America City

by Chris Beckett

  AFTERWORD

  Holly enters the warmth and brightness of the terminal. There are stores and restaurants, information points and check-ins. Foreign workers in yellow jumpsuits sweep the marble floors.

  She walks over to the viewing window and searches the sky for the drig. She can just make out a little speck, a fleck of mica glinting in the sun. But very quickly it becomes a distinct image, a toy, a scale model, and finally a real machine, an enormous powerful machine, laboring toward her through the layers of freezing air. She can almost feel the expenditure of power involved, the straining of metal muscles, as it forces itself down to the solid earth.

  A small tornado of powdered snow swirls up. Up here it does still sometimes snow in June.

  The drig’s engines swivel forward and it begins to trundle toward the passenger bridges on its massive tires. Four bridges lock into place along its hull.

  Holly makes her way to the arrivals area and finds herself a place at the railing. People start to emerge from the gate. First a young black guy in a business suit who doesn’t expect anyone to meet him, glancing at his cristal as he heads for the car hire offices. Then a white couple pulling two giant suitcases. Then a young Inuit girl who is greeted with hoots and yells by eight or nine members of her extended family. Holly notices how they’ve learnt to ignore the hostile, suspicious eyes of the people around them by making a kind of bubble around themselves.

  Passengers are soon emerging in a steady stream. But after ten minutes or so the stream thins to a trickle and she’s one of only a handful still waiting. She asks her jeenee if she’s missed a message, but it says no. She wonders if she’s somehow got the arrival time wrong, or if he’s changed his mind.

  ‘Just check the passenger list, would you?’ she tells her jeenee. But she’s barely finished speaking when there he is, all by himself in the area between the gate and the railing. He is grayer than he used to be, and not quite as thin, but still unmistakably Richard. It’s been eleven years since they saw each other.

  ‘Rick!’ she yells. ‘Over here!’

  A guarded, cautious smile as he heads toward her. They hug rather formally.

  As they pull apart, she can see him registering the giant portrait of Stephen Slaymaker that beams down benignly at the arrival gates.

  And the image comes into her mind, as it does most days, of a blonde young woman, tumbling and spinning down the deep, deep well of the sky. To escape from the vertigo, she grabs Richard’s hands much more vehemently than she’d intended. ‘Welcome!’ she tells him, as she feels him tensing uncomfortably. ‘Welcome to America City!’

  She tells the car to take a scenic route. They go right into town, through the tall towers of the business district, past the Fleet Mall, where you can shop without a coat even in January, and into the plaza in front of city hall where the Freedom Monument, carved from Nunavut granite, honors the heroes of the War of Independence. Then they swing out over to Lakeside Park, with its clumps of half-grown pine trees, its pathways lightly dusted with snow.

  Richard wants to stretch his legs, so they button up their coats, and walk down to the lake. The dome and portico of the new State Capitol stands right in front of them across the water.

  ‘Funny how we still build them in the classical style,’ Richard observes, ‘after all these centuries, and in a continent that Rome had never even heard of.’

  In front of the Capitol, three giant flag poles stand side by side, the flags flapping and flicking restlessly. On the left is the state flag of Nunavut. In the middle is the American flag, with its thirteen stripes and its sixty stars. (Or thereabouts anyway: states are being added at quite a rate these days, and the flags don’t always keep up.) On the right is the three-star flag of the nation of Northland.

  ‘They still fly that Northland flag, I see,’ says Richard, as they begin to walk along the lakeside path.

  ‘Yup. It’s very popular up here, even though Northland only lasted a few months, and even though most of the current population arrived after the annexation.’

  They walk along the lake for ten minutes then turn back across the park toward the car.

  ‘So remind me,’ says Richard, ‘these days you’re working on...?’

  ‘I’ve got my fingers in several pies. It’s the same kind of thing as before – PR, campaigning – but I’m trying to challenge myself a bit more.’

  ‘What? More than winning a presidential election? More than annexing a country?’

  She doesn’t answer this – or doesn’t appear to, anyway.

  ‘I actually designed that Northland flag,’ she says after a few minutes.

  ‘You did? You’re kidding me? It used to be everywhere! It used to—’

  ‘I also chose the name of Northland and the name of America City. But that’s all trivia really, isn’t it? If it hadn’t been that flag or those names, there would have been others. America was always going to annex the territories at some point, whatever we did, just like China was going to take over eastern Russian and Japan was going to take over...what’s its name?...that Russian island.’

  Richard considers this claim in silence.

  ‘So what does a real challenge consist of?’ he asks after a while.

  ‘Making things happen that weren’t going to happen anyway. For instance, persuading people to spend money taking carbon out of the air. That’s hard. Even now when absolutely fucking everyone can see just what that stuff has done. Even now when we’re having to move the USA to the goddam Arctic!’

  She turns to look at him as they continue to walk beside the lake. The water is very clear, very empty.

  ‘And you’re writing a book about Slaymaker?’

  ‘I thought I’d give it a go. It’d be a new thing for me, writing about someone who lived in my lifetime. There are already a million books about him, obviously, but I was kind of hoping you’d have a few insights that would give me an edge.’

  They drive to her house at the city’s northern edge. The June snowfall passes, and the sky clears. Holly shows him round her home. It’s a beautiful building, but curiously empty and austere. Monastic, Richard thinks, penitential even. On the dresser in her bedroom he’s surprised to see a small print of that famous image of the woman soldier falling, a tiny cartwheeling shape with nothing around her but sky. And right next to it, a tiny nativity carved in Inuit style from a piece of soapstone.

  They’re into a second bottle of wine when they finally come back to Slaymaker.

  ‘He wasn’t a bad man,’ Holly says. ‘I mean, you tell me one president in the history of America who didn’t get involved in a war? It’s just something they have to do. Like that king of yours, remember? The one in Beowulf.’

  ‘King Scyld.’

  ‘That’s the one. Slaymaker came from a place where life was hard and there wasn’t much love. He didn’t try to make himself care about things about things he didn’t care about, and he didn’t try to stop himself from caring about the things he did. I know we should, of course. We should let reason moderate our feelings. But there was something refreshingly...I don’t know...I guess natural...about the way he just went with what he was.’

  ‘The foundling who became a king,’ says Richard, standing up and walking over to the triple-glazed picture window that forms one entire side of Holly’s dining room.

  ‘I can’t get over how light it is. It looks like mid-afternoon.’

  Holly comes over to join him, and they stand side by side, a couple of feet apart, looking at the bare rock, the black earth, the empty water.

  ‘We were going to have kids once, remember?’ Richard says.

  ‘I remember them,’ she says. ‘Their names were Penny and Saul.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to my former colleagues Eve Slaymaker and Hollie Peacock, and to Eve’s husband Nigel Stephen Slaymaker, for the loan of their fine names. Just to be clear, the characters named after them do not resemble them in any other way, except perhaps in respect of a shared fo
ndness for dogs.

  Many thanks to my always perceptive editor Sara O’Keeffe, and, as ever, to my agent John Jarrold for his support.

  Special thanks to Nick Brooks and to my son Dom for conversations about climate change that persuaded me I should write this book in the first place. I am solely responsible, however, for any flaws in my portrayal of the effects of global warming.