America City E-Book

Chris Beckett

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 471

Beschreibung

Arthur C. Clarke Award-Winning Author'An uneasy read that manages to feel both timely and urgent... Beckett offers an intelligent, visceral reminder that unless we change what today looks like, tomorrow will be turbulent indeed.' - GuardianAmerica, one century on: a warmer climate is causing vast movements of people. Droughts, floods and hurricanes force entire populations to simply abandon their homes. Tensions are mounting between north and south, and some northern states are threatening to close their borders against homeless fellow-Americans from the south.Against this backdrop, an ambitious young British-born publicist, Holly Peacock, meets a new client, the charismatic Senator Slaymaker, a politician whose sole mission is to keep America together, reconfiguring the entire country in order to meet the challenge of the new climate realities as a single, united nation. When he runs for President, Holly becomes his right hand woman, doing battle on the whisperstream, where stories are everything and truth counts for little.But can they bring America together - or have they set the country on a new, but equally devastating, path?

Leseprobe

AMERICA CITY

Chris Beckett is a former university lecturer and social worker living in Cambridge. He is the winner of the Edge Hill Short Fiction Award, 2009, for The Turing Test, the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2013, for Dark Eden and was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Novel of the Year Award, for Mother of Eden in 2015 and for Daughter of Eden in 2016.

Also by Chris Beckett

The Turing Test (short story collection)

The Holy Machine

Marcher

Dark Eden

Mother of Eden

Daughter of Eden

The Peacock Clock (short story collection)

Coming soon

Spring Tide (short story collection)

AMERICA CITY

Chris Beckett

Published in hardback and e-book in Great Britain in 2017 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Chris Beckett, 2017

The moral right of Chris Beckett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

The quotation from Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf is included by kind permission of the estate of Seamus Heaney, and Faber & Faber Ltd.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 152 7

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 153 4

Printed and bound in Great Britain

Corvus

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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www.corvus-books.co.uk

There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,A wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.This terror of the hall-troops had come far.A foundling to start with, he would flourish later onAs his powers waxed and his worth was proved.In the end each clan on the outlying coastsBeyond the whale-road had to yield to himAnd begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.

Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney

For my dear son Dom

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

Two hundred miles south of the Azores, warm moist air is rising rapidly. It forms a kind of gigantic cylinder, a hollow tree trunk made of moving air. The tree has roots that are also air: warm, humid air rushing over the balmy waves toward that central trunk. The air cools as it rises. Eleven miles up, it spills over sideways like spreading branches. In the roots below, air still flows inwards over warm sea.

The planet, meanwhile, is spinning beneath its loose skin of air. At that latitude it spins faster than a jet plane flies, and it wraps those inward-flowing winds around one another to form a counter-clockwise spiral of warm wet air. It’s huge, that spiral, twice the size of Texas, but it’s simply air made turbulent by heat, as water in a pan is made turbulent by the hot plate beneath it.

According to the United States Weather Bureau this spinning patch of turbulence is one of the largest ever recorded. It’s going to strike shore somewhere on the coast of Delaware, which is toward the northern end, at this particular point in history, of what has become known as the Storm Coast. The government gives out instructions on the news hubs and through the whisperstream: Superstorm Simon is a seriously big storm. It will disrupt the whole of Delaware and parts of New Jersey and Maryland as well. You should board up windows and secure your house (more guidance here). You should stay home! You should not, repeat not, try to leave your home, unless you happen to live in one of the nineteen low-lying coastal communities within the affected area designated as being at VERY HIGH risk of flooding (full list here), in which case you will be personally contacted by federal agencies who will arrange your evacuation in good time before the storm surge comes over the levees. Otherwise, dear citizens of Delaware and neighboring states, do the safest thing and stay home.

Four hundred thousand people choose to ignore this. Everyone knows that when a superstorm strikes, people die. What the government is asking of them is that they draw a ticket in a lottery and hope that their number doesn’t come up. Those four hundred thousand don’t feel like taking that chance. They pile trucks and cars with refrigerators, broadscreens, dogs, settees, babies, washing machines, and head inland, thus causing the total gridlock that will be the single largest cause of death. For it means that, when the hurricane strikes, four hundred thousand people who could have been inside houses with walls and roofs reinforced with steel cages anchored in concrete (as per federal regulations under the Hurricane Defenses Act), are sitting in fragile metal boxes on a gridlocked highway, unable to move anywhere at all.

And here he comes now. Here’s Simon. Here’s the superstorm. He’s sweeping in. He’s reached the land. He’s come ashore, spinning like a giant circular saw at 170 miles an hour. He doesn’t care where the people are. He doesn’t care if they’re babies or 105 years old. He doesn’t care about the government guidance. SMASH, he hits the coastal towns. CRASH, he throws down trees. SPLASH, he flings the ocean over the flood defenses and tosses boats onto the land. And when he reaches those gridlocked cars, he sucks out their windscreens, he throws them down embankments, he opens them like tin cans to the screaming air, snatching settees, teddy bears, reading lamps from overloaded roof racks and flinging them out over the fields, and into the floodwaters, and onto the snapped-off branches of broken trees.

Those who have followed the government’s advice are lying inside houses with boarded-up windows, hoping that someone else’s ticket will come up. Many have built shelters inside their houses made of doors and tables and sandbags, as instructed by government videos. Hiding like children in these playhouses, they hear huge loutish lumps of air striding about outside in hollow streets that once were theirs. They hear those giant louts banging and roaring, flinging stuff around, shoving at roofs and walls. Even steel cages, they know, have sometimes been known to snap.

They can’t see what’s happening, of course, but who in America hasn’t watched these scenes many times over? Houses straining and bulging until they burst, cars doing cartwheels end to end, truck cabins crushed by fallen trees. Some people’s houses will blow down, they know. And some people’s bodies, now completely whole, will be crushed, or impaled, or filled up with water, or cut wide open by flying glass.

One woman somehow gets dropped onto the weathervane on a church. All of America sees her body hanging there with her butt turning purple and her dress over her face. She’s like Superstorm Simon’s flag.

CHAPTER 2

Holly and Richard had spent a lazy evening in their spacious home, twenty miles out of Seattle. Their painter friend Ruby, who they’d known since New York, had messaged earlier to tell them that finally, after several years’ wait and many frustrating hours dealing with bureaucracy, she and her partner Ossia had been awarded the much-prized ‘red pass’ from the Canadian immigration authorities. They could live and work there as permanent residents now, rather than having to renew visas every year, and were on a path that led, more or less automatically, to full citizenship. This was quite an achievement in those days, after Canada had introduced its super-strict ‘population cap’. Holly and Richard had decided to celebrate their friends’ success. They’d ordered in some food and opened a bottle of bubbly Canadian wine. Now, they called Ruby and Ossia to give their congratulations.

‘We still can’t get our heads round it,’ said Ruby. ‘And would you believe, we’ve found a house too? An amazing house with a beautiful studio. You must come and see it!’

And then there were just the two of them again, Holly and Richard on their new cream-colored sofa, with Holly’s legs draped over Richard’s, his hand resting on her knee.

‘Lucky them,’ Richard said, ‘a new country, a new home, a new chapter of their lives ahead of them.’

‘Well, what should we do,’ Holly asked, ‘to start a new chapter ourselves?’

They discussed whether they should move to Canada too – those green vineyards, that civilized political system – but somehow, it didn’t appeal to either of them. Then Richard asked Holly if there was even a little part of her that wanted to return to England, but she dismissed that idea with an incredulous laugh. Of course not! Her parents still lived there, which was not a plus, and Fortress Britain these days was a nasty, desperate place.

Not so much a fortress, really, Richard observed, but more a sinking ship, a sinking pirate ship, in a sea full of the victims of pirates, many of them still stubbornly swimming toward it, in spite of the musket fire from the decks. And America was a pirate ship too, of course, but at least for a moment it was pretty much afloat.

They talked about having kids. They asked themselves, as they’d done before, whether it was even fair bringing a child into a world like this. And as before, they concluded that their parents could have asked themselves the same question, but they were kind of glad they existed in spite of everything. Just two kids at most, they agreed: there were more than enough human beings on the planet. Rick would be the main carer; Holly earnt more than he did, and anyway, he had much more patience. They’d have a boy called Saul and a girl called Penny. Just naming them seemed to have brought them close to existence, as if they were people already, who just happened to be very far away.

They opened another bottle of wine and kissed lingeringly. They were definitely going to make a start that night on the whole making-kids routine. Or a symbolic start anyway: Holly would have to see the doctor to have her IUD taken out, and they’d need to make a decision on the timing of that, which was probably a job for when they weren’t both half-drunk. They kissed again. Warm summer air wafted in through the window from the gentle night outside. Should they take the wine upstairs right now? But they decided they’d catch the news first. This was still the aftermath of Superstorm Simon and it seemed disrespectful not to keep up to date with what was going on over there.

Drones and drigs were peering down from the sky all over Delaware. ‘America’s worst storm...People were prepared for storms but not for this...A continuous line of vehicles across four states... Scenes we’ve gotten used to seeing in the south, but now right up to New Jersey.’

Some of the drigs descended to earth and reporters climbed out to speak to the cops and to the storm people on the gridlocked highways, and to various kind folk who were helping out in heart-warming ways, inviting the storm people in, or walking across fields with sandwiches and flasks of coffee. A woman in Wisconsin had offered her entire house. A town in Pennsylvania had raised half a million dollars. Three men and a woman from upstate New York had hired four trucks, loaded them with tents and sleeping bags, and were heading south.

But not everyone was feeling so kind. The drigs came down outside a town that had been cut off from the rest of America by that glacier of cars and trucks. Four men and two women stood by a barricade. ‘Everyone cries about these storm people,’ said one of the women, cradling a rifle in her arms. ‘But what about us? We can’t go to work, we can’t go to the stores, we can’t even get our kids into school.’ Behind them was a hand-painted sign. ‘Keep out,’ it read. ‘No shelter or food here. Stick to the highway.’

Holly rested her hand on Richard’s leg, and stroked the inside of his thigh. Richard gently caressed her hand with his. All of this was bad, they knew, but for them it was just a particularly severe instance of something that had happened at least once every year, somewhere on the Storm Coast, all of their adult lives.

‘Horrible people,’ Holly said.

‘Yeah, but I heard a couple of women talking just like that up at the store earlier today. One of them said something about “those poor folk down there” and I thought at first she was talking about the storm people, but it turned out that what she meant was the ones on the barricades. The other said the storm people had only got themselves to blame. They’d chosen to stay there in the storm country so what did they expect? And now they were causing problems for everyone. I asked them what they’d do, if they’d invested everything in their home and it became completely unsaleable.’

Holly grimaced. ‘And?’

‘They just glared at me.’

‘Yeah, and after you’d gone I bet they told each other you were a typical well-to-do delicado, living with your nice things in your nice expensive house, and telling everyone else off for not being more generous-spirited.’

On the broadscreen the governors of Alaska, Idaho and Montana were giving a joint statement. There were only so many storm people their states could take in. They were already struggling to cope with the migrants from the Dust Country in the southwest that had been streaming in all through the summer. The governors were looking at the possibility of their states putting border controls in place to suspend inward migration from the rest of the USA. Some said this would be unconstitutional, but they disagreed, and were willing to defend their position in court.

There was brief footage of a demonstration in Billings, Montana. ‘Enough is enough’, ‘Montana is full’, ‘YOUR lack of planning is not MY problem’...

But then a US senator came on, Senator Slaymaker, familiar to both of them because he represented Richard and Holly’s own state of Washington, though neither of them had voted for him. ‘They are fellow Americans,’ he said. He was a big, handsome man, who’d been something of a war hero and had then set up a hauling business which had become one of the biggest in the country. He’d flown to Delaware himself to see what was going on. Slaymaker fixed the camera with his very bright and penetrating eyes. ‘We need to remember that. These people are our fellow Americans.’

In the warm darkness outside, branches sighed and rustled, were silent for a while, then sighed again. Richard stroked Holly’s knee. Troubling as the news might be, they were still intending to go upstairs directly after this item, and give themselves over to the pleasures of skin and breath and touch.

‘I know it’s hard for folk in the northern states,’ said Senator Slaymaker, ‘seeing all these people coming in from the south, but we need to fix things so they can settle down properly, and earn a living for themselves and their families, and don’t have to keep having their lives trashed by these storms. It’s the same with the people from the Dust Country. No point any more in helping them rebuild where they are,’ he said. ‘The federal government needs to build more homes up north. And I mean proper homes, not these government camps.’

‘Weird,’ said Richard. ‘He’s spent his whole political life battling against big government. And yet now he’s calling for a level of government intervention which no Unity Party government would even dare to suggest! I mean, what is his game?’

Holly frowned. Her eyes were still on the broadscreen, but the news had already moved, via trouble in the disputed territories between Russia and China, to a massacre that had happened earlier in the day in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa. Thousands of refugees outside the border fence, it seemed, had taken it into their heads to simply force their way through, though Holly barely registered this news.

‘Why do we always assume that people who don’t agree with us have some sort of dishonorable motive?’ she said. ‘How do we know we’re not the ones playing a game?’

‘Because he’s not being consistent with what he’s said before. Remember his comment about the famine in Mexico?’ Richard imitated the senator’s soft, firm, Seattle accent: ‘“Mexicans have got to look after themselves. We didn’t ask them to live in Mexico. We didn’t ask them to have more kids than they knew how ta feed.” Staggeringly callous!’

Then they told the screen to shut down and were alone in their living room again. They began to put things away for the night, ready for bed.

‘Maybe Senator Slaymaker’s selective in his sympathies,’ Holly said as she carried their glasses to the dishwasher. ‘We all are really, aren’t we? The way we delicados talk, you’d think we took personal responsibility for all the problems of the world. But we don’t really act that way, do we? I mean, what did you and I actually do about the famine in Mexico, apart from clucking our tongues at dinner parties and maybe shelling out fifty dollars to some appeal?’

Richard laughed. ‘That, I’m afraid, is a fair point.’

‘Slaymaker’s a self-made man. He had a hard start in life. A teenage mum on a trailer park, wasn’t it? With a drink problem, I think. Or maybe drugs. He had to look after himself from the beginning, so naturally self-reliance is what he believes in. I guess these storm people have touched some chord in him.’

And right at that moment, Holly’s cristal bleeped.

It was her boss Janet. She worked at that time for a Seattle-based public relations consultancy. She helped businesses with damage limitation when they got themselves into trouble, and she helped them manage public opposition when they wanted to do something controversial. The main account she was working on right then was a local hydro company which was seeking to build new dams in spots that were inevitably someone’s favorite bit of wilderness.

‘Sorry to call so late, Holly.’ Janet’s voice was shaky. ‘I’ve got a bit of a crisis going on here. Jack’s had to go into hospital. Nothing too terrible, I don’t think, but I’d kind of like to be there for him. I was wondering if you could help me out by covering something for me tomorrow. I was going to meet a potential client for lunch, a rather important potential client. Could you take my place?’

Holly said ‘yes, of course, absolutely, no trouble at all...’ et cetera, and, while she went over in her mind the diary commitments she’d have to reschedule, she asked about Janet’s husband and how he was getting on (it was heart trouble) and then about the client.

‘Well, it’s very confidential at this stage, Holly, but if we play our cards right, it could become one of our most important accounts.’

‘Wow! Exciting! But you know me, Janet, I’d always—’

‘I know, Holly. But this is kind of extra delicate, that’s all. You see, the client is Senator Slaymaker. He wants to talk over some aspects of his current project. I don’t know if you know he’s launching a campaign for a big resettlement program in the northern states.’

‘Rick and I were just talking about it.’

‘I did a little bit of work for him once, back when he was heading up the Haulers Federation. We were going to meet at Le Lac for lunch tomorrow, and, seeing as he’s already flown up from DC, I said I’d see if you could meet him instead. I told him you were way smarter than me.’

‘Wow!’ said Richard as Holly hung up. ‘Working for Slaymaker? He’s a big figure these days. Some people are saying he’ll run for president. But—’

‘Well, it’s not a presidential campaign we’re going to help with, I assure you. It’s just this campaign of his for more federal help for the storm refugees.’

‘Well, good luck with that. As far as I can see, fewer and fewer people are willing to pay out tax dollars to help out for—’

He broke off because he could see Holly wasn’t listening any more.

‘Listen, Rick, I’m so, so sorry, but I’m meeting him tomorrow, and that means I’m going to have to set aside the rest of this nice evening and put in a couple of hours of preparation.’

Richard walked over to the window to close it for the night. ‘Sure. Of course. Shall I make you some coffee? To clear your head a bit?’

She kissed him. She was already mentally compiling a list of topics that she needed to research. ‘That would be great. But don’t wait up for me after that. I’m not sure how long I’ll be.’

CHAPTER 3

Richard stared up at the ceiling in the light of his reading lamp.

He’d grown used to Holly acting for clients he didn’t approve of. How she explained it was that she was like an attorney in a court of law: her job was to represent people whether she agreed with them or not. And he kind of got that. He was also a little in awe of her for being out there in the world of affairs, and not just the world of ideas that he inhabited. In fact, he loved that about her. Picturing her in her study now, for instance, he smiled to himself. She’d already be deep into this new job, those alert, bright eyes darting about as she muttered instructions to her jeenee, had it conjure up data for her onto the multiple screens that she like to array around herself.

And when it was just some hydro company or something, well, there wasn’t that much of a downside. Big hydro fought pretty rough, it was true, and upset some of Holly and Richard’s friends, but what was the alternative, Richard had always privately thought? America needed power from somewhere to keep the lights on, and the cars on the roads.

Slaymaker, though...

The trees outside began to move again, building up to a level of agitation that was almost a gale, and then falling silent once more.

Slaymaker of all people, that ferocious American nationalist, that bloodstained warrior from America’s wars in the African Copper Belt, that self-made man who thought that just because he’d been able to claw his way up from nothing, then everyone else could too. As if being exceptionally smart had nothing to do with it, and exceptionally driven, and exceptionally ruthless.

Again the wind built up, all the trees sighing and hissing together as their branches bent and strained, creaked and groaned, like this time something was going to happen, like this time they were going to really see it through.

But no, the pulse passed, and the night fell still.

There was a side of Holly, he knew, that was drawn to people like Slaymaker: these big, tough, vivid people whose imaginations expressed themselves not in ideas but in tons of concrete, in gigawatts of power. She liked them and she got on very well with them. This was mysterious to him. He knew he’d feel uncomfortable with such people. He knew he’d feel simultaneously disapproving and inadequate. But she was completely at ease with them. It was one of the things that made it impossible for him to resolve Holly into something he could fully understand.

Yes, he dreamily thought, but that was a good thing. He needed her to be different, otherwise the two of them would just be – he pictured this rather than thought it in words, for words were slipping away from him: he was in the factory where words are made – otherwise the two of them would just be a single blob of sameness and they would be alone all over again, looking for something else to reach out to, something else to desire, out there in the world beyond...

The air slithered round the world outside, like soft, loose layers of silky skin, sliding over one another, and under, brushing the cooling surface of the shadowy world.

When Holly finally came into the bedroom, Richard was deeply asleep. She’d worked for three hours by then, searching for information, organizing it, memorizing it: facts about Slaymaker’s life and his place in American politics, information about America’s internal refugee problem, data about public attitudes. At her company’s expense, she’d even conducted a couple of small instant polls, throwing out questions into the Pollcloud – there were always people awake from every demographic who were willing to answer a few questions – and having AI statisticians analyze the answers.

She laid her cristal on her bedstand and turned out the light. Even now, she hadn’t finished working. She spoke soundlessly to the jeenee inside her cristal and asked it to give her a taste of what people were saying out there on the whisperstream, right now, about the storm people. So, as she settled herself down, she was hearing conversation after conversation through the tiny implant that she wore in her right ear. It was like opening a chink into a huge dark room, buried beneath America, full of voices – some showing off, some complaining, some trying to be original, some loudly proclaiming their orthodoxy. All were telling stories about themselves and the world, their own particular stance in relation to the world, the way they and the world connected together.

The torrent of voices continued until the jeenee could tell from her brain rhythms that its mistress was asleep. And then, like a gentle grown-up pulling up the bedcovers and tiptoeing from the room, it slid the volume very slowly down until there was no sound left but Richard’s breathing and the wind outside.

CHAPTER 4

Rosine Dubois

I guess we were lucky none of us were hurt. We’d done what the government asked, just stayed there under the table in our kitchen, watching the walls bulging and bending around us, and suddenly, SMASH, a car came through our roof, right through the metal cage and everything. It must have been blown off the flyover, though God knows what that kid was doing, driving a car in a hurricane. But whatever the reason, there he was, or there was his body anyway, his broken body, dangling through the windscreen upside down, right there in our kitchen, with the wind screaming and howling over the hole he’d made.

‘Okay,’ Herb said, when the storm had finally passed over us. ‘You take the boys round to Charlene’s and I’ll try and figure out how to get that poor kid out of the car.’

Debris lay strewn all around us: pieces of tin roof, torn-off branches, the striped awning from some store. Below us in the lower town, folk were huddled up on the ridges of their roofs, while big choppy waves rolled through the streets.

‘The walls are still standing anyway,’ Herb said, ‘and most of our stuff is okay as well. Tricky part is going to be getting the car out of there without doing more damage, but we’ll figure out something.’

But I told him no. This was it. I was done with the Storm Coast. I’d lived here all my life – my ma and pa too – but I was done with it.

‘We should’ve got out of here years ago, when the house was still worth something,’ I told him.

We both knew I’d suggested this way back, and that Herb had firmly said no.

‘Okay, Rosine,’ he said, ‘if you want me to say you were right I’ll admit it now. You were right, and I’m sorry. But it’s kind of late for moving now. No one will give us a penny for this place, so how are we going to get somewhere else to live? And how are we going to feed the kids? There’s going to be thousands of people heading away from the coast after this, hundreds of thousands most likely, and they’ll all be looking for jobs and homes, along with all those Californians and desert people. At least we’ve both got work here, and the land and the house.’

‘We’re not staying, Herb. You got to think ahead. Things aren’t going to stay the same, are they? That’s not how it works these days. If we don’t leave now, we’ll be wishing we did in two years’ time, the same as we wish now we’d left two years ago.’

Neighbors were outside as well by now, under the darkening sky, looking round at the damage.

People started to come over to ask if we wanted beds for the night. Our friend Charlene took our boys in, fed them ice cream, and let them play with a couple of new broadscreen-games that she’d put aside for her own kids for Christmas, and then me and Herb, Charlene and two or three others levered open the door of the upside-down car, wrapped a sheet round that dead kid, and pulled him out, laying him down at the back of the yard where we wouldn’t have to keep looking at him. He was awful broken-up.

Charlene’s husband Luther fetched some rags to wipe up the blood that had dripped out onto the kitchen floor, and after that, we went and inspected our truck. It was okay. The storm-proof door on our garage had held out, and the main battery and the spare had both been fully charged up before Simon brought down the power lines. We lifted the spare battery into the flatbed, and then loaded up everything else we could fit in that was of any value: the broadscreen, the washing machine, the best bed.

‘Sure you want to leave right now?’ Charlene asked. ‘Hubs say the traffic’s backed up twenty miles out of town north, south and west.’

‘Sooner we get into the line, the sooner we’ll reach the end of it,’ I said.

‘Where you going to go?’ Luther asked.

‘North and west, I guess,’ Herb said. ‘Out of the storm country as fast as we can.’

‘We may not be far behind you,’ Charlene said. ‘Make sure you tell us where you all end up, you hear?’

She glanced over at the dead body lying against the yard fence.

Beyond, over the lower town, a couple of police drigs were moving slowly over the rooftops – not picking anyone up, as far as I could see, though folks were waving and yelling for them to come down, just sweeping search lights back and forth. Looking for looters, I guess. Looking for someone they could shoot.

CHAPTER 5

The Le Lac restaurant was at the top of a slender tree-like tower on the shore of Lake Washington. Holly’s company often used the place. The food was stylish, the view was spectacular, the tables sufficiently separated from one another that you could talk without being overheard, and the kind of people who could afford to eat there weren’t overly interested by the presence of a national celebrity such as Stephen N. Slaymaker.

The senator arrived about ten minutes after her: that thick gray hair, those blue, penetrating eyes, those austere cheekbones, which (as she’d found out in her researches) he liked to say he’d inherited from his Cherokee great-grandmother. Often famous people from the TV seemed smaller than she’d expected them to be when she met them in real life, but he was, if anything, bigger: a very tall, very fit man in his mid-fifties, wearing an expensive but not particularly fashionable blue suit and a pale blue shirt open at the collar to show the strong lean sinews of his neck.

‘Senator Slaymaker! I’m Holly!’

‘Hey!’ he said as he shook her hand. ‘Nice to hear someone speaking English for a change.’

He was being nice. He meant British English. In spite of great efforts on her part, Holly had never managed to shake off the accent.

‘Or the obscure European offshoot thereof, at any rate,’ she said as they sat down at the table that Janet’s jeenee had reserved for them. ‘My husband tells me that back in Shakespeare’s time the English all spoke like Americans.’

It was the best she could manage in that benign, yet very penetrating gaze.

‘Is that a fact?’

Slaymaker had never seen a Shakespeare play, was Holly’s guess. He just wasn’t the kind to invest his time in something that was made-up, or from the far-off past. But he was visibly pleased all the same by what Holly had told him. He was always pleased to hear things that placed America at the centre of things.

‘Okay, Holly. Can I call you that? Well, to get straight down to it, I guess you know about my campaign?’

‘Certainly. You’re calling for large-scale, federally funded resettlement for folk from threatened areas on the east coast and in the southwest.’

‘Correct. Resettlement in the northwestern states, including Alaska. Did you know that Juneau, Alaska, is now the second fastest-growing city in the union after Seattle, and Anchorage the third?’

‘The whole country’s moving northwest.’

‘It is. It has been for some time. But so far, that’s just the result of folks individually making those tough calls to cut their losses down on the Storm Coast, or the Dust Country, and moving north to start again. Which is great, and it’s what America’s all about. But it’s happening too slowly and leaving too many people behind.’

‘I think it’s good of you to try to help those people. A lot of folk don’t want to know.’

‘Well, thank you. But this isn’t just about helping those folks. It’s about America itself. We’re not distributed properly any more. Folk aren’t in the places where they can be productive.’

‘When they could be really prospering somewhere else?’

‘Exactly. And they’re soaking up tax money. I’ll show you the figures. I’ve had people look this stuff up for me. The Storm Coast is a drain on our country’s resources. So is the Dust Country. So are all those towns on coasts and rivers where they have to keep building the levees higher all the time. Basically, the government needs to shift most of the US population inland and to the north. And then get off people’s backs again and let them get on.’

‘Most of the US population? That’s an incredibly ambitious plan, Senator.’

‘We’ve done it before. Go back a few hundred years and there was no America at all. Just Indian tribes and a lot of empty space.’

‘I guess so.’

‘It’s doable. I don’t care what anybody says. But to make it happen I need to sell the idea to the American people. Your Janet has done some solid work for me in the past so I thought I’d ask her for some advice. Then her guy went into hospital and of course she had to prioritize. She spoke very highly of you.’

‘I’ll try to live up to it.’

‘I’m sure you will, Holly.’ Again, that very intense and focused gaze. ‘I have every confidence in you already.’

A waiter arrived and they gave their orders. Slaymaker wanted a steak. Holly chose a fancy concoction of lobster meat and clams. Neither of them went for wine.

‘Tell me something about your general approach to these kinds of problems, Holly.’

‘Well, we usually work with a kind of triage model. We look at the audience we’re addressing and we divide it into three. There are the core supporters who are already on board, there are the firm opponents who won’t come on board no matter what, and there are the floaters who are open to persuasion. It’s the floaters you need to focus on of course but, in doing so, it’s really important not to alienate your core supporters by making them feel taken for granted.’

Slaymaker nodded, and was about to say something, but Holly held up her hand.

‘Sorry, but I was just going to add that your present campaign is a kind of unusual case which totally messes up that whole model because you’re cutting right across the normal pattern of allegiances. The demographic groups that your party normally relies on are precisely the ones that are most resistant to large-scale federal welfare projects and the most worried about migration from other states into their communities. You’re going completely against the instincts of your own people.’

She laid her cristal on the table so he could see the graphics she’d put together in the early hours of that morning.

‘The demographic groups that are the most enthusiastic about large federal spending projects are unskilled service workers, government employees, first- and second-generation immigrants, and the professions we tend of think of as typically delicado: university people, writers, artists, scientists, computer architects, and so on. And they are precisely the sectors that are least likely to vote for you or your party and most likely to vote Unity Party. And even Unity voters aren’t that keen on federal spending if it means paying more taxes.’

She touched the cristal to bring up another graphic. ‘Never mind party. Northerners of all parties aren’t keen on tax dollars going to southerners. I haven’t done all the polls yet, but I’m willing to bet they’d be even less keen on the idea of paying for the privilege of having millions of barreduras descend on them.’

‘Barreduras. I don’t like that word. It means dirt, you know? The dirt you sweep up off the floor.’

‘I’m afraid that’s how a lot of people see the folk from the Storm Coast and the Dust Country, especially people who vote for your party.’

‘I know. But I’m not talking about an election here, remember. Not at the moment. I’m talking about building up support for a program. And I’m not talking about a welfare project either. I hate handouts. I hate making people into victims. This is about reconfiguring America, you know? Making America stronger in the face of a threat. If we don’t do something, the whole country’s going to break up.’

‘Reconfigure. I like that. It’s a strong, businesslike word. So that’s the story you were thinking of, is it? Reconfiguring America to keep it together?’

‘Never mind the story, Holly,’ Slaymaker growled. ‘That’s how I really see it.’

She laughed. ‘Yes, I know. But you’ve got to understand that my job isn’t about how things actually are, or even about how they ought to be, it’s simply about how they would best be presented. I’m a storyteller, basically. I assume that’s what I’m here for.’

He smiled. ‘Whatever your clients want to say, you make it into a pretty story? Regardless of your own opinion?’

Holly could see that he wouldn’t have minded a little digression in which he could tease her a bit about the ethical vacuity of her job but she decided to stick to the matter in hand.

‘That’s right,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘And it seems to me that to maximize your support across the country we’re going to need to present your message so that it will work in two quite different ways. Firstly, in that patriotic way you’ve just demonstrated, in order to try to win over as many as possible of your usual Freedom Party-type supporters, but secondly in a way that’s going to appeal to a reasonably large tranche of Unity Party and minor party voters who wouldn’t normally see you as someone they relate to. And at the same time as walking that tightrope, we’re going to have to deliver your message in a way that works for northerners and southerners. That’s a lot of different constituencies, and a lot of nuances to work on and refine and marry up with one another to make sure they don’t clash or cancel each other out.’

She dropped her cristal back into her jacket pocket. ‘People talk about using the whisperstream to deliver customized messages to each different affinity group, but actually that’s something you’ve got to be very careful about, because affinity groups aren’t airtight. One way or another, people get to hear what you’re saying to other folk as well as what you’re saying to them, and then you end up looking two-faced. One workaround for that, of course, is to make use of feeders. It’s very expensive but it can—’

She stopped because the meal had arrived, exquisitely presented on white pentagonal plates. While they ate, Holly talked a bit more about the value bases and psychological drivers of the various groups he’d need to try to get on his side.

‘So,’ he said, ‘to sum up. The people who like me don’t agree with me on this, and the people who are most likely to agree with me are the folks who don’t like me. Yup. That’s my problem in a nutshell. And of course that’s why I’m hiring you.’

Holly suddenly realized that she’d spent rather a lot of time telling the senator things that must already have been obvious to him. This was a man of the world, after all. Before she was even born, he had commanded a battalion in the Copper Wars and built the Slaymaker Corporation up from a single truck to a continent-wide business. She felt a fool. She was on the point of making herself look more foolish by apologizing, but managed just in time to snatch back her customary professional cool.

‘Sure,’ was all she said. ‘If it was easy, you wouldn’t need our help. I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m just setting out the challenges we’d have to overcome. By the way, one of the things we need to look at is areas of vulnerability.’

‘For instance?’

‘Areas that may lay us open to charges of inconsistency or hypocrisy.’

Slaymaker speared a piece of steak, put it into his mouth.

‘I reckon I’ve always been pretty straight.’

‘Well, up to now you’ve been a strong opponent of big government.’

‘Still am. If you want to build up this country, get government off people’s backs and let them get on with it. But there are exceptions. When the nation’s in danger, like in a war, or...’

‘Like in a war. Okay. Good. It’s a war-type scenario. Because there’s a threat to the country itself. We could do with a more tangible enemy, though, than just the changing weather. Who are our opponents? Who are we fighting against? The current government, obviously, but it’s not like the government is opposed to helping the barreduras. In fact, they’re spending an awful lot of money on helping them. Too much, according to your own party in Congress.’

‘There’s no vision there,’ said Slaymaker, ‘that’s the problem. We should be looking at this weather problem as an opportunity. Like, you know, “Go west, young man!” But old Jenny Williams there looks at it more like, “Oh, those poor poor folks down south!” I do not want to treat those folks like victims, Holly. More than that, I don’t want them to feel like victims. And I do not want them to feel that they have to act like victims in order to get what they need. Nothing worse than going through life like that. And nothing worse for the country. I want them to think of themselves as pioneers.’

Go west! Pioneers. Holly made a note. There was something to work with here, though the language was way too old-fashioned.

Slaymaker lay down his fork. ‘You’re right about my own party. Worst thing is that we’ve got this group of assholes in the Freedom Party these days – Governor Hendricks in Alaska, for instance – who are raising this question of interstate frontiers. I mean, I’m all in favor of states’ rights, but once you put up border posts between states, you’ve basically given up on the USA.’ He laid his napkin next to his fork. ‘This campaign is all about keeping America together, Holly. Like Lincoln did.’

Note those last sentences, Holly silently told her cristal. It was positive stuff, but it didn’t yet differentiate Slaymaker’s position sharply enough from that of the president, Jenny Williams, who was also strongly opposed to interstate frontiers. And as to Lincoln, well, without conducting a poll you could never be sure, but she was willing to bet that three out of four Americans wouldn’t be able to say who he was.

‘Another possible area of vulnerability,’ she said, ‘is the issue of what caused the weather problems in the first place. Pretty much every scientist on the planet agrees that floods and droughts and so on are the result of human activity, but of course you’ve got a track record of denying this, particularly back in your days at the Haulers Federation. The president, on the other hand, can honestly claim to have been campaigning about it since her college days. She might well argue that all this sudden concern about hurricanes and droughts is a bit rich coming from you.’

Slaymaker laughed. ‘You’re damn right. That’s exactly what the president will argue.’ He took a drink of water, laid down his glass and looked straight at her. ‘What do you think about this weather business yourself, Holly? What do you personally think? Do you think it was caused by people?’

Holly had read about the controversy Slaymaker had stirred up during his last-ditch campaign against the shift from hybrids to all-electric trucks. But the whole issue seemed pretty straightforward to her. ‘Yes, I’m sure it was caused by people,’ she told him, then laughed. ‘Maybe not the answer you wanted, Senator, but I think we’d have been better off if we’d stopped burning that stuff about thirty years earlier than we actually did.’

Slaymaker smiled. ‘What I wanted, Holly, was for you to tell me what you thought. But my feeling is this. We don’t make thunder. We don’t make the tides. We don’t make the day and the night. The Lord does. And if He wants the Earth a little warmer and the weather a little livelier, well then, we’ve just got to deal with that fact. I guess that seems pretty old-fashioned to you.’

It certainly did – it seemed positively medieval, in fact – but all the same there was something about Slaymaker’s position that struck Holly as rather attractive in a way she wouldn’t have anticipated. It was so different to the perpetually agonized attitude she’d grown up surrounded by, the attitude of her parents and their friends, with their constant fretting about suffering in faraway places and threats in the future, their disapproval of just about anything that seemed to her like fun. It was so different too from all her friends who clucked their tongues at America’s selfish isolationism in a world whose problems it had played such a large part in causing. She liked how the senator had found a place to park all of that and get on with what life threw at him here and now. It connected with the impulse that had brought her to America in the first place. This was a country where people did things, that was how she’d seen it. They did things for better or for worse, and, if it didn’t work out, they tried something else.

‘Not that I’m some kind of religious nut or anything,’ Slaymaker added. ‘But the way I see it, we may as well leave it to God to look after the things that are just too big for little creatures like us.’

The waiter came for their plates, a young Latino man. Behind him, as he stood at the table, the lake, the mountains, the vault of the sky, with streaks of grayish cloud moving east in a brisk, high-altitude wind.

‘Now that was a steak,’ the senator told the waiter. ‘I could have done without the fancy bits and pieces, but that was a steak.’

‘Thank you, Senator, I’ll pass that on to the chef. Senator, I...’ The waiter hesitated. ‘I hope you don’t mind me telling you, sir, that me and my family are big fans of what you’re doing for the people from the droughts and fires in California.’

Slaymaker beamed at him, and reached out and took his hand.

‘Why, thank you! Thank you very much. What’s your name, my friend?’

‘It’s Luis, sir, Luis Vargas. We’ve always voted for the Latino Party in our family till now, but, like my pa says, the Partido’s gotten completely obsessed lately with the problems below the border. He says you’re the only one who’s really taken hold of the problems we have right here in the US, all of us, Anglos and Latinos alike.’ The waiter blushed. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I shouldn’t interrupt your meal.’

The senator was still firmly grasping the waiter’s hand, and fixing him with that extraordinarily focused gaze. So much so, in fact, that for a moment, absurdly, Holly felt excluded and a little jealous.

‘Not at all, Luis, not at all. As it so happens, myself and Ms Peacock here – don’t you just love her British accent? – we were just discussing how we’re going to win the support of people who don’t normally vote for my party, and I think she’ll find what you’ve just said most helpful.’

Finally, he released the waiter’s hand.

‘But now if you could bring me a couple of scoops of chocolate ice cream and a cup of strong coffee, that would be just great,’ he said. ‘And whatever Miss Peacock wants, of course. After all, it’s her that’s paying for this meal!’

‘Just a coffee for me,’ Holly said. She’d pulled up a map of North America on her cristal and was looking at the cities that Slaymaker had earlier identified as the growth points of his new America – Seattle, Juneau, Anchorage – stretched out in a long chain along the continent’s north-western edge. And she was noticing the slightly untidy fact that, in between Seattle and the other two cities, were several hundred miles of coastline that belonged to another country. This wasn’t news to her, of course, but it occurred to her that she had no idea how it had come about. She’d have to ask Rick sometime.

‘Well,’ she said as Luis Vargas headed back to the kitchen, ‘there’s a lot here to work on in terms of pulling together a message that will clearly distinguish you both from the government and from the interstate frontiers people in your own party. I’ll push some ideas out into the Pollcloud and see what comes back. If you like, we could also commission some more in-depth surveys. It’s really a matter of how much you want from us. There’s also a question of how much you want to involve us in actually delivering your message. We’re pretty experienced at running feeder campaigns, for instance, and, like I said before, they can be very useful in a case like this where you’re targeting several very different audiences.’

‘Those damn AIs. Can’t stand the things: feeders, jeenees, the whole damn lot of them. Should have been strangled at birth.’

‘Well, the fact is that, expensive as they are, they are very effective, and they end up way cheaper than the human alternatives if you measure by results.’

‘Yeah, I know, I know.’ Slaymaker smiled. ‘I’ll tell you what, when you get back to your office, write down what you want to do and how much it would cost, and send it to me. I’m pretty certain I’m going to go along with whatever you suggest.’

Luis came back with the ice cream and coffee.

‘I like you, Holly,’ Slaymaker went on, picking up his spoon but pausing to twinkle across at her. ‘I like you a lot. And I can see you’re very smart. If you’re willing, I’d very much like to carry on working with you on this job, even when Janet’s back in action, and I want you to know that I’d be very pleased if you’d come and work for me full time, when you and Janet are ready.’ He pointed his spoon at her. ‘Think it over. Don’t decide now. But I could really do with someone like you right at the heart of the project, to help me think these things through.’

He took a mouthful of ice cream, watching her as he savored and swallowed it.

‘Oh and don’t be afraid to talk to people. I know it’s quicker doing polls, I know it’s cheaper, but there’s no substitute for actually talking with folk. Budget some time for it. I’ll pay.’

•

Holly’s car drove her home on the expressway. All around her was a forest of dead and dying trees, rotting from the inside out and the outside in at the same time, weakened by weather conditions that they had not evolved for, attacked by the insects and fungi that had come north with the warmer and wetter air. But this was just the world, as far as she was concerned. What was new was that she was twenty-eight years old, and she’d just been offered a top job by one of America’s most well-known and popular politicians.

‘Hey, jeenee,’ she said, ‘give me a sample of what people are saying right now about Slaymaker. No affinity filters, just a random sample.’

At once a chain of disembodied voices began to speak to her, while the lichen-choked trees passed by.

‘Word is that Slaymaker’s going for the presidency next time round.’

‘No way will he win, though. No way. That guy’s a traitor to the north.’

‘Yeah, exactly. Fuck the storm people. Fuck them. If they’re dumb enough to still live in those places, how is that our problem?’

‘Ha ha. Very true. Beggar came up to me the other day with the usual fucking sob story about his farm in Nevada, and all the dirt drying up and blowing away. I fucking laughed in his face.’

Holly held out for about thirty seconds, then told the jeenee to flip to another thread.

‘Slaymaker? I love that guy,’ someone else was saying. ‘Gray Jenny talks the talk, but he comes right down to the Storm Coast and tries to figure out what would help.’

‘President Slaymaker, do you reckon?’

‘I’d vote for him, no problem, and I’ve never voted Freedom Party. Who else is really thinking about people like—’

Holly flipped again.

‘He’s an amateur, really. He’s got this sentimental idea about keeping the country together, but he’s basically just a trucker who struck it lucky.’

‘Si, si. And he seems nice, but he’d turn nasty soon enough when things turned out not to be as easy to fix as he thought.’

The car’s battery was running low and it shifted itself over into the dodgem lane to top itself up. A shower of blue and white sparks burst harmlessly round her like a little firework display as her slightly worn connectors settled into place against the overhead lines.

Pale wisps of cirrus were moving across the upper sky. There wasn’t much wind at ground level, but up there the air was moving fast.

CHAPTER 6

Rosine Dubois

I