“Overall, the planet needs to institute a harsh rationing scheme at once,” she concluded. “We need an accurate census of how many people are actually in the cities and how much they need to eat. We also need to start expanding farm capability as much as possible and that means rebuilding or dedicating the industrial factories to supporting the new farms.”
I scowled. I’d brought soldiers to Svergie. I hadn’t thought to bring any farmers. That oversight could have killed us all. “Get on to the personnel department and look for anyone we have with any farming experience,” I ordered, finally. “If you find anyone, tell them we need them to work out how we can quickly transform unsettled land into farms that can feed the population — by drafting new farmers from the cities, if necessary.”
“I’m not sure if that will settle all of the problems,” Muna said. “The Government would need to make life in the cities uncomfortable and that would be very… unpopular. At the moment, the urban residents have it pretty good and they don’t have many places to go anyway. A handful were able to get jobs and others did manage to go out to the farms, but they’re little more than a drop in a very big ocean. Worse, sir, the underclass are actually pumping out more children than the planet can support; we might have to suggest mandatory sterilisation of every woman who had a child, just to prevent the population from rising still further.”
Her face twisted. “I can’t have children myself,” she admitted, with a hint of pain in her voice, “but many women will be outraged by the suggestion. I can’t see the Progressive Party agreeing to it, yet they’re sitting on a time bomb, courtesy of the UN.”
“Thank you,” I said, finally. “I’ll do what I can.”
I made arrangements to meet with the Acting President — I had to keep reminding myself that she was the Acting President, not the President — and spent the rest of the day working on the paperwork I’d allowed to fall behind. It was one of the ironies of my job that I’d managed to cut down on the paperwork significantly — I saw no need for a UN-standard incident report on every little leaf that fell — but I still spent much of my time doing it. I’d promised myself that if I couldn’t justify a piece of paperwork to myself, I’d scrap it, but so much was clearly necessary. It was something that no one had ever managed to solve.
Two days later, the shit hit the fan.
Chapter Twenty-Six
It is a truism that large government cannot govern well, if by well we mean governing in a way that pleases the little people. A large government must — by the nature of the beast — concentrate on the bigger picture, and therefore irritate and alienate the little people who are, often quite unintentionally, ground up in the gears. This has three different outcomes depending on other factors; they abandon their work, they suffer in silence, or they rebel. All three have unpleasant consequences.
I hadn’t been too impressed with Frida’s ‘government agents’ when I’d first seen them and I hadn’t seen anything to change my mind afterwards. She had intended to train up a new class of bureaucrats who could carry out her orders and create a detailed census of the farmers and their property, but she’d ended up having to raid the remains of the UN bureaucracy for personnel and instructors. I was surprised that she trusted them that far, but like most bureaucrats, they were loyal to the people paying the bills and that was Frida. She sent them in groups of five to the nearest farms with orders to carry out a census and collect the names of every farmer in the area. Three days after the first ones had been sent out, the shit finally hit the fan.
They hadn’t had a very comfortable journey as they drove towards the farms. It seemed that word of their coming had passed through the planetary grapevine — they didn’t have a full-scale datanet, but evidently they didn’t need one — and their reception had not been polite. They’d expected to stay at some of the smaller farms and holdings — there weren’t many hotels in the rural areas — but apparently none of the farmers was willing to put them up for a night. The farmers were generally hospitable to visitors, but apparently they weren’t willing to share their home with lechers and moochers — their exact words — regardless of how much money they were offered. They’d ended up sleeping in their cars, cursing the farmers as they struggled to find comfort on the seats, before washing in a cold river and carrying on towards their destination. They were probably starving by that time as well; they somehow hadn’t thought to bring any food with them, either!
That problem was only solved when they reached a small village and found a shop whose owner was willing to sell them some bread and cheese, which they munched as they made their way towards the core group of farms. Frida had chosen it as their first destination because it was a political hub — insofar as the farmers had a political hub — and if they could be induced to knuckle down, the remainder of the farmers might fall in line. They drove into the village and hunted for the elected representatives. It took them nearly two hours to establish that the elected representatives were on their farms — something they should have expected from the start, seeing that they were farmers — and then they spent another hour trying to find the farm! One farm looked pretty much like all the others to city-born eyes… and they weren’t helped by misleading instructions from people they encountered along the way. When they finally reached the farm, they were in a vile mode.
We only learned the remainder of the story from the recorder in their vehicle, which survived the brief encounter. The five government agents reached the farm’s gate and demanded admittance. The farmer came out instead and talked to them over the gate, demanding to know who they were and why they were bothering him. The representatives informed him that they were there to take a census. The farmer replied that he wasn’t going to allow them on his land. The representatives said that they had permission from the government to arrest anyone who tried to bar their way and tried to grab the farmer. A handful of shots rang out and they stumbled to the ground, dead. The farmers took the bodies, dumped them in their car, drove it some distance from the farm and torched it. That was the signal for a general uprising; the remainder of the government agents scattered over the area were swiftly wiped out, their bodies dumped in their vehicles and burned, or buried in unmarked graves.
We received the emergency call from the government an hour after the shit hit the fan. The farmers had intended, I suspect, to ensure that no one knew what had happened in their territory until it was far too late. As it was, one of the agents managed to get off an emergency signal and alerted the government, which tried to raise the remaining agents and discovered that they were all off the air. The government’s links to local law enforcement units — mainly farmers or relatives of farmers — failed as well and it became clear that something was seriously wrong.
“Andrew, something has happened to the agents,” Frida said, when she called. I’d hit the emergency alert as soon as the board lit up, but we couldn’t have gotten anyone out to the farms in time to save any of their lives. Robert had been right, of course; we didn’t want to save any of their lives. “They’ve all gone off the air.”
“It could be a communications breakdown,” I said, thinking fast. It was clutching at straws and I knew it, but Frida might not know it. Coordinated action on such a scale meant carefully laid plans, icy determination… and an infrastructure capable of pulling off such attacks. I pulled up the images from the William Tell and searched for the final locations of the missing agents. The burning vehicles were easy to spot from orbit, even if their attackers were indistinguishable from everyone else. “What would you like us to do about it?”