The Rift

This work is dedicated to Willie Siros

without whose information on the geology of

the New Madrid Fault, given over lunch at a

truck stop in Bastrop, this book would not exist.

Author’s Note

The following is a story of chaos, destruction, death, and civil strife following a massive earthquake in the central U.S.

It is also a tale of a more innocent time.

In the 1990s, when
The Rift
was written, the world seemed a more stable and secure place. The Cold War had ended, bringing to an end the threat of a worldwide atomic holocaust that had furnished the background for so many works of fiction both hopeful and despairing. While I did not subscribe to Francis Fukuyama’s theory that history had just ended, it
did
seem as if the role of the American chief executive was to intervene cautiously and hopefully in minor ethnic conflicts abroad and “to be seen to be caring” about people and their problems.

And then, well, elements of my novel started to
come true
.

Not a giant earthquake at New Madrid, no. But the floods of 2002, 2008, and the disastrous floods of 2011 gave more than a hint of what might befall the country in such an event. The fall of the Twin Towers resulted in an abrupt lurch in foreign policy, as well as highlighting the dangers of religious fundamentalism. And, more than anything, Hurricane Katrina brought the world of
The Rift
vividly into focus.

As I watched Katrina unfold on the television, I was oppressed by an appalled sense of déjà vu, particularly as regards the apparent decision of the authorities to sacrifice thousands of people, most of them poor, disadvantaged, and black. In
The Rift
, the racial tragedy is the work of bad men with bad intentions. During Katrina, the sacrifice seemed the default tactic of all involved. Even the city administration, run by an elected black mayor, seemed incapable of doing anything other than enact the cultural imperative of the region.

And when I heard of the Danziger Bridge shootings, I couldn’t help but think of Omar Paxton and the officers of my fictional Spottswood Parish.

Another jolt of déjà vu came with the Tohoku Earthquake of 2011 and the subsequent meltdowns of the nuclear reactors at Fukushima. Again, watching the catastrophe unfold in realtime, on a high-definition television screen, I couldn’t help but think that in my story of Larry Hallock and the nuclear power station at Poinsett Landing, I’d written the script the world was now following. I sometimes wish that I’d been a little less prescient.

When I began planning to reissue
The Rift
, I considered whether I might want to rewrite the novel to give my characters knowledge of these events. But I realized that not only would this be a major undertaking, it might well be
impossible
— if my characters knew about Katrina and Fukushima, would their actions remain even remotely the same? Or would they behave differently, and with a different mindset?

It may be that all disaster novels are creations of their own time, reflecting the anxieties of their particular era. But even if that’s the case, that doesn’t eradicate their virtues:
The Poison Belt
is just as entertaining as it was in 1913, even if we no longer believe in the luminiferous aether stretching between the stars. The insights of
Alas, Babylon
and
On the Beach
are no less stirring than they were in the 1950s, and the wit and cynicism of
A Canticle for Liebowitz
is no less refreshing than it was in 1959.

I am therefore pleased to present to you
The Rift
, which barring the correction of a few errors of fact and more than a few insalubrious sentences, appears just as it did in 1998.

May you be preserved from all disasters.

Walter Jon Williams

New Mexico, 2013

Lights of ships moved in the fairway
—
a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.

“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

—Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness

PROLOGUE

LAST CHANT OF THE SUN MAN

He was a god to his people. He lived high above the earth, in the realm of his brother the Sun, and his rule stretched from the world of life to the world of spirits. His word was absolute. Even the gods respected his desires.

So why did the dogs disturb his dreams? It seemed unfair that he could not order them to stop their howling.

The unearthly crying of dogs awakened the Sun Man before dawn. Leaving the slave Willow Girl asleep on the pallet beneath her buffalo robes, he dressed himself in the dark— a cape of bright bird feathers, a headdress of white swan feathers that ringed his head like the battlements of a tower, an apron of pierced whelk shells brought two thousand miles upriver from the Gulf of Mexico— and then he picked up his boots and made his way out of the long house and into the still, cool predawn air.

“How may I serve the Divine Sun, my husband?” said a voice.

The Sun Man was startled, then annoyed. His wife, the Great Priestess, had a habit of turning up when she was neither wanted nor expected. Now she lay before him, stretched full on the ground in a prostration of respect. He wondered how long she had been there.

The Sun Man dropped his boots before her. “You may lace up my boots, if it suits you,” he said.

The Great Priestess rose to her knees. She held out one of his boots, and he stepped into it. Her tattooed face pursed with disapproval as she worked the hide laces.

“That lazy Willow Girl hasn’t done the job?” she said. “She doesn’t know enough to protect the feet of the Divine Sun against the dew?”

“She was asleep,” the Sun Man said.

Her voice grew more severe at this weak excuse. “It is not her business to sleep when the Divine Sun is awake.”

“I will speak to her.”

“It is a whip of braided deerhide that will do the speaking,” the Great Priestess said. “I will see to it myself.”

The Sun Man kept his face still. “If you do not think such a matter beneath your notice,” he suggested hopefully.

“Nothing that concerns the Divine Sun is beneath my notice,” she replied.

The Sun Man restrained another sigh. His wife was the absolute ruler of the household, and he had no business disrupting her domestic arrangements. If she wanted to whip a slave, she could do so. He could only hope that she would do the whipping herself, frail and old as she was, and not order a burly male servant to do the job.

He would have to try to think of a way to make it up to Willow Girl later.

The problem, he reflected, was his wife’s common birth. If she had been born into the privileged and sophisticated Sun Clan, the divine rulers of the People, she would have had a greater tolerance for his flings with the slave girls. She would have known that his liaisons meant nothing, that he was merely exercising one of the perquisites of his birth.

But the Sun Clan was very small, and the noble clans weren’t very large, either, so both were required to marry outside of their caste, which meant marriages with commoners. The Sun Man’s wife had brought her commoner’s views into his household, and expected her husband to remain faithful to her bed as if he were merely a farmer or a stinking fisherman. Such behavior was proper to one of the lowborn, perhaps, but certainly not for an all-powerful autocrat whose rule had been ordained in heaven. The Great Priestess did not understand that his slave girls were not a threat to her own position, but were just a way of keeping his bed warm at night. They were an itch that he scratched, nothing more.

The Great Priestess finished tying the laces of his boot. She held out the other, and the Sun Man stepped into it.

“The funeral of your divine brother, the Fierce Badger, was very expensive,” she said, her voice deliberately casual.

Here, he thought, was the real reason why he found her waiting here in the doorway.

“True,” he said.

“And Eyes of Spring, your sister and the mother of your heir, is growing frail.”

“Also true.”

“It will be necessary to give her an expensive funeral as well. Should you not consider a war on the northern barbarians by way of acquiring spoils?”

“I will give the matter thought.”

He
had
given it thought— these facts were obvious enough— but it was clear that he had not given it as much thought as the Great Priestess.

“The war chief is new to his post,” she continued, “and we have a whole class of young warriors that require seasoning.”

“Relations with the barbarians are good,” the Sun Man said. “There hasn’t been any trouble between us in years. I do not want my old age to be troubled by wars, and a war would disrupt our trade northward for copper and pipe clay.”

“It is sad that Eyes of Spring is so weak,” the Great Priestess reminded. “There will be great mourning soon, and disruptions one way or another.”

She tied the bootlace with a little snap of finality, then turned her head to direct her stony face to the horizon. She had made her point, and now her husband was dismissed to go about his business.

Out in the town below, the dogs yowled.

“I will speak to my brother the Sun on this matter,” the Sun Man said, and walked across the level, grassy field atop the mound until he gazed over the edge at his sleeping kingdom below.

The Sun Mound on which the Sun Man lived covered ten acres, its base larger than that of Khafre’s pyramid in faraway Egypt. Across the plaza was another mound equally large, the Temple Mound from which the Sun Man worshiped his divine brother, the Sun. Each mound had been built over the last hundred years by the painstaking labor of thousands. The great mounds had been raised one basketful of earth at a time, each basketful dug by hand and carried to its destination by a dutiful citizen.

Twelve thousand people lived below the two great earthen mounds, half within the ditch and wooden stockade that surrounded the heart of the city. The City of the Sun was one of the great cities of the world, its population larger than that of barbaric Saxon London over four thousand miles to the northeast. Many more thousands of the Sun Man’s subjects lived in large towns linked to the city by road and river, and thousands more in small villages or isolated farms. If the Sun Man ordered the new war chief, his nephew Horned Owl, to make war on the barbarians of the northwest prairies, he could bring over three thousand warriors into the field, more if the Sun Man called in the allies. It was the largest armed force on the North American continent, and assured the Sun People’s domination of their world.

And the Sun People in turn were dominated by the Sun Man, the divine ruler who held the power of life or death over every single one of them, who spoke daily to his brother, the Sun, the great burning disk that ruled the heavens and commanded all things on earth.

The Sun Man regulated everything within his empire. The time of planting, the time of harvest. He kept track of the calendar, scheduled all ceremonies, festivals, and initiations; ordered entire populations to report for duty to build mounds, repair the stockade, or maintain roads. He collected taxes in the form of corn, and traded it for precious objects or distributed it in times of famine. Though other chiefs acted as magistrates, the Sun Man was the court of final appeal—he gave justice, imposed fines, and ordered exile, punishment, or death. Although the war chief led the soldiers into battle, it was the Sun Man who declared the war and made the peace that followed.

His word was not only the law, it was the divine law. To defy him was no mere rebellion, it was blasphemy.

If only, he thought, he could command the dogs to be silent. What was bothering them?

The Sun Man began to descend the earthen ramp that led from his Dwelling Mound to the plaza below. Pain shot through his knees and back at the impact of each step. Walking downhill was always painful for him. His shoulders ached so dreadfully that he could barely raise his arms above shoulder height. He had lost half his teeth, and the rest were worn to nubs by grit in the stone-ground maize that made up most of his diet.

The Sun Man was very, very old.

He had lived for forty-one years.

At the bottom of the grass ramp the Sun Man met his two chief attendants, his pipe-bearer He Who Leaps Ahead, and his new mace-bearer, Calls the Deer. Both had been about to chant their way up the Sun Mound in order to formally awaken him— approaching the Sun Man required a degree of ceremony— but the dogs had done their job for them. They prostrated themselves before the Sun Man, faces into the turf, outstretched arms offering the pipe and mace for his use. The carved and ornamented pipe and the simple, heavy stone mace symbolized the Sun Man’s spiritual and temporal powers, the first able to summon spirits to the earth, the second capable of splitting a man’s skull.

“Stand,” the Sun Man said.

Calls the Deer, at twenty-five in the prime of life, sprang easily upright, then had to help He Who Leaps Ahead to his feet. The old pipe-bearer’s name, the Sun Man thought, no longer reflected the man who stood before him, but instead the swift youth of memory, first in races and first in war, who had joined the Sun Man’s official family back when they both, and in memory the world itself, were young. Now Leaps Ahead was ancient, crook-backed and white-haired, the tattoos on his face blurred with age, as if smudged by tears.

The Sun Man cast an admiring glance at Calls the Deer. The young man was a fine example of the noble caste: he was strong, a fine hunter, and his splendid memory gave him perfect recollection of the large number of chants and other religious ceremonies that were a part of his duties. He was deferent to his elders, but knew also how to maintain the dignity of his own high position.

A pity he will die soon,
the Sun Man thought. For he knew that he, himself, would not last much longer. And when he died, much of his world would die with him.

He who dwells in the sky

He who gives warmth and light to the world

This is the one we come to praise

This is the one whose greatness we come to exalt

It was not proper to face the god directly when approaching him, so the Sun Man and his attendants wove left and right as they ascended the Temple Mound. Their snakelike ascent made the ritual approach much longer than if they had walked directly up the ramp.

Let all the world sing his praises

Let the god rise into the sky

Let him bring his blessings to the People.

Through long practice, the words came easily to the Sun Man’s lips. But his mind was occupied by thoughts of life and death.

Barring pains in his joints and in his teeth, the Sun Man remained healthy. He was still able to chant loudly at the ceremonies, participate in some of the slower dances, and pleasure himself with Willow Girl. His mind was clear. But at his age it only took a little thing to bring him down, a chest cold that wouldn’t leave, a winter chill, a careless fall.

And when he passed from the world, Calls the Deer would die with him. As would He Who Leaps Ahead, and many others.

For the divine Sun Brother could not go unaccompanied to the spirit world. His two chief attendants would be strangled at the funeral by bowstrings, and so would his wife the Great Priestess, and Willow Girl, and all the slave girls who had borne him children. Members of the Sun Clan— including his sister Eyes of Spring, if she outlived him— would volunteer to be strangled, and so would prominent members of the noble and commoner castes. The cavernous long house atop the Sun Mound would be burned, the mound raised above its ashes, and a new long house constructed for the Sun Man’s nephew, who would reign after him.

A new conical burial mound would be raised above the Sun Man, and at least thirty young girls would be laid to rest with him there, and an equal number of young warriors, all to serve the Sun Man in the afterworld. To provide these ghostly servants, any young person would do, including slaves. But if there was not a sufficient supply of slaves, then the People of the Sun would have to volunteer, or be persuaded to volunteer.

That was why the Great Priestess had chosen to speak of war this morning. The funeral of the Sun Man’s younger brother, the war chief Fierce Badger, had reduced the number of suitable slaves, and his older sister, Eyes of Spring, was in frail health. If she died soon, a few dozen girls and warriors would be called upon to accompany her. If the supply of attractive, youthful slaves actually ran out, the Sun People themselves might be called upon to die before their time.

When this happened— and if there was an insufficient number of volunteers to make up the difference— there was sometimes an unseemly discord within the Sun People as the community’s leaders chose those most suitable for strangulation, always the fittest warriors and the most beautiful and pleasing young women, people whose lives the selfish commoners sometimes wanted to preserve. In the past there had been loud protests and even violence, disharmony that could mar the funerals of the great. It was always good for the community’s health if there were a supply of slaves on hand for sacrifice.

That was why the Great Priestess wanted war now, why she wanted the Sun Man to send the new war chief and three thousand warriors marching northeast onto the prairies.

She wanted to make certain that her husband’s funeral, which would also be her own, would be suitably grand, and that the mound would be raised above them without disharmony among the People.

There was sense behind this plan, the Sun Man conceded.

But wars, also, lacked harmony. And the Sun Man, perhaps selfishly, did not want strife to mar his last years.

He would speak to his Brother Sun, he thought. And if the Sun was in favor of war, then the Sun Man would order his mace-bearer to carry the declaration of war to the war chief.

We obey the words of the Sun

We follow him in all his ways

We chant his praises to all the world

It is our Brother Sun we exalt above all others

The chant had carried them to the top of the mound. Before them was the big temple with its steeply pitched roof of prairie grasses. Fragrant pine smoke rose to scent the air. The three prostrated themselves before it once again, and then rose to approach the temple.