Things Fall Apart by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781101626566
Publisher: Roc
Published: 2013-12-03T08:00:00+00:00

XIII

I

t was May. In what Bryce Miller kept thinking of as normal times, the countryside around Wayne State would have been bursting with spring. The grass would have been green. New leaves would have decked the trees. The birds would have been singing their heads off. Half the sophomore girls would have been wearing as little as the law allowed. Nebraska or not, that would have made for some pretty fine eye candy.

Even after the supervolcano eruption, spring would at least have been thinking about showing up most years. Not in the wake of the Siberian Express and the two other, almost equally horrendous, blizzards that followed it. Good old Theocritus wouldn’t have got very far with pastoral poetry about the landscape he could see in these parts.

Snow still lay on the ground—not here and there, as it had in some other post-eruption springs, but all over. The drifts were taller than a tall man. Bryce, a tall man, could testify to that. Daytime highs hadn’t got out of the thirties yet. The weathermen kept hopefully saying they would real soon now. The weather kept making liars of the weathermen.

A crow hopped across the crusted snow. It cocked its head now this way, now that. Its beady black eyes were alert for anything that might be food. A mouse? A discarded parsnip fry? Crows weren’t fussy. They ate anything people did, and more besides.

Compared to what the winter had brought, of course, highs in the thirties seemed wonderful. Bryce was just chilly as he walked over to the library to meet Susan—she’d come to campus to do some research for an article she was writing. She still hoped for an academic job of her own, but the hiring situation looked bleaker than ever.

The paths on campus were free of snow. Machines had done the hard work at first. There weren’t enough machines to cope with the new winters, and fuel cost too much to keep them going. Like so much of what had been routine before the eruption, nowadays they were for emergency use only.

For non-emergency use, Wayne State had students with snow shovels. Throwing snow around wasn’t a requirement like passing your English courses and U.S. history. But the college paid for the work, either in money or in meal tickets at the student union. From what Bryce had heard, more shovelers chose meal tickets. The food at the union wasn’t great, but Bryce didn’t think you could get great food at any restaurant in Wayne.

A student coming the other way on a bicycle raised one hand from the handlebars to wave to Bryce. “Hey, Professor!” he called as he went past.

“Hey!” Bryce waved back. Little by little, he was getting used to students calling him Professor. The student population stayed pretty much the same age, while he—dammit!—kept getting older.

He’d started noticing that back in L.A., when he taught at Junipero High. The boys there had all looked like kids. Some of the girls, though, were definitely edible, to his eyes if not necessarily to the eyes of the law.

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