For instance, a warning.
“There are probably more goats than people in Saskatchewan,” I said. “There are the salvage teams in the cities, and the nomadic bands of Cree ecosystem repair engineers on the high prairies, but no one else. Saskatchewan is big and it’s empty. And without resources and expertise, it could kill you.”
“In three to five days, I’d say,” added Xie. Lightly. I could swear I hadn’t let my voice slip from behind its textbook mask, and yet I could feel Da-Xia’s sudden and enveloping attention. She knew exactly what I was doing.
Han didn’t. “Three to five days until what?” he asked.
“Until one runs out of water, most likely.” I could not help but glance at Elián’s face as if glancing at the Panopticon. His mouth was stiff and tight. I looked back down quickly. Elián’s knee was visible past the heaving side of the goat—his knee, and the twitching lump that was a spider under his clothes. I knew it would be listening. I knew I was at the edge—the barest edge—of what I could possibly say. “Saskatchewan was always marginal, but after the big shift it dried up radically, and the Pan Polar government decided to move the entire population. We diked the mouth of James Bay and let the rivers turn it into a new Great Lake—and the Hudson Shore into a new breadbasket. It is a well-studied model of the rational use of resources.”
My voice was level, but I was pleading with him. Stop. Think. Don’t do this. Please don’t do this.
“Rational—” Elián’s voice cracked. Without warning he let the goat go and stood up. Bat Brain threw herself backward and kicked out with her hind feet like a war-trained stallion. I had to free my hand, so my dodge came almost too late, and had no grace: I ended up sprawled on my back. The goat took off. Elián towered over me, and the Panopticon loomed behind him. “I’m so sick of rational. Tell me something rational, Princess Greta. Will your mother let you die?”
Flat on my back in the dust, I answered him, “Of course.”
Through the next few days that “of course” was a blister on the inside of my mouth. Elián ignored me and I ignored him. Even as the nannies came into heat—one could tell because they grew louder than roosters and started to sexually assault the water barrels—I found myself thinking those words, replaying that moment.
Replaying Elián asking what he had no right to ask, what no Precepture child ever asked another. Will your mother let you die?
Mine would. Of course she would.
She would be grief-stricken. She would hesitate. She would go to war only if all other options failed. The Preceptures worked. They made the have-not states reluctant to start wars to get what they needed; they made the have states reluctant to refuse reasonable demands. Think of it as incentivizing negotiations, said the Utterances. Think of it as putting a little skin in the game.
But I had been to Lake Erie. It was little more than a marsh, reedy and loud with blackbirds, dotted with the mines that reclaimed the heavy metals that had once settled at the bottom of the polluted lake. When it was a lake.
My mother would not let that happen to Lake Ontario. I knew she wouldn’t. She had been born to a crown, and she had learned a crown’s cold courage. She would be appropriately reluctant, but if the Cumberlanders did not back down, she would not accede to their demands. She would let me die.
Of course.
And of course, too, Elián had been up to something, with that string of questions about goats. He’d been fishing for information about the Royal Visit.
That year’s visit was by a salvage family out of Saskatoon, trommellers who sorted the rubble of the abandoned city with the aid of rotating drums the size of houses—the trommels for which they were named.
The trommellers and their Royal Visitor came on the first day of September. My cohort happened, by good luck, to be up at Bonnie Prince Charlie’s pen on the ridge top, moving the fences to encompass fresh grazing. We could see the open prairie from there.
Rising from it was a plume of dust.
Grego spotted it first—and froze, his iris implants snapping shut.
Han took his arm. “Don’t be scared.” No one else would have implied that Grego was scared, but Han did it easily, blandly. “It will be the Royal Visit.”
And it was. We watched the group slowly come into view from the dust, a loose band of walkers driving goats before them with long sticks. They were a strange sight to eyes accustomed to the ranks and sorting of the Precepture—men and women and children, all strolling together. As they came closer, we could see that they all had their heads and faces wrapped against the dust; we could see their long coats made of scraps of colorful cloth, and adorned with flashing bits of metal that made them look, from a distance, like sparkle on water.