Kathleen Ann Goonan - The Day The Dam Broke

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Kathleen Ann Goonan

Originally published as an OMNI ONLINE NOVELLA

THE DAY THE DAM BROKE

Kathleen Ann Goonan

Of course James Thurber was from Columbus but I don't think he was Italian.

The

information meant to tempt someone to Colum bus for post-doc

study-intervention

in the plague zone emphasized an Italian neighborhood. I imagined being able

buy fresh buffalo mozzarella every morning, bundles of fragrant green basil,

fresh bread, and Reggiano cheese cut from a jealous wheel, crumbling

deliciously

at the edges into shards I could gobble from stiff paper or nibble between

sips

of cappuccino or pale wine.

Dream on, Julia. Maybe before the millennium, but not now. The information I

latched onto in the L.A. dome was, shall we say, a bit out of date.

One of my grandfathers was actually born in Columbus, which was a point in

its

favor. Now when he leaps from my cabin wall for a chat--nobody else to chat

with

up here in the Canadian Rockies, though I do wait for You--brief auras,

fleeting

pic tures, of old Ohio eddy from him, corridors of time which shimmer back to

the great forests, cool, slow-moving Indian rivers, and then pre-history when

the great land swelled and moved without regard to how we felt about it,

fleas

upon its shuddering thin skin.

Well, that's what I wanted. Good food. Additional personal depth. The

opportunity to make my mark as one of the hot-shot nanplague meds of the

time.

And a chance to get out of the dome.

Those pure enclaves dotted the world like the plastic bub bles they put over

smallpox vaccinations in the nineteen fifties so the kids wouldn't pick the

scabs off too soon. I hypered into that odd little tidbit while researching

plagues. I felt like part of a vaccine against the nanotech disasters of the

recent past, the disasters which still had not ended. As we were to learn. I

ached to be able to help make everything safe enough so that we could remove

the

goddamned domes, those sad ellipsoidal barriers to the sky and stars and to

what

I saw as Life.

Fine they said go. You think medicine is all G.E. That's genetic engineering

and

I did. Inhalants in which DNA rode to the rescue on viral steeds. Wait till

you

get out in the sticks. Far from us. Far from the Links--communication was

touch

and go at that point but better than now! I must tell you that I am an old

woman. That depends on your definition of old of course but I was born

pre-mil,

1999, and it is now . . . can it be? Oh, I'm just teasing you it is, it is

truly, twenty. Ninety-three. 2093. And this took place when I was a young

whippersnapper, as Thurber's grandfather might say, caught up in the RWF,

Radio

Wave Fibrillation, and the Great Panic, and there I was, alone without

medical

backup (or willing patients either so it didn't really matter) and no fresh

mozzarella either, if there ever had been any. At least I have the latter

now.

Maybe that's what I wanted most all along.

I don't digress; press your ears to what must now pass for my heart--the

radio.

If the technology is the same as now, and fibrillation has briefly ceased,

use

the purple infrabar. That will give you the correct screen; then program in

the

code CT2.1 for automatic fine tuning. I don't know what color or even what

form

access to radio waves may take further down the road and therefore I have

prepared this in airborne nan form as well--doubtful, doubtful that it would

ever be breathed by other humans, given my remoteness but if so you will

learn

how I battled the Great Midcentury Plague and how I lost, like everyone else

presume. And, if it's not too far past now for you (this might bounce forever

through the aether), at the end of the broadcast file I'll give you

directions

on how to find me, and a map if it is breathed, for I do enjoy visitors. I

truly

do. At least I think I do. Please, please come visit me. I toss this into the

air frequently, straight up, without regard for possible vandals for after all

know more than you do and if I don't surely you are more kind than those who

know less, for I believe that information grows compassion. Allow a young-old

woman her fantasies. I grow basil, by the way, in a little plot outside my

cabin

door, and cilantro, and masses of poppies which thrive in the long cool

summer.

More clues later. Proceed. Beep! (Sorry, but one gets silly with only a dog

for

company, genetically engineered though he may be.)

And speaking of silly, those satellites rained information down upon us like

silly rain, let me tell you, silly because one

couldn't count on them. But you can count on me. Real sourdough bread, and I

grow and grind and boil my own soybeans and make tofu so you see I am the

real

article. Protein ahead! Hurry! Turn up the gain and maybe that will help.

At any rate--back to the trip from L.A. to Columbus--my maglev arrived at

your

station a week late and I was happy and relieved to get there at all since

the

last maglev had been blown up somewhere in eastern Kansas (I learned after I

had

left L.A.) and then they gave me the wrong sheets.

They? No. That's imprecise. Yes, I know, and you know that I do, and you will

know more if you continue. But for the benefit of other listeners . . . for

posterity, you know . . .

Oh I know it sounds like a nightmare, what we all dreaded at the time, the

wrong

sheets, but it wasn't as bad as it sounds. They pumped me full of

Midwesternism.

Those gorgeous clear nansheets with blinking infolights taught me how to grow

corn when the flood tide on the Great Miami River receded and other

information

more applicable to my present situation than anything I ever learned in L.A.

matter how accelerated, and so I can't complain. Those erroneous sheets

helped

me survive out here and were I not so cynical might have made me a mystic.

They

upped my empathy with the strange outcast population I was coming to help

though

the people of Columbus damn well didn't want any help, not from the likes of

me,

the nanotech enemy. The sheet-empathy was particularly interesting after

living

domed all my life with all the cultural depth of your typical AI,

intelligence

incestuous and terribly inward-pointing. So you can see why I love the sky so

much, and why I perch just below a ridgetop, south-facing, away from the

fiercest, coldest winds. My synaptic code was one or two bits off, out of a

billion, but I was sick that day, with a runny nose, so I thought that virus

had

something to do with my little history lesson, why I learned about corn and

how

my ancestors survived in the deep woods, and the basics of building one's own

radio in the attic as if I were a boy in midcentury Ohio. At least that's what

thought at the time, and that's why I thought Thurber's vignettes were

suddenly

a part of my mind. Now, of course, we know differently. And one of us knew

differently at the time it happened. It all worked out for the best, though;

don't mind!

But I see that you want real people, real settings, real things happening,

not

an old lady's rumination (truth to tell I look even younger than I did, now,

and

so of course do you, all new and unwrinkled, emerging from your cocoon. The

wild

buffalo would call me medicine woman and bow on their shaggy knees and the

Puritans would call me witch and the pomos would call me visionary genius. I

know this because when the blizzards wrap me round with whiteness I sometimes

call up my grandfather, and we discuss such weighty matters and wish he still

had a mouth with which to eat my very good buffalo-buttermilk cornbread).

Perhaps I like it here so much because it's all edges--the edge of a

survivable

climate; the edge of myself, quite sharp; perhaps sharper than you bargained

for. A different edge is not far from you, either, I'm afraid. Yes, yes, the

plague. Allow me to stuff another log into the stove. (Crunch of embers, rain

orange sparks flying upward.) I buffaloed this log in, up and over the high

pass, snagged last month from the Pointed Fir Lodge, a guestless retro-hotel

ski country. It has a stone fireplace big enough to hold this entire cabin.

Perhaps we could meet there some day, at dawn, when the blue clean lake is

still

and the geese rise suddenly, with wild cries, from the reeds on the far

shore.

There is an enormous shed there, filled with logs surrounded with various

mechanical aids to help move them. The guests had to have their show, and the

lodge had laid in about a hundred such logs. This giant is aged and perfect

all of them, unrotted, requiring only cutting to twenty-four inch lengths and

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