“We’re still trying to get used to Non-Capitalist Economics,” said Gary.
“That’s no problem,” Paolo explained. “It’s easy to get used to. Once your requisitioning pattern is recognised and stays stable it just continues as a matter of course. Everything is carefully measured and used to make aggregate forecasts so that labour can be allocated accordingly. It’s a wonderful tool Commander. There are so many things it can do, even running the country and managing the economy. The ministers just keep an eye on it and make sure that it does its job, highlighting inequalities when they occur and need rectification. You could say Commander is the real Prime Minister.”
“Tara, you’re from Australia,” said Yvonne. “May I ask which part?”
“A place called Orange in New South Wales,” she replied. “And you?”
“I’m from the Northern Territory, near Darwin.”
“Don’t tell me, you were given The Queen’s Ticket by a blondish guy of about thirty, yes?”
“How did you guess?”
“Because I got mine from the same man. Last year the Defence Congress was in Sydney and he just happened to see me skating at Macquarie Ice Rink. I know he owns lots of land, though. He practically owns Bathurst Island and Melville Island having invested his parent’s fortune in them. He’s not a particularly popular politician in Australia. Australians who are friends of The Island either buy or rent their homes on one or other of those islands. They will be an important strategic acquisition for The Queen, with a merging for the first time of Russian and Australian sovereignty. There’s a lot of political as well as physical attraction between Aub and The Queen.”
“And so The Island empire grows a little bit more,” replied Michael.
“Absolutely,” said Tara. “We are living in interesting times.”
“Coming back to skating,” said Elena. “How do people cope with things like injuries? Surely they must happen from time to time?”
“They do,” said Gerry. “But fortunately our medical services are so advanced that things can be healed in minutes that used to take weeks or even months. The latest regenerative technology works wonders.”
“Tell me, what are the houses like?” Claudia asked.
“Innovative in design, and spacious. Ours looks a bit like a small Scottish castle or manor house,” Michelle explained, as she continued to describe their property in more detail.
Closing time approached.
“I think you’ll find the best bit of your time here is still to come,” Francesca told Anne. “But we cannot reveal it to you. Joanie would be very cross if we did, but you have got a really great surprise to come, I promise.”
“Give us a clue,” Claudia pleaded.
“No, no. No clues,” replied Francesca. “Strictly forbidden.”
“Where are you staying on The Island?” asked Lars.
Well, we’re here for the show tomorrow so we can all watch our contemporaries from Kamchatskiy Aerospace and Kamchatskiy Logistics,” Manuel explained. “As for where we are staying, we have rooms in Aldebaran, next to the lodge where the Karaginsky children are staying with their headmaster. There’s a special train leaving at midnight to take us back.”
*
The next day both sets were able to relax as they strolled along the beach and meet further with their trainers and their new contemporaries from the previous year’s Kamchatskiy Maritime. It was a day of everyone getting to know everyone else in preparation for the times that lay ahead. It was also a time for reflection as each set knew that times on The Island were drawing to a close, albeit with happy memories that would last a lifetime.
It was now the turn of the Kamchatskiy Aerospace and Kamchatskiy Logistics trainers and directors to be entertained by Joanie in Government House, whilst Jobine presided over day two’s dress rehearsals.
At 7.30 p.m., everyone took their seats to watch the concluding part of Carnival on Ice. This began with the displays from Kamchatskiy Aerospace, the prop for which was the all-new Hebden business jet, the Hebden Ten, again reduced in size, and mounted on a special platform so as to make it a workable prop for The Island’s prestigious display of new skating talent.
As with the other companies the show began with the unveiling of the new company dance, still to the familiar Paso Doble rhythm of ‘Viva Kamchatskiy’. The five demonstration performances then followed, this time with aviation and flight themes. Comical tweeting birds provided the first display, which was cheeky and eye-catching. This was then followed by a depiction of the tale of Icarus and Daedalus, and after the flight of the bumblebee with twelve bees buzzing around the jet, skydivers in formation and finally astronauts taking off to the moon and conducting a moonwalk, ready to usher in a new age of man in flight for the first real occasion since the Apollo moon landings of the 1960s.
There were comparatively few lifts in the Kamchatskiy Aerospace routines, but this was made up for by the fact that these sets demonstrated complete mastery of the harness. They therefore surpassed all of the others on this attribute, although, naturally, under Jobine the setmates had to have learnt to achieve a benchmark level of attainment in all of the skating skills that were generally required. It was simply that the bias was the reverse to that for the Kamchatskiy Auto sets.
With Kamchatskiy Logistics, the approach was different again. This time the theme was multimodal transport and instead of making use of one single prop the skaters had to work with one which rotated and moved, a giant unit that comprised of cranes and moving containers that symbolised the movement of goods from one transport mode to another.
The fact that the prop had moving parts required a very special combination of skills that integrated both lifts, and the use of the harness with the motion of the prop itself. Skaters had to be synchronised with its movements, giving the setmates again a distinguishing skill profile relative to the others. There were, as with Kamchatskiy Maritime, moderately difficult lifts combined with elementary use of the harness such that the girls could be placed on various parts of the moving machinery either by lifting or by use of the harness. Returning to the ice was then a skill in itself, utilising either a harness, or a lift down, or, in some cases, a specially timed drop from a part of the apparatus that had to be executed cleanly so that the entire routine flowed without interruption. This was definitely harder than it looked.
The routines covered ports of the world, railways of the world, the lifting and moving of goods, the world of the truck convoy, and express delivery of milk. The prop, unlike those of the others, was, with the aid of special effects, completely adaptable to each routine as various sections remained hidden until they were required. Some clever engineering and electronics enabled the prop to literally transform itself without manual intervention so as to be adaptable to every performance.
“Beat that if you can,” Joanie declared at the end of the final performance before this extraordinary prop was quickly dismantled by the ice squad. “Now we are complete. All twenty sets have now performed for you, and we hope you will agree that they are now fully trained and equipped for stardom. Now, before we close our show I would like to give particular thanks to a remarkable woman without whom this fabulous event couldn’t have been achieved. It is of course the one and only Jobine. She may not have any medals, nor have passed any tests, nor won any competitions, but her reputation as being the world’s greatest ice dance trainer remains undisputed. I will now ask the youngest girl from The Karaginsky School Young Skaters to come up here and collect a bouquet of flowers from Her Majesty to present to Jobine in recognition of all of the tremendous work that she has done to make the dreams of these fine setmates become a reality.”
Jobine rose to her feet among the Kamchatskiy Aerospace and Kamchatskiy Logistics trainers to accept the flowers. She could not conceal her tears as the audience gave her a standing ovation, cheering, clapping and whistling continuously in appreciation. Then she said a few touching words:
“I know I say this every year,
but I would like to say to all of my wonderful setmates that I was once in your shoes. One day, some fifteen years ago, I was a skater in Amsterdam. I couldn’t make the grade because I couldn’t pass the tests, because nerves always got the better of me and in the end my age threatened to destroy my chances of doing the work that I loved. It was just by chance that I was spotted by Donald McIlroy, on the last day of his William of Orange tour, at the rink, just as I was about to give up hope. Little did I know that Patrick was in the ice rink bar secretly watching my every move. I have to thank them, because without them I would not be here doing what I love doing best, making skating dreams come true. Believe me, I am happier doing what I am doing and seeing the setmates achieve so much than ever I would have been in the skating world. So, please give them some applause.”
The audience duly applauded as The Concierge stood briefly in the royal enclosure microphone in hand.
“It is true,” he said. “She was a brilliant performer and as soon as Donald caught sight of her we knew we wanted her. We knew she would be superb for what we needed. It was only her nerves that stopped her, but it was enough to mean that in the skating world she was not going to make the top flight that she deserved. So we helped her to overcome her nerves and learn to train others. Her methods are unique and now her results are legendary. Jobine, nothing compares to you.”
He handed the microphone back to Joanie.
“Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, that almost concludes our Carnival on Ice for another year, but not quite. Each year we conclude our Carnival with a performance by one couple from The Karaginsky Young Skaters of the classic Bolero routine performed exactly as the legendary Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean performed it at the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics. It is a tradition that we have maintained here ever since our good Queen Justine gave her royal command that it should be performed by two children from an invited school to officially end Carnival. This year is no exception, so please welcome onto the ice Petra Constantin and Oleg Shelikova from The Karaginsky School.”
The two sixteen-year-olds duly assumed their starting positions on the now clear ice ready to perform their carefully rehearsed ‘Bolero’. Just as in Torvill and Dean’s original, the routine started with the sway and lift for 28 seconds prior to the commencement of skating, reflecting the rules of ice dancing as they had been at the time, with the skating being of exactly four minutes duration. Every step and movement was performed exactly as in the original, with the same body lines preserved throughout. The performance ended with the carefully controlled fall after which the spotlights faded and the lights were finally out on the amazing one and only Carnival on Ice.
Chapter Nineteen
Prince Regent
One week later, at The Australian Defence Industry Annual Congress in Perth, Western Australia.
The delegates assembled promptly for the keynote address from Aub Ryman, Minister for Defence.
“Good morning, ladies and gents. You will be pleased to know that I will not go on for long. What I have to say to you will be swift and to the point. Furthermore, what I have to do cannot wait. So I will now outline what I propose to do.
I know many of you are expecting me to approve your budgets. This is despite what I have already told all of you, as well as the rest of this extraordinarily incompetent government, or what passes for a government, about the crisis that our defence industry now faces. As you know, I have made it known on several occasions now that the world is changing and faster than any of you can see. Like a load of blinkered bulls in a china shop you are expecting me to approve a policy that is not only outdated but foolhardy and dangerous for our country. You are wanting me to commit millions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money to a plan that hasn’t got a hope in hell of succeeding, and if I sign for it I will be held responsible. Ladies and gentlemen, no.”
There were spontaneous groans and shakes of heads from the delegates.
“What does the idiot think he’s doing?” whispered one delegate to another.
“Why doesn’t the bloody fool just follow his whip and get on with it?” whispered another, exasperated.
Aub observed the reaction and continued.
“I know many of you have been trained merely to follow orders and that thinking comes second. I do not blame any of you for that, because it has been drummed into you for so many years that I expect the majority of you have lost count. However, I am not prepared to follow this course any longer. I will say again once and once only to you what I believe the right course of action is.
You all think, and believe, because that is what you have been told by those in authority, that the way forward for our defence industry is to invest in more tanks, more warplanes, more bombs, more missiles, more guns and more weapons, because you think nothing has changed. But you couldn’t be more wrong. As I have said before, things are happening in the world that neither you nor anyone else in this haphazard regime are even aware of. You haven’t seen it, but I have, and I know that this country needs to respond to it very quickly. The sovereignty of nations is disappearing. The entire concept of countries going to war in order to defend themselves is a thing of the past. Taking territory by force is a thing of the past. On the other hand, the displacement of governments that have proven themselves to be obsessed with holding onto power and managing their resources poorly, is a thing of the present. The days of internal wrangling and merely following orders in the hope of surviving at the expense of others are coming to an abrupt end.
You haven’t listened before and I doubt you will listen now, but if you choose not to even at this late stage, then be it on your own heads. Don’t be surprised if in a few years’ time a large number of you don’t have a job because somebody over you has decided to sell out, and they will. They have those sorts of minds and are certain to be tempted by some high offers from foreign quarters. The Japanese, the Russians, the Chinese, even the Germans are fancying their chances here. It may not happen overnight, but mark my words it will happen, and when it does I for one am determined to be on the winning side. There won’t be a shot fired, nor a missile launched. It will be quiet, discreet, and done behind a little closed door that none of you even know about by people that you do not even know about.
Some revolutions are quick, some are slow. Unfortunately you have only been trained to recognise and respond to the fast type. The slow type that has been going on for the last seventy years has remained unseen by all but a select number of people who have come to understand its purpose and objectives over the decades. These people, of whom I am one, have found out, if only by accident, that there is a better way of managing the world than those which have existed hitherto. The Japanese learnt a bit about it early on, but not nearly enough. We have stayed in ignorance, believing ‘she’ll be right mate’, which, in fact, amounts to pure ignorance on your parts.”
“Oh, can’t we get this buffoon out? He’s useless,” ranted one old general, within earshot of the speaker.
“You’ll get your wish soon enough sir,” said Aub, as he stared at the red-faced man. “The New Game is coming. In fact it is almost upon us. In place of wars and battles is coming the era of trading in sovereignties, by which and through which wars will soon be a thing of the past. Who wants war anyway? Who wins? Nobody really wins a war. Wars are merely ended by one side or the other. The days are numbered for those who believe in war in the conventional sense, and that means you unless you can accept the nature of the change that is unfolding.
Get ready for the New Game. Get ready to show that you are good managers who will manage the nation’s and the world’s resources wisely, and be ready to be more self-critical than ever before. Be wise to your own deficiencies and sub-optimisation. Be wise to the need for lifelong learning and the meaning of cooperation as W. Edwards Deming said way back in, what was it, the 1950s? Let people take pride in their work, and end the practice of making choices purely on the basis of price. This is the age of the quality practitioner, not
the cowboys and the fools who want to cut corners in the false belief that they are saving money.
Now, as I know some of you are getting impatient…”
“You’re telling me,” puffed the old general.
“As I said, as some of you are getting impatient, I am going to announce to you that as of today I resign. Now, if you will excuse me I have work to do and a new life to get on with.”
There was then a mixture of astonishment, surprise, and in some cases relief as he broke the news. As some, like the old general, smiled and whispered “Thank God for that”, others were less sure, particularly the younger delegates, a few of whom shook their heads, knowing deep in their hearts that the minister probably was telling the truth and in fact it was the old guard whom they should fear. There was dissent in the ranks and arguments broke out amongst the delegates as Aub stepped down and made his way to the exit.
One or two of the delegates rose and chased after Aub as he walked briskly along the corridor to await his chauffeur.
“You can’t walk out now, sir,” one of them said to him.
“I just have,” Aub replied.
“But think of your country.”
“That’s exactly what I am thinking of.”
The Island of Dreams Page 26