This must be a most secret place. To be brought here was an honour, reflecting the utter trust the Krossingtons now placed in him. The lead marine confirmed this when he spoke:
“This place is called the Marylebone Suite. Never mention it to anyone. You’ll be here until you finish the calculations.”
“But I didn’t bring any overnight bag,” Donald said. He was annoyed at not having been warned he would be stuck in this place for five days. He was still probing his network for a means to obtain Lawrence’s personnel file from General Wardian records. And he had a date with Tanya on Friday. If he missed it… That would be awkward—possibly dangerous. “I have a client meeting on Friday.”
“Sorry, Boss’s orders. We’ll take messages out for you.”
Donald resigned himself. Damn these fucking sovereigns. They just assumed they owned people’s lives. The problem was, they did own people’s lives. Damn them.
‘This place’ proved to be more luxurious and spacious than suggested by the bare store room. They climbed a staircase to a long corridor carpeted in Krossington sky blue with wood-panelled walls. The far end was closed off by sky-blue curtains. The corridor proved to be the main avenue of a luxury business complex with a large conference room and five spacious, self-contained apartments furnished in a clean style he recognised as ‘heirloom Swedish’. The lead marine showed him a library, a small cinema and a gym. He told him under no circumstances to look behind the sky-blue curtains at the end of the corridor.
A flight of spiral steps led up to an open-air deck where there were a couple of benches and cherry trees in large earthenware tubs. The only view was straight up at the sky, as the deck was surrounded by an eight-foot-high wall to prevent anyone’s head showing above the parapet. The marine warned him never to look over the parapet, as he would risk getting his head shot off by a glory sniper enforcing Naclaski.
Donald managed to negotiate access to the Tube tunnel for a brisk walk every morning and evening accompanied by a marine. Otherwise he was ‘respectfully requested’ to keep to the first floor or open-air deck at all times. One positive point was that he had the conference room at his disposal to lay out the extraordinary volume of documentation associated with the demographic calculations. TK had explained the gist of the work and provided the official Krossington specification for the calculations. It was an exceedingly tedious read, even for Donald, who had suffered considerably more than his fair share of nit-picking and hair-splitting sophistry in his career.
In principle, it was not hard to balance land. Just forecast the population and forecast the harvest. If there was an excess of mouths over grain, then the surplus mouths had to be discharged to the public drains. The chief demographer would then report balanced land.
In practice, the calculation was not simple. Harvests could not be predicted with certainty, only forecast within a probable range. The feeding needs of native stock varied depending on what that native stock was: a five-year-old kid making bricks? A twenty-five-year-old stag hauling a plough? A pregnant fifteen-year-old doe carrying water? Each required different nutrition. Then there was the lifespan of the population. The Sovereign Lands of Krossington contained 104 manors in addition to lands owned directly by the Krossington clan. These manors ‘nestled for collective safety’ behind the greater Krossington frontier, each contributing to the cost of General Wardian’s protection according to an elaborate formula. One such manor was of course Laxbury, birth place of his wife Her Decency Lavinia. By-the-by, Donald learned that Laxbury was a prosperous concern bearing 3,256 natives according to the most recent census (dated 11th September last and signed-off by Antonio Kwasu Pezzini). Each manor had its own native life expectancy, ranging from twenty-eight years, up to forty-one years on lands owned by the Krossingtons, which possessed the richest soils. Then there was the matter of trade. Hydrocarbon products from the oilfields at Kimmeridge and Winchester commanded high prices in luxury transport markets. Gold from such sales could be used to purchase wheat to alleviate shortages and reduce discharges of surplus. Against that, the sovereign landowners had needs too: race horses, costumes for masked balls, jewellery, portraits, motorbikes, racing cars, a refit for the clan yacht Neptune, a new flying boat to replace the one (carrying Donald) shot down over the Lands of Dasti-Jones and so on and so forth.
To work through the procedure and aggregate all the results for the 104 independent manors as well as the home lands of the Krossington clan took him three days—gruelling days exasperated by vagueness in certain explanations of the calculation, mislaid data sheets, mixed-up data sheets and trances of despairing apathy.
Donald could grasp a fundamental reasoning behind the calculation. No sovereign clan could afford to let its treasury run down over time; if there were too many natives to feed, then gold expenditure would exceed gold income, an unhappy state of affairs that had to be resolved by discharging the ‘surplus’ natives.
There was a certain intellectual inescapability about the calculation that made it hard to argue with—except that waiting for sleep, he did argue about it. The Public Era certainly had not worked this way—he recalled over and over again his grandfather Sir Bartleigh telling him there were no dead bodies strewn about the public highways of the Public Era. It was quite possible to pass through life and never see a dead
