One thing Ern had trouble ignoring was the discrepancy between the amount of money he was managing and the amount of money he actually had for himself. He wasn’t the only one—nobody in Doc’s operation was pulling in more than the bare minimum. Everything that came in the front door went out the back to help pay for building what Doc hoped would be increasingly close ties between North and South.
Circumvent Central, whatever it costs, Doc had said, We do that, and we can squeeze the life out of the Council. If we do it right, the fight will be bloodless. If we do it wrong, then we will take generations to recover from the disaster.
Which at least had put Ern’s mind somewhat at ease as to what all this effort was for. There would be a revolution, just somehow not the kind people were expecting. He remained skeptical, but it helped his confidence in what he was doing.
Watching Doc work did, too. Doc worked endlessly—giving talks, giving interviews for local groups that put out newsletters, writing, corresponding with Molly and a half-dozen other people in North, Central, and up in Marino (in addition to his daughter). Ern found that he had to remind Doc to eat on days when there wasn’t an event that involved free food.
And, more than once, they ran out of food at headquarters. With Doc and Ern, and the Goon Squad consisting of Lin, Ascott, and Zerk—and occasionally Phil—it took an astounding amount of food to keep everybody upright and healthy, and, surprise surprise, the responsibility for making sure everyone stayed fed and healthy fell on the shoulders of Doc’s Chief of Staff, good old dependable and bored-to-death Ernest Peizer.
Well, in the last month it had become clear to Ern that the budget didn’t have enough, well, budget in it to actually keep them all alive and healthy if they had more than one week a month without two free dinners, and he realized that he was going to have to bow to the inevitable and add one more job to his ever-expanding list of responsibilities:
Farmer.
Farming was strictly forbidden in North—which wasn’t to say that it didn’t happen, just that what did happen was done out of the way and merged in quietly with the food supply. But you could often tell by taste what had begun life in a remote warren of the city and what had begun life in Central and then had been shipped in—and of course there were the silks and other fibers that Celine’s mother grew to stock her booth.
But here in South Nast, about one in four folks grew at least some of their own food. With the unlimited supply of electricity drawn from the reactor that had been built to power the mines, indoor farming was trivial and cheap—at least, after you got started.
To get started, and to do things really well, was going to cost a couple days of work and about four days of food budget, but it would pay for itself before the rest of the food ran out. At least, that’s what Ern had been led to believe. It seemed a stupid thing to get hung up on what with all the other things he was doing, but keeping this operation running was his responsibility, and if that meant figuring out how an algae vat worked, then so be it.
The quest for the supply house took him to the Newboy District at the south end of town, which was considerably less well-kept than the area around the college, or Groucho’s territory, or even Ern’s own neighborhood. The slime grew thick on the road down here, and it didn’t look like the ground vehicles—which were ubiquitous elsewhere in the city—came around much. The streetlights were in poor repair as well, so the evening gloom turned the mist from a blurring curtain to a blackening blanket. Younger men were everywhere down here—it was evidently the part of town where new arrivals had to make their way.
Odd thing, though: none of them would meet his gaze. It wasn’t until he’d nearly reached his destination that he realized that he was noticing Central behavior. He remembered his conversation with Molly about eye-gazing and fear, and realized that, since then, he’d made it a point to meet people’s eyes. It was so much a habit now that the behavior of all these boys felt...pathetic, somehow. As if they were wary toddlers prepared, on a moment’s notice, to dodge a capricious kick from an annoyed adult.