Charles

  That could’ve gone better.

  Throwing a snowball at Elestrine was a stupid, childish, self-destructive thing to do—no question about it. But she had been so smug, so condescending, that I just had to do it.

  And what if you’d gotten killed, you big lummox? My wife’s voice demands in the back of my mind. What would you have accomplished then?

  I pull off one of my mittens and feel around in my pocket just to make sure that my photo is still there; my fingers find, to my alarm, that it’s not. I prod frantically through the snow—

  “Are you searching for something, Mr. Prime Minister?”

  I look up to see Elestrine’s handmaiden. “No,” I lie. “I’m…packing down the snow so I have a nice, solid floor when I rebuild my quinzhee. No thanks to your boss.”

  The line doesn’t even sound convincing to me, so I’m hardly surprised when the handmaiden doesn’t buy it either. “Well, if you were searching for something, hypothetically, I might be happy to offer assistance.”

  “No,” I say flatly. “Thank you. Your assistance is not needed.”

  She crosses her legs beneath her skirt—which looks incredibly flimsy for the cold, though it doesn’t seem to bother her—and sits down on the surface of the snow. “Well, that’s good,” she replies. “Then I don’t need to point out what looks like the edge of an old polaroid photograph protruding from the snow, about five centimetres from your right hand.”

  I dart my eyes down to where she indicated, but no sooner have I seen the photograph than she’s snapped it up. “Is this your family, Mr. Oakes? Your wife and children?”

  “Yes,” I admit blankly.

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you! So young! Such a full head of hair!”

  “It was taken twenty years ago,” I say. “We were on vacation in Florida. Now—please. Just give it back.”

  I’m afraid for a moment that she might burn it in her fingers for shear cruelty, but instead she proffers it to me. “I meant no disrespect.”

  “None taken,” I say, accepting it from her in my mittened hands. I steal a quick glance at the smiling faces out of a perhaps-not-entirely-irrational fear that she might have changed it somehow, before squirrelling it away in the pocket of my parka. And then, because my parents raised me right, I grudgingly mumble out a “Thank you” to the Fairy.

  “Sorry if that was…invasive,” she says, sounding almost contrite. “I just—everyone looked so happy.”

  “Yeah, well,” I say, unable to resist the opening. “It’s amazing what food and liveable weather can do for someone’s mood.”

  “You say that now,” she replies. “But I know families. A smile in the time it takes to capture a photograph tells you very little; and—more importantly—I know you, Mr. Prime Minister; all of your questions and speeches in Hansard. I know that you were as aware as any of your countrymen of your society’s shortcomings. Ecological collapse, colonialism, injustice, inequality, official indifference—”

  “But we weren’t starving,” I retort, my hunger sharpening my anger.

  “Not in general,” she replies. “Not yet. But human civilization was never going to last. And I think—deep down—you must have known that.”

  “I don’t pretend to know the future.”

  “It doesn’t matter now, anyways; the Shift has seen to that. Fate has given you a second chance, and my Princess can help if you let her.”

  I chuckle humourlessly and look into her eyes. “So, what are you? The ‘good cop’?”

  I don’t expect her to get the reference, but she surprises me. “Oh, dear me, no. Princess Elestrine is the good cop. Audan is the bad one—he really does want to kill you, by the way—and I am just a humble servant, here at my mistress’s pleasure.” She extends her hand. “My name is Awyrel.”

  I sigh and shake her hand unenthusiastically. “Pleased to meet you, Awyrel.”

  “I actually meant for you to kiss it, but this works too,” she laughs, reciprocating the handshake.

  “Just ‘Awyrel’?” I ask, taking my life into my hands. “Tyrants don’t let their lickspittles have family names where you’re from?”

  “People with families have family names,” she replies. “I do not. And as for being a ‘lickspittle’, well…it’s a living.”

  “Oh yeah? Sick leave? Dental? Three weeks’ paid holiday? The whole nine yards?”

  “The Princess sees I want for nothing, Mr. Prime Minister. And she would have my loyalty even if she made me sleep in a closet and fed me nothing but fish heads. She is not the ogre you imagine her to be.”

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “She killed a man, you know. Right in front of me. She enjoyed it.”

  “That was—perhaps—a miscalculation,” Awyrel equivocates. “Her Excellency is still trying to familiarize herself with human customs.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll try not to begrudge her too many cold-blooded murders during her adjustment period. Now, if there’s nothing else—”

  The handmaiden cocks her head to one side. “Her Excellency is planning to withhold food aid until your people become desperate,” she says matter-of-factly. “Then she will impose concessions upon them.”

  I freeze. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Did you not already know it?”

  “I’d guessed as much,” I admit.

  “Based on your own history, perhaps?”

  My face flushes in the cold.

  “Do not judge us too harshly, Mr. Prime Minister; we’re no worse than your people. Some of your own predecessors used the same policy. In fact, if anything, we are more merciful—”

  “Do you think that makes it alright?” I interrupt, surprised by the bitterness in my voice.

  Awyrel regards me calmly. “No,” she replies. “I don’t.”

  “And yet, you’re loyal to the person doing it.”

  “Her Excellency, in many ways, is even more constrained than yourself.”

  “Aww,” I pout. “Poor little tyrant.”

  Awyrel rolls her eyes. “The point, Mr. Oakes, is that she is not in a position to help you. I am.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “You’re going to personally feed thirty-eight million Canadians?”

  “No, Mr. Oakes,” she replies. “You are. Or rather: you will teach them to feed themselves—just as I’m about to teach you.”

  I look off into the distance; Elestrine seems to be having a somewhat animated conversation with Audan. “What, right now?”

  “It’s really not that complicated,” she says. “Now follow along.”

  Like Elestrine before her, Awyrel starts gathering a bundle of snow and dead leaves. She looks up at me. “Well? Do as I do.”

  Reluctantly, I reach down and form a snowball of my own.

  “Ah-ah!” she interjects. “Use bare hands to start. No mittens.”

  The idea of prodding around in freezing snow with bare skin holds absolutely no appeal for me, but I do what I’m told.

  “I am sorry for the cold,” she says, recognizing my discomfort. “After a while, you’ll learn to live with it, but for now I’m afraid you’ll have to make do. Now then: this snow in your hand; the detritus from the trees; I want you to feel it.”

  “Believe me,” I grimace. “I’m feeling very little else.”

  “No,” she says. “What you feel is the cold, the texture of the ice crystals, the paper roughness of the leaves, the trickle of melting water…you are feeling the sum of its parts. It’s a very reductive way to look at the world, and also very wrong.”

  “You mean the trick is realizing that there is no spoon?”

  “‘Spoon’?” she echoes. “Oh. The Matrix. Wachowski sisters. Very clever. But no, that’s not what I meant at all. Snow and leaves and water and paper: all are real. But the snowball itself is real too, do you understand? Beyond its parts, the whole exists in its own right.

  “Now: I want you to think about what it is you hold in your hand, and I want you to feel it.”

  What sort of self-help-level “New Age” mumbo jumbo is that? the cynical part of my brain asks. But I owe it to myself at least to try. Feel the whole…

  I regard the snowball in my hand. It’s a bundle of different sensations—but that’s not really what it is, or at least Awyrel doesn’t think so. It exists in its own right, I repeat in my mind. Okay—so it exists. That’s nice. But where is it? Where is the snowball among the snow and the cold and the leaves? What does that even mean? Is this just some cruel joke her boss put her up to? How will I even know when I’ve found it? What am I—

  There it is.

  Right where it has been all along.

  I can barely restrain myself from laughing. Good lord, it’s so simple! It’s like one of those optical illusions—the “Magic Eyes” they used to run in the Sunday comics. When you look at the snowball one way, it’s just a bundle of stuff; but then, somehow, you force your brain to look at it another way and—

  And there it is. Feel the whole.

  “Yes!” exclaims Awyrel. “You have it now! It’s so obvious once you see it, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” I gasp in astonishment. “Has this always been here? Have I always been able to—to feel like that?”

  “Yes!” she says, nearly as excited as I am. “But it’s easier now. The whole is closer, and your mind more open.”

  “Holy shit,” I mutter, not quite believing my discovery. I feel like I’ve been blind my entire life and have only just now learned to see. “Holy shit.”

  “Now comes the harder part,” the handmaiden says, smiling broadly. “I want you to close your eyes…”

  I do as I’m asked.

  “I want you to hold your impression of the snowball in your mind…”

  I’ve never been good at imagining things, but just this once, somehow, I can picture it in astonishing detail, floating against the void.

  “Now,” she says hypnotically, “even as you hold that snowball, I want you to imagine an apple: red and crisp and sweet.”

  I try as best I can manage.

  “And now, I want you—and this is critical—to ask the snowball to become that apple.”

  “‘Ask’?” I say, not opening my eyes.

  “As politely as possible,” she says. “The snowball is fresh; it has little attachment to its shape. It will change if you ask it to.”

  Well then. If it’s not too much trouble, I think at the snowball, feeling only mildly like an enormous tool, could you please become this apple for me?

  “Now open your eyes.”

  A fresh red apple sits smooth and crisp in my hand.

  Awyrel claps in delight. “There!” she says. “That wasn’t hard at all, was it Prime Minister?”

  “Did—you do that?” I ask, staring at the fruit incredulously.

  “I think you know that I didn’t, Mr. Prime Minister.”

  “…I did that,” I say stupidly.

  “Yes,” Awyrel agrees. “How did it feel?”

  “Like…” I think on it. “Like nothing. Like the easiest thing in the world. Like breathing.”

  “Now do you understand, Mr. Prime Minister? Now do you see why her Excellency talks about humans like you’re newborn children? It’s not cruelty or condescension; it’s because, in a very real sense, that’s exactly what you are.”

  I look down at the fruit, then back at the handmaiden, still too shocked to register what she’s saying.

  “It’s…edible?”

  “Take a bite.”

  I pause and then bring it, cautiously, to my mouth; I bite down.

  And then I spit it out in disgust.

  I look at the bite I’ve taken out of it; the outside is indeed what I’d supposed, but the inside…is packed with snow and dead leaves.

  “Well, it was good for a first try at least,” Awyrel says with a giggle. “You’ll get the hang of it before long.”

  “How long?” I ask, my failure bringing me down a peg from euphoria.

  “That depends entirely on you,” she replies. “An hour. A day. How ever much you practise.”

  “And how many people will have starved to death before then?”

  This brings her up short.

  “How many people will starve before the news reaches the rest of the country?” I ask with a friendly grin.

  “Mr. Oakes—”

  “Ballpark,” I say. “A million? Ten million?”

  “Mr. Prime Minister,” she says with a sigh, “I’m doing my best—”

  “Thanks,” I reply. “Do better.”

  Awyrel looks stung, but before she can say anything, Elestrine calls out to her, having presumably completed her conversation. The handmaiden shrugs apologetically, and then takes her leave, saying only: “Practice makes perfect, Prime Minister.”