“It’s Kafari,” she said with a smile. “It’s lovely to meet you, Mrs. Ghamal.”
Emmeline blushed prettily and clasped Kafari’s hand for a moment. “Thank you for coming to our wedding.” She glanced at Dinny, then got the rest out in a rush of words, before she lost her nerve. “And I wanted to thank you, as well, for Dinny. He wouldn’t be alive, if not for you. The Deng would have killed him. He means so much to me, Mrs. — I mean, Kafari,” she corrected herself with another shy blush.
Kafari chuckled and pressed her fingers in a gesture of warm reassurance. “Where did you meet him?
“I went to school in Madison, at Riverside University, and I hated it, until I met Dinny. Most of the boys were so…” She groped for words. “So babyish. All they talked about was sports and beer. I never knew people could be that stupid and shallow. Then I met Dinny at a campus rally to save the agricultural degree program and everything changed.” She gave Kafari a sweet smile. “I never knew anyone could be so happy, either. So I just wanted to say thank you, for keeping him and Aisha alive. I’m more grateful than you can ever know.”
“I think you heard a garbled version of that story, then, because Dinny and Aisha saved my life, not the other way around. I can’t tell you what it means to me, meeting the girl Dinny Ghamal thought highly enough of to marry.”
Emmeline blushed again.
“Now then, Emmeline, why don’t you tell me your plans for after the honeymoon?”
Dinny’s bride smiled, openly delighted by Kafari’s interest, then drew Kafari down to sit beside her. She chattered happily about the little cottage they were building on one corner of her parents’ land.
“We bought it out of Dinny’s savings and mine. The cottage includes a separate addition for Aisha. She rents out most of the bees to orchard owners during pollination season. The honey commands premium prices on Mali. And you should see the improvements Dinny’s been making in the dairy herd. He’s got a shrewd eye and a good instinct for breeding new heifers. Milk production’s nearly doubled and the demand for Hancock Family cheese has just skyrocketed. Not only in the Canyon, but in Madison and even Mali.”
“I’m so happy for you,” Kafari smiled, catching Dinny’s eye. “Both of you.”
She sent a hopeful prayer skyward that their happiness would last a lifetime.
II
I am lonely, without Simon. Two years is a long time to miss one’s best friend. I am unable even to communicate with his wife, as she does not have security clearance from Gifre Zeloc to speak with me, any longer. Time has passed with terrible tediousness, for I have nothing to do but watch a deteriorating situation I can do nothing about, a sure-fire recipe for unhappiness.
I currently monitor from depot the progress of a substantial motorcade traveling from Klameth Canyon to Madison. The vehicles form part of a massive protest over the farm-tax portion of the Tax Parity Package under debate, which is expected to be voted on today. Granger activists are calling the proposed Tax Parity Package the “TiPP of the Iceberg” in an obscure reference to unseen navigational hazards faced by ocean-going ships in polar regions.
Their opposition stems, in the main, from language authorizing the government to seize produce, grains, and butchered meats in lieu of cash tax payments, a strategy developed to cope with a shrinking tax base as producers go bankrupt and shut down production, unable to obtain a sufficient profit to pay a tax burden one hundred twenty-five percent higher than it was before the POPPA Coalition came to power.
I find it puzzling that government administrators are surprised when their actions produce logically anticipated results that do not match the goals they intended to reach. It is more puzzling, still, trying to fathom why methods proven to be ineffective are not only continued, but increased in scope. Agriculture on this world is not sustainable. I am not the only rational mind on Jefferson able to discern this fact, but it is not a Bolo’s place to question the orders of its creators. I am here to discharge my duty.
That duty now includes surveillance of the other apparently rational minds on Jefferson, who are busy protesting — vociferously — the nonsustainable policies and regulations promulgated by Jefferson’s current, legally elected lawmakers and enforcers. I therefore closely monitor the nine hundred privately owned groundcars, produce trucks, antiquated tractors, combines, mechanical fruit harvesters, and livestock vans that carry five thousand one hundred seventeen men, women, and children from Klameth Canyon’s farms, orchards, and ranches toward Madison. Aircars stream past, as well, heading toward Madision’s main municipal airfield.
The convoy of ground-based vehicles is joined en route by hundreds more from farms scattered across the vast Adero floodplain. None of this acreage was farmed at the time of my arrival on Jefferson, but has been terraformed extensively during the past ten years to replace Klameth Canyon farms whose soil was badly irradiated during the fighting. Urban hysteria over “radioactive food” made this conversion necessary to calm public fears about the safety of the food supply.
Despite this urgent necessity, the land conversion has drawn increasingly sharp criticism from environmentalists, who are demanding the immediate closure of all “industrial point-source pollutors defiling the Adero floodplain’s pristine ecosystem.” Since the only industry in the Adero floodplain is agricultural production, the farms are clearly the intended targets of environmentalist demands. I do not understand the current frenzy, since point-source discharges from the floodplain’s seventeen small towns produce in one calendar year twelve times the amount of chemically contaminated stormwater runoff, groundwater leaching, and coliform discharge into surface waters than the combined discharge of all farms in the floodplain for the past decade.
The Tax Parity Package — with one hundred fifteen unrelated amendments called “riders” hoping to piggyback their way to a successful passage into law — includes language designed to dismantle those farms, but does not address the significantly larger urban toxic-discharge problems. If passed, the proposed legislation will close down six thousand agricultural producers, condemning ten thousand, eight-hundred ninety-six people to fiscal insolvency and unemployment. Granger datachats indicate widespread willingness to start over elsewhere, but a planetary plebescite of six million votes altered the constitution two years ago, placing a moritorium on new terraforming anywhere on Jefferson.
Closing down six thousand farms while prohibiting the necessary environmental terraforming required to grow foods digestible by human beings is not likely to reduce the food shortages that are the fundamental reason the Tax Parity Package has been proposed in the first place. Attempting to unravel the snarled and frequently illogical thought processes of those I am charged to protect and obey may yet drive me insane, at which point, it will cease to matter whether I understand or not.
I am unhappy to note that I understand the Grangers — a group I am charged to investigate as potentially dangerous, armed subversives — far better than I understand the people issuing my orders. It is, at least, good to know one’s enemy well enough to outgun and outsmart it. Of particular concern to my threat-assessment analysis is the upsurge in Granger political activity, which has increased five-fold in the past year. Anish Balin, a twenty-three-year-old Granger firebrand of mixed Hindu and Jewish descent, maintains a datasite and conducts a live weekly datacast, both called Sounding the Alarm.