America City

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Why can’t we?’

  ‘It’s like that stream there. I could dam it up, I could build the dam higher and higher, but sooner or later, it’s going to break through. All we can hope is that in the end we find some new configuration that works, and then we can be friends again with good people like this Mountie guy of yours.’

  The little bird poked and pecked by the water’s edge. ‘Something else I thought about,’ Holly said. ‘Nunavut is the last territory of any size in the whole of North America where indigenous people are still the majority. That’s quite something, don’t you think? A last refuge. Even the name of the territory means “our land”. Doesn’t it bother you that we’re going to snuff that out?’

  ‘Yeah, but whatever we do someone’s going to be unhappy. A guy showed me some figures a couple of days ago: the number of farmers from the southwest who’ve gone bust and committed suicide. It ran into thousands. And this guy pointed out to me that for all the people who actually kill themselves there are going to be – what? – ten, twenty, fifty times more whose lives are ruined too, but just can’t quite bring themselves to take that final step. A bit like my mom. She just about kept going, but life didn’t give her anything in the way of happiness.’

  He laid down his cup, glancing round a moment to see what the horses were doing. ‘Listen, Holly, I’ve not had much education and like to say I think with my guts, but I do try to get the facts. There are about forty thousand people in Nunavut, and, sure, that’s a lot of people. If they really want to live apart from the rest of us, we can give them a reservation but with the world like it is, they just can’t expect to keep a territory all to themselves that’s three times the size of Texas!’

  He fetched the steaks and they ate them between slabs of bread, washed down with thick muddy coffee.

  ‘I hope they don’t want a reservation, though,’ Slaymaker said. ‘I guess you know my great-grandmother – my mother’s mother’s mother – was a full-blood Cherokee. I’m very proud of that. It’s a great thing to know that some of my people have been living in this beautiful country for thousands of years. But I’ll tell you another thing I’m proud of my great-grandmother for. I’m proud that she left the reservation, got out of that little backwater, stopped holding onto a past that was finished, and jumped into the great big scary river of America. It didn’t work out so well for her. She had a lot of problems, and so did my grandma and my ma – liquor, violent men, all of that – but, the way I figure it, these things take generations. If she hadn’t done that, she wouldn’t have been the great-grandmother of a US president.’

  ‘So you really are going for the Texas Option then, si? It’s not just another rattlesnake idea?’

  ‘America needs that land. And in any case, those settlers aren’t coming back, and they aren’t going to turn into Canadians. If I don’t take that land, America will find itself another president who will.’

  CHAPTER 50

  Richard was asleep before Holly got in, and he woke before her in the morning. There she was beside him, lying on her side, her mouth slightly open. Remembering what she’d said about being in no rush, he slipped downstairs, put on some coffee and made waffles, flipping on his cristal for news. The top story was that the Canadians were offering an extraordinarily generous new compromise.

  Excited by this news, he took the breakfast upstairs on a tray. Holly stirred sleepily. ‘Oh waffles, great. Thanks, Rick, just what I felt like.’

  ‘Good day yesterday?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. We had a nice ride and we sorted some things out.’ She reached up to him, pulled him close so she could kiss him.

  ‘Did you see the Canadians have come up with a new proposal?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re offering to—’

  ‘Oh come on, let’s not talk about that now!’

  They kissed some more. They had sex for the first time in several months, and then they drank coffee and ate cold waffles side by side in bed.

  ‘This Canadian offer,’ Richard said afterwards, picking up his cristal. ‘It really is incredibly generous. They’re prepared to carve away a great big piece of land for American settlement that connects up all three of those new cities of yours. They’re saying that Americans can settle anywhere in that whole area, as many as we like, and they’ll be entitled to full Canadian citizenship after a few years.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Holly said.

  ‘I thought you’d be a bit more pleased than that!’

  ‘It’s certainly something, but we need access to the far north.’

  ‘Well, once our people have Canadian citizenship, they’ll have the same right to move north as anyone else in Canada!’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘And, if you think about it—’

  Richard broke off. ‘Oh wait,’ he said bitterly. ‘You already knew about this offer, don’t you? Of course you did. And I guess you know how Slaymaker’s going to respond to it as well? In fact, you probably wrote his answer!’

  ‘No, I didn’t know. Last I heard, their best offer was autonomy for America City and the other two cities in their fifty-mile squares.’

  Her hand was shaking, just as it had been on the evening she arrived. She felt herself being torn in two.

  Her father had died a few months previously and she and Richard had been over to England together. She’d dreaded it in several different ways, but one of the things she’d particularly dreaded was meeting her parents’ friends. All these obscure old British political dissidents, soldiering on there, and her working for the other side. She’d expected hostility, arch comments, sniggers, sarcasm. But actually, and much more painfully, she’d encountered kindness. It was her father’s funeral, and no one seemed to think her political choices were relevant just then. Even her mother’s therapist friend, Antonia, stubbornly refused to live up to the negative caricature that Holly had painted of her in her mind.

  ‘I wasn’t very close to Dad,’ Holly told her gruffly, when she offered conventional condolences.

  ‘I know,’ Antonia said, ‘but sometimes those kinds of losses can be the hardest to get over.’

  ‘Why would that be?’

  ‘I think it’s often to do with finally having to give up on the hope that maybe things could be different.’

  And Holly had to admit to herself that she didn’t feel Antonia was trying to control her, or be superior to her, or any of those things. Antonia was a strong person, it was true. She knew what she wanted in life, she stood up for her own way of seeing things. But Holly admired those qualities in Slaymaker so why not in her? There was no doubt that Antonia had been a support for her mother. And all she was doing now was offering Holly an insight from her own experience that might possibly be helpful.

  They weren’t monsters, these people, that was what she couldn’t help noticing, however much she’d made them so in her imagination. They were cautious people, it was true, and determinedly provincial people, who’d led pretty timid and unadventurous lives. But that wasn’t a crime, and, actually, it wasn’t even the whole picture. They’d stuck to their political commitments in a Britain where people like them were regarded with deep suspicion and often outright hostility. Pretty well all of them had experienced some degree of harassment from the political police. And at least one reason that they all had such dull-sounding careers was that their views precluded them from advancement. No one who openly sympathized with foreigners in Britain in those days was going to be able to rise to any level of seniority in a public service post, and nor was anyone who suggested that Britain itself must share the blame for the weather problems that had led to so many millions round the world having to flee their homes. But these people did still publicly express such views in spite of the hostility. They still went on their demos, they still handed out leaflets. And, futile or not, that took courage.

  Holly could see all that, as she and Richard mingled with the guests, nibbling at the vegetarian snacks and drinking too much of the organi
c wine. And yet these were the people who she’d needed so badly to distance herself from that she’d crossed the Atlantic and joined the staff of a Freedom Party politician who thought that foreigners had to look after themselves.

  She’d trembled then, too, standing there in the back garden of her parents’ small suburban semi, a chilly wind ruffling the leaves on the trees, a drig’s engines roaring far above as it began its descent toward Heathrow, and a water feature gurgling a few yards away in the next garden but one. Then, too, she’d felt herself at the intersection of two contradictory forces.

  CHAPTER 51

  Relieved to escape from Richard’s questions, she set off back to DC, calling Slaymaker on the way to the airport.

  ‘This is an incredible new offer from Ryan.’

  There was a pause before the president answered. ‘We’re going to refuse it, Holly. It’s come too late and we need to stick to what we’ve been asking for: settlers to have full voting rights in the territories.’

  ‘But Ryan can’t deliver that. She knows if she does the settlers will secede.’

  ‘We don’t need anyone to deliver anything, remember!’ His tone was kind but firm. He deferred to Holly about stories and presentation, but not when it came to outwitting adversaries. ‘What we need is a reason to take that land. If Ryan fails, Gwen Thomas gets in on election day, and she won’t be willing to do a deal at all. Which is exactly what we need.’

  It was useless to tell Slaymaker that Ryan’s offer would make the land available to Americans too, just so long as they became Canadians. That wasn’t enough for him. Above everything, he needed Team America to come out on top. And so, she knew, did his voters. People expected their leaders to stand up, not for the whole world, but for them. Wasn’t that Richard’s point about that king from Beowulf who raided his neighbors to provide for his own people?

  Holly sat trembling in the drig, pulled in different ways, unable to move forward one way or the other.

  The horse was bolting, she told herself, casting around for a story that would allow her to carry on. You could ride it, try to steer it a little, gradually calm it down, or you could let it fling you off. The one thing you couldn’t do was make it stop in its tracks.

  But for more than an hour, she couldn’t even bring herself to open her cristal.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ her jeenee asked when she finally did, a little cartoon figure bowing on her screen.

  ‘What’s happening out in the stream about this Canada business? Grouped semantically, what are the leading messages?’

  But before the jeenee could answer, she changed her mind. She couldn’t bear to face the roar of anti-Canuck rage that would be echoing and re-echoing round that dark cave of bats.

  ‘Cancel that,’ she said. ‘Tell me what names people are proposing for this new country that’s going to break away. What names, what flags, what songs?’

  She couldn’t face the game of chess, but she could at least work on branding. That would be soothing, like coloring in.

  ‘New America,’ the jeenee answered her, ‘the United Territories of America, the Arctic Union, Northland...’

  ‘We’ll go with Northland,’ she said, as various ugly and complicated flag designs paraded across her cristal.

  ‘They’re awful,’ she said. ‘Let’s draw a better one. Make the top half blue. It can be the Arctic sky. That’s good. And put three stars up there. That’s it, but further up, right along the upper edge, one in each corner, one in the middle. Yes, that’s great. Now make the bottom half three equal-sized stripes, red, white, red. No, that’s too like the American flag. Try reversing them, though. Make them white, red, white. Yes, that’s much better. Blue at the top. White, red, white at the bottom. It can represent...I don’t know... the unbreakable bond between the three territories, forged from blood and flame across a land of ice.’

  Now it was just a matter of having a few thousand feeders put the name and flag out there in various ways, and they’d soon be a fait accompli. She absorbed herself quite happily in that task for the rest of the journey.

  It was only when the drig had actually touched down at Reagan airport that she realized that yet again she hadn’t thought about Richard for the whole flight. She’d told him he was her anchor but she forgot him completely when he wasn’t present.

  That scared her. And yet when she’d climbed into a taxi and given the AI her instructions – an obvious moment for calling him, or at least sending him a friendly ‘arrived safely’ message – she just couldn’t help herself from having one more quick look at the flag she’d designed for Northland.

  Blood, flame, stars. What was it about words like that? They acted like seed crystals in a chemical solution. A feeling stirred inside her when she looked at the flag and remembered the symbolism she’d arbitrarily assigned to it. It was an imaginary flag for a non-existent country, but she really was quite close to tears.

  ‘I must send a message to Rick,’ she said to herself. But somehow she needed first to tell her jeenee to commission a song about her flag, set to a suitably patriotic tune. There were plenty of AIs out there that could whip up a thing like that.

  And then, when she’d set that up, news started coming through about a second bomb, this time in the new city of Lincoln in the Yukon, and so she turned all her attention to that.

  CHAPTER 52

  Margot Jeffries

  I wondered sometimes who was really pulling the strings. It all unfolded so quickly, and all the significant actors on either side seemed to work together toward the same eventual outcome, as if this was all some kind of dance, however much they claimed to hate each other.

  It started with the bomb in America City, followed by the days of angry demonstrations that eventually drove out the Mounties completely, leaving a vacuum which the Pioneers’ Union militia stepped in to fill, under their newly elected leader, Johnson Fleet, the chisel-jawed widower of Peace Arch.

  Next there was the amazing offer from Prime Minister Ryan – her swan song, as it turned out. Americans like us were being offered the opportunity to come into Canada in whatever numbers we liked and gradually become part of the life of this stable, prosperous nation. You’d think we’d be delighted with a deal like that. But when I spoke to my neighbors, or friends from the school, I couldn’t find anyone who had anything good to say about it. For one thing, I was told, it came from a Canuck and Canucks couldn’t be trusted. Had I forgotten that these were the people who’d just killed twenty-seven innocent Americans? For another thing, it was obviously a trap. It might sound generous, but the Canucks’ real objective was to cut us off, not only from our home country but also from the northern parts of the territories which we’d need to access in the future. This was typical of Canucks, I was told. They had repeatedly betrayed America throughout history, from the American Revolution, when they sided with the Brits, to 1812 when they burnt down the White House, to the Fourth Copper War only a few years ago when they didn’t send ground troops, though they’d been perfectly happy to send their extraction companies in afterwards when our soldiers had secured access to the mines. And in any case, it wasn’t going to happen because old Suzanne was finished and Gwen Thomas of the Our Canada Party was going to be the new prime minister.

  With her flaming red hair and her fiery eyes, like some kind of Canadian Boadicea, Thomas made a much more convincing enemy than sensible, reasonable Ryan, and many exciting stories were being told about her. It was apparently an open secret, for instance, that she planned to drive all us Americans out of Canada. Some said she’d kill us all.

  I wanted to ask people how they would have felt in the past if America had done the equivalent of what Ryan was doing and offered Mexico a whole new US state to settle as many of their people in as they wanted? (Imagine the howls of outrage!) But I knew from experience that there was no point. People just refuse to hear these parallels. There’s always some reason why the two cases are not the same.

  And then, as if to confirm the d
oubts about the trustworthiness of Canadians, the NCA set off another bomb over in Lincoln, Yukon, and followed it up two days later with a rocket attack on Jefferson in the Northwest Territories. I have no idea what they hoped to achieve by these attacks. It seemed obvious to me that they were playing straight into the hands of the American settlers’ movement.

  Sure enough, the PU militia transformed itself from an amateur police force into a ragtag army. They got hold of a couple of small drigs and some trucks and began carrying out ‘military exercises’ and patrols across the granite fields and lakes outside the city. A splinter group from the PU called the American Freedom Fighters carried out a revenge bomb attack on the Nunavut capital of Iqaluit on Baffin Island, killing a bunch of people who were presumably no less innocent than the ones who’d died at America City and Lincoln. But again this wasn’t a parallel that anyone wanted to hear. Those walrus-munchers had it coming was the general feeling in AC.

  Those three-star flags started appearing everywhere, and some anonymous person wrote a maddeningly catchy patriotic song called ‘The Bond of Flame’ about brave little American stars in the Arctic night. Guys and young women rode through the streets of AC on the backs of trucks, with machine guns slung on their backs: elaborately nonchalant, chewing gum or wearing mirror shades, intoxicated by their coolness and power. That feeling would disappear pretty fast, I couldn’t help thinking, if the NCA ambushed them. Difficult to feel cool and powerful if a shell has turned your legs to mincemeat or your lower jaw has been blown away.