Chapter 2

"This," Aunt Jessica said, waving at the town, "is known as The Project."

"The Project?" Danielle asked after a moment. "What kind of project?" She looked around. There wasn't a rundown apartment building in sight. "This certainly doesn't look like Northern California, either. Where are we, and how did we get here?"

They were standing on an outdoor patio, and Aunt Jessica led her to a table that was slightly apart from the others. "We're not really in California," Aunt Jessica said. She took a deep breath, smiling. "I'll explain after we get home." She waved at someone coming up a path from town. Uncle Jack and Cousin Jenny waved back, and joined them moments later.

After the obligatory round of hugs, and a quiet "We need to talk," to Cousin Jenny, they trooped off to the train, dragging Danielle's luggage along the flagstone path that linked them. They did have to stop at the gate over a deeply cut creek and identify themselves. That's when Danielle realized the building they'd arrived in—and she had no idea how that had been accomplished—was isolated by a fence and either a river or creek from the rest of the town. It wasn't surrounded by trees, either, and the only snow she could see was on a distant mountain. It was just a short walk to the station from that stop.

"We'll be home in 30 minutes," Uncle Jack said when everyone was settled.

Danielle nodded noncommittally. The first mile of track skirted the town, Terminus, she'd seen the name at the station, and she spent it looking at the people. Every woman was wearing a skirt or a dress; only the men were wearing slacks or pants. It reminded her of pictures of the 1930s and 40s. Even the kids: boys in jeans, girls in skirts.

Every square inch of land outside of the town was being farmed. The soil, what she could see beneath the plants, looked dark and rich, about like what she'd once read you found downhill from a volcano, like what she'd been told existed in Idaho.

"The area we're in is known as Three Valleys," Aunt Jessica said, "although there are more than just the three original valleys. We just left the town of Terminus, which is the largest town in Three Valleys, and the seat of the local government."

"Why call it Three Valleys if there are more than three valleys?"

"It's like a region, or state, and the original settlements were in three valleys, hence the name. There are actually six different major valleys, and an area called Seaside, which is down on the coast. We live in Valley's End, which is the next town west of here. It's where this particular valley ends. It's got a beautiful waterfall, and a terrific view of the sunset out over the ocean."

"When it isn't cloudy," Jenny added.

"Are they really different valleys?" Danielle asked.

Aunt Jessica nodded. "Each valley is 40 to 50 miles long, and anywhere from three to 10 miles wide. Two of these valleys descend from the same general mountainous area, and the others split off from them."

"There's a word for it," Danielle said, "but I can't remember what it is. But mudflows come down them from volcanoes. I saw something about them on Discovery Channel one night."

"Probably referring to the valleys that ring Mt. Rainier in Washington State," Aunt Jessica said. "You get that from glaciers at the head of valleys, which we have. The volcano, as near as we can determine, is extinct. But in case it isn't, we have ways to divert the mudflow away from where people live."

"Lahar," Danielle said. "That's what they called the mudflows. I remember they said there's evidence there have been a number of mudflows, so they called those valleys Lahar Valleys."

"Maybe in a few days we can go to the other end of the valley," Jenny said. "The view of the mountain range up there is pretty spectacular."

"Later," Uncle Jack said. "But first, we have to get you home and set up in your room."

"And tomorrow and the next day you'll be taking placement tests for school," Aunt Jessica added.

'Home' was a two-story house behind a great lawn on one end of town. There wasn't an attached garage, which seemed strange, but the house was only a few steps from the street where a bus passed every few minutes. Her room was on the second floor, at the end of the hall next to a small bathroom. It was painted a muted green, and had a double-bed, a modest walk-in closet, a vanity with a large mirror, and a window overlooking some other houses.

"This is pretty bare bones," Danielle said as she dumped her luggage at the end of the bed.

"We just moved in a couple of months ago," Jenny said from behind her. "Until then we lived on the other side of town. They let us keep going to the same high school, which is good, otherwise I'd be going to school in Terminus."

"You wanted to stay with your own group?"

"My boyfriend," Jenny said. "Anyway, about the room, we'll have to fix it up. You know, maybe something for the walls, and some flowers for the window."

Flowers for the window? Danielle thought. How old-fashioned. She smiled, though, and nodded. "First, though, we need to make the bed."

"We have linens in the closet," Aunt Jessica said. She was standing in the doorway with an armful of sheets and pillows. "Let's get these on."

She and Jenny made the bed while Danielle unpacked and hung up her clothes. When she came to the few books she'd brought along she paused. "What about school?" she asked.

"We'll get started on that tomorrow," Aunt Jessica said. "You'll have to take some tests to see which classes you have to take, and which you can skip."

That seemed sensible; she'd have had to do that in any school she'd changed to. She closed the suitcase. She had her iPod buried at the bottom of her suitcase, but hadn't taken it out yet. She made a mental note to learn where she could download some more tunes.

"In the meantime," Aunt Jessica said, "we have to call your mother and let you know you've arrived."

Apparently the call involved a special operator. Danielle heard Aunt Jessica talking to someone for several minutes. She flashed Danielle a smile while her finger tapped on the table next to the phone. Finally, though, her face lit up.

"Alexa, Jessica. We just arrived, and Danielle is starting to get unpacked. Sure, I'll put her on." She handed Danielle the phone. "Be careful what you say," Aunt Jessica warned.

Danielle gulped and took the phone. "Hi, Mom."

"How was your trip?"

"Long. I don't ever want to try a bus trip. It'd be longer than this, and more boring."

Her mother laughed lightly. "Don't tell your father, but that's how I feel whenever we go anywhere. What's your room like?"

She described her room, but having caught her Aunt's eye, didn't say a thing about what it looked like out the window. Her mother asked a couple more questions, mostly about how she was feeling, before asking to have the phone passed back to Aunt Jessica.

After a few more words, plus a promise to write, Aunt Jessica hung up. "What time do you think it is?" she asked.

Surprised, Danielle glanced at her watch. "Uh, just about 7:30," she said.

"Actually, it's closer to 3:30," Aunt Jessica said. She sighed and settled at the kitchen table. "Before I start, can I get you something, iced tea or water?"

"A Diet Coke would be great."

"Sorry, we don't have those." She glanced at the refrigerator. "I guess you'll have to settle for water." She dumped some ice cubes in a glass and added some water.

"Now this will take some getting used to," she said as she put the glass in front of Danielle and settled back in her chair, "but we aren't in California, we aren't even in the U.S."

"We ... where are we?"

"We're on the South Mexican coast, or what will be Mexico in a few thousand years. More important than that, though, is when we are. As near as the scientists can tell, the current year is 18,300 years BC, give or take a few months."

"18— You're like kidding me, right?"

Aunt Jessica shook her head. "How we got here is kind of complicated. How much history have you had? Enough to understand what happened in WW2?"

"Sort of. We expelled Americans of Japanese descent from their lands, terror-bombed Tokyo and Germany, and atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

"Oh, that is so incomplete in so many ways," Aunt Jessica said, sighing. "And one-sided, too. I suppose we extended our Imperialist reach around the world."

"Sort of," Danielle said, "though that wasn't very clear. I mean, if we did, and we exploited all of these people, then why did we bring all of our troops home? But we did. I think we substituted economic imperialism for doing it the way the Romans and others did it. We learned all about how the really rich forced people to work for starvation wages, children couldn't get health care, and things like that, and how our companies, mostly the multinationals, dominate whatever place they plant their tentacles."

Aunt Jessica shook her head. "What you're going to learn in school is going to be a big shock. All right, I'll leave that up to the teachers.

"The United States fought Germany in WW2, as well as Japan and Italy. Shortly after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on us; we hadn't declared war on them, I might point out. When our troops finally fought their way into Germany—that would be in 1945—they found a lot of technical things the Germans had been working on. One of them is how we got here.

"I won't go into all of the 'why' and 'wherefore' that happened, but the US Government decided to settle a lot of people here in the Project. The idea was that if a nuclear war broke out between the US and the Soviet Union, there would be survivors. After a few years, though, we went independent. We cut all ties with the government, and became self-governing."

"But you could still come get me."

"I didn't say we cut our links to your world, just to the government."

Danielle stared at her aunt's face for a bit. "I'm not sure I believe you, but ... why not? But aren't we displacing the people who lived here? Isn't this another form of Imperialism? And aren't we polluting the world so future generations won't have any resources?"

"That's the thing," her aunt said. "We're not displacing anyone. This isn't our past, it's one of a number of possible pasts. Every so often there's an event, that if things had gone differently, would have produced a different future. For example, what if John Wilkes Booth had not shot Lincoln."

"But he did."

"But what if he didn't? What if he couldn't break into the President's Box, or the guard was there, or ... well, like that. Or what if William the Conqueror was killed at the Battle of Hastings? Or if Napoleon won at Waterloo? Each of those generates a new history, and the Germans found a way to tap into that, and we copied it from them.

"This past ... back in the past, a really long time ago, 74,000 BC as near as we can figure, a volcano in Indonesia blew up. This was a lot bigger than Mt. St. Helens, at least 10 or 15 times the size of that volcano; the crater is something like 30 miles long and five miles wide. The dust cloud blocked the sun, and that killed a lot of things."

"Like nuclear winter?"

"We're not sure of that," Aunt Jessica said. "But anyway, this dust cloud nearly killed off all of mankind. The evidence is that there were fewer than 10,000 people left alive by the time the dust cloud settled. In this history," she thumped the table for emphasis, "it did. There's no Cro-Magnon, no Neanderthals, or any of our related species. Even most of the Great Apes didn't survive."

"So..."

"There's nobody to displace. There was nobody here when we arrived, and believe me, we looked really hard for them. When we didn't find them, we moved in."

Danielle wanted to say something about what the White Man did to the Native Americans, and how wrong that was, but if there wasn't anyone to do that to ... She shook her head in confusion. "Are you sure?" she asked. "Did they look really hard?"

"The explorers knew all the places to look," Aunt Jessica said. "The only place they didn't look was up on the ice sheets, and anyone up there would stand out."

"Ice sheets? Like the North Pole?"

"We're in the middle of an Ice Age," Aunt Jessica said. "Ice covers half of the Northern Hemisphere, and maybe 30% of the Southern.

"Most of the people who settled here live in North America, though there are groups who've spread out elsewhere, such as us, people in the Bahamas, and so on."

"An Ice Age? It didn't seem cold out there."

"That's because we're far enough south that we don't notice the extremes. Summers up north aren't that warm, and the winters can be really cold, though the farther south you get, like here, the warmer it is. The trouble is, Center, which is the capitol, and where the first explorers arrived, is about a hundred miles south of the ice sheet. Scientists don't think the ice sheet will extend any farther south than where it is right now, but in case it does they'll have to move the capitol elsewhere."

Danielle shook her head. This was all so much, so fast. "You said you'd explain everything," she said at last, "and I guess you did. I'm not sure I understand all of it. There's so much that seems ... odd."

"Oh, there's a lot more," Aunt Jessica said, "and you'll learn that in school. A lot of what your teachers will tell you is going to be different than what you learned back in Tiburon." She smiled softly. "And when you have questions, you can always come to me with them."

"But wouldn't the teachers—"

"I teach history at the college here in Three Valleys," Aunt Jessica said. "I have books and other records that the teachers don't have." She paused, hearing a noise from elsewhere in the house. "Ah, Jenny is back. She'd gone to the store for me. She can show you around."

Danielle kept her face still. It sounded like things were a whole lot weirder than she'd imagined. "Tell me one thing," she asked. "I had a ... a condition, and did you ... how did you know? How did you find out? Did Jenny tell you or something?"

"She did," Aunt Jessica said. "When we visited last week back you were pretty depressed. Jenny figured out why right away, and she talked it over with me."

"Did you tell my mother?"

"No, I didn't."

Danielle slumped in her chair. "I just know that if she finds out she'll kill me or something."

"I think you underestimate your mother," Aunt Jessica said. She raised her voice. "Jenny!"

"Mom?"

"Why don't you take your cousin shopping? Show her around town, too. Dinner's not for several hours, so you might want to get her a snack or something, it's been hours since I know she ate.

"What'll I use for money? I only have a few dollars."

"You can take something out of my purse. Don't spend too much, though. Be prudent, but have fun."

"It sure doesn't seem like a big town," Danielle said as she and Jenny rode the trolley into town. "How many people live here?"

"Almost 2,000," Jenny said. She was just a touch taller than Danielle, with an oval face and brown, shoulder-length hair that had a little curl right at the end. All the previous times Danielle had seen her, Jenny had been skinny and short, but in the last year the girl had shot up like a weed, and added womanly curves. She was wearing a brown dress with a dark red collar and belt, and black shoes that reminded Danielle of pictures of girls growing up in the 50s. She had a red leather purse slung casually over her shoulder.

"Terminus is the big town in Three Valleys," Jenny continued. "I think 7,000 people live there. But if you want a real city, that would be Center. I think 50,000 people live there, maybe double that if you include all of the little communities around it."

"How many people live in the ... Project?"

Jenny shrugged. "Well, they started with a million, but that was about 50 years ago. Three Valleys wasn't settled until the 60s, and I understand that only a thousand people or so were in that first group. Now? I'd say Three Valleys has at least 20,000 people in it. That's including Seaside."