Rise & Shine Read online

  ‘Good luck,’ she said.

  As Curtin left, Walker’s Chief of Staff, Hail, bustled through the same door, giving her hand a squeeze as he passed.

  ‘Mornin’, boss,’ Hail said. ‘Sleep well? Pleasant ablutions?’

  Walker stared at him, exasperated by the stupidity of this line of questioning, which was exactly the reaction Hail had been hoping for. In Hail’s view — it was just a theory, but a theory he’d trusted for three decades — Walker was at his best when he was mildly irritated. And so Hail made it his business to be a much-needed pain in the arse.

  ‘Hey, I’m just askin’. Just being polite. Friendly. Making conversation,’ he said.

  ‘Did I sleep well? For fuck’s sake. I haven’t slept well for months. As you well know. Last night, I dreamt I was dead. As I might well have been.’

  ‘That’s the spirit. Well, we’ve got a busy day ahead: are you ready to try to eat?’

  ‘Why not? What’s another half-hour of my life floating away like dust?’

  ‘Excellent.’ Hail spoke into his wristband. ‘Okay, people, let’s roll: let’s give breakfast a whirl.’

  The panoramic window opposite the bed became a screen again, showing footage of a group of soldiers in a trench shooting at another group of soldiers in a distant trench.

  ‘Yum,’ Hail said. ‘Let’s eat.’

  ***

  Walker’s compound sat in the barren foothills on the eastern edge of Rise. Down the slope, the inner districts ringed the city centre: a few hundred thousand survivors and their offspring. In the outer districts to the west, far from where Walker stood, lived the confused and the edgy and the grief-stained. They weren’t outcasts exactly, but they couldn’t find a way to embrace the New Time with gusto.

  Beyond the fringes was the desert area that still went by its old name of Grand Lake. The desert separated Rise from the city-state of Shine. Rise and Shine: the only two places, so far as the far-flung drones could determine, where human beings still lived. New cities built over old cities, plastic over stone and brick and wood and concrete.

  At the same moment that Walker and Hail stood in the bedroom facing an image of war on a wall, the central business district of Rise came to a standstill. The crush of pedestrians heading to work and traffic — midget cars leaning close to plastic roads, the wheels for show — paused as huge autoscreens, made of nothing but the footage itself, appeared out of thin air.

  In the main, the citizens of Rise wore happy and expectant faces as they gazed at the autoscreens, even if straightforward exhilaration was impossible. People liked to eat, after all. And a designated mealtime in a public space gave people a chance, a reason, to gaze upwards. Yes, the sky was always out there somewhere, beyond the tallest buildings. But on the whole, people preferred to avoid remembering it was there. The filters did their work, cleaning the air of poisons and bitterness. And at the slightest fear of rain, the domefield covered Rise.

  But a citizen called Malee wasn’t happy or expectant. Born in the Old Time and now in her mid-forties, she was a data analyst: like the majority of the population, she ultimately worked for Cleave, the reclusive Chief Scientist. Pausing on her way to the office, Malee looked up at the nearest autoscreen, the same as everyone around her. She did her best not to let her disinterest in the war footage show. There had to be another way to do this, she had come to feel, another way to feed the people. Malee didn’t know another person in Rise who felt the way she did, although she couldn’t believe she was unique. She was uneasy. Dissatisfied. But he was also grateful to be alive. She was grateful to have something to eat. She was grateful that she wasn’t muddled, like those poor people living on the western fringes.

  ***

  At the same moment that Malee was gazing up, feeling her isolation, preparing to eat, individual autoscreens appeared in every home in every district in Rise. In House 28, Road 83.2, in the perfectly respectable District 7, a family of four — Geraldina, Flake, and their children, not yet named — sat formally together, heads turned towards an autoscreen at the end of the dining table.

  ‘We give thanks,’ Geraldina said.

  ‘We do. We give thanks,’ Flake said. He reached out, took Geraldina’s hand, and squeezed it. ‘Come on, children: give thanks.’

  ‘Thanks,’ the girl said.

  ‘Yeah, okay, thanks,’ the boy said.

  ***

  A battalion, each soldier a household name, was caught in a firefight. For a long moment, the camera held back, as if making sure that the whole population of Rise was paying attention. And they were, even Malee. As she gazed up, she remembered her younger sister, Prija, who hadn’t survived the old times. She remembered the purple lump that had grown out of Prija’s ear, killing her in a matter of days. Malee often thought of Prija when she ate. The growth had been some sort of cancer, Malee presumed, but she’d never found out for sure. In the chaos, the outsourced authorities had simply taken Prija’s body away and burnt it with all the others.

  The panoramic view of the battle included the whole cracked, parched field, a tiny patch of the once serene if tourist-infested, the once wet, the once fish-filled, mosquito-breeding Grand Lake. Under a vast cloud of pale red dust, the soldiers danced their desperate dance. They waved guns that discharged bullets designed to wound, not kill. They wrestled with rocket launchers that delivered vibrant, fearful, non-lethal explosions. They yelled and gesticulated. They completed their moves like the experts they were, avoiding the bullets and bombs and manoeuvres of the enemy, a battalion from Shine. This particular battle was going poorly for the soldiers of Rise, which meant that it would go very well for the hungry people of Rise.

  Soon enough, the film homed in on a single soldier: Sergeant Sala, a veteran of many campaigns. Sala was pushing thirty, a ripe old age for a foot soldier, or so her friends in the battalion enjoyed telling her. She wore a hard plastic helmet that covered the top and back of her head, including most of her black hair, but which left her face exposed and filthy.

  Sala crouched behind an isolated boulder. Perhaps she was waiting for the right moment to retreat. Perhaps she was preparing to launch a daring and futile counterattack. Whatever her intentions, she was trapped.

  ‘Fall back. Fall back now,’ yelled Holland, Sala’s commander.

  A hero to the people of Rise, Holland had stood beside Walker and Barton when they created the New Time. These days, he went to war miked up. Malee, watching from the central business district, and Geraldina and Flake, watching from home, heard Holland loud and clear. But Sala, the person who most needed to fall back, heard nothing but artillery and an all-too-familiar ringing in her ears. It had reached the point where she could hear the ringing and not much else, even during the long hours between battles, even when she was on leave (not that she liked taking leave). It was an occupational hazard, the army medics had told her, which might, just might, pass in time once she stopped going to war. And if not, she’d need a soundtrack planted in her head.

  Her audience knew nothing about the ringing in Sala’s ears, but they could see that she was trapped. As she peered beyond the rock, rifle at her shoulder, a bullet thumped into her cheekbone. She grabbed at her face with one hand while aiming her rifle with the other, letting loose a burst of shots — brilliantly close to her target, given the circumstances — as she sprinted to the trench and leapt into it. As she fled, the enemy chose not to shoot her in the back. It wasn’t that sort of war.

  Sprawled in the trench, her legs twisted sideways beneath her torso, she held her bloody head in her hands. For a moment, it seemed as if she might stay passively where she had fallen, waiting for someone to come and carry her to safety. But Sala roused herself. This was, after all, the moment she had trained for, the exact reason she’d chosen to become a soldier. She stood up and dropped her hands to her sides, ensuring that her audience could see her face. Walking purposefully — not dawdli
ng, not rushing, and with her rifle slung over her bloodied shoulder — she picked her way through the trench.

  Soon enough, she found the rest of her battalion. A few of them were nursing minor wounds. Some of them were hacking up dust, and some of them were staring up at the sky, a sure sign of shock. One by one, they saw Sala, saw the blood, saw the skin on her cheek flapping about. Each of them knew that this was Sala’s moment. Her friend Kall was the first to break down, and then the rest of them — Duncen, Graice, Benn, Noot, and the others — joined the chorus of wails. Commander Holland himself, clearly deeply moved but far too distinguished to cry in public, held a white cloth to Sala’s face.

  On autoscreens everywhere, the people of Rise now saw a replay of the shooting of Sergeant Sala. When viewed in extreme slow motion, the bullet entered her face almost tenderly, easing back the skin above her cheek. Frame by frame, that side of her face broke apart. Then the people saw the moment of impact from behind: the jolt of Sala’s head, followed by a spray of blood, bone, and cartilage, framing the helmet. Then they saw it from above, the best view for the splatter pattern. And then the screen blurred and the people heard the sound of bullet hitting flesh, followed by the low grunt that Sala deigned to emit.

  As the autoscreens slowly turned to black, the chorus of the famous song ‘Let’s Be Tender’ swelled. Once the image had vanished completely, the song faded too. The autoscreens stayed entirely black for a long moment, until a message flashed: ‘Thanks for watching. We hope you have enjoyed your meal.’ After a moment, a second message flashed: ‘Thanks be to Walker. Thanks be to Barton.’

  ***

  Walker felt nothing as he watched ‘The Battle of Sergeant Sala’, although he certainly, and not for the first time, admired the quality of the young woman’s soldiering. It was a fine film. Perhaps, in time, long after his hunger had finished him off, it would be a classic. But it wasn’t helping, not in the least, the vast emptiness in his gut. As it finished — ‘Thanks be to Walker. Thanks be to Barton’ — and as the screen slowly gave way to the panoramic view of Rise, he shook his head, beaten again.

  ‘Well, that was pointless …’ He paused, gazing at Hail. ‘Oh, hell, what’s wrong with you now?’

  Hail massaged his temples. ‘That was extraordinary, wasn’t it? Extraordinary. As good as I’ve eaten in years.’ He gathered himself. ‘Well? How was it for you?’

  Walker shook his head.

  ‘Nothing?’ Hail asked.

  ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘But that poor woman —’

  ‘Soldier.’

  ‘Yes, that poor woman soldier. Her face, that awful moment … didn’t it make you want to …’

  ‘I didn’t feel a thing, I tell you.’

  ‘It hardly seems possible,’ Hail muttered.

  ‘I agree: the footage was brilliant. A bright spot in a ho-hum year. But it did nothing for me.’

  ***

  As the autoscreens in the central business district faded, the people recommenced walking, riding, driving to wherever they needed to be. The cacophony of noise, the sudden teeming embrace of peak hour, was momentarily harsh, but almost immediately settled into its normal hum. Malee shuffled towards a tall building, a relic of the Old Time, now reclad in green tiles: tasteful or garish, depending on the mood of the sun. She’d eaten, same as everyone else, and she was grateful. Truly she was. But she felt hollow as she took the elevator to the thirty-fourth floor.

  A work colleague, Peeter, nodded at her, and the new woman whose name she couldn’t remember gave her a friendly wave. She didn’t have anything against her co-workers. They worked hard and worked well, and she respected that. And they were all in the business of survival together: she honestly believed that. But she’d tried to chat and be friends with them and go out with them and watch battles with them — Peeter, for a time, had been particularly keen on all that — and she’d just found it too hard. Too false. She was happiest by herself, lost in herself, she’d decided, even if she was lonely.

  And these days, she didn’t think she trusted herself around other people: her satisfaction with life in Rise had so ebbed that she didn’t think she could hide it. She wasn’t fearful — Walker was no tyrant, and she gave genuine thanks to him and Barton every day — but she felt an increasing urge to share her worries, vague though they were. To preach. And she found herself thinking about Cleave often. The Chief Scientist hadn’t been seen in years. Decades. The human being who knew the most about the earth wouldn’t leave her own little bubble, itself inside a city-bubble. Malee sometimes wondered if Cleave and she were kindred spirits. It was probably wishful thinking, she usually concluded.

  She typed her password — ‘Hungryforsomething01’ — and waited for her autoscreen to appear. Her task for the day was to carry on doing what she’d been doing for close to a decade: crunching numbers about weather patterns, both locally and in those parts of the earth where only drones ventured. Specifically, she researched rain: where it fell, what happened to the water once it touched earth. She had no specific idea what happened to her research when she sent it off, no idea what Cleave used it for. She understood the necessity for this: most people who were exposed to the whole story of the state of the earth struggled to carry on. But she still suspected that her main function was to keep herself occupied.

  These days, and especially during the last year, it had rained more often, both in the sky over Rise and, according to the satellites and the drones, all over the earth. People hated it when it rained: the domefield enveloped the whole city, the air grew musty, the war out on Grand Lake was postponed. The domefield was a necessary evil that provided essential protection from poisonous water. Except that Malee was starting to think that she knew better. The data she gathered and interpreted hinted at bodies of water that might, just might, be fresh. Clean. Safe. As she settled into her day, receiving data from what used to be called the delta of the Ganges River, an image of Sergeant Sala’s exploding face popped into Malee’s head. At first, Malee tried to suppress it. But after a moment, she gave in. There was no shame, she decided, in eating well.

  ***

  In District 7, Geraldina held her head in her hands, overwhelmed by the tender feelings that washed through her body and mind. Flake patted her back, absently, lost in confusion. The children watched, bemused, as ever, by their hard-feeling parents.

  ‘Can I leave the table?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Me too. Can I? Can I?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Have you had enough to eat?’ Flake asked.

  The girl and the boy nodded and bolted from the room, a tangle of arms and legs and giggles. They chased each other to the playroom, where they donned goggles. The floor became a treadmill and they ran through the Old Time, an alien world to them, full of strange lifeforms — animals, they were called — and lurid plants. Their mission was to find the last remaining hippotomus, a six-legged sagging creature with a horn front and back, before it died a natural death, and to sing it a song.

  In the dining room, Geraldina still fought to regain her equilibrium, so deeply moved was she by the plight of that soldier. Sala. Some people could eat without limits. But not Geraldina.

  ‘I always love the new footage the best,’ she told Flake. ‘That poor, poor girl. Did you see her face? So twisted. Do you think there’s any chance that she’ll heal?’

  ‘I’m still hungry,’ Flake said.

  ‘And just like that, she goes from soldier to civilian, as if she’s a … like a used cleaning cloth.’

  ‘I said, I’m still hungry.’

  ‘Goodness, are you, love? That’s not like you … Do you want to buy the footage? You could watch it again straightaway. It was very good.’

  ‘Nah, the new releases are too expensive.’

  ‘We did just watch it for free.’

  ‘Let’s wait a couple of weeks until the price drops.’

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p; ‘And we have all those reserves in the bank, and nothing much to spend it on. All I’m saying is, if you’re hungry for more of that poor girl, and who could blame you, well, why not buy it? The way her face was there one second and then the next second it was just gone. It gives me the shivers. And the way she carried herself through the pain. My mum would have approved: straight back, straight shoulders, straight neck.’

  ‘I might watch something else. Variety is the spice of life, apparently.’

  ‘My mum used to say that.’

  ‘I know she did.’

  ‘God but I miss her.’

  ‘I know you do.’

  ‘I don’t mean just her.’

  ‘I know you don’t.’

  ‘I miss all of them.’

  They leant together for a moment, Geraldina still as stone, Flake shaking slightly. There was no shame in remembering: Geraldina had been seven when her mother and older sister had disappeared. There was no shame in not remembering, either: Flake’s best guess was that he’d been five when things took a turn for the worst. But he couldn’t remember his parents, beyond shadows. Siblings? He wasn’t sure.

  Geraldina roused herself. ‘Why don’t you watch “The Battle of Bare Hills”? That always fills me up.’

  ‘Ew, not for breakfast. Too heavy. Someone loses an arm in that one, don’t they?’

  ‘It was a leg, not an arm. And he didn’t actually lose it on the battlefield. But, yes, the surgeon lopped it off just below the knee. What a moment.’

  ‘Ugh, yeah, I remember. Too much for me.’

  ‘What about me giving birth to the boy?’

  ‘Jeez, I’m not that hungry. I’ve never seen so much blood and guts and pain and suffering.’

  ‘Thank you, love. I was there, you know. On the slab. Living the dream. Smiling for the cameras.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘You could watch the highlights of the first eight hours. Just up till the point when things got messy. The miracle of life, and all that. The joy of our very own child.’