On the other hand… That he’d gone to the trouble of cooking up the scheme (if he was) said he was interested. And he was a cop of sorts. Vanessa knew how cops worked. She knew it the way a fish knew water: she’d grown up with it. That might turn out to be a plus, and maybe not such a small one.
“Ms. Ferguson? You there?”
“Yes, I’m here. Maybe we can try it,” she answered.
“Good!” He sounded happy and surprised, which was about the way he should have sounded. Amazingly lifelike, she thought.
They settled on dinner and a movie Saturday after next: the opening of the great American mating dance for as long as there’d been movies. Vanessa went back to her current, interrupted supper. Getting cold hadn’t made it much worse, because it hadn’t been that good to begin with. When she finished, she added her dishes to the pile in the sink.
You couldn’t win if you didn’t bet. You also couldn’t lose, but she chose not to dwell on that side of things. She hadn’t told him to fuck off. Not this time. Not yet. Maybe I’ll get lucky this time. Maybe I really will. If you told yourself something often enough, you could make yourself believe it. Maybe—just maybe—you could even make it true.
Across the street from the buildings and parking lots at Wayne State lay tennis courts, a soccer field (a pitch, if you were feeling like a Brit), a baseball field, a softball field, and a golf course: lots and lots of wide-open spaces punctuated by chain-link fences, a few rows of trees, and some bleachers. Snow held sway over them all, like the Red Death in the Poe story.
It drifted against the trees and the fencing. It turned the bleachers into mounds of white. The ground was white. Everything for miles around was white—white as snow, Bryce thought, and sneered at himself for perpetrating a cliché, even if he did it only inside his own head. Here and there, roads shoveled clear scribed asphalt-dark lines through the whiteness. He stood by one of them, waiting for the bus to town. It wasn’t snowing right this minute—no more than a few scattered flakes, anyhow—so he could see the campus buildings, which were also unwhite, or at most dappled. When he pulled back his mental horizon, they didn’t seem like much.
They didn’t seem like much because they damn well weren’t. Snow covered the whole damn continent north of the Rio Grande, with minor polychrome enclaves in SoCal, Arizona, and Florida. It lay thicker in some places, thinner in others, but it was everywhere. Europe was no better off. Most of Europe was worse off, because the settled parts there sat farther north than they did in North America.
Asia… Northern China had always had hard winters. Now it had worse ones. Southern China had been subtropical. It wasn’t any more. People in Afghanistan were saying the winters they’d been getting (and the summers they hadn’t been) were God’s judgment upon them. God’s judgment for what? For their sins, of course. And, in arguments over what those sins might be and just who’d committed them, several different ethnic groups were shooting at one another. As far as Bryce could tell, several different ethnic groups there had been shooting at one another since at least the days of the Persian Empire. Only the weapons and the excuses changed through the centuries.
“Hi, Professor Miller!” a coed called. She waved a mittened hand his way.
“Hi, Peggy!” Bryce waved back. She was cute. She wasn’t dumb. The combo made her a pleasure to have in his class. Were he single, he might have tried to get her phone number once she wasn’t in his class any more.
Not being single didn’t stop everybody. The anthropology department had recently had a small scandal about a married prof carrying on with an ex-student. That the prof was female and the student a forward on the men’s basketball team added variety to the spice but didn’t change its essential nature.
A crow perched on the BUS STOP sign. People gathering close by didn’t bother it. People who gathered at the bus stop often ate things while they waited. They didn’t always throw what they couldn’t finish into the trash. Knowing such things was one of the ways college crows made their living.
“C’mon, you stupid bus! I’m cold,” said a guy who’d been standing at the stop longer than Bryce had. Several heads, Bryce’s among them, bobbed in agreement. He’d spent more time than he wanted the past few years standing on one corner or another with his mittens jammed into the pockets of whatever overcoat or anorak he happened to be wearing. He’d been cold just about all that time. His nose, not the smallest peak in the range, felt as if it wanted to fall off.
He’d read somewhere that Asians might have evolved their flattish features during the last Ice Age, as a response to extreme cold. He didn’t know if that was true. The anthro prof who’d frolicked with the basketball player might have had a better idea. It did strike him as reasonable, though.
Here came the bus at last. People climbed aboard with sighs of relief. It wasn’t much warmer inside than out-. They’d escaped the wind blowing down from the North Pole, though. And they weren’t just standing there. They were on their way into Wayne. We’re going somewhere, man, Bryce thought.
A few hardy souls on bikes were also pedaling between college and town, and a few more coming the other way. Bryce wouldn’t have wanted—hadn’t wanted—to do that in weather like this, but no accounting for taste. College kids were a hardy bunch. They were also often a crazy bunch.
The bus shuddered and wheezed when it stopped in the center of town. The small local bus fleet had been old and rickety when Bryce came to Wayne. It was older and more rickety now, and smaller, too. A couple of the buses that had finally crapped out were being harvested for spare parts to keep the others going. There was no money to buy new ones. Bryce wasn’t sure anyone in the United States was making new buses these days. Demand had fallen into the Yellowstone caldera.
He got off. The bus chugged away, leaving a trail of diesel exhaust in its wake. Global warming wasn’t the big worry any more. Al Gore probably burned trash in his back yard nowadays.
A team of six or eight glum-looking men and a couple of glum-looking young women were shoveling snow off the sidewalk. Bryce remembered a New Yorker cartoon about synchronized snow shovelers. Then he noticed the bored cop keeping an eye on the team. His perspective shifted. Suddenly, the scene looked more like a frozen outtake from I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
In Wayne, people didn’t get jail time for misdemeanors any more. As the town couldn’t afford new buses, so it also couldn’t afford to house petty criminals and feed them while they sat on their unproductive asses. It put them to work instead. About half the shovelers looked like college kids. Bryce recognized one unshaven older town guy who fought the cold by constantly keeping a high level of antifreeze in his blood. And he would have bet that the others were New Homesteaders. He wondered what they’d done, or whether they’d done anything. No, the town and the people who’d come here to get out of the refugee camps didn’t always get on so smoothly as they might have.
The cleared sidewalks helped him get back to his apartment building more easily than he would have otherwise. Susan seemed happy when he walked in. That made him happy. He still wondered whether he would have to move back to SoCal when the spring semester ended. If the choice was between job and marriage, job would have to bend.
“How’s it going?” he asked after he kissed her.
“Not bad. I got an idea for an article. Now I have to see if I can make it work,” she answered. No wonder she was in a good mood.
“Cool,” Bryce said. “What is it?”
“I want to see if I can connect Frederick’s ideas about falconry with his foreign policy,” Susan said. The renegade Holy Roman Emperor had written an enormous tome about hunting with hawks. Where he’d found the time, Bryce had no idea, but Frederick II was the kind of guy who made time when he felt like doing something. As for his foreign policy… The way it looked to Bryce, Frederick had flown himself against the whole damn world. He’d made it work for most of his reign, too.