CHAPTER 27
It was already growing dark when she climbed from her car the following afternoon. The house was in shadow, only the top of the ridge was still in sunlight, the trees picked out against the sky. Richard came out to meet her. They kissed.
‘How did you get on?’ he asked as he set a fish lasagne on the table. ‘Was it someone hacking your polls?’
Holly piled food onto her plate. ‘Zara went into that with our Pollcloud providers and it seems not. They even sent out drones across the country to physically check on a random selection of their volunteers – they actually have them walk out of the house, would you believe, so the drones can see them standing there when they read their iris patterns – and they were all bona fide humans. But the cloud AIs think there could have been some sort of coordinated intervention by a fairly large number of human volunteers, to vote one way for a while and then suddenly switch.’
‘Who would have organized that? Montello? Frinton?’
‘The WSS, we think. There are a lot of Salvies out there these days, and of course they’re totally opposed to any kind of mass migration – they think people should reduce their numbers, change their behaviour, whatever, but definitely stay where they are – so they’ve got every reason to dislike Slaymaker and to want to undermine his campaign.’
‘So...you’re saying that the apparent success of Slaymaker’s campaign so far has just been a kind of...well...illusion?’
Holly took a swig of white Canadian wine. Richard felt there was a certain guardedness about her that hadn’t been there when she set off for Slaymaker’s ranch. She was animated and keen to talk, and yet she wasn’t quite talking to him.
‘It’s not mainly about the Salvies,’ Holly said. ‘We paid for the AIs to do a really deep analysis and it seems there have been several distinct patterns going on out there, which have come together to create this slump. A bunch of people do seem to have made a sudden switch, but the main problem is simply a growing doubt about the whole Reconfigure policy. We managed to sell it for a while, on the back of Slaymaker’s popularity, and – you know – by very careful presentation, but that’s not quite cutting it any more.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, Holly. And that’s your baby, of course.’
‘Ah, well. I always knew it was a long shot. How you tell a story is important, but it can’t alter the basic facts. This policy will cost the taxpayer a lot of dollars, and it will mean a lot of new residents in northern states where people have begun to think of southerners as sort of foreigners.’
‘Sadly, we just assume these days that no one wants actual foreigners.’
‘I’ll tell you what this is like. You know how it is when we go out on Sergio’s boat? You don’t have to have the wind right behind you, but there’s only so close to it you can sail and still keep moving? It’s like that. We were trying to sail just a bit too close to the wind.’
‘So what happens now? I guess drop the Reconfigure thing and emphasize other aspects?’
Richard tried to expunge any trace of hopefulness from his voice. He assumed that if the Slaymaker campaign dropped Reconfigure America, there’d no longer be a place for Holly.
But Holly laughed. ‘Oh Jesucristo, no! No way am I giving up, Rick! No chance! We’ve just redesigned it, that’s all. We’ve reworked it so that it’ll, you know, catch the prevailing wind a little bit better. The basic problem was that we were asking northern voters to take on the whole burden.’
‘Which I thought was pretty reasonable, given that we’ve got it so much easier here in the—’
‘Si, si,’ Holly interrupted impatiently, ‘but it doesn’t matter whether a thing’s reasonable or not. People are always full of worry, wherever they live, whatever their situation. People fear all the time that the world they’re used to will be taken away from them. And no one votes to have their worries increased, however reasonable or fair that might be.’
Richard thought about this for a couple of seconds. ‘Okay. I guess that’s probably true. So how are you going to get round it?’
Holly hesitated, the guardedness now very apparent. ‘What we’re proposing to do is ask Canada to take in some of the barreduras, so it doesn’t look like the whole burden is going to fall on northern states.’
‘Canada?’ Richard was startled. He had a forkful of food halfway to his mouth, but he laid it back on the plate. ‘How on earth is that going to work?’
‘In his speeches, Steve will say that Canada ought to help us out more.’
‘But Canada will just shrug its shoulders and say no, won’t it? And anyway, how—’
‘He’ll be making a statement later. Let’s wait until then.’
•
They sat side by side in front of the broadscreen to watch Slaymaker, side by side but not touching, Holly with her cristal on her lap, muttering silent instructions.
They joined a twenty-four-hour news channel in the middle of a cycle. There was an item about a fight in Philadelphia between crowds of local youths and storm people, another about Spain’s sudden, panicky withdrawal from its enclaves in North Africa, another about a ferry from Liverpool to Ireland that had been accidentally sunk by one of the unmanned guns that protected British beaches against refugees. And then finally there was Slaymaker, standing in front of one of those old Mercator maps, demanding that America’s huge northern neighbor share the burden of rehoming climate refugees:
‘We need Canada’s help here. It’s richer than America, it’s larger, and it has less than one-tenth of the population. We need to ask Canada to take in some of our homeless people. Our northern states will roll up their sleeves and do their part – of course they will, they’re Americans, and that’s what Americans do – but they can’t do it all by themselves. They’ve got their own problems to deal with, and there’s only so much they can give. So, over to you, Canada. We’re waiting. We’re listening.’
Richard shut down the broadscreen the moment the news moved onto other things. ‘Jesucristo, Holly. You said “ask”, but that sounds to me more like “demand”. That was really aggressive.’
‘Well, he has his own style.’
‘I guess.’ Richard relaxed slightly. ‘So this was a case where Slaymaker wouldn’t be guided by you?’
Holly’s face had taken on a stubborn expression that he knew very well. ‘No, I wrote pretty much every word of that.’
‘You?’
‘Por cierto. In fact, I came up with the whole idea.’
Richard stared at her for a couple of seconds, Holly squirming in his gaze. ‘It doesn’t strike you as a bit of a nerve, when Slaymaker’s been saying for years that Mexicans have to sort out their own problems, and we’re under no obligation whatever to let them in?’
Holly sighed, like this was an old argument she’d dealt with a long time ago. She answered him as if he’d been a journalist calling out a question at a press conference. ‘Not at all. It would be irresponsible for the US to allow inward migration by climate refugees from other countries, when we’ve got millions of climate refugees of our own.’
‘Oh, come on, Holly. That may be the official line but you can’t possibly believe it! There’s just no comparison! Mexico and the countries south of it are desperate. There are people starving down there. The Mexican state has all but collapsed. Much of the country is ruled by gangsters. The US may have problems in some areas but it’s still one of the rich countries of the world. With the political will, we could easily look after all our own barreduras. Easily. But the Mexicans can’t look after theirs. They really can’t. They can’t even feed them. If anyone has a claim on Canada, it’s them not us.’
Holly fiddled with something on her cristal. ‘Steve needs to get elected, if he’s going to get anything done at all. There’s just no point in talking about what we could do if only the political will existed, because it doesn’t exist. You might as well talk about what we could do if we owned a magic wand.’
‘The art of the possible.’
‘Yeah. Exactly.’
‘Even if that means jettisoning—’
‘For Christ’s sake, Rick, you sound just like my dad.’ She began to imitate her father’s rather thin and querulous voice: ‘“If we can’t make things perfect then there’s no point in doing anything at all.” Steve’s approach will help several tens of millions of people – desperate people who wouldn’t otherwise be helped. It’s a shame about folk in Mexico and all those places, I know, but at least we’ll be doing something.’
‘But you only even thought of Canada because you knew your side was losing the nomination race.’
‘Of course. But what’s wrong with that? You know all those cristal games we were talking about? Where you’re competing to rule the world or something? Everyone’s happy to be ruthless when they’re playing those games, aren’t they? Everyone can see that they’ve got to play that way or they’ll just be wiped out. Well, it turns out that’s true to life.’
They sat in silence for a while in front of the blank screen. ‘It’s not like Slaymaker’s threatening Canada or anything,’ Holly finally said. ‘He’s just asking them to—’
‘He’s asking them to do the very thing that he has always completely refused to countenance, when it comes to our own southern neighbors.’
‘Well, I guess,’ Holly conceded, ‘but I’m afraid that’s how these things work. There’s a certain number of arguments that can be used to justify our actions, and we pick out the ones that best serve us at the time. I know it’s dirty, I know it’s inconsistent, but Slaymaker wants to do something that’s worth doing, and he can’t make it happen unless he can win enough support to put him in power.’
Richard shrugged. ‘Well, I understand the point, but maybe you should ask Ruby and Ossia how this is seen in Canada.’
Holly visibly tensed at that. ‘Sure. I’ll message Ruby. It won’t play the same way in Canada, I can see.’
‘Okay.’ Richard’s tone was uncharacteristically cool. ‘You do that. In the meantime, I’m going to take this coffee up to my office for half an hour because I promised Alice I’d do a bit a prep for our Faustus rehearsal tomorrow.’
Holly fetched her cristal and, sitting at the dining table, drafted a message to Ruby.
‘Hey, Ruby. You’ll have seen Slaymaker’s statement tonight, and I just wanted to say I know it will sound kind of harsh up there. He’s trying to find a way of helping us live with these weather problems, though, he really is, and he’s got nothing against Canada. I know you had your own frustrations trying to get Canada to let you in, and I remember you telling us at Mariana and Sergio’s that you and Ossia had been on demos up there about Canada’s immigration policy, so I’m hoping you’ll understand. Much love, Holly.’
‘You done?’ her jeenee asked.
‘Si. I’m done. Send it off. Oh, and let me know when she replies, even if I’m in bed. I’d kind of like to know what she says.’
They didn’t talk much for the rest of the evening, but when they were in bed, Holly reached out to Richard and they had sex again, seeking that old alchemy that always worked so well, as if anger was some kind of hard and angular crystal that formed in the gap between them, and could be crushed to powder if they pushed their bodies together with sufficient force.
It usually worked, and it kind of worked this time too. But as they lay in the darkness afterwards waiting for sleep, each of them was aware that the gap was still there, the crystals already reforming. Richard was thinking how different the two of them were, and how working for Slaymaker was drawing out a side of Holly that he had found interesting and appealing when it was a nuance, an unstated presence, but really would not get on with if it were to become her dominant self. Holly was thinking about an aspect of Richard that she had always carefully thought of as gentle, but could also rather easily be described as weak.
A faint ping from her ear implants told her that the reply from Ruby had arrived.
‘Thanks, Holly. We were a bit shaken, I admit. Ossia was really cross. She said it was funny how Slaymaker made that speech the very day you got back from Canada. I told her not to be paranoid. Yeah, you’re right about Canada’s immigration policy. It stinks. Not that the US is really in a position to criticize. But never mind. I still love you. Just no tanks along the border, okay?’
Hugely relieved, Holly sent ‘Okay, no tanks!’ back to Ruby with a little red heart, and then told her jeenee no more messages, no more anything.
Rick took the story too seriously, she thought as she lay in in the darkness. Or too literally, rather. (You couldn’t take stories too seriously!) He mistook the story for the fact.
All politicians told stories that couldn’t be taken literally. They were like the stories told by branded products. Did any man take literally the claim that a fragrance would make him irresistible to women? Of course not, but it still made that stern and angular bottle feel like something it would be nice to own. And without a story what would that fragrance be? A chemical compound. Cold, cold glass.
Bloody Ossia, Holly thought suddenly. And the idea of the dancer, her sharpness and coolness, exposed a pulsing red node of discomfort in her sleepy brain, hidden up to now behind soft black wads of mental padding. Did Ossia have a point? Had Holly suggested Canada because she was resentful in some way of Ruby and Ossia’s life together? Sudden anger toward Ruby welled up inside her: big, friendly, cuddly Ruby, with her loud laugh and her sloppy bright colors, as banal and innocent as some goofy cartoon bear. Anger from nowhere, it seemed to Holly, or anger from a place which she had never allowed herself to enter.
But she forced her attention away, like a drig forcing itself downwards against its own buoyancy. Those border rallies would do the trick. They’d bring people round. Slaymaker would be pleased with her. Everyone would tell her how well she’d done.
That felt good. The red pulse was covered over again. The dark warm padding let her sleep.
CHAPTER 28
People sometimes asked Tobin if he had Chinese ancestry, which always annoyed him, because it felt to him like they were suggesting he was some sort of recent arrival (recent to him meaning any time in the last six hundred years). But it was an understandable mistake. His face was broad, his nose quite flat, and his eyes distinctly oriental-looking, even though the hair in his wispy beard was blond and his skin too pale to conceal the violent blushes that seemed to accompany almost every emotion. He was like that all over, big and awkward, blundering through the world, a bull in a china shop, as people sometimes said, a young bull, barely able to contain the strength of his passions.
Now he was standing in the middle of a jangle bar in New York, in jeans and a red-check lumberjack jacket. The gimmick of this particular place was that the music wasn’t precomposed but was improvised on the spot by a resident AI. It monitored the activity in the room – the number of people, the amount of movement, the degree of animation in the voices and faces – and adjusted its output accordingly. Now, as the bar was filling up and building toward the busiest time of the evening, the AI was matching that sense of things starting to happen by piling up layer upon layer of sweet ascending arpeggios over a steady, loping beat that seemed all the time to climb upwards, as if this night was going to end in heaven.
‘Hey, Tobin!’
He turned toward the woman who had just tapped him on the shoulder. She had a lean, austere face and looked about forty, which would make her ten years old than him.
‘Hi. You must be—’
The woman held up a finger to silence him, and laughed. ‘First rule, Tobin, if someone is going to identify themselves to you with a code word, you don’t tell them the word before they speak!’
Tobin blushed. ‘Oh shit. Sorry.’
‘But yeah, I’m Oak Tree.’
‘Hi. You want to go and find a corner somewhere to talk?’
‘No it’s best in the middle of the room. Noise from all directions. People in the way of any pesky lip-reading cameras.’
‘Sur
e.’
‘So I gather from our mutual friend,’ she said, ‘that you want to join the WSS?’
‘I’m already a member, have been since I was—’
‘You’re a member of a support group, Tobin. That’s not the real organization. That’s kind of a nursery where we grow potential members, and pick out the promising ones for the real jobs.’
‘Well, I don’t want to be part of the support group. I want to be...I don’t know what the right word is...I want to be operationally involved.’
‘Good. I hear you’re smart, and very reliable, and very very motivated. Tell me a bit more about that last bit.’
Tobin blushed again. ‘This country has been raped. When it was just our people who lived here, we looked after it. Not perfectly, of course, but forests were forests, plains were plains, oceans were oceans. And then the white settlers came, and covered it with roads and shopping malls and fields of wheat. They told us we were savages and to get out of their way because we didn’t know anything. They told us we’d used the land so little that it didn’t really belong to us at all. But now look at it. What did they really know?’
‘Your people?’
‘Well, my mother’s people.’
Oak Tree frowned. ‘We’re not fighting some kind of race war here.’
Tobin blushed some more. ‘Oh sure, I know, I know. I didn’t mean that. This isn’t about one race or another. It’s about stopping that thing where people just trash one place and then move on and trash another. It’s just that—’
‘Okay,’ she smiled, ‘okay. That’s fine. Your frustration is understandable. So long as you know your genes don’t confer any special virtue. This is not about making claims to virtue. We leave that stuff to the delicados. Our position is simple. The human race is at the bottom of a very deep hole and yet, crazily, it’s still digging. We need to make that stop, period. We’ve got no use for anyone who tries to make it anything more fancy than that.’
‘I agree. When we hit those freight trains – when the WSS hit those freight trains, I should say – everyone was going, Why did they do that? What point are they trying to make? And I thought, No, there’s no point. Not in that way. It’s about stopping freight trains. As simple as that.’
Let Us Be True Page 14