Rise & Shine

by Patrick Allington

  ‘I’ve heard everything you’ve said, but I’m still waiting for you to say what you really came here to say, if indeed you came here to say anything. So, please, keep talking. We’ve got all day, all month, all year, I imagine, for you to find a way to plainly speak your mind.’

  ‘Very well: I’ve heard rumours —’

  ‘So you said. Several times. There are always rumours.’

  ‘Rumours about … Well: specific rumours. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Thank you for telling me what I know.’

  ‘Please don’t make me repeat the rumours out loud.’

  ‘Believe me, I have no wish to make you do anything you’re not comfortable doing. Not now. Not ever.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll just come straight out and say it.’

  ‘All right, then.’

  ‘I’m talking about strange illnesses, people wasting away, people disappearing. I’m talking about seeds, water — water, for goodness sake — trading on the black market. I’m talking about people out there trying to grow plants: that’s what I’m hearing, and if I’m hearing it, then I’m sure others are hearing it, and if others are hearing it, then I’m sure you’re hearing it. Are you hearing it? Are you? These people hope to eat these plants. To eat them, for goodness sake. Only yesterday, my daughter asked me what bread was. I felt obliged to tell her.’

  ‘You should be pleased that she’s so interested in history. The Old Time is not a dirty secret. It’s where we came from. I, for one, remember bread with fondness. A baguette stuffed with roast pork, chillis, cucumber, carrot. A hamburger bun, sweeter than it had any right to be, seared on a barbecue to stave off staleness —’

  ‘But she’s only twelve years old, her innocence lost.’

  ‘Chapatis — oh, chapatis.’

  ‘I expect, soon enough, I’ll be asked to comment about these rumours. On the record.’

  ‘It won’t be in any scripts we give you. Not yet. Probably not ever.’

  ‘But I live in Rise, in the actual districts.’

  ‘Your house sits within a ten-metre wall, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I speak to people, ordinary people, all the time. Answer their questions. Shake their hands.’

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, that all the rumours are about plants. I wonder why there aren’t any rumours about people tucking into animals?’

  ‘Oh my God. Animals? Animals? Animals? Surely not even the most extreme extremist would resort to such craziness. Touch them? Kill them? Eat them? It’s dirty. It’s unsafe. It’s the end of everything.’

  ‘It’d be just like the good old days: cut up a carcass, cook it, and chew and swallow.’

  ‘How oh how did it come to this? How did we sink so low?’

  ‘Chew and swallow … We’re just reminiscing, aren’t we? I remember my childhood with great affection, when I can control the sadness.’

  ‘Yes, but people are beginning to say that anything is possible. This will embolden the disaffected. Embolden them, I tell you.’

  ‘No,’ Walker said. He’d had enough of Heelton. He was ready to move on with his day. ‘The dissenters foresee the end of compassion. They believe we will no longer feel any tenderness towards our fellow human beings. They believe our hearts will turn to stone. And what’s more, they have no imagination. They can imagine a potato, if they work hard at it, what it once meant to the human race. But they can’t begin to imagine today’s potato, a rock-hard disc grown in carcinogenic soil, the flesh laced with lead, the skin glow-in-the-dark. Lightly steam, eat, and convulse. Die in minutes if you’re lucky, weeks if you’re too stubborn to see reality.’

  ‘Can I stand in front of a microphone and give the city that line? Are you authorising me?’

  ‘Definitely not. But it’s no line. It’s the truth.’

  ‘The best lines always are. I’m not nearly as stupid as you, as everybody, seem to think I am. I can’t even have a private meeting with you,’ Heelton said, waving towards Hail and Curtin. ‘That’s how important I am. And I know what people say about me. The jokes. Even I have a spy or two.’

  ‘You shock me.’

  ‘You mock me.’

  ‘Mr President, you misunderstand my impatience. You have my complete confidence. If you didn’t, I would dismiss you immediately.’

  ‘I’m democratically elected.’

  ‘Come now.’

  ‘I know that I’m not the great Walker, but who is? I cannot stand before the people like you can and simply make them believe me. I stand up and I give my spiel —’

  ‘Your spiel? Now you give yourself too little credit.’

  ‘— and I look into people’s eyes and I can see them thinking, “There must be something more.” And I agree with them. There must be something more.’

  ‘All right. Listen: you’re right, things are … a little complicated, a little different, at the moment. Ever so slightly tricky. But I need you to hold on. Hang tough. We must protect the majority, and so we will root out the dissenters.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then we will treat them the way we treat all of those who are downtrodden or misguided: with compassion. You’re worried about five deaths in a month —’

  ‘And I’m worried that you’re not worried about them.’

  Walker slammed the table that separated them. Curtin turned her head, surprised. Walker tried but failed to suppress a wince. ‘Of course I’m worried about them. Those poor people. Their poor families. Every life matters. But think about this: if five deaths is a problem, think about the backlash if we abandon people just because they have a view that is different to ours.’

  ‘Yes, but —’

  ‘We will sweep them up. This is strictly off the record, for now. Do you hear me?’

  ‘I hear you.’

  ‘Off the record. We will find them all. We will match stealth with stealth. If need be, we will break them, in our tender way. And then we will embrace them, because that is who we are. Our actions will show them the true meaning of empathy, misguided though their beliefs may be.’

  ‘Yes yes yes, but I need a new script to tell that story. Your “off the record” words aren’t —’

  ‘When the time comes, and the time is not yet, you will say this: “A few of us will surely starve, just as a few of us will eventually grow tumours that will finish us off. But the rest of us will remain healthy and happy and will survive and prosper and grow old, or at least what these days passes for old.” But now is not the time for you to speak publicly about all this. Not yet.’

  ‘But when?’

  ‘Perhaps soon. But if things go to plan, that day need never come.’

  ‘You put me in an impossible position.’

  ‘Yes, that’s your job.’

  ‘Please give me some new words I can use now. This week, for the peace conference.’

  Heelton’s face, Walker couldn’t help but notice, had turned a shade of purple. Then again, he’d always had an odd complexion, something like a sunset out over the badlands. It wasn’t unpleasant, and it was one of the reasons Walker had picked him for the job in the first place, for once you were gazing at his face it was very hard to look away. Mind you, over the years, his neck and shoulders had grown closer to his chin, as if his head might one day disappear inside his body.

  ‘Okay, I hear you,’ Walker said. ‘I truly do. But I can’t give you what you want, not yet, and I’m asking you to trust me. Look, we found a way to feed the people — all the people — because we remembered that people can feel the pain of others. Sure, one person can make a fuss — “I demand the right to eat a cow” — but —’

  ‘Oh my God, a cow. Don’t start talking about cows. All that fur. All that flesh. I don’t believe they ever existed.’

  ‘And, sure, it only takes a few people with a few cows to wrea
k a bit of havoc. But the majority still believe in me. The vast majority. They trust me.’

  ‘Until they don’t?’

  ‘As it’s always been. As it should be. In the meantime, we must hold the majority up. We must honour and protect them. It’s up to us: you and me. Go to the peace conference and talk at length about your hopes for peace. That’s not a lie. I do hope for peace. Every day. Every hour. But we’re not ready for peace.’

  ‘But if people begin to discuss it openly in the streets: “What is bread?”, for goodness sake. In my own home. I plead with you: take this situation seriously.’

  ‘Take it seriously? Take it seriously?’ Walker shook his head in wonder. ‘Watch and learn, Mr President.’

  ***

  On the first full day of his annual leave, Commander Holland, dressed in civvies, took a train to District 87, on the far edge of Rise. He walked through a semi-abandoned area, the buildings ramshackle but functional, their Old Time facades touched up with plastic here and there. He used the hood from his jacket to preserve his anonymity. He didn’t want an audience. He didn’t want to do anything to attract the attention of the hungry, well-hidden surveillance cameras. But although he took precautions, he felt relaxed to be away from the relentless drudgery of the war.

  Holland was pleased to see that the few people out on these streets paid no attention to him. He didn’t suspect that he was being followed by a military police officer, an up-and-comer called Wedge, also dressed in civvies. Rather than sitting on the air train, announcing himself — the single carriage was near-empty by the time Holland got off — Wedge had tailed the train in a vehicle, an oldish model, well-worn, carefully chosen to blend in with the area.

  Wedge knew he needed to be smart if he was going to stay undetected: tailing the great Commander Holland without giving himself up was surely the trickiest of games. Even as he hung back, waiting for Holland to stop loitering and to do something, to go somewhere, he was distracted by the need to navigate around the scattered pockets of people who lived all the way out here. Most of them made a show of moving away at the sight of him. None of them wanted to talk to the police or even be seen by the police, and although Wedge was dressed casually, scruffily, not a hint of tell-tale purple, it was nonetheless obvious to the people that he was officialdom of some sort. Wedge didn’t like the way they made him feel like some sort of pariah. And their choices discomforted him. There was no need for them to be scratching out lives way out here, on the fringes of the city. Wedge knew the reason — they couldn’t handle the grief, the loss: their own, the world’s — but he didn’t understand it. Why wallow? Why not embrace the continuation of life? There was a place for these people with everyone else. Wedge thought of the people of Rise as a heart muscle, beating steadily. For the life of him, he couldn’t think why anyone wouldn’t want that.

  The only local who had spoken to Wedge at all, who had even deigned to look at him, directly in the eyes, was a woman. Wedge found it hard to tell her age or her state of mind, but he suspected she was, like him, a child of the New Time, with no memories of her own messing with her.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ was all she’d said.

  There was nothing menacing in her tone or demeanour: she wasn’t threatening Wedge. She was making a statement: you are interrupting my apartness. Such muddled behaviour, Wedge thought, to try to avoid unwanted attention but to be such a misfit as to invite it.

  Although no other people spoke to him, he felt many eyes on him. If all those eyes were watching him, he worried that they knew who he was watching. Were any of them working for Commander Holland? Would they expose him? And perhaps it was his imagination, but he felt as if he could smell the badlands, not so far away.

  He knew he was overthinking the assignment. Annar, his supervisor, was always telling him to relax. It was easy for her to say: she was sure of herself, her skills. She’d done it all before. But this was Commander Holland, after all, under suspicion for … who knows what? Maybe nothing: maybe Annar was testing Wedge, preparing him for higher duties. Or perhaps she was trying to teach him something. In his most recent performance review, she’d called him a sanctimonious little bastard. She’d said it fondly, but Wedge was still taken aback. Him? Sanctimonious? Sure, he was a plain speaker. But that could only be a good thing.

  One thing Wedge was sure of: nobody could have legitimate business way out here. Not even Commander Holland. Wedge had allowed himself to drift so far back that he’d lost Holland, at least momentarily.

  ‘Confirm location of the subject,’ he murmured into his wearable.

  In head office, in a building near but not within Walker Compound, Wedge’s colleagues Bull and Boosie sat in a locked room watching Holland on multiple monitors, although ‘The Battle of Sergeant Sala’ also played on the bottom left screen, because Boosie just couldn’t get enough of it.

  ‘Street 17. He’s sped up. You should too,’ Bull said into his wearable to Wedge.

  ‘Let him do it his way,’ Boosie said. ‘He’s being furtive.’

  ‘Trying to be,’ Bull said.

  ‘He’s doing okay for a newbie, don’t you think? For a high-flyer.’

  ‘Guys, I can hear you,’ Wedge said. ‘Please. I know what I’m doing.’

  But he was too far away when Holland stepped off Street 17 into a tiny alley, upped his pace, ducked into a covered walkway, and sprinted past several buildings until he came to a door made of tired, dry wood. He turned the original Old Time handle, slipped inside, and made his way along a plastic-lined corridor, sunlight peeking through a half-hearted roof. Through a doorway missing its door, he passed into a dust-filled yard and then the shell of a different building. Inside, he picked a route through a maze of passages until he reached a dead end. He pressed the palm of his hand on the wall in front of him. After a moment, the wall disappeared into the floor. When he stepped forward, the wall automatically rose behind him. A bank of lights illuminated a steep, descending staircase.

  Wedge, meanwhile, had broken into a trot and then a run.

  ‘Where is he?’ he spoke into his wearable. ‘Quick, give me something.’

  But Bull and Boosie’s monitors didn’t penetrate past the entrance to the narrow lane. They moved from camera to camera, but nothing took them into that world.

  ‘Fuckity fuck fuck fuck,’ Bull said.

  ‘It’s all right. Don’t panic. You’re always panicking,’ Boosie said. ‘It’s all good. Wedge, my lad, are you there?’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t call me “lad”. I’m not nearly as young as —’

  ‘Try every door. But, you know, try to stay calm, if you possibly can. I’m sending the drone in now. Remember, you can’t let the subject see you.’

  ‘But what if I open a door and he’s standing right there behind it?’

  ‘Hang on, lad, I’m just juggling tasks here,’ Boosie said. He spoke into his wearable: ‘Central? Central? Listen, we’ve still got the subject but — what I mean is, we’ve lost him. But we’ve got him. We know where he’s gone.’

  ‘Sort of. Kind of. Maybe,’ Bull added.

  ‘It’s just that we can’t actually see him. Can you authorise a sniffer drone?’

  ‘That’s dangerous,’ Bull said. ‘It’s fucking Commander Holland. He’s probably wearing a sensor.’

  ‘No choice, buddy. It’ll be fine. … Yeah, immediately, please,’ Boosie said into his wearable. ‘Okay, thanks … You there, lad? The drone will be with you in a minute or two.’

  ‘Please stop calling me that.’

  ***

  While Wedge wandered about aimlessly, Holland reached the bottom of the stairs. A camera above the door blinked to life before homing in on his right eye. After a moment, the door slid open. Holland walked into a large room brilliantly lit by artificial lights. There were several doors dotted around. A thick bed of dirt, separated into squares by plastic pa
ths, covered the floor. Out of the dirt grew rows of plants, bedraggled but holding determinedly to life.

  Holland walked to a plant, its sagging stalk held up by a plastic stake. He scrabbled around in the leaves, found an ear of corn, and pulled back the husk just enough to reveal that most of it was yellow and near enough to healthy, apart from one end, where the last kernels were a lurid blue. Holland sniffed the corn deeply.

  Another door opened. Holland’s sister, Dinn, entered. He ran to her, and they embraced fiercely.

  ‘How’s Mum?’ Holland asked, finally extricating himself.

  ‘She says she hasn’t seen you for months.’

  ‘I’ve been in the field. She knows that.’

  ‘She’s too old for months. She’s too old for days.’

  ‘I talk to her whenever I can. She gets to see my face whenever she wants to turn on the autoscreen.’

  ‘I know. But it’s not the same.’

  ‘Best I can do.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘How are her tumours?’

  ‘They’re fine. Why wouldn’t they be?’

  ‘But she’s fine?’

  ‘I told you already: she’s fine. She misses you.’

  ‘Jesus, come on, Dinn: what else did she say?’

  ‘She didn’t say anything else. You know how she is: why speak when you can think? She misses you. Okay? She worries about you. We all do.’

  ‘She doesn’t know about any of this, right?’ Holland said, indicating the plants.

  ‘She doesn’t know. But she’s Mum. So she knows. You know?’

  ‘How’s her hip?’

  ‘I told you: she’s fine. Her hip is fine. Her tumours are fine. Her big toe is fine. Her memory, unfortunately for her, is fine.’

  ‘And the children? How are the children?’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t call them that. They’re adults. They’re out in the city, doing their thing, living their lives.’

  ‘And Dunk?’

  ‘He’s fine too. He thinks he’s starting to go blind —’

  ‘Oh no.’