The show was propaganda, on one of the channels that pretended to be independent but was owned and controlled by an ally of the President. But it was the kind of propaganda anyone could get behind. Because everyone was hungry in those days. It was easy to get them to go with the program. Especially the way they packaged it, with the happy rainbow families of farmers helping to propagate the new crops that would restore the American breadbasket and clean the air and the soil in the process. As an extra benefit, one of the varietals was optimized for processing into a reasonably clean fuel.
Maybe the backers of the program actually believed that was how it would work. The idea of the independent farmer was the lodestone of the American experiment, even if that species was now as rare as the wild birds that had once inhabited the forests and prairies they plowed under. The problem was, the family farmer model didn’t work for the new crops they had engineered to survive in the new conditions. To make them grow, and reproduce, you had to bring back the plantation model.
The era when armies of cheap labor would come from the global South were a distant memory, from a more prosperous era that played back in your head like a movie that had never been real. Fortunately, the border fortifications they had erected to keep people from leaving meant there was a healthy supply of cheap labor back home—many of them the farmers who had been turned into refugees by the failure of their own business model.
It made perfect sense that Tripto Labs and AMR ended up under common ownership. They had “synergies,” as the investment bankers liked to put it. The same synergies as the cotton field had with the whip. The kind of synergies that are so powerful in their productive and wealth-generating potential that entire bodies of law are developed to perpetuate them.
And when he finally saw that clearly, Donny realized that he had the theory of his AMR case all wrong. Miles knew, and they killed him for it. The deaths in the camps weren’t about politics. They were about labor. About people trying to organize. About who owns the means of production—when the means of production is the very stuff of life.
Too bad he figured it out too late.
57
When Lecker’s limousine arrived at Lou’s house, it was already surrounded by cops and firefighters. Most of the cops were private police—not the ones on Lou’s private detail, or the ones on retainer to the gated community where the house was, but the company that had been retained by the breakaway municipality that the wealthy people of the wider neighborhood had formed to protect themselves in the aftermath of the uprising. The backyard mercenaries could not keep the taxman away, but they could keep the refugees and thieves at bay.
They could not prevent a father from welcoming his daughter home, though, no matter what she had done. Or what friends she brought home with her. Or what she had in her luggage.
Donny looked at the house. It was even huger than he had imagined, more compound than house, in the style of an all-American suburban home of your childhood memory that has been crossed with a Spanish castle and then injected with some growth hormone and wrapped in precious stone harvested from faraway mountains. The polished front wall was forbidding, but when the lights of the patrol cars hit the tall thin window over the front door you could get a glimpse at the cavernous hall inside, and even make out the colors of some big contemporary painting on the wall where the lords of yore would have hung a tapestry.
“What are their demands?” asked Lecker, speaking to the officer in charge.
The cop read off the list. It was about what Donny expected. Lawyers, guns, and money, not in that order. Transfer of all of the trust funds, release of prisoners whose convictions for crimes in the uprising had been outside the Compact, amnesty for the kids inside who had taken Lou hostage.
Lecker and the cops were debating how to respond when the first bomb went off, and the top floor erupted in flames. You could hear the gasp of the air around the building being suddenly consumed by the heat, and the gasp of the grizzled old brain busters who thought they had seen it all. It took a moment before the firefighters mobilized, and the officer in charge told Lecker it was time to move in.
“Let me try,” said Donny, not really asking. But they let him do it. Walk right up to the front door, ring the doorbell, and walk right in.
Have you heard the one about the lawyer in hell? said the fireman.
58
That Friday, Harrison v. AMR was the first thing on the docket in Judge Larriva’s court.
Karen Keller had just the one junior associate with her, and she could have handled it alone. Her clients stayed home.
Donny’s client wasn’t there either. His grandma was, however, in one of her vintage People’s Lawyer outfits. And after Judge Larriva got done welcoming Carol, whose career she knew of, the current status of Donny’s client was the first thing the judge asked.
The second thing she asked was whether it was true Donny had walked into a burning building to save that client.
“Not really save, Your Honor,” he said. “Persuade. And it wasn’t just my client there. Ms. Keller’s client was there too.”
“So you negotiated this ex parte, without telling Ms. Keller?” said the judge. Ex parte was lawyer code for talking to the other lawyer’s client without the other lawyer present, unless you had their permission—a big no-no in a system that took for granted every lawyer’s ability to perform necromantic mind tricks on anyone untutored in their dark arts.
“Well, it wasn’t until after we left the building that she, Ms. Hamilton-Green, became Ms. Keller’s client. And technically she still isn’t. She just became the controlling stockholder of the corporation, and that indirectly, through a series of investments.”
“Are you okay with this, Ms. Keller?” asked the judge.
“Mr. Kimoe has walked up to the edge of the rules, but not crossed it,” said Karen. “And we now have new instructions from our client. A settlement.”
“What are the terms?” said the judge.
Donny told her.
The judge only blinked a few times.
59
The news of the escaped ex-president’s capture and delivery into the hands of international war-crimes investigators was all over the news when Donny stepped into the private club that had taken over the viewing area of the Reunion Tower. The images of the President were the old ones, from before, because the international authorities didn’t do perp walks. The new footage they had was from the airfield in Metairie, of a bright-blue United Nations C-130 sitting on the tarmac preparing to leave the country with its precious cargo already loaded. They had kept it quiet for a few days as they debriefed him and the others who were involved, but now it was all anyone would be talking about for weeks.
Donny stood and watched for a minute while the host checked his name against the guest list, trying to look at the windows of the plane, thinking maybe he would see Marianne. Then the guy led him to a booth in the back, where Thelen was already waiting.
“Thanks for the wire, sport,” he said, standing to greet Donny. “Looks like I owe you a small refund.”
“You can make it a prepayment against the next one,” said Donny.
“Doesn’t sound like you’re going to need any loans for a while,” said Thelen. “I know it’s not public, but this is a small town, and word gets around.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” said Donny. “Especially not about money. And especially not in Dallas.”
“I heard you’re behind this too,” said Thelen, pointing at the TV.
“I tricked a lot of clients at the same time,” said Donny.
“So they had him in New Orleans the whole time?”
“I can’t say. I signed a confidentiality agreement with the Interpol people. And there are others to protect. I’m sure it will all come out in time, though.”
“Well, cheers,” said Thelen as the server poured the Champagne he had already ordered.
Donny took his glass and joined in the toast. The late-afternoon light mad
e the bubbles look like a thousand tiny suns. Donny wondered if it was the residue of Dallas acid or New Orleans mushrooms that made him think about the other worlds that must be floating in there too. And then he drank them down, with a gulp that felt like pleasure and regret all at the same time.
Thelen was staring at him, with the enthusiastic smile of a deal guy who wants to know the war story.
“Don’t tell me you gave it all away, Donny.”
Donny looked back at him. “No wonder you’re such a good outlaw underwriter, Terry. You read people better than most cops.”
“I just know what an idiot you are with dough. What are you thinking? That’s some serious fuck-you money you tricked your way into, pal.”
“Well, I kept enough to pay you back. And a little more as walking-around money.”
“Right, but the rest—”
“We all have our price to pay. And I wasn’t the only one who’s giving money away. We worked out a deal that will fund a lot more future than we had before.”
“How do you mean?”
“I ensured the outcome I was hired to make sure didn’t happen. See those fields out there?”
“That’s why I like this view. I was an early investor, you know.”
“Well, you may want to sell. Because they agreed to give it away.”
“The farms?”
“The seeds. More accurately, the genomes. No more patents. All open-source. They can still sell the actual seeds, and the actual crops. But so can anyone. And people can make their own versions. Better versions, like the ones they already developed in New Orleans.”
“They’re going to give up the most valuable asset of the company?”
Donny nodded. “That, and a lot of cash. All the parties are. Even the Popular Front, though mostly what they’re contributing is expertise and ideas.”
“Contributing to what?”
“A new fund, for restoration and conservation, education, land reform. To kick-start a new ecology, or that’s the idea. And with the rights to the seeds opened up, we might even figure out ways to get it all to pay for itself, under a new business model that’s about a different kind of free market than the economists had in mind.”
“Can I keep my BMW?”
“The idea is that you won’t want it anymore.”
“Fat chance of that.”
“Then they’ll work on your kids.”
“I don’t have any kids.”
“Even better. Spread it around among your friends and business associates.”
Thelen laughed.
“This sounds big. Will they roll it into the new Constitution?”
“I wish. We talked about it. Even about getting a new bill of rights for plants and animals. But it’s not happening.”
“Why not?”
“Didn’t you hear? Negotiations have broken down. They got stuck.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“No, but this really does sound like the last. The major players walked. Maybe next year. And it’s not totally dead. I mean, people are still showing up for work at the Pentagon. But we’re basically on our own.”
“Jesus,” said Thelen.
“It’ll be okay,” said Donny. “We need to take care of each other. Rethink our whole setup. That’s kind of what this deal is about. There’s even a mutual defense component.”
“Sounds like a train wreck to me,” said Thelen. “Is that why you had to give up your fee?”
“I had to do that to get them to all agree to the deal. To get them all to agree to get along.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had AMR nailed for their crimes, Terry. Them and Tripto Labs, as it turned out. The whole enchilada. The camps. The extermination program, how they disappeared all those people—for money, not politics like I thought. And how they hid the evidence. Lecker was running a program to help all the guys who were involved disappear themselves. DIY witness protection, but better than anything the government did.”
“Where are they?”
“All over. Some overseas, but most still here. And now they are all going to get turned in.”
“No way.”
“Way. Lou’s daughter took over the company that has to write the check for what happened. She owned it all along, and pretty much knew what was going down, even when she was a kid, so no surprise how eager she was to try to fix that. And how quickly she grabbed the reins and grew the heck up when it was real. Even managed to corral her overly enthusiastic boyfriend, my client, whose parents were among the victims of her family business.”
“Sounds like my family.”
“Not funny, Terry.”
He tipped an apologetic glass. “And so your fee?”
“To get Lecker to sign, I agreed to put my fee, which was just a tip over a million bucks, into a legal-defense fund for all those murdering bastards to get a fair trial.”
“Why the fuck would you do something as stupid as that? Even I think those guys should all rot.”
“Maybe I want to try to fund a future I would actually want to live in. One based on cooperation more than competition. One that’s not run by guys meeting for drinks in private clubs.”
Thelen nodded. “That’s fair.”
“The only thing I know for sure is I have lost enough people to the fighting,” said Donny. “Haven’t you?”
Thelen didn’t need to answer. You could see it in his eyes.
“What about Joyce?” he asked.
“I lost her too,” said Donny. “I lost her eight years ago, really, but it just took me a while to figure it out.”
“I could have told you that when you came to borrow the money to spring her.”
“I wouldn’t have listened. That was the right thing to do, even if it was too late. But even she agreed to stop fighting, and focus on building.”
“Maybe you’ll meet someone new.”
“I did,” said Donny. “She was trying to arrest me.”
Thelen laughed.
“No kidding. She arrested that guy instead.” Donny pointed at the TV.
“Oh,” said Thelen.
“She offered me a job. Said I was pretty good at hunting down war criminals for a guy who looked like such a loser.”
“Did you take it?”
“No, Terry. I would have had to move. To Switzerland, or India.”
“Sounds pretty good to me.”
“I’ve had so many chances to leave. But this is home. I have a future to build here. And some trees to plant. And I wanted to talk to you about whether you’d be willing to donate that money I just gave you to the cause. Because no one is going to fix the future for us. No government, no NGO, no beneficent tycoon. We each need to pick up the spade, and use it to help put it all back the way it was when our ancestors found it. Or whatever wacked-out new version of that we can manage.”
Thelen looked at him, and then he looked out the window. Donny looked, too, and they could see the river, and the city, and the suburbs going back to green. And then they heard the tap-tap-tap, and saw a big fat bumblebee at the glass, legs loaded with pollen, trying to find its way through the world we made our slave.
Acknowledgments
This book is in large part a continuation of the stories related in Rule of Capture and Tropic of Kansas. And while this text should stand on its own, it would not have been possible without the advice and support of the people I acknowledged in those books. These include my family, innumerable friends and colleagues (especially those who brought me to Dallas over the years to get a feel for the city I put a fun-house mirror up to here), my literary agent Mark Gottlieb, and David Pomerico, cover designer Owen Corrigan, and the rest of the amazing team at Harper Voyager. I owe particular thanks to “human webcrawler”* Bruce Sterling for his helpful and timely research on early utopias, Craig Campbell for invaluable anthropological wayfinding, L. Timmel Duchamp for her annual prompts to think about my reading through a different prism, and the librarians at the Universi
ty of Texas Law School who helped me research the legal systems imagined in this book. Notable texts that were indispensable include James C. Scott’s Against the Grain, Christopher Stone’s Should Trees Have Standing?, Simon Roberts’s Order and Dispute, Njal’s Saga, and Laxdaela Saga.
While I was working on this book, I acquired two new daughters, one by birth, and one by marriage. This book was inspired by the idea of trying to imagine a future I would want them to be able to live in, and trying to imagine the more hopeful world the protagonists of Rule of Capture and Tropic of Kansas fought to realize. I don’t know if I entirely succeeded in finding it, but I like to think the characters in this book have started to map some of the unexplored territory where that lies. And I don’t know if the future in this book is as female as the one I expect the real world to bring us. But I hope it will provide some inspiration to Octavia and Ajin and their peers to help us get there, and it is to them that this book is dedicated.
Tropic of Kansas
For more of the story of the dark years between the events of Rule of Capture and Failed State, check out Tropic of Kansas, which tells the story from the perspective of people much further from the sources of power.
Excerpt from Tropic of Kansas
Eagle One flew in fast from the west, then yawed back over the East Lawn, engines whining overthrottle, blasting air onto the ground.
Eagle One was the flagship of a new line of Anglo-American tactical aircraft the President had promoted as superior to the helicopter. It could fly faster and higher, with even better vertical takeoff and landing capabilities. All jet, no wings—just stabilizers at the tail. Manufactured by a company he still had stock in.
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