and put them in a bucket before taking them home. Naturally the crabs all started trying to escape — but their preferred method for doing this seemed to involve pulling each other down in order to climb up the others’ bodies and get on top. None of the crabs seemed to notice that, as a result of all the pulling down, none of them were escaping. Now Maj thought of all those small countries, desperate, struggling, and yet succeeding mostly at keeping one another down as they struggled (they thought) up.
Elsewhere, though, power had changed hands with relatively little fuss beyond mass demonstrations in the streets and some shootings of people in high places. Romania was one of these places. After many years of truly astonishing repression under a Marxist-style dictator, the country shook him off suddenly and relatively unbloodily, and settled down into what everyone had thought would be a slow but steady process of “Westernization.” But there were still surprises in store. After the Balkan difficulties of the turn of the millennium had trailed off and a long weary quiet had settled over the area, suddenly the nationalist urge awakened in Romania, and over the space of several months the country shuddered, convulsed, and split itself in three. The southernmost and most urban part, which named itself Oltenia after its northern hills, kept the cities of Bucharest and Constante (and incidentally most of the region’s trade with the West, since it had the Black Sea ports at Constanle and Mangalia). The midmost part of the country became Transylvania as a nation as well as a region. It had stayed fairly calm and settled, even while the dust of secession was still in the air, and had continued to do a brisk business in tourism to the former haunts of Vlad Dracula, both for those tourists interested in the ancient Voivod as a nationalist hero who fought off the Huns, and those more interested in his (theoretical) career as a vampire.
The northernmost area of what the newspeople routinely called “the-former-Romania,” the area which now called itself the Calmani Republic and contained most of the mountain chain stretching down from that area, had at first seemed likely to go the same way as Oltenia had. But when the revolution had almost finished, and the candidates whom it seemed the local people wanted to run things were about to take power, there came a hiccup that took everyone by surprise. Several of the candidates for the new ten-man “Senate” died under strange and violent circumstances — shot in the streets by unknown assailants, or bombed in their beds — and other candidates pulled out of the Senate within days. When this new and terrible cloud of dust settled, there were only three senators left, and the new small country as a whole was so unnerved that no one argued much when the three of them took power as a “caretaker government” until a new set of elections could be held, if they ever would be held….
“I don’t know,” she suddenly heard her father say, from down the hall. “I’ll ask, though. Maj?”
He put his head around the kitchen door. Her dad was wearing his sweats, which was normal this time of morning; usually he went out running as early as possible, on summer workdays, to take advantage of the cooler temperatures.
“Yeah, Dad?”
“Were you going to order some workout clothes for Niko? He’s going to run with me. All he needs are sweats, nothing fancy. And he’ll need shoes.”
“Sure, I’ll take care of it. He’ll have to tell me his shoe size, though…the machine’s no good at that. At least none of our machines are…. The GearOnline computer might be able to pull something from the measurements it took the other day. Just in case, what’s the size?”
“Thirty-six,” Laurent said, putting his head around from behind Maj’s father.
She goggled at him. “What are you doing up at this awful hour?”
“It is lunchtime in Europe,” Laurent said.
“I don’t mean that. I mean, not
But Laurent grinned at her. “I am fine.”
“I’m not so sure. Is thirty-six really a shoe size where you come from?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Maj said. “I’ll tell GearOnline…we’ll see what they make of it.”
Her father and Laurent vanished around the door again, down the hall and out the front door into the morning. Maj raised her eyebrows, then said to the computer, “Go ahead again…”
A few moments later she was watching things get strange in Calmani, twenty years or so ago. The “troika” caretaker government look office and functioned well enough for a few months. But then two of them died, also under strange circumstances…and the country was kept so busy by trying to work out what the third one was going to do that they had little time or, later, opportunity to find out exactly what had happened to the others. They were too busy dealing with their new ruler, Cluj.
Daimon Cluj was an “elder statesman” who was a child in the bad old days when Ceaucescu had begun to lose his grip on a country he had dominated ruthlessly with the connivance of the old Soviet Union. Some never forgave him, or the Soviet Union for that matter, for growing so weak that the “good old days” of absolute order went away, that time when there was no drug problem and little crime in the streets because drug dealers and criminals were tortured to death when they were caught, and when there was no political unrest because anyone who got unrestful was arrested and shot.
Cluj, remembering those good old days, was determined to bring them back. And with the help of some thousands of vicious hired thugs — no one knew for sure where they came from, but there were plenty of such people still wandering covertly around the region, looking for someone to hire them and turn them loose — he brought those old days back, in spades. He established an old-fashioned one-man dictatorship, Marxist-Leninist in spirit, full of talk about solidarity and brotherhood and the people, but in fact all about keeping Cluj himself in power and putting his country “back the way it should have been.” His version of “should have been” involved large numbers of secret police, industry being taken over by the government and making what the government thought it should make, people eating what they were told to eat and seeing what entertainment or news they were told to watch, and otherwise keeping quiet and behaving themselves like enlightened citizens of an enlightened socialist state.
This all went well enough for several months, and people saw trains being made to run on time and markets having a lot of food in them — not a whole lot of different kinds of food, but a lot in terms of quantity — and drug dealers and thieves being put up against walls and shot. There was a lot of good feeling expressed about this. But then the prices of food in the markets began to go up, and the trains, though they ran on time, were not allowed to go any farther than the Oltenian or Transylvanian or Hungarian border; and as for the New Army, the grim-faced men with the submachine guns, it seemed no one had given much thought as to what they would do when they ran out of drug dealers to shoot.
Predictably, they turned their attention elsewhere, closer to home, to the ordinary people they had “liberated.” The secret police — no one called them that to their faces; Cluj’s name for the organization was the Interior Security Forces — ran out of organized crime figures to terrorize and started in on those who were neither organized nor criminals — the people of Calmani’s larger towns, Iasi and Galati and Suceava, who were assumed to be “decadent” because they lived in cities. Those who had no reason to be “living in luxury” were turned out of their homes and driven into the countryside to work on collective farms and be reeducated out of their decadent ways. But not everyone was driven out. Some, the ones that the government — meaning Cluj — wanted something out of, were permitted to stay in the cities…but they had to work for the privilege.
Laurent’s father, Maj now realized, was one of these. A scientist would be useful…a biologist much more so. And so very specialized and talented a biologist would be a big asset.
Oltenia and Transylvania were actually making noises about joining the European Union. And worse, on the northern border of Cluj’s country, the Moldovan Republic had just concluded an arms deal with Ukraine. Cluj had apparently found this particular piece of news unnerving, and Maj thought she knew why. Though his ground forces were vicious and had plenty of small arms, Cluj was short on tanks and had no long-range weaponry worth speaking of. To his mind, a deal between Ukraine and Moldova could only mean one thing — Moldavia was planning to invade him while he was vulnerable. This was obvious to Cluj because it was what he would have done himself.
