America City

by Chris Beckett

  ‘You were lovely, Ruby,’ Holly said, as they sat with drinks in front of them in the warm light of early evening, watching the cars streaming over the Lions Gate Bridge. ‘It was like suddenly discovering I had this cool big sister – cool and incredibly kind: what a killer combination – who’d look after me and watch over me until I found my way. I just totally loved you.’

  She was very aware as she spoke of the harsh things she’d said in the past to Richard about Ruby – that Ruby was a spoiled child, engaging in play while others ran the world – and she felt ashamed. The reason why Ruby had helped her so much in New York was precisely that Ruby wasn’t a child, even back then. She was a kind and thoughtful adult who didn’t just think about herself. And Holly wondered why she’d she been so harsh on Ruby for having limits to her capacity to engage and empathize, when she’d admired Slaymaker so much for the very same thing.

  Ruby leant over and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Well, I loved you too. You were so alive, so open to everything, so full of energy, battering away at America until it let you in. I won’t say you weren’t afraid of anything, because I know that’s not true, but I loved the way you simply refused to let fear be a factor in any choice you made. I always knew you’d go far, right from the beginning.’ She chuckled. Her deep warm chuckle was one of the most endearing things about her. ‘I can’t say I guessed you’d end up in the White House, but now that it’s actually happened, I have to say it kind of figures.’

  They talked about New York in the past, but New York right now was on its knees. A series of huge storms had been hitting the east coast of America that summer, and one of them had struck land in the city, a whirling power saw that tore down trees, ripped off roofs, sucked out windows and sent torrents of water running down the streets. It had coincided with a particularly severe drought that was gripping inland states way up into the Midwest. As the two of them sat outside on that balmy evening in Vancouver, long queues of heavily laden trucks and cars were trailing northwards and westwards across the USA.

  ‘What’s your feeling,’ began Holly, a little hesitantly, not wanting to complicate or put at risk this happy reprise of their old friendship, ‘what’s your feeling these days about the US settlements in Canada?’

  There were three new cities in Canada, one in each of the country’s Arctic territories: Lincoln City in Yukon, Jefferson in the Northwest Territories, and America City in Nunavut, the largest of the three. The cities had deliberately been established far away from any major population center, and although they were less than three years old, they were already home to several hundred thousand people.

  As Holly had feared she would, Ruby tensed. ‘Uh, I’m sort of okay about them, I guess. I know the locals up there aren’t happy, especially in Nunavut, and I feel badly for them, because their culture has been under threat for so long. But, well, I guess it’s not turned out as bad as many people thought, and I understand – I think I understand, anyway – your point that Canada needed to share a little bit of the pain of this exodus that you’ve been organizing. Canada couldn’t expect to be preserved as a kind of museum, I suppose, with all the rest of the world crumbling.’

  She glanced uneasily at Holly, then looked away. ‘I don’t like all this stuff you see in the US whisperstream, though. Mean Canucks, brave American settlers. I know there are always some idiots, but that is ugly. And it’s completely unfair, too.’

  Holly swallowed. She couldn’t disclose that she was behind a lot of this stuff – she’d even chosen the name of America City herself because of the role she wanted it to play in her narrative – but Ruby would surely know she had some part in it.

  ‘I guess you could look at it as a way of letting off steam,’ Holly ventured, ‘while America goes through this traumatic change.’

  Ruby watched the cars on the bridge, rather than turning round and looking at her. And before she answered, she downed the remainder of her drink in a single gulp.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose it doesn’t really hurt anyone.’ She finally glanced at Holly, managing a wry smile. ‘I couldn’t do your job, Holly. Playing chess with real people.’

  ‘I guess it is in a way.’ A sharp sadness was growing inside her. It was coming home to her that the two of them could never really recover the friendship they’d had in New York. They’d shared everything about themselves back then, and that could never happen again. ‘But we storytellers are part of how politics works. Suzanne Ryan will have people just like me advising her. Jenny Williams used to. Making things happen in politics is all about stories. They’re what allow people to let go of one reality and embrace another.’

  ‘I think I’ll stick to light and color. It’s more—’ Ruby broke off, hearing voices raised inside the bar, and looking round to see what was going on. ‘Hey, there’s something on the broadscreen.’

  Before Ruby had finished speaking, Holly’s jeenee had already told her what the something was. A bomb had exploded, blowing the entire façade off the still-uncompleted city hall of America City, Nunavut. People had been killed – twenty-seven as it was to turn out, with more than a hundred injured – and a group calling itself the North Canadian Army had claimed responsibility. The Slaymaker administration had been nagging Canada for some time to do more to curb this alliance of Salvationists and Inuit activists which had repeatedly threatened to attack America’s ‘illegal colonies’.

  ‘Steve wants a meeting with you and Jed,’ Holly’s jeenee told her through the implant in her ear, ‘to discuss how to manage this. The air force can send a drig with a sleeping cabin. Can you get down to DC for a morning meeting? He’ll probably be flying up to America City tomorrow night.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Ruby,’ she said, full of grief, knowing that this might be the last time that she and Ruby met like this, ‘this has been so lovely, but we’ve got a crisis here, and I’ve got to go.’

  CHAPTER 42

  When Holly joined Jed and the president in the Oval Office next morning, the two of them had obviously been there some time, sitting face to face on the pair of large red sofas where Slaymaker liked to work and talk, with the table in front of them strewn with papers. Slaymaker had his own relationship with Jed. There was something about Jed’s aristocratic scorn for everything that the president found fascinating, whatever he said to Holly about Jed’s rattlesnake morals. They’d clearly been deep into something when she arrived.

  ‘Great you could come down, Holly.’

  A big broadscreen on the wall behind him was scrolling through images of the damage. America City was growing very quickly and already had nearly 200,000 residents but, squatting there between two bare lakes in a flat treeless waste, it still looked more like a trailer park surrounded by a building site than a real city. The half-finished city hall, built in a classical style with a portico and columns, had been its most distinctive and city-like building, but now columns and portico lay in fragments over the plaza in front of it.

  ‘So what are your thoughts about how we handle this?’ Slaymaker asked.

  She shrugged. ‘This is awful for the people involved, but from a public relations point of view, it isn’t a problem. The truth is that pretty much all news from Canada these days is helpful to our overall strategy. If our people up there achieve something, that’s an instant injection of national pride right there. If our people come up against problems, we use them to keep up the pressure on Canada. Obviously, Steve, you’ll need to publicly accuse the Canadian government of not doing enough to crack down on the NCA, and naturally you’ll hint that, unless they do crack down, we’re bound to wonder if they really mean what they say at all, or whether they secretly want the NCA to succeed. Maybe take the position that you’d like to believe that the NCA and the Canadian government are two different things, but you need to be convinced.’

  Canada was, as she understood it, a sideshow. Altogether, about 400,000 Americans had been settled in those three cities in Canada’s Arctic territories, but more than ten times th
at number had moved into the new settlements in Alaska, Washington, Idaho and Montana. Slaymaker had made it very clear that he wanted to move people within America, as far as possible. But, by keeping the public’s attention on what was happening up there in Canada, Holly was providing an outlet for resentments that otherwise would have set Americans against one another. So, small as the Canadian settlements were within the Reconfigure program as a whole, she spent half of her budget on publicizing the triumphs and travails of those three outposts at Lincoln, Jefferson and America City, turning them into a kind of perpetual soap opera about plucky Americans in their small and incredibly isolated cities, surrounded on every side by devious Canucks. Americans as underdogs was a powerful story with immense appeal, made almost perfect by the fact that it coexisted in every American’s mind with the awareness of America’s overwhelming might. It was like being a child again, listening to an exciting adventure while all the while safe in your bed. And meanwhile, under the cover of that vivid and engaging story, the new cities in America’s northern states could quietly continue to grow.

  ‘And while you put out that message,’ Holly said, ‘I’ll keep using my feeders to suggest links between the NCA and the Canadian government.’

  ‘That shouldn’t be hard,’ Jed said. ‘The NCA are an offshoot of a political party that has seats in all three of the—’

  ‘Of the territorial legislatures. Yes, I know that, Jed, thank you very much, and I’ve ensured that a good 40 percent of the American public knows it too. I’ll be able to bring that close to 100 percent now that the NCA are actually killing Americans. It was all a little abstract before.’

  Slaymaker laughed. ‘Poor Canada. They don’t stand a chance against you.’

  ‘There’s other stuff we can use too,’ Holly said. ‘I’ve been building up this story about the NCA leader being a former colonel in the Canadian army. There’s no hard evidence for this, but our scoopers found the rumor on some third-rate Canadian news hub in Saskatchewan.’

  ‘It’s like I was saying earlier, Steve,’ Jed said, ‘Given that Canada’s job is to be our symbolic enemy, the NCA are making it a whole bunch easier.’

  For a second or two they all watched the bleak images of America City flipping by on the screen.

  ‘Of course, I know you’ll be very generous and supportive to the survivors, Steve,’ Holly said, ‘and I’ll make sure that everyone gets to hear what’s happened to them and the help you’re giving. Pretty much everyone in America will be able to get behind that. And we’ll work on the back stories, too. There’ll be some inspiring narratives for sure.’

  ‘There sure are,’ Slaymaker said. ‘Jed brought me in some printouts, as a matter of fact. We were looking at them earlier.’

  ‘And we need to push ahead with settlement,’ Jed added. ‘Keep moving more people in. The terrorists mustn’t be allowed to win, yada yada yada. And if there’s any obstruction from Canada with visas and so on, well, it’s the same response. We ask them whose side they’re on, ours or the NCA.’ He laughed. ‘Christ, this is all so easy, isn’t it? This Canada thing just runs and runs. Pure genius on your part, Holly! Pure genius.’

  Slaymaker flipped off the screen. ‘The way you two guys talk,’ he growled, ‘you might think this was all about the story and not about real people at all.’

  Jed composed his face and made it serious. He didn’t believe that anyone really cared, but the belief that they cared was, he knew, important to many.

  ‘This is my job,’ Holly said, ‘and it’s the job you gave me.’

  ‘Por cierto, Holly, por cierto.’ Slaymaker was instantly humble. ‘I’m sorry. I know we need to do this stuff.’

  She stood up. ‘Bueno. I’ll go and get on, if that’s okay? There’s a lot to do.’

  ‘Oh, wait a minute,’ Slaymaker said. ‘You may as well take this stuff on the people who died.’

  Slaymaker was very old-fashioned in some respects, and he liked things printed out for meetings. He picked a bunch of loose papers up from the table between them and handed it to her, looking into her eyes as she took them, and momentarily cupping his spare hand over hers. He had a way of locking his gaze with people, so as to establish a channel of contact that felt real, even if it only lasted for a second. He and Holly didn’t see so much of each other now he was president. They’d talked about going riding again sometime, either up on his ranch or down in Camp David, but there never seemed to be time.

  ‘We must fit that ride in sometime, Holly. I’m going to set my diary secretary onto it as soon as I’m done with Jed.’

  As communications director for the Reconfigure America Federal Agency, Holly had her own offices along Pennsylvania Avenue, a quarter mile from the White House, and her own handpicked team of staff: communications professionals like herself, rather than Freedom Party hacks. But she had a room in the White House set aside for her use when she was there and she went there now. There were a few people here she needed to speak to, and she meant to try to catch them face to face while she was in the building. But, before she did anything else, she couldn’t resist having a quick look at the papers Slaymaker had given her.

  They were basically a summary, one page on each, of what was known so far about each of the twenty-seven people killed by the NCA bomb: age, place of origin, marital status, whether they had children, and whatever was known about their journey from their original home state to America City, Nunavut:

  ...originally from New Orleans. Home destroyed in flood after Superstorm Zelda...

  ...moved to America City from Nevada, via an Illinois camp. Used to run a general store, but town couldn’t supply water any more.

  ...single mother, raising three kids after death of husband: suicide following bankruptcy...

  Twenty-seven pages down, Holly discovered that Slaymaker had given her another document, or part of one, presumably by mistake. It was just a single page, handwritten, apparently by Jed, and headed ‘The Texas Option’.

  CHAPTER 43

  After he’d slept with Alice, Richard had decided that he and Holly were going to break up. He didn’t know if that was what he wanted. It just seemed to be what was happening. And, when she came back from DC and told him that she’d accepted a job in Slaymaker’s upcoming administration that seemed to confirm it. She seemed to have made her own choice. He actually felt a little relieved to discover that it wasn’t going to be all about Alice. Perhaps this wasn’t going to be so hard, after all.

  ‘Well, maybe it’s time for you and I to call it a day,’ he suggested. They were sitting at their small kitchen table with all their familiar things around them, and even as he spoke he realized how naïve he was being.

  ‘What?’ Holly’s whole face changed in a single moment, becoming angry and scared and wild.

  ‘I’m just saying that you clearly want to move to DC. I don’t. Even if I did move down there, I know I’d hardly ever see you, just as I’ve hardly ever seen you these past months.’

  ‘So you’re saying – what? – that people who do demanding jobs have no right to an understanding partner? Jesucristo, Rick, we’re supposed to support one another!’ She was really angry, really hurt, her eyes welling with tears. ‘God damn it, I’ve been thinking of this as my home and my refuge, and now I find you’re calmly planning to get rid of me!’

  And she doesn’t even know about Alice, Richard was thinking. ‘I thought...’ he began. ‘I guess I thought you’d more or less gotten rid of me. You spend so much more time with Slaymaker, and you’re clearly much more interested in him than you are in me.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. I’ve been helping him fight an election and it’s taken a lot of time. You know what I’m like. I need projects, I need to be busy, I need do stuff, or I start thinking too much and get miserable. You always said you liked my energy.’

  ‘I do. And that’s what you like about Slaymaker, isn’t it? I write books, he does things that make people want to write books about him. These days, a new one comes
out every week. But you know it’s not much fun living with a woman who keeps telling me how useless and pointless I am, compared with another guy.’

  She studied his face for a few moments.

  ‘I’m sorry if I made you feel that way, Rick,’ she finally said, ‘but you’ve got it completely wrong. I love it that you’re a thinker and a daydreamer. I always have done. I love it that you’re different than me. For Christ’s sake, that’s what drew me to you in the first place. You were this quiet, dark, handsome, incredibly smart man, who could speak Anglo-Saxon and Latin, and knew Beowulf by heart, and lived his life halfway between this world and places that most people never even think about. I loved that. I still love that. Jesus, when I introduced you to Steve, and you recited that stuff to him I was so proud of you. Couldn’t you tell? You were showing him and Eve something that they’d probably never come across in their whole lives! A whole world they’d never even glimpsed. He still sometimes speaks about it.’

  Richard was taken aback by this. ‘But...But the fact remains that whenever I—’

  ‘Whenever you criticize, I immediately tell you how much more Steve has done with his life than you have. I know. I can see now that was horrible of me. But believe me, Rick, I don’t want you to be like Steve, I really don’t. I don’t want you to be like me, either. All I’m really asking of you is that you let me be me.’