Dracula, both for those tourists interested in the ancient Voivod as a nationalist hero who fought off the Huns, and those more interested in his (theoretical) career as a vampire.
The northernmost area of what the newspeople routinely called “the-former-Romania,” the area which now called itself the Calmani Republic and contained most of the mountain chain stretching down from that area, had at first seemed likely to go the same way as Oltenia had. But when the revolution had almost finished, and the candidates whom it seemed the local people wanted to run things were about to take power, there came a hiccup that took everyone by surprise. Several of the candidates for the new ten-man “Senate” died under strange and violent circumstances — shot in the streets by unknown assailants, or bombed in their beds — and other candidates pulled out of the Senate within days. When this new and terrible cloud of dust settled, there were only three senators left, and the new small country as a whole was so unnerved that no one argued much when the three of them took power as a “caretaker government” until a new set of elections could be held, if they ever would be held….
“I don’t know,” she suddenly heard her father say, from down the hall. “I’ll ask, though. Maj?”
He put his head around the kitchen door. Her dad was wearing his sweats, which was normal this time of morning; usually he went out running as early as possible, on summer workdays, to take advantage of the cooler temperatures.
“Yeah, Dad?”
“Were you going to order some workout clothes for Niko? He’s going to run with me. All he needs are sweats, nothing fancy. And he’ll need shoes.”
“Sure, I’ll take care of it. He’ll have to tell me his shoe size, though…the machine’s no good at that. At least none of our machines are…. The GearOnline computer might be able to pull something from the measurements it took the other day. Just in case, what’s the size?”
“Thirty-six,” Laurent said, putting his head around from behind Maj’s father.
She goggled at him. “What are you doing up at this awful hour?”
“It is lunchtime in Europe,” Laurent said.
“I don’t mean that. I mean, not just that. It’s not that long ago that we finished things up—!” And indeed Maj was feeling a little grainy around the eyeballs herself from lack of sleep.
But Laurent grinned at her. “I am fine.”
“I’m not so sure. Is thirty-six really a shoe size where you come from?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Maj said. “I’ll tell GearOnline…we’ll see what they make of it.”
Her father and Laurent vanished around the door again, down the hall and out the front door into the morning. Maj raised her eyebrows, then said to the computer, “Go ahead again…”
A few moments later she was watching things get strange in Calmani, twenty years or so ago. The “troika” caretaker government look office and functioned well enough for a few months. But then two of them died, also under strange circumstances…and the country was kept so busy by trying to work out what the third one was going to do that they had little time or, later, opportunity to find out exactly what had happened to the others. They were too busy dealing with their new ruler, Cluj.