America City

by Chris Beckett

  Holly walked a little way along the path, took a photo, sent it to her mother. Then she turned and headed back the other way, where she’d been going. Damn it, her parents had taken way too much of her life already, way too much of her energy. She was not going to spend any more time on this.

  CHAPTER 24

  As Richard had feared, Holly was away a lot, in a place that Richard had no feeling for and didn’t want her to be. But they still worked hard at staying together. One weekend in February, when Holly had been working even longer hours than usual, the two of them drove north across the border to spend an evening with their friends Ruby and Ossia.

  They took the coastal highway, entering Canada at the busy Peace Arch crossing. There was no actual barrier there, but computers logged more than thirty identifiers from the chassis number of their car to the irises of their eyes so as to be able to track them down if they overstayed the thirty days allowed for visa-free visits.

  Sergio and Mariana were already there when they arrived at Ruby and Ossia’s house: a low long structure of wood and glass at the top of a ridge overlooking the Salish Sea. It was the first time the six of them had come together since Slaymaker announced his presidential bid.

  ‘Jesucristo, darling,’ Ruby whispered in Holly’s ear as she took her in her strong arms. ‘You sure know how to challenge us.’

  Then she took Holly’s hand and led her on a tour of the house, while Richard was drawn into conversation with the other three. Holly admired the huge master bedroom, the cave-like bathroom, the spacious guest bedrooms where the four visitors would spend the night.

  ‘Oh, I love this little hallway,’ Holly said. ‘It’s almost like you’re outside with these windows on either side but it’s got that indoor cosiness at the same time.’

  Last time the six of them had met together, Holly had spoken about the beautiful houses all six of them lived in, and how these demonstrated the limits of their professed concern for humanity. Neither Holly nor Ruby mentioned that now, but as they walked hand in hand round this, the newest and most luxurious to date of the three couples’ homes, both of them remembered it. It hung there between them, unspoken. There could be no doubt that the materials, the land, the labor that went into this house represented a share of the Earth’s wealth that the vast majority of North Americans could never hope to possess, never mind people in the rest of the world. The planet simply couldn’t provide such luxury for everyone. Holly would have had to have been the worst kind of killjoy to mention this – even her priggish parents wouldn’t have done so – but she and Ruby both knew it, and they both knew that the other was aware of it right now. They was even the hint of an unspoken bargain in the air between them: I won’t mention your membership of a wealthy elite, if you don’t give me a hard time for working on Slaymaker’s presidential campaign.

  ‘Ah, and this is the best bit,’ Ruby announced, letting go of Holly’s hand to throw open a pair of doors.

  ‘Your studio! Oh, it’s wonderful, Ruby! So much space! And all that glass. It must be absolutely full of light in the daytime.’

  ‘It is wonderful, Holly. Not just the studio, but the whole house. And just being here in Canada too, being here and knowing we can stay for good, away from all the craziness in the US. It’s just kind of...unlocked me, you know? Having a home. Standing in front of a canvas and knowing that I’m exactly where I belong. I’m doing my best work ever just now. Everything just flows.’

  ‘That’s lovely, Ruby,’ said Holly, hugging her big bear-like friend. ‘That’s really great.’

  Art had redeemed luxury, like Christ washing away the sins of the world. This too Holly noticed, but she sensed that for Ruby there was nothing to be noticed. The story worked for her, and that was that, just as Slaymaker’s story worked for him, the one about hard work and self-reliance and standing up for America.

  And she was truly happy for both of them. Everyone needed those stories and they were hard to find. Often when you looked for meaning it was like grabbing at empty air. Or so it seemed to her. But perhaps that was the price you paid for being a storyteller.

  Ossia, beautiful and brittle as glass, had cooked narrow slices of three different kinds of fish in three different ways, and served them with pale blue nasturtium flowers and cirrus-like streaks of pink and yellow sauces. The six of them ate in a dining room with a ceiling the height of a two-storey house. On one side a huge window looked out over the water, the twinkling lights of settlements out on Vancouver Island, the last faint streaks of glowing cloud. On the other hung one of Ruby’s enormous paintings: its rich oranges and reds and browns layered so thickly as to be almost sculptural.

  The subject of Holly’s boss couldn’t be avoided any longer and it was raised by Sergio, whose views were delicado, but whose manners were not especially delicate.

  ‘So what in hell are you playing at, Holly? Not just working for Slaymaker but being part of his campaign team. I mean, Jesucristo, have you seen what he said yesterday about the death penalty?’

  Oddly, Holly hadn’t, and that bothered her. She insulated herself to some extent from Slaymaker’s pronouncements on topics unconnected with her own brief, but she knew she ought to keep up with them in a general way, so as to make sure everything connected together.

  Never mind. That was something to think about later.

  ‘Actually, my job is just the same as it was last time we met,’ she told Sergio. ‘Slaymaker knows I’ve always voted Unity. The whole team tease me for being a delicado. And all of them know I won’t agree with them about the penal system, or taxes, or foreign policy, and probably a whole load of other stuff. But I’m there to get the message out to America about the Reconfigure program, which I happen to believe in myself.’

  She took a sip from her glass of white wine, her eyes bright as she looked straight at Sergio. ‘You know, there are whole cities down in Arizona and New Mexico that are completely empty – just crumbling back into the desert – because it’s not economic to supply them with water. There are coastal towns and neighborhoods up and down the country – about fifteen million homes in all – which have been abandoned to the sea. Walk the streets of Seattle right now and you can see the people from all over America who’ve lost their homes and their livelihoods as a result of these catastrophes. Mariana and I saw them when we were shopping before Christmas. Gray Jenny throws money at them. Montello blames Mexico. Frinton wants them shut out of the north. But only Slaymaker has a real vision. I’m not ashamed of backing him. You should too.’

  She could feel her friends glancing at one another. Sergio opened his mouth to speak, but Holly hadn’t finished. ‘It’s actually an incredibly hard sell we’re attempting here,’ she said. ‘We’re basically asking Slaymaker’s core supporters to pay more taxes and put up with new towns and neighborhoods more or less in their own back yards. Who would have thought we’d pull that off, eh? But we’re managing it somehow, with a lot of hard work – more work than you’d believe. And I don’t mean to be rude, Sergio, I really don’t, but what have you been working on lately? What’s your contribution to fixing this problem?’

  Holly was pleased with herself. Her palms weren’t sweating, her pulse rate was steady. She’d managed to keep her tone level and friendly, rather than heated or defensive or self-righteous as it could so easily have become. And Sergio laughed and backed down.

  ‘Touché,’ he said, raising both hands in surrender. ‘You’ve got me. Right now I’m working on personality simulation in jeenees. Enough said.’

  And they all laughed and moved onto other things.

  ‘It’s good for you, isn’t it?’ Richard said, as they climbed between the smooth sheets in one of Ruby and Ossia’s spacious guest rooms. ‘This job is really good for you.’

  ‘It is,’ Holly said. ‘When we arrived, Ruby told me how this beautiful house had set her free, and it was lovely to hear. Really lovely. She can have all the fancy houses she likes as far as I’m concerned, as long as it makes her feel lik
e that. All the fancy houses in the world. And, yes, you’re right, what her house has done for her is exactly what working for Slaymaker has done for me. I really, really love it, Rick. So challenging! So many problems! So many irreconcilable things and awkward people that somehow have to be taken into account! It’s like this incredible many-layered game. It’s wonderful. I really do feel incredibly alive!’

  Richard laughed and kissed her.

  ‘I’m grateful to you, Rick,’ she said. ‘I know this is hard for you on many levels, but I do need to do it, and you’ve been so great in understanding that.’

  They cuddled up together, Richard raising himself on one elbow so he could look down at a face and gently stroke her breasts with his free hand. She pulled his face toward her and kissed him again.

  ‘This was what human brains were made for,’ Holly said. ‘Or my brain anyway. Not the construction of some...some great flawless static utopia like my parents dreamed of, not the discovery of some final truth, but picking a team – any halfway decent team will do – and then using your wits and your skills, as best you can, to make your team the best.’

  ‘Hmmm. I used to wonder about teams sometimes when I was a kid. The teacher divides the class up into two groups with different color armbands, and the next thing you know you are really desperate for the blue armbands to win and the yellow armbands to be defeated, even though the teacher could just as well have divided you up in another way. I used to wonder how come.’

  ‘Because it’s fun, Rick. That’s all you needed to know.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. It was fun, I agree.’

  ‘Speaking of games, I was watching someone playing a fantasy game on their cristal the other day. You know the ones? Where you have to colonize a planet or something, or build a city? You see people playing them all the time, on their cristals or sometimes in immersion goggles. And it suddenly struck me that those games are a kind of porn. They connect with a real human need – a need to make things happen, a need to impose shape on the world – but they don’t really satisfy it, because when the game is over, you know you’ve changed nothing at all. And I thought to myself, Well, if that’s the porn, what I’m doing is the real warm living sex. I was so pleased I almost laughed out loud.’

  Richard smiled. ‘And then of course there’s actual sex.’

  She pulled him toward her again. ‘Ah well, that’s another whole story. That feels fantastic too just now. It’s like I’m right out at the edge of myself – you know? – right here beneath my skin.’

  They’d always been lucky in that way. They’d been able to rely on sex as a healing thing, a kind of alchemy that drew the energy from the anger and hostility that built up between them and used it to bind them together again. It varied over time, of course, but it had never seriously failed them.

  And a thing like that, an ancient natural force that has remained stable and reliable for years: you assume it will carrying on working in the same way for ever.

  ‘Any urgent messages?’ Holly asked her jeenee wordlessly when she and Richard were finally ready for sleep.

  ‘There is one from Slaymaker,’ the jeenee answered in her ear.

  It had no emotions in the human sense. Where humans have desire, love, pity, hunger, fear, ambition, all in competition with one another, the jeenee inside her cristal had only one single driver: the imperative to serve its owner. But it could recognize emotions with great accuracy, knew which were desirable and which were not, and was able to anticipate the emotion that any given piece of news was likely to evoke. So now it used the exact tone that is used by human bearers of bad news, as if speaking the words but trying to suck them back at the same time.

  ‘Apparently, we’re suddenly crashing in the polls. There’s a team meeting at his ranch tomorrow.’

  CHAPTER 25

  Johnson Fleet

  Someone screwed up. They were supposed to have instruments up there measuring the ice and rain and all of that. They’d got satellites and drones and everything. They should have spotted what was building up. In fact, it was a crime they didn’t, just like it’d be a crime if I ran over a kid when I was driving on manual and not paying attention. You don’t fuck with people’s lives like that.

  Anyway, whoever’s fault it was, we had a flash flood, not down the river where all the flood defenses had been built, but down that little side stream next to my garage. I’d never really thought where that stream came from, but it turned out it was the overflow from a lake up in the mountains, held in place by a kind of natural dam of dirt and stones. And one night the dam broke. It had been raining a lot up there in the spring, raining when in the past there would still have been snow, and the snow and ice on the mountaintops had melted quicker than usual too. We’d had heavy rain all through the night. Me and Karla could hear it beating on the roof as we went to sleep, gurgling down the drains in the street, and dripping and trickling from the trees, and when we woke up we could still hear it just the same, dripping and trickling as strong as ever. We didn’t think much of it at first, other than, you know, ‘Damn, we are going to get wet when we get out of our cars at work,’ and Jade going, ‘Think you’ve got problems, Pa! I’ve gotta wait outside for the bus!’ Then we heard the news on the radio: floods in Dickensville, Idaho. Jesus! Our town! But even then we weren’t too worried because our house was fine, and so were the houses all round us. We knew we were way up above the river. Jade headed out for the bus as usual, Karla drove off to her salon, and I set out to the garage.

  But there was no garage. That dam of dirt in the mountains had broken, and the entire lake behind it had come down that little stream all at once, carrying trees and tons of mud and boulders the size of cars. There was a great big gash gouged out of the hillside, and everything that had stood there had pretty much gone completely. And that included my garage. The buildings, the robots, the vehicles they’d been working on: it had all been washed down into the river. I could just see the outline of the inspection pit, but it was full of mud and stones, and all that was left of the hydraulic jack was a few stumps of twisted metal.

  I guess I was in shock for a while. I just stood there staring as I tried to get it through my head. The rain was still falling, but I didn’t notice it. And the stream was still running down the middle of that great gouged-out gash, back to its ordinary size again, like it had nothing to do with what had happened.

  Then Karla called.

  ‘Hey, Jon honey, how are you doing? Me and Jade have both had to go home again, because the whole lower town is—’

  ‘There’s no garage,’ I said.

  ‘What? You mean it’s flooded too? I’d have thought—’

  ‘No, I mean it’s gone.’

  •

  I got in my car but I couldn’t start it. I literally couldn’t figure out what I had to do to make it go. Karla came and fetched me, took me home, made me strip off my drenched clothes and have a shower to get warm again. Then she called the insurance company and waited for thirty minutes in a queue.

  ‘Apparently, there’s an exemption for “unprecedented weather events”,’ she told me eventually, turning from the phone. ‘We’re not covered for this kind of thing at all.’

  I snatched the phone from her. ‘What the fuck’s the point of insurance!’ I yelled into it. ‘What the fuck’s the point if, when the bad thing happens, you’re going to say it wasn’t fucking included!’

  ‘Honey, there’s no—’ Karla tried to interrupt, but I wouldn’t have it.

  ‘I’m not fucking accepting this. I don’t care what it says in the fucking small print. The whole fucking point of insurance is—’

  Karla pulled the phone away from me. ‘Honey, it’s just an AI. There’s no point yelling at it. There’s nobody there to hear you.’

  We went to a lawyer, who told us the insurance company was right and there was nothing we could do. That advice cost us $400. Then we went to the bank to ask about a loan to rebuild the garage from scratch.

  �
�But you’re already borrowing up to the max,’ the woman told us. ‘And your previous loans were based on both of you having your own businesses up and running.’

  ‘My business is fine,’ said Karla, ‘and you can see for yourself that Johnson has been doing well. Soon as he’s got a garage set up again, he’ll be able to pick up right where he left off.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, but you were only just managing to pay off your previous loan, and now you’re asking to double it. It just won’t work. I wish I could help, I really do, but we’re a business too, and we can’t take that kind of risk. If you want to talk about rescheduling the previous loan, or switching to interest-only for a while, we can certainly talk about it.’

  ‘How are we going to get out of this if I can’t start up my business again?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m sorry, but this just isn’t the kind of thing our bank can take on. I believe the federal government has agencies that can help with things like this.’

  One weird thing on that first day, when we were all kind of frozen and didn’t know what to do next or where to turn: I was sitting in my armchair with my cristal, flicking through the whisperstream for something to do, when a post came up from Cynical Sam.

  ‘Floods in Idaho, I see! Anyone care to bet how long before we hear the usual whining voices asking for the government to bail them out?’

  A few hours later he changed his mind.

  ‘Hey, I’m so sorry about what I said there about Idaho. Seems folk are getting me wrong, and I’ve upset a lot of good people. I didn’t mean that people in Idaho were whiners. I meant I knew they wouldn’t whine, unlike some of those folks we’ve grown used to down in the southwest and over on the so-called Storm Coast.’