"The Haves have had. We have, by turns, aspired to, wondered at, and worshipped the Haves and their homes, their luxury, their lifestyle. Their hold and sway on us has grown in parts to an unbearable intensity. "It has become impossible to decipher our criticism of them from our praise. Even our sharpest tongues shy from total damnation of the owning class. For every centuried dynasty we curse for sitting upon their hoard of gold, there is some fresh-blooded philanthrope we will endlessly laud. Whose best intents are merely enticement dangled before the beast of burden: the worker led down the path to slave. "Ask yourself, friends, before you leave." The fringes had been drifting toward the florists', where fresh displays offered perhaps more pleasant distractions. "Say this great Florin Green takes you in, feeds you, clothes you, gives you money, even, from what I hear. She does all this, and do we expect her to surrender all of her profits to us destitute, with nothing given in return? When the common stocks in her company, which can be purchased just across this very avenue, read so clearly that the dividends payable to the bearer are guaranteed. Ask yourself: how does she benefit? For she must, else join you here in the breadline." Oleander had no answer either, of course. He'd asked himself a hundred times and had a hundred times heard nothing. But he wasn't near as interested in the answer as he was in asking the question. Having the power to ask - loudly and in public, too - meant he was free from answering. More than a hundred, must've been, who'd come today to provide their own answer. Odds were none of them agreed with any of the others on what it ought to be. But, that was seldom an issue in these short afternoon performances along the road to the Square. The audience only discussed what they knew it *oughtn't* be, so any differences in opinion were too fine to be discovered before Oleander had already carried on, with a few fresh companions who considered themselves big-picture people. Some of today's were regulars, now. Anthur, Cumbens, and Sebest were each familiar from multiple marches. But there were a couple new faces: an outcome Oleander was becoming less surprised with each day. "I'm glad you came along, friends. Every voice we can raise against the tyranny of the tariff shines a light on the freedoms being pulled right out from under us with every step." Oleander couldn't have asked for a better day for a march up the avenue. The sun had cut through the cover of last night's rainclouds and was quickly drying the pavers. Its bright intensity shone warmly against the backs of the crew. Their spirits raised, they talked excitedly, with the fan of their shadows stretched long before them. ----- "The story is always the same: the great but wicked brutalising the small but worthy. Are the great ever truly great? Is theirs ever worthy? And are the small so small? Have they ever been brutal? "I hear many criticisms of my company's work. I hear many claims made in those criticisms. But I hear claims without theory. I hear statistics without calculation. I hear accusation without evidence. And, critically, I do not hear solutions. "Solutions are what my company was built on, and the purpose for which it was built. Many of you will have seen our bulletins and catalogues, heard our airwave announcements, or may even have caught our programmes on a raytube - something we're all becoming used to seeing more of, lately. In our material we often talk of solutions. This is how we desribe our services. "Labour solutions. Financial solutions. Housing solutions. These are the solutions to the very issues most afflicting our society today. Issues for which I find myself facing blame. Yet while my critics will carry on with their words, I carry out mine. "Millions working again, with purpose and determination. Working building homes in which they can raise a family; building roads and bridges to take them across the Federation; and crafting quality products for their enjoyment and enrichment. Millions being paid for their time and efforts, and extending the gift of that reward into their communities. "No-one has ever made a feast of outrage. But the moralising manuals of the Garden Road press have no other book from which to cook than puritan panic. Their cupboards are bare, so when the blessing can no longer be drawn out, they hold the hungry hostage with the fear that all the food and drink in the world are poisoned, and they alone know who is responsible. "I will hope you forgive me for being responsible. For taking responsibility. Not because I have any need of your forgiveness - I do not- but so you are able to join the effort without prejudice. I do not wish there to be any grudge between us. I did not come to cause problems, but to offer solutions." At first, the times it came easily were the worst times. It is wickedly difficult to be angry and not tell somebody something they don't want to hear, or that you don't want to have been heard. This is made doubly so when there's nowhere for the anger to go. As her father would pipe, "The boilers had left harbour without the helm." But Florin Green knew the destination. Not the course there, or to name any port. Nor to know the land or the language, but she could trace the outline of its shore by studying the backs of her eyelids. Navigation would be gained with time, but all she understood then was that she needed propulsion. The disconnect in saying things like that boilers sailed at all was typical of Florin's father. He first told the joke in reference to an experimental motorship his firm was developing for the Navy, by which point he was no longer its president, but the chief executive of the vast parent company which had purchased the shipyards with its own shares. But his pedigree was sail, and it was ever betrayed in his endless idiomata. ----- He could have been born anywhere, but he was born here. One of a multitude of little soldiers sired by royalists and revolutionaries in the close of the last imperial century. By the time of his birth, the battleflags were waved only on Federation Day. His parents' mercenary blood had been cooled to blue by dividends of no less sensible a thing than rail bonds. It would be fitting, then, that at the moment he crossed into this world, the overnight southbound train crossed the border away from his homeland carrying the very agent of its downfall. A route which had, steel, stock, and staff, been breathed into existence by an act of Parliament imbuing with endless millions the corporation whose profits paid for his every mortal need. ----- Oleander had always wanted to be something. What, exactly, was hard to pin down: as a child, his reverence for his tutors had made him dream of being a teacher; when the long days of learning began to chafe, and he spent more and more time sneaking off to dance halls, Oleander longed for the wild life he imagined the musicians lived; when he realised the discipline he would need to master an instrument and the art of self-promotion was no less than that imposed by his tutors, he drifted again and again and again, until he could find a career that required neither study nor regimen. He believed that, whatever calling was his, inclination and inborn ability alone should be enough to find success in it. Oleander would be something, he knew. But what...? ----- It had been critical to connect the capitals of the two great rival powers driving the direction of the continent. Their histories had crashed and heaved together countless times, but now there was to be peace. Peace to last. Peace not just in its time, but for times only yet dreamt of. Committees were formed at every level of government, barged in on by community associations, labour unions, and anarchists for the whole half-decade of wearying discussion. The whirling cogs of industry and government crashed against each other with much bang and spark, but only drove the machine forward in the average. Uncounted wealth crossed the length of the land, leaving nothing in its trail but a scatter of tracks going nowhere in contradicting gauges, of which fewer than half ever carried cars. Then there was Green. Industrialist, philanthropist, wielder of wealth beyond imagining. A self-made man who would now make a continent whole. It was his merchant fleet that had first connected the world. For centuries, the wind had carried vessels, including many of Green's own, over the horizon and dropped them into the belly of the sea, from which depths their crews would plead to the stars and currents for the sight of shore. Arrival was by chance, when it happened at all. ----- She played the message. Then a second time. Could've been for any reason. She had no doubt heard it the first time. You don't mishear a thing like that. So few people had aunts and uncles as it was. The dangling blade of plague had hung over civiRuthtion since its cradle, but never had it swung so deeply as when it fell upon the continent in those years of Her parents' springtime. The memotape spooled around a third time. When the tension arm lifted away, She slid the tape off its wind and tucked it back into the envelope that had been left in the otherwise empty inbox downstairs. After carefully retying the sealing string, She pressed the envelope against Her desk with Her fingertips, briefly contemplating the possibility of delaying its delivery to the president, when he came through the door, trading jokes with his two-o'-clock. The small hand on the dial ensconced in the hutch had just rounded past the first quarter. He was early, but not uncharacteristically so. She'd lost the pace sometime during Her second time through the tape. Trying now to hide the wide, bright rectangle would only bring more suspicion than an unexpected delivery never arriving. She waited for a pause in their exchange. "Package for you, sir." She stood between Mr. Okering and the machine She'd just been using, hoping he would prefer to take the tape to his own and so miss the chance to notice the tension arm on Hers was set exactly where it needed to be to play his message. Okering suppressed a flash of annoyance, but took the envelope without comment. He made a small gesture of something like thanks and turned back to his companion. "It's been swell, really. We'll have to do this again sometime. Let the Minister know we can certainly help him with his needs. You have my information." With a wave, he was gone into his own office, with his own machine, and his guest mirrored the movement through the exit, leaving Her alone in the reception. She waited, counting Her breaths. "Come in here, would you?" rasped the intercom. Eighty-seven. Had he also replayed the tape? Had horror drawn the blood from his face? Had his hands shaken and his heart clamoured? She did as She was asked, but knew there would be no answers waiting behind the executive's frosted glass double doors. The cabinet containing the president's Cordavox machine was shut and locked. It was the only place among the office's few and minimal fixtures that could conceal the now-absent envelope and its contents. She did Her best to avoid looking at it. "I need you to take a letter to the Minister's quarters on the Square, near Confederation Park. He'll be expecting it, so I want it there by the end of the day." He held out a naked, square fold. It was sealed tightly, and carried no markings to speak to its purpose. Whatever the letter inside said, it was said briefly, as its wrapper was as flat as if it were still empty. She extended Her hand underneath his, and he dropped the missive into it. She could feel a timer start from the moment the cool paper fell against Her palm. Two hours, maybe less, until the Minister's day-shift security began locking doors and clocking out. The centretown tram would only take twenty minutes to reach the Square, but wouldn't pass by the Green Building for another twenty on its half-hourly cycle. And She still had to find Her way across the vast field of cobbles and fountains and shopcarts and statuary, then there was explanation and clearance, and hoping at the end of it all that the Minister would even remain in his offices until the evening chimes. "Don't forget to collect the department reports before you leave." And that, too, of course. Always so much. But She was being waved away again, and the timer was silently ticking. She left the office in as close to a hurry as She dared and carefully slid the doors closed again behind Her, wincing only a bit at the slight clack as they touched together. She grabbed one of the dollies from the storage closet and set off on her first order of business. Mr. Okering's division occupied the three floors at the top of the building's ziggurat base, with more than a kilometer of parquetry to cover between its numerous offices. There were plenty of elevators, however, all the fastest in the world, and She had mapped out a route up through the maze of departments that took Her through the daily task of collecting their bundles of reports in less than half-an-hour. ----- She set about readying Herself for the trip to the Square. Tickets for the tram, a hat, documents to present to security, an umbrella. It was always important to be properly prepared for a journey. She pulled Her bag from its reclusion under Her desk and went through its contents: handkerchiefs (three); a spare set of spectacles and small kit for repairing them; Her notepad and three pens (two black, one green); a small, silver comb (Her mother's); one ladies' toilette (just in case); and a toothbrush. ----- "D'you know what war is? It's an argument with every side shouting the same thing until enough of them are too deaf to object or too hoarse to continue." ----- No passion but rage; no love but jealousy; no affection but thoughtless doting. The first was rare, and perhaps stung the least; the second, Florin had only begun to register late in her father's life, and the pain came more from never having been able to have her grievance heard. The third was perhaps the worst of them, though: how could a girl accuse her own father of any cruelty when he had never denied her anything she had asked of him? She'd never met anyone who would speak of the illustrious Mr. Green with anything but reverence. She began to wonder if anybody had really known the man. She wasn't sure if she had. She wasn't sure he would've allowed it. Florin had read a book about magic once. Not the sort of magic practised by small, wingèd folk in children's stories, but real magic. The book claimed that to have power over anything in the world, you must first know its true nature. There hadn't been a single soul who had power over Mr. Green. Florin recalled a dinner at the estate of one of the northern Princes. Surrounded by a glittering palace full of servants and sycophants, the Prince, fully robed and crowned, had led Mr. Green to his seat near the head of the royal table and pulled out his chair for him. At the time, the simple sense of good manners in her child mind obscured from Florin the full meaning of the simple gesture. Even the Princess had sat herself. ----- "How long do you expect your cherished borders to last after they've all been stretched out to their greatest extent and crushed up against each other for a decade or two? You'll see before long just how thin those pencil lines are, and you'll wish you had marked them with something thicker." "What would you suggest?" "I'd suggest you erase your sketches before your armies are forced to redraw them in blood. ----- << We go together, the five of us and she. The town is only two kilometers away; the enemy is three. Dawn's distant light draws a cold sigh out of the earth, and the fog surrounds us. But only five bodies shiver. Her heart is hard and calculated. And her body - her bunkered belly - does not feel. We go together, over fields, onto cobbles Into the labyrinth, where waits the enemy: the bull and his horns His hot breath, and the thunder of his charge. Houses trampled under his advance stare down at us Flame spilling from their cracked crowns and empty eyes Fear fills the spaces in the cold mist given up by ruined gardens But only five bodies tremble She does not flinch from the fire She was formed by torch and brand She was born burning We go together, the five of us and she We will face the bull, his horns and his thunder His breath will not burn She will not step aside from his charge I give her the words, and she will speak Her language, old when the earth was new Her tongue, sharpened by forge and hammer Her shout deafens mountains And sets the valley quaking. >> Perche's eyebrows danced back and forth and again, like a pair of jostling boars at some distance. "Lovely stuff. Where in the world did it wash in from?" "Other side of the continent. Some poor fool who got stuffed into one of Old Man Green's gunwagons for half of the biggest war since the Big One and fell flat on his pants in love with the thing." Aun held out the envelope and its other contents: a fistful of adsheets to cover the cost of postage from the furthest barrens of the Republic; a small, flat loop of lightly corroded alloy; and a dutifully pressed sheet on which was the official translated print of the sender's message. << Brother Perche, >> Perche stifled a chuckle. "When did I join the Orders, Aun?" "It's how they address each other in the Republic: "Brother", "Sister". Solidarity and all that, you see." "I see." << Brother Perche, I hope this letter finds you. If it finds you well, all the better, but I will be glad if it finds you at all. The borders of my country are closing faster all the time despite our victories over the Crown, the counter-revolutionaries, and most recently against our imperial neighbours. Where some nations' successes have made them foolhardy, ours turn our leaders sights so far inward, they will not tolerate consideration of the outside world. But there are things I have learned which I believe may benefit your readers. >> ----- Their shapes flitted like titanic bats through the scattered spotlighting; a great, vast, buzzing colony. But her name was Ptarmigan, and this was not the life her mother had built her for. Indeed, it hadn't been her life until recently lived. This strange tumbling of bombs from her belly was all an alien thing. But she bore the accusing jab of the inflicted below. She was tattooed in a parody of the insult: the fiery extinguish of thousands summed up in a row of broken towers. They were splashed on her hull in a putrid ochre, vibrant against her lapis livery. The bright and salty blue was a begrudged complement to Ptarmigan's serene curvature. She was made as much by the water as for it. Through long nights hunched over wave pools and towing tanks, her mother had seen her shaping, as best intentions encountered the forces of the world. She had spent the whole of her first year in the water, a nymph with no knowledge of wingèd flight. She had swum the canals of the capital and played in the wake of the channel freighters passing hither and yon. Ptarmigan was given her wings in her second summer. They stole her from the water where she was born and would in time deliver her to her captors. Cold-mitted men who would now test her against the air. She had been torn along the ventral to make way for a vast and open bay. Where before a pair of restless passengers had, by chance, met and cozed in the midnight quiet of a lounge, a bustle of Exalopene canisters now clanked coldly in their moorings. Some of her sisters had been spared the gashing. But they were all of them gutted. Where beautiful, modern people had slept and dreamt, where they had sat and watched the sky and ocean, no room was spared now for any passenger but death. Guns and shells of every calibre, poisons and nerve agents, rockets and explosives. The luckiest merely carriaged the worst of these: the men who decided such things should be made, and be made use of against others. ----- A staff car prowled around the fence, passing under the cover of a line of maples, into the yard. It sat at the foot of the manor, basking in the noonday, purring contentedly to itself. The smell of exhaust was high and bright in the heat. There'll be a colonel in there, the Doctor thought to himself. There's always a colonel. Always had been so far. The car's languid shape was broken up as a spry lieutenant jumped out from the front passenger door. "Doctor... Rabbit?" "With two Ts" "Ah. So it is, sir. You've been expecting us." This was not a question, but the lieutenant's way of giving the order to go to the car without the open pretense that such an order was required to be followed. The language used by military when addressing civilian staff was a dialect all its own. The Doctor regretted that the opportunity to study it would only come with the completion of the project, when his presence among the ranks would no longer be required. ----- The young technician had explained very thoroughly about the thing. About how an electrical current is either off or on, and how this could mean not only "yes" and "no" but all sorts of things. Naturally, this meant jargon, and the Colonel couldn't abide such. "But, what does that mean? What can it do?" "It thinks, sir." A pause swung pendulous between them. "Then what do I do?" "Sir?" "Thinking is my job. When do you suppose was the last time I fired a rifle in anger?" "You'd have been very young to have seen the last open war." "I arrived to the officer class very late in my life." The time had come for a Story. "Spent a lot of time mucking about. Literally, in at least one case. Huh. Digging ditches." Why did they do this? All the man need do is provide a date. A slot on the calendar. But no. The circumstances needed to be explained. No matter how ludicrous, lengthy, or - as the technician suspected was the case here - incriminating they were. The Colonel was saying, "They were turbulent years. There was a revolutionary around every corner, wielding a satchel bomb or somesuch. 'Watch thy neighbour closely' was the byword of the day. ----- "Well, right now it only does equations. Fiendishly complicated ones, mind you. It could chart the movements of the moon, for instance." The technician struggled to put the Machine's capabilities into terms the Colonel could appreciate. Ah. "You could fire an artillery shell, sir, and it could tell you where it will land before it hits the ground." "That so?" The Colonel's expression had softened a bit. Whether that came of being impressed or derisive was hard to tell. "Make it do that, then." "Sir?" "Say I've just fired an artillery shell. Where's it going to land?" "I don't know, sir. Where was it fired from, to where, at what attitude, what calibre gun, with how much charge?" "I'm afraid I came up through the cavalry. Bit out of my wheelhouse. Suppose I'll have to take your word for it, then, hm? "You seem keen, though. You'll be notified if you make the shortlist." The technician had scarcely registered the clicking of boots when a plump gray envelope was being presented by the lieutenant, plainly eager to join his superior, already gone through the swinging of the workshop doors. "Thank you." The package received, the young officer was gone, with another, ever-so-softer clicking of brightly-buffed boots. The doors fluttered to a close, and a stray breeze drove its way through the shop, lifting the hood of coppery heat from the room. They opened again, and the breeze escaped. "How did it go?" "More paperwork." The envelope made a respectable thump as it landed on the chief's desk. "Well, that's more work, anyhow. Which means we're still employed." "For now." Dr. Rabbitt thumbed through the documentation pulled from the envelope as the technician looked on. "How much longer will we have to do this, chief? The war can't go on forever, surely." "All we need is another year. Maybe two. Then the funding we need will have come through. The Prime Minister was on the airwave last night, saying the war could go on for half-a-decade or more. Even if things take a drastic turn, we'll be alright." "Drastic...." The technician bit on the word like it was an unripe nut. "Would've been far simpler had you just taken Florin's offer." That name was taboo in the chief's presence, but it had been a long afternoon. "Pah! That capitalist? She'd've taken our work from us, all of it. The Machine would've ended up as some trinket for her aristocrat friends to marvel at. Or worse, tabulating payroll in the bowels of some architectural horror in the Capital." The heat in the room had risen, soured. "And how much more good will it be doing in the hands of the Army, or the Navy, or, heaven forbid, the Air Corps? Better it dispense wages than death, don't you think?" Dr. Rabbitt sighed his infernal sigh of paternal frustration. Frustration born of a presumed wisdom over a presumed ignorance. "Ruth, it is far better that the Machine's fate be in the hands of men elected by the People than by some plutocrat appointed by inheritance. You said it yourself: the war can't go on forever. And when there is peace, there will be no need to calculate ballistic trajectories or the survivability of bomber planes. But we will have completed our work, thanks to the War Ministry's financing. Then the People can decide how best to use the machine to better their lives, rather than Florin Green using it to better her own." Ruth released the edge of the desk, and the blood flowed back into her fingertips. She had needed to remind the chief of his mistake, but she could've done without the lecture. "Perhaps you're right." Not likely, though. "I'm going to wind down the cyclers, close up shop." Before Dr. Rabbitt could respond, she was already back among the stacks, flipping breakers, letting the electricity escape from the cyclers. One by one, they whippered to stillness, forgetting all about calculus and trigonometry. Ruth wondered what they would dream about as they lay cool and unthinking. Would they dream at all? She wasn't sure if she should be envious at that, though she would be sure, no doubt, before morning. ----- "Well, we've never marched on a holiday before. You..." Oleander lost Anthur's voice in the racket of snapping flags, hoists chiming against poles, and the rising din of bands tuning up in every corner of the square. "Anthur?" The other man stopped, almost startled by his own name at his ear, sounding both so close and as if from some hidden depths. -----