Let Us Be True

by Alex Christofi

  Richard bowed his head, letting the defensive anger subside before he answered. ‘Slaymaker’s energy is immense, Holly, I’ve never disputed that. But, God damn it, that doesn’t make him right!’

  ‘No one really knows what’s right, Rick, no one. But there are two kinds of people in the world. The ones who get on with stuff and the ones like my dad who just sit and criticize.’

  ‘So which kind was Attila the Hun?’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’

  She went out after that. She wanted to watch the hub news without his disapproving presence beside her, so she took herself down to the bar in the village. Richard watched the broadscreen on his own.

  President Williams was the first item. She was in a difficult position. International good manners required that she dissociate herself from the inflammatory behaviour of Senator Slaymaker. But to go too far in that direction would have been electoral suicide, because Slaymaker’s demands on Canada had been hugely popular: all through the day, large crowds had been taking part in pro-Slaymaker demonstrations in most large US cities. So she criticized the senator’s ‘intemperate language, lack of clarity and lack of sensitivity to the feelings of our friends in Canada’ but, at the same time, complained about the incompetent policing of the event by the Canadian authorities. And she spoke of the importance of her forthcoming talks in Ottawa, and the need to move very quickly there on adjusting Canadian immigration quotas to take account of ‘changing realities’.

  Suzanne Ryan, the Canadian prime minister, had been so close to Jenny Williams on so many issues that the North American media had dubbed them ‘the Gray Sisters’, but now Ryan’s own support base demanded a strong and angry response to what had happened at the Opheim crossing.

  ‘It’s all very well for the United States government to try to dissociate itself from the inflammatory language of Senator Slaymaker,’ she bellowed in the House of Commons in Ottawa, ‘but actions speak louder than words. When more than five thousand Americans gathered at a single frontier crossing, where were the American police? Why was it left to the Canadian security services to attempt to stem the tide, and what right did the American government then have to complain about the way it was handled? Have we ever denied the right of the United States, now or in the past, to rigorously protect its southern border against illegal migration from Mexico? Is anyone seriously arguing that our police, who did not cause a single injury, were in some way inferior to the US Border Patrol which shoots dead roughly ten – that’s right, ten – Mexicans a month?

  ‘Yes, and why, when the Canadian, Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic governments are all now asking the Council of Nations to urgently consider a resolution confirming the right of Arctic countries to determine their own immigration policy, did the United States choose to turn away from these four old allies and stand alongside Greater China in indicating its intention of vetoing any such move? It seems that the United States prefers to associate itself with China’s land-grabbing activities along its northern border, than to stand by its old friends!’

  And then Montello and Frinton came on, both of them saying that of course Canada should do more, and they’d always believed that, but Slaymaker wasn’t handling it in the right way.

  Richard turned off the screen. In the silence he found himself suddenly stranded, almost unable to move, as if he’d switched off his motivation along with the screen.

  Meaning depended on there being a future, he thought. People could bear the thought of their own individual annihilation, but they needed to feel that when they were gone, they’d be leaving something behind them, whether it was children, or a farm, or people who remember them, or something they’d made, like his books. Okay, they were fooling themselves in most cases – most people vanished without a trace – but there needed to be a future for us to even be able to kid ourselves.

  He had an impulse to call Alice. They could discuss the rehearsal, and no doubt get onto the news. And Alice always made him feel better about himself. Her obvious interest in him always reassured him that there was something here that merited interest. But then he noticed that Holly had gone out without her jacket. The sky was clear outside and the night was growing cold, so he thought he’d take it down to the bar for her.

  The dark ridge lowered above the village. Thousands of stars blazed down. The tiny figure of Richard made its way along the empty, dimly lit street, past houses with drawn curtains, and here and there the flickering light of a broadscreen.

  Holly was sitting by herself at the window of the bar, frowning with concentration as she muttered silently to her jeenee, her hands shaping punctuation marks. She looked very tired and, for some reason, very young.

  He tapped on the window, holding up her jacket. She started, but as soon as she saw it was him, her face broke into a smile that instantly melted him.

  He went inside. The rocket music was playing as usual. Space rocket sounds whooshed softly around the bar, while a female voice lamented a beautiful starship captain, who’d flown away to far, far Centaurus.

  ‘I thought you’d get cold.’

  ‘That’s nice of you, dearest. I’m just about done with this. Shall we walk back together? I can finish off in the morning.’

  She slipped her arm through his as they headed home.

  ‘I don’t think you’re like my dad in the slightest. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m relieved to hear it.’

  They stopped and kissed. Her lips were soft and warm.

  ‘Dad would never have thought of bringing me my coat.’

  They passed the white church, the little park, the vehicle charging station. They didn’t talk about Slaymaker. They didn’t use the time to talk about their future together, just about small ordinary things.

  It is hard to believe that things are really going to change, when they are still there right in front of you, the same as ever.

  Holly couldn’t sleep, though. She crept back downstairs – how different their living room felt in the middle of the night with only her there – and flipped on her cristal, telling the jeenee to pull up the day’s haul from her scoopers, and sort them into semantic bundles.

  Show me a Canuck and I’ll show you a traitor. That, with many variations, was the last twenty-four hours’ most frequent catch, with over a million iterations already on the whisperstream, increasingly accompanied, as time went on, by either a hangman’s noose or a revolutionary-era tricorn hat. The message seemed to be of human origin, and certainly wasn’t generated by any of Slaymaker’s feeders, though they had enthusiastically recycled it, and they had, on Holly’s instructions, been reminding the whisper-stream for several days that the Canadian colonies had taken the British side in the War of Independence.

  The AIs that controlled feeders routinely generated their own small polls to check the impact of new messages. These revealed that the ‘Canuck traitor’ message had been most popular among low-to-medium skilled voters in the eighteen to thirty-five age group. North and south of the country, the approval rating among that particular demographic group was over 80 percent for men and 70 percent for women. For both genders, the addition of the noose image increased the popularity rating by two points. The tricorn hat was popular, too, even though less than 40 percent of this same demographic group recognized the reference to the American Revolution, and over 20 percent believed that Canada’s treachery had been to side with America’s enemies during the various global wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Even though the opposite was actually true, Holly’s more down-market feeders had duly recycled messages to this effect, for their brief was to amplify any message, any message at all that would chip away at the idea of American–Canadian solidarity. Canada helped the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and Canada helped the Arabs attack New York had both proved popular, with something like ten thousand iterations each. Even the more exotic Canada helped the Arabs attack Pearl Harbor had proved to have its fans.

  Factual accuracy meant very li
ttle to the whisperstream, flowing along its countless separate parallel channels like the buried id of human society, hidden away, often denied or decried by its own creators, yet far more powerful than anything that lay above. Factual accuracy – factual accuracy even as an aspiration – was for the broadscreen-based news hubs, and only a minority of the population ever looked at those. Down in the stream, as in art, it wasn’t the literal truth of a thing that counted, but whether it felt true in your gut.

  The only good Canuck is a dead one: that was pretty popular too (and again apparently human in origin and not generated by any of Slaymaker’s feeders) and so were images of burning or bloodstained maple leaf flags. Among the higher-skilled/lower-professional demographic a popular message that day had been: The Canucks caused this mess and now they damn well need to help us clear it up. This was human-generated as well, although it seemed to draw on some work Holly had done with her feeders a few days previously in which she’d pointed out that Canada had been a major oil producer at one time, and therefore a major contributor to the world’s current weather problems. (America had produced much more oil than Canada, but of course that was entirely irrelevant for these present purposes.)

  Holly laid her cristal down on the table. She looked round the room, she and Richard’s little familiar living room, with that smart cream-colored sofa they’d bought at the Seafront Warehouse in Seattle, the broadscreen with the loose wires at the back, the old-fashioned side lamp that had belonged to Richard’s grandmother, the bold, bright semi-abstract painting of a Cascades mountainside in the fall that was their wedding present from Ruby. In the daylight, or in the evening when other people were there, that room was full of familiar meanings and associations, but now in the middle of the night, all of that was gone. It was just a box filled with random lumps of inanimate matter.

  ‘A message from Ruby,’ her jeenee whispered through the implant in her ear.

  Holly tensed. ‘Okay, read it to me.’

  ‘Hi Holly,’ the jeenee said. ‘Can’t sleep. Very upset by what’s happening on the border. Everyone here’s very scared, and me and Ossia have been getting abuse just for being American. Can we talk sometime?’

  ‘Put her through,’ Holly told the jeenee, and almost at once there was her friend’s kind face on her cristal screen.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep either,’ Holly said.

  Ruby was tense, talking quickly as if she’d had to rehearse what she was going to say in advance and was now gabbling it out like a script. ‘I really don’t want to think badly of you, Holly, I really don’t, but I know you’re part of this and I just don’t get it. I had a woman in a store yesterday tell me to fuck off back to the States. Ossia is convinced that she lost a big role the other day just because she’s American. Why are you doing this? What has Canada done to deserve it? What have Americans in Canada done to deserve it?’

  ‘Listen, let’s meet. Let’s have a meal together, and I’ll explain.’

  CHAPTER 34

  Holly wished she hadn’t suggested this idea almost as soon as she had spoken it, but Ruby ran with it, booking a restaurant five miles from the border on the American side. She also invited Ossia, along with Sergio and Mariana, which wasn’t what Holly had in mind at all. They met among tropical plants, with a pianist and a flautist playing soft liquid geometry music with an AI music machine that gathered their notes and built them into a wonderfully intricate tower of sound that constantly changed but never lost its architectural symmetry. Beautiful dishes were laid in front of them. Everyone was angry with Holly.

  ‘Jesucristo, Holly, I just can’t believe you are carrying on with these rallies after Opheim,’ Sergio rumbled almost as soon as they’d ordered.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Ossia, coldly furious. ‘What kind of politician encourages people to cross the border of another country?’

  ‘A very reckless and immature one,’ said Mariana.

  ‘A realist,’ Holly said.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ exclaimed Ossia.

  ‘A realist,’ Holly repeated, ‘and, by the way, Ossia, I thought you were against borders of any kind?’

  ‘Oh please, Holly!’ snorted Sergio. ‘That wasn’t just people crossing a border. That was an act of aggression.’

  ‘We’re asking a great deal of northern voters,’ Holly said. ‘They have problems of their own, but we’re asking them to voluntarily shoulder a burden. The only way we’ve been able to get them to agree to it is by saying that at least part of the load will be shared by others even further north.’

  ‘You can’t just use—’ began Sergio but, to Holly’s surprise, Richard interrupted him.

  ‘Seems to me,’ he said slowly, ‘that people like us – delicados if we really must call ourselves that – people like us have never quite got politics. We think of it as something you debate round a dinner table like this, or in the whisperstream at best, and maybe sign the odd petition once in a while, or go on a march. We see political discourse as a way of demonstrating our moral credentials, and we act as if we believe that, for our views to prevail, all that’s needed is for us to prove irrefutably the moral superiority of our ideas.’

  Sergio was trying to break in, but Richard held up his hand to stop him. ‘But, as you know, I’m a historian, and history tells me that what we call politics is barely politics at all. Our politics is a game, a ritual of purification, a way of washing away the sin of our privilege. But real politics is about deals. It’s about building coalitions. It’s about the implicit contracts between leaders and followers. During the twentieth century, the rough equivalent of what we call delicados were called liberals, and for a time back then prosperous liberals did have a kind of contract with the poor – if you guys vote for us and our weird modern ideas, we’ll look after you and fight your corner – but in the end liberals took that contract too much for granted, and it failed. Poor people turned to more congenial leaders who didn’t lecture them about their prejudices, and we ended up with the Tyranny. We should learn from that. No one is going to listen to people like us lecturing them about what they should think or who they should care about. If you want people’s votes you have to make them feel that you know what matters to them, that you care about what they care about, and that you’re going to stand by them in some way. And I think that’s what Slaymaker has managed to achieve with Holly’s help. This restaurant isn’t America. Life isn’t easy for most people. Whether fairly or not, Slaymaker’s managed to persuade a whole lot of those people that he’s got their back.’

  Holly was startled. He had never said anything quite like this to her. Even now, she could tell, he was going against his own instincts to say it, but he was articulating something that had always seemed obvious to her. The other four were like children. They liked to think of themselves as being on the side of the good guys, but they made no serious effort to change anything. But she had changed things. Out of all the half billion people who lived in America, she was perhaps the one individual who had actually changed the outcome of the coming election, because she alone had found a way of drawing support away from Montello and Frinton, a way of winning support from northerners and barreduras both.

  ‘But what about Canada?’ said Ossia. ‘Doesn’t Canada have some rights here?’

  ‘You’re in favor of open borders, Ossia,’ Holly said wearily.

  ‘Borders open to people who really need somewhere to go.’

  ‘Okay, well, you and Ruby are the Canadians here – why don’t you let in some Mexicans, or Bangladeshis, or South Americans? Why don’t the two of you organize a campaign to make that happen?’

  She looked into her friends’ faces. They were like children. And just for a moment, they were all daunted into silence by her adult voice.

  ‘Oh and by the way,’ Holly went on, ‘it’s true that more Americans are going to move to Canada as a result of this, but they won’t come in huge numbers. Slaymaker of all people does not want America’s population leaching away into Canada. America is his moral
universe. Last thing he wants is for Canada to grow and America to shrink. His primary objective is to build new towns and cities in the northern states of the USA.’

  ‘So we should just stop crying and put up with it? Is that what you’re saying?’

  Holly looked straight into Ossia’s eyes. ‘Yeah, actually, it is. I’m sorry it’s a bit uncomfortable just now, I really am. But it’ll pass, and I suspect that even now it’s a lot less uncomfortable up in Canada than it is in our displaced persons camps here in America, let alone in the rest of the world.’

  CHAPTER 35

  Next morning, when Holly had headed off to the campaign HQ in Seattle, Richard sat down to work on a chapter and realized that he wasn’t going to get anywhere. There was something going on in his head, some inner struggle, which made it impossible to concentrate. Holly had gone by train, so he put on his running things, took the car and headed out into the forest. Those dead trees held a gloomy fascination for him. Those miles of bare bone-like trunks, where the dominant life form was the lichen that dangled from the dead white branches in long gray strands, had a certain perverse appeal, like some vast graveyard, or the ruins of a forgotten civilization. But he was actually heading for a more hopeful place a couple of miles off the road, where the Federal Adaptation Agency had cleared away the dead wood and planted a few hundred acres of new trees from northern Cal-ifornia. Species that were dying off down there in their original habitat were now well suited to the new weather conditions up here, and the FAA had brought up flowering plants to go with them, and birds and insects. The hope was that in due course this entire ecosystem would move out into the dead forest and bring it back to life.

  Richard jogged along the path of a little stream as it wound through the dead white trunks in the open sunshine, and suddenly there were green leaves around him, the bright, bright green of spring, with birds singing and the stream winding in and out of sunlight and green shade. It wasn’t exactly like the old days – few of the trees were taller than he was – but it was life, all the same.