‘You okay, Holly?’
Slaymaker was looking at her with concern. It was unusual for her to lose her focus.
‘Sorry. I was distracted for a bit there. Been sleeping rather badly lately.’
‘Sorry to hear that. I thought you looked tired when you came in.’
‘I am tired, I must say, but I’m okay. What are we talking about?’
‘I was just observing,’ said Jed, ‘that in fifty or a hundred years’ time, the most valuable of the territorial assets we’ve just acquired won’t even be the mainland part of Northland. It’ll be those big islands way up there to the north. Baffin Island, Ellesmere Island, Greenland. One day those will be the most populous states in the USA.’
Slaymaker’s eyes were positively shining at this prospect. ‘So maybe we need to make a start on settlements right up there, si?’ he said. ‘Cold and icy as they are, shouldn’t we start laying the foundations?’
‘Or maybe we need to look at the Christmas trees again,’ Holly snapped, ‘and the sulfur aerosols and so on. Because, as Jed has pointed out many times, after we’re done with those islands, there’s nowhere left to go and your precious America will finally be completely fucked, along with the rest of the world.’
Jed laughed at her outburst. He didn’t believe in those kinds of fixes, he didn’t think the political will could be summoned up to implement them, and he wasn’t that bothered in any case – or so he’d decided to tell himself – by the prospect of the world’s end. But Slaymaker composed his face into a concerned expression so that Holly would know he really was taking her seriously. ‘I think you’re quite right, Holly,’ he said. ‘We need to get back to that, now we’ve secured the land.’
He thought he meant it too, Holly didn’t doubt that. He could certainly understand the logic of it, and would probably make some small steps in that direction in the months ahead. But she knew this stuff didn’t grab his imagination like the idea of all that new land, and all those new cities and states. When you grew up on a trailer park, she supposed, you didn’t think about long-term plans.
CHAPTER 58
Rosine Dubois
When President Slaymaker came up to sign the Treaty of Accession, it was early May. Over on the east coast the weather was already getting hot and those huge giants of air were coming together out in the ocean, to smash into the land once more. But up here in America City the air was still cold and sharp, with snow on the ground, ice on the lakes, and an icy blue sky above us.
All the way from the airport to the Freedom Plaza, people were standing by the roadside waving US flags and the three-star flag of Northland. I told the boys that, if we couldn’t feel happy, we could at least feel proud. We and these other people all around us had built a new city, a new community, out of pretty much nothing at all.
And there was something special for us to be proud of too, because we were going to receive a medal on behalf of Herb. The next day, there was going to be a ceremony where Herb and the other guys who died in that truck were going to be awarded the Medal of Honor. We talked about how proud Herb would have been of that, and we kind of laughed through our tears. Herb carried twenty, thirty pounds more than he should, he liked a beer and he liked to spend plenty of time in front of the broadscreen. He really wasn’t the hero type, and he knew it, but now the president was going to give him a medal for courage.
The city hall was being repaired, but it still wasn’t safe to go inside of it, so the ceremony was held in the big conference room of the Hilton Hotel that faced it across the plaza. There were maybe three or four hundred invited guests in there. They were what you’d call prominent people, I guess: city councillors, business leaders, officers from the Northland militia, some from America City, some come over from Lincoln and Jefferson. We all settled down and waited for a while, and then someone called out, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please stand for the president of Northland and the president of the USA!’
And there was President Slaymaker, tall and strong, with those bright eyes of his darting about, taking everything in, pointing and waving at folk here and there across the room. His beautiful wife Eve was beside him – she always looked kind of sad to me, like she was the mother of America, worrying about us all – and next to them were Johnson Fleet and his new wife Coral.
I guess it was like it says in the Bible about a prophet in his own country but I’d never quite gotten used to thinking of Johnson as President Fleet. I couldn’t help remembering that confused, angry guy who showed up to our Pioneers’ Union meeting, and broke down in tears. Yeah, and then I thought of what Herb had said: ‘That guy can’t quite believe he’s actually talking to storm trash,’ and I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. Coral looked pretty tough. She looked like she was going to grab every bit of this new fame she possibly could, and all the money that came with it.
We sat at the front, me and my boys, all stiff and awkward in their new suits and ties, along with the relations of the three young guys who’d died with Herb: Vince, Luigi and Jon. For Vince just his mom had come and his little sister. For Luigi it was his mom and dad. For Jon it was a girlfriend who looked about seventeen, along with her dad. I had my friend Tracey Suarez with me, who’d been my neighbor in that trailer park back in Montana. She was over seventy now, but still working away with Pete just outside the city in their glasshouse farm.
Johnson came to the front and made a speech. It was quite a pretty speech, I suppose – he must have had people to write it for him – about how Herb and the others had gone out on an ordinary pick-up truck to defend the people of America City, though they knew they were up against a ruthless professional army with tanks and rockets and fighter drones.
So why did you tell them to go, you fool? I thought. Why couldn’t we have just waited for the US army? And for a moment there I was so mad I felt like grabbing both boys and walking out. I mean, it wasn’t even as if Johnson didn’t know what it felt like to lose someone you loved!
But I told myself that, however dumb Johnson had been, that didn’t take away from the fact that Herb had been brave to go. And I guess you had to allow for the fact that Johnson wasn’t exactly used to this president business.
‘They were real Americans,’ Johnson said. ‘They stood up against the Canuck bullies, just like our forebears stood up against the Canucks’ old friends, the Brits. Let us not forget, people, that there’d be no America if it wasn’t for guys just like Herb and Vince and Luigi and Jon.’
Then Slaymaker himself came forward, and we were called up one at a time to collect the medals. Me and the boys were first. Carl was still a kid, Copeland was a big lanky awkward man-sized teenager, both of them proud, upset, happy and embarrassed all at once, but they were keeping it together really well.
‘I am so sorry for your loss, Mrs Dubois,’ said Slaymaker as he shook my hand, and gave me the medal in a beautiful little presentation box. ‘And you boys too,’ he said. ‘My, you’re fine lads. Your mom must be very proud of you.’
‘We met you once before, Mr President,’ I told him. ‘Our house was all smashed up by Superstorm Simon. We were on the interstate. You came down in your drig to see what was going on, and really and truly, yours was pretty much the first friendly face we’d seen since we’d left home.’
He’d leant forward as I was speaking so as to be sure to catch what I said, and now he studied my face for a second or two with those famous blue eyes. ‘Do you know what, Mrs Dubois, I do believe I remember that. You had a big old blue pick-up truck, didn’t you? I remember saying hi to these two boys in back. They’ve sure grown a lot since then!’
When the medals were all given out, we stood at the front of the stage with the presidents and first ladies, while a band played the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘The Bond of Flame’ and then it was time for them to go outside and meet the people waiting outside in the plaza, the Slaymakers going up the aisle first and then the Fleets.
Us families of medal-winners waited up there on the stage, kno
wing that when the two presidents were outside, we’d be asked to go and join them and be introduced to the huge crowd that was waiting out there. You couldn’t hear them, but you could kind of sense them somehow: all those thousands of people.
I whispered to Copeland and Carl how proud I’d been of them. Copeland was amazed that Slaymaker had remembered us out of all the people he must have met. ‘But our truck was blue, wasn’t it, Mom? He couldn’t have guessed that!’
A hubbub of voices rose up in the room, as everyone began to talk to the people around them. And then suddenly there was a faint crackling sound from outside, like firecrackers, which you could only just hear under all those voices.
CHAPTER 59
Margot Jeffries
After the war ended, a lot of people came up to America City, some to stay, but many just to see the place. A lot of trashy tourist stores sprang up. That three-star flag was printed on paperweights and tea towels and cristal covers and Christ knows what else. You could buy plastic polar bears and walruses, maps of Northland that lit up and played the ‘Bond of Flame’, snow spheres you could shake with ‘Greetings from America City’ round the base, and tricorn hats printed with the date of Northland’s Declaration of Independence.
I thought to myself, If that rubbish is selling, there’s sure to be a market for something a bit better. I’d built up quite a stock of my own pottery by then, and I sourced some more from other crafts-people I’d met in AC, and old friends back down in the US. So I gave up my job at the school and rented a store. It went better than I’d dared to hope. There were plenty of tourists coming up who wanted nice things to take home, and lots of locals came in too, people who were doing alright, and were seeking to make their homes more beautiful as they put down roots.
I had a new idea then. I decided to try to source some stuff from real local artists. I got a plane up to a place called Baker Lake, an Inuit village several hundred miles to the north of us. I met an amazing sculptor up there called Emily Saviktaaq who carved beautiful compact little scenes out of soapstone, and I persuaded her to bring some of them down to America City.
That was a bad idea. Poor Emily was spat at in the streets, and jostled by people who called her ‘terrorist scum’. You’d have thought that, seeing as we’d taken over their land, the least we could do was embrace the people who lived in it. Especially when most of us had experienced what it was like to be made to feel like unwelcome strangers in your own country. But folk didn’t see it that way in America City, not even my neighbor Rosine Dubois who was always kind to everyone.
‘I don’t want them anywhere near me,’ she said about Inuit people. ‘I don’t trust them. Not after the bomb, and not after what happened to Herb.’
I would have thought the chances that the Canadian air force men who killed her husband were Inuit was extremely small, but that kind of logic went nowhere, and in the end I gave up trying to argue. The kindest thing she could come up with as far as Inuit people were concerned was that perhaps they could be given one of those islands up north as a reservation, and leave the rest of us alone.
But anyway I’d made the contact with Emily, and, through her, with other artists she knew further north. There are different ways of looking at this, but I guess I provided them with a market for their work which they wouldn’t have had before. I was learning from them too, of course, and I thought maybe we could build bridges for the long run by learning from each other. But maybe that was just me assuaging my guilt.
I guess it’s always been that way. The hard men take the land by force. We soft types move in and make it nice again, like the stolen land was nothing to do with us. A kind of good cop/bad cop routine.
I’d made up my mind to stay away from the Accession celebrations, just as I’d stayed away from the demonstrations after the bomb, as a kind of one-woman protest against the dishonest narrative that made Canada into the big bully and Americans somehow the victims.
But then I had one of my changes of heart. I lived in America City, didn’t I? I was making use of the land that American threats had obtained, just as, when I was in Arizona, I was taking advantage of that cruel wall, fifty miles away, which kept poverty away from my pretty town. Was I going to spend the rest of my life benefiting from the tough unfair things that other people did, while pretending their actions had nothing to do with me?
Rosine was going to receive a posthumous medal on behalf of her husband for that brave but completely futile thing he did in what was now grandly called our War of Independence. A whole bunch of my neighbors were planning to go along to Freedom Plaza to cheer her when she came out after the ceremony. And I went along with them. I wasn’t sure how comfortable I was going to be there, but in the end I cheered with the rest of them outside the Hilton Hotel, and even waved a three-star flag that someone put in my hand.
I actually quite enjoyed it. I didn’t manage to push all my doubts out of my mind, but I swallowed enough of them to be able to share the general feeling of optimism with these neighbors of mine who’d been through so much to get here. Whatever you might say about flags and patriotic songs and all of that, they sure are good at bringing people together.
There was a big screen put up outside the hotel so we could see the ceremony inside, and when Rosine and her boys collected their medal from Slaymaker, we all made ourselves hoarse with yelling and hollering. That felt really lovely, not because Herb was really an American war hero, but because this was Rosine – good, warm, tough Rosine, who’d been through so much – and I had no reason whatever for not wishing the very best for her. We sang the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and then we positively bellowed out ‘The Bond of Flame’:
The bond of flame, the bond of blood,
Across the Arctic snow:
We’ll keep it strong for ever,
Against every threat and foe.
Three little stars, three lonely stars,
Shining in an Arctic sky:
Our light will never falter,
Our light will never die.
Would you believe, it actually brought tears to my eyes?
Slaymaker and his wife came out first, to a huge roar of delight, followed by Johnson Fleet and his wife, and for a few minutes all four of them just waved and smiled while we cheered and swiped the air with our flags and threw out rolls of tickertape in red and white and blue.
Soon, we knew, Rosine and her boys would come out too. We were about halfway back in the crowd, but we were absolutely determined that she and the boys would be able to sense our presence, and so every single one of us was clutching a whistle or a horn or a rattle or some other noisy thing that we’d been saving for this moment. I had a tambourine. I was all set to bang it when a strange sound came from the front like a series of firecrackers.
The president – the real president, I mean, not the make-believe president of Northland – looked kind of startled, but we still had no idea what had happened when the secret servicemen rushed across the stage and surrounded him.
Then a low moan swept out through the crowd like the shock wave of an explosion.
CHAPTER 60
They were called smart bullets: tiny guided missiles fired by a gun. You could select their target using the screen of an ordinary cristal and, after that, as long as you pointed the gun in the right general direction, the bullets would do the rest: perfect for a time like this, when there’d be no opportunity for a second shot.
There were three of them. They left the gun at quarter-second intervals and, as they crossed the Freedom Plaza, minuscule computers inside them monitored the target, noting his movements, calculating and recalculating his likely position at the moment of impact. Tiny gyros adjusted their direction of travel accordingly.
Slaymaker had invited Holly to go up to Northland with him.
‘This is your achievement as much as mine, Holly,’ he’d said, but she’d declined.
He studied her face for a moment. She felt that she had no defenses against his powerful gaze, that he co
uld see perfectly well she was planning to leave his service. But if so, he said nothing about it.
‘Okay, Holly, if you’re sure. I look forward to seeing you when we get back.’
At his arraignment, the assassin’s eyes were bruised and swollen and he could hardly walk across the room. The untrained vigilantes who called themselves the Northland police had clearly beaten him, though he’d never denied what he’d done.
His name was Tobin Coyne. He was twenty-five years old. His father was an Irish-Canadian nickel miner, a violent and abusive drunk who’d left when Tobin was seven. But Tobin identified himself entirely with his Inuit mother and the Inuit culture that had survived for so many centuries in an environment where few would even think of trying to make a living: hunting whales from kayaks, fishing through holes in the ice, building shelters with skin and bones and driftwood.
Just to surrender would be to concede that power was all that counted. That was how Tobin saw it. However futile it might be to resist, he could remain himself only if he tried.
It had been much the same when he was four years old and his father was beating his mother. Tobin had screamed at him to leave her alone, pulled at his clothes, kicked him on the legs. And though the old man barely even seemed to notice, he kept doing it anyway. It was better than doing nothing at all.
Three bullets, one after the other, at quarter-second intervals, crossed the clear still air of Freedom Plaza. The first one missed Slaymaker, but the second pierced his lung, and the third went through his heart.
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