Let Us Be True

by Alex Christofi

  Anyway, Karla and me had no time for any of that: not for Gray Jenny’s program, and certainly not for Slaymaker’s. If we could move up here without asking for government money, why in hell should we work ourselves to the bone to help other people do the exact same thing as we did? I mean, we lost a whole lot of money on our move, and now we were being asked to lose even more money on theirs. Where was the justice in that? It wasn’t like they didn’t get fair warning down there. These problems had been building up for more than two whole generations! How much warning did you need?

  Anyway, like I say, one of those government camps was right outside our town, and you could see the impact on our property values from the day it was first planned, and that was before we had barreduras hanging out all over town. Cynical Sam got hold of the figures: real figures, I mean, not the massaged government ones. Half of those people had never paid tax in their lives, he said, and you could see that was true just by looking at them. They were the sort of people that just sit there and expect the government to provide for them.

  Yeah, and a lot of them were Mexicans too, or Cubans or Dominicans or whatever, Latinos of one sort or another. I met some of them that could barely speak English. These people came over the border, they got US citizenship handed to them on a golden platter, they got federal welfare money and those goddam Spanish schools so they never even had to bother to learn our national language, and now they got help with moving too, when they didn’t like the prices at their local water company! Cynical Sam said that at times he wondered if we might do better just to hand the border states over to Mexico and build a new wall further north. He was kidding, I guess, but it actually made a lot of sense. It wasn’t really America down there any more. Crap’s sake, those Mexicans had even gotten themselves their own separate party in Congress.

  And now they expected me and Karla to pay for houses and towns to be built for them, with the government paying half the rent for pretty much ever. Really? We didn’t think so.

  It wasn’t like we didn’t have weather problems of our own up in Idaho. Our town sat on the banks of a river at the bottom of a steep valley, with three or four streams running down into it on either side. One of those streams came down right next to my garage, as a matter of fact. (When I had a quiet moment with no motor or power tools running, I could hear the little waterfalls. It was kind of nice, I guess.) But things were shifting up in the mountains – ice melting, more rain and less snow – and sometimes a huge pile of dirt got pushed away and the water came rushing down the river in a great muddy torrent. So we had to pay a lot of extra money in our taxes for flood defenses, which had never been needed before: storm drains, levees, and all of that. And we paid willingly, of course we did. No one likes taxes, but you do need taxes for some things, and that’s one of them. But here’s the thing, they were local taxes. We didn’t expect a handout from the federal government, and we didn’t get one either. So we didn’t see why we should pay with our federal taxes for other people’s defenses, or to help them out when they hadn’t bothered to protect themselves.

  That’s the way I saw it, and Karla was just the same. And I doubt you could have found anyone in the whole damn town that would have said anything different. It was just common sense.

  CHAPTER 9

  On the morning after the dinner party, Richard woke up in an empty bed. Holly had already been out for a three-mile run, and was hard at work in her office. When he went up to say good morning, her cristal was laid in front of her, her various screens ranged round her, bright with charts and text, and her jeenee, that tireless servant, was girdling and regirdling the earth on her behalf, as it unearthed nuggets of data, solved logistical problems and enlisted the services of other equally non-corporeal beings.

  Holly and Richard lived at a time of famine, poverty, war and disease, an epoch when historic nations were falling apart in bloody civil wars, million-year-old forests were dying, and vast and ancient ocean reefs, full of life and color within the memory of their own grandparents, had turned to crumbling white skeletons of stone. Yet oddly it was also a time of unprecedented technological power. No one talked about the Turing Test. The jeenee inside Holly’s cristal was quite capable of talking for hours without revealing that it wasn’t human.

  ‘So what are you working on?’ he asked.

  ‘The usual thing. Trying to get a feel for how people think, and trying to find chinks in their armor, you know? Places where they are open to influence.’

  She leant forward as Richard left her, and murmured a new question to her jeenee. She could get an answer to any question within minutes from several thousands out of the tens of millions who were signed up to the Pollcloud. And, in those few minutes, the AIs that ran the Cloud would have processed the raw responses, broken them down not only by age, ethnic affiliation, income, level of education, gender and geographical location, but also by personality type, interests, musical tastes. They would also have taken account of heart rate, brainwave activity and facial expression, all routinely gathered by the jeenees that came with even the cheapest cristals, to provide a measure of the mood of participants when asked the question, and the degree to which it engaged them. And in the few seconds they took to weigh all of this, they would also have factored in each Pollcloud member’s previous responses so that those whose preferences had been shown by subsequent events, such as elections or sales figures, to be currently typical of any one particular demographic category would receive more weight than those whose responses had been proving less predictive.

  Holly experimented by preceding questions with human stories: ‘Susan is a mother of two with her own one-woman design business, working from home in a small town in southeast California. Her husband is an AI center supervisor. They live in an average-sized house which, like most people, they bought with a mortgage. They both work hard and things were going well for them until a few years ago when the price of water started going up. Now, what with massive water bills and failing businesses – the town is shrinking and half the homes in their street are empty – they aren’t making enough to keep afloat, but they can’t sell the house either. The price hasn’t just gone down. It’s literally worth nothing at all. And yet they still have $900,000 of that mortgage to pay off.’

  The AIs made their calculations. Sympathy for the barreduras did increase among those who had read the story, but it was a short-term response. Even just separating the scenario and the question by twenty minutes was enough to wipe out the effect.

  She tried preceding questions with short lectures on the shared interest of every American in a thriving economy: ‘Every farmer who goes bankrupt is someone who could have been contributing value to our economy for the last ten years, but in fact has been contributing next to nothing. All of America is poorer if these farmers aren’t helped to start again.’

  The AIs found that a small increase in support followed, an increase that was less closely associated with short-term emotional response, and somewhat more durable than the effect that had followed the personal stories, but it was still small, and still very easily canceled out.

  Holly drummed her fingers on her desk for a moment, then sent her jeenee out again into its invisible universe of ones and zeros.

  According to the Pollcloud’s calculations, she learnt, as many as 19 percent of Americans thought there was ‘some truth’ in the belief of the Tribulationist Church that droughts and storms were sent to punish wicked communities, while nearly 63 percent generally agreed with the statement, ‘I wouldn’t expect the government to help me, so why should I help others?’

  Richard brought in a cup of coffee, kissing the top of Holly’s head and looking bemusedly at the animated graphs and diagrams on her screens.

  ‘People insist that the barreduras are to blame for their own problems,’ said Holly, ‘that’s what we’re up against. It’s weird, that, isn’t it? It really doesn’t take much imagination to see that they aren’t.’

  ‘I guess it doesn’t take much im
agination to see that an abattoir is a horrible place, but—’

  ‘But we choose not to imagine it, so we can eat the meat on our plate. That’s it, I guess.’

  As he left her again, she had her jeenee engage the services of so-called silvertongue AIs, which specialized in lateral thinking, metaphor and the rhetorical use of language, to see if she could improve on the messages she was testing on the Pollcloud.

  An hour later, frustrated by her lack of progress, she set that task aside and asked her jeenee to begin compiling a list of individuals she could interview herself from all the various key demographics.

  Slaymaker didn’t wait for Holly’s conclusions, though. That very day, he went right ahead and made a speech to a conference of freight executives in Washington, DC, in which he mocked the president’s program of building hugely costly carbon dioxide extractors.

  ‘Are we going to blow even more federal money on the president’s billion-dollar Christmas trees that achieve nothing and fall down in a puff of wind, or on those so-called storm-proofed roofs that turn out not to be storm-proof after all? Or are we going to spend it on doing what America has always done before, moving our population round this great continent to make the best of new opportunities?’

  The businessmen clapped politely. Outside the conference center, fierce gales were lashing the capital with summer hail, and making the trees in the parks rock and sway like crazed dancers. Even in the calm interior of the storm-proofed building, they could hear it out there, that huge invisible mass flinging itself against the triple-glazed windows and the concrete walls. Slaymaker tried to play this to his advantage.

  ‘Listen to that sound, Mrs President! I guess you can hear it from the White House too? It’s a wake-up call from nature. It is nature telling America that the time’s come to get out those old bullock wagons again, and start ’em rolling!’

  Again the assembled businessmen clapped, but, watching the video link, Holly wasn’t so pleased. All her instincts told her that this wasn’t going to work.

  Sure enough, President Williams was on all the main news channels before nightfall with a stinging comeback:

  ‘Senator Slaymaker might want us to run away from the weather, but I happen to think it’s better to stand our ground and face what we’re dealing with. After all, as the senator himself points out, the bad weather is moving north. So what’s he going to do when it catches up with those bullock wagons of his? What’s he going to do when we reach the Forty-ninth Parallel and there’s no more north to go to?’

  Holly had to admire whatever combination of human speechwriters and silvertongues had worked with Jenny Williams on that one. It was a nice touch to turn Slaymaker into the one who was running away, and the president into the warrior standing her ground.

  ‘As to my so-called Christmas trees, yes, I admit it, they look kind of weird. And yes, I admit it, they won’t solve this problem for us on their own. There’s a long way to go. But those Christmas trees took nearly a billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere last year. Remember CO2? Remember the stuff that everyone has known for the last century and a half is trapping in the heat? And remember how Senator Slaymaker has spent his life denying that CO2 has got anything to do with it? Because that’s another thing that Senator Slaymaker likes to run away from, isn’t it? He likes to run away from the truth!’

  Her delivery as ever was rather flat. She came over a bit too like a high-school teacher – Principal Williams, she was often called in the whisperstream – but on this occasion her authentic anger came through very well, and all the polls showed that, in this particular dogfight, she’d come out on top.

  Holly called Slaymaker that evening.

  ‘You should have talked to me first, Senator. You can’t afford to just wing it. You’ve got to think about how she might come back at you.’

  She was surprised by her own boldness in speaking to him like that. But the senator responded with playful yet seemingly genuine remorse.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right, Holly. What’s the point of hiring you to help me with these things, and then me just shooting my mouth off? Listen, I’m kind of stuck here in DC for a while. Any chance you could get down here so we can go over all this together and figure out where we go from here?’

  CHAPTER 10

  The set off late that night. Although the car could have brought itself home, Richard went with her to the airport. She was kind of touched that he insisted on this, and yet secretly she would have preferred the time in the car alone to begin to gather her thoughts. In fact, when he kissed her goodbye, she almost forgot to kiss him back, so keen was she to settle herself inside the drig and get to work with her jeenee on the data and ideas that were buzzing and fizzing inside her head.

  As it turned out, it would have been better to take the train. The wind was bad. The drig’s departure was delayed for several hours and then it had to divert to Philadelphia. She took a hire car from there, and finally arrived early the following evening, nearly twenty hours after leaving her home in Schofield. Slaymaker met her in his office in the senate building on Constitution Avenue. He had an assistant order in food, and then they settled into the large leather armchairs he favored for informal conversations. The wind was still blowing hard outside, periodically flinging hail against the warm, triple-glazed window.

  ‘No major demographic group in the northern states is keen on welcoming any more southerners,’ Holly told him, ‘whether from the east or the west. They’re not keen on it period, and Anglo northerners are especially resistant to taking Latinos.’

  ‘That’s the result of our leaky border. Most people figure the more Latinos you help settle, the more will sneak over from Mexico and South America.’

  Holly wasn’t sure about that. What he was calling a leaky border consisted of a twenty-foot-high wall from coast to coast, a twenty-foot-high fence running parallel to it topped with razorwire, and a minefield in the no man’s land between the two. Pretty much every president in the last century had garnered votes by making that barrier even more fearsome.

  ‘You weren’t completely wrong to target the president’s Christmas trees, because there’s a lot of skepticism about addressing our problems by doing something about the composition of the air. Most people know that carbon dioxide caused this weather problem but the majority are pretty fatalistic when it comes to trying to reverse it. Which actually is consistent with expert opinion. An awful lot of the science these days suggests we missed the boat and it may be too late to put the genie back in the bottle.’

  She pulled a graph up onto her cristal. ‘But here’s the thing. People may not be much interested in the president’s efforts to reverse what’s happened to the atmosphere, but if you present northerners with a straight question: would they prefer money to go (a) on Christmas trees or (b) on building new neighborhoods and towns near them so that barreduras can move into their states, suddenly they become keener on Christmas trees. You’ve really got a long way to go there, Senator. And the distance is even further today than it was yesterday, now you’ve given the president a chance to come back at you. She really hit the spot when she made this an issue about standing firm or running away. You could see her approval rate jumping up right there on the real-time polls, and it still hasn’t come back down. She’s made those Christmas trees seem suddenly sexier, and you helped her to do it.’

  Slaymaker nodded. ‘She’s done well this time, I’ll give the old schoolmarm that. She was on form.’ He sipped at a glass of water. Holly had never seen him touch alcohol of any kind. ‘By the way, Holly, feel free to call me Steve.’

  ‘Uh...okay – Steve – I will.’

  Holly wasn’t sure she liked the idea of calling him that. You don’t necessarily want your favorite uncle asking you to stop calling him Uncle Jim, or your dad telling you to call him Eric.

  ‘You’ve done a lot of work in a short time, Holly.’

  ‘Well, it’s not so hard these days, when you can just push scenarios out into the Pollclo
ud.’

  ‘Goddam AIs,’ Slaymaker grumbled. ‘We’re selling our souls to those things.’

  The assistant came and took their plates and Slaymaker requested coffee for them both and ice cream for himself.

  ‘Anyways, where do we go from here? Maybe I should ease back on those darned Christmas trees if people like them? I mean, I’m not a scientist. I dropped out of school in the ninth grade. If folk think those things might really help stop the storms and all, I don’t want to stand in their way.’

  For a moment Holly froze. How could he say that so calmly and casually after spending so many millions of dollars, in his Haulers Federation days, on a last-ditch effort to rubbish the notion that CO2 was a major factor in the climate? He’d stubbornly resisted more than a century’s worth of scientific consensus and now he was willing to change his mind in response to a couple of opinion polls – and the inconsistency didn’t seem to bother him at all.

  But she knew there was really nothing here to be surprised about. Her whole profession rested on the fact that people’s views were subjective, mutable. People chose the story that worked for them, made them feel good, justified the way they wanted to behave in any case.

  ‘As for that bullock-wagon image of yours,’ Holly went on, ‘Jesus! I know you were thinking of the Old West, but that was a long time ago, and a lot of people these days have barely heard of it. Meanwhile, we’ve had a whole century of images of people on wagons of one kind or another trying to escape from impoverished foreign countries and into countries that looked more like ours. When you talk about bullock wagons, that’s what comes to people’s minds: not fellow Americans striking out into new lands, but foreigners fleeing from famine. You know? Queues of ramshackle vehicles on the far side of the Mexican border. Or all those millions who try to cross into India from Bangladesh after each new flood.’