by Chris James
XIX
Macushla Mara’s craving of choice−Balkan Black Olives in Brine− was the only foodstuff on the island that still came out of a tin. Everything else from the convoy’s original larder had long since been consumed. One or two of the other pregnant women were also finding these delectable nuggets the only satisfying taste to be had on an island dedicated almost solely to the production of whole foods. Ten years on from the convoy’s landing, lentils, pulses and ‘Doctor Steve’s Weeds’ dominated the daily menu.
Macushla popped an olive in her mouth and immediately began to feel better. Over on the other side of the room, the male half of the conception was settling down to read a survey Bart Maryburg had commissioned in the States− ‘Eydos in the Awareness of the American People’. Being independently wealthy, Maryburg had paid for the poll out of his own pocket. After his contract on the island had expired, Eydos’ former geologist had volunteered to act as their unofficial representative in the U.S., a position he had filled for the past eight years from a small office in Baltimore. Unlike conventional emissaries, Eydos’ ambassadors had no nameplates, no titles, and were not bound by protocol. In Britain, Pilot’s former doctor, whose son Lonnie had tutored, maintained the link from his surgery in Penzance. If the British Prime Minister wished to communicate with Eydos, then an appointment to see the doctor had to be made just like anyone else. It was a procedure that infuriated Her Majesty’s Government no end. Jane Lavery’s mother, a retired school teacher who Pilot had gotten to know well at the safe house during Jane’s treatments, represented Eydos in Ireland. ‘Agent Zigzag’ and Odile Bartoli, who had taken a false identity, fulfilled the same role in France. Their efforts to secure permission for balloons from Eydos to traverse French airspace had yielded nothing, though. After ten years, Rudolf and Donner had yet to venture further than Eydos’ eastern coast. For his part, with The Big Idea consuming more and more of his time, Lonnie Pilot had lost all interest in hot air ballooning.
For the moment, Eydos was at relative peace with her neighbours. With far more pressing challenges requiring their energy, the UK and France had put their covetous designs on indefinite hold. The dissolution of the European Union, following on the heels of the annexation of Greece by Turkey, was the overriding concern of both countries.
Border controls everywhere were being tightened as more and more disillusioned, desperate people sought greener grass and increasingly, food to eat, elsewhere. As a result international migration had reduced to a dribble. Eydos, with no economy to tap into and no cultivatable land apart from the odd sediment pit, was not an attractive destination for most, but the threat of larger scale invasion remained. A small measure of security had been achieved on the Island with the installation of early warning radar stations to detect such incursions onto her territory. The other question of how to repel unwelcome visitors once they were detected had been solved by DAD, the long range, solar powered Directional Acoustic Device developed by one of Vaalon’s companies in Virginia. DAD generated 105 decibels of sound at 7 Hz via a network of pipes to an array of open emitters deployed across the island. Seven Hz was a frequency that could penetrate armour, providing little defense to those within. The sound waves were designed to cause physical pain, breathing difficulty, vertigo, nausea, disorientation, and other systemic discomfort, but not death. Prior to activating the device, any unidentified helicopters, planes or boats would be warned over emergency radio bands of what would happen if they did not turn back. So far, DAD had not been tested against a full-scale invasion, but had proven effective against small-time interlopers trying to land on Eydos’ shallow, seaweed-swathed eastern shore. Word soon spread around these disaffected people that, although the concept of Eydos sounded wonderful, the reality was excruciatingly painful.
Three months after he and Macushla Mara joined body and brain, Lonnie Pilot had regained all his drive and more, much to Aaron Serman’s relief. Never happy at the helm, Serman had resigned and called a third election. Pilot ran against token opposition and had won by a unanimous count.
To enforce Pilot’s motion from Year One that there be no populating of Eydos for the first five years, and to supplement their vast supply of condoms, non-hormonal intrauterine devices had been consensually fitted in all the island’s females by their gynecologist. Remarkably, there had been no accidental pregnancies, and on August 4th, exactly five years after landing, the IUDs were removed from all the women who wished it. Like the Oklahoma Land Rush, billions of sperms were suddenly released to stake their claims with the newly emancipated ova.
Pilot’s first motion on re-election was to limit births to one per female – to be reviewed biannually. The Pentad had pointed out to him that if a one child per couple policy were adopted, the population of Eydos would drop away generation by generation until it finally disappeared. Pilot had reassured them that there would be time in the future to bring in new people to keep the population stable, but that it was important now to introduce population ‘halving’ for reasons that would be made clear down the line. “If you have something up your sleeve, you have to show us now,” Macushla had said. “Where’s the transparency?”
“Let’s just call it opaque for now,” Pilot had answered. “I can’t see it clearly myself, yet. I just know it’s the right thing to do.” To his surprise and relief, the motion carried.
The Islanders had stuck to their game plan of keeping Eydos clear of the machinations, conflagrations and assassinations of the outside world, and the Island had remained an enigma. To keep herself in the periphery of the world’s eye, however, Eydos would periodically launch statements and observations at the iPatch satellite – utterings which would be worldwide within minutes. The words were always pointed, always relevant, but not always well received by the world’s policy makers and captains of industry.
After the outbreak of civil war in the United States, and through the entire three years of the conflict, Eydos had kept her mouth shut, preferring to let events do the talking for her. The Second American Civil War, which was more of an insurgency, had begun with the simultaneous assassinations of the Vice President, two State Governors, half a dozen prominent bankers and the chief executives of four corporations. Condescendingly described by the rich as a war between ‘US and Them’ – between the United States and its treacherous underclasses – CW2 had been germinating for years. The gap between rich and poor had become so wide, it had been only a matter of time before the ‘Have-nots’ would rise against the ‘Haves’ in an instantaneous explosion of violence and pent up frustration. With so much plenty around them, and such desperation in their own ranks, it required only a person with an understanding of combustion to set CW2 in motion. That person had been Charles Williams.
When Williams sealed his apartment, went underground and woke up the Prisoners of a Consumer Society through the POCS website and a brilliantly executed social media offensive, the match was touched to the dry brushwood of American inequity, injustice, greed, and self-interest. Tools were downed and guns loaded. Gated communities were attacked by the Have-nots, who were then randomly executed by sniper vigilante-mercenaries hired by the Haves. Under the cover of smoke, other scores were settled. Right-wing militants shot the heart out of the environmental movement in America, and several thousand bank officials who had overseen American mortgage foreclosures since 2008 had been run to ground and executed by their victims. With over 300 million firearms in private possession, the United States had become an open firing range – a 3.7 million-square-mile killing field. After two years, the number of dead was close to half a million, nearly the same number as in the first Civil War. When Homeland Security finally got their man, killing Charles Williams during a shoot-out in Washington DC, the insurgency had begun to deflate. Within a year it was over. Within another two years, although the scars were there for all to see, things were back to the inequitable status quo of before.
Henry Bradingbrooke’s trial at The Court of International Justice had not produced
the outcome everyone had expected. The legal machine had ground out its case relentlessly, giving Bradingbrooke’s broken barrister a fatal heart attack in the process. The sentence passed down – 35 years’ incarceration in ‘The Hague Hilton’, as Scheveningen Prison was still called, had been reduced to 25 years on appeal. The world had been outraged, feeling that a stern admonition was all that the polite and amiable English aristocrat deserved. Bradingbrooke himself had taken the fall with stoicism. Mission accomplished. A purefied Eydos had her martyr. For Lonnie Pilot, in terms personal loss, Bradingbrooke’s sentence was second only to Jane’s death.
In the corner of his eye, Pilot could see Macushla at work on her laptop, so he directed his attention to Maryburg’s survey, curious as to its conclusions. Between the covers were five hundred spiral-bound pages of data and a separate report of just a few pages – Maryburg’s own summary of the findings. And it was this that Pilot turned to first. Like a playwright opening the reviews after his production’s first night, he began to read.
Baltimore, November 19
Lonnie,
These results were generated through a stratified sample modeled after the most recent US Census. In measuring your support in the States, the most significant factors were age, socio-economic group and, to a lesser extent, gender. We can write off the majority of those in groups D and E and those without further education beyond high school. The reasons they will never be supporters of Eydos is because they’re too engaged in mere survival to look beyond their own four walls. Some of them thought Eydos was a cleaning fluid.
The majority of your support comes from the over 70s and the under 35s. Maybe it’s only when we stand at the doors at either end of our lives – the Entrance and the Exit – that we’re able to visualize a saner, more serene world. In between, self-interest rules.
Your real enemies are males in the age group 45-59. They hold the key executive posts in business, government and education, but because they’re not quite at the top yet, they still have hunger and that’s what makes them such a destructive bunch. They live down in the engine room of the world and can’t see what’s happening on the surface. Nothing will change until they change. Remember, these men were Charles Williams’ prime targets during CW2, and leaving a stable world for future generations is the last thing on their minds.
When you cross the fence to the females in the same age band, it gets interesting. There are two camps. The first doesn’t want to rock the boat, or jeopardise the lifestyle they’ve become accustomed to, and can be written off. The second group supports your ideals, but individual comments suggest it’s more a reaction against their menfolk, who they can see losing interest not only in them, sexually and emotionally, but in everything else outside their husbands’ single-minded march to personal success.
Men in the 60-69 sub-band are still active in their jobs or otherwise sewn into the financial cloth of the country and are too busy feathering their nests to think philanthropically. They dismiss you outright, being too set in their ways and too self-confident to be swayed by a small cadre of free thinkers on the other side of the Atlantic. The females in this band are likewise indifferent and don’t even want to mother you.
Your detracters see you as socialists and communists. But those people I’ve labeled ‘the Thinkers’ – the core of your present and future support – see you as independent, non-partisan, apolitical and smart. Eydos is giving them a platform on which to practice what was only talked about in isolation before. What’s important is that you’ve avoided being fashionable and have eschewed social media and self-publicity. That’s been key to your longevity and growing influence. Also, you’re still here after ten years against all the odds and they like that. It makes them feel secure when making their own sorties against the system. The sociological model you’re providing is beginning to flower nicely, at least in America.
You can plant anything in the fertile soil of the Western mentality, Pilot thought. That’s half the trouble. It’s fertile, but shallow. We need deeper roots if we’re going to stay put there and take hold in more rudimentary societies.
The knock on the door had gone unnoticed, and when a small vial containing a horrible-looking green-black liquid appeared under Pilot’s nose, he jumped.
“Taste this, Lonnie,” Rebecca Schein said. For several months she and some of the others had been working in the kitchens devising sauces and flavourings capable of improving the taste of the food. Pilot sniffed the mouth of the vial, then took a small sip of the mixture inside.
“What’s in it?”
“Mustard seed, wild garlic, basil, parsley and the brine from the black olives. Oh, and halite from the new salt beds. What do you think?”
“I love it.” Pilot wiped his mouth with his sleeve and wondered what Eydos’ supporters among the woolly-knicker-brigades would think if they knew how much he and the others hated the food they were forced to eat in the name of self-sufficiency. With the tang of garlic still teasing his taste buds, he said goodbye to Schein and went back to Maryburg’s report.
Awareness of you is well over 60% among your contemporaries. Most people’s idealism has evaporated by their thirties, but you’ve managed to keep it stoked up for a lot of them. Apart from the old stand-by flirtations with basic environmental and social issues, they’re beginning to seek out and attack the hidden sources of what they perceive as the rot around them. They don’t approach them through organized pressure groups, but are challenging their friends and associates as unaffiliated individuals. That way, nobody gets called a subversive, a terrorist or an anarchist, and the catalysts of change stay out of public scrutiny, just like you hoped they would.
To wrap this up, Lonnie, I know it’s just a sample of 10,000 people out of 400 million, but when looked at from a distance, the results are encouraging. The questions now are: How can you continue to inspire your current supporters and win new ones; and, What can you do to fashion the trends we’re seeing into something longer-lasting? Our Thinkers want you to have influence in the world, even if you haven’t got it yet. To me, that’s as good as having it. I sense that in Western Europe, Japan and the Antipodes, the trend is the same. There are some chinks of light beginning to appear in India and China, but the Middle East doesn’t figure in the equation owing to religious and cultural interpretations. And there’s too much strife in Africa for any meeting of minds there. The important point is that, in the U.S. at least, you’ve crossed over into the realms of possibility.
– Bart
Pilot set the report down and pondered over what he had just read. Macushla had yet to cross into the realms of possibility as far as her own baby was concerned, being only two months pregnant. It was an interesting parallel. A baby born prematurely, although viable, would have difficulty surviving, and if it did, could possibly have inherent long-term defects. Conversely, although his own plan for Phase Two had its framework in place, the details in the blueprint had been changing with world events for the past ten years. He couldn’t give birth to his Big Idea now even if he wanted to.
If his Great Aunts’ maxim was, ‘Anything for a simple life’, Pilot’s was, ‘Nothing without a simple life’. The stage on which he now played out the role of leader of the world’s smallest nation was providing him at last with an environment and a simplicity conducive to clear thinking and creativity: the womb-like comfort of their geodesic dome; the solar heating orb dispensing warmth like a stout grandmother; his partner spinning schemes with him at all hours; and best of all, unhurried sexual marathons under diffused moonlight to the music of wind chimes.
XX
In a penthouse apartment in São Paolo’s plushest apartment building, Diogo was slaughtering the last of the family’s pigs in the bathtub. Blood spattered the gold taps and lay in sticky pools at the bottom of the bath. Mains water to wash it down had disappeared a few days after the power required to fill the building’s water tanks was lost, and the water in the plastic containers they’d hauled up 37 liftless flo
ors was too precious to waste on cleaning. A makeshift barbeque pit in the kitchen sink, using splinters from a smashed up antique armoire, was being tended by Diogo’s wife. None of the windows in the penthouse was designed to be opened, so they’d had to break one. With the building’s ventilation system dead, the smoke from the fire rolled across the ceiling and over the powerless extractor fan and smoke detector towards the opening like a grey undulating sea. In the dining room, thirteen Rosenthal dinner plates had been set in preparation for the feast to come. The couple’s seven children played happily in a back bedroom the size of a squash court, while their three surviving grandparents took in the magnificent views of São Paolo from the living room, coughing occasionally when the smoke dropped too low.
Forty miles to the east, the owners of the apartment, Brazil’s top eye surgeon and her husband, were climbing into their Cessna TT at São José dos Campos airport for their planned breakout to Argentina, unaware that the plane’s fuel had been siphoned out that morning by an enterprising teenager and sold to another pilot whose tank he had emptied the night before. So far, this little scam had netted him a small fortune in jewelry and expensive handbags – Brazilian currency having become worthless. His stash would soon be augmented by the eye surgeon’s diamond wedding ring…
The situation in Brazil was as would be expected in any fragile society whose structure suddenly collapses. Having relied almost entirely on packaged foods which were suddenly nowhere to be found, and with international food aid falling woefully short of their needs because of shortages elsewhere, Brazilians in their thousands, faced with the ultimate inconvenience of starvation, had been leaving the cities and towns in a vain search for land on which to grow food. Those who hadn’t been part of the initial surge north into Central America and Mexico before those countries had secured their borders, now found themselves imprisoned by ocean to the east and the troops of Brazil’s continental neighbours to the west, north and south.