The Last President (43 page)

“Every competent person we could have elected president was killed in the last week.”

“Have you thought about Quattro—” Arnie saw it in Bambi's face, and said, “Oh, god, no, I'm so sorry.”

“You may trust me, no one with the charisma, ability, and national reputation we need is left. Nobody. We played a little fast and loose with the succession rules, so Heather is now the President, officially, but as far as any of us can think, we don't see any way to turn that to our advantage. So the current plan is that we're going to give up here. Heather is going to join Bambi in the Duchy of California, the rest of us will fold up shop, and the middle of the country will do whatever it can in the face of the Great Raid. Maybe their death rate will be higher, sooner, and their raid will be less effective, than they are thinking, and they'll empty out the Lost Quarter enough so that Manbrookstat or the Christian States of America—”

“Wait, has that been declared?”

“Going to be any minute. You'll never believe it, but Jenny Whilmire Grayson is the biggest asset the Army has in trying to stop it. But she's not enough, and it's too late. They will formally declare the CSA within two weeks, according to our source. Anyway, maybe Manbrookstat, the CSA, or whatever the Provis organize will be able to reconquer the Lost Quarter, if the tribes pay too high a price this summer or stay out on the plains too long and get caught in the winter too far from home. But the dream of the Restored Republic is finished.”

“I've decided to resign as soon as I'm at Castle Castro,” Heather said. “And there's no line of succession left after me. In a couple of days, I will have officially been the last President, of the United States that is no more.”

Arnie howled like a coyote with its balls in a trap, arched his back farther than any of them might have imagined possible, and tried to backflip toward the bench. Jason lunged forward, knocked him sideways, and tackled him to the floor. Beth and Ysabel joined in holding him down.

The seizure ran “longer than most, and more violent than anything we've seen this year,” as Beth noted.

When it was over, Arnie Yang seemed more unfocused and blurry too. They thought they would just put him onto his bench with his blankets and go, but then he spoke very softly. “That was a bad one. I think that was because Daybreak is giving up on me, trying to scramble my messages as it goes, I'm no longer useful it doesn't want to leave me around as a record of what it did.” He was crying. “I think it will try to get me confused enough to have an accident or get me someplace where I just die. James, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.”

“It's all right, Arnie, but tell me what you are sorry for. I'll forgive you.”

Normally a seizure didn't come this quickly after a previous seizure, but this one tried; Arnie again arched and kicked, but subsided very quickly. “The whole thing. The whole thing. Daybreak gets gets gets stronger from people fighting it, and we got you to fight a whole war. . . .”

James seemed to sit back as if he'd been kicked.

Arnie babbled a little longer, then fell asleep. They covered him and left.

In the conference room, James said, “I know what he meant.”

Heather nodded. “Does it matter anymore?”

“We should all know, if only for the history books. Look, the big camps along the Ohio were on the brink of starvation if they didn't start moving; we went in and attacked them and created our big scary army to motivate them. What if we'd just built up defenses for a rapid response, then sat down and traded with them? Kidnapped shamans, recruited defectors, sent over agents to sow doubt and confusion, let the camps collapse? Arnie steered us toward making it a war in the first place—one where Grayson would have to win eleven battles back-to-back.

“So then they retreated. We could have just said, the danger's over for the summer, because it was. They couldn't have come back to mount a raid across the whole territory. What they could do, though, was rally all the tribes against an invading army—and we sent them one. Not only that, they put themselves under Lord Robert's command; now he's surrounded by an army of loyal Daybreakers, who might reconvert him or his followers.

“And then . . . well, this one wasn't through Arnie, but isn't it interesting how Quattro suddenly pushed us all into defending Pale Bluff, which couldn't be done, instead of evacuating it, which could? Where do you suppose a guy who had been fighting Daybreak for a couple years got that idea?” He looked down at the table, and then looked up again. “You see it? I absolutely blew it. I am the biggest idiot in the world. Daybreak knew that we would give it a war, and the war would be how it would unify the Lost Quarter around a plan that has now totally defeated us. Heather, I know the RRC probably won't last another two weeks, but I would like it on the record that I resigned on grounds of manifest incompetence.”

“Only if we agree that I did too,” she said quietly. “It's been a terrible day full of terrible news. I want us to all gather at James's house, for one of those quiet evenings of food and being together, and then maybe tomorrow we will tackle Arnie again. But I'm very afraid you're right, James. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if Daybreak has only finally let us realize just to make its triumph more complete.”

“And to demoralize us,” Leslie said, very quietly. “I was just thinking how much I feel like giving up, and then I realized Daybreak wants me to think that. So we are going to hang on for a day longer, and if that doesn't make a difference, maybe another. Meanwhile, tonight, there's food at James's, if he'll cook.”

He sighed and spread his hands. “I'm not going to give up the only thing in the world that feels right. All right, let's all give it one more day, after the best meal I can make you.”

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. MANBROOKSTAT. 6:15 PM EASTERN TIME. MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026.

Back before,
Jamayu Rollings thought,
when this place was Brooklyn, we were all worried about how the police come late if they come at all, or however that old song my dad used to like went, and holding marches to try to get some decent protection, and I was so glad to move out to the other end of Long Island and know the cops would come if I needed them.

Well, welcome to Manbrookstat, where the police come about a day too soon.

He looked up to see that Deanna was looking at him, not moving. Shouts from downstairs at the front door were rising up toward them. He thought,
Stop reminiscing, old fart, and save your family's ass.

“By the drill,” Rollings said. He unclipped the antenna wire from where it connected to an inconspicuous bolt in the wall that happened to go through to a west-facing wire loop on the back of an old billboard. He detached the ground wire clip from the old radiator. He dropped both connector wires onto the radio, and removed the C-clamp that held it to the coffee service table. Then he lifted out the removable section of the old heating duct, creating a two-foot across hole, into which he dropped the whole radio. He put the section back, set an account book on the table where the radio had been, and opened it to yesterday's entries.

When he glanced sideways, Deanna had the correspondence and the one-time pads in a single heap, and was lifting the rug to expose the slot in the floor. She slid the papers into it and let the rug fall back into place; the papers were now between two plaster walls on the floor below.

The Special Assistants coming up the stairs might have heard the radio falling into the bend of the duct in the cellar, of course, though they had long ago stuffed it with old rags to muffle the impact. Perhaps if they found the slot in the floor, they might get ambitious enough to tear the wall apart. For the moment, though, the incriminating evidence was gone.

Just outside the door, a Special Assistant was telling Rollings's clerk that they didn't give a damn for the company rules.
They must be trying to keep it a
quiet
arrest.

Rollings risked striking a match, reaching out the window, and lighting the fuse that ran up an old rainspout and through a length of pipe to a firepot on the roof peak. The firepot was visible from
Ferengi
, currently moored in the harbor, and from the family home—if the fuse burned all the way to it, if it ignited, if anyone was looking. But it was nice to have one more thing to do. He dropped the match, pushed the window closed, rested his finger on an entry about a roll of chicken wire—the knob turned.

Rollings loudly said, “I told you no interruptions ever—”

“We are not your clerk!” the Special Assistant said, entering.

He turned around. “I can see that.”
Oh, spirits of Lando and Sisko be with me.

The Special Assistant lunged forward and struck him in the face; Rollings glared at the man with all the dignity he could muster. “If you are taking me to the Commandant, I am sure you were supposed to deliver me unharmed.”

“They didn't say,” the man said. The four Special Assistants bound Rollings and Deanna, and shoved them roughly through the door. They didn't go out of their way to push or trip them down the stairs but they didn't seem to be worrying that that might happen, either.

Four guys,
Jamayu thought.
Well, crap, I hope you're smart enough not to try anything, Geordie. Wish I hadn't sent the distress signal at all.
His older son was impulsive and brave to exactly the kind of fault Rollings was afraid he might be about to exhibit.

As they turned onto a broader street, Rollings saw that it was worse than he had thought; dozens of prominent citizens and their families were being marched through the town, and the Commandant's supporters and hangers-on had brought the city crowd out onto the sidewalks to jeer and point.
I thought the secret police had come for us, but this is feeling more like we're going to the guillotine. Well, probably they won't be looking for the radio or the code pads, then; this looks like a roundup of people that don't like the Commandant, not like me getting caught spying.

Deanna pressed against him, and at first he thought she was huddling in fear, but though her wrists were tied behind her, she managed to elbow-bump him in Morse:

G WAVED 2D FLR WNDW HE IS LOOSE

He bumped back:

STAY LOOSE UR SELF

As they walked and more prominent citizens joined the group, the Special Assistants prodded the prisoners much closer together, and it was easier for Rollings and his daughter to signal each other. The Special Assistants and their militia backup seemed to be herding them together mostly to open up a separating space between them and the yelling, cheering crowd on the sidewalk.

Other prisoners were shouted at and sometimes struck if they tried to speak, so Rollings and Deanna kept communication discreet, brief, and necessary.

After a while, glancing back, he noticed that the crowds from the sidewalk were following them, and bump-signaled Deanna. She replied,

WE R PART OF EVENT I GUESS

but then neither of them had any more to say.

The Special Assistants marched their prisoners over the Brooklyn Bridge; in places where the pavement was crumbling there were sometimes frightening holes through which they could see water far below, but no one seemed to be trying to push them in. From there, they walked south toward the area near the former Battery Park where the Commandant had established his headquarters.

In all, it was only about two miles, but many of the prisoners were elderly and people don't walk fast with their hands tied behind their backs. It was almost dark as they were herded, with the rest of Manbrookstat's elite, into an open-air pen in front of the gas-lit rostrum. All around them, the city mob was restless, happy one moment and angry the next, apparently unsure whether they had been summoned to a purge or a festival.

Finally the Commandant stepped into the pool of warm gaslight on the rostrum. “My friends,” he said, “my dear friends, let me first make an announcement that will sadden some of you. Just a few days ago, the Army of the Wabash was defeated at Tippecanoe, in what used to be the state of Indiana, and beaten so badly that they were unable to come to the defense of Pale Bluff, that charming little town some of you may have read about in foreign newspapers. On Sunday, Pale Bluff itself was lost, and my agents tell me the fires are still burning there. The former United States no longer has a viable transcontinental connection, and Lord Robert's Domain has become a secure nation with defensible frontiers.” There were so many lies in that single sentence that Rollings felt as if he might explode; dozens of routes remained open and the Domain was no bigger than it had been.
But,
he realized,
most of these guys don't know that.

“I have therefore come to a painful decision, one I had been forming for some time. The United States of America is not united anymore, many of its states have ceased to exist and are being replaced by other states and nations, and all that is left is an American continent in which we must carve out our own destiny. I am therefore proclaiming that the Commandancy of Manbrookstat is now and will remain a sovereign nation, with its northern boundary at the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, its southern boundary at the James, Greenbrier, New, Kanawha, and Ohio Rivers, details to be worked out with the Christian States of America which is now forming.

“Our western border will be fixed in negotiations with the Domain, which we have the honor to be the first nation to recognize and to accept in trade negotiations.

“The Commandancy of Manbrookstat intends to join the Atlantic League as a founding member; at this moment it appears that other founders will be the Galway Republic, the Grand Duchy of Halifax, the Kingdom of the Azores, Trinidad/Tobago, Dominica, Argentina, Puerto Rico, and a number of states now being organized around port cities in the former Brazil, Iceland, Norway, Morocco, Portugal, and Ireland.

“Finally, I realize that many of you had hoped there would someday be a United States again. I myself, as a cadet, took an oath to uphold and defend it. But however bereaved we may be, however deep our grief, however much we wish it were not so, the fact is that there is no United States anymore, and the dreams of reviving it are idle fantasies, and can only be dangerous delusional dreams in years to come.

“Now, I have every faith that the common people understand this. The common people, after all, are
born
practical, and besides, they are well aware that the old arrangements were not really in their favor; many of them can look forward to prospering much more in our newer, fairer world than they ever did under the old United States regime. And since the common people understand it, and gain by it, it is only a victory for democracy that we listen to them and pursue the independent and free Commandancy of Manbrookstat according to their wishes.”

Rollings tried to keep his face impassive as the mob surrounding their pen cheered and whooped. Apparently some of the people nearer the barriers were less good at hiding their feelings, for the crowd was jeering and throwing things at some of them, and the militia slowly, reluctantly, halfheartedly was trying to make them stop.

When the uproar had quieted, the Commandant went on. “Now, my friends and fellow citizens, you also see before you the business, educational, and political leadership of our Commandancy. These are of course people who did very well, back before.

“And then they continued to do well as the world moved, at first, toward re-establishing the old regime, and putting the United States of America back together.

“But as we have noted, there is no possibility now of a Restored Republic. Any hope for a Restored Republic, now, would be an aggressive plot to preserve wealth and privilege, or to gain more of it unfairly.

“So we can very fairly look at these citizens and ask, ‘Can we trust them? Will they work toward the new, democratic Commandancy, and for the common good?' And, to be blunt, I am sure some of them won't, but fellow citizens and good friends, let me point out to you that I have worked with many of these people, and know them, and like them, and that I am equally sure that most of them will make a full commitment to the success of the new Commandancy, and it would be the very height of injustice to treat them with suspicion or to vent anger from any bygone unfairness on these hardworking, upstanding people who have made our city a much better place to live.

“Therefore, we're going to do the following, and I really do think it is all we will ever need to do. We're going to ask each family, or as many of its members as were in the city this evening, to come forward, onto the rostrum here, and swear an oath of allegiance to Manbrookstat, to the Commandancy, to the citizens of the Commandancy, and of course to me personally as well since I am serving you as your Commandant. Then once they have given their oaths, our militia or our Special Assistants will escort them peaceably back to their homes, and they will peaceably go about their normal business tomorrow, under the fair and democratic laws of the Commandancy, just as they did under the laws of the old United States. We have a number of them to get through tonight, so I'll ask you to hold your applause till the end.”

The first family pulled out of the crowded pen and pushed into the light, not roughly but firmly, were the Theards; Rollings knew them slightly, as the owners and operators of a large fish market. Henri Theard seemed very relieved to see his wife, three daughters, and elderly mother, and they all repeated their new oath of allegiance with calm acceptance.

After a smattering of clapping, the Commandant reminded everyone to hold applause till the end. The Theards were escorted from the stage and out into the night.

That set the pattern until the Commandant called up the Steigers. Joseph Steiger had several adult grandchildren and ran the city's compost industry, which was rapidly turning large parts of Staten Island into truck gardens. In the business community, he was an outspoken public critic of the Commandant, and fifty-star flags flew from every building in his operation. It was clear that the family was being pushed more than helped onto the platform, and that it wasn't easy to find places for all of them to stand.

“And now the Steiger family will take the oath. Please repeat after—”

Old Joe Steiger bellowed, “Like hell we will. This bullshit is treason, blatant treason, and—”

Doubtless, the Commandant had planned it.

The Special Assistant behind Joseph Steiger whipped out a heavy, short piece of pipe and brought it down on Steiger's head in one savage motion. Steiger fell to his knees, moaning, and the Special Assistant struck again, knocking him to his face, kicked him in the ribs, and brought the pipe down on his head so hard that the thud was audible where Rollings stood.

The crowd was silent for a moment, and then someone laughed, and then many of them did.
Maybe that first guy that laughed was a plant,
Rollings thought.
But everyone that laughed after him, they weren't all plants. The mob's with the Commandant.

The Commandant said, “Now we will continue with the oath. Mrs. Sharon Steiger, if you will lead—”

Joe Steiger's wife (or was she already his widow?) screamed a few words of denunciation before the same Special Assistant, with the same pipe, knocked her down. The way she twitched on the little stage looked more like a spasm than a struggle. The mob was still laughing, but with a nervous, hysteric edge.

The Commandant sighed with just a hint of impatience. “Since the oldest members of the family won't lead, let's try a younger one. Tory Steiger, please step forward.”