‘Did you persuade him not to shoot his mouth off?’
‘I certainly hope so.’
‘I mean, how does that work? How do you tell a US senator to check with you before he makes a speech?’
‘Well, you know, I just tell him he’s not doing himself any favors. It’s up to him whether he wants to take that on board.’
Richard watched her hopefully, waiting for a story or two to bring this alive for him. Holly looked up at him, saw this hope, turned her attention quickly down to her food. And then abruptly she looked up again.
‘This is confidential, Rick, okay, really confidential, but he’s going to stand for president and he invited me to join his election team.’
‘You...? I’m sorry, Holly, I’m confused. I thought you were just helping him with this campaign to settle more people in the north?’
‘It’s still what I’d be working on – in fact, I’d be leading on it – but he wants it to be the central plank of his whole presidential bid.’
What he felt was dread. Like a creature safe in its warm burrow that suddenly feels the soil falling away behind him and cold bright sunlight shining in.
‘But Holly, if he gets the nomination, he’ll be the Freedom Party candidate. The party that says everyone has got to look after themselves. We’ve always voted against them, remember?’
‘He’s going to help the barreduras, and he’s going to keep the country together.’
‘Jenny Williams is trying to keep it together too. She’s not doing as much as we might like but that’s because no one wants to pay. But she’s doing her best and, unlike him, she also recognizes the humanity of people outside this country.’
‘I’m sorry, Rick. I know this is hard. I’m finding it hard myself. I don’t like the people he’s got around him, and I don’t like his party, but I like him and what he’s trying to do. I really want to work with him.’
‘So when have you got to decide by?’
‘I decided on the drig. I said yes.’
Richard looked down at his plate, poking a piece of chicken about as he tried to take this in. ‘So...So a job like this...Well, it won’t be nine to five, exactly, will it, and it’ll be all over the country. We’ll be apart a lot and—’
‘Yeah, we will, but it’ll only be for a—’
‘You could have waited to talk to me, Holly. This is going to be hard for me. It’s not just that we’ll be apart a lot. It’s that when you’re not here, I’m going to have to think of you working for a party I’ve disliked pretty much all my life, and voted against in every election, the party that rose out of the ashes of the Tyranny.’
‘Yeah, but Rick, does the party label really matter? Does the history matter? All parties change. I remember you telling me that the party that abolished segregation was the very same party that used to defend slavery. Like I said, I think—’
‘Have you thought about what our friends will say?’
Holly’s face darkened. ‘If they’re real friends, they’ll respect my choice. I’m going to do something that will make a difference, which is more than most of them can say.’
‘You’re trying to expunge your parents, Holly. That’s what you’re really doing. You’re trying to prove to yourself that you’re the exact opposite of them. Their hearts bled for everyone in the world except for you, and now you’re getting a kick out of trashing the things they believed in. Can’t you see that? It’s understandable, of course, totally understandable, but at the same time isn’t it just a little bit infantile?’
Holly regarded him steadily for several seconds, her eyes bright. ‘It seems to me,’ she finally said, ‘that you’re allowed to have your own opinions, but I’m not. My opinions are simply symptoms. I don’t think that’s fair. It’s true I grew up seeing the drawbacks of my parents’ worldview, but that’s not some kind of pathology on my part. Yeah, and when it comes to being infantile, look at our friends. What are they actually doing? Sergio works on putting even smarter jeenees in our cristals. Ruby makes giant messy pictures that people with a lot of money and very big houses can buy to hang on their walls, which is really going to help some poor bastard from Delaware or California whose life savings have been turned to matchwood. And you, Richard—’
‘Okay, Holly, okay. I just feel I’m losing you, that’s what it boils down to. I feel you’re going to a place where I won’t be able to follow. And I don’t want that to happen. I’m worried we’ll end up—’
‘We’ll end up falling apart? Jesucristo, Richard, is that really what you think?’
Now it was Holly that felt dread, a deep dread welling up inside her. She didn’t quite belong anywhere, that was the thing. She lived among Americans but she came from another country, her friends were delicados but she wasn’t quite a delicado herself. She was working for Slaymaker but she wasn’t one of his kind either. Without Richard, so it felt to her in that moment, without this little nation of two that he and she made up, she really would be alone.
‘I don’t want that, Rick. I do understand it’s difficult for you. If it had been you that suddenly said you were going to work for some Freedom Party politician, I would have found it difficult too. But I think we should learn to see past these labels. They’re just...I don’t know...tribal markings. There are good guys and bad guys in most tribes, and believe me, Slaymaker is a good guy. You’d agree with me if you met him yourself. And when you hear what he wants to do for the barreduras, I’m sure you’ll agree on that too. Okay, there are going to be lots of things he doesn’t do that you’d like him to do, but be honest, isn’t that true of Jenny Williams? Isn’t it going to be true of anyone?’
She stood up, she came round the table, she stood behind Richard and put her arms round him.
‘You must meet him,’ she said. ‘You’ll like him a lot, I promise. But please don’t stop me from doing this, Rick. Please don’t make it a choice between doing this and being with you.’
They went for a walk through the village. The sky was fiery red over the darkening ridge, smeared with rough brush strokes of black cloud.
‘One thing,’ said Holly. ‘If I work for Slaymaker he’ll pay me a ton of money. I can definitely afford to buy us a drink.’
There were just two men sitting at the bar, half-watching the broadscreen, on which a squadron of bombers somewhere were attacking a flooded town. The sound was turned off and in its place rocket music was playing softly through the bar’s speakers: a largely AI-generated genre with human singers, that took nostalgia for the far-off golden days of the mid-twentieth century, very gently sent up that nostalgia, and then layered more nostalgia on top. Holly bought Richard his favorite whiskey, and gin for herself. They settled in their usual sagging sofa. The music segued into a song called ‘Moonshot’, the sound moving between different speakers round the room to create a sense of movement through space.
As she took off her coat Holly found something in her pocket, an old-fashioned booklet printed on paper.
NOWHERE LEFT TO RUN! it read.
NO TO MIGRATION.
She wondered for a moment if it came from the Unity Party, or maybe one of those state frontiers people in the Freedom Party, but then she read on:
NO TO TRADE. NO TO INDUSTRY.
CANCEL THE STARSHIP PROJECT.
REWARD CHILDLESS ADULTS.
NO MORE SLASH AND BURN.
‘Looks like you’ve got yourself an illegal document there,’ Richard said, pointing to the initials at the bottom of the page. WSS, Holly read: World Salvationist Society. ‘The whisperstream AIs are getting so good at weeding out their stuff, they’re having to resort to paper. Where did you pick that up?’
‘Someone must have stuck it in my pocket at the airport.’ Holly had turned the page and was looking at a long list of extinct animals, printed in a text box: polar bears, giraffes, blue whales, tigers, rhinoceroses, dolphins...
‘No to migration,’ she said. ‘Well, they won’t support Slaymaker, that’s for sure!’
She studied the booklet for a few more seconds then dropped it back into her pocket. ‘Just stop doing stuff,’ she concluded. ‘That seems to be what they’re basically saying, though they could do with some help with presentation.’
‘Yeah, I think that’s about it. The great doers we admire in history, they just see as the diggers of the hole we’re in. Agriculture, medical science, you name it. In the end they just made things worse.’
‘I don’t think they’d like me.’
Richard laughed. ‘Probably not.’
‘And they really wouldn’t like Slaymaker.’
‘Ha! Definitely not. Nor Williams either, actually. Listen, are you really sure you want to help that guy get elected president?’
‘I want to see through the job I’ve already taken on. Helping get his message over about moving people north.’
‘But why? Why’s it so important to you?’
‘Because it’s a big challenge, I guess. The biggest I’ll ever have. And, you know, just because that’s how I earn my living, that’s what suits me, that’s my niche in the ecosystem: doing this stuff and doing it as well as I can. Yeah and, as a bonus, I think his plan might be a good idea. Dammit, Rick, it’s not like I’d help him if he was planning a war or something.’
‘But—’
‘Hang on, Rick, why don’t you answer the same question? Why do you write books on history?’
‘Hmm. Because...I guess...Well, I guess it’s like a Venn diagram. One circle is the stuff you really like doing, the other is the stuff people would pay you to do. I’ve found a place where the fun circle and the job circle overlap. And...well, I hope my books make people think a bit, reflect a bit more deeply about how societies work, and...’ Richard tailed off.
‘Thinking and reflecting. That’s such a delicado value, isn’t it? We place so much store by the subtlety of our thought, the exquisite refinement of our self-awareness. But—’
‘Jesucristo, Holly, you’re obsessed with this delicado thing at the—’
‘I’m just noticing it, Rick. I’m just noticing it. Like you notice your hometown when you’ve spent time away from it, you know? Things look different from outside. I saw something on the broadscreen the other week about some woman who’s worked for years to be able to cycle round a track 0.05 of a second faster than anyone else. I thought to myself, So fucking what? What a waste of energy, what an incredibly tedious and pointless way of filling up your time. But for her that goal just seemed self-evidently worth striving for.’
‘What are you saying? That reflection and self-awareness are no more important than that?’
‘They’re important to the people who find them important. Not to everyone. That’s one of the things that’s interesting about being with Slaymaker. He’s smart, obviously, and he thinks about things, but he’s really not reflective in that kind of way. He sees something he wants to make happen and then he goes after it.’
‘Which, I guess, is exactly the attitude the Salvies are against. The desire to make things happen, no matter what.’
‘But what do they think people should do with their lives? Tend their vegetable patch? I’d die of boredom. People are meant to do things.’
Baby, sang the languid human vocalist from the bar’s sound system, accompanied by faux-analogue electronic effects, come and ride with me in my car / We’ll watch the moonshot, we’ll watch the moonshot. / And then we’ll drive and look up at the stars...
‘You’re fascinated by Slaymaker, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah, I am. Hey, don’t look at me like that! I mean, suppose I’d asked you about your drama classes and why you do them, one of the things on the list would be that you like hanging out with your pretty friend Alice.’
‘Well, yes, I guess. But come on, Holly, you know that’s as far as it goes.’
‘And the same for me. Exactly the same for me.’
‘Okay.’
He laid down his drink. He reached for her hand. They kissed. Somehow it had been accepted by both of them that Holly really would be part of Slaymaker’s presidential bid.
We’ll watch the moonshot, we’ll watch the moonshot / and then we’ll dream, we’ll dream of our trip to Mars...
‘After all,’ Holly said, ‘it’s only until next November, and that’s assuming he gets the party nomination.’
All that was left of the red sky was a faint smoldering glow.
CHAPTER 19
Slaymaker announced his candidacy for the Freedom Party nomination in November in front of a giant sign that read, Building a New America. Jenny Williams and her predecessors, he said, had allowed America to become soft and weak. It was time to stop the decline and reverse it, laying the foundations for a new golden age whose powerhouse would be in the northern states.
The crafting of this message had been worked on in the main by Holly, Ann Sellick, Jed Bulinski, and the speechwriter Quentin Fox. Sue Cortez had insisted on close oversight, and Slaymaker himself had reviewed the various options and made the final choice, but weeks of work had gone into an announcement that took five minutes to make, and Holly had done the largest part of it.
This mustn’t be about welfare, that had been clear from the beginning. Holly’s polls had established that it didn’t matter how many smashed houses and abandoned farms you showed them, most people had long since learnt to shut off fellow-feeling when they saw those kinds of pictures or heard those kinds of stories. Pity could be evoked in the very short term, but would then be typically replaced not just by indifference but by a sullen, resentful anger: We’re always being told these sob stories about them, but no one ever talks about us. For most people in America, the future was scary, threats were pressing in, their way of life was precariously balanced over an abyss. To ask them to pity others was to ask them to abandon any hope that they themselves might be worthy of pity.
When it came to understanding the limits of empathy, the others in the team were way ahead of her. Ann, Sue and Jed all started off from a point where welfare was self-evidently bad, handouts a sign of weakness, and compassion and pity dangerous emotions to be held in check. Humanity took different forms, Holly was discovering. Human hardware could run many different applications. And difficult as this was to confront, it was helpful too. All her cloud polls showed that the way most Americans thought about the world was much closer to her colleagues’ way of thinking than it was to the worldview of her friends.
With Quentin and the other speechwriters, she had worked and reworked the language of the Reconfigure America program, employing silvertongues from time to time to assist – they had no human intuition, but they didn’t get into human ruts either – and running every permutation out into the Pollcloud to test how it went down with the key demographics whose support Slaymaker needed. She had ruthlessly squeezed out the smallest suggestion that Reconfigure America was a program of assistance. She had marshaled metaphors of strength and safety: building fortresses, underpinning foundations, shoring up walls. Wherever they lived, people needed to feel they were being given something, and not just being asked to give to others.
‘So yeah, it’s true, this will cost trillions,’ Slaymaker said in his short declaration, ‘trillions to build new towns and cities in the safe places, and trillions to fund the loans that would allow people to settle there. But this is an investment in our future as a nation, as a strong, united country, a fortress of peace and prosperity in a ravaged world, a shining city where our children can grow up with a secure future. The price of doing it, believe me, is a real bargain compared with the price of leaving things as they are.’
Holly had road-tested every one of those words, right down to whether he should say ‘yeah’ or ‘yes’.
CHAPTER 20
Rosine Dubois
We were just over the stat
e line of Montana. We’d been notified about fours day back that a place had been found for us in a government trailer park up there, and there were maybe two hundred miles to go.
Me and Herb were too tired to carry on driving so we’d pulled up by the roadside one last time. We were all asleep, and it was maybe four or five in the morning, when we were woken by three cars pulling up. We heard doors being flung open and angry crash music blaring out, and then a bunch of men started yelling and banging on the truck, and shining flashlights under the tarp where me and Herb had been sleeping. The kids were in the truck. Carl began to cry. Half-blinded by the light, me and Herb scrambled out of our makeshift bed.
I’ve never been so scared.
These guys weren’t cops. They were wearing these metal helmets, like in some old story, that covered up their faces so you could just see their eyes peering out, and their mouths.
‘What’s the problem, guys?’ asked Herb.
‘Stand up against the truck,’ one of them said, and they frisked us both for guns. Carl was still crying in the cabin, Copeland looking out, his face stiff with fear.
‘Where are you people headed?’ one of them said, but when Herb told him, he shook his head. ‘No, my friends. Your kind don’t belong up here. This is Norsemen country. This is where the real Americans live.’ He laughed and shone his flashlight over the piled-up stuff in the back of the truck. ‘Where are you from, anyway?’
‘Delaware,’ I told him. Straight away he shone his flashlight right into my face, completely blinding me. I put my hand over my eyes. ‘We’re not looking for trouble,’ I said. ‘We lost our home to Superstorm Simon. If you guys don’t want us in your neighborhood, just let us get in the truck and we’ll go.’
‘Sure,’ the guy said. ‘You get in the truck and drive. But you’re heading back the way you came, you understand? There’s no place for you in our America. If we hear you’re still in Montana in twelve hours’ time, we won’t be so nice as we’re being now.’
The men lined up across the road with their guns, barring the way forward, so me and Herb had no choice about it. We had to go back, Herb driving, Copeland sitting beside him and me in back trying to comfort Carl while I searched on my cristal for another way round to where we were going.
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