Ernesto Olguin's Interview

ANCUD, ISLA GRANDE DE CHILOE, CHILE

 [While the official capital has returned to Santiago, this onetime
refugee base now remains the economic and cultural center of the
country. Ernesto Olguin calls the beach house on the island’s Peninsula
de Lacuy home, although his duties as a merchant ship’s master keep him
at sea for most of the year.]

 The history books call it “The Honolulu Conference,” but really it
should have been called the “Saratoga Conference” because that’s all any
 of us had a chance to see. We spent fourteen days in those cramped
compartments and dank stuffy passageways. USS Saratoga: from aircraft
carrier, to decommissioned hulk, to evacuee transport barge, to floating
 United Nations HQ.

 It also shouldn’t have been called a conference. If anything, it was
more like an ambush. We were supposed to be exchanging warfighting
tactics and technology. Everyone was anxious to see the British method
of fortified motorways, which was almost as exciting as that live
demonstration of Mkunga Lalem. 1 We were also supposed to be attempting
to reintroduce some measure of international trade. That was my task,
specifically, to integrate the remnants of our navy into the new
international convoy structure. I wasn’t really sure what to expect from
 my time aboard Super Sara. I don’t think anyone could have expected
what actually happened.

 On the first day of the conference, we’d assembled for the
introductions. I was hot and tired and wishing to God we could just get
on without all the tiresome speeches. And then the American ambassador
rose, and the whole world came to a screeching halt.

 It was time to go on the attack, he said, to all get out from behind
our established defenses and begin retaking infested territory. At first
 I thought he simply meant isolated operations: securing more
inhabitable islands or, perhaps, even reopening the Suez/Panama canal
zones. My supposition didn’t last very long. He made it very clear that
this was not going to be a series of minor tactical incursions. The
United States intended to go permanently on the offensive, marching
forward every day, until, as he put it, “every trace was sponged, and
purged, and, if need be, blasted from the surface of the Earth.” Maybe
he thought ripping off Churchill would give it some kind of emotional
punch. It didn’t. Instead, the room spontaneously combusted into
argument.

 One side asked why in hell should we risk even more lives, suffer even
one more unnecessary casualties when all we had to do was remain safe
and sedentary while our enemy simply rotted away. Wasn’t it happening
already? Weren’t the earliest cases starting to show signs of advanced
decomposition? Time was on our side, not theirs. Why not let nature do
all the work for us?

 The other side countered that not all the living dead were rotting
away. What about the later cases, the ones still strong and healthy?
Couldn’t just one restart the plague all over again? And what about
those who prowled countries above the snowline? How long would we have
to wait for them? Decades? Centuries? Would refugees from these
countries ever have a chance of returning home?

 And that’s when it got ugly. Many of the colder countries were what you
 used to call “First World.” One of the delegates from a prewar
“developing” country suggested, rather hotly, that maybe this was their
punishment for raping and pillaging the “victim nations of the south.”
Maybe, he said, by keeping the “white hegemony” distracted with their
own problems, the undead invasion might allow the rest of the world to
develop “without imperialist intervention.” Maybe the living dead had
brought more than just devastation to the world. Maybe in the end, they
had brought justice for the future. Now, my people have little love for
the northern gringos, and my family suffered enough under Pinochet to
make that animosity personal, but there comes a point where private
emotions must give way to objective facts. How could there be a “white
hegemony” when the most dynamic prewar economies were China and India,
and the largest wartime economy was unquestionably Cuba? How could you
call the colder countries a northern issue when so many people were just
 barely surviving in the Himalayas, or the Andes of my own Chile? No,
this man, and those who agreed with him, weren’t talking about justice
for the future. They just wanted revenge for the past.

 [Sighs.] After all we’d been through, we still couldn’t take our heads
from out of our asses or our hands from around each other’s throats.

 I was standing next to the Russian delegate, trying to prevent her from
 climbing over her seat, when I heard another American voice. It was
their president. The man didn’t shout, didn’t try to restore order. He
just kept going in that calm, firm tone that I don’t think any world
leader has since been able to duplicate. He even thanked his “fellow
delegates” for their “valued opinions” and admitted that, from a purely
military perspective, there was no reason to “push our luck.” We’d
fought the living dead to a stalemate and, eventually, future
generations might be able to reinhabit the planet with little or no
physical danger. Yes, our defensive strategies had saved the human race,
 but what about the human spirit?

 The living dead had taken more from us than land and loved ones. They’d
 robbed us of our confidence as the planet’s dominant life-form. We were
 a shaken, broken species, driven to the edge of extinction and grateful
 only for a tomorrow with perhaps a little less suffering than today.
Was this the legacy we would leave to our children, a level of anxiety
and self-doubt not seen since our simian ancestors cowered in the
tallest trees? What kind of world would they rebuild? Would they rebuild
 at all? Could they continue to progress, knowing that they had been
powerless to reclaim their future? And what if that future saw another
rise of the living dead? Would our descendants rise to meet them in
battle, or simply crumple in meek surrender and accept what they believe
 to be their inevitable extinction? For this reason alone, we had to
reclaim our planet. We had to prove to ourselves that we could do it,
and leave that proof as this war’s greatest monument. The long, hard
road back to humanity, or the regressive ennui of Earth’s once-proud
primates. That was the choice, and it had to be made now.

 So typically Norteamericano, reaching for the stars with their asses
still stuck in the mud. I guess, if this was a gringo movie, you’d see
some idiot get up and start clapping slowly, then the others would join
in and then we’d see a tear roll down someone’s cheek or some other
contrived bullshit like that. Everyone was silent. No one moved. The
president announced that we would recess for the afternoon to consider
his proposal, then reconvene at dusk for a general vote.

 As naval attaché, I wasn’t allowed to participate in that vote. While
the ambassador decided the fate of our beloved Chile, I had nothing to
do but enjoy the Pacific sunset. I sat on the flight deck, wedged in
between the windmills and solar cells, killing time with my opposite
numbers from France and South Africa. We tried not to talk shop,
searching for any common subject as far from the war as we could get. We
 thought we were safe with wine. As luck might have it, each of us had
either lived near, worked on, or had family connected with a vineyard:
Aconcagua, Stellenboch, and Bordeaux. Those were our bonding points and,
 as with everything else, they led right back to the war.

 Aconcagua had been destroyed, burned to the ground during our country’s
 disastrous experiments with napalm. Stellenboch was now growing
subsistence crops. Grapes were considered a luxury when the population
was close to starvation. Bordeaux was overrun, the dead crushing its
soil underfoot like almost all of continental France. Commander Emile
Renard was morbidly optimistic. Who knows, he said, what the nutrients
of their corpses would do for the soil? Maybe it would even improve on
the overall taste once Bordeaux was retaken, if it was retaken. As the
sun began to dip, Renard took something from his kit bag, a bottle of
Chateau Latour, 1964. We couldn’t believe our eyes. The ’64 was an
extremely rare prewar vintage. By sheer chance, the vineyard had had a
bumper crop that season and had chosen to harvest its grapes in late
August as opposed to the traditional early September. That September was
 marked by early, devastating rains, which inundated the other vineyards
 and elevated Chateau Latour to almost Holy Grail status. The bottle in
Renard’s hand might be the last of its kind, the perfect symbol of a
world we might never see again. It was the only personal item he’d
managed to save during the evacuation. He carried it with him
everywhere, and was planning to save it for…ever, possibly, seeing as it
 looked like none of any vintage would ever be made again. But now,
after the Yankee president’s speech…

 [He involuntarily licks his lips, tasting the memory.]

 It hadn’t traveled that well, and the plastic mugs didn’t help. We didn’t care. We savored every sip.

 You were pretty confident about the vote?

 Not that it would be unanimous, and I was damn right. Seventeen “No”
votes and thirty-one “Abstain.” At least the no voters were willing to
suffer the long-term consequences of their decision…and they did. When
you think that the new UN only consisted of seventy-two delegates, the
showing of support was pretty poor. Not that it mattered for me or my
other two amateur “sommeliers.” For us, our countries, our children, the
 choice had been made: attack.