Everything went just the way she had planned when she put the speech together with Quentin and Jed.
‘I’m a man of peace, friends. I’m a God-fearing man and a man of peace. I do not seek conflict with anyone. But there is a problem that now faces us on this continent, a problem we’re going to have to face sooner or later. And unlike others, I refuse to be silent on it. If I put things in a bit of a rough-and-ready way, well, I’m sorry. I didn’t go to Yale or Princeton, as you know. Truth is, I dropped out of school at sixteen, and wasn’t in school all that much before then either. I’m a truck man, first and foremost.
‘But I keep my eyes open. I notice what’s going on around me, and I see what all of you can see. Things have changed these last thirty years. Things have gotten a little tougher. We have land that used to be under the plow that’s now nothing but desert sand. We have whole towns abandoned because there’s no practical way of giving them water. We have big coastal cities that are staggering under the punches that the storms keep dealing out. And on top of that, we have northern cities that are struggling to cope with all the folk coming in from other parts. So what we’ve got here is one bunch of decent hard-working folk who’ve lost their livelihoods, and are struggling to make their way, and another bunch of decent hard-working folk who’d like to help but are kind of up against it themselves. And all of us, wherever we live in America, have got worries about where we’re going to be and how we’re going to make a living, ten or twenty years down the track.
‘And now here’s where I get to the bit that upsets some folks. Here’s where I get people yelling at me. But all I’m doing is pointing out something that anyone can see who chooses to look for one moment at a map of this great continent of ours. It’s just that most people are too polite to speak about it.
‘And here it is. We’re kind of crowded here in the United States. I know the good people in the northern states of America will do their bit, like they always have done, paying out taxes to help their fellow Americans to move up and join them, and helping us build new cities and towns. But our northern people can’t do everything, no matter how much they might like to. They have the goodwill, they have the generosity, but they just don’t have the slack. So what are we going to do? Well, I can’t help noticing that just to the north of us, four or five yards from where I’m standing, there’s a huge country, bigger than America itself, much of it damn near empty. Just its three Arctic territories – there they are, look, people, lighting up right now – make up a land area that’s one-third the size of the entire United States. But all three of them together have a combined population that’s less – can you believe this? – less than the population of Little Rock, Arkansas. And those three almost empty territories are just beginning to come out, all fresh and shiny and new, from under the ice right now, while our western states are losing good land every day to dust and sand, and our eastern states are being battered every summer by storms.
‘We all know the name of that country just over those barriers, but maybe I’d better not say it out loud, because each time I do, it seems to get me in trouble.’
Slaymaker paused here, and five thousand people laughed and began to chant the name that he was pretending to be too cautious to say, while the Mounties watched stony-faced from the far side of the frontier.
‘What’s that? Canada? Really? Well, okay, but remember you said it first not me. You people are going to have to take the blame!’
A big happy cheer of assent went up on the American side. Holly had figured that people would enjoy this little conceit of them being the ones who’d stuck their necks out. People liked to be told they’re brave and tough and individualistic. They just didn’t like being those things so much.
‘Don’t you worry, Mr Slaymaker,’ some guy yelled out, ‘we’ve got your back.’
Slaymaker pointed at him, grinned, gave him a thumbs-up. ‘Much obliged, compañero, much obliged. But seriously, folks, I bear the Canadian people no enmity. They’re English-speaking North Americans, the same as most of us. The only real difference between them and us is the fact that they live north of an invisible line that someone drew with a ruler across a map, and we live south of it. Oh yeah, and the fact that they took a little longer than we did to say goodbye to English kings and queens.’
This got a big cheer too and Holly suddenly felt tears rising behind her eyes. There was a feeling of elation and release welling up in that crowd that was very moving. These were people who’d felt humiliated and powerless, and finally they were being given some hope and something to be proud of.
‘And maybe,’ said Slaymaker, ‘the fact that some of them say “hooss” when they mean “house” and “aboot” when they mean “about”.’
More cheers and laughter. Holly nodded and smiled. She’d road-tested every one of his little jokelets in focus groups.
‘Seriously, folks, I bear the Canadian people no ill will. I don’t want to take their homes from them, or their farms, or their businesses, let alone their beautiful country. But I do say to them they’ve got to let – us – in.’
There was loud applause. Good. The gear-shift from jokey to serious had worked perfectly.
‘And I mean they’ve got to really let us in, not one at a time, with temporary visas, and not a lousy twenty thousand a year, which might sound a lot, people, but really is nothing at all compared with our population of half a billion or even theirs of fifty million. No, they’ve got to open their borders and let us in as fellow citizens and equal partners. That’s the new frontier now, up there in the Yukon, and the North-Western Territory, and...uh...Nun... Nunny Vat...’
Good, that got a laugh. He could of course pronounce the name of Canada’s sole Inuit-majority territory perfectly well (although it had to be said he hadn’t heard of it until Jed told him about it). But Holly had learnt from her surveys that most Americans didn’t even recognize the name, let alone know how to pronounce it, and she wanted them to think of him as one of them.
‘Nanny Pat, Nonny Vit...whatever the heck it’s called...’ clowned Slaymaker, as they’d agreed he would do if he got a decent laugh the first time round. ‘Let’s just hope my old geography teacher isn’t watching this, or he’ll have my ass.’
There was more loud laughter and applause.
‘But seriously, people, look at the map. Look at that empty space. Look at those big islands up there. We’ve got people here in America who need that land. We’ll build the towns up there, we’ll create the jobs, and we won’t ask the Canadians to spend a single cent of their hard-earnt money, but our people do need some of that land that they aren’t using. It can’t be allowed just to stand there empty.’
Once again, the gear-shift had worked perfectly. Holly had to admit that, for all his faults, for all his slowness at grasping hold of the latest twist in the story, Quentin was great at pacing. The smiles had faded but the applause was as loud as ever.
‘Like I said, I tell it how I see it. But did you hear me say anything bad about Canada? No you did not.’
More cheers.
‘Did you hear me speak of wanting to harm those good people over there in any way, or take away their livelihoods or their homes?’
Still more cheers, and shouts of, ‘No we did not!’ The warm-up people from the buses were in the crowd to help get these responses going, but Holly was pretty sure they hadn’t been necessary.
‘Did you hear me say anything,’ Slaymaker called out, ‘that would justify the government of Canada in whining, as it did after my speech last week in New York State, about “a gross violation of national sovereignty”?’
‘No we did not!’
‘Quite right, my friends. I’m not telling Canadians how to run their country. They do that very well for themselves. All I’m saying is: let our people in, let them build new towns and cities, let them do for your country what Americans have always done best – create wealth, create opportunities, get things moving.’
He paused for a few seco
nds to let people chant out his name and then raised his hands for quiet. ‘America doesn’t stop at frontiers,’ he said. ‘Never has done. That’s not what America’s about. We open up frontiers, and then we roll up our sleeves and we make things happen. That’s America. We make things happen! We make things happen for everyone. And woe betide anyone who tries to stop us.’
Loud excited clapping and shouting. And then a new thing happened, something that Holly hadn’t planned for at all. People started to push against those plastic barriers, yelling at the Can-adian cops to get out of their way. And to their amazement, delight and scorn, the cops did just that.
The news hubs loved it, and so did the whisperstream. Later, as the Americans who’d crossed the border were finally persuaded back by the humiliated Mounties, or wandered back of their own accord, Holly sat beside Slaymaker in his personal drig and flipped through instant reaction interviews on the drig’s broadscreen. Poll data was invaluable, but individual responses gave a feel that aggregated data just couldn’t deliver.
‘I was going with Montello,’ said a man from Olympia, Washington, ‘but I’m starting to change my mind. I don’t go along with everything Slaymaker says, but he sure as hell is standing up for America.’
‘You know what I noticed?’ said a woman from New Jersey, after been shown footage of the Opheim rally. ‘It was all that empty space, stretching away, like...I don’t know...like an ocean almost, with no houses or nothing, just grass.’ She didn’t seem to have noticed that the prairie extended on both sides of the border. ‘I think the senator’s right. We gotta to be allowed access to that space. That’s where he scores over all the others, because the one thing we need is space.’
‘Thing that gets me,’ said a plump young man from Detroit, ‘is that the Canucks were on the British side when we fought for independence. So how come they still get to control all that land, and say who can come in there and who can’t? Why did we ever let them get away with that?’
‘Because they pretended to be our friends,’ said his equally plump girlfriend who’d been sitting next to him, leaning in now so as to be sure she could be seen.
‘Yeah,’ said the young man. ‘They made fools out of us, really, I guess. But I reckon Slaymaker—’
‘President Slaymaker.’
‘Yeah. I reckon President Slaymaker will put a stop to that.’
Slaymaker laughed, turning to Holly and offering her his bottle of cola to clink against her can of gin and tonic.
‘We’ll put a stop to that,’ he said, ‘President Stephen Slaymaker and Whisperstream Wizard Holly Peacock.’
CHAPTER 32
Rosine Dubois
I‘d never been on any sort of demonstration before, nor had Herb, and nor had Pete or Tracey or any of the people I knew in the camp. We’d never really bothered with politics at all. But the Slaymaker people were laying on free beer, free food, and even free childcare for our kids after school, and we thought, Well, why not? It’d be fun. It’d be a day out. Best of all, it’d be a break from those lines of metal trailers, and the sound of kids crying, and tired mums and dads yelling at them to shut up.
Yes, and Senator Slaymaker had stood up for people like us when no one else seemed to care. I reckoned we owed him a bit of support. Tracey felt the same. She’d told me that Pete and her had always voted for the Christian Party. ‘But we’re backing Slaymaker this time if he gets the nomination,’ she said. ‘We both agree about that. He might not be in the Christian Party, but he’s a Christian man, and he tries to behave like one too.’
We had a lovely time on the bus. We had this great courier called Sandra, a big loud merry woman from Chicago who got us all laughing with jokes about Canada – some of them a bit strong for my taste, but never mind – and had us practicing some stuff we could all chant out together when we got up to the border there:
‘Slay – Slay – Slaymaker! Slay – Slay – Slaymaker!’
We hollered it out together like a bunch of excited kids, and even poor sad old Pete laughed till the tears ran down his face. I sat next to Tracey with a couple of other women, and we just talked and joked non-stop the whole way. Pete and Herb weren’t quite so close as me and Tracey had become – in fairness to Herb, poor old Pete wasn’t exactly a fun kind of guy – but after a couple of beers, they seemed to get on pretty well too. By the time we piled off the bus at a service station about half a mile from the crossing – other buses unloading all around us, and more pulling in behind us all the time – we felt like we were going to a party. Everyone was shouting and singing and waving the placards and flags that the Slaymaker people had provided for us. Some people had dressed up as Uncle Sam or George Washington. There was even an American eagle with a big beer belly.
But when we got up to that big plaza where the border posts were and saw those Canadian cops lined up on the other side with their shields and visors, it felt a bit different, a bit more serious, specially when Mr Slaymaker showed us those maps, and that huge green country up there, way way bigger than the whole of America, and all of it pretty much empty, so he said, except for just a little narrow strip, just on the other side of the border, where they all lived. The Bible says we should turn the other cheek, I know, but I don’t mind admitting that it made me feel kind of mad. Herb had shown me pictures of some of that land which he’d found on the stream: beautiful green fields and empty houses. What were they keeping it for? What use was it to them?
After the senator had finished speaking, we chanted out ‘Slay – Slay – Slaymaker!’ just like we’d practiced on the bus. ‘You’ll be on the broadscreen tonight,’ Sandra had told us. ‘All the top news hubs are going to be there! So make sure you holler as loud as ever you can. I don’t want to hear any voices that aren’t hoarse when you get on the bus to go home.’ We sure did our best not to disappoint her.
When Mr Slaymaker had finished talking, Herb had an idea. ‘Look at those piss-ass cops through there,’ he yelled to me and Pete and Tracey over all the noise. ‘Do they really think they could stop us?’
Pete didn’t even bother to answer. He just took Tracey’s arm and led her forward, with me and Herb following after, and he put his hand on the plastic barrier, and turned round and winked at us all. You’ve got to bear in mind that he’d never been in any demonstration or nothing in his life before. And you’ve got to remember what a poor miserable guy he was most of the time, and how he cried like a kid when those kids trashed his little vegetable garden. But right now he had a big grin all over his face.
‘Well, what’s the worst that can happen?’ he said, or bellowed it more like, because everyone was yelling and hollering all around us.
‘The worst that can happen is they shoot us,’ Tracey hollered back, ‘and then we’d never have to go back to that goddam trailer park.’
Other people were watching him, giving him the thumbs-up as they waited for his lead, while the crowd kept yelling, ‘Slay – Slay – Slaymaker!’ And then Pete just gave a little nod and shoved that plastic barrier over. We all stepped across it, a whole bunch of us, and then there we were in Canada.
Of course there wasn’t really anywhere over there to go, but we had a bit of fun teasing the Mounties, who just drove up and down in the road in their trucks, stopping by groups of Americans and pretty much begging us to go back.
‘Hope you’ve got a note from your mom for this!’ Herb called out to one young guy, who looked like he hadn’t even started to shave. But after an hour or so we got bored and walked back into America by ourselves.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ I said, as we climbed back onto our bus. ‘I’ll never forget the expression on those cops’ faces when we busted through.’
Herb laughed, his face shining and happy like I hadn’t seen it since before Superstorm Simon. ‘They didn’t even try and stop us,’ he said. ‘That’s what gets me. They just stood aside to let us pass.’
I put my arm through his and rested my cheek on his shoulder. He put his arm round me and
kissed me on top of my head. Which was something else that hadn’t happened for a long time.
‘Well, me and Tracey always said we’d like to travel abroad,’ said Pete. ‘Looks like we finally got our wish. An afternoon in Canada, and it didn’t cost us a dime.’
It was lovely to see him joking about like that. Tracey gave him a kiss, and we all cheered.
CHAPTER 33
Then Richard got back from a drama class the following afternoon, he found that Holly had returned and was upstairs working in her study. He strode straight up.
‘Are you and Daddy Slaymaker trying to start a war?’
She’d been working on ripostes to questions about the rally, so her answer was well rehearsed. ‘No, of course not. Read his speech. He made it completely clear that he’s not challenging Canadian sovereignty over any part of its territory.’
‘And yet that’s exactly what the crowd there did.’
She’d been looking at her cristal, but now she pushed it to one side.
‘They were angry people, Rick. You can’t blame Steve for that. I was there, don’t forget. A large part of that crowd were people who’ve lost everything. Steve’s not responsible for the fact that people like that feel angry. All he’s trying to do is find a way forward that we can all live with.’
‘It would have been nice if he’d thought about that thirty years ago, when he was still paying millions to professionals like you to rubbish the science that said this was where we were heading.’
‘So he’s not perfect. But before you judge him, can I ask you yet one more time what exactly you’re doing about these problems he’s trying to fix? This is a man who starts work at half past six every day and works solidly through to eight or nine at night, not moving around words on a screen, or playing make-believe in a drama studio, but making real stuff happen.’
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