This is the twentieth installment of an exploration of some
of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative
fiction. Our narrator is forced to rethink his ideas about progress even further,
as the Lakeland Republic and the other nations of post-US North America are
confronted by a sudden crisis with all too familiar roots...
***********
A phone rang in the darkness. For a moment I had no idea
where I was, but then the bed shifted, footsteps whispered across the floor,
and Melanie’s voice said, “Hello.” I blinked, and tried to guess what time it
was. It felt as though we hadn’t been sleeping for long.
“Okay,” she said then, in a completely different tone. I
finished waking up in a hurry. You don’t hear someone speak like that unless
something’s gone very, very wrong. “Okay,” she said again. “I’ll be in as soon
as I can. ‘Bye.” The handset clicked into its cradle, and Melanie said,
“Peter?”
“What’s up?”
“Trouble. Texas and
the Confederacy are at war.”
I sat up and said something unprintable.
“Pretty much,” she agreed, and turned on a light. She was as
naked as I was, of course, but the look on her face wasn’t particularly
alluring.
“Any details?” I asked.
“Just a few. Texan ships attacked three Confederate drilling
platforms around one o’clock; no word on damage yet. The Confederate navy came
out, and there’s fighting going on in the Gulf right now.”
“That’s bad.”
“There’s worse. The
Confederate Army’s crossed into Texas territory between Shreveport and
Texarkana. Our people down there think there’s division-strength units
involved.”
I gave her a blank stare for a long moment. “Okay,” I said,
getting out of bed. “You’re going in right away, of course.”
“Yes. Not the way I’d have chosen to end a really pleasant
evening.”
I took her in my arms and kissed her. “No argument there,” I
said when the kiss was done. “Give me a call when you get some free time.”
“I’ll do that,” she said, with a smile. “If you can stand
it, stay close to your phone. I may be able to arrange something for you.”
I promised I would, and then she headed for the shower, and
I pulled my clothes on, called a cab, and let myself out. She was right, it was
a hell of a way to end a really pleasant evening, but if you’re in politics you
get used to that kind of thing. I knew that, and so did Melanie; if things
worked out, we’d find some time to spend together before I took the train back
to Philadelphia, and one way or another—
I stopped the thought in its tracks. Later, I told myself.
Later, when a couple of really hard decisions are over and done with.
The sky was still pitch black when I left the apartment
building, stood on the curb waiting for the cab. The clop-clop of horse’s
hooves announced its arrival a couple of blocks in advance. Moments later I was
inside, watching the city of Toledo in its sleep. Here and there a light shone
in a window, or a lone figure hurried down the street. It seemed hard to
believe that not much more than a thousand miles away, robot tanks, assault
drones, and long files of young men with guns were streaming through the pine
woods of northeast Texas.
The cab got me to the hotel promptly enough, and I paid the
cabby, said good morning to the tired-eyed desk clerk, and headed up to my
room. I didn’t really expect to get more sleep, but decided to give it a try,
and blinked awake four hours later with the pale gray light of morning coming
in through the window. The clock said quarter past eight; I hurried through a
shower, got myself shaved and dressed, weighed the odds that Melanie might call
if I took the time to run to Kaufer’s News to get the morning Blade, and
decided to call the concierge instead. Not five minutes later a bellhop knocked
on the door with a copy. “We got a stack of ‘em down at the desk,” he told me.
“Half the guests are gonna want one as soon as they wake up.” I thanked him and gave him a good-sized tip,
and he grinned and made off.
The paper didn’t have much more information on the current
state of affairs than I’d gotten from Melanie, but the reporters had done their
background research; the inside of the front section had big articles sketching
out the history of the quarrel, running through both sides’ military assets,
quoting a couple of experts from Toledo University on the potential outcomes of
the war, that sort of thing. Tucked away toward the end was a terse little
article about two moresatellites being taken out by debris. I was maybe halfway through that last article
when the phone rang.
“Peter? It’s Melanie. Can you get to the Capitol by
nine-thirty?”
“Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”
“There’s a courtesy briefing for the North American
diplomatic community—the ambassadors will be meeting with Meeker; this is for
attachés and staff. I’ve
arranged to get you in as a special envoy from Ellen Montrose’s staff.”
“No kidding. Thank you, Melanie.”
“Sure thing.” She gave me the details, we said our goodbyes
and away I went.
The city was wide awake as I walked the four blocks to the
Capitol. Newspapers and conversations in low voices were everywhere. The
streetcars, horsedrawn cabs, and occasional cars still rolled down the streets;
lamps shone in windows, contending with the gray winter light; nothing visible
had changed since the morning before, and everything had. I remembered stories
some of my older relatives used to tell about the first days of the Second
Civil War—carefully sanitized stories coming over the mass media, wild rumors
carried by blogs and private emails, and everywhere the sense that something
had changed or shifted or broken once and for all, and the world would never be
quite the same afterwards.
Somehow, the morning around me felt like that. I told myself
not to be silly; there had been other wars since Partition—the three-way scramble
between Texas, the Confederacy, and the Missouri Republic in ‘37, the
Confederate-Brazilian invasion of the Lakeland Republic in ‘49, and the ongoing
civil war in California—but this felt different.
“Extra!” shouted a paperboy on the sidewalk in front of the
Capitol, where people were streaming by. “Richmond’s declared war.” He was
selling copies nearly as fast as he could hand them out, but I managed to get
one before his canvas bag was empty. I wasn’t the only purchaser to turn toward
the Capitol’s big front entrance, either. We filed in the doors, and then some
of us turned right toward the Senate end of the building, went down the first
big staircase we found, and ended up in front of a big door flanked by two
guards in uniform and a man in a wool suit.
I recognized him after a moment: Stuart Macallan, the Lakeland
Republic’s assistant secretary of state for North American affairs.
“Mr. Carr,” he said, shaking my hand. “Good to see you
again.Yes, you’ve been cleared—favor to the incoming administration in
Philadelphia.” He winked, and I laughed and went on to the coatroom, where I
shed hat and coat before going further.
The room inside was a big comfortable space with a podium up
front and rows of tables and chairs facing it, the kind of place where
important press conferences and public hearings get held. All the usual
impedimenta of a high-end briefing were there—pitchers of ice water on each
table, and so on—and something I hadn’t expected: a notebook and pen in front of each place. Of
course I understood the moment I saw them: lacking veepads, how else were the
attendees going to take notes? Even so, that reminded me how many details of
life in the Lakeland Republic I still hadn’t seen.
I sat down and opened the paper. The Confederate Congress
had voted to declare war, as the boy said; the Texan legislature was expected
to return the favor shortly. In the meantime, the naval battle in the Gulf was
ongoing, with people along the coast reporting distant explosions and smoke
plumes visible on the horizon. Nobody was sure yet what was happening on the
land front; the entire region from Shreveport and Texarkana west to the suburbs
of Dallas was closed to journalists, and the entire highway system was off
limits to anybody but government and military, but long lines of army-green
trucks were streaming east across Texas toward the war zone, and a reporter
who’d gotten as far north as Henderson before being turned back by military
police reported that he could hear artillery rolling in the northern distance
like summer thunder.
Someone sat down at the chair next to mine, and I did the
polite thing and turned to greet him. “Hank Barker,” he said as we shook hands,
“with the Missouri Republic delegation.” I introduced myself, and he
brightened. “You’re Ellen Montrose’s envoy here, aren’t you? Once this is over, if you’ve got a minute to
talk, that’d be real welcome.”
“Sure,” I said. It wasn’t until then that I noticed that he
was dressed the way I was, in typical Lakeland business wear. Most of the other
people filing into the room wore bioplastic, though we weren’t the only ones in
wool. “Got tired of bioplastic, I see,” I commented.
He nodded. “Yep. You see this sort of thing more and more
often these days, out our way. ‘Course a lot of the wool and leather Lakeland
uses comes from our side of the Mississippi, so it stands to reason.”
I glanced at him, wondered whether any other Lakeland
Republic customs had found a foothold across the Mississippi. The Missouri
Republic’s big, reaching from the river to the crest of the Rockies and from
what used to be Kansas and the northwestern two-thirds of Missouri to the
border of West Canada, but a lot of it’s desert these days; it’s pretty much
landlocked—its only ports are river towns on the Mississippi and Duluth on Lake
Superior—and if they were paying off World Bank loans and coping with the same
economic pressures we were in the Atlantic Republic, they’d have to be in a
world of hurt. Before I could figure out how to ask the question that was on my
mind, though, the last of the attendees had taken their seats and a familiar
figure rolled his wheelchair across the low stage to one side of the podium.
“I’d like to thank you all for coming,” Tom Pappas said.
“We’re still waiting for more details from the war zone—”
“Like everyone else,” said a voice with a French accent
close to the front of the room.
“I’m not arguing,” Pappas said, with a broad grin. “But
we’ve got a basic idea what’s going on, and we can also fill you in on our
government’s response.”
An aide, a young woman in Lakeland army uniform, came up
onto the stage, went to the back wall and pulled on a cord. Down came a big,
brightly colored map of the eastern half of the Republic of Texas and parts of
the Confederacy adjacent to it. Pappas
thanked her, took a long pointer from behind the podium, and wheeled over to
the map.
“The three drilling platforms the Texans attacked last night
are here.” The pointer tapped a patch of blue water in the Gulf. “Those are the
ones Bullard claimed were using horizontal drilling to poach Texan oil. Based
on what information we’ve gotten at this point, all three platforms were
destroyed. The Confederates counterattacked less than an hour later, and both
sides suffered significant losses—they’ve both got decent antiship missiles,
and you know how that goes.”
A murmur spread through the room. “The thing is, the
Confederates didn’t just fire on the Texan ships,” Pappas went on. “They used
long range missiles to target Texan offshore oil assets. We’re not sure how
many were targeted and how badly they were hit, but it doesn’t look good.
“Right now there’s still fighting going on, and both sides
are bringing in naval assets from outside the area. Texas has a short term
advantage there. The Confederates have a
lot of their ships on the Atlantic coast, and it’s going to take a while to get
them around the south Florida shoals and bring them into action, but once those
arrive, the Texan navy’s going to be in deep—trouble.”
That got a laugh. “Okay,” he said, and moved the pointer up
to tap on the area between Shreveport and Texarkana. “That’s a sideshow. Here’s
the show that matters. As far as we can tell, the Confederacy’s thrown three
divisions into the ground assault: one
armored division, two infantry. More are being brought up as fast as the
transport grid will carry them. The Texans are throwing everything they’ve got
on hand into the fighting. It’s anyone’s guess whether they can get enough of
their army into play before the Confederates reach Dallas; I’m guessing they
will. Meanwhile Texan drones and land based missiles have been hitting military
targets as far as the Mississippi, and the Confederacy’s doing the same
thing—we’ve had reports of missile strikes as far west as Waco.
“And this is where it gets ugly. Both sides have allies
overseas. The Confederates have already asked Brazil to intervene; no word from
Brasilia yet, but given their track record in the past, it’s probably a safe
bet that they’ll get Brazilian munitions and advisers, and maybe more. Texas
has a mutual-aid pact with China, and after the business in Peru two years ago,
the Chinese have got to be itching for an opportunity to take Brazil down a peg
or two; a proxy war would be one way to do that. So we could be facing a long
and ugly war.
“That’s the military situation. Stuart, you want to fill
them in on our response?”
Stuart Macallan climbed up onto the stage. “Sure. Point
number one is that we’re staying out of it. We’ve declared ourselves neutral,
and President Meeker is working with the other North American governments right
now to draft a joint declaration of neutrality and an appeal to the combatants
to accept an immediate ceasefire and settle this at the negotiating table,
using the mechanisms set up in the Treaty of Richmond.
“Point number two is that we’ve ordered a defensive
mobilization all along the southern border, just in case. Those of you who know
anything about our military know that this isn’t a threat to anybody, unless
they decide to invade. If you’re not familiar with our system, Colonel Pappas
here can fill you in on the details after we finish.
“Point number three is that we’re going to look for every
possible way to expedite trade agreements with the other North American
republics. Half our exports go via the Mississippi, and I know some of our
neighbors are in the same boat—so to speak. We’re prepared to help the other
North American republics keep their economies intact, to the extent that we
can, and we’d welcome any help you can give us along the same lines.
“Finally, there’s the petroleum situation. For all practical
purposes, the Gulf oil fields, onshore and offshore, have just dropped off the
face of the Earth, and they’re going to stay that way until this whole business
gets resolved. That’s a big enough fraction of world oil production to send
markets into a tizzy. It won’t particularly affect us, as you know,. but it’s
going to be a problem for pretty much everyone else in North America. We’re
going to look at agreements with each of your countries to try to cushion the
economic hit, but whatever you’re paying for fuel these days—our best estimate
is that it’s going to double, maybe triple, maybe more, if you can get it. The
way so much oil production is locked up in long term contracts, some of you probably
won’t be able to get it at all.”
Hank Barker, sitting next to me, shook his head. Under his breath: “We are so screwed.”
****************
Back here in 2016, I'm delighted to announce the impending publication of David Fleming's astonishing book Lean Logic, an encyclopedic guide to the principles and practice of life in a deindustrializing world. Fleming was a central figure in the British sustainability movement for decades, and played an important role in the founding of the UK Green Party, the Transition Town Movement, and the New Economics Foundation; he spent some thirty years assembling Lean Logic as a comprehensive book on the ways of thinking and acting we're going to need to get through the mess ahead. (I'm quite sure it's still in print in the Lakeland Republic in 2065!) The hardback edition is now available for preorder here.
