‘Welcome aboard, Holly,’ Sue said in a tone that was as flat and indifferent as it was possible to be without actually being openly rude. ‘We’ve been hearing a lot from Stephen about your communication skills.’
Slaymaker watched the two of them, beaming benignly like he just knew they were going to get along. Did he not notice the hostility, or was he just untroubled by it?
A thin, tall, small-faced woman with long bony legs was picking her way toward them, in black pants and a white blouse; her eyes narrowed as she appraised Holly across the restaurant. Her name was Ann Sellick, and she was to be the communications lead in Slaymaker’s team. She was well known in Holly’s industry as a formidable dogfighter: a publicist whose expertise lay in discrediting individual opponents.
‘You’ll need to work closely with Ann,’ said Sue, ‘to make sure that your input on Stephen’s – uh – special project, dovetails with the rest of what we’re trying to get over.’
‘Yeah, this isn’t some little hydro scheme in Oregon,’ Ann said as she took Holly’s hand limply for a moment and let it go again. ‘Half a billion people are going to be watching every single thing we do. You can’t afford to fuck this one up.’
Holly’s eyes narrowed. ‘I won’t fuck up if you don’t fuck me around. Deal?’
Slaymaker laughed. ‘Well, that’s you told, Ann.’
Ann’s brightly painted lips puckered into a sour little smile as she settled into her seat. Slaymaker was already greeting the next and last arrival across the room.
Jed Bulinski was one of those super-bright, super-confident Ivy League types who populated the think tanks and consultancies of DC, clustering round power like exotic life forms round undersea vents. He was a strikingly good-looking man in an immaculate dark suit, with thick brown hair, a rather full, cruel mouth, and a quick mocking smile.
‘This guy has the morals of a rattlesnake,’ Slaymaker warned Holly as Jed seated himself, ‘but that’s why I hired him. He notices things that most folk are just too nice to think about.’
‘Why thank you, Senator,’ said Jed bowing his head in modest acknowledgment. ‘You say the sweetest things.’
The two older women glanced at each other, eyebrows just perceptibly raised. It occurred to Holly that, to them, Jed was another upstart like her, which made him (not a welcome thought) a potential ally, if she decided to join this team. And she realized too that of course Slaymaker was aware of the undercurrents of jealousy and hostility. He was an instinctive leader. He rewarded the loyalty of his old lieutenants, but he knew their limitations. He needed fresh perspectives, new ideas, new energy from outside, and he needed competition to keep things sharp.
The unimaginative, unnecessarily bulky food arrived. Holly listened to Ann and Sue as they surveyed the political scene. What they said was often ugly. They didn’t attempt to conceal their contempt for the alliance which the Unity Party represented: the delicados with their exquisite and expensive tastes and their ever-bleeding hearts, the unskilled and semi-skilled workforce, and the desperately poor in the bottom 20 percent of American society. This last group’s fecklessness was the particular focus of their contempt (though, in deference to Slaymaker, they avoided mentioning that the barreduras from east and west were now the largest constituent of this group). In Sue and Ann’s world the people who really mattered were the top 10 percent – the ‘creators of wealth’, as they called them.
Slaymaker was in the very unusual position of having traveled all the way from the bottom to the top, and his views on what they were saying were hard to fathom because he said very little, watching the conversation in that attentive, respectful, amused way that he had, almost as if politics weren’t really his thing, and he was an interested outsider. Jed did join in, but Holly noticed he was more even-handed in his scorn than Ann or Sue. His was an equal-opportunities contempt, it seemed. Rich or poor, Freedom Party or Unity Party, Partido Latino or Christian Party, no one escaped it.
Holly thought of her friends – Richard, Mariana, Ruby, Sergio – and wondered how she’d managed to find herself among these cold harsh people. What was she even doing here?
Finally, when Slaymaker had finished his customary ice cream, he turned the conversation back to his favorite project.
‘First and foremost, we’ve got to move people north. There are literally tens of millions up and down the Storm Coast and over in New Mexico, Arizona and California, and sitting behind flood defenses up and down America, who should be up in Alaska by now, or Washington or Idaho, in decent homes and in proper jobs that will help our nation to prosper.’
Ann and Sue glanced at each other. They were old-school Freedom Party people, instinctively opposed to any sort of big government program. They had no real sympathy for Slaymaker’s pet project, a fact that encapsulated what was difficult about his position. How could he expect to sell it to Freedom Party voters, if he couldn’t even sell it to his own lieutenants?
That, of course, was a good reason for bringing in an outsider like Holly. But did she really want to work with people she didn’t like on a project they’d prefer to bury?
‘I’m not saying it can’t be done,’ Jed observed, ‘but that is one hard sell. Northerners basically do not give a flying fuck about homeless barreduras.’
CHAPTER 14
As she settled in the drig, Holly was still torn. She was excited and flattered by the scale of the responsibility that Slaymaker was offering her, but she was aware that, if she took on this job, it would no longer be about helping a politician with a personal project. It could no longer, even at a stretch, be seen as just another PR account. It would mean abandoning her own...she searched for the right word...it would mean abandoning her own tribe and going over to help another. A terrifying prospect.
Yet in some ways, the very transgressiveness was precisely the aspect that appealed to her.
The drig was still on the ground but all around her on its middle deck, passengers were playing with their cristals. A few were using them to watch movies or listen to music or read books but Holly could tell, from the movement of their jaws, that most of them were in the whisperstream. Eleven people, just in her row of sixteen seats, were already deep in there, muttering soundlessly with almost closed mouths, their attention turned away from those who were physically with them to companions they might never have met.
Holly knew that every one of those eleven people would have affinity filters running. They might well not know it – some of them might not even know such things existed – but each one of them was being silently corralled into his or her own individual stream, its content hand-picked by AIs to ensure optimal congruence with that individual’s views, interests, demographic characteristics, consumer habits, tolerance of difference (as indicated by their decisions in the past), and emotional responses to previous messages.
Of course Holly also used affinity filters when she wasn’t at work. Not doing so would be like deliberately hanging out with people you didn’t like. But, while most folk were fooled by affinity filters to some extent into imagining they were part of a much wider consensus than really existed, Holly knew this to be an illusion. She’d first begun to notice this kind of self-deception, in fact, when she was still a child. Her father and mother would come back elated from some demo in London. Hundreds of thousands had attended, they would tell her excitedly. The streets had been packed with protestors, mile after mile after mile. How could the government ignore any more the voice of the people? But she knew that in school the next day – the tough, working-class school they’d sent her to – she’d have a job finding even one single child who agreed with whatever it was that her parents had been marching for.
Cristals allowed people to carry around with them in their pockets the same comforting illusion that her parents had experienced on those marches, without the inconvenience. But Holly knew that to shatter that feeling, all you had to do was step aside for a moment from your own stream and pick up on some other stream that intersected
with it. In a matter of seconds you’d find yourself in another conceptual universe, where another entire set of people were busily reassuring each other that they were the clear-eyed ones, they were the true majority, they were the people who knew what was really going on.
People were resistant to this truth. Holly had found that if she suggested to her friends that their views were not very widely shared, they’d first of all hotly deny it and then, if presented with evidence, they’d shrug and say that other people were simply wrong. Those people were stupid, or blinded by prejudice, her friends would say. If they were underprivileged, they’d been deceived. If they were privileged, they were either being manipulative or had deceived themselves, their beliefs nothing more than a rationalization of their own self-interest. Didn’t slave-owners once persuade themselves that slaves were happy? Didn’t people a hundred years ago persuade themselves that the composition of the air was less important than their own comfort? Her friends alone, apparently, were immune to such self-deception.
Holly wished in a way that she could be more like her friends, could dismiss the evidence, as they did, that her own tribe was no different from any other, for then she could truly feel part of the group she lived among. But she was a professional storyteller. Every day she crafted narratives that made self-interest feel like virtue. And she couldn’t see how the delicados, among all the tribes of America, could be sure that they alone were in possession of truths untainted by any calculation of self-interest. Most of them led comfortable lives, after all. They were smart, educated, comfortably-off people from smart, educated, comfortably-off families. They were the people with skills that AIs and robots still couldn’t match. They designed things, taught things, ran things, discovered things, made things into stories. Their niche in society was secure, and they were very well rewarded by comparison with the great majority of Americans, whose skills were no greater than those of machines, and had to make a living in the little cracks and crannies where it was still cheaper to use humans, or where human labor was protected by politics like some kind of endangered animal.
‘But now I’m constructing a story for myself,’ she said to herself, smiling, in the same silent closed-mouth whisper that other people around her were using to talk to their jeenees (for even the cheapest models could read language from facial muscle movements). ‘I’m constructing a story to make me feel okay about turning my back on my own people.’
Was this really what she wanted? Did she want to place herself in opposition to the values of her friends? ‘If I was stuck on a desert island,’ she said to herself, ‘wouldn’t I rather be with the likes of Ruby or Mariana, who believe in kindness, than with people like Sue or Ann or Jed?’
Yes she would, but what if she could be with Slaymaker on that desert island? That would be a different thing. The two of them would build a house in no time, work out how to make weapons and clothes from skins, spend days on the beach experimenting with designs for boats. And—
‘Okay,’ she interrupted herself impatiently. ‘I get it. Slaymaker fascinates me. But why?’
Did she find him sexy, was that it? Was this some kind of schoolgirl crush? Was all this admiration, this need to please him, really just sublimated lust? Was there some deep, wired-in instinct kicking in, some ancient Cro-Magnon imperative, carried on the X chromosome, to desire the leader, the alpha male, and his genes for strength and leadership?
Holly examined this possibility. She was no prude about sex. She had no difficulty in admitting to herself that sometimes she felt desire for men other than Richard, and even occasionally women. It wasn’t unknown for her to meet a man – or, once in a while, a woman – and think to herself quite openly and unabashedly, I wouldn’t mind fucking you. But as a matter of fact, this wasn’t a thought that had come to her when she was with Slaymaker. Even now, when she challenged herself to think it, it just didn’t seem to work. He was an attractive man, certainly, and she enjoyed his physical presence, but it wasn’t quite lust that drew her to him.
‘Never mind all this,’ she said to herself, in that silent whisper. She disliked excessive introspection. ‘I need to decide one way or the other.’
The drig jolted slightly as it was released from its moorings. As its own buoyancy lifted it, Holly asked her jeenee to make her a map of the USA with each state shaded according to the percentage of homes unoccupied as a result of being abandoned by their owners. States that had the highest percentage to be shaded in dark red, states with the lowest percentage left white. It took the jeenee about three seconds to assemble the necessary information from federal and state statistics. The map showed a clear line across the middle of America, with red or dark pink states below it, and white or pale pink states above. Mexico and Canada were both just colored gray, but Holly guessed that if they’d been shaded in too, most of Mexico would have been solid red, and most of Canada would have been white or pale pink. There was a new frontier across North America that didn’t coincide with a political border. Instead, it lay right there in the middle of the United States, halfway between the continent’s national boundaries.
Holly hadn’t expected the map to make up her mind for her. And yet now, seeing it there in front of her, she knew that she was going to work for Slaymaker. He was the only one who was really trying to deal with this stark new reality, she thought, the only one trying to rebalance America before this rift became too wide to heal, and the northern half of the country simply cast the southern half adrift. Jenny Williams was spending a lot of federal money on strengthening homes in the stressed parts of the country, on improving water supplies and moving people inland, but wasn’t that really equivalent to the aid that prosperous countries in the northern hemisphere had once used to send to poor countries in the southern half of the world? That had never been anything like enough to bridge the gulf between the two halves, and, when things got tough, and the south needed help more than ever, the aid had dried up anyway, and the northern countries had simply erected walls and built up their armies. What Slaymaker was really doing was trying to prevent a similar scenario within the United States. Okay, his horizons were limited, but anyone could have broad horizons if they weren’t really going to do anything. He at least was going to make something happen.
It would be difficult to explain to Richard, she knew, but he would come round. Her friends, too, she thought – her real friends, anyway – once they understood her thinking. After all, if there was one thing delicados believed in, it was tolerance.
Pleased with her conclusion, buoyed up by it, Holly suddenly decided to write to her mother.
She’d been more or less estranged from her father before he became ill. There’d been no formal rift, but she just couldn’t bear to talk to him for any length of time, and he never tried to talk to her. These days he was confined to a wheelchair and his contribution to a conversation consisted of him going round a cycle of four or five statements, over and over, each one followed by a bark of bitter laughter:
‘Of course when we were young, we used to protest about things. Your generation seems to have forgotten that. You get what you settle for, you know. Ha! You get what you settle for! It may be too late now, of course. We don’t live in a democracy any more. This is a plutocracy. We’ve sleepwalked into it. Some of us tried to warn people, but no one wanted to listen. Same with these climate problems. We spent half our youth trying to get something done about it, but of course nobody listened to that either. All they’re interested in is short-term profit, I’m afraid. They don’t give a damn about ordinary people. Ha! They don’t give a damn!’
God, he was tedious! And it wasn’t just his dementia. He’d always been tedious.
She didn’t feel close to her mother either, who was a humorless, gray, little creature with the strange ability to suck the joy out of her surroundings. Whatever you might be feeling pleased or cheerful about, she was sure to find a reason why you should really be feeling guilty or sad or disapproving.
But Holly did feel so
rry for her, partly because she could see it wasn’t much fun being her mother, and partly because she had to put up with Holly’s father. Holly only went back to England once every couple of years – resentfully aware that her parents had never visited her – and she could seldom bring herself actually to talk to her mother, but she tried to maintain at least some sort of contact by cristal mail, hoping to reassure the repressed and joyless woman who’d given birth to her that she hadn’t completely abandoned her.
It wasn’t going to be easy, telling her mother that she’d decided to join the staff of a Freedom Party politician.
‘Hi, Mum,’ she murmured soundlessly. ‘Sorry I haven’t been in touch for a while. Are you and Dad okay? Hope Dad’s new medication is making things a bit easier for you. Just wanted to let you know I’ve got a new job. You aren’t going to approve, but hear me out. I’m going to join the staff of Senator Slaymaker. I know! I said you wouldn’t like it. But I really do think he’s doing more than any other politician right now to stop America being divided between a wealthy north and an impoverished south, which is surely a good thing.
‘Richard’s okay. Still teaching one day a week, and working on his latest book the rest of the time. Or so he says, anyway! Ha ha.
‘Say hello to Dad from me.
‘Love Holly.’
So that was done. The thought of writing just a few lines like that always felt like a colossal task, which she’d often put off for days or even weeks. But now she could return to her work. She told her jeenee to play her some of the interviews she’d commissioned: people from key demographics talking about how they saw the world. Slaymaker was quite right: polls were no substitute for this, because what they generated was data, and what people told were stories. Data was nothing without stories to animate it.
‘Hi, I’m Henry McKenzie...’ said a middle-aged voice through Holly’s implants.
Outside of her window, the whole of Washington was laid out beneath her. There was the tiny, perfect Capitol, the miniature Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument thrusting upwards like a matchstick. There was the Reflecting Pool glinting in a shaft of sunlight like a slither of mirrored glass.
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