Powerless Day
I’ve never been the sort of person to sit and stare at something I’ve made for a long time after making it. I like to move on. If you had asked me right after I “finished” writing Ferus Rex whether it was going to be the only novel I ever wrote, I would have said “No way!” Ten years later, it looks very likely to be the only one. But ten years ago, I tried to plunge right into novel #2 like my life depended on it. I conceived to write a novel that would cure the queasy feeling of self-indulgence engendered by the writing of Ferus Rex. How that directive led me to the plot of Powerless Day, is anybody’s guess.
The year is the not-so-distant-yet-very-different future, I learned to write about thanks to William Gibson. Neuromancer foresaw accurately some things that were coming because of the Internet. When writers want things to change very dramatically in a relatively short period of time, they will sometimes interpose an apocalypse of some sort, between the present and the day-after-tomorrow they want to describe. How you actually got from A to B is relegated to the oblivion of prologue. While the words scroll upwards on the screen and the John Williams score manipulates us into the feeling that something significant is being explained, a writer has merely to declare the way things are. What continuity, if any, there might be between present and prospective future is for the reader to think about on his way home from the multiplex.
In the case of Powerless Day, all you really need to know is that America is in an undeniable decline. Things are bad at home. They are bad in a number of “trouble spots” around the world. Unemployment is exorbitant. So is crime. In many ways, American society has been flipped upside down. The white poor outnumber minority poor. The urban landscape in most major cities is dominated by a small number of organizations with a mixture of racial, ideological and political origins. In the heartland, the hillbillies are arming and entrenching. But in Los Angeles, local government, organized crime and street gangs are engaged in outrageously candid warfare on the city streets. In New York, it is the same. In all the country, there is a high hysteria in the air. The experiences of rape and riot and violence are common in most places. Half the populace is checked out on drugs. The other half is having an orgy while Rome burns all around them.
In the midst of the chaos, an African-American is about to be elected president for the first time.
My story centers on a pair of LA policemen, coupled to each other in mortal partnership in a dangerous place at a dangerous, uncertain time. One white, one black.
That was what Powerless Day was supposed to be, lol. Here’s as far as I got:
Prologue
The policeman was running. He was running hard, thrusting with arms and legs against the great weight of fatigue that was crushing him. They were chasing him and he was running for his life.
The night was filled with flaming perils. Jagged, ruined, exploded things were everywhere on the streets. Fires dotted the darkness here and there, and they were the only light. The power was out in the city and there was madness and terror in the air. Cars were burning. Storefronts had vomited forth their merchandise. Sneakers and televisions lay darkly in piles of glass, where dim figures picked through them. But the running man saw nothing but the blur of his own two feet in front of him. The function of desperate flight pulsed wordlessly inside him and the body performed it. He moved within the vast shadow that was the world, thinking only of his own mortality. He moved as a mouse moves in a room full of cats. He was hunted. He brought his will to bear on the unwilling body and coerced from it a great, arcing leap over a furiously burning thing that lay on the ground in his path. It was an errant tire from some exploded automobile. The burning rubber made an acrid, black smoke that choked miserably in the throat. He coughed convulsively. The life inside him faltered, was squeezed to the point of extinction by fear and tiredness and heat. And he fell. Brutally.
He lay against a curb, his face in a puddle, one eye blinking frantically in dark liquid, the other full of the orange fires that danced and licked all around him. More than anything, even more than his desire to see the world hauled out of this sewer of chaos, to have things return to the way they had been only hours before, more than all these things he wished simply to lie still, to relent and be motionless. But he felt his limbs begin to struggle again, to tense and push the body up, up onto the feet, so that the legs could be made to run again. Fear was moving him. Fear was at once a part of the smothering weight on top of him, and an animating force within. There was a lively core of fear inside him, and presently it fed fear into the veins, so that fear stood the man up. Though there was no reason in the world why he should not be dead, he stood up. And then fear started him running again.
Even as he ran, the core of fear reached up from within him and laid its hand upon his senses. So the eyes were touched, and they looked on the flaming husk of an automobile, but saw instead a tortured heap of brimstone consumed by hell’s own fires. His eyes looked upon a black man and woman, running together in the grip of panic, running toward him, running toward his uniform. But he saw demons. They put their frantic hands on him, gathering bunches of silver fabric in their fists. They put a pleading in their faces. “Help us.” they said in some wordless way appropriate to the moment of apocalypse, when the world is shuddering and melting. They shook him by the shoulders when he did not behave as a policeman should, but only stared blankly at them, mouth aquiver. “Help us!” but they could not understand, as they looked at him grimy and struggling, that no vestige of Law & Order dwelt anymore in his gold epaulets, and that the gold-crested helmet, a symbol, had been knocked from his head by a bullet, fired from the mob that wanted him dead. And when some threshold of horror was passed, the policeman shrieked and struggled free of them. Please! No! And confusedly, the couple let him go, since they were not a part of the mob, and in any event, they had no idea who he was. So he was running again, even more desperately.
There was an awful and constant noise, and the ears that listened, like the eyes that looked, had been altered by fear. He could not distinguish the individual sounds that made it, so it seemed that only a single bat-voiced din filled the air. The noise penetrated into the brain, and put the tempo of madness into his movements. He ran, and when he could no longer run, because his chest was full of burning vapor and even the great energy-giving fear could no longer lift the dying legs, he lumbered and loped. Ever forward. Because somewhere in the night, unseen now but still inexorable, they were coming after him. Even the buildings, where not a single bulb glowed, were like the dark reaching fingers of some monstrous hand, thrusting down through the smoke. He stumbled into an alley, under a complexity of dead neon letters. The bat-voiced sound swelled in his head, flourished and weaved a demented music. Strings rose in crescendo, bore him up to a height from which he knew he must fall, come crashing down. Brass tore at him mercilessly. Wagner’s cold winds blew into the sockets of his skull. For one terrible moment it seemed that those who chased him were already on top of him, beating him with their sticks, kicking their feet against the pitiable wreckage of his humanity. He clawed at his own face and fought the vision.
But somewhere under the fear, the logical mind was working too, working to dispel panic, even as the ancient instincts of flight were alive and throbbing. He was safe for the moment, hidden in a pile of garbage. He knew that. A part of him knew also what some of the noises were; and he used the knowledge to put some distance (if only in his thoughts) between himself and the mob that wanted to kill him. There was the insane crackle of fire. It seemed to make a fabric over the entire city, though he could see flames eating only here and there when he looked around him. The fires were transfiguring objects, giving them the glow and menace of infernal rubble. Only the daylight (and daylight seemed so far away now, like a dream) might reveal them as they really were — smoldering husks, tortured, burnt, ruined, blackened things, that were nevertheless scrutable fragments of a dimly remembered society. He knew that. Steady, man! He knew it was only a flickering magic that made them alive, groaning and breathing with evil intent. He knew when the dawn came, that earthliness would be restored to these relics. It gave him a small hope, but it also made the looming continuation of night even more terrible. Night, where the only light was flames!
He looked up toward the sky, where a working knowledge told him another sound was. He picked one thread out from the fabric of woven noises. From behind the vast body of choking smoke, he could hear the rotors slicing the air. The gyrocopters were up there somewhere, unmanned and nearly silent, making their futile reconnaissance. He knew, and knowing brought a flood of reason. They were looking down through the smoke with their infrared eyes, seeing the fires, but not coming too close. They were kept back by a human sense of menace, imbued by their programmers with a natural apprehension for smoke and chaos and people run amok. One gleaming black bird appeared for an instant through a patch of thinner smoke, lit briefly from below by orange flame. The man saw himself as they must see him, a blob of lesser warmth among the bright shapes of fire. A watershed thought came into his mind, and he started to scramble free of the concealing garbage. He remembered the tiny metal dot implanted under the skin at the highest point of his skull, Policeman’s Crown they called it. They gyro would pick it up. His miserable presence on the ground would trigger an overriding rescue response. “Must get out into the open…” he thought, running again with a new vigor made of hope.
And indeed the black bird began to descend through the barrier, its rotors making eddies and swirls of the smoke. He got under the machine, and panicked for a moment when it seemed that fire from the ground might have actually reached up and laid a hand on his delivering angel. But it was only reflected flames on the glassy, black surface. He raised his arms into the air, and there came into him the joy of imminent rescue. The black machine’s wind washed over him and its belly produced a glorious tether and harness. He stretched up on his toes, thrusting awareness only upward and away from the madness at ground level, since now he was out in the open and he did not wish to conceive himself on that landscape. The descent of the harness was achingly slow, a millimeter at a time it seemed, as the rotors shredded the air over his head. A difference of noise erupted suddenly from behind him. Immediately he knew what it was and wished to disregard it, refused the distraction. Because now the harness was in his hands. “It’s him! Over here! He’s getting away!” The voices broke over the general clamor of terror. But he would not look at them again, did not wish to see the hatred on their faces as they were running toward him. Things began to whizz past him, invisible hyper-accelerated things. They whizzed past his un-helmeted head. Near misses! They whizzed away into the darkness and occasioned tiny blue explosions wherever they hit. They were firing upon him, but it didn’t matter because now the harness was slipping over his head and under his arms. He felt the burden of his own weight pass to the machine. His feet left the ground, and the force of ascent spun him at the end of the cable so that now he was facing the advancing mob — perhaps twenty of them and a scatter of eager boys. There were more whizzing things. And the gyro hesitated, considered myriad courses of action. Thinking. The man shook himself frantically and yanked the cable. “Let’s go, Goddamnit!”
From a height of perhaps twenty feet, he saw a young black boy caper out of deeper shadow and place a silver case sternly on the ground. The boy knelt, opened the case carefully, and seemed to draw things out and work them together. Then there came a naked and shameless moment, a moment of inhuman clarity. A flame on the ground leapt suddenly higher, so that the boy’s face glowed briefly and the expression it held became unmistakable. They boy looked up at the man in the silver policeman’s uniform, hanging like a worm on the end of a string, and aimed his weapon. The muzzle flashed and the man drew his arms up over his eyes. The silver arms held crossed in front of the face kept him from seeing how from the flash a bundle burst forth, and how the bundle expanded into a tangle, and how the tangle did not assault the man, but rather the machine. A mass of titanium molecular filaments with beads of lead at each end snared the gyro’s three main rotors. The machine made a sick sound, a high whine of stricken beast. The invisible filaments made a destructive halo round the gyro: the lead beads were accelerated by the rotor tips to super-sonic speed, reeled in, and began smashing against the hull. The man uncovered his eyes in time to see the machine begin to fall on top of him. His feet hit the ground, hard, with the force of a free fall, though the harness was still around him. The machine shrieked and hovered over his head for one final, shuddering moment, then lurched sideways suddenly toward the crowd. He was dragged along the ground for a torturous distance, dragged over a burning couch, through the beach of shimmering glass that lay in front of a furniture store, until at last the cable snapped and the gyro exploded brilliantly.
He lay on the ground again, betrayed by the machine, bedraggled and bleeding. Movement was misery from a thousand places on the body. He lifted his head feebly to assess what menace remained. The mob was on the other side of the soaring orange flames and the newly fallen wreckage. He could hear them, louder suddenly, over the fading echo of the explosion. Ecstatic celebration over the dead machine. Their shadows were long and grotesque over the pale face of a windowless building behind them. Children were laughing, mimicking the sound of the blast, and with an excess of saliva under their tongues, the roaring music of fire that played within the shattered black eggshell. There was a new sound suddenly, bright and fresh amid the crackles and hisses of fiery destruction. A gush of water flowed from under the wrecked gyro, toward him down a slight slope in the street, from where a hydrant had been smashed by the falling machine .
Not a foot from his nose, a river swelled. The water was cold, and its movement put a coolness in the air that touched his face agreeably. The coolness in the air arranged itself in front of him as a means of escape. Where a moment before, the heat and mob noises had been a smothering pressure from above, now they were merely a presence behind him. So he began to wriggle forward on his elbows, until the inch-deep water touched him. The cold gripped his chest. The breath seized in his throat, as if suddenly solid. There was a terrifying moment of suffocation, until the body adjusted. Some of the effort of forward movement was borne by the rushing water, so, on his stomach, he advanced more rapidly than he had any right to.
Chapter 1.
Nine hours earlier, that very same day, a young Senator from New Jersey took the podium in the middle of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Nearly 90,000 fans rose to their feet and produced a noise that could be heard for miles. Into the great absence of noise that followed, he began a speech that would change everything, forever.
“America,…”