Let Us Be True

by Alex Christofi

  Sue shook her head sadly. ‘You never give up, do you, Holly? More rallies will make him look more weird. The primary season’s beginning, and instead of working the states we need to win, he’s canceled prearranged events to wander along the border.’

  ‘Like a demented old man who’s forgotten where he is or where he’s supposed to be,’ added Quentin, ‘beating on random doors.’

  ‘And we all know that’s not Steve,’ said Sue. ‘That’s not him at all. Come on, Holly, help us out here. He listens to you. Tell him we need to rethink this. It’s not too late.’

  Slaymaker came in then, in a check shirt and jeans, beaming round at everyone as if he had no sense at all of the tension in the room. ‘Hey! So how are all you guys this morning? Thanks for coming. Holly, can I have a word with you first?’

  In his large wood-paneled office, he beckoned her to one of the leather armchairs. ‘I’ve asked Jed to join us when he arrives.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve led you down the wrong path,’ Holly said.

  He frowned, leant forward. ‘Sorry for what? The others been getting at you out there?’

  ‘Well, they’ve got a point. The polls aren’t great after Ambassador Bridge. I did a lot of work overnight, but I’m not really shifting anything. Sue and Ann have always thought the Canada idea was crazy, and I’m starting to think they may be right, because an awful lot of Freedom Party voters seem to feel the same way. Ann and Sue never liked Reconfigure America much, either. I knew it was going to be a hard sell, but I persuaded myself – and maybe persuaded you – that it could be done. I have to admit that perhaps Sue and Ann had a point there, too.’

  He settled back into his chair with a comfortable sigh. ‘I knew it was a long shot, Holly. I’ve never thought it could be done for sure. You just persuaded me that you were going to give your best try, and that if anyone could do it that person would be you.’

  ‘That’s nice of you. I appreciate you having so much trust in me. I’m just saying that this Canada plan may not work. Our opponents are making fun of us and, so far at least, their mud is sticking.’

  The senator shrugged. ‘Well, I’m sure you’re fighting back.’

  ‘Certainly. I’m using every trick I know. Shame we have to resort to these things but—’

  ‘You mean AIs and such? Couldn’t agree with you more. Hate the things.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking so much about the AIs. I was thinking more about making up stories.’

  Slaymaker’s eyes took on that slightly distant look they sometimes had, when you spoke about something outside of America, or outside the sphere that he cared about. ‘What can you do about it, though? That’s just how it is these days. Everyone does it, and if we don’t, we’ll be fighting with our hands tied behind our backs while they have both hands free.’

  ‘Anyway, Steve, all I’m saying is, listen to the others as well as me. I’ve no political experience. I don’t even come from this country. They may be right.’

  ‘They may be, but I’m willing to take that risk. Stick to what you’re doing. If I lose, I lose. I’m okay with that. It won’t kill me.’

  A car scrunched on the drive as it parked itself outside, and Jed came in, in a sharp blue jacket and black pants.

  ‘Holly’s having doubts,’ said Slaymaker. ‘Polls aren’t great and she’s wondering if Sue and Ann have been right all along.’

  ‘Ha. Can’t say I blame you for wavering, Holly, what with the constant onslaught from those two, but I still think Canada was pure genius. Obviously it’s going to take a while to build up momentum. People aren’t used to blaming the Canucks for things, and they need to get the hang of it. But it’s pure genius all the same. Oh, and I’ve seen some of the stuff that our feeders are putting out – your work, I assume, Holly – and I think it’s amazing: the Canuck jokes and everything. Only thing I will say is that we need to increase the temperature at the rallies themselves. Bus in a lot more people, whip them up, get a bit of real rage going.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure about rage,’ Slaymaker muttered. ‘I’m not saying Canada is the bad guy here. Come to that, I’m not planning to ask them to take in all of our barreduras, or even most. I don’t even want that, for Chrissakes! I don’t want to grow Canada. I want to grow America.’

  ‘Por cierto, por cierto. But there has to be rage for Holly’s plan to work. We’re not going to gain any traction unless people are really, really resentful of Canada for holding on to all that land. You may not want Canada to take in too many barreduras – that’s entirely up to you – but what you really do need Canada for is to absorb the anger of the American people about all the uncertainty they’re having to live with, the sacrifices they’re having to make. Otherwise, Americans are going to turn on one another, and you’re going to lose the election.’

  Holly nodded. ‘We need Canada for storytelling purposes, in other words.’

  ‘Exactly!’ In his enthusiasm, Jed slapped his hands down on the armrests of his chair. ‘What you need in an election is a story with good guys and bad guys, and preferably a story so darn simple a half-witted kid could get the gist of it. And that’s the genius of Holly’s idea. We need land and they’ve got loads of it: who could find that hard to follow? And if you’re feeling badly about the Canucks, Steve, well don’t. They’re doing pretty well. They’re doing better than we are, better than almost any other country in the world.’

  He laughed, and turned to Holly. ‘Hey, do you know what the Indians used to call the Forty-ninth Parallel?’

  ‘Yes. The Medicine Line. I’ve no idea why, but my friend Ruby always calls it that.’

  It felt strange to mention Ruby’s name here, and she wished she hadn’t.

  ‘They called it that because they noticed that, for some magical reason they couldn’t understand, US soldiers in pursuit of them would suddenly stop when they reached it. There seemed to be some kind of invisible force field there that had the power to stop Americans. Maybe you could make something of that, Holly? The arbitrariness of—’

  ‘Okay, so we’ll hire a load more buses next time,’ Slaymaker said. ‘That should be easy. Can you get Sue onto it? We can give the poor bastards in the trailer parks a day out. And let’s put someone on each bus to get them going: a warm-up guy, kind of thing. There’ll be people we can hire for that. Yeah, and we’ll give them all free food, free coffee, free beer, while we’re about it.’

  Holly smiled and nodded a little distractedly. Mentioning Ruby in this context had stirred up painful feelings that she was now having to suppress. ‘Jed’s right about riling people up,’ she said. ‘That has to happen for the plan to work. We have to get America angry. And not only that. We need to rile the Canadians, too. The more anger we get from their side, the more material we’ll have to work with on ours. Right now we need as much “them and us” as possible.’

  Slaymaker rubbed his hands together and laughed, already looking forward to this new game.

  ‘Brilliant!’ exclaimed Jed. ‘And if we get that right, then Montello and Frinton will be put in the position of having either to belatedly back us against Canada, which will make them look weak, or take the side of a hostile nation against us, which will make them look unpatriotic. Man, this woman is good, Steve!’

  Slaymaker beamed proudly at Holly.

  •

  ‘This Canada thing of yours has unleashed some nasty stuff on the stream,’ Richard said when they sat down to eat that evening. ‘Really ugly stuff about Canadians.’

  ‘I know,’ said Holly, ‘but what can you do? There are some very mean people out there.’

  It was the first time she’d so deliberately concealed from him the full extent of her complicity in what was going on. He didn’t know that, of course, but she felt she could have taken out a ruler and measured the distance as it grew between them.

  ‘It’s...It’s hard to say it, Rick, but a bit of hostility toward Canada may not be a bad thing. Americans need somewhere to direct their frustrations othe
r than at one another.’

  ‘Jesucristo, Holly. Are you suggesting that—’

  ‘What would King Scyld have done?’

  Richard didn’t hesitate. ‘He would have said the Canadians have got something we want so we should beat the shit out of them until they give it to us. But since when has King Scyld been your benchmark?’

  ‘You referred to him yourself not so long ago, Rick. You said we were taking rings from the people we needed to give them to. You were quite right, and we had to find a way round that. Otherwise, Montello or Frinton will win the candidacy, and, given Jenny Williams’ slumping ratings, most likely the presidency too.’

  ‘But what about Canada? Ruby says it’s been terrible on the Canadian side. Everyone’s really shocked by this gale of anti- Canadian feeling that suddenly been blowing toward them.’

  Holly shrugged. ‘Ruby is shocked every time she catches a glimpse of the machinery of the world, even though it’s the same machinery that feeds her and makes her rich.’

  ‘Jesucristo, Holly, that’s horrible! That’s a really horrible thing to say about your friend.’

  ‘I guess. But she can’t expect to have the rest of us protect her innocence all the time, like she’s some kind of privileged child.’

  Richard regarded her in silence for a few seconds. ‘You want to be careful, Holly. If we know we’re going to hurt someone, we make ourselves get mad at them first, so we can tell ourselves they deserve it. Are you sure that’s not what’s going on here?’

  CHAPTER 31

  The second border rally was at Oroville, Washington, on a narrow strip of flat land beside a lake. There were over a thousand Americans there, and Holly saw Slaymaker handle them with great skill, never saying anything explicitly anti-Canadian, but building up a real sense of grievance about this entirely arbitrary line that prevented them from moving any further north across the continent. Coached by the warm-up artists who’d ridden with them in the buses, the American demonstrators soon got an angry chant going: ‘Let us in! Let us in! Let us in!’

  Holly had planned the rally to ensure that roughly equal numbers of northerners and barreduras had come, and had instructed the campaign’s camera people there to shoot a bunch of heart-warming clips of the two groups together.

  ‘We’ve always wanted to help guys like Jeffrey here,’ said a middle-aged farmer from only twenty miles south of the Oroville crossing. He’d just been introduced to a displaced farmer from California of about the same age, and the two were filmed standing side by side, the northerner with a protective arm across the Californian’s shoulder. ‘Trouble is, with the unpredictable weather we’re having ourselves and the flash floods and what-all, we just can’t. And that’s why it makes sense to ask our Canuck friends over there to help out a little too. I mean, they owe their freedom to us, after all. We’ve defended their freedom against Germany and Russia and...uh...Britain, and all, and now it’s pay-up time, I reckon.’

  Canada as ungrateful: now that was good, thought Holly as she watched on one of her screens. AIs were all very fine, but you couldn’t beat real, ordinary human beings when it came to material like that. The farmer’s grasp of history was somewhat shaky but that didn’t matter. Calling Canada ungrateful very nicely turned on its head the message coming from across the border that Canada had supported the US loyally over the centuries, and that Americans should be more grateful to them. She made a note. She would work on this; she would set the feeders and scoopers on it: Canada wasn’t just a dog in a manger, though that was bad enough. Canada was a dog who only even had a manger to lie in thanks to American generosity and support.

  By the end of the day of the Oroville rally, it was clear that things were starting to move. Slaymaker was climbing in Holly’s polls, and the cave of bats was buzzing with excited gossip about the rallies. Americans – genuine ones as well as AI simulations – were talking about how inspiring these events had been. People anywhere near the border were wanting to know when the next one would be and how they could get there. Canadians – encouraged by a corps of Canadian feeders that Holly had purchased – were getting worked up about the unreasonableness of American demands, something which only served to make wavering Americans more certain that the demands were in fact fair. After all, the Canucks had ten times as much space as America per head of population, so how could it not be fair to ask them to take in a few desperate Americans?

  •

  Slaymaker pulled back into the lead among Freedom Party supporters right across the country, and he began winning primaries, even in states which he’d had to neglect almost entirely. Public demonstrations of support broke out. There were big marches in LA, Boston and Chicago. And Holly had a bunch of professional demonstrators unfurl a giant banner in front of the Canadian embassy in Washington, with the famous dog-in-the-manger cartoon, and the caption: ‘YOU’RE NOT USING IT. WE NEED IT.’ That big gray building, bristling defiantly with maple leaf flags, looked like a hostile fortress with its long row of black slit windows looking coldly down.

  Seeing the way things were going, Frinton and Montello both tried to claim that they’d always intended to demand a more generous immigration policy from Canada. But it was too late. They were already on record saying that leaning on Canada was a crackpot idea and that Slaymaker had only done it because he was desperate. And Holly’s feeders made sure this wasn’t forgotten:

  Who’s desperate now, eh?

  Still think Stephen Slaymaker’s a crackpot?

  Thousands of feeders repeated these questions in hundreds of variations, individually tailored for each main demographic group from college-town delicados to city slum-dwellers to prairie fundamentalists, so that all over the country people would feel that the friends of their friends were coming to the same conclusion: Slaymaker was the one in front, and so he should be, for didn’t everyone agree he was the one with the vision?

  •

  President Williams was also feeling the pressure. All the polls had shown her lagging behind all three Freedom Party front-runners, and now they were showing her with less than half the approval rating of Senator Slaymaker. She asked for urgent talks with the government of Canada about ‘their current untenable immigration policy’ and the Canadians, equally keen to head off Slaymaker, hastily agreed. But of course the voting public could see perfectly well that it was Slaymaker who’d started this, and Williams who was following his lead. Holly made sure of that. She even commissioned a little ten-second animation – rather an old-fashioned tool, but still very effective if used sparingly – that showed Slaymaker driving a train that was leaving a station. Montello and Frinton were hauling themselves, sweating and panting, into the caboose, while Williams, who was famously overweight, was still desperately waddling along the platform. The clip ended with a close-up of her shining, gasping face.

  Holly’s stock rose within the campaign team. Even Ann Sellick admitted that ‘this stupid Canada stunt may just have saved us’. And Sue Cortez suddenly started being nice.

  ‘I want you to come along and meet some of our donors, Holly. Steve and Eve keep telling them about you and they’re all desperate to see you in the flesh. We’ve got a dinner coming up in a couple of weeks. Why don’t you come down and say a few words?’

  She scrunched up her face a bit, making an effort to change her expression to something approaching humility. ‘Listen, Holly, I admit I wasn’t sure about it at first. I wasn’t sure of you, to be honest. But this was a great idea of yours. The polls are amazing, and we’re even getting a whole new bunch of donors coming forward with money.’

  •

  When it came to the fifth rally at a place called Opheim, Montana, Holly went along herself. The crossing was in the middle of empty prairie, but a recently built electric highway crossed the frontier there, and there was a large plaza straddling the border, with US and Canadian customs posts facing each other in the middle of it. There were no big towns nearby, but – and Holly had checked this – there were several big fede
rally run trailer parks within a couple of hours’ drive which were the home of many thousands of weather refugees, mainly from the southwest.

  Holly flew over there with Slaymaker in his private drig, and when she’d overseen the preparations, she took her place in the large and growing crowd. Parked buses and cars clogged the highway for several miles to the south of the border as what turned out to be more than five thousand people crammed themselves into the America side of the plaza. Just across the frontier, a few hundred Canadians had come to listen too, and there were about fifty Mounties in front of them, lined up along the border and looking tense and grim. As in Oroville, there was no river or any natural feature to mark the frontier. The Medicine Line was made visible on the plaza itself by a red and white striped plastic pole, held up by a row of plastic trestles, in order to stop cars from simply driving round the customs posts where the computers would check and record their details. One of the poles had been broken at some point and repaired with a crude bandage of silver duct tape. Out on the prairie the border was completely invisible.

  Slaymaker stood on a small platform just to one side of the US customs post. Holly had arranged to have big maps projected on to twenty-foot-high screens: Mercator projections, as ever, with America in a dull desert red and a huge sprawling Canada in a lush, verdant green.

  Slaymaker was fierce and powerful, very different from the courteous, attentive and almost humble persona he presented when you met him one-on-one. He was charming, funny, outrageous, warm, folksy, and yet at the same time somehow very dangerous in rather a thrilling way. She could sense the tough wise-cracking trailer-park kid right there, the kid who’d figured out he was smarter and more determined than any of the others, ready to beat the shit out of anyone who messed with him. And he employed to perfection his well-practiced technique of appearing not well-practiced at all: that regular-guy trick that allowed him to give out all kinds of signals that his followers would be able to pick up, but which he could take back later if need be, apologizing for the roughness and clumsiness of his untutored tongue.