‘Sorry to call so late, Holly.’ Janet’s voice was shaky. ‘I’ve got a bit of a crisis going on here. Jack’s had to go into hospital. Nothing too terrible, I don’t think, but I’d kind of like to be there for him. I was wondering if you could help me out by covering something for me tomorrow. I was going to meet a potential client for lunch, a rather important potential client. Could you take my place?’
Holly said ‘yes, of course, absolutely, no trouble at all...’ et cetera, and, while she went over in her mind the diary commitments she’d have to reschedule, she asked about Janet’s husband and how he was getting on (it was heart trouble) and then about the client.
‘Well, it’s very confidential at this stage, Holly, but if we play our cards right, it could become one of our most important accounts.’
‘Wow! Exciting! But you know me, Janet, I’d always—’
‘I know, Holly. But this is kind of extra delicate, that’s all. You see, the client is Senator Slaymaker. He wants to talk over some aspects of his current project. I don’t know if you know he’s launching a campaign for a big resettlement program in the northern states.’
‘Rick and I were just talking about it.’
‘I did a little bit of work for him once, back when he was heading up the Haulers Federation. We were going to meet at Le Lac for lunch tomorrow, and, seeing as he’s already flown up from DC, I said I’d see if you could meet him instead. I told him you were way smarter than me.’
‘Wow!’ said Richard as Holly hung up. ‘Working for Slaymaker? He’s a big figure these days. Some people are saying he’ll run for president. But—’
‘Well, it’s not a presidential campaign we’re going to help with, I assure you. It’s just this campaign of his for more federal help for the storm refugees.’
‘Well, good luck with that. As far as I can see, fewer and fewer people are willing to pay out tax dollars to help out for—’
He broke off because he could see Holly wasn’t listening any more.
‘Listen, Rick, I’m so, so sorry, but I’m meeting him tomorrow, and that means I’m going to have to set aside the rest of this nice evening and put in a couple of hours of preparation.’
Richard walked over to the window to close it for the night. ‘Sure. Of course. Shall I make you some coffee? To clear your head a bit?’
She kissed him. She was already mentally compiling a list of topics that she needed to research. ‘That would be great. But don’t wait up for me after that. I’m not sure how long I’ll be.’
CHAPTER 3
Richard stared up at the ceiling in the light of his reading lamp.
He’d grown used to Holly acting for clients he didn’t approve of. How she explained it was that she was like an attorney in a court of law: her job was to represent people whether she agreed with them or not. And he kind of got that. He was also a little in awe of her for being out there in the world of affairs, and not just the world of ideas that he inhabited. In fact, he loved that about her. Picturing her in her study now, for instance, he smiled to himself. She’d already be deep into this new job, those alert, bright eyes darting about as she muttered instructions to her jeenee, had it conjure up data for her onto the multiple screens that she like to array around herself.
And when it was just some hydro company or something, well, there wasn’t that much of a downside. Big hydro fought pretty rough, it was true, and upset some of Holly and Richard’s friends, but what was the alternative, Richard had always privately thought? America needed power from somewhere to keep the lights on, and the cars on the roads.
Slaymaker, though...
The trees outside began to move again, building up to a level of agitation that was almost a gale, and then falling silent once more.
Slaymaker of all people, that ferocious American nationalist, that bloodstained warrior from America’s wars in the African Copper Belt, that self-made man who thought that just because he’d been able to claw his way up from nothing, then everyone else could too. As if being exceptionally smart had nothing to do with it, and exceptionally driven, and exceptionally ruthless.
Again the wind built up, all the trees sighing and hissing together as their branches bent and strained, creaked and groaned, like this time something was going to happen, like this time they were going to really see it through.
But no, the pulse passed, and the night fell still.
There was a side of Holly, he knew, that was drawn to people like Slaymaker: these big, tough, vivid people whose imaginations expressed themselves not in ideas but in tons of concrete, in gigawatts of power. She liked them and she got on very well with them. This was mysterious to him. He knew he’d feel uncomfortable with such people. He knew he’d feel simultaneously disapproving and inadequate. But she was completely at ease with them. It was one of the things that made it impossible for him to resolve Holly into something he could fully understand.
Yes, he dreamily thought, but that was a good thing. He needed her to be different, otherwise the two of them would just be – he pictured this rather than thought it in words, for words were slipping away from him: he was in the factory where words are made – otherwise the two of them would just be a single blob of sameness and they would be alone all over again, looking for something else to reach out to, something else to desire, out there in the world beyond...
The air slithered round the world outside, like soft, loose layers of silky skin, sliding over one another, and under, brushing the cooling surface of the shadowy world.
When Holly finally came into the bedroom, Richard was deeply asleep. She’d worked for three hours by then, searching for information, organizing it, memorizing it: facts about Slaymaker’s life and his place in American politics, information about America’s internal refugee problem, data about public attitudes. At her company’s expense, she’d even conducted a couple of small instant polls, throwing out questions into the Pollcloud – there were always people awake from every demographic who were willing to answer a few questions – and having AI statisticians analyze the answers.
She laid her cristal on her bedstand and turned out the light. Even now, she hadn’t finished working. She spoke soundlessly to the jeenee inside her cristal and asked it to give her a taste of what people were saying out there on the whisperstream, right now, about the storm people. So, as she settled herself down, she was hearing conversation after conversation through the tiny implant that she wore in her right ear. It was like opening a chink into a huge dark room, buried beneath America, full of voices – some showing off, some complaining, some trying to be original, some loudly proclaiming their orthodoxy. All were telling stories about themselves and the world, their own particular stance in relation to the world, the way they and the world connected together.
The torrent of voices continued until the jeenee could tell from her brain rhythms that its mistress was asleep. And then, like a gentle grown-up pulling up the bedcovers and tiptoeing from the room, it slid the volume very slowly down until there was no sound left but Richard’s breathing and the wind outside.
CHAPTER 4
Rosine Dubois
I guess we were lucky none of us were hurt. We’d done what the government asked, just stayed there under the table in our kitchen, watching the walls bulging and bending around us, and suddenly, SMASH, a car came through our roof, right through the metal cage and everything. It must have been blown off the flyover, though God knows what that kid was doing, driving a car in a hurricane. But whatever the reason, there he was, or there was his body anyway, his broken body, dangling through the windscreen upside down, right there in our kitchen, with the wind screaming and howling over the hole he’d made.
‘Okay,’ Herb said, when the storm had finally passed over us. ‘You take the boys round to Charlene’s and I’ll try and figure out how to get that poor kid out of the car.’
Debris lay strewn all around us: pieces of tin roof, torn-off branches, the striped awning from some store. Below us in the lo
wer town, folk were huddled up on the ridges of their roofs, while big choppy waves rolled through the streets.
‘The walls are still standing anyway,’ Herb said, ‘and most of our stuff is okay as well. Tricky part is going to be getting the car out of there without doing more damage, but we’ll figure out something.’
But I told him no. This was it. I was done with the Storm Coast. I’d lived here all my life – my ma and pa too – but I was done with it.
‘We should’ve got out of here years ago, when the house was still worth something,’ I told him.
We both knew I’d suggested this way back, and that Herb had firmly said no.
‘Okay, Rosine,’ he said, ‘if you want me to say you were right I’ll admit it now. You were right, and I’m sorry. But it’s kind of late for moving now. No one will give us a penny for this place, so how are we going to get somewhere else to live? And how are we going to feed the kids? There’s going to be thousands of people heading away from the coast after this, hundreds of thousands most likely, and they’ll all be looking for jobs and homes, along with all those Californians and desert people. At least we’ve both got work here, and the land and the house.’
‘We’re not staying, Herb. You got to think ahead. Things aren’t going to stay the same, are they? That’s not how it works these days. If we don’t leave now, we’ll be wishing we did in two years’ time, the same as we wish now we’d left two years ago.’
Neighbors were outside as well by now, under the darkening sky, looking round at the damage.
People started to come over to ask if we wanted beds for the night. Our friend Charlene took our boys in, fed them ice cream, and let them play with a couple of new broadscreen-games that she’d put aside for her own kids for Christmas, and then me and Herb, Charlene and two or three others levered open the door of the upside-down car, wrapped a sheet round that dead kid, and pulled him out, laying him down at the back of the yard where we wouldn’t have to keep looking at him. He was awful broken-up.
Charlene’s husband Luther fetched some rags to wipe up the blood that had dripped out onto the kitchen floor, and after that, we went and inspected our truck. It was okay. The storm-proof door on our garage had held out, and the main battery and the spare had both been fully charged up before Simon brought down the power lines. We lifted the spare battery into the flatbed, and then loaded up everything else we could fit in that was of any value: the broadscreen, the washing machine, the best bed.
‘Sure you want to leave right now?’ Charlene asked. ‘Hubs say the traffic’s backed up twenty miles out of town north, south and west.’
‘Sooner we get into the line, the sooner we’ll reach the end of it,’ I said.
‘Where you going to go?’ Luther asked.
‘North and west, I guess,’ Herb said. ‘Out of the storm country as fast as we can.’
‘We may not be far behind you,’ Charlene said. ‘Make sure you tell us where you all end up, you hear?’
She glanced over at the dead body lying against the yard fence.
Beyond, over the lower town, a couple of police drigs were moving slowly over the rooftops – not picking anyone up, as far as I could see, though folks were waving and yelling for them to come down, just sweeping search lights back and forth. Looking for looters, I guess. Looking for someone they could shoot.
CHAPTER 5
The Le Lac restaurant was at the top of a slender tree-like tower on the shore of Lake Washington. Holly’s company often used the place. The food was stylish, the view was spectacular, the tables sufficiently separated from one another that you could talk without being overheard, and the kind of people who could afford to eat there weren’t overly interested by the presence of a national celebrity such as Stephen N. Slaymaker.
The senator arrived about ten minutes after her: that thick gray hair, those blue, penetrating eyes, those austere cheekbones, which (as she’d found out in her researches) he liked to say he’d inherited from his Cherokee great-grandmother. Often famous people from the TV seemed smaller than she’d expected them to be when she met them in real life, but he was, if anything, bigger: a very tall, very fit man in his mid-fifties, wearing an expensive but not particularly fashionable blue suit and a pale blue shirt open at the collar to show the strong lean sinews of his neck.
‘Senator Slaymaker! I’m Holly!’
‘Hey!’ he said as he shook her hand. ‘Nice to hear someone speaking English for a change.’
He was being nice. He meant British English. In spite of great efforts on her part, Holly had never managed to shake off the accent.
‘Or the obscure European offshoot thereof, at any rate,’ she said as they sat down at the table that Janet’s jeenee had reserved for them. ‘My husband tells me that back in Shakespeare’s time the English all spoke like Americans.’
It was the best she could manage in that benign, yet very penetrating gaze.
‘Is that a fact?’
Slaymaker had never seen a Shakespeare play, was Holly’s guess. He just wasn’t the kind to invest his time in something that was made-up, or from the far-off past. But he was visibly pleased all the same by what Holly had told him. He was always pleased to hear things that placed America at the centre of things.
‘Okay, Holly. Can I call you that? Well, to get straight down to it, I guess you know about my campaign?’
‘Certainly. You’re calling for large-scale, federally funded resettlement for folk from threatened areas on the east coast and in the southwest.’
‘Correct. Resettlement in the northwestern states, including Alaska. Did you know that Juneau, Alaska, is now the second fastest-growing city in the union after Seattle, and Anchorage the third?’
‘The whole country’s moving northwest.’
‘It is. It has been for some time. But so far, that’s just the result of folks individually making those tough calls to cut their losses down on the Storm Coast, or the Dust Country, and moving north to start again. Which is great, and it’s what America’s all about. But it’s happening too slowly and leaving too many people behind.’
‘I think it’s good of you to try to help those people. A lot of folk don’t want to know.’
‘Well, thank you. But this isn’t just about helping those folks. It’s about America itself. We’re not distributed properly any more. Folk aren’t in the places where they can be productive.’
‘When they could be really prospering somewhere else?’
‘Exactly. And they’re soaking up tax money. I’ll show you the figures. I’ve had people look this stuff up for me. The Storm Coast is a drain on our country’s resources. So is the Dust Country. So are all those towns on coasts and rivers where they have to keep building the levees higher all the time. Basically, the government needs to shift most of the US population inland and to the north. And then get off people’s backs again and let them get on.’
‘Most of the US population? That’s an incredibly ambitious plan, Senator.’
‘We’ve done it before. Go back a few hundred years and there was no America at all. Just Indian tribes and a lot of empty space.’
‘I guess so.’
‘It’s doable. I don’t care what anybody says. But to make it happen I need to sell the idea to the American people. Your Janet has done some solid work for me in the past so I thought I’d ask her for some advice. Then her guy went into hospital and of course she had to prioritize. She spoke very highly of you.’
‘I’ll try to live up to it.’
‘I’m sure you will, Holly.’ Again, that very intense and focused gaze. ‘I have every confidence in you already.’
A waiter arrived and they gave their orders. Slaymaker wanted a steak. Holly chose a fancy concoction of lobster meat and clams. Neither of them went for wine.
‘Tell me something about your general approach to these kinds of problems, Holly.’
‘Well, we usually work with a kind of triage model. We look at the audience we’re addressing and w
e divide it into three. There are the core supporters who are already on board, there are the firm opponents who won’t come on board no matter what, and there are the floaters who are open to persuasion. It’s the floaters you need to focus on of course but, in doing so, it’s really important not to alienate your core supporters by making them feel taken for granted.’
Slaymaker nodded, and was about to say something, but Holly held up her hand.
‘Sorry, but I was just going to add that your present campaign is a kind of unusual case which totally messes up that whole model because you’re cutting right across the normal pattern of allegiances. The demographic groups that your party normally relies on are precisely the ones that are most resistant to large-scale federal welfare projects and the most worried about migration from other states into their communities. You’re going completely against the instincts of your own people.’
She laid her cristal on the table so he could see the graphics she’d put together in the early hours of that morning.
‘The demographic groups that are the most enthusiastic about large federal spending projects are unskilled service workers, government employees, first- and second-generation immigrants, and the professions we tend of think of as typically delicado: university people, writers, artists, scientists, computer architects, and so on. And they are precisely the sectors that are least likely to vote for you or your party and most likely to vote Unity Party. And even Unity voters aren’t that keen on federal spending if it means paying more taxes.’
She touched the cristal to bring up another graphic. ‘Never mind party. Northerners of all parties aren’t keen on tax dollars going to southerners. I haven’t done all the polls yet, but I’m willing to bet they’d be even less keen on the idea of paying for the privilege of having millions of barreduras descend on them.’
‘Barreduras. I don’t like that word. It means dirt, you know? The dirt you sweep up off the floor.’
America City Page 2