When the Devil Dances

Mike looked at the message and frowned. There should be more, he should be talking about the battalion and things that they had done. But he knew that Michelle had grown very uninterested in the blindsided slaughter that was Earth; she didn’t even seem to want to return. He was losing this daughter, probably had already lost her, and he didn’t know what to do about it or even how to do anything about it. She had been dropped into the Indowy, raised by the Indowy and she was becoming Indowy. And he didn’t know what to do about that either.

Finally he gave up and hit Send.

The next message was from Cally and it, too, was everything he had come to expect. Cally’s messages were not nearly as frequent as Michelle’s and the two sisters were clearly developing in… somewhat different directions. Cally also did not have access to GalTech and, therefore, sent a standard text message.

Hey Daddyo

We had visitors this week; some ladies from the nearby Sub-Urb and a couple of snake-eater buddies of Baldy. They had some kids with them who were, like, totally weird. They’d never been outside or shot anything and the weirdest shit freaked ’em out. I mean, don’t even mention Posties around these guys or they got, like, spastic.

No big news other than that. Baldy shot a feral up the hill, but that’s no big news. I mean, I got a deer, Baldy shot a feral, Wow!

Oh, Baldy’s made some mention of one of the ladies that was visiting shacking up with him. Maybe. I’ll believe it when I see it. She’s a nice old biddy and I think it would be good for him to get laid once in a while; maybe he’d lighten up. But I’ll believe it when I see it.

Oh, yeah, DUDE! Way to stack some horse up in Rochester! Can we O’Neals kick ass or what?

:-)

Take care and remember: HVMs Smart!

Cally

Mike sighed, hit reply and blanked. All things considered, he preferred the Rampage to the Robot, but replying to Cally had its own problems. Should he point out that referring to her grandfather as “Baldy” was probably not the best of all possible actions? Or that at thirteen, worrying whether her grandfather was getting laid often enough was probably not her business? For that matter, it probably wasn’t her business at forty.

For that matter, was she sexually active? I mean, Dad would probably pass that on to him, but there wasn’t much Mike could do about it if she was. What was he going to do? Sitting the guy down and having a man to man talk with him was out; he was five hundred miles away.

And then there was the whole bloodthirsty edge she had developed. He had noted it in Tommy Sunday as well. The generation that was being raised in the war was a generation soaked in blood; they were desensitized to a degree that he found unhealthy.

Maybe it was a valid reaction to the conditions, but a generation so… disinterested in the value of life — it seemed to extend to humans as well as Posleen — was not going to be reconstructing a positive, growing, functional society after the war.

There was some fundamental spark, some flare of optimism, that really seemed to be missing from them. Maybe Horner was right, maybe he just wasn’t cold and hard enough for this world. God knew at times like this he just wanted to lay the burden down, to just say “get somebody else.” But there really wasn’t anybody else. To lead the battalion or even carry the spark; his was one of the last generations that was raised in the “golden age.” If they didn’t keep their eye on the prize, which was to recover the world not just to a survival level, but to recapture the beauty and art and science, then nobody would. Humanity was going to sink to the level the Darhel chose for them. And the only ones who could stop that were these feral wild-children of the war. Who had as much connection to the basic concept of positive human growth and human rights as they did to…

Well, frankly, there was nothing they were more disconnected from.

This really sucked.