Eastward Ho

From an old science fiction story massively expanded and elaborated on, William Tenn’s (Philip Klass) “Eastward Ho!”

(Warning: the usual global catastrophe stuff)

It’s been about a century since the Obliteration War of 1968, in which the US and USSR took each other out, along with the majority of the human race. If the atomic weapons hadn’t been bad enough, there was the release of Bleeding Fever by the rather-more-thoroughly nuked Soviets as a last gasp bit of defiance, and the annoyed US response with SuperFlu-217.

Interestingly, the Bleeding Fever, perhaps due to a lack of appropriate test subjects in Soviet territories, while it managed to kill off almost 90% of surviving white and black Americans, only killed off about 10% of the surviving American Indian population. (The US use of SuperFlu-217, probably just icing on the cake when it came to the Soviets, went on to kill with no partiality some 85% of the population of Eurasia. Some island nations and, thanks to poor communications, large parts of Africa managed to avoid infection).

As a result, the Indians, already lightly hit due to their most rural population, found themselves post-war with a national demographic distribution rather more in their favor, and their tribal societies far less shattered by the loss of essential skilled personnel, the destruction of families, etc. than those of the white man.

To these advantages was added the cohesion of tribal society, and the fact that most Indians were accustomed to a dirt-poor rural lifestyle to begin with. Still, this might not have led to the situation of 2068 if it were not due to two other factors: first, the fragmentation of what was left of the US during the Breakdown of ’69-’80, which when it ended left behind a United States, the New Confederacy (eventually to split into eastern and western halves), and the republics of Texas, California, and Mormon Utah, not to mention the theocratic (and rather radioactive) state of Midwest-centered Free America, none of which had more than partial control of the territories they claimed. Secondly, there was the Prophet.

Ahaloke of the Seminoles never called himself a Prophet, and although he described himself as a man with a mission, he never claimed it was a Mission from God. Still, he did crisscross much of the ruined US for the next fifteen years with only a small band of followers, risking death time and again, talking murderous bandits into letting them pass alive, and preaching his gospel of Native American revival, unity and organization wherever he went. Other men like John Lapahie of the Navajo would do the detailed political deal-making, and other like Nick Hummingbird of the Cherokee would lead armies, but without the Prophet it is unlikely the Retaking of the Lands would have happened, at least not in as organized a fashion, and probably far less successfully. By the time he died of leukemia in 1984, many considered him a saint, and among the followers of the old faiths, some considered him an actual god. To this day his tomb is the site of countless pilgrimages. Within two decades of the War, the League of First Peoples, organized, determined, and filled with a fiery conviction that God was on their side, had taken over two large swathes of territory, what once had been New Mexico, Arizona and Oklahoma in the south, Montana and the Dakotas to the north, and were pushing down the I-25 through the no-man’s land of eastern Wyoming and Colorado to link up.

Meanwhile, things were not going well in the remaining fragments of the US: the collapse of industrial production, the essential end of international trade, the wrecked conditions of communications _within_ the US (split up by radioactive areas, dotted with bandit gangs, rail hubs annihilated, no oil coming in), all meant plummeting standards of living, and simply to grow enough crops to live on required essentially mass levees of the population to plant and harvest under largely pre-industrial conditions. Efforts to get oil abroad with the few functional tankers were frustrated by the fact that the plagues had brought chaos and revolution to Latin America, and people in the old world, even in areas which had not descended into chaos, were a bit peeved over the whole SuperFlu-217 thing, tending to shoot Americans on sight. Struggles to “gear back” to a steam-coal-and-steel situation were disrupted by famines, revolts, and the sheer loss of talented people, and in the South the local black population decided they really didn’t like the way the white people were eying them when they talked about the need for forced labor, and race war was soon added to the fun.

Eight decades went by.

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The League of First Peoples began to break up a quarter century ago, as tribes reclaimed their lost homelands and began to find the notion of liberating Gary, Indiana for the sake of the Miami less appealing. Still, the old western core remains a functional federal union: only on the borders, where ambitious leaders with largely invented new identities seek to carve out new territories for themselves is there actual fighting between tribes (to some extent inter-tribal violence is sublimated in the Tribal Games, held every year in what used to be Wyoming. The revival of some rather brutal old-fashioned Indian games means that a certain number of fatalities are both inevitable and accepted).

The League touches the Pacific in Washington, extends south to the Chihuahuan Desert and follows the old US Rio Grande border east of Del Rio, and north into southern Canada, where it borders an allied Canadian Indian nation which holds much of that former nation. East it swings north of the south Arkansas-Louisiana-Mississippi-Alabama Western Confederacy, and then across the Old South to the Atlantic: on the east side of the Mississippi, it also holds Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula, and much of Kentucky and Illinois. Its political setup is complex, being a league of tribes many of which are themselves confederations of some sort, and the possession of various scattered bits and pieces of former US territories gives a map of the League a bit of a Holy Roman Empire look. Large areas in the Midwest and former Southeast US are de jure part of the League, but, as mentioned, de facto independent.

The League has been quite emphatic about keeping as much science and technology alive as possible, and is nowadays a quite literate society, and has, with the aid of Texan and Oklahoman oil wells, and the return of trade with formerly Latin now Amerindian America, managed to restore at least 19th century technology, although only a few cities are electrified yet. Railways have been rebuilt, and engineers are struggling to build steam ships reliable enough to reach South America with reliable frequency.

Population has grown greatly over the last century, partially by nature (Indians tend to large families), partially by immigration of mostly Amerindian Mexicans fleeing warlords, and partially by “conversion”: as the League increasingly became seen as a winning proposition, any white with an Indian anywhere in his or her family tree claimed citizenship. As the Indians have become the dominant power on the continent, racial borders have hardened, it has become harder for Palefaces to gain citizenship and League citizens with questionable ancestry work at becoming “more Indian than the Indians”.

To do so, besides such dodges as doing a lot of tanning, or makeup, a lot of such borderline Indians have been very big on the whole “cultural revival” thing: increasing numbers of Indians have adopted old-fashioned dress, the old languages have been revived, and a great many worn old anthropology texts have been thumbed through in efforts to establish what the “correct” customs for ones tribe should be. This leads to often comical results, as various new tribal unions cobbled together from dying little tribes play mix and match cultures in effort to construct new identities, or when the young and the obnoxious make a habit of talking down to white people in stilted “Tonto-speak.” On the darker side, it encouraged the emergence of identities separate from those of Indians as a whole, and sharpens internal divisions within the League.

There is also something of a religious revival ongoing: although most Indians remain at least nominal Christians, it is seen as increasingly acceptable to have a few good words for the old spirits, and there is a sizeable constituency of hard-core Old Religion practitioners and revivalists. (Although nobody is currently advocating sacrificing people to the Morning Star)

Currently, the League has some 42 million inhabitants, some 27 million of them Citizens, another 15 million Whites (and some blacks), of which some 10 million lived on reservations or protectorates, and another 5 million as second-class citizens in Indian territory proper (second-class or worse: some tribes tend to have rather draconian laws re palefaces that can’t show they have a regular job, and a lot of forced labor within the League is performed by whites).

Of the fragments of the old US, only the (black-dominated nowadays) Western Confederacy, the United States in the Northeast, and a shrunken California survive. Torn from within by racial and regional conflicts, the Confederacy simply lacked the cohesion to survive, and what was the area of Tennessee, Florida, and the Carolinas is divided between several “reconstituted” tribes (usually led by what are essentially ambitious Caudillos with largely made-up ethnic antecedents) and various miserable and crowded white “reservations”. Increasingly, their inhabitants flee north to the United States, to get the shittiest jobs and be abused as “traitors” to the USA. (Virginia, also part of the New Confederacy, was divided between the US and the League).

Texas, long the most vicious enemy of the League, and thanks to its oil wells better able to maintain a modicum of technological civilization, was finally crushed in the 2020s in a joint assault by the League and the Zacatecas Republic (with its large Amerindian population, Mexico fathered a trio of sizeable successor states after the chaos of the 20th century died down), much of its territory annexed, and a rump protectorate established along the Rio Grande (partly as a buffer against the Mexicans, who may be fellow Indians but are culturally still pretty Mexican, Catholic, and dubious about the “retro” stuff). The tough and well-organized Mormons managed to hold onto the bulk of their territory and survive as a semi-autonomous people within the League, although some new-style Indian racists have called for their expulsion. California, currently under the benevolent dictatorship of Reagan V, although losing rather a lot of its territory, managed to hold onto the central valley and has managed to modernize to the point where it is once again a major exporter of agricultural goods. Californians have a reputation as sailors, and have recently reopened the long and dangerous trade route across the Pacific.

Free America essentially self-destructed, rather messily.

The Western Confederacy, where black men run the show and whites step carefully, is on cordial terms with the League, whose leaders see them as fellow victims of the White man, although there are some hotheads that grumble that Natchez, Choctaw, and Chickasaw lands remain to be liberated. A lot of League commerce flows down the Mississippi and a New Orleans which hasn’t sunk as far as OTL is prospering.

The US, although its territories suffered terrible devastation from atomic warfare, did have the advantage of a tiny Native American population and neighbors too messed-up to form much of an immediate threat. Although suffering through a long period of dictatorship in the first half-century after the war, and very nearly losing any industrial capacity at all as technology decayed and was not replaced, enough basic knowledge survived for a shaky return to democracy in the 2010s, and a crude technological revival, wood and cement, coal and wood furnaces, waterwheels and windmills, basic steam engines and even crude generators and spark-gap radio. Libraries of crumbling old books are carefully preserved for knowledge to still be extracted, and crude printing presses are producing somewhat smeary books of mashed-rag paper. Travel is mostly by horse and foot, but it is claimed that the railway will soon return south and west of New Jersey.

To the north, the US has a friendly neighbor in the mostly French-speaking rump Canadian state occupying the islands, southern Quebec, and a bit of Ontario, the regions to the west being Amerindian. Sure, they’re a hereditary dictatorship, but they’re jolly enough people, and they share a common interest in keeping the Redskin Menace at bay.

Still, the US remains in the shadow of its neighbor. The US, in spite of heavy immigration in the last generation, has rather less than half as many inhabitants as the League, is generally more technologically backwards, and has a rather corrupt “professional army” (divisions between rich and poor, town and country, remain sharp) rather than being a “nation under arms” like the League. Border disputes are accompanied by a great deal of bullying on the part of the League, and the southern warlords often conduct provocative raids and border probes, hoping another war will mean new territorial gains at the expense of the US.

There are those who are sick of the US Government’s “compromise, kiss ass, and wait for the Indians to turn on each other” attitude: some want war, having a somewhat unrealistic view of the relative strengths of the two powers: others look abroad. The surviving states of Europe may not be interested in saving the US’s ass from invasion and dismemberment, but they are not entirely unwelcoming to American immigrants nowadays: increasingly, Americans save up for the expensive, dangerous trip across the Atlantic to the largely mysterious lands of Europe…

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Latin America, with its large Amerindian population and comparatively few targets of interest to the Soviets, had a rather higher general rate of survival than the US, although some “whiter” states like Argentina were hit almost as hard by the Bleeding Fever. At the other extreme, only about 35% of the population of Bolivia and 40% of that of Peru perished of the Fever, (although famine and regular disease went on to inflict a big hit) and the revived Empire of the Four Quarters, which also includes Ecuador, parts of fragmented Colombia, and large chunks of Brazilian jungle, has some 60 million inhabitants and is the most populous state in the Americas. (Also rather overpopulated and short on food, quite a bit of which it is now importing from the League and California: its economy is essentially pre-industrial outside of some coastal cities and some mining areas).

The three successor states to Mexico, thanks to their proximity to the League and the remnants of the US, have been more successful at modernizing. The southernmost state is having its own Aztec revival, but the states run from Zacatecas and Acapulco remains firmly catholic and find this sort of stuff rather creepy. The Maya have taken over most of Central America, and much of the Amazon has been abandoned by civilization, allowing the local tribes to get back to their business of tribal coup-counting and monkey-hunting, much to their satisfaction. Small and fragmented Indian-dominated states struggle to keep afloat along the Old Spanish Main of northern South America, while in southern Brazil, an area where people of European and African descent greatly outnumbered native Americans, a fairly colorblind socialistic dictatorship has managed to maintain more of the basic 19th century industrial package than the Andean empire, and stave off conquest by the Paraguayan Empire, which subsequent to the collapse of Argentina managed to fulfill the dreams of Lopez by conquering most of that former state. True to form, the Paraguayans are currently fighting a bloody war with the Andean empire over some fairly worthless jungle.

West across the Pacific, Hawaii (not quick enough in instituting a “shoot down every plane from the mainland, and in any event hit by several nukes) is inhabited by a handful of post-cannibal fishermen: some of the more isolated Pacific isles have done better: although things have collapsed back to pre-Cook living standards, at least they avoided the plagues. New Zealand is divided into two squabbling neo-feudal farming and sheep-raising regimes, and has only intermittent naval contact with the scattered coastal “free townships” of Australia, which theoretically are a united state with its government in Melbourne, but due to poor communications are essentially independent. (The interior is independent Aboriginal tribes: unlike the Amerindians, they had no immunity to the disease, but vast unpopulated distances did convey some protection).

Many small new states have emerged in the regions of SE Asia and the islands, mostly pre-industrial, although such skills as gun-making and printing have been widely maintained. Pockets of technological civilization (at least at a late 19th century level) survive in mostly-reunited Vietnam (although quite a bit of the north has been lost to the Chinese, the Hill Tribes are generally being pushed further into the interior) and in Malaysia, where enough of the Heritage of Singapore survived to make a fresh start (under the present dictator, experiments are actually being carried out in flight, both winged and blimp-style). A new Islamic movement based in Java is busily at work trying to reunite Indonesia, with those fine old instruments, fire and the sword (plus, guns. And homemade nitro, in the more martyr-minded cases).

After a lengthy period of division, China reconstituted itself in the less radioactive south, and the Chinese have spread north into their old stomping grounds, but have been stymied in occupying Manchuria and Inner Mongolia by the Tatar Khanate. The Khanate is a coalition of small north Asian peoples and some Koreans and Russians, which have created a nation of steppe pastoralists and small farmers connected by a network of horse transport and as efficient as that of Genghis Khan’s day while maintaining enough expertise in the building and use of gunpowder weapons and explosives that in spite of their 7-1 numerical advantage, the Chinese have suffered some nasty military defeats. [1] The Chinese Blue dynasty (so-called for the odd sartorial laws in which the peasantry all wear blue Mao suits and the ruling Mandarin-Commissars wear blue robes) is an agricultural tyranny with mass corvee labor, well maintained roads, a still-existing engineering tradition which produces crude steam-boats on the Yangtze, and an odd mix of Confucianism, peasant superstition, and repurposed Marxist doctrine. Frustrated in the north, the Chinese recently occupied Japan, where heavy fallout, the super-flu, and short flight-times by Soviet planes and missiles led to a rather thorough-going collapse.

India, although avoiding nuclear hammering (although the Chinese got in a few out of spite in the final stages) was still hit by fallout, and, worse, the super-flu, and disintegrated, although there has been increasing movement towards reunification in the three democratic successor states, and within said democracies, the peasantry, mostly pre-industrial before the war anyway, have the luxury of plenty of land for themselves and their children, although at present growth rates things are likely to get crowded again in another generation or so (if farming technology does not modernize in the meantime). To the North, Tibet, not hit as badly as some other places due to poor communications, has returned to Lamaism and is an ally of the Khanate to the north against the Chinese.

Africa south of the Sahara, although not as badly hit by the super-flu, is pretty much a mess, having pretty thoroughly collapsed back to pre-industrial conditions, a mix of revived native kingdoms, various military dictatorships, and depopulated, war-torn zones. Roads have decayed and railways are no longer operating, and books and printing presses are few. In a few places some white settlers have managed to set themselves up as little kings, although by now the only survivors have those who has shown willingness to integrate (local wives, for instance). South Africa, where the White-Black conflict came to a bloody end some forty years ago, is divided into the warring Xhosa-Cape Colored state (includes white people) and Zulu kingdom: some of the Boers have departed on another Trek, and after some ethnic cleansing, have carved out a new state in the under-populated desert and semi-desert to the north and west.

The Ethiopian kingdom has shrunk back to medieval borders, and some energetic new Islamicist regimes have sprouted in the Sahel. They are currently clashing with the various nomadic and semi-nomadic raiders that have sprouted up again in the Sahara in the absence of legal authority. Although much of the interior is isolated, slowly relations with the outside world are opening up again as Americans, Europeans, and Indian sailing ships visit the African coasts: some tentative trading posts have been set up in the more stable coastal kingdoms, and south Brazil has reopened contacts with Angola, which still uses Portuguese as a common language among its various successor states: there is some talk of restoring the oil-wells. Thanks to the lighter impact of the plague and the retention of basic notions of sanitations, quarantine, etc. quite a bit of Africa is crowded by the standards of this somewhat depopulated world.

The Middle East is a complex patchwork of states. Much of former Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia (where not taken over by the Tatars) has little in the way of functional states, a mess of tinpot dictators and local “big chiefs” and whackos of one sort or another. Saudi Arabia, with no food or labor imports (not to mention the Soviet’s rather impolite “denial of resources” attack on the oil fields) collapsed rather thoroughly, but Wahhabism didn’t, and the New Caliphate of Arabia is only slowly being pushed out of former Iraq by the forces of the Islamic Kingdom of Iran (the Pahlavi dynasty collapsed, but the Mullahs didn’t take over either – Khomeini died of super-flu) which espouses a somewhat socialistic version of Shi’a Iran and has nothing but contempt for the impoverished camel-jockeys of the peninsula).

Much of Turkey (heavily pounded, NATO member) has been taken over by the Kurds, and Israel, suffering from Soviet nukes, its own technological breakdown and invasions from collapsing neighboring societies, no longer extant as a nation, although a scattered Diaspora of former Israelis survives in other states. Most of its former territory is currently occupied by Egypt, which is ruled by a Whacky New Islamic movement, and has suffered so much loss of good soil thanks to the now mostly silted-up Aswan dam (no longer producing electricity) that there is only enough food thanks to the massive population losses of ’68-’69 (and still things are bad enough that Egypt expands ever southward, forcibly Religiously Re-educating the population and turning them into an urban proletariat so more productive Egyptian farmers can take over their lands). Various minor statelets (and one fairly wild Islamic-Communist revolutionary movement) make up the rest of North Africa.

The Former USSR is mostly Tatar east of the Volga: scattered communities of Slavs knocked down to a pre-industrial farming sort of lifestyle have coalesced to small states over the last century, with an mix of theological and Communist rhetoric as weird as that prevailing in China: backwards and lacking cohesion, struggling to rediscover an almost mythical scientific past, these Russian states are under increasing pressure from the East (and let’s not mention the menace of Greater Chechnya.)

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Europe, the Promised Land of the White Man, is not without some problems of its own. Much of Germany, Poland and the UK, frontline areas of combat, were essentially depopulated and resettled from elsewhere: Spain, after a period of fragmentation under various Caudillos, created a unified dictatorship that went on to conquer much of still-fractured France. The Mafia run what’s left of southern Italy, and the descendants of General Gagarin still run much of the Balkans as the “USSR in exile” - of late there has been talk of pushing through Greater Moldavia to reoccupy the Homeland (of perhaps 5% of the population).

Still, Europe has recovered somewhat in the last century: like Singapore, the League of First People, and (more marginally) the US, it has managed to retain or recover a late-19th century technology in various pockets here and there, and in the confines of the small continent, know-how has spread around to an considerable extent. Population losses were greater and recovery slower than within the territories of the US (currently Europe west of the USSR has only about a bit over 1/5 of its pre-war population, while North America is over 1/3), but societies are generally a bit more cohesive. And there is the European Federation.

The Federation consists, roughly, of Switzerland, northern Italy, northern France, the Low Countries, Northern Germany and western Poland, Bohemia, Scandinavia and the British Isles. Spreading from neutral Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden and Finland, where despite horrendous human losses the infrastructure at least was still in one piece, the Federation expanded into depopulated north Italy, Britain and the North European plain. Today it is a loose, federal structure, including a number of teeny “autonomous” or “associated” states, but with no passports or trade restrictions, and a unified armed forces to keep at bay the Spanish Imperium (which has recently occupied quite a bit of North African coast to “suppress piracy”), the Five Families of Naples-Sicily, the Lithuanian Hegemony, and the Rather Weird Catholicism of the Bavarian-based Union of the Holy Cross.
(Relationships with the USSR-in-Exile, with which there are no common borders, are actually pretty cordial. It’s a dictatorship, but a rational sort of one).

Britain and former Germany are patchworks of settlement, Russians and other eastern Europeans fleeing postwar horrors, Swiss and Dutch and Swedes looking to bring some order to radioactive regions (inhabited by crazed survivalists, the occasional paranoid and cancer-ridden farm communities, and the occasional lurking cannibal), and small pockets of survivors gathered into larger communities. A patchwork of small states in Northern England claim to be the proper government of all Britain, and they’ll see about establishing their rights, as soon as they get to establishing a functional common government. The Republic of Greater Britanie so far refuses to join up with the rest of the French federation, which of late is always pushing for a war to liberate the south. And so on, but somehow the show stays on the road. Coal, steel and steam are once again befouling the landscape, it is hoped a Federation-wide radio service may soon come into existence to supplement the telegraph, and ships now sail to the Americas and Asia.

The increasing number of American refugees and immigrants is a source of some concern: besides the whole “disease-ridden country bumpkins” mental image [2] that many Europeans have of Americans, many still remember SuperFlu-217, and wonder what sort of affects these newcomers will have on the society and nature of the Federation.

[1] Not that backwards, really: they even have electricity in areas of convenient hydropower.
[2] Not to mention the fact that the Irish and the surviving Scots and English can barely understand their version of “English”: a century of linguistic drift and no TV or radio will do that…

PS- I added in the plague to the story to give the native Americans some extra help: the original story was a bit more satirical than plausible (but super biowarfare is? Yes, in the context of 1950s SF near futures )