Christopher Nuttall - Picking Up the Pieces

As soon as we returned to the spaceport, I went into my quarters, booked a meeting with the Acting President for the following morning, and went to bed. I was surprised, and not a little horrified, by how badly I’d taken the day at the fortress and seriously wondered if I was coming down with something unpleasant. In the olden days — only a few years ago — I would have been able to stay awake for longer, although back then I had only been responsible for a single Company. The UN had decided that I was too untrustworthy — read competent — for a regimental command, so they’d frozen my career. Botany had been meant to be a death sentence; instead, I’d survived and prospered. Now, I was in command of a larger army than I’d ever dreamt of commanding and was in charge of a war I knew we’d lose, unless we created a political solution. That was not going to be easy.

Muna met me for breakfast the following morning. She looked better than she had after her captivity, but her wince when she saw my face convinced me that I hadn’t managed to wash away all the stress. I’d shaved and showered, but evidently it hadn’t been enough to make me presentable. She took a seat and a bowl of gruel — the UN called it Standard Breakfast Ration One, but everyone else called it gruel, mainly because it tasted like damp cardboard — and sat opposite me. I would have liked to devour everything I could, but instead I had a breakfast MRE myself. Nothing destroys morale faster than watching a commanding officer devouring a luxury breakfast when the common soldiers are still on MRE packs.

“I was looking at the farming problem,” she said, once she had eaten about half of the gruel and washed it down with water. I was drinking a mug of UN-standard coffee. “We need to get more food quickly and there are limits to what the farms can provide even if they surrendered tomorrow and accepted the Acting President’s proposals without further objections. We need additional farms and we need additional foodstuffs. I think I’ve found the answer.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “How useable an answer?”

She smiled, rather humourlessly. “One we should have seen from the start,” she said. “Have you ever heard of the Cropland Potato?”

I shook my head. “I’ve eaten potatoes, but I can’t say I ever paid any attention to what kind of potatoes they were,” I said, finishing my MRE and pushing it aside. “How can the Cropland Potatoes help us?”

“Oddly enough, the idea came from the UN,” she explained. “Back when the sea levels on Earth started to rise, before the UN got so bloated that it couldn’t take any action at all, they came up with a genetically-engineered crop that they could seed everywhere to prevent further soil erosion, which was destroying their own croplands and reducing their food supply…”

“So they tried to steal it from the colonies,” I said. I’d seen it happening, although naturally only the upper classes on Earth had benefited from the exercise in interstellar theft. The sheer logistics of transporting enough food to Earth to feed every starving mouth boggled the mind. The UNPF had never been large enough to transport all that ! “I know how it worked.”

“Anyway, they used the common potato as the base for one of those crops,” Muna continued, refusing to be diverted. “They came up with something that would grow very quickly, within a few weeks, and produce a crop every month or so. The plants don’t last more than a year and they had to reseed them, but they were edible by humans without many precautions.”

She shrugged. “They wouldn’t need any precautions here,” she added. “There’s nothing in the planet’s atmosphere that would be poisonous to humankind.”

I sipped my coffee, wondering if she was right. Earth was a special case in many ways; the UN’s attempts to prevent pollution had backfired badly, leaving the planet on the verge of a permanent ecological collapse. The introduction of a genetically-engineered plant was against thousands of UN regulations, but I could see desperate men and women deciding to ignore the regulations and pushing ahead anyway. The UN might even have approved their actions afterwards… no, I was definitely dreaming. The people had probably wound up being exiled to Botany.

“If the crop is so useful,” I said, carefully, “why didn’t the UN use it to feed the starving on Earth?”

“They did,” Muna said, dryly. “Those ration packs that the UN used to issue to everyone on welfare — which was really almost all of the population — came from possessed potato and a handful of other crops. The problem was that the pollution kept getting worse, quality control became a joke, and the supply of even modified potatoes started to fall.

“In any case, they can be obtained on several words,” she continued. “Erin, in particular, maintains a massive supply of them because the UN issued an edict that they were to do so for cultural reasons. There are a handful of others, but we could get them cheaply on Erin.”

I smiled, tightly. The UN’s belief that all cultures were equally valid and worthy of respect led to some appalling blunders. Having decided that the potato was the national symbol of Old Ireland — a nation on Earth that founded Erin, a colony world only a hundred light years from us — the UN had decreed that they were to have potatoes all the time… and there’s only so much one can do with the common potato. The UN in a nutshell; it must be sensitive and tolerant in the most infuriatingly insensitive and intolerant way possible. The Irish hadn’t seen the joke. By the time John Walker launched his coup, the garrison on Erie was up to seventeen divisions and was still losing ground.

“We’ll send the Julius Caesar to purchase enough to start them growing here,” I said, finally. “Once we fix the food problem, we might be able to fix other problems as well or at least win time for a political solution.”

“That might not be easy,” Muna pointed out. “If we feed the poor, they will continue having babies and put new demands on the food supply. I think we need to look at longer-term solutions.”

“I know,” I said. “I intend to discuss it with the Acting President this very morning.”

Suki — after greeting me with a kiss — drove me into New Copenhagen and, at my request, drove us through the riot scene. A handful of Communist prisoners, wearing yellow jumpsuits and shackles to prevent escapes, were working on clearing up the mess. The riot hadn’t done that much damage compared to the insurrection, but a few more of them would destroy the city. The people who had friends and relatives out in the countryside had already gone to stay with them, leaving the inner cities packed with the hopeless and the destitute. Frida had her hands full… and yet, her solution would only cause more suffering. It would have been easier if she were evil. I could have assassinated her without remorse.

Frida looked tired when I saw her, sitting behind a desk and signing papers after reading them. I guessed that she had never learnt to delegate her duties, or even work out what was urgent and what could be handled by a lower level. There were probably hundreds of people in the Progressive Party alone who were demanding the attention of the President, and who would be angry if she brushed them off with someone else. It might explain her distraction, I decided; the President, at least, knew what to put aside for someone else to handle.

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” she said, softly, signing another sheet of paper. I read it upside down and realised that it was a contract for repairing the damage to the roads caused by the war. Another involved welfare benefits for those who had been rendered homeless by the Communists. She pushed the rest of the paper aside with a sigh of relief and looked over at me. “Congratulations on occupying the fort.”