Salt Peanuts: An Excerpt
Jimmy Carter, R.I.P.
I don’t exactly love Jimmy Carter as a public figure, because he began all the policies for which we now blame Reagan and the right, but he is a major character in an upcoming novel of mine, Salt Peanuts. It is set in Houston, Texas, in the 1970s and 1980s. I grew quite fond of my character Jimmy Carter while writing it, whereas I grew ever more confused and distressed by Ronald Reagan, for instance.
I guess I’m a bit of a genre writer: Rytius Records is post-apocalyptic earthbound sci-fi, and Salt Peanuts is alien-invasion alternative history. I hope you enjoy this excerpt!
The first ship had...docked, seems to be the right word, over the White House. You could tell from the newscasts that first day—Carter had just got back from Camp David—how big it was, because it came in the morning, and it was a clear day on the East Coast, but the newscasts had to be artificially lit. They had to turn on the streetlights. The second one docked over lower Manhattan, and the third over the Mitsui Tower in Nihonbashi, and the fourth over Peking. Beijing now. There were two in India: one over South Bombay (Mumbai now) and one over the Rashtrapati Bhawan in New Delhi. They went to Moscow, and the Bundeshaus in Bonn. Paris, Beunos Aires, and a couple dozen other cities followed. Detroit, of course. By the time the sun descended below the edge of the ship at dusk, it was time to turn on the streetlights anyway.
Carter couldn’t do much. They had done their homework. They had covered every major city. They had cybernetically synthesized all the major human languages, and Martin was at home with his mother and father eating dinner with Eight Is Enough on ABC when they broke in to announce a summit with President Carter the next day. It was the first Carter had heard about it. It came out later that he had attempted, heroically, but, sadly, ineffectively, to launch a nuclear attack, but they had long since disabled our nuclear facilities. The consensus is that they just changed the launch codes. No one knows what they are anymore. They’re supposed to change them randomly from time to time even now. There was no clear way to fight them, and a conventional attack would have been a farce. If Sam and them could have found anyone willing to fight anyway. It’s fair to say that more minds were blown than spirits broken by their arrival and Carter’s failed pre-emptive strike that day. All the ancient slumbering hopes swole and rose along with the fear. You could hardly tell them apart.
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They returned the albums we sent them and demanded 75 million metric tons of kosher salt and 100 million metric tons of Dixie Spanish Red peanuts every year, deliverable in 2 shipments on May 1 and November 1, respectively. Coarse and unhulled, respectively. Because of the short notice, the first shipment would not be due until May 1, 1979, and not November 1, 1978. That would have been absurd. They would arrange for shipping from Cape Canaveral. It was a hundred-odd miles and a matter of minutes by train from Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, which was ringed with ports handling exports from all over the South and imports from South America; it was a couple hundred miles from the port at Charleston, and, the point was lost on no student of military strategy, sufficiently isolated from the mainland to make a conventional attack by ground or air forces exceedingly difficult. They would be at their most vulnerable during outbound loading. No human military force would stand a chance in a straight-up confrontation, but they had seen Cronkite’s post-Tet segments, too. Determined guerrillas might manage to take hostages, destroy buildings, or otherwise sabotage operations. By the end of the broadcast, they had established an un- . . . “manned” seems to be the word, border along the 29th parallel north of Orlando, from the Mosquito Lagoon in the east to the Crystal River Park in the west. It was a long line of radio-controlled free-electron laser turrets, each mounted on a sunk carbon-fiber beam, a buoy, or its own pole, depending on the terrain, every 300 feet or so for more than 100 miles. They assured Floridians that local residents would still be allowed to fish and hunt in and around the lakes, forests, and swamps through that part of the state. Martin had wondered at the time what local resident would attempt to avail herself of the privilege.
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Carter sent Brzezinski to Moscow the very first night. The United States went to Moscow, instead of demanding that Russia come to Washington, as an act of goodwill and aggressive good faith, like King and Gandhi. Carter was on a trip about moral high ground and integrity. There were no minutes taken so nobody knows exactly what was said, but two days later the largest ever impromptu meeting of the world ruling class—chairmen, prime ministers, presidents, geurilla leaders, chief executives, kings, intellectual riffraff, notorious arms dealers, Nobel Prize winners, and acclaimed war criminals, more than a few in the same person—was convened at the Château du Nyon in Vaud on Lake Geneva. It was a terrorist’s wet dream: the Andreas Baader Commando had just blown up NATO Supreme Commander General Alexander Haig’s motorcade, after all.
Thus the water was covered by a rotating fleet of Super Huey armed helicopter sentries, and an international security force comprising NATO, SAS, and 9GR troops secured the thoroughfares. The town was evacuated except for essential service and wait staff. One of the prostitutes, later interviewed by People and the Financial Times, alleged that Prince Fahd’s entourage roasted a goat in his suite—they dug a pit in the floor and roasted a goat in it. It was unbearably delicious, seasoned with allspice, cardamom, cumin, cinnamon, and garlic, and served with a nutty long-grain rice. Kissinger talked Mitbestimmung all evening with George Meany.
Arafat and “Helmy” Schmidt entertained and stimulated a group of summitteers with an informal, though, for that, no less eloquent, debate over proper methods and avenues of anti-imperialist struggle—armed or civil, for instance, in, say, the case of the Palestine Liberation Organization, or the Red Army Faction, for example.
Chirac and Mobutu almost came to blows over Chirac’s accusation that Mobutu double-dipped the pâté de foie gras. Gadaffi and Eiji Toyoda broke it up, but the display of violence so nauseated John Kenneth Galbraith that he threw up on Nelson Rockefeller. It’s a good thing the Swiss cultural ministry removed the good china. It was a stressful time. Worse, the aliens had submitted detailed phytosanitary regulations, none of which were met by any agricultural exporter. Only the European Common Market even came close, and they didn’t grow peanuts.
Carter’s “heart sank, and was heavy,” when he saw the requirements, he confessed in a live press briefing after Nyon. Martin had been watching The Jeffersons with Uncle James. Does it even need to be said that the United States had the least rigorous mycotoxin standards? All the major pesticides were banned, as were inorganic fertilizers, and they were dead set against gene-spliced cultivars. “We face the greatest challenge in human history to our strengths and capacities, not only as a nation, but as a planet.” The aliens understood that salt manufacture required chemical processing, but they wanted natural peanuts. “We face a challenge that is no less than the moral equivalent of war. I will not issue the American people bb guns.” Which is why World Bank president Robert McNamara traveled down to El Batán in Texcoco, México, outside of Mexico City, to see Norman Borlaug, who had been running the Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo for the Rockefeller Foundation, to persuade him to come to Washington instead, to advise Donald Rumsfeld from Searle and John Hanley from Monsanto on shuttle breeding and the other conventional crop-improvement techniques he had used in India.
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Carter’s first administrative act upon passage of ECoLI was the Maximum Crop Mandate, an executive order institutionalizing the High-Yield Working Group, the interdepartmental consultancy headed by Norman Borlaug, the man behind the green revolution, working in close consultation with stakeholders in the private sector. The new federal agency, the MCM Commission, was divided into two departments, in accordance with its twofold mission: Human-Genomic, tasked with immediately and by any means necessary increasing production for human consumption, and ET-Traditional, to exploit any and all opportunities for surplus peanut production. It was obviously a matter of national and planetary security. That was clear. But all was far from well. On March 3, 1979, there were eight months till first outbound harvest, and, worried, Carter called his most trusted advisors to Camp David for a working weekend—Andy Young, Zbig Brzezinski, Cyrus Vance, Chuck Schultze, and New York Federal Reserve president Paul Volcker. Bert Lance was there, too, but not in any official capacity. Carter just wanted them to pray together, like old times, before the others arrived.
“You sure he should be here, Jimmy?” Schultze asked upon entering the cabin.
“I don’t see why not. He’s my friend. Nobody’s recording anything.”
“Deng thought so, too. And you don’t have the luxury of a censored state press.”
“ ‘What makes you think they’ll print it?’ ” Volcker chuckled. He had recently seen a re-release of Three Days of the Condor.
“Neither I nor the American people need luxury,” Carter fairly spat. “This goes deeper—deeper,” he slammed his left fist into his right palm for emphasis, “than wage increases, GDP growth, and inflation. What we need is the truth.”
“Alright, alright, calm down,” Schultze sat in the puke-yellow upholstered armchair near Young, who had grabbed the last remaining Barcalounger nearest the fire.
Zbig squinted and pulled his shawl-collar cardigan tighter around his neck. The fire was low in the newly installed 140,000-BTU Charmaster Chalet indoor forced-air wood-burning furnace with 30-inch firebox, draft control, automatic thermostat, hot-water heating coil, natural-convection thermosiphon, smoke burner and creosote converter. Jimmy had half a dozen Charmasters installed here and at the White House, but he insisted on burning the deadfall twigs and green hickory he had gathered from the grounds, though the Secret Service had left half a face cord of dry seasoned Tamarack outside the door. Bert had to use the remainder of a bag of charcoal briquettes to get the hickory lit. “I suppose you don’t have a firm agenda.” Carter was emptyhanded. He had no notepad, papers, or briefs, and they were meeting in the Holly Cabin den instead of around the table at Laurel.
“I know what’s on my mind, but no, it’s not real formal. It needs to be. It’s been weighing on me since shortly after the. . . visitation.”
“Let me guess,” Andy offered. “You’re unhappy with ECoLI.”
Jimmy was grave. “Yes, that’s part of it. I don’t like interfering with the market. Especially not on the labor side. Now, we have a good basic posture regarding the rest of the world now that China is on board, but I’m not sure how we can predictably, consistently, hit our mark.” He drew in a sharp breath, the beginning of a sigh. “How is PeECAN going, Chuck?”
“It’s going strong, as far as it goes, but now with Iran we’re working against two external shocks. Unemployment’s jumped to 10 percent from 7 back before the visit. That’s about 12 million workers out of a job, but we’ve placed 3 million since we started in December. Meany and the AFL-CIO are on board, so labor engagement is solid, increasing even.”
“I stand by my initial position: putting the jobless to work by paying part of growers’ wage bill does nothing to increase production,” Andy interjected. “Can’t increase it. You should be dissatisfied, Jimmy, because paying the entire agricultural wage bill wouldn’t increase production.”
“And what do you suggest, Andy? You’re a broken record. Cut red tape? Relax requirements? We don’t control the requirements. That’s the problem,” Chuck said. Jimmy concurred. “You know I agree with stripping away needless and costly regulation in favor of marketplace forces wherever possible, Andy, but it’s not practical here. It’s beside the point. Go on, Chuck.”
Salt Peanuts is scheduled for fall 2025.
I will certainly pay for the full novel when it drops. You gotta drop the other novel on here with the audio and let us pay for that one on here? Maybe just drop the audio on here for your first novel since you have it out on print already.
I loved this excerpt.