Lost Harvest: Book One of the Harvest Trilogy
Page 7
His attention moved back to the screen showing the price trendlines for grain. Yet again, he wondered if John Banks might somehow be right. The Minister of Science was undeniably brilliant, though with an irksome tendency to assume disasters always lurked just over the horizon. He didn’t want Banks to be right. The nutrition industry was a uniquely mature and lucrative enterprise, and had been for many years. It was a key profit center for many of the companies that made up the Chamber, one that required limited investments in research, maintenance, or marketing. The collapse of the sector would be highly inconvenient, perhaps even ruinous, for some extremely powerful people. Dramatic change to accommodate the new realities Banks foretold would be expensive.
Still, his own inclination to disbelieve the Minister of Science did not stop Djimonsu from conducting his own inquiries into the matter. If anything, it made him more diligent. He had earned his station in life as a pragmatist, not an ideologue, and he carefully considered all the aspects of the decisions he made each day. After all, trillions of pounds flowed in and out of the Kingdom’s treasury depending on his choices. He consulted with Chamber-funded scientists as well as independent research labs, and the results were mixed. Either way, there was a gamble to be made. He could accept Banks’ scenario, and recommend that the entire agrifactory system make wholesale and ludicrously expensive changes in anticipation of a crisis that might never materialize. And if that crisis never came, the waste would range into the untold billions. Surely not the ringing crescendo he sought for his career!
And if I reject his findings? If we do nothing? Things would most likely remain the same, and investors did love stability. The likeliest threat to that stability was not that the dire predictions would come to pass, but rather that Banks would attempt some heroic gesture that would result in disruption to the markets. The Privy Council had taken his presentation under advisement. That is to say, they had ignored it. Banks, however, was not a man to go quietly if he felt the danger was real. He’s going to try something. Djimonsu needed to know what that was, and stop it. Fortunately, he had the resources necessary to do just that.
Sliding aside one of the panels on his desk, the Lord Chancellor revealed a second, smaller set of smooth buttons. He touched several in sequence, and then waited a few moments. Before long, a voice answered through the speakers recessed in the surface of the desk, unrecognizable, modulated by computer scrambler.
“This is Henry.”
Djimonsu smiled. He had many operatives throughout the Kingdom, embedded close to the various centers of influence in the military, the bureaucracy, the political parties, the palace, the board rooms. Information was power, and he went to great lengths to be the most-informed man on – or off – Earth. Each of his agents bore the name of one of the monarchs in the long British line: Edward, Victoria, William, Katherine. Henry was among his most reliable, and valuable.
“Henry, report.”
“It is as you suspected, my Lord. The Minister closeted this afternoon with the Star Lord.”
So, thought Djimonsu, whatever he wants is off-planet.
“He needs a ship,” he said.
“And he has found one,” replied the metallic voice. “From his current fleet. The crew is being assembled even now. As I understand it, their plan is to procure some new extraterrestrial food supply and bring it back here. Departure is estimated at within two weeks.”
From his current fleet. Damn. If Lord Exeter came to the Privy Council to commission a new vessel, or to expend extra-budgetary funds, Djimonsu could stop him. By using the Admiralty’s existing resources, however modest, Exeter skirted that potential roadblock. No one ever said the man was a fool.
Djimonsu sighed, looking back toward the towering wall of glass that looked out over St. James Park. As before, he could not see the Palace, but he knew it was there, beyond the forest of skyscraping buildings. I am a Privy Councilor, he thought, a Peer of the Realm. It was his duty to his King and His Subjects to ensure that the great British companies continued to thrive, to produce and procure the goods and services needed by the burgeoning Kingdom. From humble island origins centuries before, the British people had forged and sustained an empire that first spanned the globe, then burst free of those terrestrial boundaries to reach out into the stars. And it was the companies of the Chamber that made it all possible; in particular, the Big Five, the corporations that enjoyed the broad, centuries-old monopolies the Crown had granted them in various sectors: the venerable Galactic East India Company, importing exotic foodstuffs and luxury consumer goods from the corners of known space. The Royal Bank of Britain, financier to the royal family and almost everyone else. The Universal Lever Company, supplier of consumer goods to the King’s subjects, from clothes to furniture. Reis Inc., the galaxy-spanning telecommunications empire. And the vast FoodCo agrifactory conglomerate, feeding the tens of billions of Britons on Earth and across the galaxy.
Like generations of investors before him, the Lord Chancellor was a gambling man at heart. A cautious gambler, certainly, who liked to know as much as he could about the stakes and the wager before the throw, but a gambler just the same. And when pressed, he would always bet on the system that had been in place for decades and worked so well. The stakes were too high to simply let the Science Minister and the Star Lord pursue this folly. If word leaked about Banks’ claims, there could be a dangerous and destructive panic. Worse, if by some chance their mad mission succeeded, they might establish competition for the monopolies enjoyed by the Chamber’s agrifactory interests. That, he could not permit.
“Very well,” he said, leaning over his desk as he spoke. “Arrange for one of our people to be on that ship, Henry. It is our duty to protect the Kingdom from this fool’s errand.” Djimonsu shut off the channel. The best gamblers play with loaded dice.
****
The shuttle docked at the Port Zante terminal, in the heart of Basseterre. Once, decades before, this had been a deep-water port of call for ferries, cruise liners and cargo ships. Even further back, it had served as an anchorage for the great sailing ships of the 18th century; frigates, barques and merchantmen stopping over between Europe and Spanish Main, or plying the Caribbean trade in sugar, gold, or slaves. Now it was like any other station in the Kingdom, a shiny steel riot of landing strips and control towers.
William Pearce had never been to St. Kitts. Fletcher had invited him, of course, but it had never really been convenient. During his stays on Earth, Pearce had been content to spend his time in London with Mary and James. For a man who had traveled farther into the unknown than almost anyone on Earth, he had seen precious little of his own home planet. Part of the reason for that, he told himself, was that there was not much that could truly be considered exotic about other corners of the globe. The homogenization of human culture that began in the late twentieth century had only accelerated during the twenty-first, and now London food, language, and music were indistinguishable from those in Kyoto, or Johannesburg, or Riyadh. As for natural wonders, most of those were long gone as well. All but the deepest oceans had been reclaimed for more living space, and from the poles to the equator, the world had become a fairly uniform quilt of steel, plastic and glass. Here and there a bit of the jungles and deserts and a mountain or two had been preserved as curiosities, but these were tourist destinations where people on vacation could visit a few square miles of managed wilderness. Open space had become a luxury humanity could no longer afford.
The main thoroughfare in Basseterre was Bay Road, so named because it once ran alongside the blue waters of Basseterre Bay, the narrow bite the Caribbean Sea used to make into the island of St. Kitts from the Fisherman’s Wharf to the long-defunct oil refineries. Now, buildings towered over both sides of the road, with a wide gap to the south where the sky peeked in above the Zante Terminal. It was almost noon, and the day was hot. The Kingdom’s engineers had succeeded in moderating the climate of Earth over the previous century, making hurricanes, tsunami, blizzar
ds, and other disastrous natural phenomena all but unknown. Still, the mercury rose higher here in the tropics than in London, and even though Pearce had eschewed the heavy blue jacket and cockaded hat as both too warm and too formal, he found himself sweating in his white uniform shirtsleeves and trousers.
And the people. He knew that St. Kitts had a fraction of the population that London did, but there were never crowds like this, even on the streets of England’s busiest cities. There, the swift and efficient tube system siphoned off at least some of the human foot traffic. Here, there were no tubes, the roads were still choked with antique combustion cars, and the sidewalks between roadway and buildings were sometimes thronged so thickly with people that Pearce had to shoulder his way past.
He had traded messages with Fletcher early that morning, asking to see her, and she had invited him to come to dinner that night at her grandfather’s house. The appointment was still several hours off, and Pearce’s stomach was making its midday rumble, so he decided to find lunch. Running a sleeve across his brow, Pearce ducked through the front door into a nearby Greenstalls. The controlled temperature of the cafeteria was a relief after his brief warm walk from the shuttle, though there were still more people inside than he thought possible. There were five queues, and each moved slowly, but that wasn’t uncommon. Greenstalls was the mid-range brand of the FoodCo restaurant spectrum, and popular around the world. At the low end was Ploughman’s, a favorite of the commons with a well-earned reputation for middling quality delivered swiftly, while the upper classes generally chose Roast, which was excellent, expensive, and exclusive. Pearce was a Greenstalls man, though he knew his way around a Ploughman’s, too. He had never seen the inside of a Roast.
Maybe once all this is done, he thought. I’ll take Mary to the Roast in Piccadilly, and James, too, once he’s well. It was a fortifying thought, and cheered him as he inched his way forward to the vending counter. Once there, he was about to punch in the code for one of his usual selections, a simple pork pie and onion (number 22F36, which he knew by heart), when he hesitated. He usually just entered this code, or one of a handful of others he preferred, and like all the other patrons, he would collect his meal through the adjacent delivery window after a few moments. It had been a long time since he scrolled through the screen’s catalog, with small images of all the different choices available. Greenstalls had perhaps seventy main lunch options, with a host of possible side dishes. The beverage station was nearby, with a similar interface. Pearce ignored the grumbling of the customer behind him and tapped his finger against the corner of the display screen, flipping the virtual page. Bacon sandwich, fish and chips, black pudding, even cucumber sandwiches. Each was presented appetizingly in its respective picture, and his stomach growled.
It’s all the same. He had always known that, of course, in the parts of his mind that were well cordoned-off from his empty belly, but after Banks’ discourse on the nature of human nutrition, the reality of it came crashing down on him. The meals would taste as they were supposed to, depending somewhat on the quality of the restaurant, but it was all the same. Three grains. Three dying grains. It had never bothered him before that the variety in his diet was utterly illusory, that everything he ate was virtually identical genetically. And why should it matter? It was nutritious, and it kept him, and billions upon billions of his fellow humans, on his feet. What does it matter? He couldn’t say why, but it did. The curtain had been pulled back, and as much as he wanted to forget what Banks had said the night before, he couldn’t. You could not uneat the apple of the tree of knowledge, no matter how much you craved a return to ignorance.
“Hey.” Behind him in line, a tall, lithe man, so black he was nearly purple, was holding up both hands in a gesture of impatience. “Some of us want to eat today, brother,” he said in the affected singsong lilt of the native islander. Not me, Pearce thought. He knew his hunger would eventually get the better of his uneasiness, and he would eat again, but not now. And he would never look at food the same way again.
“Sorry,” muttered Pearce as he shouldered his way out of the Greenstalls and back into the sweltering crowds of Bay Road. His experience in the eatery had unsettled him, and he did not like the sensation. He was a career star-mariner, used to eating the same things at the same time each day, and this disruption in his equilibrium was unwelcome in the extreme. I’m nervous, he thought, as he stepped onto a nearby group-tram whose signage declared it was headed west toward the Brimstone Hill section of Basseterre. From there, Fletcher’s directions told him he could easily walk to her grandfather’s house, where she had grown up and was staying.
There were plenty of good reasons for his anxiety. He was going back to Cygnus, where God only knew what he might find, on a mission to prevent the starvation of Earth. As if that weren’t enough, they had thrown his son’s life into the bargain, as well. No wonder I lost my appetite. He needed Christine Fletcher with him for this. She had never been a naval officer, serving her whole career in the merchant marine, and yet she was still the best star-mariner he knew. She was deeply competent, running a ship’s crew with effortless precision, but it was more than that. She was good at the things he was not, at things that mattered during a deep-space voyage. She inspired loyalty and had an easy charisma that he envied, a magnetism that buoyed the morale of everyone on board, including him. If they were to succeed in this task that could not fail, he needed Christine Fletcher.
Pearce had said as much to the Star Lord when he had agreed to the task. His reinstatement in the Navy had been immediate, with promotion to commander, as promised. They had discussed timetables, potential ships, and when the conversation turned to crew, Pearce had insisted on Christine Fletcher as his executive. Lord Exeter had balked at first, insisting that the first officer of a navy ship had to be a naval officer. It had been Banks, in his usual inimitable style, who had deftly severed the knot by suggesting that Fletcher be made a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Exeter had grudgingly acquiesced, and the envelope bearing her commission was in Pearce’s bag even now.
And how she’ll hate that, he thought.
He had promised a gift to Mary as partial apology for dashing off across the Atlantic to recruit Fletcher, perhaps a dress dyed in the distinctive batik style for which St. Kitts was famous, but Pearce had lost all interest in exploring the shops of Basseterre. It was still entirely too early to call on Fletcher, but he resolved to go anyway. He knew that as soon as he convinced her to sign on, the tight ache in his chest would loosen, if only a little.
The tram ride did nothing to put him at ease. It was a rickety, antique model that still made use of cable-cushion technology that had been cutting edge eighty years before, and it wheezed and grunted along Canyon Street only marginally faster than he could have walked. The long, thin carriage was constantly full, regardless of how many passengers boarded or disembarked at each stop, and despite the heat of the day, Pearce was thankful for the open windows on each side. Eventually they arrived at the Brimstone Hill station, where he fought his way to the crowded exit, squeezing out just before the automatic doors snapped shut with an authoritative clang.
Here in the western part of the city, the skyscrapers of Basseterre had thinned out and smaller buildings had gradually taken over. There was more sky here than Pearce had ever seen, and the sun, usually seen in London as a yellow sliver peeking through the cracks in the steel canopy overhead, was full and round and painfully bright. Shading his eyes with a hand, Pearce could see that the road here was lined with what appeared to be single-family homes, a sign that here there lived gentry, perhaps even nobility. The houses were still crowded close together, often touching, but few were more than two or three stories tall, and all had some kind of open area in front of the door. A yard, he seemed to remember Fletcher calling it. And these yards had grass, and flowers, a personal splash of color and life for each family. Once, Pearce would have been agape, but the memory of Banks’ garden at Spring Grove was still fresh.
Perhaps I was wrong, he thought, not to explore my own world more. Certainly the cities were similar to the point of being identical, sprawling metal siblings. But here, at the fringes of the unrelenting urban sameness, people were making an effort to preserve some sense of cultural self. He wondered if the same was true elsewhere, if the outskirts of Moscow or Lima retained some vestiges of Russian or Peruvian ethnic traditions. It was an article of faith in the King’s schools that the strength of humanity came from their shared global culture, which had over the centuries come to reflect a decided British quality. No surprise there; the United Kingdom, even before it had come to hold global political power, had always been the worldwide leader in entertainment, producing the bulk of the Earth’s popular music, holovids, and literature. There were vestiges of other influences, but these became increasingly hard to trace as the whole melted together over the decades. Standing in front of Fletcher’s grandfather’s house, Pearce wondered if too much had been sacrificed to achieve global unity. How much of ourselves have we lost? He was an ethnic Briton, and proud of it, but what of a native of the African Department, or Cathay? Could they be a good subject of the King and still proud of their ethnicity as well?
The house of Baronet Miguel Diego Ochoa was handsome, as all the houses were, tall and stately, yet not forbidding. Pearce tried to imagine Fletcher growing up here, seeing the full sun and touching dirt and grass every day. Small wonder she exuded such charm and magnetic energy. Covering the pathway from road to front porch in a few quick steps, Pearce touched the bell panel on the door. A few moments later, the bright blue door opened inward on old-style hinges to reveal an older gentleman, white-haired and dignified. Ochoa, assumed Pearce. Fletcher’s grandfather.