But of course we were us and they were them and different rules applied. In fact, now that they’d been defined as our enemies, any attempt to understand the NCA’s motives was more-or-less treason as far as most people were concerned. They were murderers and that was that. There was nothing to understand.
We’d barely begun to process the city hall bomb and its aftermath when the Pioneers’ Union began making demands. They insisted we had to have full voting rights in the territorial legislatures, and our own separate police force. Big crowds came out onto the half-built streets of America City (and, so we saw on the hubs, the streets of Lincoln and Jefferson, and in cities all across the USA itself), people shouting and marching in support of the Pioneers’ Union demands, people roaring through megaphones, people waving American flags and burning Canadian ones. ‘Enough is enough!’ I heard people saying to one another over and over in AC. ‘We bent over backwards to fit in with what the Canucks wanted, and this is how they repay us!’ It was everywhere, the same words almost, repeated again and again. It made me think of those dances that bees do, so the whole hive knows which way to go.
Eventually the trouble got so bad that they shut down the school until further notice, because barely any kids were coming in. I drove out to a little lake I’d found about ten miles to the south of the city, sat on a flat rock, and watched the ripples on the water and the gray clouds blowing by above me. Back in the city, they were screaming abuse at terrified Mounties. I couldn’t stop that, any more than I could stop an ocean tide, but I really didn’t feel like being part of it.
CHAPTER 47
Alice had found a new job as soon as Richard told her he was staying with Holly. He’d heard she was with some jangle musician in Seattle. Richard tried to make the two-home arrangement work, giving up his own job at the school and dividing his time between Schofield, Washington and Washington, DC, but the traveling was irksome and, as time went on, his visits to DC and hers to Schofield had become less and less frequent.
When Holly came up after the bomb in America City, it was the first time she’d been there for four weeks, and she seemed to him changed. She was oddly distant and agitated. She resisted any questions about what was going on for her but, when she’d had several drinks in quick succession, she began to speak as if she was in some dangerous place, and was relying on him to keep her safe. ‘You’re my anchor, Rick, you know that?’ she said several times. ‘You’re my anchor. You’re my link to reality. Don’t let go of me.’
The story that had grown up between them over the years had been the opposite of that, that part-joking, part-irritated, part-affectionate story of the kind that couples tell each other about their relationship: Richard was the one in danger of drifting away from reality – into the Dark Ages, or Elizabethan England, or whatever he happened to be writing about at the time – and she was the one who stood on solid ground.
In the morning, she drank a pint of coffee and readied herself to go to see Slaymaker at his ranch, where he was staying after his much-publicized visit to America City. He’d gone to comfort the bereaved and injured, but he’d ended up negotiating the departure of the Mounties.
As the car reversed itself out of their little drive, she was already giving instructions to her jeenee.
He watched the news on the broadscreen. Big demonstrations were taking place in all three of those grim artificial cities that Slaymaker had built in Canada. An angry crowd had gathered outside the Canadian embassy in DC. The Canadian government had just offered to carve the American cities away from the territories they were in. Each sat in the middle of its own fifty-mile-square concession, and Prime Minister Ryan offered each of these three squares a self-governing entity in its own right. But the Pioneers’ Union was insisting it be allowed to participate in the government of the territories as a whole, which, given that settlers were already more numerous than the local population in all three territories, would mean putting American settlers in charge of most of northern Canada. Neither the locals nor the Canadian authorities were prepared to accept this. Effigies of President Slaymaker had been burnt in Whitehorse, Yukon, while in northern Nunavut, Inuit activists spread out a huge banner, a hundred meters long, which simply read, ‘THIS IS OUR LAND’.
‘It is your land,’ Prime Minister Ryan assured them, on a flying visit to the territories. ‘And it’s Canadian land. The Canadian government will stand beside you as we search for a way of integrating American settlers without undermining your own proud traditions. We will not be deflected from that search by the extremists and wreckers on either side.’
Ryan was fighting for survival, though. She was in the final days of an election campaign, she was widely seen as having given way to Slaymaker too easily, and the fiercely anti-American Our Canada Party had overtaken her in the polls, having suddenly emerged from the margins of Canadian politics into the mainstream, with a powerful organization and a formidable war-chest. Our Canada’s leader, Gwendoline Thomas, was drawing huge crowds to her flame-lit rallies in Canada’s Anglo heartlands.
Holly returned quite late, just when he was thinking about giving up waiting for her. She still seemed agitated, pouring herself a large whiskey and downing it in a few gulps, though she insisted that she and Slaymaker had sorted out all the issues that had been bothering her.
‘I think maybe I should go up to my office and do a bit of work,’ she said. ‘I said I’d go for a ride with Steve tomorrow, but on Monday morning I’ll have a bit of time before I fly back to DC, so we’ll be able to have a nice leisurely breakfast together, if you’re not rushing anywhere yourself.’
CHAPTER 48
Rosine Dubois
What was so unfair about that bomb is that we chose to come up to Canada so as to not be in anybody’s way. Back in Montana, when the Reconfigure America scheme came in, I’d made Herb sit down with me in front of the broadscreen and look at the different places we could move to. I wasn’t having any more of his talk about how it was ‘up to you, Rosine. You’re the one who wanted to leave in the first place’. I’d worked out a little system where we wrote down a score out of ten for each one and we both separately ended up giving the highest score to those three places up in Canada. We figured the reason for that was that there was no one else near them. We were sick of being made to feel like we weren’t welcome and so we picked a place where no one lived at all.
There was nothing here when we first arrived. And I mean nothing. Back then, America City looked pretty much like the trailer park we’d come from down in Montana, but with no town nearby and no farms, just dirt and cold water. There was just one single road coming up to it from the south (which America had paid for anyway), and a whole lot of lakes, and nothing else. You’d have to travel for hundreds of miles to get to anything that looked like a town and, from what we’d heard, that was more of a village really, with no roads going out of it, and only a little airstrip to connect it to the rest of the world.
Looking back at the time before we moved up here, I think Herb had been in shock, ever since Superstorm Simon. He’d driven me nuts back in that trailer park, sitting there in front of the broad-screen doing nothing at all, hour after hour after hour, but I can see now he just didn’t have it in him back then to do anything else. He picked up a bit when the border rallies were going on, but it was only when we starting reading more about America City that he really began to get interested again. There was something exciting about starting over like that.
‘And one thing’s for sure,’ Herb said with a chuckle. ‘If there’s any place on Earth those superstorms are never going to reach, it’s up there. Way way up north, and pretty much as far from the ocean as you can get.’
I hadn’t seen him so lively since we went up to Opheim. Thinking about it now, I guess that had been a first glimpse of what it might be like to be with a whole bunch of people in the same situation, all working together to make things better.
But life wasn’t easy when we first came here. There was no city hall th
en, there were none of these big buildings that sprang up over the next few years: the biggest building back then was that giant thermal power plant steaming away. And even though it was April, the weather was cold and gray. We were used to warmth, and we were used to color too, specially the color green, that lovely green of the trees, swaying in the warm breeze. And, okay, there were little flowers in Nunavut, among the bare gray stones, and they were kind of pretty but they were no substitute for what we’d left behind. We had to wear coats all the time, and the mosquitoes were worse than any we’d known before.
But there was a decent house waiting for us, made in a factory in Illinois, which we could afford to rent and had the option of buying later, and it was warm, however cold the weather outside. And there was work for both of us, too, in the offices of two of the big construction companies who were building the city from scratch. I have to say, it was all way better than we could have hoped for when we set out from Delaware. In fact, in money terms we were actually better off, and we wrote our folks back down south that they should kiss goodbye to superstorms, and come up and join us. Most important of all, we were surrounded by people who’d arrived from outside like us, not folk who thought they owned the place and resented our being there. AC people are pleased when more people arrive and new houses are built between us and the bare country outside.
One guy we knew called Johnson Fleet – he lost his wife at Peace Arch, and became the secretary of the Pioneers’ Union in America City – used to talk about how, up here in America City, we were all just Americans together. It wasn’t quite that simple. Herb figured that Johnson couldn’t quite believe he was hanging out with dusties and storm trash and had to keep reminding himself it was okay. There were still tensions in America City, between black people and white people, people from the east and people from the west, and so on and so on. But, that’s human nature, isn’t it? And at least if someone called us storm trash, we could just call them dust trash right back. Because storm trash and dust trash: there weren’t many there who weren’t one or the other, apart from a few like Johnson who’d had their troubles in the north. We were all pretty much in the same situation, and we knew it was up to all of us to make something of this place. That kind of brought us together.
And then that bomb went off. I was only a few blocks away, shopping with Copeland, so near that we felt the blast of it, and could hear the screams of the people from the plaza. Lord, what a sound! Like hearing the souls in hell. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I felt so angry with the people who did that, it almost made me sick. What harm had we done them, way out here, with none of their towns anywhere near? Sweet Jesus, there had to be somewhere for people like us to live! There had to be somewhere other than that storm-wrecked country where a dead woman hung like a flag.
CHAPTER 49
When Holly reached Slaymaker’s ranch, everything was ready for her. She was about to make small talk with Eve, but Eve just laughed and shoved her straight out of the door into the stable yard, where the president was saddling up two horses, with food and drink already packed.
They rode quickly up the same path they’d followed before, a couple of secret service men riding a respectful distance behind them, and a drone circling overhead, but they went at a much faster pace without Richard or Eve to hold them back. (Those secret servicemen had clearly passed some kind of advanced riding test to get their jobs.) Holly loved this, directing this powerful animal many times her own weight, while at the same time trusting the creature to find his own way over the uneven ground. She had to be entirely focused so as to move with the horse, rather than bracing against him, as he skirted rocks, crossed scree, dipped down into gullies and climbed out again, constantly shifting the angle of his body in relation to the slope. It was a strange hybrid of surrender and control in which both Holly and Slaymaker were entirely absorbed. If they spoke at all, it was only about the ride and the horses.
‘He’s never liked this bit.’
‘Hey, we pretty well flew down there, didn’t we?’
At the top of the ridge, they looked down into a smaller side valley, much of it wooded. A stream flowed along the bottom of the valley, sometimes dividing around little rocky islands. Many small side streams flowed down into it from the slopes on each side. The horses splashed through the ones that crossed their path. And now they picked up speed, the big beasts breaking into a canter along the straight stretches and only slowing down briefly to negotiate stony twists and turns. Eagles, riding the currents high above the horses and their humans, cocked their heads briefly to check them out and then continued their search for pikas and marmots.
At the bottom, Slaymaker pulled up in a grassy spot beside the stream, and they jumped down and released their horses to graze. The secret service men did the same, hanging back thirty yards so that the president and his adviser could talk without being overheard. There was a stone fireplace with a pile of wood ready and some slabs of rock to sit on, overlooking the stream just at the point where two channels of it came together again after dividing round an island. The churning water gave out a constant blast of white noise. Holly and the president lit a fire, put on a pot of coffee and a couple of steaks.
‘So...’ Slaymaker said, ‘the Texas Option.’
‘Tell me first of all if you ever gave, or even considered giving, any money to the NCA.’
‘Of course not, Holly. They’ve just killed our people. Of course I wouldn’t give them money. But don’t be too hard on Jed. Remember I pay him to think the unthinkable. That’s his job!’
‘But you are giving money to other parties in Canada.’
‘Oh, por cierto. The same as they give money to US parties. Jenny Williams had half a billion from the Canadian government, you know. And who can blame them? They knew she’d be easier to deal with than me, and they did what they could to tip the balance in her favor! If I’d been them, I’d have done the same.’
He glanced at her. ‘But that’s not where your problem lies, is it, Holly? What’s troubling you is us taking their land.’
‘I can’t believe it’s not troubling you.’
‘We need those three territories to the east of Alaska. Canada’s a friendly country, I know, but that’s a lot of space to be left almost empty, and we need it a whole lot more than they do.’
‘Just those three territories?’
He studied her face. Slaymaker was always very careful never to flinch or look away. ‘Sure. If any other part of Canada wants to join us, that’d be great, but it’s those three that I reckon we need most. And of course I’m working with the Danes on a deal about Greenland, too. Between them, those three northern territories plus Greenland will give America plenty of elbow room for when things get really tough weather-wise. Plenty of space, and plenty of options.’
‘For a generation. A lot of the science says it’s only a matter of decades before the heat gets to be a problem even up there.’
Slaymaker’s eyes glazed very slightly. These matters just didn’t engage his imagination in the same way as the question of land. ‘Sure. Well, maybe we need to revisit those Christmas trees, or the sulfur aerosols or whatever. But that’s not going to turn things around for some time, and we need the land right now.’
‘So how does this work? Right now the Pioneers’ Union is demanding control of the whole of the territories. When Canada says no, they declare independence and we recognize the three territories as an independent country? Is that it? And then we invite that so-called independent country up there to join the USA?’
He turned the steaks, then took the coffee off the heat and set the pot on a warm stone beside the fire.
‘That’s the way I’m starting to think. Jed’s going to be over here this evening, and I thought maybe the three of us could sit down together and sketch out some plans. We need to think about the timing of all this, with my second term campaign coming up.’
She looked away from him for a moment, toward the two streams of water as they smashed
together. A small bird waited on a stone by the water’s edge, tipping its head this way and that, and from time to time suddenly jabbing down with its beak to pluck some titbit from the current.
‘But it’s a big thing,’ she said, ‘taking Canada’s land.’
‘It is a big thing. But I was never easy, as you know, with the idea of too many of our people moving north and becoming Canadians. That would mean Canada ending up being the big country in the end, and America a kind of Mexico.’
‘I found an interview the other day with a Canadian cop who was there at Opheim. Nice guy, about your age, looks and talks a bit like you. He says he’s always had very friendly feelings for Americans. And he also says he’s always liked you. In fact, he told his wife, only a couple of months previously, that he wished they had someone like you in Canada. And then he looks up at the interviewer and he’s really distressed. “But then suddenly the guy turned on us!” he says. “I just can’t figure out what we did to deserve it.” I’m wondering how you would answer that guy.’
Slaymaker’s eyes were fixed on her face, attentive as ever and yet at the same time completely closed off.
‘When I went into the trucking business,’ he said, ‘we still had manually driven trucks. Cars were self-driving, but trucks were only semi-robotized and still had to have a driver, just in case. Then the law changed and fully driverless trucks came in. They were way cheaper to run than trucks with drivers – way way cheaper – and we had no choice but to go over to them, or our competitors would have put us out of business in a year. So I had to lay off all our drivers. There was no way this was going to feel fair to them, or make sense, but I had to do it. And it’s the same now with this Mountie guy, and people like him. It won’t feel fair to them, of course not, but that doesn’t mean we can get out of doing it.’
Let Us Be True Page 25
