Well, as the lender was nationalized along with all the rest of the banks in the third year of the crash, if SunSkin’s lawsuit ever comes to you, you may have to recuse yourselves as being a party to the defendants. Not that that kind of conflict ever stopped you before.
I don’t know, can there be contempt of court if the court is beneath contempt?
I don’t care, I brought my toothbrush. I’ll be appealing this peremptory judgment at the next level.
Not true. There is most definitely a next level.
DRONES
Simon Ings
SIMON INGS (www.simonings.com) was born July 1965 in Horndean, Hampshire, England. He attended King’s College in London, where he studied English. His first SF story was “Blessed Fields”. Debut novel Hot Head and sequel Hotwire were cyberpunk, of sorts. Other works of SF include City of the Iron Fish and Headlong. Painkillers is a thriller with some SF elements, while The Weight of Numbers and Dead Water are big, ambitious literary works. He returned to SF with Wolves, about augmented reality. He also wrote non-fiction The Eye: A Natural History. Ings also edited Arc, the SF magazine produced by New Scientist, where he works as a culture editor.
THERE’S A RAIL link, obviously, connecting this liminal place to the coast at Whitstable, but the mayor and his entourage will arrive by boat. It’s more dramatic that way.
Representatives of the airfield construction crews are lined up to greet him. Engineers in hard hats and dayglo orange overalls. Local politicians too, of course. Even those who bitterly opposed this thing’s construction are here for its dedication. The place is a fact now, so they may as well bless it, and in their turn, be blessed.
It’s early morning, and bitterly cold. Still, the spring light, glinting off glossy black tarmac and the glass curtain walls of the terminal buildings, is magnificent.
I’m muscling some room for my nephews at the rail of the observation deck, and even up here it’s hard to see the sea. A critical press has made much of the defences required to protect this project from the Channel’s ever more frequent swells. But the engineering is not as chromed as special as it’s been made out to be: this business of reclaiming land from the sea and, where necessary, giving it back again (‘managed retreat’, they call it), is an old one. It’s practically a folk art round here, setting aside this project’s industrial scale.
The mayor’s barge is in view. It docks in seconds. None of that aching, foot-tap delay. This ship’s got jets in place of propellers and it slides into its decorated niche (Scots blue and English red and white) as neatly as if it were steered there by the hand of a giant child.
My nephews tug at my hands, one on each, as if they’d propel me down to deck leveclass="underline" a tempted Jesus toppling off the cliff, his landing softened by attendant angels. It is a strange moment. For a second I picture myself elderly, the boys grown men, propping me up. Sentiment’s ambushed me a lot this year. I was engaged to be married once. But the wedding fell through. The girl went to be a trophy for some party bigwig I hardly know. Like most men, then, I’ll not marry now. I’ll have no kids. Past thirty now, I’m on the shelf. And while it is an ordinary thing, and no great shame, it hurts, more than I thought it would. When I was young and leant my shoulder for the first time to the civic wheel, I’d entertained no thought of children.
The mayor’s abroad among the builders now. They cheer and wheel around him as he waves. His hair is wild, a human dandelion clock, his heavy frame’s a vessel, wallowing. He smiles. He waves.
A man in whites approaches, a pint of beer – of London Pride, of course – on a silver tray. The crowd is cheering. I am cheering, and the boys. Why would we not? Politics aside, it is a splendid thing. This place. This moment. Our mayor fills his mouth with beer and wheels around – belly big, and such small feet – spraying the crowd. The anointed hop around, their dignity quite gone, ecstatic. Around me, there’s a groan of pop-idol yearning, showing me I’m not alone in wishing that the mayor had spat at me.
IT’S FOUR BY the time we’re on the road, back to Hampshire and home. The boys are of an age where they are growing curious. And something of my recent nostalgia-fuelled moodishness must have found its way out in words, because here it comes, “So have you had a girl?”
“It’s not my place. Or yours.”
“But you were going to wed.”
The truth is that, like most of us, I serve the commons better out of bed.
I’ve not been spat on, but I’ve drunk the Mayor of London’s piss a thousand times, hardly dilute, fresh from the sterile beaker: proof of the mayor’s regard for my work, and for all in Immigration.
The boys worry at the problem of my virginity as at a stubborn shoelace. Only children seem perturbed, still, by the speed of our nation’s social transformation, though there’s no great secret about it. It is an ordinary thing, to prize the common good, when food is scarce, and we must husband what we have, and guard ourselves against competitors. The scrumpy raids of the apple-thieving French. Belgian rape oil-tappers sneaking in at dusk along the Ald and the Ore in shallow craft. Predatory bloods with their fruit baskets climbing the wires and dodging the mines of the M25 London Orbital.
Kent’s the nation’s garden still, for all its bees are dead, and we defend it as best we can, with tasers and wire-and-paper drones, klaxons, and farmer’s sons gone vigilante, semi-legal, badged with the crest while warned to do no Actual Bodily Harm.
(“Here, drink the mayoral blessing! The apple harvest’s saved!” I take the piss into my mouth and spray. The young lads at their screens jump up and cheer, slap backs, come scampering over for that touch of divine wet. Only children find this strange. The rest of us, if I am typical (and why would I not be?) are more relieved, I think, rid at last of all the empty and selfish promises of our former estate.)
So then. Hands on wheel. Eye to the mirrors. Brain racing. I make my Important Reply:
“One man can seed a hundred women.” Like embarrassed grown-ups everywhere, I seek solace in the science. This’ll fox them, this’ll stop their questions. “And so, within a very little time, we are all brothers.”
“And sisters.”
“Sisters too, sometimes.” This I’ll allow. “And so, being kin, we have no need to breed stock of our own, being that our genes are shared among our brothers. We’ll look instead after our kin, feed and protect our mayor, give him our girls, receive his blessing.”
“Like the bees.”
Yes. “Like the bees we killed.”
In northern Asia, where food’s not quite so scarce, they laugh at us, I think, and how we’ve changed – great, venerated Europe! Its values adapting now to a new, less flavoursome environment. (“Come. Eat your gruel. Corn syrup’s in the jar.”) They are wrong to laugh. The irony of our estate is not lost on us. We know what we’ve become, and why. From this vantage, we can see the lives we led before for what they were: lonely, and selfish, and without respect.
Chichester’s towers blink neon pink against the dying day. It’s been a good excursion, all told, this airfield opening. Memorable, and even fun, for all the queues and waiting. It’s not every day you see your mayor.
“How come we killed the bees?”
“An accident, of course. Bill, no one meant to kill the bees.”