Without warning

of a sinking ship. Together the rationing and curfew systems tended to keep people at home most of the time.

They slowed down to negotiate a large but docile crowd that had gathered at the Fort DeRussy parklands for a food-distribution point run by the army. A dozen trucks were parked in a line before an avenue of olive-drab tents. Soldiers were unloading hundreds of boxes, stacking them in neat piles guarded by colleagues toting rifles. It was still a bizarre, unnatural sight – Americans lined up like victims of a Honduran earthquake to score a bowl of rice or a milk biscuit. Culver pushed the images out of his mind and returned to his papers, making some untidy margin notes on a briefing he had to deliver later that day at a telephone hook-up between the attorneys-general of the surviving states.

Admiral Ritchie was adamant that the armed forces could not continue drifting through the constitutional limbo into which they had been cast. It was not simply a matter of requiring political direction for the course of the hot war they were now fighting in the Middle East. There were security nightmares springing up like poison weeds all over the world, as well as some very basic and uncomfortable questions of sustainability for those forces that remained in existence.

‘How do we keep going?’ Ritchie had asked Jed late last night.

Culver thought the admiral might as well have asked, ‘Why should we keep going?’ He couldn’t imagine what was holding together a fighting force that had nothing to fight for anymore, and increasingly lacked the money to do so.

Immediate survival, he supposed. But if and when the immediate peril was no longer there, what then? A nation of ten million people – that was the rough estimate of living, breathing American citizens left in the world – a nation that small could not sustain a military even a fraction the size of the one it had at the moment. Especially not with most of the country sealed off behind an impenetrable and utterly mysterious barrier. Frankly, Culver doubted whether the area that remained unaffected on the continent was viable in the medium term anyway. He grunted almost imperceptibly as he briefly thought of all those people stuck in Seattle and just across the border in Vancouver. None of them could be certain some natural fluctuation in the event horizon wouldn’t gobble them up in the blink of an eye, although, by that measure of course, nobody on the planet could really feel safe.

You had to wonder how much of the chaos wrapping itself like giant bat wings around the world was down to the effect of that uncertainty rather than the unsettling effect of simply removing at one stroke the massive political ballast represented by America… Oh, screw it. It was undergrad bullshitting, all of it. The only thing that mattered was fixing the problems he could fix, and for now that meant stabilising the remnant power of the United States and securing the immediate future of his family.

The lawyer flipped open his laptop and began to compose an email to Ritchie. He wanted to bounce a few ideas off the admiral before the conference call in the afternoon.

‘Hey Ritch,’ he began, very deliberately using the informal style of address he’d cultivated in his dealings with the navy man.

You asked for my thoughts on the line of succession before I wrote them up for the reference group. Well, I’m thinking the only way to punch through all this is to go back to first principles. We’ve got us a constitutional boondoggle. We need us a constitutional convention to stamp it flat. A short, sharp, butt-kicking convention.

Normally you’d require a vote of two-thirds of the state legislatures just to get everyone together. It’s the only amendatory process available in the absence of a functioning Congress and Senate. The intent of the relevant section of the Constitution, Article 5, is that the ‘two-thirds’ would be ‘two-thirds’ of all of the states, but that is impossible under present circumstances.

The only available option would be for the three surviving states to declare themselves the only three states and to then call a convention or, more likely, to declare themselves trustees for the ‘missing’ forty- seven states, and vote those states’ interests at a convention called to address the current emergency. The result is the same, and it is the only mechanism available in my estimation to reconstitute a federal government within the letter of the Constitution.

Jed stopped tapping the keys and stared out of the window at the passing scenery for a moment. They had turned onto the freeway, which was largely deserted, save for a few Hummers heading downtown from Pearl, and the National Memorial Cemetery was slipping by on the right. He had a great-uncle buried up there. Uncle Lou, on his mom’s side. He’d meant to visit the grave sometime during his vacation but had never made it. He was sure his forebear would understand. Lou Stafford had been killed on Wake Island, the same day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He’d fought when all seemed hopeless, given his life so that Jed and his kids could live free. You had to wonder what the old guy would have made of all this, thought Culver – before reminding himself that Lou Stafford was only nineteen when he died. Not much of an old guy, really. The lawyer nodded a quick greeting, which would have to do for now.

He went back to his screen, wondering about the difficulties of assembling a convention along the lines he was proposing. The very nature of the three surviving states might pose problems. Hawaii and Washington, particularly the western half of the state, were very liberal, Democratic leaning, and in the case of the latter, not particularly pro-military. Seattle he found notoriously smug and self-righteous, although that may have changed now. The eastern, agricultural portion of Washington, right up to the event horizon, was heavily Republican, although many of those people had already relocated into temporary shelters in Seattle. Hawaii had no oil, no real agriculture and no industry, but it did have a strong military presence. The maritime power alone concentrated here was still greater than that of any other country in the world. Washington had agriculture, industry and refining capacity, but no oil. Alaska had no agriculture, plenty of oil and decent refining capacity, but very little else, particularly people; and what people it did have tended to be very conservative, libertarian Republicans. He just didn’t know whether they could all get together.

With Massachusetts and Mississippi gone, you could award a blue ribbon to Alaska and Washington for taking out the Polar Opposites prize. Jed figured that Washington, with its much larger population and resource base, would resist Alaska having a virtual veto over any measures necessary to act within a constitutional framework. And Alaska, for its part, might well see itself as the last bastion of rugged individualism, and so would have limited interest in submitting to a drastically revised federal system highly tilted toward nanny-statism.

It was going to be worse than the First and Second Continental Congress, that was for certain. It was going to make the argument over issues like the Article of Confederation and how much of a person a slave represented look like a middle-school debate class. There wasn’t any George Washington around to hold the delegates together or come up with the various compromises they’d need. Any constitutional convention with the three remaining players was going to be a first-class WWE smackdown cage match.

Culver sighed, already exhausted at the prospect of tying all this together into a neat package with a bright bow that everyone would want to own. He returned to his keyboard for one last sentence for Ritchie’s benefit.

The trick to making this work will be to cram all the wild cats into the bag before they know what’s happening.