Chris Beckett - Two Tribes

TWO TRIBES

ALSO BY CHRIS BECKETT

Novels

The Holy Machine

Marcher

Dark Eden

Mother of Eden

Daughter of Eden

America City

Beneath the World, A Sea

Short Stories

The Turing Test

The Peacock Cloak

Spring Tide

CHRIS BECKETT

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2020 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright Chris Beckett, 2020

The moral right of Chris Beckett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 932 5

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 934 9

Printed and bound in Great Britain

Corvus

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

2627 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

For Aphra, hoping youll find out
that other futures are available.

H arry Roberts describes a shallow valley, like an indentation in a quilt, with green pastures and trees on either side. A pair of crows cross the sky ahead of him, three women outside a bus shelter turn to watch him pass.

I managed to obtain a permit to visit the area. The shallow valley is still there, of course, but in place of pasture there are sunflowers and maize growing out of bare brown earth. There are shacks by the roadside and on the low ridge to the south stands an automated watchtower built during the Chinese Protectorate and still in use, a steep cone of stained concrete the height of a ten-storey building rising out of the sunflowers to bring forth its own strange flowers in the form of satellite dishes, cameras and remote-controlled cannons. Beside the road is an old sign, so rusty as to be almost completely unreadable apart from the initial letter W, and pierced by multiple bullet holes from the time of the Warring Factions. (Give guns to a bunch of barely trained young men and they tend to want to play with them.) What we now call the Eastern Prefecture was then a stronghold of the Patriotic League.

I feel the holes with my fingertips: Thomas testing the wounds of Christ. The past is so tenuous, so small and far away, that it always seems slightly miraculous to me that pieces of it are still around us. Driving through that soft green quilted landscape two and a half centuries ago, Harry passed the very same sign that I saw and touched. Welcome to Suffolk, it read and he reached it at half past six. He doesnt mention bullet holes. The Warring Factions were still in the future and, though he thought of the time he lived in as a troubled one, the idea that British politics might degenerate into civil war would have seemed to him far-fetched.

I look back across the old county boundary into Essex and towards London and close my eyes to make the fields green again, with big green billowy trees, and crows high up in the cool blue sky. And I imagine his car approaching from the Essex side, billowing out its invisible fumes. It was a fairly small red car, somewhat old and scratched, and, though it had four seats, Harry Roberts was the only person inside it. He was forty-six years old. It was 26 August 2016, 250 years ago, before the Protectorate, before the Warring Factions and, I suppose, before the Catastrophe, though 2014, 2015 and 2016 had each in turn been the hottest year ever yet recorded and far off in the Arctic regions, the ice was already breaking up.

Something shifted when Harry crossed into Suffolk.

The way he puts it in his diary is that hed been experiencing life as hollow, like the toy food that was made at the time for children to play with: hollow oranges and apples and hamburgers, moulded from coloured plastic. And yet as he crossed the county boundary, he suddenly noticed the world had become nourishing once more: the trees, the fields, the winding road, the women chatting at the bus stop in the evening sun... It was sufficient again, somehow. He was savouring the feeling of being alive.

Harry was an architect. Janet, his wife of many years, had left him eight months previously. They had no children, their only son Danny having died five years previously of meningitis at the age of two. Harry was driving himself, as people often did then, in a metal car with an internal combustion engine that consumed a litre of refined oil every ten minutes, to the weekend retreat of a couple called Karina and Richard. Karina was what was called a food writer strange as it now seems, she made a living by describing the food in restaurants and Richard ran his own actuarial consultancy in London, which was at that time a global centre for lending and borrowing money. They were friends of Harrys twin sister and only sibling, Ellie. Ellie and her husband were also going to be there, and it had been Ellies idea that Harry should join them. You spend much too much time moping around on your own, bro.

Crawling his way out of London, whose streets at that time of day were packed with several hundred thousand crawling lumps of metal (each one of them burning a litre or so of fuel every ten minutes, and emitting the acrid residue into the air), Harry had been resenting Ellies interference, her attempts to organize him and make him conform to her idea of what a person in his situation ought to be doing. Why on earth would he want to waste a whole weekend with her friends, hed been thinking, when after all he had friends of his own? But now, he had to admit, he was looking forward to it.

*

Karina and Ellie came out to meet Harry as he pulled up into the drive of the half-timbered cottage. Karina was tall and imposing, dark-haired and dark-eyed, and wearing white; Ellie was a short, lively woman in a pretty red dress, who observed her twin brother with her characteristic combination of affection, pride and exasperation. Shed worried about him a great deal during the months after Janet left, and he knew she found his passivity irritating. There were things a person could do to move on from a setback like that, and Harry seemed to her to stubbornly refuse to do any of them.

Karina led them through the house. In the living room Richard, Karinas husband, and Phil, Harrys brother-in-law, stood up to greet him from one of three elegant grey sofas. While Karina was very good-looking in a dark-haired Mediterranean way, Richard, with his untidy red hair, short legs and slight pot belly, could almost be described as ugly if it were not for a smouldering energy which was apparent as soon as you met him. Phil, whod been a friend of Harrys even before hed got together with Ellie, was a tall thin man, rather intense, with large hands and a pointed head that he kept completely shaved.

The room was beautifully laid out, thought Harry, looking about him with a professional eye. Modern design had been cleverly married with many of the original features of the three separate workmens cottages that this had once been: the black wooden beams, the uneven floor.