America City

by Chris Beckett

  CHAPTER 37

  Slaymaker had returned to DC for the dinner with his donors, and Holly flew down to join him. ‘They’re all so keen to meet you, Holly!’ Sue kept telling her. ‘We all keep telling them how smart you are!’

  Inside the drig, she opened her cristal and began to work on ideas for the next move.

  Obviously the first thing she had to think about was the issue of the shootings. All her polls so far had shown they’d done Slaymaker no harm at all. On the contrary, by increasing the general anti-Canuck mood, they’d bumped up Slaymaker’s already soaring ratings by several points. But you could never take these things for granted. New stories could turn these trends around in a matter of hours. Before setting out, she’d commissioned specialist research AIs to find out everything possible about the American victims and their families, and to identify family members, friends and neighbors who’d be willing to speak to her. It was awful those people had died, obviously, but there was no denying that it was a public relations gift, so much of a gift, in fact, that she found it hard to make herself wait for the bios before she began to write imaginary scripts in her head:

  These were regular ordinary hard-working Americans, not prone to complaining, not prone to political activity of any kind...

  Jill was sixty-two and had never been on a demonstration before in her life...

  Ted, fifty-seven, was a pillar of his local community. ‘Didn’t matter who you were, Ted always had time for you’, as one former neighbor recalls...

  But of course, this was silly. She needed to wait for the real names and bios and, even once those were available, the first priority would have to be to look after the survivors. Slaymaker had a reputation for warmth, and that needed to be maintained.

  Meanwhile, there were other things to think about. There was the injured Canadian cop, for one thing. The fact that that cop hadn’t died made her job much easier, but she still needed to find a way of batting away the inevitable claims that the whole ugly incident was the direct result of Slaymaker’s deliberate provocation. That was job number one.

  And then there was the question of what next? Peace Arch was obviously going to have to be the last border rally, so what else could be done to keep up the momentum? Holly wondered briefly about Greenland, that huge island, which Prime Minister Ryan had raised. Perhaps Slaymaker should make something of that. Greenland was very big and very empty, and yet its southwestern corner, so her jeenee now told her, had cattle ranches, sheep farms and even some summer crops. There would perhaps be some benefits, she thought, in not just picking on Canada. And Greenland, with its minute population and its small, distant and not-very-interested mother country, was such an easy target.

  ‘It’s essentially an Indian Reservation,’ she muttered experimentally, watching her words scroll out on her cristal screen and testing their weight. ‘It’s an Indian Reservation maintained in North America, for historical reasons, by a small European country. Less than seventy thousand people live in that Reservation – the population of a small city – but it’s bigger than the whole of Mexico. Come on! There’s a crisis going on! Let’s get real here!’

  But again she was getting ahead of herself. Sometimes this happened with her. Ideas tumbled out over each other, the next one coming before the previous one had even been fully formed. It usually happened when there was something underneath that she was trying not to think about. And the truth was she was very nervous about the donors’ dinner and the speech she’d agreed to make. Holly was confident about many things – she could call anyone at all and talk to them without the slightest worry – but public speaking wasn’t one of them. Richard would have been much more at home with it.

  She’d already been carefully over the guest list but now she went over it again, memorizing the names and faces, and trying to ensure that she knew, for each individual guest, not only where they came from and how they’d made their money, but at least one personal fact. Lucy Vandemon-Rock, for instance, was a big donor who’d only just recently come on board. She came from Vermont, and her family’s immense wealth came primarily from the building materials industry – in fact, VR Cement and Aggregates, in which she personally owned a 51 percent stake, was America’s largest producer and wholesaler of cement, sand, concrete mixers and building cranes – but Holly guessed that what she’d most like to talk about was that her dog ‘Sparky’ had won first prize in his category in last year’s AKC show.

  •

  She was above Washington, and the drig’s engines were beginning to roar as it forced itself downwards, when the news began to break about the arrest of the man who’d fired that first shot at Peace Arch. It could hardly have been better! His name was Pierre Artois and he was French Canadian from Quebec, with a history of mental illness, violence and involvement in the darker fringes of Quebecois nationalism. He’d apparently told neighbors that war between ‘the two Anglo nations’ would be the best thing that ever happened to Quebec.

  Holly started sketching out a press statement at once.

  ‘A Canadian national, standing in Canadian territory, shoots a Canadian policeman,’ she began, ‘and this becomes the pretext for the deaths of three unarmed American citizens.’

  But was that really needed? Did she need to make it a blaming thing? Wouldn’t Slaymaker come over better if he were magnanimous? She tried again.

  ‘It was neither America nor Canada that broke the pledge of Peace Arch. It was a crazed individual who hated both countries equally, and wanted to stir up hate where there should be understanding.’

  Yes, that was much better. Best to leave the nasty stuff to the feeders.

  Sue Cortez and Ann Sellick met her in the Diamantina Hotel, said to be the most expensive in DC. Coffee and cakes were set out in an exquisite meeting room, with a view of the hotel’s famously tranquil Japanese garden. Slaymaker and Jed were still on their way.

  Sue was all over Holly, reaching over the table and taking both of Holly’s hands in hers. Whether she really liked Holly any better than before was impossible to tell, but she could certainly see that Holly was serving her interests. It now seemed very likely that Sue was going to be the campaign director of a historic election victory, and she knew that it was Holly’s border rallies that had made that possible.

  Ann was more guarded, her own role and status more directly challenged by Holly’s privileged position and success. Holly needed to make the first move. ‘Outing Cynical Sam as an AI was just genius,’ Holly told her. ‘Still smile whenever I think about it.’ Winning Ann round by flattery had never been possible in the past, but it was a sign of how different things were that the thin, spider-like woman now almost audibly purred with pleasure.

  ‘A classic AI mistake,’ Ann said, pursing her tiny mouth. ‘You learn to spot them. It had been told to mock folk who asked for government money when they lost their homes. It didn’t have the instinct to know that the rules were different if those folk came from the north.’

  Then Slaymaker and Jed arrived with breaking news of a new deal struck between the Gray Sisters, and everyone turned on their cristals. Canada was to increase its annual quota of red passes for Americans to 250,000, a more than tenfold increase.

  They all turned to Holly but she just smiled. ‘Sorry, Jenny,’ she said, ‘but it’s too little, too late.’

  The others hooted and cheered.

  ‘Too right,’ said Slaymaker, reaching over the table to squeeze her hand. ‘Too damn right, Holly. You’ve run rings round the old gray lady.’

  ‘You surely have,’ said Sue. ‘Jenny’s so dizzy trying to follow your lead, she hardly knows which way she’s facing.’

  CHAPTER 38

  Richard met some of his friends from the school for a drink: Dave, Sanjay and Alice. Dave was a big blond guy from Colorado who taught physics. His husband, Sanjay, was a lean, sharp-tongued AI consultant.

  ‘No Holly?’ Sanjay asked.

  The bar was a softly lit brick-lined basement on the eastern edge of S
eattle. There was jangle music playing softly in the background, those long skeins of ascending arpeggios piling one over the other.

  ‘No. She’s down in DC.’

  ‘With Slaymaker? Dave keeps telling me this stuff and I can’t quite believe it.’

  ‘Yeah, really. She’s with him most of the time. Maybe I should write to one of those relationship advice sites. My wife spends all her time with the next president of the United States. I know he’s strong on family values, but should I be worried?’

  ‘PS He seems to want to move us all to Canada,’ Dave added. ‘Does that make a difference?’

  ‘Does she agree with his politics?’ Sanjay wanted to know.

  ‘No, but she thinks he’s right about his move-everyone-north program. And that’s the part that she deals with.’

  ‘Well, I agree with him about Canada too,’ Sanjay said. ‘I mean, look at all that empty space, those green meadows. It’s kind of an indulgence, wouldn’t you say, with the world as it is, for one country to insist on keeping all that to itself.’

  ‘These rallies are stupid and provocative,’ Dave said. ‘People throw up their hands about that shooting but, really, what did they expect? But aside from that, yeah, I agree, we need to be able to move some people north.’

  ‘But it shouldn’t just be Americans,’ Alice said. ‘There are people south of the Mexican border that need the space a whole lot more than we do. Why not open up all borders everywhere and let people move wherever they want? Why do we need borders at all?’

  ‘So Holly feels really strongly about it, does she?’ Sanjay asked. ‘Dave tells me she’s given up most of her life to it.’

  ‘I never heard her say anything about it,’ Richard said, ‘until she met Slaymaker. She was never very interested in politics. Now she works on it sixteen hours a day.’

  ‘Mmm. I thought you were kidding just now, but maybe you really do think there’s something going on between her and him?’

  ‘No I don’t actually. Not sex, anyway. But she’s pretty obsessed with the guy. His wife thinks she’s Slaymaker’s daughter substitute.’

  ‘His wife? You discuss these things with Slaymaker’s wife?’

  ‘I met her once.’

  ‘Well, come on, Rick, tell! What’s she like?’

  ‘Quite quiet, a little sad, but maybe kind of playing on that sadness, so as to seem brave, if you know what I mean, and to seem interesting. You know like some people do? She’s an actor, after all. Seriously, though, do you guys really think Slaymaker is right to demand access to Canadian land?’

  ‘Sure,’ Dave said. ‘Like I say, I didn’t like that rabble-rousing stuff along the border, but, yes, basically I agree that we have to find ways of redistributing the population of the world. It’ll buy us some time.’

  ‘Just buy time?’

  ‘Of course. We’ve set so many feedback loops in motion now that the atmosphere is going to carry on heating up for some time. Whether the Venus scenario is our ultimate destination, I don’t know.’

  ‘The Venus scenario being...?’

  ‘That the oceans boil.’

  ‘Ah yes, that.’

  ‘Obviously what we really need to do is reverse what human civilization has done to the atmosphere,’ Dave said. ‘That’s the part that Williams has got right. It may be too late. But it’s our best option. Even if we do, though, and even if it works, it’ll take decades, and things will get a whole lot worse before they get better.’

  They all allowed themselves to take this thought in, while the jangle music continued to unfold its interlocking rhythms, like silver wheels spinning round inside each other, some going one way, some the other, and the alcohol seeped into their bloodstreams.

  ‘It’s odd how rarely we talk about this stuff,’ Alice said. ‘We know it, but we hardly ever go there.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s odd at all,’ Sanjay retorted. ‘It’s like your own personal death. You know it’s going to happen. You know it’s not going to be pleasant. But why spoil the rest of your life thinking about it? In fact, come to think of it, why even spoil an evening? Let’s talk about something else. Why did we come to this shitty bar, anyway? I hate jangle music.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ Dave said. ‘You’ve got a large collection of the stuff.’

  Richard found himself oddly detached suddenly, as far away from them as Holly was from him, watching this little corner of the world, and seeing just a tiny part of a giant clockwork toy that was slowly unwinding to the intricate but emotionless rhythms of jangle music.

  We are children, he thought. We’re children pretending to be grown-ups. The world is arranged for us by others, and, like teenagers do, we sneer and talk scornfully as if we knew better.

  ‘I found a diary of my great-grandmother’s the other day,’ Alice said. ‘She kept it for about a year when she was in her twenties, before she had my grandpa.’

  ‘What was in it?’ Dave asked.

  ‘Oh, you know, quaint twenty-first-century stuff. Cellphones. Airplanes. She comes over as a smart, interested, well-informed woman. She was a politics teacher and she often talks about what’s happening in the world, not just her own life. A revolution in Egypt. A big banking crisis they’d had. That kind of stuff. She talks about these things, she has views about them, and a couple of time she even does something: you know, write to her congressman maybe, or go on a demo. But weirdly there’s only two lines in the whole thing about the way things were going with the weather.’

  ‘Which were?’ asked Dave.

  ‘Heading for Thailand. Second Asian trip this year. How great is that? Should feel guilty, I suppose – global warming and all that.’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘Si. That’s it.’

  ‘How did that make you feel?’ Richard asked, pulling himself back into the world.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t born then – my grandfather wasn’t even born – so, in fairness to her, she didn’t know me as a person, but when I read it there, it felt for a moment like...’

  She hesitated.

  ‘Like your great-grandma didn’t give a shit about you?’ he said.

  ‘Si. That. Exactly that.’

  She considered this for a moment. ‘Exactly that,’ she repeated, ‘though in fact she was a kind and sweet grandmother to my mum and her sisters, from what I’ve heard, and they loved her dearly.’

  ‘There were plenty of things they could have done back then,’ Dave said. ‘Plenty of things.’

  ‘It makes me think of Faustus,’ Richard said to Alice. ‘You know what I mean? Mephistophilis is quite clear with Faustus that his soul will go to hell in twenty-four years – he lays it right out there in so many words – but Faustus just laughs and says there’s no such thing as hell, even though Mephistophilis’ very presence is proof to the contrary, and even though the whole deal depends on hell being powerful and real.’

  Alice smiled and nodded. ‘Come, I think hell’s a fable,’ she quoted, instantly assuming the persona of the medieval scholar.

  ‘Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind,’ Richard answered in the soft, smooth voice of Mephistophilis.

  ‘Why, think’st thou, then, that Faustus shall be damn’d?’

  ‘Ay, of necessity, for here’s the scroll / Wherein thou hast given thy soul to Lucifer.’

  ‘Ay, and body too: but what of that? / Think’st thou that Faustus is so fond to imagine / That after this life, there is any pain? / Tush, these are trifles and mere old wives’ tales.’

  The other two gave them a round of applause, and they all moved on to other things, Richard glancing at his cristal for a moment to make sure he hadn’t somehow missed a message from Holly. But no. Nothing to say she’d arrived in DC, nothing at all. He was disappointed, and yet there was also a part of him that felt released. He switched off his cristal.

  Dave and Sanjay went home fairly early, leaving Alice and Richard well on the way to being quite seriously drunk.

  ‘I wonde
r what it would be like if we knew for certain the world was really about to end?’ he said, as they moved closer together to fill the space that the other two had vacated.

  ‘No one would bother to write books, or teach school,’ Alice said. ‘That’s for sure.’

  ‘There’d be no right or wrong in the usual sense,’ he said. ‘There’d be no point. Whatever you did, the end result would always be the same.’

  She looked straight into his eyes. ‘All that would matter would be the present moment,’ she said. ‘Not the record of the moment, not its consequences, not its wider significance, but only the moment itself.’

  CHAPTER 39

  Sue had given Holly a $10,000 budget for a dress to meet the donors, but Holly didn’t actually get to choose the shimmery white thing she ended up wearing, because that was the job of Dirk, the full-time fashion adviser to the Slaymaker campaign, whose main task was to pick out the dresses Eve wore for public appearances, and help Senator Slaymaker maintain the regular down-to-earth look which, or so Dirk maintained, was the hardest part of all.

  He checked Holly over before she stepped out onto the stage. ‘You are looking fantastic, Holly! Like something out of a fairy tale!’

  And then she was out there, facing a hundred of America’s wealthiest people, who were all watching her and clapping and smiling from their beautifully set dinner tables. Stephen and Eve Slaymaker had just been addressing them, Eve looking lovely in an amazing green dress that had probably cost ten times as much as Holly’s. Now the two of them welcomed her to the stage.

  ‘Listen carefully to this smart smart woman, people,’ Slaymaker told his audience. ‘I certainly do, and it works for me every time. She is just so good at figuring out how to make things happen.’

  ‘And isn’t she beautiful?’ exclaimed Eve.

  While the people clapped Holly again, she walked to the podium and looked out, giving herself a few seconds to match the faces to the names and bios she’d studied and memorized. There was Randy Lancaster, for instance, over there on the right with his fourth wife Lana. His family’s power base was in Seattle, and it was said that, over the last five years, 25 percent of all the new homes built in America had been built with Lancaster money. Here in front of her was Donny Bonito from Oregon who, among other things, was America’s biggest producer of construction-grade steel. At the back and toward the right, with her husband and daughters, was Rhianna Morgan, from Michigan. Her family’s core business was in heavy machinery – bulldozers, diggers and trucks – but they’d diversified over the years, via road building and the construction of motels and service stations, into pretty much every part of the US economy. At the table next to her was Fox Lamont, the Juneau-based businessman whose family had for three generations been building and acquiring office blocks at prime city locations, the richest man in America’s fastest growing state.