by Andy Graham
“Sit down, Private.” Rick pulled the silk hanky out and mopped his brow. There must be something I can do. Even from here.
“Sir,” Marka said, watching him. “I don’t want to speak out of turn, but I’d get rid of that hanky if I were you.”
“The hanky?” It was sweat darkened and limp.
“The resistance have adopted the material as their symbol,” Marka said. “The Silk Revolution — bloodless and smooth. Groups march down the streets waving silk hankies and scarves. They’re demanding the reinstatement of De Lette. Personally, I think the protesters are more interested in a repeal of the new laws being rushed out. There’s talk of prohibition, closing the coal mines, a ban on non-GM food and permanent curfews. People have been mugged just for wearing a silk shirt by pro-government supporters.”
“I thought the revolution was bloodless?” He stuffed the hanky back in his pocket. It had become Rose’s in his mind; she already owned it, despite never seeing it.
“Relatively, sir. State history overlooks details that don’t fit with the accepted narrative.”
Rick turned his body so the camera on the wall was behind him. “Careful,” he mouthed, indicating the camera with his eyes, “keep it neutral.” There were some things that were dangerous to think, let alone say, in the present political climate. Rick didn’t want this kid to get into trouble just because he was hungry for news and she was happy to talk. Marka must have realised the same, the ease that had slipped into her posture was gone. She was as stiff as the chair she sat in. Before things got any worse, Rick went for the safe solution. “You’re dismissed.”
“Yes, sir.” As she turned to leave, she flashed him a hint of a smile. “I’ll be back soon to see if you need anything else, sir.”
The door clicked shut leaving Rick alone again, acutely aware of the flashing red light of the camera above him, of the silk hanky in his pocket pressing into his thigh, and the sense of dread that the Silk Revolution was far from over.
16
No Ifs, Ands or Buts
Another week passed, each day identical to the previous: up before the sun and the daily timed run and log drills everyone in the military had to do before anything else. The soldiers referred to it as the breakfast that set you up for the day. This was followed by showers and their first meal, invariably some kind of grey slush with differently textured lumps in it to give it flavour. This was known as the first training session of the day; if it didn’t kill you, it wouldn’t make you stronger.
Today, like every other day, his breakfast sloshing around in his stomach, Rick made the long trudge to what he tried to think of as his office. The windowless room doubled as a dumping ground for both old computers and a questionable war hero who was having treasonous thoughts.
As he turned into the last corridor, a dead end with a camera blinking down at him from high on the walls, he wondered how long he could stretch out his research. A twisting feeling had been worming through him since Marka’s visit, unrelated to the food. What if his work on the sun-fans and the power bridge, this elecqueduct, were the only things keeping him and his family safe? He pulled out his access card to start another day in his cubicle.
“Another day in solitary is another day closer to home,” he reminded himself as he swiped in. Not even Private Marka had been back to see him since her last visit. Closing the door, the sigh died in his mouth as the chair spun round.
“Hello, Rick. I thought you’d be here by now, but then you were always a little slow in the morning, weren’t you?”
He stood to attention, warring feelings springing up in his stomach. “Hello, ma’am,” he said, with a glance up at the camera.
Beth followed his eyes. “It’s off, Rick. I had it deactivated yesterday. I convinced them you weren’t a problem, that you worked best without being watched.”
He heard the odd stress in the sentence but let it pass. Standing at ease, he clutched the water bottle he had filched from the canteen behind his back.
“Aren’t you going to ask me to sit down, this is your office?” she asked.
“You are sitting. And no more games please. Are you here for an update on my work?”
“To apologise. I was more than a little forward last time, in my office. You didn’t deserve it and I’m not sure why I did it. I guess I was more stressed about what was going on than I realised. Hamilton has kept me on as presidential permanent secretary, so I’m safe for the time being.” She held out a hand. “Friends?”
She looked different. Weary or jaded? Her eyes were the same defiant blue as always but the dark rings under them were deeper than before. Her skin tauter. Her hair, however, gleamed the same oil-black colour it always had. Six years ago, Rick had found, and pulled out, her first grey hair. They’d been lying on a library floor being watched over by dusty anatomy books. Days later, it had been closed. The Great Library of Tye sealed forever. It was a superficial improvement to the dark period in Ailan’s past when furnaces had been fuelled by words, and anyone the state considered an ‘intellectual’ had been found floating in giant vats of ink.
As if reading his thoughts, Beth patted a stray hair back into place. “You know me too well but I’m not bluffing, Rick. This is a genuine apology. It was touch and go for a while. I was guaranteeing you safety when I had no assurances of my own. When I saw you, I slipped back into the old pattern.” She clasped her hands together, rubbing the ring finger of her right hand. “It felt comfortable, the flirting, being able to strip off and dance around a man with no worry about repercussions. It was liberating.”
“And what if I’d made a move?” His pulse was hammering under the burn scars on his wrists.
“You wouldn’t have. You never cheated on me, so you wouldn’t do that to your wife and child.”
“How do you know I didn’t cheat on you?”
“Because I tried to set you up on enough occasions with my friends to prove to them that not all men were driven by the little ball-brain.”
Rick laughed, the sound uncomfortable in the small room. “I should’ve known it wasn’t my charm and good looks that were responsible for the sudden surge in interest when we were together.”
“It made things easier for me,” Beth said. “I knew it was a sure thing, no ifs, ands or buts, that you’d stay loyal.”
Rick shoved his notes to one side and slammed the water bottle on the desk. Beth had ignored him for weeks and now turns up and dumps this on him? “You told me once that loyalty gets you nowhere. You called it highbrow emotional blackmail, used and abused to inculcate a sense of belonging or security into others. That someone seeking someone else to be loyal to is a sign of weakness. That the only kind of loyalty worth having is that from a dog.”
“Rick, please.”
“I was loyal to you, Beth. If we use your pessimistic logic, what does that say about me?”
“I was loyal to you, too,” she replied quietly. “I don’t have an answer to your question and it annoys me.”
Rick crashed into his chair. “You want a loyal dog, go to the Donian Mountains. Talk to Private Marka about it. Apology accepted, by the way, so unless you have anything else to say, I have some electronic bugs to squash in the name of National Security.”
Beth rubbed the mole on the tip of her nose, pulling at it between thumb and forefinger. He knew what that gesture meant. She was nervous. Rick bit back his frustrations. “Why are you here, Beth?”
17
The Great Trade Conflict
Beth headed over to the file boxes on the shelves. Successive division heads in Sci-Corps had had different ideas of how things should be ordered. Keen to make a mark, each one had imposed fresh systems on the old. It had resulted in an organisational backlog of the archives that was as inconsistent as it was unnecessary, and stretched into layers of dust on the shelves.
She was calmer now; the deep lines in her face gone. Some people drank, exercised, surfed drivel on the internet or bullied others in order to unwind. Beth syst
emised. She called it organising; Rick called it controlling. He guessed she was trying to decide whether the files looked better in alphabetical order or by height.
“Do you know why the Great Trade Conflict, the last official war we took part in, was fought?” She blew a swathe of dust off a binder full of old electronic bits and pieces and placed it next to a file marked with the same year.
Date, Rick realised, she had gone for time in the end. The dust at the far end had already been partially wiped off the shelves. Someone must have been in here while he was off duty, looking for something amongst all the digital junk.
“A handful of Ailan politicians and business people wanted to protect their own commercial interests from interference from foreign companies. They rebelled against the deal proposed by the president and chancellor of the time,” he said, digging the filth out of a groove on the keyboard. “Every school kid in my generation remembers learning those headlines. ‘The Day Decorum Died.’ ‘Parliament Goes on a Pub-Brawl.’ They were whipping each other with ties, soaked in red wine of all things, by the time the police brought it under control. I remember acting it out with Stann in the Axeford playground. The footage of that scene is what got me into cameras in the first place.”
Beth stuck her fingers in her ears. “Stop. I know. You told me that every time you got drunk.”
Rick ignored the jibe. “That fight spawned the Great Trade Conflict. Beyond that, I don’t really know what the GTC was about. Except we’d have a lot more families in Ailan if the soldiers sent to war had fought with wine-soaked ties rather than bullets and bombs. My dad survived and celebrated the old-fashioned way. Nine months later I popped out.”
Beth finished sorting a series of old pen drives and discs into a box she had labelled ‘dead or dying (possibly diseased)’, and slid it back onto a shelf. “There’s not much more to tell,” she said. “No one wanted their life ruled by a faceless committee of multinational shareholders and lawyers, many of whom had never even set foot in our country. If we’d made a decision that didn’t fit into their business plans, they could have taken everything from us: medicine, milk, motorways.”
“You’re doing your alphabetised noun trick again, Beth.”
She held up her middle finger over her shoulder, what the soldiers called ‘flying the eagle’. Pausing in her reorganisation, she traced a smiling face in a dust-covered screen. It was a habit he remembered from the steam of a bathroom mirror, her way of starting the day with a smile.
Rick considered helping her with the files. It would make a change from his time buried with the sun-fans but, even after their bickering, he wasn’t sure he trusted himself to be that close to her anymore, despite what she had said about his loyalty. That bothered him — a burr under his saddle he couldn’t reach but wouldn’t scratch if he could. He twisted back to the desk, flicked through his notepad and psyched himself up to wrestle with his computer for another day.
“Mennai and the mainland countries decided they were at risk from this trade deal, too.” Beth pressed on with her impromptu history lesson. Rick let her talk, she seemed to need it. “So they allied with Ailan, briefly, to fight the larger overseas enemies. Since the conflict ended, trade has been booming and prices are lower than ever before.”
“We won. I know. Where are you going with this?”
Beth checked the date on a set of files and moved them. “Our former enemies are massively in debt. They were trying to avoid the war reparations but their lawyers ran out of excuses, even lame ones. So, the UN’s solution was the Universal Nations Financial Aid Information Report. And they should have written that acronym out before agreeing on it.”
There was a low whine from Rick’s server. He scrambled to pull the plug out, peppered the air with curses and gave the computer a kick before switching it on again. The machine spat his clearance back at him. Computers, he thought, fuming. A miracle of technology that was moodier than a grounded teenager on a Friday night. The log-in screen flashed random letters at him, this time alternating with indistinct images outlined in pixelated rainbows. He was running out of patience. The only solution he could think of was kicking the computer harder.
“I thought you had a way with those things?” Beth asked. “Don’t you dream in binary?”
“My dreams aren’t quite as simple anymore.” Rick rattled the keyboard against the desk. “And this computer’s mother was a brick, a dead brick.”
Beth gave him a quizzical look as she trailed a finger along the shelf to check the files were flush. “De Lette realised Ailan was never going to see any money from the other countries, so he used an executive order to bypass parliament. He agreed to give our erstwhile opponents a debt-shave and preferential trade agreements. They couldn't pay anyway, so he figured that trade agreements, primarily for gas and coal, were more valuable.”
“Give me gold any day.”
“Gold? Worthless. You can’t cook over gold, or run our old, ravenous power stations with gold. The modern, super-efficient power stations we had allowed foreign governments to build in Ailan prior to the GTC had been shut down remotely when those governments thought we were criticising them. So much for the new ‘extra special relationship’ it was touted as. The only people happy about the divorce were our security services. They called those stations information sink holes. I don’t understand the logic behind politicians so pro-privatisation they allow foreign governments to buy up our public services. Nationalisation is bad except when a foreign power is nationalising our country? It still makes no sense.”
She scooped up a bunch of pen drives and tossed them into the box she had labelled. “I do know a handful of people who got very rich off those deals, though. One man in particular. He could keep himself warm by burning his money, while the rest of the country is still recovering from the massive shortfall in energy supply.”
“Your point?”
“In the wilderness what's more important: shiny stuff or stuff you can burn?”
He dragged his eyes away from his pig-headed computer to watch Beth. The slightly glazed look some people had while tipsy, Beth got when her mind was running on several levels. “You can buy the latter with the former?”
“Yes, but if you have the latter, you get the former. Lots of it. Unless you’re a magpie, gold is overrated. Pissing your trousers in the snow to warm yourself up is not a long-term solution, but that seems to be the way some people think. If I’d been president, I wouldn’t have traded only for fuel, I’d have included brain power. Siphon off all the doctors, engineers and scientists, and leave our trading partners with a bunch of idealists, celebrities and creative types. That would’ve helped us and hindered them.”
“A no-brainer.”
“Stop right there.” Beth held up a hand and even the dust motes floating in the air seemed to freeze where they were. “Even by the dubious standards of dad-jokes, that was low.”
“It’s not our fault. It’s a genetic thing, kicks in with the birth of your firstborn.”
She gave him a rancid look. “Have you fixed that computer yet?”
“You want to try it?”
“That’ll be a no then.” She stooped down to a low shelf to straighten some files. Her trousers stretched tight across her behind and Rick spun his chair round, gripping the monitor with both hands.
“The debtors signed a contract that they would have to deal with us exclusively, at a preferential rate, once their economy had stabilised, at a level predetermined by us. Then they could start paying back the money. It makes perfect sense — an act of charity and compassion that benefits both parties. Our opponents were a major export market for us. As things stand, with rampant inflation and an incontinent banking system, they can’t afford to buy anything from us.”
Hands on hips, head tilted, Beth surveyed her work; an artist assessing her creation. Though lopsided, the reorganisation of the files seemed to satisfy her. Hooking the second chair with her foot, she sent it twirling towards the desk. The smooth l
ines of her suit softened as she sat and helped herself to his water bottle. She licked a clear bead of water off her lips in what appeared to be slow motion. Rick gave the server a kick just because he could.
“I thought De Lette’s plan was a good one,” she said. “Hamilton didn’t. He made several speeches opposing it in the Chambers of Justice and Reason. He said generosity was a primal display of weakness. That it would lead to our streets being flooded with foreigners — hordes of marauding cockroaches feeding off our compassion. Hamilton claimed the riots that led up to the revolution were just the beginning and the attack in Castle Brecan was the end, the coin that tips the scales of justice from tolerance to retribution.”
“My wife’s one of those cockroaches.”
Beth poked him in the arm with the water bottle. “I didn’t see your wife rioting in any of the pictures from the news reports.”
“Images are easy to doctor, you know that. One dodgy picture’s worth a thousand written lies.”
“So she was rioting?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t not say that.”
She jabbed him in the arm again. He batted the water bottle away. “What’s your point, Beth?”
“I don’t know why you’re so spiky. It can’t just be about that bloody computer.”
“Our new president just accused my wife of being a violent cockroach. What do you think is the problem? She wouldn’t riot, at least not in public. It’s not her style. And it would help if we had access to unbiased news, rather than regurgitated images with random captions tagged onto them.”
“News outlets exist to sell content, not tell the truth. They’re businesses, just like banks, lawyers and you people with your bullets.” Beth pointed the bottle at him. “And your wife’s country benefits from De Lette’s trade deals.”
