He quickly realized they took delivery of enough extra water per day in taxes and through other sources that they had an excess, and so he advised that they sell water on the city’s black market. A single unit of water fetched between twenty-five cents and a dollar, depending upon the news and whatever crisis was in vogue that week. At forty units per gallon, this made an excellent ongoing base for the economy, but it was not enough.
As Zach fretted over the figures at the big table in the map room, other Sherwood Rangers and officials busied about behind him.
“We need taxes, Renee,” he said as she sat down next to him. “That’s how all governments work.”
“We have taxes—”
“I mean more than two units—we need them to pay. You can’t run clinics and farms and schools on nothing.”
Gregor leaned into the table and crossed his arms. He still made Zach uneasy. In the transition from drug lord to general of the Sherwood army, very little seemed to have changed. He wore the same V-neck sweater most days and never donned a uniform. He moved like some great, lazy cat, languidly carrying his belly weight. When they’d had a conflict on the western border with the city, Zach had been startled at the speed with which the man could jump to action. Gregor served tea often—pulling off of the water bank liberally to do so. Indeed, tea ceremony, and more simply water ceremony, had become a part of Sherwood culture.
“Can you imagine?” Renee said in agitation. “We go from robbing from the rich to give to the poor, to charging them double taxes all in the space of what, a couple weeks? The irony would cause riots. Nottingham!” she called and raised her fist in mockery.
“The Rangers need money if they’re going to stay on,” Gregor said. “An idea only gets you so far. When that runs out, you have mass defections.”
“Sure, hey, let’s draw their blood too. We’ll arm the water carriers with syringes.”
“Renee—” Zach said.
“Marian,” she said.
He was allowed to call her Renee in private only. He exhaled and they all stared at the center of the table for a moment.
Somehow the thought of paying her Rangers had been a blind spot. There was something distasteful about the whole affair, and not for the first time that week did she long for the simplicity of being outside the law, fighting with a small band of believers. But admittedly, the sight of the Rangers out her window in the morning gave her a sort of happiness, a power and comfort. Dressed in green, like the yard of grass that ought to be below her.
“We can’t pay as we would in non-drought times,” Zach said, “but they’ve got families and bills. Some will drop out, others will join. How about we start them at thirty dollars a day. I can make a budget for that.”
“Forty,” Gregor said.
“Thirty-five,” Zach said. “We can’t hamstring ourself with more. Thirty-five with a potential weekly bonus. Put them on four-day work weeks. Depending upon the size of the force, that’s eight to twelve thousand dollars a day.”
“Every day?” Renee said. “Is that even possible?”
“Every single day. That’s why we need taxes.”
“Absolutely not,” Renee said. “Can’t they pay to get out of mandatory volunteer work?”
Zach snorted, “Every time you say mandatory volunteer I feel a little sick. Wait, what?” On paper he began to work through the math. “Say it costs, what, fifteen dollars? To get out of your one volunteer day?” Zach bounced his leg and scratched out the plan on paper. It was a massive number of potential volunteers, even after removing children and elders. Management of a fresh workforce of six or seven hundred volunteers on a daily basis was going to be an immense and interesting problem. “The percentage who pay will be a minority, but still I’d guess those would be decent revenues. With that alone we could hire one to two hundred Rangers a month. And I don’t think we let them opt out every time.”
Renee nodded, satisfied. She’d learned to move quickly on after decisions, and to rely on others to implement. There were so many systems to create. “Then we do it. Zach, draw up the policy. Gregor, put someone in charge.” She pounded her fist once on the table and smiled. “You people are geniuses. Progress, people!”
As she departed, on to the next task, she let her hand trail along Zach’s back and hoped he would feel in the caress an apology.
She was of two minds now, and one tinkered on in the background, observing what the other did, while the other commanded a country. She took to carrying a knife around. It was a thin-bladed fish boning knife, sharp as a razor. It had a subtle curve, like a miniature saber, and a solid plastic handle. The six-inch blade locked into a plastic sheath, and she wore it attached to her belt. She wore the knife parallel to the belt, in place of where a belt buckle would be, so that it took a moment’s observation to see that she was indeed armed. She did not wear it for show or to deter; she wore it because she was afraid.
She woke that morning out of a dream where soldiers stood around her bed—US Marines—shooting into her, and she’d looked up at them calmly, as she felt the blood drain from her body. It’d been a surprise to feel along her stomach after she’d woken and find nothing. No blood, no unnatural holes she could dip her index finger into. She lay in bed and let life return to her, trying to push away the feeling of impending doom.
“These are no end-times,” she whispered into the room. It was a mantra she’d taken up since her first night in Sherwood. A poem of sorts that had taken shape in her head, the words reeling out of her. “These are no end-times. This time is simply a tunnel, from one time to the next. I work here to see us through. The darkness is a passage.”
It was with great strength that she blotted from her mind the end of the mantra, a new addition: “I do not seed the violence.” The last part began to show up on her lips, materializing there out of deep subconscious, tacked on to the end of the mantra unbidden.
“Who said anything about violence?” Renee said aloud. Bea was gone, her bed meticulously made. A single shaft of dawn from the east made it through her north-facing window and burned orange against the west wall. Water, food, security, health, education. That’s what she did. And yet? She leaned up out of bed and looked down into the backyard and saw, as always, the small army there, rifles on their shoulders, pistols on their belts, Jamal in their midst, and she shuddered.
Renee divvied her own water share. Her Ranger-delivered unit gallon—minus one tax-unit—had been left at her door. The remaining 39 units—each one fortieth of a gallon of water—were divided between six task-based gallon jugs, old glass apple juice containers. Water to drink: 18 units. To cook with: 10 units. Cleaning: 4 units. Hygiene: 4 units,. Miscellaneous (a plant she had on her window sill, a luxury, the occasional wetted handkerchief to wipe her brow, etc): 1 unit. Charity: 1 unit. Savings: 1 unit. She stared at the portion she’d parted away for cleaning and it looked trivially small. Just over twelve ounces of water. She hungered for a shower and a way to properly wash her hair. But above all, she thought, she must live as she asked others to live.
She breathed in the smell of the water, taking pleasure from its many mysterious sounds, the way a quantity of it sounded in a glass jug, glunk, glunk, or the way the glass rang with the water inside when touched with the blade of her knife. She could delegate this, but divvying water was a vital ritual, a uniting one. She imagined herself performing the task in synchronicity with everyone else in Sherwood, like a morning prayer.
Today she would work on the clinics. She’d find doctors and nurses who understood her, who knew that these were not end-times, who may be persuaded to work locally and not in the hospitals. In her entire territory there had not been a single doctor’s office, and so she would need to find and pay for equipment and medicine. Nearly every day they carried bodies to the Rose City cemetery. People who had died because of dysentery or bloodshed, dehydration-related symptoms, old age, or the relentlessly boring pace of an apocalypse in slow motion. Fewer died than before she’d come, she remi
nded herself. They dug holes where they could find the space. She’d been to more than a few of these, wielding a shovel and talking to families and drawing off some of the hate and grief and taking it into herself. Afterwards the survivors told their friends and family that Maid Marian had come to the funeral and wept, and her renown deepened. Time is simply a tunnel, she told herself, from one time to the next. There is no end, there are no end-times.
Even without her, with her personal end—say, a marksman’s bullet taking her down—there was no end. She was only time’s helper, a temporary worker.
She ate the breakfast a Ranger brought her in the map room. No one else was yet in the room and this was when she loved it best. When all of Sherwood was only hers. It was in the early morning when she composed her notes to Sherwood. Later they were printed by her team in a fury in Sherwood’s computer room, so many to a page, in the hour of electricity, or when their batteries were charged, or hand-lettered en masse when technical difficulty made it necessary.
Her breakfast plate was divided into sections, rations on one side—a mottled piece of tinned fish and a clumpy bit of bulgur or something of its ilk—and on the other a fried egg, given to her by some grateful citizen and cooked with reverence by some other Sherwoodian. She tore into the egg. A surprising number of chickens were found in the territory, and they were also on her list. They needed roosters. Surely there was at least one lucky rooster in the territory. They needed a flock. These are no end-times. This is the beginning of time.
And then it hit her: This was the beginning, and time needed to reflect that. She pulled the calendar off the map room wall and stared at it. She would make July 17 the new independence day, the day when the nation of Sherwood rose up. But the year bothered her, sitting at the corner of the calendar with its four ungainly digits, its two-thousand-year baggage. She didn’t want that tacked onto any Sherwood holiday. She grabbed a marker from their meeting table and scratched a black patch over the year. Beside it she hesitated: was it the year zero or the year one? How does time begin?
In binary numbers, she remembered, 0 was off, 1 was on, 1 was yes. And so she wrote a big, chunky 1 on the calendar. Yes.
Dear Sherwood, July 24, Year 1, she wrote. Welcome to the end of week 1, in the year 1, of your new country.
She doodled in the margin for a moment as she thought back on her week of faith. She had nailed it. She had so nailed it. She fidgeted at the edge of the paper there trying to figure out how to word things, in the way an A-student futzed with the margins of a perfect essay before turning it in. A moment of reflection to delay the praise that was sure to come. Informally, her approval rating was in the nineties. Water delivery and street safety were now a given—in a single fucking week. There’s no way the citizens of Sherwood would go back.
As security issues began to resolve, Zach set in on Renee’s second wave of projects—clinics, schools, and farms—and he finished the last of his indicators. They were fine work, if he did say so himself. There were indicators for water level, Rangers, money, crimes, and food. Because he loved the numbers, he searched about for a few more he might add to the mix. He hit upon one that he thought might be a perfect indicator of Renee’s popularity: immigration versus emigration requests. At the time of his first tabulation they were 19 to 1.
Using the water carriers to query citizens, Zach put together a skills roster for the nation, and he developed a symbol system so that bikers and Rangers could quickly mark up each message with metadata, which greatly enhanced the efficiency of the information processing. This would not, he thought, be a nation that took its data processing lightly.
Among his other pet programs was something he called the “research department.” He’d tried to remember all the water-saving projects he and Nevel had come up with over hours freighted with the knowledge that the mayor would shoot down one after the other. Each of the department projects hung from the wall of the map room on a single clipboard. Some of them he got the official OK to put together a team to pursue, and some languished there. Along the top of each clipboard was the initial proposal:
Garden techniques—plastic sheeting and water drain-off, high density gardening, water recycling via elevated, cascading beds. Build series of greenhouses.
Urophagia (drinking urine)—issues: salt danger to kidneys, marketability for mass consumption, instructional manual for population. Benefits: extreme recycling! Or: Urine filtration for other uses (boil + steam runoff?).
Rain dancing—Seriously, why the hell not? Needed: team of four to hunt down anthropological books mentioning the subject for possible techniques. Seek out any elder Native Americans in the territory that might have a connection to traditional rituals. Evidence of efficacy? Mass institution? Ritualize it? Dance party?
Well digging—secure location closer to Columbia River. Previous attempts moderately promising, yielding a trickling amount of water after substantial digging.
Cloud seeding—(i.e., rain making through chemicals!): in need of silver iodide or dry ice.
Employment metrics—guarantee that every citizen works for pay at least one day a week.
Independent Press—crucial, but govt. hand must be absent. Suggest meetings w/ former journalists?
Distillery—Improve upon ration-distilling techniques, consult gardener. Make some small portion available. For sale? As part of distribution?
In the meantime he began a surveying project, sending a dozen or so water carriers off with questionnaires in order to measure the satisfaction of the citizens with their new government.
It was not at all unlike a small village, Zach thought, one in which the populace’s survival dangled by a thin thread of interconnectivity. The slightest of tension and that thread breaks, and people die. All of them were hyper-dependent upon each other, and upon outside forces.
Pulling down a sheet of scratch paper he penciled SHERWOOD at the top, and then spent a half hour idly drawing trapezoids below it.
In a village, he thought, much of the security and functional nature was dependent upon its small size. The smallness led to an increased familiarity and mutual dependency and thus trust. With their nation, much larger than a village, he set out to duplicate these aspects of a village, while attempting to keep some of their scale. The government must feel as though it is familiar and known to its citizens, humanly recognizable, the arms of it going deep into the citizen’s lives, or conversely, the sensation that each citizen holds a marionette string straight to the top.
Below the trapezoids, he wrote:
Cannot exceed the level beyond which citizens are human-processable by the government.
On the side of his unit gallon he stared at the phrase he’d asked them to write on the side before they went to mass production. “That which is measured improves.” It was more true now than ever before.
On Saturday, August 18, Jason helped his father with the tunnel while his sister napped upstairs. His mother, Cora, was talking to a neighbor across the street. His job was to take loads of dirt up to the backyard. There were great mounds there now that he knew his mother didn’t approve of, but his father had promised to make a series of raised beds from the dirt. Step gardening, he’d said brightly, as if it were a feature she’d always wanted, as if any sort of gardening was possible. For when the drought is over! He’d managed to get grudging approval.
Jason had two plastic beach buckets and he took them to the end of the tunnel to be refilled.
“Ready for another load, sir?” Nevel said. His tunnel had at first snaked its way toward the street in front of the house. It was the way the wall faced and digging straight out felt right. Then the tunnel took a subtle bend to the right and Nevel knew it was because of the highly attractive woman who lived across the street and one house up. There were no definitive plans—none, other than, Nevel had justified, if you are going to tunnel, tunnel toward beauty. He liked the idea of sitting in the tunnel below her house, the feel of her sleeping up there somewhere. Obviously, he knew,
this was deeply perverted shit to get into. It was not a fantasy to share with your family, who could scarcely understand your motivation for digging a tunnel in the first place. But he was nowhere near that destination yet and had kept himself from thinking about it in too precise terms. Lately, however, a side tunnel had made some marked progress in the direction of Sherwood. He looked down from shoring up a wall. His son Jason was contentedly embedding a toy car into the dirt at three feet high.
“All right, let’s get you another load.”
“Do other houses have tunnels, Dad?”
This was a startling question and Nevel froze for a moment, listening to the earth, wondering if just beyond any of the walls he worked on there were the ends of some other neighbor’s tunnel. Perhaps all men dug beneath their houses. Perhaps he was simply another victim of some mental illness epidemic brought on by the drought that turned fathers into moles. Perhaps the beautiful woman in 3416 was working on one and their two tunnels would meet. A tunnely tryst may await him already!
“Huh . . .” Nevel said, gripping the tunnel wall in a brief moment of vertigo. “I don’t know. We should ask your mom, wouldn’t she know?” After a moment he said, “No, let’s not ask her. I’m going to guess no, right?”
It would be a beautiful thing if it were so. He liked the idea of a secret shared closeness with his neighbors. Some mutual passion they could not speak of.
Sherwood Nation Page 27
