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"Hey, I grew up with electric trains," said Cole. "Mine were just smaller. And Mingo, you promised to give me a ride back."
Mingo grinned. "I could give you your own set of Bones. It's way faster than the bike."
"But it attracts more attention. And I'd be likely to trip crossing the Potomac."
"Naw," said Cat, "you can leap the Potomac. At the falls, anyway."
"Now wouldn't that have been useful a few years ago."
Of course they all knew he was referring to the day Rube got murdered—they had to rescue Cole from the middle of the river, where Aldo Verus's walking tanks had him pinned down after a crazy chase through D.C.
"Just remember," said Arty. "This isn't an Iron Man comic. There's no shielding. Unless you wear Kevlar."
"So I'm not bulletproof."
"But you can leap short buildings in a—"
"In a single bound," said Col
e. "I'm getting it."
"And … don't tell the President yet, okay?" asked Load.
"Tell him what?" asked Cole. "You mean he doesn't know about it?"
"He doesn't know that this technology is in our hands," said Mingo. "And he probably doesn't know how effective it is. But hey, we could jump the White House gates in front of the Secret Service and be inside before they started shooting at us."
"Let's not put that to a test just yet," said Cole.
The others laughed. A little nervously, or so it seemed to Cole.
After Mingo dropped him off in front of his rooming house, as he carried his bike upstairs Cole thought back on the conversation and wondered why they had used breaking into the White House as their example. Just because it was so well defended that it symbolized a tough target? Or was there something else on their minds?
We keep gathering together in ever-larger communities. Towns. City-states. Kingdoms. Empires. The art of living together in large numbers is called "civilization," and people who can get along well in such an intense social setting are called "civilized."
But we must never forget that the only reason humans keep banding together in ever-larger numbers is because it enhances our ability to survive as a species. If it did not do so, those human traits we call "civilized" would have been extinguished generations ago, and the traits we call "barbaric" would have predominated.
The job of families is to create children and rear them to carry out all the behaviors that promote the survival of the civilization. Families use the civilization to enhance their children's ability to reproduce successfully by expanding the gene pool and ensuring the general prosperity; a civilization uses families to perpetuate the successful values and behaviors of that civilization so it can persist across time and continue giving its members superior ability to reproduce.
The laws of evolution apply to civilizations as surely as to species and individuals: Only the fittest survive.
So it is a foolish civilization that ever acts in such a way as to interfere with the successful reproduction of its own citizens. Whether consciously or not, the citizens of such a civilization will abandon it, either by moving away or by reducing their allegiance to it until they are willing to see it be conquered, overthrown, or culturally transformed back into a reproduction-enhancing entity.
Civilizations fall either when they stop working, or when they are confronted by a civilization that is better at its job.
Chinma was up a tree, checking on his money, when the thugs arrived. Chinma knew it was wrong to care about his stash when the family was in such desperate straits. But Father had refused to take his money when Chinma offered it. And now Father was dead and the family was poorer than ever. Nor was there any help to be had from the rest of the tribe. Half of them were dead, the survivors struggling just to keep their poor farms productive.
Chinma knew he should offer the money to his mother. But he didn't trust her to use the money wisely. This was a terrible thing to think about his own mother, he knew. But she was too smart for her own good sometimes. And too good at other times to be very smart. She might turn the money over to the new chief—whoever that would be, now that Father was dead, and all of his most promising sons. Or she might take the money and flee alone back to Yoruba lands, where she had been born and raised; and whether she would take Chinma or not, he could not be sure.
But what could he, a twelve-year-old boy still emaciated from the ravages of the monkey sickness, do with this much money? There was nothing to buy in the village, and no way to get from the village to Ilorin, and there was no city closer. Besides, they had heard that everyone in Ilorin was sick or dying or dead now.
Chinma was not stupid. He knew that it was his illness, which he caught from the monkey sneeze, that was spreading now, not Ire's sickness, for the people got sick the way Chinma had, very slowly, with sneezing first and then headache and mucus in the lungs and then coughing so violent that you could tear muscles or break ribs, and then the constipation and the diarrhea and the unbearable thirst. And, if you were going to die, bleeding from the eyes and nose and ears, which spurted a little with every sneeze or cough.
But Chinma had not bled, nor had his mother, nor his brother Ade.
Could he ask Ade what to do? No. Once Ade would have been wise, but now he stayed always near to Mother, doing only what she asked. It made a kind of sense—Mother had nursed Ade carefully through his long illness, and then he had nursed her in turn when he was better and Mother had caught the disease from him. Ade now belonged to Mother, body and soul.
Chinma felt no such loyalty. Mother had not tended him. Only her eldest son was worth the risk. When the illness was at its worst, Chinma had had to crawl to the river and drink. They wouldn't even share the filtered water that they drank in the house. And then when they were so sick they couldn't get up to fill their cups from the filtered water, and the filter jug was empty anyway, he brought them water from the river, a little at a time because he was so weak he couldn't carry a full pail. He tried his best to help them, but he gave up when Mother screamed at him because his baby sister died and said it was because he brought dirty river water to them.
