A distant look had come into Slaymaker’s eyes, as if Holly had lost him by referring to events outside America, but he nodded to acknowledge that he’d heard and understood her.
‘Si,’ Holly added, ‘and, in the days of the Wild West, as I understand it, there were sparsely populated territories out there beyond the edge of America waiting to be settled and civilized. It’s not like that any more. Your bullock wagons will be rolling into land where Americans already live. In fact, they’ll be rolling into the backyards of the kinds of folk who vote for you. Damn it, your core supporters, the people you rely on, are not the pioneers in the wagon trains rolling into new lands. They’re the Indians who are already there, dreading their arrival.’
Slaymaker laughed. ‘I guess so. So how do we sell it to them?’
‘Not as some kind of exodus, that’s for sure. Something more on the lines of what you said before – reconfiguring America, building a new nation that will be stronger for everyone. I’m still working on that, and I’m not there yet, but that has to be the way to go.’
She was doing her best but, even as she spoke, trying to sound confident and in control, she knew there was something missing. All of this was way too abstract.
‘I’ll be truthful, we haven’t nailed this yet. You’ve got a story to tell but there are potent rival stories that have far more immediate appeal. Like this new state border thing, for instance. Erecting walls has always been a popular idea: a big high wall to shut out all your worries and fears. We need to find something as simple and powerful as that.’
Slaymaker twinkled at her. ‘Well, I trust you, Holly. I trust you to come up with something good. Did you think about my offer?’
‘I did. And, yes, I’d be pleased to join your team, just so long as you know I can’t actually do magic.’
‘All I ask is that you do your best.’
‘Thanks. Well, okay then, just let me sort it out with my boss.’
He beamed with pleasure. ‘That’s great news, Holly. You’ve made my day. Welcome aboard.’ Then he leant forward confidentially, though the two of them were alone in his office. ‘I’d probably better let you know at this point that I’m planning to run for president.’
CHAPTER 11
Quite unexpectedly, a sharp, clinging sadness had gripped Richard’s chest as he watched Holly disappear into the departure area. Why, he wasn’t sure. This wasn’t exactly a bereavement, after all. It was hardly even a parting. She was just going away for a couple of nights. But he’d always felt there was something precarious about Holly’s attachment to him, always secretly doubted his ability to compete with her other enthusiasms.
The car drove him home past the new thousand-acre Boeing weapons complex. High walls and fences. Cameras and gun turrets. Cold white lights. Not a single human being in sight in that icy castle. Later he passed a group of foreign contract workers in yellow jumpsuits, repairing some barriers along the road under a floodlight, their overseer leaning on a tree as he watched them, his hand resting on his gun.
At home Richard stayed up, skipping between news hubs and channels on the broadscreen and his cristal. Another storm was coming in, Superstorm Thomas. It would slice into the North Carolina coast. More refugees, more floods and roofless houses. The size of these storms was unprecedented, and so was the speed with which they followed one another. The pot had been bubbling for some time, everyone kept saying, but now it felt like it was really beginning to boil. But being unprecedented was not itself unprecedented. Records were always being broken. Previously unknown scenarios were regularly becoming part of everyday experience. And even a rapid rate of change can become routine. He let the news wash over him and waited for more interesting stories to come along.
He saw some pictures of Ceuta – smashed fences, corpses, burnt-out shopping malls – and got to thinking about what it was that those people were running away from so desperately that they were willing to risk being crushed to death. He found a piece about Southern Africa and a phenomenon emerging down there which someone had named the Memetic Hordes. Gangs of deserters from armies whose governments could no longer afford to pay them had grown into large stateless armies in their own right with names like the Lions of God, the Children of Zion...
They were the next stage on from warlords, so it was said. Warlords controlled specific territories, and maintained a level of economic activity. But the hordes simply wandered back and forth across a swathe of drought-ridden nations, raping, plundering what they could – once they’d slaughtered elephants for ivory, but of course there were no elephants left – and killing whoever opposed them, often in deliberately spectacular ways. They maintained their numbers by press-ganging children into service, and funded themselves by selling plundered goods and taking protection money. The stolen kids grew up in the hordes and became part of them. The current leaders of the various hordes had all themselves started out as abducted children. Growing up without love, their only security lying in service to the horde, the ones who rose to the top were those who were the purest in their savagery. They wore gold rings on their fingers and mirror shades, had cold skull-like smiles and actively encouraged atrocities among their lower ranks – rape, public torture, cannibalism – knowing from their own experience that complicity, even more than fear, would bind their followers to them.
Richard laid down his cristal and went to stand at the back door looking out into the warm darkness. A gentle wind stroked his face. The air was like some fierce beast at rest, a lion curled up for a nap after devouring a wildebeest.
Of course there were no lions these days, either. Or wildebeests. Any land in Africa that could support large animals had long since been given over to farms.
He felt strangely detached and calm. Perhaps those hordes were really a cleansing force, he thought. They could hardly be described as alive. They were more like glaciers or lava flows, methodically scouring the land, so it could revert to the pristine, mineral, peaceful desert it once had been before those peculiar self-replicating molecules started to coagulate in the primeval oceans, bringing fear and craving into the world.
And then there would just be rock and earth and water and air, spinning quietly through space. Storms could rage, droughts could desiccate whole continents, but they would have no more consequence than the fall of a single drop of rain, or a single grain of sand.
CHAPTER 12
Margot Jeffries
I used to live in a beautiful little town in Arizona called Santa Jordania, just fifty miles north of the Mexican border. The sky was bluer than you’d believe possible and the air so clear that the mountains twenty-five miles away across the desert looked like you could reach them in fifteen minutes.
Tourists came in the dry, intense heat of summer, to take pictures of our Spanish church and our pretty painted houses. I made pots and sold them in my little craft shop. And when I wasn’t potting, or drawing, or reading in my backyard under the shade of my orange tree, I’d get together with some friends and sing. There were downsides, like there are anywhere, but even at the time I knew how lucky I was and wondered how long it would last.
There turned out to be an answer to that. It was twelve years. The wells the town relied on began to dry up. We got by on rationing for a while, and then we got a new kind of water recycling plant so the same water could be used over and over again. At one point the mayor looked into laying a pipeline hundreds of miles across the desert. But it turned out to be too costly to be viable. If I was going to pay the higher bills that would have involved, I’d have had to charge twice as much for my pots and still sell just as many. Same for the hotels, same for the restaurants. And that just wasn’t going to happen.
The hardest part was that our houses and businesses were now worth nothing at all. No one was going to move into a town with no water, so pretty much all of the money we had invested there was gone for good. And for me, and for a lot of others too, that meant ending up with less than nothing, because I still owed money on my house a
nd my kiln.
We’d kind of seen it coming for several years, though – the same thing was happening all over the south-west – and we made up our minds as a community to have one last big party under the stars, sell whatever movable stuff we could, and then go our separate ways.
I had no savings, but I guess I could have rented a one-room apartment somewhere, and maybe taken up teaching again, but for some reason I chose to become a proper barredura and see what it was like. I moved to Federal Resettlement Camp I34 in central Illinois. It was a bare grid of nine hundred identical aluminum trailers, right next to a little prairie town about the same size as the town I’d left behind down in Arizona.
The local people didn’t like us being there. There were only about four thousand of them, they were all related, all Lutherans, and most of them were descended from Swedes who’d settled that part of Illinois the better part of three hundred years previously. They were proud of their neat little town with its tidy white church, where everyone knew everyone, and no one even had to lock the doors.
There were about three thousand of us in the trailer park. We came from California, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico, and were a pretty mixed bunch: some of us were Anglos like me, but most were Mexican Americans and Native Americans, including a big group of Navajos. The town news hub carried gloomy articles about how the new arrivals were driving down their property values and committing crimes, and when it came to the elections to the town council, the mayor actually went to court to try and get us barreduras off the voters’ roll. We were only temporary residents, was his argument. We should vote in elections back where we came from.
That was a joke. Where I came from wasn’t there any more! The houses, the church, the stores, the fire station: they were just a bunch of empty shells with the wind blowing through them and the sand building up against the walls.
There was this new group in the Midwest back then, calling itself the Norsemen. Vigilantes, basically, who wore Viking-style helmets with facemasks. They posted signs: ‘Town elections. Dust trash not invited.’ And then one evening some of them came through the camp with guns, shouting abuse and flinging red paint about. A woman called Patricia had become a kind of leader in the camp. An imposing half-Navajo woman, six foot tall, she’d spoken out publicly in a town meeting for our right to vote. The Norsemen tossed a firebomb through the window of her trailer and then stood and jeered at her and her wife June when they came running out in their nightclothes.
‘Go home, redskins!’ they yelled. ‘Go back to the desert, lesbian scum!’
Redskins. Lesbian scum. You heard more and more of that. I even got to wondering whether there was – I don’t know – some kind of genetic thing inside us that switches on when things get hard, and makes us notice distinctions that we wouldn’t previously have bothered about. I mean, defining groups of people as ‘them’ and not ‘us’ sort of reduces the number of folk we have to feel obligations to, doesn’t it?
Anyway, the firetruck and the sheriff didn’t arrive for an hour, by which time Patricia’s trailer was completely burnt out, and the Norsemen had long since gone. Which was kind of suspicious, when you remembered that the fire station and the sheriff’s office were both only three miles away, and that there weren’t any other fires to put out that night, or any reports of crimes. Well, hadn’t they been telling us that? That this was a peaceful place without any crime? And one of my neighbors swore that one of the firemen had red paint on his hands.
Afterwards, people gathered together around Patricia. Some talked about fighting and revenge, others about lawyers and letters to congressmen. One woman said they ought to talk to Senator Slaymaker: ‘He’s the only one of the lot of them that gives a shit about people like us!’
I don’t like shouting and indignation soon tires me. I could tell that this scared, angry litany could easily go on all night, so I went to bed.
I lay awake for hours, thinking, thinking, thinking. It was such a strange situation I found myself in: a refugee in my own country. But I’d always lived on my own, and that did make things easier when it came to adapting to change. I had no one to worry about but myself. I was troubled, of course, but I wasn’t really scared.
And, unlike some of the people here, I’d kind of chosen this life. Once, when I was in the town, a woman in the drugstore asked me why I stayed in the camp. ‘You’re not like the rest of them,’ she said to me, meaning I guess that I had an educated voice, and my ancestors came from northern Europe. ‘We wouldn’t mind if they were all like you.’
I remembered that now. And as I lay there listening to those indignant voices rising and falling outside, I found myself thinking about the Mexican border. It had only been about fifty miles south of our little town, but I’d very seldom given it any thought. The only time it really came home to me what that border meant was when a tunnel caved in down near Naco and about fifty people inside it were crushed to death. A few months previously, there’d been a noisy demonstration on the Mexican side going on for many weeks, and it turned out all that noise had basically been cover to allow the tunnellers to do their work without being detected by acoustic sensors. The tunnel itself was a horrible narrow hole, no more than four foot high. Illegal migrants had been coming in through it all that time.
Now, as I lay in my trailer in Illinois, I remembered feeling sad about that, sad that some people were so desperate to get out of their own country that they’d take that kind of risk. And I remembered feeling angry that my country had put up that ugly wall. I’d signed some kind of petition about it, I seemed to recall, though I couldn’t now say what it said (to be honest I probably hadn’t even read it through). And once I’d gone down to Naco with a bunch of people in the town and taken part in a small demonstration. But that was it, and within a few weeks, I’d forgotten all about it.
Thinking about it now, it struck me how much my whole way of life down there had depended on that wall. I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself at the time – I’d wanted it to be the responsibility of someone else – but really I’d known quite well that it was the wall that made possible our pretty little town in the desert, where the tourists came to buy my pottery. It was like a dam, holding back all that desperation and need, and allowing us to continue to enjoy beauty, peace and prosperity, just fifty miles north of it. Without it, we’d quickly have become a crowded, poverty-stricken Mexican town, like a hundred others to the south of the border.
At least that drugstore woman was honest, I thought. At least she came out and said who she wanted in her town and who she didn’t. We wouldn’t have wanted migrants from Mexico in Santa Jordania – shacks spoiling our view, beggars making us feel bad, hawkers undercutting our prices. I wouldn’t have flung red paint at them, of course, or called them names, or tried to scare them into leaving, but I would have moved away myself. We were living in a pretty little pastiche of Mexican life, and the real thing would have completely spoiled it. So we let others build the wall and guard it, and pretended it was nothing to do with us.
As I lay there thinking about this, rain began to fall, a few big drops at first, but pretty soon a proper downpour, which finally broke up that little gathering of scared indignant folk outside. I lay and listened to it, the steady hiss and patter of rain falling on the roof of my trailer, and the little gurgles and splashes, and sometimes in the distance the crack and boom of enormous clumps of air colliding in the darkness, thousands of feet above the prairie.
CHAPTER 13
‘Okay,’ Holly said in that big comfortable office on Constitution Avenue. ‘Well, that changes everything. If you’re going for the presidency, there’s no sense at all in carrying on with this resettlement campaign as a separate project. Every single thing you say from now on is going to be a part of your election campaign. And I can’t pretend I know the slightest thing about elections.’
Slaymaker leant forward. ‘This isn’t you quitting, is it?’
‘It’s me saying I don’t think I’ve got anything to
offer.’
He laughed. ‘Hey! I’ll be the judge of that! But maybe you don’t want to get involved in a political campaign, is that it? I’ve kind of got you down as someone who doesn’t normally vote for the Freedom Party?’
‘You’re right. I’ve voted Unity ever since I became a US citizen.’
‘But you were happy to help me with my resettlement campaign?’
Holly’s party affiliation didn’t seem either to bother Slaymaker or to strike him as a particular difficulty.
‘Por cierto. And not only because I’m a professional. I actually agree with it.’
Slaymaker nodded. ‘Well, it’s going to be the centerpiece of my campaign, Holly, reconfiguring our country to stop it from falling apart.’
‘I wouldn’t make it the centerpiece if I were you. You should go with...I don’t know, some part of your program that’s easier to sell, like...maybe...tax cuts, or a foreign war or something. Or building this starship people talk about.’
‘I want to make it the centerpiece. This is the thing I most care about, and, if I’m going to drive it through, seems to me I need a proper mandate from the American people. And I’d be really pleased if you’d carry on helping me figure out how to get that message over. I’ve got other people to help me with taxes and defense and all the rest.’
‘I need to think about it,’ she said.
‘Okay, well, let me at least introduce you to some of my team!’
They met Sue Cortez, who was to be Slaymaker’s campaign director, in one of the dull, expensive restaurants he favored. She was a tough, compactly built African American woman in her fifties who’d been a sidekick of his for many years: a professional troubleshooter with sour, coolly appraising eyes. It was obvious she didn’t welcome this British, delicado, Unity-voting upstart. She and Holly circled each other, obliged to be nice with Slaymaker there.
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