Sometimes I’m asked if we regretted our decision to stay aboard. I can’t speak for my mates. On their deathbeds they both said they’d do it all over again. How can I disagree? I don’t regret the physical therapy that followed, getting to know my bones again and remembering why the good Lord gave us legs in the first place. I don’t regret being exposed to so much cosmic radiation, all those unprotected EVAs, all that time with inadequate shielding in the ISS. I don’t regret this. [He motions to the hospital room and machinery attached to his body.] We made our choice, and, I’d like to think, we made a difference in the end. Not bad for the son of an Andamooka opal miner.
[Terry Knox died three days after this interview.]
ANCUD, ISLA GRANDE DE CHILOE, CHILE
[While the official capital has returned to Santiago, this onetime refugee base now remains the economic and cultural center of the country. Ernesto Olguin calls the beach house on the island’s Peninsula de Lacuy home, although his duties as a merchant ship’s master keep him at sea for most of the year.]
The history books call it “The Honolulu Conference,” but really it should have been called the “Saratoga Conference” because that’s all any of us had a chance to see. We spent fourteen days in those cramped compartments and dank stuffy passageways. USS Saratoga: from aircraft carrier, to decommissioned hulk, to evacuee transport barge, to floating United Nations HQ.
It also shouldn’t have been called a conference. If anything, it was more like an ambush. We were supposed to be exchanging warfighting tactics and technology. Everyone was anxious to see the British method of fortified motorways, which was almost as exciting as that live demonstration of Mkunga Lalem. 1 We were also supposed to be attempting to reintroduce some measure of international trade. That was my task, specifically, to integrate the remnants of our navy into the new international convoy structure. I wasn’t really sure what to expect from my time aboard Super Sara. I don’t think anyone could have expected what actually happened.
On the first day of the conference, we’d assembled for the introductions. I was hot and tired and wishing to God we could just get on without all the tiresome speeches. And then the American ambassador rose, and the whole world came to a screeching halt.
It was time to go on the attack, he said, to all get out from behind our established defenses and begin retaking infested territory. At first I thought he simply meant isolated operations: securing more inhabitable islands or, perhaps, even reopening the Suez/Panama canal zones. My supposition didn’t last very long. He made it very clear that this was not going to be a series of minor tactical incursions. The United States intended to go permanently on the offensive, marching forward every day, until, as he put it, “every trace was sponged, and purged, and, if need be, blasted from the surface of the Earth.” Maybe he thought ripping off Churchill would give it some kind of emotional punch. It didn’t. Instead, the room spontaneously combusted into argument.
One side asked why in hell should we risk even more lives, suffer even one more unnecessary casualties when all we had to do was remain safe and sedentary while our enemy simply rotted away. Wasn’t it happening already? Weren’t the earliest cases starting to show signs of advanced decomposition? Time was on our side, not theirs. Why not let nature do all the work for us?
The other side countered that not all the living dead were rotting away. What about the later cases, the ones still strong and healthy? Couldn’t just one restart the plague all over again? And what about those who prowled countries above the snowline? How long would we have to wait for them? Decades? Centuries? Would refugees from these countries ever have a chance of returning home?
And that’s when it got ugly. Many of the colder countries were what you used to call “First World.” One of the delegates from a prewar “developing” country suggested, rather hotly, that maybe this was their punishment for raping and pillaging the “victim nations of the south.” Maybe, he said, by keeping the “white hegemony” distracted with their own problems, the undead invasion might allow the rest of the world to develop “without imperialist intervention.” Maybe the living dead had brought more than just devastation to the world. Maybe in the end, they had brought justice for the future. Now, my people have little love for the northern gringos, and my family suffered enough under Pinochet to make that animosity personal, but there comes a point where private emotions must give way to objective facts. How could there be a “white hegemony” when the most dynamic prewar economies were China and India, and the largest wartime economy was unquestionably Cuba? How could you call the colder countries a northern issue when so many people were just barely surviving in the Himalayas, or the Andes of my own Chile? No, this man, and those who agreed with him, weren’t talking about justice for the future. They just wanted revenge for the past.