Tropic of Labrador

By Tim Craire

Three stories:
-2080 brings dustbowls and mass migration northward -- but on the bright side, there's also the Fourth Annual Jellyfishburger Cook-Off on the warm beaches of Labrador!
Plus:
-In the 2020s, a real football fan doesn't just support his team; he seizes it
-A bored national security agent asks: Why spy when you can own?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tim Craire
• Release date: Jan 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311039439

Tim Craire

Tim Craire is a writer of speculative fiction who lives in a far green country under a swift sunrise.

Book preview

Tropic of Labrador:

Three Stories

By Tim Craire

Copyright 2014 by Tim Craire. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form, except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews, without prior written permission from the author.

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Smashwords Edition

Cover by Barnabas Kiss

White Cedar Press

New York - Miami - Auckland

Red Right ’28

Manufacturing Dissent

Tropic of Labrador

Red Right '28

Since this is a romance, I should start with a vision of the woman I went nuts about, the vision of her I saw on television as I watched the Pittsburgh-Lyons game early in October. During a huddle break the camera focused on the Loyalists at Three Rivers and then zeroed in on her. She was wearing black and yellow, and shouting, and waving one of the INVISIBLE HAND signs. She was screaming so hard that you could see the fans below her sort of flinch. The camera operators at Three Rivers are as indentured as anyone, so it's strange they would focus on her like that, because she was yelling and snarling and waving that sign like a club; she looked pretty feral, really. They probably liked her fanatic screams and thought she looked tough, formidable. I thought she looked tough, and gorgeous, and sharp. As she yelled I could see how perfect her teeth were, and with the cold and her agitation her cheeks were red, which was cute.

I had seen her before. A team of us in Outreach had caravanned to the first Cleveland-Pittsburgh game this season, in September, and I had met her when she yelled at me when Rick and I went up into those same Three Rivers stands to try to hand out some literature. What a fiasco that was—all of them were jumpy because their star tackle, a huge guy named Shimizu, was up there mingling with them and signing autographs. He lumbered through the fans like a dronebine in a cornfield, reaping their adulation. Shimizu was a franchise player they were berserk about in Pittsburgh. With him up there shaking hands and kissing babies they considered it disrespectful for us to barge in and tell them their entire franchise was a rotten, criminal exercise in grassroots fascism. They attacked, and the Pinkertons hurried down, and Rick and I weren't able to hand out many flyers, to say the least. As the klieg lights flared on and the riot guards and the dogs started pulling people out of the brawl, I saw this enchanting woman pick up one of our pamphlets and scowl at me and shred it; but as she did it there was something in her eyes, not hatred so much as pity or condescension. She looked right at me, right in the eyes, and spit. It could have been worse. Just before the billy club smacked into my head she yelled:

He built this team! He built it! He'll bury you!

—so it was nice that she was trying to explain herself. As I blacked out I had this scene before me, a scene I remembered in my cell later that night: My vision woman looking me in the eyes and tearing up our propaganda, while behind her Shimizu himself picked up one of our flyers and looked at it quizzically. He was half-smiling, as if he considered it child's work, inane