Jericho Iteration Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF ALLEN STEELE

  * * *

  “An author with the potential to revitalize the Heinlein tradition.” —Booklist

  “The best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade.” —John Varley, author of Slow Apocalypse

  “One of the hottest new writers of hard SF on the scene today.” —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “No question, Steele can tell a story.” —OtherRealms

  Orbital Decay

  Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel

  “Stunning.” —Chicago Sun-Times

  “[Steele is] the master of science-fiction intrigue.” —The Washington Post

  “Brings the thrill back to realistic space exploration. It reads like a mainstream novel written in 2016 A.D.” —The New York Review of Science Fiction

  “A damned good book; lightning on the high frontier. I got a sense throughout that this was how it would really be.” —Jack McDevitt, author of Cauldron

  “An ambitious science fiction thriller ߪ skillfully plotted and written with gusto.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A splendidly executed novel of working-class stiffs in space.” —Locus

  “Reads like golden-age Heinlein.” —Gregory Benford, author of Beyond Infinity

  “Readers won’t be disappointed. This is the kind of hard, gritty SF they haven’t been getting enough of.” —Rave Reviews

  The Tranquillity Alternative

  “A high-tech thriller set against the backdrop of an alternative space program. Allen Steele has created a novel that is at once action-packed, poignant, and thought provoking. His best novel to date.” —Kevin J. Anderson, bestselling author of the Jedi Academy Trilogy

  “Science fiction with its rivets showing as only Steele can deliver it. This one is another winner.” —Jack McDevitt, author of The Engines of God

  “With The Tranquility Alternative, Allen Steele warns us of the bitter harvest reaped by intolerance, and of the losses incurred by us all when the humanity of colleagues and friends is willfully ignored.” —Nicola Griffith, author of Ammonite

  Labyrinth of Night

  “Unanswered questions, high-tech, hard-science SF adventure, and action—how can you fail to enjoy this one?” —Analog Science Fiction and Fact

  The Jericho Iteration

  “Allen Steele is the best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade. In The Jericho Iteration he comes down to a near-future Earth and proves he can handle a darker, scarier setting as well as his delightful planetary adventures. I couldn’t put it down.” —John Varley, author of Slow Apocalypse

  Rude Astronauts

  “A portrait of a writer who lives and breathes the dreams of science fiction.” —Analog Science Fiction and Fact

  The Jericho Iteration

  Allen Steele

  for Kent, Lisa, and Megan Orlando

  Contents

  Introduction to the 2013 Edition

  Introduction

  Part One: Ruby Fulcrum

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Part Two: The Nature of Coherent Light

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Part Three: Phase Transition

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Part Four: His Court of Love and Beauty

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Introduction to the 2013 Edition

  THE JERICHO ITERATION was my fifth published novel, and in several ways it was a departure from my previous work. It was my first novel to take place entirely on Earth. It was the first novel of mine to be told entirely from a first-person point of view. It was my first book-length effort at combining the science fiction and mystery-thriller genres. And it was my first novel to have a hardcover first edition in the United States (my four previous books had been published in hardcover in the UK).

  All this represented changes I was going through at the time. In late 1990, my wife and I moved from New England, where we’d been living for the past five years, to St. Louis, her hometown. Linda had gotten homesick and wanted to return to the place where she’d come from, and I was ready for a change of scenery, so we packed up our stuff and moved to the Gateway to the West, where we’d live for the next seven years before deciding to move back east. I’d lived in Missouri before when I’d gone to grad school at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and so I’d visited St. Louis many times; the city wasn’t completely unknown to me.

  After three years in a small New Hampshire town, relocating to a major Midwestern city still came as something of a shock. I’d lived in urban areas before, but it had been several years since the last time I’d heard anything at night besides crickets and bullfrogs or felt it necessary to lock the door when I left the house. Sirens made me look up alarm, I had to relearn how to drive in heavy traffic—indeed, the car I owned was a Jeep Cherokee, which I customarily drove without either doors or top; I finally reattached them, albeit grudgingly—and even having my mail delivered to my door instead of to a rural post office box was something I’d forgotten. So I had to get used to this new life faster than I’d expected.

  At the same time, my writing was changing as well. My first four novels—Orbital Decay; Clarke County, Space; Lunar Descent; and Labyrinth of Night—had all been set in outer space, as had most of my short fiction. But I’d become tired of writing about space; I wanted to do stories where I didn’t have my characters floating in zero gravity or exiting through airlocks. And there were other speculative concepts I wanted to explore. I’d touched on artificial intelligence in Clarke County, Space, for instance; now I wanted to investigate it further, putting my own spin on science-fictional ideas that had become popular but hadn’t been treated quite the way I might have treated them, if given the chance.

  There’s always been a subtle autobiographical aspect to my work, in that I’ve often used places where I’ve lived as settings, or experiences that I’ve had as backgrounds for my characters. Shortly after moving to St. Louis, I decided to put space fiction aside for a while and write about the city where I now lived. This manifested itself in a series of stories, each unrelated to one another, about St. Louis, which I wrote for Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, and various anthologies. The first few stories came out well enough that I became confident enough to consider writing a full-length novel about what I’d come to think of as my adoptive hometown.

  Likewise, I wanted to write a story told from the viewpoint of a working journalist. Until I sold Orbital Decay, I’d been an investigative reporter for a weekly alternative newspaper in Worcester, Massachusetts. I didn’t miss the long hours and low pay, but I still had a certain nostalgia for that time in my life, only a few years earlier, when I knew just about everything that was going on in the place where I lived, and my job was reporting it to the public.

  Shortly after my wife and I moved to St. Louis, a bizarre incident occurred which gave me the essential idea for this novel. A quack scientist publicly declared that he’d figured out exactly when the nearby New Madrid fault would undergo a major geological shift, thereby triggering a major earthquake that could potentially destroy much of the city. This sort of prediction is impossible, of course—not even the best geologists in the world can forecast precisely when and where an earthquake will occur—but it didn’t stop the local news media from treating his claim as if it were established scientific fact.

  The quake didn’t happen, but
the episode did make me aware that St. Louis was particularly vulnerable to such a natural disaster. Once this was combined with a growing interest in the cutting edge of cybernetic technology and the possibility of both artificial intelligence and artificial life, I had the novel I wanted to write.

  The research was fun. Work on this book gave me an excuse to explore parts of the city that I might not have learned very much about otherwise, and do things—like go to the Veiled Prophet Ball one year—that I might not have done if they hadn’t presented themselves as opportunities for great scenes. Most of the locales depicted in this novel exist in real life, including Gerry’s house in Webster Groves, which was my own.

  Oh, and the dog who appears in the novel? That’s Zack, who was my canine companion and best friend for fifteen years. I still miss him.

  Like a number of my early works, The Jericho Iteration has outgrown the time in which it was set. St. Louis did not suffer a catastrophic earthquake on May 17, 2012, and I couldn’t be more pleased that it didn’t. And while New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and many New Jersey and Long Island communities were struck hard by Superstorm Sandy, none of these places were impacted in quite the same way as St. Louis was in this novel. ERA was never intended to be a stand-in for FEMA and should not be misinterpreted as such, as some readers apparently have done. I dread any circumstances that might cause a major American city to come under martial law, but real-life disasters such as the ones that occurred after this novel was first published have shown me that reality is (as usual) more complex than fiction.

  Nonetheless, I hope the New Madrid fault remains asleep for a long, long time to come.

  Allen Steele

  Whately, Massachusetts

  May 2013

  LET’S TALK ABOUT JERICHO.

  According to the Book of Joshua, the Canaanite city of Jericho was destroyed after Joshua marched his army around the city’s walls for six days. On the seventh day, upon his command, the Israelites blew their ram’s horns and began to shout. The walls collapsed, thus allowing Joshua and his followers to overrun the Canaanites and claim the city as their own.

  That’s how the legend goes, at any rate. About twenty years ago, archaeologists studying the ruins of Jericho in Israel, just outside Jerusalem, arrived at a different conclusion. They uncovered evidence suggesting that Jericho had been destroyed not by ram’s horns but by a major earthquake caused by a geological fault line running through the Jordan Valley. Furthermore, the city was destroyed at least a hundred and fifty years before the reported date of the Battle of Jericho. Hence, the Talmudic account differs considerably from modern interpretations of the same evidence: in short, people took credit for something nature had already done.

  And now it’s Friday, April 19, 11:32 P.M. About three and a half millennia since the fall of Jericho, give or take a few hundred years, but who’s counting? It doesn’t make much difference in the long run. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

  I’m sitting cross-legged on the living room floor of an abandoned, half-collapsed house in south St. Louis. It’s the middle of the night, and I’m dictating these notes into my pocket computer. Joker’s nicad is still fully charged, but I’m nonetheless keeping an eye on the battery LED. If it runs low …

  Well, I’m sure I can find another. They’re not as hard to find on this side of town as, say, an unclaimed can of Vienna sausage. On my way here I passed a scavenged 7-Eleven about four blocks away; southside looters normally don’t go after batteries, although you never know.

  I heard recently about a teenager who was killed scrounging through a video rental shop; seems he had been trying to make out with an armload of movies when a street gang that had claimed the store as their turf caught him. The story that made its way to the Big Muddy Inquirer was that they had strung him up from a telephone pole; when he was found the next morning, he had a copy of Hang ’Em High wrapped around his purpled neck. A touch of irony, if you like that sort of thing, although I doubt the guys who murdered him would know irony if it shot ’em in the ass with a Smith & Wesson.

  Of course, this could be only another rumor. We’ve heard a hundred of them since the quake, and since it was never substantiated, we never ran it in the paper. Nonetheless, I think I’ll keep talking only until the low-battery light begins to blink. Bopping on down to the 7-Eleven ain’t what it used to be.

  When the family who once lived here moved out of the city, as have so many others since New Madrid, they took with them whatever they could salvage. What little furniture they left behind is mostly buried beneath the rubble of what used to be their bedrooms; there’s also a bad stink from that part of the house. I hope it’s only a cat. Dead cats don’t bother me, but dead children do.

  The former residents left behind the refrigerator and the stove, but since there’s no electricity in this neighborhood, they don’t work. Union Electric must have determined that this is a vacant block, because even the streetlights are inoperative. There’s also a filthy couch infested with insects, a mildewed Mickey Mouse shower curtain, which is the sole clue that there were once kids living here—like I said, I hope it’s only a dead cat I smell—and, on the top shelf of the kitchen pantry, a half-empty box of Little Friskies.

  Got to be a dead cat.

  I’ll have to ask the dog if he knows.

  The dog who discovered me in the house was glad to have the Little Friskies. I found a forgotten spare key tucked beneath the back-door welcome mat—whoever once lived here didn’t have much sense of originality when it came to hiding places, but then again, St. Louis used to be a much safer place—and had invited myself in when I heard something panting behind me. I turned around to find, in the last weak light of day, a full-grown golden retriever who had followed me into the backyard. His big red tongue was hanging out of his mouth, his fur was as wet as my leather jacket, but unlike so many other strays I’ve seen recently he didn’t appear to be feral. Just a big old chow dog, living by his means in what used to be a middle-class neighborhood.

  He sniffed me and wagged his tail, and didn’t mind when I patted him on the head, so I let him into the house with me. What the hell; we both needed company. As luck would have it—for the dog, at least—there was the box of cat food. He didn’t seem to mind the moldy taste. I only wish I could have eaten so well.

  Friendly pooch. He decided to stay the night. I warned him that he was accompanying a federal fugitive and was thereby subject to prosecution to the full extent of the law, but the mutt didn’t give a shit. I had given him a bite to eat, so I was square in his book, and he paid me back by warning me about the helicopter.

  Several hours later: the sun was down, I was exhausted from running. Lying on the couch, idly scratching at the fleas that had come crawling out of the upholstery, listening to the cold, hard rain that pattered on the roof and dribbled through the cracks in the ceiling. Eyes beginning to close. It had been a hell of a day.

  The dog was curled up on the bare floor next to the couch, dead to the world, when he abruptly leaped to his feet and began to bark. I opened my eyes, glanced at him, saw that he was looking out the wide picture window on the other side of the room.

  I couldn’t see anything through the darkness, but I could hear a low drone from somewhere outside the house ….

  Chopper.

  I rolled off the couch and fell to the floor, then scurried across the living room and through the kitchen door, out of sight from the window. By now the sound of rotor blades was very loud.

  While I cowered in the kitchen, hugging the wall and sweating rain, the dog fearlessly advanced to the window and stood there, barking in defiance as the clatter grew louder. Then the helicopter was above the front lawn, invisible except for its running lights.

  Captured by the Apaches.

  One, at least: an AH-64 gunship, twenty-one thousand pounds of sudden death. Maybe it was an antique, but I remembered when I was a kid back in ’89 and saw the TV news footage of those thing
s circling the skies above Panama City, hunting for PDF holdouts and some pimple-faced cokehead named Noriega. Now one of them was hunting for a journalist named Gerry Rosen.

  By the way, did I mention my name?

  For several long minutes the Apache hovered outside the window. I could imagine its front-mounted TADS infrared turret peering into the house, the copilot in the chopper’s back seat trying to get a clear fix through the downpour. The helicopter was close enough for me to make out the shadowed forms of the pilot and copilot within its narrow cockpit. The picture window shuddered in its tortured frame from the propwash.

  It occurred to me that, if the 30-mm chain gun beneath the forward fuselage were to let go, the plaster wall in front of me wouldn’t protect me more than would a sheet of Kleenex … and if I ran for the back door, the IR sensors would lock onto me before I could make it through the backyard. Anyone seen on the streets by ERA patrols after the nine o’clock curfew was assumed to be a looter, and in this side of town they didn’t bother to make arrests anymore. In fact, they didn’t even give you the dignity of slinging an old Clint Eastwood flick around your neck.

  I clenched Joker against my chest and waited for the bullets to come through the window. They had found my best friend, they had found the poor bastards from the Tiptree Corporation, and now they had found me ….

  And yet, despite all the noise, locked in the center of a crosshairs, the dog stood his ground. With his paws jammed against the windowsill, his lips pulled back from decayed brown teeth, his tail down but not tucked between his rear legs, this scrawny, matted stray dog angrily snarled and snapped and barked ferociously at the flying machine on the other side of the window, and in a brief, sudden, very clear moment of understanding, I knew what he was saying—