This is the first of a series of posts using the tools of narrative fiction to explore an alternative shape for the future. A hint to readers who haven't been with The Archdruid Report for long: don't expect all your questions to be answered right away.
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The cheerful brick buildings of Steubenville’s downtown didn’t offer me any answers. I sat back, frowning, as the train rattled through a switch and rolled into the Steubenville station. “Steubenville,” the conductor called out from the door behind me, and the train began to slow.
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I got to the Pittsburgh station early. It was a shabby
remnant of what must once have been one of those grand old stations you see on
history vids, nothing but a bleak little waiting room below and a stair rising
alongside a long-defunct escalator to the platforms up top. The waiting room
had fresh paint on the walls and the vending machines were the sort of thing
you’d find anywhere. Other than that,
the whole place looked as though it had been locked up around the time the last
Amtrak trains stopped running and sat there unused for forty years until the
border opened up again.
The seats were fiberglass, and must have been something like
three quarters of a century old. I found one that didn’t look too likely to break
when I sat on it, settled down, got out my veepad and checked the schedule for
the umpteenth time. The train I would be riding was listed as on time, arrival
5:10 am Pittsburgh station, departure 5:35 am, scheduled arrival in Toledo
Central Station 11:12 am. I tapped the veepad again, checked the news. The
election was still all over the place—President Barfield’s concession speech, a
flurry of op-ed pieces from various talking heads affiliated with the losing
parties about how bad Ellen Montrose would be for the country. I snorted, paged
on. Other stories competed for attention: updates on the wars in California and
the Balkans, bad news about the hemorrhagic-fever epidemic in Latin America,
and worse news from Antarctica, where yet another big ice sheet had just popped
loose and was drifting north toward the shipping lanes.
While the news scrolled past, other passengers filed into
the waiting room a few at a time. I could just make them out past the image
field the veepad projected into my visual cortex. Two men and a woman in
ordinary bioplastic businesswear came in and sat together, talking earnestly
about some investment or other. An elderly couple whose clothes made them look
like they came straight out of a history vid sat down close to the stair and
sat quietly. A little later, a family of four in clothing that looked even more
old-fashioned—Mom had a bonnet on her head, and I swear I’m not making that
up—came in with carpetbag luggage, and plopped down not far from me. I wasn’t
too happy about that, kids being what they are these days, but these two sat
down and, after a little bit of squirming, got out a book each and started
reading quietly. I wondered if they’d been drugged.
A little later, another family of four came in, wearing the
kind of cheap shabby clothes that might as well have the words “urban poor”
stamped all over them, and hauling big plastic bags that looked as though
everything they owned was stuffed inside. They looked tense, scared, excited.
They sat by themselves in a corner, the parents talking to each other in low
voices, the kids watching everything with wide eyes and saying nothing. I
wondered about them, shrugged mentally, went back to the news.
I’d finished the news and was starting through the day’s
textmail, when the loudspeaker on the wall cleared its electronic throat with a
hiss of static and said, “Train Twenty-One, service to Toledo via Steubenville,
Canton and Sandusky, arriving at Platform One. Please have your tickets and
passports ready. Train Twenty-One to Toledo, Platform One.”
I tapped the veepad to sleep, stuffed it in my pocket, got
out of my seat with the others, climbed the stairs to the platform. The sky was
just turning gray with the first hint of morning, and the air was cold; the
whistle of the train sounded long and lonely in the middle distance. I turned
to look. I’d never been on a train before, and most of what I knew about them
came from history vids and the research I’d done for this trip. Based on what
I’d heard about my destination, I wondered if the locomotive would be a
rattletrap antique with a big smokestack pumping coal smoke into the air.
What came around the bend into view wasn’t much like my
momentary fantasy, though. It was the sort of locomotive you’d have found on
any American railroad around 1950, a big diesel-electric machine with a blunt
nose and a single big headlight shining down on the track. It whistled again,
and then the roar of the engines rose to drown out everything else. The
locomotive roared past the platform, and the only thing that surprised me was
the smell of french fries that came rushing past with it. Behind it was a long
string of boxcars, and behind those, a baggage car and three passenger cars.
The train slowed to a walking pace and then stopped as the
passenger cars came up to the platform. A conductor in a blue uniform and hat
swung down from the last car. “Tickets and passports, please,” he said, and I
got out my veepad, woke it, activated the flat screen and got both documents on
it.
“Physical passport, please,” the conductor said when he got
to me.
“Sorry.” I fumbled in my pocket, handed it to him. He
checked it, smiled, said, “Thank you, Mr. Carr. You probably know this already,
but you’ll need a paper ticket for the return trip.”
“I’ve got it, thanks.”
“Great.” He moved on to the family with the plastic bag
luggage. The mother said something in a low voice, handed over tickets and
something that didn’t look like a passport. “That’s fine,” said the conductor.
“You’ll need to have your immigration papers out when we get to the border.”
The woman murmured something else, and the conductor went
onto the elderly couple, leaving me to wonder about what I’d just heard.
Immigration? That implied, first, that these people actually wanted to live in
the Lakeland Republic, and second, that they were being allowed in. Neither of
those seemed likely to me. I made a note on my veepad to ask about immigration
once I got to Toledo, and to compare what they told me to what I could find out
once I got back to Philadelphia.
The conductor finished taking tickets and checking
passports, and called out, “All aboard!”
I went with the others to the first of the three passenger
cars, climbed the stair, turned left. The interior was about what I’d expected,
row after row of double seats facing forward, but everything looked clean and
bright and there was a lot more leg room than I was used to. I went about
halfway up, slung my suitcase in the overhead rack and settled in the window
seat. We sat for a while, and then the car jolted once and began to roll
forward.
We went through the western end of Pittsburgh first of all,
past the big dark empty skyscrapers of the Golden Triangle, and then
across the river and into the western suburbs. Those were shantytowns built out
of the scraps of old housing developments and strip malls, the sort of thing
you find around most cities these days when you don’t find worse, mixed in with
old rundown housing developments that probably hadn’t seen a bucket of paint or
a new roof since the United States came apart. Then the suburbs ended, and
things got uglier.
The country west of Pittsburgh got hit hard during the
Second Civil War, I knew, and harder still when the border was closed after
Partition. I’d wondered, while planning the trip, how much it had recovered in
the three years since the Treaty of Richmond. Looking out of the window as the
sky turned gray behind us, I got my answer: not much. There were some corporate
farms that showed signs of life, but the small towns the train rolled through
were bombed-out shells, and there were uncomfortable stretches where every
house and barn I could see was a tumbledown ruin and young trees were rising in
what had to have been fields and pastures a few decades back. After a while it
was too depressing to keep looking out the window, and I pulled out my veepad
again and spent a good long while answering textmails and noting down some
questions I’d want to ask in Toledo.
I’d gotten caught up on mail when the door at the back end
of the car slid open. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the conductor said, “we’ll be
arriving at the border in about five minutes. You’ll need to have your
passports ready, and immigrants should have their papers out as well. Thank
you.”
We rolled on through a dense stand of trees, and then into
open ground. Up ahead, a pair of roads cut straight north and south across
country. Until three years ago, there’d been a tall razor-wire fence between
them, soldiers patrolling our side, the other side pretty much a complete
mystery. The fence was gone now, and
there were two buildings for border guards, one on each side of the line. The
one on the eastern side was a modern concrete-and-steel item that looked like a
skyscraper had stopped there, squatted, and laid an egg. As we got closer to
it, I could see the border guards in digital-fleck camo, helmets, and flak
vests, standing around with assault rifles.
Then we passed over into Lakeland Republic territory, and I
got a good look at the building on the other side. It was a pleasant-looking
brick structure that could have been a Carnegie-era public library or the old
city hall of some midsized town, and the people who came out of the big arched
doorways to meet the train as it slowed to a halt didn’t look like soldiers at
all.
The door slid open again, and I turned around. One of the
border guards, a middle-aged woman with coffee-colored skin, came into the car.
She was wearing a white uniform blouse and blue pants, and the only heat she
was carrying was a revolver tucked unobtrusively in a holster at her hip. She
had a clipboard with her, and went up the aisle, checking everybody’s passports
against a list.
I handed her mine when she reached me. “Mr. Carr,” she said
with a broad smile. “We heard you’d be coming through this morning. Welcome to
the Lakeland Republic.”
“Thank you,” I said. She handed me back the passport, and
went on to the family with the plastic bag luggage. They handed her a sheaf of
papers, and she went through them quickly, signed something halfway through, and
then handed them back. “Okay, you’re good,” she said. “Welcome to the Lakeland
Republic.”
“We’re in?” the mother of the family asked, as though she
didn’t believe it.
“You’re in,” the border guard told her. “Legal as legal can
be.”
“Oh my God. Thank you.” She burst into tears, and her
husband hugged her and patted her on the back. The border guard gave him a grin
and went on to the family in the old-fashioned clothing.
I thought about that while the border guard finished
checking passports and left the car. Outside, two more guards with a dog
finished going along the train, and gave a thumbs up to the conductor. A minute
later, the train started rolling again. That’s it? I wondered. No metal
detectors, no x-rays, nothing? Either they were very naive or very confident.
We passed the border zone and a screen of trees beyond it,
and suddenly the train was rolling through a landscape that couldn’t have been
more different from the one on the other side of the line. It was full of
farms, but they weren’t the big corporate acreages I was used to. I counted
houses and barns as we passed, and guesstimated the farms were one to two
hundred acres each; all of them were in mixed crops, not efficient
monocropping. The harvest was mostly in, but I’d grown up in farm country and
knew what a field looked like after it was put into corn, wheat, cabbages,
turnips, industrial hemp, or what have you. Every farm seemed to have all of
those and more, not to mention cattle in the pasture, pigs in a pen, a garden
and an orchard. I shook my head, baffled. It was a hopelessly inefficient way
to run agribusiness, I knew that from my time in business school, and yet the
briefing papers I’d read while getting ready for this trip said that the
Lakeland Republic exported plenty of agricultural products and imported almost
none. I wondered if the train would pass some real farms further in.
We passed more of the little mixed farms, and a couple of
little towns that were about as far from being bombed-out shells as you care to
imagine. There were homes with lights on and businesses that were pretty
obviously getting ready to open for the day. All of them had little brick train
stations, though we didn’t stop at any of those—I wondered if they had light
rail or something. Watching the farms and towns move past, I thought about the
contrast with the landscape on the other side of the border, and winced, then
stopped and reminded myself that the farms and towns had to be subsidized.
Small towns weren’t any more economically viable than small farms, after all.
Was all this some kind of Potemkin village setup, for the purpose of impressing
visitors?
The door at the back of the car slid open, and the conductor
came in. “Next stop, Steubenville,” he said. “Folks, we’ve got a bunch of people
coming on in Steubenville, so please don’t take up any more seats than you have
to.”
Steubenville had been part of the state of Ohio before
Partition, I remembered. The name of the town stirred something else in my
memory, though. I couldn’t quite get the recollection to surface, and decided
to look it up. I pulled out my veepad, tapped it, and got a dark field and the
words: no signal. I tapped it again, got the same thing, opened the
connectivity window and found out that the thing wasn’t kidding. There was no
metanet signal anywhere within range. I stared at it, wondered how I was going
to check the news or keep up with my textmail, and then wondered: how the plut
am I going to buy anything, or pay my hotel bill?
The dark field didn’t have any answers. I decided I’d have
to sort that out when I got to Toledo; I’d been invited, after all. Maybe they
had connectivity in the big cities, or something. The story was that there
wasn’t metanet anywhere in the Lakeland Republic, but I had my doubts about that—how
can you manage anything this side of a bunch of
mud huts without net connections? No doubt, I decided, they had some
kind of secure net or something. We’d talked about doing something of the same
kind back in Philadelphia more than once, just for government use, so the next
round of netwars didn’t trash our infrastructure the way the infrastructure of
the old union got trashed by the Chinese in ‘21.
Still, the dark field and those two words upset me more than
I wanted to admit. It had been more years than I wanted to think about since
I’d been more than a click away from the metanet, and being cut off from it
left me feeling adrift.
The sun cleared low clouds behind us, and the train rolled
into what I guessed was East Steubenville. I’d expected the kind of suburbs I’d
seen on the way out of Pittsburgh, dreary rundown housing interspersed with the
shantytowns of the poor. What I saw instead left me shaken. The train passed
tree-lined streets full of houses that had bright paint on the walls and shingles
on the roofs, little local business districts with shops and restaurants open
for business, and a school that didn’t look like a medium-security prison. The
one thing that puzzled me was that there were no cars visible, just tracks down
some of the streets and once, improbably, an old-fashioned streetcar that paced
the train for a while and then veered off in a different direction. Most of the
houses seemed to have gardens out back, and the train passed one big empty lot
that was divided into garden plots and had signs around it saying “community
garden.” I wondered if that meant food was scarce here.
A rattle and a bump, and the train was crossing the Ohio
River on a big new railroad bridge. Ahead was Steubenville proper. That’s when
I remembered the thing that tried to surface earlier: there was a battle at Steubenville, a big
one, toward the end of the Second Civil War. I remembered details from headlines I’d seen when I was a kid, and a
history vid I’d watched a couple of years ago; a Federal army held the Ohio
crossings against Alliance forces for most of two months before Anderson
punched straight through the West Virginia front and made the whole thing moot.
I remembered photos of what Steubenville looked like after the fighting: a
blackened landcape of ruins where every wall high enough to hide a soldier
behind it had gotten hit by its own personal artillery shell.
That wasn’t what I saw spreading out ahead as the train
crossed the Ohio, though. The Steubenville I saw was a pleasant-looking city
with a downtown full of three- and four-story buildings, surrounded by
neighborhoods of houses, some row houses and some detached. There were
streetcars on the west side of the river, too—I spotted two of them as we got
close to the shore—and also a few cars, though not many of the latter. The trees that lined the streets were small
enough that you could tell they’d been planted after the fighting was over.
Other than that, Steubenville looked like a comfortable, established community.
I stared out the window as the train rolled off the bridge
and into Steubenville, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Back on the
other side of the border, and everywhere else I’d been in what used to be the
United States, you still saw wreckage from the war years all over the place.
Between the debt crisis and the state of the world economy, the money that
would have been needed to rebuild or even demolish the ruins was just too hard
to come by. Things should have been much worse here, since the Lakeland Republic
had been shut out of world credit markets for thirty years after the default of
‘32—but they weren’t worse. They looked considerably better. I reached for my
veepad, remembered that I couldn’t get a signal, and frowned. If they couldn’t
even afford the infrastructure for the metanet, how the plut could they afford
to rebuild their housing stock?
