‘It’s good to see you making a fuss,’ Curtin said. She murmured and pointed. The nurse shot a dart of white powder into the wound. ‘Good. But there too,’ she said. ‘And there. One more. That’ll do.’ She stood upright and said to Walker, ‘We’ll need to do that every three hours for a couple of days.’
‘I can’t wait,’ he said.
She drew nearer. ‘It’s seeping. And it’s sitting close to a tumour.’
The man and woman who had wiped Walker clean now placed a loose white shirt over his head. It had buttons on the front — pure decoration — and a zip that ran from hem to armpit. As the woman eased the zip up — carefully, to avoid a scab that had finally hardened — the shirt inflated with air, filling out Walker’s wasted frame, squaring his shoulders, and hiding his bloated stomach.
The man, meanwhile, helped Walker step into a pair of loose trousers, and then swabbed his feet in cloth. Walker stepped into a pair of soft shoes with hard soles. The fact that he managed it by himself gave him confidence that this was going to be a good day.
A final touch: the man took a fresh cloth and rubbed, ever so gently, the sores and scabs on Walker’s face, scalp, neck, hands, and wrists. Within a minute, his exposed skin glowed with the appearance of good health.
Walker was finally ready for the day: the well-toned, still-handsome, universally loved ageing saviour, fully dressed, fully lacquered, fully himself. His belly lay in swollen anonymity beneath the shirt. His sores and scabs fought the antiseptic powder in silence. His brain ached but was as sharp as ever.
Walker dismissed the woman, the man, and the nurse one at time by gripping their hands in his, nodding briefly, bowing slightly. Curtin clapped her hands on his puffed-up shoulders, and they leant into each other, foreheads kissing.
‘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.