The Rift by Walter Jon Williams Page B

wanted the Mississippi Valley Division. And now she had it.
    And she was only forty-one years old.
    She paused, a framed certificate still in her hand. She had run out of picture hooks. Apparently she had a few more credentials than her predecessor.
    She laughed. This was probably a good sign.
    *
    Cellphone plastered to her ear, Jessica nodded good-bye to her driver, Sergeant Zook, and walked past Pat’s red Jeep Cherokee to the new house, the one with the rustic wooden sign marking it as the dwelling of the Commander, MVD. She could hear Pat playing “Hail to the Chief” on his fiddle. She opened the door, and the fiddle fell silent when Pat saw she was on the phone. “If you’re sure,” she said, “that water at the levee toe is from the rain, and not—” she said as she marched across the polished wood floor of their new house, dropped her heavy briefcase onto the couch, then spun and tossed her hat at the wooden rack by the front door.
    Missed. Damn.
    Pat already had the place smelling like home, which meant wood shavings and glue. She finished her conversation and snapped the phone shut. A mental image of Captain Kirk folding his subspace communicator came to her, and she grinned. Then she bounded across the room and let Pat fold her in his arms.
    “I take it that things went well,” he said.
    “Mm-hmm.”
    “Careful of the fiddle.”
    Pat Webster was a tall, bearlike Virginian, and Jessica’s second husband. Her first marriage, in her early twenties, had been a catastrophe— a pair of obsessive, overachieving bipolar maniacs joined in a relationship was not a recipe for success— and by the time she’d met Pat, she’d pretty much given up on anything but transitory romance with colleagues temporarily stationed at the same base.
    It was her friend Janice, when they were both stationed at Army Material Command in Alexandria, who talked her into going to a contra and square dance, overcoming her expectation that she would be encountering women in Big Hair and crinolines. Instead Jessica found herself quickly defeated by the fast-moving patterns, the allemandes and honors and courtesy turns and chains, and she ended up at the head of the dance hall, talking to the members of the band in between numbers.
    And there, with his fiddle and mandolin, in his jeans and boots and checked shirt, was Pat Webster, laconic and smiling. She watched his hands as he played, the long expert hands that made light of the intricate music that he coaxed so effortlessly from his instruments.
    She fantasized about those hands all the way home. And, a week or so later, when they finally touched her, she was not disappointed.
    She found that Pat had a career, but to her utter relief, it was one that could stand uprooting every couple years as one assignment followed another. He was a maker of fiddles, guitars, dulcimers, and mandolins— in fact, a genuine handmade Webster guitar sold for up to a couple thousand dollars, depending on the model, and until Jessica got her general’s star he brought more money into their marriage than she. He brought with him the pleasant scent of seasoned wood, of varnish, of glue. He brought her his calm, measured presence, a balance to her own unbridled energy.
    He brought her the eternal gift of music.
    Inspired, she had even learned to dance squares and contras.
    “So how are the levees up in Iowa?” Pat asked.
    “Holding. It was the private levees that broke.”
    It had been all Jessica could do to keep from flying north to check the situation personally. But her deputy at Rock Island assured her that there was no significant danger to Corps structures, and she concluded that she would be better employed in Vicksburg, getting her teams up to speed for when the flood waters headed south.
    “Private levees,” Pat mused. “Funny we’ve still got so many of ’em.”
    “The Corps budget will only do so much,” Jessica said. Corps levees were built to a standard height and width, faced with