Scale, p.24
Scale, page 24
As they approached the docks, Loretta saw a line of navy ships out on the water, presumably there to enforce the blockade. G8’s submarine could probably have put a hole in any of them without risking a scratch itself, but whoever made the call on that had at least shown enough restraint not to start sinking ships before there was a nation on whose behalf they could claim to be acting.
Most of the marchers came to a halt at the entrance to the docks, while the first of the crate-bearers continued on toward the Scale Seven wharf. There were prominent signs decreeing limits on the number of people permitted on the wharf at any time, and both the total weight of cargo and the weight per square millimeter allowed. Loretta could hear the timber creaking with each step; she tried to calculate the relevant numbers in her head, but she was too agitated to trust her estimates. Then again, if the bearers’ spines had endured the load throughout the march from the Town Hall, surely the Scale Seven planks beneath their feet could do the same for half a second.
They lowered the crate from their shoulders to their hands and swung it, albeit not very high, before casting it over the edge of the wharf. A spray of coarse droplets from the river’s top layer rose into the air, but instead of stepping back to avoid the splash, they let it rain down on them and sizzle away. The marchers cheered, and the two bearers returned to make room for the next pair.
“Anyone could drag them up if they really wanted to,” Pablo said quietly.
Loretta supposed that was true; a winch with a strong enough grapple and chain might do it, though you’d risk tearing a hole in the wharf, or being beaten up by stevedores, if you tried it without building a separate structure of your own to support the winch. “Probably not before the polls close,” she replied. If casting the weapons into the river was a powerful gesture, it wasn’t entirely ineffectual as an act of disarmament either.
One by one, the other crates followed the first into the water. No one from Spotlight showed up to interrupt the process and try to rescue the guns; Loretta didn’t know if they were simply unaware of what was happening, or if most of the lower-level employees had decided that, while they were willing to fire on invading soldiers, turning these weapons against their neighbors was not what they’d signed up for.
The marchers stood at the entry to the wharf, somber now. Loretta had half-expected someone to jump onto a crate and make a rousing speech, but they just talked among themselves for a few seconds, then dispersed. They hadn’t come to the debate together, to cheer on any particular faction; all they had in common was that they’d responded the same way to what they’d witnessed.
“What now?” she asked. The rabbit virus story had clearly shaken some people, and as news of the shootings spread it would anger many others, but was any of this enough to sink Beech’s chances entirely? Or would the people who’d accepted her position from the start believe her accusations against the navy, and treat the actions of the guards against the mob as wholly justified?
Chandra said, “You’ve put your best argument, and the others put theirs. What else is there to do? We should all get some sleep before the vote.”
Chapter 38
There was a long queue outside the primary school near Loretta’s apartment. When she saw how many people were waiting she was afraid that the polling booth hadn’t actually opened, but as she walked past the entrance she saw a slow trickle of voters filing into the building.
She took her place at the end of the queue, nodding a greeting to the people in front of her. The mood was subdued; Loretta had heard on the radio that both gunshot victims, Sandra Krauss and Alfred Kenani, had died in hospital, and though the police had identified two suspects they were yet to make any arrests.
“Loretta?” Jake paused beside her, standing away from the line to make it clear he wasn’t cutting in. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. No one laid a finger on me. You were there, weren’t you? Didn’t you see it all?” She was still confused about the sequence of events.
Jake looked embarrassed. “I only saw the start. I was focused on getting the kid and his mother out.”
“Yeah, of course.” Loretta smiled. “Don’t worry, I’m not blaming you for running away.”
This dispensation didn’t seem to set his mind at ease. “Maybe you should blame me for helping to provoke it.”
“What, with the rabbits? Wasn’t that true?”
“It was true as far as it went,” Jake replied. “But the whole situation, with the boy and the hijacker ... ” He caught himself; these were things he shouldn’t be talking about in public. “Anyway, it’s a long story. Maybe we can catch up later.”
“Sure.”
Jake left to join the end of the line. While Loretta waited, a man walked the length of the queue with a clicker, helping to compile an independent count of the turnout.
Eventually, the flow carried Loretta into the building, down a corridor and into the school’s assembly room, repurposed for the occasion. She gave her name to the poll worker, who checked her off the roll and handed her a ballot.
If there was anyone from Spotlight present at the booth, they were not in uniform, and certainly not armed. As far as Loretta could tell, the same Council workers who’d handled any number of other polls had simply shown up and done their jobs, regardless of the fact that their Mayor seemed to have gone into hiding.
She placed her ballot in the registration machine and stamped it, printing six copies of the same random ten-digit number at various locations on the form. Then she tore it in half, ensuring that the tear took a detour around the third option, leaving its full text intact on one piece while the other two were divided. She folded up that piece and dropped it in the ballot box, keeping the other as her receipt.
As she stepped out onto the street, her phone rang. Genevieve said, “If you’re interested, they’re raiding Spotlight right now.”
“Who is?”
“The police.”
“Is this on the news?”
“I’m not sure,” Genevieve replied, “but I’m standing right outside the office myself.”
Loretta said, “I’ll be there in a few seconds.”
When she arrived, there was a crowd gathered on the street. Uniformed police were stationed outside the doors of Spotlight’s headquarters, but there were no hints as to what was going on inside. Loretta looked around and located Genevieve.
“Did I miss anything?” she asked.
“They took out a whole lot of boxes of paper.”
Loretta found that encouraging; the shooters were unlikely to be hiding here, but if the investigation was wider than that, contracts with the Council and G8, invoices and purchases, personnel files and memos to employees, might all form part of the case. “It’s almost as if the police have grown a spine,” she said.
“It only took two murders,” Genevieve replied grimly.
Loretta felt queasy; she should have found a way to get the police involved long ago, as soon as Cara was free.
“Was there a long line where you voted?” she asked.
“I was just on my way,” Genevieve confessed. “I should probably stop standing here gawking; nothing’s going to happen.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you still on for Stephen’s place, after the count?”
Loretta said, “I’ll try. I didn’t get much sleep, so if it’s bad news, I might just crawl into bed.”
After Genevieve left, Loretta lingered; for the first time in a long while she had nowhere else to be, and no idea what she ought to be doing. If the campaign had ended in two deaths, what would the final results bring? But she’d had her chance to try to shape the outcome; it was all out of her hands now.
The doors of the Spotlight building opened, and a man emerged, in handcuffs, escorted by four police officers. He wasn’t wearing a Spotlight uniform, but as Loretta watched him being led over to a van, she realized that he was one of the shooters.
There were cheers from the crowd, and Loretta joined in, but she wondered what the man’s fate would be if the “yes” vote won. The would-be nation had no laws of its own ready to be applied, or even a constitution defining its legislature and other institutions; that all remained to be determined. In the interim, with different actors vying for power, everything would be provisional. This arrest could end up meaning anything at all, from a genuine reassertion of the rule of law, to a gesture intended to appease the public’s anger. Maybe the police were staking out a claim for their future role, whoever won the ballot ... or maybe the Council had just given them permission to treat a couple of Spotlight employees as scapegoats.
Loretta called Genevieve to let her know what had happened, then she headed home, and ate lunch alone. Reports were coming in of large early turnouts, all across the district, but when the newsreader began to talk about exit polls she switched the radio off; she didn’t want her hopes raised, or dashed, prematurely. She thought of calling Jake, but she didn’t have the energy to try to drag the whole story of the river base out of him while he was censoring himself to meet his obligations to his client.
She closed the shutters and lay down on the couch. She dozed fitfully, dreaming of massacres in the Town Hall, and refugees trying to flee across quicksand.
When she woke, it was 8:19:07. The polls had closed more than a minute ago and counting was well underway. She drank two glasses of water and went out to clear her head.
Loretta found herself outside the primary school, where a small group of people were waiting for the results to appear. She didn’t usually take part in this ritual, but having arrived she felt reluctant to walk away.
“Do you always do this?” she asked the woman beside her.
“No. But this time it seemed worth checking, just in case.”
Loretta stood in the sunshine, watching the morning light reflecting off the tiers of buildings to the west. More people arrived; a few had brought radios with them, probably to listen to the other counts coming in, but they were polite enough to have brought earpieces too.
Finally, two officials emerged with the results. Every ballot from this booth had been sorted by registration number and pinned to a set of wheeled cork-boards. Any voter who wished to check that their ballot had been counted could scrutinize the appropriate board to see if it was present – and anyone who doubted that the local tallies were correct could perform as extensive an audit as they wished, with all the evidence in plain sight. Loretta had heard plenty of complaints about the system, but she believed most kinds of fraud would be difficult to enact. A mathematical trick with the registration numbers made it hard to fake receipts, but easy for anyone to check if they were valid; in principle, she supposed a voter acting in bad faith could copy the number from their genuine receipt onto a fake one, and then claim a mismatch, but she had never heard of that happening. And even if relatively few people showed up to verify their own votes, any serious discrepancy between the number of ballots displayed and independent assessments of the turnout would immediately attract suspicion.
Totals were given for each column on each cork-board separately, while the last board also contained the full tallies. There had been 3,204 votes for “Yes,” 2,913 votes for “No” and 4,340 votes for “Option Three.”
People began approaching the boards to hunt for their ballots. Loretta hung back, watching in fascination but trying not to stare so intently as to threaten the privacy of the vote-checkers. That brought to mind another flaw: to lodge a complaint that your ballot had been lost or miscounted, you really needed to show the receipt that disclosed how you’d voted. Still, it was heartening to see so many people walk away satisfied, having located an anonymous scrap of paper that they knew for certain was their own.
When the activity died down a bit, Loretta dug her receipt out of her pocket and stepped forward, finding her ballot on the third board and getting close enough to compare the precise contours of the tear. She moved away from the board to let other people in, but then she stood at a distance and did her own quick tallies for one of the columns. She was out by one, so she repeated the counts, and the second time they agreed exactly.
She returned home, to find Dahlia waiting outside the apartment.
“I just wanted to congratulate you,” Dahlia said.
“For what?”
Dahlia was incredulous. “You really don’t know?”
Loretta said, “I was checking the local numbers, but I haven’t been following the whole count.”
“You’ve won. Not all the booths are in yet, but it’s impossible for anyone else to beat you.”
“Okay.” Loretta unlocked the door and gestured for Dahlia to enter. None of her team had phoned to share the news, but they were probably waiting for her to show up at Stephen’s house.
“I still don’t think it will work,” Dahlia said defiantly. “But we’re stuck with your stupid plan now, so we’re going to have to make the best of it.”
“Well, it’s gracious of you to put it that way.”
Dahlia scowled. “Would you rather I pretend that this has fixed all our problems?”
Loretta said, “No, but you could admit that it’s a start.”
“They’re never going to let us use those generators,” Dahlia insisted.
“You don’t actually know that. That’s been the whole problem from the start: everyone assuming the worst, because they think that will shore up their own position, when it’s really just undermining it.”
Loretta’s phone rang; she didn’t recognize the number. “Loretta Anselm,” she said.
“This is Lisa Braun, from the Mayor’s office. How are you?”
Loretta was bemused; she hadn’t expected a concession call from her enemy. “Fine, thanks. And you?”
“I’m fine. Congratulations on the success of your campaign.”
“Thank you.”
Braun hesitated. “The Mayor has been suspended from her position, as she’s currently subject to criminal charges.”
“I didn’t know that,” Loretta replied. “But it’s very kind of you to concede on her behalf.”
Braun said, “That’s not the only reason I’m calling. In the Mayor’s absence, I’m acting as an interim administrator, and one of my duties will be to comply with the results of the referendum. The Council will need to appoint negotiators for the talks with the national government as soon as possible, so I’m hoping you’ll be willing to take on a role there.”
Loretta managed to suppress a nervous laugh of disbelief; as ill-fitted as she was for such a job, this felt less like an undeserved honor that she could simply decline out of honest humility than a matter of the world calling her bluff. She’d championed the potential of talks with Wendale, and now she was being asked to make good on her claims.
“The negotiators are going to need expertise in all kinds of technical fields,” she said.
“Of course,” Braun conceded. “No one expects you to do this without a team of advisers. But we’ve already had people from the government making contact. They’ve said that if we can announce a chief negotiator as soon as possible, that could speed up their own response.”
Loretta lowered the phone for a moment.
“Are you all right?” Dahlia asked.
“Yes.”
She put the phone back to her ear. “Are we still holding any soldiers captive?”
Braun said, “No. They were all freed ... after the debate.”
Meaning not by the Council itself, so it would be hard to claim any credit for that. Still, at least that sticking point had been removed, and Wendale might be ready to make their own gesture of good will. “Someone’s waiting for a call from you, confirming this appointment?”
“Yes.”
Loretta said, “Tell them they need to announce that the blockade is over, and that work will commence on repairing the border with D6 within the next five minutes. If they’re willing to do that, then I’m prepared to take the position and start negotiations.”
Braun was silent; Loretta could almost picture her struggling to decide if she should offer her own advice. But then she said, “All right. I’ll pass that on, and get back to you with their response.”
Loretta hung up the call.
“What was that about?” Dahlia asked. “Who did you just tell to cancel the blockade?”
“The people who put it there,” Loretta replied. Maybe they were playing her, but if she was going to do this at all, she had to start by taking them at their word. “They’ve heard the results, and they want to talk.”
Chapter 39
Stephen’s house was crowded, full of people Loretta had never met before. She didn’t begrudge them joining in the celebrations just because she hadn’t seen them working on the campaign; the result was the work of the whole forty-four percent who had voted for negotiations. But with all the noise and distraction, the party was almost over by the time she had a chance to approach Chandra and speak to her without having to shout.
“I want you to join the negotiating team,” she said.
Chandra was bemused. “Why? I don’t know anything about lepton engineering.”
“Nobody does; I’m still hunting for technical advisers. But I’ve never heard anyone express the clash of interests between the scales as clearly as you.”
Chandra laughed. “I always thought you considered me too much of a pessimist.”
“I need a pessimist on the team, to keep us from drifting off into wishful thinking. I believe we can make this work, but only if we’re clear-eyed about the pitfalls.”
“Can I think about it?”
Loretta said, “Of course. Take all the time you need; nothing’s going to start until the blockade’s been lifted.”
“You know there are road-building crews at the border?”
“Already?” There’d been a radio tuned to the news playing somewhere in the house, but Loretta hadn’t been able to make out any of the reports over the music and the general hubbub. “Well, it will still take them a while.”
