Once upon a time, Donald had been a cocky twenty-six-year-old of perfect qualification, too expectant of triumph to perceive ambition. The hard grind of raising a family was as yet far over the horizon of his blasé habits. Lavinia had fitted perfectly what he wanted—an attractive, not overly demanding young lady of sovereign birth with which to appear in society. It was not the basis of a successful marriage—it was never meant as more than a vehicle by which an ambitious lawyer could build his sovereign clientele whilst looking for a more enduring companion.
The day after Donald learned she was pregnant, Father drew him into his study, put a whiskey in front of him and became very man-to-man. Donald was twenty-six. It was time he ended this playboy frivolity and got serious. If he wanted respect, he had to be a full man, not just a smart counsel; it was time he got married and raised a family of his own. Lavinia is an absolutely charming girl and she comes from a prominent manor in the Lands of Krossington. I want you married and I want grandchildren. Do you understand? As Father detected a profound reluctance, his mouth closed to within an inch of Donald’s right eye.
“Her family is close to Krossington. You will marry her because you have to—if you want a future in this town.”
There is no truth like that spoken with brutal simplicity. Marcia was born seven months later, to be joined by Cynthia two years later. Yet marriage had not given Donald a future. At best, it had launched him adrift on an ice floe. Sooner or later, every ice flow melts. Lavinia had just spoken aloud what both of them had known for years; from her point of view, his best option was to disappear to the Nameless Gone.
He felt very alone. He longed to know what had really happened to Lawrence.
Chapter 7
On the following Wednesday, Donald met His Decency Thomas Thomson Krossington at the Palace of Westminster. This immense building was an heirloom of the Public Era. Prior to the Glorious Resolution, it was the seat of government of the old nation state of the United Kingdom. Now it was the most exclusive club on the Island of Britain.
Like the raving babble of a madhouse, a hundred conversations boomed off the golden ceiling of the Lords Chamber. Donald gazed overhead, awed by the impression of a roof drooling gold, the panelled walls carved in a density of shields and frescoes reminiscent of St Paul’s Cathedral on the occasion of his father’s funeral. In his admiration, he bumped the shoulder of his host.
“My apologies, Your Decency,” he said.
Tom Krossington was a stocky man wearing a pin-striped suit. His shoulders were broad for his height, his head large, appearing larger due to the vigour of his curly grey hair. The suit fitted neatly about a trim form, for he was ascetic and, despite being now in his late fifties, athletic. He was known to all as TK. He made a peculiar overhead sweep with one hand, as if trying to catch a moth.
“It was the British Empire back when this place was built,” he said. “The greatest empire there ever was in history. Yet despite all this leaf and flourish, the Glorious Resolution happened just the same and they all went to the Nameless Gone.” TK looked back sharply at Donald. “That’s why we must keep a better guard than they did.”
The noise level dropped as members filed into the Lords Chamber and settled down. TK pointed out his ‘dearest neighbours’; other sovereigns with lands around the Great Ring Drain of London. Together with the Krossingtons, they were known as the Big Seven. They were envied by the other members due to the extent and wealth of their lands. A tall and brown-skinned man with disarrayed white hair was Frederick Dasti-Jones—the host of Donald’s recent internment. Another man with thick black hair and a snooty face was Augustus Shellingfield. There was also a man of about sixty with a limp and walking stick. That was Sebastian Fiesler-Cohen. The limp came from crashing his motorbike as a teenager.
“How many members are there, Your Decency?” Donald asked.
“Only about two hundred now. Big lands eat small lands, sometimes with consent, sometimes without. Big lands can afford more safety features than small lands. That’s just life. Our Lands of Krossington are about three thousand square miles, with some 140 miles of land frontier.” Donald was stunned to be passed such privileged information. He sensed that TK was going to make him an important offer, which would have happened two weeks ago but for the crash. “We pay ten thousand ounces of gold annually to come here—you really have to enjoy politics to stump up a pile like that.”
An elderly, stern-faced man wearing a black wig stepped up on a kind of sack at the top of the Lords Chamber, not ten feet from where TK and Donald sat. This man was known as the Speaker. He presided over the Assembly and resolved questions of protocol.
“Order! The Assembly is now in session.”
“Hear! Hear!” chorused the members.
“Before the normal work commences, it will first be necessary to resolve a grievance between two clans. On 5th October last, a flying boat operated by the Krossington clan injured the sovereignty of the Dasti-Jones clan under our laws of Naclaski and Frite. I now offer Member His Decency the Honourable Sovereign Frederick Arthur Ludwig Sergey Dasti-Jones, Lord of the Isle of Thanet, Canterbury, Dover, Hastings, Maidstone and lands in between to state his terms.”
TK had already explained to Donald that this was a formality and would not be dangerous. The Dasti-Jones clan was allied to the Krossington clan. Frederick Dasti-Jones stood propped on his stick and stated that acceptable terms had been agreed and the Canterbury Assembly had voted the matter settled.
“I now ask the offender to speak,” the Speaker said. “Member His Decency the Honourable Sovereign Thomas Thompson Krossington, Lord of the North Downs and the South Downs, of Southampton and Portsmouth, the Isle of Purbeck, Reigate and lands in between will establish his position.”
This was not a formality. It could become dangerous. TK was sweating and the hand holding his speech trembled for the first few seconds until he calmed himself. He began with an elegant resumé of the evolution of the laws of Naclaski and Frite, how they had come to express the core values of the new sovereign society, one that demanded no less than the absolute right to private air all the way to outer space. After the Sack of Oxford in 2073, radio waves were also banned from private air after years of debate over the technical difficulties and security implications. By way of light relief, he inserted an anecdote about one clan—now extinct—which had unsuccessfully taken a glory trust to the Land Court for failing to exclude cosmic radiation. The glory trust had successfully argued that excluding sunlight from a client’s land was neither desirable nor feasible.
Donald noticed an obvious partisanship across the Assembly between those who laughed with an artificial gusto and those whose faces remained cast in stone.
TK closed in on his topic with a description of the last flight, including some rather pedantic technical details about the maintenance records for the navigation instruments. He explained the training and service records of all four crewmen and emphasised that the Krossington clan sustained a low rate of offences compared to other sovereign clans. He concluded the disaster was caused by a freshening of the eastern wind leading to error in dead-reckoning navigation. He finished by praising the effectiveness of Battery George’s gunners in their enforcement of the Naclaski law.
The Speaker thanked His Decency and called upon common guest Donald Bartleigh Aldingford to support.
Donald was of course used to public speaking and in court was agile like a swift, but that was after long preparation. Today TK had given him a speech, which he had barely glanced at before being led to the Lords Chamber. Now he was faced with more than two hundred stern and in many cases downright hostile listeners who viewed him with contempt as a common servant.
He read it evenly and with increasing animation, feeling his old debating technique coming back. The speech was only a few hundred words, explaining that he had been ordered to take the flight by His Decency Tom Krossington and he was travelling under Krossington contract. He extended his grati
tude for having been treated in accordance with the law of Frite and thanked the Dasti-Jones clan for having agreed terms quickly. After which trial, he was glad to sit down. TK patted him on the sleeve and murmured:
“Excellent. Well done. Now comes the fun.”
To begin with, Donald could not make head or tail of what was going on. Members waved white batons in the air, were selected by the Speaker, stood to pontificate over some long-standing grievance against another clan, only to be countered by contrary claims from that clan. It was like a primary school class. Gradually Donald realised there was a pattern to the claims. Enemies of the Krossingtons tried to discredit the ‘excuses’ for the offence, whilst allies attacked those enemies on the basis of other Naclaski offences, some dating back more than thirty years. The ‘claimed’ strengthening of the eastern wind was the point most wrangled over. The weather record came from a station within the Lands of Dasti-Jones, the implication being the clan had fabricated the evidence to defend their allies, the Krossingtons. However, in the end nothing came of the squabble. The Speaker called on the Assembly to vote on whether to accept TK’s position. The ‘ayes’ had it by too clear a margin to warrant a count.
“Good,” TK said. “Our diplomats had to do a little work in the background to ensure that result.”
“What happens if a flying boat gets shot down by an enemy?”
“Don’t even ask. There are cases from the nineties still dragging through the Land Court.”
The normal work of the Assembly now began. Donald observed the procedure, assisted by murmured narration from TK. Applications from members wishing to speak were drawn at random from the Ballot Box. This allocated limited Assembly time in a fair way. It also meant TK had to be ready to deal with any spin-balls other members might throw his way.
Donald grew increasingly disgusted by the pettifogging griping and carping level of debate. Speaker after speaker stood up and attacked a neighbour over some frivolous grievance. One sovereign attacked another for ‘outrageous reflections’ of sunlight off the windows of a mansion in the neighbour’s land. Another accused their neighbours of deliberately infecting wild hogs with anthrax and discharging them to invade his lands.
For Donald, the most disturbing speech was by “Member His Grace the Legitimate and Worthy Sovereign Augustus Markus Antonine Maximus Shellingfield, Lord of Bournemouth, Portland, Bristol, Dorchester, Sherborne and all of the Summer Country”. The Shellingfields were well known for their hatred of their neighbours to the east, the Krossingtons. Augustus Shellingfield ranted against the Krossingtons for their selfish hoarding of the only major oil wells on the Island of Britain and for their excessive and profligate discharges of surplus. Shellingfield claimed that some of these discharges nested on his lands and had to be extracted by General Wardian glory trust at considerable expense in gold. He claimed compensation from the Krossington clan.
TK dismissed it all with adroit rhetoric, while Donald stared at his knees, thinking. TK had invited Donald to this exclusive room for more reason than just to make a short speech. No member in this place cared a hoot what any commoner had to say. Suppose afterwards, TK took Donald into some quiet place and made him an offer he could not refuse, a most lucrative offer? Donald needed gold to survive. What would his conscience have to say about taking gold sweated off the backs of scores of thousands of wretched natives? There was no doubt that Krossington discharged surplus to the public drains, after all, in such great amounts as to draw complaints from his neighbour. What could a man do? Donald sighed and gouged his nails into his palms. He was being slammed hard to comply with sovereign immorality.
The Speaker opened the next randomly-selected application from the Ballot Box.
“Member Professor Vasco Banner, MA (Oxon), PhD, DSc, the president of the National Party, will now speak,” the Speaker said.
Donald lurched back from introspection. He was not alone in being rapt. Amid stunned tension, Professor Banner stood up. Compared to the tailored suits and lavish finery of the rest of the membership, Professor Banner appeared like a footman about to return to an industrial asylum on leave. He wore a brown jacket, so old it wrapped over the bones of his shoulders and, incredibly, no tie, just a white shirt with an open collar. He reminded Donald of the janitor of his chambers. There was some cat-calling as Professor Banner waited, looking over his notes. The Speaker eventually called order. Quiet settled over the chamber.
“Thank you, fellow members, for providing me this opportunity to address you—”
“You’re very welcome,” quipped a voice.
“Order!” barked the Speaker.
“My name is Vasco Banner, I am the president of the National Party.”
He spoke in a quiet, patient voice, as if beginning a lecture he knew the students would find taxing. The Assembly became dead still, as members strained to hear him. Banner explained that he was an economic historian. He had spent his life amassing and analysing statistics about the collapse of the Public Era. Between 2038 and 2041, the globalised world economy of the Public Era shrank by 99%, as estimated from the catastrophic fall in the buying power of gold after the bursting of the Gold Crest. Reputable estimates showed the Island of Britain lost 90% of its people. Nothing learned in the most adventurous prowling of the world’s oceans suggested any region had been spared. The economy of the world had regressed to the nineteenth century, indeed, in some respects to a state more akin to the Roman world than any shadow of modernity. By a grotesque abuse of language, this collapse had come to be known as the Glorious Resolution.
And there the world had remained, frozen in time for seven decades. This stagnation flouted the normal human performance of learning, improving and expanding.
Why?
Explaining this economic mystery was the core of his research.
The National Party had been formed at Brent Cross industrial asylum in the eighties from the remnants of the old SUN Party. It was limited in its media, due to the Naclaski ban on radio transmissions across private land. Nevertheless, the Party now had a membership in excess of one hundred thousand.
Someone muttered: “Do you think that’s true?”
Those seeking reform faced an economic conundrum known as the Underpopulation Bomb—the lack of people to consume. Just as a great river cannot flow out of a desert, so the gigantic factories required for mass production could not exist without a population to buy all the mass-produced stuff. The population of Britain was lower today than during the High Middle Ages of the thirteenth century. Furthermore, most people were not so much poor as denied even the touch of money, supposing one could call shiny tokens money. Nevertheless, the Party offered a programme that would, given decades of effort, reconstruct the old world of trading strangers.
Donald’s principal reaction in listening to all this was frustration at his unfamiliarity with economic concepts. He had never studied economics. In fact, until now had not even considered it a veritable subject.
Banner now described the National Party programme. Donald floundered. He had no idea what fiat legal tender was, for instance, nor had he heard the term ‘bank’. However, he had a fine memory and stored the jargon for later enquiry. There would be a state bank to issue fiat legal tender. The glory trusts and the repugnant Night and Fog racket would be banned, as would the private armies of the larger sovereign clans. Public safety would be established internally by a national police and externally by three national armed forces: air, sea and land. These would swear loyalty to the National Sovereign Cabinet. Oil fields, coal mines, canals and railways would be owned by the state and operated for the people. There would be suffrage for the people. There would be national passports for the people…
A rising murmur of heckling erupted into ironic cheers and slow hand-clapping.
“Order please, ladies and gentlemen,” called the Speaker.
Sebastian Fiesler-Cohen got helped to his feet by an assistant.
“We have been idealistic
to assume that anyone who could afford the annual fee must be competent. I think we should review the screening of new members.”
The Speaker waited until the groans of approval eased.
“Our current rules allow each speaker twenty minutes. The member Professor Banner still has four minutes remaining.”
Professor Banner ruffled his notes, glanced at his watch and resumed.
“I will make one announcement. On Saturday 30th October, the National Party will hold its annual conference in Brent Cross industrial asylum. It’s an opportunity to learn more about the Party and meet its council. You are all cordially invited to attend. Thank you for your attention.”
Laughter and jeers washed him back to his seat. Donald was both surprised and disappointed by this exhibition of schoolboy tribalism. He was going to that annual conference. What Banner proposed was the solution to the abominable discharges of surplus. Donald sensed, if as yet only vaguely, that a crucial event had occurred in his life. He also sensed, again as yet only vaguely, that his life was going to be more dangerous.
TK stood up and rapped the top of his seat with a Britannia coin.
“I beg to speak!”
“Does the house object?” called the Speaker. Despite some grousing from Shellingfield and a few of his allies, no member formally objected. “You have two minutes.”
“Let us remember why the Glorious Resolution happened. Fundamentally, the Public Era was based on the dangerous idealism that everyone has the right to whatever they want. Trying to give everything to everyone just can’t work. The Public Era mined out its own future with debt, it crammed the planet with tourism and traffic, it razed the ancient forests, it poisoned the oceans, it even threatened to wreck the climate of this Earth. It stacked such a tower of debt that there could be only one end. What you must understand is that the National Party is leading us down the same road to ruin; they’re driven by pious rectitude, not pragmatism. Over all our petty squabbles and rivalries, we the sovereign class must prevent the recrudescence of the Fatted Masses. That is why we sovereigns must unite to control the problem—”
Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 1 Page 7