will. One needed only study the bloody clashes between Mormon angles and Catholic latinos in the American southwest. Already the media were spiking rumors that White House Central might relocate again from its New Mexico warrens.
Canada, too, had a strong gentile distaste for the new turn in our political path, but chose to treat it as a temporary aberration. Canada's gross national product and her technologies had swelled to the point where she no longer needed to feel defensive about her southern sister. Rather, said Howell, she began to feel all too protective. From the remnants of Maine to the desperate survivors freezing in Michigan, Canadian currency was now more readily acceptable than US greenbacks. Because Canada was our conduit to Asian battlefields and a potential source of fossil fuel, the Collier administration kept a discreet silence on the currency question. But — Seth Howell chose his words with great care in describing US/Canadian relations — White House Central had an obvious problem. Quantrill had to check the definition of the key word, 'hegemony'.
Meanwhile, Canada worried about her RUS alliance. It was not just a question of competition for polar resources, but also of a big new semi-capitalist union adjacent to an enormous semi-Marxist union. Canadians never tired of warning that the Russians had learned nothing but caution in their 1985 debacle. After the RUS learned to modernize their own frozen northlands and to fully exploit their resources, she would doubtless covet Canada's.
Doubtless. But all that could be dealt with later; the spectre of a Chinese Siberia frightened the Canadians even more than
Russians did. Canada stretched out her hand to the RUS, and counted her fingers.
If anyone expected the Russians to make a big display of thanks for Canadian aid, he courted disappointment. The official line from Tass maintained that the ice-crusted Kazakhstan front held the key to western survival. The RUS Supreme Council no longer blustered in blunt ideological jargon terms for foreign audiences. The old words could be dusted off again after the war. The RUS relied instead on a partly genuine, partly spurious identification with the west, and backed the claim with a few gestures such as the Frisbees they exported for US deployment. Without question, the Frisbees had been a major factor in limiting the Indian-supplied invasion of Florida. Just as surely, that invasion was doomed anyway by the vulnerability of its supply lines. Its Latin American supply sources evaporated with the 'Libyan' nuke strikes on Latin American ports, and excepting the few supply submersibles India had punched through the gauntlet of Allied hunter-killer teams, the invaders were now on their own. Tampa Bay would hold.
A few nations were still seeking ways to turn a global atrocity into local profit. Neutral Sweden remembered her windfalls in World War II and sought to employ her merchant fleet as a pipeline for refugees. She could rake in the krona by providing safe floating platforms for those who could pay the price. Brazil, whose neutrality leaned toward the SinoInds, listened to the Swedes; thought she might slash her huge external debt by billions of cruzeiros; and magnanimously offered sanctuary to SinoInd refugees — prepaid in precious metal which Indians had in quantity.
But Argentina and Peru bordered Brazil, and had scarifying debts of their own. They promptly offered to accept Allied refugees for so many pesos and sols per head, whether they came by Swedish surface ships or waterwings. Brazil instantly reconsidered her offer. She needed high technology, not a prefabricated war. The Swedes sulked, and went on selling machine tools to both sides.
Yet America's most sharply-felt boundary was internal: the paranthrax quarantine line which ran up the Mississippi, then the Ohio, extending to Lake Erie via the Ohio state line. Early in February of 1997, the long- awaited vaccine was ready for airdrop, packaged as pressure-fed intramuscular injection ampoules for the millions of Americans in our eastern states. The first drops were made in Tampa and Orlando; the health of our swamp guerrillas was more immediately important than that of miners in West Virginia.
Americans knew, because the holo told them, that the quarantine would be lifted in time. But even the reassurances of Eve Simpson could not counter a suspicion that paranthrax spores might lie dormant for decades. Rumors among the well-informed suggested that the quarantine would stay in effect until every mammal in the US was vaccinated. Until then, it was said, quarantine-runners would be shot on sight. Even quintessential materiel like titanium from mines in New York and Virginia was refined and packaged hot, for hot shipment through Cincinnati. No one needed worry about any bug surviving a ride on
The American west and midwest fared as well as could be expected, as reclamation teams cleared debris from city sites most vital to the war effort. Bakersfield had been a petroleum nexus and would be again; the burly oilfield workers learned new skills while revitalizing the city. Fresno, Lubbock, Wichita, and Des Moines were rapidly rebuilt into the agrarian centers they had been before. The first rolling stock into Lubbock's rail yards brought cultivation equipment to plant more Jojoba and variant Euphorbia than cotton. You could dress in cowhides if necessary, but you couldn't run the railroads on cottonseed oil. We did not expect vegetable oils to become a cheap mainstay. We could only hope they would fill the gaps in our production of oil from wells and Colorado shale.
Faced with widespread demolition of energy sources, President Collier gave a nod of the leonine head to fission reactors. Americans had learned to accept the pervasiveness of ionizing radiation; well then, they would learn to accept fission reactors again. Collier was initially heartened by the simultaneous revelations of a dozen LDS Apostles, all divinely guided to press for more reactors. God had not told anyone how they could be secretly built on short notice. Nor had the Deity hinted that nuclear reactors might become targets of gentiles who would view fission reactors as a symbol of a repressive theocracy. The President went ahead with a sense of disquiet. In the future, he felt, it might be wiser to keep these multiple revelations out of the eye of the gentile public. And for that, he would need more control of media.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
'Now you're being testy, Eve,' said Rudolf Berg, one of NBN's senior VP's. 'Some might even say unpatriotic.'
Eve Simpson slid from the exercise machine, mopping her forehead as she glared from Berg to the beach far below. Wind currents from Santa Barbara and Los Angeles had not been kind in March. Eve missed her little outings, and somebody had to pay… 'Brucie, get me a Drambuie.'
'Calories, Eve,' he clucked.
She would not look toward the mirror in the exercise room; she knew what it would tell her. Those extra few kilos were showing at her waist and chin. 'A joint then,' she raged. 'A cup of hemlock, Bruce; something! Rudy here has Brigham-friggin' City on his brain!'
'I'm only thinking of the network and your future, Eve,' said Berg. 'You can't really expect the President to drop everything and come here.'
'I'm becoming nothing more than an interviewer,' she spat, then inhaled on the proffered filter-tip joint.
Berg met her anger with aplomb, a grey little man with sequined ideas. Even Professor Kelsey praised Berg's sensitivity to the public pulse. 'You're playing a vital role as sugar-tit, Eve. Don't knock it. You have more credibility now than you ever had.'
'I have more tit, you mean,' she grumbled. “Is there no such thing as a low-calorie London broil?' She inhaled again; held it.
'Eat less, chase your young men more.' Berg scratched his nose to hide his expression. “I should imagine there are enough studly young priests in Brigham City to please you.'
'Salt Lake City's still hot,' she accused, exhaling as if Berg himself had dropped the single nuke that exploded over North Temple Street.
'They'll take you around it, as you very well know. And the Gulf of Kutch invasion is
Berg did know how to pull triggers. Eve despised the upstart Ynga Lindermann with her exotic accent and slender rump, whom NBN was surely grooming as a capital-P Personality. Berg knew, too, that Eve valued her
