North of Los Angeles, the highway that led from Mojave to Olancha was one of Franz’s joys, despite its cutting through New America. He didn’t much like traveling east of Pacifica but if he had to do it there was nothing like roaring through the high desert at 150 kph, gliding alongside lava flows and red volcanoes, with a view of the great Sierra Nevada to the West. The Quark was at its best in the wide open spaces, and Betty used the satellite downlink to update her background on Offworld so that she could brief Franz on the way up. He also had her fill him in on the latest ominous rumblings about moral corruption issued by the Colorado Springs White House.

New America was where it had all come apart. The undoing of a once great nation. America’s heartland had gotten it wrong, caught up in culture wars while the economy unraveled around them. Globalization and outsourcing had boosted corporate earnings and diminished gainful employment for working America, already stung by the loss of a social safety net and the inflation of health-care costs.

Feeling impotent, they vented their rage in the wrong places.

As Old America grew more religious, cynical politicians contrived every possible “moral challenge” and “national-security issue” to cling to power and divert attention from rampant corruption and cronyism, and the economic plight of the poor. The Far Right subjected the nation to unrelenting manipulation with doublespeak straight out of an Orwellian nightmare. It worked well for them, despite short-lived comebacks by the Left. But it was a dangerous political game that ultimately split apart the country.

The tipping point was the New Depression, triggered by massive deficits, oil shortages, a collapsing dollar, a trade war with China, and a growing Asian preference for Euro bonds. With their former livelihoods gone forever, many Americans resolved that they were damned if they were also going to lose their God or their guns. No latte sipper, tree hugger or U.N. sympathizer would infringe upon their freedom. Gays and feminists would not destroy their families. And secular humanists would not corrupt their sacred values.

The conversion of churchgoing folk to fundamentalist religions had become a tidal wave. Many were millenarian and were bracing for the apocalypse, and millions worshipped in virtual churches. By the start of the New Crusades, two out of every three American citizens were armed, believed in angels, and took the words of the Bible as literal truth. Creationism explained the cosmos and contrary thought was evil. Franz was saddened by the descent into a medieval mindset full of superstition and demonization. He knew from his anthropology studies that cults and extremist religions had always flourished in times of cultural upheaval. So had characters like Reverend John T. Jawbone, who felt he had been called into action by the Lord. He was the founder and leader of the BGN, the Big God Network, so named because of his vision of a mile-high Jesus Christ.

Jawbone was a colorful character who was vastly popular. News programs couldn’t resist video footage of him dressed in a white hat and rearing up on his white stallion, prior to a BGN demonstration or march. The good reverend delivered pithy sound bites on Fox and CNN about controversial issues while twirling a pearl-handled Smith & Wesson. He conducted glamorous weddings on Mississippi River steamboats for the sons and daughters of the conservative elite. He enraptured stadiums full of converts during his road-trip crusades. The BGN’s own 24-hour network had spread the message of Jawbone, who built the largest virtual congregation in Christendom.

Jawbone had faith that the Rapture would soon set things straight, but in the meantime there was God’s work to be carried out. He urged his enraged constituency to sweep pro-choice murderers and pro-sin heathens out of the Land of the Free once and for all, by ballot or by community pressure, by any means necessary.

Tell the Benedict Arnolds to leave, he said. Send the deviants packing. Urge those with blasphemous speech and cowardly ways to get in their Volvos and drive across the border. Convince them to move to decadent France, to communist Canada, or to the rogue nations that they secretly supported.

Right-wing TV and radio disseminated his fiery gospel loud and clear throughout America, and Jawbone’s matches lit an emotional tinderbox. The BGN was the most powerful church in the American Christian Coalition. Along with kindred congregations in the ACC like GP (God’s Party), it inspired those who launched the New Crusades. Jawbone never directly preached violence, but his call for a holy purification of his Christian nation was a rallying cry, echoed by the Howling Patriot and other strident voices in talk radio and on the Net. For them, nothing less than the soul of the country was at stake.

Conservatives staged protests relating to immigration, abortion, and gay rights. Democrats and moderates countered with their own demonstrations on those issues, shedding their passivity of previous decades.

In the deep-Red states, the followers of Jawbone and the Howling Patriot waged a “holy war” against liberal marchers, and their listeners beat up, pepper-sprayed, and sometimes shot members of the opposition. Angry mobs attacked brown-skinned immigrants, accusing them of job-stealing and terrorism. When Latin Americans retaliated, they earned themselves mass arrests and deportations. Hooligans invaded campuses to punish the “traitor elite” with impunity, the local authorities looking the other way as New Crusaders went on crimson rampages.

The Southern Baptist president, Eileen Roberts, refused at first to use force to quell the Radical Right uprising, and the violence increased. The Air Force purged non-evangelicals from its ranks, and its top officers joked about nuclear options for San Francisco and Boston. The Army and Navy declined to take sides.

Democrats and minority groups realized that they would have to defend themselves. They began to seriously fight back, and the Resistance was born. Roberts maintained her distance, insisting that individual states deal with the troubles.

The New Crusades had begun, and tens of thousands would be killed.

North Carolina was a major battleground, with few counties attempting to maintain order. Franz didn’t know a Glock from an RPG, but he joined the Resistance chapter that formed around the university towns of Durham and Chapel Hill. He was earning his anthropology Ph.D. at Duke at the time, and joined fellow students to defend people and institutions on ACC hit lists, which included mosques, synagogues, abortion clinics, bookstores, the local ACLU and Sierra Club branches, and leftist professors. Unitarian churches were fire-bombed.

Franz lost friends. Drive-by snipers gunned down two who were defending an NAACP office in Raleigh. A creationist zealot assassinated one of his professors, who taught physical anthropology and was an outspoken evolutionist.

The New Crusader net was tightening around the Triangle Area, where Duke was located, and the opposition there was badly outnumbered. Luckily for them, hostilities diminished at a critical moment

because of extreme diplomatic pressure exerted by the United Nations and a horrified Europe and Japan. Roberts finally restored law and order with the use of military and National Guard soldiers. She was fair to both sides, but a wound had opened that could not be healed.

It was a deepening of a rift that had long existed in the United States and had gained serious momentum with the rapid growth of evangelical churches in the late 20th century and the “Blue State / Red State ” tension at the outset of the 21st. Those who believed in the separation of church and state did not wish to live in a militaristic Jesusland run by a Christian Taliban, and fundamentalist Christians did not want to be governed by godless socialists who believed that man evolved from monkeys.

L. Bud Sanchez, a Democratic senator and Iraqi war veteran, proposed an informal national plebiscite on the subject of breaking up the country. The Congress did not take him seriously, but they went along with the idea because of its overwhelming support in national polls. Then, a supermajority of Americans voted in favor of splitting up the United States, much to the surprise of politicians and the dismay of the military. When Congress tried to back away from the idea, riots broke out. Americans were nostalgic for their heritage and ideals, but knew that the different factions could no longer live in peace together. The Union was not tenable. A second vote confirmed the overwhelming desire for what was termed “the Great Split.” Congress and the state governments held complex negotiations and approved the Accommodation.

Several nations were formed. Pacifica ranged down the West Coast, with the coastal mountains as its eastern edge; it ran from the Cascades in Washington south to the San Gabriels in Southern California. Its capital was Portland, Oregon.

New England held most of the Northeast, including New York and New Jersey. Alaska was a new nation, except for sections that became Inuitland. Hawaii and Louisiana were their own sovereignties. Dinee was comprised of the Navajo lands in the Southwest.

Florida held the southern half of the old state with the rest opting for New America, the largest new country of them all. It contained the rest of what had been the USA: most of the South, the West and the Mountain States. It included the conservative California strongholds of Orange County, the Inland Empire and San Diego. The Great Lakes states also threw in their lot with N’Am by the narrowest of margins. A massive exodus of Democrats out of Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota followed. Residents of each nation had a five-year grace period for changing citizenship.

Franz’s life was forever changed by the New Crusades, as it was by his meeting a Duke student with similar interests the summer before all hell broke loose.

She had a proud face framed by long braided auburn hair, and warm eyes that made him want to promise her everything good in the known physical universe. Her laugh made him feel alive, and he liked her earth-mother look. The day they met she wore an indigo blue vest over a tie-dyed rainbow blouse, and black cloth pants, hemp-cord bracelets, leather sandals, and silver toe rings. Her mind kept him alert; she was getting her Ph.D. in Virtual Engineering, yet seemed to know as much about different cultures as he did. Her father was Chinese and her mother Mexican, and her name was Dolores Chang.