Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(9)
“What are your intentions?”
“Rebuilding. Quebec has grown rich by exporting thorium and uranium to France, but what has it done with its riches? Nothing. The city is sitting on a pile of gold. The poor aren’t getting anything out of it and the rich are living behind walls, whining about taxes.”
“So, you want to bring back the glory days of the Dark Age.”
“No! Enough grovelling before the Ancients. We’ve indulged in too much of it. Let’s tell the truth: our ancestors built things halfway and half-assed, and they paid too much. They accumulated so much debt that we’re still paying the interest owed to the biosphere. If Quebec is an island, if the West is a desert, if we’re short of metal because we don’t have the energy it would take to produce more, it’s because the Ancients burned everything they could, turned the world into their private garbage pit, and willed us their leftovers.”
“I remember a young man saying the same kind of thing. But a grown man should know enough to leave na?ve dreams to youth.”
“Unless he’s learned how to turn his dreams into realities.”
Lacombe shrugged wearily. Darrick stared, unable to find in his mentor’s eyes excitement to match his own. His first impression had been the right one. The former chancellor was a man as worn down by the years as the staircase outside. The ironbearer suddenly felt absolutely certain that not one hopeful word, not a single animating ideal would shake the inertia weighing down his friend. He turned to Naoufal.
“I was wrong. I shouldn’t have come. Let’s go.”
Naoufal left the window. Darrick had reached the door when Lacombe hailed him. “Tell me, Darrick, were you happy in France? Do you have a wife and children? Did you start a new life?”
“I’m an ironbearer,” the traveller answered coldly. “I did not demean myself. I never begged, if that’s what you want to know.”
“You should have stayed over there.”
“Until recently, I fully intended to.”
“So what happened?”
“I discovered the reason why my father’s Court is next to St. Macaire’s Dome.”
The man nodded slowly, as if against his will. “What do you hope to achieve? Make a great public fuss?”
“Much more than that, old friend. My father’s reign of terror must end. Even in exile, I’ve managed to follow what’s happening here. Letters from my friends countered every happy radio bulletin broadcast from St. Macaire. My father no longer tolerates any check on his power. I was crazy enough to hope that my exile would at least allay some of his fears. But no! Don’t deny it. His rule has become a reign of terror. I’ve seen with my own eyes the cages hanging at the crossroads, dripping with the rotting flesh of his victims or rattling with their bones. And what about the crosses drawn on the walls where his thugs beat or killed innocent bystanders? I knew what they meant before landing, thanks to the letters of Naoufal, but they still gave me the shivers. Isn’t it past time to put an end to it all?”
Lacombe refused to be moved.
“Those so-called ‘victims’ of your father were criminals and troublemakers. You have to keep a strong grip on the rabble to have law and order.”
“That’s not what you taught me once upon a time! What about the consent of the governed? And the respect of basic rights?”
Lacombe shrugged.
“I got old.”
“Me too,” Darrick replied. “And I saw in France that it was possible to do things differently. We just need to wake up and give change a chance. It’s not because we live on an island that we must cut ourselves off from the rest of the world.”
“Depends what the rest of the world is like. France isn’t surrounded by semi-barbarians and lands ruled by sheer savagery.”
Despite himself, Darrick glanced at the shrivelled legs of the old chancellor. He could hardly reject Lacombe’s point. In North America, the collapse had been shattering when cheap oil had run out. The cost of coal and gas had climbed to dizzying heights. States supplied with electricity from hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants or wind farms had gone off the grid, bringing down electric lines and pylons to hoard the power they would no longer sell to their neighbours. Retaliatory raids led by hotheads had wrecked more than a few surviving reactors and wind turbines.
The electricity wars had complicated coal mining, already made tougher by the shortage of gasoline for trucks and excavators. In the larger cities, lack of heating during the winter had killed thousands. As gasoline ran out for farm machinery and natural gas for the synthesis of nitrogen-based fertilizers, crop yields dropped and prices rocketed. Since North American transportation depended on fossil fuels, famine had struck by the end of the second winter and visited time and again until the population’s dieback had matched the reduced food supply.
The powers that be, blamed for their improvidence, had withered away while cities took over essential tasks. The oldest ones retained denser neighbourhoods better suited to the new era than their younger, sprawling counterparts.
In some areas, economic migrants had tried to return home without the help of planes or cars, giving rise to wandering tribes who ended up choosing a nomadic lifestyle. The Trucker Tribe. The Newfs. The Hicanos from Mexico.
“I’m making you think?” Lacombe asked.
“Yes. And I still say that we must reject barbarism. If we do not wish to see Quebec fall as low as Toronto, we must take action. Blow up the old power structures and start over again.”