America City

by Chris Beckett

  But you couldn’t say things like that. There was a whole lot of stuff you couldn’t say. I guess it was the same in 1775. A critical mass is reached, and after that either you go along with the newly formed nation or you’re a traitor. Three women in Lincoln who’d been foolish enough to go out with Mounties were paraded through the streets with shaven heads.

  Meanwhile, the Canadian army sent troops into the principal Canadian towns in the three territories: places with names like Yellowknife, Whitehorse, Hay River and Rankin Inlet. The US government condemned this as ‘provocation’ and lined up its own troops on the Alaska border.

  I hated all of it, but I guess that’s like saying you hate bad weather.

  CHAPTER 53

  The declaration of independence happened just two days after the Canadian election. Holly was with Steve and Eve Slaymaker at the White House, watching the big broadscreen in the Executive Residence, along with Jed, Ann Sellick, who was now press secretary, and Sue Cortez, who was now the White House chief of staff.

  The Pioneers’ Union had declared a new United Republic of Northland with jurisdiction over the entirety of all three territories. America City was to be the nation’s capital, and one of the leaders of the Pioneers’ Union was appointed interim president until formal elections could be held. Holly watched a ragged honor guard from the new nation’s ‘army’, as they raised a giant version of her three-star flag in front of the half-ruined city hall. The new young president awkwardly saluted the flag, in a cheap suit that was a little too tight for him. Holly glanced round at Slaymaker and was surprised to see his eyes filled with tears.

  A servant brought in bottles of champagne that had been chilled in readiness, and the team toasted the United Republic of Northland and its future, with as much feeling as if they genuinely didn’t know that it was their own creation and that within a few months it would cease to exist.

  Sue Cortez, to Holly’s amazement, actually gave her a hug. ‘Who’d have thought it, eh, Holly? Who’d have thought, when you pointed out Canada on that map in Steve’s ranch, that in less than four years we’d have come to this?’

  On the screen, excited crowds were waving three-star flags in all three of the American cities in Canada and right across America itself. And then the story flipped over to Canada and the new prime minister, Gwendoline Thomas, who’d just told parliament that she’d send her air force and army to suppress the American rebellion. Everything was going to plan.

  Slaymaker came over, placing one hand on Holly’s shoulder and one on Sue’s. ‘If it wasn’t for Holly’s idea,’ he said to Sue, ‘it would have been Frinton or Montello here in the White House, and our country would be tearing itself in two. I mean, when’s the last time you heard even a peep about state frontiers?’

  Soon after that, the party ended. Slaymaker needed to call his fellow president up there in America City, and offer his congratulations, and then he was going to talk to the generals.

  As Holly climbed into her car and told it to take her back to her apartment, she took out her cristal and found that Richard had tried to call her seventeen times.

  She could easily have called him back on the thirty-minute journey to her DC apartment, but she put it off, riding across the city in a strange dazed state of dread. She let the car drop her off and take itself off to park, stepped into the lift, and rode up to her front door on the eleventh floor. She took off her coat and shoes, poured herself a glass of wine, flipped on the broadscreen and had her jeenee reach down for her into the whisperstream, where American pride and anti-Canuck rage were roaring like Niagara Falls. She told her jeenee to make a few notes about things to work on in the morning. But all the time, the dread inside her was growing. She knew she needed to call him.

  Rick answered at once, like a lynx leaping on its prey.

  ‘So now I know, Holly! I finally know why you didn’t want to discuss Ryan’s peace offer, and I know what you and Daddy Slaymaker were talking about on his damned ranch! I can’t get over the cynicism of it. The callousness. But above all your duplicity. All lovey-dovey with me, when all the time you knew you were brewing this. I can’t believe you could even think of it. You had an offer from Ryan, you had an amazing offer, but instead—’

  ‘Rick, it’s not as simple as—’

  ‘I hope you’re ready, Holly. I just hope you’re ready for the blood that’s now going to flow.’

  ‘Richard, please, I need you to—’

  ‘Oh Richard, you’re my anchor!’ Rick cried, mimicking her British accent. ‘No, Holly, no, no, no! I am not your anchor. An anchor’s a thing that holds you back. And you made quite sure, didn’t you, that holding you back was the one thing I was not going to be able to do.’

  ‘It’s more complicated than you think, Rick. If we hadn’t—’

  ‘I’ve got CNN on the broadscreen right now. I guess you know that Prime Minister Thomas announced a shoot-on-sight policy about two hours ago for any Americans found outside the fifty-mile squares? I guess you know the Canadian air force has already attacked some of the militia units up there? I’m seeing more Canadian drones taking off right now, one after another, from a base in northern Ontario, each one with four air-to-ground missiles. Think about that, Holly. Some of those Americans you sent up there are riding around right now in their silly pick-up trucks, playing at being soldiers, and they’re going to be dead before the morning. Yeah, and then what’s going to happen, eh, Holly? Have you and Slaymaker thought about that?’

  ‘Of course we have, but you’ve—’

  ‘We’re through now, Holly. That’s it. I’ve waited four years for you to let me back into your life, and that’s long enough. And if this is the life you want to lead, I don’t want to be part of it anyway.’

  Her mind felt numb, but her body knew this was a calamity. She was already shaking violently now, when suddenly she realized she was about to throw up. She ran to the toilet to retch out the White House champagne in three sour convulsive gouts.

  She tried to call Richard again. He didn’t get it, she was going to tell him. The only way they’d got any concessions at all out of Suzanne Ryan was by piling on the pressure, and by the time she gave way, events had moved on, new forces were in play and it was already way too late. But his jeenee wouldn’t accept her calls.

  She sampled the whisperstream again. There was no way anyone could stop that Niagara now. A hundred thousand top-grade feeders calling out for peace would have been drowned out completely by that mighty roar. Just in the last hour, her jeenee told her, there had been over thirty million iterations of calls for a nuclear attack: What are we waiting for? Nuke those Canuck bastards. Turn Toronto into a sheet of glass...

  CHAPTER 54

  Rosine Dubois

  I‘ve never seen Herb so proud and so happy as he was when he joined the Pioneers’ militia. You wouldn’t have thought that was such a great way to spend your time, bouncing and banging along in the back of a pick-up with nothing to look at but empty lakes and bare rock and yellowy tussocks of grass. But he just loved it. I guess all his life he’d thought of himself as a guy who played it safe, worked in an office doing a job that anyone could do, never made much money, never did anything that marked him out as different or special in any way. But now he’d come home from the office as Herb Dubois, Assistant Data Supervisor, who’d spent his day muttering to jeenees, and he’d put on his uniform, and straight away he’d become a whole different person, standing up straighter and pulling in his belly as he went out again as Sergeant Dubois, United Northland Army, heading off into the cold and dark to protect America City.

  Me and the guys did this, me and the guys did that. He was always talking about it. In fact, I’ve got to admit, it got on my nerves. He liked to think he was a soldier, but it wasn’t as if the militia ever actually had to fight anyone. They hardly met anyone at all out there, and it counted as a pretty exciting day when Herb and the others stopped a truck of Inuit caribou hunters one time, and sent them back the way they c
ame. The way he told it, you’d think he’d done something really brave.

  Still, Herb felt he was someone, and that was good.

  Once or twice, a thought came into my head about those Delaware state troopers and how they treated us when we were trying to get away from the storm, and I wondered if those Inuit people felt a bit like we’d done, like they were suddenly foreigners in their own country. But I put that thought firmly out of my mind. This wasn’t like Delaware. Delaware had farms and fields and houses and churches and roads, but no one had done a thing with this country until we came here. It was empty for miles and miles. Nearest place to America City of any size, or so I’d been told, was a nickel mine more than a hundred and fifty miles away, with maybe two hundred yellow-coat miners living in dorms. And even that was owned by an American company.

  I figured those Canucks lost any right to our sympathy when that bomb went off in front of our city hall.

  Then we had the Declaration of Independence, and suddenly we were living in Northland. We all waved flags in the street and sang that new song about the three lonely stars and the bond of flame.

  Over in Ottawa, the new prime minister, Gwen Thomas, stood in front of a giant maple leaf flag and warned us she was sending the Canadian army into the territories, and we’d better stay inside our fifty miles. But our new Northland president, in all his wisdom, announced that the Northland army would fight back. Of course, Herb insisted on going out in his truck that same night, ‘to show those Canucks we don’t scare easy’.

  ‘Don’t do it, Herb,’ I said. ‘Sit this one out. We’re not talking about a few Inuits now, we’re talking about a real army. We’re talking about professional soldiers who’ve been properly trained, with drones and drigs and lord knows what else. You guys won’t have a chance. And you won’t achieve anything either. You need to sit this out, and wait for the US army.’

  ‘No way, Rosine,’ he said. ‘That would be desertion. Our job is to defend Northland, whether it’s dangerous to us or not. You heard our president. You heard him say that—’

  ‘Oh come on, Herb. Our president? That was Johnson Fleet, for Christ’s sake! Remember how you used to laugh at him for being so proud of himself for getting along with storm trash? What does he know about fighting wars?’

  Herb laughed angrily. ‘What are you saying, Rosine? Because we have the honor of being a friend of our president, that means we don’t have to listen to him when he calls for our help?’

  ‘Listen to yourself, Herb! Just listen to yourself! This isn’t real. Can’t you see that? President, country, army, honor...None of it is real. This is like...I don’t know...It’s like some little kids’ game except that you’re playing it with real guns against people who could really hurt you.’

  ‘Well, I sure am sorry it’s not real to you, Rosine, but it’s real to me. More real than anything that’s ever happened to me. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a patrol to lead.’

  I yelled after him as he walked away, really yelled, with tears running down my face: ‘Herb, don’t go!’

  Carl was crying too, but Copeland took his dad’s part. ‘Jesucristo, Mum, what are you doing? Dad’s just going out on patrol.’

  Herb was too angry to turn around and look at us as he climbed into his car. He just told it where to take him and then bent over his cristal as it drove off.

  We never saw him again. Not even his dead body. The Canucks fired down a rocket from the sky and it blew Herb and the other three into little pieces.

  CHAPTER 55

  Within an hour of the news that Canada had attacked and killed members of the so-called Northland Army, President Slaymaker had ordered cruise missile strikes on half a dozen Canadian air force bases, and declared the airspace of the Northland Republic to be a no-fly zone. What had begun with cartoon dogs and jokes about three Canucks in a bar had become thousands of tons of metal on the move, thousands of gallons of rocket fuel igniting, megatons of high explosives blasting through concrete and steel.

  Gwen Thomas announced that all Canadian airspace was a no-fly zone for the USAF, and a Canadian drone attacked a troop transport heading for Jefferson, with 653 men and 327 women on board. The drig was unarmored and it cracked open like an egg. A news hub drone that was accompanying it shot a piece of footage that was to appear that night on all of the hubs, and ricochet back and forth across the whisperstream. It was of a young woman with blonde hair falling through the sky, her eyes apparently wide open, her arms and legs flung outwards as she slowly cartwheeled toward her death.

  •

  Holly was to watch that clip many thousands of times. The young woman was an army engineer called Specialist Susan Wright and was almost exactly the same age as Holly herself. Holly searched for everything that was known about her: her school years, her hikes in the Cascades, her little brother Craig, her policeman fiancé Damian, her fondness for speed-jangle music, her mother who was a nurse, her aptitude for maths, her childhood bedroom with the teen pictures still up on the walls.

  It would have provided excellent material, but Holly didn’t use any of this information to make stories for her feeders to put out into the stream. She told no one about it. She didn’t recycle it in any way. No one knew of her obsession. A war with Canada might have happened anyway without her – things like it were happening all over the world – but Holly knew that it wouldn’t have happened in exactly this way. Perhaps it would have been worse – how could anyone know? – but there was no doubt that it was Holly who’d set in train the particular sequence of events that led to the death of Specialist Wright, when she pointed out Canada on that old map on Slaymaker’s wall.

  And though she spent many hours learning about Susan Wright, what Holly came back to most of all was that little fragment of footage. She would play the clip on repeat, pausing sometimes, zooming in, trying to knock the reality of it into her head. This had been a real person, as real as she was, alive and out there in the world. This real person had been sucked, fully conscious, out of an exploding drig and, as long as she remained conscious, she’d had no choice but to fall, to feel herself falling with nothing to grab hold of, knowing that in just a few minutes she would be dead and broken, somewhere on the ground below.

  CHAPTER 56

  Slaymaker sent tanks over the Alaska border and bombed the Ministry of Defense in Ottawa, reducing it to rubble. All across America the Stars and Stripes flew side by side with the three-star flag of plucky little Northland, allowing Americans simultaneously to revel in their country’s military might and bask in the righteousness of the underdog.

  The tanks rolled across the Yukon. The Navy sent aircraft carriers to menace Canada’s coasts.

  After a two-day lull in fighting, a US drone in the vicinity of Lincoln shot down a Canadian army drig with two hundred soldiers on board. Gwen Thomas ordered a retaliatory missile strike across the border against a USAF control center. One of the missiles went wide, and blew up in an elementary school in a Detroit suburb. America responded with another series of devastating cruise attacks on Canadian air force bases.

  There was another pause in the fighting. As battered, bloody Canada slumped in its corner and America swaggered about in the ring, the premier of Quebec, Michel Morin, declared that this was a family quarrel between two Anglo nations and French Canada wanted no part in it. With immediate effect, Quebec was an independent state. America recognized the new Quebec republic at once. Gwen Thomas accused Morin of treason and ordered his arrest – ‘You are gonna hang, Michel, you are gonna hang so high!’– but her authority was dwindling. No one acted on her words and the following day, the premiers of Alberta and British Columbia also dissociated themselves from the Canadian federal government.

  What was left of the Canadian armed forces wasn’t willing to be wiped out with Thomas in some kind of heroic Götterdämmerung. Thrilled, eroticized almost, by the scandalous destruction their country had wrought, rapt Americans watched on their cristals and broadscreens as Canadian officer
s climbed from limousines outside the prime minister’s chateau-like residence above the Ottawa river, to place Gwen Thomas under arrest.

  Suzanne Ryan came back as the head of a ‘provisional government of national unity’. But by now there was no national unity. As she hastily arranged a ceasefire with America, Canada lay in pieces all around her.

  Holly came up to Schofield to collect her things. She insisted to Richard that the destruction of Canada had never been the plan. Not her plan, and not even really Slaymaker’s. ‘It’s not what it looks like,’ was actually the phrase she used. And she spoke rather wildly about forces outside of Slaymaker’s control, and overflowing dams, and difficult choices, and unstoppable momentum.

  The two of them had a huge row then, quite unlike any they’d ever had before: savage, bitter, full of the rage and hate that both of them had been swallowing for years. He told her she was utterly ruthless, that she was without loyalty or principle, that she was willing to sacrifice everything to her own ambition. She told him he was a nobody and always would be, a creature of the shadows, afraid of the light of the sun.

  He’d been working on a chapter about St Gildas, who’d watched the destruction of Britain, and seen its cities, churches and literature, its history, its Celtic language, its Christian and Roman culture, all swept away by the pagan invaders from Angeln, Saxony and Jutland, who eventually became the English.

  CHAPTER 57

  When the ceasefire was agreed, Slaymaker called Jed and Holly to the Oval Office to discuss his next moves. The overall plan was pretty clear. Northland needed to be supported and built up prior to annexation, and the independence of Quebec needed to be entrenched. As the three of them talked, a new assumption seemed to emerge that Canada’s western provinces would be persuaded to accede to the United States, thus uniting Alaska and Northland with the other forty-eight states in a single vast bloc encompassing most of the continent. Somehow it just seemed inevitable but, all the same, Holly did find it strange hearing her own voice calmly sketching out ways of driving the wedge still deeper between the virtuous westerners, who were almost American already, and the real Canucks in Ontario.