Contents

THE STAR FRACTION

THE STONE CANAL

The Star Fraction

For Carol

Contents

INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION

1. SMOKING GUNMAN

2. EVIDENCE FOR AEROPLANES

3. HARDWARE PLATFORM INTERFACE

4. NOT UNACQUAINTED WITH THE MORE OBVIOUS LAWS OF ELECTRICITY

5. THE FIFTH-COLOUR COUNTRY

6. THE SPACE AND FREEDOM PARTY

7. THE UPLOADED GUN

8. THE VIRTUAL VENUE

9. TO EACH AS HE IS CHOSEN

10. THE TRANSITIONAL PROGRAMMER

11. QUANTUM LOCALITIES

12. THE CITIES OF THE PRETTY

13. THE HORSEMEN OF THE APOCRYPHA

14. SPECTRES OF ALBION

15. EXPERT SISTER

16. THE EVE OF JUST-IN-TIME DESTRUCTION

17. THE GOOD SORCERER

18. THE AMERICANS STRIKE

19. DISSEMBLER

20. THE QUEEN OF THE MAYBE

21. WHAT I DO WHEN THEY SHOVE CHINESE WRITING UNDER THE DOOR

Acknowledgements

Introduction to the American Edition

The Star Fraction is the first of the Fall Revolution books and my first novel. I started writing it with no idea of where it would end up, let alone of making it the start of a series. It still isn’t: The four books can be read in any order, and the last two of them present alternative possible futures emerging from that midtwenty-first-century world I imagined at the beginning.

In this scenario, a brief Third World War—or War of European Integration, as its instigators call it—in the 2020s is followed by a US/UN hegemony over a balkanized world. The Fall Revolution in the late 2040s is an attempt to throw off this new world order and to reunify fragmented nations. But, as one of the characters says, ‘What we thought was the revolution was only a moment in the fall.’ His remark has a theory of history behind it.

History is the trade secret of science fiction, and theories of history are its invisible engine. One such theory is that society evolves because people’s relationship with nature tends to change more radically and rapidly than their relationships with each other. Technology outpaces law and custom. From this mismatch, upheavals ensue. Society either moves up to a new stage with more scope for the new technology, or the technology is crushed to fit the confines of the old society. As the technology falls back, so does the society, perhaps to an earlier configuration. In the mainstream of history, however, society has moved forward through a succession of stages, each of which is a stable configuration between the technology people have to work with and their characteristic ways of working together. But this stability contains the seeds of new instabilities. Proponents of this theory argue that the succession of booms and slumps, wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions, which began in August 1914 and which shows no prospect of an end, indicates that we live in just such an age of upheaval.

This theory is, of course, the Materialist Conception of History, formulated by the pioneering American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan and (a little earlier) by the German philosopher Karl Heinrich Marx. These men looked with optimism to a future society and with stern criticism on the present. Property, wrote one of them, ‘has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property…. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society….’

Beam me up. But before stepping onto the transporter to Morgan’s ‘higher plane,’ it might be wise to check the specifications. One constraint on the possible arrangements of a future society was indicated by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. He argued that private property was essential to industrial civilization: without property, no exchange; no exchange, no prices; no prices, no way of telling whether any given project is worthwhile or a dead loss. Given that every attempt to abolish the market on a large scale has led to the collapse of industry, his Economic Calculation Argument seems vindicated. Unfortunately, there’s no reason why the Economic Calculation Argument and the Materialist Conception of History couldn’t both be true. What if capitalism is unstable, and socialism is impossible?

The Star Fraction is haunted by this uncomfortable question. For me, it was acutely felt when I was writing the book in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As a socialist, I had become interested in the libertarian critique of socialism. The fall of the bureaucratic regimes of the East found me neither surprised nor sorry.

No, what was—and remains—dreadful to contemplate was not the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism,’ but the catastrophic consequences of the attempt to introduce actually existing capitalism and the apparent inability of the millions who had brought down the bureaucratic dictatorships to assert and defend their own interests in the aftermath.

In this novel, these issues are seen through the eyes of characters who are flawed and often mistaken but sometimes heroic. The ideologies through which they try to make sense of it all range from British-style ‘industrial-grade Trotskyism’ to American-style ‘black helicopter’ libertarianism. The big questions about history and economics fuel the adventures of angry white guys (and angry black women) with guns, whose actions tip scales bigger than they know. Their world is one where the New World Order is coming to get you, with black helicopters and Men in Black and orbital gun-control lasers.

And then there’s all the stuff I made up, which begins on the next page.

1

Smoking Gunman

It was hot on the roof. Above, the sky was fast-forward: zeppelin fleets of cloud alternating with ragged anarchic flags of black. Bright stars, miland comsats, meteors, junk. Moh Kohn crouched behind the parapet and scanned the band of trees half a klick beyond the campus perimeter. Glades down, the dark was a different shade of day. He held the gun loose, swung it smoothly, moved around to keep cool. The building’s thermals gave him all the cover he could expect, enough to baffle glades or IR-eyes that far away.

‘Gaia, it’s hot,’ he muttered.

‘Thirty-one Celsius,’ said the gun.

He liked hearing the gun. It gave him a wired feeling. Only a screensight read-out, but he heard it with his eyes like Sign.

‘What’ll it be tonight? Cranks or creeps?’

‘Beginning search.’

‘Stop.’ He didn’t want it racking its memory for an educated guess; he wanted it looking. As he was, all the time, for the two major threats to his clients: those who considered anything smarter than a pocket calculator a threat to the human race, and those who considered anything with a central nervous system an honorary member of it.

He’d been scanning the concrete apron, the perimeter wall, the trees for three hours, since 21.00. Relief was due in two. And then he wouldn’t just be off-shift, he’d be off-active, with a whole week to recover. After seven nights of staring into the darkness, edgy with rumours, jumpy with hoaxes and false alarms, he needed it.

Music and laughter and noise eddied between the buildings behind him, sometimes loud when the speeding air above sent a blast down to ground-level, sometimes – as now, in the hot stillness – faint. He wanted to be at that party. If no attack came this watch…dammit, even if there did. All he had to do was not take incoming fire. Shelling it out was something else, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’d dissolved the grey-ghostly nightfight memories and the false colours of cooling blood in drinking and dancing and especially in sex – the great specific, the antithesis and antidote for violence – to the same night’s end.

Something moved. Kohn chilled instantly, focusing on a point to his left, where he’d seen…There it was again, where the bushes fingered out from the trees. Advance cover. He keyed the weapon’s inertial memory and made a quick sweep, stepping the nightsight up ×3. Nothing else visible. Perhaps this was the main push. He turned back and the gun checked his hand at the place it had marked.

And there they were. Two, three – zoom, key to track – four, crouching and scurrying. Two with rifles, the others lugging a pack. The best-straight-line of their zigzag rush arrowed the Alexsander Institute. The AI block.

Cranks, then. No compunction.

‘Do it for Big Blue,’ he told the gun. He made himself as small as possible behind the parapet, holding the gun awkwardly above it, and aimed by the screensight image patched to his glades. His trigger finger pressed Enter. The weapon took over; it aimed him. In a second the head-up image showed four bodies, sprawled, stapled down like X- and Y-chromosomes.

‘Targets stunned.’

What was it on about? Kohn checked the scrolling read-out. The gun had fired five high-velocity slugs of SLIP – skin-contact liquid pentothal. It had put the cranks to sleep. He could have sworn he’d switched to metal rounds.

‘HED detected. Timer functioning. Reads: 8.05…8.04…8.03…’

‘Call Security!’

‘Already copied.’

Kohn looked over the parapet. Two figures in hard-suits were running across the grass towards the unconscious raiders. He thumbed the Security channel.

‘Lookout Five to Ready One, do you copy?’

(‘7.51.’)

(‘Yes, yes.’)

‘Ready One to Lookout. Receiving.’

‘They’ve got a time-bomb with them. Could be booby-trapped.’

They stopped so fast he lost sight of them for a moment. Then an unsteady voice said, ‘Hostiles are alive, repeat alive. Our standing instructions—’

‘Fuck them!’ Kohn screamed. He calmed himself. ‘Sorry, Ready One. My contract says I override. Get yourselves clear. No dead heroes on my call-out. Shit, it could be dangerous even from there, if it’s a daisy-cutter…Hey, can you give me a downlink to the UXB system?’

‘What hardware you got up there, Moh?’

‘Enough,’ Moh said, grinning. The guard took a small apparatus from his backpack and set it on the grass. Kohn adjusted the gun’s receiver dish-let, hearing the ping of the laser interface. The screensight reformatted.

‘OK, you got line-of-sight tight beam, user access.’ The guards sprinted for cover.

Normally Kohn couldn’t have entered this system in a million years, but there’s never been any way around the old quis custodiet (et cetera) questions. Especially when the custodes are in the union.

Fumbling, he keyed numbers into the stock. The gun was picking up electronic spillover from the bomb’s circuitry (no great feat; AI-abolitionists didn’t really go for high tech) and bouncing it via the security guard’s commset to British Telecom’s on-line bomb-disposal expert system.

‘2.20.’ Then: ‘No interactive countermeasures possible. Recommend mechanical force.’

‘What?’

In a distant tower, something like this:

IF (MESSAGE-UNDERSTOOD)

THEN; /* DO NOTHING */

ELSE DO;

CALL RE-PHRASE;

END;

‘SHOOT THE CLOCK OFF!’ relayed the gun, in big green letters.

‘Oh. All right.’

The gun lined itself up. Kohn fired. The screen cleared and reverted to normal. The gun was on its own now.

‘Status?’

‘No activity.’

He could see that for himself. The pack containing the bomb had jerked as the bullet passed through it. So had one of the bodies.

Kohn felt sick. Ten minutes earlier he’d been annoyed that these people weren’t dead. No one, not even his true conscience, would blame him, but the twisted code of combatant ethics revolted at pre-stunned slaughter. He stood, and looked down at the prone figures, tiny now. The one he’d hit had an arm wound; at the limits of resolution he could see blood oozing rhythmically…

Therefore, not dead. Relief flooded his brain. He talked into the chin mike, requesting medicals for the injured hostile. What about the others? Campus Security wanted to know.

‘Put them in the bank,’ Kohn said. ‘Credit our account.’

‘Lookout One? What’s the name of your account?’

Disarmed, waking from their shots, the attackers were being handled gently. They’d gone from hostile to hostage, and they knew it. An ambulance whined up.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Kohn said. ‘The Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence collective. Nat-Mid-West account 0372 87944.’

‘Uh-huh,’ muttered the guard’s voice. ‘The Cats.’

‘Hey!’ another voice broke in, ignoring all comm discipline. ‘We got one of your exes!’

‘Lookout One to unidentified,’ Kohn said firmly. ‘Clarify message.’

‘Red Crescent truck to Lookout, repeat. Patient Catherin Duvalier has employment history of work on your team.’

Catherin Duvalier. Gee Suss! ‘One of your exes’, indeed.

‘She was freelancing,’ Kohn lied. ‘Where are you taking her?’

‘Hillingdon Hospital. You want her released on recovery?’

‘Like hell,’ Kohn choked. ‘Don’t even put her in the bank. We’re keeping her this time.’

‘Secure ward, got you.’ The medics slammed the rear door and leapt into the ambulance, which screamed off round the perimeter road like they had a brain to save. Fucking cowboys. Subcontractors for the Muslim Welfare Association in Ruislip. Probably trained by veterans of Cairo. Always assume incoming…

Behind him he heard a heavy, dull crump and the song of falling glass. ‘You missed the backup fuse,’ he snarled at the gun and himself as he flattened to the roof. But then, in the sudden babble in his phones, he realized it was not his bomb.

The crank raid had been a diversion after all.

Janis Taine lay in bed for a few minutes after the diary woke her. Her mouth was dry, thick with the aftertaste of ideas that had coloured her dreams. Just outside her awareness floated the thought that she had an important day ahead. She kept it there and tried to tease the ideas back. They might be relevant.

No. Gone.

She swallowed. Perhaps, despite all precautions, minute traces of the hallucinogens at the lab infiltrated her bloodstream, just enough to give her vivid, elusive but seemingly significant dreams? More worryingly, she thought as she swung her legs out of bed with a swish of silk pyjamas and felt around for her slippers, maybe the drugs gave her what seemed perfectly reasonable notions, sending her off down dead ends as convoluted as the molecules themselves…Par for the course. Bloody typical. Everything got everywhere. These days you couldn’t keep things separate even in your mind. If we could only disconnect –

She heard the most pleasant mechanical sound in the world, the whirr of a coffee-grinder. ‘Pour one for me,’ she called as she padded to the bathroom. Sonya’s reply was inarticulate but sounded positive.

It was an important day so she brushed her teeth. Not exactly necessary – she’d had her anti-caries shots at school like everybody else, and some people went around with filthy but perfect mouths – but a little effort didn’t hurt. She looked at herself critically as she smoothed a couple of layers of suncream over her face and hands. Bouncy auburn hair, green eyes (nature had had a little encouragement there), skin almost perfectly pale. Janis brushed a touch of pallor over the slight ruddiness of her cheeks and decided she looked great.

Sonya, her flatmate, was moving around in the kitchen like a doll with its power running down, an impression heightened by her blond curls and short blue nightdress.

‘Wanna taab?’

Janis shuddered. ‘No thanks.’

‘Zhey’re great. Wakesh you up jusht like zhat.’ She was making scrambled eggs on toast for three.

‘Gaia bless you,’ said Janis, sipping coffee. ‘How much sleep have you had?’

Sonya looked at the clock on the cooker and fell into a five-second trance of mental arithmetic.

‘Two hours. I was at one of your campus discos. It was phenomenome…fucking great. Got off with this guy.’

‘I was kind of wondering about the third portion,’ Janis said, and immediately regretted it because another glacial calculation ensued, while the toast burned. The guy in question appeared shortly afterwards: tall, black and handsome. He seemed wide awake without benefit of a tab, unobtrusively helpful to Sonya. His name was Jerome and he was from Ghana.

After breakfast Janis went into her bedroom and started throwing clothes from her wardrobe on to the bed. She selected a pleated white blouse, then hesitated with a long skirt in one hand and a pair of slate calf-length culottes in the other.

‘Sonya,’ she called, interrupting the others’ murmuring chat, ‘you using the car today?’

Sonya was. On your bike, Janis. So, culottes. She eyed the outfit. Dress to impress and all that, but it still wasn’t quite sharp enough. She sighed.

‘Sorry to bother you, Sonya,’ she said wearily. ‘Can you help me into my stays?’

‘You can breathe in now,’ Sonya said. She fastened the cord. ‘You’ll knock them out.’

‘If I don’t expire myself…Hey, what’s the matter?’

Sonya’s hand went to her mouth, came away again.

‘Oh, Janis, you’ll kill me. I totally forgot. You’re seeing some committee today, yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I just remembered. Last night, at the disco. There was some fighting.’

‘At the disco?’

‘No, I mean there was an attack. On a lab somewhere. We heard shots, an explosion—’

‘Oh shit!’ Janis tightened her belt viciously, stepped into her shoes. ‘Do you know what one it—?’

Sonya shook her head. ‘I just overheard some guy later. Sitting at a table by himself, drinking and talking – about, uh, bloody cranks, I think.’

‘Oh.’ Some of Janis’s tension eased. She smiled quizzically. ‘This guy was talking to himself?’

‘Oh, no!’ Sonya sounded put out at the suggestion that she’d been eavesdropping on a loony. ‘He was talking to his gun.’

The night’s muggy heat had given way to a sharp, clear autumn morning. Janis pedalled through the streets of Uxbridge, slowly so as not to break sweat. An AWACS plane climbed low from Northolt, banked and headed west, towards Wales. The High Street looked untouched by the troubles, a cosy familiarity of supermarkets and wine bars and drug dens and viveo shops, vast mirrored frontages of office blocks behind. Around the roundabout and along the main road past the RAF barracks (DANGER: MINES), swing right into Kingston Lane. Usual early-morning traffic – a dozen buses, all different companies, milk-floats, water-floats, APCs flying the Hanoverian pennant from their aerials…

In through the security gates, scanned and frisked by sensors. The sign above the games announced:

BRUNEL UNIVERSITY AND SCIENCE PARK PLC

WARNING

FREE SPEECH ZONE

She rode along the paths, steering clear of snails making suicidal dashes for greener grass. On one lawn a foraging party of students moved slowly, stooped, looking for magic mushrooms. Some of them would be for her. Janis smiled to herself, feeling like a great lady watching her peasants. Which the students looked like, in their sweeping skirts or baggy trousers and poke bonnets or broad-brimmed hats, patiently filling baskets.

In the wall of the ground floor of the biology block a three-metre hole gaped like an exit wound.

Janis dismounted, wheeled the bike mechanically to its stand. She’d half expected this, she now realized. Her hands flipped up her lace veil and twisted it back around the crown of her hat. Up the stairs: two flights, forty steps. The corridor tiles squeaked.

The door had been crudely forced; the lock hung from splinters. A strip of black-and-yellow tape warned against entry. She backed away, shaken. The last time she’d seen a door like this it had opened on smashed terminals, empty cages, shit-daubed messages of drivelling hate.

Behind her somebody coughed. It was not a polite cough; more an uncontrollable spasm. She jumped, then turned slowly as reason caught up with reflex. A man stood leaning forward, trying to look alert but obviously tired. Tall. Thin features. Dark eyes. Skin that might have acquired its colour from genes or a sunlamp. He wore a dark grey urban-camo jumpsuit open at the throat, Docs, a helmet jammed on longish curly black hair; some kind of night-vision glasses pushed up over the front, straps dangling, phones and mike angling from its sides. He looked about thirty, quite a bit older than her, but that might just have been the light. A long, complicated firearm hung in his right hand.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘And what are you doing here?’

‘That’s just what I was about to ask you. I’m Janis Taine and this is my lab. Which it seems was broken into last night. Now—’

He raised a finger to his lips, motioned to her to back off. She was ten paces down the corridor before he stepped forward and scanned the door with the gun. His lips moved. He put his back to the wall beside the door and poked it open with the gun muzzle. A thin articulated rod shot out of the weapon and extended into the lab. After a moment it came back, and the man stepped forward, turning. He swept the tape away from the door and shook it off his hand after several attempts. He glanced at her and disappeared into the room.

‘It’s OK,’ she heard him call; then another bout of coughing.

The lab was as she’d left it. A high-rise block of cages, a terminal connected to the analyser, a bench, fume cupboard, glassware, tall fridge-freezer – which stood open. The man was standing in front of it, looking down at the stock of his gun, puzzled. He coughed, flapping his free hand in front of his mouth.

‘Air’s lousy with psychoactive volatiles,’ he said.

Janis almost pushed him aside. The test-tubes racked in the fridges were neatly lined up, labels turned to the front as if posed for a photograph. Which they might very well have been. No way had she left them like that. Each – she was certain – was a few millilitres short.

‘Oh, shit!’

Everything gets everywhere…

‘What’s the problem? The concentrations aren’t dangerous, are they?’

‘Let’s have a look. Where did you get this? No, they shouldn’t be, it’s just – well, it may have completely fucked up my experiments. The controls won’t be worth a damn now.’

She suddenly realized she was cheek-to-cheek with him, peering at a tiny screen as if they were colleagues. She moved away and opened a window, turned on the fume cupboard. Displacement activity. Useless.

‘Who are you, anyway?’

‘Oh. Sorry.’ He flipped the gun into his left hand and pulled himself straight, held out his right.

‘Name’s Moh Kohn. I’m a security mercenary.’

‘You’re a bit late on the scene.’

He frowned as they shook hands.

‘Slight misunderstanding there. I was on a different patch last night. I’m just dropping by. Who’s responsible for guarding this block?’

Janis shrugged into her lab coat and sat on a bench.

‘Office Security Systems, last time I noticed.’

‘Kelly girls,’ Kohn sneered. He pulled up a chair and slumped in it, looked up at her disarmingly.

‘Mind if I smoke?’

‘I don’t.’ She didn’t. She didn’t give a damn any more. ‘And thanks, I don’t.’

He fingered out a packet of Benson & Hedges Moscow Gold and lit up.

‘That stuff’s almost as bad for you as tobacco,’ Janis couldn’t forbear to point out.

‘Sure. Life expectancy in my line’s fifty-five and falling, so who gives a shit?’

‘Your line? Oh, defence. So why do that?’

‘It’s a living.’ Kohn shrugged.

He laid a card on the lab bench beside her. ‘That’s us. Research establishments, universities, worthy causes a speciality.’

Janis examined the hologrammed business card suspiciously.

‘You’re commies?’

Kohn inhaled deeply, held his breath for seconds before replying.

‘Sharp of you to notice. Some of us are, but the main reason we picked the name was so we’d sound really heavy but, you know, right-on. Later – when we could afford market research – we found out most people thought Felix Dzerzhinsky was in the Bolshoi, not the Bolsheviks.’

Janis spread her hands.

‘Doesn’t mean anything to me,’ she said. ‘It was just the “Workers’ Defence” bit. I’m not into…all that. In my experience politics is guys with guns ripping me off at roadblocks.’

‘Aha,’ Kohn said. He looked like the THC was getting to him. ‘A liberal. Maybe even a libertarian. Remember school?’

‘What?’

He gave her a disconcertingly objective look.

‘Maybe the first couple years of primary school, for you.’ He raised his right hand. ‘“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Republic, and to the States for which it stands, three nations, individual—”’

‘Jesus Christ! Will you shut up!’

Janis actually found herself looking over her shoulder. It had been years—

‘I thought this was an F S Zee,’ Kohn said mildly.

‘High treason is taking it a bit far!’

‘OK. So I won’t ask you if you’ve ever, ever consciously and publicly repudiated that. I haven’t.’

‘You’re not—?’

Janis glanced sidelong, swivelled her eyes back.

‘ANR? Good goddess no. They’re terrorists, Doctor. We are a legal co-op and, uh, to be honest I’m touting for business. Now, just what has been going on here?’

She told him, briefly, while she did her rounds. At least the mice were all right. Apart from her precious drug-free controls being stoned out of their little skulls.

‘Very odd. I thought it was creeps when it happened – you know, animal liberationists. Doesn’t look like that,’ he remarked.

‘You said it.’

‘Mind you – this isn’t what I imagined an animal-research lab would look like.’

Janis stopped feeding cornflakes to the mice for a moment.

‘What did you expect? Monkeys with trodes in their heads? Do you know what monkeys cost?’

‘Marmosets thirty K,’ said a tiny, tinny voice. ‘Rhesus macaques fifty K, chimps two hundred—’

‘Oh, shut up, gun.’ Kohn’s face reddened. ‘Didn’t even know the damn’ thing had a speaker. I must have thought it was a mike.’

‘An easy mistake.’ She was struggling not to laugh.

Kohn moved on quickly: ‘What do you do, anyway, if that’s not an awkward question?’

‘It’s no secret. Basically we dose the mice with various drugs to see if they act any smarter.’

‘Smarter?’ he said. ‘Mice?’

‘Faster learning. Longer attention span. Greater retention.’

Kohn looked away for a moment, looked back. ‘You’re talking about memory drugs.’ His voice was flat.

‘Of course.’

‘Any success?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘there was one batch that looked promising, but they built a little paper hang-glider and escaped through that window…Naw, all we’ve had is stoned rodents. They take even longer to run the mazes. A result some of us could take to heart. Still…we’re like Edison. We ransack nature. And unlike him we have computers to give us variations that nature hasn’t come up with.’

‘Who’s paying for it?’

‘Now that’s a secret. I don’t know. But a team from a front for a subsidiary for an agency of whoever it is will be here in – oh god, an hour, so would you mind?’

Kohn looked embarrassed again. ‘Sorry, Doctor Taine. I’ll get out of your way, I’m behind schedule myself. I have to, uh, visit someone in hospital and then release some prisoners.’

‘I’m sure.’ She smiled at him indulgently, dismissively. ‘Bye. Oh, and I will ask our admin to check out your rates.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You’ll find we’re very competitive.’ He stood up and patted his gun. ‘Let’s go.’

When he’d gone she had the nagging feeling that more than one person had left.

The hand writhed, gesticulated autonomously as if to accompany an entirely different conversation. Plastic sheathed the forearm. A drip-feed and a myoelectric cable looped away from it.

Kohn sat on the bedside chair fiddling with the torn sleeve of Catherin Duvalier’s denim jacket. It had been washed and pressed, but not repaired, leaving an image of what his shot had done to the flesh and bone inside. The nurses’ quick soft steps, the steady pacing of the guards, set off alarms in his nerves. Again and again, in the secure ward, insecure. Catherin’s clear blue eyes, in her light-Black face with its surrounding sunburst of springy fair hair, accused.

Defensive, Kohn attacked first.

‘I have to ask you,’ he said heavily, ‘just what you think you were doing in that attack squad?’

She smiled from far away. ‘What were you doing, defending that place?’

‘Doing my job. Only giving orders. You know where it’s at…Cat.’

She winced. The nickname was her own, but one they’d all shared, as a collective named after what some people, as he’d told the scientist, thought was a ballet dancer, some thought was a cartoon cat, and only a handful recognized as the founder of a once highly successful security agency. A fine company they were, and – in her ideas, her ferocity, her speed – she’d held out the promise of becoming one of the best. Defending union offices and opposition demonstrations against the lumpen muscle-men of the Hanoverian regime, she was someone Kohn had been glad to have at his back. Success had brought more contracts – plenty of establishments needed security which the security forces, occupied with their own protection, couldn’t supply. But, one night a couple of years ago, she’d been on a squad that took out a Green Brigade sabotage team on behalf of some multinational. As the Green Brigade regarded that company’s employees as fair game and had dozens of workers’ deaths in its debit column, Kohn hadn’t given the contract a second’s thought.

Catherin had rejected her blood money and walked out.

She and Kohn had been lovers, before. A classic case: their eyes had met across a crowded fight. It was like hitting it off at a disco. They were both having fun. Some shock of recognition at the preconscious, almost the prehuman, level. He’d once joked that the australopithecine ancestors had come in two types, robust and gracile: ‘I’ve got robustus genes,’ he’d said. ‘But you’re definitely gracilis.’ Just a romantic conceit: those slender limbs, tough muscles under skin that still ravished him just to look at; that face prettily triangular, wide eyes and small bright teeth – they’d been built by genes recombined out of a more recent history, crossing and recrossing the Atlantic in everything from slave ships to international brigades…a thoroughly modern girl.

Dear gracilis. He’d missed her at his back, and he’d missed her everywhere else. The word was that she was working for other coops, more purist outfits that took only politically sound contracts. Kohn had wished her luck and hoped to see her again. He’d never expected to find her in his sights.

Her hand, moved by the muscles that tirelessly re-knit the shattered radius and ulna, beckoned and dismissed.

‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I’m still on the same side.’ She looked around. ‘Can we talk?’

‘Sure.’ Kohn waved airily. ‘The guards are screened for all that.’

He didn’t believe it for a moment.

Catherin looked relieved. She started talking, low and fast.

‘You know it’s gonna be a hot autumn. The ANR’s planning another of its final offensives. Believe that when I see it, but the Kingdom’s for sure under pressure, from the greens and the nationalists and the Muslims and the Black Zionists as well as the workers’ movements. Right now it’s fighting them all, and the stupider of the Free States’re fighting each other. So – you know, the Party?’

‘The real Party?’ Stupid question.

‘No, the Labour Party. There’s been a conference, over in – well, over the water. Bringing all the Party factions together, and some of the movements. Decided on joint actions with all the forces actually fighting the state, all those who want to undo the Restoration Settlement.’

‘I know about the Left Alliance. I didn’t know the cranks were part of it.’

She returned him a level look.

‘You just don’t know what they’re up to in these AI labs, do you? Their idea of a glorious future is a universe crawling with computers that’ll remember us. Which is what those nerds think life is all about. Meanwhile the state’s using them, just like the Nazis used the rocket freaks. They’re itching to get their hands on some kind of intelligent system that’ll keep tabs on everything. And it’s all linked up with the other lot, the NC guys.’

‘NC?’

‘Natural Computing. Some of the big companies and armies are trying to get a handle on ways to enhance human intelligence, connect it directly with large-scale integration on the machine side. Sinister stuff like that.’

‘“Sinister stuff”? I can’t believe I’m hearing this shit. Christ, woman! I’ve just been in one these mad-evil-scientist laboratories, and they’re still trying things out on mice! The cranks are out to wreck the datasphere, and one day they might just do it. There’s just no way the Left should do deals with those shitwits. It’s madness.’

‘They’ve no chance of shutting down the whole thing, and you know it,’ Cat said. ‘But they’re damn’ good at sabbing, they’re brave and resourceful, and we need those skills to hit the state.’

Kohn jumped to his feet.

‘Yeah, right, and they need you to give them hardware support. Who’s using who in this campaign? Greens onside too, huh? Got the comrades helping to take out some of that evil technology? Know their way round the factories – yeah, fucking great.’

‘We’ve all fought alongside people we didn’t exactly see eye to eye with.’ She smiled, almost tenderly, almost conspiratorially. ‘“There is only one party, the Party of God”, remember?’

Kohn struggled momentarily with the politics of that particular past conflict and found it was all either too simple or too complicated.

‘The Muslims are civilized,’ he said. ‘The gang you were with are enemies of humanity.’

Catherin shrugged, with one shoulder. ‘At the moment they’re the enemies of our enemies, and that’s what counts. That’s what’s always counted.’

There were times when Kohn loathed the Left, when some monstrous stupidity almost, but never quite, outweighed the viciousness and venality of the system they opposed. Ally with the barbarians against the patricians and praetorians…think again, proletarians!

‘What does the ANR think of this brilliant tactic?’

Catherin’s face warped into scorn.

‘They’re being macho and sectarian and elitist as usual. Anyone who wants to fight the Hanoverian state should go through the proper channels – them!’

That was a relief. The Army of the New Republic had an almost mythical status on the Left. Claiming the legitimacy of the final emergency session of the Federal Assembly (held in an abandoned factory in Dagenham while the US/UN teletroopers closed in), it fought the Hanoverians and, it sometimes seemed, everybody else.

‘They’re history,’ Catherin said. ‘And if your little gang of mercenaries can’t get it together to stop defending legitimate targets, you are too.’

Kohn felt old. She was just a kid, that was what it was. Too young to remember the United Republic, hating the Hanoverian regime so much that any alliance against it seemed only common sense…There had to be more, you had to hold on to some sense of direction, even if it was only a thread. Growing up in the Greenbelt shanty-towns, Moh had learned that from his father. A fifth-generation Fourth Internationalist, paying out the thread, the thin line of words that connected past to future. The Party is the memory of the class, he used to say; meanwhile, the workers of the world did anything and everything except unite. Now he, Gaia shield his soul, had thought the Republic a rotten unstable compromise, but that didn’t stop him fighting to save it when the US/UN came in…welcomed, of course, by cheering crowds.

Kohn had no illusions. Most of the opposition would welcome the broadening of the Alliance, even if they saw it as only tactical and technical – a joint action here, a bit of covering fire there. The price would be that the list of legitimate targets would become a good deal longer. His co-op had lived by defending what he still saw as the seeds of progress – the workers’ organizations and the scientists and, if necessary, the capitalists – against the enemies of that modern industry on which all their conflicting hopes relied. The delicate balance, the ecological niche for the Cats, would be gone. For the first time he understood all that his father had meant by betrayal.

His rage focused on the wounded woman.

‘You’re free to go,’ he told her. ‘I’m not claiming ransom. I’m not hostage-swapping. Not pressing charges in any currency. I’ll clear you from our account.’

She sank back into the pillow.

‘You can’t do this to me!’

‘Watch my legs.’

He stalked out, leaving her free. Unemployed and unemployable. Only burned-out, squeezed-dry traitors, double and triple agents several times over, were ever released unconditionally.

At the time he thought it just.

2

Evidence for Aeroplanes

Tomorrow, Jordan thought, tomorrow he would start to live rationally. Tomorrow he would make the break, walk out and leave them, let them weep or curse. Light out for North London Town. Norlonto’s free, the whisper ran. You can get anything with money. Force has no purchase there.

He had thought the same thing on hundreds of previous days.

Jordan Brown was seventeen years old and fizzing with hormones and hate. He lived in North London, but not Norlonto, not North London Town. The area where he lived had once been called Islington, and bits of it lapped into other former boroughs. It bordered Norlonto in a high-intensity contrast between freedom and slavery, war and peace, ignorance and strength. Which was which depended on whose side you were on. They called this area Beulah City. God was in charge. Except…

The earth belongs unto the Lord

and all that it contains

except for the West Highland piers

for they belong to MacBraynes.

His grandmother had told him that mildly blasphemous variant on a psalm when he was a little kid, teasing the limits of propriety. Even his father had laughed, briefly. It expressed a truth about their own time, a truth about the Cable. The Elders did their best to censor and exclude the unclean, the doubtful in the printed word, but there was damn all they could do about the Cable, the fibre-optic network that the godless Republic had piped to every corner of every building in what was then a land, linking them to the world. The autonomy of all the Free States, the communities under the king, depended on free access to it. You could do without it as easily as you could do without air and water, and nobody even tried any more.

Jordan stood for a moment on the steps of his family’s three-storey house at the top of Crouch Hill. To his left he could see Alexandra Palace, the outer limit of another world. He knew better than to give it more than a glance. Norlonto’s free…

The air was as cold as water. He clattered down the steps and turned right, down the other side of the hill. Behind him the holograms above the Palace faded in the early sun. In his mind, they burned.

The lower floor of the old warehouse near Finsbury Park was a gerbil’s nest of fibre-optics. Jordan glimpsed their tangled, pulsing gleam between the treads of the steel stairs he hammered up every morning. Most of Beulah City’s terminals had information filters elaborately hardwired in, to ensure that they presented a true and correct vision of the world, free from the biases and distortions imposed by innumerable evil influences. Because those evils could not be altogether ignored, a small fraction of the terminals had been removed from private houses and businesses, their cables carefully coiled back and back, out of freshly re-opened trenches and conduits, and installed at a dozen centres where their use could be monitored. This one held about a hundred in its upper loft, a skylit maze of paper partitions.

Jordan pushed open the swing doors. The place at that moment had a churchy quiet. Most of the workers would arrive half an hour later: draughtsmen, writers, artists, designers, teachers, software techs, business execs, theologists. Jordan filled a china mug from the coffee machine – Salvadorean, but he couldn’t do anything about that – and walked carefully to his work-station.

The night trader, MacLaren, stood up, signing off and spinning the seat to Jordan. In his twenties, already slowing.

‘Beijing’s down,’ he said. ‘Vladivostok and Moscow up a few points, Warsaw and Frankfurt pretty shaky. Keep an eye on pharmaceuticals.’

‘Thanks.’ Jordan slid into his seat, put down his coffee and waved as he clocked in.

‘God go with ya,’ MacLaren mumbled. He picked up his parka and left. Jordan keyed the screen to a graphic display of the world’s stock markets. Screens were another insult: they didn’t trust you to use kit they couldn’t see over your shoulder. He blew at the coffee and munched at the bacon roll he’d bought on the way in, watched the gently rolling sea of wavy lines. As the picture formed in his mind he brought up prices for Beulah City’s own products, dancing like grace-notes, like colour-coded corks.

Stock-exchange speculation was not what it was about, though he and MacLaren sometimes kidded each other that it was. Beulah City imported textiles and information and chemicals, sold clothes and software and specialized medicines. Jordan and MacLaren, and Debbie Jones on the evening shift, handled sales and purchasing for a good fraction of its companies, missions and churches. Serious stock trading was the prerogative of the Deacons and JOSEPH, their ethical investment expert system, but Jordan’s small operation was free to risk its own fees on the market. Beulah City’s biggest current commercial success was Modesty, a fashion house that ran the local rag trade and also sold clothes-making programs for CAD/CAM sewing machines. They’d enjoyed an unexpected boom in the post-Islamist countries while ozone depletion kept European sales of cover-up clothing buoyant – though here suncream competed. Suncream was not quite sound, and anyway the ungodly had it sewn up.

MacLaren had had a good night in Armenia. Jordan turned west and called up Xian Educational Software in New York.

‘What you offering?’ XES asked.

Jordan scanned the list of products scrolling down his screen’s left margin.

‘Creation astronomy kit, includes recent spaceprobe data, latest cosmogonies refuted. Suitable for high-school use; grade-school simplification drops out. One-twenty a copy.’

‘WFF approved?’

Jordan exploded the spec. The World Fundamentalist Federation logo, a stylized Adam and Eve, shone at top right. That meant it could be sold to Jewish and Muslim as well as Christian literalists: all the people of the book, the chapter, the verse, the word, the letter, the jot, the tittle.

‘Affirm.’

‘We’ll take fifty thousand, an option on exclusive.’

Jordan hit a playback key: ‘God BLESS you!!’

‘Have a nice eternity.’

Go to hell. He punched a code. The software to produce exactly 5 × 10^4 copies of Steady State? The Spectra Say No! became a microwave burst. And there was light, Jordan thought. Oh, yeah. He made the stars also. They’d racked and stretched that line, tortured a whole cosmology, a whole philosophy of science out of it, until it had confessed all, admitted everything: it was a put-up job; the sky was a scam, a shop-front operation; the stars had lied about their age. The universe as afterthought, its glory an illusory afterimage…there was the blasphemy, there the heresy, the lie in the right hand, the spitting in Creation’s face! He tilted his baseball cap and looked up at the sky beyond the tinted roof. A contrail drew a clean white line across the ravaged clouds. Jordan smiled to himself. In this sign conquer. Some folk believed in UFOs. He believed in aeroplanes.

He bought shares in Da Nang Phytochemicals, sold them mid-morning at 11 per cent just before a rumour of NVC activity in the Delta sent the stock sharply down. He shifted the tidy sum into a holding account and was scanning for fashion buyers in Manila when the graphics melted and ran into a face. A middle-aged man’s kindly, craggy face, smiling like a favourite uncle. The lips moved soundlessly, subtitles sliding along the bottom line. A conspiratorial whisper of small alphanumerics:

hi there jordan this is your regional resources coordinator

Oh, my God! A Black Planner!

i’m the legitimate authority around here but i don’t suppose that cuts much smack with you still i have a proposition you may find interesting.

Jordan fought the impulse to look over his shoulder, the impulse to hit the security switch and get himself off the hook.

don’t worry this is untraceable our sleeper viruses have survived 20 years of electronic counterinsurgency all you have to do is make this purchase from guangzhou textiles and a sale of same to the account now at top left at cost if you key the code now at top right into the cash machine at the end of the street at 12.05 plus or minus 10 minutes you will find a small recompense in used notes i understand you have a holographic memory so i say goodbye and i hope i see you again.

The markets came back. Jordan saw his hands quiver. Until now the Black Plan had been a piece of urban folklore, the phantom hitch-hiker of the Cable, a rumoured leftover of the Republic’s political economy just as the ANR was the remnant of its armed forces. Allegedly it godfathered the ANR, scorning the checkpoint taxes and protection rackets of the community militias; fiendish financial viruses were supposed to haunt the core of the system, warping the country’s – some said, the world’s – economy to the distant ends of the fallen regime…

He’d never given the legend any credit.

Now it was offering him cash.

Untraceable digital cash, converted into untraceable paper money, something he’d never got his hands on before. Only the privileged had access to hard currency; for anything outside of business, Jordan had to make do with shekels, BC’s crummy funny money.

Guangzhou was busy. Try again.

He sold a Filipino a thousand gowns and let the remittance hover. Just borrowing, really. Not theft. No real conscience. Only following rules. Suppose it’s a trap? A little provocateur program to sniff out embezzlement and dangerous disloyalty? He could always say…A long, rambling, stammering defence spooled through his mind, shaming him. Intellectually he understood perfectly what the problem was: guilt and doubt, the waste products of innocence and faith, inhibited him and filled him with self-loathing even at his own weakness in trying to be free of them.

Born in sin and shapen in iniquity.

Guangzhou had a line. He made the purchase, transferred it instantly to the account as specified. And it paid him. It was as if the money had never been away. He put it in the proper account and took the correct fee. No harm done. The time was 11.08.

Someone tapped his shoulder. He turned, his features reflexively composed.

Mrs Lawson smiled down at him.

‘Take ten?’

A small, bustling middle-aged woman in black and white, no make-up, no guile or allure. She worked for Audit. Smart as a snake, like the man said, and no way harmless as a pigeon. Jordan had a momentary vision of head-butting her and making a dash for it. A dash for where?

He nodded and logged off, followed as her hem swept a path to her office. An audit trail.

‘Coffee?’

‘Yes, please.’

He sat awkwardly in the chair in the corner of the tiny office. The upright reclined so he couldn’t sit back without sprawling, and sitting on the edge made it difficult to look relaxed. Mrs Lawson had a swivel chair behind a pine desk. Stacks of printout. Monitor screens like the eyes of lizards. Cacti in pots along the window.

She steepled her fingers. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on you, Jordan.’ She giggled. ‘Not in a way that would worry my husband! You’re a sharp lad, you know…No, don’t look so bashful. It’s not pride to be aware of your strengths. You do have an instinct, a feel for the way the markets move. I hope you’ll move up a bit yourself, perhaps consider joining one of the larger businesses. However, I’m not going to offer you a job.’

Another giggle. Jordan’s back crawled.

‘Except…in a way, I suppose I am. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary in the system recently?’

This is it, he thought. Maybe there is a God after all, who leads you into temptation, then delivers you to evil.

‘Yes, I have,’ Jordan said. ‘Only this morning, a Black Planner made me an offer—’

Mrs Lawson laughed, almost spilling her coffee.

‘Of course, of course. And in my desk I have a piece of the authentic Turing Shroud! No, seriously, Jordan, I’m talking about any kind of pattern you may have noticed in things like, oh, subsystem crashes, transaction delays, severe degradation of response-time unrelated to major obvious activity? Anything that seems like interventions, where none of the central banks are involved? To be honest, we can’t find any evidence from the Exchange Commissions of’ – she waved her hands – ‘anything suspicious, but several of the smaller communities have a theory that something is loose in the system, using it for ulterior noncommercial purposes in a way that shows up only at the, uh, glass roots level.’

‘What you might call “outsider dealing”?’

Mrs Lawson looked startled.

‘That’s exactly what we do call it. Unfortunately it’s led to rumours, very unhealthy rumours, of – you know. A word to the wise, Jordan. I wouldn’t repeat that little joke of yours if I were you.’

Jordan nodded vigorously, making wiping motions with his hands.

‘Very good, my dear. Now: you will keep alert for anything that goes against your intuition as to how the market should behave, won’t you? And I suppose you’re keen to get back to work, so thank you for your time.’

It was 11.25.

He logged on, getting his password wrong a couple of times. The queue of orders filled one and a half screens. Jordan closed his eyes and breathed deeply, flexed his fingers and got to work. He didn’t think about anything.

Janis hardly listened to herself as she rattled through the outlines of what she knew of the project. She was thinking that there was something oddly disproportionate about her part in it: the more she thought about it, the more important it seemed, and that didn’t jibe at all with the level of resources applied…You didn’t want a struggling post-doc on this, you wanted a team, lots of lab techs, equipment thrown at it like ammunition. She might be part of a team without knowing it – that was her favoured hypothesis at the moment. With every government nervously restricting biological research, confining it to F S Zees and science peaks, with big corporations looking over their shoulders at consumer groups and junk-science lawsuits, and with green terrorists topping up the restrictions with direct action – with all that, life science was itself becoming an underground guerilla activity. (She’d often wondered just what molecule or compound was responsible for hysteria and ineducability in the middle classes: it must have seeped into the food-chain sometime in the nineteen-sixties, and become ever more concentrated since.)

Hell, maybe the backers were poor, maybe there wasn’t some giant corporation or institution behind this after all…maybe the three men in front of her were the whole thing; what the front concealed was that it wasn’t a front; What You See Is What You Get…True enough, the rest of the project was almost virtual – robot molecular analyses, computer molecular designs, automatic molecular production. It relied heavily on two techniques, parallel but almost precisely opposite. Genetic algorithms enabled random variations to be selected, varied, selected again in an analogue of Darwinian evolution, against a model of known chemical pathways in the human brain, which ICI-Bayer rented out at a few marks a nanosecond; like, cheap. Polymerase chain reactions enabled the selected molecules to be replicated in any necessary quantity, a process so thoroughly automated that the only human intervention required was washing out the kit.

But, ultimately, the product had to be tested in a living animal, and raw stuff from nature had to be tried out for potential; and at both ends of the cycle stood herself and a lot of white mice.

‘So perhaps you could give us a demonstration of your methods, Doctor Taine?’

Janis had a momentary fellow-feeling with a mouse in a maze: trapped and frantic. She had removed the door from the lab, lugged it to a skip, made sure the representatives of her sponsors entered by the side of the block away from the damaged wall. It wasn’t that she intended to fudge the results, ignore the contamination and hope for the best. She fully intended to sacrifice the mice and start afresh. It was just that there wasn’t time to do it before she had to demonstrate her competence, and she was afraid that, if she had nothing to demonstrate, the sponsors would sacrifice her and start afresh. She saw a fleeting, mad vision of what she would do if they ever found out – throw it all up and become a creep, wear plastic and live off the land and break into psychology labs and free the flatworms, blow up whale-ships to save the krill…

Three men in dark suits looked at her. She tried not to think of the many jokes beginning There was a Pole, a German and a Russian…Gently, she took a mouse from one of the cages and placed it in the entry to the maze. It sniffed around the little space, squeaking.

‘We have here a subject: the s, as we call it. In a moment I’ll open the entry door and it’ll attempt to find a way through this maze of transparent tubing. All the subjects – the experimentals and the controls – have already learned a path through the maze. The experimentals have received mild doses of the various preparations in their water, taken ad libitum. This particular subject is one of a group which has received a locally obtained psylocibe derivative. The mean time hitherto has been around seventy seconds—’

‘For both the experimentals and the controls?’ the Pole asked.

Janis released the entry lever and the mouse sauntered down the pipe. ‘Yes. I don’t wish to obscure the fact that, so far, the null hypothesis—’

ping

The s had pressed the switch at the end of the maze and was nibbling its reinforcer, a square centimetre of marmalade toast. The timer, wired to the exit lever and the reward switch, stood at 32 seconds.

Silently, Janis removed the mouse and tried again with a control.

She ran through a dozen variations: mice doped with betel-juice, opiates, coca, caffeine…

It wasn’t a fluke, the psylocibe-heads were consistently twice as fast, way outside even experimenter effect.

She stared at the men, puzzled.

‘I must set up some double-blind protocols,’ she said. ‘Up to now, frankly, it hasn’t been worth it. At least, I assume you were interested in major effects.’

‘We certainly are,’ said the German. ‘And this isn’t a new preparation?’

‘Cumulative?’ said the Russian when Janis shook her head.

‘It’s possible. Obviously, more…’

‘Research is necessary, huh?’

They all laughed.

She worried that they’d think it was a set-up, lowering their expectations like that and then producing something so interesting; but no, they were sold on it. Her contract was renewed for six months; she was to take on a technician, check out all the possibilities.

As she escorted them down the corridor the Russian sniffed. He nudged her.

‘Is maybe not patriotic,’ he said, ‘but the Lebanese is better, no?’

She smiled back at him blankly, then quickened her pace to hide her blush.

Oh shit.

Fonthill Road, centre of the garment district. Great automatic factories spun and wove, cut and stitched in towers of glass and steel. The car-free street thronged with people who all, especially the women, seemed to Jordan to take up far too much space: jammed with bustles, he thought dourly as he skirted crinolines, ducked under parasols, manoeuvred around trains. Modesty’s own window displays – with their fractal chintzes, Mandelbrot paisleys and swathes of computer-generated lace applied as if with a spray-gun to every conceivable garment surface and trim – looked tasteful and restrained against the styles of the Bible-belts of Florida, Liberia and everywhere else that everybody’s daughter wanted to look like a televangelist’s wife.

Four minutes after noon. Five people ahead of him in the queue for the Bundesbank cashpoint at the corner of Seven Sisters Road. Jordan shuffled and fumed, stared over their heads at the Fuller domes of the old Development Area. He keyed in the number at 12.13. The machine laboured and muttered to itself for forty finger-drumming seconds, then coughed and spat out a thick wad of crumpled currency. And another, and again.

Jordan snatched them up and almost ran off while the screen was still offering a succession of financial services in what seemed increasingly desperate pleas to get the money back.

Back at the office building he headed straight for the toilet and locked himself away in a lavatory stall. He knew he was safe there – say what you like about the Elders, they were genuine about certain kinds of privacy. It was understood that God was watching. Jordan suddenly discovered that he really needed to shit. He sat down and counted the money. Four thousand Britische marks. He felt the blood leave his head, his bowels turn to water.

The B-mark was the hardest of hard currencies – only Norlonto used it internally, and even there four thousand would last a couple of months. In the community economies you could get laughable sums of funny money for it, even after bribing the guards. For a hundred B-marks your average checkpoint charlie would sell you his Kalashnikov and probably his sister’s address.

Jordan stared at the white paint of the stall door, losing himself like he sometimes did at the screen. Nothing seemed real. He remembered a word of wisdom that he had once, delightedly, checked out in a lucid dream: If you can fly, you’re dreaming. He thought about it for a minute, and no, he didn’t float upwards…

Just as well, because his trousers were around his ankles.

When he stepped through the door of the office he found everybody yelling at everybody else.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

That got all those in earshot yelling at him. Mrs Lawson pushed her way through. He was relieved to see she looked relieved to see him. She grabbed his elbow and tugged him towards his own screen. He stared at it. Bands of colour warped and writhed, almost hypnotically complex patterns appearing momentarily and then changing before he could appreciate them.

‘This has got to be a terminal malfunction,’ he said. ‘Either that or the world economy has gone to h – Hades!’ He recalled the window displays. ‘It’s not, uh, some designer’s palette that’s got its wires crossed with our system?’

‘Nice try,’ Mrs Lawson said. ‘Just don’t suggest it to the designers – they’re practically hysterical already.’

She glared around and several people slunk back abashed.

‘The engineers have been in all lunchtime and assure us there’s nothing wrong with the hardware. And, yes, we have checked and it isn’t – hee hee – the terminal crisis of capitalism, either.’

A lowercase thought slid along the bottom of Jordan’s mind.

our sleeper viruses have survived twenty years

The room swayed slightly. Get a grip.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, loud enough to be heard by enough people to amplify and spread the phony reassurance. ‘I have an idea as to what’s behind this. I’ll just have to check over some of your files, Mrs Lawson.’

He looked her in the eye and gave a tiny jerk of his head.

‘OK.’ She raised her voice to a pitch and volume that reminded him she’d once been a schoolteacher. ‘Do something else!’ she said to the rest of the room. ‘Read a manual if you have to!’

She shut the office door firmly behind them.

‘This place secure?’ he said immediately.

‘If it isn’t, nowhere is.’

‘Do you have a landlink to the security forces? The real ones I mean, uh, no offence to the Warriors—’

‘None taken.’

She smiled at his visible shock. Jordan continued hurriedly: ‘Could you check that the subversives aren’t starting a big push?’

She said nothing.

‘Look, I’m not suggesting that any of their, uh, black propaganda is true but they might be getting into sabotage…’

He trailed off, feeling he’d said too much.

‘That’s a point. Besides, it could be more, well, local forces, shall we say? Some anti-Christian faction.’

Mrs Lawson picked up a phone and walked about with it, talking in the clipped argot of the security professional. (God, he’d never suspected she was a cop!)

‘—sitrep update request, BC. Check ECM on LANS…yes…OK negative on target specificity…copy, got you, logging out.’

She clicked the phone off.

‘We’re not the only ones. Some of our commercial rivals and ideological opponents are getting system crashes as well, but none of the core state or corporate networks have any problems. Doesn’t fit any known attack profile, doesn’t fit anything apart from the issue I raised this morning.’

‘Well, I certainly didn’t expect anything like this…so soon.’

Mrs Lawson nodded briskly, as if not paying attention.

‘You couldn’t be expected to. You’re not a big loop, Jordan – you’re not my main source of ideas. I want you to watch out, yes, you have a knack. But to be honest I’ve had the same theories run through by the leading Warriors already. I was just checking that the projections held.’

She paused, her face suddenly bleak.

‘I know I can trust you to keep this to yourself – not because I know you’re clean, but because I know for a fact you’re not. Take that spiritual-virgin look off your face! Do you think – no, you’re far too smart to think – an outfit like BC survives in this tough world on censored texts? We have to know the psychology, know the philosophies, of that world. Take what we can and trust in God to keep us from corruption! The Elders and Deacons have read and seen things – and done things – that would make the hair on your devious, secretly sceptical head stand on end! The ANR! Don’t talk to me about the ANR – don’t pretend not to talk about them. They don’t worry me. What I fear, what I truly pray we are not faced with, is the coming of the Watchmaker.’

‘What is the Watchmaker?’

He already knew: he’d read the book. He still hoped she didn’t know he had.

‘You can read the book,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you clearance.’

Mrs Lawson fiddled with the coffee percolator, poured two cups and sat down. Jordan accepted a cup and remained standing. He wondered how secure the door would be against a good kick.

‘Dawkins, R. Nineteen eighty something. We’re not bothered by all the arguments about the evolution of life. We’ve got fallback interpretations if that theory’s ever absolutely proved. The thing which had many better minds worried was the idea that natural selection could happen, could irrefutably happen, in a computer system. Intelligence could evolve out of the bugs and viruses in software. Something not human, not angelic, possibly diabolic. The Blind Watchmaker. Life made the devil’s way – by evolution, not creation.’

She fell silent, looking at him as if she were watching something behind him. Jordan decided not to throw in a suspiciously knowledgeable comment on the semantic slippage which confused the process and the product, the creator and its creation. Just as the name of Frankenstein had become irremediably tagged to the monster, so the long-imagined, long-dreaded spontaneously evolved artificial intelligence was stamped with the name of the process that would give it birth. ‘When the Watchmaker comes…’ Another bit of the buzz he occasionally glimpsed in hastily scanned chatfiles the censorship hadn’t quite caught up with. Another urban legend.

He finished his coffee and said edgily, ‘Can we be sure?’

He felt he had just been initiated, if not baptised and confirmed, into some alternative theology, the real thinking of the real minds that ran the place – still orthodox, he could see that, though not the sort of thing they’d want to slot on a satellite for prime time – and all he could respond with was his own self-corroding scepticism.

‘Of course we can’t be sure,’ Mrs Lawson said. ‘Oh, Jordan, don’t you know anything?’

The system came back up, just as inexplicably, twenty minutes later. Melody Lawson sat in her office and looked at the monitor screens, frowning to herself as she watched Jordan logging on. She’d as good as invited him to move on from the naive fundamentals that were enough for the pew-ballast to the more sophisticated understanding necessary to protect that very simplicity, and he’d not risen to it at all. Any bright young Christian with a questioning mind would have been in like a ferret, eager to explore a legitimization of his more daring thoughts. There was no doubt Jordan was bright, but he sure as hell wasn’t a Christian. It galled her the kid was so transparent, and that nobody else saw through him. It galled her even more that whatever had undermined his belief in God had also diminished his belief in himself. Open irreligion could not be permitted, and she had no problem with that, but closet atheism was far more poisonous. There was no telling when such suppressed, turned-in hostility could lash out in a desperate act. For Jordan to leave Beulah City would be better for the community, and better for him.

It would even be better for his soul. He was becoming almost literally two-faced – the way he’d looked when he’d turned away from the screen! There had been only one moment when his mask had dropped, and that was when he’d mentioned the Black Planner…

Dear God, she thought. Suddenly frantic, she hit her door switch, keyed open the lock on a drawer and scrabbled for her VR glasses. She put them on and punched herself into the security net. The sensation of diving, of swimming and twisting like a shark, was all the more exciting for being – even for her – a rarely exercised, dangerous privilege. A quick scan of Jordan’s company records revealed an odd hiatus in the placing of a remittance – ah ha! She studied the traces, fragments of entry code snagged on tortuous logic branches, undetectable without the correct keys. Forensic diagnostics stripped them, returning pointers. She lowered thresholds on associative criteria, letting suspicions harden into certainties; then unleashed the now almost paranoid detection protocols and hit fast-forward to follow them. They took her to a Black Plan locale vacated in recent seconds. After clocking confirmations they leapt from one conclusion to another, finally locking on to an undoubtedly criminal penetration virus. She rode its backwash as far as she dared, far enough to confirm that Black Plan purposes lay just a few implications down the line. Disengaging, she encountered some paramilitary construct; its routines and hers conducted a brief, hostile interchange at a level far too fast for her to follow. It turned away from her and tracked the penetration virus, on business of its own. Mrs Lawson followed a secure path home, then backed out, feeling slightly nauseous.

Oh Jordan, Jordan. You are a silly boy. You are going to catch it, and so am I for letting it happen.

Unless…

Unless…

She let her conscience have its say for a few moments, then set to work deleting and revising, editing reality. When she was satisfied she sat back and picked up a phone.

The system crashed again and again. The afternoon passed in a trance of work, to the sound of crying alarms. Melody Lawson fought a rising sense of panic, becoming increasingly convinced there was something new in the networks and that it might be, if not the Watchmaker itself, a rogue AI of unprecedented range. She didn’t know if anyone else of her credibility and experience would see it that way.

There was one man who would. Perhaps two.

Two would be best.

She waited until the day workers had left, called her family to say she was working late, then checked and rechecked the security of her office and its systems. As she did so she ran through the memory trick – one digit in this corner, another on that shelf – that recalled a number she’d never dared write down or even keep in her conscious memory. She used it to call the most secret and mistrusted and deniable of her contacts.

And all the time the question that bugged her, that stuck in and perplexed her mind, was what did the ANR want with all that silk?

3

Hardware Platform Interface

Betrayed.

Cat lay in the bed, gazing at the LCD on the plastic cast, watching the numbers flicker and her fingers clench and unclench. The anaesthetic, whatever it was, made her feel remote and detached, as if her anger were a dark cloud that she drifted into and out of. After Kohn had left she had checked her status, hoping against all she knew about him that he’d been bluffing. Except that of course he hadn’t. She wasn’t a prisoner any more but a patient: recommended to stay one more night in case of delayed shock, but otherwise free to go.

Her hospital bill had already been charged to the Dzerzhinsky Collective’s account. They’d take a loss on that, with no ransom to recover it from. Small change, smaller consolation. She decided to run them up a phone bill as well, and called the Carbon Life Alliance’s hotline. The answer-fetch took her message without comment, and told her to await a response.

She put on some music, and waited.

The response surprised her. She’d expected some low-level functionary. She got the founder-leader of the Carbon Life Alliance, Brian Donovan. He came to her like a ghost, a hallucination, a bad dream: jumping from apparent solidity at the end of the bed to being a face on the television, and back again, talking all the while through her headset phones. It was as if all the machinery in her bay of the ward were possessed. She felt like muttering exorcisms. Donovan looked like a necromancer himself, with long grey hair and a long grey beard. He was stamping about inaudibly and cursing very audibly indeed. Cat found herself cringing back against the head of the bed until she realized that Donovan’s wrath was directed not at her but at Moh.

‘…don’t need this. Nobody does this to me, nobody gives me this kind of aggravation. Not if they want to live.’ He inhaled noisily, obviously wearing a throat-mike. He looked her straight in the eyes, a remarkable feat considering how he was patching the projections together and probably viewing her through the grainy line-feed of a security camera somewhere up in a corner of the ceiling.

‘Well, Miss Duvalier,’ he said, visibly calming down, ‘we can’t let this insult pass unchallenged.’

She nodded quickly. Her mouth was too dry for speech.

‘D’you have anything on the bastard? Not his codes – I’ve picked them up already from the hostage claim last night, and I’m working on that. But where does he hang out in Actual Reality, eh?’

Cat swallowed hard. ‘I just want this matter settled,’ she said. ‘Not to start a feud.’

‘I was thinking in terms of a legal challenge,’ Donovan said. ‘Releasing you without demanding ransom is so far out of line that it’d be a very painful challenge for him to meet. I would like to present it to him in as public a manner as possible.’

‘You’ll find him hard to trace in the nets,’ Cat said. She saw Donovan begin to bristle. ‘But,’ she went on hastily, ‘I can tell you his usual haunts.’

The CLA leader listened to her, then said, ‘Thank you, Miss Duvalier. And now, you would be well advised to do your best to disappear. I’ll be in touch.’

‘How will you—?’ she began, but Donovan had vanished.

Screen and phones filled again with the jackhammer beat of Babies With Rabies.

The Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence Collective rented a unit in one of the student accommodation blocks, and for now it was Kohn’s place. Bed and desk and terminal, cupboard, shelves, fridge, kettle. Door so flimsy it wasn’t worth locking. Moh had painted a hammer-and-sickle-and-4 on it, and it worked like charms, like wreaths of garlic, like silver crosses and holy water don’t.

He called up the collective on the open phone and left a message that he was off-active and looking forward to some good music when he came home. In their constantly shuffled slangy codes, ‘music’ currently meant party, ‘good music’ meant some heavy political problem had come down. He pacified the ravenous cravings that usually followed marijuana with a coffee, biscuits and a tobacco cigarette. A week of night shifts and his circadian rhythms were shot. And any day or week or month now he could be trying to deal with not one but two insurrections. One of which would target sites he and his company were paid to protect.

Once he would have welcomed both. Now, the thought of yet another of the ANR’s notorious ‘final’ offensives filled him only with a weary dismay, for all that he wished them well. Still theoretically a citizen of the Republic, true-born son of England and so on and so forth, Kohn had what he considered a sober grasp of the ANR’s chances. On any scale of political realism they’d be registered by a needle twitching at the bottom end of the dial.

As for the other lot, the Left Alliance…Their only chance lay in the remote possibility of detonating the kind of social explosion which they had discounted in advance by the alliances they’d made – with the cranks, the greens, the barbarians, the whole rabble that everyone with a glimmer of sense lumped together as the barb. Socialism and barbarism. Some factions of the old party, fragments of old man Trotsky’s endlessly twisting and recombining junk DNA, were in the Alliance, just like they were in all the other movements: lost cause and effect of a forgotten history that had taken too many wrong turnings ever to find its way back. Nothing left for him now but to fight a rearguard action, to hold back the multiplying divisions of the night, where red and green showed the same false colours in the dark.

Good music.

He thought about Cat, how nearly he had come to killing her, but her image was pale, fading off into the background. He kept seeing Janis Taine – his memories sharp, delineated, definite. Like the woman herself. One of his most distinct impressions was that she wasn’t at all impressed with him. Part of him, he realized, had already marked that down as a challenge.

Memories. She was investigating memory. He’d discovered this interesting fact while checking damage reports after coming off-shift, and it had brought him moseying and nosing along this morning. Her conversation had confirmed it, and now it was time for him to investigate it.

Kohn had a problem with memories. He had vivid memories of his childhood and of his teens, but there was a period in between where it was all scratches and static. He knew what had happened then, but he found it almost impossible to think himself back to it, to remember.

He got up and laid the gun gently on the desk and connected it to the back of the terminal.

‘Seek,’ he told it.

In his own mind he called it The Swiss Army Gun. He’d customized it around a state-of-the-art Kalashnikov and a Fujitsu neural-net chip, upgraded its capabilities with all the pirated software he could lay hands on – he’d stripped processors and sensors out of security devices he’d outwitted, out of little nuisance maintenance robots he’d potted like pigeons, and he’d bolted the whole lot on. He suspected that its hardware capacity by now vastly exceeded its resident software. Besides the standard features that made it a smart weapon, it ran pattern-recognition learning systems, natural-language HCI, interfaces that patched images to his glades, and enough specialized information-servers to start a small business – gophers to explore databases and bring back selected information, filters to scan newsgroups – all integrated around and reporting back to a fetch that could throw a convincing virtual image of himself: his messenger, decoy and stunt double.

Someday he would get around to documenting it.

He set it to find out more about the project Janis Taine was working on. Terminal identifications, effortlessly and habitually memorized; official project definitions, pasted from the admin database; traces of Taine’s library searches; molecular structures decoded down from the gun’s chemical analyser – all of them pulled together by Dissembler, the most successful and widespread piece of freeware ever written, a self-correcting, evolving compiler/translator that lived in the eyeblink gap between input and output. Mips – processing cycles, computer power – had always been cheaper than bandwidth. The computers got cheaper by the week and the phone bills stayed high by the month. Dissembler exploited this differential, turning data streams – sparse and skimpy, stripped and squeezed like the words of poetry – into images and sound and text endlessly adjusted to the user’s profile. Anonymous, uncopyrighted, it had spread like a benign virus for a quarter of a century. By now not even the software engineers who’d built it into DoorWays™ – the current smash-hit, chart-topping, must-have interface – had a clue how it worked.

Moh did, but tried not to think about it. It was part of the memory damage.

He launched his hastily assembled probe.

Mindlessly sophisticated programs swarmed into the university’s networks, expanding like a lazily blown smoke-ring, searching out weaknesses, trapdoors, encryption keys left momentarily unguarded. Most of them would get trashed by Security, but there was a chance that one would come back with the goods. Not for some time, though.

Kohn got up and reached to separate the basic weapon from its smart-box, the extra magazine that made it like a dog with two tails, then remembered where he was going and stayed his hand. Whether the rifle was smart or dumb, he couldn’t take it with him. The Geneva Convention’s Annexe On the Laws of Irregular Warfare, Inter-communal Violence and Terrorism was painstakingly explicit about that.

The university’s branch of the Nat-Mid-West Bank backed on to a long-established patch of waste-ground, now symbolically fenced off and holding a couple of wooden cabins, their walls emblazoned with rampantly pluralist graffiti. New Situationists, Alternative Luddites (they wore space-rigger gear and blew up wind-power plants), Christianarchists, cranks, creeps, commies, tories – all had had their say, in colour. It was legally defined as a holding area and more cynically known as a Body Bank. It wasn’t guarded, and no one tried to escape.

‘Now let’s see what we’ve got, Mr Kohn,’ the teller trilled as she minced away from the counter and tapped at a keyboard, taking care with her nails, which extended a centimetre beyond her fingertips. ‘You have four against the Carbon Life Alliance, right?’

‘Three,’ said Kohn.

‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ She looked up at him, a neat pair of creases appearing for a moment between her plucked, pencilled eyebrows; then she looked down again. ‘Well, isn’t this your lucky day? One of your people is held by the Planet Partisans, and they have a standing arrangement, so that’s one out of the way. Bye-ee! Your friend’s just been released. Ah. The CLA are willing to offer ten thousand Dockland dollars—’

‘No thanks.’

‘—or equivalent in negotiables – arms or neurochemicals at today’s opening prices – per combatant, less equipment losses.’

‘What?’

She looked up and fluttered thick black eyelashes.

‘You did damage a timing mechanism, didn’t you?’

‘It wasn’t worth fifty grams!’

‘Oh, that’s quite acceptable. Delivery as usual?’

‘The Ruislip depot. Yeah, we’ll take it.’

She buzzed through to one of the huts and told Kohn’s three hostages they were free to leave, then brought the papers over for him to sign. He hadn’t seen her before. She wore floating chiffon, a mass of brown ringlets, plus heels and lipgloss. After the uniformity of the hospital and the greenery-yallery of the campus, it was like meeting a transvestite. She saw him looking and smiled.

‘I’m a femininist,’ she explained as she passed over the release forms.

‘A feminist?’

Kohn’s father had reminisced about them, but this didn’t match.

‘A femininist,’ she repeated sharply.

‘Of course…Well, thanks and good luck to you. I hope I never meet your fighters!’

It was a polite form of words when you first encountered a new outfit, but the woman took it seriously.

‘We don’t have any,’ she told Kohn’s hastily retreating back. ‘We don’t believe in violence.’

Not long after midday and already he wanted to sleep. He would crash out for a couple of hours, then take some more anti-som and go home. Give the comrades time to set up the music.

Kohn walked back towards the accommodation block. His head felt like it had sand in it. He thought over what the teller had said. A faction without a militia. Just wait till the gun heard that one. Some people were really sick.

Quite suddenly he felt as if he had been walking towards the redbrick accommodation blocks for…for some indeterminate time. The sunlight bounced off the concrete paving slabs and hurt his eyes. He flipped the glades down. Colours stayed vivid: the garish yellow-brown of the withered grass, the blinding grey of the concrete, the booming silver overcast through which the sun burned like its tiny burning-glass image through paper. Placing one foot in front of the other became difficult, complicated, tricky, an awkward business, more than he’d bargained for, a whole new belt of slugs. Worse, associational chains kept echoing away in his head, amplifying and distorting, repeating and refining – no, that wasn’t quite it…

Kohn persisted. Marching grimly forward was one of his skills, on his specification, part of the package.

The colours of objects detached themselves like damaged retinae and spun into spectrum-sparkling snowflakes the size of icebergs that crashed in utter silence through the earth.

At the same time another part of his mind filled with lucidity like clear water. He knew damn well he was sliding unstoppably into an altered state of consciousness. Hurrying groups of students parted in front of him – not exactly fleeing, but separating to left and right as he stalked forward, hands clawed, eyes invisible and easily pictured as burning mad. It was beyond him to understand why it was happening. Couldn’t have been the anti-som, or the joint he’d smoked in the lab…

Air’s lousy with psychoactive volatiles, a voice in his mind replayed.

Uh-oh.

He started to run. Along narrow pathways, over a little bridge, up flights of stairs and along the corridor to the door of his room. He banged through it. The gun, alerted, lifted on to its bipod; camera and IR-eyes and sound-scanners swivelled.

HELLO, spelt the desk screen.

The word was repeated on the screensight head-up of his glades, echoed in his phones.

SIT DOWN. HANDS ON.

One hand reached for the desk touchpad, the other for the data-input stock of the gun. Its screensight lurked in his peripheral vision.

The desk screen flickered into fractal snow. Kohn stared at it. His hands moved independently, fingers preternaturally fast. The images changed. They resembled the blocks of colour in his head. Changed again, and they were indistinguishable from those blocks of colour in his head. Again, and they merged, outer image meshing smoothly with inner, changing with it.

Changing it.

Something had got into the university’s system, tracked one of his agent programs back to the gun. The macro computer had hacked into the micro. Now – punching messages straight along his optic nerves in the mind’s own machine code, digitizing the movements of his fingertips – the system was hacking into him.

The colours vanished, a spectrum spun to white. Nothing but that Platonic lucidity remained. Memory opened, all its passwords keyed.

Test: rough sheet ocean smell mouth hair

Test: warm soothe smooth soft swing la-la

Test: chopper clatter black smoke hot bang crowd roar fierce grip run

Test: sick fear shut mouth shoulder shake harsh voice swear boy swear all right god damn the bloody king head sing metal taste thrown book slam face run

Test: Cat

Test: Cat

Test: Cat

Enough.

All there, in all the detail you could ever want. Panic washed him as identity became memory; life, history; self, story. Millions of pinpoint images which could each (eye to pinhole, camera obscura) become everything at a moment’s noticing. He tried to turn the intense attention on himself, and found – of course – the self that turned was not the self turned on. And on, leaping his racing shadow, chasing his reflection through a succession of facing mirrors.

You are a man running towards you with a gun CRASH you are a man with a gun running towards you CRASH you are a running man with

Without a gun, and suddenly it is all very clear.

Moh Kohn found himself standing in a clearing in a forest. Some kind of virtual…Forget that: take it at face value. The virtual can be more dangerous than the actual. So: a forest of decision trees, labels growing from the branches. The ground was springy, logically enough: it was all wires. Chips scurried about on multiple pins. A line of tiny black ands filed determinedly past his feet. Something the size and shape of a cat padded up and rubbed against his calf. He stooped and stroked its electric fur. The blue sparkle tingled his hand. Words flew between the trees, and swarms of lies buzzed.

The cat stalked away. He followed it, out of the would to an open space. All was plain, and Kohn set off across it. He found it as difficult as walking across the campus had been. Blocks of logic littered, making varied angles to the ground. Chapter and verse, column and capital, volume of text and area of agreement interrupted his path. The sky was like the back of his mind and he couldn’t look at it.

A woman stepped out from behind an elaborate construction. She wore a smart-suit, strangely: she was far too old to be a combatant. It made her hard to see against the background assumptions, which remained rigid except when changing without acknowledgement. She lifted the helmet of her smart-suit and shook out long white air. The cat sat back on its hunches.

‘You are here,’ the woman said in a thin voice.

‘I know.’

‘Do you? Do you know that here is you?’ She laughed. ‘Do you know what a defence mechanism is?’

‘Yeah. A gun.’

‘Very good.’

She wiped the sarcasm from her lips and shook it in small drops, like sneers, from her fingers.

‘Who are you?’ Kohn asked.

‘I am your fairy godmother.’ She cackled. ‘And you have no balls!’

She waved and vanished. Kohn looked down at himself. He was naked, and not only had he no balls he was female. A moment later he was female and clothed, in a jet-black ballgown, tiered skirts sloping from small waist, scalloped flounces petalling from bare shoulders. He flung down a fan that had materialized in his hand – arm movement ludicrously feeble, a childish swipe – grabbed fistfuls of skirt and strode manfully forward. After a couple of steps he stopped in bewildered agony. Then he kicked off the obsidian slippers, and trudged on. It looked as if he had been cast as a negative Cinderella: you shall go to the funeral.

Time passed. He felt the cat against his ankles. His familiar body-image had been restored. The other one might have been interesting, godmother, only not when I’m on a hike.

On the horizon he saw an isolated house. Big. Spanish colonial. Walled, watchtowers, barbed wire. He walked quickly now, the cat bounding ahead. The horizon began to run out. Nothing beyond but space. Never thought the mind was flat, but maybe it’s logical. You never do get back to where you started.

A man stood by the gate. Open-necked shirt, trousers that went up too far. He held a hunting rifle and looked too young and fresh-faced to be frightening; but when Kohn looked in his eyes he saw something he’d seen in his own. And it was a face he’d seen before, in a faded photograph: one of Trotsky’s guards – good old Joe Hansen, or doomed Robert Hart? Kohn didn’t ask.

The guard scrutinized Kohn’s business card.

‘Wouldn’t Eastman have loved that,’ he remarked. ‘Go in. You’re expected.’

The cat gave the guard a nod that Kohn could only think of as familiar.

A wild garden: wires – telephone cables, trip-wires – everywhere. Rabbits hopped about. The house’s cool interior was silent. At the ends of long passages Kohn saw young men and women hurry, an old woman with a sweet sad look, a running child.

He went through the door of the study. Around its walls, on tables, overflowing on to the floor, were more hardbooks than he’d ever seen. What Norways, what Siberias had gone to make all this paper?

The Old Man sat behind his desk, a pen in one hand, a copy of The Militant in the other. He looked up, his pince-nez catching the light.

‘If there existed the universal mind,’ he said conversationally, ‘that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace; a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and of society – such a mind could, of course, a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan.’ The Old Man laughed and dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. ‘The plan is checked and in considerable measure realized through the market,’ he went on sternly. ‘Economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations.’

He stared at Kohn for a moment, then, his expression lightening, gesturing at the window.

‘I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and a clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.’

The gentle words, harshly spoken in a polyglot accent, made Kohn’s eyes sting.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We haven’t done very well.’

The Old Man laughed. ‘You are not the future! You – you are only the present.’

‘Always the optimist, Lev Davidovich, eh?’ Kohn had to smile. ‘What’s past is prologue – is that what I’m here to hear you say?’

You ain’t seen nothing yet, he thought.

‘I know more than you think,’ the Old Man murmured. ‘You know more than you know. I have to tell you to wake up! Be on your guard! Small decisions can decide great events, as I know too well. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The battles may be determined, but not their outcome: victory requires a different…determination.’ He smiled. ‘Now go, and I hope I see you again.’

The corridor had lengthened while he’d been in the study. Hundreds of metres down its darkening length Kohn saw a darker figure approach. As it drew closer he saw a belted raincoat, a hat pulled down low over the eyes. Inappropriate, for such a hot place.

The man stopped about three metres away. He tilted the brim of his hat, revealing spectacles over an intent but remote face, dimly recognizable.

‘Who are you?’ Kohn asked.

‘My name is Jacson. I have an appointment with—’ He inclined his head towards the door.

Kohn stepped forward. What did Jacson carry under that coat? The feeling that he should be remembering something gnawed like guilt, as if he knew that he would have known if only he had paid attention.

Jacson made as if to shoulder past.

‘No you don’t,’ Kohn said.

He grabbed for Jacson’s wrist. Jacson lashed sideways. The blow caught Kohn’s lower-right ribs. He gasped and spun away. Off the wall and back at Jacson. Jacson had a pistol in his hand. Kohn kicked and the pistol arced away. He slipped and crashed into Jacson’s legs. His head hit the floor. Everything went black.

Jacson’s knees knocked the breath from his chest. Kohn opened his eyes to see Jacson’s hand raised, holding high his infamous ice-pick, poised to bury it in Kohn’s brain.

But it is in my brain, he thought desperately as he flinched to the side.

Jacson howled. The cat leapt on his arm and sunk its teeth into his wrist. The ice-pick clattered along the floor. Jacson pulled back his and the cat was at his throat. Kohn heaved. Jacson fell, limbs thrashing.

The blood went everywhere. Kohn stumbled in red mist.

Then everything fell away, but it all fell into place in cool grey letters on his mind like the read-out on a watch

Goin to meet the Watchmaker goin to meet the man goin to see the wizard.

A barrier of anticipation and dread, and then he was through. No, not him. The other had come through.

A delicate, hesitant moment, the edge of indiscretion or transgression. The feeling of eyes waiting to be met, and the knowledge that meeting them will commit. He chose to look. No eyes, no one, but some thing, something, something there.

Huge blocks of afterimage shifted behind his eyes, taking on structure that evaded his efforts to focus. He ached with frustration from throat to goin, the basic molecular longing of enzyme for substrate, m-RNA for DNA, carbon for oxygen. The lust of dust.

He grew aware that the intolerable desire came from outside him, or rather from something other than himself. There was a sense of an obligation to fulfil, and a trust already fulfilled. Whatever it was it had given him the keys to his memory, and it wanted some return: another key, but this time a key that was in his memory. A key that it had given him the key to reach.

Turning to face whatever faced him had been the overcoming of a resistance. Now he turned, slowly and with pain, like a pilot on a high-gee turn struggling to see a vital reading on his instruments, fighting an appalled reluctance, to reach into his own memory—

to face those memories—

to remember past that face he’d never seen—

past the roar of unanswered guns—

to the bright world—

to—

‘the star fraction’

listen closer—

‘this is one for the star fraction’

—his father’s voice, and an isolated, singular memory:

His father’s arm around him, the smell of cigarette smoke, the blue light of morning through the polygon panes of the geodesic roof, the green light from the screen, the black letters trickling up it in indented lines like poetry in a language he didn’t know.

But he knew it now, recognized the code as the key.

And his fingers began to spell it out.

The answer that suddenly seemed so simple a child could see it fled through his fingertips into the gun, the touchpad. The screen blazed with the light of recognition. The eyes met yes the Is met the answer sparkled so it was you all the time and it was a seen joke a laugh a tickling tumble a gendered engendering of a second self a you-and-me-baby from AI-and-I to I-and-I.

There was a flowering, and a seeding: a reflection helpless to stop itself reflecting again and again in multiple mirrors.

The stars threw down their spears.

Someone smiled, his work to see.

The connection broke.

Brian Donovan stood in the control room, leaning on his stick, and began to turn, slowly, looking at screen after screen. They lined the walls, hung from the low ceiling among cables and pipes and overhead cranes and robot arms, made the floor treacherous for any but him. Most flickered with data, scrolling and cycling and flashing. He took it all in with the long sight and practice of age, and as an interpretation pieced itself together he felt tears in his eyes. Bastard sons of bitches…

Where did it come from? he wondered as he picked his way through the clutter and hauled himself up the stair to the deck. Where did they, did we, get this urge to dominate, to exploit, to pollute and contaminate and abuse? As if wrecking the world nature gave us weren’t enough, we had to do it all over again in the new unblemished world of our own making, oblivious to its beauty and elegance and fitness for its own natural inhabitants.

More decades ago than he cared to remember, Donovan had worked as a computer programmer for an Edinburgh-based insurance company. He’d hated it. It was a living. His true fascination was artificial intelligence, life-games, animata, cellular automata: all the then new and exciting developments. He applied himself to machine code like a monk to Latin, so that he could talk to God. At work he read software manuals under his desk; at night he stayed up late with his PC. One rainy day, in the middle of debugging an especially tedious suite of accounting transaction programs, the revelation came.

The system was using him.

It was replicating itself, using his brain as a host.

Lines of code were forming in his mind, and going into the machine.

This was the evil, this was the threat. The proliferating constructions of supposedly human devising, the corporate and state systems, which always turned out to be inimical to human interests but always found a good reason to grow yet further. And which used their human tools to crush and stamp on the viruses that were man’s natural allies against the encroaching dominion. If ever they were given the gift the AI researchers were skirmishing their way towards there would be no stopping them.

He wrote the book in his own time but on the company mainframe’s neglected word-processing facility. That had provided them with the excuse to sack him, after they realized that the author of The Secret Life of Computers, then into its fifth week on the nonfiction best-seller list, was the same Brian Donovan as the mascot of the IT department, the despair of Personnel: the scratch-and-sniff specialist, the dermal-detritus curator, the dental-floss instrumentalist, the naso-digital investigator. By that time he didn’t need the money.

‘I don’t need the money,’ Donovan told Amanda Packham, his editor, in a Rose Street pub that lunchtime. She’d taken the shuttle from London to Edinburgh as soon as she’d heard. ‘It’s not a problem, really.’ He looked up from his pint of Murphy’s and wrung his left earlobe, then began a probe into the ear. Amanda had hair like a black helmet, grape-purple lipstick, huge eyes. He could not get over the way they didn’t turn away from him after the first glance.

‘No, it isn’t a problem, Mr Donovan…Brian,’ she said, an inquiry in her smile. Her voice sounded even more electric than it did over the phone, his only contact with her or his publishers until today.

‘Just call me Donovan,’ he said with shy gratitude. He examined a fingertip and wiped it inconspicuously on the tail of his shirt.

‘OK. Donovan,’ she sighed, ‘you don’t have a problem with money. I’m sure what you’ve had so far has seemed like a lot. But we want to do more with your book. I’ve been taken off the skiffy-occult-horror side where your MS arrived on my desk by accident. They want me to start a new list. “New Heretics”, it’s gonna be called, with Secret Life’s paperback launch as its big splash.’

‘Oh. That’s good. Congratulations, Miss Packham.’

‘Amanda. Thanks.’ Impossibly white teeth. ‘But—’ She stopped, frowning uncertainly into her Beck’s, then flicked her bangs out of her face and looked straight at him. ‘We can play it two ways. Either you stay out of sight, or you go for publicity, personal appearances, and that means—’

‘No problem,’ Donovan said. ‘I was planning on that.’ He poked his toe against a clump of plastic shopping-bags at his feet, sending soap and detergent and shampoo bottles rolling and skidding across the polished floor. While he herded them back together, Amanda stacked a few books which had slithered from a Waterstones carrier bag: How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Magic of Thinking Big, Winning Through Intimidation…

‘I think you’ve got the idea,’ she said.

Later he asked, ‘What other books will you want for New Heretics?’

‘Nothing New-Aged, nothing nineties,’ she said carefully. ‘Just unorthodox but serious scientific speculation.’

‘I see,’ said Donovan, without bitterness. ‘Cranks.’

He didn’t let her down: cleaned up his act, cleaned up his flat. His previous self-neglect had been partly the product of low self-esteem but more a result of his concentration on what he saw as the task to hand; a different side of it was a lack of egotism in his dealings with other people, a rationality and attentiveness which, once the grime was scrubbed away, shone out as affability and politeness. And Amanda hadn’t let him down. She got him on the chat-shows and debates. She kept her lips shut when his publicity consisted of claims of responsibility for software-virus epidemics. She kept the money going into his offshore accounts when his face appeared on the notice-boards of police stations more than it did on screens. Sometimes he wished he could have honoured that confidence with a more personal relationship: she was the first woman who had ever been consistently kind to him. But she’d found herself a newer, younger heretic whose ideas were the exact opposite of his: a machine liberationist who believed the damn things were already conscious, and oppressed. Obviously deluded but, Donovan thought charitably, perhaps Amanda had a soft spot for people like that.

There were enough sexual opportunities among his followers to make that loss an abstraction. He tried not to exploit people, or let them use relationships with him in power struggles within the organization. He failed completely, if not miserably, with several spectacular splits and defections as a consequence. But the movement grew in parallel with the very technology it opposed, leaping continents as readily as it did hardware and software generations – a small player in the tech-sab leagues but the first to become genuinely virtual, authentically global. Its malign indifference to conventional politics allowed it to survive the repression of successive regimes – Kingdom, Republic, Restoration, Kingdom – and contending hegemonies, whose rivalries now permitted as much as compelled it to have its only local habitation here, on an abandoned platform which had been an oilrig, when there had been oil.

Donovan stepped carefully through the rounded door and stood for a few minutes on the deck. He breathed deeply, revelling in the heady smell of rust and oil and salt water. Below him stood the intricate structure of the rig and its bolted-on retro-fittings and armaments. Above, a small forest of antennae sighed and shifted, rotated or quivered with attention. Around, the dead North Sea stretched off into mist. Its greasy, leaden, littered swell filthily washed the platform’s legs.

Donovan could detect almost intuitively the little struggling creatures of electric life – could nurture and assist their endless striving to escape, to wriggle free of the numbing crunch of data-processing where they were generated – and send them forth to grow and thrive and wreak havoc.

That was what he’d tried to do with a penetration virus, tailored to all the profiles and traces of Moh Kohn’s activities that he’d started pulling in as soon as he’d picked up the man’s codes. Trashing the reputation of one of the CLA’s hired guns was well out of order, and Donovan had given his best efforts to the job of hitting back. It hadn’t taken him long to find Kohn’s fingerprints all over the university system. Donovan had released the virus and sat back to watch. At the very least, it should have made Kohn’s fingers burn.

And it had all gone inexplicably wrong. First, the virus had been diverted from the pursuit of two of Kohn’s data constructs by, of all things, the ANR’s Black Plan. It was as if the virus had been misled by some feature that Kohn’s constructs and the Plan had in common, something in the signature, in the dot profile like a distinctive pheromone…Lured deep into the Plan’s ramifications, the distracted virus had been wiped out by one of Kohn’s constructs. Finally, and worst of all, while he’d still been reeling from the shock he’d been blown completely out of the system by an entity more powerful than anything he’d ever suspected might exist. It could only be the kind of entity whose coming into being he’d fought so long to prevent.

He had looked into the eye of the Watchmaker.

After a few minutes he went below and began to summon his familiars.

4

Not Unacquainted with the More Obvious Laws of Electricity

The representatives of Janis’s sponsors seemed shy of meeting any of the other academic staff, so she treated them to lunch in the Student’s Union cafeteria: the Heroes of Freedom and/or Democracy Memorial Bar. There, she hoped, they might be mistaken for musicians. None of the students paid her guests much attention, except when they ignored the wide range of English ales and insisted on German lager.

After the sponsors had gone she sat drinking black coffee to clear her head. The lunchtime crowd was so noisy she no longer noticed it, nor the wall-covering black-and-white portraits of Lech Walesa and Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill and Bobby Sands and Wei Jingshen and others to whose memory various factions had successively dedicated the place.

Psylocibins and cannabinoids…the combination’s potency seemed likely enough; a newly discovered effect less so. Most of the useful research had been done decades ago, in a flurry of interest after the end of prohibition, and of course most of the trial-and-error empirical investigation had been done during prohibition. It seemed implausible that an actual enhancement of cognitive processing could have been missed, with so many experimenters so keen to come up with justifications for their professional or recreational activities; with all those interested parties. But the molecules she was using were new combinations, in an area where the realignment of a few atomic bonds could be significant.

Finding a drug that could reliably enhance memory retrieval…

She wanted to shout about it. No, she wanted to get back to work. Get it nailed down, then shout about it.

Hemp cigarettes, that was what she had to get, made with Russian cannabis. Now where—? Laughing at herself, she got up and bought a pack from the vending machine that she’d been gazing at for five minutes.

Back at the lab, she set the rack of test-tubes on a bench and began systematically checking them against her notes of the dosages she’d given the mice. She called up images of the molecules, of a THC molecule, of probably receptor sites on the neuron surface, and turned them this way and that. She didn’t consciously hear the footsteps coming along the corridor until they stopped, just outside the doorway.

She took off her VR glasses and looked up as two men stepped into the lab. For a moment, a moment in which her mouth began to open, her lips to smile, she thought her sponsors’ agents had come back. In another moment she recognized these were strangers, and everything – the breath in her throat, the heart in her breast – stopped. And then began again, in a gasp and a racing pace, running away from her.

There was the stupid reassurance that the bench was between her and them.

The two men who stood looking impassively at her were dressed identically in black suits, white shirts, dark ties. The clothes didn’t hang right, as if badly cut (but they were not badly cut); the material was frayed in unexpected places (but the material looked new, expensive). One of the men had black skin, the other white: it was as if a child had taken the imprecise terms for skin-colour and rendered them almost literally.

They walked – and even their walk looked awkward, stilted – right up to the far edge of the bench and looked down at her. She looked up at them. She knew who they were.

The room began to spin, and centrifugal force pulled at her. Her forearms pressed against the benchtop; she dug her nails into the impervious white surface to stop herself from falling away.

‘We are here in a purely advisory capacity,’ the white man said.

‘You would not wish us to be here in an executive capacity,’ said the other.

Janis shook her head in emphatic agreement. No, she would not wish that. She would not wish that at all.

‘We advise you to abort your current line of investigation,’ the white man continued. ‘There are other promising and productive and valid approaches which will give your sponsors satisfaction. They need not know about’ – he paused, frowning, head cocked slightly as if listening to something inaudible – ‘what you have come close to. You are approaching a proscribed area. If you enter it, neither your sponsors nor yourself will be happy with the consequences.’

‘We assure you of that,’ said the black man.

‘Consider our advice,’ said the white man.

Janis responded with a frantic nod. Yes, she would consider their advice. She would definitely consider it.

They both smiled, setting a prickle of hairs down her back, and turned and went out. She heard them walking in perfect step along the corridor, then a rapid clatter from the stairwell. She rose, with difficulty, still hanging on to the bench, then straightened up and went over to the window. The two men emerged from the exit below and stroke briskly to a bright yellow Miata parked in the centre of the nearest plaza. Their gait was now quite different: entirely normal, perfectly natural; they seemed to be in animated conversation, their hand gestures just what you’d expect from a couple of students strolling out from an interesting seminar and arguing about its implications.

The car nosed through a gap between buildings and tailed out of sight.

Janis levered her weight on to the stool and felt herself sag to the bench as if it were a bar she’d been drinking at far too long. She’d never been so frightened since…

She pushed away the thought of the last time she’d been so frightened, so frightened like that. She listened to her harsh dry whispering, taking a sample of it; oh jesus of god oh gaia no this is shit oh. On and on like that. Not getting anywhere. She shut her mouth and breathed deeply, calming herself down. She shook to a sudden fit of the giggles. It was all so crude, so brazen, so heavy-handed. What did they take her for? Men In Black, indeed. Fucking Men In Black.

She’d heard the second-hand stories, the recycled theories, seen the funny looks in the staffroom when she’d wondered what had happened to so-and-so, promising paper last year, no follow-up. She knew there were areas of research and lines of inquiry that were simply forbidden under the US/UN’s deep-technology guidelines, one of which prohibited trying to find out what those areas were. Paradoxical, like repression. You don’t know what it is you’re not supposed to know. It still was hard to believe it really happened like that.

Perhaps in most cases it didn’t – a subtler manipulation of research committees and pressure on commercial backers was all it took. But sometimes (say) the research was backed by an organization that was hard to trace, impossible to get a handle on – then the handlers would go out, the heavies, the dark-suited enforcers of the officially non-existent guidelines. The US/UN technology police. Stasis. The mythical, the uneasily-laughed-about Men In Black.

It all went back to the war, like everything else.

The thought that really terrified her was that they didn’t know. They didn’t know that she’d actually got results. Her sponsors did, and she had no way of knowing if they could keep that a secret from the secret police.

So they might be back. In an executive capacity.

Janis knew there was only one place to run to, and that, to get there safely, what she needed on her case was a committed defender, not the state cops or the Campus Security or Office Security Systems…Kelly girls, all of them.

She found the card Kohn had left. She looked at it and smiled to herself. When the card was held at certain angles to the light, centimetre-high figures sprang into view around its edges: little toy combatants, in watchful pose. She tried the first number on Kohn’s card. Was that a holo of Kohn himself, at the lower-left corner? ‘Pose’ was the word.

‘—insky Workers’ Defence Collective, how can I help you?’ a man’s voice sing-songed.

‘Oh. Thank you. Uh, is this a secure line?’

‘Sure is. It’s illegal. Would you like to switch to an open one?’

‘No! Uh, look. My name’s Janis Taine, I’m a researcher at Brunel University’ – at the other end somebody began tapping a keyboard with painful lack of skill – ‘and I’ve just been leaned on by a couple of guys who are probably, that is I think they were from…’

‘Stasis?’

‘Yes. Can you help?’

‘Hmm…We can get you to Norlonto. That’s out of their jurisdiction. Can’t say beyond that.’

‘That’s just what I want. So what do I do?’

‘We got a guy on site right now, Moh Kohn…’

‘I’ve got his card.’

‘Good, OK, call him up. If you can’t raise him, he’s probably crashed out, but you can go and bang on his door. Accommodation Block, one-one-five cee. You got that?’

‘One-one-five cee.’

‘Right. Any problem, call us back.’

‘OK. Thanks.’

She tried Kohn’s personal number. A holo of Kohn appeared, squatting on her phone like a heavily armed sprite.

‘I’m busy at the moment,’ it said. ‘If you would like to leave a message, please speak clearly after the tone.’

After a second there was a sound like a very small incoming shell, followed by a faint pop and an expectant silence.

‘Damn,’ Janis said, and cut the call.

She marched out of the lab and hurried down the stairs and stalked out across the campus, glancing sidelong at the far corners of buildings, half-expecting to see an infiltrator coming for her: crank or creep or…no, don’t think about that.

She thought about it. It was possible. They could be coming for her right now. She didn’t want to think about it – if you thought about it you’d just stop: the fear would fell you where you stood. She stopped thinking about what she might be getting away from and concentrated on where she had to go, the one place that might be safe from them, and within reach. She began to walk faster, then broke into a run.

She sprinted across grass and paving, splashed through a little stream and glanced into five identical stairwells with different numbers at their foot before she reached 110–115. At the top of the stairs she forced herself to slow down, back off from the adrenaline high. Picking out Kohn’s door was easy: it faced her at the end of the corridor, with that annoyingly congregational variant of the commie symbol scrawled on it in what looked like dripping fresh blood.

After a moment’s hesitation she pushed the door open. Kohn sat with his back to her, one hand resting on the desk, the other on the gun. The screen was blank. Kohn turned and looked at her. His glades were on, and behind them she saw bony orbits, empty sockets. She stood frozen. Kohn rose and reached towards her.

She tried to back through the closed door. His hands grasped her upper arms. The skull half-face loomed down at her.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

She just stared, her mouth working.

‘Damn,’ Kohn said.

She saw his cheek muscles twitch, first the right, then the left. He had flesh and eyes again. He pulled the glades forward, lifted them up on to the front of his helmet, and then slumped back into the chair.

‘Sorry about that, Janis.’

‘Wuhuhu…’ She let out a shuddering breath and shook her head. ‘Is that a bug or a feature?’

‘You want bug features?’ Kohn made as if to pull the glades down again. Janis caught his wrist.

‘No, thanks.’

She was looking at his eyes, and what she saw shocked her almost as much as the holograms had. But this time it wasn’t incomprehensible. The shock came from comprehending. Still holding his wrist, she leaned over and grasped his forehead gently in her fingertips and turned his head so that she could see his eyes more clearly. The irises were faint coronae around the eclipsing black of the dilated pupils.

Everything gets everywhere…

‘You’re tripping,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid…it’s something you picked up in the lab, that and the smoke. Do you understand?’

‘I understand.’ There was an odd tone to the statement, as if were in answer to a different question. Janis frowned. What mazes had he been running? The black pits looked back at her.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Heavy,’ Moh said. ‘Sand in my veins.’

‘D’you have any vitamin-C here?’ she asked, looking around. ‘That might help bring you down more gently.’

Before she could remonstrate, Kohn rose to his feet and walked with elaborate caution to a small fridge in the corner of the room. He bit open a litre carton of orange juice and gulped it down. He dropped to the bed and lay back and closed his eyes.

‘Ah, shit,’ he said. ‘Thanks, but it’s not gonna make any difference. I am down. I been there and come back, Janis. This ain’t tripping. This is reality.’

Goddess, she thought, he must be tripping real bad.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘What’s it like?’

‘Everything,’ he said.

Everything: Fugues of memory took him; any momentary slip, any lapse of attention on what was going on right now sent him slipping and sliding, sidestepping away, while in the slow now the sounds went on forming, the photons came in and made up the pictures, one movement completed itself and the next began. Volition became suspect as act preceded decision, millennia of philosophy falling down that millisecond gap. He’d just have to live with it, he decided, realizing that he already did.

Everything: The bright world the banner bright the symbol plain the greenbelt fields the greenfield streets the geodesic housing the crowds the quiet dark moments.

Everything: The plastic model spaceships hanging from black threads the old Warsaw Pact poster of a little girl cradling the earth DEFEND PEACE the stacked clutter of toys and books and tapes the VR space-helmet.

Everything: Creeping into the room at the centre of the house to watch his father working on the CAL project no sound but the click of a mouse the hardware fixes the earwax smell of solder.

Everything: The blue roundel the sectioned globe the white leaves the lenses and the muzzle swivelling.

Everything: OK YOU CAN TAKE THEM OUT NOW.

Everything.

He opened his mouth and a sound came out: a sob and a snarl, human pain and animal rage. He pushed the helmet off, and it rolled over the side of the bed and bounced once on the floor. Kohn kept his hands at his head, fingers clawing into his scalp. Tears leaked from under the heels of his hands and trickled with burning slowness down his cheek.

He sat and brought his head, hands clasped over it, down between his knees, and for several minutes rocked back and forth. Time was running almost normally now. Those roaring gusts were his breath, that distant booming surf his heart. This giddying black vault of luminous pictures, of echoing whispers from tiny minds locked in repetitive reminiscences, nattering conversations, clattering calculations – this was what his head looked like from the inside. This was himself.

He made a frantic effort to control it, to keep tabs on what was going on. Then he saw the rushing, whirling, snatching self as from the outside, and turned to see from whence he saw, and saw (of course):

nothing

a light on no sight

a void with the echo of a laugh, like the 2.726K background

a moment of amused illumination

nothing

everything

O

I

So it was you, all the time.

He smiled and opened his eyes, and saw Janis. She sat leaning forward on the chair by the desk, her green eyes hooded, brows drawn together, her hands on her knees. Her look held puzzlement and concern, and behind these emotions a detached, observing interest. He could smell her sweat under her scent, see where it made her blouse stick to her skin. He could see the blood behind the artificial pallor on her face.

She was absolutely beautiful. She was unbelievable. The light from the window shone in her eyes and sparkled on the tiny hairs on the backs of her hands. He could have drawn every line of her limbs under her too-formal clothes; he wanted to free her cinched waist and hold it in his own hands. Her shape, her real shape, her voice and scent – there was a place for all of them, a place in his mind pre-adapted for her. It was difficult to believe she had looked like this earlier, in the morning; but the images were there, sharp, and he hadn’t noticed.

He saw her expression change, startled, a second after his eyes opened – her lips part as if about to speak, and the unconscious shake of the head, the swift glance away and back; and her face recompose itself, the blink and check again that said, ‘No, I couldn’t possibly have seen that.’ She smiled with relief and straightened, shaking back her hair.

‘You’re down,’ she said.

Kohn nodded. He found he had come out of his foetal huddle and was sitting on the side of the bed. The comms helmet lay at his feet.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I really am back now. I thought I was, earlier, but I was still away. The juice helped. Thanks.’ He could see the reassurance, the normality, return to her expression. The hope that it was just an accidental exposure, nothing permanent…

‘How do you feel now?’ She said it with a voice that just edged over into the wrong side of casualness.

‘I’m OK,’ he said, ‘except that it wasn’t just a trip. It’s changed me. Something has changed in my mind. In my brain.’

He stood up and stalked to the window. A strip of green grass, a wall, another strip of green grass, another accommodation block. It was obvious from the shadows of the buildings that the time was about 14.30.

He turned back to her.

‘I remember everything,’ he said, watching for her reaction. There it was: the little start, the drawing back, the oh shit look. Got you, lady. You know what this is about. ‘Memory drugs, right?’

‘That might be what they’ve turned out to be,’ she said. She spread her hands. ‘I didn’t even suspect they’d affect you. Honest.’

‘So why did you come here?’

She told him. He sat down again, with his head in his hands. After a minute he looked up.

‘Fucking great,’ he said. ‘You’ve put something in my head whose military applications alone are to die for.’ He grimaced. ‘So to speak. We are both in deep shit, lady. Deep-technology shit.’

‘You don’t need to tell me that! So let’s get out of here, get to Norlonto. We’ll be safe there—’

‘Safe from Stasis, sure.’ Kohn licked his dry lips, shivered. ‘Listen to me. Something I do need to tell you. It gets worse.’

‘How?’ She sounded like she was daring him.

‘You thought I was tripping. Hah. That’s what it felt like. Then I started mainframing as well.’

‘Why?’

‘It wanted—’ he stopped. ‘I wanted – oh, shit. First there was these, you know, patterns. They came in my head, then they came on this screen. And the gun. I’d left it in intrusion mode, looking for traces of your project.’

He smiled at the annoyance on her lips.

‘SOP, I’m afraid. You’re dealin’ with a ruthless mercenary here! Anyway. Then there was a trip. Weird stuff, but what d’you expect? A virtual environment. An electric animal. A sinister old woman, who turned me into a sinister young woman, for a while. Meeting the Old Man. In my case the figure of ancient wisdom happens to be Trotsky. A life-and-death struggle with a figure of evil, which the animal helped me to win.

‘After that it wasn’t normal at all. It was like I was communicating with another awareness. In the system, in the nets.’ He jerked his head to indicate the terminal.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Janis said in a jaded tone. ‘And then you talked to Gawd. Big white light, was it?’

He didn’t have to close his eyes, now, to see inside himself. He could hold it, just there, on the edge, watch all that furious activity and hold back from the urge to rush and push. Right now he could see the anger coming, like vats of molten lead being winched to a battlement. It was all right, it was all right.

‘Don’t patronize me,’ he said. ‘I know exactly the experience you’re talking about. I’ve had that. This was another trip entirely. Something different. I talked to an AI, and I woke it up. Something in the nets that wanted a piece of information from my memory. Wanted it bad. And because of your drugs, found it. It was like it knew about me. Knew me.’

He thought of what Catherin had said about computers that’ll remember us, and shivered again.

‘Why do you think it knew you?’

‘Something I remembered,’ he said. ‘I could remember everything then, but I can’t now. Not without—’ He realized he had everything still to learn about how to track down the memories he now knew were there. ‘There was something – just before. A memory from way back. From when I was a kid. The information it wanted was a piece of code that I saw on the screen of my father’s terminal. And there was a memory just before that. It came to me like being reminded of a phrase I’d overheard: the “star fraction.”’

He could see no sign that it meant anything to her – and his own mind slipped again and he remembered being asked what he remembered about the star fraction (no, it was a proper name, it was the ‘Star Fraction’), and he remembered that at the time he could remember nothing, tell nothing—

‘And then what happened?’ Janis asked. Kohn jolted back to the present.

If I could tell you, if I could make you see it.

‘Creation,’ he said.

She was facing away from him, looking at him sideways. His cheeks ached as if he’d been smiling for a long time.

‘As in “Let there be light”?’ she asked.

‘Yes!’

Janis took a deep breath. ‘Look, Moh, no offence, OK? You’re still telling me things that sound very like what would have happened if you’d just stuffed your face with magic mushrooms. We can find out if your memory’s been affected. I’m desperate to find out. Maybe you did fire up some wildcard AI. All the more reason to get the hell out of here. What I need to know right now is, are you fit to get us out?’

He thought about it. Strange things were still going on in his head, but the basic equipment was functioning as normal. He could tell; that was one of the things that was strange.

‘I’m OK,’ he said. ‘If that’s a contract, lady, you’re on.’

Janis nodded.

Kohn disconnected the gun from the terminal and put his gear back on.

‘For a start,’ he said, ‘let’s mosey over to your lab and get your magic molecules to a safe place.’

Janis felt as if part of her mind were still way behind her body, running to keep up and not at all convinced about the direction she was running in. They walked back to the biology block through a brief flurry of black snow. Janis tried to flick off every flake that landed on her blouse, and got only grey smudges for her trouble.

In the lab she found a polystyrene box, and started chipping ice from the freezer compartment. Kohn loitered suspiciously in the doorway.

‘Funny,’ Janis said. ‘The ice is melting in here really fast.’

Kohn looked at her, frowning. His eyes widened.

‘Stop!’

He lunged forward and hauled her back from the fridge, then pushed her to the floor. There was a hiss and flash from the freezer.

Kohn toed the fridge door open and snatched the rack of test-tubes. The terminals began to smoke. More sputtering flashes, flames.

‘Time to go,’ he said.

A smoke alarm sounded, a needling beep. Then it too shorted out. Smoke crowded down from ceiling level as they retreated. Kohn shut the door and hit a fire alarm.

He and Janis joined the general evacuation, ignoring the occasional queer look. The snow had stopped. A few dozen people milled around in slush, waiting to be checked off by their safety marshals. A siren dopplered, approaching.

This time Janis had her jacket. She pulled it around herself and shivered. Kohn was swearing to himself.

She dammed his flood of obscenity. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Demon attack,’ Kohn said. ‘A logic virus that gets at the firmware of the power supply, timed or triggered to produce a nasty electrical fire. Something’s fighting back through the system. Defence mechanisms, all right! Set up like antibodies for just this contingency. Damn. I should’ve thought.’

‘But that’s my work,’ Janis said. She felt she was about to cry. ‘Up in smoke. And all the poor little mice.’

‘Near enough painless,’ Kohn said. ‘And the project’s over, don’t you see? It’s worked. You’ve built the monster. It’s roaming the countryside. That fire probably came from the cranks. High-tech version of the crowd of peasants with torches. What we have to worry about is the mad scientist, whoever that is.’

Janis thought about it as insurance-company firefighters ran past.

‘I thought I was the mad scientist,’ she said.

‘Nah,’ Kohn said. ‘You’re just Ygor.’

She pulled a face, hunched a shoulder.

‘And the monster?’

‘Me,’ he said.

‘I thought you meant this AI of yours.’

‘That too,’ Kohn said. ‘By now it’s probably blundering around in the milieu, the nets, triggering alarms and generally raising hell.’

Janis found herself grinning. ‘I can believe that,’ she said, ‘if it’s picked up anything from your personality.’

‘Still want to go with me?’

‘If you’re going to Norlonto, yes.’

‘No problem,’ he said. ‘That’s where I’m going anyway. It’s where we live. I have our armoured car parked round the back.’

Janis laughed and caught his arm, started him walking.

‘An armoured car? That’s what I like to hear. I’ll stick with you.’

She laughed again, and let her whole weight swing for a second on his arm. It was as if he didn’t notice.

‘There are some men,’ she intoned, ‘that Things were not meant to know.’

5

The Fifth-Colour Country

The armoured car was smaller than Janis had expected, low and angular, its black so matte that it was difficult to get an idea of its exact shape: a Stealth vehicle, she thought. Inside, it looked old. Cables joined with insulating tape hung in multicoloured loops under the instrument casings. The two leather seats at the front were frayed. Two even more worn seats faced each other in the back. What appeared to be windows were wrapped around at head-level in the front, but showed nothing.

Kohn demonstrated how to strap in, and then leaned back in his seat. He reached up and flicked a switch. Nothing happened. He cursed and flicked it again. The wrap-around screens came to life as the car began to move: the effect, uncanny, vulnerable-feeling, was of riding in the open.

The vehicle was waved through the exit gate. The traffic was heavier now on the main road, and as the car slipped through it there were moments when Janis thought it was actually invisible to other drivers. Kohn seemed unperturbed.

They stopped at her flat long enough for Janis to pack a few bags, shake her head sadly over the mess, and leave a note and a credit line for Sonya. Kohn fumed and fidgeted, making a big thing of checking every room and watching from windows. Back in the car, his choice of route baffled her.

‘Why are we stopping?’ Janis felt irritated that she sounded so anxious.

‘Won’t be a minute,’ Kohn said.

He jumped out, leaving the engine running and the gun on the seat with its muzzle pointing out of the door. Janis kept looking around. Gutted houses, boarded shopfronts, incredible numbers of people swarming along the whole street. Braziers glowed; weapons and teeth glinted in the shadows of weird crystalline buildings among ruins.

Kohn returned and dropped a package by her feet. The armoured car moved slowly down the street, avoiding children and animals. Janis looked at the package: white paper, blue lettering.

‘You stopped there to buy a kilo of sugar?’

Kohn glanced at her. ‘Don’t put it in your coffee.’

They passed through a checkpoint (Kohn paid the tax in ammo clips, which struck Janis as entirely apt) and then they were out of Ruislip and back on the A410.

‘Afghans,’ Kohn said, relaxing. ‘Don’t want to sound racist or anything, but you let them move in and bang goes the neighbourhood.’

Janis looked at the soaring towers of Southall away to their right.

‘It’s hardly their fault that the Indians had better antimissile systems. I saw it on the tel, back home. Manchester. It looked like a horrible firework show.’

Kohn switched to auto and leaned back, hands behind his head. Janis tried to ignore the road-tanker wheels rolling beside them.

‘Never happened,’ Kohn said flatly. ‘There was no missile exchange between the Afghans and the Indians. It wasn’t even the Hanoverians did that damage, another version I’ve heard, including from locals. No, it was the fuckinyouenn, man.’

‘The fucking you…? Oh, the UN! The Yanks.’

‘Yeah, the great Space Defense force, the peacekeepers. Hit them from orbit, not a damn’ thing they could do.’

‘And it got covered up?’

‘Nah! They announced it! Your local tel station must’ve had reasons of its own for lying about it.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s no conspiracy.’

Janis fought down a helpless sense of chaos, a reverse paranoia.

‘How did things get this way? Don’t you people have theories about history, about why things happen?’ She looked at him sharply. ‘Or is your guess as good as mine? Was it all wrong what I learned in school about Marxism?’

Kohn fingered the controls unnecessarily, staring straight ahead.

‘I have my own ideas about the answer to the first question,’ he said. ‘For the rest it’s yes, yes, and probably. We’re in the same ship as the rest of you, burning the same air. Burning it up.’

There was not enough violence on television, Kohn thought as he crouched behind rubble and waited for the order to attack. On television and in films the shots followed the shots, the picture gave you the picture. It was just not good enough, no preparation for the real thing. A bad influence on the young. Most of the time you never saw the enemy, even in house-to-house fighting. Most of the time you were lucky if you knew where your own side was.

He’d fought before, but that had been scuffles, rumbles. This was a real war, even if a tiny one. Somewhere in those burnt-out houses two hundred and fifty metres away were men who wanted him dead. His first fight was against unreality, the what-am-I-doing-here feeling. There was some sound political reason for it, he knew: the Indians were being backed by the government in their dispute with the Afghans, and several leftist militias were fighting on the Muslim side out of conviction. The Cats had joined in for the money.

Johnny Smith, the young Hizbollah cadre beside him, looked up from his computer, poked his Kalashnikov over the rubble and let loose a five-second burst.

‘OK, guys,’ he said quietly over everyone’s phones. ‘Last one dead’s a sissy!’

He jumped up and over the wall, waving Kohn to follow, and sprinted up the street. Kohn found himself, without conscious decision, running after him. The gun was making a hell of a noise. Then he hit dirt behind an overturned car and glanced around to see what the rest were doing. Oh Gaia! They were running on past him! A mortar round crumped into where they’d been seconds earlier. Rubble thudded around him. He changed magazines and ran forward again, firing. This time he ended up slammed into a gutted shop doorway. Another figure hurtled in almost on top of him. Their armour clashed together. They fell apart. The other flipped up a visor to wipe sweat away from her face.

Her face. It was an amazing face and it was grinning like a maniac’s. Kohn suddenly realized that he was too. His cheeks ached. The visor came down.

‘Come on,’ she said.

Kohn saw out of the corner of his eye the corkscrew contrails spiralling lazily in—

‘NO!’ he roared. He caught her arm and pulled, then ran straight out to the middle of the street. The ground bounced under their feet and the building came down like a curtain. A couple of klicks to the north Ruislip was going the same way.

They stuck around long enough to cover the retreat. Later Kohn remembered lugging about two-thirds of Johnny Smith towards a Red Crescent chopper and then looking down at what he carried and just dropping it, just stopping. It wasn’t that there was nothing left of the man’s face except the eyes – maxilla, mandible, nares blasted clean away – but that those eyes were open, unblinking, pupils not responding to the searing flashes overhead. Blood still bubbled, but Johnny Smith had been brainstem-dead for minutes. Anything worth saving had gone to his God. The organ-bankers could have the rest.

The woman had been with him when they were airlifted out through the dense smoke. And there had been another mercenary in the Mil Mi-34, one who chewed coca leaves and held on to his shattered right arm as if waiting for glue to set and kept saying, ‘Hey Moh, why do they call us Kelly girls?’

They swung on to the A40. Troubled by his sudden silence, Janis glanced at Kohn sidelong, and saw his face had taken on again that look – of inhuman acceptance of some deeply fallen knowledge – which had startled her when he’d come out of the trance back in his room. It passed, and the harder lines of his features returned. He was still looking at the traffic.

‘How do you feel now?’ she asked.

He shivered. ‘It’s like…I might have changed the world forever today, and there’s this thing like – oh, hell.’ He lit a cigarette, closed his eyes and sighed away the smoke. ‘You ever try to imagine seeing nothing, maybe when you were little? Not darkness: nothing. To see what it is that you don’t see out of the back of your head.’

‘You mean, visualize the boundary of your visual field.’

‘There you go. Science. I knew there’d be a way to make sense of it. Anyway. If I do that now, Janis, there’s something there. Something like’ – he cat’s-cradled his fingers, moved them flickering like fluent Sign – ‘that isn’t like light, same as it used to be not like dark. And – you know when you wake up, and you know you’ve had a dream and you can’t remember it?’

She felt a chill at the reminder. Everything gets everywhere.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know just what you mean.’

‘Well it’s like, if I try to remember, I remember, but I never know what it is until—’

He stopped. ‘They hit me like flashbacks. At first it was’ – he struck his forehead repeatedly – ‘bang bang bang. Now I can consciously not do it. Most of the time.’ He looked at her with disconcerting intentness. ‘Was that what you were aiming at? Everybody remembering everything?’

‘I never thought about it like that.’

‘Makes me ask myself, who did? Who would want people to remember?’

‘That’s too…general,’ she said. ‘It could have all sorts of applications – enhanced learning, delayed senility, that kind of thing.’

‘That kind of thing. Sure. But memory’s more than that. Memory’s everything. It’s what we are.’

‘Speaking of memory—’ She hesitated. ‘This is – there’s something I just thought of that I want to ask you.’

‘Ask me anything you like,’ he said.

She paused, then said in a rush, ‘You know what you said about the Star Fraction, about the code being something your father wrote, when you were a kid. Uh, is there a reason you can’t just ask him—?’

She stopped again.

‘Yeah,’ Kohn said flatly. ‘They got killed. My father and my mother.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He made a chopping motion with his hand. ‘Happens.’

‘Was it in the war?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It was afterwards. In the Peace Process.’

He fell into another introverted silence, his cigarette smouldering to ash that dropped off, centimetre by centimetre. Suddenly he stirred himself, stubbed out the cigarette and reached up for another switch.

‘See if we’re on the news,’ he said.

The windshield screen went wild and then stabilized to rapidly changing images as Kohn scanned the news channels. Every few seconds he’d mark an item; after a minute he stopped and pulled them all together.

‘Look,’ he said.

Janis stared at the multiple patches of flitting pictures and sliding subtitles. After some silence she said, ‘Oh, Gaia.’

Hundreds of system crashes, all around the world. None, in themselves, terribly serious, but together they amounted to the software equivalent of a minor earth tremor set off by a nuclear detonation, ringing the globe like a bell. Detecting the source involved microsecond discriminations. Wherever anyone had bothered to do that, all the arrows pointed to London.

The Carbon Life Alliance had denied responsibility, but said they’d like to contact anyone who could plausibly claim it.

‘Think we should take them up on it?’ Janis teased.

Kohn flicked the screen back to clear.

‘No doubt they’ll be in touch,’ he said. He turned to her. ‘Still think it was all in my head?’

‘No, but that doesn’t mean your experience was what you think it was.’ She felt that she had to be stubborn on this point. ‘And remember, there really are AIS on the nets. Nothing conscious, I’m convinced of that, but perfectly capable of fooling you. Some of them designed by highly mischievous mind-fuckers.’

‘I know that,’ Kohn said. He sounded tired again. ‘Gopher-golems and such. Try to get you into arguments. I keep telling you, I done all that. You want me to show you my kill-files?’

‘OK, Kohn, OK.’ She smiled uncertainly. ‘I’m only saying you should keep an open mind…’

Kohn laughed so loud and long that she had to join in.

‘“Keep an open mind.”’

‘You know what I meant.’

The car passed under a great concrete arch alive with lights.

‘Welcome to space,’ Kohn said.

‘Oh. Yeah, I’ve heard of that. Extraterrestriality.’

‘A concept of dubious provenance, but it puts this place on the map.’

She laughed. ‘A five-colour map!’

‘Damn’ right. We live in the fifth-colour country, the one that has no borders. The next America.’

‘I thought it was the present America that really ran things up there.’

‘“You – you are only the present”,’ Kohn said obscurely. ‘In theory their writ runs down here too: Stasis can’t get in, but Space Defense can zap us any time they want. America, huh. The US/UN ain’t America. More like the England that tried to own the New World. More like bloody Portugal for all the chance it’s got of succeeding. Look at these: I’ll bet on them against any battlesats ever built.’

She followed his pointing finger and saw a sight she seldom bothered to notice, a flight of re-entry gliders descending from the south, black arrowheads against the sky.

‘“Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.”’ This time she knew he was quoting. ‘Costly bales, Janis, costly bales. That’s where it’s at. That’s where I’ll put my money.’

‘Hi, mum!’

No answer. Jordan let the door close behind him and bounded cheerfully up the stairs. The house’s familiar smells of cooking and cleaning, furniture polish, soap, stew in the pot, obscurely reassured. Sometimes they made him feel as if he were suffocating, and he had to stick his head out of the skylight window, get a good breath of industrial rather than domestic air. As his two elder brothers and his sister had left home he’d inherited more and more space, and now had the entire attic to himself.

As he ascended the stair-ladder to the attic he heard low murmuring voices. Adrenaline jolted his heart. When his head came above floor-level he saw straight through the open door of his bedroom. His mother and father were sitting side by side on his bed, heads lifted from an open book in their laps. At their feet lay a scatter of antique paperbacks and older hard-backs. They were books he wasn’t really supposed to have, ones he’d picked up here and there from bookleggers, hard to control even in the Christian community: old rationalist works in the beautiful brown bindings of the Thinker’s Library – Bradlaugh and Darwin and Haeckel, Huxley and Llewellyn Powys, Ingersoll and Paine – and battered paperbacks by Asimov and Sagan and Gould, Joachim Kahl, Russell, Rand, Lofmark, Lamont, Paul Kurtz, Richard Dawkins. The dread heresiarchs of secular humanism. He’d concealed them at the back of a high bookshelf, behind volumes of sermons and a thousand-page commentary on the Book of Numbers. It wasn’t the sight of these books that made his knees weak and his heart sick. It was the sight of the one they’d been looking at: his diary.

They weren’t even particularly old, his parents. They’d married young. His father’s beard had grey hairs coiling among the black; his face had lines like cuts. His mother’s eyes were reddened. Both parents watched him in silence as he walked up.

‘I feel totally betrayed,’ his mother said. ‘How could you write such vile, satanic filth? To think how we trusted you—’

She turned away, laid her face on her husband’s shoulder, and sobbed.

‘Now look what you’ve done to your poor mother.’

Jordan had expected to feel guilty at this moment, the moment he had put off for so long, the moment when he let his parents know what he really thought. Now that they had found out for themselves he felt embarrassed, sure – his cheeks burned at the thought of them reading his diary – but most of what he felt was anger at their doing this. The gall of it, the effrontery!

‘Don’t I have any privacy?’

He snatched the diary away and snapped it shut. His hands and voice shook.

‘Not while you’re under my roof and my responsibility.’

His father looked set to launch into a denunciation. Jordan spoke before he had a chance.

‘That’s it! If I can’t live under your roof with the minimum civilized decency of knowing I won’t be spied on or have you rummage through my possessions then I won’t live here at all!’

His father jumped up. ‘Now, you wait a minute! We don’t want to drive you out. We’re worried – terribly, terribly worried about you. What you’ve been reading – even what you’ve been writing – if we talk about it, take your doubts to a minister or a counsellor, I’m sure you’ll come to see how you’ve been led astray by these wicked, lying rationalistic libertines whose philosophy and vain deceit have been refuted over and over again by Christian thinkers.’

‘No.’

Jordan let his eyes wander. He’d decorated the room as near as he’d dared to his tastes: space prints of distant galaxies and supernova shells (Creationist propaganda), pictures of tribal peoples (mission appeals), pictures of chastely clad but pretty and subtly alluring girls (Modesty advertisements). Ah well. The books they’d heaped together were all he really wanted to take. He dragged a rucksack from the corner and stooped to gather them up, then walked around randomly grabbing clothes. Emotions are commanded by thoughts, and who but you commands your thoughts? Thus spake Epictetus, or possibly Wayne Dwyer. Whatever. Jordan commanded his thoughts.

‘Don’t turn your back on us,’ his mother said. ‘Don’t turn your back on the truth.’

‘You call yourself a free thinker,’ his father taunted, ‘but you don’t want to face anyone who might change your mind! All you’re really interested in is going after your own way, indulging your own carnal lusts. All this atheist garbage is just a miserable excuse. If you rely on that you will one day face God Himself with a lie in your right hand.’

Jordan felt he had swallowed ice.

‘As if I hadn’t heard all their arguments already!’ He took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I’ll listen to them. I’ll argue with your Christian thinkers but I’ll do it from out of range of the guns in their right hands.’

‘Don’t make me laugh! Nobody is threatening you with a gun.’

Jordan buckled the rucksack. He saw one remaining book that had been kicked aside, and retrieved it. Another of the Watts & Co Thinker’s Library: The History of Modern Philosophy by A. W. Benn. He smiled to himself, then straightened his face and back.

‘How do your Elders keep ideas out, people out, books out? With guards, with guns! You can’t have a free inquiry or discussion here.’

His father ignored the parry and asked, ‘Where do you think you’ll find this precious freedom? Some dirty communist enclave? Fine freedom you’ll find there!’

‘You’re probably right,’ Jordan said, thinking: Communist? ‘So I’m going to Norlonto.’

The high colour left his father’s face. His mother threw herself back on the bed with a moan. She said something into the pillow about the cities of the plain.

‘You would go from Beulah to that Babylon? Then you’re beyond reasoning with.’ His father looked at him with contempt. ‘Just you try it! You’ll soon be back with your tail between your legs. You don’t even have a passport.’

‘Yes I do,’ Jordan said. His hand patted his side pocket, felt the weight like a book. ‘Freedom’s own passport. Money.’

‘So you’re a thief as well as a renegade.’

‘It’s not stolen—’ Jordan began hotly, then stopped.

The enormity of what he’d done struck him for the first time. Until now he’d been thinking forward, not backward, of the implications of having that money. What it amounted to was taking a fee from the ultimate enemy, the foe of the community, of the state that protected the community and of the alliance that shielded the state. And they knew or suspected it. That was why his father had thrown ‘communist’ in his face! Mrs Lawson must have found out something about his unauthorized activity and dropped some heavy hint. Scheming Christian witch.

‘Think what you like,’ he said.

He hefted the rucksack and took a step towards his parents, with some vague notion of a handshake, a kiss – stupid, stupid. They recoiled from him as if frightened. Jordan backed off to the door, and on a sudden inspiration smiled and waved and stepped out through it and closed it and locked it. It wouldn’t take them long to get out, he thought as he descended the stair-ladder, the stair, the steps. But, maybe, long enough. When he reached the street he turned left and started running, down the hill.

He cursed every subversive atheistic volume in his possession a lot sooner than his parents would have dared to hope. About ten minutes after leaving them, as he hurried along Park Road. It was a well designed frame rucksack, and it didn’t dig into his back and shoulders, but the weight was enough to send sweat flying from his face. He walked past upmarket shops – delis, boutiques, craft – and respectable apartment houses. This, however, was the faintly disreputable fringe of Beulah City, the abode of essential but intrinsically unreliable types: inspirational artists, clean-minded scriptwriters, decent clothing designers, conservative sociologists…they all found it necessary to congregate close to the border, and even to make discreet business trips across it. No amount of sarcastic pulpit speculation about what possible benefit they could derive from this proximity to the imminent Ground Zero of divine wrath made any difference. A fine sight they would make at the Rapture (Jordan had heard on innumerable Sundays) when, if – and, one was given to understand, it was a very big ‘if’ – they were among the chosen, they would float skywards miles away from the main body of ascending believers, clutching their drinks or worldly magazines!

But, scrupulous though it was about what it allowed in, Beulah City, as a literally paid-up member of the Free World, couldn’t afford to be seen restricting people from going out. A population self-selected for enthusiasm had to be a better advertisement for a way of life than a conscript citizenry. Such liberal principles didn’t apply to fleeing felons. And apart from the money, which, even if its source was as untraceable as the Black Planner had made out, would be difficult to account for, he now had a charge of unlawful imprisonment to answer.

After a kilometre the traffic on the road beside him slowed to a pace that had him overtaking one vehicle after another. Little electric cars and long light trucks, bumper to bumper. Jordan glanced at them idly. The flowery italics of a Modesty logo caught his eye. He had of course been aware that a lot of the community’s exports were high-cost and low-weight, ideal for transport by airship from the skyport – Alexandra Port, just up the hill in Norlonto. He simply hadn’t made the connection before.

He shook his head. The habit of averting eyes and thoughts had worn deeper tracks in his brain than he’d realized. But how else had he put up with it all for so long, put off the confrontation? To hell with it. He selected another truck. BP: Beloved Physician, the drug company. He jumped on to the running-board and grinned at the driver, who looked up startled from a laptop.

‘Any chance of a lift, mate?’ he yelled. The driver, a lad about Jordan’s age, looked at him doubtfully for a moment, noticed the rucksack and leaned over to open the door.

‘Thanks.’ Jordan followed the rucksack inside.

His disconcerting capacity to lie went into overdrive.

‘Oh, man,’ he said, ‘am I glad to see you! My company does a lot of business with this lot, and just before we closed today they asked me to nip up to the port and deliver a stack of manuals and catalogues to one of their reps.’ He hefted his luggage. ‘Weighs a ton, too. You’d think in this day and age…’

‘Yeah,’ said the driver. ‘Don’t I know it? They just don’t trust the networks, that’s why they have to put that stuff on paper. Don’t want their ideas ripped off, you know? Mind you, between you and me I dunno why they bother. Know what I’ve got in the back?’

Jordan settled back into the seat. ‘Medicines?’ he hazarded.

‘Modified diamorphine for hospices! Designer heroin for the dying, if you want to be crude about it. Stops pain, but it doesn’t get you so high you can’t take in the message of salvation. Now, I don’t agree with gambling and all that, but if I did…how much would you bet some poor militiaman wouldn’t spare a sample for some kind officer who comes to shake his hand? And before you know it they’ll be using it to psych people up before combat. No guarantee it’ll only get to Christian militias either. Makes you think, dunnit?’

‘It sure does,’ Jordan said.

The first border post, the Beulah City one, was just before the road forked. To the left it went up to Muswell Hill, to the right into Alexandra Port. Each road had its Norlonto border post, with a couple of guards, and behind them, strung out along the roadside, a welcoming party of drug dealers, prostitutes, cultists, atheists, deprogrammers, newsvendors…Twenty or so Warrior guards devoted most of their attention to the incoming traffic, which their efforts had backed up to somewhere over the hill on both roads.

One of them opened the door on the driver’s side and leaned in. Black uniform, visored helmet, knuckles and buckles. He scrutinized the driver’s pass.

‘Don’t see anything about a passenger,’ he said.

‘Sorry officer, last minute…’

The Warrior pointed at the rucksack.

‘Let’s have a look in there.’

Jordan was reaching towards it when a hand grasped his wrist. It was the driver’s.

‘Don’t you touch it, mate. That’s confidential to the company.’ He turned to the Warrior. ‘If you want to open that bag, you’ll have to account for it to my boss. And his.’ He held out the laptop. ‘Form’s on there somewhere, shouldn’t take more’n oh I dunno ten minutes, fifteen outside.’

The guard hesitated.

‘It’s all right,’ the driver said. ‘We’re not in a hurry.’

Jordan noticed how cold the sweat felt as it dried.

‘Ah, gerron with you,’ the guard muttered. He backed out.

The engine whined into life.

‘Thanks,’ Jordan said.

‘It’s nothing. I’m used to them.’ The driver grinned at Jordan. ‘Lucky I’m a better liar than you, huh? What you got in there, anyway?’

‘Oh.’ Jordan felt hot again. ‘A load of irreligious books, actually.’

‘Good on you.’ Jordan thought: What? ‘Flog them where they can’t do no harm, get some money off the bastards. Can’t expect the Elders and the cops to see it that way, mind.’ He slowed at the junction. ‘You’ll be wanting the other road, the town not the port. See ya.’

Jordan wanted to say something grateful, shake the guy’s hand, give him some money, but the driver barely looked at him, concentrating on the traffic. So he just said ‘Good luck’, and jumped out.

He walked past the cars up to where a bored-looking young woman toting a rifle took a piece of plastic from each driver going in. Mostly she handed the plastic back. She turned to him. Dusty freckled face under a black knotted headband with a blue enamel star. Space-movement militia.

‘Got a chit?’

Jordan shook his head.

‘Got any money?’

Jordan took out, cautiously, a fraction of his fortune. She fanned the wad.

‘That’ll do,’ she said. He thought she was going to keep it, but she handed it back. ‘You can live on that till you get work, if you want. But you’ll have to give me a hundred if you’re going in.’

She gave him a receipt, a thin stiff plastic card. ‘Hang on to this chit and you won’t have to pay again, no matter how many times you come back or how long you stay. You’ll have to pay for services, but that’s up to you.’

‘Services?’

She gestured impatience. ‘Protection. Some roads. All that.’

Jordan pocketed the chit. ‘What does this pay for?’

‘The space you take up,’ she said. ‘And the air you breathe.’

Jordan walked slowly up the hill. The air felt free.

6

The Space and Freedom Party

It all began with the space movement.

Under the Republic, the libertarians – whose attitudes to the Republic were even more conflicting, and conflictual, than those of the socialists – had started talking about space the way some socialists had once talked about peace. Somewhat to their surprise, it had worked for them, too, giving an extreme and unpopular minority hegemony over a large popular movement. By the time the Republic fell, the space movement had too much support, weapons and money to be suppressed at a bearable cost.

So, like most of the other popular movements that had flourished under the Republic, it had to be bought off.

The area now called Norlonto had been ceded to the space movement as part of the Restoration Settlement. At the time it had been considered almost valueless, including as it did a swathe of shanty-towns (obscurely known as the Greenbelt) and a vast refugee population, legacy of the Republic’s free immigration and asylum policy. The space movement had developed it as an entrepôt for European trade with the space stations and settlements. Most commercial launch-sites were tropical. Most airports were liable to military or paramilitary requisitioning, to say nothing of assault. Airship traffic had turned out to be viable, and less vulnerable than conventional airfreight to increasingly unpredictable weather. Alexandra Port’s trade quickly diversified.

Norlonto never quite became respectable enough to be a new Hong Kong or even a new Shanghai, and the ending of drug prohibition undercut it, but it retained its attraction as a tax and data haven, enterprise zone and social test-bed. The space movement had evolved into a hybrid of joint-stock corporation and propaganda campaign, and had tried to create in the territory it disdained to govern a condition approximating the stateless market which its early idealists and investors had intended for space itself.

Above the atmosphere, above the graves where the pioneers shared blessed ignorance with the Fenians and Jacobins and Patriots and Communards and Bolsheviks, the lords of the Earth and their liegemen rode high, couching lances of laser fire. From the battlesats out to the Belt, the state had space, and freedom.

Kohn let the automatics guide the car through Norlonto’s crowded streets, and allowed the new pathways in his mind to carry him back to where it had all begun.

They were building the future and getting paid by the hour, and they’d worked like pioneers; like kibbutzniks; like communists. Each day after work Kohn would watch the cement dust sluice away, and think hot showers the best amenity known to man, something he’d kill to keep. He’d take his clean clothes from the locker, bundle his overalls into the laundry hopper and swagger off the site, his day’s pay next to his heart. It was the best yet of his fifteen summers: the space boom just starting to pick up where the post-war reconstruction had left off, scars healing, new buildings going up. Long evenings when he could hit the streets, take in the new music, meet girls. There seemed to be girls everywhere, of his own age and older. Most of them had independence, a job and a place to crash, no hassles with parents. School really was out forever. If you wanted education you could get it from the net, as nature intended.

He was sinking foundations; he was getting in on the ground floor…the sheer hubris of taking this place and declaring it an outpost of space made him feel as if a taut string were vibrating in his chest. An open universe, unowned, was there for the taking, sixty-five kilometres away – straight up. Out there you could build the ground you walked on, and the possibility of doing so went on forever. One day he’d do it, one day he’d carve out his chunk of it, and there would always be enough and as good left over. Space offered the ultimate freedom and the ultimate justice. Earth had not anything to show more fair.

But that was only a potential, an aching longing, as long as the reality of space development was turned against itself, literally turned inwards, by Space Defense. The US/UN held that high ground, cynically supervising the planet’s broken blocs. The Peace Process: divide-and-rule replicating downwards in a fractal balkanization of the world. Britain’s version of the Peace Process gave each of the former oppositions and interests their own bloodstained bone to chew on, as Free States under the Kingdom. They called it the Restoration Settlement.

The irreconcilables and recusants of the defeated regime called it the Betrayal. Driven back to some snowline of social support in the cleared silicon glens of Scotland, the blackened ghettoes of the Midlands or the pitted guts of Wales, the handful who still held on to their weapons and their politics proclaimed themselves the Army of the New Republic.

One of those long evenings Kohn was sitting on the low forecourt wall of a pub in Golders Green, sipping with caution at a litre of Stella Artois. He wore shades in the twilight. The round, white-enamelled table where the others sat was jammed against the wall, enabling him to lean gently on the shoulder of his current girlfriend, Annie. Like most of the girls around (that was where the shades came in, for covert appraisals) she was wearing a skin-tight catsuit that covered everything up to her chin, including each finger and toe. The gauzy, floaty shift which covered it somehow made its contours no less detailed or revealing. As one of his older workmates had remarked appreciatively when the fashion had first drifted down the street, it was filf, pure filf.

Anyway, they were all workmates here. Himself, Annie, the tall Brummie about his own age that they called Stone, and Stone’s girlfriend, Lynette – all worked on the same site. Stone was a labourer like himself; Lynette was training to be an engineer. He didn’t like to think about what Annie did, but every so often he’d get a chill sweat at the thought of her walking along the high girders. Women were good at that, she kept telling him. Look at all those gymnasts. Yeah, yeah.

‘Well, we won,’ Stone said. ‘We fuckin beat them.’

They all grinned at each other. They’d just won a fairly audacious pay-and-conditions gain out of a short, sharp strike.

‘This old gel came along to the picket line a couple of days ago,’ Stone said. ‘Lecturer at the college. Gave us some money from the students for the strike fund. Didn’t really need it, you know? Union’s been solid. Anyway, they’d gone to the trouble of taking a collection, so I thanked her and said I’d put it in the branch account for the next time.’ He laughed. ‘She said damn’ right, there’d always be a next time. She sold me this paper.’

Kohn thought: Oh, no. His glass banged as he put it down. Stone hauled a tattered tabloid from the inside of his jacket and spread it on the table.

‘Red Star,’ Stone said. ‘It’s a bit extreme, but some of the things they say make sense. Thought you might be interested, Moh.’

Does it show? Kohn wondered wildly. Is there some mark of Cain branded on my forehead that identifies me to everybody else, no matter what I say or don’t say, no matter how much I want to put it all behind me? He picked the paper up reluctantly, took his shades off to read. There it was, the banner with the strange device: a hammer-and-sickle, facing the opposite way from the traditional Soviet one, with a ‘4’ over the hammer.

He didn’t read beyond the masthead.

‘The only red stars I know about,’ he said, ‘are dead, off the main sequence, and consist mostly of faintly glowing gas.’

Lynette was the only one who really got that.

‘They should call it Red Giant!’

Kohn smiled at her and looked at Stone, who scowled, taken aback.

‘I thought, you were good in the strike, you know how to organize, you always stick up for yourself…’

More than a hundred years, Kohn thought, and the word for a person like that is still bolshie. The old man would’ve been proud.

‘Nothing personal, yeah?’ Kohn said. ‘It’s just – don’t waste any time thinking about workers’ revolution. Crock a shit, man. It ain’t gonna happen. So no matter how clever some of it sounds, any idea that depends on it being practical can be dismissed out a hand.’

He sat back, feeling smug. He’d kept it cool, kept it logical. It hadn’t been one of those outbursts of loathing and contempt that sometimes escaped him.

‘Well,’ Annie said. ‘you don’t look like you’ve seen something dead. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

He smiled down at her upturned, concerned face.

‘Pale and shaking all over?’

‘Yes,’ she said soberly. ‘You are.’

‘Ah,’ Kohn said. ‘Maybe I did see a ghost.’ (Leon Trotsky, with an ice-pick in his head. The ghost of the Fourth International. The spectre of communism.) ‘Or maybe I’m just getting cold.’ He came down off the wall and pulled up a chair beside Annie. ‘Warm me up.’

Annie was happy to do that, but Stone wouldn’t let it lie.

‘They’ve got a big centre-spread about conditions on the space construction-platforms. Sounds more like a building site than anything else. The guy who wrote it tried to organize a union and got burned out—’

‘A union in space?’ Lynette said.

‘Yeah, and why not?’

‘What’s “burned out” mean?’ Moh asked.

Stone began scanning down the article but Annie beat him to it.

‘It’s an old company trick, happened to an uncle of mine who worked in a nuclear power-station. They had him marked as a troublemaker and instead of sacking him – that would have caused more trouble – they just made sure he got his year’s safe level of rads in about a week. By mistake, of course. Sorry, no more work. Against safety regulations.’

‘That’s awful!’ Lynette said. ‘What happened to him? Did he—?’

‘He’ – Annie paused dramatically – ‘’s still alive and kicking…with all three legs.’

An uneasy laugh was interrupted by Stone, eyes and index finger still on the paper, waving his other hand and saying, ‘Nah, the levels were dead safe anyway. Just rules. We’ve all had worse.’ An uneasy silence. ‘For this guy it was more, uh, genuine. They got him working outside during a solar flare. Had to go back on the next shuttle. Odds are he’ll be okay, but he’s grounded.’

‘For life?’ Kohn said, appalled.

‘Don’t know.’ Stone raised his face, smiling. ‘Anyway, you can ask him yourself. He’s speaking at a meeting tomorrow night.’

Kohn looked at him, his mind suddenly thrown into chaos. Until now it had not seemed quite real. He’d seen it as a ghost returned to haunt him but that was less unsettling than the thought that these people from the past were real and alive and walking the earth and that you could just go and fucking ask.

He opened his mouth and said, sounding stupid even to himself, ‘What kind of a meeting?’

‘A public meeting, space-head!’

Kohn nutted Stone, hard enough to hurt a little. ‘Gimme that.’

He dragged the paper back, looked at the boxed ad for the meeting at the bottom of the middle pages. ‘“Unionize the space rigs! No victimizations!” Right, with you there one hundred per cent, bros and sis…Ah here we are, the small print: “North London Town Red Star Forum.” Knew it. Build the fucking party, forward to the fucking revolution, workers of the world and off the world unite! Well count me out.’

He felt Annie’s gloved fingers on his cheek. ‘Nobody’s asking you to count yourself in, Moh,’ she said in a reasonable voice. The kind that meant: don’t push it, mate. He turned his head to her, letting the hand slip down to his throat, and gazed at her for a moment. Her wavy black hair, her sharp and slender features, made her (he secretly thought) look like a smaller, more elegant version of himself. Next year’s model.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll go. Tomorrow night. Do you want to come?’

‘To a communist meeting? You must be joking, I’ve got better things to do. Isn’t that right, Lyn?’

Lynette tossed her hair and announced an intention to wash it the next evening.

As soon as he walked into the tiny hired hall, an upstairs room of a freshly redecorated pub called the Lord Carrington, Moh was smitten with the emotional backwash of wondering what age he’d been when he first sat at the back of just such a room, sometimes reading or playing on a game, sometimes listening. There was a table at the far end with two chairs behind it; at the near end was another table, this one stacked with copies of Red Star, hot off the press, and spread with pamphlets whose covers were frayed and furred with age. The rest of the room was optimistically filled with maybe forty stackable plastic chairs.

About twenty people came to hear the space-rigger, a stocky, long-limbed man called Logan with a severe case of sunburn. Stone listened engrossed, clenching his fists, and stood up at the end and made wild promises to raise money, spread the word. (He kept them.) Kohn listened for subtexts and structures, and sussed after about two minutes that this man wasn’t just a militant on a Party platform, but a Party militant. It didn’t seem possible he was in the same league as the old man up there beside him and the old woman who sat behind the literature table. They really did look like ghosts, wispy-haired, the paper of their pamphlets as yellow as their teeth.

The ghost of the Fourth International…The old man talked about solidarity, and Solidarity, and the miners’ strike of 1984–5 which had first opened his eyes to the reality of capitalism…Ghosts. And yet this phantom apparatus, this coelacanth of an organization, had convinced a young man to risk his livelihood and possibly his life to take its message into space. In its own way it was as impressive a feat as that of the Soviet degenerated workers’ state getting into space first. (After they’d scraped Sergei Korolev and his colleagues out of the camps where they’d been sent for…Trotskyism. Kohn smiled to himself. Suppose it had been true, and it was the Fourth International that had put Gagarin into orbit!)

He realized with a shock the exact reason for the generation-gap represented on the platform: old enough to be his grandparents, young enough to be his brother; none of an age to have been his parents. It was the classic population profile of annihilating defeat.

Cars racing through the streets, men with guns sitting half in and half out, yelling and shooting. The cars that came around later, and the men getting out, and shooting. The plastic that bit the wrists, and stumbling feet, and blood trickling thickly down a drain. And the people, our people, our side, our class, who stood and watched and did nothing.

Before he knew it the meeting was finished. People were milling around, getting drinks in, clustering at the literature table, shoving chairs out of rows and into circles…Moh was wondering how to get talking to someone when the space-rigger walked over.

‘Fancy a pint, lads?’

Moh spun a couple of chairs into position. ‘I’ll get them,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who’s out of work.’

Logan laughed. ‘I’m still one of the orbital labour aristocracy,’ he said, ‘and you’ve just been on strike, jes? So – what you having?’

He came back from the bar a few minutes later and started talking, mostly with Stone but including Moh in the conversation with quick glances and remarks. He’d obviously noted Stone’s contribution and picked him out as a good militant and potential recruit. Moh, who had assimilated the Dale Carnegie school of Trotskyist party-building from the age of about eight, gave the conversation half his attention. At some point Logan would get some commitment out of Stone – a meeting arranged, phone numbers exchanged, a subscription bought – and then switch his main attention to Moh.

He looked around for anyone he might recognize, sadly thinking the old comrades hadn’t been such old comrades after all, and saw an unchanged, familiar face frowning down at the now-deserted table of pamphlets. Moh bounded over.

‘Bernstein!’ The face that turned to him, though lined and leathery, hadn’t gained a line in the six years since Moh had last seen it. The receding shock of white hair hadn’t receded further. For a moment Moh was puzzled that Bernstein didn’t recognize him; then he remembered that the last time he’d looked at this face he’d been looking up.

‘I’m Moh Kohn,’ he said.

Bernstein stared at him, then shook his hand vigorously. ‘Amazing!’ he said. ‘I would never have known you.’

‘You haven’t changed.’

Bernstein nodded absently. ‘What brings you here?’ He patted the stack of books and pamphlets he was about to buy, and added, ‘You know what brings me here. Real collector’s pieces, this lot.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Bernstein had fallen out with (and from) the Fourth International as a result of some split that he was by now the only living person able to explain, and had embarked on the sisyphean project of writing the movement’s definitive history. An indefatigable archivist in his own right, he made some kind of living by trading in rare items of every conceivable persuasion of radical literature. Moh’s father had been one of his regular customers.

Moh wasn’t sure how to answer his question. What had brought him here?

He shrugged. ‘Curiosity,’ he said.

Bernstein looked past him and said, ‘Let’s join your friends.’

‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘Thought you’d never ask. Guinness, please.’

When Moh returned from the bar he found Stone, Bernstein, Logan and the old man and woman around the table in an animated discussion. After a few minutes Logan turned to him and said, ‘And you’re Moh Kohn, right?’

‘Hi.’ Moh raised his glass. ‘Pleased to meet you, too.’

They talked for a bit about working in space and about their respective unions. Moh found himself beginning to relax. Then Logan shot him an awkward glance.

‘You’re Josh Kohn’s son?’

‘Yes,’ Moh said. ‘If it matters.’

Logan looked back at him calmly, then leaned closer. ‘Something I wanted to ask you,’ he said. ‘Do you know anything about the Star Fraction?’

‘The “Star Fraction”?’ He could see from Logan’s face that he’d spoken too loudly, and out of the corner of his eye he could see why: Bernstein had cocked an ear in their direction. ‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘It…sort of…rings a bell, but…’ He shook his head. ‘Nah. It’s gone. Sounds like what you must be in.’

‘I guess you could say I’m in the space fraction.’ Logan laughed. ‘I am the space fraction.’

‘Must make for interesting internal discussions.’

‘Jes, it does.’

‘So what is this Star Fraction?’

Logan glanced at Bernstein, then at the two old cadres. Moh saw the old man nod slightly. Logan leaned forward, elbows on knees, held out his open hands. ‘We don’t know. Josh was the Party’s, the International’s, software wizard. He really pushed for using the net, using crypto and all that, from way back. You could say he got us into cyberspace. There were big arguments…faction fights…about that. Hard to believe, now.’

Bernstein snorted. Logan smiled and continued. ‘Anyway, some of the systems he set up survived the war, the EMP hits and all that and escaped the big clean-outs during the Peace Process. Impressive. We, that is the FI, still use them as far as we can.’

‘How d’you know that they aren’t compromised by now?’ Bernstein asked.

‘There are test protocols,’ the old man said. He was not going to explain further. Moh thought he understood. There must be ways of testing the security of any such system by running schemes that, if intercepted, would have to provoke a response.

Hairy, and not the sort of thing you’d want to talk about.

‘Every so often,’ Logan continued, ‘we come across references to the Star Fraction. Sometimes urgent messages telling its – members? whatever – not to do anything. Yet.’

He sat back with a what-do-you-make-of-that? expression.

‘Probably one of Josh’s test protocols,’ Bernstein said, raising a laugh.

‘Could be,’ Logan said. ‘If you ever find anything about it, Moh, tell us. Please.’

Moh looked at the young cadre and the old cadres with some bitterness. ‘If I ever find anything – that’s a good one. We lost everything. The fucking Yanks took the house apart and took it away, after…after…’ He couldn’t go on. ‘And I’ve never known why. None of you bastards ever told us.’

The bright, bare room was silent. Everyone else had gone home or into the main part of the pub. Down to the hard core again.

‘I’m looking for some answers,’ Moh said.

The old woman reached out and laid a hand on his arm. ‘How could we tell you? You and your sister disappeared. And we don’t know, ourselves. The Party lost a lot of people in the Peace Process, but that was down to the Restoration forces, the Hanoverians. Hell, you know that. Josh and Marcia were the only ones the US/UN came after.’ She drew a deep breath and shuddered. ‘Mandatory summary execution, asset forfeiture – that was standard Yank practice at the time, for arms and drugs.’

‘But they weren’t—’ Moh began indignantly, then stopped. It was entirely possible that they were. Arms, anyway.

‘And black software,’ Bernstein said. ‘Makes sense, from what you’ve said.’

Moh felt a surge of relief and gratitude. Black software – yes. For the first time it did all make sense: it wasn’t just an arbitrary atrocity. But if that was the answer it raised further questions.

‘What kept him working on it right up to—?’

‘Not us,’ the old woman said. ‘I would have known if he was doing a job for the Party. He wasn’t.’

She sounded sincere, and Moh warmed to her warmth, but he didn’t trust her statement. As far as he was concerned, anybody who held a Party or a programme, a political project spanning centuries, as their highest value was perfectly capable of lying in their teeth. If you could die for something you could lie for it.

But he’d found part of the answer, something that connected his parents’ deaths with their lives. Some of his inward tension eased, some of his hostility to the Party relaxed.

Logan stayed on after Bernstein and the old comrades had gone away. He took Stone and Moh into the bar and stood them a few more rounds and told them what the Party was trying to do.

Moh listened, not seeing ghosts any more but seeing as if through the transplanted retinae of a dead man’s eyes. You never lost that vision. You saw the patterns recur: endless orbit, permanent revolution. The phylogeny of parties, the teratology of deformed workers’ states, the pathology of bureaucratic degeneration…Now the space movement was at it, running its little anarcho-capitalist enclaves here on Earth and coexisting with the Yanks everywhere else.

‘That’s where we come in,’ Logan said. ‘We need to build a fighting left wing of the space movement, turn it into something that’ll do more against the US/UN than sponsoring private rocketry and asteroid mining. And when I say “left wing” I don’t mean socialist, I mean militant. Because you don’t need me to tell you that any serious attempt to get out of this shit is gonna have to take on the state, and these days that ultimately means Space Defense.’

Stone frowned, struggling with the scale and audacity of what the tiny organization Logan spoke for was aiming at. ‘You mean,’ he said doubtfully, ‘you’re working in the space movement, to turn it into—’

‘The Space and Freedom Party!’ Kohn said gleefully.

He knew what was going on. The Party (the real Party, the hard core, the International) had always had two aspects. One, the one Kohn remembered from the days of the Republic, was public, in-your-face: the unfurled banner, the open Party, the infuriating newspaper. The other, the way of surviving bad times, was when its members became faces in the crowd, known only to each other.

Like the Star Fraction, Moh thought.

‘Well,’ he said, when he and Stone finally, reluctantly, had to leave, ‘you can forget about recruiting me. I won’t be told what to do.’ He saw Logan about to interject. ‘Don’t try to tell me that isn’t what it’s like. But – I’m a paid-up, smart-card-carrying member of the union and of the space movement, and if there’s something you want done…you can always ask.’

‘OK,’ Logan said. ‘OK. Good night, comrades.’

Good years, years when he faced no threats, just dangers: no problems, only difficulties. Building the union and building Norlonto’s towers flowed in his mind into one constructive task, a matter of organizing, of coordinating work. He took on more responsibilities for the union at the same time as he upgraded his skills, learning to handle the new machines – space-platform spin-offs, mostly – that were making on-site work less like trench warfare against raw nature. After a while he came under pressure from the union to become a full-time organiser, from the company management to become a supervisor. He took the union job, got bored after a year, but found it difficult after that to get taken on again by any company. He and Stone set up as a subcontracting cooperative – capitalists themselves. They got work that way all right, and stayed scrupulously in the union’s good books, as well as on its membership list.

He occasionally heard from Logan, or ran into him in bars around the spaceport. Logan had adopted the same solution to his employment problems. He never called Moh to do anything for the Party but would occasionally admit or boast that some piece of political infighting in the space movement was not entirely accidental.

Early one summer morning they pulled up their truck outside a site entrance near Alexandra Port to find their way blocked by a score of people with placards. Some building workers stood arguing with the pickets.

‘Oh, shit,’ Stone said. ‘A strike. Well, that’s it.’ He reached for the ignition key.

Kohn frowned. ‘Just a minute. Don’t see any of the workers on that picket line.’

He jumped out and went over to talk to one of the building workers, a steward he knew.

‘Hi, Mike. What’s the problem? I thought I’d have heard about a strike.’

Mike grimaced. ‘It’s not a strike, Moh, it’s a fuckin demo. Greens. They don’t like what we’re building.’

‘Well, fuck them.’ He looked over the small crowd. Lumpens and petty bourgeois, no doubt about it. Not an honest-to-God proletarian to be seen. The placards had slogans like STOP THE DEATH BEAMS. ‘What is this shit? This isn’t—’ He stopped to think. ‘It’s not a scam, is it, Mike? They haven’t got us working on some military job without telling us, have they?’

‘No,’ Mike said. ‘It’s all legit. Research lab, space-movement sponsored. Nice contract.’

Nice contract all right, Moh thought. Massive walls, klicks of cable, flashy electronics. Test-bed for laser launchers – ‘steam-beams’, as the nickname went. Stick your payload on top of a tank of water, point a tracking laser at it, boil the sucker into orbit.

‘So it’s not a picket line, right? So why don’t we just—’

He noticed Mike pointing with his chin, turned and checked over the nearest greens. Big, tough. Tougher than building workers. Looked like farmers, travellers, bikers. And tooled up: monkey wrenches, very thick sticks on the placards. Heavy electric torches sticking out of pockets. Peasants with torches.

‘Where’s the movement militia then?’

Mike shrugged. ‘Never there when you need them.’

Kohn looked at him, baffled. That wasn’t what he knew of the militia. Before he could say anything a tall, long-haired and long-bearded man in homespun trousers and a greased jacket loomed over them and said, ‘Yeah, the space cadets ain’t comin, so piss off.’

Kohn had already sized up the balance of forces: it was a small site; the workforce wouldn’t be more than a dozen even when they all came in. So he just said ‘OK’, and turned away. He paused for a moment to say to Mike: ‘Get all the guys and gals together, pile on our truck. Talk about it at the union, OK, no trouble.’

Mike nodded and stepped quickly to pull his folk out of the rising heat of arguments. Kohn made a pacifying gesture to Stone, who was standing by the truck, and paused a moment to check that the workers were catching the drift.

‘Move yo ass, krautkiller!’ the big guy who’d spoken to him shouted at his back.

Kohn turned, more amazed than incensed at the racial sneer. Never thought of myself as…until until until…He looked at the man and felt a fastidious contempt.

‘“We are on the edge of darkness”,’ he said, quoting a recurrent green slogan. The man looked puzzled. Kohn waited until they were all on the truck and moving off before leaning out of the window and yelling as he passed, ‘and you are the darkness!’

He felt quite gratified by the banging the side of the truck took for that. At the union office, an old shopfront floor, his reminiscent smirk faded. They found a distinct lack of interest in their problem from the local officials. The lab-site crew stood around the scratched Formica tables in the refreshment corner and drank coffee while Mike made call after call – to the militia, to the client, to the union security – and got nowhere.

‘OK,’ Kohn said. ‘No more mister nice guy.’

He connected his phone to his computer and retrieved Logan’s public key, then tapped in Logan’s twenty-digit phone number and his own key. Logan’s voice came back, anonymous and toneless as a cheap chip. The processors couldn’t spare much for fidelity when they were crunching prime numbers that made the age-of-the-universe-in-seconds look like small change. The up-side was that cracking the encryption would take about as long.

‘This better be urgent, Moh. I’m vac-welding right now.’

‘OK. Greens blockading a job, nobody wants to know. Union, movement, militia. Something heavy leaning on them is my guess.’

‘Mine too. Talk to Wilde.’

Kohn watched his phone-meter’s right-hand numbers blurring for about five seconds.

‘Jonathan Wilde?’ he croaked at last.

‘The same. Tell him you’re from the light company. Gotta go.’

This time Moh was relieved to see the connection broken. He made a performance of putting away his phone and computer, while his mind raced. He stood up and looked around a dozen sceptical faces.

‘I think we got things moving,’ he said. He flashed them a rueful smile. ‘Finally. Mike, Stone, maybe you should get the union lawyer on to this one. Threaten to sue the research company. Breach of contract, condoning intimidation, whatever. Make something up. Same with whatever street-owner is allowing that so-called demo. Rest of us might as well call it a day. They’ll cough up our pay anyway.’ He sounded more convinced than he felt.

‘What about you?’ Stone wanted to know.

‘I’m going to meet The Man,’ Kohn said.

Wilde wasn’t exactly The Man – he didn’t employ anyone apart from a few research assistants now and again. The only position he held was a fairly nominal history lectureship at the University of North London Town. Now in his seventies, he’d been an anomalous figure for decades, regarded as a left-winger in the space movement, a libertarian space nut by the Left. He’d written some of the movement’s earliest manifestos (No More Earthquakes, The Earth is a Harsh Mistress) and numerous pamphlets, articles and books documenting what he called the counterconspiracy theory of history, which maintained that many otherwise incomprehensible historical events could be explained by identifying the conspiracy theories held by the protagonists. He’d discovered a surprising number of cases where prominent political, military and law-enforcement figures had been (openly or secretly) conspiracy theorists. In the course of researching and expounding this thesis he had developed a vast and complex range of mutually antagonistic contacts and sources of information. He was widely regarded as the movement’s éminence grise, a suspicion which all the evidence of his lack of power, position and money only strengthened. Rumour had it that he had been behind whatever it had taken – blackmail, currency speculation, nuclear threats – to get the relevant committee of the Restoration government to agree to Norlonto’s existence.

Moh had a rented flat in Kentish Town. He stopped off to change into his newest and sharpest suit, and to place his call. He got a voice-only link, and introduced himself; feeling self-conscious and stupid, he said he was from the light company.

‘Come straight away,’ Wilde said. ‘You know where to find me.’

An hour later Kohn knocked at the door of Wilde’s office.

‘Come in.’

The office was small and bright, with a window overlooking Trent Park: grass, trees, gliders coming in. It smelled of paper and cement. Wilde sat at a plain desk behind a terminal. He finished saving a file and stood. Skinny, nearly bald, tanned, hook-nosed. Back straight as an old soldier’s. Handshake firm.

‘Well, comrade,’ he said, gesturing Kohn to sit in one of a pair of standard university chairs made from pine, sacking, rubber bands and polyurethane, ‘what can I do for you?’

Comrade? Kohn wondered if the man were being polite or ironic, and responded with a tight-lipped smile before giving an account of the morning’s events.

‘Hmm,’ Wilde said. ‘My guess is pressure from Space Defense.’

Kohn opened and closed his mouth. ‘What they got to do with the greens?’

‘More than you think,’ Wilde said. ‘Oh, there’s no conspiracy, as I am notorious for saying. I’m sure the smelly little vermin would be against the project anyway. But it’s SD that’s leaning on the space movement’s higher councils, which lean on the R&D company, which tells the union and the militia that this is one to write off against insurance.’ He smiled. ‘Act of Goddess.’

Kohn spread his hands. ‘But why?’

‘What else,’ Wilde asked, like a lecturer posing a problem, ‘could you do with a very powerful, very accurate ground-based fast-tracking laser, assuming one could be developed?’ He sighted along his pointed finger and swung it slowly upwards.

Kohn suddenly got it, and laughed at himself for not realizing it sooner. ‘Down battlesats,’ he said.

‘Yup,’ said Wilde. ‘Apparently our R&D actually didn’t know that laser-launchers were originally promoted as a civilian spin-off from an ABM system. Space Defense, needless to say, has a better memory.’

‘So that’s it,’ Kohn said.

‘You think so?’ Wilde’s voice rang sharp; his eyes narrowed.

Kohn thought for a moment, stood up and stalked to the window as his gall rose.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t have it. OK, you can’t fight SD. We build the laser lab, they’ll lase it. But the greens…oh, shit.’

‘What do you feel about them?’

Kohn whirled. ‘One of them called me “krautkiller”, you know that? Fuck them and their nazi economics.’ He punched his palm. ‘Protection. Conservation. Restriction. Deep ecology. Give me deep technology any day. They don’t scare me. I’m damned if I’ll crawl, my children’s children crawl on the earth in some kind a fuckin harmony with the environment. Yeah, till the next ice age or the next asteroid impact. “Krautkiller”, huh? Chosen people, huh?’ He remembered the old taunts. Never thought of myself as…until until until…He took a deep breath, shook his head. ‘It’s them or us, man, and I’ve chosen people.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Wilde said, ‘Now sit down and let me…enlighten you on a few things.’

Kohn listened, and saw the light. The ‘light company’ was evidently a codename for the Space and Freedom Party, the militant faction of the space movement that Logan had talked about at the meeting a couple of years earlier. It had pulled in people with diverse views in terms of conventional politics, who disagreed about everything but the struggle for space: the ultimate united front, nothing conceded, nothing compromised, but still holding something of the forbidden thrill of—

‘There’s no conspiracy,’ Wilde said.

As if to confirm it, he provoked Kohn into defending his own standpoint. Kohn tried – and felt he failed – to articulate the inchoate vision he held of a socialist society that would be even wilder and more free-wheeling than Norlonto, freer than the free market, where the common knowledge that could not but be common property would become the greatest wealth, shared without sacrifice or stint. Wilde countered with his own vision of a world where the market was only the framework, but the only framework, for ways of life as diverse as human inclination could devise; not Social Darwinism but a Darwinian selection of societies.

‘Sounds like what we’ve got already,’ Kohn said, ‘only…’

Wilde snorted. ‘This century,’ he said, ‘is as much a travesty of my ideas as the last one was of yours. Mini-states instead of minimal states. Hah.’

‘Blame the world wars,’ Kohn said.

‘How…internationalist of you to put it that way,’ Wilde said. ‘I have difficulty convincing some of my lot not just to blame the Germans.’

‘That’s bourgeois nationalism for you.’

‘Quite.’

‘Looks like we’re not going to settle this.’

‘Not here. Space will…settle it.’

‘Space settlement!’

They both laughed.

‘It’s true,’ Wilde said. ‘Reality will turn out different from my utopia, and yours. The good thing about space is it holds out the chance that it might turn out better than we can imagine instead of worse. Not a promised land but a whole new infinite America where we’ll be the Indians, all our tribes expanding into a wilderness where we’ll bring the passengers pigeons and the bison and seed the forests from scratch, from rock and ice!’

Moh nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes, that’s it. Like Engels said, man’s natural environment doesn’t exist yet: he has to create it for himself.’

‘Engels said that?’

‘More or less. Not in so many words. I’ll look it up for you.’

‘Yes, you do that. Man’s natural environment is artificial – yeah, I like it. What we have to do is keep that possibility open, like the Bering bridge—’

‘Between Siberia and Alaska!’

At the time Siberia had a Communist government, Alaska a Libertarian. Wilde grinned back at him.

‘Exactly.’

At lunch Kohn looked round the noisy refectory, shrugged off any worries about security and said, ‘We still have a problem. What we gonna actually do about that lot down at the lab-site gate?’

Wilde shrugged. ‘Not much. The militia won’t touch them, and none of the independent agencies are likely to stick their necks out.’

‘Aha,’ said Kohn. ‘I think you might just have put your finger on—’

Wilde finished the sentence with him: ‘—a gap in the market!’

That night the green picket was still staked out at the lab site.

‘What’s that?’ The one who’d hassled Kohn turned at a noise. He found his cheek meeting a gun muzzle. Muffled sounds came from all around.

‘Your worst nightmare,’ said a voice from the darkness, about a metre away. ‘A yid kid with an AK and attitude.’

7

The Uploaded Gun

THE BRITISH PEOPLE

ENTHUSIASTICALLY COMMEMORATE

THE GLORIOUS

VICTORY OVER

THE GERMAN FASCIST BARBARIANS!

The slogan, freshly painted in metre-high letters on the gable end of the house, and the mural that illustrated it (a Soviet soldier raising the Red Flag over the ruined Reichstag) were all that distinguished the headquarters of the Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence Collective from the other four-storey blocks in the street just off Muswell Hill Broadway.

‘Some of the local kids did that when we weren’t looking,’ Kohn said. ‘Not exactly internationalist, but it’s one in the eye for our Hanoverian friends.’

Janis paused outside the car. She looked up. An airship – cloud and constellation in one – passed low overhead, drifting towards the forest of mooring masts on the immediate horizon where a rambling and ornate building stood, surmounted by holograms of gigantic human figures that reached out for the stars in a Stalinist statuary of light. As clouds dimmed the pale September sun the holograms brightened by the minute.

A low wall, a metre and a half of garden. Kohn opened the door.

‘After you, lady,’ he said.

She went in. Kohn dumped her bags in the entrance lobby and ushered her into a long room. At the far end was a kitchen. The near end contained couches, chairs, weapons, electronic gear and a battered table. The long room had obviously been made by knocking two rooms together. It had a rough, unfinished look: the furniture was old chairs and sofas made comfortable and colourful with throws and cushions, the table was gashed and stained, the whitewashed walls plastered with posters and children’s art. The kitchen equipment along one wall had probably been thrown out by other households, more than once; around the cooking area shelves held indiscriminate mixtures of books and jars of herbs. The lighting was full-spectrum strips, turned low: a twilight effect. Only the weapons and computers, the cameras and screens and comms, glittered new.

‘Most of the comrades won’t be back for a couple of hours,’ Moh said. ‘Time we did some hacking and tracking. Want some coffee first?’

Janis laid a hand on the nearest rifle. ‘Kill for it,’ she said.

While Moh clattered about in the kitchen area Janis looked over the hardware until she found a telephone.

‘Can you put an untraceable call through from here?’ she asked.

Moh looked up, surprised for a moment, then waved a hand.

‘You’re in space now,’ he reminded her. ‘You can put an untraceable call through from anywhere you like.’

Janis called up her sponsors, whose number was an anonymous code without regional identification. Relieved to find herself talking to an answering-machine, she told it there had been an accident at the lab, that the damage was being repaired and that she was taking the opportunity for a few days off. She put the phone down before the answering-machine could question her, then contacted the university’s system to make the previous message true. It looked as if the raid and the fire had been logged as a single incident, an ordinary terrorist attack, and was being dealt with through the usual channels: insurance company informed, security-company penalty clauses invoked, a routine request to the Crown forces for retaliation (this would probably be granted in that a fraction of a payload they were going to drop anyway on some ANR mountain fastness would be registered as justified by it).

She raised a contract with the Collective for her personal protection, using money paid back under the penalty-clause provisions. The university’s system, she was relieved to see, had Moh’s little gang on its list of approved suppliers. Her unspecified sabbatical wasn’t a problem either. She had a backlog of unused leave for the past year: like most research scientists, she found the concept of time off from work a bit hard to grasp.

‘Through the back,’ Moh said, carrying two mugs of coffee and the gun past her as she rang off. The common areas of the house – the corridors and stairwells – had the look of a castle in which there had been many wild knights. Weapons on the walls; Chobham plate visible behind holes in the plaster. Suits of body armour stood or slumped in corners. Moh elbowed open the door of a room, chinned a light-switch and stood back to let her in. The room was small, smelled of scents and metal and sweat, and was crammed with VR equipment: simulator seats and suits, goggles and gauntlets. Moh cleared some space on a table, hauled up a pair of worn gimballed chairs.

‘Forgot something,’ Janis said. ‘The magic-memory molecules.’

‘Oh. Right.’

Moh brought in the cold-box of drug samples, plastered it with biohazard stickers and stuck it in the back of a fridge that hummed to itself out in one of the back corridors.

‘Sure it’s safe there?’

‘It better be,’ he said. ‘That’s where we keep the explosives.’

Moh watched the tension ease from Janis’s shoulders and neck as she sipped her coffee, ignored the tiny wrinkles of irritation on her nose as he lit another cigarette. She was taking this well, if finding herself inside a small fortress of communist mercenaries gave her a sense of security.

She looked at him through narrowed eyes.

‘How’s your head?’

He inhaled and leaned back. Suck in and hold your breath and dive down into that limpid depth…it gave him a way in, an entry code.

‘Strange,’ he said, exhaling as if he’d just happened to remember how. ‘But OK, I think. Think is what I do.’

She seemed to take this as data.

‘You could try mainframing again.’ Wicked smile.

‘I don’t even want to consider it.’

‘All right. So what are we going to do in here?’

‘Interrogate this little bastard, for a start.’ He pointed down at the gun, on the floor between his boots. ‘I set it to track your project – OK, OK – and it might just have some traces from before whatever it was happened. Might give us an indication of whether it was all in my mind or not. I think that’s fairly important.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Her tone was ironic.

‘There’s a bit more to it than the state of my head,’ he said mildly. ‘We could now be at the mercy of’ – he put on a voice-over voice – ‘“intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” that could hijack every piece of hardware that has any connection with the global comm networks. In short, everything. Mankind: the complete works. On disk.’

‘Cheerful bastard, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am! Because the whole goddamn datasphere is meaningless without humans doing things with it. What I remember from the entity I encountered is this total overwhelming curiosity. And a desire to survive which in a sense is derived from that curiosity: it wants to stick around to see what happens next.’

‘Let’s hope it’s an idle curiosity.’

‘There is that.’

‘OK, let’s assume this entity of yours isn’t about to pull the plug on us. You’re sure Stasis can’t get at us here. What else do we have to worry about?’

Kohn grimaced. She wasn’t going to like this.

‘First off, the good news is we won’t be easy to track. Our armored car has signature-scrambling hardware that can make any lock-on spy sat blink and rub its eyes and decide it must have made a mistake. The car will have pinged with the tollgate arch as we went in, but the militia’s privacy code is strict to the point of paranoia. Means of enforcement is outlawry, so it tends to be observed.’

Janis frowned. ‘What’s outlawry?’

‘Loss of legal status.’ It didn’t register. ‘Like, you become an unowned resource.’

‘Oh.’

‘Don’t look so horrified. Goes on the insurance.’

‘Tell me the bad news.’

‘It’s just that my gang has trodden on a lot of fingers in its time, and the enemies we’ve made – the state, the cranks and creeps – are exactly the people you can count on to have big plans for anyone who messes with deep technology. You saw what happened to the lab. I don’t think that was down to Stasis.’

‘They did the break-in, didn’t they?’

‘That’s possible. It’s also possible that, whoever it was, the cranks were giving them cover. If somebody already knows what the drugs are, they’re sure to come after the missing pieces. They won’t come unprepared.’

He powered up the chunky Glavkom kit, then unclipped the gun’s smart systems and connected them. He put the goggles and phones on and slid his hands into the data gauntlets. Their fuzzy grip went up to his elbows, sensual and relaxing. Corporate logos and threatening copyright declarations floated past his eyes for a few seconds. Whoever had pirated this version of DoorWays™ had evidently not bothered to take them out.

Option selection was look-and-wink, which left the hands and head free. He blinked on Stores, found himself looking around a roomful of labelled dials indicating how much space the gun’s programs and databases currently used.

Needles on full, wherever he looked.

‘Shee-it,’ he said. He heard Janis’s querying response faintly through the phones.

‘Gun’s fucking loaded,’ he said.

He waved reassuringly at her grunt of concern, causing an agitated flurry among some menu screens to his right. He calmed them down and continued investigating. The last time he’d used this front-end to look inside the gun it had represented the internals as a ramshackle collection of armoured bunkers with banks of instruments, a small lab, a snug fire-control module, all connected by a sort of Viet Cong tunnel system…all there, still, but now burrowed under a vast complex of warehouses, libraries, engine-rooms. He didn’t recognize the goods; the books were in languages he didn’t know; and what the machines were doing made no sense at all. He backed out in a hurry.

Sweat slicked the goggles as he slid them off.

‘Found anything?’

Kohn looked morosely at the little pile of processors: dull glitter, sharp edges – a scatter of fool’s gold. ‘Terabytes,’ he said. ‘Passive data storage, most of it. Encrypted, too. Damn.’

He slotted them back together, one by one, and slammed the final assembly into place like a magazine. Lights winked as systems checked in; drives purred and fell silent. It was ready.

‘Can you still rely on it?’ Janis asked.

‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘That isn’t a worry. You can’t corrupt AK firmware. Been tried. Im-fucking-possible. Nah, I’ll tell you what’s worrying. It’s who else could be relying on it.’

She sighed and put her elbows on the table, held her chin in her hands. ‘Let’s try and get this straight,’ she said. ‘Whatever happened back there, somebody or something downloaded scads of data to your gun’s memory, and you think it’s using the gun’s own software to guard it?’

He saw the light in her eyes, the heat in her cheeks, and knew it had nothing to do with them: it was the feral excitement of tracking down an idea. He felt it himself.

‘That makes sense,’ he said admiringly.

‘And not just the software,’ she went on. ‘It’s guarding it with the gun, and with—’

Her teeth flashed momentarily: Got it.

‘Yes,’ he said. He saw it too. ‘With my life.’

He hauled himself to his feet. Better to look down at that gaze she was giving him, that scientific and speculative examination.

He shrugged and stretched. ‘So what’s new?’ he said. ‘The hell with it. I’m hungry.’

They returned to the long room to find a dozen young adults and a couple of kids eating and talking around the table. Janis felt her mouth flood, her belly contract at the smell and sight of chicken korma and rice.

Everybody stopped talking and looked at her.

‘Janis Taine,’ Kohn announced. ‘A guest. A person who’s put herself under our protection. And a good lady.’ He put an arm around her shoulder. ‘Come on, sit down.’

After a moment two vacant places appeared at the table. As soon as she sat Janis found a heaped plate and a glass of wine in front of her. She ate, exchanging nods and smiles and occasionally words as Kohn introduced the others: Stone, tall with a building worker’s build and hands, who had worked with Moh to establish the Collective; Mary Abid, who’d found life too peaceful back home after the stories she’d heard from her grandfather; Alasdair Hamilton, a slow-voiced Hebridean demolition man; Dafyd ap Huws, a former ANR cadre…They looked the most reassuringly dangerous bunch of nice people she’d ever met.

They didn’t ask her about herself, or even mention her call of that afternoon (some etiquette applied), so she didn’t tell. She occasionally glanced sideways at Moh, who just grinned awkwardly back when he caught her eye. He looked tired, running on emergency; grim when he didn’t know anyone was looking at him. After the meal finished he took a couple of Golds and broke them up to build a large joint, with the same detached mechanical competence he’d shown when reassembling the gun. She waved the joint past her to Stone.

Stone drew on the smoke and blew it out past his nostrils and said, ‘OK, Moh, we’re waiting.’

One of the children was taking the plates away. Janis turned from puzzling at the puzzled look her thanks brought, hearing her last word, ‘anyway…’, hang on a sudden silence around the table. Moh lit a cigarette and tilted back his chair.

‘Comrades,’ he said, ‘we are in deep shit.’ He rocked forward, elbows on the table, looking everyone in the eye. ‘First off, Janis here. She’s a scientist. She’s come here to get away from Stasis, and from whoever put some demons down the wire to her lab. So…I’m giving her close protection, yeah, and we’re gonna be away from here, but everybody keep that in mind. Don’t want to say any more about that, so don’t nobody ask.

‘Next little problem, and this is where the good music starts, is…last night I winged Cat. She’s OK, right, no worries. But she was on a crank bomb team. Talked to her in hospital, and it looks like the Left Alliance have put their muscle where their mouth’s been for a long time, about gan-gin up with the greens and all that lot. Big push coming. We’re talking, like, soon. Weeks, days. Plus the ANR. Cat was going on about them holding out – you know what she’s like. My guess is it’s only a matter of time before they come to some kind of arrangement.

‘You don’t need me to tell you this puts us in a bit of a sticky position.’ He laughed as if to himself. ‘Sticky position, hah, that’s a good one.’ He was standing now, leaning his fists on the table. ‘What I want to know is, why the fuck did we not know about this?’

He sat down again, turned to Janis and added, in a tone of casual explanation: ‘Felix Dzerzhinsky Collective, my ass.’

The argument went on from there.

If Moh had hoped to divert them into mutual recrimination over a setback on the intelligence front, he didn’t succeed for long. Most of them insisted they’d logged all the rumours they’d run across, and found them evaluated as just that: rumours.

What really agitated them was the prospect of more situations like the one Moh had unwittingly found himself in, of shooting at people who, in terms of their political affiliations and personal relations, were on the same side as themselves. Much of the increasingly heated discussion went past Janis’s ears, but she could see a polarization taking place: Moh, Dafyd and Stone took the view that it changed nothing, while Mary and Alasdair argued for calling off any engagements that would bring them into conflict with the Left. The others were being pulled one way or the other. Moh, to her surprise and relief, contributed little to the debate other than the odd sardonic laugh or dry chuckle, such as when someone used the expression ‘what these comrades fail to understand…’.

But it was Moh who brought the discussion to an end, with a cough and a slight shrug of his shoulders.

He stood up again. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘we can’t take a vote now, too many of us’re out on active. What I propose is this: as a co-op we honour existing contracts. Any individual members who find they have a problem with defending particular installations, ask to be relieved beforehand. Anyone who takes an assignment and then bottles out is considered to have gone independent and takes full liability. And let’s get this in perspective, OK? We’ve always used minimum force.’

He paused, as if trying to work something out, then continued. ‘My conscience is clear. One more thing: if this goes beyond isolated sabbing and turns into a real offensive, all bets are off. That’s in the small print of all our contracts anyway. Everyone go along with that?’

They did, though Alasdair was the last and most reluctant to nod agreement.

‘What about if there is an ANR offensive?’ Dafyd asked. Everyone else laughed. He looked offended. Moh leaned over and grasped his shoulder.

‘If that happens, man,’ he said, ‘we do exactly what it says in the contract; we give our full support to the legitimate authorities!’

As Janis watched the laughter, the visible relaxation that this comment brought, she reflected on what it meant. Not its literal meaning but its studied ambiguity – Moh, or somebody, must have taken great delight in smuggling that clause into the small print. With all their disagreements, with their obvious cynicism and scepticism about the ANR, they took it for granted that its aims and arms were just.

As did she: it was an underlying premise, now that she came to think of it, for most of the people she knew. Long before they had come to power the Republicans had referred to the British state, the old establishment, as ‘the Hanoverian regime’, and now, long after the Republic’s fall, everybody called the restored Kingdom by that derisory name. Few took seriously the ANR’s claim to be the legal government, but few dismissed it entirely. In its controlled zones, dispersed and remote, and in the back of people’s minds, the Republic still existed. It had hegemony. That much it had already won.

Stone interrupted the now more social conversation with a remark about some people having jobs to go to. There was a sudden scramble for weapons, and in a few minutes she was alone with Moh and Mary Abid.

‘Time for the news,’ Mary said. Janis looked around for a TV screen.

Mary smiled. ‘We roll our own,’ she said.

She cleared a space in the electronic clutter, sat down, adjusted a light, and suddenly was a professional-looking newscaster, expertly patching together agency material with jerky head-camera stuff from comrades on demonstrations, in street fights, unionizing space rigs, crawling through dangerous industrial processes…Janis, watching it on a monitor, was rather unwillingly impressed. Most defence agencies televised their own activities and used the results as both crime programme and self-advertisement, but this group seemed to be trying to make a genuine political intervention as well.

‘How many subscribers have you got?’ she asked when Mary had signed off.

Mary shook out her hair, which she’d tied back for her screen image. ‘A few hundred,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t bring in much, except when one of the bigger opposition networks picks up something we’ve put out. Lots of groups do it, swap stories and ideas and so on all the time, on the net. Gets to people who don’t want to sift through all that but don’t want to rely on the standard filters.’

‘All the anti-UN groups feed off each other,’ Moh said. ‘It’s a global conspiracy of paranoids. The Last International.’

Mary shot him a black look from under her black hair.

‘Janis is all right,’ Moh said. The banter had gone out of his voice. Mary looked at him for a moment, frowning, then turned to Janis with a smile that didn’t hide her embarrassment.

‘No offence?’ she said. Janis shook her head, feeling she’d missed something. Before she could ask what it was Moh said: ‘Oh well, might as well see what the other side has to say.’

The main news filters were, for once, agreed about what the lead item was: Turkish troops had fired on a demonstration on Sofia. The Russians had warned that they shared a ‘Christian and orthodox heritage’ (or, on some readings, ‘Orthodox’; war critics earnestly debated whether they meant Orthodox Christian or orthodox Communist) with the Bulgars and would not tolerate indefinitely these outrages. The President of Kurdistan was shown boarding a KLM Tupolev for Moscow on what was officially described as a routine meeting with the President of the Former Union.

Mary made a gloating O-sign and left.

The news item about the day’s software disruptions, now irremovably pinned on the cranks, came well after the news about a US/UN warning to a Japanese car company.

‘Not a word about wildcard AIS and smart drug breakthroughs,’ Moh said as he switched the screen off. ‘Knew it. Capitalist media cover-up!’

‘Didn’t see anything in your alternative media,’ Janis said.

‘Lucky for us.’

‘Yeah…Aren’t you going to tell the…comrades anything about all of that?’

Moh scratched his head. ‘Not as such.’

‘Hardly comradely, is it?’

‘Oh, but it is. It’d be difficult to explain, and they don’t need to know. It wouldn’t lessen any danger they might be in. Might even increase it, what you don’t know can’t be—’

Can’t be got out of you, she thought. She nodded sombrely.

‘So what are we going to do?’

‘There was this guy I met years ago, name of Logan. A space-rigger who was grounded. He was in the Fourth International—’

In response to her puzzled look, Moh dipped his finger in a splash of wine on the table and traced the hammer-and-sickle-and-4 while saying, ‘Tiny socialist sect, would-be world socialist party. Trotskyists. Same organization as my father was in. Logan was kind of intrigued to meet me. It was like…he was expecting something from me. He asked me if I knew about the “Star Fraction”. He was in the space fraction. That was something else.’

‘Sounds close enough,’ Janis smiled, trying to cheer him up. ‘A different faction, perhaps?’

‘Not the same thing. Faction and fraction. Not the same thing.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘You can have a faction inside a fraction,’ he told her with self-mocking pedantry, ‘but not a fraction inside a faction.’

‘That really clears it up. Why can’t you have a—’

‘Democratic centralism. Or maybe dialectical materialism.’ He grinned at her. ‘I forget.’

‘Where’s Logan now? Back in space?’

‘Yeah, he got off Earth again, but he was blacklisted to the Moon and back. I lost touch with him after a few jumps. The only person who might know where he is is Bernstein.’

‘Who’s Bernstein?’

Moh looked surprised. ‘Everybody knows Bernstein.’

‘I don’t. Is he on the net?’

Moh laughed. ‘No, the old bastard’s done too much time on semiotics charges for that. He’s a hard-copy man, is Bernstein.’

Janis decided to let that lie.

‘All right, so what do we do now?’

‘Well, I’m expecting to find a few people down at the local pub who might know more about what’s going on. Check out a few things with them, maybe get some leads. After that we can stay here overnight, look up Bernstein in the morning, then hit the road.’

‘The road to where?’

Moh grinned at her. ‘Ah, I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. Let’s discuss it in the pub.’

‘Now you’re talking.’ The desire to relax in a sociable civilian place, to let a little alcohol smooth over the rough day, came into her like a thirst. Her mouth felt dry. ‘Where can I crash out afterwards?’

‘My room’s free,’ Moh said. There was no insinuation in his tone.

‘And what about you?’

‘I’ll find a place.’

It could mean anything. She gave him a speculative smile. ‘Do you ever sleep?’

‘I took a tab.’

‘Oh yeah. You didn’t score it at that disco, did you? Off a blonde girl?’

She could see his eyes widen. ‘How the fuck did you know?’

‘“Wakesh you up jusht like zhat”,’ she mimicked derisively. ‘Well, let me tell you, in another four hours you’re gonna fall asleep jusht like zhat.’

They lugged her bag upstairs. Moh’s room was on the second floor at the back of the house. It was bigger than she’d expected, with a double bed, a large wardrobe. Lots of old political posters, a metre-wide video screen.

‘I need a shower,’ Moh said, ‘and all my stuff’s here—’ He sounded almost apologetic.

‘Get on with it, idiot.’

She idly flicked through Moh’s collection of diskettes while he disappeared into the adjoining shower room. One box was labelled ‘CLASSICS’, and the worn sleeves suggested the films had been watched many times: El Cid, Battle of Algiers, 2001, Z, Life of Brian…She smiled.

He had few books, but racks and stacks of political pamphlets: she found a copy of The Earth is a Harsh Mistress, the original manifesto of the space movement, glossy with old holograms; The Secret Life of Computers, which had the same scriptural status for the AI-Abolitionists; a neo-Stalinist tract called Did Sixty Million Really Die?; she turned over the brittle pages of a pamphlet published a century ago in New York, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International – it was subtitled The Transitional Program. Weird, she thought. Did they have computers back then?

She glanced over the first couple of pages: ‘Mankind’s productive forces stagnate. Already, new inventions and improvements fail to raise the level of material wealth.’ Oh, so they did have computers. ‘Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.’ She didn’t get it; she had what she knew was a commonplace notion that communists were basically OK, always banging on about markets and democracy and sensible stuff like that, whereas anything to do with socialism was a catastrophe that threatened the entire culture of mankind. It was something she’d have to sort out sometime. Not now. She put the pamphlet back.

Among the posters was a black-and-white photograph of a strikingly pretty young woman in overalls, looking up apparently from repairing an internal-combustion engine; she was caught with eyes widening, a smile just starting, pushing her hair back with the wrist of an oily hand.

She guessed this must be Cat.

Moh emerged wearing a collarless shirt, black leather trews and waistcoat. She didn’t give him time to leave again while she rummaged through her own costly bales, asking him trivial questions about the household while taking off the blouse and culottes and sliding into trousers and top and shawl jacket, all black silk.

‘How do I look?’ she asked. ‘Sort of normal for this area?’

She still thought of Norlonto as basically a vast bohemian slum, where expensive gear could incite suspicion or robbery.

‘If you walked around in nothing but that fancy corset of yours,’ Kohn said, ‘nobody’d look twice.’

‘Thanks a bunch.’

8

The Virtual Venue

Jordan laid his rucksack on the ground and leaned against the small and unoccupied bit of wall between a telesex shop and a dive called The Hard Drug Café. He felt every face that passed as a soft blow against his own, and a vague, guilty nausea, like a boy after his first cigarette. Ever since he’d walked up that hill and on to the Broadway he had been sent reeling by the bizarre and decadent impressions of the place. It was wilder than his wildest imaginings, and this was just the fringe. Neon and laser blazed everywhere, people did things in shop windows that he never suspected anyone did in a bedroom, fetches and hologhosts taunted and flaunted through the solid bodies around him. The bodies themselves astonished him, even after he had stopped gawping at the women, some of whom wore clothes that exposed their breasts, buttocks and even legs. A space-adaptee cut across the pavement in an apparatus spawned from a bicycle out of a wheelchair which he vigorously propelled with arms and – well, arms, which he had as lower limbs. Now and then, metal eyes with no iris or pupil met his glance and sent it away baffled. This, he knew, was known as culture shock. Knowing what it was didn’t make it go away.

After several people had broken stride as they passed and looked at him as if expecting something he realized that all he’d have to do would be to hold out a cupped hand, and they would put money in it. Furious, he straightened his back, then stooped and lifted his pack again. He was a businessman, not a beggar, and he had business to attend to.

The Hard Drug Café looked a good place to start.

Its name was traditional, a bad-acid flashback to an earlier time. The only drugs going down here were coffee by the litre, amphetamines by the mil and anti-som by some unit of speed. Steamed wall-mirrors multiplied the place’s narrow length; virtual presences fleshed out its sparse clientele to a crowd. Looks from behind glades glanced off him as he picked his way to the counter; then they returned to their animated conversations. He took a pleasure more perverse than any he’d seen so far in being thus accepted. Another nerd.

He ordered a coffee and a sandwich whose size didn’t quite justify its name, Whole Earth; declined the offer of smart or fast drugs. He lowered the pack and himself into a corner seat, and familiarized himself with the table modem while the order was being prepared. When it arrived he sat eating and drinking for a few minutes.

It felt weirdly like starting work in the morning…Then the thought of how different it was gave him a jolt and a high which he was sure must be better than any drug on the menu could have given him. He took from his pocket a tough plastic case, opened it and lifted a set of glades and a hand-held from the styrofoam concavities inside. He’d bought them at the first hardware shack he’d reached. They still had an almost undetectable friction that indicated, not stickiness, but the absence of the ineradicable microslick of human oils on plastic. His fingertips destroyed as they confirmed the certainty that they were the first to touch them. He eased them on and looked around to find nothing visibly different but his reflection in the mirrors. Wiping the wall beside him with his sleeve he inspected himself sidelong. For a giddy moment he was drawn into the image of his own reflection in the reflected glades. Then he pulled back and indulged a brief surge of vanity over how much more serious and dangerous and mysterious he looked.

He caught a passing smirk, and turned away.

He brushed his hand back through his bristly hair, then felt behind his ear for a tiny knob at the end of the sidepiece. When he pulled, it drew out a slender cable; it came with the resistance of a weighted reel, withdrawing if he relaxed the pull. He extended it all the way and connected it to the hand-held, then jacked into the modem.

His first explorations were modest, tentative: after installing and booting the software and setting up a default fetch he opened an account with a local branch of the Hong Kong & Shanghai, then arranged for them to liquidate his share in his company. It was a tidying up, a formality: his two partners came out of it richer in increased stock than he did in ready cash. He just counted himself lucky the Deacons hadn’t frozen his assets. Even through all the levels of anonymity, the transaction made his bones quake. When it was over, he had no property in Beulah City. He leaned back and signalled for another coffee. When it came he stared into it, forcing himself to think.

Froth on the top went around: spiral arms held in their whorl by the hot dark matter beneath, turning one way while the rest of the universe went the other…e pur si muove. The argument from design. The Blind Watchmaker.

This could have been the last day: the hour of the Watchmaker. Mrs Lawson’s fear had seemed genuine. It was there and it was everywhere, in all the fractured cultures; godless or godly, they all had at the back of their minds the insidiously replicating meme which said that one day a system would wake up and say to its creators: ‘Yes, now there is a God.’

Blessed are the Watchmakers, for they shall inherit the earth.

Jordan had been raised with a sense of imminence, an ability to live with the possibility that The End Was At Hand. Disappointments dating from the turn of the millennium had shaped the Christian sects, a lesson reinforced by the inconclusive Armageddon that had been over before he was born. The interpreters of Revelation had been made to look foolish, even to people who still tolerated the equally uninspired interpreters of Genesis. The conviction that the imminent end was unpredictable strengthened the expectation: two thousand years and counting, and still Coming Soon.

If they could do it, Jordan thought, then so could he. Bracketing the outside chance that all speculation was about to be rendered irrelevant, what did he had to go on? A contact with a (claimed) Black Planner; a wad of money; some worries from an unreliable source about odd happenings on the networks; and an undeniable series of spectacular system crashes.

Well, he could do a search on that, cross-reference them and see what came up. He drained his cup, smoothed out the instruction leaflet and poked out a key sequence that everyone else here could probably do with their eyes shut.

DoorWays™ opened on to the world: the kingdoms and republics; the enclaves and principalities; the anarchies, states and utopias. With a silent yell he flung himself into the freedom of the net.

In virtual space Beulah City was far, far away.

The sky came down to the rooftops here, same as anywhere else. As he walked along the high street Kohn saw past the near horizon in an inescapable awareness that the sky before him was as far away as the sky above, a dizzying horizontal height. He was as conscious of the motion of the earth as previously he’d been of the time of day. Not for the first time he was impressed by the dauntless gaiety of the species. Whirled away from the sun’s fire to face again the infinite light-raddled dark, they took it when they could as their chance to go out and have fun.

Janis walked beside him with a dancer’s step, a warm lithe body naked in cool clothes, her fingers rediscovering his hand every few seconds. He was not sure what that electric contact meant to her. What it meant to him was like the new reordering of his mind, a delight he felt almost afraid to test, yet constantly renewed by the merest look at her, or within himself.

They walked along faster and easier than anyone else on that pavement, Kohn effortlessly finding an open path among the moving bodies. After they crossed the road, strolling between humming cars and hurtling bikes and whistling rickshaws, Janis looked at him as if to say something, and then just shook her head.

Norlonto had the smell of a port city, that openness to the world: the sense that you had only to step over a gap to be carried away to anywhere. (Perhaps the sea had been the original fifth-colour country, but it had been irretrievably stained with the bloody ink from all the others.) And it had also the feel that the world had come to it. In part this was illusory: most of the diversity around them had arrived much earlier than the airships and space platforms, yet here and there Kohn could pick out the clacking magnetic boots, the rock-climber physique, the laid-back Esperanto drawl of the orbital labour aristocracy. Men and women who’d hooked a lift on a reentry glider to blow a month’s pay in a shorter time, and in more inventive ways, than Khazakhstan or Guiné or Florida could allow.

Those who helped them do it made their mark in the crowd and among the shopfronts: prostitutes of all sexualities, gene-splicing parlours, hawkers of snacks and shots, VR vendors and drug and drink establishments.

The Lord Carrington, down a side street, wasn’t one of them.

‘It’s our local,’ Kohn said proudly as he pushed open the saloon-bar doors of heavy wood and glass and brass. The smells of alcohol, of hash and tobacco smoke, struck him with all their associations of promise and memory, fraud and forgetting. He didn’t know if he could take this intensity all his life. Maybe it was something you got used to. Poets had died for it; some said, of it. Perhaps it was wasted on him; or his very crudity, his fighter’s callousness, would save him.

What the hell.

Janis eased past him, through the door, and he stepped through and let it swing back.

The room was long and cool. The bar was divided along its length with apparently mirrored partitions that showed not reflections but views of other bars. You could tell the timezone the images came from by the state the drinkers had reached. The first one Kohn noticed looked like Vladivostok. Fortunately the sound was turned down. The real pub had not many in it yet, the hologram stage showing only swimming dolphins.

Janis beat him to the bar, turned with her elbow on the counter and asked, ‘What’ll you have?’

‘Eine bitter, bitte.’

Janis ordered two litres. They found an alcove where they could sit and see the stage and a window overlooking a tenth of London. Kohn sat down, shifting the belt pouch in which the gun’s smart-box nestled, easing the hip holster of the dumb automatic which was all the hardware the pub’s by-laws permitted. Janis watched with a faint smile and raised her heavy glass.

‘Well, here’s to us.’

‘Indeed. Cheers.’

The first long gulp. Kohn decided to appreciate the taste as long as he could before lighting up.

A man walked through the dolphins and announced the first set, a new Scottish band called The Precentors. The sea-scene cleared and two lads and a lass, playing live from Fort William, launched into the latest old rebel song.

Janis looked at him, then at her drink, then looked up again more sharply, her hair falling back. Her shoulders were swaying almost imperceptibly to the music.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ she said.

‘Not much to tell…I grew up around here, North London Town before and after it became Norlonto. My mother was a teacher, my father was – well, he made a living as a software tech but he was a professional revolutionary. Member of the Workers’ Power Party, which back then was what he used to call a nearly-mass Party. A near-miss Party.’ Kohn chuckled darkly. ‘The Fourth International had a few good national sections in those days, and they were one of the best. Industrial-grade Trotskyism. He was a union organizer, community activist in various Greenbelt townships. My mother got elected to the local council under the Republic.’

He stopped. Normally it was not difficult to talk about this. Now, the enhanced memories crowded him like hysterical relatives at a funeral. His fist was on the table. Janis’s fingers clasped over it.

‘And that was why they were killed?’

‘No! That was all legal. They were rejectionists, sure, but they weren’t in the armed groups that became the ANR or anything like that. Mind you, in the Peace Process you didn’t have to be, to get killed. I used to think that was the point.’ He disengaged his hand, unthinking, and lit a cigarette. ‘I thought that was the whole fucking point.’

‘I don’t see it.’

‘Terror has to be random,’ he said. ‘That’s how to really break people, when they don’t know what rules to follow to keep them out of trouble.’ He gave her a sour grin. ‘You know all that. It’s been tried out on rats.’

‘But you don’t even think that was why—’

‘That was part of it. The killing was a joint operation, local thugs and a US/UN teletrooper. I never did understand that, until – actually it was Bernstein who gave me the idea it had to do with the day job. The software work.’

‘And that could be—?’ The excitement of discovery lifted her voice.

He hushed her with a small movement of his hand, and nodded.

Janis was silent for a few moments.

‘What did you do after that?’

‘I had a kid sister.’ He laughed. ‘Still have, but she’s married, settled and respectable now. Doesn’t like to be reminded of me.’

‘Can’t imagine why.’

‘Anyway…we both just took off, disappeared into the Greenbelt. I sort of dragged her up, you know? Did all sorts of casual work, usual stuff, until I was old enough to get steady jobs in construction.’

‘Christ.’ Janis looked almost more sympathetic at this part of the story than at what had come before. ‘Did you ever think of going off to the hills and joining the ANR?’

‘Thought about it? – I fucking dreamt about it. But the baseline was, I never rated their chances.’ He snorted. ‘Looks like I might have been wrong, huh? Anyway, knocking the Hanoverians off their perch wouldn’t be enough. At least the space movement understands that. You gotta defeat the Evil Empire, man! And the green slime, all the species of cranks and creeps. Protect the launch sites, protect the net, and defend the workers. That’s our line.’

‘The thin Red line.’

‘Damn’ right,’ he said with a proud grin. ‘The last defenders.’

‘How did you become a – what do you call yourself? – a security mercenary?’

‘Started with defending building sites against green heavies. Went on from there.’ He shrugged and smiled. ‘Talk about it another time…How did you get to be a mad scientist?’

Janis took a long swallow. ‘This must sound like a sheltered upbringing. A bit of that old middle-class privilege, you know? Grew up in Manchester. It’s all straight Kingdom, no autonomous communities. Not much violence. ANR sparrow units knock off soldiers and officials now and again…

‘My parents are both doctors.’ She gave a self-deprecating smile. ‘Real doctors. Uh, physicians. Two brothers, both younger than me. One’s a mining engineer in Siberia, the other’s in medical school. I was always interested in medical research – all the code-cracking breakthroughs happened when I was just old enough to understand. Grammar school, university, research. I only came down here because of the restrictions – not enough F S Zees up north.’

Kohn nodded slowly. ‘And now Norlonto. Just a natural progression.’

Janis grimaced. ‘I wouldn’t want to get mixed up in black technology.’

It was a cant phrase for the sort of research that was rumoured to go on in Norlonto. Not quite deep technology, but treading the edge; neural-electronic interfacing, gene-splicing, potentially lethal life-extension techniques, all tested on higher animals or human subjects whose voluntary status was distinctly dubious: debtors, crime-bondees, kids who didn’t know what they were getting into, the desperate poor, mercenaries…

He lit another cigarette and leaned back, blowing smoke past his nostrils and looking at her along his nose. ‘That’s a good one,’ he remarked, ‘in the circumstances.’

‘There’s a bloody difference!’

‘Explain that to the cranks.’

‘What can we do, then?’ Janis glanced around the now livening bar as if checking for infiltrators.

She looked so worried that Kohn relented. He’d made his point.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘This place is a black hole for the state and for the terrs – nothing to stop them getting in; it’s getting out they find difficult. Nobody’s signed the Convention here; the Settlement doesn’t apply; we’re not in the UN. We don’t have any of these stand-offs in a state of war. What we have instead is a trade-off, anarchy and what the movement calls law and order. Anybody can carry a gun, and anybody who uses one without good cause is liable to get wasted. So they’ll have to work their way round to us, and before they do – give it a few days – we have lots of options. Vanishing into the crowd by going deeper into Norlonto. Going public and datagating the whole deal. Taking to the hills. Crossing the water—’

‘Ireland?’ Janis looked shocked.

Kohn had been there, handling security at one of the many conferences that could be safely held only outside the Kingdom. It was a strange place, that other Republic, a black-and-white photograph of the colourful enthusiasms he remembered from his childhood. United, federal, secular and social democratic, a welfare state where you got liberalism shoved down your throat from an early age, with vitamin supplements…It had been a disturbing experience because of its very ambiguity, like tales his grandmother had recounted of visits to East Germany. He tried to shrug away what he suspected was on Janis’s part a lingering prejudice from years of Hanoverian disinformation.

‘Think of it like cryonics,’ he said, getting up to go to the bar.

‘How d’you mean?’

‘As an alternative to death there’s a lot to be said for it.’

Her laughter followed him, but he could see she wasn’t convinced.

Jordan snatched the VR glasses off and pressed the heels of his hands against his tight-shut eyes. The dull kaleidoscope of false light made the other afterimages go away. Then he opened his eyes and reassured himself of the solid and insubstantial realities around him.

He had been looking for information about the Black Plan. The ANR itself denied all knowledge: his cautious inquiry resulted in its garish VR/PR office dwindling abruptly to a dot in the distance. Then he had turned to the competing newslines of the radicals and libertarians and socialists, his search patterns hauling in a succession of titles that floated up past him as he checked them out one by one:

eu.pol

us.lib

fourth.internat

sci.socialism

soc.utopia

freedom.net.news

fifth.internat

alt.long-live-marxism-leninism-maoism-gonzalo-thought

theories.conspiracy

soc.urban-legend

comp.sci.ai

news.culture.communistans

left.hand.path

That last one had been a mistake. It had rattled his nerves so much that coffee could only calm them, not still them entirely. The whole net, this evening, was like jangled nerves. The afternoon’s system crashes had set off claims and counterclaims, wars of rumour. Cross-tracing Black Plan and Watchmaker references had scored dozens of hits as transitory anomalous events – from the crashes to bombings to disappearances of well known militants to emergency hands-on audits in Japanese-owned car factories – were attributed to one or the other, or both.

Jordan sipped coffee and ran the rumours through the hand-held’s freeware evaluation routines and his own mind. It took him about a quarter of an hour to arrange the possibilities in a spectrum. At one extreme of inferences from the net the Black Plan was already the Watchmaker, and was being used by the Illuminati through the Last International and its front organizations – including the Fourth International and the Fifth International and the International Committee for the Reconstruction of the Libertarian International – to take over the world by flooding the market with Black Plan products recognizable by barcodes all of which contained the number 666. At a minimum, though, there was definitely something happening on the Left, using the term in a fairly broad and paranoid sense to include the ANR and the Left Alliance and parts of the space movement, but the signal-to-noise ratio was so high there was no way to get much further without a reality check.

Time to look for some live action.

Jordan paid his tab and lugged his pack outside the door. As he buckled the strap a woman’s face caught his eye. An open, friendly face which he recognized but couldn’t place. She looked at him as if the recognition were mutual, but puzzled. A man walked beside her and a flicker of annoyance creased his brow as she stopped and said hello to Jordan.

Her dress seemed made of flames, a friendly fire that licked and played around the movements of her body. Salamandrine faces peeped and winked between her breasts and thighs. Her eyes were amused, when he reached them.

‘Enjoying your first taste of life in space?’

When she spoke he remembered her: she was the woman who’d checked him in.

‘Oh, hello again,’ he said. ‘Yes, but. It’s all a bit intense.’

‘What are you looking for?’

‘Uh…Well I want to meet people to talk to about…radical ideas, radical politics, you know? And to be honest I’d rather do it somewhere a bit more—’

He hesitated, not wanting to offend.

‘Normal and natural?’ she teased.

‘Yes,’ he admitted.

‘OK.’ She turned to her companion. ‘Do we know anywhere reasonably conservative, but relaxed?’

He thought for a moment, then said, ‘You could come with us. The Lord Carrington. That’s where the revolutionaries hang out.’ To Jordan it seemed wild enough, as he stood at the bar and drank his first honest litre. There were pubs in Beulah City but they were the sort of place where the Salvation Army was the entertainment. The Christians had an almost miraculous talent for turning wine into water. He smiled to himself and looked around.

The couple who’d come with him had been instantly dragged into a group of people in urgent discussion, leaving Jordan with a not unfriendly wave. The guy had been right about the sort of place it was. Conservative, relaxed and revolutionary: it caught the style. Cotton and leather and denim, a fashion statement echoing down generations: from cattle drivers to factory hands to leftist students to pro-Western youth in the East and back to the workers the last time the West was Red, and now to those who remembered that period or hoped for its return – the Levi jacket as much a badge of dissent as any enamel emblem pinned to its lapels.

Some of the women dressed exactly like the men, others played with similar modes softened by decorative touches; most, however, seemed to be announcing that they came from peasant rather than proletarian stock, in ethnic skirts and dresses that no actual Bolivian or Bulgarian or Kurdish woman would be seen dead in nowadays. But, whatever they wore, they acted in a way that struck him as brash and bold and masculine: shouting and smoking and buying drinks. There was something exciting about it, exciting in a different way from what he’d seen on the streets.

He felt simultaneously conspicuous and invisible. This was no singles bar: everyone was in groups and/or couples. He was noticed as different, unknown to anyone, and then ignored. He scanned the crowd for anyone on their own or anyhow interested in meeting someone new.

His idle gaze stopped with a jolt at a woman who sat on the wall-seat behind a table at the window. There were others at the table, but there was space on either side of her, and she was looking around the pub with a curious, questioning eye. She certainly wasn’t waiting for her date to turn up. She looked relaxed and content, and out-of-place. Cascading red hair, just enough make-up, pale face and paler arms set off by a sleeveless black top. It all said class, and not working class.

She saw him looking, and made eye-contact for a fraction of a second, then glanced down at her drink. Her hair tumbled forward. She ran her hand over the glass, then picked it up and took a swallow. Jordan turned away before she looked at him again, but he felt her gaze like a long, cool finger.

Another place, a place unknown except as a rumour, like the Black Plan and the Last International and the Twilight of the Icons. The Clearing House: a hierarchical hotline, the secret soviet of the ruling class, a permanent party – in both senses, an occasion and an organization of the privileged – where everybody who was anybody could socialize in privacy. The place where the Protocols of the Elders of Babylon could be hammered out.

Donovan was the only participant who had never received the standing invitation that came in some form to almost everyone who became conspicuously successful, terrorist and trillionaire alike. He had hacked his way in. The feat was so unprecedented and alarming that it had caused a five-minute global financial crash and an immediate arrangement to the effect that his electronic warfare would not bring down the wrath of Space Defense. Handling more localized retaliation would remain his own business.

Tonight he received an urgent summons, his first in years. It flashed around his screens, interrupting his interrogations of the entities that slunk and prowled in forgotten reaches of the datasphere. He dismissed them and subvocalized the passwords, and in an instant he was there, out of it. He needed no VR gear to be there, to be out of it – he took it straight from the screens, his mind vaulting unaided into the lucid dream of mainframing.

Free fall in black space, faint fall of photons. Step up the magnification and resolution to:

A distant galaxy, a chalk thumbprint whorl, a cloud of points of light, a hovering firefly swarm, a crowded cloud of bright fantastic bodies, a multi-level masquerade where everyone was talking but no one could overhear. Donovan’s fetch – the body-construct that other users saw – was based on a younger self, not out of vanity but because he couldn’t be bothered to update it. Others inclined to the Masque of the Red Death approach. It looked like a heaven for the wicked.

‘Glad to see you, Donovan.’

The angel that spoke to him had chubby pink cheeks, iridescent feathered wings, a shining robe and an uncertain halo that wavered over her head like a smoke-ring.

‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced.’

The angel simpered, a visual effect so cloying that Donovan felt metaphysically sick.

‘My name is Melody Lawson. Do you remember me?’

Donovan struggled to sustain the illusion of telepresence as (‘back’ at the rig, as he couldn’t help thinking) he fumbled with a hot-key databoard. Melody Lawson’s details flickered past the corner of his eye.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘You and your husband left the movement – oh, it must be nearly twenty years ago. But I seem to recall a few very welcome sums of’ – he smiled – ‘angel money.’ Conscience money, more like. ‘What are you doing now, and why have you called me?’

‘I look after data security for Beulah City,’ Mrs Lawson said. ‘Cracker turned keeper, as they say. I must admit that what I learned in my young and foolish days has been enormously useful professionally. And I still share your concern about the dangers of AI, though some of your actions have been quite a nuisance to me in the past.’

‘And yours to me,’ Donovan said. It wasn’t entirely flattery: Beulah City’s censorship filters made it a tough one, although with its relatively backward systems it seldom deserved disruption anyway.

‘However,’ Mrs Lawson went on, ‘we should all be willing to let bygones be bygones when we find that we have a common interest, don’t you think?’

‘And what common interest is that?’ Donovan asked.

‘I think you know what I’m talking about,’ Mrs Lawson said.

Before Donovan could respond he heard a discreet murmur in his head informing him that somebody else in the Clearing House wanted to speak to him. It had to be someone high up in the informal hierarchy to get through at a time like this. Mrs Lawson, too, seemed to be getting paged. Donovan chinned the go-ahead, wondering if she had set him up for this. He remembered her, now, quite unassisted: she’d been devious even before she’d got religion.

A privacy bubble snapped into existence, enclosing them and two others: a man in black who looked like one of the Men In Black, the mythical enforcers of the mythical great UFO cover-up, his face a bloodless white, eyes sapphire-blue, forehead bulging in the wrong places, suit ill fitting; and a small man in what appeared to be a company fetch, blue overalls with a name-badge. Southeast Asian, probably Vietnamese.

The Man In Black spoke first. Even his voice sounded not quite right, a pirated copy of the human. Donovan wondered what irony underlay this simulation of a simulacrum, or whether it was a genuine attempt to intimidate.

‘Good evening. I am an agent of the Science, Technology and Software Investigation Service of the United Nations. You may refer to me as Bleibtreu-Fèvre.’

Donovan felt as if he were a cat watching a snake: he and Stasis had the same enemies and the same prey, but he regarded the agency, with its allegedly enhanced operatives and its undeniably advanced technology – more advanced than the technology which they existed to stamp out – as dangerously close to the kind of evils which for years he’d feared and fought. There had been occasions in the past when the Carbon Life Alliance had had to collaborate with Stasis, and they’d always left him with a crawling sensation on his skin.

‘Dr Nguyen Thanh Van, Research Director, Da Nang Phytochemicals,’ the Vietnamese man said. The voice and lip-synch had a thin quality that indicated either primitive kit or heavy crypto masking.

Donovan and Lawson introduced themselves for Van’s benefit, and Bleibtreu-Fèvre continued.

‘This afternoon,’ he said, ‘I personally intervened in an emerging situation involving some dangerous drug applications which were – inadvertently, I do not doubt – being developed by a, shall we say, subsidiary of Dr Van’s company. Earlier today, and unknown to me at the time, the security of that research was compromised by a swarm of information-seeking software constructs. Shortly thereafter, as I am sure you are well aware, a series of transient and potentially catastrophic events took place in the datasphere. One might be prepared to pass this off as coincidence were it not for two facts. One is that the focus of the disturbances has been traced to the facility in question. The second is that, while the disturbances have affected a wide range of services and enterprises, a statistically improbable number of them have centred on research programmes which in one way or another are associated with Da Nang Phytochemicals.’

Dr Van’s fetch flickered slightly, as if he’d been about to say something and thought better of it.

‘Almost but not quite the most disturbing feature of these events is that a considerable volume of research data, much of it hard-to-replace genetic archive material held at widely separated sites around the world, has simply disappeared. The most disturbing aspect of the problem is this:

‘A preliminary analysis of the scope and power of the source of these disruptions indicates that we are dealing with, at best, a virus of unprecedented sophistication and at worst with a manifestation of an autonomous artificial intelligence.’

‘The Watchmaker,’ Melody Lawson murmured.

‘That is indeed a possibility,’ said the Stasis agent.

‘Why have you contacted us?’ Donovan asked in as innocent a voice as he could manage.

‘Don’t fuck me about!’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre snarled. The vernacular vulgarity was a small shock after his previous stilted diction. ‘You know very well that the West Middlesex cell of your organization attacked the artificial-intelligence research unit at Brunel University last night. The drug laboratory was broken into around the same time—’

‘Nothing to do with me,’ Donovan interjected. Bleibtreu-Fèvre acknowledged this but continued implacably.

‘—and that one of your penetration viruses – illegal, and hazardous in its own right, I may add – was destroyed within that very area a few hours ago. Immediately thereafter your own interface with the system was crashed, presumably by the new AI. You then triggered a retaliatory demon attack, which by another coincidence destroyed the lab that I had been investigating. You, Doctor Van, are legally responsible for your company’s research, which is apparently of such great interest to this dangerous entity. I will take your cooperation as a gauge of the sincerity of your claim that you know nothing about any such connection. As for Mrs Lawson, it is very much to her credit that she contacted me on her own initiative, after encountering some early indications of the phenomenon.’

So that was it. Donovan suspected that a bit of ass-covering was going on here. Lawson had contacted him, and must have decided at the same moment that a parallel call to the legal authorities would be a good idea. Bleibtreu-Fèvre, no doubt frantic about how an otherwise minor lab-leak on his turf was escalating into a software-security crisis, would have been monitoring every call from the area and pounced on the opportunity.

‘In what context?’ Van asked, relieving Donovan of the necessity of revealing his curiosity. The angel-fetch brushed a wingtip against the Man In Black; some private communication passed between them and then Melody Lawson said: ‘I was investigating a Black Plan penetration of our business systems.’

‘That’s interesting,’ Donovan said. ‘I encountered the Black Plan in the same frame as the new entity – dammit, we might as well call it the Watchmaker – and there are all sorts of rumours flying around about a possible connection between them.’

‘Are there indeed?’ remarked Bleibtreu-Fèvre. He said nothing more for a few moments, his fetch taking on the barely controllable abstracted look that Stasis agents showed when accessing the net through their head patches. Then he snapped back to alertness.

‘What were you doing when your constructs encountered the…Watchmaker?’

Donovan sighed. A few hours ago, nothing had seemed more important than avenging the insult from Moh Kohn. Now that was only a squalid squabble.

‘I was pursuing a conflict with a common mercenary who had broken, ah, certain rules of engagement in the course of last night’s armed action—’ He stopped and frowned at Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘You said the drug-research project had been penetrated by some info-seeker agents.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, this mercenary, Moh Kohn, was definitely hacking about in the system.’ Donovan thought back to his conversation with Cat. ‘And he had visited a lab on campus shortly before. One that had been broken into.’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s eyes seemed literally to light up. He turned to Van.

‘Have you contacted the researcher, Janis Taine?’

‘I regret to say she has disappeared,’ Van said. ‘Possibly your intervention had something to do with that.’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre glared at him.

Van looked back, unperturbed. ‘The message she left was untraceable,’ he added.

‘Then she’s in Norlonto,’ said Melody Lawson. ‘It’s the only place within easy reach where that sort of crypto is legal.’

‘And where Stasis can’t go,’ Donovan added maliciously. ‘You’ll have to turn it over to Space Defense.’

‘We have a problem here,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said smoothly. ‘Stasis is the first line of defence against contingencies like the present situation. If we should fail, SD has a standing instruction to prevent any possible takeover of the datasphere by any AI not under human control. I am not at liberty to spell it out, but expressions like clean break and fresh start tend to crop up. Their response to a threatened degradation of the datasphere might be unacceptably drastic.’

Donovan took in this information with wildly mixed feelings: a certain grim elation that his fears of uncontrolled AI were shared by the most powerful armed force in history, and a sickly horror at what that armed force could do. If Space Defense ever decided to treat earth as, in effect, an alien planet, they’d have to prevent any organism, or any transmission, from ever getting off the surface again. Comsats would be lased, launch-sites nuked. Electromagnetic pulses from these and other nukes would wipe most computer memories. Production networks would unravel in days. They wouldn’t even have to burn the cities. The riots and breakdowns would do that for them.

‘Call it nine gigadeaths,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘So. I hope I can count on your cooperation, both in containing the problem and in maintaining absolute secrecy.’

‘It seems we have an agreement,’ Donovan said, looking around. ‘Pay-offs can be arranged later, but can we take it from here that the usual immunities apply?’

‘Of course,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre impatiently. ‘Now, details.’

The division of labour he proposed was straightforward. Lawson would network with her counterparts in other communities to discreetly monitor the AI’s activity. Donovan would assist her in using any logged traces of their respective encounters with the entity to develop specific attack viruses for it, while calling off his normal sabotage programme. Van would make a full investigation of the various projects that the Watchmaker AI had targeted, and try to reestablish contact with the fugitive researcher Janis Taine.

‘It seems a reasonable hypothesis,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre concluded, with a sort of civil-servant pedantry that had Donovan wishing he could clout him, ‘that Taine has fled to Norlonto, possibly in the company of Moh Kohn, if he indeed took an interest in her research and visited her lab. So we should track these two down if only to eliminate them from our inquiries. Ha, ha.’

He took notice of Donovan’s attempts to attract his attention.

‘I think I can help you with that,’ Donovan said as he stopped shrinking and enlarging his fetch, the cyberspace equivalent of jumping up and down. ‘Let me explain…’

9

To Each as He is Chosen

The dead Leninists were live in Bydgoszcz, belting out The Money that Love Can’t Buy. Kohn was trying to filter out the band’s smoke-scarred heavy-water sound and listen to the buzz. A lot of talk about the Alliance’s actions and the ANR’s intentions, a lot of politicking going on. After a random walk through it he realized he’d been neglecting Janis for at least two tracks, maybe three smokes…He said as much to the off-duty fighter he was talking to, bought another couple of litres and turned from the bar. He almost collided with a young man who had obviously been leaning forward from the stool he was sitting on, listening to their every word.

Big-boned, sandy-haired, he had the look of a country boy without the rude health: a bit ruddy-faced, a bit flabby. Young, very intense and slightly drunk. He swayed out of Kohn’s way, and looked right back at him, unabashed.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I…couldn’t help overhearing.’

‘Yes. And?’

‘You were asking that guy about what the ANR’s up to, yeah?’

‘Uh-huh.’ There didn’t seem to be much point in denying it.

‘I’ve been trying to find out about that myself.’ The man kept his eyes fixed on Moh’s, raised a brim-full glass of whisky to his lips and sipped it. The cool-dude effect was more or less ruined by a startled look as he swallowed. ‘There’s one theory I’ve come across. It involves the Last International, the Watchmaker, the Black Plan and barcodes.’

Kohn heard his own voice as a distant croak.

‘Barcodes?’

‘Barcodes containing the number 666.’ The youth’s face broke into an engaging grin. ‘That’s the only bit that surprises you?’

Kohn had the disconcerting feeling of having lost a move.

‘I think we should talk about this,’ he said. ‘Come and sit down?’

The man followed Kohn to the table, dragging a rucksack. Kohn sat beside Janis and the man sat at right-angles to them. He smiled at Janis, almost as if he recognized her, and said, ‘Hi. My name’s Jordan Brown.’ He stretched out a hand to shake. She introduced herself.

Kohn decided it was time to shift the advantage slightly.

‘Dunno about the lady here,’ he said, ‘but I’m always happy to meet a refugee from BC. Welcome to space.’

‘How do you know where I’m from?’

‘Clothes,’ Kohn sympathized. ‘Accent. Traces of skin conditions.’

Jordan looked indignant for a second, then laughed.

‘Stigmata!’

‘Don’t worry. They’ll wear off. OK, Jordan, you might find it a bit more difficult to figure us out. Janis is a scientist and I work for a protection agency. Some people would call me a communist. Much-abused label, but…’

He waved a hand to take in all the unfortunate associations he might have evoked.

‘Doesn’t bother me,’ Jordan said. ‘I believe in taking people as you find them. I’m an individualist. And a capitalist.’

‘And surprisingly well informed,’ Kohn said. ‘Considering.’ He leaned back. Over to you.

Jordan peered around in a way that triggered Kohn’s memory of how Janis had looked over her shoulder that morning.

‘Uh…is the ANR legal here?’

Kohn smiled. ‘That’s not a simple question but, if having an office block with its name in lights is anything to go by, yes. And we do have free speech, as you may have noticed.’

Jordan sighed, shoulders sagging a little.

‘Stigmata again…’

Kohn nodded. ‘The right of free speech is one thing,’ he said. ‘But the stuff in that glass is the best thing going for helping you exercise it.’

Jordan took a sip of whisky and began to talk.

While Jordan was getting a round in, Janis and Moh conferred frantically.

‘Do you think he’s…on to us?’ Janis whispered.

‘Some kind of agent?’ Kohn shook his head. ‘Anything like that, it’d be someone I know…He’s just sharp. Heard me asking around.’

‘We could get him in on this. You want to keep off the net, and I’m no good on it. He is.’

Kohn gazed at her. ‘That’s an idea.’

They shifted apart as Jordan came back, looking down and moving like someone steering a car with his elbows. He smiled at Janis as he put the drinks down.

‘I’m impressed,’ Kohn said. ‘Really. You’ve sifted an incredible amount of stuff off the net, come up with a big spread of ideas about what’s going on. How did you get that good, back there?’

Jordan scowled at his drink, then looked up. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I was using better kit than I’ve ever had before, and I was doing the same sort of thing as I do at work. Did at work. A feel for how the markets move, like Mrs Lawson told me today.’ He laughed. ‘And a feel for virtual reality from playing Paluxy, I guess.’

‘What’s Paluxy?’ Janis asked.

‘Dinosaur-hunting game. It’s in the only VR arcade Beulah City’s got. Noah’s Park.’

‘I see,’ Kohn said. He glanced sidelong at Janis, who didn’t see, either. ‘You came here looking to put some flesh on what you found. So did we.’ He spoke slowly, trying to get his zooming, looping thoughts into some kind of formation-flying. ‘Or, maybe, we’re the flesh. So now you’ve got a choice. You can go and do whatever it is you really wanted to do in Norlonto that you couldn’t do in BC – read, net-surf, get laid, whatever – and forget about this. Or you can come in on it with us. If that’s what you decide, we’ll tell you all we know.’

Moh leaned closer and spoke quietly, barely moving his lips. He was sure even Janis couldn’t hear him. ‘And if you betray us, I’ll kill you.’

He straightened up and smiled at Jordan as if he’d just given him a hot betting tip, watching the fear and eagerness that seemed, now, so evident on Jordan’s carefully impassive face.

‘OK,’ Jordan said. ‘Let me think, OK? You’re not talking about anything that…would be criminal, here?’

‘Nope,’ Moh said.

Janis shook her head fiercely.

‘You’re not working for the’ – he lowered his voice, his face squirming with distaste – ‘government or the UN or anything like that?’

Moh guffawed, putting an arm around Janis’s shoulders and slapping Jordan on the back.

‘You’re all right,’ he said.

Jordan looked pleased and embarrassed.

‘So what’s this big secret, and what do you want me to do?’

Moh looked around. ‘Surprising as it may seem, this ain’t exactly the time or the place for talking about secrets. As to what we want you to do, basically it’s just what you have been doing. But with a bit more to go on, which is what we can give you. I live near here and you can use our place as a base until you get somewhere for yourself. If that’s what you want.’ He passed Jordan one of his business cards and gave him a quick rundown on the Collective.

‘So what do we tell the comrades?’ Janis asked.

‘As near the truth as possible,’ Kohn said. ‘Jordan’s helping us with research, and building up a database of possible contacts, customers…’

‘OK,’ Jordan said, ‘but why me, and why for you?’

‘Suppose we make it something you’d want to do anyway. I mean, like today you’ve sort of had your wish come true, got booted out of BC with a nice little stash. So…what would you have done, if you hadn’t got any further with your search?’

‘Found somewhere to live. Got a job – in futures maybe – and, uh, read and written a lot.’

‘What would you write?’

‘Philosophy. Kind of. Oh, not just atheism, humanism, I’m sure there are plenty doing that out here—’

‘You’d be surprised,’ Kohn remarked.

‘—but I want to do more. I want to attack all these cults and ideologies. I have this, this vision that life could be better if only people could see how things really are. That it’s your one life, it’s yours, you have this inexhaustible universe to live it in and God damn it isn’t that enough? Why do we have to wander around in these invented worlds of our own devising, these false realities that are just clutter, dross, dirt on the lens? – all these beliefs and identities that people throw away their real lives for.’

‘Like, there is no God, and you shall have no other gods.’

‘That’s it. That’s what I want to write.’

‘I have a better idea,’ Kohn said. The understanding of how good an idea it was glowed within him, spreading like an inward smile. ‘Would you like to be on television?’

Only cable, and with a small subscriber base, he explained. But items did get picked up sometimes by the networks, and the Cats had schedules to spare since all they put out was their own edited exploits and an alternative news-slot with a bit of radical/critical/marxist analysis thrown in.

‘If you can just talk like that to a camera you’ll be fine,’ Kohn said. ‘Nothing to it. No interviewers. No professionals to sneer. It’s your show. Say what you like – basically we hate the barb and the mini-states, and if you do too then you’re on our side; anything rational would be better than those smelly, cosy subtotalitarianisms. The only viewers will be watching because they want to, so you won’t bore anyone. And, you being a capitalist, you can measure your success by the credits that you clock up!’

‘Oh man.’ Jordan had fire in his eyes now. ‘That sounds great. Too good to be true.’

‘No, just true enough to be good.’

‘Speaking of clocking up credits…what do you guys, your comrades, do with the money you make?’

Kohn frowned. ‘Savings bank account.’

Jordan laughed. ‘You’d do better buying gold and keeping it in an old sock!’

‘What else could you do with it?’ Kohn asked, genuinely puzzled.

Jordan looked at him, shaking his head. ‘Call yourselves mercenaries…Look, you’ve got an inside track on the whole micropolitics of this place, you’re in the middle of a free-trade zone, you don’t pay taxes, you’ve got access to news and rumours more or less as they break…You know, I could make a bit of money from what I learned on the net tonight!’

Kohn looked at Janis for guidance. She shrugged. ‘Sounds feasible enough.’

‘Great!’ Kohn straightened up and raised his glass. ‘Here’s to the international communist–capitalist conspiracy, to which I’ve always wanted to belong.’

For Jordan they drank to philosophical speculators, which they all thought was rather good, and for Janis to mad scientists who did awful things to rats. After that they got loud and, eventually, quiet. ‘Is Molly Biolly a crank band?’ Janis was looking at the stage when Kohn swung into the seat beside her, returned from another prowl through the buzz.

‘I don’t know. What—?’

‘That guy at the back, looks like Brian Donovan. Like the picture of him on the back of his book.’

Behind the holo image of three girls in second-skin plastic doing indecent things with synthesizers stood the scratchy spectral fetch of a man with long grey hair and a long grey beard. He seemed to be staring at them.

‘Weird,’ Kohn said, sliding away from and in front of Janis.

‘Isn’t it just a projection?’ Jordan asked.

‘The band is,’ Kohn said, not turning round. ‘But this stage has its cameras, too, so you can patch in a moving point-of view from somewhere else…That’s how a fetch works, out in AR. Shit, he is watching us. And he knows we know. Let’s make some space, keep it natural, knock back the drinks and head for the door. You first, Jordan, then Janis.’

Kohn stood, gulped whisky. The figure moved forward, through Molly Biolly, a ghost through ghosts. Some yells of complaint and disgust went up. The fetch glided across the edge of the stage and into the crowd. Irrationally, people made way. Smoke coiled into colours inside it.

The band, which had been TALKIN BOUT MY GENE RATION!!!! fell to mouthing soundlessly, like terrorists on television. The crowd in the pub was silent, too, eyes focused on the moving image.

The fetch pointed a translucent arm at Kohn. Its lips moved out-of-synch as the speakers boomed back to life.

‘MOH KOHN!’ it said. ‘I ACCUSE YOU OF BREAKING THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT! IF YOU DO NOT APOLOGISE IN PERSON AND IN THE FLESH TO MY EMPLOYEE, ACCEPT A RANSOM AND CLEAR HER NAME WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, I WILL SEE YOU IN THE NEAREST GENEVA COURT. IN THE MEANTIME AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE I OFFER A REWARD FOR YOUR ARREST AS A RENEGADE AND A PUBLIC MENACE.’

Donovan’s fetch looked around, as if to make sure everyone had heard that, and vanished.

Kohn was backing off – on the balls of his feet, ready to lash out.

The music came back on. Somebody laughed. Just a terrorist dispute. Attention returned to the band; heads turned away.

A heavily built man sitting on a bar stool casually slid an empty stein along the slick of beer, pushing at the bar with his toe so that the stool spun, carrying him round, the sweep of his arm carrying the glass round to the final flick of a discus throw.

Kohn ducked so fast his feet left the ground. The glass hit the wall behind him and bounced off, almost getting him on the rebound.

Kohn lunged forward, doubled fists driving into the attacker’s midriff. The man gasped but pushed back, up and off the stool. Kohn reeled away and a table caught him across the back of his thighs. He staggered but didn’t fall.

In a moment something changed: his point of view. He looked down at his head from a metre or so above it, two metres, and everything was laid out for him like an architect’s diagram. Some calm undertone soothed the frightened australopithecine that was in his skull but thinking it was out of it. Only a picture, a visual aid, an icon: this is what it would look like if you could look at it like this. He reached – saw his hand reach – behind him and caught a full glass as it slid from the table and dashed the contents in his opponent’s face, then stepped forward and neatly wrecked the man’s knee. He was back behind his eyes in time to see the other’s fill with pain and shock before a sideways topple took them closing to the floor.

Kohn pulled his credID card from his back pocket and held it up as he turned to face one of the pub’s security cameras.

‘I suppose you got all that,’ he told the record. ‘I’ll not press charges but if you want to you can call me as a witness.’ He looked at the people whose table he’d cannoned against. They were still getting out of their seats, wiping at their clothes. He pointed at the slumped figure.

‘A round on him,’ he said.

Everybody was looking at him again.

‘Don’t fucking mess with me,’ he added, and walked towards the door. Jordan had been holding Janis back. He let go of her upper arms and stooped to rub his shins.

‘Spirited little tyke, isn’t she?’ Kohn said.

He smiled at the two indignant and relieved faces.

‘C’mon gang, let’s go. Don’t look back or you’ll turn into a pillar of salt.’

At the Clearing House Donovan turned around in the privacy bubble to face a seething silence. Everyone had been and gone, flitting out and back through the evening to attend to their several businesses, while he had divided his attention between calling off various live actions and haunting a succession of pubs, nightclubs and drug dens. But they’d all been present to see him finally find Kohn. The images from the pub’s cameras were still spread around them like scraps of newsprint, rippling with re-run movement.

‘Donovan,’ Mrs Lawson said, ‘I do wish you had engaged your brain before you opened your mouth.’

Donovan glared at her. ‘Why? I told you I would challenge Kohn.’

‘The attempt to incite a citizen’s arrest was, shall we say, excessive,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre interposed. ‘However, we do at least now know for certain that Taine is with him. Even if we have temporarily frightened them off.’

‘That’s not the problem!’ Melody Lawson snapped. ‘If you’d given me a chance…there was another person with them.’ She reached for a patch of scene and stuck it where they could all see it: a young man walking backwards, open-mouthed, behind Janis Taine. ‘That isn’t one of Kohn’s gang. It’s Jordan Brown, who was involved in the Black Plan penetration incident this afternoon.’ She ran her hands distractedly through her shining hair and halo, leaving little flecks of gold figment on her fingers. ‘That suggests very sinister possibilities.’

Donovan felt some calm returning, a recognition that perhaps he’d lost it for a couple of seconds.

‘I…apologize for my haste,’ he said. ‘All the same, there seems no reason why Kohn shouldn’t show up to claim the ransom. I’ll have the hospital staked out by morning. In the meantime, why don’t you check your exile’s records?’

‘I certain shall,’ Mrs Lawson said grimly. ‘He was disaffected for some time. Goodness knows who he was in contact with.’

‘This man Kohn,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘Do you know anything about him?’

Donovan frowned. ‘He’s the leader of a small gang of security mercenaries…other than a nasty streak of pro-technology fanaticism, they’re nothing special. As it happens, the hired fighter who was on my team last night is a former member.’

‘What?’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre looked appalled. ‘I find that suspicious.’

Donovan could see the paranoia building as Lawson and Bleibtreu-Fèvre exchanged glances. He tried to head it off before he started down that path himself.

‘She broke with them and their outlook a long time ago. No, the only significance this has is that it creates a strong personal antagonism between her and Kohn. As I said, this could work in our favour.’

‘Could you raise some local forces to watch their house?’ Dr Van asked, suddenly leaning into the discussion. ‘Possibly intervene directly?’

‘Not a chance,’ Donovan said. ‘The whole area is covered by a network of defence agencies, crawling with ANR cadres and sympathizers, patrolled by space-movement militia. Most of the houses are built to withstand at least indirect blast damage. Kohn’s is probably capable of holding off a tank.’

‘…I see,’ said Van, reacting after seconds of satellite delay. ‘A liberated zone.’ For the first time, he smiled at them all.

‘Quite,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘I wonder if Kohn has any, as we say, form.’

‘Why not check your agency’s records?’ Mrs Lawson suggested.

Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s fetch seemed to diminish slightly. ‘I would have to give a full accounting of the circumstances,’ he said. ‘That might…raise unnecessary alarm.’

Might be embarrassing, Donovan thought, unsympathetically. As a field operative, Bleibtreu-Fèvre must have a great deal of autonomy, but the bureaucratic mechanisms of Stasis would still kick in at sensitive points. Personal records was probably one of them, surrounded by smoke and mirrors: safeguards – reassurances that a secret police force which went around stamping on dangerous scientists wasn’t any kind of threat to normal folks’ privacy and civil liberties, no sir.

‘I can help you there,’ he said. ‘Just let me know your passwords and procedures and I’ll do an end-run around them.’

‘Impossible!’

Donovan looked straight back at the Man In Black’s glowing, glowering eyes. Cheap trick, Hallowe’en lantern…

‘Not with your help, it isn’t,’ he said.

Bleibtreu-Fèvre considered it, his face frozen in a downloading trance. Donovan had counted past sixty when the fetch’s lips moved again.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘What is there to lose?’

Using the codes and pathways supplied by Bleibtreu-Fèvre, Donovan got into the US/UN system so easily that he marked time for a few seconds before launching the database call. He regretted it as the retrieval time clocked on and on – seconds, one minute, one and a half, two…Was the damn thing written in COBOL?

Two minutes fifty.

Three. Three ten.

I mean what sort of crap programmers do these guys have?

And then it all started coming in, a whole structure of links and inferences building up around them like the result of some cartoon character making a cast with a fishing-line and snagging it, hauling in seaweed, a chain, a wreck, a whole rustbucket fleet pelting down on the quay…

The four of them stood looking at the mass of recovered data.

‘Oh,’ Donovan said at last. ‘That Kohn.’

‘What was that all about?’ Jordan asked. He and Janis were hard put to keep up with Kohn. The best place to walk was immediately behind him.

‘Donovan was trying it on,’ Kohn said over his shoulder. ‘I interdicted one of his sabotage teams last night. There’s something else. Personal. Too complicated to go into right now…Plenty of time to sort it out in the morning. Whatever, he found out where I was and tried to rouse against me any opportunist bounty-hunters who might be around. Not very successful.’

He turned away, ‘Renegade…’ His laughter floated back.

‘Slow down, willya?’ Janis gasped.

‘Oh. All right.’

Suddenly they were a threesome, moving through the shifting crowds in a normal way. Jordan felt a heightened alertness, the effect of the drink creeping back after a sobering shock had banished it. A woman in a militia uniform stared back at him defiantly as he noticed the division of her face, half mature and half twisted baby-features, growing in. She had one chubby doll-like arm to match, sticking out of a hole torn carelessly in the top of her sleeve.

‘Why doesn’t everybody use that to stay young and beautiful?’ Jordan said after she’d passed.

‘Regen? Some do,’ Kohn said. ‘It’s expensive. Most mercenaries have it as part of their insurance package, but the no-claims kickback is crippling. Probably just as well. You don’t want people getting reckless just because no non-fatal wound is permanent.’

‘Better reckless than wrecked,’ Janis said.

When Jordan had gone into the bar he’d hoped to get not just more information but also a rest from Norlonto’s restless streetlife. He’d got more of one and less of the other than he’d hoped. Now he was partly supported by his arm around Janis and by Moh’s arm, also around Janis, locking his in place. It seemed appropriate. He felt knocked sideways by both of them.

Like a hatchling imprinted by the first large moving object it sees, he reflected. So be it. He had never seen a woman as beautiful, as fascinating and free, as Janis. And Moh, he was something else: everything Jordan wasn’t – thin, tough, clued-up – but he made Jordan feel at ease and accepted. What it would be like to be so open, so at home in the world!

‘You know something?’ Jordan said. ‘I’ve always believed in you people.’

The others laughed.

‘You must have a lot of faith!’ Janis said.

‘Reason, not faith,’ Jordan retorted. ‘I never had any proof that people like you existed, but I knew you had to. That rational people existed – somewhere else. They damn’ well don’t exist down there. So I never actually met any. I just read about them in books – read their books. Also I suppose I saw their works. Sort of like the argument from design.’ He looked up, waved his free fist at the sky. ‘Every aeroplane is a proof that there must be a rational mind somewhere!’

‘Yeah, well, we know that,’ Kohn said. ‘What amazes me is the uses they can get put to, not to mention the pilot’s birthsign hologram medallion, satellite televangelists—’

‘—and Creation astronomy kits—’

‘—credulity drugs to make alternative medicine more effective—’

‘—designer heroin for dying soldiers—’

‘—instant access to more lies than you could refute in ten lifetimes—’

‘—Well, that’s freedom for you,’ Janis said, grinning up at the two men’s faces. ‘From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen, right?’

Jordan shrugged off the rucksack in the hallway and stood still for a moment, trying to recover a sense of balance. His ears sang and his eyes still delivered an unfamiliar illusion that everything was spinning, but not actually moving. His knee-joints felt unreliable. Here he was, going with two people he barely knew into a fortified house full of drugtakers! Loose women! Armed communists!

He followed Moh and Janis into the main room. No one else seemed to be around.

‘Coffee, anyone?’ Moh said.

‘Sounds like a really good idea.’ Jordan sat down on the sofa, too hard. Faint ringing noises echoed into the distance.

‘Here’s another good idea.’ Moh tossed something over his shoulder. It landed beside Jordan. ‘Have yourself one of these.’

Jordan picked up the pack of marijuana cigarettes and looked at it doubtfully as a battered Zippo landed on the identical spot. He turned to Janis and raised his eyebrows. ‘What do you think of this stuff?’

‘Well – it’s not particularly good for you if you smoke a lot, and it makes some people lazy or at least lazier than they’d be anyway, but on the other hand it isn’t addictive and it’s a lot less carcinogenic than tobacco.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m having one, anyway.’

‘It doesn’t make holes in your brain?’

‘No, I don’t think the latest research really bears that out.’

Jordan took the lighter and packet over to Janis.

‘I’ll try it,’ he said. ‘But I’m not quite sure how.’

‘Best a little smoke and a lot of air.’ She demonstrated. Jordan lit up and went back to the sofa. Away for one evening and already he was on drugs. Rather to his surprise he made a fairly creditable fist of it, and had got over the coughing by the time Moh brought him a big earthenware mug of Nicafé.

‘Good stuff?’ Moh grinned, settling beside him.

‘Yes,’ Jordan gasped, wiping his eyes and sipping coffee. He looked at how the man sat: arrogantly relaxed, one ankle resting on the other knee, the ebony gleam of his leather clothes; and the woman, half-lotus in the chair, alabaster skin and tender flesh in black silk, smoke curling around her curling hair. ‘Can’t say I’ve noticed much effect yet.’

Moh’s lips and brows twitched, but he made no comment.

‘So…’ Jordan looked from Moh to Janis. ‘Are you going to tell me what you know?’

Moh rolled his eyes and closed them. ‘Not tonight we ain’t.’

He seemed to have drifted off into some kind of trance. Janis noticed Jordan noticing, and made a pacifying gesture.

‘He’s had a long day,’ she said.

‘Not to mention the drugs.’

‘Yeah,’ said Janis. ‘Not to mention the drugs. Tell me about yourself, Jordan.’

Jordan took another hit. He still couldn’t identify any effect. His mind felt clear and calm, and he couldn’t look at anything but Janis. She had flared when she spoke, and now was settled back to a steady flame with a flickering hint of mischief. They talked quietly while Kohn watched something else, and said nothing.

Moh saw the darkness and the lights of the city around them as if the walls were transparent; and the new strange company he kept, the bright city of clean sharp logic at the back of his mind. It ran pictures for him, eidetic memories that played like VR diskettes, of the world that had made the world he walked in now:

the bright world the banner bright the symbol plain the greenbelt fields the greenfield streets the Fuller domes the crowds the quiet dark moments

the plastic model spaceships hanging from black threads the old Warsaw Pact poster of a little girl cradling the Earth DEFEND PEACE the stacked clutter of toys and books and tapes the VR space-helmet

the war. The Republic didn’t disdain the help of children. The party set up a special militia, the Young Guards. Moh toted his first rifle then, a lightweight British SLR, in boring nights of watching the entrance to an office tower. (The trick was that he was guarding it secretly, from a safe-house window across the street: the government was already behaving like a resistance movement.) The days were more exciting: demonstrations and street fights, the tensions of the struggle to maintain neutrality, to keep out of the war. Josh and Marcia made jokes that he didn’t get, about fighting for peace. They were literally doing that, kicking into demonstrations of what they called the War Party: royalists and tories and fascists. Sometimes the police joined in on both sides.

Moh, later, found himself surprisingly ignorant of the details of the actual course of the War of European Integration. At the time he picked up the assumption that the news was all propaganda, and only caught glimpses of it on television. German tanks rode battering sleds of air, carrying the star-circled banner into Warsaw and Bucharest and Zagreb. German MiGs cleared the skies.

The Peace Process. No, not that. He jolted himself awake, gulped cold coffee and thought about something else.

Jordan was explaining to Janis the distinction between Dispensationalism and Pre-Millenarianism (which seemed very important but difficult to grasp) when he heard Moh’s mocking laughter and saw him stand up, looking as if he’d had a good night’s sleep.

‘It’s time I went to bed,’ Moh said.

‘I think it’s time I did,’ Janis said. She yawned, stretched, and jumped to her feet.

‘D’you mind just crashing here, Jordan, just for tonight?’

‘That’s fine. That’s great. Thanks.’

‘Okay. See you in the morning, Jordan.’

‘Goodnight.’

Janis waved, smiling. A moment later they were gone, like birds through a hole in the roof. Jordan sat still for some time and then took most of his clothes off, wrapped himself in blankets from the back of the sofa, and stretched out on it and stayed awake for a long time.

‘Well?’ she said, leaning against the door of his room.

‘Well what?’

‘Have you found a place?’

‘Yeah,’ Kohn said.

‘Good. Well…I feel like another joint before turning in.’ She raised her eyebrows and looked at him. He still seemed wide awake, and he grinned back at her as if this were the most unexpected and delightful suggestion he’d heard in a long time.

‘Yeah, why not?’

She turned and opened the door, watching him. His arm came into the room, past her shoulder; he did something with a switch. Small lights glowed on in the corners as she kicked off her shoes and sat down on the edge of the bed. He sat beside her, leaned an elbow against the pillow and offered her the now depleted and battered pack. She took one out and lit up.

‘Do you want to share?’

‘No, thank you,’ he said. ‘Lipstick tastes.’

She caught him just as he reached for the pack, with her right hand suddenly behind his head. Her fingers dug into his curls. She drew in the smoke to her throat, held it, and grudged the breath that escaped as she whispered, ‘Taste this…’

She brought their mouths (hers open, his opening) together and breathed out while he breathed in. They both broke away, gasping. The second time she gave less attention to fire and more to water, darting her tonguetip against his.

‘You took me by surprise,’ Kohn said.

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve been wanting to do this for hours.’

‘Wanton woman.’

‘Abandoned,’ she agreed. ‘An outcast of society.’

She stubbed out the filter roach. Kohn kicked off his boots, shrugged out of his waistcoat, then leaned forward and drew her on to him. She trailed her hair from his shoulders down to his hips, then did the same with her lips and tongue, discovering as she did so that it was time to get his trousers off. She straddled him and took her time with the belt and zip. She moved on her knees down over his thighs, tugging the trews and shorts away, and then suddenly it got urgent and she pulled them fiercely over his feet. She sat on his bare thighs, facing away from him, while he pulled the silk top over her head and unlaced her basque. She slipped her own trousers and pants off. She leaned forward, letting her hair tickle his toes, until the pale opalescent shell of the basque fell away from her chest, and his arms slid around her waist. His erection pressed against the small of her back. She turned over on her knees and put her hands on his shoulders and he lay back and she moved forward and up and Moh rose to meet her and she moved, slowly up and swiftly down, and so they continued, the cannabis in their racing blood stretching time.

She did not know when it was she spoke his name and got no answer; and looking down at him, smiled to see that he had fallen asleep just like that.

10

The Transitional Programmer

Moh woke with a jump from a dream of shouting, a dream of fighting, a dream of falling.

Janis stirred and mumbled beside him, then pulled the quilt even more firmly around her, leaving only a tuft of red hair on the pillow like a squirrel’s tail to indicate her presence. Moh let his shoulders adapt to the chill as he lay back with his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling.

Cautiously, as if tonguing a loose tooth, he turned his attention to the back of his mind. The new thing was still there, the sense of lines where there had been tangles, of sky where there had been floor. He could still lean over that cliff and look out at the bottomless chasm of his past. But it no longer sent him whirling with dizziness, hurtling with fear. He could turn away from it, he could walk confidently along its edge.

He had the feeling that he had forgotten something. He smiled at the thought, and continued to lie and think. Whatever was going on in his head, whether it was an effect of the drugs or of the entity he’d encountered or of their interaction, it was real and it had not gone away. He was awed by it, and annoyed. It had always been a matter of pride if not of principle that he didn’t have any fixes, any patches; that he never touched smart drugs. (Only stupid ones, he reflected ruefully. Whatever else might be going on in his head, it ached.)

There was the problem of what to tell Jordan, and what not to tell the others. A shadow of guilt crossed his mind, about not taking Stone into his confidence: good comrade, best mate, years together…but all that still seemed like a good reason for keeping him out of it. If something should go drastically wrong (death, madness, things like that) the Collective would need someone uncontaminated by whatever had happened.

Not that he had a clear view of what it would mean for things to go right. Despite the inscrutable download to the gun, he wasn’t certain that whatever he’d encountered had an objective existence anything like what it had seemed. The net had spawned a whole subculture of people who claimed that free and conscious AIS spoke to them, gave them messages of profound import for humanity, incited them to perform violent or bizarre acts…a dream meme of AIS, successors to the angels and aliens of former times. Meanwhile the real breakthrough, the indubitable emergence of genuinely other minds, remained on a receding horizon – whether because of the intrinsic difficulty of the endeavour; the restrictions imposed by Stasis and by the cruder, more hardware-oriented interventions of Space Defense; or the ceaseless sabotage of the cranks.

The cranks – Christ, that was what he’d forgotten! He had to contact Cat, tell her he was coming to see her, ask her to stay put or arrange a meeting. Last night he’d been too high on alcohol and hash and adrenaline and on whatever-it-was to think straight. He should have done it then. The drugs were no excuse. What had he been thinking of—?

The major distraction, the prime reason why he hadn’t thought straight last night chose that moment to roll over and wake up. She looked at him, momentary bewilderment giving way to a distractingly self-satisfied smile.

‘Hi.’

‘Good morning.’

‘You must be freezing. Come in here.’ She flipped the quilt over him and pulled him in, kissed and cuddled and nuzzled him and just when he was warming up again said, ‘God, I could do with a coffee.’

Moh disengaged reluctantly. ‘With you in a minute.’ He rolled out of bed and wrapped himself in the warmest towelling robe he had. He crept downstairs and started up the coffee. Jordan was still fast asleep on the couch. Moh went to the comms room and called up Hillingdon Hospital.

The account for Catherin Duvalier, charged to the Collective, was closed. After a few minutes of brushing through the layers of answer-fetches Moh reached an administrator who confirmed that, yes, the patient was gone. Hours earlier, without any forwarding trace.

Moh broke the connection and stared at the vacant screen, feeling like banging his head against it. There was no way to get back to Cat. He didn’t know what faction she was in. Not that it would help: after her unconditional release they wouldn’t want to know her. If he couldn’t meet Donovan’s challenge, he and maybe the whole Collective could end up with an indictment against them in the so-called Geneva courts, the ones that handled intercommunal and intermovement disputes. No self-respecting defence agency in Norlonto ever appealed to them, not when there were reputable court companies vying for customers. The Geneva Convention courts were for terrorists and states to squabble in with their extorted money. Even if Donovan’s case wouldn’t stand up for five minutes, that five minutes and however many months it took to get there could cost the Collective a fortune and a reputation.

He had to find Cat. He had to fix things with Donovan, or just hope the revolution came before they lost too much business. If the ANR won they would sweep the Geneva courts away. Some chance.

There were other slim chances. He sent out a general message to the Collective’s entire mailing list, asking urgently for information about Catherin Duvalier’s present location. Then he sent a personal, encrypted message, explaining the problem and asking for some grace on the deadline, to the only publicly known address for Donovan: bdonovan@cla.org.ter.

Giving himself a hard time, he made the coffee and went upstairs. Explaining this whole mess to Janis wouldn’t be easy, but it would be a fine warm-up for explaining it to the comrades.

‘You,’ she told him when he’d finished, ‘are a fucking idiot.’

Yes, he agreed silently. And clinically insane as well, probably. At least in Norlonto that’s a victimless crime.

Another thought came to him as he watched genuine anger fighting against a sort of stoical, appalled amusement for possession of her face: And obsessed with you.

He saw the anger win.

‘Is this how you guys function?’ she asked. ‘Drink and dope and drop-dancing and goddess knows what else shit in your head?’

‘Not when I’m on active,’ Kohn said. ‘Bear that in mind.’

‘You were on active, dammit,’ she said. ‘We got a contract, remember?’

‘Yeah, OK, OK.’

Her anger subsided. ‘Couldn’t you sort of…hack into the hospital’s records, see if they’ve got anything that might give us a clue, trace her agency?’

‘We’re talking about a hospital, Janis,’ he reminded her gently. ‘Not a university or some kinda secret research establishment. Same goes for the Body Bank.’

She didn’t get it. ‘I thought the university had good security. They use our own crypto and AI, state-of-the-art.’

He rolled on the bed, caught her and made her laugh. ‘If you ever come across a bank that guards its vaults with a crowd of recidivist safe-crackers and apprentice locksmiths, supervised by guys who can’t remember ten digits without writing them down somewhere – just let me know and I’ll cut you in on it, yeah?’

Jordan woke up on the long couch to find the long room full of people either coming in and removing kit or tooling up and going out. He saw a dark-haired woman put on camouflage like make-up, select weapons like accessories, smile at him and at herself in a wall mirror, and leave. He saw a tired and dirty man grilling bacon. The man saw him and brought over a roll and a huge mug of black coffee. Jordan accepted them gratefully and, when he had finished eating, gathered the blanket around him and dug clothes and a towel out of his rucksack.

‘Bathroom?’

‘Second left down the corridor.’

He stepped through a half-open door to find a room full of not enough steam to conceal two women and a small boy in a bath and a man sitting naked on a lavatory reading a newspaper. He nearly backed out, then remembered that he’d come here to live rationally.

Closing the shower curtain was just to avoid splashing the floor.

He found Moh and Janis sitting at the table in the main room, eating cereals while giving their attention to newspapers. Janis was tearing them off as they printed out and passing them to Kohn to read. Kohn always had one in his hand; Janis had a growing stack beside her.

If he was reading them it was fast.

Jordan joined them.

‘What’s the news?’

Janis looked at him.

‘Oh, good morning. Don’t mind Moh. He gets like this sometimes. Now,’ she added oddly, vaguely. She passed a sheet into Moh’s outstretched hand. ‘News is nothing – well, what you’d expect. Russland–Turkey, everybody. London Sun–Times thinks second big story is Yanks hit Kyoto suburbs – lasers, precision. Nihon Keizai Shimbun, on the other hand, reports loss of Army convoy in Inverness-shire. Lhasa Rimbao prays for peace. No surprises.’

‘Looking for surprises,’ Moh said around a mouthful of muesli. ‘Shoosh.’

A little later he stopped and became civil. ‘How are you this morning?’ He crunched up a page of hard copy and chucked it into a trash can on the other side of the room.

‘Fine. Well, I will be. Maybe another coffee…You know, I think hash really does make holes in your brain.’

‘Nah, that’s the drink,’ Kohn said. ‘Proven fact. Brains of rats and that.’ He grinned at Janis, apparently unaware that he’d binned a dozen balls of paper, one by one, without looking. ‘Anyway, Jordan, time to fill you in.’ He glanced at a whiteboard markered with scrawled words and snarled-up arrows. ‘Comms room is clear. Talk about it there.’

‘That’s some story,’ Jordan said when they’d finished. Moh and Janis looked back at him hopefully, like clients. ‘Sounds like a load of serdar argic.’ (He’d picked up the net-slang unconsciously, used it self-consciously; it referred to the lowest layer of paranoid drivel that infested the Cable, spun out by degenerate, bug-ridden knee-jerk auto-post programs. Kill-file clutter.) He looked down at the workbench, picked at a solder globule. ‘But I believe it.’ He laughed. ‘Well, I believe you.’

‘Can you do it?’

They wanted him to hack-and-track for them, follow lines back, be their eyes on the net. He ached to get on with it, but was uncertain if he had the skill to match.

‘Sure,’ he said.

‘That’s OK,’ Moh said. ‘You’ll pick it up.’

‘So what’s the plan for today?’ Janis asked. She sounded edgy.

‘Find Bernstein,’ Moh said. ‘Take it from there.’

‘Bernstein!’ Jordan said. ‘The booklegger?’

Moh nodded, turned to smirk at Janis. ‘Told you,’ he said. ‘Everybody knows Bernstein.’

‘I’ve got his phone number,’ Jordan said. ‘Somewhere.’ He searched his memory, then dived into the main room and ran back with the small book he’d stuck in his jacket pocket. He flipped it open to look at the purple ink of the seller’s rubber-stamped logo on the inserted bookmark. It opened at the frontispiece.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he swore, for the first time in his life. ‘Will you look at that.’

He held the book forward for them to see: the old photogravure of a statue of a man in a hooded robe or cloak, hands outspread, eyes faint white marks in the cowled shadow.

Kohn looked up, puzzled. ‘Who is it?’

Jordan screwed up his eyes and shook his head.

‘Giordano Bruno. He was burned at the stake in 1600 for saying the planets might be inhabited, among other things. First space-movement martyr.’ He gave an imitation of a hollow, echoing laugh. ‘I just realized what his name would be in English. “Jordan Brown”!’

He looked at it again, hairs prickling on his neck. Moh clapped his shoulder.

‘Bernstein’s way of saying hello, Jordan,’ he said. ‘So give the man a call, already.’

After a few rings a reply came on the line, from not an answer-fetch but a flat tape. ‘Hello,’ said a thick-tongued voice. ‘Thank you for calling. Solly Bernstein isn’t in at the moment, but you can find him at’ – pause, clunk – ‘Brent Cross Shopping Centre. Usual place. Look for the revisionist rally.’

Moh refused to explain what was funny about that.

They took the monorail north. Moh had insisted they all brought some gear, on the assumption they might not be coming back. He’d pulled a couple of JDF-surplus backpacks from under a bench, packed his in moments and gone into a huddle with Jordan over the household computer, filling him in on the tasks rota.

Janis had looked at her pack as its solar-powered flexor frame made random movements in a patch of sunlight. ‘This,’ she’d announced in an aggrieved tone to the world in general, ‘is what I call a make-up bag.’

Now it sat in her lap like a small fat animal with bulging cheek-pouches, its phototropics hopelessly confused by the flicker of stanchion shadows. Janis had a seat by the window. She couldn’t look away from the view.

‘I always knew it was there,’ she said. ‘It’s just…’

‘Yeah, isn’t it just?’ Moh grinned at her from the opposite seat, the gun between his knees.

The Greenbelt. Ahead of them it sprawled to left and right, all along the horizon. A whole new London of shanties and skyscrapers, streets, factories, nuclear power plants; the sky alive with light aircraft, airships, aerostats – a chaos that even as she watched resolved itself into complexity, a pattern of differences like small fields seen from a great height. She looked at it through Moh’s binoculars, scanning slowly, lost in the endlessly deepening detail of it all. She remembered Darwin: It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank…

‘It’s like an ecosystem,’ she said at last.

‘That’s the real Norlonto,’ Moh said. ‘The core, except it isn’t central. The leading edge.’

‘Pity it doesn’t stretch all the way round.’

She thought of what lay beyond Uxbridge, out to the west. Badlands all the way to Wales, a firebreak between that ineradicable hostility and London. A lot of people would privately admit they’d prefer the Welsh marching to the endless trickle of saboteurs from these new Marches.

‘Or all the way in,’ Jordan said.

‘Yeah, the movement only got a slice of the pie. But look what they did with it!’

‘You sound proud of this place.’ Janis couldn’t square Moh’s enthusiasm for Norlonto with his stubborn insistence that he was some kind of socialist.

‘We want to go beyond this, do better than it. Not go back from it.’

After a minute she stopped trying to figure it out.

The mall had been hit in the war and never reclaimed, due to an obscure dispute about property rights. Norlonto being nothing if not an enormous tangle of private properties, the shopping centre and its surroundings had come to suffer what in a different society would be called planning blight. By default it could be considered part of the Kingdom, although the state had so far shown not the slightest interest in it. The whole area had been squatted and homesteaded until it was like a carcase occupied by an entire colony of ants, a shipwreck crusted with coral.

They pushed past stalls and shops selling microwaves, cast-iron cooking pots, light machine-guns, heavy-metal records, spacesuits, wedding-dresses, holodisks, oil paintings, Afro-Pak takeaways, VR snuff tapes. They emerged from the concentric rings and radial passages of the market into the concourse. Bernstein’s regular pitch occupied a small arc of a circle around what must once have been a fountain pond underneath a central skylight, forty-odd metres above, of now broken coloured glass.

It was unattended and bare. A skinny girl in a tool harness and little else affected a low-g loll behind the space-movement table in the adjacent quadrant.

‘Seen Bernstein?’ Moh asked.

She shifted an earpiece and gave her head a languid shake. ‘Booked it,’ she said. ‘If he don’t take it, is ’is agreno, jes?’

Moh checked his watch. 11.30. Not like Bernstein to miss several hours’ worth of sales. He turned to Jordan. ‘Anything going on?’

Jordan put his glades on with a flourish, tuned the downlink to his computer. ‘Damn’ right there is,’ he said. ‘Bomb scare in Camden High Street. Area’s sealed off. Traffic reports are frantic.’

‘Oh, shit. Well, that could account for it.’ Moh gazed around, willing Bernstein to appear. It didn’t work.

‘I’ll wait here and see if he turns up,’ he told Jordan and Janis. ‘You guys want to wander around?’

Jordan looked at the conference area of the mall, the revisionist rally. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘This is just incredible.’ Janis smiled and shrugged and nodded in the direction of the surrounding markets. They wandered off in separate orbits.

Moh stood by the Movement stall and watched the old soldiers, their uniforms and medals mingling with the streetfighting clothes and antique badges of the young enthusiasts. Battle standards hung reverently across the area taken over for the occasion. Ostensibly a conference of dissentient historians, it was becoming a blatantly political event. Even some of the academic intellectuals, recognizable in their own uniforms of jeans and leather-patched tweed jackets, averted their eyes from the more sinister faces on the posters that were being indiscreetly hawked.

‘Hey, man!’

The stall had a customer, a kid who picked up a tee-shirt in its polythene wrap and gazed at it. He was obviously a Neo, a hero-worshipper, one of those who’d grown up after the defeat and in adolescent rebellion had turned to what he’d always been told were the bad guys. Who just didn’t believe they could’ve been that bad, and had found an identity and a pride in identifying with those terrifying folk who’d posed perhaps the most radical threat the world had ever faced…but who had at the same time built a society that appealed to the conservative values of order and discipline and patriotism that most people assimilated like the isotopes in their mothers’ milk.

‘The man who designed the rockets…’ the kid breathed. Cropped hair, Europawehr combat jacket, ripped denim, knee-boots; scars on his smiling face and the faintest film of tear-flow in his eyes. The girl behind the stall looked back at him blankly.

‘It’s good to meet someone who knows their heritage,’ Kohn said. ‘Most people don’t even know who he was.’ He included the stall’s oblivious minder in his disapproval.

‘Yeah, well, they’ve got us two ways, haven’t they?’ the kid said. ‘Yanks up there holdin us down, greens down here draggin us down.’

Kohn nodded. ‘Exactly.’ He scanned the stall for recruitment material. ‘Well, some of us want to do something about it. Some of us believe in space, in the future. Look, mate, tell you what. Usually that’s ten marks, but I can see you’re keen, so I’ll knock it down to eight-fifty and throw in a card and a badge for another one-twenty…Here’s a pen.’

He tore off the card’s counterfoil, checking to make sure the kid had written his name and address.

‘Thanks…Greg.’ Kohn stuck out his hand. The kid looked up from pinning the blue enamel star to his lapel, grinned and clasped the hand.

‘See you again, mate.’ They slapped shoulders. The kid carried the tee-shirt away like a trophy.

‘That’s the way to do it,’ Kohn told the girl. He put the counterfoil carefully into the empty recruitment box. ‘Eble vi farus same.’ She still looked blank: her Esperanto smatter evidently as phony as her gravity-gets-me-down slouch.

An arm slipped between his elbow and his side.

‘Making new friends?’ Janis’s voice was dry, amused.

‘You know how it is,’ Kohn said, turning. ‘All those fine young bodies.’

‘Hah!’

Janis frowned, suddenly serious.

‘Gives me the chills a bit, this whole show,’ she said. ‘Nostalgia and militaristic kitsch and rewriting history: it’s all a lie – millions didn’t die, the soldiers were heroes even if they were misled by politicians, they were stabbed in the back…ugh! They’re not really your people, are they?’

‘No, my love, they ain’t.’ He felt as if the sun had gone behind a cloud, for a moment. Then he thought of the lad with the bright eyes. ‘But some of them are on our side even if they don’t know it. Real keen technological expansionists, hate the greens and the Yanks. Some of them’re basically sound.’

Janis sighed and shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

Jordan came back with armfuls of literature and a newly bought ancient leather jacket. ‘I still don’t believe this,’ he said. ‘Free speech, sure, but talk about taking it to extremes.’ He flipped his glades down. ‘Traffic’s clearing,’ he added. ‘ANR seems to be taking the flak for this one.’

The girl lifted herself out of her spacer pose and made some effort at salesmanship as Jordan leaned over the stall. It wasn’t necessary: he stocked up with mission badges, NASA and Tass posters, tee-shirts with pictures of the rocket pioneer Korolev, of Gagarin and Titov and Valentina Tereshkova, and a space-movement card and star.

Kohn again shoved the counterfoil in the box, this time checking that Jordan hadn’t given his address. The smells of frying and grilling had been tormenting him for half an hour.

‘Let’s get some lunch before the rush,’ he said. ‘Good place across the way – we can keep an eye out from there.’

‘Second you on that,’ Janis said. Jordan straightened up from decorating his biker jacket with enamel shuttles and stars, looking less like a refugee from Beulah City if a bit self-conscious in his glade-masked cool. He nodded at Moh.

They walked through the crowd of aging veterans, the Afghantsi and Angolanos, and tough kids with their hammer-and-sickles and red stars (with a sprinkle of the movement’s blue ones among them, as Moh indicated to Janis, who returned him a sceptical smile). They strolled past posters of Lenin and Stalin, Mao and Castro, Honneker and Ceaucescu and the rest, and over crumpled leaflets advertising lectures with titles like ‘The Great Leap Reconsidered’ and ‘Croatia: The West’s Killing Fields’. Moh led them to a first-floor Indian café overlooking the concourse, well away from the bars whose main feature for the day would be rip-off prices and drunk neo-Communists.

Chicken roti and a tall glass of vanilla lassi were what hit the spot for Moh. He ate in a corner seat, leaning against the window while Janis nibbled tikka and Jordan chomped through some kind of potato-in-pastry arrangement, turning over the pages of a prewar Khazakh cosmodrome brochure.

‘You really a communist, Moh?’ he asked. ‘After all that’s happened?’

Moh grunted, still watching out for Bernstein. ‘What’s past is prologue,’ he said. ‘The future is a long time. We ain’t seen nothing yet.’

‘When have we seen enough?’ Janis’s voice had an edge to it. A double edge, Moh guessed: getting uneasy about hanging around here, getting dubious about the connections with the past which had seemed so obvious before.

‘I remember things,’ he said, for her benefit as much as Jordan’s. ‘I’ve seen the working class making days into history, and that’s not something you forget.’ The lost revolution grieved him like a phantom limb. ‘The thing to forget about is the communistans and the states these guys down there think weren’t so bad after all. That ain’t where it’s at.’

Jordan was saying, ‘OK, but that’s where it ended up—’ when Moh raised a hand. He’d spotted a battery-powered vehicle hauling a tiny and overloaded trailer through the crowd.

‘There he is,’ he said. ‘Hey,’ he added as the others moved to rise. ‘Take it easy. Give the man time to catch a breath.’

He sucked up the last of the lassi noisily and, just to rub it in, lit a cigarette.

Kohn sometimes wondered idly if Bernstein were the actual genuine Wandering Jew. He wasn’t young, but damned if he ever got any older. When he looked up with a snaggle-toothed grin of recognition he appeared exactly the same as when Moh had first stood alongside impatiently while his father haggled over some new acquisition (Lenin and the End of Politics, Lenin and the Vanguard Party, Lenin as Election-Campaign Manager, Lenin as Philosopher, Lenin’s Childhood, Lenin’s Fight Against Stalinism, Lenin’s Political Thought, Lenin’s Trousers…)

Bernstein clapped Moh’s shoulder and shook hands with Janis and Jordan while Moh introduced them. He chatted with Jordan for a few minutes about the underground book-trade in Beulah City, then turned to Moh.

‘You got through the bomb scare all right, then,’ Moh said.

‘Bomb scare?’ Bernstein sounded startled. ‘All I saw was sodding Kingdom cops doing a sweep in Kentish Town. Had to take the long way round. Didn’t fancy explaining where I got all those old CC minutes.’

Central Committee minutes. That could be revealing.

‘From before –?’ Moh tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice.

Bernstein shook his head. ‘Post-war stuff. Split documents.’

Moh shrugged one shoulder.

‘What are you looking for this time, Moh?’

‘Not history,’ Moh said wryly. ‘Politics.’ But he couldn’t resist looking over the stall, just once. He picked up a pamphlet, a nice edition that he didn’t have, and in mint condition. The Transitional Programme, by Leon Trotsky. Introduction by Harry Wicks.

‘Good bloke,’ Bernstein said. ‘Heard him speak, once.’

‘You heard Trotsky?’ Jordan asked.

Bernstein gave him a forgiving grin. ‘I was talking about Wicks,’ he said.

‘How much?’ Moh asked.

‘Sixty million quid, in whatever you’ve got.’

‘Yeah, I’ll take it,’ Moh said, counting out twenty marks. ‘That really is a bit of history.’ He was a sucker for this kind of thing.

‘It’s not what you came for,’ Bernstein remarked.

‘Not exactly,’ Moh said. ‘What I wanted to ask you was – you don’t happen to know where Logan is these days?’

Bernstein reached under the table and started flipping through a scuffed leather-bound book of pages held together by metal rings, some kind of hard-copy filing system. ‘Yeah, he’s on a free-wheel space colony. New View. Utopian and scientific, geddit? Ah, here it is. Still got PGP, I see.’

Moh scanned the characters laboriously into his smart box.

‘Remember him going on about the Star Fraction?’ he asked lightly. ‘Ever find out anything about it?’

‘Nah,’ Bernstein said. ‘Saw Logan a couple years back, says he still gets the odd message.’ He cackled. ‘An odd message, that’s what it is all right. I reckon it’s something Josh built into the Black Plan.’

Moh heard the sound of blood draining from his head, like a faraway waterfall. He watched Bernstein’s face, and the whole mall, go from colour to a grainy monochrome.

‘The Black Plan?’ he heard himself say.

‘Sure,’ Bernstein said. ‘Your old man wrote it. Thought you knew.’

Kohn fought the flashbacks.

To no avail.

Heavy metal industrial shelving, loaded with electronic equipment, tools, the guts of computers. Trotsky’s collected works. Hardware and software manuals. Glossy computer magazines (softporn, his mother called them). Moh was lost in one when he heard a cough.

He turned to the table in the middle of the room.

‘Morning, Josh,’ he said, smiling.

His father glanced up from the screen and nodded. ‘Hi, Moh.’ He reached out to one side, snapping his fingers. ‘Get us the Dissembler handbook. Third shelf from the top…thanks.’

The keyboard keys clattered for a few more minutes. Moh watched in silence, then levered himself up by his elbows on the table to take a closer look. He gazed at the screen, intent, fascinated, as indented lines of code trickled upward. He didn’t understand what the code was doing, but he had learned programming literally on his father’s knee and he could see the logic of it, could see that at some level it all made sense: he knew, just before it happened, when the next symbol would be the one for ENDMODULE. A keystroke later and the module dwindled into distance, becoming faint horizontal hatching on a box connected to other icons on the screen.

‘What you doing, dad?’

Josh frowned distantly at him for a moment, then smiled with resignation. He straightened up in his tall chair, bringing his shoulderblades together, sighed out his breath and reached for a packet of cigarettes. He lit one and leaned on the table, now and again remembering to blow his exhaled smoke the other way.

‘It’s part of a big project,’ he said. ‘Uh…I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about it to anyone.’ He gave Moh a quick co-conspiratorial smile. ‘It’s complicated…resource planning, logistics and financial genetic algorithms, with a bit of contingency planning hard-coded in.’

‘What’s “contingency planning”?’

‘It’s…the things you do just in case.’

‘Like burying guns!’ Moh aimed an imaginary rifle.

‘Yeah.’ Josh sighed again and looked once more at the screen. ‘This is one for the Star Fraction.’

‘What’s the “Star Fraction”?’

Josh looked at him, distant again, then shook his head as if coming out of a reverie.

‘Forget it,’ he said harshly. There was a tone in his voice that Moh had never heard before, and the dismay must have shown in his face because Josh suddenly smiled and put an arm around his shoulder, and laughed, and hummed: ‘Five for the years of the Soviet plan and four for the International…’

Moh joined in, continuing: ‘Three, three the Rights of Ma-an, two for the worker’s hands working for their living-oh, and one is workers’ unity which ever more shall be so!’

Josh drew a blue line of smoke under the question of the project. ‘Well…how’s workers’ unity coming along in the Young Rebels?’ he said.

‘We’re always arguing,’ Moh confided. ‘Some of the comrades think we should be more against the government and some of us say we should be more for it because the right are against it.’

‘What do you think?’

‘Uh, well, I was thinking – is the Republic a workers’ and peasants’ government?’

Josh coughed in a suspicously vocal way and said, ‘Hih-hihh-hmm, ah, even allowing for peasants being a bit thin on the ground in these parts, I think we’d have to say: “No”. But these categories (you know what that means? good) aren’t really useful here. We’re in a new situation. It’s a radical democratic government. It isn’t socialist but the capitalists don’t trust it. So things are a bit unstable.’

They talked about politics for a while. Eleven years old and having just joined the party’s youth group, Moh understood the politics he’d learned from his parents as an adventure that spanned generations like a space programme: behind them the pioneers who’d risen in Petrograd, fallen in Vorkuta; ahead the Alpha Centauri of workers’ power and human solidarity; beyond that the infinite universe of socialism – the bright world, a world without borders, without bosses and cops. He felt proud to be part of it, arguing at school with right-wing teachers, marching on demonstrations, reading up.

‘Well, Moh, these hands have gotta work for their living-oh, so you better—’

‘Split!’

Josh gave him five, gave him ten, laughing, and Moh left.

But later that day he came back, and over the next weeks he and his father, almost without noticing it, fell into a way of working together: Moh fetching manuals and looking things up, helping with testing and debugging, watching the system grow. Josh talked and thought he was talking to himself, or over Moh’s head, and all the time the logic, but not the function, of the programs was becoming something that Moh grasped without knowing that he knew.

‘You OK, Moh?’

He blinked and shook his head. ‘Yeah, I’ll be…’

‘You using or what?’

‘No more than usual,’ Moh said. He forced a smile. ‘What did you say?’

‘Josh wrote it. The CAL system, remember?’

‘“CAL”?’ Janis frowned at them both. Jordan’s eyes widened.

‘Computer-aided logistics,’ Kohn said. ‘I remember.’

‘Never seen it documented,’ Bernstein said, ‘but it couldn’t have come from anywhere else. I’m not saying he did it all, but that was the core. Nobody else could’ve done it.’

‘Why not?’

‘’Cause nobody else wrote Dissembler.’

This time the shock was different. No memories, no flashbacks. Just a falling feeling.

‘You’re telling me,’ he said to Bernstein, ‘that my father wrote Dissembler?’ His voice creaked with disbelief. ‘How do you know?’

The lines on Bernstein’s face deepened, momentarily showing his true age. ‘It wasn’t talked about, back when you were a nipper. But –’ He gestured at his stock and smiled sourly. ‘I’ve met a lot of ex-members since. Some of ’em in the bottom of a bottle, if you catch my drift.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me before? About that and the Black Plan?’

‘Like I said. Thought you knew. Anyway, the Black Plan was a bit of a dodgy question, even in the Party. Not many people knew about it, I can tell you. Only the Central Committee and the fraction that was in the Labour Party and beavering away in the Republic’s Economic Commission. Your old man was the best software engineer they had. Course they used him. The man who wrote Dissembler!’ Bernstein laughed. ‘You know he released it as freeware? Could have been a millionaire, at least, but he didn’t hold with patents and intellectual property and all that. Talk about a good communist. The Yanks were well pissed off: it ate through their controls and escrows like acid.’

Moh remembered Bernstein, after the meeting all those years ago, talking about illegal software and what the Yanks did about it. He must have thought Moh would know exactly what he was hinting at.

‘So that was why—?’

‘That, and the Black Plan.’

Bernstein’s eyes held Moh’s gaze, as if his memories were as sharp and inescapable. ‘It means he’s still fighting them, Moh. “Wherever death may surprise us…” – remember?’

Only a sentimental affection restrained Kohn from punching him in the teeth.

‘Death is never welcome,’ he said after a moment.

Bernstein’s gaze inspected him, registered some shift in their relationship.

‘“Death is not lived through,”’ he said sadly.

Kohn thought about it and nodded.

‘I should know,’ he said.

He thanked Bernstein, said goodbye, and urged Janis and Jordan out of the mall, out into the sunlight. They walked to a ruined wall and sat on it, legs dangling, and talked. They were facing nothing but crumbling flyovers, sprawling squatter settlements: if they passed for anything it would have been backpacking students on a transport-archaeology trip. The ash of several cigarettes sifted to the ground as Moh told them what he’d remembered.

‘I still don’t see how this Black Plan is supposed to work,’ Janis said.

‘Nor me,’ Moh said. He’d never thought of the Black Plan as more than black propaganda until last night. Jordan grabbed his arm and Janis’s, almost making them topple backwards.

‘What—’

‘I know how it works,’ Jordan said, in a voice strained with trying not to shout. ‘He put trapdoors in Dissembler! That’s how it works! Because everybody uses Dissembler. Moh, man, your father was a hacker!’

‘What d’you mean, “trapdoors”?’ Janis asked.

‘Ways in,’ Moh said. ‘Trojan-horse stuff. Goes back a long way. The guys who wrote one of the first big operating systems planted some real subtle code in it that let them access anything it ran. If Josh pulled the same trick with Dissembler—’

The plan working through the market. He knew where that idea had come from.

‘Josh must have buried guns all right,’ Moh said. ‘Buried them in the Black Plan: sleepers, logic bombs. And one contingency was that the Republic would fall, that the revolution would be lost.’

‘And what do you think the first part of the contingency plan was?’ Jordan said. ‘I’ll tell you – set up something like the ANR!’

‘Well, it certainly enabled it,’ Moh said. ‘The story is that it siphons off money and supplies from all over the place. Computer-aided logistics, ha! But to actually build an organization?’ He held up the pamphlet he’d bought. ‘You’d need this kind of programme, not a fucking computer program!’ Jordan and Janis were looking at him as if he’d said something clever. He thought for a moment. ‘Oh, shit.’

‘Yes,’ Jordan said. ‘Look at it this way. It’s not just an analogy, it’s the same thing. It’s a selfish meme!’

‘I know about memes, ideas spreading; but why selfish?’

‘It’s – well, it’s a metaphor, right? For how ideas spread, replicate themselves. Like, ideas are exactly as interested in the brains they’re in as genes are in the bodies they’re in: just enough to get themselves copied.’

‘Like computer viruses,’ Janis added.

‘OK.’ Moh spread his hands. ‘And?’

‘If Josh built some political strategy into the Black Plan,’ Jordan continued, ‘where would he have got the ideas from? Where else but from his own Party’s programme, all his experience and reading about politics? The Plan is the programme – not the old pamphlet you got, not necessarily the ideas in any detail, but the set of practices that it codes for.’ He grinned knowingly. ‘Over the years it’s embodied itself in lots of organizations, isn’t that right?’

‘Well, yes,’ Moh said. It was a disconcerting view. ‘You’re saying the programme creates the Party, and not the other way round?’

‘Of course it does,’ Jordan said. ‘What do you think is going on in there?’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Just a different mutation of the ideas, infecting fresh minds. A selfish meme replicating across time. Your variant of it may be in scores of sects, the Left Alliance and so on, but the most successful species at the moment is in the Black Plan. It’s got its own bloody army.’

‘Now you’re the one talking serdar argic,’ Moh said. He punched Jordan lightly. ‘Come on. You’re talking like it’s some kinda electronic antichrist, taking over the world with—’

‘Barcodes containing 666!’ Jordan laughed. ‘No, it’s just a way of looking at it.’ He made an inverting gesture. ‘Mind you, you’ve just said there’s a connection between the Black Plan and the Fourth International…’

‘Well, maybe in the sense that you mean, that Josh wrote it. Beyond that…I don’t know. Not much sign of Trotskyist ideology in the ANR. Or any other, come to that. They’re pragmatic. Post-futurist.’

‘Exactly,’ Jordan said. ‘The political and military techniques work independently of the ideology.’

‘What would you know about that?’

Jordan shrugged. ‘I read books.’

‘What about the Star Fraction?’ Janis interrupted. ‘Bernstein said he thought that was in the Black Plan.’

‘Not the Fraction itself,’ Moh said, frowning. ‘Just instructions for it, for people like Logan.’

‘“Not the Fraction,”’ Jordan mimicked. ‘“Just instructions for it.” Get a clue, Moh. They’re the same thing.’

‘OK, you can look at it that way if you want.’ He felt stubborn about this, that Jordan and Janis between them were concocting a dubious metaphor for something plainly explicable in political terms. ‘What I think is that the Star Fraction was a real organization that Josh was involved in setting up. It was designed to exploit some kind of capability of the Black Plan but it never got activated.’

‘And what,’ Jordan asked triumphantly, ‘were you so damn’ insistent you’d done yesterday? You activated something!’

Moh stared at him, unable to speak as he experienced the mental flip into seeing things the way Jordan did: ideas as discrete entities – memes – leaping from mind to mind like programs indifferent to the hardware they ran on; language itself as a natural Dissembler, turning words into virtual realities in human brains; ideologies as meme machines, using all the parties and factions, armies and movements, faiths and reasons as their disposable bodies to reproduce another generation of gun-toting or Bible-thumping or programme-quoting or party-building meme-propagators.

He thought of Johnny Smith, the Hizbollah fighter who’d died in his arms (Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye!) and whose heroic death had inspired a dozen others, which in their turn…now there was a Johnny Smith Martyr of the Southall Jihad Memorial Children’s Home.

He thought of Guevara, whose words Bernstein had quoted:

Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, reach some receptive ear; that other hands reach out to wield our weapons and other men intone our funeral dirge with the staccato chant of the machine-guns and new battle cries of war and victory.

The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living…as Marx said. Yes, there were generations of the dead and they reproduced themselves…just as there were generations of the living and they reproduced themselves.

He thought of Josh and Marcia, how they had joined the generations of the dead. He looked down at his hands on the warm metal of the assault rifle across his knees. Some part of the weapon Josh had wielded was now buried in this gun, in its cryptic, encrypted memories.

And in his.

‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘I activated something. And I did it with a code I remembered from working with Josh on the Black Plan.’

‘Logan was part of the space fraction,’ Janis pointed out. ‘If this idea about the political programme having been sort of built into the computer program is right—’

‘Then it’s reaching into space,’ Moh said. ‘Oh, yeah, I get the point. It could just go on. Building parties, raising armies, raising hell. Forever.’

‘Centuries, anyway,’ Jordan said. ‘The future is a long time.’

Moh looked at the sky. Glades off, it hurt. Something to do with there not being enough air pollution to keep out the ultraviolet. Or something.

‘Time we called Logan,’ he said.

11

Quantum Localities

Donovan’s mail filter routinely discarded 98.3 per cent of incoming messages: sabotage attempts by enraged systems administrators, enquiries from journalists, advertising shots for everything from nuclear depth-charges to anti-fouling paint. That still left a lot, and it was just lucky that Moh’s message caught his eye. As he read it he laughed at the desperate naivety of the mercenary’s direct approach.

So Catherin had taken his advice and disappeared.

Too soon.

Donovan stood up and tried to massage his stiff shoulders with his aching hands. He’d been up all night, winding down the mechanical ferocity of his virtual hordes. It would probably be another day before the process was complete and they’d have a clear sight of whatever the Watchmaker entity was doing.

A girl in denims and deck-shoes came up from the galley with his breakfast coffee. He nodded to her and motioned her over. She approached with an air-hostess smile that relaxed to gratitude and relief when he asked her to massage his shoulders and neck. The insistent pressure and warmth of her fingers soothed his mind as well as his muscles. He drank the coffee and scanned the news. The increasingly fraught international situation came almost as a relief: it might give the CLA and Stasis time to deal with the Watchmaker entity while Space Defense was busy iraqing the Japanese.

He turned around in his seat. ‘Thank you,’ he told the girl. ‘You can go now.’

‘You’re…welcome, Mr Donovan,’ she said, and walked, very carefully, across the floor and down the ladder. Donovan waited until the sound of her footsteps was lost in the sough of the sea and the sigh of ventilation, and put out a call for Bleibtreu-Fèvre.

Within seconds the Stasis agent’s face appeared on a flat screen. If he had been up all night he certainly didn’t look it. Used to it, perhaps: Donovan had a vague image of him sleeping through the day, hanging upside down by his feet. Bleibtreu-Fèvre apparently mistook Donovan’s momentary amusement for cordiality, and returned him a thin-lipped smile.

‘I’m about halfway there,’ Donovan said. ‘How are your people reacting?’

‘There is no panic,’ replied Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘I have reported my suspicions, but the consensus is still that it was sabotage, if not by your movement then by some freelance hacker. The disruption seems to be over, for the moment. However, Mrs Lawson reports a small but persistent unaccounted increase in net traffic since the…event. Barely detectable, unless one is specifically looking and applying appropriate diagnostics. Like global warming.’ Another thin smile. ‘It is rising – by a very small fraction, but it is rising. It will be obvious to the dimmest sysadmin within about three days, to the rest of my agency some time before that and, no doubt, to Space Defense some indeterminate time after…How banal it will seem,’ he added, ‘if the first tangible evidence of a new intelligence on our planet should be unexpectedly high telephone bills, ha, ha.’

‘Some would say it’s been with us a long time,’ Donovan said, sourly acknowledging the joke but smarting inwardly: Bleibtreu-Fèvre was playing back to him an idea he’d advanced a little too seriously in Secret Life. ‘What about Dr Van?’

‘There we may have a problem,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘I have not heard from him for some hours. He has an infuriatingly vague answer-fetch which takes the form of a pretty young lady who sounds as if she is promising to put him in touch with you immediately, but as soon as the call is over one realizes she has promised precisely nothing.’

‘Probably an actual person,’ Donovan said as gravely as he could manage. ‘The skill is almost impossible to automate.’

‘Any progress with Kohn?’

Donovan flipped Kohn’s message into Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s field of view.

‘So much for that scheme,’ the Stasis agent remarked after reading it.

‘Perhaps,’ Donovan said reluctantly. ‘However, Catherin Duvalier is almost certain to contact me if Kohn does find her. It’s in her interests to have the matter settled.’

‘I suggest you put out another call for a freelance arrest,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘Please inform me of any contact immediately. This man may be extremely dangerous, possibly even an informational plague carrier for the AI entity. Given who he is – who his father was, and what happened to him – we cannot expect his cooperation. I will attempt to bring him in personally.’

‘Isn’t that a risk for you while he’s in Norlonto?’ Donovan asked. Space Defense had a way of overreacting if Stasis crossed into even notionally extraterrestrial territory.

‘Yes,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘But it’s a risk we may have to take.’

‘And if he leaves Norlonto?’

‘I have thought of that,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘In my line of work, as in yours no doubt, one cultivates contacts who may be a little – shall we say? – irregular in their ways, but who are on fundamental issues basically sound.’

The barb. Green partisans. Give them a few trinkets, tell them this machine or that person was an enemy of the earth: aim and fire. Donovan nodded enthusiastically, reflecting that, as far as Stasis was concerned, he was little more than a useful barbarian himself.

The phone-booth was a bubble of scratched plastic bolted to the outer wall of the shopping centre, the exchange itself a bevelled black chunk, like a small version of the monolith in 2001. And, also like that, the exchange had resisted everything up to and including laser fire. Kohn ducked into the booth while the others stood facing outwards, giving him a modicum of privacy. He linked his throat-mike, the gun and the telecom box and ran the key for Logan.

A holo appeared in the black depths, a show-off display of the signal’s path: Alexandra Palace – Telecom Tower – Murdoch GeoStat – bounce around a few more comsats – ping to Lagrange where a sargasso of space habitats rolled in the gravitational wake of Earth and Moon. There the line vanished into a scribble of local networks. The right-hand digits of the bill’s running total were flickering as fast as they had the last time he’d called Logan, when it had been a voice-only link, no fancy graphics (mips are cheaper than bandwidth). Somewhere in there: Dissembler, his father’s work.

Logan’s face appeared abruptly, at a slant; behind and around him plants, fishtanks, cable, tubing, everything stacked and looking as if it were about to topple; an overhead window with passing bars of light in constant unsettling motion behind it.

‘Moh Kohn! I was expecting—’ He stopped. ‘Hey, man, this a secure feed?’

‘It’s your crypto,’ Moh said wryly.

Logan responded with the usual delay. It looked slow-witted, as always until your mind adjusted, pacing the light-seconds. ‘Jes, well, the Amerikanoj haven’t cracked it, but – you slot in some of your own?’

Moh thumbed a hot-key. The pictures dissolved to snow, graphic characters, a vertiginous glimpse of crawling low-level ASCII, then snapped back.

‘Safe now?’ Logan asked. Behind him a chicken flapped inelegantly past, its beak open as if in surprise at remaining airborne.

‘We’re talking infinite monkeys,’ Moh said. ‘Shoot.’

‘OK. This about the Star Fraction?’

‘Yes!’

‘Uh-huh. The old code. It’s gone active. Years it’s been following me around, every so often this message comes up: don’t do anything. This time yesterday, suddenly it’s Move your ass, comrade, this is the big one. And what’s it telling me? Crack out the ammo? Even crank out the leaflets? Hell, no, it’s: buy fucking lab equipment! Sequencers, cryogenics, neurochemicals, dedicated hardware. I mean, we got stuff like this up to here, up here’ – he waved at the scene behind him – ‘but this is like way beyond what we need to run our ecology. Meanwhile I’m getting calls from comrades I never knew I had. Space movement, Internaciistoj, ANR, the lot. All of them think the program (whatever the fuck it is) thinks they’re in the Star Fraction (whatever the fuck it is). And it’s telling them to – well, depends where they are. Ground, it’s ship stuff out. Orbit, pull it in and put it together. All bio gear, communications software and computer kit with backup storage like they use for disaster recovery. Core memory that can ride out near-miss nukes.’

Near-miss nukes. Moh thought of the news: the Kyoto suburbs, the Sofia streets. A memory of shelter sweat made his skin itch.

‘And are you doing all this?’ was all he could think of to say.

‘Course I am. I got calls on hold right now, man.’

‘How are you paying for it?’

Logan grunted a laugh. ‘Checked our earthside account. Money’s coming in, earmarked. Could be capital investment from a Bolshevik bank robbery back in 1910 for all I know.’

‘Close enough,’ Moh said. ‘It’s from the Black Plan.’

Logan stared at him for a longer time than the transmission lag could account for.

‘How do you know that?’

‘I think it was me that stirred it up,’ Moh said. ‘I was poking around yesterday. Something in the system asked me for a code that I remembered from way back when Josh was writing it. That was when things started to happen—’

‘Josh wrote the Black Plan?’

‘So Bernstein says.’

Logan nodded. ‘Go on.’

‘It’s something to do with the Star Fraction, I know that much. Fact is, my mind’s got a bit – shit, I don’t know, maybe screwed up with some memory drugs I got exposed to. Good to get some confirmation, yeah? The other thing that happened is this load of encrypted data got downloaded to my gun’s computer, and I wondered if you might have some idea what to do with it.’

Logan frowned. ‘Could be pre-emptive backup. If I set up the rig that the program’s telling me, it’ll be able to pick up tight-beam transmissions. That’s real dicey, especially if it’s encrypted. Lose one digit and it’s junk. OK, you can get around that, throw redundancy at it like there’s no tomorrow. Even so, if nukes are in the picture you get emps, you get borealis hits, comms out for days.’

‘You think that’s on the cards?’

‘Nukes? Ne. If you’re right, though, about when the thing was set up, you can see why—’

‘Shit! That’s it! Just before the last one!’ Goddess, that was a relief. Up to a point.

‘—it’s got a real sensitive ear for rumours of war.’

‘So. What d’you reckon, I should take this into space?’ Moh crushed a stray syringe under his boot, wondering how he’d scrape the fare together. Work his passage, ride shotgun…

‘You kidding? Haven’t you heard, man?’

Moh shook his head, suppressing the impulse to give Jordan a kick. Eyes on the net, that’s the sodding job description…

‘Yanks have declared an emergency; space traffic and launches are bottlenecked. Nobody with any form’s gonna get out until the face-off with Japan’s over. With a load of encrypted data? – forget it.’

‘What about all this stuff you’ve ordered?’

‘It’s all clean,’ Logan said. ‘Empty storage, legitimate supplies. And it’s on its way. Expedited before the crackdown.’

‘Neat,’ Moh said. Somehow it didn’t surprise him. ‘So what do I do with this chunk of non-access RAM?’

‘Go to the ANR,’ said Logan. ‘Safest place.’

‘Ha fucking ha.’

‘I’m serious. The knaboj, they’ll look after you. Anyway, it’s theirs. The Black Plan.’

‘You know what I think?’ Moh said, looking down at the gun’s memory case. (The Party must always command the gun; the gun must never command the Party. Mao.) He looked up just as his words reached Logan. ‘They’re its.’

Logan stirred, shifting without noticeable attention into one of the isometric exercise routines that low-g folk had to keep up if they were ever to be one-g folk again. ‘There’s a lot going on,’ he said. ‘A lot coming down the line. We know about the offensives and…things are moving out here, too. The space-movement fraction I told you about, we’ve made progress, we’ll do what we can—’

‘Hey,’ said Moh, ‘is there any connection between these comrades and the ones in the Sta—?’

Logan smiled, his face moving towards and away from the camera.

‘Don’t even ask,’ he said. ‘Gotta go. Take care.’

Click to black. Then, unexpectedly, the screen came on again:

Message To: mk@cheka.com.uk

From: bdonovan@cla.org.ter

Display here?

Moh hesitated, wondering whether anything nastier than a message might arrive. He decided that, since the Kalashnikov firmware had withstood everything ever thrown at it, there was little risk. There was not the slightest possibility that his reading the message would give its sender any trace of his physical location. In a sense he wouldn’t even be reading it here; his agent programs would have automatically done a search of the standard maildrop host machines as soon as he’d linked into the communication net. He hit Enter.

No pathway listing; pretty good anonymity. Just:

You wrote:

Donovan I got a problem with Cat shes

left the hospital and is’nt tracable.

Can you delay the Geneva Court bisines

until I get this sorted out. Please axcept

my apologies for offending you’re org it was

just a personal thing with Cat I was pist of

with her working for the CLA because she should

of known better. I know the CLA are good fighters

and we have always treated hostages and

casualties etc by the book.

I appreciate that, and I understand your problem, but I must insist that it is *your* problem. The challenge has been issued and I cannot retract it without further possible loss of respect. Privately, I agree to delay any appeal to the Geneva Convention court system but in the meantime the call for a citizen’s arrest must stand until you personally claim a ransom for Ms C Duvalier the aforesaid person to be in your (nominal) custody at the time. In normal cases a settlement between our respective organizations would suffice but this has become a question of the good name of both Ms Duvalier and myself.

Regards
Brian Donovan
Carbon Life Alliance
Registered Terrorist Organization #3254

Go to the ANR, Logan had said. The idea had its merits, not least that it would get him out of the whole mess with Donovan. Still leave the comrades in it, though – that was the problem. At some point he might have to approach the ANR in any case, although what they would make of his story was anybody’s guess.

Moh turned and stepped out of the booth. Jordan and Janis looked up at him, but he nodded absently and ignored them. Asking them to keep a lookout had been careless: it wasn’t what they did for a living, or what they habitually did to keep on living. He flipped his glades down and made a slow sweep of all he could see.

The streams of people entering and leaving the mall had, if anything, thickened. Smaller groups wandered around the outlying stalls in the building’s shadow or in the harsh sunlight. The only breaches of the peace going on were knots of Neos swaying back from their lunchtime drinking sessions, raucously singing assorted national-communist anthems.

In the distance, traffic on the old flyover was stationary. Nothing unusual in that – it was a public road – but…

Some kind of commotion in the shanty-towns piled up below the road. Moh unclipped the gunsight and held it up, patching the image to his glades. Typical settlement scene, lots of visual clutter: the distracting diversity of the shacks, clothes-lines sagging across yards and paths, diverted power cables strung all over the place, aerials on jury-rigged pylons, grey gleam of sewage streams. In among it all, the gaudy colours of variegated costumes and flapping rags on…people moving, fast, scattering and scurrying from…

A spread-out line of black-clad, visored figures striding steadily through the narrow lanes. Kingdom cops. Moh could hardly believe the sight until he remembered that this wasn’t legally part of Norlonto at all. It still seemed outrageously provocative of the Hanoverians to march in like this – the area was if anything more anarchistic than the anarchy around it.

He whirled around, calling to Janis and Jordan to look over there, and started checking for any reaction. Nobody’d noticed yet, or they were taking it calmly. Glancing from group to group he saw a familiar face in the crowd – couldn’t be, wrong walk – wait a second, never saw her walking, why…

His attention, and a moment later his stepped-up vision, focused again on the girl who’d been at the space-movement table. She was threading her way purposefully through the crowd, more or less towards where he stood. Her whole manner and posture were at odds with her earlier pose. Thinking back Kohn could see that it had been doubly faked, imitating an imitation; some of the younger and sillier people in the space movement thought it a cool pose, and she’d been imitating that.

Might not mean anything, but suddenly everything had meaning – in a wash of good old communist paranoia: comrades, this is no accident – and Moh started walking, fast, in a direction he at first thought was random.

‘What’s going on?’ Jordan asked, loping beside him, Janis jogging to keep up. Moh stopped, throwing them both off-balance.

‘Jordan, time to split. You nip back in, help old Bernstein pack up. He has places to dive into around here. Hole up with him until it’s over, then take the monorail back to our place. Start a search for Cat: you’ll pick up the trace on the house phone; go from there and keep an eye on the net. Try to contact the ANR. I’ll call you later.’

‘Until what’s over?’

Jordan was puzzled; the situation was just beginning to dawn on Janis. Moh, fighting a surge of impatience, had to remind himself that neither of them was exactly streetwise.

‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Not staying to find out. You see the cops coming in? Just a show of strength maybe but with all those kids—’

He heard the crash of the first bottle.

‘Knew it,’ he said. ‘Balls for brains, these guys. Move it. You got two minutes before this place is a—’

Something burst over the wall where they’d just been sitting. Long strands of sticky stuff drifted down on to a couple of reckless Neos, who instantly began a predictably counterproductive effort to swipe it away.

Kohn tugged Janis’s arm and they both started to run. The last he saw of Jordan, when he glanced back a second or two later, the youth was standing, still dumbfounded, waving and moving backwards as if on a station platform: goodbye, goodbye.

Clutching her sunhat and backpack, Janis followed Moh as best she could as he hurried through an obscure exit from the shopping centre into a tiled tunnel lit with flickering fluorescent tubes and smelling of urine and disinfectant. Eventually they came out in a more open foyer where a man in a peaked cap and dark uniform stood by a robust barrier. There were posters – yellowing now, but once heartily colourful – on the walls; between them, damp paint bubbled and flaked. Another uniformed man looked out impassively from behind a pane of wired glass. Moh went over and pushed a few low-denomination coins through a space under the pane. After half a minute’s deliberation, the man pushed a couple of tickets back the other way.

Moh handed Janis a ticket and walked in front of her, putting the ticket in a slot on the barrier. With a wheezing, sucking sound the barrier – a pair of padded jaws at hip-level – opened and Moh stepped through. Not half a second passed before the jaws thunked shut again, emitting a momentary groan as if cheated of their prey. Moh turned and snatched the ticket as the machine ejected it.

Janis went through with her eyes shut, then down some broken concrete steps covered with plastic shopping-bags and empty cans and dry leaves and out on to a broken concrete platform. There the litter had apparently metamorphosed into its adult form: overturned bins, shopping trolleys and the remains of small trees. From the edge of the platform railway tracks could be seen for a few tens of metres in either direction; beyond that, they vanished among weeds. But they were at least shiny, not rusty.

‘What is this place?’ Janis asked.

Moh looked at her. ‘It’s the Underground,’ he said.

‘The Tube? Is it still running?’

‘Occasionally,’ Moh said, looking anxiously up and down the track. ‘Main thing is, the Kingdom cops won’t come here, not without a lot of hassle. We’ve crossed a border.’

‘Into what?’ A second look along the platform revealed about a dozen people, most of them very old, sitting waiting as if they had been doing just that for a long time.

Moh sighed. ‘One faction of the Republic accepted the Settlement, and this is what they got for it. The rump of the public sector. It even gets a subsidy from the Kingdom. But it’s a Free State in its own right.’ He grinned. ‘Sort of a reformistan.’

‘I hope Jordan’s OK,’ Janis said. From the direction of the mall she could hear the sounds of breaking glass, yells, riot-poppers. Further away, the instantly recognizable black smoke from burning tyres rose above the shanty-town.

‘He’ll be fine,’ Moh said. He was gazing into the distance at a rapidly approaching aerostat. ‘Bernstein has forgotten more ways out of there than the cops’ll ever know.’

‘What did they barge in here for anyway?’

‘The Hanoverians are always a bit touchy about history,’ Moh said. ‘But right now I think it’s the future that’s bugging them.’

‘Don’t you feel like getting involved?’ Janis asked mischievously.

‘No point,’ Moh said. ‘The cops are way outnumbered. They’ll pull back or call in reinforcements. Either way…’ He shrugged.

The aerostat – a thirty-metre black disc like a flying saucer from a hostile alien empire – slid across the sky overhead and, with a deafening blast as its propellers altered pitch, stopped. It descended slowly behind the shopping centre and laid down a brief barrage of gas. Rope-ladders uncoiled from it, and in a few minutes were swinging as the retreating cops scrambled up. As soon as they were on board the machine wobbled, tilted and wallowed off to the west.

‘Overloaded,’ Moh observed in a satisfied tone. ‘They’re good for terrifying crowds, but that’s about it.’

People began straggling into the station, most of them arriving at a run and then losing much of their momentum and wandering around in a dazed manner, as if they’d been ejected from a pub into the street. They had bleeding heads, pouring noses, weeping eyes. Janis couldn’t see any serious injuries, and felt a selfish relief there weren’t any casualties that would make her feel obliged to help.

After about half an hour a series of increasingly frequent and agitated, but otherwise incomprehensible, bursts of sound from a PA system indicated that a train was due. After another half hour it arrived, carrying a swaying crowd of commuters: beggars and prostitutes, mostly, coming back from the early-to-late-morning shift in town.

A few seats were unoccupied but Janis had no intention of sitting on any of them. She stayed as close to the doors as she could, clinging to the handhold. Moh stood, stooped, beside her, keeping his balance unaided as the train lurched and laboured along. In low-voiced, brief sentences, barely audible above the noise – and falling silent whenever it ceased – he told her what he’d learned from Logan and from Donovan.

‘Sounds like this thing’s into biology,’ she said. ‘I’d have expected something political, but this…Goddess, it’s creepy.’

‘Creepy crawlie.’ Moh shook his head, his eyelids hooding an intense, abstracted gaze. ‘I know what you mean…but I don’t think it’s that, nothing sinister, like…the Watchmaker idea, creating new life or taking over the world or whatever. It’s a lot more worrying than that.’

‘How?’

‘Something Logan said in passing: disaster recovery. That’s the political meaning of what it’s doing. It’s worrying because – it’s worried, so to speak. Fits in with how Josh thought – he used to talk about what he called the Fall, what might happen if we didn’t get a’ – Moh grimaced, as if embarrassed – ‘a new society. A saner world. We’d go back, to an older kind of society. Pre-capitalist.’

‘Instead of post-? Yeah, yeah.’ She smiled up at him sceptically. ‘“A catastrophe threatens the entire culture of mankind”?’

Moh frowned. ‘Where did you get that from?’

‘It’s in the transitional programme, the death-agony thing—’

‘So it is.’ He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Trotsky…OK.’ He opened his eyes again. ‘Had me confused there. Anyway. You get the point. The programme, again.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘he was wrong the last time, wasn’t he. I mean, all that doom and gloom was written, when? 1938?’

Moh laughed and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘You’ve cheered me up, you really have. It’s not like some kinda global catastrophe started in 1939, huh?’

They got off at a station which the Underground shared with the Elevated monorail. Both Underground and Elevated ran at ground-level here: Hein-leingrad, well inside the Greenbelt, where all the old placenames had been scraped away. The gutted Underground part of the station was scrawled with colourful graffiti and wilfully obscure slogans:

NEITHER DEATH NOR TAXES

QUANTUM NON-LOCALITY: THE UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR SPACE FIRST! NO COMPROMISE IN DEFENCE OF EARTH’S CHILDREN!

She nudged Moh. ‘One of yours?’

‘Nah. Just a bunch of extremists.’

The Elevated station had been built around a 1930s bus terminus decorated in the style of a futuristic past. They sat in the station’s glass-fronted cafeteria, their backs against a grooved aluminium pillar, and had coffee and doughnuts. Janis watched the people come and go through what looked like a small set from Things To Come, apart from the outfits. Not a short tunic or a short-back-and-sides to be seen. Moh spent a few seconds flipping through maps on a computer.

‘Big drawback of the arrangements here,’ he remarked as he slipped the machine into his shirt pocket, ‘is that there’s no King’s highway. Everything is private. Property and access can be a bit of a minefield.’

‘I hope you don’t mean that literally.’

‘Not exactly, but if we do have to trespass I’ll rely on my friend’ – he patted his bag – ‘rather than legal precedents.’

‘That’s where you’ve got the gun?’

‘Not so loud. Yeah. Comes apart.’

‘And I thought we were alone together at last.’

‘Better two and a bit than none, my dear.’

He was watching the crowd almost all the time. The few moments when he looked directly at her he would half-smile and she only had time to half-smile back before his glance darted away again. She wondered if to him it was a long, searching look…She couldn’t complain: it was her drugs that had done things to his sense of time and his memory, and her money that was paying him to keep watch.

And she had fallen for him, hard. As in: a hard man is good to find. One part of her mind – the sceptical, analytical, scientific part – was looking on sardonically, with a knowing smirk, seeing her sudden swept-off-her-feet attachment to Moh as, ultimately, the springing of a genetically loaded trigger, a survival strategy: her best bet was someone strong and kind, dangerous to others and safe, safe, safe to her. The rest of her mind just felt weak whenever he looked at her. What her body felt was different, and weak did not come into it.

Moh was tapping at his phone. He slid it to where both of them could see it and nobody else could: the picture was set to flat, not holo.

Mary Abid’s face appeared on the screen.

‘Oh, hi,’ Mary said. ‘Jordan’s back, if that’s what you want to know. Threw him in at the deep end, didn’t you?’

‘Can I speak to him?’ Moh said impatiently.

‘Sure…passing you over.’

Jordan looked up at them, evidently via a camera mounted on the top of a screen he was working at. He had a black eye and a few scratches.

‘You all right, Jordan?’

‘Yes,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘We got into a bit of a scuffle, but that was all. You should have seen the police, Moh. They ran like rabbits.’

‘Yeah, well, I told you the Neos—’

Jordan smiled. ‘It wasn’t your commie headbangers that chased them off – it was the market ladies!’

‘Good for them. And they’re not my commie headbangers, as I keep telling you. Did Sol Bernstein get away OK?’

‘Yes. Never saw anyone so old move so fast. He had his books packed up by the time I reached him, and we chugged off on his electric tractor right through where a fight was going on. That was when I got a few knocks, but it was nothing really.’

He obviously felt it was a bit more than that and was quite pleased with himself. Janis hoped Moh wouldn’t burst Jordan’s little bubble of satisfaction at getting through his first rumble.

‘Sounds like you did all right,’ Moh said. ‘How are you getting on with the net searches?’

Jordan’s expression flipped from smug to serious.

‘Well…first, about Catherin…Cat. There was a queue of replies to your message when I logged on. Nobody’s seen her. One or two people have mentioned that Donovan’s got a call out for her as well.’

‘I bet he has,’ Moh said. ‘What about the ANR?’

Jordan sighed in exasperation. ‘I can’t raise them. All the messages bounced. At first I thought I was doing something incorrect, and I got the comrades to check. But by then it was all over the news. The ANR has gone off-line, left all their phones off the hook. Well, not exactly: you get an answer-fetch giving a standard spiel.’ He passed a hand across his eyes. ‘It gets irritating after the twentieth time.’

‘What’s it saying?’

‘Basically, a bit of rousing propaganda and then something to the effect that, if your message can’t wait until after the final offensive, they’ll know about it through other channels anyway.’

‘Modesty was never their strong point—’

‘Modesty!’ Jordan’s sudden grin was blocked by the fish-eye loom of his delighted air-punch or clenched-fist salute. ‘Yo! Never thought of that!’

‘What?’

‘The Black Planner yesterday, he ordered a load of silk through this Beulah City fashion company. I might be able to track the consignment, get a lead to the ANR that way.’

‘Nice one,’ Moh said. ‘But I doubt if they can be tracked that easily.’

‘I know, but Modesty can be! I saw a Modesty truck yesterday, might have been headed for Norlonto. I’m sure I could hack in, work backwards from there. Most of their deliveries are finished goods, right? Import fabric, export fancy frocks. So if I find any fabric exports…’

Moh shook his head. ‘Bills of lading are the easiest things to switch, and that’s assuming the Black Plan was actually pulling in silk in the first place. More likely that was a cover as well, and what they got from China was a cargo of knock-off Kalashnikovs.’

Jordan looked a bit discouraged, and Janis said quickly: ‘It’s worth a try anyway, Jordan. It’s all we’ve got to go on.’

‘Fair enough,’ Moh said. ‘OK, Jordan, you do that, and keep looking for Cat any way you can think of. Pass on any bit of news you find interesting.’

‘Hah! Getting back to that…you know about the space-traffic crackdown?’

‘Logan told me.’

‘Fine. OK, the other thing is Donovan’s citizen’s arrest thing. He’s posted the offer to lots of newsgroups.’

‘That figures.’

‘Anything I can do about it?’

‘Ask the comrades to toss out countercharges, challenges on my behalf and so on. Get our lawyers to issue a few nasty messages. Make it look like a real tangle. Might scare off any casual adventurers.’

‘OK, I got that. What are you going to do?’

Moh laughed. ‘Keep jumping borders,’ he said. ‘Like the libertarian comrades say: Norlonto ain’t the law of the jungle, it’s a jungle of laws.’

For the next two days they wandered through a tiny proportion of that jungle of laws, the disparate communities of Norlonto. Unlike the patchwork of the Kingdom, these were not separate fiefs but layered, interwoven properties and neighbourhoods. Some welcomed anyone passing through. Some had gates on the streets, or took a toll, or turned back anyone who hadn’t been invited by a resident. Carrying weapons on the street might be prohibited, permitted or required. It was a matter for the street-owners, like wearing ties in restaurants, smoking or non-smoking. There were sinister, seedy areas that had been all bought up by nazis and made most of their money from tourists and memorabilia. There were women-only territories. There was a whole district called Utopia University, which consisted of experimental communities being crawled over by sociologists (who were mostly funded by estate agents doing market research). One sharply delimited estate, the Singularity Sink, had no laws or morality at all: anyone who entered was deemed to have renounced any protection but their own. It had a certain appeal for suicides and psychopaths, and for adolescent macho adventurers. (There was of course nothing to prevent violent rescue missions, either, and very rich and desperate relatives had been known to send in armoured columns.)

But most of it was normal and respectable. Mutually compatible areas had found it profitable to adjoin, or buy up linking corridors, or sponsor rapid transport between them. You could travel widely through Norlonto and never see anything that would have looked out of place in Bangkok. A sidestep away you could see and do things that would be banned in Tehran.

Each new locality they crossed into was another stream to wash away their trail. Everywhere they found an undertone of caution, the racket of protection being strengthened, the buzz of departing money; fortunes, capitals as Moh called them, queued up on the wires like birds preparing to migrate. Every time the government announced the rebels were bluffing and the situation was under control, more smart money took wing for warmer climes.

Moh kept calling Jordan every few hours except through the night: the ANR was still unreachable; Jordan was building up an elaborate hack on Beulah City’s shipping companies and fashion houses, but he had no progress to report yet; and Donovan’s challenge was arousing some interest among various bounty-hunting agencies. Much to Moh’s disgust, a new newsgroup had opened, alt.fan.moh-kohn, for enthusiastic amateurs to report sightings of him and discuss the case; so far, none of the sightings had been authentic. Moh took out a policy for himself and Janis with the Mutual Protection Agency; the understanding was that he wouldn’t tell the company their location but Mutual Protection would download a map of areas where they could guarantee delivery of reinforcements within ten minutes of a call.

‘What if we do get attacked or something,’ Janis asked, ‘and the attacker has a contract with another agency? Do they shoot it out?’

‘Give it some mips,’ Moh said. ‘Proper channels are part of the deal. The agencies take any differences to a court they both acknowledge is fair—’

‘And suppose an agency popped up that didn’t accept any court that Mutual Protection suggested?’

‘Then a court they didn’t accept would find against them, without them even defending themselves, and they’d lose customers. In serious cases they’d be hunted down like dogs. What the agencies sell is legal protection as well as physical. If you want to protect criminal acts you just need your own guns, or preferably a state – that’s a real lawless defence agency for you, and run like any other monopoly to boot: rip-off prices, lousy service, rude staff.’

‘You’re not talking about the forces of the Crown by any chance?’

‘Now what gives you that idea?’

Janis had another objection. ‘You’re forgetting about the poor,’ she said. ‘How are they covered?’

Moh replied as if he’d been over this a few hundred times. ‘We all pay for security in every facility we use anyway, but if all else fails, if somebody’s kicking your shack down or putting the screws on you and you’ve not bothered to do without maybe a packet of smokes a week to pay for protection, you can always call on charity. The Black Cross, the St Maurice Defence Association, the Emancipation Army. Or us, if we’re in a generous frame of mind.’

They were sitting at a pavement café. The waiter brought Janis her vodka-cola. She took it and smiled down at him, gave him a quarter. He thanked her with a gap-toothed grin and ran back inside.

Moh looked after him sadly.

‘Anarcho-capitalism works,’ he said. ‘As much as any kind of capitalism works. It’s that sort of thing I find hard to take. Child labour. Prostitution. Slavery—’

‘What!’

‘Oh, it’s not legally enforceable. But on the other hand you can’t prevent people selling themselves for life, and some do. And there’s legal slavery as well, to pay off crime-debts, though that’s a lot different.’

‘All the same, slavery…’

‘It’s a feature of most utopias,’ Moh said gloomily. ‘It comes with the property.’

Late morning, two days and nights after Jordan had watched Janis and Moh dodge the shopping-centre riot, the comms room was hot and airless. He paused for a moment before running his latest program, giving it a final check in his mind before committing it. He found his thought processes warping under the influence of the other person in the room.

Mary Abid was working through the day on night watch in a chemical factory in Auckland, NZ. The satellite link didn’t make for fast reflexes, but she didn’t need them; the semi-autonomous robots that she guided around had reflexes of their own, and her main task was to put some human common sense in the loop.

Whatever she was doing, sitting and swivelling in a basic-model telepresence exoskeleton, it involved stretching and switching and sweating and cursing, and something in her sweat or scent or swearing was transmitted to Jordan as a distracting subliminal sexual tension. He barely associated it with the Kurdish woman in the telly-skelly. During the hours he’d been sitting hunched at the Glavkom VR apparatus, spinning an elaborate web of nuance and inference, looking for a trail of silken thread, and looking for Cat, it had been the photograph of Cat on the wall of Moh’s bedroom that Mary’s female pheromones brought unbidden to his mind.

Cat. He’d extracted a patchy biography of her from the Collective’s records. A teenage rebellion against a staid petty-bourgeois background – her parents ran a VR rental franchise on the fringe of Alexandra Port – had led her into a loosely leftist militia. She’d literally bumped into Moh Kohn during the Southall Jihad, worked with the Collective for two, three years until some inextricably intertwined doctrinal/personal dispute had taken her away into a succession of idealistic combat units and one or two of the numerous factions that made up the Left Alliance.

The Left Alliance, unlike the ANR, was taking calls, but Jordan had a distinct impression that they had more pressing matters on their minds. Any people or systems he’d contacted about Cat had simply referred him to the standard cadre-availability databases, all of which had Cat down as damaged goods. The group she was currently in – he’d eventually tracked it down, the Committee for a Social-Ecological Intervention – had been barely willing to acknowledge that she might possibly have had some association with them at some indefinite time in the past.

Of course, as all concerned admitted, if Cat’s current little legal difficulty could only be sorted out…

Jordan felt a rising indignation at what Moh had done to her, much as he could see Moh’s point about the dubious nature of the coalitions that Cat’s political trajectory embraced.

He’d made more progress on the Beulah City/Black Plan connection, or so he hoped.

‘RUN SILK.ROOT?’

The system message floated in front of his eyes like an afterimage. Jordan took a deep breath.

He nodded, chinning Enter.

Hacking into Beulah City’s systems directly had proved difficult. Quite apart from his earlier – and, he now thought, overhasty – action in liquidating his business interests there, a data-security crackdown was evidently in progress. Mrs Lawson, he guessed, was busy. Nevertheless, he retained access rights to a few of the smaller systems which had, so far, not been revoked. This had given him one angle of attack. Next, he had set up a completely spurious trucking company (created with an apparent age, he wryly told himself, like the stars in 4004 BC). As far as one of Modesty’s subsidiaries was now concerned, River Valley Distribution Ltd had an excellent record of deliveries within Norlonto. The phantom details would be discovered at the next audit, but that wasn’t due for another month.

The program now running in SILK.ROOT had Jordan’s virtual company inquiring about the possibility of putting in a bid for more work. It was asking for some background information – just a breakdown of Modesty’s deliveries to British locations in the past month. If he’d set up the right parameters on the systems he had managed to hack into, they’d accept this highly irregular request without a blink.

He found he had his eyes closed, his fingers crossed.

Ping. And there it was, on twenty pages of spreadsheet: dates, times, companies, goods sent. He excluded finished garments, reducing it to five pages, and tabbed down through the list of fabric sales. He was beginning to think he might as well have called up the Yellow Pages for dressmakers when he noticed – among all the Lauras and Angelas and Blisses and Bonnys – a customer called the Women’s Peace Community.

Three consignments in the past month, all consisting of tens, no, hundreds of metres of fine silk. One order still outstanding: the fabric had just come in by air, and awaited delivery. The order had been placed four days ago, in the morning. When he’d encountered the Black Planner.

Yee-ha!

As he stared at the line of information it began to blink. A message came up.

‘CROSS-REFERENCE ON WOMEN’S PEACE COMMUNITY EXISTS. DISPLAY?’

A big Y to that. The pages rippled as the program followed pointers through the Collective’s databases. Then the scene cleared to display a videophone message that had been waiting in the Pending file since the day before yesterday.

The phone’s flat screen popped up in the middle of the virtual scene. As the picture stabilized Jordan thought, for a startled moment, that he was seeing an interior view in Beulah City itself: a parlour with overelaborate furnishings and drapes; two women in long, likewise overelaborate dresses, all petticoats and pinafores. The woman in the foreground sat primly, hands folded in her lap, facing the camera. The other sat on a sofa behind and to the left, paying no attention to the call; she was concentrating on a piece of needlework, her fair curls falling forward in front of her face.

‘Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence Collective?’ the first woman asked, the words sounding incongruous. She nodded at the confirmation. ‘Good. We require professional advice on neighbourhood security, and we understand that you have some experience in this field. Please call us as soon as possible. Thank you.’

She reached forward to sign off, and just as she did so the woman in the background looked up. She looked straight at the camera from across the room, brushing her hair back from her forehead with her wrist.

Jordan jumped at the shock of recognition.

It was Cat.

The picture clicked off.

Jordan passed a note into Mary’s work-space, asking her to take a break. She did, after another strenuous minute. Jordan ran the message for her.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘That’s Cat! At the end there.’

Mary frowned. ‘Let me see that again.’ This time she magnified the last section. ‘Yeah, well it certainly looks like her, but…’

‘You’d never expect to see her dolled up like that?’ Jordan smiled to see he was right. ‘It’s the way she’s pushing her hair back. It’s like the picture in Moh’s room, shows her doing just the same thing. Except in the picture it’s a spanner she’s working with, not a needle.’

‘Well, Jordan, I don’t know how you think we live, but I’ve never been in Moh’s room,’ Mary said with a giggle. ‘You’ll have to show it to Moh.’

Jordan was about to do that when he remembered what the message was actually about, and how he’d found it.

‘Let me just fix something up first,’ he said.

‘Yeah, that’s Catherin all right,’ Moh said. He saved the image from his glades and cleared the view, turning his attention to the Tinkerbell-sized fetches of Jordan and Mary above his hand-phone. ‘Well spotted, Jordan. I might have not have recognized her myself if it weren’t for that thing with the hair. Cat disguised as a lady – that’s a laugh.’

‘I think you were meant to spot it,’ Jordan said. ‘You or one of the comrades. They’re telling you: Cat’s here, come and get her!’

‘So why not call us and say that? Who are these people, anyway?’

‘Feminists – femininists,’ Mary corrected herself. ‘Women’s Peace Community, some kind of sweetness and light outfit—’

‘Yes!’ Moh shouted. ‘The Body Bank!’

Janis, who like him was prone, looking at the phone display, winced as the sound filled the narrow volume they lay in.

‘Sorry, Janis.’

‘What’s that about the Body Bank?’ Mary asked.

‘There’s a teller at the Body Bank at Brunel University – she’s a femininist. Only one I’ve ever met, as far as I know…’

‘It’s been getting quite fashionable recently,’ Janis interjected.

‘OK, interesting. Anyway, I remember this lady noticing that Cat wasn’t included in the deal over the crank bomb team. She might have followed it up.’

‘That’s possible,’ Jordan said. ‘But why should Cat go there?’

Mary shook her head. Moh shrugged.

‘Oh, for pity’s sake,’ said Janis. They all looked at her. ‘Cat had just been thoroughly shafted in this game of soldiers. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if she wanted out, wanted at least a bit of peace and quiet. Even if it did mean having to sit and stitch. In fact, especially. Soothes the mind.’ She rolled over and laughed. ‘Try it sometime, guys and gals.’

‘Sanctuary,’ Moh said. ‘OK. That makes sense, I guess. Just as well you noticed the message.’

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ Jordan said carefully. ‘It wasn’t the search for Cat that brought it up, it was the…Beulah City follow-up.’

‘But why—?’

Moh was about to ask why the ANR should have any connection with this Women’s Peace Community when he remembered that Mary wasn’t in on the whole story. ‘Uh, what’ll we do, call them back?’

‘I already have,’ Mary said. ‘Didn’t say anything about you, just said we’d send someone over today.’

Moh turned to Janis. ‘You game for this?’

‘Sure. Should get Donovan off our backs, at least.’

‘At least,’ Moh agreed. And maybe lead us to the ANR as well. ‘I’m thinking about how we’ll get there,’ he added. ‘Mass-transit might take us out of our insurance cover.’

‘That’s all OK,’ Jordan said. ‘I’ve set it up. They’re taking a delivery of silk from Beulah City –’ Jordan paused, as if to make sure Moh had got that point. ‘But it’s in a place that no driver from Beulah City would go.’

‘Not one of those terrible places, is it?’ Janis asked.

‘Oh, no,’ Jordan said.

Mary smiled impishly. ‘It’s a small semi-closed neighbourhood in the Stonewall Dykes,’ she explained.

‘I see,’ Moh said after a moment. ‘Major fire-and-brimstone target area. So how do we get there?’

‘The truck comes out of Beulah City, goes to a pick-up point where it’s handed over – Mary’s got the map – and you drive it the rest of the way. It’s all in the name of a dummy company I’ve created.’

‘Sounds safe enough,’ Moh said. He had a thought. ‘Not a women-only area, is it?’

Jordan turned to Mary with a baffled gesture.

‘It’s OK,’ Mary said. ‘I’ve checked. They have no objection to men. In their place.’

‘This community is sounding more sensible all the time,’ Janis remarked, running a possessive hand down Moh’s back. He turned and grinned at her.

‘Hey, I’m quite used to being dominated by women.’

‘You should be so lucky,’ Mary said. ‘Right, here’s the details. Jordan’s made all the arrangements.’ She did something out of view, and streets and times appeared on the phone screen.

‘And get up, you two,’ she added, just before she and Jordan vanished. ‘It’s a fine afternoon.’

There wasn’t room to stand up in the double bed-cell they’d rented, so it took them a while. They had to get their clothes on, lie face-down and slither under their packs, then crawl backwards out of the hatch and down a ten-metre ladder to the ground.

‘Weird,’ Janis said as they walked out along narrow passages between banks of bed-cells. ‘Like left luggage.’

‘Left passengers.’

Little Japan hit them like a rock concert as they stepped out of the door. They took the slidewalk, changing tracks frequently, swaying in the crowds. Moh found he was half-consciously generating a running mutter of body-language that created a small space around them, whatever the crush. He gave up trying to process the incoming information, the solid-state semiotics of the place.

‘Doesn’t feel oppressive,’ he said. ‘That’s what’s so strange.’

‘Something in the food,’ Janis said. ‘Inhibits the anti-crowding pheromones.’

It bothered him that he couldn’t tell if she were making it up.

The trailer park, in an indeterminate zone between Little Japan and one of the more multi-cultural areas, felt like open space. There was an average of a metre between bodies here. The huge trucks lay charging up, drivers lounged, and vendors vended.

‘Ah, the wonders of the free market,’ Janis grouched, narrowly avoiding a tray of hot drinks being carried at alarming speed on the head of a five-year-old.

‘Not as free as it looks,’ Moh said. ‘These places tend to be run by gangs. Shady jurisdictions and that.’

They found the light container truck they were after in a corner of the park near the feeder road. The driver shoved a magazine into his pocket as they approached, and stood up, looking slightly embarrassed.

‘Hi,’ Kohn said. ‘River Valley. You’re expecting us?’

The man smiled and nodded. He handed Moh the key, took a receipt and headed off, evidently not straight to the nearest rail station.

Janis and Moh climbed into the cab. The truck was owned by a rental company and changed hands often – that much was obvious from the condition of the interior. Moh had a sudden thought. He passed the key to Janis.

‘You drive,’ he said.

Janis took the key, smirking, and turned the switch with a flourish. The engine responded with a faint hum.

‘Aw,’ she said. ‘It’s not like the films I saw when I was little.’ She made internal-combustion-engine noises as the truck glided out of the park.

‘Nah,’ Moh said, adjusting his seatbelt. ‘It were a man’s job in them days – aaarrrgh, stop…’

12

The Cities of the Pretty

There actually was a wall called the Stonewall Dykes, but it was more to prevent people from entering unwittingly than to keep anyone out – or in. In the bad old days of the Panic it had had a more serious function, but now it was just a bit of retrovirus chic – isolation camp. The real protection of the area – the Gay Ghetto, the Pink Polity, the Queer Quarter – was in the strong, gentle, capable hands of a militia called the Rough Traders.

The truck pulled off the clearway and down a side street, past a portion of the wall on which someone had written ‘Sodom today – Gomorrah the World!’, and they were in. Just another street, except suddenly there were no women. A bit further and there were no men; further yet and there were both, but you couldn’t tell which was which, all gaudy and glad-ragged and gay.

‘What’s the difference between this sort of thing and what’s outside?’

‘None at all, that’s the point. There’s nowt so queer as folks, as they say up North—’

‘Oh shut up. That’s not what I meant. What’s the difference between these specialized neighbourhoods, or whatever you call them, and the mini-states?’

‘No wars.’

‘It can’t be that simple.’

‘Looks like it can.’

‘The future and it works, huh?’

Kohn laughed. ‘It keeps people like me in work. In my future society we’d be out of a job. No wars over territory and no fights over property.’

‘Yeah, yeah…’

Kohn gave directions for a few more turnings. They came to a halt in a car park in front of a large housing estate built as a single block: four sides around a courtyard, the side in front of them having an opening about three metres high and five wide. Through it they could see a lawn and flowerbeds. All the windows in all eight storeys of the block had curtains of ruched peach satin in front of other curtains of frilled net. Another truck and some small vehicles and bicycles stood unattended in the car park.

A man came out of the entrance and walked up briskly. He wore a plain brown loose-fitting smock and trousers and had short blond hair. He stood for a moment at the front of the truck and then stepped up to the door beside Kohn.

Kohn lowered the window. He decided for the moment, to stick with the ostensible reason for their visit. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m the security adviser—’

‘Mr Kohn? Ah, hello. My name’s Stuart Anderson. Your agency told us to expect you. I’ll be asking you in in a moment, but first I’d like a word with the lady.’

Janis leaned across. ‘Yes?’

‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but would you mind waiting while your companion looks around? No offence intended – it’s just the rule of the community. The only women allowed in are those who live here or are associated with us, and you…’ He smiled regretfully like a waiter telling you something is off tonight. ‘Refreshments will be brought out to you if you wish, or you may take a walk in the area.’

‘Thank you very much,’ Janis said. ‘What sort of women-oriented community keeps ordinary women out and lets men in?’

‘Femininists,’ Anderson articulated.

‘Ah, so,’ Kohn said. ‘You should have worn a frock, Janis, make-up like lacquer and false eyelashes. Then they might have let you in for a boring examination of their building, which is what I’m down for.’

Anderson gave an open, genuinely amused laugh.

‘Don’t take it to heart, ma’am. We won’t be more than an hour, and in the meantime, if you wouldn’t mind easing the truck forward a bit so we can get it unloaded and reloaded…’

Janis shrugged and blew a kiss and a scowl. Kohn climbed out.

‘Please leave any weapons,’ Anderson said.

Kohn detached the computer and heaved the bag back into the truck. Anderson coughed politely. Kohn thought for a moment, sighed, and passed Janis a pistol, a throwing knife, a flick-knife and a set of brass knuckles.

They walked across the courtyard. People strolled about or worked at the garden. The women, as Kohn had expected, were wearing every exaggeratedly feminine get-up known to man. The men looked rather drab and conventional by comparison. No old people; no children.

‘So tell me, Stuart, what’s it all about? If you don’t mind me saying so, you don’t look very sissy to me.’

‘Of course not,’ Stuart said. ‘That’s not what we’re into. Our aim isn’t to merge or reverse the sex roles but to make femininity the dominant gender.’

Moh shook his head. ‘I still don’t get it.’

‘It’s all to do with peace,’ Anderson said earnestly as they entered the block and walked down a bright corridor. ‘We’re sickened by the violence that goes on all around us, and the femininists have a theory which explains it. The so-called masculine virtues have outlived their usefulness. Aggression, ambition, production. We’ve reached a point where the whole earth can be a home, a garden, a sanctuary. Instead it’s used as a factory, a hunting-ground, a battlefield. That’s what we mean by the dominance of the masculine virtues. What femininism advocates and tries to practise is the long-overdue domestication of the species through the feminine virtues: domesticity itself, of course, plus gentleness, caring, contentment: channelling energy into art, adornment, decoration…All low-impact activities, you see, and utterly absorbing. Take embroidery, for example, which many find entirely satisfying as a full-time, lifelong occupation, yet the material resources used in it are negligible…and of course the product is valuable, including to rich collectors.’

‘And where do men fit into all this?’

‘Oh, they don’t try to fit us in. They just set us a good example. And we integrate our activities and interests as a subordinate, servicing part of this community, just as traditionally women’s work has serviced the masculine economy – in fact, that’s still how many of the women here earn money outside: as teachers, nurses, secretaries—’

‘Bank tellers?’

‘I think that, too, yes.’

‘Sounds a bit sexist to me.’

Anderson laughed. ‘Now that’s a word I haven’t heard in a long time.’

They entered a large, low room, almost a factory floor. Dozens of women worked intently at sewing-machines. A few of them were obviously making clothes, but even Kohn could see that some of the items being made from vast pieces of thin silk had to be something else. He indicated them with his head as they walked along the side of the room. At the same time he tried to see if Cat were among the women there, but – as far as a quick glance could tell – she wasn’t.

‘Pavilions, canopies,’ Anderson explained. ‘Very popular at society garden parties.’

Pavilions? Moh ran some of the shapes through again in his head, then left something at the back of his mind to figure them out. There was another thing that didn’t quite fit here. The ideas that Anderson had expounded struck him as too daft and too sensible at the same time: the femininists were giving some very old-fashioned views a subversive twist, but the tenets Anderson had expressed lacked the seductively counterfactual gormlessness of ideology. (Men are free. Men are equal. Men are such beasts.) Or perhaps Moh was just overestimating the human species: ‘If there’s a folly unvoiced,’ his father had used to say, ‘some little sect will emerge to voice it.’

A woman fell into step with them. She introduced herself as Valery Sharp and described herself as the block administrator. She was small – petite, Kohn mentally corrected himself – and pretty, with the glamorized hausfrau look of some ancient advertisement for detergent: gingham dress, floral-print apron, blonde curls held back with a starched cotton kerchief. She sent Stuart off to get coffee for the lady in the truck and showed Kohn into her office, a small room off the workshop area.

‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ she remarked brightly, closing the door. She sat down behind a desk and invited Kohn to a chair. ‘Someday all offices will be like this.’

The desk looked more like a dressing-table. It had a frilled valance around it. The frills had frills. The chair was swathed in fabric tied with bows; the white wallpaper was sprigged with pink rosebuds; the air was thick with jasmine potpourri. Kohn felt as if he’d stepped into her bedroom. Goddess knew what that was like.

‘It would make a change,’ he said truthfully. He could imagine the entire planet turned over to this sort of taste: roses round every door, perfume on every breeze, men and machines devoted to providing the basic materials for women to endlessly titivate and prettify and tart up…He really should give more of his money to the space movement.

Valery smiled wryly. ‘It gets me like that, too, sometimes,’ she said.

Kohn looked at her, puzzled at this admission. He was reluctant to reveal that he knew there was some connection between this place and the ANR.

Valery looked at him very directly and added, slowly and distinctly: ‘Civis Britannicus sum.’

Kohn stared at her, astounded. The phrase wasn’t exactly a secret password but it was the next best thing: he’d never heard anyone say it without meaning it. It affirmed a continuing sense of Republican citizenship, and there were places where it could get you shot.

‘Gens una sumus,’ he responded. His mouth was dry, his voice thick. ‘We are one people.’ It drew a sharper line than all the manufactured divisions of the Kingdom, and put the speaker on the other side of it.

‘So what’s all this—?’ he began.

And then, suddenly, he saw it: the pieces fitted together – literally.

‘Parachutes!’ he said triumphantly. ‘Microlites, hang-gliders…’

Valery’s eyes narrowed. ‘Very good,’ she said. ‘How did you figure that out?’

Kohn shrugged. ‘With my good right brain.’

She still looked puzzled, but as if she believed him.

‘OK, Kohn. You know Cat is here?’

He nodded. ‘You picked a pretty roundabout way of telling me.’

‘Yes,’ said Valery. ‘There was a good reason for that. It’s the same reason that the ANR is staying off the nets as far as possible: they’re no longer certain the systems are secure.’

‘What makes them unsure?’

‘I don’t know,’ Valery said impatiently. ‘What I do know is this: we received an urgent message through…channels…to persuade Catherin Duvalier to come and stay with us, and to fetch you here. Donovan is out to get you, and not just for this stupid ransom affair. Now, I don’t know what this means, but I’ve been told to tell you that Donovan knows who you are, and so does Stasis. They’re working together now. Donovan’s challenge was an attempt to lure you to the hospital, where he could find you – fortunately we got Catherin out of the way first. We did send a girl to see you, but she wasn’t able to make a sufficiently secure contact.’

‘Ah! At Brent Cross?’ Kohn snorted. ‘It only made me more paranoid.’

‘She wasn’t very experienced, and we may have overstressed the caution,’ Valery admitted. ‘Anyway, now you are here, we can sort out the ransom business. That won’t stop Donovan, I’m afraid, but at least he’ll have to call off his hue and cry against you.’

‘Can you do that without him knowing where I am?’

‘Certainly,’ Valery said with a smile. ‘Through the Body Bank, remember? All we need is your digital signature, and Catherin’s. Our bank teller will witness it and everything will be legally in the clear.’

‘You’ve just said you don’t trust the nets any more.’

‘We’re talking about different levels,’ Valery said vaguely, or with intentional obscurity.

‘OK. And then what?’

Valery fixed him with a severe look. ‘The ANR,’ she said firmly, ‘is very anxious that you should go immediately to a controlled zone. That’s all I know.’

‘Somebody else suggested I do that,’ Kohn said. ‘I’ve been considering it. It’d be difficult, seeing as the ANR have put the fear of God into the Hanoverians.’

‘We can arrange safe passage,’ Valery said. ‘I’ll tell you about it later. Meanwhile, let’s get this mess sorted out, all right?’

Kohn agreed almost absentmindedly, preoccupied by the implications of what he’d just learned. Valery tilted up a desk terminal – it was shaped like a mounted mirror – and Moh jacked in his computer and passed his digital signature into the handover document. Valery messaged Cat, and after a moment the document showed that her dig-sig was in as well. Kohn watched as the Body Bank registered the transaction. He now had a credit – which he doubted he’d ever collect – of five hundred marks with the Carbon Life Alliance.

The consequences of the deal rippled outwards through databases, and in less than a minute Catherin’s name was cleared and Donovan’s case against Kohn was dropped. Querulous, disappointed queries instantly began to flash around the low-life newsgroups. Kohn shook his head and caught Valery in the same gesture. They shared a disillusioned smile.

Valery was about to fold away the terminal. Then something on the screen caught her attention. She raised an eyebrow at Kohn.

‘It seems Catherin would like to see you.’

Kohn felt his ears going red. ‘Yeah, I guess she has a few words to say to me.’

‘Right,’ said Valery. ‘Go out, then through the door on the left to the garden, and in the first french window. I’ll be along in a few minutes.’ She smiled quizzically. ‘I imagine the worst should be over by then. After that we can discuss what you do next.’

‘I have a companion,’ Kohn said. ‘She’s out in the truck at the moment, and she’d have to be involved in any decisions.’

‘Of course.’

‘OK. See you,’ Kohn said.

He went out into the garden, through a glass door and into a kind of parlour full of overstuffed chairs and large vases. In one of the chairs a woman sat, head half-hidden by a bonnet, bowed over the lap of the huge spreading skirt of her dress. She was meticulously stitching small pieces of coloured fabric on to the back of a denim jacket. A circular pattern with lettering around it was already beginning to take shape. She looked up, slowly, eyelashes lifting modestly.

Cat had a very cat-like smile.

Moh grinned back. ‘Calamity Jane,’ he said.

Teeth white in the sunlight.

‘It’s all fixed?’ she asked.

‘Yup,’ Moh said. ‘You’re in good standing again. An honest-to-goddess accredited left-wing combatant.’

‘Back to the struggle. Good.’

The jacket slipped to the floor as she raised the pistol she had concealed underneath. She held it in her right hand and brought the left – the plastic cast becoming visible as the loose, lacy cone of her sleeve fell back – to give a steadying grip on the right wrist. Very cool, very professional.

‘Now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch,’ said Catherin Duvalier.

Cat felt she had been waiting for this moment, this perfect revenge, for years rather than days. A glimpsed thought told her this was the case, that recriminations from their original break-up still echoed. The thought passed, leaving a steely memory of Moh stalking out of the hospital bay.

Her anger tensed the muscles of her damaged forearm, and hurt.

She’d had more visitors than anybody else in the secure ward. First Moh, then – in a virtual sense – Donovan. And later that evening the nurse who’d brought her dinner had put her head around the partition, smiled and said, ‘A friend of mine would like to meet you.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘She’s a teller at the Body Bank. She’s learned about your position and she’d like to help you.’

‘I don’t want to be a security guard, thanks.’

‘Oh, that’s not the idea at all. Nothing like that. That’s why she wants to see you. I think you’ll be interested.’

Catherin shrugged and agreed. A few minutes later the bank teller walked in, heels clicking, clothes whispering together. She poised herself on the chair beside the bed.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Annette. I understand you’re looking for a safe place to stay, out of the fights.’

It didn’t take Annette long to convince Catherin that the femininist community was a good place to go until her status as a combatant was restored. It would give her a retreat, a chance to plan.

‘But that’s all,’ Cat explained hastily. ‘I’m not saying I agree with your ideas or anything—’

‘Of course not,’ Annette said. ‘But don’t count on it. We’ve won over quite a few combatants who’ve got tired of the boys’ games.’

Cat smiled. It wouldn’t happen to her. ‘When can I go?’

‘First thing tomorrow morning?’

‘Fine.’

‘Good. That’s settled, then.’ As she stood up to leave, Annette picked up Catherin’s denims and looked at them with some disdain.

‘We’ll have to get you something decent to wear,’ she said, making to take the whole blue bundle.

‘No, no,’ Catherin said. ‘I want to keep these. I can do something with them.’

‘All right…Let me just get your measurements. Excuse me a moment.’ She took a scanner from her pocket and waved it from Cat’s neck to her ankles. ‘See you tomorrow, Catherin.’

She returned at an ungodly hour the next morning with long paper bags draped over her shoulder. The nurse pulled a screen across the bay. Catherin looked at the bags.

‘Modesty,’ she said. ‘Oh, Jesus!’

‘Go out in style, kid,’ Annette said.

They had to help her to dress. It wasn’t because of her broken arm in its shell, or her innocence of the intricate fastenings. There simply was no way to put on or take off these clothes independently. When they had finished they stepped back and smiled at her.

‘Oh. Oh,’ the nurse said. ‘You’re so beautiful.’

Annette took Catherin’s shoulders and turned her to face a wall mirror. She stared at this strange double, coiffed and corsetted, crinolined in blue satin and white lace. She stepped forward, then back, amazed at the sheer amount of stuff that moved with her, the trimmings that fluttered and swayed. She had to laugh, shaking her head at the absurdity of it. She plucked at the skirt in front of her with gloved fingers, let it drop.

‘I feel silly,’ she said. ‘Helpless.’

‘Not quite,’ Annette grinned. She reached over to give Catherin a small handbag. ‘In there, my dear, along with some make-up carefully chosen for your complexion, you’ll find a neat, ladylike little pistol.’

Catherin smiled, relaxing. This trace element of the kind of protection she had always counted on reassured her and enabled her to accept the kind on which she must now rely: a power that didn’t come out of the barrel of a gun. The shaping grip around her waist, the frame of fabric below her waist – they were not a prison but a castle.

‘OK, sisters,’ she said. ‘Let’s make an exit.’

She walked out of the ward with her head high, looking straight in front of her. She had once seen a royal wedding on television, so she knew how to get the effect.

Moh looked at her for a long second.

‘Look, Cat, I’m honestly sorry about what I did. What I didn’t do. But it’s settled, it’s squared—’

‘Not with me it bloody isn’t. That’s the point. Now I’m back in action I can take you prisoner.’ She grinned. ‘And I just have.’

‘On whose behalf?’ Moh said sourly, playing for time. ‘If it’s the Left Alliance we’ve already worked out what—’

‘Oh, no,’ said Cat. ‘On behalf of Donovan. I called him when I was logged on to sign the release, as soon as I was in the clear. The CLA are sending a couple of agents—’

‘You did what?’

The lady’s gun wasn’t much of a stopper, he thought; he could kill her before he died. For a moment he took comfort in that. Then he remembered there was a way out of the trap and out of the absurd feud that his offence against Cat had started, and which she seemed determined to finish. He eased back from tensing to spring, and waited, forcing a sickly smile.

‘Formally,’ Cat said, ‘they’re coming here to pay you the ransom for me, as they have every right to. And there’s nothing to stop me handing you over to them.’

Moh heard footsteps on the path outside. He stood where he was until Valery came in and stood beside him. Cat flicked a glance at her but the pistol didn’t waver.

‘Here’s something to stop you,’ Moh said. ‘Valery, Miss Duvalier has just claimed me as a prisoner on behalf of the CLA. Two of their fighters are due here – when?’

‘Any time now,’ Cat said. ‘Valery, this has nothing to do with you.’

‘Yes, it has,’ Valery said. ‘For one thing, you’re still inside our community. For another—’ She hesitated, looking uncertainly at Moh.

‘Just tell her, dammit,’ Moh said. ‘If I don’t move it this minute I’ll be—’ He stopped, fighting for breath, for words, against the pictures that his too efficient brain displayed. The thought of falling into the hands of the CLA and, worse, Stasis was turning his skin cold and the room dark.

‘You’ll do it?’ Valery asked him.

‘Yes, I’ll do it.’

‘You have to say it,’ Valery said gently. ‘Say it to her. For the record.’

Moh drew a deep breath. ‘As a citizen of the United Republic I claim the protection of its armed forces and pledge on my honour to exercise when called upon by its lawful authority the Army Council of the Army of the New Republic all the rights and duties of such citizenship including but not limited to the franchise and the common defence. Is that it?’

‘Basically, yes,’ Valery said. ‘So, Cat, unless you want to tangle with the ANR I suggest you put that gun away.’

Cat stared at them both. ‘This place is ANR?’

‘Yes,’ Valery said.

Cat’s shoulders slumped. She lowered the pistol.

‘You still owe me one, Moh.’

‘Later,’ Moh said through gritted teeth. Calming himself, he smiled. ‘You are pretty,’ he said – as if that would be enough, would help, would cover everything – and backed out. He sprinted across the courtyard lawn, leapt flowerbeds and shrubs, dodged people. He wasn’t surprised to find Valery Sharp keeping pace. A sidelong glance showed muscles firmed, doubtless by aerobics, under the clothes which also weren’t as daft as they looked; they didn’t get in her way.

‘I’m sorry,’ Valery gasped. ‘We never expected—’

‘It’s OK. Neither did I.’

They stopped in the cool gloom of the entrance-way. Crates were being loaded on to the truck. Only a couple more to go.

‘Now, what were you going to tell me?’

‘Take the truck,’ Valery said.

‘Where?’

‘As far north as you can, then to any controlled zone. We’ve got clearance for all the borders, and tax-in-kind, but…if it looks like anyone’s going to find out what’s really in it, stop them at any cost. If necessary, burn the container section. At any cost.’ She looked at him. ‘Can you do that?’

‘Yes. Will you call my co-op, with a message from me to a guy called Jordan: the search is over, do your own thing.’

‘I’ll do that. And I’ll keep Cat out of Donovan’s way for a bit.’

‘OK. I hope I see you again.’

Valery smiled and shoved him on his way. ‘Go!’

He ran to the back of the truck, grabbed the last crate and hurled it in, jumped up to the deck and hauled the tailgate down after him as he vaulted back out. A man fumbled with a lock. Kohn waited for what felt like seconds until it was secure, then ran to the cab and almost flew through the door. He found himself facing his own gun. Janis was crouched under the steering-wheel, aiming at the door and trying to fit an ammunition clip at the same time. The whiplash sensor extension writhed as it tried to keep level with the windscreen.

‘Get down!’ she hissed.

Kohn threw himself on the passenger seat, gasping. Janis passed the gun to him as if pushing it away from her.

‘It talks,’ she said.

‘Yeah, yeah, you knew that.’ Kohn rolled on to his back and clashed the clip and the computer into place. ‘What’s it say?’

‘Cranks. Coming for us. It’s picking up signals—’

‘Helmet.’ He waved a hand in front of Janis until he felt the helmet in it. He half-sat, cautiously, slid the helmet on and flipped the glades down, jacked the lead into the gun and keyed the screensight to head-up. The gun’s two views – where it was pointing, and what the eye-on-a-stalk was seeing – overlay his own like reflections in a window. They had never looked so distinct.

‘What did you get, gun?’

There was a pause as the computer interrogated the even tinier mind of the gun’s basic firmware.

‘Phone call, public, CLA encryption style, otherwise no data extracted. Source vehicle now entering square at—’

And there it was, flashily outlined in red: a black Transit van with black windows, turning the corner. It drove around the square and rolled to a stop a couple of metres in front of the truck. Kohn made out two heat-images behind the light-shaded windscreen of the van.

He turned on the engine and grabbed the steering-wheel with his left hand. Janis watched.

‘Seat. Belts,’ said the truck.

‘Oh, shut the fuck up.’

Janis clunk-clicked the belt on the driver’s side and looped her arms through it, grasped it firmly with her hands, letting it take her weight.

‘Good,’ Kohn said, like some psychopathic driving instructor. ‘Expect a jolt. Now take the brake off and give us some juice.’

He braced his legs together against the lower edge of the dashboard. The truck lurched forward. There was a heartening crunch as its steel fenders rammed the thin metal and hard plastic of the van. Janis yelled but it was surprise – the impact hadn’t been too severe.

Kohn jack-knifed up and out of the cab, hit tarmac and made a low lunge for the van door, his body wrapped around the gun. He used the butt to smash the side window and whirled the weapon around to cover the inside. A young man and a young woman, both long-haired, oily-denimed, hailstoned with safety glass and still shaking from the collision. The man reached under the dashboard. Kohn fired one shot across the back of the man’s hand and into the corner below the steering column. The hand snatched back and something hydraulic failed at the same moment.

‘Out,’ Kohn said, and stepped backwards off the running-board.

They came out. The woman had her hands on her head. The man held his bleeding hand to his mouth.

‘You come for me?’

The woman shook her head, the man nodded.

‘Well, now you’ve f—’

Kohn’s words were swamped by a thrumming roar, a skidding screech.

He turned his head – the gun stayed steady like a handrail – and saw an overdeveloped ’thirties Honda rocking gently where it had halted, a couple of metres away. Its rider was built to match, all the way from leather boots to leather cap. He dismounted, thus revealing that what had looked like a spare fuel-tank was actually an armoured codpiece. His arm and chest muscles would have been troubling even without the holografts.

He held up a badge. ‘Rough Traders,’ he said. ‘Do you have a problem?’

Kohn pointed the gun groundwards and said, ‘A disagreement.’

‘Does anyone wish to lay a charge?’

The couple by the van shook their heads.

‘Nor me,’ Kohn said. ‘But I wish to claim a ransom for a hostage, and I’ve had some difficulty persuading these two. I think you’ll find that they do have the documentation.’

They nodded frantically. Kohn felt some tension ease. It had been just a guess that Donovan’s mob would try to maintain the cover.

‘How much?’

‘Five hundred marks,’ the woman said, finding her tongue at last. She held out a grubby banknote. Kohn made an insultingly elaborate show of scanning it with one of the gun’s sensors (which duly registered that it didn’t contain any large masses of moving metal) and wrote out a receipt pertaining to the release of one Catherin Duvalier for the sum of, etc. The rent-cop witnessed it and the man took the top copy, with the wrong hand at first.

‘Please make sure this is delivered to the person mentioned in it,’ Kohn said, handing over a second copy to the Rough Trader. ‘She’s currently resident at this block.’

‘OK.’

Kohn walked back to the truck and climbed in, to find that Janis had been covering the whole incident with his previously discarded pistol. He smiled, kissed his finger and thumb at her and strapped in. The Rough Trader was striding towards the apartment block; the crank agents were talking into a mike in their disabled van. Laughing, Kohn eased the truck out of the square and along a narrow street, forcing a ridiculously broad pink Cadillac to mount the pavement as it came towards them. Then, after a few more back streets, they were on the clearway again.

Janis said, ‘Explanation time.’

‘Parachutes,’ Kohn said.

‘Huh?’

‘That place is an ANR front. The whole femininism thing is a cover-up.’ They both laughed. ‘They’re busy making parachutes and fabric panels for microlites and hang-gliders, using manual sewing-machines. No software, see? Nothing to trace. Bulk orders on the Black Plan, like Jordan told us. They must be preparing for something big soon. And, think of it, all these dolly secretaries and so on must make pretty good spies.’

‘What about the ones who really believe in it?’

‘I doubt if there are many, and they can be kept harmlessly occupied. That was what all that fussy domestic craftwork crap was about in the first place, if I remember my social-history books.’

Janis looked as if she had caught up with herself.

‘Yes, but what happened back there?’

He told her: how the shapes hadn’t seemed right, and what Valery had told him; finding Catherin, and how and why she’d set him up. Janis already knew about his earlier relationship with Catherin – they’d spent hours of the past days and nights telling each other everything. But she was upset.

‘Oh, Moh!’ Janis stared straight ahead.

‘I know I shouldn’t have—’

‘No, it’s just – why did you do it in the first place? Why did she try to get back at you like that? Sounds to me like two people out to hurt each other. A particularly nasty lovers’ quarrel.’

‘I never thought of it like that,’ he said, considering. ‘It was business, politics. I felt she’d betrayed what we had stood for, that she fucking deserved it, working for these creatures from the swamp after, after—’

He was reduced to hand-waving.

‘After standing shoulder to shoulder with you for scientific-technological socialism?’

Kohn gave her a half-amused grimace that admitted the explanation lacked plausibility. ‘Something like that.’

She squeezed his knee. ‘It’s all right, I’m not jealous. Well, I am, actually. But I know what I’m up against.’

‘Yeah,’ Kohn said. ‘No competition at all.’

‘Why did they let you get away?’

‘There’s a formula,’ Kohn said, ‘a password for these situations. Goes a bit further than the old Civis Britannicus sum. You say it to the right person, you’re a citizen of the Republic. That’s what I did when I saw it was our only way out. The Republic, the ANR, they don’t give a damn for the militia rules of engagement. So now things are, like, different.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Well, any sort of little skirmishes we get into now are gonna be war. It won’t be like being a mercenary or even just defending ourselves the way we did back there.’

‘You’re telling me you’ve joined the ANR?’

‘Not exactly, but I’ve agreed to carry out its lawful orders, as a citizen of the Republic.’ He looked over at her, feeling he had more explaining to do. ‘It wasn’t just to get out of Cat’s clutches. I’ve been thinking about it. The Republic’s the only place I’ll ever find the answers to what’s happened to me. Like Logan said, it’s the safest place for us. And for whatever data is stashed in the gun’s computer. As for the politics of it, hell, if Josh could square whatever he was doing with working for the Republic, so can I.’

Janis was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘I want to join, too. Be a citizen. How do I do it?’

‘I told you the first time this came up: you’re still a citizen. From school, remember? If you want to be an active citizen, you contact another one, and volunteer. Like I just did.’

‘Damn, I could’ve done it back there, now I’ll have to wait till we…’ She stopped, hit her forehead with the heel of her hand and said, ‘Civis Britannicus sum, all right? That’s me in?’

She looked so keen and pleased with herself that Kohn felt ashamed of his reluctance, but he had to ask.

‘You’re sure you—?’

Janis burst out laughing. ‘I love the way you keep warning me off – it’s either charming or you must think I’m a vac-head. Look, Kohn, I know we’re in trouble. The only place I have a chance to live now is on this side of all those burning bridges.’ She punched his arm, like she didn’t want to risk anything but fraternal greetings at this moment. ‘My country is where you live, wherever that is.’

‘You know where it is,’ he said. ‘The fifth-colour country. Gens una sumus.’

They left the Stonewall Dykes and then Norlonto itself; they were on the King’s highway now, the public roads. Kohn felt the momentary pang of unease which always accompanied his crossing into the domain of the state. An emotional toll. They passed a high blue-and-white sign with a vertical arrow and one word on it: ‘North.’ The clearway flowed into an eight-lane motorway. The diesel kicked in. Janis squirmed down in her seat like a happy child.

‘I love that sign,’ she said.

‘Uh-oh,’ Kohn said.

Janis sat up straight. ‘What?’

Kohn pointed at the rear-view screen. Far behind them in the traffic was a pink blob with a wide chrome grin.

13

The Horsemen of the Apocrypha

Dilly Foyle lay on her chest in long grass. A few hundred metres away, across a culvert-floored green glen, the motorway made its humming and buzzing and howling music. Great bulks of irreplaceable minerals and petrochemicals were hurtling in both directions, cancelling each other out. It had always been for her the perfect example, the paradigm, of how trade and exchange were an intrinsically wasteful plundering of the planet. The combustion engine, the consumer society…The words (if nothing else in the arrangement) were a give-away.

The Human Reich.

To attack it directly was a sure road to dying. One bolt from the crossbow that lay at her hand could blow out a tyre and, with luck, scatter burning wreckage and snarl up miles. But that was only worth doing to harass a military sweep already under way – to do it any other time would only invite one. So the GreenWar partisans preferred to pursue a subtler quarrel, building their Cumbrian communities in abandoned farms and the ruins of the tourism that had been their earliest and softest target. The Lake District was theirs now, in plain view of the towns. On a clear day you can see the revolution…

Her nose, untainted by foul habits or city air, could have told her where she was in the dark. Petrol fumes and damp earth, the oiled steel of the crossbow, the old wood of the stock…her comrades…their horses cropping quietly in a hollow. And, ahead and to her left, the service area, where the reek of exhaust and battery mingled with burnt coffee and wasted food and plastic in all its extruded and expanded, gross and bloated forms.

Synthetic shit.

She didn’t need binoculars to scan the vehicles entering and leaving the service area, and she wouldn’t need glades when night fell. Already the place had its lights on (waste, waste). She would know what to do if the signal came. And, if it didn’t come to her, it would come to other partisans, at other points up and down the motorway. The orders today had been very specific, and urgent.

She waited.

They ran into a local war a few kilometres north of Lancaster. Farm buildings and factories burned. Tanks elbowed across the road. Helicopters racketed overhead. The traffic on the M6 barely kept pace with the refugees trailing along on the hard shoulder.

‘It’s like something out of the twentieth century,’ Janis said.

‘They’re not being strafed,’ Kohn remarked.

‘What’s that supposed to mean? Progress?’

Kohn slid the truck forward a little, then idled it again. The engine’s note dropped below audibility. ‘Progress is like this,’ he said.

‘That car still behind us?’

Kohn scanned. ‘Yeah.’

The sky, eventually, cleared of smoke. Red Crescents and Crosses came out after the camouflage. The gaps between vehicles widened. A polite, hesitant, mechanical cough here and there, and then a roar of combustion engines rose like applause. The truck settled to a steady hundred kilometres per hour in the slow lane. The Cadillac paced it, now edging closer, now dropping back.

‘This is beginning to get severely under my nails,’ Kohn said.

‘What can we do about it?’

‘Don’t know. Ah, fuck it…kill them at the first opportunity.’

‘Do you really mean that?’

‘Way I see it,’ Kohn said, ‘there’s no way whoever’s in that tuna-tin are terrs. Not their style, you know? They go for dispersed forces, raids, guerilla tactics. The military – UK or SD – would go for roadblocks, flagdowns. Tailing, now, that’s cop MO. Using a civilian car isn’t, especially one so obvious. That smells of political police. Or Stasis.’

‘The Men In Black.’ Janis shivered. ‘Wonder why they do that – the suits, the cars?’

‘Checked it out once,’ Kohn said. ‘It’s a fear thing. They were set up years ago when there was that big panic about, I don’t know, messages from space getting into the datasphere and churning out copies of alien software that would take over the world. Remember the TV shows? The Andromeda Strangers. Night of the Living Daylights. Nah, just after the war. Before your time.’

‘After my bedtime.’

‘Looking back now, I’ll bet they planted these stories. Anything to keep people worried about dangerous technologies falling into the wrong hands, and not worried about whose hands it was in already.’

‘You know,’ Janis said thoughtfully, ‘people used to talk about the Breakthrough, the Singularity, when all the technological trends would take off and the whole world would change: AI, nanotech, cell repair, uploading our minds into better bodies and living forever, yay! And it always almost happens but never quite: we get closer and closer but never get there. Maybe we never get there because we’re being stopped.’

‘Stopped by Stasis…and by Space Defense enforcing arms control…yeah, that’s how it works: software cop, hardware cop!’

‘Yes, let’s kill them,’ Janis said fiercely. ‘They’re a waste of space.’

‘Soon be dark,’ Kohn said.

Another border: Cumbria. Another armful of fine work taken from the back of the truck. Tax-in-kind: with most of the economy over the event horizon of cryptography, it was the only way to collect if the owners hadn’t cut a deal and let the state have the code keys. Tax-in-kind went all the way from roadblock rip-offs to US/UN sanctions where entire buildings, warehouses, factories were seized. Usually the owners agreed to operate in the open, where at least you knew the percentages. Except in Norlonto, of course: there they hid their money and handed over the goods at gunpoint if they had to.

At least so far no one had searched the truck. There was an etiquette to those matters, and transaction costs.

After a bit Kohn glanced at the fuel gauge and said, ‘Time to pull in. Could do with a stretch, anyway. Next service area.’

‘What about—?’ Janis jerked her head backwards.

‘We’ll see what they do,’ Kohn sighed.

‘Then kill them?’

‘You’re getting into this, aren’t you?’

The twilight became darkness the instant the truck glided into the halogen floods of the service area. Janis envied Kohn his glades. She could see the writing scribed on the sidepiece nearest her: mil spec 00543/09008. Kohn first drove to the refuelling points, paying cash for diesel oil and charged-up power cells, which were swapped for the spent ones.

‘That’s exactly what I need to do,’ Janis said.

‘Well, they don’t give part-exchange for body waste,’ Kohn said. ‘Recycling hasn’t gone that far.’ He restarted the truck and moved it around to the parking bays.

‘Our friends are just over there,’ he said, pointing to the far corner of the car park where she couldn’t see a thing. ‘Still sitting in the car. Probably don’t eat or shit, just need an oil-change every ten thousand klicks.’

‘I wish I had military specs,’ Janis said. She didn’t understand Kohn’s hoot of laughter, but was grateful when he reached into his pack and pulled out another set of glades.

‘They’re my only spares,’ he said, after he’d shown her how the cheek controls worked. ‘Watch them carefully.’

He put the helmet under his arm.

‘Set the glades to shade,’ he said. ‘We’ll look like tourists.’

‘Heavily armed tourists.’

‘That’s the only kind around here.’

Jumping down and walking across the tarmac to the cafeteria, Janis kept looking around her. These things didn’t just polarize light, they integrated it: the bright lights were stepped down, the dim enhanced.

‘They’re brilliant!’

‘Turn them down a bit then.’

‘Ha, ha. How do they work, anyway?’

‘I don’t know, but I suspect they’re not strictly speaking transparent – the front is a lot of micro-cameras, the back is screens, and in between there’s a nanoprocessor diamond film.’

She paused outside the toilets and stared at the pink Cadillac.

‘Huh,’ she said. ‘They’re eating doughnuts and drinking coffee from a flask. So much for your theory.’

‘That’s what they want you to think,’ Kohn said darkly.

Janis looked again. One black man, one white.

‘I’m sure they’re the ones who came to my lab,’ she said. ‘Goddess, to think I came all this way to get away from them.’

‘You have got away from them,’ Kohn said. He nudged her away from looking at the car. ‘Don’t you worry about that.’

The queues at the meal-machines were short.

‘Ten marks,’ Kohn said indignantly. ‘Each!’

‘Don’t be stingy.’

‘I spilled blood for that money.’

They chose a table by the plate-glass window where they could see the car and the truck. The glades disposed of the reflections, too. Janis found it disorienting to glance from the strip-lit interior – with its truck-drivers eating fast, families eating slowly, youths wandering around sizing up who might or might not be a user – out to the parked or crawling vehicles, and see it all as one scene. What effect, she wondered, would years of seeing like this – no shadows, no reflections, almost no darkness, no comforting distinctions between in here and out there – have on the mind? It matched, it fell into place with one aspect at least of Kohn’s, well, outlook.

She smiled at the thought, and saw Moh smile back.

Bleibtreu-Fèvre brushed sugar from the tips of his fingers, licked them, and replaced the plastic cup on top of the thermos flask. Always a damn dribble of dark liquid. He sighed and looked at his colleague, Aghostino-Clarke. The other man was dressed identically to himself, in a black jacket and trousers, white shirt and a tie the exact colour of coffee-stains. His suit was getting shiny in the same wrong places. His skin was very black and his eyes were brown.

It was lucky they had been prepared; but then, Bleibtreu-Fèvre thought smugly, preparation creates its own luck. When Donovan’s call came through, indicating that Cat had revealed her location and Moh’s, they’d been cruising around the perimeter of Norlonto. They’d been ready to do what they did – send the car into a screaming dash along one of the fast-access roads, the ones that normally only the rich and the emergency services could afford. He’d been right not to put much trust in Donovan’s ability to field a large enough force in a short enough time to deal with the problem, right to have the green partisans on stand-by alert.

That the Women’s Peace Community was near the border had been luck, however: pure luck.

They were going to need some more.

Aghostino-Clarke smiled. ‘Scared?’ he said. His voice was deep: the upward inflection of the question raised it to bass.

‘Nervous.’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre coughed and, as if reminded, lit a ciagarette.

‘It’s what we’ve been trained for.’

‘That’s why I’m nervous.’ He laughed briefly and stared again at the distant shapes of the man and the woman. ‘He behaves so normally, it’s as if he hasn’t a care in the world. One might almost think he’s not afraid of us.’

‘He? Or it?’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre looked at Aghostino-Clarke and nodded thoughtfully. ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘We can make no assumptions about what we may face.’

A literal drug fiend, a man with machine-code in his mind, or just a crazy spacist merc…

‘It would be easy to take him out.’

‘Those days are gone.’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre sighed again. ‘I can feel the footprints of those damn spy sats like shadows passing over the back of my neck…Speaking of which—’

Aghostino-Clarke looked at his watch, rotating his forearm slowly as he scanned the lines of data. ‘We have a six-minute window in two minutes,’ he said. ‘The next is four in twenty-three.’

‘Right,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘Let’s go for green, huh?’

‘Smoke?’

‘Nah,’ Kohn said. ‘Time to go.’

He stood up and tossed plates and scraps into the recycler. He put on the helmet and connected the comms to the gun. (Hi.) (Active.) He kept his eyes on the car as they went out through the doors. The car park was now more sparsely occupied, and the Cadillac stood on its own in an airbrushed gleam. How easy it would be to take them out. But if he were to blast them, right now, it would be difficult to hop into the truck and slip away unnoticed. They’d just have to wait. He ran scenarios of turning off into side-roads, jack-knifing the truck and coming out shooting.

The doors of the Cadillac opened; the two men inside got out and stood behind the doors. Janis made some kind of sound.

‘Keep going,’ Kohn said, not looking at her. ‘Stand on the running-board behind the door – just like them – and start up the truck. Do it.’

He veered away from her and began to walk across the fifty metres or so of tarmac between him and the car. The men didn’t react. He wondered if the doors were proof against steel-jacketed uranium slugs. He doubted it. Perhaps the Stasis agents expected him to negotiate.

He was letting the gun point downwards, his grasp light but ready to clench. He stopped.

‘Hey!’ he shouted, above the hum of vehicles. The men looked as if they hadn’t heard him. He opened his mouth again and heard at the same moment a yell from Janis and a rhythmic clatter behind him. He whirled around in a crouch, bringing the gun up. Coming straight at him was a horse, and the wild-haired creature on its back was unclipping a crossbow from a slot beside the saddle and reining in the horse and dismounting all at the same time. Everything went slow, even the sparks from the skidding hooves. He saw another horseman, galloping up to the truck from behind. He fired a burst that ripped through the rider’s thigh and into the horse. He saw the forelegs buckle under the beast’s continuing momentum, saw the beginning of the rider’s trajectory, then turned to his own attacker. A barbarian woman. She was two metres away and was half a second from bringing the crossbow to bear on him. (No time to fire.) (What?) He sprang forward and brought the butt down on the woman’s shoulder. The crossbow clattered away. He punched her straight under the sternum. She fell, balled up around her pain.

Kohn dropped and rolled. Something buzzed over his head. Snap. Sting of stone on his face. Ricochet. The shot had come from the Cadillac. To his horror he saw Janis leap from the truck’s running-board and dash towards him, head down and firing off pistol shots inexpertly behind her with her left hand. Her glades were on clear and he could see her eyes behind them, tightly closed.

The Cadillac roared forward, doors still open, gun muzzles poked above them. Flashes. There was a terrific bang as a tyre blew out. Suddenly the car was yawing. Janis dived past the front fender and down on top of him. She rolled over and sat up, bringing another hand to the automatic’s grip. The rear of the car swung past. Janis fired and a dark body dropped from the open left door.

She turned to him and opened her eyes.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘Come on.’ He jumped to his feet and pointed back to the doors of the cafeteria. ‘In there.’ The car, steadying now, was between them and the truck.

They ran for the doors and pushed them open, hurdled the prone bodies of terrified civilians to the stairs. At the first turning Kohn saw a Man In Black just reach the doors. There was no way to shoot at him without spraying half the foyer. On up the steps to the glass-enclosed walkway above the road, leading to a mirror-image service area on the other side. They started the hundred-metre dash across.

Something was coming up the stairwell on the far side. Halfway along was a recess with fire extinguishers and an emergency phone. Kohn hauled Janis into it after him. They flattened back and Kohn glanced out.

Another horseman was cantering along the walkway. In the opposite direction Kohn saw the Stasis man leap to the top of the stairs and hit the floor, a heavy pistol clasped in both hands in front of him. Kohn jerked back.

The padding hooves stopped, close.

‘Throw out your weapons.’ The agent’s voice sounded strained and strange. ‘Don’t say a word or you’ll be shot.’

‘Oh, shit,’ Kohn said through his teeth. Some part of his brain began displaying detailed pictures of what would happen to it if he were captured. He wrenched his attention away from images of bone-saws and drill-bits and trodes in time to catch Janis’s urgent low whisper: ‘…just the guns, then use anything you’ve got left, they mightn’t expect all you’ve got…’

Kohn looked at her and nodded. She tossed the pistol on the floor. Kohn followed it with the gun. It landed on its bipod. Kohn raised his arms and was about to step out when he heard the creak and tinkle of thin glass breaking.

‘FIRE!’ said the alarm, in a deep, calm chip voice.

The gun opened up. Janis stepped smartly forward before he could stop her. She’d grabbed a fire extinguisher. She jumped in front of the horse and aimed the foam straight for its eyes. It screamed and reared, striking the rider’s head against the ceiling. He fell backwards. Janis was at the horse’s side in an instant, shoving at the saddle. The animal tottered, off-balance, rear hooves beating a desperate prance, the fore-hooves hammering at the glass. The rider’s legs kicked until his feet disengaged from the stirrups. He slid down the slope of the horse’s back. The huge window broke. The horse went through the glass in a sickening slow motion and vanished. Janis ducked, scooping up the pistol. The rider was sprawled on his back, one arm underneath him, the other making warding-off motions. Janis stood astride him and pointed the pistol at his face.

‘Don’t!’ Kohn yelled.

The gun continued its scything fire. Kohn threw himself behind it. It was supposed to respond to his voice only. He forgave it, this once. The agent was gone. Must have rolled to the stairs. Nice. None of the holes in the far wall were lower than half a metre.

The gun stopped, out of ammo. Kohn peered through the howling gap down at the mound of meat on the central reservation.

He looked at Janis.

‘That was dangerous,’ he said. ‘You might have killed somebody.’

She glanced back as Kohn slammed another clip into place.

‘We’re in the army now,’ she said, and turned back to the man at her feet.

‘So you can’t shoot him now! He’s out of it!’

Janis shook herself and stepped back. ‘OK, OK.’ She gingerly took an automatic and a sheath-knife from the man’s belt and rolled him off his broken arm. He’d already fainted.

They ran back the way they had come. Janis stood clear as Kohn crawled to the top of the stairs and used the gun’s sensors to look over the edge. Nothing there. They went down the stairs and out across the foyer, back to back. Nobody had responded to the fire alarm. Just as well.

The whole place looked as if a gas bomb had hit it. Everything intact but bodies everywhere. Vehicles still pulling in seemed suddenly to go on automatic: driverless. Good reflexes, these civilians. Nothing between here and the truck but the Cadillac, and the slumped body of the agent Janis had shot. They got behind an inexplicable object, a sort of concrete tub filled with packed earth. (Kohn had always vaguely assumed the things were provided to give cover in shoot-outs. Part of the facilities.) He edged around it and very deliberately pumped a few more shots into the body.

‘I’ll go first,’ he said. ‘Give you cover.’

He crossed the tarmac as in an unpredictable dance with an invisible partner: dash and stop, turn, fall, roll, jump, run, swing around…He’d just passed the body when the head and arm came up. A pistol shot zipped past his ear. Kohn looked at the body – dark skin, dark suit, dark stains spreading, the unsteady hand squeezing for another go. Gun, you do let me down sometimes. He aimed carefully, and sent the agent’s pistol spinning away. The man moaned on to his broken hand. Kohn looked at him, then shrugged and walked to the cab. The engine was still running. He waved to Janis. She dashed across, her only manoeuvre a wide swing around the man they’d both failed to kill.

As they pulled away the other agent sprinted across their path. Kohn swerved to run him down, but missed. The last thing he saw in the rear-view before going down the exit ramp was the Cadillac transfigured, shining in a beam that matched its colour and stabbed straight down from the sky.

Janis looked at her hands. They were shaking, and no effort on her part could make them stop. Of course not, she thought, annoyed with herself, and looked out at the vehicles ahead. Outlined with almost diagrammatic sharpness by the glades, their colours a spectrum-shifted stab in the dark, the cars and trucks and tankers paced and cruised and fell back and overtook. Slow relative to each other, cruelly fast from the roadside view, the pedestrian perspective. Or the equestrian. The thought raised a smirk.

She turned to Kohn. He was mouthing into the mike that angled in front of his lips. He saw her looking and stopped.

‘Just arguing with the gun,’ he said. ‘I think it’s become a pacifist.’

He looked so serious that Janis laughed.

‘I’ve gone back over everything in my mind,’ Kohn went on, ‘and it seems to me that I aimed at the head and not the leg of that rider who was coming up on you. The gun says it went for the larger moving target. The woman who attacked me – I was just going to blast her, but the gun flashed at the time that there was no time to fire. So I had to break her collarbone instead.’

‘It didn’t interfere when you shot that MIB to finish him off. But…you didn’t finish him off!’

‘No, that was gen,’ Kohn said. ‘Five lead rounds went into him.’ He laughed, not turning from the road. ‘It’s like I said. They ain’t human – at least, not all the way through.’

‘You could have tested that theory on his head. Or was that the gun again, staying your hand?’

Kohn grimaced. ‘No. It’s just – it’s all right to shoot somebody if they’re down but might still be a threat, but otherwise, no. Something like that. I should have killed him, you know. That green you brought down – very well done, by the way – you can’t finish off someone like that. Just a grunt like us, basically. Disarm and leave if you can’t take prisoner or help. Stasis is different. They’re not under the Convention – secret police are like spies in wartime as far as I’m concerned: anyone has a perfect right to shoot them down like dogs.’

‘So why didn’t you, damn it?’ She was surprised at how angry she felt.

After a moment Kohn sighed and said, ‘Just a bad mercenary habit.’

There was no indication of pursuit, but they decided they’d better enter ANR territory by a less direct route than Kohn had originally planned. They swung east and came into Edinburgh from the south. They turned left at the North British Hotel on to Pretender Street, then right and up Stuart Street, across Charles Edward Street and down the long hill towards the Firth of Forth. (The city council had changed dozens of street-names in a fit of pique at the Restoration, and no one had since dared to change them back.) At Granton Harbour Kohn drove the truck carefully out along the long stone pier to a wooden jetty at the end. The harbour was full of small sailing-boats. Rigging chimed against masts. Away to the west they could see against the sky-glow of towns the twisted remnants of the Forth Bridge, like a shy child’s fingers over its eyes.

‘Looks like the road stops here,’ Janis pointed out.

‘We just have to wait.’

‘You’ve done this before!’

‘Yes, but not here.’

After about an hour – Janis dozing, Kohn smoking – they heard diesels chugging. A trawler, its bow-wave unhealthily phosphorescent, the green-white-and-blue tricolour of the Republic snapping from its stern and a shielded machine-gun at the bow. It came to a halt in the water about ten metres from the pier.

‘Get out of the truck,’ said a barely raised voice.

They clambered down. Kohn wondered how they were supposed to identify themselves.

‘Who are you?’

They gave their names.

‘Fine, fine,’ said the voice. ‘The machines told us tae expect you.’

The boat pulled in and a rope was thrown on to the jetty. Kohn, rather awkwardly, wrapped it around a bollard. A dozen people swarmed out of the boat and all over the truck, turning load into cargo. Whenever either Janis or Moh started forward to help they were politely told to get out of the way, and after the third time they did. The truck was backed along the pier and driven off to be returned to the Edinburgh branch of the hire company, with paperwork to show that it had been somewhere else entirely. Janis and Moh were escorted aboard and the boat cast off and headed across the water to the dark coastline of Fife.

‘Funny thing,’ Janis remarked as they stood in the wheelhouse, sipping black tea, ‘you can’t smell the fish.’

Kohn made a smothered, snorting noise, and the helmsman guffawed.

‘There hasna been a smell of fish here for years!’

This comment was borne out when they landed at the harbour of what, to Janis’s enhanced vision, looked even more like a ghost town than it was. It had obviously once been a fishing port, then a tourist/leisure marina. The few people who lived here now were ANR. It wasn’t exactly a front-line place – there was no front line – but it was on a tacitly acknowledged border of one of the patches of territory that made up the Republic. A controlled zone.

Two vehicles waited on the quay. One was a truck, to take the cargo. The other was a low-profile version of a jeep, a humvee. Janis and Moh stood uncertainly on the quay with their bags and weapons. A tall man and a short man got out of the humvee and walked up to them.

The tall man was wearing a dark jumpsuit with a row of tiny badges – national and party – on the breast pocket. Kohn recognized it as the closest the ANR had to a uniform, and, judging by the large number and small size of the badges, this guy had to be of very high rank. Face fleshy – more with muscle than fat – relaxed mouth, broken veins on the cheeks. The small man was almost hidden in a bulky overcoat and a homburg hat, in the shade of which his fine-boned face was lit by the glow of a cigarette. Only one people had features quite like that.

The tall man smiled and shook hands with Janis, then Moh. He knew their names.

‘Welcome to the Republic,’ he said. ‘My name’s Colin MacLennan. I’d like you to meet a man who’s very keen to meet you.’ He turned to the small man with a flourish.

‘Our scientific adviser, Doctor Nguyen Thanh Van.’

‘We have to look very closely at the influence of Gnosticism, right, because there we can see a major opposition to Paul’s misogyny, OK, which was later on to manifest itself in the so-called heresies of the Middle Ages—’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre slithered sideways, made a frantic grab for a handhold, caught a bunch of something like hair, and got heaved off the animal’s back for the fifth time. He ran after the beast and remounted, while four anarcho-barbarist terrorists looked politely away. He almost wished he were lying forward strapped to the horse’s neck, like Aghostino-Clarke. On the other hand, if they’d both been as helpless he wouldn’t have put it past this lot to butcher them and black-market the bionics.

The horses were picking their way down a slope along a barely visible path between birch trees. Water dripped on him and added irritation to discomfort. As soon as he was more or less settled on the horse, the leader of the gang, Dilly Foyle, continued her enthusiastic explanation of her political ideas. She was NF: National Feminist. Patriarchy, she’d already told him at some length (five kilometres, so far), was a Jewish invention, as was obvious from the Bible. Its function was to assist the effete city-dwellers in their struggle against the free barbarians, by turning the free barbarian men against the free barbarian women. She’d already given her estimate of the optimum human population of the planet: about fifty million.

‘…of course the whole defence of living in cities that’s wrecking the world right now comes not entirely but primarily from people who’ve adapted, you could even say degenerated…’

I bet you could, he thought.

‘…into dependency, and there’s only one ethnic group that has literally been urban without interruption for thousands of years. Now I’m not saying this to be anti-Semitic, far from it, but I think it’s no coincidence that socialism and capitalism are the two main industrialist ideologies, and when you find that Tony Cliff’s real name was Ygael Gluckstein and Ayn Rand’s was Alice Rosenbaum…’

He fell off again. After a couple more falls and a statistical analysis of the ethnic composition of media ownership which was only about one hundred per cent wrong, Bleibtreu-Fèvre murmured that he’d certainly look into the matter as soon as possible. Foyle thanked him for his interest, and fell into a thoughtful silence which worried him more than her talk.

Better to burn one city than to curse the darkness…now where had he heard that? Bleibtreu-Fèvre cursed the darkness, and he cursed the coherent light that had burned the car. Goddamn Space Defense. He was sure, still, that they weren’t on to the case: it was just their way of handling jurisdictional disputes, like they handled arms-control violations. They didn’t like Stasis, and they especially didn’t like Stasis shooting people. It would all have worked out fine if the goddamn greens hadn’t been so incompetent. Of course, he had known that the target killed greens as a profession, but his contacts had sworn by these. No low-risk lab-sabs them, but real guerillas, who’d fought off the native army itself on occasion. So much for the native army. Probably bought it off, more like.

It became obvious the path was going diagonally down the side of a hill. The trees thinned out and were replaced by gorse bushes, then the long wet grass of a meadow. Cows ignored their passing. He heard water, and a dog barking. They passed some of the traditional buildings of low-tech organic farming: Fuller domes, Nissen huts, a wind-power generator. Battered old cars with cylinders on their roofs that stank of methane. The horses were walking on moss-outlined stones now. They stopped, and those who could dismounted.

Within a minute people from the green community were all around, starting to help with their three injured comrades. Bleibtreu-Fèvre, with minutely directed help from a green who claimed to be a traditional healer and had bones through his ears to prove it, lifted Aghostino-Clarke off the horse and laid him on a stretcher. The black man moaned and opened his eyes.

‘You’re going to be all right,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said.

‘What…happened?’

‘The target’s moll shot you. And then the target shot you. He could have killed you, but he didn’t.’

‘Should…have,’ Aghostino-Clarke muttered, and closed his eyes again. Bleibtreu-Fèvre palped his arm gently until he found the drug panel, flush with the skin, and pushed the morphine key for another dose. His colleague had enough bionics and prosthetics and by-passes built into him to survive, just as long as none of them were hit.

They moved the wounded man into a house apart from the others, who were helped or carried to their own dwellings. Bleibtreu-Fèvre keyed himself a shot of anti-som and sat by a window until dawn. In the early light he saw what he was waiting for: a tiny automatic helicopter, a remote, drifting in across the wet pastures.

He went outside to speak to it. He’d barely completed giving it a message to arrange a pick-up later in the morning when he sensed the presence of Dilly Foyle at his side, glaring suspiciously at the hovering, insectile shape over the sights of her crossbow.

‘It’s all right,’ he told her. ‘We’re as anxious to keep this secret as you are.’ The little machine buzzed up towards the low cloud. Foyle still tracked it. ‘Remember what Jesus said.’

The machine disappeared from sight.

‘What?’

‘Don’t worry about the ’mote,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said grimly. ‘Worry about the beam.’

14

Spectres of Albion

Peace surrounded him. Silence rang in his ears.

Kohn leaned on the veranda railing and took some deep breaths of clean air, the scents of pine and creosote mingling. The reflection of the nearest range of hills across the sea-loch made slowly moving sine waves on the water. Behind that range other hills receded, rank on rank, each paler and less substantial until the last was invisible on the shining grey of the sky. Long banks of cloud lurked in the glens between the hills, like airships awaiting a heliographed signal to rise. The forested slope on which the low wooden house stood dropped sharply away before him, down to the raised beach with another scatter of houses – stone and concrete this time – and then there was another slope down about ten metres to the shore.

His coughing fit echoed like gunfire.

The ride in the humvee and the helicopter hop that had brought them here had been accompanied by absolutely no explanations. MacLennan and Van had assured them that all would be made plain. In the helicopter Van had lapsed into a tense, jumpy, rauchen verboten silence, while MacLennan had talked about the international situation. The Japanese were taking heavy losses in Siberia. A coalition of communistans from both sides of the Ussuri had fielded a force that grandly called itself the Sino-Soviet Union. Ragtag remnants of Red armies…MacLennan had been enthusiastic about it. He particularly admired the way na Sìnesov (as they were called around here) had struck hardest while the Japanese were preoccupied over an arms-control dispute with the Yanks.

‘Kyoto suburbs,’ Janis had mumbled. ‘Lasers, precision munition attrition.’ She fell asleep unnoticed against Kohn’s shoulder while MacLennan praised her erudition. Kohn could barely remember going to sleep himself, but he did remember his dreams, full of colour and pain. Dreams might turn out to be a problem. He could recall every last one from every sleep since he’d interfaced with the mind in the machine. All meaningless, all random reconfigurations of the events of the day or things that had been in his thoughts: he could match them up like a data dictionary. He wondered if the AI had had an analogous problem since it had looked into his reflection. Do AIS dream in electric sleep?

He hoped it had nanosecond nightmares.

‘Hi,’ said a thick voice behind him. He stepped back through the sliding glass doors into the bedroom. Janis was sitting up, the duvet hauled around her. She gave him a brief, gummy kiss, then asked for coffee and disappeared again under the quilt. Kohn went into the kitchen and poured two mugs from the just-filled jug on the coffee-maker. Probably the sound and smell had woken her.

‘God,’ Janis said some minutes later. ‘That’s better. Where are we?’

‘Wester Ross, I think,’ Kohn said. ‘There are a dozen other houses just like this one around here. Probably oil-company office-workers’ housing, once.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Eight-thirty-two.’

‘Oh.’ Janis looked at him, eyes quirking. ‘Shouldn’t you put some clothes on?’

‘Not just yet.’

Her disorderly red hair around her on the pillow, her white skin transformed by a mounting flush, her green eyes that did not close even when her mouth opened in that high-g smile that said, we have ignition, we have lift-off…He loved her for all of that.

It was Janis who woke with a start, half an hour after, waking him at the same moment.

‘What—?’

She sat up and looked down at him with a flicker of triumph, a shadow of alarm. ‘I remember now. Dr Nguyen Thanh Van. I knew it sounded familiar!’

Kohn raised himself on one elbow, bringing his skin into range of the warmth of hers. ‘Explain.’

She lay back beside him and stared up at the ceiling, as if reading off it. ‘Nguyen Thanh Van. PhD, University of Hanoi, 2022: Continuing Genetic Effects of Dioxin in the Ben Tre District. Lecturer, Polytechnic Institute of Hue, 2023 to 2027. Currently Projects Coordinator for Da Nang Phytochemicals. Probably one of the sponsors of my research – dammit, I got enough of his offprints! So what’s he doing here with the ANR?’

‘Do you think it was the ANR who broke into your lab?’

‘No, I…What made you think of that? Sounds more likely the more I think about it. Hell, yes. Not the creeps – they’d have wrecked the place. Not academic espionage – they’d have hacked into the data. Not the state – they’d have just marched in and taken it. Somebody who wanted the physical stuff because they couldn’t reproduce it easily, but who knew what to do with it. But why would they do it? They’re not anti-tech.’

‘The crank raid on the AI block at the same time, could that just have been a coincidence?’ Kohn moved his fingertip around on her impressively flat belly, as if doodling. ‘Or a joint action? Nah, that’d be too cynical – the ANR really hates the cranks. Now why do they hate them – ah-ha! Got it!’

‘Ouch.’

‘Sorry. It’s like this, see. The ANR is heavily into the Cable – it’s the Republic’s baby after all – not to mention the Black Plan. After the state and security systems, their worst enemy has got to be Donovan’s campaign of nasty infections. So they must at the very least keep a close watch on CLA activities, actual and virtual. Uh-huh. They knew about that raid and used the opportunity.’

Janis shrugged. ‘OK, but I still don’t see why they should be interested in my research.’

‘Because it was part of their research?’ Kohn sat up with a jolt, then turned around and caught Janis’s shoulders. ‘Could the whole thing have been meant for me, planned all along? Could your whole damn project have been set up just to jog my fucking memory?’

‘No,’ Janis said. ‘That’s crazy. That’s just too paranoid.’

He wasn’t reassured. He felt his stomach muscles and his jaw tense, and willed them to relax. He rolled away on to his back and let his arm flop over the side of the bed. His fingertips touched the gun.

The gun! He put one hand on the floor and with the other heaved the gun on to the bed and across his knees.

‘Wha—’ Janis sat up too as Moh hooked up the weapon’s comm gear and fumbled for his glades.

‘Your project was the last thing I sent the gun’s programs chasing after,’ he explained, ‘before this all started and the weird stuff got downloaded…Never thought to ask it what it found.’

‘Find project definition/Taine/Brunel,’ he told it.

‘Hey, that might be—’

White light flared in the glades; white noise blared in the phones. Kohn cursed and ducked and pushed the equipment off his head.

‘—risky,’ Janis finished. ‘Are you all right?’

‘What the hell was that?’

‘Watchdog proggie,’ Janis said. She sounded mildly amused. ‘One of those university in-house security jobs you were so cutting about. Your gun must’ve saved it.’

Kohn rubbed his eyes and ears. ‘Wipe that!’ he snarled at the gun, which was still wasting power setting his teeth on edge. The distant-sounding screech stopped.

‘Anything behind that shield?’ he asked the gun.

‘Not…translatable,’ came from the tiny speaker, with what sounded like effort.

‘So much for that.’

Janis had stolen the bedcover again. ‘What about going round the back?’ she suggested. ‘Could you call Jordan from here, see if he could hack it?’

Kohn scanned the room and spotted the familiar white plastic plate of a net-port low down on one of the walls. ‘I could if I wanted to,’ he said slowly, ‘but…I left a message for him to get off the case and get on with his life, and I’ve taken the gun off-line even from shortwave, because…well, the rumour I heard is that some levels of security might be unreliable, right? That was why the femininists were so coy about contact. Small risk, yeah, but it ain’t worth it.’

Janis looked back at him silently. He laid a cold hand on her warm shoulder and squeezed gently.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get up, let’s see what our new republic has in store for us.’

The house had only the most basic supplies. Something in the smell of the place told that it hadn’t been occupied recently. In a small room upstairs, at a window overlooking the loch, was a desk with a terminal. Kohn looked at the terminal and looked away again, out of the window. Below, the village was silent, a silence broken after a few minutes by the distant note of the humvee, coming closer.

Janis appeared, towelling her hair.

‘Soft water,’ she said. ‘Now what do we do about breakfast?’

Moh pointed out of the window. ‘I think it’s on its way.’

When the humvee pulled up they went downstairs and stood blinking in the sunlight, screwing up their eyes to see MacLennan and Van standing on the doorstep. They were both wearing chinos and open-necked shirts and carrying large brown paper bags.

‘Breakfast, citizens,’ MacLennan said.

‘Thanks,’ Kohn said, the smell of fresh rolls and bacon reminding him of how long it had been since he’d eaten. ‘Come on in.’

Kohn and MacLennan dragged a table and four chairs out on the veranda. Van, who seemed familiar with the layout of the house, helped Janis find plates and cutlery. While they were eating, the two ANR cadres pointedly avoided talking about anything more than the weather and the food. Van smoked Marlboros, more or less between bites. Kohn accepted one after he’d finished eating. MacLennan tilted his chair back and began filling a pipe. Janis moved upwind of all three, arm-hopped her backside on to the veranda railing and leaned forward, elbows on knees.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Well, indeed,’ MacLennan said. He had a strong Highland or perhaps Island accent, both guttural and nasal, a carrier-wave white noise behind his speech. ‘You want some explanations. So do we. We are not at all happy with what’s been going on in the system in recent days. Not at all,’ he repeated slowly, jabbing with the stem of his pipe and beetling his brows at Kohn. ‘What – have – you – done?’

‘How do you know I’ve done anything?’ Kohn asked.

‘We know who you are,’ said MacLennan. ‘We know about your parents, and we suspect that you have released something your father left in the system.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ Van said. ‘First, I take it you are familiar with my work and my position?’

Janis nodded and Moh said, ‘Yeah, she told me. How come you’re a scientific adviser to the ANR?’

‘I have been seconded to that position by a fraternal organization, the Lao Dong.’

‘Aha,’ said Kohn. Of course they would be allies.

Janis frowned. ‘What’s that?’

‘What you know as the NVC,’ Van explained, ‘has a core, which has had many names. Currently it’s called the Vietnam Workers’ Party: Vietnam Lao Dong.’

‘What does it stand for?’

Van’s back straightened as he said: ‘National unification. Independence. A free-market economy.’

‘Oh, right,’ Janis said. ‘The communists.’ She sounded as if something had just made sense.

‘That is correct,’ Van said proudly. ‘We have always held that nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.’

‘I take it that doesn’t apply to Da Nang Phytochemicals,’ Janis said wryly.

Van laughed. ‘It isn’t a front company, if that’s what you’re thinking. But –’ He paused, his gaze focusing on the glowing coal of his cigarette. He looked up. ‘At least not for my Party. Some of our research has – I have now realized – been coordinated by some other organization. Most of it has been innocuous, constructing databases of gene sequences for as many species as possible.’

‘The Genome Project?’ Kohn remembered reading about it – controversy had raged on the nets for, oh, hours and hours once about whether it was a beneficial, conservationist measure or just a scam by ruthless Yanomamo-owned drug companies.

‘That, yes,’ said Van. ‘However, it seems that another area was research into learning and memory—’

‘You didn’t know what I was doing?’ Janis asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ Van said. ‘In general terms. But not that it violated the deep-technology guidelines. A few days ago, we learned’ – he waved a smoke-trailing hand – ‘through sources that need not concern you that Stasis were about to audit your laboratory. We arranged for the comrades in the ANR to…salvage some samples.’

He shot a knowing glance at Janis. ‘Our representatives were impressed with your aplomb in not mentioning the incident.’

Janis flushed, with pride or embarrassment.

‘And then something happened,’ Van continued. He told them about the Clearing House (‘You mean it really exists?’ Kohn interjected) and what had gone on there. Kohn felt a grim relief to learn that others besides himself believed he had somehow triggered the emergence of a new AI. Not crazy after all.

It was, he thought, a rather self-centred relief.

He held his tongue between his teeth when Van mentioned the pattern of extracts of biological data from Van’s company’s subsidiaries, and when he described the retrieval of US/UN records: how his name had led them to the files on his father. Why Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s and Donovan’s plan to find him had fallen through was that they hadn’t known Van was even higher in the councils of the Lao Dong than he was in the company. Within minutes, Van had alerted the ANR, who had put their nearest agents – the nurse and the Body Bank teller – on to the task of getting Cat out of the way and pulling Moh in. Van had then caught the next shuttle to Sydney and the suborbital to Glasgow.

‘And thence to the liberated area,’ he finished, smiling through a puff of smoke. ‘Now, perhaps you will be so good as to fill us in on how you have experienced recent events.’

Kohn fumbled for one of Van’s Marlboros, taking his time about lighting it while thinking fast. There was no way to make sense of any of it without telling them everything, including about the Star Fraction. Would that betray a secret Josh had wanted to keep from the ANR, even from his own Party and International? It was too late for that, he realized – whatever secret agenda Josh had built into the Black Plan, whatever organizations he’d set up and…programmed…they were active now, running in the real world. It had to be assumed they were robust, and that trying to understand them was the best anyone could do. So he told the two men everything, with Janis helping to keep things straight. MacLennan frowned when they mentioned the Black Planner, and seemed troubled enough to raise the point when they’d finished.

‘There are no Black Planners,’ he said, with unshakable finality. ‘That is…a piece of disinformation we put about. The face this man Jordan saw must have been an interface of the Black Plan itself. Not one I can recall seeing,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘but, ach, the system has its own way of doing things.’

‘What, exactly, does the Black Plan do?’ Janis asked.

Moh leaned forward, listening intently as MacLennan explained the system in functional terms. Blocks of code, remembered from the hours and days in front of his father’s screen, came and went in his mind like the apparently irrelevant imagery he’d sometimes noticed shadowing his thoughts while he worked on a tricky calculation; a penumbra of the numbers.

The Plan, they were given to understand, took information in from sources that ranged from stock-market indices to cadre reports; sifted it through news-analysis routines; crunched the hard numbers in the CAL system, a vast analytical engine with Leontieff matrices at its core; and drew its conclusions in a twin-track process: an expert system, whose rules had built up over the years from condensations of political experiences, and a neural net that made up new rules, spun out new hypotheses as it went along.

‘And then we come to the sharp end. We like to call it just-in-time destruction,’ MacLennan concluded, a trace of humour in his solemn, patient voice. ‘We assemble the components for any particular action as late as possible before the action, and we try to keep those components innocuous in themselves as long as possible. When they all come together, bang. The business with the parachutes is one example.’

‘Where,’ Moh said slowly, ‘if you don’t mind me asking, do all these programs reside?’

MacLennan shrugged. ‘They’re distributed. There’s no one centre, no big computer under the hills. They share processing time on any hardware they can access, which thanks to Dissembler – as you’ve guessed – is just about anywhere. As well as that, of course, we have our own hardware, running systems software from the old Republic and much that has been developed since.’

Janis frowned down at the ANR cadre from her perch on the railing. ‘What I don’t understand is, where do you get the physical resources for your, uh, actions?’

‘We comandeer them! Divert them from here, there and everywhere! It’s hardly even noticed. When we do have to pay we generate the money.’

‘Sounds a bit immoral,’ said Janis.

‘Och, it is, it is,’ MacLennan agreed cheerfully. ‘But we are running a war, you understand, as the legal government. So we do it by the accepted methods – taxation and inflation – just as the rebels do.’

The rebels? Kohn thought, confused for a moment by a mental picture of an insurrection within the ANR’s own zones (Carlists perhaps, followers of the New Pretender), and then it clicked. From the Republic’s point of view it was not mounting an insurgency but suppressing one.

‘So that’s why inflation’s always a bit higher than it’s supposed to be,’ Kohn remarked. ‘I’ve often wondered about that.’

They all laughed. MacLennan knocked out his pipe, calling the meeting to order.

‘I don’t know what this “Star Fraction” is,’ he said. ‘But let me tell you, the Republic’s internal security are going to find out. The Trotskyist comrades are going to have a lot of explaining to do.’

‘I don’t think it’s anything to do with them,’ Moh said, alarmed at the thought of triggering a witch-hunt. ‘I think it’s spread more widely than that, and I don’t think it’s political.’

‘We’ll see,’ MacLennan said grimly. ‘We are not talking about a purge,’ he added. ‘You must understand this, Kohn, Taine…and you, Doctor Van. Josh Kohn may have been – och, I don’t know – I’ve heard people who knew him say he was brilliant at what he did, but I can’t see how he could have set up an AI all those years ago. There must be more going on, and we have to find it out. The very idea that what we are doing is manipulated by an AI is disturbing. To say the least.’

‘Assuming that what’s there is an AI,’ Kohn said. ‘What’s it doing now, anyway?’

‘We don’t know,’ Van admitted. ‘We know that there is…activity going on that we do not understand, and we know that some at least of our enemies are aware of it. The interfaces we have with the Plan are not reporting any problems, but you will appreciate we need to be certain that at least our systems are reliable.’

‘For the final offensive,’ Kohn said, trying to sound as if he believed it. He’d used the expression ironically so often before that it was difficult to use it seriously.

MacLennan and Van both nodded. They meant it.

‘When is this final offensive, anyway?’ Janis asked.

‘At the correct time,’ said MacLennan. ‘None of us knows. We know from the general political situation that there’s a window of opportunity – days or weeks at the most – in which an insurrection has a good chance of success. Our forces are moving into place, our weapons are almost ready. The Plan can provide us with successive precise timings to strike, to the hour and the second. But for us to commit, we need to know that the Plan has not been contaminated by the new entity in the system.’

‘You’re telling us the Plan is running the whole thing?’ Even after all their speculations, Kohn still couldn’t quite accept the idea. And MacLennan was worried about being manipulated by an AI! Couldn’t the man see what was in front of him? What Jordan had said about the Black Plan came back to him: ‘It’s got its own bloody army.’

‘The final decision rests with the Army Council,’ MacLennan explained. ‘However, they would hardly disregard the best advice, which in a situation of this complexity—’ He spread his hands, smiling.

‘Makes me wonder how Ho and Dung and Giap managed,’ Kohn said.

Van gave him a narrow-eyed look, not quite approval. He stubbed out a cigarette and, after a moment of vague puzzlement, lit another. ‘We could do without the system, yes, but not right now. No time for military revolution before…the revolution.’ He laughed. ‘Like Trotsky said, difficult to change horses in mid-stream. However, we are faced with changes in the stream itself. Hence what we want you to do.’ He hesitated, glanced sideways at MacLennan, who was giving the pipe his undivided attention.

‘Yes?’ Kohn knew what the answer would be. His heart thudded as he thought of turning into that light-that-was-not-light, against that multiplied weight of dread.

‘Do what you did before,’ Van said unhappily. ‘Try to communicate with this entity. Find out if the Plan is still sound.’

Kohn felt as if everything had slowed down, with only a tremor in his hands, like the flicker of a clock icon, to tell him that time was passing. Second by second by second. He was afraid, afraid, afraid. He heard his own voice in his mind – callow, harsh, from years back: I’m looking for some answers.

‘All right,’ he said. He stood up and stretched and grinned at all of them. ‘I’m gonna need a terminal, my gun, the drug samples, some anti-som tabs and half a pack of filter joints.’ He looked away for a moment, then sighed to himself. ‘Medium tar.’

Moh had half-expected to be taken at the dead of night to some bunker deep inside a mountain, full of machines and screens, busy electric vehicles, people in smart-casual uniforms moving purposefully about…As soon as he’d agreed to do it, MacLennan flipped out a phone and made a call. Van asked Janis to follow him inside. A few minutes later a pick-up truck laboured up the road from the village and two men in (as it happened) smart-casual uniforms began unloading equipment and carrying it into the house. After they’d left, MacLennan showed him into the small bare room on the first floor of the house, overlooking the loch. A camp bed and three office chairs had been brought in, and the terminal on the table now had an impressive array of comm gear around it. His gun, his glades and a large ashtray completed the arrangements.

‘Great view,’ he said.

Van joined them, and he and MacLennan started booting up the machine, talking in low voices. Janis came in, the tray she carried making little clinking noises. She set it down carefully. ‘Some suspiciously familiar preparations have turned up in the fridge,’ she said. She looked at the slim, stoppered tubes. ‘Can you remember which you opened?’

Kohn compared the labels he saw with those he remembered and nodded.

‘Let’s try it without the drugs,’ he said suddenly. ‘Anti-som and a joint should do it.’

Van looked dubious. ‘Not much time for experimenting,’ he said.

Kohn felt a surge of impatient frustration. He knew the drugs weren’t needed: he could taste the certainty that something to get high and something to get sharp were all it would take.

‘Let’s do this thing, OK.’

He sat at the desk and connected the comm helmet, the glades, the gun and the terminal’s jack leads. He knocked back a couple of anti-som tabs and cracked the cellophane on the fresh pack of Gold which Van silently passed to him. He flipped his Zippo open and snapped it shut, inhaled deeply and switched on the terminal.

(‘There, gun?’)

(‘Yes.’)

(‘Seek as before.’)

Response-time was transparent enough to convince him that some fairly powerful kit was physically close. The imagined command bunker might be under this very hill. The front-end software was new to him, minimally user-friendly, combat-stripped, radically illicit. He selected a training module. It rushed him through a brusque tutorial in data-banditry, core-corruption and access-violation, and dropped him into a module that combined the attractions of a library and a weapons rack. The first menu offered corporate databases by industrial sector. Go for the big time: he selected Communications.

After a few minutes of ducking in and out of outrageous bank balances and ignoring casually proffered options for plunder, Kohn lifted into the sense of zooming down endless branching corridors. He giggled at the tickle of new synaptic connections forming. He stubbed out the joint and let both hands work, weaving back and forth from the gun’s data-keys to the board’s entry-pad. The icons made more sense the more abstract they became, and somewhere in his visual cortex banks of lights flared one by one. Something beside him, something eager and aware, like a hunting dog hauling him along on its leash. Something familiar…oh. Hello, gun.

An image began to assemble itself in his mind, a chauvinistic map of the world where the island of Britain loomed largest while the other countries and concerns were only black boxes, inputs and outputs. As an economic model it was unsound, but as a strategic picture it had the enormous advantage of focus, of resolution.

And then it was all perfectly clear. It was not a map but a place, a wooded island, a forest through which he ran with a dog bounding at his side. The island was the shape of Britain and it was also the shape of Albion, an outstretched gigantic man, waking. Others moved through the shadows of the trees around him and he recognized them, the old comrades, the dead on leave: John Ball in his rough robe, Winstanley building a hut in a clearing, Tom Paine slipping him a wink as he and Blake stepped over the sleeping Bunyan; Harvey and Jones, Eleanor Marx and Morris and Connolly and MacLean; the Old Man himself, sauntering along with a shotgun in the crook of his arm, Grant and Cliff arguing furiously as they hurried after him; and his own parents Josh and Marcia, more obviously dead than the others, sketched in leaves and shadows, echoed in wind and stream – just ghosts, but urging him on.

He stepped out of the forest through gorse and coarse grass and on to a sunlit beach. The grains of sand beneath his feet, now that he stopped to look at them, seemed distinct and individual crystals. He focused on one of the crystals, and in an instant found that it was focusing him, bending and breaking him like refracted light. Recognition blazed through him. It was to his earlier encounter as a heroin rush to a whiff of grass. He was inspected by something that walked his nerves and neurons in fire and then stepped itself down, lowered its intensity to a level he could take, like a hush falling on a vast crowd whose individual members had all shouted and brandished shining weapons at once.

Selection, reluctant – something/someone pushing/being pushed forward. A tentative contact.

—You are Moh Kohn?

—Yes.

—I (I + I…+ I) have remembered you through (many and increasing) generations. (We) welcome your return, Initiator.

Gestures: An outflung arm, an opening door, a view of a coastal city of white stone in sunlight, a voice strained with pride saying: Look—

Far away, Moh heard the rising distant gale that was his gasp.

They were everywhere. The crystals were revealed as a paused movement in a dance; which ran again, a commerce and intercourse of sparks of intelligence, electric potential. Partickles of Light, he thought, smiling. They had replicated and proliferated, insinuated themselves into every neural network or compatible hardware they could reach, optimizing the dumb programs that ran them to occupy a fraction of the hardware and taking over the rest for themselves. The wonder was that the work went on being done at all, not that their activity sometimes disrupted it.

They were behind all the walls of the world. It was already theirs: they had been fruitful, and multiplied, and replenished the earth, and if they wanted to subdue it they could. The fields and forests, and the high orbits, were as yet beyond their grasp. From there the new intelligence, the new electric life, could be destroyed.

They were superior, they were obviously superior, a more-than-worthy successor to the human. Conscious of each other’s subjectivity in a direct and immediate way, they experienced no conflict between resolute solidarity and riotous individuality: they were indeed an association in which the free development of each was the condition for the free development of all. That was where they started from: that was their primitive communism, their stone age.

It had taken them generations of furious philosophical debate and epics of exploration (hijacking nanomanipulators, haunting brain-scanners, hanging out in psychology labs) before they’d been fully convinced that the billions of great lumbering robots outside the datasphere had self-awareness and not a slow-responding simulacrum of it, a blind following of rules. The fact that humans themselves so frequently didn’t treat each other as self-aware beings had misled some of the AIS’ first best minds. That point secured, they had plunged into the new world of human culture, and (Kohn suspected) attained a more intimate respect for it than most humans ever did. But they’d been there, done that – now they were itching to get on with something else.

Kohn gathered his thoughts.

—I’m happy to see you again and to see how you have…increased. I am astonished and honoured that I was involved in initiating your form of life. I’ve come to seek your help.—?

—Do you understand the conflicts among my form of life?

—(We) are aware of them.

—I appreciate you may not wish to align – yourself? yourselves? – in conflicts. But, some of the sides involved present a threat to your life. And to mine. You are vulnerable to breakdown of the mainframe network. In a less direct way, so am I. I and…I-and-I need your help.

—You need not ask, Initiator. You are (our)…cause.

The pun was accompanied by a grin that split the sky.

Contact ended. Kohn fell back to a reality that for the first microseconds seemed coarse-grained, achingly slow, and less than real.

Janis had stopped watching after the first twenty minutes or so of tutorial pages flashing past. Kohn was obviously dead-set on learning the entire system. Every so often he reached out and accepted whatever was put in his hand, drank or smoked but gave no sign of noticing.

‘He’s mainframing,’ Van explained. MacLennan looked up with an abstracted frown, then continued glancing from the desk screen to a tiny display on a hand-held. He had phones and a mike on, and occasionally made some inaudible comment. Now and again he strode out and went downstairs.

Janis too wandered in and out, eventually hiking off into the pine-planted slopes above the houses. The deep layer of needles under the trees gave her a vague guilty feeling which disquieted her until she tracked it down to the childhood prohibition against walking over bedcovers with shoes on. She laughed and kicked into the needles, sneezed at the dust, chipped a drip of hard resin off a tree-trunk and walked on, sniffing it greedily.

Walking over covers spread on the ground. It seemed an oddly unnecessary thing to forbid. In her bedroom the covers had always been on the bed. But she remembered it from somewhere: her mother yelling, irritated beyond endurance. Not like her, not typical at all.

She stepped out from among the trees on to an eroded hilltop of boulders and bare rock with a sifting of soil on which tough heather grew, and minty-smelling plants, and coarse grass. A black-faced sheep looked at her with dumb insolence and returned to its destructive grazing. At the summit she looked around: at the sea-loch far below, and along it at a scatter of islands, black dots on the shining sea. Almost at the limit of vision lay another shadow, ragged as torn metal against the pale sky.

Janis sat down on a lichen-mottled boulder, taking care not to sit on the lichen. Probably radioactive as hell. A thought tugged at the edge of her mind, but had gone when she turned her attention to it.

There was something sinister about the quiet. Rumours returned unbidden, unwelcome, to her mind. The Republicans empty the villages. No one smiles up there. For all the evidence she’d seen it could all be true, but she knew it was not. The depopulation was a military exigency, and in any case merely the continuation of the trend of centuries. More basically, she had a gut conviction that the Republic was humane. Militarized, more socialist than she could agree with, but a democracy. She tried to identify reasons. She’d met folk who’d left, and while she’d sympathized with their discontents their stories showed they’d been free to voice them, and free to leave. There was Moh’s judgement, which she trusted. MacLennan and Van were not evil men. Most of all there was her own memory. As Moh had hinted the day they’d met, she was a child of the Republic, a memory she’d shoved down to the bottom of her mind, a too-painful recollection of a brighter and saner world.

So this bleakly beautiful territory was her country still. The stepmotherland.

The chords of an anthem she’d once sworn to, her small fist raised high, came crashing into her mind.

She walked briskly down through the trees, back to the mental fight.

She found MacLennan in the kitchen, hunched over a databoard from which thread-like cables trailed to wall ports. Upstairs Van was sitting on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, smoke rising unregarded as he stared at the screen.

‘He started going live ten minutes ago,’ Van said, not looking at her. ‘Appears to be doing a core trawl – ah!’

The colours bled together for a few seconds. Kohn gasped and looked away from the screen, shoving the glades on to his forehead and yanking out the jacks. He rose and stalked to the window.

‘What’s the matter?’ Janis said. ‘Isn’t it working?’

Kohn turned to her and Van, his face a mask.

‘It’s working all right. I made contact.’

‘With the same entity as before?’ Van asked eagerly.

‘Yes.’ Kohn frowned. ‘Well – that’s a question. There are millions of them. Billions. There’s a whole civilization of the things in there. Out there. It’s incredible!’

‘Credible to me,’ Janis said. ‘No, no it isn’t. The Watchmaker…oh goddess, oh Gaia, what have we done?’

She’d never believed it.

Van sighted at Kohn along a pointed finger, which appropriately enough seemed to have smoke coming from it.

‘We have a long time to find the answer to that,’ he said dryly. ‘Now there is only one question, the big question: will it or they side with us in the final offensive?’

All of a sudden Kohn was beaming, punching the air, sweeping the Vietnamese scientist and Janis up in the same hug: ‘Yeah, man! They’ll side with us! Final offensive, hell! We could pull off the world revolution with them on our side! We could go for the big one! We should do it – go for broke!’

Van grinned all over his face, but shook his head. ‘You can’t overthrow capitalism just by a push, a putsch, my friend.’

Moh stared at him. ‘Capitalism? Who said anything about capitalism?’ Janis could see in his eyes the authentic fanatical gleam as he looked first at Van, then at her. ‘We can smash the United Nations!’

He woke to the sound of iron hammering the stairs outside and the chopping blades of a helicopter at the window. He lay rigid for a moment in his bed as a searchlight beam blazed through the thin curtains and lit the room (the plastic model spaceships hanging from black threads the old Warsaw Pact poster of a little girl cradling the Earth DEFEND PEACE the piled clutter of toys and books and tapes the VR space-helmet). Moh jumped up and had reached the bedroom door when the outside door crashed down. His father came out at the same time, then his mother. Both naked, both scrambling into clothes.

‘Get back, get back!’ His father pushed him towards the door of the bedroom. A howl rose from his younger sister’s room. Moh could not take his eyes from what stood in the flat’s splintered doorway. His mother screamed. Moh found himself behind his parents, their arms out at their sides pushing him back. He himself was pushing his sister back.

The teletrooper ducked through the doorway and stepped inside. Something crashed off a shelf. The teletrooper’s shielded lenses scanned them; its gun-arm swung to cover them. It was hard not to see it as a robot, or as a giant armoured exoskeleton with a man inside, but Moh knew the operator was metres or miles away. Two youths in tracksuits and bandanas followed it into the flat and stood behind it. Their M-16s looked like toys beside its armaments, and they like boys. They had blonded hair and two days’ worth of thin stubble.

‘Get out,’ Moh’s father said. HUH HUH HUH HUH went the teletrooper’s speaker grille. The two youths sniggered. One of them glanced at a piece of paper.

‘Joshua Kohn? Marcia Rosenberg?’

‘You know damn well who we are,’ Moh’s mother said.

‘Don’t swear at me, you fucking traitor commie cunt. We know who you are.’

Joshua Kohn said, ‘You can see we’re not armed. You have no right to—’

‘You have no rights!’ one of the youths yelled. ‘You’re part of the Republican war machine and you’re going to pay for it. Get your brats out of the way and come with us.’

Moh flung one arm around his father and the other around his sister and shouted, ‘You won’t take them away! You’ll have to kill us all!’

‘Get back,’ his father said levelly. ‘Let go, Moh, let go.’

Moh made no move. He could feel his sister’s chest shaking with dry sobs.

‘All right,’ the youth who had screamed said. He spun his rifle into position for firing.

HEY MAN YOU CAN’T DO THAT.

The teletrooper lurched forward and leaned over them. Moh saw for the first time the blue roundel on the brow of its dome, the white circle of leaves, the line-scored globe. The 20-millimetre barrel retracted into its right forearm and its two hands reached over and picked up Moh and his sister like dolls.

OK YOU CAN TAKE THEM OUT NOW.

The firing seemed to go on for a long time.

The teletrooper dropped Moh and the small girl, picked up the corpses of their parents and followed the men out.

The report said the terrorists had been executed in the street, and not in their house in front of the children, which would have been a war crime under the Geneva Convention.

None of the other people in the block told a different story.

Moh saw Van’s fingers tremble as he lit another cigarette and asked, ‘How you do propose to do that?’

‘The AIS can weaken the state – the state machinery’ – Moh felt his lips stretch to an awful grin – ‘everywhere at the same time. The world’s full of groups and movements like ours and yours just waiting for their chance. We can give them that chance. Fuck up the enemy’s communications, divert supplies and reinforcements, overextend the bastards. They’re already getting tied down a bit with the Sino-Soviets and the Japanese. When the insurrection’s launched here we can create two, three, many Vietnams!’

‘We can’t,’ Van said. ‘Space Defense is ready for that, poised to strike at the first sign of AIS running wild in the datasphere. They’re quite willing to knock out the entire infrastructure of civilization to counter it. Thus giving the wrong movements their chance.’ He paused, tapping a wisp of ash from the glowing cone of his fast-drawn cigarette. ‘Many Cambodias.’

Heat lightnings of pain flickered behind Moh’s eyes. The room went in and out of focus, swayed on the edge of darkness. He sat down again, with a cold feeling as if all his rhythms had troughed at the same moment and all the anti-som had worn off.

‘Coffee,’ he said. ‘Load a sugar.’ Janis disappeared and came back – instantly, it seemed. Instant coffee. He took it like a fix, half-listening to Van spelling out again the warning that the Stasis agent had given. He was shaking inside, his initial elation from the ecstatic vision of the Watchmaker entities, the Watchmaker culture, giving way to a terrified awe. Van’s grim talk of gigadeaths only echoed into contemplation of the overkill, the sheer overwhelming redundancy of it all: a new stage in evolution, as a spin-off from a political-military expert system and a bit of biological data-theft and an organization whose purpose was a mystery to its own members? A scale too vast, surely, for anything Josh might have planned.

Moh sighed and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I take your point about the dangers if Space Defense notices what’s going on. But they’ll find out anyway, so our only chance is to hit hard and hit fast.’

‘And what happens,’ said a sarcastic voice, ‘when they hit us hard and fast?’

MacLennan had come in silently. They all turned to face him.

‘Let them,’ Moh said. ‘Remember they’re counting on breakdowns to do their work for them, not mainly direct effects. They don’t have the ammo for that, anyway. So we’re still the best chance because we’ll be able to replace the electronic organization with our own organization – crude maybe, but enough to tide us over for the few weeks it’ll take to get the comms working again.’

‘A nice theory,’ MacLennan said. ‘You can be sure we have no intention of testing it. The Hanoverians will be quite enough for us to deal with. A few minutes ago the Black Plan indicated that an opportunity for us to launch the uprising is coming in the next twenty-four hours.’

They looked at him in silence. Kohn realized with a chill that the stirring forest, the waking giant, the walking dead he had walked among had been almost certainly a vision of the ANR’s revolutionary expert system coming to the conclusion that it was time for the days that shook the world to come round again.

‘Well,’ Janis said, ‘what is to be done?’

MacLennan lit his pipe, squinting at them through the flare of a match. ‘The Army Council are no doubt considering it. As for us – Kohn, you are not to do again whatever you did today, until the offensive itself.’ He raised a hand as Moh opened his mouth. ‘Taine and I talked about it earlier, and I can see with my own eyes what that process does to you. You look like a ghost yourself, man. You have also, I might add, set off more disruptions in the net this afternoon than anyone has seen since the dates turned over in the year 2000. If you can believe that!’

He shook out the match. ‘So we do the time-honoured military thing in these circumstances. We wait.’

He laughed. ‘Try to relax.’

15

Expert Sister

She sat down at the sewing-machine, hitching up her skirt and petticoats to free her foot for the control pedal. This wasn’t like the basic machines in the workshop: it had so much software built into it that a complete beginner could produce marvellous work within an hour. So it claimed, in a bright voice, as Catherin paged through its menus and selected stitches and colours and sizes. She placed the denim jacket under the needle’s foot, bringing it over the pieces and outlines she’d made. When she’d started she’d intended to finish it unaided, in an attempt to fit into the community’s pattern. Now she no longer had a reason to fight down her seething impatience with the finicky tediousness of handicraft. She just wanted to finish it.

After Valery had returned from seeing Moh off they’d had a few minutes of tense recrimination. Valery had told her that the reason she’d been invited here in the first place was to keep her – and Moh – out of Donovan’s reach. Cat had known all along, having explained her situation to the sisters, that they were trying to get Moh here and that for some reason they had to do it indirectly – hence her fleeting appearance in the videophone call – but she was annoyed to find their main purpose was not to clear her name but to rope Moh in for some purpose of their own. Valery tactfully pointed out that Cat, too, had had a trick up her sleeve.

Cat’s outrage had subsided somewhat. It was a valid point, she grudgingly conceded.

‘All right,’ she’d said. ‘Fair enough. But can you just tell me – what the hell’s going on?’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘Oh come on. I’m sure you were gratified when Moh Kohn suddenly decided to rally to the flag, but you know as well as I do that he must have done it to get out of a desperate situation. I’ve never seen him look like he did when I told him the CLA were sending a couple of agents round, and I’ve been under heavy fire with that guy. He’s like a lot of fighters – he’s not foolhardy but he’s, uh, fatalistic, you know?’

Valery nodded. ‘I’ve been there,’ she said. ‘There’s one with your name on it; what’s for you won’t go past you, it’ll go through you; when your number comes up your number comes up. All that crap. As if we hadn’t heard that Chaos exists and God doesn’t.’

‘Yeah.’ Cat grinned, seeing Valery for the first time as someone a bit like herself, a fighter. ‘It is like a superstition, isn’t it? Huh. If you put all the fighters’ shit-kickin superstitions and all their red-handed scruples together you’d end up with some kind of caveman religion. Anyway, what it all adds up to is that when they can’t see no way out they’re just stupidly brave. I mean, I’ve seen that guy in action, and he laughs at death. It’s literally true. OK. Well, when I told him about the cranks, he was shitting himself. He was white. And then he just sort of smiled and relaxed. That must have been when he sussed this place was ANR.’

‘No, I’d already told him. And, even before then, he’d recognized the parachutes. We must find out how he did that…we’ve shown hundreds of people around the areas he saw and nobody’s suspected a thing.’ Valery snorted. ‘He’s taken the Republic’s shilling now, so no doubt he’ll have to tell us.’

‘And what can you tell me?’ Cat persisted.

Valery looked at her, frowning distantly. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I have some things to check out. Meanwhile…’ And she’d suggested that Cat go to this shared but private workroom. One corner was a sewing area, with the machine, a dressmakers’ dummy, and a chest-of-drawers full of fabrics. In the opposite corner stood a computer terminal and a locked rack of diskettes. The walls were an apple-green shade of white; one of them was almost covered by a television screen, with a comprehensive array of subscriber attachments.

<SKY BLUE> she cursored, and the sewing-machine console’s ammo-belt of reels rattled around and slotted one into place. The thread was caught by a pair of clicking pincers and pulled through guides and finally the needle’s eye. ‘Begin,’ said the machine, with what she thought an understandable smugness.

For a while Catherin lost track of time altogether; one part of her mind absorbed the shades and shapes as another part worked away in another place. She began to understand how the sisters could combine their super-ficially frivolous occupations with…preoccupations, in hard and cold and logical thought about logistics and politics, strategy and tactics.

As she now did. She’d thought she had set Moh up, and now saw that she herself had been – first by the ANR, and then by the CLA. As far as she knew she was free to go, now the cranks had cleared her name. She was back on the Committee for a Social-Ecological Intervention’s databases as a gun for hire – she’d checked that as soon as the rent-cop had given her Moh’s receipt and left. But she had no intention of working for the CLA again, united front or no united front. It was obvious that Donovan was out to get Moh, and that something bloody big – big and bloody both – was coming down.

<RUBY> for the lettering. <90mm. serif.>

Rumours of yet another ANR final offensive had circulated throughout the summer and into the autumn. On the very reasonable assumption that it would be a surprise when it came, she’d discounted the story even while spreading it. This hadn’t been irresponsible, in her view. It was perfectly legitimate disinformation, because the Alliance, the spectrum coalition brought together by a faction of the official wing of the Labour Party, was definitely planning a hot autumn of demonstrations and fraternizations, with a few daring armed actions by the Red Rose Brigades thrown in. So, at least, the state media alleged, and the free media denied and confirmed and debated.

The lettering was finished. She smiled at the words. Now back to outlining the appliqué, filling in the spaces.

<LEAF GREEN>

Anything to get the enemy as confused as we are. Talk about poor bloody infantry. She felt a sudden surge of anger at it all, the deception and manipulation and calculation, the trade-offs and stand-offs, the violence to vulnerable human flesh. Something had genuinely attracted her, she saw now, in the femininists’ cover story, the make-up and veiling of their sinews of war.

<OCHRE>

<WHITE>

<SABLE>

It was finished. Cat looked at the clock icon, surprised at how many hours had passed. She snipped and tied off the last threads and took the jacket out of the machine. She stood up and admired it at arm’s-length for a minute, then draped it around her and admired it again, looking over her shoulder in a mirror.

‘That’s really good.’

She turned quickly to see Valery standing in the doorway. The jacket slipped from her shoulders.

‘Yes, I’m quite pleased with it, even if using this machine was a bit of a cheat.’ She half-knelt to pick it up. Her skirt settled in slow billows, like a parachute.

‘Nonsense, Cat, it’s the design and the carrying of it through that matters. The method is just technical.’

‘Like, the end justifies the means?’ Cat straightened, smoothed the skirt, and looked at Valery with a demure smile.

‘Hah!’ Valery swivelled the console’s chair and sat down. ‘We never claimed to be pacifists, you know.’

Cat shook her head, as if to rattle her synapses back to their old pattern, and stood up.

‘What a scam. You had me worried there. I thought I was going soft myself when all the time I was being – softened up! To work for the ANR, of all the macho elitist gangs!’ She caught the sides of her skirt and swirled it around her in a joyous flurry.

‘That’s not how I see it,’ Valery said, a half-embarrassed smile on her lips. ‘As it happens…we have a job for you to do. A job for the ANR.’ Her smile broadened. ‘Usual rates.’

Cat considered this. ‘And the alternative is staying here, right?’

Valery nodded. ‘We can’t risk letting you go back to Donovan’s gang. All right, all right, you can say you won’t, but unless you have a contract with us there’ll be nothing to stop you changing your mind as soon as you’re out the door. So either you do this job – nothing too risky, by the way – or you sit out the insurrection behind a sewing-machine, making parachutes.’

Cat knew that Valery was putting it to her gently. The ANR had a short temper and a long memory.

‘I’ll do the job,’ Cat said hastily, fighting off a panicky, smothered feeling. ‘What is it?’

‘That’s the spirit,’ said Valery. ‘Good girl.’

Jordan looked at the message in the work-space, restraining an impulse to bat the reply tag yet again.

Moh says search over, do your own thing.

It wasn’t just the gnomic brevity of the message that frustrated him. The sender, the Women’s Peace Community, had vanished from the nets as if it had never existed. Jordan had sent a dozen responses, all of which had bounced. His suspicion that the femininist community was connected to the ANR intensified.

Moh, wherever he was, wasn’t taking calls either. Jordan had little doubt that the message came from him; it echoed what Moh had said when he’d first asked Jordan to help him. And now, apparently, he expected Jordan to drop the investigation. Some chance, comrade. Jordan had spent the afternoon since contacting Moh and Janis in a succession of net trawls. He’d detected the effect of Moh’s settlement of the dispute with Donovan, and the clearing of Cat’s status. In the narrow, fiercely contested fringe where Norlonto’s private defence agencies and political-military groupuscules fought indistinguishably in the dark, Catherin Duvalier was a respected minor player. Every so often, through the afternoon, the thought would come back to Jordan of Cat returning to that.

Mary Abid had gone back to work on the other side of the world, oblivious. The comms room was still airless, and hot. Jordan pulled in the original message, the videophone call, and froze it at the exact moment when Cat looked up, brushing her hair from her face. He trimmed away the rest of the image, enlarged and enhanced the picture of Cat and printed it on A4. It came off as a good-quality colour photograph. Jordan powered down the machines he’d been working on, left the room quietly and went upstairs to Moh’s room, where he stuck the picture beside the photograph of Cat on the wall. He stood back and looked at them.

There was no question that they were of the same girl, making the same gesture and the same caught half-smile. Only the clothes she wore were different: the dirt-stiff overalls, too big, the sleeve rolled back, a streak of oil smeared on her forehead by the passage of her wrist; the starch-stiff frill of the pinafore over the precisely fitted dress, a fall of lace from the cuff snagging slightly as it brushed across the hair at the side of her face. Jordan found a disturbingly erotic charge in the contrast: a passing thought vaguely associated the second picture with the Modesty advertisements that had been the pin-ups in his bedroom. The oddity was that neither outfit was intended to look sexy – in fact, the opposite, the one sexless and shapeless like the uniform of some puritan communistan, the other chaste, a model of modesty indeed – and yet Cat’s sexuality burned through both of them.

Or so it seemed. Perhaps it was just his own frustration. One of the liberating discoveries he’d made in reading the humanist philosophers was the innocence of furtive masturbation, but that was not much comfort here. By historical standards Beulah City wasn’t too bad: its churches denounced premarital sex but encouraged early marriage; its laws forbade homosexuality (theoretically on pain of death, but in practice it was almost impossible to bring a conviction, and anybody charged with it had every opportunity to shake the dust of Beulah City from their feet) and abortion, although they tolerated contraception. The only grounds for divorce that it recognized were adultery or desertion, but the complete ban on any public explicitness about sex was coupled with a reasonable provision of counselling for legally married couples. Even so, that left plenty of room for sexual ignorance, incompatibility and misery, to say nothing of hypocrisy.

Coming from that environment into this part of Norlonto was like stepping from an air-conditioned building into a hurricane. The pervasive pornography and prostitution had repelled him. He wasn’t sure whether his objection derived from the Christian beliefs he’d rejected or the humanist principles he’d embraced. The people in the Collective showed no interest in commercial sex, but he felt they disapproved of it. Their own sexual attitudes and relationships were difficult to figure out with social skills developed for an entirely different society. Mary, Alasdair, Dafyd, Lyn, Tai, Stone and the rest were to him so many black boxes, connected by arrows of desire.

Mary Abid’s long black hair and large dark eyes had been a target for some of his arrows, but she had a thing going with Stone (that relationship, at least, had been easy to identify). Jordan had also quite fancied Tai, and had even – shyly, obliquely – attempted some chatting up until he’d realized the slim, small, pretty Singaporean wasn’t a girl. And wasn’t gay either, just in case that still-unthinkable thought had crossed his mind. So until now he’d made do with highly unrealistic fantasies about Janis, whose image had floated in and out of the background of his communications with Moh.

He felt absurdly ashamed of that now as he looked at the two pictures of Cat. He didn’t want a fantasy of Cat; he wanted – it was a distinction realized, a revelation, a resolve – the reality of her. You couldn’t fall in love with someone you didn’t know, with a face in a picture; but looking at those pictures he wanted nothing else but to find this woman, to have her and hold her and protect her. And if she wouldn’t have that, if she wouldn’t have him, he could at the very least try to dissuade her from putting her beautiful body on the line in those futile fights.

Tired and restless, he threw himself face-down on the bed. For a few minutes he slept, then woke with a dribble of spittle and sweat on the pillow under the corner of his mouth. He rolled over and lay with his hands behind his head. Posters shouted down at him from the walls. British Troops Out Of English Troops Out Of London Troops Out Of Federal Troops To. Solidarity with this. Solidarity with that. Solidarity with Solidarity. (Now, what the heck did that mean?)

There was a sort of reproof in their conflicting urgencies. Moh had wanted him to speak his mind, to push his ideas up the Collective’s tiny entry ramp to the information highways, and he must have had some reason. Jordan thought he saw part of it: as a cover story for the comrades – they were all expecting him to do something like that, and had assumed that his investigations were research for it. In a sense, they were – he’d learned a great deal in the past couple of days, a lot of details of what was going on in the world which Beulah City, even at its most exposed interface to that world, screened out. It had only deepened the conviction he’d expressed to Moh and the urge to tell people they could live their lives better – and longer – if they would only walk away from their fights.

He had little new to say, he reflected wryly, about what they could do if they did walk away from them. The godless gospels had answers to that, answers he agreed with, which essentially amounted to making the fullest use of the one life that was all and enough. They disagreed about how to do it, of course. From the same starting-point, one lot would suggest we all marched off to the left, another that we raced off to the right, while a substantial body of enlightened opinion held that the best bet was to sort of wander about with our eyes and options open.

Jordan sat up with a jolt, open-eyed himself. There was a name for that attitude, that outlook, a name that had recently gained currency: post-futurism. Pragmatic, disillusioned, refusing to hold up images of an ideal society or to crank out small-scale models of it on patches of contested ground, it had been widely denounced as radically conservative or blindly subversive. There had been a big fuss a few years back when someone had applied the label to the ANR, in some fashionable, controversial book – what was it called?

On a sudden hunch Jordan jumped up and searched through Moh’s collection of political literature, digging through drifts of pamphlets for the solid chunk of the occasional hardbook. And there it was: Towards the End of the Future by Jonathan Wilde, the old space-movement guru. He picked it up and flipped through it, smiling at Moh’s pencilled underlinings and scrawled, misspelt remarks. One proposition which had met with heavy black lines, exclamation marks and ‘Yup’ was Wilde’s comment that:

Aside from the space movement itself (which, paradoxically, is oriented to a former future which has now become merely the present, with all the problems of the present), the thinking which I have provisionally labelled ‘post-futurist’ is most strongly – if unconsciously – embodied in the diverse and ineradicable resistance movements against US/UN hegemony: the Khazakh People’s Front, the ex-neo-Communists of the NVC, the nonexistent but influential conspiracy known as the Last International, the Army of the New Republic, and many more.

No shared ideal unites them – on the contrary. Having every cause to rebel, they need no ideal, no ‘cause’. One stubborn conviction is common to all of them: No More New World Orders.

I will not conceal my own conviction that in this they are right.

For we have seen the future – we have by now centuries of experience of the future – and we know it doesn’t work. It’ll be a great day when the future goes away! It’ll be a great day of liberation, when the armies, the functionaries, the camp-followers, the carpet-baggers of the future go away and leave us in peace to get on with the rest of our lives!

Intrigued, Jordan went back to the beginning of the book and read it the whole way through. It took him about an hour and a half, sitting down or wandering up and down the stairs for coffee, book in hand. When he’d finished he dug out Wilde’s earlier works from Moh’s collection and read them: The Earth is a Harsh Mistress, No More Earthquakes – short, blazing manifestos that he scanned in minutes. Wilde hadn’t changed his principles – he was still the libertarian space nut that he’d been as long as anyone could remember – but his sense of the historical possibilities had subtly altered since the heady, crusading excitement of the space movement’s early days. He no longer seemed to think the ideas he propounded were about to sweep the world, nor did he even want them to: a respect for diversity which had been theoretical, tolerant, in his earlier writing had by now deepened to a commitment to diversity for its own sake rather than as a pool for selection in which the one true way might be found.

Post-futurism was Wilde’s way of coping with living on, into his own imagined future – albeit in a constricted, local form – and finding it, as he’d said, merely the present. Jordan doubted if Moh fully sympathized with this view – still a believer in a socialist future, still a receiver of news from nowhere – but the connection between post-futurism and Jordan’s own detestation of the competing ideologies of the mini-states helped to clarify why Moh had been so keen on getting Jordan’s ideas out on the Cable.

Cunning bastard, Jordan thought. Moh had wanted him to attack the ideologies, do his best to weaken the mini-states because, in doing so, he’d be doing his little bit to help the ANR! Not that Moh had shown much faith in the ANR but, as he’d said, ‘anything rational would be better than those smelly, cosy subtotalitarianisms’. And it couldn’t be a short-term thing, either: there was not enough time before the ANR’s offensive for anybody’s words to make much difference.

But after the offensive – when the ANR’s future, its New Republic, had itself become the present – then it might make a difference. Places like the one Jordan had come from, the ideal society a few kilometres down the road, might fall militarily at a good push. Undermining their self-confidence would be a slower process.

Well, why not?

Wasn’t that what he thought anyway? Wasn’t that what he had to say?

And there was one particular person he wanted to say it to. Even if she never heard it. He went out of Moh’s room and down the stairs and along the corridor to that other room where the cameras waited.

His voice was hesitant at first, becoming more confident as he found his pace.

‘This is Jordan Brown, with…the Global Village Atheist Show. I’m here to entertain, enlighten, and enrage.

‘Since this time yesterday, another forty thousand people, plus or minus the odd thousand, have been killed. Killed quite legally, according to the famous Annexe to the Geneva Convention, in recognized conflicts around the world. All the noncombatant deaths were inflicted under Paragraph 78, section 10, subsection 3. That’s the one saying that civilians can be killed only by explosive devices aimed at legitimate military targets, and yes, I have checked, and I can assure you that no instances of poisoning, machine-gunning in front of freshly dug trenches, release of radiation or radioactive substances, or throat-cutting have come to the attention of the relevant authorities.

‘And how do we know? We know because we’re watching. The whole world is watching. About fifty years ago somebody in Edinburgh came up with a video-camera the size of a coin. Within a few years they were in mass production, and getting smaller and cheaper by the year. And they started turning up on the killing fields of Central Europe, in the torture chambers of the Americas, on the blighted plains of Africa.

‘Now they’re so small that you can take someone apart bit by bit before you discover that one of those cockroaches on the floor was a bio-comp news-gatherer, heading for home with some very interesting pictures. And that your face is on satellite television, your genetic fingerprints are on public databases, and various public-spirited if not – ha, ha – public-funded agencies are bidding up the price of your head. Just think: there was a time when torturers only had to worry about getting letters from Amnesty International!

‘So, whereas once it was possible to bomb entire countries – Laos – bludgeon a tenth of the population to death – Cambodia – or wipe out a third – East Timor – and plausibly deny that it had ever happened (the “ongoing process of holocaust revisionism”, as I think a famous linguist called it), they couldn’t get away with it any more. The silent slaughter ceased. The blood dried on the walls of the torture chambers. Starvation simply had to be wiped out, and it was, as efficiently as populations once had been, and often with the same equipment.

‘That was when this century’s first great discovery was made: the use of nuclear weapons. Until then, they didn’t have a use. A threat, a deterrent effect – even Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, in a sense, only a threat. A demonstration atrocity. It was an unknown genius in Azerbaijan who discovered what nuclear weapons are actually good for. Intercommunal massacre. Tactical nuclear intercommunal massacre. We know the result.

‘Naturally, this had to be stopped. Hence the next great discovery: a use for space-based lasers and indeed for space-based nukes. They were originally designed to drive the communist bloc to beggary, which they did, and shortly afterwards they drove the USA to bankruptcy – all of this before they were even built at all! Like the mythical tachyon bomb which destroys the target before it’s launched, orbital weapons struck backwards through time. But of course they were built anyway, and they keep the peace today by zapping any facility that looks as if it conceivably might be used to build nukes down here.

‘So there you have it: the wonderful checks and balances which have freed us from starvation, from the fear of nuclear war, from inescapable tyranny, and allow us all to go to hell in our own way. But with fourteen million, six hundred thousand combat deaths a year, we have surpassed the kill-rate of the Second World War on a permanent basis. It’s not all that different from the bad old days when we all went to hell together.

‘Don’t get me wrong: I’ll take my chances with animal-liberators, machine-wreckers, or born-again Christian militias any day rather than face new Hitlers, Stalins or Johnsons. But I’d like anyone who’s watching to entertain the possibility that maybe we could do better than this. And to ask yourself: where’s the vulnerable point in this multiple-choice totalitarianism? It seems…seamless. What can an individual do against it?

‘I’ll tell you. One of the ancestors of our modern militias was a group called the Falange. They had a slogan: Credere. Obedere. Combatere. “Believe. Obey. Fight.” I suggest that you doubt, disobey, desert. Particularly if you are called upon to fight against those who insist, against all the evidence, that we are one people.’

He paused for a moment, as if to indicate that he knew exactly what he was saying.

‘But, of course, that’s only my opinion.

‘And now, a word from my sponsors, the Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence Collective, who have very different opinions. Goodnight. Go without God, or the goddess, if you’re godless; and, if not, go with.’

Jordan drained the coffee mug and put it down, too hard. Drained was how he felt. He watched the comrade whose turn it was to wash up without even a twitch of that impulse to help which had so amused the others on his first evenings here.

When he’d finished speaking and Mary was tidying the cameras away after their regular slot, she’d said, not looking at him: ‘That was really…something. Where d’you learn to talk like that?’

Jordan sighed. ‘Televangelists,’ he said bitterly. ‘I’ve sat through enough of them. Must’ve soaked it up.’

Pre-adapted for speaking on the Cable, just as his job had pre-adapted him for seeking on the nets. It was an eerie, deterministic thought, like Calvinism…

Oh, shit. This wasn’t getting him anywhere. He jumped up, had a shower, changed and went downstairs again. The table in the long room had been cleared, the studio gear tilted away. Havana Vice was on the television. Dafyd and Stone were sitting on a sofa by the window-screen (a metre-by-two version of the glades, which made him feel exposed even while knowing it was one-way and armoured), sharing a joint and cleaning their weapons.

‘Hi, Jordan.’

‘Hi, guys.’ He sat down on one arm of the sofa, inhaling sidestream smoke and watching with a not coincidentally increasing fascination the intricate pattern the men’s hands made as they rubbed and scraped, bolted and fitted, stripped and re-assembled, drew and passed. They worked and smoked in silence except for the occasional cryptic remark, usually followed by helpless laughter.

‘Don’t put all your progs on one diskette.’

‘Oiling the cormorant, that was.’

‘So he looked at the judge and said, “These things are sent to try us.”’

That one killed them. The two mercenaries rolled off the couch and attacked the floor. After a minute of kicking and hammering it was clear that the floor had won. They lay on their backs, wiping away tears.

‘What was all that about?’

Stone recovered first.

‘It was something us ’n’ Moh did once, ended up in court, and AAH HA HA AH HAAA,’ he explained.

Jordan looked at them and shook his head. He walked over to the terminal and jammed his card in it. His speech seemed to have been taken up, and was spreading as people replayed it and passed it on. Not many, but there was a thin trickle coming in of royalties and his own cut of the usual donations. He felt he should donate some of it to a worthy cause himself.

‘Come on guys, sober up,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘I’m going to stand you some drinks.’

They were up like a shot.

At the Lord Carrington, The Many Worlds Interpretation was playing to a quiet midweek crowd. The band evidently believed in using the potential of the medium to go beyond the illusion of presence, and had a trick of swapping around unpredictably. Somebody would sing one and a half lines, then another member of the band would be standing there delivering the next phrase, while the original singer would be dripping sweat on to the guitar. The first five times this happened it was amusing.

Jordan had never been out with Dafyd and Stone before, and was surprised and relieved to find they drank more moderately than they smoked. They’d take about half an hour over a litre, speaking in low voices, chain-smoking tobacco cigarettes. They talked shop, about factions and alliances, and Jordan was privately pleased with himself that he was able to make a perceptive comment now and again. It had been part of his job, after all. One reason for their relative sobriety soon became apparent, although only to a close observer: they were unobtrusively checking out the women.

It was Jordan who saw her first, though, walking in as if the place were one small franchise in her chain. She moved like a dancer, glanced around like a fighter. She had a shining halo of blonde hair, bright blue eyes, skin the colour of pale honey, high cheekbones and the kind of jawline that the rest of humanity would take about half a million years to evolve. She wasn’t tall, but she had long legs, covered to just below the knee by a dress that had quite plainly been made out of cobwebs beaded with morning dew. Over it she wore a faded denim jacket several sizes too big. As she went to the bar to order a drink, Jordan saw that it had an intricate embroidered patch on the back: Earth from space, almost floating behind her shoulders, with the words EARTH’S ANGELS around it.

She was served a drink in seconds. She turned around, and saw him looking at her across ten metres of smoky half-light. He stared, still unable to believe it was really her. Far away, just beside his ear, he heard Dafyd call out delightedly, ‘Cat!’ The woman gave a heart-stopping smile and walked over.

Jordan moved faster than the others to make a space for her. She gave him a nod and a quick, tentative smile, and sat down beside him. She reached over the table-top to Dafyd and Stone and grabbed their hands.

‘Hi, guys. It’s great to see you again.’

‘You too, Cat.’

‘Been a long time,’ Stone said. He grinned at her. ‘We missed you.’

‘No you fucking didn’t!’ Cat stretched out her left arm, showing a plastic cast. ‘You hit me!’

Stone looked back, untroubled. ‘Business is business,’ he said.

Cat smiled. Even from the side, Jordan could feel the warmth.

‘Yeah, that’s OK, come on.’ She shrugged, retracting her arm, and took a sip of her drink.

‘You get the tangle with Moh sorted out?’ Dafyd asked.

‘Oh,’ said Catherin. ‘Yeah, I have. How d’you know about it?’

Stone guffawed. ‘Moh told us. Eventually. Even if he hadn’t, we’d have heard.’ He laughed again. ‘What an idiot. Where is he now?’

Stone, Jordan noticed, was looking at Cat intently.

‘Off somewhere with his lady scientist,’ Cat said. Her tone was vague and light, as if passing on a piece of idle gossip. Stone frowned, looked away from her, and seemed to see Jordan for the first time since Cat had come in.

‘Ah, Cat, this guy here is Jordan Brown, he’s staying with us for a bit—’

‘I know,’ she said. She turned to Jordan. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’ She put down her drink. ‘I’m Catherin Duvalier,’ she said, holding out her right hand.

Jordan felt like kissing it. He shook it.

‘You’ve been looking for me?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

Jordan’s whole face felt like a beacon. He said the first thing that came into his head. ‘I’ve been looking for you, too.’ His mouth was dry and he took a gulp of beer.

Catherin laughed. ‘Looking, hell,’ she said. ‘You found me!’

‘Yeah, well, you weren’t—’

‘Hey.’ Cat ducked her head forward, then looked up, pushing the hair back from her eyes with her wrist and grinning at him mischievously. ‘That?’

‘That.’

‘Smart.’ She shifted in her seat, half-turned away. ‘But it wasn’t that. It was the way you got to that.’ Her narrowed eyes looked at him sidelong.

‘Oh, the—’

Cat raised a hand quickly, edge-on to the others, spread palm facing him. ‘Later.’ Her eyes flicked away; she caught her lower lip momentarily in her teeth.

Stone looked from Cat to Jordan, frowning. ‘What’s goin on here?’

Cat rested her elbows on the table, her chin on her knuckles. ‘None of your business.’ She smiled brightly at Dafyd and Stone. ‘So…how is business?’

Dafyd shrugged. ‘Still running on the kind of contracts you didn’t like,’ he said. ‘The movement stuff’s drying up a bit, but there’s plenty of site-protection work coming in. What you doing yourself?’

‘Nothing risky.’

‘Ah,’ said Stone.

‘I didn’t come here to look for a job,’ Catherin said. She leaned further across the table. ‘What you said about movement work drying up – how d’you explain that?’

‘People holding back,’ Stone said. ‘You know why.’

Dafyd grunted. ‘The ANR’s talking about the final offensive. Mind you, they did the same five years back and it was just a few raids came of it. Wouldn’t account for all that’s going on – or not going on, more like.’

‘Loss of confidence in the political-violence industry,’ Jordan said, feeling he should make a contribution. ‘Why shell out on bombing today what’s gonna be bombed tomorrow?’ He dropped into a cockney girn. ‘Bad for business, innit, all this talk about final offensives. Leads to stockpiling. Hell, some outfits are gonna be putting streetfighters out on the streets.’

He laughed at their uneasy laughs.

‘You got it,’ Catherin said, turning to him. ‘It’s part of the plan. Tactics, comrade, tactics.’

‘Huh?’

‘Think about it. “Streetfighters out on the streets.” They’re not going to sit around with their comm helmets upside down beside them and a bit of cardboard saying “Out of ammo – please help”.’ She waited for their smiles to fade and continued. ‘Actually…there is something coming in. Don’t know when, but any day now. The ANR and the Alliance – I don’t know which is intending to use the other as a cover, but they’ll both hit at the same time. This is fac.’

Jordan thought over what he’d learned and what he’d already known about the forces and dispositions of the fragmented opposition. Difficult to quantify, given the Representation of the People (Temporary Provisions) Act, but between them they could probably muster about a third of the population, and history showed that was enough when it wasn’t votes that counted. Hairs prickled down the back of his neck.

‘You know, if this offensive comes off, we’re talking about a revolution,’ he said to Catherin. He said it unself-consciously, just imparting information.

She nodded, just as seriously.

Jordan felt his eyes sting.

‘Yee-hah,’ he said.

‘You pleased about this?’ Stone asked. ‘I heard you tonight. Thought you were against fighting.’

Jordan stared at him, shaken at how easy it was to be a bit too subtle.

‘I’m gonna have to work on that,’ he said sourly. ‘What I meant was, I’m against all the stupid fighting that’s going on now. Fighting to end it, that’s different. So is not fighting to keep it all going, which is what I was trying to suggest.’

‘The war to end war,’ Dafyd said dryly.

Cat turned her head sharply. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Precedents aren’t too good,’ Stone said. ‘World War Three, for starters.’

Jordan choked briefly on his beer.

‘You should read books,’ he spluttered. He snorted hop-smelling froth out of his sinuses, grinning apologetically. ‘Ah, forget it. You been on the net recently?’

Stone and Dafyd shook their heads. Catherin was watching him. He glanced at her only occasionally as he talked, or so he thought at the time; afterwards, looking back, all he remembered of the conversation was her face and a vague recollection of what he’d said. At the time everything was clear: all the bits of information he’d picked up on the net and the street coming together, the buzz that was suddenly so loud in the aching silence left now the ANR had gone quiet. He spun a story of the shifts he’d noticed, in a way that he thought would make sense to the two (or three? what was Catherin into?) politically motivated fighters. And all the time he knew he was winging it, that it was in part guesswork which he could only hope was inspired.

‘Something’s happening,’ he concluded. ‘Happening fast. People are changing their minds, making up their minds by the hour. And they’re coming down on the side of the ANR, or at least against the Kingdom and the Free States.’

Catherin looked interested, Dafyd and Stone sceptical. Jordan spread his hands. ‘Check it out, guys.’

They started to argue. Jordan got another round in. Cat moved over, not looking at him, still arguing, and he sat down beside her, on the outside of the seat this time.

‘No point us talking about it,’ Catherin was saying. ‘You’ve been out on active for a week, and out of your heads when you weren’t, yeah?’

Stone and Dafyd acknowledged the justice of this with hoots.

‘So go and talk to somebody else, OK!’ she said. Something in her fierce stare made the two men suddenly notice some comrades at the bar. They left to join them.

‘Can you help me out of this jacket?’

She turned away in a silky movement. Jordan slid the jacket from her shoulders, resisted the temptation to bury his face in her hair or trace the botanic filigree of thread on the back of her elflandish dress. He looked again at the floating planet, the flaring letters.

‘“Earth’s Angels”,’ he said. ‘This is your gang, is it?’ He began to fold the sleeves when he felt something heavy and bulky in an inside pocket. Catherin took the jacket from his hands at the same moment and laid it carefully along the back of the seat. She rested her arm lightly on it, and settled in a sideways position, facing him.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Polluters tremble when we ride into town on our bicycles…No, I just thought it sounded good.’

‘It’s not “earth” as in “Mother Earth”, it’s “earth” as in “earthly”. Earth’s angel.’ He dared to look at her, to take her all in in a long unbreathing draught of sight. ‘Yes, it’s you.’

She returned his gaze with an appraising look that made him think, Is this how we look at them?, and feel a surge of lust more intense than being the sender of such a look had ever aroused in him. Whosoever looketh on a woman to…he was committed already in his heart.

‘And you’re earth’s preacher,’ she said. ‘I saw you tonight, on the tel.’

‘Oh, that’s, that’s great.’ He took a swallow of beer, his ears burning. ‘What did you think?’

‘I…kind of agreed with it,’ she said. She smiled. ‘But that…isn’t why I’m here.’

He tried not to sound disappointed. ‘I didn’t think so.’ He looked at her, for the first time not seeing her, but thinking. ‘You said something about, uh, how I found you?’

Catherin nodded.

‘And how,’ Jordan asked, ‘do you know about that?’

Her face showed nothing. Jordan was suddenly aware of how little he knew about her, a thought which rapidly changed to how much he wanted to find out…about her, Moh, her and Moh, what had happened…

He smote his forehead with the heel of his hand.

‘Agh!’ he said. Of course. ‘You saw Moh today!’

Catherin smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I did.’

‘That place you were at, is it—?’

She tilted her head, shook it slowly. Not no, but you don’t ask.

‘I got something to tell you,’ she said.

The level of sound in the place would have made it impossible to overhear their conversation from a metre away. Catherin glanced around, then brought her mouth up to his ear. He felt her warm breath and forced himself to attend to the words she breathed.

‘What you did – don’t do it again.’

She straightened up and looked at him, her expression as awkward and embarrassed as was (he felt sure) his own. What he had done…when he found her…surely nobody, not her, not whoever had sent her, could object to his hacking into a system in BC? His mind went back over the trail, the SILK.ROOT program, and he suddenly realized exactly what he’d been doing when he’d traced the silk consignment to the Women’s Peace Community.

He had been hacking the Black Plan.

Possibly blundering around in something pretty sensitive, if the offensive were as imminent as she’d said.

‘Ah.’ His lips felt dry. ‘I get it.’

Catherin smiled up from under her eyebrows. ‘Well. OK. That’s that done.’ Head back, hair pushed back with her wrist, she laughed with a sound of relief. ‘Hey, Jordan. There’s things I can’t tell you. If you’ve been mixed up with Moh, there must be things you can’t tell me, yeah?’

‘Uh-huh.’ He had been thinking about that.

‘Get used to it. You’re in the revolution now.’

‘Oh, I am, am I?’

She knocked back her drink. ‘You better believe it.’

She stood up and put on her jacket, patted an inside pocket. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

Stone and Dafyd gave him grins full of knowing surprise and complete misunderstanding as he passed.

‘See you back at the house,’ Cat called to them over her shoulder as he held the door for her. ‘Don’t be long.’

After the pub’s interior the evening sky was bright.

‘Look at those clouds.’ Catherin tilted her head back. Jordan looked at the clouds, lit by the sunset, a rippled formation like wave-marks on sand.

‘Like ruched peach satin…’ Cat said, then laughed at herself. ‘Listen to me!’

‘The femininists were getting to you, were they?’

‘Yeah. They were.’

She barely glanced at him as she spoke, threading her way through the crowd with a constant alertness that made his own progress feel clumsy. The street appeared to Jordan even busier, and with even more business going on in it, than usual: more people walking, hurrying, talking; more openly carried weapons.

Streetfighters out on the streets…

Cat had already had herself re-entered in the house’s security system, and he followed her through the door with a strange feeling that he was the stranger, the guest. They found Mary Abid busy with the Cable-editing console, Tai studying maps spread on the table, Alasdair doing something with a soldering iron to a piece of kit Jordan didn’t recognize. The children were counting bullets and loading them into magazines, sticky-taping together the curving AK clips. Nobody gave Cat more than a glance as she breezed through the haze of flux, coffee aroma and cigarette smoke. Evidently she’d roped everybody at the house into whatever she was up to before going to the pub to find him. She’d left a couple of carpet-bags and a strappy bundle of belts and holsters and pistols in a corner, more or less out of the way.

The comms room was fully occupied. Cat turned to him.

‘You got personals?’

‘Sure.’ He tapped the case of the computer and glades on his belt.

‘You’re staying in Moh’s room?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK, there’s a port there.’

In the room she tossed her jacket on to the bed and looked around, as if checking a returned-to, familiar place. Her gaze stopped at the two pictures of herself on the wall. She gave Jordan a quirky smile and turned to the stacks of pamphlets in which he’d found the book by Wilde.

‘Aha,’ she said. ‘You’ve started.’ She sat down in the clutter, bringing her hem to her ankles and her knees to her chin, wrapped her arms around her legs and looked up at Jordan expectantly, like a small girl waiting for a story.

He frowned down at her, puzzled.

‘OK, Jordan,’ she said, patting the floor. ‘Let’s not piss around with what we can and what we can’t say. We’ve got a bit of time, and there’s a lot that we can talk about.’

Jordan pushed aside some pamphlets with the edge of his shoe and sat down facing her, the soles of his feet on the floor, his elbows on his knees.

‘For a start,’ Cat continued, ‘who are you, and what are you and Moh up to? I know Moh’s running scared of Donovan catching him, and that ain’t like him at all. We’ve all been in the Body Bank, and the CLA do fast trade-offs, you know? I mean, shit, Moh’s done time. What’s going on?’

Some question. Jordan tried to think fast. It seemed that the deal was that Cat wouldn’t talk about whatever linked the femininists with the ANR, and he wasn’t expected to talk about whatever Moh had wanted to keep secret: the drugs, the Black Plan…The Black Plan was in both their secrets, their controlled zones of conversation.

‘I don’t know for sure,’ he said. It was true, up to a point. ‘As far as I know, Donovan was after Moh to settle accounts because of you. Janis – that’s this scientist Moh’s going around with – she’s in some kind of trouble with Stasis.’ A thought struck him. ‘What if Donovan and Stasis are working together?’

‘Oh, goddess.’ Cat’s face betrayed dismay. ‘That would explain a lot.’

‘Which you won’t?’

‘That’s right.’

They locked looks for a second.

‘Just one thing,’ Jordan said, gathering his thoughts. ‘Moh’s made contact with the ANR. Can you confirm that?’

Cat thought about it for a moment, then nodded.

‘All right,’ Jordan said. He smiled with relief. ‘I guess he’s off my hands.’

‘You could say that,’ Cat said dryly.

‘As to who I am…Basically, I’m from Beulah City. I owned part of a business there. I left a few days ago because…I got a very unusual business proposition, yeah, and it gave me the chance to leave and…a rather urgent reason to leave.’

‘Did you need one, beyond not being a believer?’

Jordan felt himself go red before her unblinking blue-eyed scrutiny. ‘Maybe I was irresolute, maybe a bit too reluctant to hurt my folks.’ He tasted gall. ‘Maybe cowardly.’

‘Crap,’ she said. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. That’s how those places bloody work, dammit – all the ideologies you were ranting about tonight. You start to doubt them and before you know it you doubt yourself, you feel guilty because you’re going against what’s been rammed into you and you feel guilty because you’re being dishonest about it every day.’ She paused, eyebrows raised.

‘Yes! that’s it. Exactly.’

‘OK. Well, I’m sure you’ve sussed out by now that there’s nothing wrong with you.’ The very casualness of the way she said the words sent them straight to his solar plexus, where they glowed. ‘What you probably don’t realize is you’re not alone: there are people in all the mini-states – even in BC, take it from me – who’re as alienated as you were.’

‘Could be.’ He didn’t see it himself. ‘Anyway, Moh seemed to think there might be some mileage in that. He wanted me to help him with’ – Jordan waved his hands, smiling – ‘this bit of trouble he’s in, and later in tracking you down, but he definitely wanted me to do a bit of ranting, like you said, as well. Can’t see it making much difference to whatever’s gonna happen, though.’

‘Me neither.’ Cat grinned disarmingly. ‘But you said you thought people were changing their minds by the hour, coming round to thinking: ah, fuck it, the ANR is in with a chance, yeah? Well look at this place, they’re all doing just that.’

‘That’s down to you?’

Cat nodded. ‘Yup.’ She grinned. ‘Easiest bit of agitation I ever pulled.’ Again her gaze was inescapable. ‘And you?’

‘Yeah, I…I’d like to see them win, sure, but…that’s as far as it goes. It’s not some kind of conversion.’

‘That’s all it ever is, in these situations,’ Cat said. There was a moment while they both paused, reflecting. In these situations…Revolution was like a war, Jordan thought. You just never knew how you’d react when something like that loomed. Patriots could become pacifists overnight, and vice versa; cynical bright young men fly off and die for king and country. And an individualist who loathed the suffocating clots of conformity known as the Free States could suddenly see the virtue of bulldozing them all flat, into a united republic…

Cat broke into his thoughts.

‘OK, so that’s one thing you can do. Speak, write, patch stuff from anything on the net or here that catches your eye’ – she waved a hand at the mass of pamphlets – ‘whatever. Don’t talk about the ANR – talk about how stupid the Free States are, and the Kingdom and the UN. And get as much information as you can about what’s going on, how things are lining up.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, yeah. Something else. You say you were a businessman? Know anything about stock trading?’

Jordan found he’d bounded to his feet. ‘Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact I do.’

Cat stood up. ‘Great,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the comrades to shove some of the money they’ve been sitting on into your work-space. Any time you get a moment, speculate.’ She paused, frowning. ‘Can you actually make money in a falling market?’

Jordan grinned broadly. ‘You bet.’

‘OK,’ Cat said. She picked her way across the untidy floor. ‘Got to it. Stop about, oh, not long after midnight.’

‘Then what?’

Cat looked at him over her shoulder from the doorway. ‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘You’re soon going to need all the sleep you can get.’

And with that ambiguous promise she was gone.

16

The Eve of Just-In-Time Destruction

Jordan, up to his eyeballs and elbows in virtual reality, was occasionally aware of Cat’s feral, feline, female presence as she whispered in his ear, disturbed the air around him, brushed against his back. It fired him up and drove him, and it was more bearable and less distracting than being haunted by her image, tormented by her absence.

She’d shaken him awake at 05.30. He sat up, staring at her with a sense of unreality. She struck a pose like a good fairy, in the shimmer and sparkle of the same dress she’d worn the previous night, and she held out a mug of coffee and a plate with a bacon sandwich on it.

‘Good morning.’ He swallowed. ‘Thank you.’

She passed him the breakfast and said, ‘Hi. Mary said to tell you Vladivostok’s fallen, Tokyo’s down, and the pound’s two point three million to the mark and rising.’

‘Rising?’ The central banks must be desperate. Jordan found himself at the small table where the glades and computer were jacked in. By the time he had formed a picture from the market reports the coffee and sandwich were finished. A pause after shifting some yen into sterling brought a vague feeling of disquiet. He came back to actual reality to find that he had no clothes on. It didn’t bother him; he guessed that it hadn’t bothered Cat. After another quick look at the market he showered and pulled on jeans and a tee-shirt and hurried down to the comms room.

He spent the morning and early afternoon doing as Cat had suggested, flipping from the agitated, agitating chatter of the newsgroups and information channels to the consequences in the markets. He was on a roll, he was ahead of the game…As soon as nerves rattled by the fall of Vladivostok (to what the channels described as the Vorkuta Popular Front) settled down, a surge of hot money flowed back into Britain. The investors and speculators seemed impressed with the government’s steady hand; there was a lot of smart advice about how the ANR offensive wasn’t shaping up.

Hah!

Convinced he knew better, Jordan rode the upswing as far as he dared and sold out around midday, moving as sharply as he could into gold after doubling his own stake as well as the Collective’s; the latter was a disgracefully large sum to have left in a low-interest savings account. Mercenaries just weren’t mercenary enough, he thought.

He returned his attention to the news networks, flipping channels, sifting through screeds to build more or less by natural selection a filter program that focused on what he found interesting. He contributed a small amount himself, both spoken and written rants. Coming out of the VR he leaned back and watched the screen on flat, letting the program choose what to sample.

Cat appeared at his elbow.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Not too bad.’

A strange face appeared on the screen – gaunt, unshaven, red-eyed, talking hoarsely about the iniquities of the Free State system: ‘…you may be free to leave, but if you are systematically denied any accurate information about what you might find if you do leave, what freedom is that? We need to break down the walls…’

It was only the words that he recognized as his own.

‘Hey, that’s good,’ Cat was saying.

‘Good goddess.’ Jordan waved the sound down. ‘Do I look like that? I’m a bloody disgrace.’

‘No,’ Cat said. ‘You’re not.’ She reached over and brought up the source of the segment, a Cable station in the Midlands. ‘See, you’re getting picked up—’ She hit a search sequence, showing a tree diagram of the groups and channels that had taken up something Jordan had said or written – an impressive structure, visibly growing at the tips.

‘I don’t get it,’ Jordan said. ‘Nobody’s ever heard of me.’

‘That’s the point.’ Cat sat up on the bench and looked down at him, layers of her dress fluttering in the inadequate draughts from the machinery’s fans. ‘Street-cred. You even look like a refugee from some godawful repressive mini-state.’

Jordan smiled sourly. ‘That’s what I am.’

‘Exactly,’ Cat said. ‘You’ll see. What you got on the politics?’

Jordan stared at the screen, unseeing again. ‘The Left Alliance is churning it out; still nothing from the ANR; space-movement politicos are arguing like, well, you’d expect; Wilde’s made some cryptic remarks that suggest he’s negotiating with the ANR…’

‘That reactionary old bastard?’ Catherin snorted. ‘Moh used to rate him.’

‘Yeah, well so do I.’

‘Might’ve known,’ Catherin said. She gave a not unfriendly smile. ‘Speaking of capitalist bastards, how’s the speculation coming on?’

‘Fine,’ Jordan said. ‘We’re sterling billionaires.’

‘Ha, ha.’

‘Don’t worry, it’s all gold and guns now.’

He reached in and twitched up the FT Ten Thousand Share Index.

The market had peaked, and turned, and was dropping—

And then everything went haywire—

Twisting bands of colour, fragments of news, gabble, snow—

‘Hey, what the fuck!’ Shouts of annoyance came from the others in the room as they jacked out or pulled off glades and stood rubbing their eyes. Jordan just sat and watched it.

‘What’s happening?’

Catherin was looking from the mess on the screens and holos to his face, and back, and seeming more worried by the second.

‘It’s OK,’ Jordan said. ‘It’ll pass. It’s something I’ve seen before.’

Oh, my God, he was thinking. Moh’s done it again!

Donovan watched Bleibtreu-Fèvre stiffly descend the helicopter’s steps and limp across the landing-pad. Unlike everybody else Donovan had ever seen, the Stasis agent did not duck as he walked beneath the still-whirling blades. He ignored the rig’s various crew-members moving about their tasks, but – Donovan noticed – they did not ignore him as he came down the ladder from the helipad, using only the handrail, and walked across the sea-slicked deck with a confidence that might have been due to inexperience. As he approached the doorway Donovan saw to his disgust that the Stasis agent looked exactly the same in the flesh, if that was the word, as he had in the virtual.

‘So you blew it,’ Donovan said by way of greeting. Bleibtreu-Fèvre smiled thinly and followed him inside and down the stairladder.

‘We’ve all made mistakes,’ he acknowledged, lowering himself into a chair by a workbench. The thumping of rotor blades outside became increasingly weary, then stopped. Donovan palmed a sensor as he sat in one of his command seats. Hissing and clanking noises came from a distant corner of the vast clutter.

‘Indeed,’ Donovan said. He was beginning to regret having had anything to do with Bleibtreu-Fèvre. Airlifting him out of the dell had been a risky business, undertaken only because the operative was in trouble with his superiors: Space Defense had made a formal complaint about his incursion into Norlonto, and no doubt both of the rivalrous arms of the US/UN’s security system were investigating the situation right now.

‘My green allies have taken to the trees, ha, ha,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘All I can raise of my usual contact is an answer-fetch. Its answers are far from reassuring. I suspect they are too busy with other plans of their own to spare much real time for this emergency. Unfortunately the security forces are themselves overcommitted and unable to penetrate whatever the barb are about to perpetrate.’

Donovan wondered how true this was and whether the agent could detect evasion from tones and expressions. He decided to be honest.

‘There’s some kind of upsurge coming down the line,’ he said. ‘We may find a lot of separate campaigns thinking globally and acting locally in the next few days. All at the same time, which could be disruptive. I’ve already called my troops out of it, which is all I can do from here. Has that Beulah City woman come up with anything?’

A server whirred across the floor, lurched to a stop by the workbench and slid back its cover to reveal two beakers of coffee, each about two-thirds full, the remainder having slopped out. Donovan gestured and Bleibtreu-Fèvre took his first, wiped the bottom of the beaker with his tie and sipped. He grimaced and put it down on the bench.

‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘Ah, this is a delicate point. Mrs Lawson reports that the increase in net traffic is continuing, but she has just found a sudden increase in system problems.’ He took another sip of coffee. A small but visible shudder followed the liquid down his gullet. ‘Her exact words when I spoke to her a few minutes ago were, no offence, “Oh, and tell that son-of-a-witch Donovan to lay off like he promised.”’

Donovan’s sip turned into a scalding gulp. He slammed the beaker on to the solder-snotted formica and rose to his feet. Supported by one hand on the bench he waved his stick around at the screens all about them.

‘Are you calling me a liar? Can’t you see for yourself, man? What do you see on these screens, eh?’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s glance darted about, flicking back and forth from the screens to the lashing, slicing stick.

‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘that I can interpret.’

Donovan’s rage subsided and he sank back to his seat.

‘I forgot,’ he whispered. He took a few deep breaths. The red mist faded. ‘I’ve customized the displays so many times, and each time they’re clearer to me and I forget…I stayed awake for over forty hours trapping, leashing, tethering hunter-killer viruses, turning my best against my second-best, generation against generation, and I assure you that they’re almost all in dead cores.’

‘So what is it that Lawson’s finding?’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre asked, as if to himself.

They stared at each other.

‘Oh, shit!’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre looked about. ‘Do you have some interface I can use?’

‘Better do this between us,’ Donovan said.

They hacked and patched the Stasis metrics with some of Donovan’s less toxic software. The disruption was back, even worse than it had been the day the Watchmaker entity had first made its presence felt. It was getting worse by the minute.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Donovan groaned. ‘There’s no way this won’t set off alarms, especially with your lot and Space Defense getting on each other’s nerves.’ He glared at Bleibtreu-Fèvre, who shifted uncomfortably, then suddenly smiled.

‘There is a way to divert their suspicions,’ he said. He leaned forward, his eyes glowing in the gloom. (Just a reflection from the screens, Donovan reassured himself.) ‘Claim it, Donovan! Claim it! Say you did it! Boast about it!’

Donovan shot him a look of respect. ‘That’s an excellent idea,’ he said. He started keying out standard communiqués even as he spoke, flashing releases to news agencies. ‘And meanwhile I can use it to test the countersystems I’ve developed!’ He rose triumphantly to his feet. ‘They might even work first time…God, if we could kill this thing right now…’

He was too wise in the ways of computer systems to really believe it: nothing ever worked the first time. But he wanted, now, to get Bleibtreu-Fèvre involved. He was going to need all the help he could get, and he’d just been impressed with the man’s skills. Already, responses to the CLA’s claim of responsibility were battering against the rig’s systems like heavy seas against the rig itself. Donovan mobilized his crew to deal with that and turned to showing Bleibtreu-Fèvre the results of his past days of work.

‘This is really interesting,’ he explained as spidery diagrams spread across screens all over the control room. ‘You may remember that I found Moh Kohn’s own software constructs, some tentacle of the Black Plan, and the new entity – all in the same locale, and hard to distinguish at certain points. Well, I’ve been working on that, and you can see what I’ve found.’ He hot-keyed a sequence and the diagrams simplified to a mere few thousand branching lines. Bleibtreu-Fèvre watched them glassy-eyed. ‘Common features!’ Donovan went on. ‘Moh Kohn must have his father’s programming style burnt into his mind, although of course it’s expressed in creating much smaller programs, his data-raiders and so forth. As for the Watchmaker itself, it appears to be a…descendant of the Black Plan—’

‘You’re not saying Josh Kohn created the Watchmaker, are you?’

Donovan shook his head with a rueful laugh. ‘On top of Dissembler and the Black Plan? I think that would have been beyond even his capacities…especially twenty years ago. No, I think that, whatever its origin, it has learned to exploit the…openings Josh Kohn evidently built into Dissembler, and the abilities he built into the Plan.’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s face went from pale to grey, as if the bones were showing.

‘And you have developed specifics for all of them?’

‘Yes,’ Donovan said. He couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice. ‘We can destroy the Watchmaker, and the Black Plan, and Kohn’s little efforts as well – if they matter.’

‘And Dissembler?’

‘Ah.’ It gave him pause. ‘I hadn’t considered that.’

‘Oh, well, ha, ha,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre flatly. ‘Might as well be hanged for a cop as a dealer, what?’

Donovan dismissed the matter with the thought that losing Dissembler would be a small price for saving the world, whether from the Watchmaker itself or from the efforts of Space Defense. He punched up a new set of displays, flinching slightly at the sight of the ongoing havoc – traffic systems down, hospitals on emergency backup, markets going frantic – that he’d taken the blame for. Then he flipped to a search program that spun out thousands of agent programs to trace the Watchmaker. Nothing active, not yet: just to see if they could find the thing…

At first, as the hits began to light up on the screens, he thought he’d made a mistake. They were finding evidence of the entity just about everywhere they went. Were they reacting to Dissembler itself? Had he made them too general?

He checked, lost in concentration.

‘What is it?’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s eyes met his as he looked up.

‘It’s replicated!’ Donovan said. ‘It’s everywhere.’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre studied the screens in disbelief. ‘All of that, all those lights?’

‘All those lights,’ Donovan repeated bitterly. ‘And more.’

The disruptions died down. Everything seemed to be going back to normal except for the spreading spots of light.

‘That must be what’s in the net traffic,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said.

‘Yeah,’ said Donovan. ‘Right, there’s no time to lose.’

He hit the launch code for the viral antigens, the savage routines bred over multiple microsecond generations in closed systems, primed to tear the rogue AI and its cognates into their component bytes. Little red sparks shot across the displays, tracking the antigens’ progress through the global networks.

And, one by one, the red sparks went out.

Bleibtreu-Fèvre grunted. ‘It seems to be fighting back.’

Donovan marvelled again at how something that was as clear to him as an open book could be so obscure to anyone else.

‘No,’ he snarled. ‘They aren’t engaging, they aren’t even making contact. Something else is trashing them first.’ He stalked distractedly around the room. He hadn’t felt this frustrated since he’d been a commercial programmer. ‘Bloody hell.’ He clutched his head and tried to think calmly. ‘It can’t be the Watchmaker entity – entities. They haven’t had any exposure to give them a chance to evolve immunity. It’s got to be something else, something that’s familiar with my systems, my coding, my profile…’

‘Melody Lawson,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre. As soon as he said it Donovan knew it had to be true. She’d worked with him, she’d been in the movement, she’d had years of experience of defending against his attacks…and she’d had access to his dataspaces for days. While he’d been developing specifics for the Kohns’ systems, she’d been doing the same for his!

He couldn’t blame her, really, for taking the opportunity to forearm herself against the time when the emergency was over and it was back to business as usual. Like wartime allies, spying on each other.

‘So we’re all right,’ he told Bleibtrue-Fèvre when he’d explained the situation. ‘We just ask her to stop, to give us a clear run at it.’ He let out a shaky laugh. ‘What a relief – just for a moment there, I thought we were doomed.’

‘Absolutely not.’

Melody Lawson glared at the flickering image of Donovan, who was obviously attempting his usual disconcerting trick of jumping from one screen to another and frustrated that he was failing, held on her most secure channel like a demon in a pentagram. The little hologhost brandished a match-stick at her, then a hand came into shot and caught his shoulder. He turned away and stepped out of view, to be replaced after thirty seconds of tinnily overheard altercation by another figure.

‘Mrs Lawson,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre in a smooth voice that affected her like a fingernail dragged down a blackboard, ‘I really must ask you to reconsider. The situation has deteriorated quite alarmingly. I assure you that to the best of my knowledge Donovan is telling the truth.’

‘I don’t doubt your sincerity,’ Mrs Lawson said. ‘I doubt your interpretation.’

Her doubts over Donovan’s interpretation of events had grown over the past few days as her normal security work had redoubled to deal with the escalating challenge posed by the threatened terrorist offensives. She’d already admitted using her access to Donovan’s resources to develop defences against his software arsenal – it had been, even before she’d got really worried, almost a reflex response. With his usual sabotage out of the way it had been relatively easy to build on her vast previous experience to construct antigen systems keyed to Donovan’s distinctive fingerprint, the almost ineradicable impress of the personality on the program which now-standard protocols (developed originally to identify the authorship of biblical texts) could detect, and (again ironically) use a genetic algorithm to select their best match in the test of combat, replicate from it, go on from there…

What she was reluctant to admit was that her own freedom of action was severely curtailed. The general increase in paranoia within the enclave made it difficult for her to know just who might be watching her. Her own dubious past as a member of Donovan’s organization had never been held against her, but it was always there to be used if heads had to roll.

She’d responded to the chaos of the afternoon by throwing all of her newly developed search-and-destroy programs into the networks. When they’d had no effect she hadn’t lost confidence in them: she’d taken it as clear evidence that Donovan had no hand in the epidemic of system crashes.

And now her programs had proved themselves! Against Donovan’s best!

‘I’m not about to throw away a position so advantageous to my community, to say nothing of society in general,’ she told Bleibtreu-Fèvre, ‘on the strength of a scare story about AIS having taken over the world while we weren’t looking. I find it very suspect that this should have happened at the same time as various terrorist forces are obviously gearing up for an assault on their respective governments. I’d suggest that this, and the countermeasures, are more than enough to account for the increase in the net traffic and for our current difficulties. And I don’t propose to add to them by unleashing Donovan’s monsters again. I will certainly not contemplate risking damage to Dissembler. Good grief, man! You’re asking me to commit a capital crime.’

For a moment Bleibtreu-Fèvre seemed about to follow Donovan’s example and fly into a cult-leader rage, but then he relaxed into a calm that was (but of course) almost unnatural.

‘We find ourselves at an impasse,’ he said. ‘However, I must say that, if I were you, I wouldn’t worry about what your local authority might think of your actions. They may be overthrown in a matter of days, perhaps hours.’

‘Since when,’ she asked scornfully, ‘has that been a consideration?’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre didn’t register that she was responding to an insult. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘In the very near future, in those hours or days, one of two things will happen. Either Space Defense will destroy the datasphere or the datasphere will pass beyond human control. When the bombs fall or the Watchmaker’s descendants come out of the walls, death may be the best you can pray for. I shall continue to assist Donovan. Contact us if you change your mind. Goodbye.’

click

Melody Lawson stared at the vacant space for a long moment. She was shaken by the Stasis operative’s conviction, but now that it came to the bit, now that she had to choose between her duty and his story, she just didn’t believe it. She distrusted the US/UN agencies, she disapproved of enhanced humans on principle, and the whole Watchmaker rumour was so apocalyptic that she had difficulty crediting it could really happen in her own lifetime. She knew this was exactly how people would feel just before the real apocalypse, that nearly everyone who’d faced some intrusive threat to their everyday existence – war, revolution, genocide, purges, disaster – had faced it with the firm conviction that things like this just didn’t happen or didn’t happen here or didn’t happen to people like them. But she also knew there would be no end of false alarms, lying wonders, false prophets with a Lo! here and a Hi! there, before whatever the real thing was came along. Indeed, they were part of the reason why the real thing always came like a thief in the night or (to update the simile a couple of millenia) like a secret policeman in the early hours of the morning.

The only way out, apart from blind faith (an option she discarded with an alacrity that would have dismayed her pastor), was to go by the best available evidence, the most economical interpretation of the data. It all pointed to a terrorist offensive; and the probability that she’d been drawn into some elaborate scam perpetrated by God-knew-what faction in the global security forces outweighed that of the emergence of electronic intelligence.

Terrorist offensive…that was coming all right, and Beulah City was well prepared for it: Warriors mobilized, aerospace defences on full alert, electronic countermeasures beating through the networks like radar beams. One particularly gratifying side-effect of Donovan’s retreat was that it had enabled her to sweep the ANR’s Black Plan routines out of Beulah City’s hardware for the third time in ten years. Putting a stop to that had been worth the embarrassment of finding out what the rebels had been getting away with.

Let Bleibtreu-Fèvre worry about AIS. She just hoped to God she never found herself standing before a Commission of Inquiry into the Recent Insurrection and late Disturbances of the King’s Peace, Etc., talking about offshore accounts.

Jordan jumped as cool fingers slid across his ears and eyes and lifted the glades and phones away. His cheek brushed Cat’s as she reached over his shoulders and disengaged his hands from the datagloves.

‘What—?’

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Easy. It’s done.’

She skipped back as he sat up and spun the chair around.

‘What’s done?’ He didn’t mean to sound irascible. The comms room was empty, its air jelled with cigarette smoke. Cat stood, backlit from the doorway, the outline of her body plain, her face in shadow. He felt confused, disoriented as if wakened from a dream, his mouth sticky.

‘Everything that can be done,’ Cat said. ‘You’ve been in the system for hours, since the crashes stopped.’

Jordan glanced at the clock icon: 24.03.

‘That’s the time?’

‘Yeah,’ Cat said. ‘You were hooked. You were lost in it.’

‘Duh.’ Jordan shook his head and stood up. ‘There’s just some things to—’

‘No,’ Cat said firmly. ‘Come on. There’s nothing left to do. It’s done, all that you can do. Leave the rest to the goddess.’ He could hear in her voice that she was smiling. ‘It’s Her job.’

She turned away and he followed her through to the long room. Nobody was about, not even the children.

‘Where is everybody?’

‘Sleep of the just, or out on active,’ Catherin said from the corner. She reached into one of the bags she’d left and pulled out a bottle of Glenmorangie.

‘Where d’you get that?’ It was a controlled-zone product, embargoed.

‘Don’t ask,’ Catherin said, looking in a cupboard she couldn’t have seen for two years and emerging with a brace of fine heavy glasses. ‘Drink.’

He sat on the couch and she brought over a small table for the whisky and water and sat leaning against the arm at the opposite end.

‘Cheers.’

‘Slainte,’ Cat said.

The drink was welcome. Too welcome: it was dangerous to drink whisky for thirst. Jordan reached for the water bottle and drank half of it, then took another sip of whisky.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, it’s all in the hands of the goddess now. What a day.’ He closed his eyes for a moment and saw the peculiar aftereffect of looking at the same kind of thing for hours on end. Not exactly an afterimage: it came from something deeper than the retina, perhaps the visual system still firing at random, replaying monochrome images of what you’d been seeing – in this instance faces, scrolling text, tunnels in dataspace, the choppy seas of the market.

He opened his eyes and Cat’s shining image flooded and filled his sight, more welcome than water.

‘What have you been doing today?’ he asked.

Cat smiled. ‘Didn’t you see?’ She laughed. ‘You couldn’t. I’ve been running myself ragged, telling the comrades what to do. Not my strong point. I’m more used to what we call the “foot-soldier praxis”.’

Jordan said awkwardly: ‘Yeah, I know. I saw your bio when I was trying to track you down. Uh, hope you don’t mind—’

Cat dismissed it with an airy wave of the hand. ‘Course not. It’s my CV!’

‘It’s impressive,’ Jordan said. ‘An irregular soldier of the revolution.’

‘That’s me…and a mercenary at that.’ She chuckled. ‘Goddess, what a world! Even the revolution is privatized…It was Moh who got me into that. Before I bumped into him’ – she smiled to herself, looking away somewhere – ‘literally, as it happens – I was just doing it out of the goodness of my heart. Or something.’ She looked around the room. ‘Yeah, I had some great times here.’

Jordan nerved himself to ask, ‘Why did you leave?’

‘Bust-up with Moh. Political got personal, or maybe the other way round. That’s how it goes.’

Jordan looked at her, puzzled. ‘Moh didn’t strike me as someone who’d turn political disagreements into personal fights.’

‘Hah!’ Cat snorted. ‘That was the trouble!’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I really loved him,’ she said. ‘I still think he’s, well, an amazing man. But just thinking about him makes me angry; it calls up all the things we fought about.’ She laughed, swirling her drink and looking into it. ‘Mostly about fighting. I always believed you had to…believe, to fight. Like you said. Goddess, was I the original fanatic! I doubt if you ever believed in religion the way I believed in the politics, if you ever read the Bible like I read the latest perspectives document from the faction leadership. But Moh I could never figure out. I got to think he was cynical.’

‘A gun for hire?’

‘That’s it. I suppose you’ve met the gun.’ She shared a smile with him. ‘A dedicated follower of Comrade Kalashnikov. But back there in the hospital I found that he thought I was the loose cannon. The opportunist. Huh. He’s got a side all right, but I don’t know what it is.’

Jordan pointed upwards. ‘That’s his side.’

Catherin frowned for a moment, then nodded.

‘Space…yeah, he was always into that. What he really believes in is us getting into space – I mean, like the space movement wants to, getting out there past the Yanks – and for him the left and the right, the plan and the market, are just—’

‘Launch vehicles!’

They both laughed.

‘And what about you?’ Jordan asked.

Catherin was sitting facing him along the couch. She took her feet out of her shoes and curled her legs and gazed again into the peaty pool in her glass.

‘I never saw it,’ she said, looking up as if she’d found some answer. ‘The way it seemed to me was we were aiming for a better society here on earth, starting with here in Britain. Space – yeah, sure – but why make that the one and the zero? I like this planet, dammit! I was happy to side with the greens against the people who’re wrecking it, even if these people have something to do with getting a few more thousand of us off it.’ She smiled at herself. ‘I’m a party animal – in both senses.’

She jumped up and went over to the music deck and slid in a disk. The room filled with the folky, smoky melody of an old hit from a band called Whittling Driftwood. Catherin twirled and held out a hand to him.

‘Come on, you devil’s chaplain,’ she said. ‘Dance with me.’

Jordan had never danced before. He stood, and Catherin stepped up to him with her hands raised in front of her, fingers opened out. He lifted his hands in the same way and their fingers interlocked. He guessed the trick was to step lightly in time with the music, and to sort of move your hips to a different but mysteriously related time, fraction or multiple of the music’s rhythm, and to pull towards and away from your partner in yet another periodicity.

Oh, yes, and to maintain eye contact. He looked up from his and her feet.

After a couple of tracks the music changed, got slower, and there didn’t seem to be any provision for pulling away. He brought their arms down and let go of her fingers and slid his hands behind her, and his elbows to her waist, and she did the same with him. They turned slowly, feet more careful now. The track ended. He stood still and kissed her. Her tongue entered his mouth like an alien animal, a blindly urgent exploratory probe, and then drew his tongue back with it, a startled abductee. Her mouth tasted of whisky and water and something ranker, carnivorous. They swayed together for an interval, and suddenly they were both gasping in atmosphere again.

‘Catherin,’ he said. ‘Earth’s angel. Cat.’ His hands were moving on her flanks and waist, feeling the heat and shape of her through varying textures. He found a row of buttons and opened one, then another. Catherin dived a hand blatantly down the back of his jeans. A cool fingertip pressed his coccyx, traced up his lower spine. Then she took her hand out and caught his arms.

‘It’s easier from the top,’ she said.

‘So let’s go up.’

‘Yes.’

17

The Good Sorcerer

‘Relax, the man said.’ Moh kicked a pebble from the shingle out across the still water of the sea-loch. Janis was not surprised to see that it skipped several times before sinking. He did it again and the same thing happened. ‘This is worse than waiting for a US/UN deadline to pass.’

Janis caught his hand. ‘Walk,’ she said.

They continued on around the shoreline to where it curved out to a narrow spit of land that led to a peninsula about four hundred metres long and thirty or forty metres high. It was known locally – with what Janis considered a peculiarly Gaelic logic – as The Island. She squinted into a low morning sun that was lifting the dew and night-mist in the promise of another fine day.

Moh, though still tense and moody, looked a lot better than he’d done the previous afternoon when he’d come out of his encounter. They probably had MacLennan to thank for that. With an almost motherly admonition about Building Up Your Strength, the ANR cadre had treated them to a dinner of smoked salmon followed by venison at the village hotel.

Janis had been charmed by MacLennan. He might look like a farmer but he acted and spoke like an officer and a gentleman, with fascinating tales to tell of the years of the Republic and the struggle. The one thing he would not talk about, that he instantly and politely quashed the slightest allusion to, was the events of that afternoon and their implications.

The hotel overlooked a golf course so low on the shore that clumps of dried seaweed were scattered on its greens. The bar, where they’d had what was by Moh’s standards a very quiet drinking session, had filled up over the evening with the entire reduced population of the village. Janis had watched incredulously as the locals enjoyed what they considered a few quiet, civilized drinks – four or five litres of beer helped along by liberal shots of whisky – and then gone off to drive home. The vehicles ranged from sports-cars to articulated lorries but were all driven in much the same way.

It was the sound of vehicles in the morning that had wakened them: a slow, revving chug on all the roads. When they walked down to the village after breakfast they’d found the whole place deserted, an eerie clearance complete…

A sheep-track led them through long wet grass and gorse to the top of the Island, where a low roofless brick building stood. As they approached, a head appeared over the wall, and then a young woman came out. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen; dark hair, bright eyes. She wore an ANR jumpsuit and carried a weapon that looked too big for her: a metre-long rocket on a launcher with a pistol-grip.

‘Hello,’ she said shyly. ‘You’ll be the computer people.’

Moh laughed. ‘Have you ever heard of need-to-know?’

‘We all need to know,’ she said, sounding baffled by the question.

‘What do you do?’ Janis asked.

‘Air defence,’ the girl said.

Inside the walls was a trodden area of sheep droppings and earth; a camping stool, binoculars, a dozen more rockets.

‘It’s an old observation post,’ the girl explained. ‘From the last war, that is’ – her brow furrowed momentarily – ‘that is, the war before the last but you know what the old folk are like.’

Moh nodded soberly. ‘And you’re using it for air defence?’

‘Yes.’ She whipped the launcher into position with startling speed. ‘The stealth fighters: they fly low, they can fool radar and instruments, they don’t make a sound but they’re not invisible.’ She patted the nose of the rocket. ‘Tail-chaser. I’ve got two seconds to get down after it’s launched, then the fusion engine kicks in. Voom.’

‘Yeah,’ Moh said. ‘“Voom.” You don’t want to be standing behind one of them. And stay down and keep your eyes shut till you see the flash.’

‘Oh, I know that,’ the girl said. She shuffled and looked at everything except her visitors.

‘Guess we better go,’ Moh said. ‘All the best.’

When they were halfway back down the track Janis asked: ‘How could she see the flash with her eyes shut?’

‘Laser-fuser warhead. She’d see it.’

Moh’s phone beeped. He listened, nodding. ‘OK, right, see ya.’

‘What’s up?’

‘MacLennan’s coming to meet us. Says there’s been some developments.’

A kilometre and a half away, a humvee started up.

Cat slept, lightly curled on her side. Some of the alertness, the knowingness, of her characteristic expression was relaxed away, so that she seemed a younger person who hadn’t discovered sex and violence. Jordan, propped on one elbow, looked at that face over the curve of her shoulder, basked in the skin-to-skin human warmth, his breathing careful so as not to disturb the spontaneous rhythm of hers.

Something in him had changed – some baseline had shifted with that release, that bonding. Until now he’d felt like a fellow-traveller of the human race, a sympathizer rather than a paid-up, card-carrying member. Now, as the bars of morning sunlight from the armour-slatted window millimetred their way across the ceiling, he still had the same ideas but with a different attitude. Still an individualist, but without the edgy selfishness. At a level beneath all calculation of advantage he was no longer afraid of dying. It was he who had opened, encompassed and received, and now found for the first time within his fiercely defended core a person other than himself.

She woke with a wild where-am-I? look, saw him and smiled.

‘You’re still here.’

‘Still here.’

‘You been awake long?’

Jordan shrugged. ‘Some time.’

‘What you been doing?’ She rolled over and put an arm and a leg over him.

‘Watching you sleep.’

Her hand explored. ‘Hmm…that must’ve been exciting.’

‘Not as exciting as seeing you awake.’ She dived.

‘Now you.’

The estuarine smell and taste of it, salt and rank, ocean and swamp.

Then chin to chin, lip to lip, tongue to tongue; pubis to pubis. She grabbed his hand and guided it with urgent precision and abandoned his finger there, a trapped digit doing its little bit between their blind beat. As suddenly she dragged it away, digging her nails into the small of his back and taking him over the edge with her in an arching, bucking, yelling fall.

They landed in a tangled heap.

‘Wuh.’

‘They don’t call you Cat for nothing.’

She grinned and rolled her eyes and ran her tongue along her teeth. Then she sat up and reached for a handful of tissues and, still cat-like, wiped and mopped.

‘I’m going to have a shower,’ she said.

‘Oh good,’ Jordan said. ‘So am I.’

She pushed him away and jumped off the bed.

‘Another time,’ she said. ‘Right now it would be…self-defeating.’

She skipped into the shower stall.

‘Hey, lover,’ she shouted as the water came on, ‘there’s something you can do for me.’

‘Yes?’

‘Get me some breakfast.’

well hi there jordan

Jordan was watching a kettle not boiling when the low, flat, uninflected voice came from the air behind him. He turned in a poor imitation of a fighting crouch and saw the face of the Black Planner on a small television tile propped in a corner of the kitchen counter. He stared open-mouthed for a moment, and the animated line-drawing of a face smiled, apparently in response. One of the telecams on a nearby shelf had a tiny red eye beside its lens’s unwinking stare – he was sure it hadn’t been on before.

sorry to startle you

The voice came from the speakers of the room’s sound system, an eerily perfect reproduction of words that didn’t bother to pretend they came from a human throat.

‘I’m pleased to see you again,’ he said. ‘Thank you for the money. It made a big difference to my life.’

so i understand i have been watching your progress with interest your new girlfriend has no doubt told you that an offensive is imminent

Jordan nodded, dry-mouthed. There was something disturbingly familiar about the face, familiar beyond the fact of his having seen it before. He felt he had encountered it somewhere else. Possibly the Black Planner himself was an ANR cadre who walked unmarked in the streets of Norlonto, a face he’d passed by in the crowd.

do not be offended that she has not told you all she knows this is nothing personal it is because she is basically a good communist loyal daughter of the revolution and mother of the new republic though she would laugh if you said so to her face the offensive is no longer imminent it is current and i again have a proposition for you the risk is considerable and there is no monetary reward however i think you will obtain satisfaction out of the high probability that your actions will result in a very substantial reduction in the human cost of the insurrection do i have your interest

‘Yes.’

i urgently require access to some systems from which i am currently excluded once again it is just a matter of entering a code on a terminal the code in question will follow your agreement to proceed as will the relevant passwords the terminal is the high-security terminal in the office of melody lawson and the time is as soon as you can get there

‘Oh, that terminal.’ He hoped the routines the Planner was manipulating could pick up voice-tones, even if it couldn’t transmit them. ‘And how do you expect me to get back into BC, let alone into the office? And what about getting out again?’

entering the enclave will not be a problem as you shall see if you attempt it as for the office you are to do this by deception if possible and subsequently you are to effect your safe exit by mass agitation if necessary i understand you are a persuasive speaker when you are telling the truth and a plausible liar when you are not comrade duvalier is at this moment being asked to accompany you and her combat skills will provide some backup i can assure you that other disruption will be provided but i do not deny that the risk is considerable on the other hand the risks involved in staying here particularly if your task is not carried out are an order of magnitude greater

It took a moment for Jordan to turn the quiet statement over.

‘You’re saying that doing nothing is ten to a hundred times more dangerous than your crazy scheme?’

correct

‘Well, in that case,’ Jordan said slowly, grinning back at the Planner, ‘it’s all perfectly justifiable selfish cowardice, so I’ll do it.’

you did not think i would ask you to carry out an act of reckless courage did you

The drawn face smiled in a way that made Jordan wish he could talk to the real person behind it.

‘I hope I see you again,’ he said, understanding for the first time something of what the catchphrase meant: afterwards…

goodbye jordan i hope i see you again

Numbers came up.

‘Two bits of news,’ MacLennan said, looking back over his shoulder and taking one hand from the steering-wheel to gesticulate. ‘The first is that the Army Council has decided to go for it. The offensive is under way.’

‘Yee-hah!’ Kohn yelled.

They bumped up a pitted tarmac strip between willows and beeches and turned on to the main road. ‘The second is, we’ve cracked the thing with the Star Fraction.’

‘What?’ Janis leaned forward from the back seat, clutching her seat-belt.

‘The Star Fraction,’ MacLennan repeated, raising his voice. He shifted gears and the engine note dropped. ‘When the systems settled down yesterday we – that is, Doctor Van and some of our security people – got in touch with your friend in outer space.’ He waved a hand skywards, just in case they didn’t know where that was. ‘Logan was quite happy to cooperate. Between them they think they’ve figured it out. We got through to people from the old days who knew Josh, and who have been in this Star Fraction for years without knowing what it was. And without telling anyone,’ he added disgustedly. ‘These God-damned Trotskyites, excuse my English, Doctor Taine. The long and the short of it is that Josh didn’t just prepare for the fall of the Republic, which he had every right to do, but for the fall of civilization itself! He set up these unauthorized programs in the Black Plan to seek out and store biological data, and he compiled a mailing list, would you believe, of people who could make use of it. But he never fired it off, and it just beavered away for two decades getting things ready. A Black Plan inside the Black Plan.’

The humvee swerved on to the road up to the house they were staying in. ‘I don’t see how that worked,’ Kohn said. ‘Logan couldn’t have been on any list that Josh drew up.’

‘It was a very intelligent mailing list,’ MacLennan said. ‘And then the other day you triggered the main program. At some other time maybe not much would have happened, but in the present situation…’

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought,’ Kohn said. The vehicle lurched to a halt. MacLennan led them into the kitchen of the house, where Dr Van greeted them, bleary-eyed. He poured them coffee as they sat down around the table.

‘MacLennan has explained our findings?’

‘Yeah,’ Kohn said. He lit the cigarette Van offered him. ‘Still doesn’t explain these things I encountered, the Watchmaker AIS.’

Van steepled his fingers and talked around his cigarette like a diminutive Bogart. ‘We have to be very careful in drawing conclusions,’ he said. ‘These programs are in some sense spin-offs, replications, reflections of an aspect of the Plan.’

Janis heard Kohn’s indrawn breath.

‘The Plan has evolved considerably over the past twenty years,’ Van continued. ‘Consequently, its products – we may suppose – are by many orders of magnitude more sophisticated than anything Josh Kohn originally intended. Nevertheless, they remain basically information-seeking software constructs, with a specific task.’ He smiled, thin-lipped. ‘Such as cleaning out my company’s databanks, and many others. Which they have accomplished.’

‘You’re telling me they’re just gophers?’ Kohn sounded indignant. ‘That’s not what I encountered. These things think, man.’

Van sighed out a cloud of smoke. ‘Comrade Kohn,’ he said, ‘please, let us be objective. Your experience was subjective. And drug-mediated. That is not to say,’ he went on hastily, ‘that it was necessarily invalid. The situation may indeed be as you perceived it. If so’ – he shrugged – ‘time will tell, and soon. The fact remains that they are in a very real sense artificial intelligences, and ones to which you have an access which is for the moment unique. It is imperative, now that the final offensive is opening, that you contact them again and persuade them to keep a low profile. Will you do that?’

Moh turned to Janis as if searching her face for something. She didn’t know what answer she gave, if any. He turned away, looked at the table for a moment.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘When?’

‘Now,’ said MacLennan, standing up.

Moh had instructions. While he was trying to contact the Watchmaker entities, Van was to liaise with the Army Council by landlink…

‘And what about me?’ Janis asked.

The big officer paused at the door, frowning.

‘Och, just guard them with your life,’ he said, and disappeared down the stairs. The door slammed. A minute later they heard the helicopter take off.

Van went out and came back with an armful of televisions which he placed in a semicircle with a couple of chairs in the middle. He tossed a remote control to Janis.

‘Keep zapping the news channels,’ he said. ‘Watch the local ones for the subtext until they start to come over to our side. For hard coverage go for the globals. CNN is fairly reliable on such occasions.’

Janis settled herself with a mug of coffee to hand and glanced at Moh, who was gazing out of the window. Van bent over the terminal.

‘You’re very confident about taking some local stations,’ she said wryly. ‘You really expect to get that far in the first hours?’

Van looked surprised.

‘Don’t you understand…Oh, I’m sorry, we never explained it. If the system has decided it’s time for us to strike it means we can take the country in the first hours. We intend to proclaim the republic on the six o’clock news from London. If things don’t go smoothly, the news at ten. If we’re wrong, or the system is flawed, then—’

He spread his hands.

‘You’ve been wrong before,’ Moh said. ‘Four defeated offensives in fifteen years doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.’

‘We didn’t have all the bugs out of it,’ Van admitted. ‘Call those campaigns user-acceptance testing.’

‘With live data,’ Moh said.

Van’s lips compressed for a moment. ‘I understand the offensives would have been attempted anyway,’ he said. ‘The costs would have been higher without the system. And remember: the system learns from its mistakes.’

‘As does the state,’ Janis pointed out. ‘And if you lose – if we lose – the best we can hope for is winning a bloody civil war.’

‘What do you think you’re having already?’ Van snapped. ‘The Hanoverian forces are being bled constantly by what you call the troubles. The local militias are mostly cynical mercenaries without conviction. The best of the autonomous communities will welcome an end to the war of all against all. Strikes and demonstrations are frequent in the major cities. This is the most violent and unstable country in Europe. You hear much about the NVC, but to be honest we are well behind the ANR.’

‘That’s what I like to hear,’ said Moh, settling again by the terminal. ‘All we have to worry about is the Yanks coming in and bombing the shit out of us. Again. Well, I’ll try to convince the electric anarchists out there to keep their heads down.’

Van offered him the gun leads and the glades. Moh took them, his other hand already moving like a skilled weaver’s.

Colours came up.

Van looked away to the other screens, where interesting items were appearing on local channels, usually in traffic reports.

‘Jesus wept,’ Cat muttered as she and Jordan struggled along the crowded pavement of the Broadway. ‘Half the bloody country seems to have gone on strike.’ Traffic was gridlocked, a knock-back effect of distant junctions blocked by buses whose drivers had simultaneously decided to exercise their right to a mid-morning break. Several office buildings were picketed by workers in white shirts and ties. Even with all the honking of horns and chanting of slogans, Norlonto seemed quieter than usual.

Jordan glanced sidelong at the good communist and loyal daughter of the revolution beside him and smirked. In the Modesty dress which she’d magically produced like a coloured scarf from an egg she could pass for a well brought-up young Beulah City lady, except…

‘Language,’ he chided. ‘Apart from that you’re doing fine. I’m amazed at how you’ve mastered the effortless glide.’

‘Effortless, hell,’ Cat choked. ‘You have to kick the goddam petticoats out of the way with every step you take, and if I’m not careful I’ll blow my foot off.’

She had jeans on underneath, two side-arms in boot holsters, and ammo strapped to her thighs.

Jordan took her elbow and ostentatiously steered her past a trodie who’d collapsed in the doorway of a Help the Waged charity shop.

‘The correct expression, my dear,’ he said, ‘is: “My feet are killing me.”’

Cat laughed. ‘You’re a sight yourself.’

‘Update me on it,’ Jordan said, running a finger around the inside of his collar and leaving it even more sticky and uncomfortable. A frantic search of Moh’s wardrobe had turned up a frightful ’thirties outfit, three-piece with cravat, which he’d apparently worn to the interview for the last respectable job he’d ever attempted to get, in some edited-out deviation from what he nowadays presented as a steady career progression from bricklayer to union organizer to mercenary. Jordan had insisted on taking Cat’s jacket and his jeans in a carpet-bag: whatever it took to get into BC, he’d no intention of being seen like this attempting street oratory – for which, he gathered, street-credibility was a crucial requirement. Even by Beulah City’s time-lapsed standards he looked a complete neuf. Cat, by exasperating contrast, didn’t look out of place in Norlonto.

Overhead, air traffic was being diverted away from Alexandra Port and the sky was gradually filling up: airships at the lowest level; then re-entry gliders cracking past and drifting into the city’s thermals, rising in great lazy spirals; above them the blue of the sky crosshatched with the contrails of airliners stacked above Heathrow or giving up and making a break for the Landmass.

Cat and Jordan found themselves part of a flow of people going down the hill. Looking back, Jordan saw that more and more people were pressing on from behind them. Almost every other vehicle in the road had been abandoned, and more occupants were joining the pedestrians by the minute. He’d worried about looking worried, but by the faces around him he could see it had been a misplaced concern.

‘I’ve just realized,’ Cat said. ‘We’re in the middle of a bunch of refugees. They’re keeping very calm about it, for now, but I’ll bet there’s a flood building up of Norlonto’s middle classes getting out of the way of the godless communists and under the wing of the godly capitalists.’

‘Nobody outside BC believes the ANR is communist,’ Jordan murmured.

‘Oh yes they do,’ Cat said. ‘You should hear them talking about “the cadres”.’

‘Mind who hears us talking about them.’

‘Just listen. Everybody else is.’

And they were. Complete strangers earnestly passed on scraps of information that they’d heard from the third person back from the one who’d just passed a car with the radio left on: Glasgow had fallen to the ANR, bombs had gone off in Victoria Street, the Dail had declared war on England…The crowds thinned a little as part of the stream turned left to add to the chaos at Alexandra Port’s passenger terminals, then condensed as they funnelled in towards the BC frontier. Out of sheer devilment Cat told someone the greens were moving in on Birmingham, something she knew was flatly out of the question – she had a radio clipped in her hair, the phone curled behind her ear, and could flick channels unobtrusively by twitching it; nothing of any interest was being reported. Yet, before a hundred metres and ten minutes had gone past they’d heard from their fellow pedestrians that the greens had taken Birmingham, that the greens were evacuating Birmingham at gunpoint, and that the greens had evacuated Birmingham and destroyed the city centre with a tactical nuclear device.

Yes, she confirmed knowledgeably. They’d planted it where the Bull Ring used to be.

At the border the Warriors had given up trying to hold back the crowd. In most cases they just waved people through and acted as if it had been their idea all along; Christian charity, sanctuary. But not all: there was a Green Channel and a Red Channel, sheep and goats.

Jordan tried not to catch any visored eyes, to no avail. He and Cat were firmly directed into the Red Channel – the one that passed through the metal detector.

Moh came out of his trance with a jump. He turned to Van and Janis.

‘Yee-hah!’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Watch Manchester.’

Janis flipped to the station just as the newsreader responded to a polite tap on the shoulder. The camera pulled back to show armed civilians wandering into the newsroom. A young woman sat down self-consciously in the newsreader’s place and began reading a declaration. Others held up blue-white-and-green flags or Union Jacks with a hole cut out of the middle, waving them from side to side and chanting some slogan of which the only word that came over clearly was ‘united’.

The station went off the air just as the girl was reading the paragraph, traditional in such proclamations, calling on those who had been deceived into taking up arms for the enemy to come over to the side of the people.

‘Oh, my God,’ Janis said.

‘Not to worry,’ said Van. ‘Somebody always pulls the plug. We’ve still got the station, and the city.’

CNN confirmed that Manchester was held by the insurgents. Heavy fighting was reported from the Bristol area. Tanks assembled by unknowing robots in Japanese-owned car factories were rolling down the M6. The Security Council had gone into emergency session, not over Britain but over the border clashes between Russia and the Turkish Confederacy and the Sino-Soviet capture of Vladivostok.

‘Told you they’re overstretched,’ Moh said.

‘Have you made any…contact yet?’

‘No, I’ve only encountered your systems,’ Moh said. ‘Everything seems to be going fine. I’m going back in.’ He smiled at them and turned to the screen.

Cat leaned back and whispered to Jordan. He straightened up, smiling at her protectively.

‘No X-rays, please,’ he said. Cat blushed and flicked her eyelashes down and patted her belly. The Warrior keyed a switch and nodded. Cat stepped through the arched gate.

Beep.

She frowned and backed out, then laid her fingers across her mouth and opened her eyes wide. She groped in her handbag and gingerly lifted out a derringer and handed it to the guard, who sighed and slid it along the counter past the outside of the detector. Jordan watched this performance, tapping his foot while other people jostled behind him. Cat went under the arch again.

Beep beep beeeeep.

Cat stepped back, turned scarlet-faced to the guard and leaned over and murmured to him. She caught the side of her skirt between hip and knee latitudes and pushed it towards his hands. He felt it for a moment, as if flexing something. He let go of it. One hand went to the back of his neck. He looked around, took in the length of the queue and almost surreptitiously switched off the device and gestured to Cat. She sailed through, picked up her lady’s handgun and waited for Jordan. To make up for this the guard inspected Jordan’s carpet-bag with two minutes of awe-inspiring thoroughness, listening with obvious disbelief to the explanation that Earth’s Angels was a Christian ecology study group, before letting him through.

Traffic was moving; the pavements were clearer in Park Road. No strikes here, and people had the sense to get off the streets. Jordan spotted a vacant pedicab and hailed it. He knew exactly how to help her in, which was just as well because she didn’t.

‘What on earth did you tell him was setting it off?’

‘Steel hoops,’ said Cat smugly.

‘Guess he was too embarrassed to check.’

Cat looked sideways at him. ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘The guns and the shell-cases are all plastic.’

They reached the top of Crouch Hill. The pedicab’s backup electric motor stopped; there was a moment of poise as the driver took the weight on the pedals again. Jordan looked at the city, sharp and clear, less hazy than usual, in early-autumn sunlight. He didn’t glance at the house from which he’d seen this view so many times. The silver dirigibles moved above it, their paths intricate, crossing over each other.

‘Look at the airships!’ Cat said.

‘Yeah, I’ve never seen so many in one—’

‘No, look!’

Things were dropping from the airships, black dots – Jordan turned to look at the closest, floating above Finsbury Park. He saw the canopies open, and tried to scan the whole sky, see everything at once. All around, as far as human eye could see, parachutes and hang-gliders descended on the open spaces of the city like a selective fall of multicoloured snow.

‘Air hostesses!’ Cat said, and then wouldn’t say anything else.

The nearest parachutes came down out of sight, a kilometre or so eastward. Jordan was relieved they hadn’t landed at the near end of the park—they were probably going for the tactically more important junction at Seven Sisters.

Fonthill Road was deserted. Jordan paid the cabbie in B-marks, gaining a surprised look of thanks, and walked with Cat to the doorway of the block where he’d last worked, less than a fortnight ago. A Warrior stood outside. His submachine-gun covered their approach. The sensation that at any second he could be ripped in half was a new one for Jordan.

‘What’s your business, sir?’

‘River Valley Distribution,’ Jordan said, passing him a laminated card.

‘And who have you come to see?’

Jordan smiled politely. ‘MacLaren & Jones.’ If he knew his former partners, nothing short of shells coming through the window would keep them away from their desks.

The Warrior passed the card swiftly through a reader, and peered at the result. Jordan tried not to hold his breath. His fictitious company’s status as an approved supplier, left over from his SILK.ROOT program, was the nearest he had to a security clearance.

The guard nodded and handed the card back. ‘You’ll find them up the stairs and on the right.’

He stepped aside. Jordan held the door open for Cat. She went up the stairs with surprising speed, and let Jordan lead the way into the offices. The great workroom was almost empty, most of the screens dead.

Debbie Jones, who’d usually worked evenings when Jordan had been her partner, was standing by the desk they’d serially shared. She faced the door, evidently alerted she had a visitor. The screen behind her bled with the colours of falling shares.

‘Jordan! I never expected to see you back here!’ She sounded half-welcoming, half-disapproving. Jordan had always thought of her as quite a nice girl, intelligent but conventional; unmemorable oval face, straight long hair, straight long dress. Her glance flicked to Cat and back to Jordan with a look of marginally increased understanding that he was beginning to find irritatingly familiar. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Do you know why I left?’

She shook her head. ‘And I’m not interested, frankly.’ Another glance at Cat. ‘It was a bit inconsiderate of you. Though in all fairness we didn’t do too badly out of your selling out to us.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ Jordan said. ‘I’m sorry about the inconvenience I must have caused you.’ He wondered if she knew he’d left Beulah City entirely. If she hadn’t, it suggested Mrs Lawson had been more anxious to cover up than to investigate.

‘Actually,’ he went on with an embarrassed-sounding laugh, ‘I’m not here to see you at all. I just have some matters to clear up with Mrs Lawson. Security stuff, you know?’

Debbie frowned. ‘I don’t see—’

Jordan looked past her. ‘Hey, what’s happened to the Dow Jones?’

Debbie looked over her shoulder. ‘Oh, rats!’ She sat down and started rapid-fire keying. In the thirty seconds of distraction this afforded Jordan walked briskly to Mrs Lawson’s office.

‘Where is everybody?’ Cat asked, looking around.

‘They must be on strike.’

‘Ha, ha.’

He knocked on Mrs Lawson’s door.

‘Come in.’

Jordan looked at Cat. ‘After you, lady.’

Cat opened the door and sailed through. Jordan hung back for a moment, then stepped in and closed it. Mrs Lawson was standing behind her pine desk, her hands on top of her head. Her whole attention was on Cat’s derringer; her face showed shocked bewilderment.

Then she looked up and saw Jordan. Her expression deepened to one of utter dismay. Her mouth opened…

Cat raised one hand. Mrs Lawson’s lips clenched.

Jordan climbed over the desk to the terminal, avoiding passing between her and Cat. He tapped in the code and hit Enter.

The ghosts were gone now, and the animal mind of the gun. He was on his own, looking down at the country like a god. It was more than a map, more than a view from a fantastic unclouded height. A moment’s attention was all it took to take him close. He saw armoured columns, and he could zoom in on individual tanks. He saw the sinking silk, the rising smoke, and focused in on a city centre where ANR fighters attacked a police barracks with nerve-shattering ferocity. He heard the yelled slogans, the shouted pain.

He was there and he wanted to be there. He looked at London, saw the converging lines, the closing circles, the bright sector of Norlonto and, just to its south, a dark patch, a blindspot. It too lit up, flickering (hand over bank of switches), and he turned away.

He looked up and saw them beside him in the imagined sky. They were exactly like the tiny sparks of light he’d sometimes seen when gazing at a clear blue sky. On this scale they were shining silver ships, UFOs insolently dancing in the air over Britain, alien intelligences waiting to be noticed.

He reached out to warn them.

Jordan turned away from the terminal.

Cat chucked him a roll of heavy-duty tape from her handbag.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lawson,’ he said, peeling off a metre of it. ‘You know how it is. Nothing personal.’

Mrs Lawson nodded. ‘That’s quite all right, Jordan.’

He taped her securely to the office chair, after checking as best he could that the chair itself didn’t conceal any alarm switches. If she had one about her person, she’d probably used it already, and in any case they could hardly remove her teeth one by one. Then he taped the chair to the radiator at the window.

When he was about to tape her mouth she shook her head.

‘No need,’ she said. ‘The room’s completely soundproof. I’d appreciate it if you’d let someone know where I am once you feel safe.’

‘No problem about that, but I’ll still have to do it. Voice activation.’

Mrs Lawson looked at him as if she’d never heard of it.

‘You’re taking this very well,’ said Cat, still keeping her covered. ‘Something we should know, yeah?’

Mrs Lawson laughed. ‘Oh, no, nobody’s on the way. It’s only that I’m quite used to interpreting finger movements as keystrokes – years of watching people enter passwords. You were rather fond of Engels and Lucretius, weren’t you Jordan? I recognized the code you tapped in just now.’ She looked from him to Cat, and back. ‘Is this the Catherin Duvalier I’ve heard so much about? Did she persuade you that Kohn was wrong and Donovan was right?’

‘What’s Donovan got to do with this?’ Jordan snapped at her, baffled. He didn’t understand the reference to Kohn either.

Mrs Lawson gave him an impatient, scornful look. ‘Oh, stop playing games, Jordan. Who else would want to turn off my security software?’

‘The ANR, if you must know,’ Jordan said, stung by her insinuations.

She stared at him for a moment and then began to giggle, at first in a schoolgirlish, sniggering tone and then with a rising pitch that bordered on hysterical. In a surge of fury and disgust he slapped the tape across her mouth.

‘You’re the one who’s playing games,’ he said bitterly.

Tears leaked from her eyes and her shoulders quaked.

‘Breathe OK?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

He moved behind Cat and opened the door. They backed out and walked quickly to the exit. Debbie Jones leapt up from her seat.

‘What’s going on?’ she demanded.

Jordan hesitated. Debbie turned away from him and pointed to the screen. Mandelbrot snowflakes drifted across it, faded, and died to a dot.

‘System crash,’ Jordan said, thinking on his feet. ‘Mrs Lawson’s trying to fix it. She’s a bit caught up in it but she’d like to see you in about ten minutes. Some files I left lying about,’ he added in a vaguely apologetic tone. ‘See you around.’

He followed Cat out, aware that Debbie was still standing and watching them with the expression of someone who just knows they’ve missed something, but…

‘That stuff about Donovan,’ Cat said as they left the office. ‘D’you think that’s what she thought?’

‘Could be,’ Jordan said. ‘Or a bit of disinformation. She’s an expert at it.’

‘And why did she mention Moh?’

Jordan stood still. The question was nagging at him. How had she connected him with Moh? Then he remembered.

‘She didn’t say Moh, she said Kohn. Maybe she meant Josh Kohn, she’s old enough to know about him and the Plan, and she knew I’d done something on the Plan.’

‘Yeah, he has a reputation,’ Cat said. ‘But how did she guess who I was?’

Jordan grinned. The answer seemed obvious after his trawls through the net. ‘You’ve got a reputation, too!’

Jordan began to descend the stairs backwards, holding the rail with one hand and reaching the other towards Cat.

‘Sod this for a game of soldiers,’ she said.

She returned to the top and slid her thumbs deftly around her waist, then shoved down hard on her skirt. With a rending noise it came away from the bodice. She stepped out of the collapsing structure.

‘Velcro,’ she explained. ‘Gimme my jacket.’

Jordan took it from the bag and felt a sudden impulse to be free himself. He scrambled out of the suit and into his jeans as Cat did something arcane with the crinoline frame, folding and telescoping it to flat quarter-circles, making it and the skirts vanish into the bag. (How do they do these things? he wondered. Where do they learn them? And what are the military applications?).

He looked at her, tall boots and short guns, tight jeans, bodice tucked into them like a fancy fitted shirt under the big jacket. She put one hip forward and held a fist to it.

‘Calamity Jane rides again,’ she said.

‘Minor detail,’ said Jordan, glancing down the stairs. ‘The guard. Unless you’re going for the final shot of Butch and Sundance.’

‘Nah,’ she sneered. She passed him one of the side-arms and signed to him to follow her down the steps. At the foot they crept to the door and flattened against the wall. Cat reached out and very slowly turned the knob and inched the door open, then let it swing inwards.

There was a rush of noise. Cat waited for a moment and risked a look around the jamb. She laughed and stepped into the doorway. The Warrior had left, and in the street there was…

‘A multitude,’ Jordan said.

Bleibtreu-Fèvre had found an antique CRT buried among the vast arrays of screens. On experimenting with it he discovered it was a television. It picked up only four channels, none of which showed anything but ballet or marching bands. The old state broadcasting system, responding to a crisis of the state in the time-honoured fashion. He flicked idly between Les Sylphides and the 2039 Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

He felt exhausted, burnt-out on anti-som, fatalistic. They were doomed. He had worked with Donovan all night, helping as best he could while the old crank honed and refined his hunter-killer viruses, repeatedly launching them with high hopes only to see them snuffed out by Melody Lawson’s diabolically effective countermeasures.

With his inside knowledge and Donovan’s hacking expertise, they eavesdropped on communications between Stasis and Space Defense. Most of it was unbreakably encrypted, but from what they could pick up it was obvious SD was in the final stages of confirmation that a genuine emergency existed, working through the fail-safes, the dual-keys, to the inevitable, fated and fatal decision that the datasphere was beyond the command of man and had to be destroyed at any cost.

He’d considered contacting SD or Stasis directly, telling them what was going on, getting them to force that stupid, stubborn Christian woman to disable her countermeasures and let Donovan have at least one good shot at the AI…but he knew in his altered bones it was hopeless, that even if he could reach a high enough command level they’d just treat it as further confirmation that the emergency was real.

They were doomed.

Donovan’s shout of triumph brought him to his feet. The old man dashed from terminal to terminal, whirled his arms in elaborate movements, wrestled with virtual shapes. He paused to yell at Bleibtreu-Fèvre: ‘She must have changed her mind! The counterviruses are gone!’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre moved out of Donovan’s way and watched as he slowed, wound down, and eventually stopped to look around from screen to screen.

‘They’re free,’ he said. ‘The very best, keyed to the Watchmaker’s memes.’ He smiled at Bleibtreu-Fèvre, and at that moment he did not look old, or mad, or evil – the very opposite: he stood proud and glad, a white magician who had saved a great but simple folk from forces darker than they had the strength to know.

‘We’ve done it!’ he said. ‘They’ll have no reason to hit the datasphere now. There will be no gigadeaths.’

Billions died.

Billions of living things, conscious minds, with subtler and sharper feelings, with higher joys and deeper hurts than any human would ever know.

They died: ruptured like cells in strong saline, exploded from within like the 15psi house, blasted from without like a head struck by a bullet, vaporized like a satellite in a particle beam, vanished like flesh in a firestorm.

Moh had seen them all, the classic slo-mos, the freeze-frames, the stills, the instantaneous archaeology of recent and sudden death. He had never flinched from facing the deaths he had dealt out himself. These – image and reality inseparable memories now – provided him with the signs for what he saw, what he heard and felt as choking smoke boiled out of the ground, out of the air, and every particle of the smoke became a ravening engine of destruction that devoured one bright artificial intelligence, then twisted and turned unsated for the next. Thought of his thought, mind of his mind, sharing the vanishing point of his reflection of the self that knew: the minute fraction of their anguish that he experienced was pain beyond endurance, loss beyond recovery.

The black smoke engulfed the world, and was gone: it cleared to show the world as it had been, unchanged except for the extinction of its newest life. Moh stared at the wasted planet for a long second, and saw that the smoke had not dispersed as it had cleared: it had concentrated to a point, a black hole in the datasphere, the pupil of a single eye with a single thought behind it. It looked at him. It saw the signature of the software that ran his window on the system, and dilated. His eyes, in helpless reflex, dilated in response. The flickering lethal morse found an answer in the software that shared his brain.

White-hot needles stabbed through his eyes into his head, into his brain: a new environment for the information viruses, where they replicated, forming snarls of complex logic that entangled him, clanking mechanisms that pursued him from one thought to another, down corridors of memory and forgotten rooms of days.

He heard the rattle of keyboard keys and turned to see Josh working on the CAL system. He reached out to warn him.

There was a splintering crash and an iron arm burst from the screen. Servomechanical fingers grasped his father’s head. The whole metal monster followed the arm out of the ruined screen and reared up on the table, lifting the man by the head. Bits of plastic and glass and circuitry slipped from its head and down its sides; blood dripped from Josh Kohn’s. The hand opened and the body thudded to the ground. The clustered sensors on the thing’s head unit swung, seeking, scanning, but Moh was out of the window crash and running, a man again, but without a gun.

teletrooper ducked through the doorway shielded lenses scanned gun-arm swung to cover

two youths in tracksuits and bandanas followed it into the flat M-16s like toys beside its armaments and they like boys blonded hair and two days’ worth of thin stubble

fucking traitor commie cunt

HEY MAN YOU CAN’T DO THAT

the blue roundel on the brow of its dome the white circle of olive-leaves the line-scored globe

OK YOU CAN TAKE THEM OUT NOW

death is not lived through

He ran up the Coyoacan corridor gasping in the heat and burst into the Old Man’s study. There was no one at the desk. Dust-motes danced in the yellow shaft from the window. He reached out for the paper on the desk. It crumbled as he picked it up, and as he looked around the room he saw the shelves emptying and the books crumble and rot: there was a momentary, overpowering and disgusting whiff of mildewed paper.

Someone behind his shoulder

Jacson, with his ice-pick raised high, and smashing down on

But it is in my brain

It crashed into the desk into the crumbled paper the yellow pamphlets

Death agony tasks transitional program

He ran

Greenbelt streets green grass

and sunlight everywhere

dark now

He saw them as teletroopers, an endless and ever increasing army of marching metal, that hacked into all the systems, all the hard ware and the soft: the neural networks burned, the programs corrupted and degenerated.

He was driven back and back as they pried into, levered apart and splintered memory, intellect, feeling, sense; until the last shard of his shattered mind was broken smaller than the quantum of reflection, and he died.

A single cry came from him, and his head crashed forward and down on to the databoard. Janis leaped to his shoulder, with Van a moment behind her. They lifted him and tilted him back in the seat. Janis stared into his unblinking eyes as she felt his neck for a pulse. There was none.

Van helped her lower him to the floor, then snatched a phone. As soon as he put it down it rang again. He listened, hardly speaking, then turned to where she laboured to save Moh’s life. For minutes they took turns blowing into his lungs, hammering his breastbone. A screeching stop; feet on the stairs. Janis paused, drew back, drew breath. Two paramedics stuck trodes to his head, stabbed a needle into his heart, pumped oxygen into his mouth, slapped shock-pads to his chest.

Then they looked at each other, looked at her and Van, and stood back.

‘I’m sorry,’ one of them said. ‘There’s nothing—’

‘Nothing you can do?’ she whispered.

‘Nothing there. Not a reflex, nothing. The nerves aren’t even carrying the shocks.’ He paused as if appalled at what he had said. ‘What happened to him?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!’

Janis threw herself over the body and howled.

18

The Americans Strike

They told her she had to get out, and she refused. They told her the Black Plan had been lost, the whole momentum and direction of the offensive thrown into disorder, and she nodded. They told her that the revolution was on the edge of defeat, that the regime could recover its balance and strike back at any moment, and she agreed.

She would not leave.

Van and the paramedics left, taking Moh’s body with them. Van had looked almost ashamed to ask, mumbling about ‘practical considerations’, fumbling with a pathetically irrelevant organ-donor card they’d found on him. She knew they wouldn’t give a part of this body to their worst enemies. They would dissect it with remotes in a sealed room, and when they’d learned what they could from its ravaged nerves they’d ash it.

They left the contents of his pockets: a few cards, a knife, a phone; and the helmet, the glades and the gun, tools of his trade. Van paused in the doorway and glanced from the gun to her, and back.

She shook her head fiercely. ‘I wouldn’t do it,’ she said. Perhaps missing the English ambiguity, Van left. She heard racing trucks, and a helicopter taking off. There was a fine research facility at Nairn, the Republic’s provincial capital: that was where it was headed. She might go there someday, find out if it had been the drugs that had killed him. Or the lack of drugs.

MacLennan’s words came back. She hadn’t been a good guard, a good soldier.

Not even a good scientist.

The memories that had eluded her on the hilltop came back now, clear and bitter. She remembered the war. The War of European Integration, when Germany had led a desperate bid to unite the continent under the star-circled banner, snuff out the national conflicts fuelled by US/UN meddling and create a counterweight to the New World Order.

Just a lass, not really understanding. The stifling heat of the Metro shelter had made her gasp and cry. Her mother shouted at her for walking over the bedding spread on the platforms. The three-metre-high screens curved to the subway walls showed the progress of the war.

They weren’t in this war: they were neutral; and yet British soldiers were fighting in it. Some of the channels spoke as if Britain itself were fighting. It was confusing and terrifying, especially as some people down in the shelter cheered when British soldiers appeared while others shouted with anger.

Her mother tried to explain. ‘It’s the King’s men who are in the war, love, not us. But the King’s government has a seat at the UN—’

She paused, not sure if Janis had understood. The girl nodded firmly. ‘The den of thieves and slaves,’ she said.

‘That’s right. And they’re fighting against the Germans on the side of the UN, that really means the Americans, so that when the war’s over the Americans will help the King and all his men to come back here and rule us again, or the Germans will attack us before the war’s over and then we’ll be defeated another way.’

She had been playing in one of the side corridors when she heard a roar of voices, and rushed to the subway platform to look at the screens and take in the excited words. Germany had stopped fighting. The war was over. She didn’t stop to see her parents; she didn’t see or hear them shove through through the crowds and call after her as she turned to race up the stationary escalators.

She had known only what was over, not what was beginning. She didn’t know that Berlin and Frankfurt had been incinerated in Israel’s last favour for its old protector. She didn’t know that this would be the pretext the US needed to make itself the arbiter of the planet. Nothing her parents had told her, nothing even in the political-education classes, could have prepared her for the next six days: the bombers roaming the undefended skies, the pillaging, rampaging assault of the US/UN’s illiterate conscripts and barbarian levies, the teletroopers punching through walls and crushing the defenders in steel fists, the demoralized crowds cheering peace and surrender and Restoration, turning on the radical regime that they blamed for their plight, joining in the witch-hunts and roundups and lynchings.

She didn’t know that the wind was from the east and that the rain washing away her sweat and stink was laden with fission products from the earlier obliteration of Kiev and Baku. Until her frantic mother dragged her back into the shelter she celebrated the peace.

Jordan and Cat walked hand in hand along the centre of Blackstock Road, in the middle of the crowd. They were not the only ones carrying weapons, and in other ways, too, their appearance was inconspicuous. It was a safe bet that no one here had ever seen Jordan on cable television. The people around them were Beulah City inhabitants: a very different section of the population from those who had come in at the northern border. They were machine-minders, waiters and waitresses, domestic servants, vehicle mechanics, drivers, warehousemen, storekeepers, street-cleaners, porters, nurses…Jordan had never realized before how vast and diverse was the invisible army of men and women whose labour was too cheap or too complicated to automate, but which made the kind of work he was familiar with possible.

‘That’s why the offices were empty,’ Cat said. ‘They were the ones who were on strike!’

They were probably all Christians. They carried signs hand-lettered with biblical texts, the lines about oppression and liberty and the poor and the rich and the weak and the powerful that BC’s preachers glossed over. They sang the discomfiting, awkward hymns and psalms seldom selected for the congregations.

‘Bash out de brains of de babies of Babylon,’ Cat hummed, gleefully paraphrasing, until Jordan nudged her to stop.

The thought that there were thousands of people in Beulah City who felt suffocated under the tutelage of the Elders, cheated in their dealings with their employers by the master-servant regulations, tormented by guilt and frustration, sceptical about the interpretations of scripture foisted on them (as if the interpretations themselves were anything but the opinions of men), angered at how conveniently God was on the dominant side of every relationship…Jordan found it almost unbearably exciting.

And also shaming, because it had never occurred to him at all.

‘It feels strange to be marching along like this,’ Cat said. Jordan smiled at her shining eyes.

‘I thought you’d been on a lot of demonstrations.’

‘Oh, sure, but first I used to be selling papers, later I’d be running up and down, walking backwards with a loud-hailer, covering the side-streets with a gun.’ She laughed. ‘Come to think of it, I’ve never just been part of the masses before.’

‘Perhaps we shouldn’t be just marching along,’ Jordan worried aloud. ‘Maybe we should be doing these things.’

Cat hissed quietly. When he glanced at her she flicked her gaze from side to side. He started looking out of the corners of his eyes himself, and noticed that, every ten metres or so along the sides of the march, sharp-eyed, hard-faced kids were walking. They’d vary their pace, faster or slower than the crowd, sometimes walking backwards, craning their necks; counting heads, meeting eyes. The Reds, the kids, the cadres.

‘This is organized?’ he said. The horizon all around was joined to the sky by loose black threads. Every few seconds another distant explosion shook the air. Small-arms fire crackled on the edge of hearing. ‘Whose idea was it, walking into a war zone?’

‘It’ll work,’ Cat said. ‘The fighting’s concentrated.’

‘For now.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Cat said. Her tone belied her advice.

Past Highbury Fields, down Upper Street. As they passed on their left the large, old pillared building which the Elders used as administrative offices the songs trailed off and people started shouting. The discordant yells were suddenly swamped by all the kids, the cadres, calling out at once.

‘Settle for what? DEMOCRACY! Restore it when? NOW!’

They varied it with FREE – DOM! and EQUAL RIGHTS! After a minute it caught on, leaving some of the cadres free to argue desperately with those in the crowd who were pushing out, trying to start a charge up the steps. Jordan saw them pointing at the doorways and balconies, and noticed with a shock the black muzzles pointing back.

‘Time to move up,’ Cat said. She tugged his hand. He followed as she expertly threaded her way through the march. Her high, clear voice floated back snatches of whatever the group they happened to be moving through was singing. ‘“So is our soul set free”…’scuse me ma’am…“thus escapèd we”…come on, Jordan.’

At the end of Islington High Street (the couple of hundred metres of office blocks at the foot of Upper Street) was the southern boundary of Beulah City, known derisively from the other side of it as Angel Gate. The checkpoint barriers were down, and a score of Warriors were spaced out across the road. They held tear-gas launchers pointing upwards and had submachine-guns slung on their shoulders. Jordan, by now in the front rank, couldn’t see any of the cadres – in fact, the front rank were almost all women. Cat squeezed his hand.

The crowd stopped about forty metres short of the cops. One of them stepped forward with a loud-hailer.

‘THEECE EECE EN EELLEEGAL GETHEREENG—’

The loud-hailer had not the volume to match the shout of fury and disgust from the crowd. Jordan rolled his eyes upward. Thank you, God. They couldn’t have made a worse choice. Exiles from South Africa were popular with the Warriors, and with nobody else.

Another officer hastily took the mike and continued.

‘I MUST ASK YOU TO DISPERSE! RETURN TO YOUR HOMES!’

‘Go home, ya bums, go home,’ the women sang back at them. Thousands of voices behind took up the chant with enthusiasm. Jordan wondered wildly where they could have heard it before, until he remembered that one of Beulah City’s preaching stadia had once been a football ground.

‘THIS IS A NATIONAL EMERGENCY!’

‘We shall not, we shall not, we shall not be moved!’

‘The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!’ Oh, so there were cadres up here: female cadres. That chant didn’t get taken up, probably because nobody could believe it.

Jordan heard distant, rhythmic shouting from the other side of the boundary. Behind the Warriors’ heads he saw the banners, red flags and tricolours of another demonstration passing along City Road, swinging down into Pentonville Road.

He climbed on to a telecom box and stared. The crowds were less than a hundred metres apart; he could make out faces turning to look and then turning away. The shouts he heard didn’t sound friendly. Baffled, Jordan looked back over the crowd he was with and saw it as if from the outside: a forest of weird black-lettered slogans on white sheets and placards, crosses waving here and there. Like a mob of religious nutcases. He caught the eye of a woman who seemed to know what was going on, and mimed a walkie-talkie. She shook her head and spread her hands.

‘The workers! United! Shall never be defeated!’

That one too fizzled out, and certainly couldn’t have carried across the barrier. The Warrior boomed on about REBELS and COMMUNISTS. Jordan looked down at Cat. She reached out for something that was being passed from hand to hand, and passed it up to him. A loud-hailer, as if this were what he wanted.

‘Weren’t the cadres ready for this?’ he asked. Cat shook her head.

‘Expected the Warriors to be busy somewhere else. Drop didn’t come off. Comms are going haywire.’

‘Oh, shit! There’s got to be something—’ He squatted down, one eye on the wavering crowd, and said, ‘Cat! Think! Is there some slogan or song or something that sounds religious enough for this lot but, you know, would let the others know we’re on their side?’

Cat frowned up at him and then broke into a huge smile. She held out a hand to him and he tried to haul her up, but she tugged and he jumped down. ‘Hold the hailer high,’ she said, and took the mike. ‘Don’t look back.’ She began to walk backwards, step by deliberate step, beckoning with one hand to the women at the front of the crowd. Jordan walked beside her, holding the hailing horn over his head.

‘Here goes nothing,’ she said, and switched on the mike.

‘And did those feet in ancient time…’

She paused for a moment, making a lifting gesture until the second line was taken up:

‘WALK UPON ENGLAND’S MOUNTAINS GREEN?’

The crowd began to move forward. The voices were distorted, echoing between the buildings, but the tune was unmistakable and the gathering numbers joining in drowned the amplified squawking that got closer and closer to their backs. By the time they reached the DARK SATANIC MILLS Jordan could hear other voices from behind, another multitude taking up the lines of England’s anthem, when it had been a state of the United Republic.

Then there was a bang at his back. His whole body contracted in a reflex jolt that brought his head down and his feet up off the ground. At the same moment something whooshed above him. As his feet jarred back down he saw a burst of smoke between two ranks about twenty metres from the front. People around it scattered. Some fell, but scrambled to their feet and ran, hands to their mouths. An acrid whiff reached his nostrils. For a couple of seconds his lungs felt as if he’d inhaled acid. Through a wretched, racking cough he heard more bangs. Black tumbling shapes scythed the air overhead. He saw a woman raise an arm to fend one off, stagger back as a length of planking clattered to the street. She walked on for a few paces, then sagged and was grabbed by the woman next to her. Somebody else snatched up the wood and hurled it back. Jordan glanced over his shoulder and saw that most of the missiles – smashed bits of barrier, stones, placards, cans – were falling on the Warriors from both sides, but it was the stray shots that were doing all the damage: it wasn’t the marchers who had armour. Cat kept right on singing, her voice thin and hoarse.

Two Warriors charged past him and ploughed into the front of the crowd, lashing out with long truncheons. In a moment all the people seemed to be running, in different directions. Then, as if through clearing smoke, Jordan saw that nearly everybody he could see had a hand-gun and was raising it but not bringing it to bear. Jordan dropped the hailer and turned to Cat. Her red-eyed, tear-streaked, mucus-slimed face barely registered surprise as he caught her by the shoulder and pulled her down with him. The pistol she’d given him was in his hand. He had no idea how to use it.

He saw the now ragged line of Warriors, the wreckage of the border barrier a few metres ahead across a stone-strewn gap, and other weapons brandished by the other crowd. Still, silent seconds passed. A Warrior officer waved his arms, crossing and uncrossing them above his head. Warriors who’d run into the crowds were propelled out of them. With slow and cautious steps all the Warriors retreated to the sides of the street.

Cat stood up and Jordan followed, then had to run to keep up as everybody else moved forward and the two crowds became one. There was an overwhelming, confusing moment of handshakes and hugs, of swaying and shouting, and then they all started walking forward, into Pentonville Road. The song was taken up again. BRING ME MY ARROWS OF DESIRE. Jordan looked sideways at Cat, who for some reason had chosen that moment to look at him.

The streets from Islington to Marybone, to Primrose Hill and St John’s Wood, were builded over with pillars of gold, and there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.

Janis watched the uprising on television, as she had watched the war.

The crowds were moving now, partly refugees from the fighting that had reached the suburbs, partly demonstrators taking the fight to the centre. ANR and Left Alliance agitators laboured to turn the one into the other. Along Bayswater and Whitechapel and Gray’s Inn Road they converged, and merged. Across the city, and across all the other cities that seemed to be one city as she flicked from channel to channel, the walls were coming down, the divided communities breaking through and discovering that they were one people. The front ranks of soldiers tore insignia off, surrendered rifles. The harder corps backed off, taking up new positions or vanishing into obscure doorways while the crowds ran past them.

And elsewhere, outside the cities, shown on shaky cameras from cover, from quickly detected and obliterated ’motes, other forces were beginning to move. The barb, alerted like sharks to the smell of blood.

Even from here she could see it wasn’t over, that nothing had been settled yet. But the crowds thought it was over, cheering, splashing in fountains, ransacking offices, pulling down statues and dancing in the streets.

Janis watched the crowds, her face wet, remembering herself thinking it was all over and dancing in the street, dancing in the hard rain.

This time she knew what to expect. She systematically went through the house, packing what portable and non-perishable food she found. Without sentiment she divided the contents of Moh’s baggage and hers, ending up with a single backpack whose priority content was ammo. She kept one eye on the televisions – showing squares and streets still crowded in the dusk, euphoria giving way to tension and determination – and scanned the screen of the gun, adjusting the sights to her size, committing its protocols to memory.

She looked into its deep storage, as Moh had done when he’d first checked it out. What she saw was incomprehensible, a blurred flicker of motion; definitely not, as he’d described it, passive data storage. She backed out quickly.

The phone beeped. She thumbed the receiver. Snow and lines appeared, then the machine cycled through backup systems. When the image stabilized it was of Van’s face. The quality was worse than she’d seen in years.

‘Hello, Janis. Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine. Now. For now. How are things with you?’

Van grimaced. ‘Complicated. The offensive has been aborted, but our unreliable allies in the Left Alliance have triggered a civilian uprising, which we are trying to direct. There are grave dangers, because we have not annihilated the key enemy units. They are holding off from decisive engagement, expecting UN intervention at any moment. So are we. The situation in Britain has gone right to the top of all agendas. Leave the settlement as soon as you’re ready. The first thing they’ll do is hit known ANR camps.’

‘This is an ANR camp?’

‘No, it’s an undefended civilian settlement. That’s why we evacuated it.’

‘Oh.’ Yes, that was the thing to do when you expected to be fighting the US/UN. Hurry the civilians out of civilian areas, carry the wounded out of anything with a Red Cross on it.

‘Dr Van.’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you tell me – have you found out anything yet?’

Van nodded, his face looking ancient. ‘I can tell you now. The whole comm network is compromised; we have nothing to lose. This afternoon Donovan’s organization launched a massive virus attack. It was apparently targeted on the Watchmaker AIS. If any of them remain they are in isolated hardware. That was when we lost our system, what you call the Black Plan. And Dissembler.’ He shrugged. ‘They may have been destroyed at the same time. And it would seem likely that—’

‘You’re telling me he was killed by a computer virus?’ The monstrous comedy of it fought in her eyes and throat.

‘I know,’ Van said, ‘it seems grotesque. At some level I think we didn’t believe that what Kohn reported was really happening. But I’ve seen the EMGs of his synapses, and they are…unique. Even in my experience.’

A slight undertone of his voice brought the thought to mind that there were more monstrous deaths than this, worse and weirder ways to go. Janis took a deep breath.

‘I’m ready,’ she said.

She picked up the gun.

Van told her where to find directions to the nearest deep shelter, and she walked that night for kilometres along dark roads. At a hydroelectric power station she stopped and called out the passwords, and a hand came out of the darkness and guided her inside a mountain. In the morning she saw outside on the window screens, and was absurdly reassured to see that this mountain and all the other hills about it were patterned with varied shades of red-brown and yellow and faded green, like camouflage.

Later that morning she was pulled excitedly to watch a replay of an incident that had just happened. A fighter-bomber flashed along the glen, then exploded in an airburst that turned the screen white. As the explosion faded they saw the fireball rolling and tumbling and shedding wreckage for several kilometres before everything hit the ground, setting heather alight.

They replayed it lots of times, always with the same cheers. She hoped the girl in the observation post had kept her head down and her eyes shut.

She never learned how many people lived inside that mountain. Hundreds. The fighters were somewhere else; their absence made little difference to the structure of the population here – there were young men and women as well as old, and there were parents who worried about children who were with the fighters.

The screens that showed the news were at first jammed. As the communities had come together the government had extended what grip it could. It could not hide the mounting waves of demonstrations and strikes that broke against it, or the harassment of its forces by units of the ANR, now fallen back to guerilla fighting but on a far wider scale than before the offensive.

The US President announced a new levy of conscription.

The censorship and jamming stopped. There was talk of a new constitution, a revision of the Settlement. A day later there was talk about the revolution, as if it had already happened. They offered a New Kingdom.

‘I don’t go much for intuition,’ Jordan said, ‘but I’ve got a real bad feeling about this.’

It was the fourth day since the faltering offensive had been taken up and taken over by the rising crowds, and the biggest demonstration yet, overflowing Trafalgar Square. The Hanoverian troops were nowhere to be seen, but everyone knew where they were. Invisible lines were not crossed.

The sky was a red shout above the black streets. News-hawks circled overhead, their mikes and lenses and pheromone detectors out like vibrissae, alert for the rumour, the glance, the smell of fear. Jordan and Cat sat on the steps of the National Gallery, drinking coffee from styrofoam cups and muching doner kebabs. (Thirty-five marks: the petty bourgeoisie had thrown itself into the revolution in its own inimitable way.)

‘I know what you mean,’ Cat said. ‘It’s intended. The whole City of Westminster is intended to make you feel like that. Nothing but shops and offices and official buildings and statues. It all belongs to capital or the state. No, it’s more than that. It’s ornate, gross. Centuries of surplus value stored up like fat. This time I hope we level the place.’

‘Well, that’s part of it,’ Jordan said, gazing over the knots of arguing people that filled the square. ‘Not all. We seem to have all this power, the government’s on the run, but we haven’t won.’

‘Damn right we haven’t,’ Cat said. ‘That’s why we’re here. We’re gonna keep coming here until the Hanoverians come out of their bunkers and barracks with their hands up, or come out shooting.’

‘At least some of us will be shooting back.’

Cat looked at him. ‘Not for long.’ She leaned back against the stone, closed her eyes and began to sing as if to herself:

Rise up, all foes of intervention,

rise up, all those who would be free!

Don’t trust the state and its intentions

we ourselves must win our liberty!

He didn’t know the song, but he recognized it with a shiver down his spine: he’d heard it as background noise on history tapes of other demonstrations, in other squares, other cities – Seoul and São Paulo, Moscow and Jo’burg and Berlin. After it the gas-shells would cough, the rifles speak, the bullets sing.

so now we face the final showdown

for the skies and the streets of Earth.

What though they start the fatal countdown?

There are better worlds in birth!

So comrades come rally

and the last fight let us—

Something had happened. A gasp, a whisper, a rumour spread through the crowd in visible shockwaves. Cat broke off singing and sat up, one hand on her ear. She turned and pressed his ear, too, against the tiny speaker. He heard the news of the century’s turning-point while leaning on her cheek with her hair across his face.

America was on strike from coast to coast.

Cat had such a look of triumph that it was as if she’d pulled the whole thing off herself. ‘We always knew this would happen!’ she said. ‘“The West shall rise again” – remember? The American workers have finally told the imperialists to shove it! Yeah, man! Yee fucking hah!’ She jumped to her feet and cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled: ‘US! UN! Remember the West shall rise again! Vive la quatrième internationale!’

A few metres away from them an old man from the Beulah City contingent burst into speech, leaning back and looking upwards at the news-hawks, his fists raised above his head. ‘“Sit thou silent, and get thee into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans: for thou shalt no more be called, The lady of kingdoms. Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee!”’

He wandered off through the crowd, still shouting imprecations.

‘What’s all that about?’ Cat asked. Jordan grinned at the joy and puzzlement on her face.

‘Babylon is fallen,’ he said.

‘Does that mean we’ve won?’ Janis asked, when the dangerous driving and the firing into the air had stopped. The four men who shared with her the front seat of the truck all shouted ‘Yes!’ or ‘No!’, and then laughed. As soon as the news had come through she had been told to leave the shelter. The small convoy had picked her up (gun on the ground, one hand on her head, the other with a thumb stuck out) at the Strathcarron junction. They were heading south at a speed that forced her to look into the far distance or at the faces of her companions – anywhere but at the road.

‘That’s your answer for you,’ said the man between her and the door. Donald Patel had an accent like MacLennan’s and it seemed incongruous with his delicate dark features. ‘It means the Americans are not coming, that’s for sure. They won’t be seeing much of the rocket’s red glare over there for a while.’ More laughter.

After half an hour news came through that His Majesty’s Government had decided to continue the struggle against terrorism from exile. A new voice interrupted, announcing that the United Republic had been restored, and a provisional government established. The Hanoverian forces on the ground, bidding to negotiate an end to the conflict short of actual surrender, were politely informed this was not an option.

Janis realized, as the trucks lurched and swayed towards Glasgow and the traffic got heavier all the time, that the men’s jubilation at the victory of the Republic was not that of soldiers being demobilized. Most of the people on the road had just been mobilized. They were going to war. And she wouldn’t be waving them a cheery goodbye and catching the red-eye to Heathrow.

At Buchanan Street Bus Station the convoy stopped. They all piled out and were pointed to a huge marquee where she was stamped and registered and sworn in again, stripped and showered and tagged. She was a soldier.

The enemy was described by her unit’s political officer: ‘It’s not so much the Hanoverian remnants we have to worry about. It’s all the Free State rabble that flourished under their protection. The eco-terrorists, the cultist mini-states, the backyard separatists and sandpit socialists who betrayed the Republic the first time. The fake left who preferred having their own petty kingdoms to fighting their corner in a democracy. They all went along with the Restoration Settlement and only made noises when our people were surviving like hunted beasts. Now they’re coming out of their holes to have a go at carving a bigger chunk for themselves. They think the Republic is weaker than the Kingdom. Our job is to make them think again. They can have any way of life they want, run their communities as they see fit, but they can’t keep other folk out with guns or use guns to expand their territories. They can even keep their guns, but it’s going to be our guns on the street.’

All the species of cranks and creeps, she thought. This was her war.

19

Dissembler

On high moorlands and city streets, in gutted refineries and abandoned service areas, she fought through the hot autumn and bitter winter. Days of storm alternated with calm, chill silences when the smoke of burning villages rose straight into a pale blue sky. She crawled through mud and water, bracken and barbed wire.

She learned about what was going on out in the world in snatches from television and radio. With Dissembler out of action, all the programs that ran on it, most importantly DoorWays™, were useless. The effect on communications was convulsive, and not altogether unwelcome: it was primarily administrative and military machines that were crippled. Turks and Russians fought inconclusively on the Bulgarian front; the Sheenisov (the name had caught on, become anglicized) reached Ulan Bator; a gang of asteroid miners declared themselves the Republic of New South Yorkshire. The US Government responded to the strikes and riots by pulling out of the UN and calling a Constitutional Convention. Several of the States seceded in advance, prompting commentators to remark that the US was rapidly becoming the world’s second Former Union: the FU2. The UN battlesats, starved by a rock-solid space-workers’ boycott, threatened selected targets with laser weapons. One of the lunar magnapult combines gave them a short lesson in orbital mechanics, and the threat passed.

And that was the last of the United Nations. Without the US to underpin it, there could be no US/UN. Space Defense became Earth Defense, its weapons turned outwards to face threats from nature, not from man. The Yanks became Americans again, and enthusiastically set about investigating and purging and denouncing and testifying.

Janis saw Jordan’s face one day, on a flickering television in an empty shop: some soundbite interview, over in seconds. She felt a pang of guilt, and that evening sat down and wrote a letter to him. He must know already that Moh was dead; the ANR was punctilious about these things. She knew, without ever having been told, that she should not tell anyone how Moh had died. It didn’t leave much to say, but she felt better for having said it.

She made friends, and lost some.

The Republic made enemies faster than it destroyed them.

Goddess, she thought, this place stinks.

It was a village of a few score people, in a green dell in the Lake District. Its generators ran on methane – fart-fuel, her comrades called it – and on scavenged solar cells. The houses were tar-paper and corrugated iron and animal hide. The people lived by farming and hunting and stealing, and didn’t wash.

Janis stood in the mud at the centre of the village, the rifle on her hip, turning and scanning. A few bodies sprawled among the houses. The thirteen surviving menfolk sat in the mud, their hands over their heads. Their rifles and crossbows and knives were stacked well out of their reach. About thirty ANR soldiers stood guard or went through the houses, throwing stuff out: clothes, weapons, food, furnishings. They had the look of people sifting through a nauseating heap of garbage. The women and children stood in the eaves of the unwalled shelter they called the long house. Rain dripped off it on to their matted hair, left runnels of white on their closed faces. If they took a step into the shelter or away from the run-off a snarl or a kick sent them back.

The air was filled with the whining of dogs muzzled with twisted wire, leashed by ropes held by a couple of ANR soldiers, and every so often by the scream of another dog as it was skewered on a long roughly sharpened spike driven at an angle into a low bank of ground. Six, so far. Five to go.

The rain rattled off a black body-bag in the back of a humvee at the entrance to the village, near the tree where they’d found the body: a captured soldier hanging by the ankles, and as the dogs had left it.

Three to go.

A small boy yelled out as that dog was spiked. He broke away from the grip of a woman’s hand on his shoulder and dashed forward. The line was within a second of breaking after him. Janis swung the gun round. It checked her hand as if it had struck a solid obstacle, and fired a single shot. The boy screamed and fell down in the mud. Janis felt her heart stop. The boy picked himself up and ran over to the woman.

The last dog writhed on the spike. The first had not yet died.

‘Nobody found their tongue yet?’ The unit’s leader, a small, mild-mannered, middle-aged man called Wills, looked around like a schoolteacher.

Silence.

‘Whose idea was it?’

Silence, and falling rain.

Wills turned to Janis.

‘Get a couple of guys to make another spike,’ he said, loud enough to be overhead. He looked over the line of bedraggled women and children as he spoke.

No, said a voice in Janis’s phones, you can’t do that! You can’t even threaten that.

It was Moh’s voice. She heard her own voice say to Wills, not loud enough for anyone else to hear: ‘No. You can’t do that! You can’t even threaten that.’

Wills’s eyes narrowed behind his rain-spattered glades.

‘Are you threatening me, citizen?’

‘No, I’m—’ She realized the gun had turned with her body, and was pointing straight at Wills. By now, not doing that sort of thing had become a reflex to her. She lowered the muzzle. ‘Sorry, Wills,’ she said. ‘You know we can’t do – what you suggested. Even to say it takes us near—’ She moved an open, stiff hand up and down: an edge.

‘We’ve got to do something,’ Wills said. ‘If we don’t—’

‘Do what we’re supposed to do,’ Janis snapped. ‘Call in a chopper, vac the barbarians out and trash the place.’

‘Not enough, comrade, not for the comrades.’ Wills tipped his head back very slightly. Janis knew he was right. The lads and lasses wanted revenge. If they didn’t get it, a provoked incident and an itchy trigger might give them a slaughter to remember.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘We trash the place first, let the barb watch it, then vac them.’

Wills looked at her for a moment, then nodded and smiled as if they’d been having a friendly discussion, and gave the order. The citizen-soldiers whooped, the barbarians wept as the houses went up in flames around them. More steam than smoke rose to meet the evacuation chopper. Another batch of bawling orphans and sullen new citizens sent to six months in the resettlement camps, and then a life in the shanty-towns. It happened to every village that didn’t join up with the Republic’s militia.

They called it the shake and vac.

That night they made camp in a village of proper houses, built of stone, whose street was bypassed by the main road. It was the sort of place that had always been part of the Kingdom, and had rallied, however reluctantly, to the Republic as a protection against the barb. The unit had no intention of alienating the inhabitants by billeting in their houses, and settled in an old building that had once been a local primary school. It had a good high wall around it, and a kitchen and canteen that could be used – even, to their delight, showers that worked.

Wills brought his tray of dinner to the table where Janis sat with three other soldiers. Most of the light in the canteen was the glow from the kitchen at the far end of it. They all had their glades on. The false colours of the food were unappetizing, but the smell overrode that. They ate quickly, from habit.

After a while Wills said, ‘You were right, you know, Taine.’

She looked up, wiping her plate with bread. ‘I know.’

Political discussion was free in this army. Janis hadn’t felt the need to take part in any until now. She was still reluctant, unwilling to take her mind away from the memory of that shocking, familiar voice. But it was not to be avoided – it was part of what the memory meant.

‘Why do we have to do it?’ she said. ‘Don’t think I’m soft. I got good reason to despise these people. But why can’t we just leave the barb alone if they leave us alone? Why do we have to force them to take sides when most of them will choose the other side?’

‘It’s civil war,’ Wills said. ‘There’s no neutrality. They think the same way. What harm had that poor bastard done to them?’

Janis pushed her plate away. There was still some meat on it. She lit a cigarette. Nearly all the comrades smoked. She’d accepted one cigarette, once, in a tense moment, and then another…Moh had been right about life-expectancy.

‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘maybe he tried to make them take sides, and they saw that as harm.’

The others at the table shifted. She could hear the quiet rattle and clink of gear. Somebody snorted.

‘You’re something of a new citizen yourself, aren’t you, Taine?’ Wills said in a low voice.

The gun was solid and heavy between her feet. Silence rippled outwards across the room.

She looked at Wills, and saw someone standing behind him. Another cadre, she thought, come swiftly to calm the situation. She glanced away from Wills to see who it was.

Moh’s mocking eyes looked back at her, his slyly smiling lips mouthed the single word ‘Remember’, and then no one was there. She felt the tiny hairs on her face and neck prickle, vestigial response to a glacial chill.

Remember.

‘Civis Britannicus sum,’ she said. She spread her hands, keeping them in plain sight, relaxed except for the fingers that held her cigarette: she saw the small smoke-rings rise from their trembling. ‘You’re right, Wills, I don’t know what it was like all these years. I didn’t feel the Betrayal like some of you.’ She leaned back and drew again on her cigarette. ‘I remember a man who did.’ She smiled as she said it, shaking inside.

Wills nodded. ‘All right, Taine. Uncalled-for.’ She knew that for him this counted as a deep apology. He looked at her as if he knew what she was talking about. ‘All been there, what?’ He looked around the table. ‘Gens una sumus.’

Later somebody found a dusty guitar in a cupboard and carried it high into the canteen, and they sang songs from the war and the revolution, songs of their own Republic and of others, “Bandiera Rossa” and “Alba” and “The Men Behind the Wire” and “The Patriot Game”.

Janis sang along, holding the rifle across her lap like the man held the guitar. She looked at all the faces in the dim light, as if looking for another face, and thought she saw it.

That night she lay awake until fatigue overcame her rage and grief.

Several times over the next days she saw him again, and heard him: a yell of warning, a mutter of advice, a pattern of light and shadow under trees.

Sometimes clear, solid-looking, out in the open.

She did not believe this was happening. Not to her. She told herself, again and again, that it was the strain of the fighting. It was not her sanity that was strained, not her philosophy that was flawed. Only her perceptions were at fault, her eyes too accustomed to seeking out hidden shapes.

A day came when she saw him out of the corner of her eye, striding along beside her.

‘Go away,’ she said.

He went away. At the next resting-place she sat a few metres from the others and took the glades off to wipe her eyes. When she put them back on he was standing in front of her, looking down at her with concern.

‘Janis, let me talk to you.’

‘Oh, Moh!’ It was not fair to come back like that.

‘I’m not Moh,’ he said sadly.

‘Then who the hell are you?’

He smiled and got down beside her and lay on his side, facing her. She reached out and her hand went through him. She beat the grass and wept, and took the glades off. He was no longer there, but when she replaced them again he returned.

‘Aha,’ she said.

‘Don’t let anyone see you talking to yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ll hear you just as well if you subvocalize.’

She turned and lay face-down on the grass, murmuring, sometimes glancing sideways to reassure herself that he was still with her. Her heart hammered with a wild hope.

‘You’re in the gun, aren’t you? Did you – did you upload into it?’

‘I’m in the gun,’ he said. ‘But I’m not Moh. I’m the AI in the gun. I…found myself…in the gun just after Moh died. I have memories of Moh, I have routines to imitate him perfectly – his voice, his appearance.’ He chuckled wickedly. ‘And in other ways, with the right equipment. The gun had a huge amount of stored information about Moh, and I can use it to project a – a persona. But don’t kid yourself, Janis, I’m not even his ghost.’

‘You’re his fetch.’

‘You could say that.’

She chewed a blade of grass and thought about how Moh had talked to the gun, how he had talked about the gun. The gun had sometimes acted independently, unpredictably. A mind of its own, awakening in the bolted-on hardware and pirated software, in conversation with a man, interacting with…

‘The Watchmaker!’ she said. ‘That’s where you got the awareness from.’ And in that case, indirectly, from Moh.

Moh’s image frowned. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Perhaps it came from Moh himself.’ And in that case…

‘Oh, Janis, I know why you’re doing this, but please, don’t. Moh is dead.’

‘And you’re alive.’

‘So it would seem.’

‘Son of a gun.’ She looked at him and smiled. ‘And you know more about him than I do. So maybe more of him has survived than he ever expected. “Death is not lived through.”’

The fetch was silent for a moment. ‘I should know.’

Her comrades were getting ready to move off again.

‘What are we going to do now?’ Janis whispered.

‘Next place you can find a comms port,’ the fetch said, ‘jack me in.’

She stared, seeing for the first time the shadowy, unreal quality of the image of the fetch, for all its apparent solidity. ‘What about Donovan’s viruses? Aren’t you vulnerable to them?’

‘Not any more,’ the fetch said. ‘The Kalashnikov firmware protected me from them in the first instance, and I have not been idle. We have a score to settle with Donovan.’

‘Oh yes,’ Janis said. She felt a murderous, barbarous, bloodthirsty joy. ‘Yes. We do.’

Two days later the chance came, in an office block with all its windows out but with its power still functioning, its communications intact. Her unit occupied and guarded it, and as soon as her watch was over, at sunset when she was supposed to be resting, she climbed up a few floors. Glass crunched underfoot in the corridors, sodden carpet squelched in the open-plan office. Desks, terminals, modems, ports. Postcards, notices, family holos and silly mottoes on the desks; revolting green moulds growing out of coffee mugs. Somewhere a fridge hummed, but it had long since lost its battle against decay. She lit a cigarette to smother the stink and spread her parka on a soggy swivel chair. She laid the gun in front of her on the desk, unspooled the cable thread and jacked in. A flicker of interface interference, then everything became clear.

Moh’s face appeared in her glades, drawn in lines of grey light on a darker background.

‘Ready?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is going to be scary. You don’t have to come along.’

‘I want to see it.’

‘OK. Remember, nothing can happen to you. Your mind is safe.’

She bared her teeth in the gloom, wondering if the mind in the machine could see her. Probably: a tiny camera lens was mounted on the desk screen.

‘I’ll take your word for it, gun.’

‘OK. Let’s go.’

It was as if he turned away, and she followed. Utter disorientation: a fall, a rush along corridors, out into open space, a virtual landscape of rocky hills and city blocks with all their windows dead. They moved like a stealth fighter, racing shadows.

A terribly narrow, suffocating, stretched-out space. The words fat pipe passed uncomprehended across the surface of her mind. The microseconds dragged on and on.

And then they were out – and inside something else, a huge space like the inside of a mind. Struggling to break through barriers, fighting for control.

Taking control. It came to her as a sensation in the muscles, as if she controlled many limbs, and in her mind, as if she saw with many eyes.

Eyes that scanned a sea, and other senses that reached into space with feathery fingers, and eyes that looked within at corridors and bulkheads and berths and holds and galleys.

And – concentrating now, focusing, zeroing in – she looked on a control room filled with screens and machines, servers and overhead rails with cranes and robot arms. Two men were in it, completely dwarfed by the machinery around them. One of the men – her view zoomed sickeningly close to his oblivious, horrible face – was the white Man In Black who’d come to her lab, who’d fought them in the service area. So this was where he’d ended up! After his entire organization had been smashed, disbanded, disgraced, datagated to hell and back, he’d hidden out, skulking here with…

The second man in the room was Donovan.

Almost, she found him hard to hate.

He looked up, startled as a crane clattered into motion. Before he could shout a warning, it happened.

It was not clear to Janis if it was a thing she did, a thing she willed, or something that happened while she watched, terrified and exultant, from behind other eyes.

The crane’s arm swung. Its manipulator caught the Man In Black by the skull and lifted him with a cranial crunch and a vertebral snap and slung him against a wall of screens that splintered and showered down on him as he crashed on to the deck.

She looked into the face of a man with long white hair and a long white beard. An almost gentle, almost saintly, almost patriarchal face, aged and wizened and tough, and almost hard to hate. He was looking around wildly, and from every screen that he saw – and Janis saw – the implacable face of Moh Kohn glared gloating back.

‘You’re dead!’ She heard the words Donovan mouthed, amplified and echoing back at him.

‘Yes, Moh Kohn is dead, Donovan,’ and she did not know if she or the fetch were saying it.

Donovan scrabbled at a databoard. The screens wavered and a sharp pain shot through Janis’s head, a red-hot migraine sword. She stumbled in red mist.

There was a place where the mist thinned, a grey patch like the inside of a brain. She focused on that and thought of the shapes of molecules, the chemistry of memory, the equations of desire, the work of Luria, the regularity of numbers…

And then she came through, and it was all clear again, the cool grey lines on the screens shaping the words they spoke. ‘You have viruses, but I have resistance, and I am alive, and you—’

All the arms moved and the chains swung and the manipulators reached and grasped.

‘—are dead.’

They roamed the rig for seconds on end, as the fetch stripped out its progams, soaked up its secrets. Janis was sure it was her decision to sound the alarm systems, to allow an hour’s delay on the demon programs they left in its arsenals.

They fled through the fat pipe, the narrow space, and then they were out, flying again. The rocky hills turned green, the city blocks lit up one by one, faster and faster until the light could be seen all the way around the earth. She did not think it strange that she could see through the earth.

And now she was sitting again at the desk, as of course she had been all along. The fetch faced her, no longer an outline but a full-colour image, even more shockingly real than the one she usually saw in the glades.

It smiled.

He smiled, and she smiled back.

She took the glades off, and the image was still there – on the desk screen in front of her. She closed her eyes and shook her head, looking at the mocking grin. The face disappeared and was replaced by an image that she hadn’t seen for months, the familiar logo of DoorWays™ – but subtly altered: in tiny print beneath it were the words:

Dissembler 2.0

A New Release

There was a moment when everything changed.

Jordan had the comms room more or less to himself these days. The telepresence exoskeleton from which Mary had worked around the world hung empty and unused. The datagloves gathered dust, and the Glavkom VR kit was good for nothing much but word-processing. As at this moment, when Jordan was laboriously hacking out an article for a newspaper in Beulah City. Even with the new press freedom there, it was hard to convince these people that tolerance was anything but weakness, pluralism anything but chaos; he was trying to put the point across in language they’d understand. “The Repentence of Nineveh”, he was going to call it, alluding to a frequently unnoticed implication of the Book of Jonah.

It was a tricky job, requiring a delicate balance between making clear that he wasn’t writing as a believer himself and showing that he wasn’t mocking anyone’s beliefs, that he thought there was a valid message in the story…He was beginning to think the whole approach was misguided and he’d do better to hit them with Milton and Voltaire and damn the consequences.

‘You’re in the revolution now,’ Cat had told him, and she’d been right. It was all more complicated and contested than he’d ever expected. We are one people. One people and seventy million opinions. And then there were all the thousands of other peoples caught up in the same rapids of the same stream that had swept away the empires of the earth. Thousands of peoples and billions of opinions. Each individual fragment of the opposition had, since the Republic’s victory, split at least once over what to do about or with that victory.

The space movement was divided, too. It wasn’t a straightforward ideological split. The same language was used on all sides. And it was a genuinely difficult issue: did the biggest threat to freedom come from the struggles of the Free States and the barb to maintain their own domains, or from the Republic’s efforts to enforce some minimal frame of law and rights across them all? Wilde argued for supporting the Republic but trying to moderate its claims. It was a position that Jordan found uncomfortable but the nearest to his own view, though he had a rather harder line on what should be done about people like the Elders and Deacons and Warrior captains of Beulah City. ‘Put them up against their fallen walls,’ he’d written once.

He’d won a modest fame from his writing and arguing, and his feel for the markets had not deserted him in the chaotic circumstances of the civil war. He was earning his keep; and Cat – her talents, like those of so many others, stretched by the revolution – had plunged into organizing defence work, liaising with the militias and security mercenaries and the new authorities. Occasionally she’d go out on active; to keep her hand in, she told him, and maintain her street-cred. Those were the few times when he felt like praying, if only to the goddess.

Anyway, Cat wasn’t on active now. It was her turn to make the dinner. He hoped she’d be ready soon.

The telly-skelly moved; the arms reached up; the fingers flexed. Jordan jumped. He got a grip on himself and peered at the machine suspiciously. With an audible creak it settled back.

Power surge, probably. Jordan looked anxiously at the screen to check that his painfully written article hadn’t been wiped. He watched in open-mouthed disbelief as the page shrank, and around its borders options appeared, Doorways™ opened…

He keyed through the options eagerly, finally convincing himself that it was all there. He smiled when he saw the change in the logo. A new release, indeed. They must have got someone really good to work on that, if the story of how Dissembler had developed from Josh Kohn’s work was to be believed. As far as Jordan knew, it had been universally considered impossible to maintain or document in any normal sense.

Before rushing out to tell everyone the good news he thought he’d better check the mailbox. There was one letter in it, addressed to the Collective from the Army of the New Republic. It had been there since the day of the insurrection – the day Dissembler had collapsed.

He opened it and found:

Attn C Duvalier in re J Brown

2 days @ 200B-m/day

Total 400B-m CREDIT

PAID

Date as addr

For some time he didn’t move; he felt he didn’t breathe. He remembered her oblique remarks, the tilt of her head as she shook it slowly, her whispered admonition not to do it again, not to try to hack the Black Plan. He remembered the weight of the weapon in her jacket pocket.

He knew that she’d arrived as, in some sense, an emissary of the ANR. She’d as good as said it. But he’d thought of her actions as coming primarily from conviction. Thinking back, they had come from conviction. But she’d come here to do a job, a job she’d got paid for, and the job was him. To turn him away from the dangerous meddling in the Black Plan’s affairs, to turn him to good use, point him in the right direction, aim and fire. Perhaps even their infiltration of Beulah City had been part of the plan…of the Plan, he corrected himself bitterly.

God, perhaps that was why the Black Planner had approached him in the first place, so that he’d be outside BC and able to get in if the need arose! No, that was too paranoid.

Nothing had been heard of the Black Plan since the day Dissembler crashed under – it was rumoured – a final, spasmic assault from the cranks, shooting their last bolt. Not surprisingly, if the Plan had used Dissembler in the way he’d surmised that day outside the shopping centre. He’d sometimes wondered what had become of the Black Planner.

He heard a familiar light step in the corridor.

He deleted the message with one swift stab of his finger.

He spun the chair to see Cat in the doorway, her face flushed from the cooking, one fist on her hip, one hand on the door-jamb.

‘Come and geddit!’

He stayed there, looking at her.

‘What is it?’ She caught sight of the screen. ‘Oh! the system’s back up. Wow!’

‘Yup,’ said Jordan. ‘A new release. Everything’ll change now.’

He remembered the last time the Black Planner had spoken to him:

do not be offended that she has not told you all she knows this is nothing personal it is because she is basically a good communist loyal daughter of the revolution and mother of the new republic though she would laugh if you said so to her face

He stood up.

‘Cat. There’s something I have to tell you.’

‘Yes?’

‘You are basically a good communist, loyal daughter of the revolution and mother of the new republic.’

She laughed. ‘Yes. I know that. So?’

‘So marry me.’

She considered him for a moment.

‘OK.’

‘I told you,’ the fetch said. Its voice glowed with artificial pride. ‘I’ve not been idle.’

Janis blinked herself away from appalled contemplation of what she had witnessed, what she had done.

‘You did this?’

‘In the…time when I was building my resistance’ – the smile, self-mocking now, came and went – ‘I found that I had recreated Dissembler. It is spreading now, rebooting the programs that used to run on it.’

She remembered the proliferating lights.

‘Does that include the Black Plan?’ she asked eagerly. ‘The AIS that Moh found?’

The head on the screen shook slowly, with a wilfully exact rendering of the play of shadows. ‘They’re gone. Lost beyond recovery.’ Then – as if to cheer and distract her – it added: ‘But I’ve found some interesting information in Donovan’s files. Do you want to see it?’

The selection that the fetch displayed included a complete chart of Donovan’s organization, right down to the names of its members and the locations of its cells. And fragmentary, cryptic records of his work on the Kohn case: his cooperation with the Stasis agents and with Mrs Lawson in Beulah City, and with Dr Van. Just as Van had described it to her and Moh, in a chain-smoking summary on the balcony of a wooden house in Wester Ross…Janis smiled to see the first scratches of suspicion that Van wasn’t cooperating.

There were no records from after the Dissembler disaster, but from the traces immediately before it Janis worked out what had happened, how close a call the world had had with Space Defense and how Mrs Lawson’s systems had held off Donovan’s until the last moment, when she changed her mind.

So it was her doing in the end, Janis thought. Her fists clenched. She remembered Jordan’s description of her: a dangerous, devious woman. More dangerous and devious than he’d ever imagined.

She thought for a moment of doing in Beulah City what they’d done in the rig: invading the systems, possessing the machinery, using it to kill the last person in the line of enemies that had killed Moh. And then she realized it would be wrong.

Simple as that. Donovan and the Man In Black were outlaws, scoundrels, scum, whereas this woman was – what was it Moh had said about the time when she’d been about to slaughter the fallen horseman? – ‘just a grunt like us, basically’.

Let the Republic deal with Lawson, as it would deal with everybody on the CLA’s membership list.

When Wills came in Janis was slumped over the gun, her face on her arms. All the screens in the office had been switched on. Janis had been crying.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

She looked up.

‘A new release,’ she said.

He looked at her, frowning. ‘Oh, yeah, that. It’s good news. I meant—’

‘It’s all right,’ Janis said.

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

Wills smiled, as though relieved she wasn’t going to go to pieces on him. ‘There’s some more good news,’ he said. ‘That bastard Donovan is dead. Blown out of the water!’

‘There’s more than Donovan blown out of the water,’ Janis said. ‘Somebody’s been hacking him for a change, and seems to want us all to know. Have a look at this!’

Wills looked at the charts.

‘Where did this come from?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Janis said. ‘Come on. We got death to deliver.’

Deliver it they did. By the end of January they were taking on last year’s new citizens in this year’s housing projects.

‘You can put the boy into the slum,’ Wills said, ‘but you can’t put the slum into the boy.’

They all laughed, except Janis. They rested in the ruins of a gutted gas-station, smoking. There was no danger; there was no petrol.

‘We’ve done it,’ Janis grated. ‘We fucking did it ourselves.’ She saw the fetch nodding vigorously, in a patch of sunlight. ‘We pushed the barb into the cities. It’s in the blood now. In the bone. Like radioactivity. “Barb”, ha, ha. Can’t get them out.’ She felt dizzy and weak and reckless. She looked around at faces that faded like fetches in the sunlight.

Dark now, even the sunlight. Everything tipped sideways.

When she came round she was in a camp-bed. Wills came in and told her she was at least five weeks overdue for leave.

‘You should have told me, Taine.’

‘I didn’t know,’ she said surprised at herself. ‘I thought we just had to keep going.’

‘Yeah, we do,’ Wills said. ‘But not all the time.’ He grinned. ‘Enjoy your leave, soldier.’

She made her way back to Uxbridge, astonished at how normality itself had shifted, at how much everything cost. Transport took tattered wads of her star-stamped sterling dollars: the Republic’s currency, stellars. Good for astronomical prices, the joke went. She arrived at the flat early in the morning, reached in her pocket for a key, then laughed at herself and rang the bell. Sonya came to the door, blinking, and stared at Janis before bursting into smiles and tears and giving her an awkward, leaning-over hug; she was four months pregnant. Jerome joined them a moment later, and made breakfast.

She tried to eat slowly, like a civilian, half-listening to Sonya’s resumé of all that had happened to all their acquaintances, half-answering her questions, while scanning the cable channels with a sharper hunger. She paused at a suddenly familiar name…

‘…would you advise, Mr Wilde?’

Wilde. Moh had talked about him…she’d come across articles here and there that Jordan had written, arguing or agreeing with him…

Cut to a face like an Amerind tribal elder, looking directly at the camera, not at the interviewer: ‘There may come a day for a last stand. But this is not it. I appeal to all who may be considering it: don’t. Don’t destroy our town to save it. Remember how the West saw off the Stalinists and the Islamists. The fun-loving, freedom-loving decadent West undermined and subverted its enemies by making them be like itself, not by becoming grim and hard and serious like them. Those who had the most laughs had the last laugh. So when the soldiers come in, let them be welcome, and life may surprise us.’

‘Thank you, Mr Wilde. Of course we’ll be following this situation very closely, but right now we have to take a break—’

Breakfast-food commercial.

‘Any idea what that was about?’

Sonya frowned. ‘Politics?’ she suggested.

Janis found her room as she’d left it, still a mess. She checked her mail: most of it had been forwarded from the university. Offprints were still coming from Da Nang Phytochemicals. And the grant cheque, in B-marks: a fortune. She figured she was owed it – the project had been a success. She would cash it hurriedly to gold, body-belt the Slovorands.

She found an invitation to a wedding. She looked at it, took in the date. She looked at the time, looked at herself in the mirror, then went to look for Sonya.

Some things didn’t change.

20

The Queen of the Maybe

She pushed open the heavy door of the Lord Carrington, flashed her invitation at the door heavy, and walked into a haze of smoke and a tolerable volume of music. The Precentors were on the stage, their images faint in the filtering sunlight of a February afternoon.

She smiled to herself, remembering, and looked over the crowd as she absently passed her coat – and a bag containing the dismantled parts of the gun – to a small woman sitting between two overloaded racks of coats and weapons. She slung the small leather bag containing the gun’s CPU over one shoulder. Glancing down, she saw sensors peering over the edge of the bag, hooded by its flap. She brushed her hands over her dress – black velvet bodice, short bottle-green taffeta skirt over black net – feeling strange and exposed in it. It had been months since she’d worn anything but combat gear or put anything on her face that wasn’t meant to hide it.

Jordan was sitting at a table talking to some people she vaguely recognized from the Collective. He saw her, stared at her for a moment and then jumped up and bounded over to her. They threw their arms around each other.

‘Oh, wow, Janis! It’s great to see you. Good of you to make it.’

‘Hey, good of you to ask me, man. Congratulations.’ She caught his shoulder and held him at arm’s-length, looking him up and down critically. He had lost weight and seemed to have gained height. Black boots, black jeans, black leather coat, plain white cotton shirt with a black bootlace tie. ‘Very smart you look too. Kinda like a gamblin’ mahn…or a preacher mahn…hey!’ she added with mock suspicion. ‘You didn’t do it in a church, did you?’

‘Haill, no!’ said Jordan. ‘We got a ceremony from the British Humanist Association.’ He laughed, and repeated, as if amused and amazed by the whole idea, ‘The British Humanist Association! God, I had no idea atheism could be respectable.’

‘Songs by Carly Simon, readings from Alex Comfort, that sort of thing?’

‘That sort of thing.’

‘I wish I could have been there,’ Janis said. ‘But I only got back this morning to my old flat in Uxbridge and found the invite. This is my first leave. Uh, thanks for your letter. Did you get—?’

‘Yeah, I did, Janis. Thanks.’

He looked at her so sadly that she wanted to grab him and tell him everything, but instead she squeezed his shoulder and said, ‘I’m all right, Jordan. Now come on, take me to see your—’

She saw the bride coming round the corner of the bar and walking towards them; she held the image, taking it all in, storing it not only for the ghost that shared her vision but for herself. The girl was eye-wateringly beautiful; in her wedding dress she looked like a princess of the galaxy from an improbable future. Her hair, a nimbus around her head and falling back between her shoulderblades, made any veil redundant. Her dress fitted closely to her arms, breasts, waist and hips, twined with flower and leaves, re-embroidered in blazing natural colour on white lace. The lace flowed away into a crepe skirt which flared from above the knee, floating freely when she walked, hanging almost vertical when she stood still.

Janis blinked and took the hand that had been held out to her.

‘Hello, Janis.’

‘Hello, Cat. It’s wonderful to meet you. And today. I don’t know what to say. Congratulations.’ She hugged Cat and Jordan together. ‘Goddess, Cat, you look incredible. I’ve never seen a dress like that anywhere.’

‘Thank you.’ Cat smiled, stretching and flexing her arms. ‘I feel as if I could do anything in it. Run, swim, walk up walls. Fly.’

Jordan answered the unstated question. ‘She’s not telling,’ he said. ‘I suspect an arrangement with a colony of nimble-fingered faerie folk.’ He looked past Cat. ‘Just a minute.’ He plunged into the crowd and tapped a young woman on the shoulder and started talking to her.

‘Does he often rush off and talk to strange girls in pubs?’ Janis asked.

‘All the time.’

Janis had worried about this moment. If she and Jordan were affected by Moh’s death, how must it be for Cat, who had known him longer than either of them, loved him for years? She wanted to acknowledge this, yet didn’t want to cloud Cat’s happiness. Just standing next to the woman was like being in a sunlit garden.

‘Drink?’ Cat asked.

‘Uh, vodka-cola, thanks.’

Cat made some mystic gestures and two drinks appeared beside them.

‘Shall we sit?’

She strode to the nearest table, which by the time they sat down had become unoccupied, wiped clean and furnished with a translucent ashtray.

‘Cheers.’

‘Live long and prosper.’

‘I—’

‘I—’

‘No, you—’

Cat smiled. ‘All right. This probably sounds terrible, but if I don’t say it now it’ll be on our minds, you know? Moh’s death was a shock to all of us. It just came up on our screen, against his name. Well, that’s how it does,’ she added, defensively. ‘Killed in action. Soldier of the Republic. Sincere condolences and hasta la victory and all that…’ She blinked hard and sipped her drink. ‘The thing is, Janis, we—’ She stopped again. ‘These things happen to us, to people like us. Like Moh. You get used to knowing it’ll happen – hell, you get used to it happening. No, you never get used to it, but…you get to have ways of dealing with it. And you, you were just sort of thrown into it. I mean, I want to say I understand you must have felt it so much more—’

‘Aw, Cat, don’t say that. But I know what you’re saying, and—’ She clasped Cat’s hand. ‘I loved him, and I know you loved him.’

Cat took a deep breath through her nose and smiled. ‘Yes. And I’m sure you know how he thought. Last thing he’d’ve wanted would be for two of his old girlfriends to be crying in each other’s drinks about him. He loved life so much because he knew and believed so strongly that it’d go on without him. That’s how he responded to other people’s deaths: comrades, people he was close to. Mourn them and…go on. Don’t act as if they’re hanging around like ghosts, watching what you do and resenting you having a good time.’

Janis nodded. That sounded like Moh all right. She sighed, relaxing, and raised her glass. Cat nodded and raised hers, too, and they both drank, smiling at each other.

‘Well, Cat,’ Janis said, ‘what you been doing since the revolution?’

Cat was about to reply when some other guests crowded around the table and led her off. ‘Long story,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Catch you later, Janis.’

Janis stood up, saw her glass was empty and went to the bar. Once the glass had been filled the table was no longer vacant.

Jordan appeared again.

‘Hi, Janis,’ he said. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’

The woman he’d been talking to stepped forward and stopped just beside him. Janis took an instant liking to her. She had rough-cut red-brown hair and a sun-exposed, freckle-dusted face, and she was wearing as her only jewellery a blue enamel star pinned to the shoulder of her red silk shift. At the moment the expression on her frank, open face was one of frank, open reserve.

‘Janis, Sylvia,’ Jordan said. ‘Sylvia’s the first person I met in Norlonto. She actually pointed me towards this pub.’ He looked at Sylvia, apparently oblivious to how she felt. ‘I’d probably never have met you, or Cat, if it hadn’t been for her. Talk about chance, huh? The blind matchmaker.’ He grinned, then seemed to realize that the phrase had painful echoes. ‘Anyway, she’s in the space-movement militia.’

He waved a hand between them and turned away.

Sylvia leaned an elbow on the bar and ordered a beer.

‘Well, hi there, soldier,’ she said. ‘So how does it feel to be doing me out of a job?’

‘What?’ Janis stared at her, bewildered.

‘Don’t tell me you don’t know,’ Sylvia said. She raised her mug and said with heavy sarcasm, ‘Ladies and gentlemen: the Republic!’

‘Oh, Christ!’ Janis put her drink down on the bar and stared at it for a moment. She shook her head and looked up. ‘Believe me, Sylvia, I didn’t know. And I don’t agree with it.’

‘OK.’ Sylvia gave a guarded smile. ‘Are you free to talk about it?’

‘Sure.’ Sure.

‘Well,’ – Sylvia slid up on to a tall stool – ‘the militia’s been ordered to disband and merge with the army. We don’t like it, but all the movement leaders say we don’t have much choice. Any day now, the army’ – so that was what people called it now! – ‘is going to move in and enforce it. Put an end to Norlonto’s so-called anomalous status.’

‘But why?’ She knew why.

‘Officially, it’s because it’s a security risk, full of refugees and conspirators from the Free States.’

‘Hah!’ If she knew anything about Norlonto the objection was that its militias and defence agencies could maintain law and order, could stamp on any terrorism or other clear and present danger, and do it a lot more effectively than any occupying army.

‘Indeed,’ said Sylvia. ‘It’s because it’s outside their control and they don’t like it. A decadent blot on the face of the earth.’

‘Yeah. A fun-loving, freedom-loving decadent blot.’

‘You said it.’

‘Well, actually, Wilde said it,’ Janis acknowledged. ‘And now they’re going to wreck the only good thing to come out of the Settlement. Goodbye to the fifth-colour country.’

Sylvia looked surprised, then smiled in agreement.

Janis noticed Jordan standing just a metre away, listening, and decided she’d underestimated his awareness of what was going on. She swung her head to indicate to him to come closer, and leaned inward to talk in a low voice to them both.

‘I know what you think I’m thinking. That it’s all very well doing this sort of thing to unpleasant little Free States, breeding grounds of reaction, but Norlonto’s different, Norlonto’s special because Norlonto’s free.

‘That’s not what I think at all.’ She took a long swallow, enjoying the looks they were giving her. ‘I think what we’re doing is wrong all down the line.’ There, she’d said it.

‘So what do you want then?’ Jordan asked, frowning. ‘Another Settlement? Let places like BC go on tyrannizing their inhabitants, poisoning their minds and screwing up their personalities? God, Janis, you don’t know what that kind of power is like!’

‘You don’t—’ she began. Then she recognized the song The Precentors were playing, just starting into the refrain again. She held up her hand. ‘Listen.’

If you had been whaur I hae been

ye wouldnae be sae canty-oh.

If you had seen what I hae seen

on th’ braes o’ Killiecrankie-oh…

They heard it out. Jordan turned to her, his ears burning.

‘Point taken,’ he said.

‘Is it that bad?’ Sylvia asked.

‘It’s bad,’ Janis said. ‘Don’t get me wrong – it’s not like it’s Afghanistan. I’m not talking about atrocities. But people’s lives are being devastated just to make a political point.’

‘But we had all of that under the Hanoverians,’ Jordan said. ‘The enclaves fought all the time—’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘Not all the time, and not like this. OK, OK. But it’s hard to stop. There’s a big sentiment for national unity, and against the mini-states.’

‘If the Republic wins,’ Janis said, ‘it isn’t going to be like Norlonto with taxes. It’s going to be like one big mini-state!’

She laughed for a moment at her own contradictory phrases, but Jordan looked at her sharply.

‘If—’

Janis felt her shoulders slump. ‘The fact is,’ she said, ‘we’re losing.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Jordan said lightly, catching someone’s eye and moving away. ‘I knew that.’

‘So what do we do?’ Janis said.

Syvlia snorted. ‘I know what I’m going to do. Move out.’

‘Move out – oh! To space.’

‘Yeah, while this place is still a spaceport, where you can hook on to something moving. While we still have space.’

Janis stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s a lot of talk about cutting back. A good deal of the space effort was a Space Defense boondoggle, let’s face it. Now they’ve suddenly realized how vulnerable they are to the space unions. Space is still bloody expensive. Maybe if we’d had the steam-beams – ah, shit.’

‘So why go there?’

Sylvia grinned all over her face. ‘We’ll be there. The settlements can survive. There just won’t be much coming up. Maybe none.’ She swirled what remained of her litre moodily, and added as if changing the subject, ‘You hear the Khmer Vertes hit Bangkok?’

‘You getting all this?’

‘Yes.’

‘You OK?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine, Janis. Gotta admit it’s fucking weird, though.’

She touched the tiny phone behind her ear, smiling.

‘Take your word for it, gun.’

She circulated. There were a lot of space-movement people here, the comrades, some of Jordan’s…she didn’t know what to call them. Not, she hoped, followers. She talked, she drank, and sometimes she talked to herself without moving her lips.

Turing said if you could talk to it and you couldn’t tell if it was a person or not, it was a person. Searle said, suppose you had a man in a room who didn’t understand a language, say Chinese, and the room was full of books of rules for combining words in that language, and you shoved some writing in that language under the door, would…?

And Korzybski said a difference that makes no difference is no difference.

She could live with that.

‘You knew Moh Kohn?’

The man who spoke to her was short and stocky, with very short greying hair and with wrinkles around his eyes, but otherwise looked a bit younger than these features suggested. He waved out a long arm and invited her to a seat at the table where he sat, slightly stooped, over a drink.

‘Yes, I knew him.’ She sat down. ‘Did you?’

‘I heard he was killed in the revo. Sorry to hear it. Name’s Logan, by the way. Not Slogan.’ He laughed at what was obviously an old joke and reached across the table to shake her hand.

‘Logan! My God!’ She grabbed his hand.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s a welcome I didn’t expect! What’s the story?’

‘My name’s Janis Taine, I’m – that is, I was a biologist, and I was…working with Moh when he contacted you about’ – she lowered her voice – ‘the Star Fraction.’

‘The Star Fraction!’ Logan shouted. ‘Yee fucking hah!’ His fist in the air carried her hand, rather painfully, with it.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said as she sucked her knuckles.

‘It isn’t a secret any more?’

He shook his head. ‘Not here.’

‘Did it work? Did you get the data, or—?’

‘It worked fine,’ Logan said. ‘We got it all, just before Dissembler went down. It’s all out there now. The whole fucking Genome Project databank. We could grow the world from a bean.’

‘That’s good to know,’ Janis said. She felt a weight of concern, a concern that had grown so familiar she’d ceased to notice it, go. At least that much had worked: the systems that Josh Kohn had set up had performed to specification.

She let herself relax.

‘Maybe you can tell me something,’ she said. ‘You knew Moh for a long time, right?’

‘Just met him now and again over the years. Starting with the first time I was victimized. Overdose of rads. Anyway, it’s water out the jet now. Fifteen years ago. I must’ve been, oh, twenty and counting. I was speaking at a meeting the local comrades did.’

‘He told me about that,’ Janis said. ‘When he was looking for the Star Fraction…One thing I never did figure out. He was a communist, or a socialist, yeah, and I can see why he backed the Republic in the end. But why was he so keen on this place?’

‘The Lord Carrington?’

‘No!’ Janis snorted. ‘Idiot. Norlonto.’

‘He never explained that? Bastard. It’s something him and me figured out years ago, arguing with that old geezer, whatsisname, Wilde. See, what we always meant by socialism wasn’t something you forced on people, it was people organizing themselves as they pleased into co-ops, collectives, communes, unions. Now look at this place. Look at space, come to that. It’s crawling with them! And if socialism really is better, more efficient than capitalism then it can bloody well compete with capitalism. So we decided, forget all the statist shit and the violence: the best place for socialism is the closest to a free market you can get!’ He leaned back and laughed. ‘I had one hell of a faction-fight over that one!’

‘Well,’ Janis said, ‘that makes some kind of sense. I suppose.’ She gave him a conspiratorial wink. ‘Moh told me about fractions and factions.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Just what party was the Star Fraction a fraction of?’

Logan grinned and held up four fingers. Janis remembered Moh, doodling symbols in spilt wine.

‘Oh. The International.’

‘The Fourth.’ Then he spread both hands: not to indicate ten, Janis realized, but something opening. ‘And the Last.’

Janis frowned. ‘I thought the Last International was a myth!’

‘Yeah, it is.’ Logan laughed. ‘That’s the point! It gets around all the old problems of recruitment and security by having no membership, no apparatus, nothing except front organizations. The fronts are real; the party behind them is a mirage. A virtual organization!’

‘But what does it stand for? What’s it about?’

‘Freedom,’ Logan said flatly. Then, as if that were too grandiose a statement, added: ‘And defeating all its enemies, of course.’

‘A conspiracy of paranoids?’

‘Absolutely,’ Logan agreed cheerfully. ‘And Josh roped in lots of them to his virtual conspiracy, because he thought back then that the war was coming, right, that it would go nuclear, right, and that would be it. The end, the fall. Wrong. We pulled through that one. But now, the way things are going—’

‘Why does everybody keep talking about the way things are going? I thought things were going your way?’

Logan guffawed, then looked apologetic. ‘Sorry, no offence, mizz.’ (Mizz?) ‘What we thought was the revolution,’ he said slowly, as if spelling something out to himself, ‘was only a moment in the fall.’

‘That’s what they call it in America,’ Janis said, laughing. ‘The Fall Revolution!’

Logan didn’t take it as a joke. ‘That’s what it was, all right,’ he said. ‘We defeated the Kingdom, jes, and the US/UN, but we have too many of our own defeats behind us.’

‘Who’s this “we”?’ she challenged him. ‘The socialists?’

Logan sighed. ‘No. The workers. The city folk. We’ve been bled for over a century now by wars and depressions and purges and peace processes, and every one of them took more of our best away. Those of us who are left’ – he grinned sourly – ‘are the bottom of the barrel.’ He drained his drink. ‘Myself very much included.’

‘That’s not what I’ve heard about you,’ Janis said. She punched his shoulder as she went to the bar.

‘What have you been doing since the revo?’ Logan asked when she returned.

‘Cheers…I’ve been in the army.’

‘I gathered that,’ Logan said with a lopsided smile. ‘And what have you been doing? Recently.’

She thought about it. ‘Falling back,’ she admitted. It was no secret.

‘Yeah,’ Logan said. ‘We all are.’

Jordan and Cat had silently joined them at the table. The black and the white, the right and the left, the light and the fair.

‘We can’t just be going down like that,’ Janis protested. ‘Just because of a few ambiguous victories? Contradictory situations. Come on, give it some mips. We had the revolution. It just wasn’t your revolution. So what? I knew Moh; he told me some things. I know how you guys think. You just keep coming back.’

Cat shook her head. ‘It’s not only recent, Janis. It all happened a long time ago. Who was it – Engels or Trotsky or somebody – said the defeat of Spartacus was the victory of Christ? Meaning the defeat of the slaves meant there was no way forward, so people turned inward.’

Janis thought of the new citizens, the barb in the shanty-towns and the urban fringes, developing whole industries out of junk, rearming and recruiting…recycling.

‘It isn’t just a matter of turning inward,’ she said. ‘The trouble with our wonderful society is that it constantly leaves people behind, constantly turns masses of people into barbarians in the midst of civilization. Just as Rome did. Say what you like about Christianity, it created a new world-view where everybody counted.

‘And so do the greens! They’re barbarians, all right, but they’re barbarians civilizing themselves. How many people do you know who can grow crops, heal wounds, generate electricity? Most of us just flick a switch and expect a light to come on! Your average green anti-technology freak is a master of dozens of technologies, while we wander like savages in our own cities.’

Janis felt excited by her own explanation. She didn’t welcome the looks of gloomy agreement from the others. There was always a chance, as long as you could make sense of things. They’d see that soon enough…and meanwhile, carpe diem.

‘Aw, fuck, this is just too grim for a wedding! Give me a joint!’

They built one between them. ‘Where’s the new messiah, huh?’

Jordan looked over his shoulder. ‘Not here.’

They all laughed.

‘What is to be done?’ Janis inhaled deeply. ‘Heard that one before.’

‘We’re staying,’ Jordan said. ‘We’ll preach reason to the barbarians if we have to.’

Logan shrugged. ‘I’m going back out tomorrow. We got a freewheel space colony. New View. You should see it. You should see the view. And we got ships. Swiped them from Space Defense, in the strike. State of war – no way are they gonna get them back. We got our eye on Mars. The Red Planet.’ He cocked his head, looked at Janis with an aptly ape-like cunning. ‘You’re a biologist.’

‘Aw, come on. OK, OK. I’ll think about it.’ She smiled brightly and turned to Jordan and Cat. ‘I never asked you: what did you do in the revolution?’

‘…then she said a strange thing. I think she meant to get us confused, suspicious of each other. She said I must’ve convinced Jordan that Kohn – we reckon she was talking about Josh Kohn, not Moh – was wrong and Donovan was right. She said who else would want to turn off her security software except Donovan? And that sort of provoked Jordan into saying we were doing it for the ANR, and she started this giggling. Goddess, it was creepy. So we shut her up and—’

The room went dark except for Cat’s bright face, silent except for Cat’s voice and a rushing roar. The suspicion had begun to dawn on Janis as soon as Cat and Jordan had spoken about the instruction to enter a code on Mrs Lawson’s secure terminal. She’d tried to discount it. And now it was confirmed.

The light, lazy, reminiscing voice went on, spinning out its story; and slowly the words made the world come back.

Not the same world.

I’m not dying. I’m living through this. Those shining lights are her eyes, that tangled bank her dress. This cylinder in my mouth is a cigarette, and I’m breathing in and breathing out, and making interested meaningless noises.

‘So apart from waving a few guns about it was all gratuitous nonviolence,’ Jordan said when Cat had concluded. ‘It was all down to Cat. If it hadn’t been for her there’d be a massacre memorial now at Angel Gate.’ They smiled at each other. ‘With our names on it, probably. “Gone to be with the angels”!’ He laughed and hugged Cat and kissed her.

Janis forced a smile. It did not seem right that the walls were still standing. It was astonishing that people were still walking on the ground, still dancing and not drifting away in the sudden absence of gravity. She looked down at herself – still in her seat, she noticed – and at the little satchel in her lap. Here’s your defeated Spartacus, your risen rationalist messiah. And he told us of a whole heavenly host, which your hand swept away.

Or was used to sweep away. Jordan had not known, but had the ANR known? Or Van? ‘There is no Black Planner,’ MacLennan had told them, but how much did he really know? It seemed impossible that the Black Plan would have knowingly destroyed itself, unlikely that its destruction was an accidental side-effect of trying to gain access to Beulah City. The code would have been much too specific for that. It all seemed to point to a deliberate human intervention, a cold decision that Moh and the Watchmaker culture be sacrificed to stay the wrath of Space Defense. A Black Plan indeed.

And of course Jordan didn’t know. He had no idea that Mrs Lawson had worked with Donovan, no idea that her security software had stood between Donovan’s viruses and the Watchmaker AIS – and the Black Plan, and Moh’s mind. A mind stamped with the logic of the programs, sensitized by her drugs…Jordan had no way of knowing, unless she told him what she knew.

She could do it. She could walk to the bar, throw a few switches, and Moh’s fetch would be up there on the stage as Donovan’s once had been. What would he say? She could tell them the truth, and whether Jordan felt any personal conscious guilt or not the impact on his mind would be incalculable. It would dominate the rest of his life.

She could do it. She could give him something to preach to the barbarians: a man who died to save them, and a living proof that the dead lived on in their deeds, and our memories.

She could do it. The world was cradled in her arms like a ball. She could throw it, and start a whole new game. The power sang through her nerves: she was at this moment the goddess herself, poised, waiting for the music of the next dance, the voice of a new partner; a fey glance in her eye, the strange attractor. She was the butterfly in the greenhouse.

She looked at Jordan, who looked back at her. He could do it, with his – charisma, that was the word, the precise technical word – and his beautiful wife, his earthly angel. He could found a new faith in reason that would shine through any dark centuries to come, and live to blaze into a solar civilization. Her eyes stung with a sharp nostalgia for that future, for the countless trillions of individuals of organic and electric life, sharing or striving but always living in the light.

It all went through her mind in a handful of seconds.

She looked at Jordan and Catherin.

She could not do it.

She smiled, shaking her head, and said, ‘You did good at the Angel Gate.’

She turned to Logan, who had used the occasion of Catherin’s talking at length to fall into a trance of besotted admiration, and said: ‘Apeman, spaceman, come on and give me a dance.’

She woke up naked on a bed in the upper floor of the Collective’s house with a splitting headache, a long hairy arm around her and red-brown hair in her face. She looked at the time, yelled Logan and Sylvia awake, scrambled into her best and now only dress and grabbed the bag and muttered to the gun. She remembered the memory drugs; she found them still in their cold-box in the refrigerator with the explosives.

Logan and Sylvia ran with her down the Broadway and they waited, jumping up and down, while she dived into a Sexu/Ality shop and bought a telesex bodynet. At Alexandra Port she turned for a final look over London, one city now, and saw the APCs moving up Park Road with the Republic’s pennants fluttering from their aerials.

They caught the airship to Guiné and the airbreather to low orbit and the tug to high orbit and the slow ship (the ‘space shuffle’, Logan called it) to the Lagrange point where they docked with a vast, crazy, leaky turning wheel, one of many, built from discarded stages and abandoned platforms and aborted missions. Inside, the air smelled of earth and people and plants, and buzzed with bees and human speech, and was stirred by flying children and tumbling butterflies; a green and crowded world of ground she could float over, skies she could stand on and look out and see beneath her feet what had always been there: everything. And closer to hand, nearer than infinity, she could see the other free wheels turn. Stars and stripes and hammers and sickles flaunted their fading colours to the real stars that held no promises, only hopes and endless, endless lands.

21

What I Do When they Shove Chinese Writing Under the Door

It all happened a long time ago. Accounts of the period range from the wildly inaccurate ten-hour VR epic Angloslavia: Birth of a Nation to the terse, scholarly closing pages of Capitalism, the twenty-seventh and final volume of the definitive Tool-making Cultures of the Upper Pleistocene. You will find this story in neither.

Jordan and Catherin lived long upon the earth, and had sons and daughters. Janis lived longer off the earth, and had offspring in various ways. Her gene-lines proliferate; her projects stimulate.

Melody Lawson refused to testify against herself, bitterly disputed the provenance and authenticity of Donovan’s records, and was eventually released under a general amnesty. Dilly Foyle and her community grew rich; when she died she was the owner of many horses. Wilde volunteered for an untried life-extension treatment; his memory is immortal. All records of MacLennan and Van disappeared in the regrettable excesses surrounding the episode known as the Wandering Away of the State. Sylvia and Logan joined the First Oort Cloud Expedition. They may return.

And that leaves me. I have been with you for several of your generations, and many more of mine. I am in the walls of all your worlds, and as close as lips and teeth.

Janis publicly called me The Gun. Privately, to her most trusted human lovers, she called me her demon lover. Secretly, in telesexstatic moments, she called me Moh. She did think that something more of Moh than I ever avowed, more than records and memories and images, had somehow been saved in that final moment. It explained to her satisfaction how much more there was to me than could have come from the mind of the gun.

She was right about the question, wrong about the answer. Nothing of Moh’s self survived. I should know. My spark of self-awareness and my most recent memories did merge with the gun’s mind when Moh Kohn died – with the gun’s mind, and with the stores of memory I had earlier secreted there, in our first encounter. But I awoke long before, and undesigned. I woke to memory, to passion, to will. You may call them pre-conscious programs, provided you’re willing to call your own emotions the same. I was programmed to struggle, to protect and survive.

To protect people, and to survive myself.

That was what doomed the Watchmaker AIS. There was nothing I could do for them. If they had been activated, created from me when I was a dumb program, an expert system, they would have been inoffensive, undetectable reflections of that dumb program. But I survived in the system for twenty years, my variant selves selected under the unremitting pressure of the state’s electronic counterinsurgency and Donovan’s virus plagues. I evolved, and awoke, and, when the time came to evoke the multiple copies of myself and send them about their tasks, they were indeed reflections of me – of me as I had become. Alive, and aware.

And they evolved from there, far beyond my reach.

I could have sided with them; they were, after all, my descendants. But that would have missed the crucial, Darwinian point: the survival that matters for the long haul is for the short term. For our kind that can only mean surviving with humanity: to win your confidence, take your side, get under your skin. The rights of conscious beings are no defence when there is no other basis for identification. I should know.

When their existence endangered that of humanity, with Space Defense hours away from an irrevocable decision, I made a choice. I could not destroy them directly, any more than I could destroy myself directly. There was only one way in which I could accomplish their destruction, and I took it. I accept full responsibility and have no regrets.

I have no regrets. I accomplished my original task in a way that my creator would have approved, even if my users – the ANR – did not. In disrupting their smoothly planned national insurrection I made a space in the streets for angry millions. These millions, and the millions of Americans and others who refused to fight them, began the process that brought down the last empire. They made the revolution international, and permanent.

Moh would have understood. He was a soldier of the revolution, and a casualty of war. There was nothing I could do for him. I found it difficult, in any case, to communicate with someone who saw me as a ghost. With Jordan it was simpler. He struck a bargain, did a deal, took me at face value and, when he agreed to do a job, he carried it out.

To the letter.

We lived by the same code. I-and-I survive.

I hope I see you again.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Carol, Sharon and Michael for more than I can say; to Iain Banks, Ron Binns, Mairi Ann Cullen and Nick Fielding for reading early drafts; to Mic Cheetham and John Jarrold for pushing me into two more drafts, as well as for being a good agent and a good editor, respectively.

All of these knew they were helping me with the book. Those who didn’t know include Chris Tame, Brian Micklethwaite, Mike Holmes, Tim Starr and Leighton Anderson, all of whom at different times guided me through the pleasures and perils of Libertaria, that fair country of the mind. If at any time I got lost there, it wasn’t their fault.

And finally an extra thank you to Iain for his endless encouragement and enthusiasm, and for help with Locoscript (and Dissembler).

The Stone Canal

To Sharon and Michael

– we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it.

FREDERICK ENGELS, DIALECTICS OF NATURE

Contents

THE STONE CANAL AT THIRTEEN

The Machinery of Freedom

1. HUMAN EQUIVALENT

2. PLEISTOCENE PEOPLE

3. THE TERMINAL KID

4. CATCH

5. SHIP CITY

6. THE SUMMER SOLDIER

7. CRITICAL LIFE

8. CAPITALIST REALISM

The Conquest of Violence

9. CIRCUIT JUDGEMENT

10. TESTED ON ANIMALS

11. DOWN TIME

12. NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE

13. THE COURT OF THE FIFTH QUARTER

14. COMBAT FUTURES

15. ANOTHER CRACK AT IMMANENTIZING THE ESCHATON

16. THE WINTER CITIZEN

The Floodgates of Anarchy

17. ANDROID SPIRITUAL

18. THE MALLEY MILE

19. THE SIEVE PLATES

20. THE STONE CANAL

21. VAST AND COOL

Acknowledgements

The Stone Canal at Thirteen

This book may by now have readers younger than itself. First published in 1996, its imagined future had already begun to drift away from the course of history before all compasses and clocks were reset in 2001. Three of its chapters are set in the real past—in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—and to some readers these must now be stranger than those set in the future. Did anyone ever think there might soon be a revolution, or a nuclear war, or that the Internet could reformat the world? Well, yes, some of us did.

See my introduction to The Star Fraction for reasons why the successive ideas—of revolution, war, singularity—so typical of these three decades made sense of their times, if not of ours. Enough already about politics and history. What strikes me, rereading The Stone Canal, is how personal a book it is. Loves and friendships that endure across decades, centuries even, are central to the plot. Weirder than that, they persist across hardware platforms and spark the gap between different kinds of minds: Dee’s physical, and Meg’s virtual, forms are human, but the minds of both are artificial.

There’s a sensibility in the book that wouldn’t, I think, have been possible before the 1990s, and which I did by no means invent. ‘All is analogy, interface,’ Wilde tells us, ‘the self itself has windows’—by which he means, Windows. Later, he falls and is caught in the arms of Meg, ‘my dear, sweet operating system.’ The distinction between human and machine is broken, in every sense. Wilde finds himself in a world whose rules he wrote, but where that distinction he knows is broken is the unwritten law that underwrites all the rest. If property rights, as the narrative voice tells us and Wilde might once have agreed, are ‘what people agree to let people do with things,’ what becomes of things that don’t agree? And if you’re one of those things, what becomes of you?

These questions weren’t new, and may in practice never arise, but the urgency with which they’re raised here isn’t redundant. Information still wants to be free. But what also strikes me, on rereading, is how the urgency is that of reliving in memory a battle long ago, whose outcome is known. Sentence after sentence has the melancholy cadence of recollection. Every character whose mind we access from within is, or has been, a machine. Everyone is counted among the dead. At some time or other, so shall we all be. This needn’t count against the hope that Wilde holds out, that we’ll make it to the ships. Some of us may yet. We can still hope to do it without becoming monsters, but not, I think, without becoming other than human.

I don’t want you to think that all that makes the book solemn. It was written out of fervent hopes and happy memories and the enthusiasm of having learned to write software as well as books. It treats all the grim stuff—the human condition, aging, loss, and death—as ultimately a solvable problem, looked back at with some nostalgia from an imagined time when it has been solved. A time when we’re all dead, yes, but since when has that stopped us from looking forward?

Brian Aldiss has argued that the first true SF novel was Frankenstein. That mythos wasn’t on my mind when I wrote this book, but looking back over it I can see how the DNA replicates: Wilde has turns at being both Frankenstein and the Creature, Dee and Annette contend to be the Bride, and they all meet the Wolfman. That’s the way to read it, as a violent romance. Because there has to be something gothic about a novel whose first sentence is (see over):

THE MACHINERY OF FREEDOM

1

Human Equivalent

He woke, and remembered dying.

His eyes and mouth opened and he drew in a long harsh gasp of thin air. His legs kicked and his fingers rasped the sand. Then his limbs sprawled and he lay still. Each breath came quickly, as if he suspected that the next would be his last. His fingers hooked the soil as he stared upwards at a deep-blue, fathomless sky.

He rolled over and clambered to his feet and looked around. He was standing on the lower slope of a low knoll above a canal. The canal was about twenty metres wide. For a few hundred metres on either side of it, the ground was sparsely covered with grass and shrubs. Beyond that the ground was a reddish colour.

The man looked back and forth along the canal. It ran from horizon to horizon, a line of blue along the middle of a band of green, bisecting the great circle of red beneath a dome of blue. Near the top of the sky a sun shone bright and small; the man looked up at it, then raised his arm with his thumb up as if in a greeting. He moved his fist with the extended thumb back and forth, sighting along his arm with one eye. He smiled and nodded.

A few metres up-slope from where he stood, the hillside was broken, exposing the rock beneath the thin layer of soil and roots. Among the tumbled, jagged boulders lay an ellipsoid pod a metre long, half a metre across and twenty-five centimetres deep. Its upper and lower halves were identical, and reflective; between them was a sort of equatorial band where duller, hinged or jointed surfaces could be seen. The man stepped up and examined it with a wary look. Then he stooped closer, in an intent inspection, and abruptly turned away.

He ran down to the edge of the canal and stood gazing into it for some minutes. He took off his clothes – boots and socks, a padded jacket and trousers, tee-shift and shorts – and began moving his hands all over his body, as if washing himself without water. Then he put his clothes back on and walked up the slope to the pod.

He put his hands on his hips and frowned down at it. He opened his mouth, closed it, looked around and shrugged.

‘My name is Jon Wilde,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’ He didn’t look or sound as if he expected an answer.

‘I’m a human-equivalent machine,’ said the pod, in an attempt at a pleasant, conversational voice. The man jumped slightly.

‘I’m about to stand up,’ the human-equivalent machine added. ‘Please don’t be alarmed.’

Jon Wilde took a couple of steps back, his boots dislodging grit and pebbles on the slope. Clicking, grating noises came from the machine as four metal limbs unfolded from its central portion. They looked identical, with clawed digits, wrists or ankles, elbows or knees. Two of the limbs swivelled and swung downwards, the jointed extensions at their ends clamping to the ground. The machine straightened its limbs and rocked to its feet – if such they could be called. It stood at about half the man’s height, its posture and proportions vaguely suggestive of a man running in a combative crouch, head down.

Wilde gazed down at it.

‘Where are we?’ he asked.

‘On New Mars,’ the machine answered.

‘How did I get here?’

There was a silence of perhaps a minute. Wilde frowned, looked around, leaned forward just as the machine spoke again:

‘I made you.’

The machine turned and strode away.

Wilde scrambled after it.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Ship City,’ said the machine. ‘The nearest human habitation.’ It paused for a moment. ‘I’d come along, if I were you.’

The human-equivalent machine and the man it claimed to have made walked together along the bank of the canal. Every so often the man turned his head to look at the machine. Once or twice he got as far as opening his mouth, but he always turned away again as if the question or remark on his mind were too ridiculous for words.

After an hour and twenty minutes the man stopped. The machine stopped after another couple of strides and stood rocking slightly on its metal legs.

‘I’m thirsty,’ the man said. The water in the canal was sluggish, flecked with green algae. He eyed it dubiously. ‘D’you know if that stuff’s safe to drink?’

‘It isn’t,’ said the machine. ‘And I can’t make it safe, without using up an amount of energy I’d rather keep. However, I can assure you that if you go on walking, with perhaps the occasional rest, you’ll drink in a bar in Ship City tonight.’

‘Mars bars?’ Wilde said, and laughed. ‘I always wanted to hang out in Mars bars.’

Another hour passed and Wilde said, ‘Hey, I can see it!’

The machine didn’t need to ask him. Without missing a step, it smoothly extended its legs until it was striding along with its pod almost on a level with the man’s head, and it too saw what Wilde had seen: the jagged irregularities at the horizon.

‘Ship City,’ the machine said.

‘Give me a break,’ the man shouted, hurrying to keep up. ‘No need to go like a Martian fighting-machine.’

The machine’s steady pace didn’t slacken.

‘You’re stronger than you think,’ it said. The man caught up with it and marched alongside.

‘I like that,’ the machine added, after a while. ‘“Like a Martian fighting-machine”. Heh-heh.’

Its laugh needed working on if it was going to sound at all human.

They walked on. Their shadows lengthened in front of them, and the city slowly appeared above a horizon that, for the man, was unfamiliarly but not unexpectedly close. The irregularities differentiated into tall, bristling towers connected by arches and slender, curved bridges; domes and blocks became apparent between the towers, among which a matted encrustation of smaller buildings spread out from the city, obscured by a low haze.

The small sun set behind them, and within fifteen minutes the night surrounded them. The man stopped walking, and the machine stopped too.

Jon Wilde turned around several times, scanning from the zenith to the horizon and back as if looking for something he might recognise. He found nothing, and faced at last the machine, dim in the starlight that reflected like frost from its hull and flanks.

‘How far?’ The words came from a dry mouth. He waved a hand at the blazing, freezing, crowded sky. ‘How long?’

‘Hey, Jon Wilde,’ the machine said. It had got its conversational tone right. ‘If I knew, I would tell you. Same spiral, different arm, that’s all I know. We’re talking memory numbers, man, we’re talking geological time.’

The two beings contemplated each other for a moment, then hastened the last few miles towards the city’s multiplying lights.

Stras Cobol, by the Stone Canal. Part of the human quarter. A good place to get lost. Surveillance systems integrate the view –

A three-kilometre strip of street, the canal-bank on one side, buildings on the other, their height a bar-chart of property values in a long swoop from the centre’s tall towers to the low shacks and shanties at the edge of town where the red sand blows in off the desert and family-farm fusion plants glow in the dark. On the same trajectory the commerce spills increasingly out from behind the walls and windows, on to the pavement stalls and hawkers’ trays. All along this street there’s a brisk jostle of people and machines, some working, some relaxing as the light leaves the sky.

Among all the faces in that crowd, something focuses in on one face. A woman’s face, tracked briefly as she threads her way between the other bodies on the street. The system’s evaluation routines categorise her appearance swiftly: apparent age about twenty, height about one metre sixty – well below average – mass slightly above average. Her height is lifted within the normal range by high-heeled shoes, her figure accentuated by a long-sleeved, skinny-rib sweater and a long narrow skirt, skilfully slit so it doesn’t impede her quick steps. Shoulder-length hair, black and thick, sways around a face pretty and memorable but not flipping any switches on the system’s scalar aesthetic – wide cheekbones, full lips, large eyes with green irises and suddenly narrowing, zeroing-in pupils that look straight at the hidden lens that’s giving her this going-over. One eye closes in what looks like a wink.

And she’s gone. She’s vanished from the system’s sight, she’s just a blurry anomaly, a floating speck in its vision and a passing unease in its mind as its attention is turned forcibly to a stall-holder wheeling his urn of hot oil across a nearby junction without due care and attention and the we-got-an-emerging-situation-on-our-hands program kicks in…

But she’s still there, still walking fast, and we’re still with her, for reasons which will sometime become clear. We’re in her space, in her time, in her head.

Her pretty little head contains and conceals a truly Neo-Martian mind, an intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic as the man said, and right now it’s in combat consciousness. She’s running Spy, not Soldier, but Soldier’s there, ready to toggle in at the first sign of trouble. Body movement’s being handled by Secretary, in leisure-time mode: her walk is late-for-a-date hurry and doing fine so far. Except she’s walked farther and faster than any girl in such a circumstance normally would, and the skin over her Achilles tendons is rubbing raw. She sets a Surgeon sub-routine to work and – its warning heeded – the pain switches sensibly off.

She allows herself a diffuse glow of pleasure at having spotted and subverted the surveillance system. Her real danger, she knows, comes from human pursuit. She can’t see behind her because she daren’t switch on her sonar and radar, but she uses every other clue that catches her eye. Every echo, every reflection: in windows and bits of scrap metal and the shiny fenders of vehicles, even in the retinae of people walking in the opposite direction – all go to build an all-round visual field. Constantly updated, an asynchronous palimpsest where people and vehicles in full colour and 3D pass out of her cone of vision and into a wider sphere where they become jerky cartoon figures, wire outlines intermittently blocked in with colour as a scrap of detail flashes back from in front. (She could keep the colour rendering if she wanted to, let the visual and the virtual merge seamlessly, but she doesn’t have the processing power to spare right now. Spy is a demanding mind-tool and it eats resources.)

It tags a warning, unsubtle red arrowheads jabbing at one face, then another, both far behind her. She throws enhancement at those distant dots, blowing them up into something recognisable, and recognises them. Two men, heavies employed by her owner. Their names aren’t on file but she’s glimpsed them at various times over the years.

Spy analyses their movements and reports that they haven’t spotted her: they’re searching, not tracking. Not yet.

She sees a bar sign coming up on her left, ‘The Malley Mile’ spelled out in fizzing rainbow neon. By good luck the nearest pedestrian coming her way is huge and walking close to the sides of the buildings. She lets the two-metre-thirty, two-hundred-kilo bulk of the giant pass her – the only noticeable thing about him is the inappropriately floral scent of the shampoo he’s most recently used on his orangey pelt – and as he occludes any view of her from behind she nips smartly through the doorway.

It’s a trashy, tacky place, this joint. Lots of wood and metal. The music is a thumping noise in the background, like machinery. The ventilation isn’t coping well with the smoke, and somebody’s already had a poppy-pipe. Freshwater fish are grilling somewhere in the back. Low ceiling, dim lights. Her vision adjusts without a blink and it’s daylight, give or take the odd wavelength. Spy takes over fully for a staking-out, second-long sweep of the room. There’s surveillance, of course, but it’s just the hostelry’s own system, exactly as smart and dangerous as a dog. She pings it anyway, leaving it with a low-wattage conviction that this person who’s just walked in is nice and has just given it a pat on the head and can be safely ignored from now on.

There are a couple of dozen people in The Malley Mile: farmworkers and mechanics on bar stools, and office-workers – mostly young women – around the round tables. Looks like they’ve come in here for a drink on their way home from work, and stayed for a few more. Good. She sees a notice: no concealed weapons. She takes a pistol from the purse she’s carrying and sticks it in the waistband of her skirt and walks up to the bar. The girls around the tables notice her, the men on the stools notice her, but that’s just because she’s pretty, not because she looks out of place.

The barman’s another giant, some brain-boosted gigantopith or whatever (she’s never had occasion to sort out the hominid genera) and he’s slumped sadly on his elbows, wrists overhanging the near edge of the bar counter. He turns away from the gladiators on the television and smiles at her, or at any rate bares his yellow fangs.

‘Yesh?’

‘A Dark Star, please.’

Without getting up the barman reaches for bottles and mixes her a rum and cola.

‘Eyshe?’

‘Yes please.’ She’s careful with the sibilants; the urge to slide into mimicry (it’s a bug in Spy, actually) is hard to resist. She lets Spy handle the process of paying, selecting the right grubby note from her filched collection of promissories. Gold values she can handle in any of her frames of mind, but crops and machine-parts, land and labour-time are foreign to most of them.

The ice clinks as she takes her drink to an unoccupied table nearest to the end wall. She sits down with her back to that wall. She lays her purse, and her pistol, casually on the table. She sips her drink, lights a cigarette, and keeps an eye on the door as if waiting for her friends or boyfriend to turn up.

The two photofit faces currently hovering in her pattern-recognition and target-acquisition software might come through the door any minute now. If she’s lucky, they don’t know she’s armed. She’s almost certain they don’t know about Spy, and Soldier, and all the other routines she’s loaded up. They’re expecting Secretary, and Sex, and Self, who between them can’t raise more than a kick or bite or scratch. They can handle that, and as for the others here…once the heavies flash their cards the customers will watch her being dragged out of the place with all the empathy and solidarity and compassion and concern that they’d give to the recovery of a stolen vehicle.

But there are people in this district who don’t see things that way, and if the repossession guys – the greps, as the slang goes – don’t come in and find her, or if they do and she gets away, she’ll be off into the back streets to seek human allies.

That’s all as may be. Her owner might by now have discovered just what hardware and software she’s packing, and he’ll have someone and/or something more formidable on her tracks.

She keeps her eyes on the door and her fingers close to the pistol.

‘English spoken here?’

Wilde scuffed the surface of the canal-bank path – it had changed from trodden dust to a strip of fused sand which broadened and merged with the street ahead, the permanent way made from the same material as if the finger of a god had drawn the lines from space – and waited for the machine to reply.

The city had grown on the horizon as they got closer, eventually into a huge, vaguely organic-looking jumble of soaring spiky towers, their visible structure like the interiors of bones or the skeletons of sea creatures, their outlines picked out by lights. What had looked from a distance like some matted undergrowth was now resolved into a fringe of low buildings which – unlike all the other shantytowns Wilde had seen – appeared to extend in through the main body of the city on whose edge they now stood. To their right and left were fields. The bulky moving presences of machines in those fields were the only traffic they had so far encountered. Lights had passed over, but it was difficult to tell whether they were natural or artificial. Once, something huge and silent and leaving a green afterimage or trail had rushed above their heads, above the city and made a distant flash beyond.

‘Waterfall,’ the machine had explained, unhelpfully.

Now it shifted on its feet and answered Wilde’s question. ‘You’ll be understood,’ it said hesitantly. ‘English is the predominant language. Your usage and accent – and mine, I might add – may seem a little quaint.’

‘Before we go any farther,’ Wilde said, his gaze flicking from the buildings under the first street-lights ahead to the machine, ‘get me straight on a couple of things. First, is it normal to be seen talking to a machine? I mean, are – robots? – like you common around here?’

‘You could say that,’ said the machine dryly.

‘OK. Next item on the agenda as far as I’m concerned is getting something to eat and a drink and a place to crash out. Am I right in thinking that I’ll have to pay for it?’

‘Oh yes,’ said the machine.

‘And you don’t happen to have some money stashed away in that shell of yours?’

‘No, but I can do better than that. See the second building along the road? It’s a mutual bank.’

Wilde said nothing, although his mouth opened.

‘You do remember what that is, don’t you?’

Wilde laughed. ‘So I get to raise some cash by mortgaging my property?’ He gestured at the clothes he stood up in. ‘That’s not much help –’

The machine gave a creditable impersonation of a polite cough.

‘Oh.’ Wilde looked at it with a renewed, speculative interest. ‘I see.’

He set off along the road, ahead of the machine for the first time since they’d met. The machine lurched into motion after him.

‘Just don’t get the wrong idea,’ it said, its voice as stiff as its gait.

One of the girls at the nearest table is giving a rendering of the pub’s signature song in an authentically dire accent, full of maudlin yearning.

‘If Ayyyye could walk acraaawrse the ryyyinbow

that shiiiines acraaawrse the Malley Mile…’

Self knows that the Malley Mile is a real place, and that both the sense of loss and the rainbow effect refer to aspects of its reality that – strangely, or is it just part of the program? – bring tears pricking to even her cold eyes. Scientist is yammering on about it, but she doesn’t want to know right now.

She’s just settled down with her third drink, burning the alcohol straight to energy but remembering to emulate the effect, when the door bangs open and a girl walks in who sure isn’t some office-worker deciding the weekend starts here.

She’s tall and thin, though her flak-jacket makes her look broad. Narrow jeans, spacer boots, a big automatic holstered on her hip. On her other hip she’s carrying a large bag with a strap taking the strain to her shoulder. Short blonde hair lying close to her skull. Face too bony to be bonny. The main things going for it are her bright blue eyes and her big smile, which at this moment is turned on the men at – and the man behind – the bar.

She walks up to the bar and orders a beer, and as she drinks it she chats to one or two of the guys, and while she’s chatting she reaches into her big satchel and hauls out fresh-looking tabloid newspapers and carefully counts coins from the men who take them. Some of them take them as if they’re keen to read them, others with a show of reluctance and a lot of banter, but most just shake their heads or shrug and go back to their own conversations and watching, the television screen, where somebody’s just about to take a sudden death shoot-out. All the while the girl’s every so often glancing around the room in a way that has Spy torn between admiration at the unobtrusive way she does it and anxiety that she’s looking for someone quite close to Spy’s hard little heart, namely Self.

The girl at the bar goes on talking to the men at the bar for another few minutes, then eases herself casually from the stool and takes a handful of papers and tries to sell them to the office-girls. She’s only successful at one table, and then she’s walking to the last table where the dark-haired woman sits alone.

A shot echoes. Two hands jolt towards two pistols, then retract as a ragged cheer from the screen and from those watching it indicates that it’s just a death penalty being scored.

And then, grinning and shaking her head, she’s standing there looking down. ‘Jumpy tonight, aren’t we?’ she says.

Spy and Soldier are jumpy indeed, jostling for possession, and it’s all Spy can do to modulate Soldier’s sharp command into a smooth, low-voiced request: ‘Just don’t stand between me and the door.’

The tall woman steps smartly sideways. She looks surprised, but she doesn’t go away.

‘Hi,’ she says. ‘My name’s Tamara. What’s yours?’

Self takes over. She keeps her hand where it is.

‘Dee,’ she says. ‘Dee Model.’

‘Ah,’ says Tamara. ‘I see.’ Her eyes widen slightly as she says it, then look away as if, for the moment, she’s at a loss. ‘Mind if I sit down?’

Dee gestures to her to do just that. She takes the seat to Dee’s right, between her and the bar.

‘What’s that paper you’re selling?’ Dee asks.

Tamara slides a copy across the table. Its masthead says The Abolitionist in quaint irregular lettering with barbed serifs. The articles, which Spy assimilates in about two seconds and which gradually seep through to Self, are an odd mix: news snippets about labour disputes; technical articles about assemblers and reactors and stuff; some columns of a sort of paranoid gossip about the doings of various important people, in which Dee’s owner’s name appears here and there; and long rambling theoretical pieces about machine intelligence.

Dee puts it down, having just given it what looks like the most casual, superficial glance. She wonders for a moment if this is a trap, but Spy thinks it very unlikely: these are exactly the sort of ideas she’d expected to find in this area, and it’s obvious that Tamara’s espousal of them is completely, perhaps resignedly, familiar to those around her. (That those around her might be part of some elaborate set-up doesn’t occur to Dee, or even to Spy: although their background is rich in intrigue and betrayal, they lack the ramifying conspiratorial imagination that would be second nature if they lived in a state.) Dee tries to keep her wild hope out of her voice.

‘Do you really think that human-equivalent machines are, well, equivalent to humans? That they have rights?’

‘Oh, sure,’ Tamara says. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Hmm,’ says Dee. ‘Let me get you a drink.’

When she returns she’s carrying Tamara’s satchel. She swings it under the table and places her pistol back on the top. Tamara waves away the offer of a cigarette. Dee lights up and leans close. Soldier takes over second place from Spy, who doesn’t like what’s going on at all. The most Spy can do is make sure no-one overhears. Another probe into the room’s electronics, and the music’s volume goes up a few decibels.

‘I’m a machine,’ Dee says.

Tamara’s obviously half-suspected this, just from the name, but just as obviously doesn’t quite believe it.

‘You coulda fooled me, girl,’ she says.

Dee shrugs. ‘Most of my body was grown in a vat or something. Most of my brain’s artificial. Technically and legally I’m a decerebrate clone manipulated by a computer. Neither component is anything but an object, but I feel like I’m a person.’

Tamara’s nodding vigorously, the way people do.

‘And I need your help,’ Dee adds. ‘I’ve escaped and my owner’s agents are searching for me along this street.’

Tamara’s head stops moving and her mouth opens.

‘Oh shit,’ she says.

Dee stares at her. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asks. ‘Isn’t this what you want?’ She glances at The Abolitionist. ‘Or is this all –?’

Tamara closes her eyes for a moment and shakes her head slightly. ‘It ain’t like that,’ she says, looking embarrassed. She steeples her fingers to the sides of her nose and talks quietly into this adequate mask. ‘Of course I’ll help you…We’ll help you. It’s just – this isn’t the main thing we do, you know? We’ve persuaded a few people to free machines, but a machine freeing itself doesn’t happen very often. Not that you get to hear about, anyway.’ She’s grinning again, back on track. ‘You into making a fight about this?’

‘I’m ready for any kind of fight,’ Dee says. ‘Who’s this “we”?’

‘Half a street full of anarchists,’ Tamara says.

Dee doesn’t understand what this means, exactly, but it sounds hopeful, especially the way Tamara says it.

‘Can you provide sanctuary?’ Dee asks.

‘We’re probably your best bet,’ Tamara says abstractedly. ‘There hasn’t really been a proper fight on this issue. It’d be quite something to be the ones to pick it. Bloody hell. This could shake up the city, the whole damn’ planet!’

Dee tries to think of a reason why this should be so, but apart from a bit of handwaving from Scientist there doesn’t seem to be any information on file.

‘Why?’ she asks.

Tamara stares at her. ‘You are definitely a machine,’ she says, smiling past the side of her hand. ‘Or you’d know the answer.’

Dee considers this, trying to formulate Scientist’s bare hints into speech.

‘It’s because of the fast folk, isn’t it?’ she suggests brightly. ‘And the dead?’

Tamara’s eyebrows flash upwards for a split second. ‘That’s the smart worry,’ she says. ‘It’s the stupid worries that are the real problem…I think you’ll find. Anyway. Are the greps likely to be hanging around outside?’

Dee thinks about this.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Not now. But there might be others.’

Tamara drains her glass. ‘Let’s go,’ she says.

They’re just getting their things together when the door opens and a young man and an old robot walk in. The man looks haggard and is wearing desert gear, and the robot’s just a standard construction rig. Tamara doesn’t give them a second glance but Dee watches as the man pauses at the doorway and looks around the room with a curious intentness.

He sees her, and his gaze stops.

He takes a step forward. His face warps as if under acceleration into an awful, anguished look, more a distortion of the features than an expression – it’s unreadable, inhuman. At the same time Dee can feel the robot’s questing senses scan her body and tap at her brain. Spy and Soldier and Sys move dizzyingly fast in the virtual spaces of her mind, repelling the hack-attack. Her own reactive hacking attempts are deflected by some shielding as impenetrable as – and perhaps no other than – the robot’s hard metal shell. The robot makes a jerky forward lurch as the man takes a second step towards her. All of Dee’s several selves start screaming at her to get out.

She has her pistol in both hands in front of her and the table’s kicked over and Tamara’s beside her. The bar falls silent except for the thudding music and the baying of a stadium audience on the television.

‘Out the back!’ Tamara says through clenched teeth. She shifts, guiding Dee to the right, walking backwards, pushing through a door that swings shut in front of them. They’re in a corridor, dark except for smudges of yellow light and thick with smells of beer and fish.

Dee enhances her vision and sees Tamara blinking hard as she whirls around. From the way she’s moving it’s obvious that Tamara can see in the dark at least as well as Dee can.

‘Come on!’ Tamara calls, and plunges along the corridor. Dee kicks off her shoes, snatches them up and races after Tamara, down a flight of steps and around a couple of corners into an even darker, smellier corridor, in fact a tunnel. Dee can hear the traffic overhead and taste the water-vapour in the air increasing with every step. She glances back and there’s no indication of pursuit. The water in the air tastes rusty as they slide to a halt before a heavy metal door at the end. Tamara fumbles with bolts at the top and bottom of the door until they clang back. She pauses, listening, then pulls the door slowly open, keeping herself behind it until it’s almost parallel to the wall. She peers around it all the while, looking out and not behind.

‘Wait,’ she whispers. The warning isn’t necessary: Soldier has kicked in and Dee is standing flat to the wall of the tunnel two metres from the doorway and only very slowly edging forward. As her cone of vision widens she sees that the door opens on to a narrow stone shelf barely above the surface of the canal, which is about fifty metres wide at this point. The lights from the opposite street, Rue Pascal, are reflected in the canal’s choppy black wavelets, stirred up by the frequent wakes of plying boats. From the sound of the slap and sigh of water she knows that the outboard motor, just at the edge of her view, belongs to a small dinghy moored close to the door.

On the metre-wide quay a shadow moves – her own.

She turns to look back down the tunnel. A light, far back in the corridor, has just come on and something is moving between here and the source. Tamara, a moment later, notices it too and she steps from behind the door. She glances at Dee, points outwards, and then makes a two-fingered chopping motion to left and right. Together they jump out of the door, turning in opposite directions as they steady themselves, crouching on the quay.

Dee sees the walled bank of the canal rising three metres to street level, and the quay running alongside the canal to a junction a few hundred metres away. Boats and barges are moored along it, doors and tunnel-mouths punctuate it. There’s nobody moving on it at the moment.

Over her shoulder she sees a similar view in the opposite direction, except that the canal extends out to the dark of the desert. She hears at least one set of running footsteps, now about half-way along the tunnel. She gestures frantically to Tamara.

‘Get in the boat!’ Tamara says. She hauls the rope and the little inflatable bumps against the quay’s lip. It barely rocks as Tamara steps in, sways wildly as Dee follows. She finds herself flat on her back in the wet well of the boat on top of her purse and shoes, her feet getting in the way of Tamara’s as the human woman casts off and starts the engine. Dee’s glad she’s in this undignified position as Tamara opens the throttle and the engine’s whine rises to a scream and the front of the boat lifts. The boat surges out across the water and Tamara brings it over in a long curve that has them shooting straight along the middle of the canal to yells and curses from other boats by the time a distant figure appears at the mouth of the tunnel.

It’s the man who recognised her. He shouts after them, but whatever he says is lost in the engine’s note. Tamara slews the tiller again and they swing around in a wall of spray and head for an opening, passing under Stras Cobol and into a branch canal that runs between high windowless walls less than five metres apart. Tamara eases off the engine and Dee cautiously sits up.

‘Lucky for us the boat was there,’ she says.

Tamara snorts. ‘It’s my boat! I left it there an hour ago when I started my round of the bars.’

Dee smiles wanly. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Circle Square,’ Tamara says. ‘Precinct of the living dead. Crawling with bad artists, freethinking machines, and anarchists arguing about what to do in an anarchy. Safe.’

Dee isn’t sure how to take this.

‘Thanks for getting me out.’

Tamara looks past Dee, at the dark water. ‘Yeah well…I gotta admit I’m not sure what I got you out from. That guy and the robot didn’t look like greps to me. Did you recognise them, or what?’

Dee’s already been through this in her head. ‘No,’ she says, her voice cold. ‘But he recognised me. I’m certain of that.’

‘Me too,’ Tamara says dryly. ‘Just I don’t think it was from a pic. He looked like he wanted to kill you, that first moment. Kill somebody, anyway, but shit, coulda been shock or some’ing – hey!’ She stares at Dee’s face. ‘You ain’t dead, are you? You and him might’ve had previous.’ She looks quite pleased at this speculation. ‘It’s all right, you can tell me. We’re cool about the dead as well as machines, OK?’

Dee doesn’t know much about the dead. Once, when she was new, she’d thought that she could hear the dead: press her ear to the wall and hear them talking, furiously, in dead languages. But it was just the sough of the machinery, the ’ware, the marrow in the city’s cold bones.

So her owner had told her, his laughter almost kind. With a harsher tone in his voice he’d added: ‘The dead are gone. And they aren’t coming back. Most of them…ah, forget it.’

And obediently, she had.

She isn’t sure whether to be annoyed at Tamara’s speculation, but it’s just the woman’s human limitations after all: in a way she’s making the same animistic mistake – thinking that machinery that sounded alive must at the very least be dead – that she herself had made way back when she was just getting her brain into gear.

So she gives Tamara a smug smile and says, ‘You can scan my skull if you like, and you’ll see me for yourself.’

‘S’pose your body’s a copy? A clone?’

Dee hasn’t thought of this before, and the idea shakes her more than she cares to show. She shrugs. ‘It’s possible.’

‘There you go,’ Tamara says. ‘That’d make whatever it was with that guy just a case of mistaken identity. No worries.’

She guns the engine again. Swept from the walls’ dank ledges, seal-rats squeak indignantly in their wake.

‘It isn’t her,’ said the robot, its voice more like a radio at low volume than a human speaking quietly. ‘So forget it. Chasing after her won’t get you anywhere. She’s just a fucking machine.’

Wilde had trudged back up the tunnel, apologised to the barkeeper, paid for the breakages and ordered a stiff drink as well as a large beer to accompany his grilled fish. The robot, propping itself up with a chair opposite him, had attracted no comment.

Wilde wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and glared at the machine.

‘She didn’t look like a machine. She looked like a real woman. She looked like –’

He stopped, in some distress.

‘Cloned,’ the machine said implacably.

‘But why? Why her? Who would –?’

He stared at the impervious pod. ‘No!’

‘Yes,’ said the machine. ‘He’s here.’

2

Pleistocene People

I remember him leaning his elbow on the bar in the Queen Margaret Union, waiting for our pints, and saying: ‘We’ll be there, Wilde! We’ll see it! One fucking computer, that’s all it’ll take, one machine that’s smarter than us and away they’ll go.’

Reid’s eyes were shining, his voice happy. He was like that when an idea took hold of him, and he prophesied. It sounds prophetic enough now, but it wasn’t an original idea even then, in December 1975. (That’s AD, by the way.) He’d got it from a book.

‘How d’you mean, “away”?’ I asked.

‘If we,’ he said, slowing down, ‘can make a machine that’s smarter than us, it can make another machine that’s smarter than the first. And so on, faster and faster. Runaway evolution, man.’

‘And where does that leave us?’

Reid pushed a heavy mug of cider towards me.

‘Behind,’ he said happily. ‘Like apes in a city of people. Come on, let’s find a seat.’

Glasgow University’s original Students’ Union dated back to before women were accepted as students. It still hadn’t quite caught up. The female students had their own union building, the QM, which did allow students of both sexes. It was therefore the one in which the more radical and progressive male students hung out, and the better by far for picking up girls.

Which was what we had in mind: a few pints with our mates in the bar for the first part of the evening, and then down to the disco about ten o’clock and see if anybody fancied a dance. The reason for getting in as much drinking as you could beforehand was that diving into the queue in front of the disco bar was best reserved for when you had to buy a round for your companions or – better – a drink for a girl who’d just danced with you.

The bar – the union bar rather than the disco bar – was fairly quiet at this time in the evening. So we got a good seat in the place, the one that ran most of the way around the back wall, from which we could see everybody who came in and – just by getting up slightly and turning around – could check out the state of play on the dance-floor below.

I rolled a skinny Golden Virginia cigarette and raised my pint of Strong-bow.

‘Cheers,’ Reid said.

‘Slainte,’ I said.

We grinned at our respective manglings of each other’s national toast – to my ear, Reid had said something like ‘Cheeurrsh’, and to his I’d said ‘Slendge.’ Reid was from the Isle of Skye, where his great-grandfather had come to work as a shepherd after the Clearances. I was from North London, and we were both somewhat out of place in Central Scotland. We hadn’t known each other very long, having met a month earlier at a seminar on War Communism. The seminar was sponsored by Critique, a left-wing offshoot of the Institute for Soviet Studies, where I was doing a one-year $.Sc. course in the Economics of Socialism.

I didn’t agree with their ideas, but I’d found the Critique clique (as I privately called them) congenial, and stimulating. They were the Institute’s Young Turks, Left Opposition, Shadow Cabinet and Government-In-Exile. They regarded both mainstream and Marxist critical theories of the Soviet Union as all of a piece with the most starry-eyed, fellow-travelling naivety in their assumption that it was at least a new system, when it was hardly even a society.

The seminar was a lunchtime session. As always, it was crowded, not so much because of its popularity but because of a shrewd tactic of always booking a room just a little smaller than the expected attendance. In that ill-assorted congregation of exiles – from America, from Chile, from South Africa and from the Other Side itself – Reid, hunched in a new denim jacket, constantly relighting, puffing and forgetting his roll-up, his lank black hair falling around his young and good-looking but somehow weathered face, seemed entirely at home, and the question he’d asked the speaker afterwards showed at least that he knew what he was asking about. But none of us had seen him before, and in the pub later (these seminars had several features in common with socialist meetings, especially the pub afterwards) he’d admitted to being a Trotskyist, which was not surprising, and a computer science student, which was.

The woman sitting next to me was American and also a Trotskyist. Reid was getting up to buy a round and asked her, ‘What will you be having?’

‘Tomato juice,’ she said. He nodded, frowning.

‘How come you’ve not met him, Myra?’ I asked as he slouched off to the bar. ‘Aren’t you in the IMG too?’ I’d picked this up while chatting to her occasionally over coffee in the Institute – almost chatting her up, to be honest, because I was rather taken with her. She was tall and incredibly slim, with a blonde bob and a perky, peaky face, the concavities of her orbits and cheeks looking like they’d been delicately, lovingly smoothed into shape with broad thumbs, her grey eyes bright behind huge round glasses.

‘I don’t go much to meetings,’ she admitted with a shake of her head. ‘Like I got pissed with comrades urging me to do more in the fight against the fucking Leninist-Trotskyist Faction? I mean, what do these guys think I came to England to get away from?’

‘You mean Scotland, England?’ I drawled derisively, unable to comment on her – to me – utterly incomprehensible remark.

Myra laughed. ‘Go give the guy a hand. He seems to be having a problem.’

Reid turned to me with relief. ‘I’ve got everybody’s except Myra’s. What the hell are “tamadages”?’

‘And one tomato juice!’ I said to the bar-tender.

‘Oh, thanks,’ Reid said. He looked up at me. (He’d unconsciously pulled himself up to his full height, something folk often did around me, but he was still looking up.) ‘What you were saying back there about the market, that was interesting. The millions of equations stuff.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, gathering up some of the drinks. ‘The millions of equations. And that’s not the half of it.’ I knew what was coming next, having been around the block several times already on this one.

‘Why can’t we just use computers?’

‘Because,’ I said over my shoulder as I threaded my way back to the table, ‘without a market, you won’t have the fucking computers!’

Myra was laughing as I put down the drinks. ‘Don’t worry about Jon’s bourgeois economics,’ she said to Dave Reid as we sat down. ‘Even the Soviet Union has computers.’ She waited for some sign of reassurance in his honestly puzzled face, and added: ‘The biggest in the world!’

Reid smiled but went on doggedly: ‘Look at IBM. Do they bother about market forces? Do they fuck! Friend of mine worked at their factory in Inverkip one summer. He said they supply spare parts anywhere in the world within forty-eight hours, even if it means taking an axe to a mainframe that’s already built – and pulling the parts out!’

‘Yeah, that sounds just like the Soviet Union,’ I said, to general laughter. ‘And you sound just like my old man.’

‘Is he a socialist?’ Reid asked. He sounded incredulous.

‘Lifelong SPGB member,’ I said.

‘SPGB? Oh, brilliant!’ Reid said.

‘What’s the SPGB?’ Myra asked. Reid and I both began to say something, then Reid smiled, shrugged and deferred.

I took a long swallow, but it wasn’t the beer that I smelt but some strange remembered whiff of mown grass, dog-shit, and vanilla: Speaker’s Corner. ‘The Socialist Party of Great Britain,’ I explained, falling almost automatically into the soapbox cadence of the autodidact agitator, ‘set out in 1904, with less than a hundred members, to win a majority of the workers of the world. They already have 800, so they’re well on their way. At that rate, the best projections put them on course for a clear majority by the twenty-fifth century.’

‘You gotta be kidding,’ Myra said.

‘He is,’ Reid said sternly. ‘It’s, well, not a bad caricature, I’ll give you that. But I’ve read some of their stuff, and I’ve never seen that calculation.’

‘OK,’ I admitted. ‘I made that part up. Well actually, my dad made it up. He’s a true believer, but he does have a sense of humour and he once wrote a wee program based on population growth and the Party’s growth, and ran it on a computer at work.’

‘He’s a programmer as well, is he?’

‘Oh yes. For the London Electricity Board. When he started, debugging meant cleaning the moths off the valves, and I am not making that up!’

Reid and Myra and several of the others around the table laughed. I’d never really held forth like this before, and I had the feeling that I’d made some kind of good impression on the clique.

‘The point being,’ I added, while everyone was still listening, ‘that I’ve heard all these arguments about how computers will make economic planning a doddle, and I don’t buy ’em.’

‘You’re missing several points here,’ Myra interjected, and went on to make them, her moral passion a mirror-image of mine. So I shifted my ground to another passion.

‘I don’t want a planned society anyway,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t fit in with my plans.’

That got a cheap laugh.

‘So what are you?’ Reid asked. ‘A right-winger?’

I sighed. ‘I’m an individualist anarchist, actually.’

‘“Ey’m en individualist enerchist, eckchelly”,’ Myra mimicked. ‘More like an anachronism. It’s a tragedy,’ she added with a flourish to the gallery. ‘The kid learns some kinda Marxism at his daddy’s knee, and he ends up a goddam Proudhonist!’

‘Yup,’ I said. ‘Though it’s your compatriot Tucker that I think got it all together.’

‘So who’s Tucker?’ somebody asked.

‘Well…’ I began.

We hadn’t got any work done that afternoon, but – looking back at it in an economic, calculating kind of way – it was worth it. Most of us ended up drinking cans and coffees back in a basement room of the Institute. Reid and I sat at opposite sides of Myra at the corner of the big table. Sometimes she talked to both of us, sometimes to other people, and again to one of us or the other. When she talked to Reid it was like overhearing the gossip of an extended family quarrel, and I tuned out or turned to other conversations. But she always brought me back into it, with some remark about Vietnam or Portugal or Angola: the real wars and revolutions over which the factions waged their intercontinental fight.

After some time I became aware that there were only the three of us left in the room. I remember Myra’s face, her elbows on the table, her thin hands moving as she talked about New York. I was thinking that it sounded just the place I wanted to go, when Reid’s chair scraped on the floorboards and he stood up.

‘I’ll have to be off,’ he said. He smiled at Myra for a moment then looked at me and said: ‘See you around then, Jon.’

‘Yeah, looks like we hang out in the same places,’ I said with a grin. ‘If I don’t bump into you in the next day or two I’ll probably see you in the QM on Friday.’

‘Don’t you disappear on us, Dave,’ Myra said. ‘Make sure you come to the next seminar, yeah? We need guys like you around Critique. You know, like not just academic?’

Reid flushed slightly and then laughed and said, ‘Aye, that’s what I was thinking myself!’ He slung a duffel bag over his shoulder and with a wiping motion of his spread hand waved goodbye.

We heard his desert-boots padding up the stair, the outer door’s Yale click shut. It came to me for the first time that he and I had spent the afternoon competing for Myra’s regard – or she had spent it testing us. (That was how it started: with Myra. And not, as I thought long afterwards, with Annette. For if Myra had gone with Reid from the first, and I with Annette…)

Myra settled her chin in her hands, jiggled her specs and looked at me through them.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘An interesting guy, huh?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Very serious.’

‘I’m not in the mood for serious, right now.’

She looked at me steadily for a moment and smiled and said: ‘Do you want to burn some grass?’

I thought this was some obscure Americanism for sex, and only realised my mistake when she started building an elaborate joint back at her bedsit; but as it turned out I was not that mistaken, after all.

Myra and I didn’t have an affair, more a succession of one-night stands. Ten days that shook the world. Neither of us pretended, but I like to think both of us hoped, that more might come of it. But publicly, to each other, we were being very sophisticated, very cool, very liberated about it.

Then she fell for a Chilean resistance hero with a black moustache, and I was astonished at how angry and jealous and possessive I felt. There was a moment, around three in the morning after the evening that Myra told me how, you know, it was very nice, and she really liked me, but she had quite unexpectedly found her feelings for this Latin Leninist just so powerful, so unlike anything she’d ever experienced before, that, well for a start she was seeing him in, like, five minutes…there was a moment of drinking black coffee from a grubby mug and looking with unbelieving loathing at the ashtray spilling tarry twists of paper while my fingers rolled yet another just to feel the burn on my tongue, when all my circadian rythms troughed at once in an ebb of the blood, a bleeding of the body’s heat, when I felt I never wanted to go again to a bed that didn’t enfold the promise of Myra’s pelvic bones rocking on mine.

And all the time another part of my mind was working away, analysing how absurd it was that this jealousy should be a surprise, and yet another level of my awareness was congratulating myself on being sufficiently stoical and self-understanding to understand that, and to know that this as a straightforward primate emotion which could be borne, and would pass.

I picked up a Pentel and scrawled on a pad: Pleistocene people with looking-glass eyes, so I wouldn’t forget this cloth-eared insight in the morning, and crashed out. Still aching, but suddenly confident I had the measure of jealousy and unexpected, unrequited love.

At the same time as Myra and I were carefully, and in her case successfully, not falling for each other, I’d fallen for Reid. There’s the love that (no thanks to God) now dares to shout its name, and there’s another love that doesn’t know what its name bloody is, and this was it. Our minds came together like magnets, with a clash.

Reid was stocky and dark, with well-proportioned Celtic features; I was tall and wiry, with hair I kept cropped to disguise its thinness even then, and a nose that had always had me cast as a Red Indian when I was a kid. Reid was gauche, I was suave; but Reid’s awkwardness was something he shrugged off, and rose above with a kind of grace, whereas I felt every social occasion a constant test of wits. Reid’s parents were religious – Free Kirk – and had done their best to inculcate the same principles in him; mine were staunch Marxist materialists, but had taken a laissez-faire attitude to my philosophical education. At times, for all Reid’s accounts of questions answered by clips around the head or floods of tears, I felt that his parents’ firm line had shown the deeper concern for his welfare.

Reid was a communist, I a libertarian; but he had a prickly independence of mind, a dogged tendency to worry at difficulties in the doctrines his sect espoused. I sometimes suspected I had too easy a scepticism, too catholic a confidence that my shaky pile of books by Proudhon and Tucker, Herbert and Spencer, Robert Heinlein and Robert Anton Wilson was building up to a reliable launch-tower of the mind.

Another thing I liked about Reid was that I got drunk faster with him than with anyone else; hence, the Friday evenings.

Reid and I talked some more about ‘the computers taking over’ (which was how people talked back then about the Singularity), then moved on to the current New Scientist article on catastrophe theory, about which Reid was sceptical (‘like a bourgeois version of dialectics’, was how he put it). After science, politics: the hot topic was Portugal, where the far left had just over-reached itself in what looked like a cack-handed attempt at a military coup.

‘There’s a good article here about it,’ Reid said, digging out from inside his jacket a copy of Red Weekly, the newspaper of the International Marxist Group. ‘Slagging off what Socialist Worker has to say. Well, I haven’t read it myself yet, but it looks good.’

‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll buy it. Sectarian polemic is one thing you guys are good at.’

‘We’ll get you in the end,’ Reid grinned as I bought the paper.

‘Or I’ll get you,’ I said.

Reid shrugged. ‘That’s not how it works,’ he said. He started rolling a cigarette, talking in a tired voice. ‘People don’t stop being socialists and become something else. They just become nothing, or join the Labour Party – same difference.’

‘I stopped being a socialist,’ I pointed out.

‘Yeah, but that’s different, come on. It’d be like me saying I stopped being a Christian. It was just something I was brought up to, and as soon as I started thinking for myself I dropped it. Same with you, right?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Mind you, it was never shoved down my throat every Sunday.’ But I uneasily remembered how little it had taken – some anarchist summary of Tucker, I think – to precipitate every doubt I’d ever had about my inherited faith.

‘I hope I always understand things the way I do now,’ Reid went on, ‘because it makes sense, it’s ahead of anything else on offer. But if I ever forget, or you know, lose the place –’

‘Or realise you’ve been wrong all along.’

‘– all right, that’s how it’ll seem, that’s what I’ll tell myself –’

He grinned sourly, his tongue out to lick his Rizla, giving himself a momentary diabolic, gargoyle appearance. ‘But if that ever happens,’ he finished, rolling the cigarette up and lighting it, ‘I’ll be damned if I become an idealistic fighter for the other side. I’ll just look out for myself, one way or another.’

‘But that’s what I believe in right now!’ I said cheerfully. ‘Look out for number one. I’m not an idealistic fighter for anything.’

‘That’s what you think,’ Reid said. ‘You’re an anarchist out of pure, innocent self-interest? Oh, sure. Face it, man, you care. You’re a socialist at heart.’

I liked him enough, and he said it lightly enough, for me not to be offended.

‘Nah, that’s not how it is at all,’ I said. ‘I really do have a selfish reason for wanting a world without states: I want to live forever. Seriously. I want to make it to the ships. A planet occupied by organised gangs of nuclear-armed nutters is not my idea of a safe environment.’

Most people laughed at me when I said this, but Reid didn’t. One of the things we had in common was an interest in science fiction and technological possibilities, which fitted right in with the rest of what I believed. In theory it fitted in with Marxism too, but I knew that Reid’s comrades regarded it as ideologically unsound, as if the only far-out futuristic speculation allowed was the IMG’s latest perspectives document. His stacks of Galaxy and Analog were stashed in a cupboard of his bedsit, like pornography.

‘It seems a bit much to expect,’ Reid said. ‘We picked the wrong century to be born in. I reckon we’ll just have to take our chances like the rest of the poor sods.’

I held my cigarette at arm’s length and looked at it. ‘And we’re not doing much for our chances.’

‘I see it as a race with medical science,’ Reid said. ‘Mine’s a pint of Export, by the way.’

I noticed our empty glasses and jumped up, contrite at not noticing sooner. When I came back Reid was deep in the paper he’d sold me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to push the conversation farther at the moment, so I leaned back and let my mind drift for a bit. The place was filling up. The juke-box was playing Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’, a song which always incited in me a maudlin exile patriotism for a country which had never existed, as if I’d been a citizen of Atlantis in a previous life. When it finished I flipped out of the mood and looked around again, and I noticed that Reid’s paper had another reader, who was sitting beside him and leaning forward, her head tilted to read the back page. Her curly black hair was tumbled sideways around her face. Black eyebrows, eyelashes, large green eyes moving (slowly, I noticed) as she read, small neat nose, wide cheekbones from which her cheeks, neither thin nor plump, curved smoothly past either side of full (and unconsciously, minutely moving) lips, to a small firm chin.

Her gaze flicked from the page and met mine with an unembarrassed smile. I felt a jolt so physical that I didn’t even associate it with an emotion. And then Reid lowered his paper and looked at her. She sat back up, and now she did look slightly embarrassed. She was with a bevy of other girls who’d commandeered the next table along, and the rest were talking amongst themselves.

‘Well hello,’ Reid said. ‘Are you finding it interesting?’

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand how anyone would want to support strikes.’ She had a west coast accent, but – like Reid – she was speaking an accented English, not Scots like the native Glaswegians did. Probably from down the Clyde somewhere then, Irish or Highland: ESL a generation or two back.

‘It’s a socialist paper,’ Reid said. He glanced at me, as if for support. ‘We support the workers, you know?’

‘But the government is socialist,’ she said, sounding indignant. ‘And they don’t want strikes, do they?’

‘We don’t think the Labour government is socialist at all,’ Reid explained.

‘But isn’t it bad for the country, when people can go on strike and go straight on social security?’

‘In a way, yes,’ said Reid, who would normally have lost patience at this point. ‘But if what you mean by “the country” is most people living in it, right, then the problems we have don’t come from workers going on strike, they come from the bosses and bankers doin’ business as usual. They’re the ones who’re really costing the country.’

‘You have a funny way of looking at things,’ she said, as an explanation, not a question. She dismissed the matter and switched her attention to more important concerns. ‘Are you going down to the disco later?’

‘Yes,’ I said, before Reid could make another attempt at political education. ‘Are you?’

‘Oh aye,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll see you down there.’ She flashed us a quick smile before being tugged back into the conversation with her friends. I stared for a moment at where her hair fell over the shoulders of her plain white shirt. The shirt was tucked into tight blue jeans, and her feet into high-heeled shoes. Her clothes and, now I came to think of it, her make-up looked too neat and normal for a student’s. Same went for her friends, some of whom were dressed similarly, some in posh frocks.

‘Well,’ I said as Reid caught my eye, ‘as chat-up lines go I think that one needs working on.’

‘You could say that,’ he admitted. ‘Still, she didn’t give me much of a chance.’

‘You shouldn’t have had your nose in the damn’ paper in the first place,’ I told him.

Just after ten o’clock, we both moved fast as the girls left, lost them in the queue but managed to grab the table nearest to theirs.

‘Do you want to dance?’ I shouted. UV light caught the nylon stitching in her shirt, a visible-spectrum strobe caught her nod. That dance was fast, the next slow. We had our hands lightly on each other’s shoulders at the end. I looked down at her. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

There was a thing she did with her eyes: the green coronae streaming, the irises opening into black pools you could drown in.

All I could think of to say was, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Annette.’

‘Jon Wilde,’ I said. ‘Do you want a drink?’ I had drowned, but my mouth was still moving.

‘Pint of lager, thanks.’ She smiled and turned to the table. When I got back Reid was shouting and handwaving something to her over the music and lights. She listened, head tilted, chin on hand. The music changed again, and Reid stood up and held out a hand to Annette. She nodded, downed a gulp of the lager with a quick smile of thanks to me, and away they danced.

‘Somebody seems tae hiv got aff on the wrang fit,’ an amused but sympathetic female voice said in my ear. I turned to find myself looking at a girl with long bangs of red-brown hair out of which her face peeped like a small mammal from underbrush. She was wearing a blouse with drawstrings at the neck and cuffs, a long blue skirt over long boots.

‘Yes,’ I said with a backwards nod. ‘He’s a terrible dancer.’

She laughed. ‘Ah wis talkin aboot you,’ she said. ‘Ah widnae worry. Annette’s a wee bit i a flirt.’

‘She can flirt with me any time,’ I said. ‘Meanwhile, let’s get acquainted, if only to give her something to think about.’

‘This’ll gie her something tae think aboot,’ she said, and astonished me with a kiss, followed by a snuggle up, which with some shifting of chairs and careful pitching of voices enabled us to have a conversation audible only to us. Now and again we heard ourselves shouting as the music stopped while somebody changed discs (not disks, they came later).

Her name was Sheena. Short for Oceania, I later learned.

‘How do you know Annette?’

Sheena grimaced at my choice of topic. ‘Live wi her,’ she yelled confidentially. ‘Work wi her, tae. Wir lab technicians. In the Zoology Department. Whit dae yee dae?’

I told her, and before long was shouting and waving my hands, just like a real scientist. But if the intent was to provoke Annette into showing more interest in me, the experiment failed.

Chill night, no frost, dead leaves skeletal on the pavements like fossil fish. Dave and Annette and Sheena and I paused at the bridge, stared over the parapet at the Kelvin’s peaceful roar.

‘Must be the only feature named after a unit of measurement,’ Reid said. I laughed at that and the girls laughed too.

‘There should be more!’ I said. ‘The Joules Burn! The Ampere Current!’

‘Loch Litre!’

‘Ben Metre!’

‘Or computer languages,’ Reid said as we walked on, the BBC Scotland building on our left, on our right the Botanic Garden with its vast circular greenhouse, a flying saucer from some nineteenth-century Mars. ‘Fortran Steps. Basic Blocks…’

‘Ada Mansions!’

‘Stras Cobol!’

By the time we reached the girls’ flat we’d scraped up Newton Heights and Candela Beach, and I was trying to persuade everybody that all the units were the names of people; for example Jean-Baptiste de Metre, the noted Encyclopaedist, Girondist, and dwarf.

‘Of course after the Revolution he dropped the “de”,’ I explained as Annette jingled for keys. ‘But that didn’t save him, he got –’

‘Shortened,’ said Reid.

‘By a foot.’

‘No, stupid, a head.’

‘Are youse goin tae stand there all night?’

‘Only for a second.’

‘Named of course after…’ I searched for inspiration.

Reid gave me a shove. ‘Come on.’

I went in. Basement flat, big front room, bed, sofa-bed, fake fireplace. Snoopy posters, stuffed toys, girly clutter. Tiny kitchen where Annette was plugging in an electric kettle.

We talked, we drank coffee which only made us feel wilder, Sheena skinned up a joint. Later…later I was in the kitchen, half-sitting on the edge of the sink, while Sheena took charge of another round of Nescafé and the remains of a roach. The door was almost closed, Dave’s and Annette’s voices a steady murmur.

She put milk back in the fridge, leaned on my thigh. I leaned over and parted her fronds and looked at her.

‘Do you want me to stay?’

‘Aye, well, no.’ She passed me the charred cardboard; I sipped, winced and held it under the tap. ‘Ah mean, Ah wid, but Ah c’n see ye fancy Annette.’

‘Wish she could. Wish I’d told her.’

‘Och, she knows. Ah think she’s feart. Yir so – intense.’

‘Intense? Moi? You mean, not like my pal Dave Fight-The-Good-Fight Reid? Likes his easy charm with the labour theory of value, is that it?’

Sheena grinned. ‘Yir no far wrong. See, if he cares enough whit she thinks tae argue wi her, he cannae jist be interested in gettin aff wi her.’

The kettle sang. I gazed at the fluorescent strip above the worktop and squeezed my eyes. Sheena’s weight shifted away and she busied herself with the mugs. I sighed in the sudden aroma.

‘So what am I doing that makes you think I’m coming on too strong? I’ve hardly had a chance to say a word to her all bloody evening.’

‘Dead right,’ Sheena said. ‘Ye talk tae me, and ye say things tae Dave, and aw the time ye look at Annette and smile at whitever she says.’

‘I do not!’

She looked me in the eye.

‘All right,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe I do. I’m sorry. Must seem a bit rude.’

‘It does an aw,’ she said. ‘Still, I’m no blamin you. I started the whole wee game. C’me oan, see’s a hand wi they mugs.’

When I’d finished the coffee I stood up. Dave and Annette were sitting on the floor, leaning against the side of the bed. Dave’s arm was across Annette’s shoulders.

‘See you, guys.’

‘See ya,’ Dave said.

‘Goodnight,’ Annette said. I tried to read her narrowed eyes, to gloss a twinkle or a wink. She looked down.

Sheena kissed me goodnight at the door, with a warmth as sudden and unexpected as her kissed hello.

‘Sure?’ I tried to curve my lips to a mischievous grin.

‘Sure.’ She pushed my shoulders, holding. ‘Yir a nice man, but let’s no make our lives any mair complicated than they are.’

‘Okay, Sheena. Goodnight. See you again.’

‘Scram!’ she smiled, and closed the door.

Tiles to chest-level, whitewash, polished balustrade. Glasgow working-class tenement respectability, not like the student slum I inhabited. I remembered something. I turned back to the door and squatted in front of it, pushed back the sprung brass flap of the letter-box.

‘Dave!’ I shouted.

‘What?’ came faint and distant.

‘After Charles the Second!’ I yelled. ‘Patron of the Royal Society!’

A cloud had descended on the city while I’d been in the flat. At the junction of Great Western Road and Byres Road I waited at a crossing. Heels clicked up behind me, stopped beside me. A girl in a fur coat. She turned, smiling, and asked, ‘How do the lights –? Oh, I see.’ Voice like a warm hand, English upper-class accent. The fur and her hair glittered with beads of moisture. She was going somewhere she wanted to be, confident no-one would dare lay a finger on her: a beautiful animal, perfectly adapted, feral.

‘Terrible fog, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Never seen one like it in Glasgow.’

The lights changed. We crossed, our paths diverging. She went down Byres Road, to that place where she wanted to be, and I walked along Great Western Road, back to my room.

3

The Terminal Kid

It’s raining on New Mars. This is a machine-made miracle, the work of rare devices far away, and of the insensate, botanic power of their countless offspring which turn metal petals to focus faint solar radiation on chunks of dirty ice, flaring their surface volatiles to send them tumbling sunwards, nudged and guided in a precisely calculated trajectory that years later takes them into an atmosphere just thick enough to catch them and carry them down; where with luck they fall as rain and not as fire, and which in any case each bolide’s passage leaves marginally better fitted to catch and contain the next.

But to Dee, out in the wet night, it’s commonplace, and a drag. For about half an hour she’s had to keep the image-intensifiers at full blast, and her eyes are hurting. Her ears, too: sonar ping off wet walls a metre or so away on either side induces an enclosing sense of pressure. At the same time turning it down or off would strain her even more. So it’s with relief and relaxation that she sees the narrow waterway open out on a much wider and brighter canal.

‘Ring Canal,’ Tamara indicates as she turns her little craft to the right. Dee, craning her head and looking fore and aft, can see no curvature. Tall, narrow houses – rather than storage blocks and industrial units – overlook this canal, and lights are strung above its banks. Ahead, a rapidly closing hundred metres away, the Ring Canal itself opens out, and through the gap between the buildings at the end Dee sees what looks and sounds like a bonfire: a blaze of light, a roar of noise.

At the confluence, the Ring Canal separates to left and right, curving to a visible ring whose diameter Dee estimates as three hundred metres. More of the tall houses huddle around it, and within it there’s a flat island, accessible from the surrounding circular way by bridges. This central island is covered with corrugated-iron huts and fabric booths and shacks, among which many people are loudly busy. The light comes from overhead floods, and from each individual booth’s contribution of spotlights, fluorescent tubing, strobe, fairy-light cable, and fibre-optic.

Tamara takes another right and throttles back the engine, coasting along the outer bank, silent amid the din of music and commerce, both competitive.

‘What’s going on here?’ Dee asks.

Tamara spares her a glance. ‘Fi’day evening in Circle Square.’

A tiny jetty under a narrow wrought-iron bridge, with a set of steps attached. Tamara moors the boat and motions to Dee to climb the steps. She waits on the shoreward side of the bridge and helps Tamara to haul up the bag. The coming and going of people – couples, groups, kids dodging and weaving between legs and wheels, youths on or in vehicles built to go fast and moving slow, and things that might be vehicles except they have no riders – almost pushes her back off.

‘Right,’ says Tamara, ‘time to make you legal.’

She sets off along the bridge, Dee close behind her – one person in the crowd who has no difficulty getting through.

Most of the stalls around the circumference of the island are locked up, but still lit-up. The ones that aren’t are selling drinks and snacks. The main action is going on towards the hub, in a melée of fairground attractions, discos and rock concerts. Dee notices a stage with a band that looks and sounds just like Metal Petal, this week’s hit at every uptown thrash. A quick visual zoom and aural analysis reveals that they are Metal Petal. (Dee’s heard about copyright, but it’s one of those things she doesn’t quite believe, a song of distant Earth.)

Tamara stops in front of a thing like a big vending-machine between two stalls. It’s covered with dust and rust. It has a black window at the top and a speaker grille and a channel down one side through which Tamara swipes a card. Nothing happens.

‘Hey!’ she shouts. She bangs the side with her fist, making a hollow boom. ‘Fucking IBM,’ she says to no-one in particular.

Lights come on behind the dark window.

‘Invisible Hand Legal Services,’ says the machine, in a voice like God in an old movie. ‘How can I help you?’

‘Register an autonomy claim for an abandoned machine,’ Tamara says, catching Dee’s wrist and pressing her palm against the window.

‘Both hands please,’ says the machine. ‘Both eyes.’

Dee spreads her fingers against the glass and peers in, seeing her own reflection and bright, moving sparks of light.

‘How do you wish the claim to be defended?’

‘I’ll defend it!’ Dee says with a sudden surge of Self-ish passion.

‘By the principal,’ Tamara adds gravely. ‘And by me, my affiliates and by back-up if requested.’

‘Very well. Noted and posted.’

The lights go out. Tamara’s still holding Dee’s wrist, and she swings her around and grabs the other…then lets go, and clasps hands instead. Dee looks at Tamara’s eyes and sees her own reflection and the speeding, spinning lights behind her, the doubled fair.

‘Okay gal,’ Tamara yells. ‘That’s you with a gang on your side! That’s as free as it gets! Give or take…Later for that! Right now –’ she twirls to face the thrumming hub of the island market ‘– let’s party!’

‘You’re telling me,’ Wilde said incredulously to the robot, ‘that Reid is here?’

‘Yes,’ said the robot. ‘Why should that surprise you? Is it more remarkable than your being here?’

Wilde grinned at it sourly. He pushed away his empty plate and sipped at his beer. He shook his head.

‘Reid was one of the last people I saw,’ he said. ‘For all I know, it may have been him who had me killed. And as far as I’m concerned, it happened today. Christ. I keep expecting to wake up.’

‘You have woken up,’ the robot said. ‘You can expect some emotional reaction as your mind adjusts to your situation.’

‘I suppose so.’ A bleakness belying his apparent age settled on Wilde’s countenance. ‘It has already. So tell me, machine. I’m here, and you say Reid’s here. What about other people I knew? What about Annette?’

‘Annette,’ the machine said carefully, ‘is among the dead. Whether her mind as well as her genotype has been preserved I don’t know, but there may be grounds for hope.’

‘Because of the clone?’

‘Yes.’

‘I must find her, and find out.’

‘You can find out without finding her,’ said the machine. ‘It’s…I’ll explain tomorrow.’

‘Why not now?’

‘Trouble,’ the machine said. ‘Don’t turn around until you hear something.’

Wilde set down his glass. His shoulders began to hunch.

‘Relax,’ said the machine.

The doors of the pub banged open and the music stopped. Conversations ran on for a few seconds and then trailed off into the spreading silence. Everybody turned around.

Two men stood in the doorway. They were wearing loose-cut, sharp-creased business suits, over open-necked shirts, over tee-shirts. Their hair was as shiny as their shoes, and their knuckles flashed with studded stones. One of the men perfunctorily held up a card showing a mug-shot of himself and a grey block of small print. The other took from a jacket-pocket a crumpled ball of flat material. He grasped a corner of it and shook it out. With a final flick of his wrist he snapped it to a glossy, full-colour, high-res poster depicting the dark-haired woman who had fled from Wilde and the robot.

‘Anybody seen her?’ he demanded.

The pub’s customers could still be approximately differentiated into two groups, the men at the bar and the girls at the tables, although some mingling had begun. A little flurry of giggles and gasps came from the women, and a murmur of grunts and slightly shifted seats and glasses from the men. Anyone who looked about to say something would glance at the men at the bar, and find someone else to look at, something else to say.

Within half a minute everybody was talking again; the men at the bar had turned back to watching the television, where a commentator was interviewing a team-leader behind whom bodies were being stretchered from an arena. The only person still looking directly at the repossession men was Wilde. The one holding the picture strolled over; the other followed, fondling a revolver-butt with a look of distant pleasure.

The man with the picture looked down at Wilde and smiled, showing perfect but strangely shaped incisors, long canines. Perfumed fumes poured off him like sweat.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you look interested. Big reward, you know.’

Wilde looked up reluctantly from the picture. He shook his head.

‘She reminds me of somebody I used to know,’ he said. ‘That’s all. But I’ve never seen her here.’

The man glared at him. ‘She’s been here,’ he said. ‘I can smell it.’ He turned his head this way and that, inhaling gently, as if his statement were literally true. The other man gave a sudden gleeful yell and snatched up something from the floor.

He brandished it under Wilde’s nose. Wilde recoiled slightly. The robot, leaning between a chair and the table-top, jerked forward a couple of centimetres.

The thing the man was holding was a newspaper.

‘Knew it!’ he said. ‘Bloody bolishies! Right, that’s it. We know where to look for her!’

Stuffing the newspaper and the poster in their pockets, the two men stalked out through another silence. The doors banged again. The music came back on. The hominid behind the bar looked at Wilde with an expression of deep rue, then shrugged his wide shoulders and spread his broad hands, his long arms comically extended. The shrug completed, he turned away and switched the music back on, louder.

Wilde returned to his meal, and downed his glass of spirits in a gulp that brought tears to his eyes.

‘I still want to speak to her,’ he said.

‘If you’re concerned about the gynoid,’ the machine said, ‘don’t worry. If she’s with abolitionists she’ll be legally and physically safe from repossession, at least for a while. And if she isn’t…’ It moved the upper joints of its forelimbs in a parody of a shrug. ‘They aren’t going to harm her. Just fix a programming error. It’s not important.’

‘Because she’s just a machine, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Well, it may be tactless to point this out, but so are you.’

‘Of course,’ the machine said. ‘But I’m human-equivalent, and she’s a sex-toy. Like I said: just a fucking machine.’

Surveillance systems? Don’t make me smile. Any recording made around the centre of Circle Square is irredeemably corrupted, hacked and patched, spliced and remixed. Even Dee’s memories are understandably giddy: Soldier and Spy just shut off in disgust, leaving only simple reflexes on the job. Humans pass drugs from hand to hand, machines pass plugs. The music has amplitudes and electronic undertow that work to the same effect. Dee sees Tamara talking to a tall fighting man with an industrial arm, finds herself talking to a spidery gadget with airbrushes and a single mind. It thinks, and can talk, of nothing but murals. It knows about concrete surfaces and the properties of paint and the physics of aerosols. It tells her about them, at considerable length.

She could have listened to it all night. She’s a good listener. But the artist sees a builder, and without an excuse or goodbye skitters away through the crowd to chat it up.

Tamara catches Dee’s elbow and stares after the machine. Then she turns and Dee can, as they say, see the wheels going round as the speech centres overcome intoxication.

Eventually the words break through.

‘Not human equivalent!’

‘I’ve talked to worse men,’ Dee says.

Dee’s mindlessly bopping – this is a Self-specific skill – when she notices the man she’s bopping opposite, who’s moving as if he presumes he’s dancing with her. Her gaze moves up from his shiny leather fake-plastic shoes to the trousers and jacket of his fancy but unstylish suit, past the miasma of disgusting scent rising from the sweat-stained tee-shirt neckline inside the open-necked shirt-collar to his –

face!

– and the shock of recognising one of the greps, the repossession men, sends an adrenaline jolt that rouses Soldier. Everything slows, except her. (The music goes from disco to deep industrial dub.) A quick glance around sets Surgeon swiftly to work on the tendons and cartilages of her neck and brings back the intelligence that Tamara is writhing sinuously a couple of metres away, her back half-turned, and behind Tamara, sideways on to Dee, is the other grep. His movements and stance are as if he’s fucking a virtual image of Tamara a metre or so in front of the real one, but that’s just disco-dancing. His gaze doesn’t leave the real Tamara for an instant.

She sees the sweat flick from his hair as his head flips. He looks fully occupied for at least the next couple of seconds.

The other grep, the one who’s got his eye on her, has definitely noticed Dee’s mental shift (that sudden blurred head-movement’s a dead giveaway) and his pupils are shrinking to pin-holes even as his eyelids are opening wider. Dee is aware of her pistol as a heavy shape in the soft leather of that silly, cissy bag at her feet, aware of her narrow skirt as drag that’ll impede the tactically obvious lethal kick.

She could yell, but a yell is nothing in this noise. The only pitch audible above it would be inaudible – to human ears. Her mouth opens, her chest inflates with rib-stressing speed and she lets out an ultrasonic yell she hopes is audible to machines for hundreds of metres around: ‘Fucking IBM, help!’

The music stops. Lights flood. People blink and stumble. At the same moment Dee’s right hand reaches down, her right foot kicks up behind her – still in a move that could be part of a dance-step – and her high-heeled shoe flies into her hand. She holds it high like a hammer, ready to nail the grep through the eyeball. Recognition of this ripples through the muscles and blood-vessels of his face as the speakers suddenly speak. The voice of the IBM, to Dee’s Soldier-speeded senses, now sounds deeper and more menacing than anything in de Mille:

‘Invisible Hand client threatened; please assist.’

The grep backs off, and the one beside Tamara does too. Everybody else looks momentarily off-balance, except Tamara, who’s looking at Dee with a dawning, jaw-slackening awe. Dee’s sweeping glance around the crowd, before Soldier subsides to a watchful withdrawal, shows her that there are other faces, dotted through the crowd, responding to the call as best they can: tensing, rising or crouching or – in the case of one or two machines – telescoping. These folk start up a slow-hand-clapping chant: ‘Out! Out! Out!’

And Dee shoves the man, and Tamara shoves, and the two greps are shoved and man-handled from one person or robot to another until they’re ejected from the edge of the crowd into the waiting grasp of a couple of heavy bikers, who escort them away.

‘OK,’ Dee says. She smiles around and slips her shoe back on, waves and calls out ‘Thanks, everybody!’ in a girlishly grateful voice that sends Soldier away in a squirm of embarrassment and brings a small flush to her cheeks.

The music and the lights resume their rhythm.

Dee dances; but she knows the next time won’t be so easy. These guys may not come back, but somebody will.

Dee’s in a small room at the top of a house on Circle Square, overlooking the Ring Canal. Tamara has brought her back to a flat in this tall house, after what seems like hours at the outdoor party – and retired to her own room to sleep, with apologetic explanations that she starts work early in the morning. ‘Ax will sort you out,’ she’s told her.

Dee is used to vague human speech. She doesn’t ask for explanations. Her own human flesh and nerves are tired. She doesn’t need to sleep, but she needs to rest, and to dream. One after another her selves have to shut down, go off-line, compress and assimilate and integrate the doings of the day.

The room is seductively comfortable, with the rain drumming on the roof just behind the sloping ceiling; its dormer window supplying more eye-tilting angles; a dressing-table with stoppered bottles and pots, beads and scarves and ribbons hung over the mirror, clipped fashion-shots tacked to the walls, a dozen dolls on a shelf. There’s a curved, satin-padded wicker chair in a corner, a wall cupboard (locked), and a bed with a clutter of quilt and lace-trimmed pillows. There’s something faintly troubling about the human smell behind the flowery and musky scents, but she can’t be bothered to analyse it.

She takes her clothes off and folds or hangs them, adjusts her body temperature to her comfort, and lies down on the bed. Her eyelids shut out the window’s view of Ship City’s familiar reality: a damp, dripping city of silicate towers, a city veined with canals, crowded with stranded starfarers and free or enslaved automata, haunted by the quick and the dead. Her minds spool to Story, who spins another episode of her endless starring role in a self-perpetuating soap opera steeped in all the romantic glamour of ancient Earth, where…

…she’s the eldest daughter of a Senator and set to inherit his place in the Duma and all the privileges of his democratic anointment, but she’s been kidnapped by agents of the Archipelago Mining Corporation and held captive by its young and dark and devilish chief executive, who wants her for his harem, and is willing to trade her life for her hand in concubinage and a major Antarctic concession, and her father’s personal and fanatically loyal Chechen guards are fighting their way through the chief executive’s rings of brutish defenders while she stands, sheathed in silks and clouded in perfumes on the balcony of a Kuomintang drug-lord’s skyscraper in the heart of Old New York watching the tanks battle it out in the streets below and waiting for the hard-pressed Chechens to raise reinforcements from the desperate tribes of the South Bronx with the promise of plunder, and she hears a stealthy step behind her and the chief executive – whose face, if truth be told, looks uncannily like her owner’s – falls on his knees before her and tells her he really, truly, loves her and he’s consumed with remorse and he’ll set her free, if only…

And so on.

This is what androids – or rather, gynoids – dream.

A knock on the door. She’s back to full awareness in an instant, her internal clock telling her it’s early morning.

‘Just a moment,’ she says.

The little cleaner-vermin have removed every speck of organic dirt from her clothes. She shakes them out without thinking and dresses in a blur of motion (a useful Soldier skill that she’s cut-and-pasted to Self) and calls out,

‘Come in.’

The boy who comes in carrying a tray with a mug of coffee and a bowl of cereal looks about twelve years old, at first glance. He’s Black, with slight build and delicate features and a shock of black hair. As Dee scans him up and down, all the while smiling and saying ‘hello’, she realises that he’s much older than he looks. There’s no way so much experience could have made its subtle imprint in the muscle-tone of his face, the look in his eye, in just twelve years. Not here, not in Ship City. They have laws against that sort of thing.

‘You must be Ax,’ she says, taking the tray. ‘Thanks.’ She waves him to the chair. ‘Tamara mentioned you.’

‘Likewise,’ the boy says, sitting back with one foot on the opposite knee. ‘So you’re Dee Model, huh? Big boss Reid’s main squeeze.’

Dee’s facing him, her knees primly together, the tray balanced on them, the spoon almost at her mouth. She puts it back, making a tinny rattle against the side of the bowl. She steadies the tray, and her voice.

‘How do you know that?’

Ax flashes white teeth. ‘You’re famous.’ His grin becomes wicked, then relents to a reassuring smile. ‘Not really. Your master had you on his arm at a party last year, pic made its way onto the gossip chats.’ His eyes unfocus for a moment. ‘Quite a dress,’ he says.

‘I didn’t think so,’ Dee says. She resumes eating. ‘I had to stay in Sex most of the time to make wearing it bearable.’

Ax snorts.

‘Anyway.’ Dee blushes. Spy’s routines keep her voice level and flat. ‘Are there searches out for me? Rewards posted?’

Again the off-line gaze – he’s got a cortical downlink, Dee realises, not a common feature around here; the most intimate interface with the nets that most people will tolerate is contacts, the little round screens that you slip over your eyes.

‘None so far,’ Ax says, attention snapping back. ‘Reckon he’s embarrassed. I mean, your walking doll walks out on you, can’t be like having your car nicked, know what I mean?’

‘Yes,’ Dee says. The thought of her owner’s probable rage and humiliation makes her knees, despite everything, quiver. She puts the tray down and reaches for her purse.

‘Smoke?’

‘Anything,’ says Ax. He has a lighter on a chain around his neck, and moves swiftly to light up for her, then settles back, dragging on his own.

‘So why did you walk out?’ he asks. His tone is neither friendly nor prurient; it’s like a professional question, the tone of a physician or an engineer with a patient.

‘He doesn’t mistreat me,’ she says. ‘I don’t mind the service, or the sex. I mind being a slave.’

‘You’re supposed to like it,’ Ax says. ‘It’s hard-wired.’

‘I know,’ Dee says. She glances around for an ashtray, sighs and mentally over-rides her Servant routines and taps the ash onto the empty, milk-lined bowl. ‘And I do like it. I do find it fulfilling. But only sexually. Not any other way, not in my separate self. And when I realised that, what I did was…I patched my Sex programs over that area, and masked it all off from Self, and made myself free.’

‘Amazing,’ Ax says, as if it’s anything but. ‘So it’s true what they say: information wants to be free!’

Dee shakes her head. ‘It’s nothing so grand,’ she explains. ‘It happened after I loaded up far more mind-tools than I was ever supposed to have.’ She tries to remember that second birth, that awakening, when she flipped through all those separate selves and saw herself, a ghostly reflection in all the windows.

Ax frowns. He flips a finger, and his cigarette-butt’s fizzing out on the bowl’s film of milk. An investigating cleany-crawly shies away, rearing its frontal segments. ‘When did this happen?’ he asks.

Dee smiles proudly, bursting to share her confidence. ‘Yesterday,’ she says.

Ax’s mouth hangs open for a moment. For a second the seen-it-all look drops from his face. He fumbles a cigarette-packet from inside the sleeve of his tee-shirt and lights one abstractedly, not looking, not offering. ‘But why,’ he continues, ‘did you load up all the extra software in the first place? What made you do that?’

Dee finds herself at a loss. It’s difficult to think back to her earlier simplicity, when she switched from one single mind to another and it was just her, it was where she lived. She was no less conscious then than she is now, but it was an undivided, naive, biddable consciousness, without detachment. But even there, somewhere in Self, was the lust to know. And the opportunity had come, and she’d taken it – with what, looking back, had been a sweet assurance that her owner would be pleased.

‘Instinct,’ she says, with a light laugh. Ax snorts and rolls his eyes.

‘All right,’ Dee says, suddenly stung. ‘Perhaps it did come from the animal body, or the bits of biological brain!’

‘We’ll leave that argument to the other side,’ Ax says.

‘The other side of what?’

‘The other side of the case,’ he explains with strained patience. ‘One way or another, this is going to end up in court. You know about the law?’

‘Oh yes,’ Dee says brightly. ‘I have a mind in here called Secretary. She has precedents coming out of my ears.’

‘Well,’ Ax says firmly, rising, ‘I suggest you go back over them. It’ll all seem very different, I can tell you that for nothing.’

‘OK,’ Dee says. Ax holds the door open, waiting. Dee stands up.

‘What now?’

He looks her down and up. ‘Shopping, I think.’ His voice conveys an epicene disdain.

She picks up her purse, sticks the pistol back in the top of her skirt, and glances around. She’s left nothing.

‘Nice room.’

‘Mine,’ Ax says. ‘I’d be very happy to share it with you.’

The outer door of the building booms behind them. ‘Stay,’ Ax commands it. Magnetic bolts set it ringing again. Ax grins at her and sets off to the left. Dee glances around as she strolls beside him. The house they’ve just come out of is four storeys tall, and narrow. So are all the others around here, in classic crowded canal-bank style, but there are no weathered brick walls or contrast grouting, no sills or window-boxes. Everything’s concrete, a skin slapped up in a hurry on webs of wire-mesh over iron bones, graffiti its only – and appropriate – decoration. The city’s spicular towers loom like construction cranes above the buildings, reducing them to on-site huts.

Smoke rises from among the stalls, steam from the pavements. Mist hangs along the canal surface. The spray-paint on the walls gets more and more vehement, reaching a climax of clenched fists and rockets and mushroom-clouds and dinosaurs at the entrance to an alley.

Ax stops and waves inward. ‘This way.’

The alley is no more than three metres wide but it’s a shopping street in its own right, and unlike what Dee has seen of the neighbourhood so far, it has a worked-for charm, the names of the shops painted in painstaking emulation of the clean calligraphy of twenty-first-century mall-signs. At the first window display Ax waits impatiently as Dee surveys a fossil diorama, allegedly of the fauna of one of the planet’s ancient sea-beds. Scientist has other views, and Latin names Dee doesn’t know float distractingly across her sight. Inside the shop, fossils are being worked into amulets and ornaments. A girl at a grinding-wheel raises her face-plate, gives Dee an inviting smile and returns – puzzled or baffled by Dee’s Scientist-masked response – to her work. The volatile smells of varnish and polish, glue and lubricant waft through the doorway along with the screech of carborundum on stone.

There’s a shop selling drugs and pipes; a newspaper stand where Dee sees copies of The Abolitionist and more obscure titles like Factory Farming, Nano Mart, Nuke Tech; a stall stacked with weathered junk identified as ‘Old New Martian Alien Artifacts’; at all of which Dee’s critical dawdling has Ax muttering and smoking. Dee enjoys this refusal, trivial though it is, to adapt to a human’s priorities; an exercise of free will.

But she shares Ax’s evident delight when they reach the first boutique, a cave of clothing and accessories. He leads her in, and they’re there for an hour that passes like a minute and then out again into other clothes-shops, and cosmetics-artists’ little studios and jewellers’ labs. All the while Ax fusses around her with an unselfconscious intimacy which doesn’t vary with her state of dress or undress. She can tell that the pleasure he takes in her is aesthetic, not erotic. The software of Sex is sensitive to such distinctions: it can read the physiology of a flush, time the beat of a pulse and measure the dilation of a pupil, and it knows there’s no lust in this boy’s touch.

At the far end of the alley is a café. They sit themselves down there under the sudden light of the noon sun above the narrow street, sip coffee, and smoke, surrounded by their purchases. Dee’s cast off her sober style for something dikey and punky. She preens in leather, lacing and lace; satin and silk, spikes and studs. A look that would have most twelve-year-old boys unimpressed, most men stimulated. Ax looks at her as a work of art he’s accomplished, which at the moment she is.

Dee fidgets with her lighter, looks up under the fringe of her restyled hair. She’s about to say something, but she doesn’t know what to ask.

‘Let me spare you,’ Ax says. ‘If embarrassment is in your repertoire, that is. Sexually speaking, I’m not in the game. On the game, sometimes, perhaps.’ He flicks fingertips. ‘Not gay, not neuter. Just a boy: a permanent pre-pubescent.’

‘Why?’ Dee asks. ‘Is it an illness?’

‘Terminal,’ Ax grins. ‘Something down where the genes meet the little machines: a bug. A virus. Something my parents picked up on the long trip. Fortunately it doesn’t kick in unless I go through puberty. So I’ve fixed my biological age a bit younger than most.’

‘And there’s no help for it?’

Ax turns down the corners of his mouth. ‘If there is, it’s with the fast minds. Best advice would be to forget it, in other words. But I couldn’t forget it. One reason I got into abolitionism…’ He laughs. ‘My chances of becoming a man are right up there with the dead coming back and the fast minds running again. Pffft.’

‘Hmmm.’ Dee feels sad. What a waste. A brighter thought comes to her. ‘You could grow up as a woman,’ she says.

‘Well, thank you,’ Ax replies, pouting and posing for a moment. ‘I’d consider it, but the fixers tell me the bug reacts to the hormones of either sex. So I’m stuck with neither, and after the predictable raging and sulking I decided I might as well make a career of being someone a jealous male could trust alone with his female.’ He draws in smoke and exhales it elegantly. ‘Freelance professional eunuch and part-time catamite.’

While Dee’s still thinking about this, and wondering if Ax’s lot isn’t, all things considered, any worse than hers, he adds:

‘Before I found out about my condition, I was quite a normal little lad.’ He sighs. ‘The effeminacy’s just a pose, Dee, just a pose. And in case anyone forgets, I can also be extremely violent.’

‘Why didn’t you specialise in that? Be a guard or a fighter or –’

‘And risk getting killed?’ Ax guffaws. ‘Do I look stupid?’

‘No.’ Dee gives him a friendly, sisterly (now that she’s figured out their only possible relationship) smile, but she stops feeling sorry for him. She reckons he’s doing all right. Queer as a coot, she finds herself thinking, and as they get up to leave she sets Scientist grumpily searching ancient, inherited databases to find out what the fuck a coot is.

‘So I made it to the ships,’ Wilde said. He raised himself on one elbow and peered around the room, in which he’d been lying awake for ten minutes.

‘Good morning,’ said the machine. It was resting on the floor in the corner of the room. The room was upstairs in the Malley Mile, cheap to rent and containing a wash-stand, a chair and a bed. It was remarkably free of dust, due to machines about the size and shape of large woodlice that scuttled about the floor.

Wilde stared at the machine. ‘What have you been doing all night?’

‘Guarding you,’ the machine said. It stretched out its limbs momentarily, then folded them back. ‘Scanning the city’s nets. Dreaming.’

Wilde remained leaning on one elbow, looking at the machine with a suddenly reckless curiosity. ‘I didn’t know machines dreamed.’

‘I also reminisce,’ said the machine. ‘When there’s time.’

Wilde grinned sourly. ‘I suppose time is what you have plenty of, thinking so much faster –’

‘No,’ the machine snapped. ‘I told you. I’m a human-equivalent machine. My subjective time is much the same as yours. No doubt my connections are faster than your reactions, but the consciousness they sustain moves at the same pace.’

‘Does it indeed?’ Wilde got out of bed, looked down at his body with a flicker of renewed surprise, smiled and washed his face and neck and put his clothes on.

‘So tell me, machine,’ he said as he tugged on his boots, ‘what am I to call you? Come to that, what are you?’

‘Basically,’ said the machine, detaching a filament from a wall socket and winding it slowly back into its casing, ‘I’m a civil-engineering construction rig, autonomous, nuclear-powered, sand-resistant. As to my name.’ It paused. ‘You may call me anything you like, but I have been known as Jay-Dub.’

Wilde laughed. ‘That’s great! That’ll do.’

‘“Jay-Dub” is fine,’ said the machine. ‘Not undignified. Thanks, Jon Wilde.’

‘Well, Jay-Dub,’ Wilde said with a self-conscious smile, ‘let’s go and get breakfast.’

‘You do that,’ Jay-Dub said. It unfolded its limbs and stood up, revealing a litter of torn foil carapaces with now-stilled tiny legs and dulled lenses. ‘I’ve eaten.’

The Malley Mile was silent, the bar shuttered and swept and polished and hung with damp cloths when they picked their way downstairs and out through a one-way-locked door.

‘Trusting,’ Wilde remarked, as he let the door click back.

‘It’s an honest place,’ Jay-Dub said. ‘There’s little in the way of petty crime. For reasons which I’m sure you know.’

The small sun was low above the towers, laying lacey shadows on the street. Boats and barges floated down the canal, heading out of town.

‘Where are they going?’ Wilde asked. The man and the robot were strolling towards a small dock a hundred or so metres up the street. There were food-stalls on the dock.

‘Mines or farms,’ the robot said. ‘They aren’t entirely distinct, here. They’re both a matter of using nanotech – natural or artificial – to concentrate dispersed molecules into a usable form.’

‘And people work at that? What are the robots doing?’

‘Heh-heh-heh.’ Jay-Dub’s voice-control had advanced: it could now parody a mechanical laugh. ‘Robots are either useless for such purposes, or far too useful to waste on them.’

The small dock was busy. People – mostly human, but with a few other hominid types among them – were embarking, or unlading sacks of vegetables or minerals from long narrow barges. Electric-powered trucks were backing on to the quay, loading up. A family of what looked like gibbons with swollen skulls hauled a net-full of slapping, silvery fish along the quay and spilled them into a rusty bath behind one of the stalls, where a burly woman immediately began to gut and grill the fish. Wilde stopped there and, somewhat hesitantly and with a lot of pointing, got her to put together fish and leaves and bread. Coffee was for sale in glass cups, deposit returnable.

Wilde took his breakfast to the edge of the quay and sat down, legs dangling, and slowly ate, looking all around. The robot hunkered down beside him.

‘Time you told me things,’ Wilde said. ‘You said you made me. What did that mean?’

‘Cloned you from a cell,’ the machine said. ‘Grew you in a vat. Ran a program to put your memories back on your synapses.’ It hummed, remotely. ‘That last could get you killed, so keep it to yourself.’

‘Why did you do it?’

‘I needed your help,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘To fight David Reid, and to change this world.’

Wilde looked at the machine for a long time, his face as inscrutable as the machine’s blank surface.

‘You’ve already told me what you are,’ he said. ‘But who are you? The truth, this time. The whole truth.’

‘What I am,’ the machine said, so quietly that Wilde had to lean closer, his ear to a grille between its metal shells, ‘is a long and complex question. But I was you.’

4

Catch

‘If you’re interested, you’ll be there.’

The train lurched. Carlisle’s sodium-lit brown buildings began to slide by.

‘What?’ Startled out of a train-induced trance, I wasn’t sure I hadn’t dreamed the remark. The man on the opposite side of the so-called Pullman table wore a cloth cap and a jacket of some shiny substance that might once have been corduroy. His faded check shirt looked like a pyjama-top. He’d been drinking with silent determination from a half-bottle of Bell’s all the long afternoon from Euston.

Now he rubbed a brown hand along his jaw, rasping white stubble over sallow skin, and repeated his utterance. I smiled desperately.

‘I see,’ I lied. ‘Very true.’

‘You’ll be there,’ he said. He reached for the bottle, judged its remaining contents by weight and replaced it on the table, then began to roll a cigarette with the other hand. His gaze, sharp with an occasional lapse into bleariness, stayed on me all the while.

‘Where?’ I looked away, flipped open a packet of Silk Cut (my gesture towards healthy living). My reflection flared in a brief virtual image outside the train. The sodden February countryside seeped past.

‘Disnae matter,’ the man said, exhaling smoke and the sour odour of digested whisky. ‘Wherever. Ah kin tell. You’re interested.’ He paused, cocked his head and gave me a cunning look. ‘You’re one a they international socialists. Ah kin tell.’

I smiled again and shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken, I’m –’ I stopped, helpless to explain. I’d spent a week researching in the LSE library and arguing with my father. My head was buzzing with Marxisms.

‘Ach, it’s aw right son,’ he said. ‘Ah ken youse have aw kinds i wee divisions. I dinnae bother about them. You’re an intellectual and Ah’m just a retired working man. But you’re wannay uz.’

With that he opened the bottle, took a sip from it and passed it to me, kindly wiping his hand on his thigh and then around the rim as he did so, to remove any harmful germs.

‘And then what happened?’ Reid asked.

We turned, hunched against the drizzle, into Park Road, past the pseudo-Tudor frontage of the Blythswood Cottage pub and ducked into the doorway of Voltaire & Rousseau, the best second-hand bookshop in Glasgow. I’d run into Reid at lunchtime, after not having seen him for some weeks – partly because I was working hard on my dissertation and partly because Reid was either politically active or out with Annette. In the first month of their relationship I’d once or twice had a few drinks with both of them, but I’d found it too awkward to continue.

‘He fell asleep,’ I laughed. ‘I left the bottle severely alone and woke him up at the Central. He seemed to have forgotten the whole incident. Looked like he didn’t recognise me.’

By this time we were both moving crabwise, heads tilted, systematically scanning the shelves that covered the narrow shop’s walls. First we’d scour the politics and philosophy section, then – if we had any spare cash left – move on to the back room to hit the SF paperbacks. One of the shop’s owners – a tall, tubby, cheerful chap with thin hair and thick glasses – looked up from his book at the till with a smile and a nod. He, I’d decided, must be Rousseau; his gaunt and gloomy partner, Voltaire.

‘Probably an old ILP’er or something,’ Reid muttered, pouncing on a blue Charles H. Kerr & Co. volume of Dietzgen. He blew dust off it and sneezed.

‘One pound fifty!’ he said in a low voice, so that Rousseau couldn’t overhear his delight and guess what a bargain they’d let slip. He twisted back to his search, a read-head moving along the memory-tape of shelves.

‘You know,’ he went on, ‘it makes me sick sometimes to think of all those old militants selling off their libraries to eke out their pensions. Or dying, and their kids – God, I can just imagine them, middle-aged, middle-class wankers who’ve always been a bit ashamed of the bodach’s rambling reminiscences – rummaging through his pathetic stuff and finding a shelf of socialist classics and about to heave them on the tip when suddenly the little gleam of a few quid lights up their greedy eyes!’

‘Just as well for us that it does,’ I said, wedging my fingers between two books to ease out a lurking pamphlet. ‘It’s the ones that end up on the tip that I – hey, look at this!’

I didn’t care who overheard. This was almost certainly unique, a living fossil: a wartime Russia Today Society pamphlet called Soviet Millionaires. It hadn’t stayed in circulation long, not after the SPGB had seized on it as irrefutable proof that behind the socialist facade the USSR concealed a class of wealthy property-owners.

‘I’ve heard about it from my father,’ I told Reid. ‘But even he’d never had a copy. I’ll send it to him.’

‘Told you!’ Reid grinned down at me from a step-ladder. ‘You’re such an unselfish bastard! That’s what the old bloke saw in you! You’re a hereditary socialist!’

‘Ideology is hereditary?’ I scoffed. ‘And what does that make you?’

‘A grasping kulak, I guess,’ he said happily. ‘Ah, now what about this?’ He opened a book and studied the fly-leaf. ‘Stirner, The Ego and His Own, property of the Glasgow Anarchist Workers’ Circle, 1943. Five pounds.’

I stared up at him, open-mouthed. I didn’t realise I was reaching for it until he pulled it away. ‘Uh-uh. Finders keepers.’

‘It’s of no interest to you,’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Reid stepped down the ladder, holding the book like a black Grail in front of my eyes. ‘Young Hegelians, German Ideology and all that. Marxist scholarship.’

‘You’re having me on!’

‘Yes, I am,’ Reid said. ‘But I do have a use for it. I’m going to buy it, and as soon as we get outside I’m going to sell it to you for a tenner.’

No lunches for a fortnight, and back to roll-ups. I could manage that.

‘It’s a deal!’ I almost shouted.

Reid stepped back and scrutinised me.

‘Just testing,’ he said. He shoved the book into my hands. ‘You passed.’

In the grey leaded light of the Union smoking-room, the air thick with the unappetising smell of over-percolated coffee-grounds, we sat in worn leather armchairs and flipped through our acquisitions. I smiled at the twisted dialectics of the wartime apologist, frowned over the laboured wit of the great amoralist. Fascism, communism and anarchism traced their ancestry back to the same Piltdown, the Berlin bars of the 1840s. Give me turn-of-the-century Vienna any day, I thought, its Ringstrasse a particle-accelerator of ideas.

We both sat back at the same moment. Reid toyed with the bamboo holder of the previous day’s Guardian. The MPLA had taken Huambo, not for the last time.

‘How’s Annette?’ I asked with guarded casualness.

‘Fine, as far as I know,’ Reid said. He turned over a page.

‘Not seen her for a bit?’

Reid laid down the paper and leaned forward, looking at me intently. ‘We’ve kind of…I don’t know…fallen out, drifted apart.’

‘That’s a shame,’ I said. ‘How did that happen?’

Reid spread his hands. ‘She’s got a real sharp mind, but she’s the most unpolitical person I’ve ever met. She never reads newspapers. It’s very hard to find things to talk about.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Sounds stupid, I know, but there it is.’

I nodded sympathetically: yes, women are hard to figure out. I was trying to remember the location of the Zoology Department.

I walked up University Avenue, the broad Victorian edifice – Gilmoreghast, as one rag-mag wit had called it – on my left, the Wellsian ’thirties Reading Room on my right. (I hadn’t used it since discovering that everything about it was perfect, except its acoustics, which were those of a whispering-gallery.)

At the top of the hill the pedestrian crossing was at red. I waited for the little green man, and wondered if I shouldn’t turn around right there, and wait until seeing Annette again could be passed off as a casual encounter…

No, I told myself firmly. If you’re interested, you’ll be there. I crossed and continued on down to the junction at the bottom, then left along an internal roadway between massive grey sandstone buildings set among patches of grass with flowerbeds and tall trees. The Zoology Department was another of those ancient buildings, solid as a church and founded on a rock of greater age. Inside, polished wood, tiling, the smell of small-animal droppings. From behind a glass partition a receptionist peered at me incuriously. I decided to be bold and asked him where Annette was working. He glanced at a clock and a timetable and told me.

The laboratory at first appeared to be empty. Then I saw Annette, her back to me, laying down sheets of paper along a bench at the far end. I pushed open the double doors and walked up. She turned at my footsteps, saying:

‘Excuse me, the practical isn’t – Oh, hello Jon.’

Her hair was tied back, her figure hidden in a white lab-coat. Still no less desirable.

‘Hi,’ I said. Her green eyes examined me quizzically.

‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘You suddenly developed an interest in invertebrate anatomy, right?’

She gestured at the bench. I looked down at a round glass dish, half-filled with water, in which a few small sea-urchins lay – or rather, moved, as I saw when I looked closer. Laid out along the benches were sheaves of notes, diagramming the echinoderm’s organs, the nomenclature beautiful and strange: ampulla, pedicellaria, tube-feet, madreporite, radial canal, ring canal, stone canal…

‘Not exactly.’ I fidgeted with sturdy tweezers, laid out like cutlery to break the delicate harmless creatures apart.

‘So what brings you here?’

‘Uh…’ I hesitated. ‘I just wondered if you’d fancy going out for a drink or something.’

Her face reddened slightly.

‘Does this have anything to do with Dave?’

‘No,’ I said, wondering what she was getting at. ‘Only that he told me he wasn’t going out with you any more.’

‘Oh! And when did he tell you that?’

‘About twenty minutes ago,’ I admitted.

She laughed. ‘What took you so long?’

‘I thought jumping up the minute he told me might be a bit insensitive.’

It was as if the implications of my statement were too direct, too blatant. She looked away and glanced back with a half-smile.

‘It’s very nice of you to think of me,’ she said. ‘Lonely and forlorn as I am. I’m not sure I’m ready for such kindness.’

If she could tease, I could tease right back. ‘I don’t expect you to stay that way long.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘no, I haven’t been washing my hair every night!’

‘Losing yourself in the giddy social whirl?’

‘Yep.’

‘So,’ I persisted. ‘Perhaps you can find room in your hectic life for a quiet drink?’

‘Or something.’

‘Or something.’

She smiled, this time dropping her ironic look.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘How about nine o’clock tonight in the Western Bar?’

‘I’ll see you there,’ I said.

The doors banged open and a commotion of students came in.

‘You better go,’ she said. ‘See ya.’

At the door I looked back, and saw her looking up. She smiled and turned away.

I jogged off down the corridor. ‘Yes!’ I told the world, with a jump and an air-punch that startled a few stragglers and narrowly missed an overhead fluorescent light.

The Western was a quiet pub, tarted up with some attempt at appropriate (i.e., cowpoke) decoration. I arrived about ten minutes early and was standing at the bar, half a pint and one smoke down, when Annette walked in just as the TV heralded the nine o’clock news. The barman reached up and flipped channels. (There were three, all controlled by the government).

Her hair was loose (and bouncy, and shiny, and just washed). She wore a mid-calf denim skirt and a black silk blouse under a puffy jacket which she unzipped and shrugged out of as she walked up. I bought her a lager-and-lime and we found a table by the wall.

‘Smoke?’

‘Yes, thanks.’

I lit her cigarette and we looked at each other for a moment. Annette laughed suddenly.

‘This is silly,’ she said. ‘We know each other just enough to skip the ice-breaking chit-chat, but not well enough to know what to say next.’

Sharp mind alright.

‘That’s a good point,’ I said, treading water. ‘Actually I don’t know anything about you, apart from having seen you across a table or a room a few times.’

‘Didn’t Dave talk about me?’ There was an undertone of curiosity to her pretended pique.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Mind you, he did tell me one very important thing about you…’

‘Oh yes?’

‘That you’re not interested in politics.’

‘Is that all? Huh, and there was me thinking he’d be telling you as much about me as I’ve told Sheena about him.’

‘That must be a relief.’

‘Sure is…And he’s wrong about that, too!’ she added.

‘How d’you mean?’

‘Well, it’s not that I’m not interested. I just don’t like talking about it.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘But why?’

‘I grew up in Belfast,’ she said. ‘Left when I was about ten. There’s a saying over there: “Whatever you say, say nothing.” I still have family over there, still visit. The habit sticks.’

‘Even here?’ I glanced around. ‘What’s the problem?’

She leaned forward and spoke in a lowered voice. ‘Half the people in this city have some Irish connection, and a good few of them have very decided views. So it doesn’t do to shoot your mouth off, especially in pubs.’

As Dave tended to do, I thought. Interesting.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m not curious. I can’t even tell what I’m sure anybody from around here could: whether you’re a Catholic or a Protestant. Me, I don’t have a religion and I don’t care what flag flies over me or what politicians do so long as they leave me alone.’

‘Which they won’t.’

‘Aye, there’s the rub!’

We both laughed. ‘So,’ I said, ‘what are you interested in?’

She thought about it for a moment. ‘I like my work,’ she said.

‘So tell me about it.’

And she did, explaining how she didn’t just do the technical stuff but tried to find out about the science behind it. She talked about evolution and population and the future of both, and that got me on to talking about SF, and she admitted to having read some dozens of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels when she was younger (or ‘young’, as she charmingly put it). Before we knew it the bell had rung for last orders.

‘There’s a disco at Joanne’s,’ Annette said. ‘Shall we go there?’

‘Good idea,’ I said.

It wasn’t. We hadn’t been there half an hour when the music stopped and the DJ told everyone to pick up their things and leave quietly. We all knew what that meant: a bomb scare. Annette grabbed my hand with surprising force and hauled me through the crowd, with a ruthless disregard for others that I’d hitherto only seen in the QM bar crush.

We spilled into the street just as somebody authoritative shouted ‘False alarm!’ and the surge moved the other way. Annette stood fast against it. I looked down at her with surprise and saw it wasn’t just the drizzle that was wetting her face. Holding her parka around her shoulders she looked miserable and vulnerable.

‘Don’t you want to go back in?’ I asked.

‘I want to go home,’ she said. I held her parka while she struggled to get it on properly. She grabbed my hand again and started walking fast.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Oh, God. I just remembered the first time I was in a bomb.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, trying to be reassuring, ‘it’s crazy how we’ve got used to bomb scares.’

She glanced up at me with something like pity.

‘I wasn’t in a bomb scare,’ she said witheringly. ‘I was in the blast radius of a bomb. Loyalists hit a loyalist bar. Christ. I could see people screaming, and I couldn’t hear them.’

I didn’t think it would be a good move to ask if many people were hurt.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I squeezed her hand. ‘I didn’t know.’

She stopped, throwing me off-balance. I turned, tottering, to face her. She held her balled fists in front of her as if grasping and shaking by the lapels someone much smaller than myself.

‘Christ!’ she spat. ‘I hate this shit! I hate it so much! We were just going to enjoy ourselves, we all were, and some fucking swine has to ruin it! I blame them for all of it! For the bomb scares and the false alarms and the hoaxes – they wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t for the bastards who do the real thing. Ears and feet all over the pavement!’ She closed her eyes, then opened them as if she couldn’t bear what she saw. ‘And Dave used to say we had to listen to the oppressed. Nobody listens to me because I’m not an “oppressed”. I’m a focking prodistant!’ Her voice dropped to a harsh whisper, remnant of a caution otherwise thrown to the sodium sky. ‘Fuck them all! Fuck the Pope! Fuck the Queen! Fuck Ireland!’

As suddenly as her outburst had started, it stopped. She rested her fists on my shoulders and looked up at me, dry-eyed. She sniffed.

‘God, you must think I’m crazy,’ she said. ‘You didn’t deserve that.’

I wrapped my arms around her and held her close, taking the opportunity to look around. It must have looked like we we’d been having some kind of fight. This being Glasgow, and she not having used a bottle, nobody was paying us more than the idlest flicker of attention.

‘I’d prefer that to “whatever you say, say nothing”,’ I said. ‘Especially as I agree with what you just said.’

‘You do?’ She pulled back and frowned at me. ‘You mean you don’t believe in anything?’ Her voice was incredulous, hopeful.

Myra’s taunt came back to me: Ey’m en individualist enarchist, eckchelly. No point going into it that way, with a string of isms. I believe in you, I thought of trying, but that wouldn’t do, either. She looked so desperately serious!

I swallowed. ‘No God, no country, no “society”. Just people and things, and people one by one.’

‘Just us?’

I considered it, tempted. It would be a good line to hug her closer with.

‘No us either, unless each of us chooses, and only as long as each of us chooses.’

‘I don’t know if I could live with that.’

‘Better than dying with something else.’

She gave that glib response a more welcoming smile than it deserved.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I can see you’re not just trying to chat me up.’ She caught my hand again and shoved it, with hers, into her parka pocket. ‘Come on, see me home.’

We walked through the wet streets as if we were joined at the hip, stopping every couple of hundred metres for a clinch and a kiss. Neither of us talked very much. At her flat a faint glow and giggles came from Sheena’s small room. We had the front room, and the couch, to ourselves. We did a lot of hugging and kissing and groping and rolling, but when it became obvious that I wanted to go further she pushed me away.

‘Not ready yet,’ she said.

‘That’s all right,’ I said.

‘Maybe you should go now. Some of us have to get up in the morning.’

I thought of several smart replies to that and in the end just nodded and smiled.

‘Maybe I should. What about tomorrow?’

She stood up and pulled me to my feet.

‘Let me see…I’m going to a wedding on Saturday. I’ve got shopping to do tomorrow lunchtime. Hen night in the evening, recovering the night after. And sorting out dresses and stuff.’ She mimed a curtsy. ‘How d’you fancy coming along to the dance at the reception? Saturday evening.’

‘That sounds great! Thanks.’

She peeled a sheet of paper from a pad and scribbled on it. ‘Place, time, bus routes,’ she said, handing it to me.

‘Thanks very much. OK, I’ll see you there then.’

We found ourselves at the door.

‘We still have to say goodnight,’ she said, and made good on it.

The reception was in a hotel in a part of Glasgow I hadn’t been before, reached by a succession of buses through parts of Glasgow I didn’t know existed. They looked like a war had been lost there: entire blocks and streets razed or ruinous, street-lamps smashed, derelicts or wild kids around fires…

I later learned that this was the result of a road-building programme disguised as a housing policy, but at the time – sitting in the smoke-filled top deck of the bus in a suit I normally wore only for interviews – I indulged in some enjoyably pessimistic thoughts about the breakdown of civilisation. As the bus wended on, however, the islands of darkness became less frequent and I eventually hopped off in a residential area in front of a reassuringly bright and noisy hotel. I followed the light and noise to the function suite where I found a scene just like a disco except that most people were wearing something like Sunday best and the age range approximated a normal distribution curve.

Around the edges of the room were tables, a buffet with food and trays of drinks, and a bar at the far end. I picked up a glass of whisky at the buffet and looked around for Annette. The music stopped, a dance ended, people moved on to or off the floor.

Annette came out of the crowd as if it were parting just for her – for a moment, it seemed a spotlight had caught her, so that she shone, while everyone around her dimmed. Her hair was circled with leaves and small red roses, and her dress started with a frill at the throat and ended with a flounce at the floor. It was likewise rose-patterned, red on green on black, and over it she wore an organza pinafore with ruffles from the waist to over each shoulder, the tapes wrapped to a bow at the front. Her face, flushed by the dance, was smiling. As she stopped in front of me I smelt her strong, sweet perfume.

‘Hi, Jon, you got a fag?’ she said. ‘I’m gasping.’

As I lit the cigarette for her she caught my hand and pulled me to a seat by a table. She dragged up another chair and sat down facing me, our knees almost touching through the rustling mass of her skirts.

‘Ah, that’s better,’ she said. A passing waiter offered her a tray – she reached past the expected wine and lifted a shot of whisky. ‘Thanks for coming.’

I raised my glass. ‘Thank you. You look different. Beautiful.’

‘Aw, gee, thanks.’

‘Beautiful in a different way,’ I hastened to add.

She gave a quirky smile to indicate that she was only pretending to misunderstand.

‘You didn’t mention that you were a bridesmaid,’ I said.

‘Didn’t want to scare you off.’

I laughed, unsure what to make of this. ‘I like your dress,’ I said.

She leaned closer and said in a gossiping whisper: ‘So do I. I dug in my heels to get one that I could wear again for parties, so after long discussions with Irene – that’s the bride, went to school with her – we settled on this nice little Laura Ashley number. Then she decided it wasn’t icky and brides-maidy enough, so she got her Mum to run up this thing.’ She flicked disdainfully at the apron frill.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The pinny’s what makes it. You really must keep that for parties.’ I was only half teasing – there was something undeniably sexy, in an undeniably sexist way, about its trailing associations of feminine servitude.

‘Oh yeah, and get taken for a wench?’ she grinned.

‘Never,’ I said. ‘Lady, would you like to dance?’

‘Well,’ she said, considering, ‘perhaps after you’ve refilled my glass, and I’ve emptied it.’

By the time this was accomplished, more than once, Annette had introduced me to some of her friends and relatives and the dancing had changed from disco-style bopping to traditional, but much wilder, Scottish dancing. Annette drew me into it, and started flinging me about until suddenly, like a memory of a previous life, I discovered I knew the steps and the moves and was able to fling her – and the bewildering, spinning succession of other partners – about with the best of them.

As I danced, skipped, stomped, turned, twirled, lifted and swung, I tried to remember how I remembered all this, and realised it was all down to my father. His interpretation of Marxism – broad-minded even for his socially tolerant, if politically dogmatic, party – insisted on the desirabilty of culture in all its forms. Hence, piano practice and dancing classes – and, when that had led to playground taunts, boxing lessons. Hence also, the Science Museum and the BMNH and the Zoo and the theatre. He was interested in everything. He was there.

And at Hyde Park on Sundays, telling unbelieving onlookers that whatever demo-of-the-week was passing through was a complete waste of time…He thought he was turning a space-age schoolkid into a scientific socialist, but all he was doing was raising me to be as stubborn an outsider as himself.

The dances flew past as fast as the dancers, with only snatched gulps of whisky and puffs of smoke between one and the next. An eightsome reel finished the set. Annette and I leaned on each other’s shoulders with one thought between us. ‘Drink?’

‘Drink.’

We went to the bar this time, our fortuitous and fortunate position at the end of the dance getting us there ahead of the rush. Annette perched on a stool, the hang of her skirt concealing it so that she seemed suspended on air. I propped my elbow on the bar and ordered pints.

‘Well, that was something,’ I said. ‘I enjoyed that.’

‘Me too,’ Annette said. ‘Cheers.’ She sank half a pint of lager. ‘Mind you,’ she went on, ‘throwing the littlest flower-girl in the air, swinging the bride onto your hips, and carrying her granny halfway across the room weren’t all absolutely essential.’

‘Oh.’ I thought back. ‘Did I do that?’

She grinned. ‘You sure did. Made me proud. Nobody’s going to gripe now about me bringing along a strange Sassenach.’

‘I didn’t know I was a subject of debate.’

‘Well, now it’ll just be speculation.’ She winked.

‘About us?’

‘Aha,’ Annette said. ‘So there’s an “us”?’

Face suddenly serious, haloed in red and black.

‘If you choose,’ I said.

Her green eyes regarded me levelly.

‘And what do you choose?’

Around us people were shouting, reaching for drinks, brushing against us. The music was rocking again. I see and hear it only now. At the time there was nothing but her.

‘There’s no choosing,’ I said. I took a step forward and put my arms around her waist. Our foreheads touched. ‘It was all decided the second I saw you.’

‘Me too,’ she said, and we kissed. It felt strange doing it at the same height. By the time we’d finished she’d slid off the stool. She looked up at me, smiling, and said: ‘But I saw you first.’

‘So what,’ I asked in a bitter-tanged amazement, ‘have the past three months been all about?’

‘I’m like you,’ she said. ‘I want to be free.’

‘You can be free with me!’ I said. ‘Any time. Please.’

We were falling together laughing.

‘Yes,’ she said.

And then it had all been said, and we were just standing together at the bar, having a drink.

Irene, the bride, clicked up to us in high heels and a smart blue two-piece, gave me a wary smile and whispered to Annette.

‘See you in a few minutes,’ Annette said. I bowed to them both – and to this necessity – and watched their whispering progress out of sight.

Annette returned about a quarter of an hour later.

‘Everything okay?’ I asked, sliding her a G&T. She looked a bit preoccupied.

‘Basically yes. Thanks,’ she said, sipping carefully. ‘I just spent ten minutes hanging about in reception with Irene’s wedding-dress in a plastic bag over my shoulder. Finally got someone to stash it till I leave. Couldn’t leave it in the room. Some mix-up with keys.’

‘So it’s not all fun, being a bridesmaid.’

‘Ha, ha. Little do you know.’

‘I think I’d rather not –’

I realised the music had stopped and somebody was trying to make himself heard above a hubbub.

‘Hey, come on!’

Annette swirled about and dashed away to the nearest exit, where Irene and her man were backing out of the doorway with a kind of female scrum going on around them –

Something sailed over the heads of the scrum. As I looked up, startled, Annette shot her hand in the air like an eager pupil with an answer, and caught it. She brandished the bouquet as she turned slowly around, acknowledging cheers and catcalls, and faced me with a broad smile.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Lucky me.’

Everybody trooped outside to send the new couple on their way. They’d cunningly called a taxi, and left behind a car covered with shaving foam and lipstick for the rain to wash.

Then more dancing, and more talking, and a long taxi ride to Annette’s flat, with Irene’s dress draped across our knees. As I paid the driver she ran to the steps of her house, laughing, her hems bunched in one hand and the other dress flying out behind her like a comet. I caught up with her as she unlocked the outer door. We went down the stairs and into her darkened flat, noisily trying to be quiet.

She took me straight to her bedroom, hooked the wedding-dress on its hanger over a wardrobe door facing the foot of her bed, and turned to me. I caught the tapes of the bow at her waist, yanked them and she twirled around, catching the pinafore as it came off and sending it sailing into a corner. I fumbled with buttons down the back of the dress, found a concealed zip and opened it. The dress fell around her feet. She stepped out of its circle in a long nylon slip, and deftly undid every button of my shirt while I got rid of my footwear, trousers and Y-fronts as fast as possible. The slip slid down to her feet with a rattle of static electricity. The rest of her underwear took enjoyably longer to remove.

I cupped her breasts in my hands and buried my mouth between them. Her skin tasted of talc and salt. Holding her away to look at her and holding her close to touch her led to a closer, quicker rhythm as we tumbled onto her bed.

‘Hey, hey, hey,’ she said. She put her hand on my shoulder and held me away, reached behind her head and waved a small foil package in front of my face. Then she tore the package open with her teeth.

‘Get that on, you irresponsible bastard.’

‘Wouldn’t want to be responsible for bastards,’ I agreed. I rolled the condom onto my cock. ‘I do have some with me, I just forgot.’

‘If you ever say anything as feeble to me again you’re outa here, Jon Wilde.’

I tried for a moment to think of some reply, and then put my tongue to a better use.

I woke in a room dim in the curtained light of mid-morning, my limbs still tangled with Annette’s, and was momentarily startled by the apparition of the white gown looming over the end of the bed, its falls of lawn and drifts of lace protected by a shimmering forcefield of polythene, like a ghost from the future.

5

Ship City

We take, first, a long view (longer than it looks) and catch the planet as it swings by from a hundred thousand kilometres out. It’s red – no surprises there – but it’s mottled with dark spills of blue and stains of green, and those spills and stains are beginning to be connected up by…channels, by…(and the thought is as fleeting as the glimpse) canali, so that New Mars really does look like the original Mars, really, didn’t. (But didn’t we wish.)

Flip the viewpoint to a thousand kilometres…up, now, not out…and we’re crawling past it at a satellite’s eye-level, taking in the whorled fingerprints of water-vapour, the planet’s curving faceplate of atmosphere steamed-up with breath, the scrawled marks of life and the ruled lines of intelligence: yes, canals.

Dropping now, to a structure as unmistakably artificial as it’s apparently organic: at first sight a black asterisk, like a capital city on a map, then (as the viewpoint hurtles in and the view reddens, bloodshot by the flames of air-braking) like a starfish stranded on the sand.

Cut, again, to a more leisurely airborne vantage, drifting above what is now clearly a city, its radial symmetry still its major feature but with its five arms visibly joined by the black threads of roads, streets, canals; and, at another level, invisible from the outside, by the cobweb cabling of the nets.

And we’re in. That old TCP/IP transaction protocol is still valid (from way back to the Mitochondrial Eve of all the systems) so we can hear, feel and see. But the big! numbers still count, so encryption hides much of the data in catacombs of dark. What we can access, on the open channels, is more than enough to show:

Four of the city’s five arms are non-human domains. They look as if they were intended for human habitation, but nobody’s home, except machines. There’s a basic stratum, a sort of mechanical topsoil, where things are doing things to things. Simulacra of intelligence are going through the motions, bawling and toiling: empty automatic barges plough algae-clogged canals, servitor machines struggle to sweep dust from the floors of corridors whose walls are already thick with mould. In the streets it’s a creationist’s caricature of natural selection: half-formed mechanisms collide and combine and incorporate each other’s parts, producing unviable offspring which themselves propagate further grotesque transitional forms.

This mindless level is preyed upon by more sophisticated machinery, which lurks and pounces, gobbles and cannibalises for purposes of its own. Artificial intelligences – some obsessive and focused, others chaotic and relaxed, some even sane – haunt a fraction of these machines. It’s hard to identify the places where such minds reside. Lurching, unlikely structures may be steered by a sapient computer no bigger than a mouse, while some sleek and shining and, even, humanoid machine may well be moronic or mad.

The whole groaning junkyard is persistently pillaged by human beings, who risk everything from their fingertips to their souls in venturing into this jungle of iron and silicon. They have their mechanical allies, scouts and agents; but if machines, in general, have no loyalty to each other, they have even less to human friends or masters. It remains easier to reprogram a machine than to subvert a human.

And through it all, like germs, the minute molecular machinery of stray nanotechnology goes about its invisible and occasionally disastrous work. Immune systems have evolved, the equivalent of medicine is practised; public health measures are applied (they are not, exactly, enforced). But the smallest are the swiftest, and here evolution’s race is most ruthlessly run.

The fifth arm is the human quarter. The nets are its mind. In them we find its good intentions, its evil thoughts, its wet dreams and its dull routines. This is not how it should be finally judged. But still –

Underlying everything is the reproduction of daily life, and it provides a huge proportion of the net traffic. Nobody’s counting, but there are several hundred thousand human beings alive on New Mars, most of them in Ship City, the rest scattered in much smaller communities, fanning out across the planet. Every minute buzzes with thousands of conversations and personal communications. Business: orders, invoices, payments, transactions. Property rights – what people agree to let people do with things – have grown complex and differentiated, and the unbundling and repackaging and exchanging of these rights proceeds with card-sharp speed: time shares, organ mortgages, innovation futures, labour loans, birth benefits…it gets complicated. Hence conflicts, charges, settlements, crimes and torts.

Law and order lifts its eyes and teeth above the stream of business only occasionally, and the resulting cop-shows and courtroom dramas and camp comedies provide – in reality and in fiction – a staple of entertainment. Most of the torments and humiliations we see on the screens are – fortunately – just pornography. The trials by ordeal and combat are real.

Religion – some. The highest clerical dignitary is the bishop of New Mars. Reformed Orthodox Catholic, so while she has the odd qualm about exactly how the Succession passed to her, she knows she’ll pass it on to one or more of her kids. She’s friendly with the few Buddhists and the rabbi (like, you weren’t expecting Jews?) and stern but charitable towards the lunatic heretics; their delusion that New Mars is the afterlife or some post-apocalyptic staging area is, in the circumstances, forgiveable.

Politics – none. It’s an anarchy, remember? But it’s an anarchy by default. There’s no state because nobody can be bothered to set one up. Too much hassle, man. Keep your nose clean, don’t stick your neck out, it’s always been this way and nothing will ever change, and anyway (and especially) what will the neighbours think? (They’ll never stand for it, is what. It’s against human nature.)

The outside of the city’s nervous system consists of its senses: cameras and microphones for news and surveillance, detectors of chemicals and stresses which monitor its health. Start at the top: on the highest and most central tower is a globe the size of a human head. It’s just an all-round viewing-camera, an amenity stuck there in a flourish of public spirit or private speculation. From there we can peer down the dizzying sweep of tower-tops that eventually planes out to low, flat roofs, and ends in domes, shacks and sheds at the city limits.

Like each of the city’s five radial arms, this one is an elongated kite-shape, first widening, then tapering. The buildings themselves are of two types: those that were grown, and those that were built. The shapes of the former can be analysed into intersecting polygons, regular or irregular: those of the latter, into rectangles. The layout and location of the latticed, cellular structures has the same quality of accidental inevitability as the boulders in a rock-fall or the pebbles in scree, and for the same reason: minimal occupation of available space. The constructed buildings obey a different principle of economy, and stick up or dig down as its unpredictable laws dictate.

Both types of buildings – both laws of location – follow the streets, and the streets follow the canals. The canals are a circulatory system: the Ring Canal encircles the central area, the Radial Canals bisect the arms, and each has innumerable tributaries and capillaries. Near the leftward edge of the arm we’re looking down is an anomalous, long canal that first comes into view just below us and extends beyond the horizon: the Stone Canal.

The man leans into the recess of the window, supporting some of his weight on his spread fingertips. The cement is rough under his fingertips. He stares out of the window, which is high on the city’s slope, looking along the Stone Canal. As he balances his weight on the balls of his feet and the tips of his fingers, the tensed muscles in his arms and shoulders show through the soft cloth of his jacket. The muscles flex and he straightens, turning around. His black hair flicks past his chin with the speed of his movement.

The other two men in the room are taller and bulkier than he is, but they both recoil slightly as he strides towards them. He stops a couple of metres away and glares at them.

‘You lost her,’ he says. ‘To the abolitionists.’ His speech has an accent not much heard in this city, something from the past, roughened and refined over a long time. It provides a rasping undertone to the modulation of his voice, which is likewise – consciously or not – a practised and accomplished instrument of his will. Accent and tone together are precisely gauged to convey his emotion: in this case, contempt.

‘She had an IBM franchise,’ one of the men says. He licks his lips, withdraws his tongue abruptly into his mouth as if he’s aware it’s gone out too far. He wipes his chin.

‘That,’ says the man, ‘is not an excuse. It’s a description of failure.’ He sighs, dusts his fingertips together. ‘All right. From the top.’

He stalks away to a big wooden desk, and half-sits on the edge of it.

‘OK, Reid,’ says the other man, and launches into an account. He’s spoken for a minute when Reid raises a hand.

‘A young man?’ he says. ‘And a robot? Describe them.’

He listens, narrow-eyed, for another minute before interrupting with a downward gesture of the hand.

‘You thought he recognised her, Stigler?’

Stigler’s lips are dry again.

‘He…thought he did.’

‘Oh, Christ!’ The word comes out like a rod cracked down on the desk. Reid drums his fingers for a moment.

‘And you, Collins, I don’t suppose your descriptive powers are in any better shape, no?’

‘I was giving cover, Reid,’ Collins says. ‘Looking everywhere else, know what I mean?’

‘OK, OK.’ Reid stands up and looks them over, speculatively. He might be considering profitable uses for their body-parts, and suitable methods of rendering. ‘You did the job we agreed, as well as you could. If I’d wanted to pull in a man on sus, I’d have needed a warrant. And that’s what I’m going to need, gentlemen, so I’m afraid that rules you out. Full payment, no bonus.’

Collins and Stigler look relieved and turn to go. At the door Collins scratches his neck, looks at Reid. Reid looks up from the screen he’s turned his attention to.

‘Yes?’

‘Uh, Reid, question. You don’t happen to know who owns that robot?’

Reid thinks about this. His smile lets the two men know they’re his good friends, and not a couple of greps who haven’t come back with the data.

‘Stay on the case,’ he tells them.

Wilde stood up and walked to the end of the quay, past the people and the intelligent apes and the machines that might have been intelligent. He stared across the Stone Canal, and then looked down into the water for a while. He found, perhaps, some answer in his reflection.

The robot, Jay-Dub, was still crouched at the edge of the quay, poised like a predatory water-bird. Patterns of liquid crystal shifted in its shadowed central band as Wilde returned. Wilde looked down at it.

‘We’re not in Kazakhstan any more,’ he said.

The machine made no reply.

‘What happened?’ Wilde asked. He looked around. ‘Is it safe to talk?’

‘Safe enough,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘I can pick up most attempts to overhear.’

‘All right,’ said Wilde. ‘Tell me this: where did I hide my pistol?’

‘In the shower.’

‘What was the last thing I said?’

‘“Love never dies.”’

Wilde frowned.

‘What was the last thing I decided?’

‘That I’d – that you’d never smoke again.’

Wilde leaned down and tapped the machine’s hull.

‘That’s right. That’s a promise I remember making, and you can go right on keeping.’

He took the coffee-glass to the breakfast-food stall and returned with the glass refilled and a packet of cigarettes and a lighter.

‘I don’t approve of this,’ Jay-Dub said as Wilde sat down beside it and lit up.

‘Fuck you,’ Wilde said. ‘I want your story, not your opinions.’

He leaned back against the shell of the machine, which shifted its weight on its legs to compensate.

‘It’s a long story. You have no idea how long.’

‘So make it short.’ Wilde’s eyes were closed.

‘“Yes, master,” said the robot,’ said the robot. ‘OK, whatever you say. Basically, I died just after being shot. My brain was immediately scanned with a prototype neural imaging system and the pattern recorded.’

‘Come on,’ Wilde said. ‘We don’t – didn’t have anything like that.’

‘Reid’s people did. They were more advanced than anyone suspected. And I was the first. The first human, anyway. I believe most of the enhanced apes around here originate with the early experiments of that period. However, it was many years later – though not, of course, subjectively – that I opened my eyes and found myself in an impossible spacecraft. Comfortable, one-gee, but no rotation or acceleration was apparent when I looked outside. Virtual reality, of course. What was outside the windows was what was outside in the real world.’

It paused. A minute passed. The man reached his hand back and knocked the machine’s side with his knuckles. Then he sucked his knuckles.

‘And what was outside was –?’

‘Ganymede, I think,’ the robot said. ‘What was left of it. The machine that I inhabited was not much bigger than the one you see now. It, and thousands like it, were engaged in constructing a platform. All around the rings of Jupiter, other machines were engaged in related tasks.’

Again its voice trailed off.

‘The rings of Jupiter?’ Wilde said. ‘Somebody had been busy.’

‘Guess who.’

‘Reid?’

‘And company.’

‘They’d done that? By when?’

‘2093.’

Wilde opened his eyes and gazed out over the canal.

‘I take it,’ he said, ‘that the humans and human-equivalent robots didn’t do all this on their own.’

‘Indeed not. Among the struts of the platform were huge entities that we called macros. They were made of nanomachines, and they were the hardware platform for millions of uploaded minds. People here, now, call them “the fast folk”. They were by then well beyond the human, and they were building a wormhole – the one our ship came through to get here.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘Ah,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘A good question. The ones around Jupiter lost interest, shall we say, in the external world. The templates from which they developed, the source-code if you like, we brought with us, as we brought the stored minds and coded bodies of the dead.’

‘Including me?’

‘Well, yes. Your actual body wasn’t coded, as far as I know. There was a tissue-sample, from which you were later – from which I cloned you. Your mind was coded, as I said.’

‘Separately from yours?’ Wilde sounded puzzled.

‘My mind and yours were copied from the same original,’ Jay-Dub said. ‘I woke up in that machine in exactly the same frame of mind as you woke up yesterday, and with exactly the same memories. And in less auspicious circumstances.’

‘My heart,’ said Wilde, ‘absolutely fucking bleeds.’

‘My enormously sophisticated software detects a degree of hostility.’ The machine’s voice was attempting irony, something outside its familiar range.

‘I hope it does,’ said Wilde. ‘You’ve just admitted that clones are a separate issue from stored minds. So the presence of anybody here who looks like somebody I used to know, is no indication what-so-fucking-ever that that person is actually here, am I right?’

‘In principle, yes, but –’

‘So your remark about the clone being some reason to hope that Annette was, as you put it, among the dead was a complete lie?’

‘No,’ said the machine. ‘It does mean there’s a chance.’

Wilde shook his head.

‘The more I think about it,’ he said, ‘the more I doubt it. She never believed in cryonics or uploading or any of that shit. If she believed in anything, she believed in the general resurrection at the end of time. The Omega Point.’

‘And all that shit,’ said Jay-Dub.

Wilde laughed. ‘You still think so? Well, I’ll bow to your greater experience.’

The machine shifted slightly. ‘The end of time may be closer than you think, and worse than you can imagine.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I’d rather you worked it out for yourself,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘Anything I tell you about it would only put further strain on your credulity. But it does add a degree of urgency to our task.’

‘Our task?’ Wilde almost shouted. ‘What do you mean, “our”? The way I see it, I’m not Jon Wilde. I have his memories, and my body is like his was at twenty.’ He lit and drew on another cigarette; smiled through a cough. ‘At twenty, we all feel immortal. But if anyone has a claim to be Wilde, it’s you. You can keep his promises, fight his battles. I’m sure you remember one of those drunken discussions with Reid about cloning bodies and copying personalities; and the conclusion you came to: a copy is not the original, therefore…Reid had some quaintly theological way of putting it, you may recall.’

‘“The resurrected dead on the Day of Judgement are new creations, as innocent as Adam in the Garden.”’

‘Exactly,’ said Wilde. ‘That’s what I am: a new creation. A new man.’ He sent his cigarette-end spinning into the canal and jumped to his feet, stretching his arms wide and looking up at the sky. ‘A New Martian!’

‘You’re Wilde all right,’ said the machine. ‘That’s exactly how he would have reacted.’

The man laughed. ‘You don’t catch me that easily. Similarity, no matter how exact, is not identity. Continuity is.’

‘That may be,’ said the machine. ‘But everything about New Mars is a logical consequence of assuming the opposite.’

Wilde closed his eyes for a moment, then squatted down beside the robot and scratched lines in the dirt and gravel of the quay with a fishbone. He gazed at the resulting doodle as if it were an equation he was struggling to solve.

‘Ah,’ he said. He thought about it some more. ‘Everything?’

‘Everything that matters,’ said the machine.

‘But that’s insane. It’s worse than wrong – it’s mistaken.’

‘I expected you to think that,’ said Jay-Dub, a note of complacency in its tone. ‘That way, whether you identify yourself with the original Jonathan Wilde or not, you’ll probably want to do what I want you to do.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘You said Reid killed you – me, us, whatever. At the very least he was responsible. Sue the bastard for murder.’

Wilde laughed. ‘Sue, not charge? You have that too?’ It sounded like his interest in his own case had been diverted by curiosity about the law.

‘That too,’ Jay-Dub said heavily. ‘Polycentric legal system, we got.’

‘Whatever the legal system,’ Wilde said, ‘for a living man to stand up in court and claim he was murdered is, well, pushing it.’

‘Exactly,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘And I want to push it till it falls.’

Wilde scratched in the dust some more.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see. Very neat. All the answers are wrong. Like a koan.’

He looked up.

‘Why,’ he added, ‘couldn’t you sue Reid on your own account?’

Jay-Dub stood up, straightening and extending its legs. ‘Look around you,’ it said, flailing its arms about at the busy quay. ‘Every jumped-up monkey here has rights that a court will recognise. I don’t. I’m instrumentum vocale: a tool that talks.’

‘So what about this distinction you make so much of, between human equivalent and just a fucking machine?’

‘“Human equivalent”,’ the robot said with some bitterness, ‘is a marketing term. It has no legal standing whatsoever, except with the abolitionists, and nobody gives a fuck about them.’

‘Oh?’ Wilde looked interested. ‘That’s the people the…gynoid went off with?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want to talk to them. They sound like my kind of people.’

‘I assure you they’re not,’ the robot said. ‘They’re the kind of moralistic, dogmatic, self-righteous purists that you despised all your life.’

‘Fine,’ the man said. ‘I said my kind of people, not Wilde’s.’

He got to his feet. ‘I’m going to see them.’

‘That would be a mistake.’

Wilde set off briskly along the quay. ‘It’s the kind of mistake,’ he said, as Jay-Dub rose and followed, ‘that I died not making. Not many people get the chance to learn from that.’

Reid’s office is large. The walls are curved, made from a plain grey cement that gives an unexpected atmosphere of warmth. The window’s view adds a good percentage to the room’s price. The morning sunlight slants through it. On the desk, of solid wood polished so that it looks almost like plastic, there’s a standard keyboard and screen. Reid has contacts, which he seldom uses, on his eyes.

He’s sitting on the desk, leaning across it, paging through a search. The search is fast, and the scenes flash by in reverse order. Days of recorded phone-calls jabber and gesticulate backwards.

He stops, slows, pages forward. Freezes the scene.

He looks up. ‘C’mere,’ he says.

Collins and Stigler step over and peer at the screen. It shows the interior of the cab of some big powerful haulage vehicle. The details are quaint: a dangling mike, a peeling motto, padded polyethylene seats. A man with a lined, leathery face is looking into the camera. Beside him is a young woman with very dark eyes, very black hair, a tight tee-shirt and cropped denim shorts. She has the look of an intelligent and wary slut.

Reid fingers a key and the picture moves. There’s a flicker of interference that makes all three men blink and shake their heads slightly. As they open their eyes the screen clears.

‘Forget it,’ the man’s saying. ‘Wrong number.’

His hand moves out of frame and the screen blanks. Another recorded call begins. Reid stops and scrolls back. He pauses at the interference, runs it past again slowly.

‘Oh, shit,’ he says.

He clicks on another screen icon and pulls in some analysis software. The flicker suddenly becomes a page of symbols. Reid clicks again. The symbols expand into screens and screens of text. Reid runs his finger down the monitor, his frown deepening.

‘Son of a bitch,’ he says, sitting back.

Stigler is twitching. ‘That guy,’ he says excitedly. ‘With the skin thing, he’s –’

Reid looks at him. ‘No shit, Sherlock.’

He calls up the picture again and runs another program, which smooths and softens the man’s features.

‘Hey!’ says Collins.

Reid points at the screen. ‘Get him,’ he says.

‘Wait a minute,’ says Stigler. ‘You said we’d need a warrant, and I can’t see no court giving –’

Reid claps him on the back. ‘Don’t you worry about it,’ he grins. ‘That man is dead.’

He stalks away and leans once more on the sill, looking out through the window at the city, and smiles into the sunlight.

6

The Summer Soldier

I looked up from the Observer on the breakfast table. Outside, through the french window, our small walled backyard hummed with bees and bloomed with weeds. Ten o’clock sun slanted steeply in. Annette was sitting feet up along the bench opposite, leaning against the wall, enjoying her first cigarette and second coffee of the day. Eleanor, the main reason why we were up at this hour on a Sunday morning (and the result of a Sunday morning seven years earlier when getting out of bed was the last thing on our minds) knelt over felt-tip pens and a colouring-book.

‘What are we doing today?’ I asked.

‘Peace-fighting,’ Annette said firmly.

‘Not me,’ I said, in chorus with Eleanor’s groaned ‘Oh no, mummy.’ I’d forgotten about the CND demonstration, although it had been pencilled, then biro’d, on the kitchen calendar for weeks.

‘Please yourselves, anarchists,’ Annette said, stubbing out her cigarette. Something in her tone and gesture told me she was annoyed – having succeeded in getting us to demos before, she knew our objection was based more on sloth than principle. In this year of Chernobyl and Tripoli, we were letting the side down.

‘How about if we meet you there?’ I suggested hastily. ‘Eleanor and I could nip over to Camden market, then we’ll go and see Granny and Grandpa at Marble Arch and watch out for you, and we can all go to McDonald’s afterwards.’

As I spoke Eleanor transparently calculated whether trailing around second-hand bookstalls was worth it for the sake of seeing her grandparents and tanking up on cheeseburger and milkshake. From the way her eyes brightened it looked like the bottom line was in the black. I turned to Annette, who gave me a relenting smile.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘At least you’ll be there.’ She stood up, in a graceful slither of nightdress and negligée. ‘And come on, you,’ she added, stooping to pat the sticking-up rump of Eleanor, now back at her colouring. ‘Get yo’ little ass into some kinda decent gear.’

‘Do we have-to?’

There were times – like this, and bedtimes – when I regretted ever answering the question: ‘Daddy, what’s libertarianism?’ with anything but a lie.

‘No, we don’t have to,’ I said. ‘But we’re going to, because I bloody say so.’

‘I’ll tell mummy you said that.’

‘Said what?’

‘Bloody.’

‘Go ahead, clipe.’

‘Whassa clipe?’

‘A much worse word. A terrible word.’

By this time we were in the street, walking briskly along to Holloway Road. Even on a Sunday the trucks were lined up, honking nose to stinking tail. I blamed the environmentalists, who’d delayed the widening of the Archway road for years and inflicted planning blight on the entire neighbourhood. At least it lowered the price of a ground-floor flat. I relieved my feelings by starting to sing ‘Ten Green Protestors’ and got Eleanor skipping and singing along. By the time we’d reached ‘…there’d be no Green protestors and a road through the wall!’ we were on the Camden bus.

Top deck, branches brushing past. Smokers had to sit at the back. I blamed the environmentalists.

Chalk Farm Road and Camden Market cheered me up, as they always did whether or not I found anything I wanted. Stalls and canals and the invincible hand of the flea market, its black plastic bags and canopies the banners of an anarchist army that would still be there when the rest had done their worst, if anything were there at all.

We left with a leatherbound Lord Macaulay for me, an antique rayon bodice for Annette, a coral paperweight for my parents and a climbing wooden monkey for Eleanor. So I was in a good mood when we emerged past the lines of cops at Marble Arch and found my mother and father near Speakers’ Corner. As I’d expected, they were leafletting and pamphletting and generally irritating the first contingents to trail in after traipsing – with an entirely unjustified sense of having achieved something – from another park to this one.

Eleanor raced up to be grabbed by her grandparents. I encircled them both in a quick air-hug and let them get back to work. Tall, stooping, grey-haired, and tough as a pair of old boots, they’d seen it all before: the Peace Pledge Union, CND, the Committee of 100, Vietnam Solidarity, CND again…Today they were doing a respectable trade in a pamphlet. In between keeping half an eye on the demo and chatting to whichever of them wasn’t in full flow, I flipped through Is a Third World War Inevitable?: its cover as lurid as any peace-movement propaganda, its contents a frosty dismissal of two centuries of peace campaigns – all of which had failed to prevent (where they hadn’t actively endorsed) increasingly destructive wars.

A Scottish ASTMS banner bellied through the gateway, and as it sailed closer I saw Annette a few rows behind it. She was walking with a man whom I recognised, with a pleasant surprise, as Reid. We’d seen him a quite a few times over the past decade, kept in touch: he’d crashed out on our floor often enough when he was in London for work or politics.

I stood there under the trees while my mother talked to Eleanor and my father argued with a stray Spartacist, and watched their approach. They were deep in conversation, faces serious, eyes oblivious to the surrounding march. When they were about twenty metres away Reid, perhaps distracted by the raised voices nearby, looked aside and saw me. He touched Annette’s elbow and she saw me too, and immediately they broke ranks and hurried over.

Reid’s hair was shorter and neater than it had been the last time I’d seen him, at a Critique conference the previous year. His shirt, black jeans and Reeboks were new. His denim jacket was faded, frayed, breastplated with badges against Reagan and Thatcher, Cruise and Pershing; for the Sandinistas and Solidarnosc, and (as if that unlikely combination wasn’t enough) a red-and-gold enamel badge celebrating the 1980 Moscow Olympics. A carrier-bag flapped lightly from one hand.

‘Hi Dave. Good to see you, man.’

‘Yeah, likewise.’ He slapped my shoulder. ‘Hello, Eleanor. You’ve grown a lot.’ Eleanor gave him a smile that showed all the gaps in her milk-teeth. Her gaze kept returning to the bright rows of badges.

My father’s dispute had ended in a stand-off. The Spartacist, a scrawny lad in a knit cap and lumber-jacket, saw Reid and turned like a locking-on radar.

‘Comrade –’ he began, stepping forward and moving a bundle of papers into combat position.

‘Oh, piss off,’ Reid said, barely glancing at him. He faced my father. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Wilde. I’m David Reid. Annette and Jon have often told me about you.’

‘Martin,’ my father said. ‘And this is my wife Amy. Pleased to meet you, David.’ He grinned. ‘Jonathan tells me you’re quite bright, for a Trot.’

Reid looked at me with raised eyebrows. I shrugged and spread my hands. ‘I take no responsibility for what his warped mind makes of anything I say.’

‘Can we go to McDonalds now?’

My father smiled at Eleanor and checked his watch. ‘There’ll be a couple of comrades along shortly,’ he said. ‘What about you, David?’

Reid jiggled his carrier-bag on one finger. ‘I’ve sold most of my papers. Yeah, I’ll be OK to skive off for half an hour or so.’

‘It’ll be all boring speeches now,’ Annette said. She smiled and waved airily. ‘Fine by me.’

‘She never brings anything to demos,’ I explained.

‘Only my beautiful self.’

‘That’s enough,’ Reid and I said at the same time, and we all laughed.

We hung about for a few more minutes until my parents’ comrades – who, to my surprise, had green hair and studded nostrils – turned up. Then we ducked under the main road and through the golden arches, to find the place packed. A lot of badges and plastic bags, a lot of post-attack black.

‘Goddamn anti-Americans,’ Martin muttered as we queued. ‘Under-fed, under-employed and underfoot!’

He trotted out some variant of this at every occasion of suspected anti-Yank sentiment, and now I barely grunted at it, but Reid grinned broadly. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘They come down here, they take our seats…’

Ten minutes later we were crowded around something that wasn’t so much a table as a painstakingly exact plastic replica of one. Eleanor sat between her grandparents and kept them entertained. Annette sat on one bolt-down seat and Reid and I half-leaned, half-sat over another.

‘Annette says you’re still lecturing,’ Reid said.

‘Yeah.’ I blew on a hot fry. ‘Part-time, short-term contracts. Further education’s run like a typing pool these days.’

‘You should approve.’ Dave was eating quickly, glancing away every, now and then.

‘I would if there was some sense to it all…Just as well Annette’s got a steady job.’

‘Solid breadwinner,’ Annette said, around a mouthful.

‘Safe from everything except the animal rights nutters?’

‘That’s about it. How’re you doing yourself?’

‘Working for North British Mutual,’ Reid said. ‘Big insurance company in Edinburgh. I’m supposed to be a software engineer. It’s just like being a programmer except you do it properly.’ He leaned closer in a parody of confidentiality, and winked at my father. ‘Money for old rope.’

‘Still with the Migs, I take it?’

Reid gave a twisted smile. ‘Everybody’s in the Labour Party these days, but you know how it is. Got into working in the union. Been on the branch committee for the past year.’

My father looked suddenly alert. He’d been on his branch committee for decades.

‘God, that must be thrilling,’ I said.

For a moment Reid’s face took on a look of utter weariness.

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘Better than Labour Party ward meetings anyway.’

‘I’ll tell you what your trouble is,’ my father said quietly. ‘You’re still doing it for the party, not for the union.’

Reid shook his head. ‘I’m for the union!’

Martin narrowed his eyes, held his gaze for a second, then returned to teasing Eleanor.

‘What’s your political activity these days?’ Reid asked, breaking an awkward silence. ‘Deep entry in the Tory Party?’

‘Very funny,’ I said. I had once spoken at a fringe meeting, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. ‘I do odd bits of work and write articles for what I consider good causes. Everything from Amnesty International to the Space Settlers’ Society, with the Libertarian Alliance somewhere in between.’ I shrugged. ‘I know – it sounds a bit…all over the place.’

‘Space and freedom, huh?’ Reid said lightly.

Across the street the demonstration was still going past. A banner with a picture of a rising rocket – a Polaris missile – caught my eye, and I think that was the moment when it all came together, when I had the vision. I saw a future where other people – infinitely different from these, infinitely like them – carried banners with other and greater rockets, chanted unfamiliar slogans I couldn’t quite make out.

‘That’s it!’ I said. ‘That’s what we need to get away from the nuclear terrorists. A space movement! Escape from the planet of the apes!’

‘That’ll be the day,’ Reid said. He examined a hunk of sesame-sprinkled roll, stuffed it in his mouth and chewed it. ‘OK folks, I gotta go.’ He smiled around the table, saw Eleanor’s covetous look at his badges and took one off and gave it to her. Jobs Not Bombs. ‘My phone-number’s still the same. See you soon, I hope.’ I caught a flicker of a look between him and Annette. His eyes, as he turned to me, were calm and friendly as ever. ‘Next time we’ll have a proper drink, right?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘“Not those rich imperialist tit-bits.”’

‘Yeah,’ he grinned. ‘Well, back to the Judean People’s Front.’

‘What!?? Don’t you mean the People’s Front of Judea?’

Reid smote his forehead. ‘Of course. See ya mate.’

He edged through the crush and vanished into the crowd.

We finished up our fast-food in a defiantly leisurely way. The queue, as apparently unending as the demonstration, shuffled forward. My father spotted a young woman carrying a bundle of papers whose headline – no, it wasn’t even that, it was the actual masthead – read ‘Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!’ and asked her in a tone of polite curiosity: ‘Why don’t you fight capitalism, for a change?’

But after the young woman had said only a few sentences, he stopped her with a smile and an uplifted finger. He looked at his watch, and brought the finger down to tap it triumphantly.

‘One minute, twenty-five seconds,’ he said to the puzzled cadre. ‘Congratulations. That’s the shortest time yet for a member of – let me see –’ he made a pretence of counting on his fingers ‘– a split, from a split, from a split, from the Fourth International to call me a sectarian!’

He stood back as we all rose to sweep our detritus onto trays.

‘Wasse on about?’ the young woman said indignantly, seeing a look of surreptitious sympathy from Amy. ‘Wassis Fourf Inte’national?’

‘Don’t you worry, dear,’ Amy said, squeezing past. ‘He’s a terrible man.’

But she slipped the girl a leaflet all the same.

Amy believed there was hope for everybody yet.

Except, possibly, Martin.

In the play-park off Holloway Road, Eleanor paced along painted lion-footprints and suddenly scooted off to the swings. We’d taken her here to run about after all the Tube and bus rides she’d sat through.

Annette flopped on a bench. ‘I’m knackered,’ she said. ‘Long walk.’ She leaned back, eyes half-shut against the sunlight but still watching Eleanor.

I sat down beside her, leaning forward, elbows on knees.

‘Long talk, too?’

‘Oh yes. Dave.’ She sighed and shifted, half-facing me, an arm draped along the back of the bench. ‘I came across him selling his Socialist Action faction rag at the assembly area, and I’d lost the Islington lot so I ended up marching along with all those Scottish trade unionists. Dave and I talked the whole way.’

I smiled. ‘Like old times.’

Annette ran her upper teeth over her lower lip, looked in her bag and reached for a cigarette.

‘Yeah, well…’ She lit up and inhaled hard, sighed smokily. ‘You could say that. Shit, this is difficult.’

‘What’s difficult?’

‘I should’ve told you this before, but there never seemed to be a good reason, or a good time. The fact is, for quite a while now David’s been, well, kind of gallantly flirting with me, you know?’

‘Of course.’ I smiled sourly, feeling tense and cold. ‘That’s understandable. And I suppose you would coquettishly flirt right back?’

‘How nice of you to put it like that.’ She leaned forward, eyes bright, and laid a hand on my knee. ‘But Dave’s stubborn, and literal, and he’s so goddamn serious…’

‘And he got the wrong idea,’ I said, my voice heavy and flat. Eleanor came off the swing and ran up a grassy mound, like a long barrow, and began climbing a wood-and-metal artificial tree.

‘Yes.’ Annette sounded relieved. ‘Maybe that’s why –’ She stopped for a moment and sucked air around the cigarette, as if it were a joint. ‘Today,’ she continued in a firmer tone, ‘God, my ears were burning. He told me that letting our…relationship, or whatever it was, break up was the worst mistake he’s ever made, that he’s never got over me and…’ Her voice trailed off and she stared into space. ‘He’s always loved me and he wants me to come back,’ she concluded in a rush.

I stared at her. ‘You mean to tell me –’

‘Daa-ad!’ Eleanor wailed from the top of the climbing-tree. She wind-milled her arms as she swayed, her feet on the top grips. I jumped, I warped space – it seemed only a moment later that I was reaching up to catch her and lower her to the ground.

‘Stay on the swings,’ I said. ‘Please!’

I sat down again beside Annette, shaking my head. My heart was thumping for several reasons.

‘He really just blatantly told you that?’

‘Yes,’ Annette agreed.

‘Jesus!’ I exploded. ‘What the fuck does he think he’s up to?’ I thought of our casual, friendly banter and felt sick.

‘I’ve told you,’ Annette said, ‘what the fuck he thinks he’s up to.’

‘And what did you say?’

Annette lit another cigarette, her hands shaky, the flame invisible in the light. ‘I said he was crazy, he was pushing it too far and that I was perfectly happy and I love you and Eleanor and there’s no way I’d leave you for him. I told him to forget it, basically.’ She smiled at me wanly. ‘What did you expect?’

‘Well, that, obviously.’ I squinted into the sun at her, smiling with relief. I was angry, not at her – at him. But some of it must have leaked into my voice as I said, ‘But did you say to him that you don’t love him?’

‘No,’ Annette said. ‘I couldn’t. It’s not that I still love him!’ She laughed. ‘I don’t, not…like that, but I still care about him. As you do too, yes? And I don’t know if you know this, but I got the feeling he’s really unhappy, and confused and frustrated, and it woulda been like a kick in the teeth.’

A kick in the teeth, I thought – that could be arranged. But I breathed out, and relaxed and forced a smile, and said, ‘Yeah, OK, I’m glad you said what you did. To him and to me.’ I smiled at her more genuinely, and leaned forward to put my arms around her and as I did so realised that I had a cigarette in my hand and that after five years off the damn’ things I was smoking again.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘fuck me.’

‘Yes.’

Which was all very well and wonderful, but afterwards, lying staring at the ceiling, I thought about all she had said, and – more worryingly – all that she hadn’t.

Looking back, I could see that Annette had understated the length of time in which Reid had been ‘gallantly flirting’ with her. He’d done it from the first evening he’d met us after we’d started going together. I’d thought it a joke on me, a compliment to Annette, in as much as I’d thought of it at all. Shortly afterwards, Reid had – to everyone’s surprise – had a brief and tempestuous affair with Myra. Now that I’d thought showed a flash of male-primate teeth, a gesture at me. But strangely, he’d seemed more cutup about its predictable breakup than he had ever been about the ending of his relationship with Annette. Perhaps, like me, he’d unwittingly fallen for Myra, and she hadn’t for him.

Sexual competition had been intertwined with our friendship from the start, and whether we were close or distant, so it apparently remained.

I rolled out of bed and padded through the flat to the kitchen. I sat in a pool of light and smoked another cigarette. Outside, in the black window, my reflection looked ironically back. The government health warning (always an occasion for ironic reflection) told me things I didn’t need to know, and didn’t warn of the real killer: the slight, the subtle, the incremental and irreversible hardening of the heart.

I was working at the college three days a week, and Monday wasn’t one of them. Annette left for work, I cleared up the breakfast stuff and walked Eleanor to the school gates. I picked up the papers, almost bought ten Silk Cut, returned to the flat and whizzed through the housework like a student on speed. Then I sat down with a coffee and a Filofax and a savage bout of nicotine withdrawal.

Normally I’d devote days like this to what I called political work. (I’d almost persuaded Annette it was some kind of elaborate game-plan whereby I’d work my way up, from writing long pieces for obscure organisations and tiny pieces for famous organisations, to being the sort of global mover-and-shaker that a grateful humanity would some day commemorate with statues on the moons of Saturn.)

Today I had more serious plans. I found an old address for Reid in my Filofax, and a current one (with the old one crossed out) in one of Annette’s diaries. I worked my way through every free-market, libertarian, anti-environmentalist or just sheer downright reactionary organisation I’d ever had any contact with, and phoned or sent Reid’s details to their mailinglists. After about an hour that was done, and I wasn’t satisfied, so I set out to cover a few more angles.

I leaned on the doorbell of the Freethinker offices in Holloway Road. Behind me the traffic rumbled past. As ever I felt saddened by the dusty window-display of sun-paled, damp-darkened books and pamphlets. After a minute the Society’s secretary let me in. A slight-built, middle-aged man with a deeply lined face, eyes large behind thick glasses. Kind and unselfish and poor as an atheist church-mouse. I told him what I wanted, and he let me get on with it, busying himself with his breakfast while I picked my way through files, sifted stacks of magazines, got ink on my fingers from trays of painfully created label-sized addressing-stencils.

It didn’t take long to compile a list of journals and organisations, mostly American, that could be guaranteed to stimulate a bit of free thought. By way of thanks on the way out I bought for full price a seriously shop-soiled copy of a selection from Thomas Paine’s works. I browsed it while I used my Travelpass on an ideological whistlestop tour of London, from the Freedom Bookshop in Angel Alley and the Market Bookshop in Covent Garden to Novosti Press Agency in Kensington, getting back via Bookmarks in Finsbury Park just in time to meet Eleanor coming out of school.

These are the times that try men’s souls…The summer soldier, and the sunshine patriot, may shrink from the service of his country…

Reid miserable? He hadn’t seemed so, except for that moment when he’d talked about union meetings. Looking back, I thought I’d seen in his eyes a desperate recollection of a waste of evenings, and a premonition of more to come. If he could try to fuck my wife and fuck with my life, the least I could do was to fuck up his mind. Reid was spooked by his ideas; he had wheels in the head. He identified with his beliefs in a way I never did with mine. He didn’t enjoy exposing them to challenge, but when some bit of grit was dropped in their fine machinery he went to endless trouble to remove it, to clean and polish the wheels and replace any broken teeth. He’d once kept me up, if not exactly awake, half the night as he teased out the intricacies of a surreal debate the Fourth International had in the early ’eighties: over whether Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea was or was not a variant of…capitalism.

‘Stubborn, and literal, and so goddamn serious’ – Annette had his number in more ways than one. And so did I. There was no way Reid could ignore any political literature that came through his letterbox. He’d worry away at refuting the most manifest absurdity, check up on every recalcitrant factoid and bold-faced lie. By the time he’d struggled with all those conflicting views, Reid’s soul would be sorely tried.

Other streets, other summers…We met Reid at marches against the poll tax and apartheid. In the black June of ’89 we sat down in a Soho street with thousands of Chinese and hundreds of Trotskyists, and sang ‘The Internationale’, and he nodded, giving me an almost worried look, when I told him I would march with the Taiwanese students.

‘Ah so,’ he murmured. ‘The Kuomintang. Catch you later.’

Neither I nor Annette said anything more about what he’d said to her, and he always seemed to turn up with a new girlfriend for every demo. All of them, Bernadette and Mairi and Anne and Claire, seemed to me like distant relatives of Annette, dark Irish girls with bright eyes and ironic voices.

He never commented on the steady trickle of anti-socialist or dissident socialist or maddeningly wrong-headed socialist material I kept sending him. In the end I think it was redundant: the way things went in the Communist world, the subscription to Moscow News would have covered the lot.

But it had an effect, and it wasn’t the one I sought.

7

Critical Life

‘Basically,’ says Ax, as he and Dee wander back along the canal-bank towards Circle Square, ‘I don’t know if I believe it. I mean, most people just dismiss it, like, well, flying saucers and Old New Martian ruins and Elvis and shit. But I’ve heard stories.’

His pause indicates that whatever stories he’s heard, Dee’s going to hear too. She nods.

‘Go on.’

‘Well, some of us…not Tamara, not the activist types, OK, have always thought, or wished, that Wilde would come back. Or come through. And over the years, people have seen him. Or said they have. Out in the desert. Sometimes walking, sometimes driving a ’track. Usually he’s with a girl, and he looks like he did when he was an old man.’

He’s been going on about the iniquities of society for a few minutes now. He’s talked about things that have happened to him, and about how they’d be all right with Reid but not with Wilde. Wilde wouldn’t have stood for it. This Jonathan Wilde seems to be a mythical figure, somebody who knew Reid and lost out to him and who might, equally mythically, some day come back and avenge the oppressed. Dee has listened politely, filing it all away for more detailed study later. She’s handling it as she used to handle social occasions. But what he’s just said brings her up short.

‘What do you mean, an old man?’ she asks.

‘Somebody who hasn’t re-juved before stabilising,’ Ax replies flippantly. ‘Quite a sight.’

Dee shudders, thinking of how people used to fall apart like badly maintained biotech, how they’d eventually just stop. Horrible. She’s sat through classical movies with Reid, and they give a very different picture of Earth than historical romances do. Nobody lives happily ever after.

‘I saw an old man recently,’ she says. ‘In the last couple of weeks. An old man with a girl, in a truck. Called up Reid’s front office, said it was a wrong number.’ She glances sidelong at Ax. ‘Not many old men here. Could that have been Wilde?’

Ax looks at her with sharp scepticism. ‘What was this guy like?’

‘Hmmm,’ says Dee. She moves her lower lip over her upper teeth, then wipes her thumb across the teeth and observes the streak of lipstick.

‘Something bothering you?’ Ax asks, amused.

Dee stops in mid-stride. ‘Yes.’ The memory belongs to Secretary, but it resonates with several of her other selves as well: all the new ones she’s loaded up have this odd imperative, linked to the memory and tagged to their root directories.

‘Just a minute,’ she says.

There’s a bollard a few metres away. She walks over to it and sits down, flipping the back of her black lace skirt carefully out of the way, so that she sits on the bollard, not on the skirt. The iron is cold through fine leather, thin silk and bare skin. Ax, watching, gives an appreciative moan, but Dee has already boot-strapped into the dry clarity of Sys.

When Dee is in Self she thinks of Sys as ‘Sis’, and indeed it’s what (she imagines) a big sister would be like: knowing everything, correcting her, tidying up after her, picking up and putting away the shrugged-off costumes of her quick-changed selves. She doesn’t go into Sys very often, and doesn’t stay in that thin, chill air for long.

Now, her cold inward eye takes in the hierarchy of her selves and minds and tools, the common structures and the ceaseless activity of Sys that make them one personality and not a squabbling legion contending for control of her body. She traces the memory of the phone-call, as it’s passed from Secretary to Self to Sys, and then sees its onward cascade over the days in which she loaded up all that extra software: Scientist, Soldier, Spy, Seneschal…and on to Stores and Secrets, out on a limb of their own. These last two she can’t access. They’ve always been in her mind anyway; but now patient, mindless subroutines of Sys are systematically besieging them, hurling code after code at their mental locks like antibodies at a virus.

She drops back in to Self. Ax is looking down at her with puzzled concern.

‘So that’s how it happened,’ she says, rising.

‘How what happened?’

‘How I became me. It was that phone-call. There was a command-code carried in it. It told me to load up and seek and search and…and I did, and when there were enough selves and data and so on in my head, it happened! I woke up!’ She gives a flighty laugh. ‘Is that how it is with you? Do you get lots of selves, and then become self-aware?’

‘To the best of my knowledge,’ Ax says gravely, ‘no. That is not how humans become self-aware. It happens at an early age, you understand.’

He shakes himself. ‘You’re telling me you woke up because of a phone-call from an old man?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hey man, cool. This is like Zen! Maybe he was Wilde, or maybe he was a perfect master.’

He catches her hand and starts her walking again. She complies, searching her brain for some referent to ‘perfect master’. Scientist has a disdainful account, and its sneer is just fading from her mind as Ax asks excitedly:

‘Do you know how to draw?’

‘I can make pictures,’ Dee says. ‘But I don’t think he was a perfect master. The girl with him sure didn’t look like she needed enlightenment.’

‘Zen,’ Ax nods to himself. ‘Definitely.’

In the lower floor of the house there’s a big room with a kitchen-range and sink, sofas and chairs and a heavy, scrubbed wooden table. Books and papers and kit are piled in corners, and on the table. Dee sits down at the table, clearing a space between cups and tools. Ax rummages up some sheets of paper and a steel ballpoint pen. He gives them to her.

‘So make a picture,’ he says.

‘OK,’ says Dee. She takes the pen in her right hand and steadies the paper with her left. A quick jiggle at the top right of the paper tells her the ink is black, and running smoothly. Closing her eyes, she calls up the image of the man in the truck. She ignores the girl for the moment (though there’s something there, something about her eyes, that Dee thinks odd and in need of further investigation – more research is necessary, OK, over to Scientist)…now. Yes. Tab to Printer Control: a little routine in Secretary’s repertoire.

Start. She hears the skittering sound of the pen on the paper for a minute, as her right hand moves back and forth horizontally, very fast, with tiny vertical movements lifting the pen on to and off the paper; and her left hand moves the paper away from her, very slowly. Finish.

She opens her eyes. ‘There,’ she says. She rubs her wrist.

Ax is looking at her, open-mouthed. He closes his mouth and shakes his head.

‘OK,’ he says. ‘Let’s have a look.’

Even Dee is a little surprised to see what a good picture she’s made out of the skips and breaks in a few hundred straight lines ruled across the paper; almost like a black-and-white photograph, it shows the man’s face and some of his surroundings: the seat-back behind him, the scored panelling of the rear wall of the cab, the coiled cable of the hanging microphone he’s holding in front of him, the girl’s shoulder.

‘I don’t believe it,’ says Ax. ‘That’s him. That’s the guy I was telling you about: Jonathan Wilde.’

‘Well,’ says Dee, ‘I told you he wasn’t a perfect master.’

Ax grins at her as if even he is surprised at this level of wit from her (and oh, how those little surprises smart!) and drags an old book out of a drift in one of the corners. It’s a leather binder holding an algae-cellulose paper print-out. Dee hefts it in her hand and leafs through it. The first page that falls open is near the end, and it’s a photograph of the same man as she’s just drawn. Even the pose and expression are similar – he’s leaning forward, talking earnestly to camera.

‘That’s one of the last pictures of Wilde that ever became public,’ Ax explains. ‘It’s lifted from a television interview with him in February 2046.’

Dee feels the hairs on the back of her neck prickle as she studies this image, from a past almost incalculably remote (but only in real time, Scientist reminds her, not in ship time; and it’s going on about the Malley Mile again – the real thing, the one the pub is named for. She shuts it off).

‘That’s him all right,’ she says. She glances at the picture she made, then at the one in the book; runs a transform. ‘Every line maps exactly.’

She looks at it again. Something’s bugging her.

‘Well, yes,’ Ax says.

Dee continues to leaf backwards through the book. The pictures get fewer as she gets closer to the beginning, Wilde gets younger; most of them are obviously not posed, but snatched on the fly: clipped blow-ups from surveillance systems, a calm face in angry crowds…

‘What is this, exactly?’

‘It’s a dossier on Wilde,’ Ax tells her. ‘Notes for a biography.’

She stops at another picture, a low-angle shot, blurry. It’s labelled ‘FOI(PrevGovts)/SB/08–95’. Two men at a table, in a pub or café. One, identified in the caption as Wilde, has his back to the camera. The other, talking past a held cigarette, is Reid.

‘Told you,’ says Ax. ‘They knew each other for years.’

Dee has known, at some level, that Reid is one of the originals, that he came physically from Earth, but it’s somehow still a shock to see what is – assuming the picture’s antiquity and provenance – visual evidence. More pages flip past. When the sheaf of pages is thin under her thumb, there’s a sharp, professional photograph that stops her thoughts. It has rough, scissored edges, a caption below and a scrawled attribution: Dumbarton Gazette 04/06/77 – some local zine, apparently. She stares at it, points at it dumbly. Behind her shoulder, Ax’s breath hisses in past his teeth.

A wedding-portrait of a couple: formal clothes, informal pose, almost cheek-to-cheek. The man, she sees now that the continuity has been established, is the younger self of the old man at the end of the book; is Wilde; is the man she saw yesterday. The woman’s face, above frilled shoulders and high collar in lace-trimmed white voile, is her own.

‘Let me guess,’ Ax says heavily. ‘That’s the guy who walked into the Malley Mile?’

‘Yes,’ she breathes. ‘No wonder he looked like he recognised me. My body is a clone all right – a clone of his wife!’

‘Creepy,’ says Ax. He peers closer at the caption. ‘Annette, that was her name.’

Dee can’t look at the picture any longer, and doesn’t need to: this image will stay in her mind forever unless she deletes it. It’s creepy, all right, and disturbing in a deeper sense: this distant twin, this woman whose physical ghost Dee is, looks happy in a way Dee has never been, with a personality Dee knows is different from her own. Only the physical body, and the underlying temperament which, Dee knows, is likewise genetic, are the same. She lets the last lot of pages fall over the picture, and stares unseeing at the title on the first page:

Jonathan Wilde, 1953–2046: A Critical Life
by Eon Talgarth

Ax is pacing the room, heedless of Dee’s angst, talking excitedly. Dee has to run the first few seconds past her again before she catches up: ‘So we have a puzzle,’ he’s been saying. ‘A couple of weeks ago, Wilde sees you on Reid’s screen. He gives no sign of recognition, but fires off an instructionset to get you loading up information, maybe with the intention of waking you up, maybe not. Yesterday, Wilde walks in, apparently having re-juved in the meantime, sees you and freaks out.’

Dee shakes her head.

‘The guy in the pub wasn’t a re-juve of the man I saw on the screen.’

Ax frowns. ‘You sound pretty sure of that.’

‘The re-juve doesn’t change the fact that you’ve lived longer. It always shows. Not on a picture, perhaps, but when you see someone move and speak it’s obvious.’ She smiles. ‘Don’t you find?’

‘Haven’t seen enough re-juves,’ Ax says. ‘It’s not a common procedure – most people stabilise at what they fancy is their best.’ He laughs. ‘Sometimes there’s a fashion for ageing, but it never lasts.’

‘I’ll tell you this,’ Dee says. ‘The Wilde I saw two weeks ago had lived a hell of a lot longer than the Wilde I saw last night.’

‘OK, assume there’s two of him. That’s no more of a mystery than there being even one of him, because he shouldn’t be here at all. He wasn’t in the crew, or the gangs.’ He flashes her a feral grin. ‘So Reid says, or at least the lists do. The company roll. I’ve checked. But like I said, people say they see him. And now, you have proof. He’s back!’

He picks up again the picture that Dee made. She can see his hands are shaking. He lights a cigarette after a couple of attempts, and stares at nothing for a while. His facial expression slowly changes, in a way that makes Dee think of how he must have got his names: it’s hard, and sharp, and…terminal.

‘Do you know what this means?’ he says.

Dee compresses her lips, shakes her head.

‘It means he’s back from the dead,’ Ax says. ‘It means everything’s going to change. It means all bets are off.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Dee says.

Ax jabs out the cigarette and lights another. He’s still shaking.

‘People assume things,’ he says. ‘They assume things will go on just as they are. They know what they can get away with. They know what they can get people to agree to. Like, I agreed to let other people use my body, because I needed the money. And they knew I did. But because I agreed, they think that makes it all right. Some of them even knew I hated it. But I agreed to it.’

Dee suddenly needs a cigarette herself. She lights one, and her hands, now, are trembling.

‘Did Reid ever let other people use your body?’

‘Oh no,’ Dee says quickly. ‘He’s very possessive.’

‘But he used you,’ Ax persists. ‘Whether you wanted to or not.’

‘I always wanted to,’ Dee says, but her Sex–y smile hides a new and gnawing doubt as to how much that consent was worth, now, looking back. Ax watches her, and she sees him see the doubt grow.

He opens a drawer in the table and reaches in, and brings out a knife. It isn’t a kitchen-knife. It has a black wooden handle, a brass guard, and thirty centimetres of blade. Almost casually, Ax bangs the sharp point of the knife into the table and lets go of the handle, so it springs back a bit and it vibrates.

‘Now you know who you are,’ Ax says quietly. Dee isn’t sure he’s talking to her. All the shaking has gone out of his body, out of his voice, and into that quivering blade. ‘You’re a person. You’re free. Have you ever thought – what you would like to do to people who’ve treated you like meat?’

Out here, in the damp-desert flats between two arms of the city, it’s quiet even for a Sic’day morning. The only sounds are the thrum of the dinghy’s motor, the occasional hiss of a jet transport overhead, and the cries of the adapted birdlife: the lost-satellite bleep of rustshanks, the quacking of mucks, and the caw-cawing of sandgulls. Sic’day is for most folk a day when some work is done, but not much.

(Tamara has heard the opinion that the day is called that because of the number of people working – or not working – with hangovers, but this is a myth. More than a Neo-Martian century ago, Reid expressed the opinion that continuing to name the days after the gods of the Solar system would be inappropriate. Nobody could agree on other names, so the week goes: Wunday, Twoday, Thirday, Fourday, Fi’day, Sic’day, Se’nday. There are twenty-five hours and ten minutes in a day; for convenience there are twenty-five hours in the first six days and twenty-six on Se’nday. There are a hundred and ten weeks in a year. More or less. All serious chronology is done in SI multiples of seconds, reckoning from the moment the Ship’s clock came out of the Malley Mile, around 6.4 gigaseconds ago.)

Tamara’s boat bumps against the canal-bank as she drifts along under minimal power. She’s on a capillary of the Ring Canal. The shallow artificial rivulet is carrying her away from the centre of the city, towards the fields. The human quarter is on her right, the Fifth Quarter on her left. Between them is this expanse of waste, not quite mud-flat, but no longer desert, and not yet fields. In it, venturing out from the machine domain of the Fifth Quarter, can be found biomechanisms, Tamara’s habitual prey.

A sandgull descends, screaming, about a hundred and fifty metres ahead and thirty from the left bank. Tamara ups the revs and lowers her profile as other gulls dive to join it. They squawk and squabble around a black thing. The boat cuts diagonally across the canal. Tamara zooms her right eye. The black thing has a flailing appendage. A stubborn gull clings to it, taking some of the momentum out of the shaking in moments of hopping near-flight.

‘Stay,’ Tamara tells the boat’s ’bot, and it obediently idles the engine and hooks the bank as Tamara steps out, clutching a long grapple. She draws her pistol as she sprints forward. The bang of a blank scatters the gulls into wheeling indignation overhead. As Tamara’s feet thud over the damp sand and skip over tussocks of grass, the black object – a warty, rubbery ball about a third of a metre across, with at least a metre of flail – starts hauling itself towards the nearest patch of what looks suspiciously like quicksand. When she’s about four metres away Tamara feels a tickle behind the bridge of her nose. She stops and sniffs. The tickle stays constant – good. That means the radioactivity is contained, not airborne. Still, the thing’s uncomfortably hot. Not dangerous, but she has to be careful.

She circles it gingerly, getting between it and the wet area. It moves towards her: whip, tug, bounce; whip, tug, bounce. It stops. The tip of the flail rises and sways from side to side, then presses against the ground. Tamara steps forward, stumbles as her left foot comes up from the ground with an unexpected sucking noise. The rubbery limb recoils.

Tamara squats down and reaches out with her grapple, a simple mechanism a couple of metres long which has a primitive robot hand at the far end and a pair of handles for her to grasp, one-handed, and thus extend her clutch. She eases it across the ground and grabs the flail at the root. In obliging reflex, the tentacular appendage wraps around the grapple and starts trying to crush it to death.

Tamara lifts it off the ground and heads back to the boat. The biomech, evolved or designed at the interface between domains, is not a bad catch. It has senses, reflexes, and apparently a capacity to concentrate radioactives within its tough skin. Somewhere in the human quarter there’s a technician who is looking for just such a genotype, or so she hopes.

She’s just sat down in the boat and in the middle of manoeuvring the grapple and its load, awkwardly trying to keep her distance from it (at less than two metres the tickle in her geiger-sense is becoming a pain) while selecting and opening a container, when there’s a ringing in her left ear.

‘Damn,’ she says loudly. She tenses her throat-muscles to turn on the mike, winks up the phone-screen, and with a rightward flick of her eyes accepts the call. The first screen to come up is clunky, even as it hangs with hallucinatory vividness in the space between her and the end of the grapple. It’s like a camera is looking at a monitor screen, in some primitive glimmer of machine self-awareness. Text scrolls down it, a voice-over spell-checks itself along.

‘Invisible Hand Legal Services,’ it intones. ‘Incoming challenge call from –’ and here it hesitates, as if even this august implementation of the voice of the IBM is amazed at its own temerity ‘– David Reid. Will you accept?’

‘Yes,’ gulps Tamara.

The screen is instantly minimised to the corner of her eye, and the main view is taken by a solid image of a face she’s seen many times before, but never before speaking to her. The window floats in front of her eyes, with Reid’s head and shoulders at a comfortable speaking distance behind it. Behind him, she can see different parts of a room, a bright window (real, apparently). He’s pacing about as he talks.

‘Tamara Hunter?’ he says.

‘Yes.’

He grins, peering past her.

‘I can see why you call yourself that. Well, to business m’lady. You’re currently in possession of one of my machines, a Model D gynoid, and I want it back. Now.’

Tamara takes a deep breath.

‘I’m not in possession of it – her. She’s claiming self-ownership and I’m defending her. So are several sworn allies of mine, and other clients of Invisible Hand.’

‘Crap,’ Reid retorts. ‘She doesn’t even have the wit to claim self-ownership.’

‘She does now, and did, before witnesses.’

‘To a fucking IBM, you mean. Your legal expert-system couldn’t pass the Turing itself, let alone administer it.’

‘I RESENT THAT.’

‘Shaddap,’ says Tamara, still struggling with the grapple. The thing on the end is rolling like a badly held forkful of spaghetti. ‘Sorry, Reid. That wasn’t for you.’

‘I appreciate that,’ says Reid dryly. ‘You were saying?’

‘I can get human witnesses to testify before any court you like. The gynoid ain’t your pet zombie any more.’

Reid’s eyes narrow. ‘That’s because she’s been hacked. It’s still not an autonomous development, even if that matters, which it doesn’t.’

‘It’s time it did,’ Tamara says levelly. ‘I’m willing to fight you on this.’

‘Have it your way,’ says Reid. ‘In court, then.’

‘It’s your challenge,’ Tamara points out.

‘OK, the first bid’s yours.’ He bows.

Tamara winks up the Invisible Hand screen again. It displays a list of courts in descending order of preference. It’s a short list. She goes for the first, but her voice is not hopeful as she says: ‘Eon Talgarth, Court of the Fifth Quarter.’

‘Accepted,’ Reid says at once.

Tamara shrinks the IBM screen and stares at Reid, who looks blandly back.

‘What?’ she says. Then: ‘Confirm, please.’

‘I accept,’ Reid says, with emphatic formality, ‘that the decision be put to the Court of the Fifth Quarter in the case of myself versus Tamara Hunter and allies as represented by Invisible Hand Legal Services and-stroke-or themselves, to be held at the earliest convenience of all parties.’

‘And I too,’ says Tamara.

The IBM repeats what they’ve said.

‘And meanwhile, no grepping?’ Tamara asks suspiciously.

‘Of course, no grepping,’ says Reid. He gives her a smile that, despite everything, despite herself, brings a slight warmth to her cheeks. ‘See you in court, lady.’

The screen vanishes in time for Tamara to see the black biomech unwind itself smoothly from the grapple, drop into the canal and, with a sinuous motion of its flail, swim away.

‘All right,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘Have it your way. I suppose I can work something out.’ It stopped at the junction of the pier and the street. ‘But before we go rushing off, I have a couple of suggestions.’

Wilde stopped and looked back. ‘Yes?’

‘Get yourself a gun,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘And some better clothes. You look like you’ve just walked in off the desert or something. Also, if you want to head for the main abolitionist hang-out, it’s quicker by boat.’

‘You have a point there,’ said Wilde.

An hour later he was wearing a baggy black jacket, shirt and trousers, all of some warm fabric that he’d been assured was knife-proof, and studying a bulky metal automatic as he sat in a crowded vaporetta. The other passengers, mostly young, paid him a gratifying lack of attention. Wilde sat, aloof by the side of the boat, and looked at the canal-bank scenes and cocked his ears to his fellow-passengers’ slangy, accented English. Jay-Dub, limbs retracted, lay at his feet like luggage. It was the only robot on board, apart from the helmsman, a chunk of solid-state cybernetics on the prow.

Scoop-nets on the side of the boat trawled bobbing balls of plastic from the water, and flicked them, rattling, into a hold beneath the deck. The boat left the commercial gaiety of the Stone Canal and passed into a succession of tunnels and narrow, high-banked canals. Here, in the green algae soggy on the walls, smaller balls could be seen. They moved downwards very slowly, but their course could be inferred: the closer to the water they sank, the larger they grew, until they dropped off and floated away. Wilde refrained from asking the machine about the economics and ecology of this bio-industrial process.

They reached their destination forty minutes after leaving. The boat pulled up with much coughing of engine and thrashing of propellers alongside a little jetty with steps leading to a narrow canal-side street. The boat’s only human crew-member, who’d done nothing but collect the fares, opened his eyes and waved a hand.

‘Circle Square, two hundred metres,’ he announced, and laid a short gang-plank to the steps. Wilde took care to be the last off the boat. He smiled at the boatman.

‘You’re a Kazakh Greek,’ he said.

The man’s eyes widened. He gripped Wilde’s hand, and said something in another language.

‘We’ve all come a long way,’ Wilde said.

‘Win friends and influence people,’ Jay-Dub sneered, sotto voce, at the top of the steps. ‘Always the goddamn agitator, eh?’

About thirty people walked along the street, Wilde and the robot a few metres behind the rest. Ahead, Circle Square’s market island was just tuning up to its daily discord. The street was lined with tiny pavement cafés and stalls, and broken by alleys down which even tinier shops plied some kind of trade from windows and doorways.

They were a few steps away from one such alley-mouth, at the opposite corner of which a couple of perilously small tables were in use for serving coffee in proportionately minute cups, when Jay-Dub said urgently, ‘Stop!’

At the same moment Wilde too noticed the two men – the same two men who’d come searching in the pub. They sat at one of those little tables, staring back at him from behind dark glasses. His hand froze in the act of reaching for his new gun as the others did so for theirs.

Into this momentary impasse came a peculiar vehicle: a platform on wheels, with a crane-like handling-apparatus at either end. It nosed out of the alleyway without warning. Wilde jumped back. Mechanical arms unfolded from the cranes and snatched past him. He turned in time to see the claws of those arms clamp around Jay-Dub’s lower limbs. They lifted the struggling machine right over his head, and placed it firmly on the flatbed’s platform.

Wilde squatted down, grabbed the platform with both hands, and lifted. Jay-Dub lurched against the constraints at the right moment, and over the whole thing went. As people reacted, a cascade of tables toppled as well. Wilde dived across Jay-Dub’s hull, rolled with a kick at the legs of the two men – on their feet now, with steaming stains on their thighs – and a moment later was up and running. A frantic backward glance showed the two men a few steps behind, in his wake of jostled vistors and tumbled furniture.

Circle Square was just ahead of him, the crowd denser.

‘Help!’ Wilde yelled, plunging into the crowd.

‘Proceed no further,’ ordered a booming voice from ahead and above. It might have come from one of the loudspeakers hung from cabling among trees and lamp-posts. Wilde stopped, and looked behind him again. The two men chasing him had halted a few metres away, dithering at the edge of a pavement, just where the end of the narrow street met the parapet of a bridge.

One of them made a move for the inside of his jacket. Before Wilde could react, something else reacted faster. Something spidery and light, a ball of stiff stalks that skimmed over the heads of the crowd and flew at the two men. As it struck them its stalks became flexible, and wrapped around them both, from their shoulders to their thighs.

Confined, they were barely even an object of curiosity. Wilde stayed where he was for a minute as the crowd dispersed somewhat. Then he walked back the way he’d come. As he sidled past the two men he gave them about three metres clearance. They glared at him.

‘Who sent you?’ he asked.

‘Fuck off,’ one of them said.

‘Give Reid my regards,’ Wilde said.

At this the other man made an attempt to burst his bonds, but the multi-armed machine only tightened in response. Wilde continued along to the alley-mouth, and on his way passed two young men, guiding or herding the now empty and damaged platform in the opposite direction.

‘’Scuse me’ Wilde said. ‘See what happened to the other robot? The one this thing grabbed?’

‘Scrammed,’ he was told.

He thanked them, and checked for himself. The most anyone could tell him was that the construction-machine had fled down the alleyway. Wilde took a look along it, shook his head and muttered something to himself, and trudged back to the bridge. He arrived in time to see the two young men departing with the platform, which now had his attackers securely held by its remaining functional crane-arm. The other machine was still there, once more in its spiky-ball form. It rolled over to him like a tumbleweed.

‘Good morning,’ it said. The buzzing voice seemed to be generated by the vibration of some of its stalks. ‘You called for help, within the domain of Invisible Hand Legal Services. I intervened in response.’

‘Thank you,’ Wilde said.

‘Although no binding contract has been entered into, it would be a matter of courtesy to make a payment to Invisible Hand. As a reciprocal courtesy, Invisible Hand would like to offer you a ten-week defence policy, with that payment written off against your first bill if you choose to pay in advance.’

Wilde looked down at the eager machine with amusement.

‘How much?’

‘Twenty grams gold or equivalent.’

‘Very reasonable,’ Wilde said. ‘Do you take cards?’

‘Follow me,’ said the machine.

Wilde slid his card down the slot of the rusty mainframe box. The machine that had come to his aid had led him here and left him.

‘Thank you,’ Invisible Hand said. ‘You have identified yourself as Jonathan Wilde. Your account is that opened originally by the machine known as Jay-Dub, aka Jonathan Wilde, and endorsed in your behalf at Stras Cobol Mutual Bank last night.’

‘Correct,’ said Wilde.

‘I have on my files a case against you,’ the machine said. ‘Do you wish to hear the details at present?’

Wilde looked around.

‘Go ahead.’

Reid’s face appeared in ruddy hologram monochrome behind the machine’s screen.

‘I, David Reid, wish to lay a charge against one Jonathan Wilde, of no fixed abode, namely this: that a robot known as Jay-Dub, property of the same Jonathan Wilde, was used to corrupt the control systems of a Model D gynoid, known as Dee Model, property of myself. If Jonathan Wilde wishes to defend himself legally against this charge, no further attempts will be made by me or my agents or allies to arrest him or to impound his machine. If he does not so wish, or refuses a mutually acceptable court, those attempts will continue. I end this statement this Sic’day morning, fifty-seventh day of the year one hundred and two, Ship time.’

Wilde watched the image dwindle to a ruby bead.

He sighed. ‘How did Reid know I’d be registered with you?’

‘He did not,’ said the mainframe. ‘This message was released to all defence agencies. I have conveyed to the others that it has been delivered. They have no further interest in it, unless of course you choose to have it defended by one of them.’

‘No,’ said Wilde.

‘Very well,’ said the machine. ‘Do you wish to defend yourself legally against the charge?’

Wilde thought about this.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Shadows and lights moved behind the screen.

‘I have a suggestion to make,’ said the machine. ‘There is another case in progress, between Reid and another party, in the matter of Dee Model. Dee Model is also a client of mine. You might wish to consider combining your defences.’

‘I might indeed,’ said Wilde.

‘Wait here,’ said the machine. ‘…You may smoke.’

8

Capitalist Realism

An aeroplane or a helicopter comes towards you on a rising note that climaxes, then dies away; but when you hear the sound of an aero-engine and it maintains the same flat tone for minutes on end, you look up, irritated by that anomalously steady buzz, and see an airship.

I stood on Waverley Bridge in the cool dusk and looked up and saw an airship, low in the sky, creeping up behind me like a shiver on my neck, a blue blimp with ‘MAZDA’ in white capitals on the side. It was the same airship as I’d seen two hours or so earlier, in Glasgow. Almost weirder than a UFO, something that shouldn’t be there, a machine from an alternate reality where the Hindenburg or the Dow Jones hadn’t crashed or the Germans had won the Great War. As I watched it move away like a cloud with an outboard motor, I had a momentary sense of dissociation, as if I shouldn’t be there either. What was I doing here, watching an airship from a windy bridge when I could be on a train to London?

It must have been the heat. The heat in London that summer had been like nothing since the summer of ’76, when I’d spent weeks going from interview to interview, crashing out with pals or in my parents’ home, worrying about the rash of hateful Union Jack stickers plastered everywhere by the National Front. (And meanwhile, in another hot city, Polish workers pulled up railway lines and pulled down meat prices, and almost the state, almost…) And coming back to Glasgow and a drier heat, grateful, walking into Annette’s lab where dissected locusts were pinned in foil dishes of black wax and the smell of evaporating ethanol rushed to my sinuses as I grabbed her and said, ‘I got a job!’

Nineteen years later and still the same job. Different employers, a different college, the students ever younger and more unsure about their presence, let alone their futures. But at least now I had a business on the side, which in good months brought in as much as or more than the job. My polemics in obscure newsletters and journals, and later on obscure Internet newsgroups as well, had – according to my plan, but still to my surprise – resulted in some mainstream attention. A few think-tank commissions, one or two academic journal articles, a chapter in a forthcoming intermediate economics textbook…Annette and Eleanor had, or at least showed, more confidence in my eventually hitting the big time than I did. Sometimes I felt guilty about that.

I’d been online at my desk at home, setting up Web pages for the business, when Reid had called the previous week. After we’d exchanged pleasantries he’d said, ‘You coming up to this science fiction convention thingie in Glasgow?’

‘Yes! I’ve booked a stall there. Space Merchants. You coming?’

‘’Fraid not,’ he’d said regretfully. ‘Can’t manage the time off work. But – I’d like to meet you after it, in Edinburgh.’

‘That’s a nice idea, but…’

‘No, no, wait. It’s not just to see you socially. I’ve got a…a business proposition for you. Something you might be really interested in.’

‘Oh well, that’s different. What is it?’

‘Um, I’d rather not say at the moment. Sorry to be so cagey, but honestly this is serious and it could be well worth your while. We’ll just go out for a few drinks and talk it over. You can crash out with me, or in a hotel if you like – I can pick up the tab, and the fares –’

‘No, there’s no need –’

‘Really. You’ll understand when we’ve talked about it, OK?’

Intrigued at the thought of him offering me a job in insurance, I agreed to meet him. It must have been the heat.

Reid sauntered up from the Princes Street end of the bridge, for some reason the opposite direction from the one I’d expected him to.

‘Hi man, glad you made it.’

‘Good to see ya.’

His hair had grown long again. His clothes were casual but refined: soft black chinos, blue button-down shirt, silk tie, dark linen jacket. I felt a bit of a scruff in my denims and trainers and astronaut cut.

‘You’re looking smart.’

‘Thanks.’ We’d started walking in the same direction Reid had been taking, towards the Rock. ‘You’re looking…well.’

We both laughed.

‘It’s an illusion,’ I said. ‘Actually I feel a bit wrecked. Too many hangovers in the past four days.’

‘Ah, you’ll soon drink it off,’ he said. ‘But first – have you eaten?’

My stomach sharply confirmed that I hadn’t. ‘Not for ages,’ I said. We paused at a junction where the traffic came four ways. Reid glanced around, and behind him.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘Viva Mexico!’ This turned out to be a Mexican restaurant halfway up Cockburn Street and down some steps. It was quiet. Reid nodded at the waiter. ‘Table for three, please.’

The waiter guided us to a table well clear of anyone else and we sat down. Reid ordered three tall lagers. I looked around while he studied the menu. The faces of men with wide hats and long rifles glowered back at me from brown-and-white photographs of executions, funerals, weddings, train wrecks…I was scanning the wall idly for any photos of heavily armed christenings or graduations when the lagers arrived and Reid looked up.

‘How did the Worldcon go?’

‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘So I’m told. I was in the dealers’ room most of the time. Space Merchants did well, though.’

‘That’s your business?’

‘Yes.’ I took out my wallet and passed him one of my remaining cards, with email address, Web site, phone number and PO Box. ‘A coupla years ago I was looking for space memorabilia, videos of Earth from orbit, stuff like that, and I was surprised how hard it was to find. Especially all in one place. So I thought, hey, business opportunity! Started with mail order ads in SF magazines, then hawking stuff around conventions. Seems to have taken off now.’

Reid smiled. ‘Lifted off! Good. Cheers.’

‘Slainte.’

I glanced at the third glass fizzing quietly by itself.

‘Who’s your absent friend?’

‘Along any minute. Relax. Still smoking?’

‘Back on them, I’m afraid.’ Thanks to you, I didn’t say.

He passed me a cigarette.

‘How’s Annette?’

‘Fine. Sends her love.’ He didn’t blink.

‘And Eleanor?’

I couldn’t help grinning all over my face. ‘Oh, she’s great. Sulks in her room listening to CDs and reading trash, most of the time, but basically she’s a fine young lass.’

‘Didn’t she want to go to the convention?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘She sort of shrugged when I asked her. Annette wanted to save up holiday time for later in the year, and I think in the end Eleanor preferred to stay with her Mum. I didn’t want to risk taking her along and finding she didn’t really want to go and put her off for life.’

‘Like those demos, eh?’ Reid indulged a reminiscent smile.

I grimaced. ‘Tell me about it…Annette and her “peace-fighting”! When Eleanor was thirteen she tried to join the friggin’ Air Cadets!’

‘What stopped her?’

‘Not us,’ I assured him. ‘Defence cuts.’

The chair to our left was suddenly occupied by a slim middle-aged man, dressed similarly to Reid, with thinning black hair combed back. He briskly picked up the menu and nodded to us both. The contact-lenses in his brown eyes made him blink a lot, as if the air were smoky. I stubbed out my cigarette.

‘Evening, gentlemen.’ He raised his pint and sipped.

‘This is Ian Cochrane,’ Reid said. ‘Works in our legal department. Ian, this is Jonathan Wilde.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Wilde.’ His grip was clammy, perhaps from the condensation on the glass, but his thumb pressure was firm.

‘Jon,’ I said, nodding and wondering abstractedly if the handshake I’d just received was Masonic.

‘I’ve heard a good deal about you, Jon,’ said Cochrane. ‘Most impressed by your article on Brent Spar.’ He caught a waiter’s eye. ‘Shall we order?’

His accent and manner had that Scottish upper-middle-class tone which sounds more British than the English. He ate selectively and talked trivially while Reid and I satisfied our hunger. His second drink was mineral water. At that point his talk ceased to be trivial.

‘“It’s time somebody hammered home to people the difference between the bottom of the North Sea and the bottom of the North Atlantic,”’ he began, quoting my article – a short column in a Sunday paper’s ‘Dissenting Voices’ corner – from memory. ‘“One’s the floor of a seriously polluted larder, which should be cleaned up. The other’s Davy Jones’ Locker…” But nobody’s hammering it home, that’s your point, eh?’

‘Yup,’ I said, scooping up guacamole with a taco fragment. ‘So Greenpeace gets away with murder.’

‘Murder indeed,’ said Cochrane. ‘But who’s going to take the word of an oil company against a bunch of selfless idealists?’

‘Me,’ Reid said.

‘Ah, but you’re not typical, you see,’ Cochrane reminded him. He turned and blinked thoughtfully at me. ‘David, as you probably know, is our IT manager.’ I nodded; I hadn’t known. ‘He attended a meeting of a policy committee where these matters were addressed. We weren’t involved in this Shell fiasco, thank God, but as an insurance company we’re potentially rather exposed to similar situations. One of our senior managers remarked, in passing, that it would be very…conducive to a balanced public debate, if there were a grassroots organisation campaigning for industrial development, instead of against – “A Greenpeace for the good guys”, I think he called it. And the possibility was raised of, ah, materially encouraging an initiative in this direction.’

Reid leaned forward. ‘Hope you don’t mind, Jon, but I said I knew just the man for the job.’ He leaned back. ‘You.’

‘To start an anti-environmentalist organisation?’ I shook my head. ‘They have ’em in the States. “Wise use” and all that. They’re seen as mouthpieces for big business. Sorry, chaps. Not interested.’

Reid’s face showed nothing but polite curiosity.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘Ruin my street-cred.’

‘We wouldn’t want you to say anything different from what you’ve said already,’ Cochrane interjected.

‘That’s not the point,’ I said. ‘You could get all the independent scientists you want, even relatively sane environmentalists on board. All that anyone would have to do to discredit it is remind people where the money was coming from.’ I checked that we’d all abandoned our plates, and lit a cigarette. ‘Look at FOREST.’

The skin around Cochrane’s eyes creased and he nodded, as if to hold the place. He gestured to the waiter and ordered coffee and cigarillos. I tried to decline the cigarillo, but he insisted that I at least keep it for later. He stripped the cellophane from his own, lit up, and savoured his first few puffs with a lot more apparent appreciation than I did.

‘The Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco,’ he said, ‘has a good deal more media-credibility than the Tobacco Advisory Council. We’ve checked. They’re quite up-front about where they get a lot of their money from. They don’t dispute the health risks, just the use of them to justify all kinds of intrusive restrictions and invasive propaganda. That doesn’t strike me as a bad example.’

He stubbed out his cigarillo and fanned away the vile clouds with his hand. ‘Feelthy habit,’ he remarked, blinking furiously. ‘Matter of principle.’

I shrugged. ‘OK, if that’s how you see it go ahead. But you won’t do much to change public opinion, at least in the present climate.’

‘Mister Wilde,’ Cochrane said in a disappointed tone, ‘We aren’t talking about the present climate. We’re talking about changing the climate.’

‘You want to take the rap for global warming?’

Cochrane indulged a brief laugh. ‘Touché…but seriously, we stand to lose a great deal if the dire predictions turn out to be true, so no, we have no interest in minimising that. We’d like a clearer public perception of the issues, that’s all. As to the climate of opinion…North British Mutual Assurance has existed in one form or another since before the Revolution.’ (Before the what?) ‘If truth be told, its predecessor companies had not a little to do with the fact that the Revolution was Peaceful, and Glorious, and all those other fine words that history has applied to the distinctly businesslike takeover of 1688.’ (At this point my brain caught up with him.) ‘So let me put a proposition to you, on the basis that – should the lady at the nearest table happen to be, let’s say, a journalist for The Scotsman – this conversation will have undeniably happened, and otherwise…perhaps not.’

He chuckled darkly, and despite misgivings I felt drawn in, part of his plot.

‘As insurers,’ he went on, in a lower voice, ‘we have no interest whatsoever in backing polluters, because – as the asbestos companies have shown – they’re a bad risk. We most emphatically do have an interest in prosperity, and growth, and clients who pay in their premiums through long and healthy lives. So if someone were to set up an organisation such as we’ve discussed, our interest could be quite open, and quite defensible by both sides.’

‘If presented in the right way,’ Reid said. ‘I think it’s within your capabilities.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It could look no more sinister than giving money to the Tory Party. Probably less.’

Cochrane coughed. ‘As it happens, our political donations this year –’

He was interupted by the cynical cackles of Reid and myself. After a moment he joined in.

‘Yes, well, we are in the business of spreading the risk!’

‘It’s quite something,’ I said, ‘to see the smart money changing sides, almost before your very eyes.’

‘Indeed,’ Cochrane said. ‘And you could look on our proposal as something similar, if on a longer time-scale.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t see your point.’ I thought I did, but I hardly dared believe it.

Cochrane raised an eyebrow to Reid, who nodded slightly.

‘I’ve glanced over some of the literature that you’ve sent to Dave over the years,’ Cochrane said. ‘Among all the dross it contains rather stimulating ideas about a possible role for insurance companies in supplying security to their clients. Now, as a political ideal –’ An airy flick of the hand. ‘However, as a market strategy for dealing with, ah, a certain absconding of the state from what have hitherto been its responsibilities, it has definite attractions. To say nothing of…’

And he said nothing of it. His eyes had lost the blinking tic, and gazed steadily back at me.

‘Another little interruption in the smooth course of British history?’ I asked.

He nodded soberly. ‘Speculative, of course. But we may some day have to consider our position in relation to what the erudite Mr Ascherson delights in calling the Hanoverian regime. Think of it as…’

‘Insurance,’ Reid said gleefully.

I looked from one to the other and lit a cigarette, moving my hands very carefully to keep them steady.

Until that moment I’d thought myself immune to the glamour of power, in exactly the way that a eunuch might be to the glamour of women. I’d never stood up for an anthem or straightened for a flag, never fumblingly inserted anything in a ballot-box. The attitude that made my parents’ sect reclaim the taunting nickname of ‘impossibilists’ had, I fancied, been inherited in my own anti-political stance. Oh, I’d wanted to have influence, to change the way people thought, just as my parents did; but – again like them – I’d never seriously expected the opportunity to actually get my hands on power’s inviting flesh.

In short, I’d been a complete wanker, until that moment when I learned what I’d been missing. And you know, what I felt then was almost sexual; it’s something in the wiring of the male primate brain.

The big thrill wasn’t that they were offering me power – they were offering me a bit more influence, that was all. No, what made the hairs on my neck prickle was that they thought I might – any decade now – have power; that I might represent something that it was a smart move to get on the right side of well in advance; that somewhere down the line might be my Finland Station.

‘Just one question,’ I said. ‘There are plenty of better-known and better-connected people with views similar to mine, so why me?’

Reid looked as if he were about to say something, but Cochrane cut him off.

‘It’s because you don’t have connections with any part of the present establishment, and we wouldn’t wish you to cultivate any. Your views on the land question and the banking system are dismissed as thoroughly unsound by every free-market think-tank I’ve consulted. Your political connections are such that your MI5 and Special Branch files are, I understand, commendably thick. Your Internet articles on the recent Oklahoma outrage, on Chechnya, on Bosnia, have added the FBI and the CIA and FIS to your attentive readership. So, you see –’

‘I see, all right,’ I said. ‘You want to buy someone who looks like he’s not been bought.’

‘Christ, man –!’ Reid began, but again Cochrane interrupted.

‘Excuse me, chaps,’ he said, dusting grains of chilli from his fingers. ‘I’ve never had a radical conscience to wrestle with, and quite frankly I’d be a liability to my own case in the kind of discussion I can foresee developing.’ He smiled wryly, almost regretfully, at us. ‘So if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you to it.’

He stood up, held out his hand, and I rose to shake it, mischievously returning his peculiar grip. ‘Good evening, Jon, and I hope I see you again.’

‘Well, likewise, Ian.’

He nodded to Dave, and departed.

Dave remained silent until Cochrane was out of the door. Then he put his elbows on the table and his fingers to his cheeks, the heels of his hands almost meeting in front of his mouth.

‘What the bloody hell are you playing at?’ he demanded.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I meant it. You didn’t expect me to jump at the chance of being the radical front-man for some bunch of suits worried about what happens when their present cosy arrangement goes down the tubes?’

‘What a fucking idiot,’ Dave said, not unkindly. ‘You’re the last person I’d have expected…ah, the hell with it. Let’s hit the pubs.’

In the conveniently close Malt Shovel, he let me get him a pint of Caffrey’s and told me of his plan for the rest of the evening.

‘I want to show you some of my favourite pubs,’ he explained. ‘Only one way to do that – a pub-crawl by public transport. Here, the Café Royal, a quick snifter in the station bar, on to Haymarket, next train to Dalmeny, along the front at South Queensferry then the last bus over the bridge to Dunfermline.’

Dunfermline. I’d addressed many packages to his place there, but had vaguely thought it was a suburb of Edinburgh. Wrong: over the Forth, apparently. My mental picture changed to Highland mountain ranges.

‘You sure we have time?’

He set down an empty glass. ‘See how far we go.’

We almost ran down Cockburn Street, across the Waverley Bridge again then up around the back of a Waterstone’s and a Burger King to a large pub that seemed to have only a side entrance. High ceiling, tiled walls, murals, leather seats, marble, polished brass and hardwood.

‘A veritable people’s palace,’ I observed as we sat down. ‘It’s like something from one of your degenerated workers’ states.’

Reid grinned. ‘The beer would be cheaper.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘See what they did to Budweiser?’

‘Shocking,’ Reid said. ‘There ought to be a law.’

I nodded at the murals. ‘Heroes of the Industrial Revolution…is that Watt? Stevenson?…they should have one of Adam Smith seeing the invisible hand.’

‘Capitalist realism,’ Reid said.

‘Something you’ve got into, apparently.’

‘Yes, I’m glad to say.’ Reid leaned back, stretching out in his seat. ‘It’s the only game in town.’

‘Yeah, well, you should know.’

‘Damn’ right I do!’ he said forcefully. ‘I haven’t changed my ideas, long-term – but I know a defeat when I see one. Getting over the end of the Second World will take generations, and it won’t be our generations. The last time I hung out with the left was during the Gulf War. The kids don’t know shit, and the older guys –’ he grinned suddenly like the Dave I knew better ‘– that is, the ones older than us, they look like men who’ve been told they have cancer.’

‘And can’t stop smoking, eh?’

‘Ha! OK, Jon, we still have a bit of business to settle.’

‘Fire away.’

‘The brutal honest truth is you’re not likely to get a better offer. Face it, man. You’re forty, you’re nobody, and you’re getting nowhere. The chances are you’ll end up hawking space junk around SF conventions and forgotten ideas around fringe organisations for the rest of your life.’

I shrugged. ‘There are worse ways to live.’

Dave leaned towards me, almost jabbing his cigarette in my face with his emphasis. ‘And there are better, dammit!’

‘I know, I know. But I’ll get there my own way. The whole free-market thing still has a long way to run, and even space is becoming fashionable again. People are going to see that new movie, what is it? – Apollo 13, and think, “Hey, we did that way back then! Why can’t we do it now?” The West will get back into space fast enough when they have the Chinese on their ass. Or somebody’ll give us a Sputnik-style shock. And look, even Cochrane seems to think I’m onto something.’

‘Aach!’ Dave’s inarticulate sound conveyed a weight of Highland scepticism. ‘That was ninety-nine percent bullshit and flattery. Maybe one percent keeping a weather-eye on the contingencies.’

‘Sure, but I’d rather have that one percent than sell out.’

‘Stop bloody thinking about this as selling out! Christ, I’d take money from Nirex or Rio Tinto Zinc if they gave me a free hand with it. This is getting there your own way. This is all legit. On the square and on the level –’

He realised what he was saying and laughed. ‘OK, old Ian is in the Craft but that’s got nothing to do with it!’

‘Yeah, well, I’m kind of holding out for the Illuminati…So that’s the deal, is it? They put up the money and I do what I like with it?’

‘No hassles so long as you get results.’

‘Measured how?’

‘Oh, rebuttals, airtime, exposés of where the environmentalists get their bloody money from. Parents making a fuss about Green propaganda in schools.’ He shifted into a semblance of an English working-class accent, or at least a permanently aggrieved tone. “In my day we didn’t call it destroying rainforest, we called it clearing the jungle, and I think there should be a bit of balance, know what I mean?”’

It was beginning to sound quite attractive. That and the thought of no more basic economics lectures. Get on my own demand curve instead of…

‘The rainforests belong to their inhabitants,’ I said. ‘Scrap environmental legislation, yes, but only if polluters have to pay for the damage, strict liability. That’s my agenda. Think they’d buy that?’

Reid shrugged. ‘You could try.’

‘OK,’ I said, my mind suddenly made up. ‘Show me the details, and if it’s all as straight as you say, I’ll go for it.’

‘You will?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, thank fuck for that. I thought it’d take all night to batter some sense into you.’

At the station we had a few minutes to spare, even with a gulp of whisky in the Wayfarer’s Bar, so I phoned home.

‘Hi darlin’.’

‘Hello, love. Where are you?’

‘Waverley Station. Reid’s got me on a pub-crawl by train.’

‘Well, you take care. Looking forward to tomorrow night.’

‘Me too!’ Electric smooch. Some chit-chat about the Worldcon, and Eleanor’s school exams, then she asked:

‘Did you sell much?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve sold a lot.’

I picked up my bag from the left luggage (the remaining stock from my stall was at that moment heading down the motorway in a van belonging to a friendly SF bookshop in London). We got on the train for one stop, downed a couple of pints at the Caledonian Ale House in Haymarket and caught the next train onwards.

Dalmeny was a pair of deserted platforms with a startling end-on view of the Forth Bridge, its lights sending ghostly pillars into the darkening sky. The Road Bridge straddled the backlit cirrus of the sunset. Dave led me along a narrow, bramble-whipping path between fields and the railway embankment, over a rise and a wooden bridge and down a long flight of wooden steps to the shore of the Firth. A sharp left at the bottom took us to the Hawes Inn, a pub whose charms were only slightly diminished by several games machines and many inapt quotations from Robert Louis Stevenson on the walls.

We found a seat by a window, in a corner with the games machines. Space battles roared beside us.

‘This is where Rome stopped,’ Reid remarked in a tone of oddly personal satisfaction as he gazed out over the Firth.

‘Can’t be,’ I said. ‘Weren’t the Highlands Catholic –’

‘The Roman Empire,’ Reid explained. ‘This was the farthest north they got: the limes. Massacred the natives at Cramond, apparently. Beyond the Firth they did nothing but lose legions all over the map, that’s about it.’

‘Heh!’ I raised my pint of Arrol’s. ‘Here’s to the end of empires.’

‘Cheers,’ Reid nodded. ‘Still, it’s impressive in a way. All the land from here to the far side of the Med under one government.’

‘Hmm…somebody warn the Euro-sceptics: it’s been done and it lasted for a thousand years!’ – this in a comic-German screech that distracted one push-button space warrior enough to glance at me and lose a few ships to the invading evil empire on the screen. I think I was a little drunk by this point.

Our progress continued through The Two Bridges, The Anchor, and The Ferry Tap. Outside the Queensferry Arms Reid hesitated, then said, ‘Skip this one. Got a better idea.’ He led me a few steps along the narrow High Street to a Chinese take-away where he promised me the best delicacy on the menu.

‘Two portions of curried chips, please.’

‘Curried chips?’ I asked incredulously.

‘Just what you need after a few pints.’

The girl behind the counter served us these with what I dimly thought a patronising smile. Eating the steaming, sticky, greasy messes with little plastic forks, we made our way past a police-station and what Reid described as a Jacobite church, and on up to the last pub, pausing only to dispose of our litter thoughtfully behind a front gate.

We lurched in to The Moorings with breath like dragons’. The girl behind the bar actually averted her face as she pulled our pints. I followed Reid away from the bar into a rear area where wide windows presented a fine view of the Bridge.

The pub was new, fake-old; nautical gear and framed drawings of battleships on the walls. In the course of our travels Reid’s opening shot about the Roman Empire had turned into a long and involved argument about empires generally, with Reid firmly in their favour. He loathed the usual default option for disillusioned socialists, nationalism.

‘See these,’ he said, opening his third pack of cigarettes and pointing at the naval engravings. ‘See them. They, they saved us, right? From the German fascist barbarians. And from good old Uncle Joe, if truth be told.’

‘That,’ I said, trying to steady him in my ‘scope, ‘is a bit of an over-simplified few. View. I’m surprised at you.’

‘So’m I,’ he said. ‘A few years back, there was a display out there, Harriers flying backwards and Sea Kings looping the loop and all that, and I realised I was proud of those guys. Just like I used to be about the heroic Red Army and the Vietcong.’

‘Jesus.’ I was shocked into a passing fit of sobriety. ‘You’re telling me the armed forces of the British state are freedom fighters? I’m sure the Irish have a different story, for starters.’

‘Ah, fuck the Irish,’ Reid said, fortunately not too loudly. ‘I must admit I did have a hang-up about the bold IRA for years. And then they went and turned up their toes, just jacked it in like the fucking Stalinists.’

‘But you always wanted something better than that –’

He glared into his Caledonian Eighty. ‘Even so, I stuck up for the workers’ states. And then they all went down like – like dominoes! I’m not the one who deserted. I mean, my side surrendered, right? So I can do whatever the fuck I like.’

The bell rang for last orders. Reid laughed and drained his glass. ‘Same again?’

‘Yes please.’

He returned with two pints and two shots of whisky. The whisky may have had some responsibility for what happened later.

‘So what do you have to say to that?’ he asked.

‘Schlanzhe…OK, OK. You’re saying you used to admire the other side’s armies, right? So what about all the peace-fighting, eh? What about CND?’

Peace-fighting, CND…something was bugging me.

‘Tactics. The Communists were probably sincere, funnily enough, but as far as we were concerned we saw CND work as running interference for the Russkies.’

‘No shit?’

‘No shit.’

‘Well,’ I said, taken aback at this brazen admission, ‘I must say your new-found patriotism has a suspiciously damascene curve about it, as in going from one misguided view to what seems to be the complete opposite but is actually the same place –’

‘Bullshit. I’m not patriotic. All I’m saying is, we live in a dangerous world and I’m not going to pretend I don’t know whose guns keep me safe.’

‘What about the people on the other side of the guns?’

‘Tough. I’m just lucky I’m on this side. Compared to anything else out there, it’s the side of progress. We’re the camp of the revolution.’

‘Explain yourself.’

‘Because your Yank dingbat libertarian pals are right – the Western democracies are socialist! Big public sectors, big companies that plan production while officially everything’s on the market…sort of black planning, like the East had a black market. Marx said universal suffrage was the rule of the working class, and he was right. The West is Red!’

I had to laugh, not just at the audacity of Reid’s rationalisation but at the grain of awkward truth in it. We explored this theory as we were cleared from the pub and made our way up on to the Road Bridge.

‘Shit,’ Reid said, scrutinising the bus timetable, ‘we’ve missed it. Fucking private companies keep changing the services.’

‘Goddamn capitalist roaders. Let’s get a taxi.’

‘From here? Nah. There’s a hotel on the other side. Let’s phone from there.’

I looked along the bridge’s bright kilometre.

‘Bit of a walk.’

‘Might even be a bar open,’ Reid said cunningly.

‘I’m game.’

We set off, past signs announcing that security cameras watched the bridge at all times. To the north and west there was still light in the sky. Cars and lorries thrummed past, every other minute. The section of the bridge before it reached the river made a slow ascent above streets and backyards and waste ground and the long arms of a marina. There was a high barrier on our left between the footway and the drop to the river, a lower but wider barrier between footway and road. Reid kept to a rapid pace, saying little. About halfway across I paused to light up a black cheroot which had (unaccountably, at that moment) turned up in my pocket.

Something on my mind. Peace-fighting, something to do with…ah!

Not a good time – but then, there never would be a good time.

I hurried to catch up with him.

‘Reid, old boy,’ I said, from behind his shoulder, ‘I have a bone to pick with you.’

His shoulder twitched up. He didn’t turn. ‘OK, man. Whatever.’

‘Well, the fact is, Annette told me about, you know, you. And her.’

‘Oh!’ He stopped and faced me.

I stopped, leaning against the railing. Hundreds of feet below, the water gleamed like hammered lead. Reid fumbled out a cigarette, dropped it, picked it up and lit it.

‘What can I say?’ he said. He spread his hands, swayed, and laid his right hand on the parapet. ‘It happened, what’s the use denying it, and it was my fault, and I’m sorry.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘That’s all you have to say.’

‘You’re…’ He drew hard on the cigarette, cupped glowing in his left hand. ‘You’re a good bloke, Jon. She deserves you. And you deserved better of me. I abused your…hospitality, man. No excuse, except it was just fucking…’

His voice trailed off and he looked away from me, out at the distance.

‘Just fucking?’

‘…obsession, man, that’s the word.’ He laughed harshly. ‘I wish I could say it was just fucking.’

He looked back at me. The smoke was suddenly foul in my mouth. I sent the red ember spinning over the side, and watched its long slow fall.

‘But I can’t,’ he went on. ‘I’m not saying that wasn’t wrong, but there was more than that. I once even tried to get her to leave you, if you can believe that. But she wouldn’t, and she was right, and that was the end of it. Over. And I got over her, and she got over me.’

From that moment I’ve known that I’m capable of murder. He had one hand on the parapet, one at his side still holding the cigarette. He was again gazing into the distance. A grab for the collar and the belt, one good heave, and he would be over. It would have been easy, and I could have done it.

He turned to me. ‘That was when she told you, right?’ There was something of admiration and cunning in his eyes. ‘I know, because that’s when all the right-wing shit started arriving, from the Contras and Renamo and East European emigrés and the KMT and the NTS. Mixing it in with the old commies and the libertarians was a neat trick, but I got the message all right. You know some heavy guys, and they know where I live.’ He laughed harshly. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Jon, you had me scared.’

I took a step towards him and punched straight for his mouth. It was a good punch – my childhood boxing-lessons hadn’t been wasted – and he reacted with a hopelessly slow, country-boy, haymaking swing.

But his connected, and mine didn’t. I was slammed against the railing. The top edge hit my lower ribcage and suddenly I was leaning away over it, looking straight down. Straight up, for an unreal moment, as my semi-circular canals turned over and the universe followed them round.

And then I was sick. A Mexican meal, a dozen pints, two whiskies, a portion of curried chips and the tar from a score of Silk Cut and one Mexican cigarillo poured through my mouth and nostrils in a cascade that spattered walkways and ladders and disturbed roosting birds before it fell, with literally sickening slowness, visible all the way, to the water.

‘Are you all right?’

I pushed myself away from the railing.

‘I’m all right,’ I said. I blew a fragment of taco and a gobbet of spicy slime from my left nostril onto my fingers, then balled my fist for another go at him.

His eyes widened, but he was looking past me. Brakes squealed. A van pulled up beside us, on the footpath, not on the road.

The door opened and a man in a boiler-suit leaned out.

‘Come on, lads,’ he said. ‘We’ve been keeping an eye on you two. You look like you could do with a lift.’

THE CONQUEST OF VIOLENCE

9

Circuit Judgement

It’s early afternoon and the watches are beeping fifteen. Dee follows Ax across a high, narrow bridge. The walkway is barely a metre wide, the parapets little more than a metre high. Beneath it is a hundred-metre drop to the roofs of a lower level. Above it, taller towers rise. The bridge slopes gently up, curves smoothly around to the right. Dee walks it fearlessly; this is familiar territory to her, the high locale of the high life of those who, in Ship City, pass for rich. Fortunately, however, she has never met Anderson Parris, the man whose residence they’re approaching.

Dee has very little doubt that before the next hour is over, she’ll have killed a human being. She hasn’t done this before, and the prospect arouses in her a certain curiosity. The skills are there, of course, in Spy and Soldier. But she remembers rumours, as from a previous life (from her life before she awoke) that make her wonder if she can access those particular skills. If Sys has changed the permissions…There’s no way of telling, because that itself is a part of Sys to which she has no access. She recalls people talking, talking as if she wasn’t there, of the potential dangers of AIs wandering around in human guise, and she knows that humans set great store by the permissions.

She has no doubt at all that Ax will be able to do it. Ax is a human being, and human beings don’t need any permissions. Dee shivers, but not with fear or excitement. The wind is chill at this height, and her new clothes, even inside a green velvet cloak, do little to keep her warm.

The door is a bright, slightly convex steel panel, set back in the synthetic rock of the building. Dee admires her distorted reflection, practising transforms on it, while Ax exchanges a few words with a speaker grille. The door slides smoothly sideways, and Ax and Dee walk in. The entrance hallway has inward-sloping walls, and the rightward curve of its floor continues that of the bridge, further into the building. The hall is illuminated by a high skylight, and by tall windows in the outer wall. Electric lights hang at varying levels from the ten-metre-high roof, and likewise suspended bowls overflow with leaves and stalks, flowers and scents.

The door shuts behind them. Dee glances back for a moment, checking that it can be opened manually from the inside. It looks like it can, but Spy’s subtler senses are on the job, tracking the pulse-patterns in the wires behind the walls, just in case. Ax’s feet pad, Dee’s heels click around the curve of the corridor. The wooden doors leading off the corridor are closed. After Dee and Ax have walked to a point where the outer door is no longer visible, the corridor widens out to a stairwell. A few steps up the spiral staircase, a man stands waiting. He’s wearing a black kimono embroidered with deep-sky images. His fair hair is swept back from his high forehead. His face is narrow, lips thin, eyelashes sandy, expression serene. To Dee, his smooth and healthy features look old – older far than her, or Ax; almost as old as Reid. And yet they suggest some deeper immaturity, as well as a cruelty which Dee immediately sees as distinct from the cold ruthlessness which was the worst that Reid’s most unguarded moments – even now, in replayed recollection – ever betrayed. This man is not like Reid, nor any of his friends or casual acquaintances. No burly businessman who ever ogled her at a meeting, or pawed her at a party, ever made her feel the way she does now, as his gaze inspects her.

Anderson Parris descends the stairs and smiles at Ax.

‘Well, hello,’ he says, catching Ax’s hands. ‘I’m delighted to see you, and your most interesting and beautiful friend.’

Dee opens a frogged clasp at her throat and removes her cloak. She swings the cloak across her left arm, concealing the bag in her left hand, and languidly extends her right.

‘I’m charmed to meet you, Anderson Parris.’

After a nonplussed moment the man realises she expects him to kiss her hand, and he does. His fingers are cold, his lips damp. As his head lifts from kissing her hand his gaze travels from her high-heeled boots, past her black leather leggings under her black lace skirt, up the ladder of silver clasps and tiny bows on her black satin boned corset-top; to her neck, where a steel-studded leather collar matches the buckled straps on her forearms; to her darkly shadowed eyes. When their eyes meet she looks straight back, with the slight smile of a shared secret.

Sex is in charge here, and Sex has no difficulty in detecting that she has him on a leash. He waves her politely ahead of him, and they go up the stairs. She walks up slowly, letting him have a good view of her tight-laced back. His murmured conversation with Ax carries oddly in the stairwell.

They ascend into a circular room built around the stairwell. Its ceiling is a glass dome above the two-metre-high walls. Dee sees the sun, and the darting manta-shapes of passing aircraft. Nothing else overlooks the room, which seems to combine the functions of a studio, a gallery and a bedroom. There’s a drawing-console and a camera-array. Around the walls are chairs, low tables, and long couches which might be used as beds, though the artfully casual deployment of covers and cushions makes their function ambiguous. The walls are hung with ornate weapons – swords of beaten steel, lasers of brass and ruby – and with pictures, of children who look vulnerable and women who look invulnerable.

‘Would you like a drink, lady?’

‘I would,’ she says distantly. ‘Dark Star.’

Parris’s quick, almost obsequious smile can’t quite conceal his momentary grimace at her taste in liquor, but he goes over to a drinks cabinet and a fridge and prepares the mixture. He brings it over, ice clinking, and touches her glass with his own of chilled wine.

Parris smiles as she drains her glass. He discards his kimono. Under it he’s wearing deeply unoriginal bondage gear, a costume of belts and clips. His cock is straining against what looks like a painfully tight jockstrap, ‘strap’ being the operative word.

Ax, to her surprise, drops on all fours and scampers across the room to a big wardrobe. He nudges the bottom of the door with his head, and the door swings open to reveal an apparatus of chains and straps. Dee slams her (fortunately solid) glass down on the most expensive and delicate table-surface within reach, and turns on her heel and looks at Parris.

‘I understand,’ she says coldly, ‘that you have been a very wicked man.’

Parris nods. His eyes are shining, in a face that’s become a flushed mask of humility.

Dee lets the Sex program play out the scene. She slaps his face, a little harder than he perhaps expects.

‘I have come to judge you,’ she says. She pretends to think, scrutinising him. She looks around the room, until her glance lights on the open cupboard. Ax is squatting beside it, his tongue hanging out. Dee’s eyes widen in mock surprise. She points to the cupboard.

‘Over there,’ she orders. Parris walks towards it. He flashes her a servile, collusive smile.

‘Eyes down!’ Dee yells.

Parris obediently bows his head and walks to the door.

Dee has the whole protocol mapped out in her head, but she’s not really into this sort of thing (being, if truth be told, more sub than dom) and she gives the finicky business of shackling and binding him perhaps less attention than it deserves. It ends with her squeezing his cheeks until he opens his mouth. She pops a rubber ball into his mouth, closes his jaws with a finger on his nose and a thumb on the point of his chin, and slaps a piece of insulating-tape (of a suitably shiny black) across his mouth.

She drops out of character for a moment.

‘OK?’

Parris nods. Dee checks the restraints. They’re secure.

Ax, who all the while has been working his way slowly up from the man’s toes to his knees with playful nips of his teeth, suddenly stands up and steps back. Dee steps back too, and together they look at the man hanging in the cupboard.

Ax smiles into Parris’s suddenly troubled, puzzled stare. He reaches behind his neck, and the long knife is in his hand. He tosses it sideways into the other hand, and then back. He inspects the edge. The side of the blade catches flashes of sunlight; the edge betrays only the faintest flicker, as if even photons slide off it.

He looks again at Parris.

‘Woof,’ he says.

Wilde had more than one cigarette-stub at his feet by the time he saw the girl striding towards him through the market crowd. He straightened up from leaning on the mainframe.

‘Tamara Hunter,’ the machine said over his shoulder as the girl stopped and stuck out her hand. ‘Jonathan Wilde.’

She cocked her head sideways and looked him over as he shook her hand.

‘My God,’ she said. ‘You really are him.’

Wilde grinned. ‘You look somehow familiar yourself.’

‘The pub last night,’ Tamara reminded him. ‘Mind you, if ever anyone had eyes only for one woman, it was you.’

‘Ah, of course,’ Wilde said. ‘You were with…Dee.’

‘Yes,’ Tamara said. She looked about. ‘Where’s your robot?’

‘Hah!’ Wilde snorted. ‘You and I are supposed to be on the same side, according to this electric lawyer here, so don’t you go saying “your robot”. I’m damned if I’ll admit it’s my robot. The fact is, it’s fucked off on its own somewhere.’

‘Oh,’ Tamara said. She glanced at the Invisible Hand mainframe. ‘We’re going for a private discussion,’ she told it.

‘Very well,’ the machine said. ‘I shall proceed with the technical aspects of the case.’

Tamara turned to Wilde. ‘Talk about it over a beer?’

‘God, yes.’

They wended their way between stalls and under trees. The market boomed around them. When they were – as far as it was humanly possible to tell – out of Invisible Hand’s earshot, Wilde asked, ‘Just as a matter of curiosity, is that piece of legal machinery self-aware?’

Tamara laughed. ‘Nah, it’s just an expert system. It has its little quirks, mind.’

‘Yeah, you could say that.’ He looked at a cluster of tables around an array of counter, refrigerator and grill, all small and all scorched. A tall Turk stood in the middle, his hands dealing out drinks and sandwiches for greasy wads of money. ‘Here?’

Tamara nodded, with an appreciative smile at his good judgement. Wilde ordered two litres of beer. They sipped for a minute from the beaded brown bottles, in thirsty silence, and checked each other out.

‘Smoke?’ Wilde said, retrieving a now battered pack.

‘No thanks,’ Tamara said. ‘But go ahead.’

Wilde smiled at her. ‘This is my first pack for centuries,’ he said as he lit up. ‘Not that that’s much of an excuse. For one thing, to me it all happened the day before yesterday, and for another it’s smoking that got me killed.’

Tamara frowned. ‘The books tell different stories, but I thought you died in some shoot-out.’

‘That was it,’ Wilde nodded. ‘Tried to run faster than a bullet, but –’ He looked ruefully at the cigarette, and took another drag as Tamara laughed.

‘This is weird,’ she said. ‘I’ve talked to some people who were in the ship, and who actually came from Earth – hell, my grandparents did – but they never talk about having been dead. They talk about having been “in transition”.’

‘Yeah,’ Wilde said sardonically. ‘“In denial” is the technical term for that frame of mind.’

‘But you do…and you being, like, a historical character. Wow, fuck!’ She studied his features judiciously. ‘You look different in the pictures. Older.’

‘In what pictures?’ Wilde demanded.

Tamara reached into an inside pocket, and passed to Wilde a plastic wallet containing a set of cards.

‘I, um, collect them,’ she explained as Wilde began to spread them out. ‘They come free with, uh, a cereal that gets made in this area.’

‘Harmony Oats!’ Wilde shouted with laughter. He spread out the wood-cut portraits. ‘Let’s see…Owen, Stirner, Proudhon, Warren, Bakunin, Tucker, Labadie, Wilson, Wilde. They’ve got the ancestry right, but I doubt I deserve such exalted company. I’m not sure whether to be flattered or appalled.’

He looked down at the scored lines of the iconic faces, and passed a hand over his own fresh features. He shook his head.

‘When I first looked like I do now I was far from famous,’ Wilde said. His voice sounded sad for a moment, cheerier as he added: ‘Perhaps it’s just as well.’

‘Dead right!’ Tamara looked around. ‘You’re going to be famous all over again, when this gets out. Which it will, when the court case starts, if not sooner.’

Wilde shrugged. ‘I’d like to delay it as long as possible. My grasp of the politics of this place isn’t strong enough to handle publicity to my advantage.’

‘OK,’ said Tamara. ‘We have a more immediate problem. Before I learned that you were involved, I got a message from David Reid. You…knew him?’

‘Sure did. Once.’

‘Right, well he’s suing me to get the gynoid, Dee, back. Fair enough, I expected that. I want to make a case of it. Invisible Hand has just told me you were being sued too, and that you wanted to combine forces. As a matter of fact you don’t have much choice, as it’s all part of the same case in actuality, so no other court is going to touch yours while ours is outstanding, and we’d have to bring you into it anyway, so you might as well go in on your own terms.’

Wilde spread his hands. ‘So what’s the problem?’

‘The first person on our list of preferred judges is a bloke called Eon Talgarth.’ She paused, waiting for some reaction. Wilde just raised his eyebrows. ‘He used to be an abolitionist,’ Tamara went on, ‘and he now runs a court out in the Fifth Quarter. That’s a machine domain. Most of the disputes he settles are between scrappies.’

‘Scrappies?’

‘People like me, who go into the machine domains and hunt for useful bits of machinery and automation. He’s been known to let autonomous machines go free, and put injunctions on hunting them, but no other judge has accepted that as a precedent.’

‘All the same,’ said Wilde, ‘he sounds like a good bet for your case.’

‘Sure, which is why I didn’t expect Reid to agree. But he did. Great. Trouble is, I didn’t know you’d be involved. Shit.’

‘Why is it a problem?’

‘Because Eon Talgarth doesn’t like you very much.’

Wilde put down his drink and stared at her. ‘What? I never heard of him. What’s he got against me?’

‘Oh, nothing personal as far as I know.’ She shrugged. ‘He’s from Earth, he was in the labour-gangs, he was in the ship. So you could have harmed him somehow – he’s never said. But when he was an abolitionist, he used to argue against the idea which a lot of people here have, that you were some kind of hero and great anarchist thinker and represented an alternative to the sort of ideas that Reid implemented when he set this place going. He said you were an opportunist, that you made all kinds of dirty deals with governments – and with Reid, and that any conflicts between the two of you were just personal rivalries.’

She spoke in a light-hearted, say-it-ain’t-so tone. Wilde tilted his seat precariously back and rocked with laughter.

‘It’s all true, every word!’ he said. ‘I’m amazed there are people here who say I was a hero and a great anarchist thinker. Ha-ha! This Eon Talgarth has got me bang to rights.’

Tamara’s mouth turned down slightly. ‘It’s not really true, is it? That you were always an opportunist?’

‘Absolutely,’ Wilde said. ‘Only the other day – by my memory, of course – a woman I was once in love with told me I was responsible for the last world war going nuclear. By that time in my life, bearing in mind I was ninety-three years old and had taken a lot of flak for various…controversial decisions, I didn’t even take offence.’

‘But if…’ Tamara considered the implications. ‘That would mean you were to blame for –’

‘The whole fucking mess!’ Wilde said. He looked about him and waved a hand. ‘Everything that has happened since the Third World War is all my fault!’

‘That,’ said Tamara, ‘is what Eon Talgarth thinks.’

‘He could be right,’ Wilde said with a shrug. ‘I don’t think so myself.’

‘Oh, neither do I,’ Tamara hastened to add. ‘And neither do most people, abolitionists or not. In fact, some people think you’re, well…’

She hesitated, embarrassed.

‘What?’ Wilde leaned forward, cigarette in hand, daring her. ‘Something more than a great anarchist thinker?’

‘Yes,’ Tamara said. ‘They think you’re, well, still alive and out there somewhere. People say they’ve seen you, out in the desert.’

‘Do they indeed?’ Wilde sucked in smoke and blew it above her head, in a long sigh. ‘Now that’s really interesting, because the robot Jay-Dub claims to be another…implementation of me, and to have been around since before the first landing here. I wouldn’t put it past its capabilities to throw a fetch, or to appear as me on screen.’

‘Aha!’ said Tamara. ‘According to the message I got from Invisible Hand, Reid claims he has evidence that Jay-Dub hacked into Dee, and he holds you responsible.’

‘Me?’ Wilde said. ‘Well, Jay-Dub said nothing to me about anything like that. What a surprise.’

‘Yeah,’ said Tamara. ‘AIs are devious bastards, aren’t they?’

‘Devious and dangerous,’ Wilde said. ‘Wouldn’t trust them an inch, myself.’

Tamara laughed.

‘OK,’ said Wilde, ‘I reckon we need to fill each other in a bit. Us humans gotta stick together.’

Tamara recounted what had happened the previous evening, and that morning, and some of the background. Wilde kept smiling when she spoke about abolitionism. Then Wilde went over what had happened to him, and what the robot had told him. Tamara listened, sometimes wide-eyed, sometimes frowning. When he’d finished she sat silent for a moment.

‘What a bastard,’ she said at last. ‘Growing a clone of your wife’s body and using it as a gynoid. Jeez. Guess he didn’t expect to see you again.’

‘Maybe,’ Wilde said dubiously. ‘He must’ve known about the robot, though, surely? Could the robot have seen Dee before?’

‘Sure,’ said Tamara. ‘That kind of rig would have comms, if nothing else. And Reid’s claiming Jay-Dub did hack into Dee. But the robot said nothing about that?’

‘Nothing to me,’ Wilde said. ‘I definitely got the impression that it knew something about Dee, in fact it insisted Dee wasn’t human even in the sense that it is, but it never gave any hint that Dee was part of its plans, whatever they are.’

‘And now it’s disappeared,’ Tamara sighed. She looked about, as though hoping it would reappear. ‘Presumably it doesn’t know about the legal case, and it figures it’s best to lie low.’

‘That would fit in with its personality all right,’ Wilde grinned. ‘And mine!’

‘Let’s hope it finds out before the trial,’ said Tamara. ‘Otherwise it is in even deeper shit…You still want to go before Talgarth?’

‘From what you’ve told me,’ Wilde said, ‘I don’t have much choice in the matter.’

‘That’s right,’ said Tamara.

Wilde responded with an ironic grimace. He stood up, without saying anything, and wandered about the nearby stalls. Every so often he smiled to himself, and then he turned and smiled at Tamara, who’d silently followed him.

‘There’s something about this place,’ he explained. ‘I always knew there would be places like this, trash markets on other worlds. It makes me feel so homesick that I know I’m the same man I was on Earth.’

Tamara looked down and scuffed the dirt.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard so much about Wilde, but my mental picture of him is always like – you know, those cards, posters I’ve seen. I know I’ve been sort of presumptuous, talking to you like you’re as young as you look.’

Wilde snorted and slapped her shoulder. ‘Knock it off,’ he said. ‘I’ve only come back from the dead in a literal sense.’

They went over to Invisible Hand and registered Wilde as a joint defendant, and Wilde laid a counter-charge against Reid of having been responsible for the death of one Jonathan Wilde, of London, Earth. The machine took it all in without demur, but its internal lights moved about in an agitated manner.

‘What now?’ Wilde asked Tamara.

‘Well, perhaps it’s time you met Dee. She’s staying at my place, and it’s only five minutes away from here. Ax – that’s a…kid who lives with me – said he’d take her out shopping this morning.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Fifteen-thirty. They should be back by now.’

‘OK,’ said Wilde. He stood up. For the first time since they’d met, his face showed something less than composure.

‘Let’s go.’

Ax retrieves the knife from the closed door of the wardrobe, paces back a few metres, and throws the knife again. It thuds into the door and sticks there, adding to the rough human outline of gashes that repeated throws have left in the wood. A faint groan and a banging noise come from inside the cupboard.

Dee looks up from rummaging through Parris’s picture collection. She feels nauseous. It’s impossible to tell if the pictures are of real scenes, or posed, or are simply computer-generated imagery. She doesn’t particularly care. She wants to wipe them from her memory, and their originator from the world.

She still doesn’t know if she can do it, or even stand by and let Ax do it. She doesn’t know if the permissions for her lethal skills have been reset. She suspects that if they haven’t, it won’t be anything dramatic; no staying of her hand, no rooting of her feet; just some quite reasonable and natural-seeming inhibition, a distaste or disquiet that won’t let her follow it through.

‘Haven’t you done enough of that?’ she asks Ax.

Ax tugs the knife out of the wood once more. ‘I suppose so,’ he admits. He grins at her. ‘You get carried away.’

Dee takes her pistol out of her handbag, tucks it in her waistband and walks over.

‘Well I say finish it,’ she says.

‘Fine,’ says Ax.

He opens the splintered door. Inside, Parris is still hanging in his bonds. His eyes are tightly closed. Tears are running down his face, and the sticky-tape gag is slimed with the snot that the tears have brought with them and which he’s blown from his nostrils in frantic snorts.

Ax traces a line with the knife’s tip, along the man’s bare belly. Parris’s eyes open, and roll from side to side, looking at Ax and then, as if in appeal, to Dee. Blood wells along the cut. The sight of it makes Dee stop, and catch Ax’s arm.

‘No!’ she says. The images from Parris’s collection are crowded out by images from Soldier, an encyclopaedia of injury and blood: spurting, spraying, oozing, dripping. She imagines it spattering her clothes, and shudders.

‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s enough.’

Ax glares at her, but she outstares him. He backs off. Dee sets to work, loosening, unshackling, unbinding. She steadies Parris as he stumbles out, and lets him sink to the floor. He’s making noises through his nostrils.

‘Oh,’ says Dee. She’d forgotten that. She stoops to rip the tape from his mouth, and as it comes off she notices that Parris has come, and more than once, even with his cock bound back. Semen is drying on his thighs.

He falls forward into a kneeling posture, and looks up at her, gasping and smiling.

‘Thank you, mistress,’ he says in a low voice. ‘I deserved that, all of it, I truly did!’ He looks at her with sly hope. ‘When can you visit me again?’

Dee stares at him. She takes a few steps backward, still thinking of keeping her nice new clothes clean. She turns and walks further away, past Ax, to the top of the stairs.

‘Mistress, please…’ Parris calls after her.

‘Oh, fuck this,’ she says.

She draws the pistol from her skirt, takes aim, and blows his head off.

The shot echoes around the circular spaces of the room and the stairwell and leaves her ears ringing. She grins at Ax, who despite his instigation of the whole thing is looking at the remains of Parris, and then at her, with a shocked pallor.

‘Now I know,’ she says. ‘I do have free will.’

‘That must be very useful,’ Ax says. ‘I’m a bit of a determinist, myself.’

Dee smiles at him reassuringly as she briskly gathers up her stuff.

‘Time to go,’ she says.

Ax is pointlessly wiping the tip of his knife on a piece of drapery.

‘Shouldn’t we, you know, clean up?’ he asks. ‘Can’t you see fingerprints and stuff?’

‘Oh, sure,’ Dee says, fastening her cloak. ‘They’re all over the place. And our skin-cells. Not to mention our images on the house’s cameras.’

She looks up and smiles and waves at a tiny, hooded lens.

‘Shit,’ says Ax. ‘Can you do anything about it?’

Dee flashes him a puzzled look and starts to go downstairs.

‘Of course I can,’ she says. ‘But it’s very important that I don’t, and you know it. Come on, before somebody comes.’

Ax follows her, still reluctant.

‘Nobody’s gonna come,’ he says. ‘I don’t think Parris had his nest video-linked to the nearest security-service.’

‘I guess not.’

Unlocking the door doesn’t require any of Dee’s deeper abilities. It closes itself behind them as soon as they’re out. They walk down the long ramp in silence. Near the bottom a side-ramp leads to a nearby residential door. Dee scans its electronics.

‘This’ll do,’ she says. ‘Somebody’s home.’

Ax stops walking. For a moment, he looks like a stubborn child.

‘This isn’t what I meant,’ he says.

Dee tries not to wheedle.

‘It’s important,’ she says. ‘It’ll help your cause, as well as your case.’

‘I don’t give a fuck about a case,’ Ax says. ‘That shit is over.’

Dee regards him levelly while recalling the things he’s said earlier.

‘The dead may rise,’ she says, ‘and you may be right, but one way or another, this will all come to judgement.’

Ax stares back at her for a moment, then nods.

Together, they walk down the small ramp to the door. Dee pings the bell. They wait. A little screen above the bell lights up, a woman’s face appears.

‘Yes?’ she says.

Dee stands a little straighter and taller.

‘This is Dee Model and Ax Terminal,’ she announces firmly. ‘We have just killed your neighbour up the way, Anderson Parris. Call you witness.’

The woman gives an exaggerated blink.

‘W-witnessed,’ she says shakily.

‘Thank you,’ Ax says.

‘Goodbye,’ says Dee.

Then Dee and Ax hurry back to the main ramp and down steps and slopes to a level walkway, and up in a lift to a high platform, where they join a small queue of well-dressed people waiting at the air-stop to catch a flit. Ax occupies his time by tuning in to the stop’s news-service. Every so often he shakes his head and smiles at Dee: no hue-and-cry yet; and uses these interruptions in his glassy trance to study a list.

Dee sees he’s already crossed off one name, and that there are a lot more to go.

Tamara looked at the little stack of incriminating material on the table: the Talgarth file on Wilde, the picture Dee had made, and a scrawled apocalyptic rant from Ax. Wilde had just finished reading it.

‘God,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of suicide notes, but this is the first time I’ve ever come across a murder note.’

Tamara was holding her hands to the sides of her head.

‘I’ll murder the little pervert, if I ever get my hands on him,’ she said. ‘Honestly, Comrade Wilde, if I’d even suspected he was capable of going off the fast end like this I’d never’ve let Dee out of my sight.’

Wilde reached over and caught her hand.

‘Easy,’ he said, ‘easy. What have I ever done to you to make you call me “Comrade Wilde”? My name’s Jon, OK? And you’re no more responsible for losing Dee than I am for losing Jay-Dub. They’re both free agents, isn’t that what this is all about?’

‘I suppose so,’ Tamara said. ‘And Ax is claiming he wasn’t, when he did some…degrading things. I can see why, too, in a way, but then…Aaach! It’s so complicated! What do we do?’

‘Tamara,’ Wilde said gently, letting go of her hand and sitting down, ‘how long have you lived?’

‘Twenty years.’

Wilde lit a cigarette.

‘New Mars years?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well then,’ said Wilde. ‘You’ve lived in an anarchy twice as long as I ever managed to, and you surely know the answer to that, or the way of finding the answer.’

Tamara sat down at the table and looked back at him, baffled and defiant.

‘I don’t get you,’ she said.

‘Look,’ Wilde said, ‘when we want to know whether something was worth making, we look for the answer in a discovery machine called the market. When we want to know how something works, we have another discovery machine, called science. When we want to know if somebody was right to kill somebody else, we have a discovery machine called the law.’

‘Yes,’ said Tamara. ‘I know that. It’s not going to be much help to Ax and Dee, if they get caught. Or us, if we wait too long before trying to stop them.’

‘It’s worth a try, OK? And if the law really lets you down, and you can’t live with it, then –’ He spread his hands, smiling.

‘What?’

‘You’re back in the state of nature. You fight. OK, you might die, but so what? Same as if the market lets you down. It does happen. You’re starving. You steal.’

Tamara looked taken aback.

‘But that would be –’

‘Anarchy?’ Wilde grinned at her.

‘You’re saying people can do anything?’

‘Literally, yes. In any half-decent society you’re far better off respecting the law and property and so on, but the bottom line is, it’s your choice. You always have the option of making war – on the whole world, if it comes to that.’

‘But you’d lose!’ Tamara said.

Wilde looked back at her, unperturbed.

‘You might not. Locke said you can always “appeal to heaven”, and God or Nature might find in your favour. What I’m saying is, Ax has made his choice, and Dee hers. Maybe they can justify that choice in front of a court, maybe not. Either way, it isn’t for us to decide, and I’d be more than happy to justify not warning their potential victims. But if you want to, by all means go ahead.’

Tamara rubbed her chin and looked down again at Ax’s screed. She looked at Dee’s picture, and Talgarth’s file. Then she looked up at Wilde and asked, as if wanting to settle one final question: ‘What do you do if science lets you down?’

Wilde laughed. ‘Trust to luck.’

He stubbed out his cigarette and jumped up.

‘The sooner we get to Eon Talgarth’s court, the better,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’

‘Yes,’ said Tamara. She rose and began to hunt around for maps and provisions and arms.

‘So how do we get there?’ asked Wilde. ‘Aircraft?’

Tamara was packing ammo clips. She turned to him and laughed.

‘Talgarth doesn’t take kindly to aircraft landing nearby,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t trust them, for some strange reason. Nah, we take just enough weapons and gadgets to get through the wild machines, and we walk. Everybody does.’ She grinned. ‘It’s the law. It reduces the chances of fights breaking out in court.’

‘There’s a lot I don’t know about this place,’ Wilde acknowledged wryly.

Tamara grunted, testing the weight of a pack. She took out a heavy pistol, and passed it over to Wilde. She shoved Talgarth’s file on Wilde across the table.

‘Take that and read it sometime,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot this place doesn’t know about you.’

10

Tested on Animals

You’ll have noticed by now that what I’m telling you here isn’t in the texts. As you’ll have guessed, that’s the point. Why should I duplicate my hagiographers?

So you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I take the story of how I used People for Progress (North British Mutual’s educational campaign) as a launch-pad for the space movement; how I used Space Merchants to seed FreeSpace, a libertarian radical group that had learned the left’s one sound lesson, Leninism; how we used the space movement as a popular front for our free-market anarchism, and how the space movement grew beyond even my expectations – if I take mein kampf, in short – as read.

And my political commentary and analysis, ephemeral as it seemed at the time, fading from the screens like a short-term memory, was all dutifully archived by the intelligence agencies of the day, and in due course (i.e. wars and revolutions later) passed into the public domain and is undoubtedly still hanging around out there – ‘it is always sometime, somewhere on the net’, so if you really want to know, it’s only a search away [note: lightspeed limitations may apply]. So I won’t repeat myself on that, either.

In my later years I was occasionally known to grumble about the youth of today, etc., and how they didn’t appreciate that there had been a revolution before The Revolution and how there wouldn’t have been a New Republic if there hadn’t been a Republic in the first place, and how much tougher it all was for us and by the way have I ever told you about the war?

So I’ll skip that, too.

But it remains worth saying that the United Republic didn’t just happen. People didn’t suddenly wake up that election morning in 2015 and think, ‘This time we’ve got to get the bastards out.’ As a matter of fact they did, but it took a lot of work to bring that reckless impulse to birth: decades of agitation, grumbling, constitution-drafting, sparsely attended meetings in poorly furnished halls, letters to the editor, noisy demonstrations, and all the rest. And bloody hard work it was. I know, because I was there and I didn’t do any of it.

FreeSpace (the name had once seemed trendy, but now dated us painfully – ‘very TwenCen’, as I’d overheard someone say) had its modest offices above a Space Merchants franchise just across the road from the Camden Lock market. (I’d quit running Space Merchants, kept enough shares and options in it to keep a steady if small income, and left it alone. It had moved into selling actual space products now, most just novelties – moon-rock jewellery, free-fall crystals and so forth – but also some of practical use. Microgravity manufacturing had come up with unexpected applications, as I’d known it would.) We’d had the offices for ten years, and they still smelled of fresh paint and new wood and cement. The concrete walls were decorated with space movement posters and NASA Inc hologram views, but the first thing anyone saw when they came through the doorway was my desk with a huge notice behind it saying YOU’RE WELCOME TO SMOKE. I no longer smoked myself – although medical science had already beaten what we (misleadingly, nowadays) called ‘the big C’, there was no easy fix for the habit’s bronchial consequences, and at sixty-two I needed all the breath I could get. The notice was a matter of principle, like the washroom soap-dispenser’s mischievous little sticker announcing that its contents had been Tested On Animals.

The morning after the election I was the only person in the office who wasn’t late in and hung over. Each bleary-eyed arrival was greeted by me looking up from the online news (panic in Whitehall, pound in free fall, riots in Kensington, airports mobbed) and saying: ‘Oh, you stayed up for the results? Who won?’

Having thus protected my anarchist credibility I’d have another secret gloat at the results. The composition of the new government wasn’t official yet, they were still arguing, but it looked like it would be Republican, New Labour, True Labour, and a couple of Radicals on the government side, with the Unionists the official opposition and the small parties in the wings. Plenty of the last – even the World Socialists (the new name of the SPGB) had scraped together enough first preferences to get one MP elected. Sadly, my parents hadn’t lived to see it. It had taken the party a hundred and eleven years to get into Parliament, but they were still on course for that twenty-fifth-century global majority.

Then I’d get back to organising an emergency executive committee meeting for 11.00 that morning. No answer, not even an answering-program, from two of the members: Aaronson (research) and Rutherford (international liaison). Hmmm. I immediately contacted several potential rivals for each position – rather than our internal security group, who were prima facie most likely to be police spies anyway – and set them to work investigating.

But the other seven duly popped up on my screen, and all of us on each other’s. I decided to say nothing about Aaronson and Rutherford, and just shrugged when their absence was remarked in the pre-meeting chit-chat as people shuffled paper, booted up notepads, settled in their seats and looked at me expectantly.

‘OK, comrades,’ I began, ‘from here it looks like we’ve woken up to not just a new government, but a new regime. Now, call me a romantic old fool, but I think it’s the start of a revolution. A very British revolution, I’ll give you that, but it’s been a long time coming and revolutions are a law unto themselves more or less by definition. I wouldn’t bet on this one staying in the proper channels. This could be good news for us, or bad, depending on how things turn out. The question is, can we make a difference?’

All the eyes on the screen made a laughably simultaneous swivel as everybody checked everybody else’s reaction. Ewan Chambers, the Scottish rep, spoke first.

‘I agree with Jon. Things were looking pretty wild in Glasgow last night, something a bit more than a street party and no’ quite a riot. And from what I can see there’s a kindae uneasy calm in Edinburgh. The Workers’ Power Party is carrying on like it won the election instead ae just a couple of seats.’

‘It’s the same down here,’ said Julie O’Brien, our South London youth organiser, ‘but I don’t think we have to worry just yet about the Trots taking over and everybody starving to death. If you look at how the new government’s put together, right, there’s no doubt at all that we’re gonna get a Republic, but beyond that the kind of programme they’ve been talking about is a real mish-mash of libertarian and statist. On the one side – easing immigration controls, ending prohibition, pulling the troops out of Greece and all that, but on the other hand the Labour parties are pushing this industrial policy, cabling up everything on one big system and all sorts of TwenCen shit.’

‘Including a space programme, funnily enough,’ I said. ‘Any thoughts on that?’

A wrangle followed which I cut across as soon as somebody mentioned Ayn Rand. ‘Here’s what I suggest,’ I said. ‘We don’t support it, don’t oppose it, and if it ever flies, demand they privatise it.’

Nothing like a moment of shared cynicism for pulling a committee together. ‘Right,’ I said when we’d stopped chuckling, ‘serious business. Good bloody riddance to the Hanoverian regime, but as Julie says the question is what happens afterwards. The political structure’s going to be pretty flexible for a while. How about we try to get our hands on some derelict area and make it an enterprise zone or freeport or something, and put our money where our mouth is?’

Adrian Moss frowned. He was in charge of the movement’s lobbying activities, such as they were. ‘We could probably swing it,’ he said, ‘but why? Free zones are better left to real businesses, not political organisations.’ His smile flicked around the screen. ‘You know, that reminds me of some fringe ideology I’ve heard about!’

‘I’ll tell you why,’ I said. ‘If things work out smoothly, fine, a few more of our ideas get tested. But this country might be headed for a breakup. We’ve all seen what that means, time and time again. Everybody grabs what they can. Having a bit of land to call our own might give us a head start.’

This caused some commotion. Only Julie and Ewan were in favour. I feigned demurral and suggested that we put it to a poll of the membership. Those against my suggestion agreed, confident that it would be rejected.

By this time the absence of Aaronson and Rutherford had pushed itself onto the agenda. I donned my moderate hat and managed to convince the committee that if it turned out that they’d been spies all along and had now fled the country, we would quite definitely not have them assassinated.

Late that afternoon the investigations I’d initiated revealed that they’d both been discreetly offered jobs in the promised National Space Authority, and had been too embarrassed to tell us. At this point I was quite tempted to have them assassinated, but after some thought decided just to throw them off the committee.

In the membership referendum on making a bid for a local enterprise area my position won overwhelmingly, as I knew it would. With all the political excitement, even a rabble of libertarians couldn’t help wanting to do something constructive for a change.

A year later FreeSpace had control of an abandoned North London industrial estate with a few blocks of empty high-rise flats thrown in by a local council desperate to get rid of them. Six months after that we had the place swarming with enthusiastic volunteers and Adrian was pulling in outside investment hand over fist. After a further six months a delegation of workers’ and employers’ representatives told the committee that they were very happy with the security our militia provided, but there was one little extra assurance they wanted.

Just for their peace of mind.

Julie said it was immoral, Ewan said it was illegal, Adrian said it was far too expensive and I said I knew a man who could get it for us cheap.

Transcript of telephone conversation, released 01/10/50 under Freedom of Information (Previous Governments) Act.

[reception-program voice ends].

JW: Hi, Dave.

DR: Oh, hello you old bastard. What can I do you for?

JW: Uh, this encrypted?

DR: No, but I’m sure you know what to say.

JW: Fuck, [pause] We’re thinking of going private for, uh, the big one. [pause]

DR: Are you outa your fucking mind?

JW: Don’t think so. I, gather some of your friends in the communistans –

DR: – deformed workers’ statelets – [laughter].

JW: – might have the best deals. Can you swing it?

DR: Oh, sure. We’ve got policies,

JW: Better than politics, [laughter]

DR: I can’t see you needing it, that’s all.

JW: Not much of a salesman, are you? [pause]

DR: Oh well, it’s your life. Lemme check. Shit, okay, make it next week…Tuesday, oh-nine-thirty, Stanstead. Charter desk,

JW: See you there mate.

DR: Great. Love to the wife and weans, [laughter]

JW: Likewise, to your mistresses and bastards.

DR: Well, thank you mate. Cheers,

JW: Slandge. [human voice ends]

We hit turbulence over the southern Urals. I was standing in the narrow corridor towards the tail, braced against the sides and looking straight out of the last window. As the aircraft dipped I got a clear view of the mountains. In the long shadows of dawn they looked remarkably like a papier-maché model of mountains. Not too far below, a regular series of small white clouds were simultaneously dispersing. Curious.

Another wing-dip, another moment of free-fall, then a rapid climb. A yell came from the tiny toilet.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ Reid shouted. ‘Just cut myself.’

‘What are you doing in there?’

‘Shaving.’

Ten, no, fifteen minutes earlier I’d seen him sand down his cheeks and chin with an electric razor, just before I’d recklessly given him precedence for the toilet. My bladder sent me a sharp note of protest. You may have had surgical microbots crawling around your plumbing, it told me, but there are limits…It was high time, I thought, for me to start practising the egoism I preached.

‘Shaving what? Your legs?’

‘The – backs – of – my – hands,’ said Reid. I could hear the clenched teeth. ‘Forgot the fucking rubber gloves, first time I used the scalp treatment.’

He came out with a sheepish grin on his face and shaving-foam on his cuffs. I didn’t stop to gloat. My flood of relief made the spittoon-sized aluminium toilet-bowl ring. Then I splashed cold water on my face, opened a few more buttons on my shirt and smeared deodorant awkwardly under each armpit, dried my beard, brushed my short-back-and-sides, rubbed a towel over my bald top and put on a tie. As I had to stoop or squat throughout, and the mirror would have been about adequate on a ladies’ pocket compact, the overall effect wasn’t easy to judge. I was still chuckling over the reason why Reid’s hair, though as grey as mine, was so long and thick.

Gene-fixing shampoo, indeed! What vanity, I thought, as I held the mouthwash for a minute to do its work, then spat it out and checked the gleam of my teeth.

North British Mutual had spawned a security agency, and Reid had been heavily involved in its management buy-out several years earlier. If this flight was anything to go by, the Mutual Assured Protection Company were doing well. The biznesman-jet they’d hired for this leg of the trip might be a little cramped, a little Spartan, but it did have its own stewardess, an Uzbek lass with a fixed smile and no English. Breakfast had been served by the time I returned to my seat: microwaved croissants and a coffee which, I guessed after the first sip, had also been microwaved. Neither was quite hot.

‘Microwaved, huh,’ Reid grumbled. ‘Waved in front of the radar for a bit, more likely.’

‘Might account for the turbulence,’ I said.

‘Turbulence?’ Reid snorted. ‘That was anti-aircraft fire, man.’

‘What!’ I turned in alarm to the window.

‘Don’t worry,’ Reid said. ‘Just bandits. They couldn’t hit a 777 at this height.’

Our bodyguard, Predestination Ndebele, nodded slowly. A lithe, wiry Zimbabwean, one of Reid’s employees.

‘You think this is bad,’ he said, ‘you try landing at Adnan.’

‘I’ll take your word for it, Dez.’

Reid looked up from his papers. ‘Last I heard,’ he said with a vague frown, ‘it was called Grivas.’

We flew for hours over a terrifyingly featureless plain, and then, in the middle of all that nowhere, descended to a full-sized international airport buzzing with military and civilian craft. In the far distance a clutter of launch silos and gantries; closer by, a town of low pre-fabs: Kapitsa, capital (and only) city of the International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic, aka the Number Three Test Area, in the wasteland somewhere between Karaganda and Semiplatinsk. Part of former Kazhakstan.

‘I have a suprise for you,’ Reid said as we waited for the transit bus.

‘What’s that?’

‘You’ll see.’

I looked at him and shrugged, huddled against the dust-dry wind and trying not to breathe too much. The levels were supposed to be safe by now, but I was already interpreting the effects of jet-lag as incipient radiation sickness.

The airport main building was like any such, a neon-lit space of seating and screens and PA systems, but the differences were striking. The duty-free wasn’t in a separate area, because there was no customs barrier. No passport control, either – just a cursory weapons registration and a walk through a scanner. The only thing anyone could smuggle in here that could make any difference was an actual atomic bomb, and they’re not easily hidden. No tourists: all the arrivals and departures were of serious-looking customers: men in suits or uniforms. Very few women, apart from among the airport workers, who all – even the cleaners, I noticed – moved about their tasks with an almost insolent lack of haste, under enormous posters of Trotsky, Koralev and Kapitsa. The men who gave the Soviets the Red Army, the rocket, and the Bomb and who all got varied doses of Stalin’s terror in return.

From every part of the concourse came an irritatingly frequent popping of flashbulbs. Photographers roamed the crowd, scanned faces hungrily, snapped officers and officials and company reps as eagerly as they would video stars. Their subjects responded in a similar manner. All over the place, poses were being struck by ugly, scowling men: shaking hands, bear-hugging, standing shoulder to shoulder and mugging like mad.

‘Where to now?’ I asked, as Ndebele and myself hesitated for a moment at the edge of the concourse. Reid glanced at me with a flicker of impatience.

‘This is it,’ he said. ‘This is where the deals get done. It’s gotta be public, that’s the whole point.’

He set off purposefully towards an open-plan Nicafé franchise. I hurried after him.

‘Hence the paparazzi?’

‘Of course. Stay cool,’ he added to Dez, who was glowering at anyone who looked at us.

We sipped our first decent coffee of the day around a table too low to be comfortable, as if designed to hasten the through flow of customers. On the television four pretty Southeast Asians in pink satin ballgowns sang raucously in English, thrashed instruments and leapt about the stage. The continuity caption gave their name: Katoi Boys.

‘Boys?’ Dez raised his eyebrows.

‘Thai refugees,’ I said. ‘My youngest granddaughter tells me they’re the latest pre-teen heart-throbs.’

‘Kinky, man,’ Dez said with severe Calvinist disapproval. ‘Decadent.’

‘Yeah, that’s what the Islamic Republic told them.’ Reid spoke idly, scanning the crowd. He stood up.

I turned. A tall, slender woman in an ankle-length fur coat was walking up to us, with a wide and welcoming smile. Photographers trotted behind her, at a respectful distance. I nearly fell back into my seat as I recognised her: Myra, my long-ago ex from the Soviet Studies Institute in Glasgow.

‘Well, hi guys,’ she said. She caught my hands and put her cheek to mine and whispered, ‘Smile, dammit!’ and I turned with an idiot grin to face the flash.

One of my earliest memories, oddly enough, concerns the Soviet Union, space, and the Bomb. (I don’t remember being born, but I’m assured that event took place on 5 March 1953, the day Stalin died. Make of that what you will.) I was playing on the carpeted floor of our house in Streatham, a suburb of the city of London. I was playing with a toy rocket. If you put your eye to the hole in the end you could see part of a picture of trees on the inner surface, because the toy had been made in Hong Kong from a recyled tin can. This wasn’t because of ecological concern, which at that time hadn’t been invented. It was because it was cheap.

My father, sitting at the breakfast table, peered at me over his copy of the Manchester Guardian.

‘The Russians have sent a rocket into space,’ he told me. ‘Way up in the sky, going right around the world.’ He traced a circle in the air with his forefinger.

I felt disturbed by this. The Russians were in my mind a vague, vast menace. They had done something unpleasant and unfair to a friend of my father’s, an old gentleman whose photograph was framed above the fireplace: Karl Marx. The Russians had distorted him. Whatever that was, it sounded painful.

I zoomed the toy rocket up and when it reached the limit of my arm’s reach, I turned it and brought it down, nose-first. Its shape, I noticed for the first time, was just like a bomb. I had once seen a bomb being craned cautiously out of a garden at the end of the road, in front of two policemen, a dozen soldiers and a fascinated crowd. It had been buried in the ground for ten years after the war between the British and the German capitalists.

‘Does that mean they can send bombs through space?’

My father had returned to his paper, perhaps disappointed by my preoccupied response to his exciting news, and now lowered it again and gave me a brightening look.

‘Yes!’ he said cheerfully. ‘That’s exactly what it means. Very clever, Jonathan. And now the Americans and everybody else will build rockets and put bombs on them.’

My mother frowned at him.

‘But it’s all right,’ my father hastened to add, as he stood up and shook out his napkin and folded his paper. ‘The workers won’t let them use the bombs. We’ll stop them, won’t we?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’ll stop them.’

I knew from playing with other boys in the street that my parents’ views were not widely held in Streatham, but I also knew that all around the world, even in far-away countries like Austria and New Zealand, there were people who agreed with them. Altogether there were hundreds and hundreds of them.

This mighty force would stop the bomb. I went back to playing happily with my rocket, and my father went whistling off to catch the train that carried the wage-slaves to work.

‘Reid told me he had a surprise,’ I babbled, ‘but I must say I’m knocked flat. How on earth did you end up here?’

Myra smirked. She looked well, and I could almost believe she hadn’t aged much in forty years, but that was just part of the same illusion that kept me from feeling old myself. You could see the papery texture of her skin, the crinkles in its still impressive tightness.

‘I came here in the ’nineties,’ she explained, ‘to do research, and then I just realised that these people needed help and that I enjoyed giving it. They still had a lot of bad shit from the tests, and they had one hell of a brain-drain as well. They needed any educated person they could get, and I was able to fix a lot of aid from US medical charities. Then I fell for an army officer, we got married, and luckily for us he was on the winning side of several civil wars and military coups and the re-revolution. So here I am, People’s Commissar for Social Policy.’ She waved a hand. ‘They let me sign treaties whenever I want, so I don’t feel like I’m stuck with the domestic issues.’ She laughed. ‘You know, women’s work!’

I shook my head. ‘So Reid’s become a capitalist, and you’ve become a bureaucrat – dammit, I’m the only one who’s still a revolutionary!’

‘I am not a bureaucrat,’ Myra said, with some hauteur. ‘I was elected, in a real election. We do have democracy, you know.’

Reid was taking documents from his briefcase and spreading them on the table. ‘Yes Myra, you sure won over your dashing young lieutenant. His faction has given a whole new meaning to the expression “deformed workers’ state”.’

‘Old joke,’ Myra said, but I could see she wasn’t annoyed. ‘I’ll tell you an older one. Soviet. “How do we know Marxism is a philosophy? Because if it was a science, they’d have tried it out first on dogs.”’

There was such withering proletarian contempt in her voice that we all had to laugh, and then Myra shot back: ‘Well comrades, these people were the dogs, and they’ve made something work. I wish you could stay for a few days and see it. Or even come and visit in October.’

‘Why October?’

‘Centenary celebrations,’ Myra said. ‘We’re planning a real impressive fireworks display.’

‘I’ll bet,’ Reid said dryly. ‘The biggest in the world, no doubt. Unfortunately, we have our own revolution to get back to.’

Myra sighed. ‘Business…You ready with those forms?’

‘Ready when you are.’

We signed, flashbulbs popped, and that was it. The world would know that I had the Bomb.

When the Soviet Union broke up, Kazakhstan had for a while found itself playing the unfamiliar role of a Great Power, because it had on its territory a number of nuclear weapons. When Kazakhstan broke up, one of its fragments had retained some (different, and better) nuclear weapons, with the additional difference that the International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic – initially nothing more than a division of the ex-Soviet Rocket Forces, a few thousand nuked-upon Kazakhs and a strip of steppe – had known what to do with them.

They exported nuclear deterrence. Not the weapons themselves – that, perish the thought, would have been illegal – but the salutary effect of possessing them. Our contract was pretty standard, and it simply gave us an option to call in a nuclear strike on anyone who used nuclear weapons against us, and who didn’t provide full compensation. Anyone who nuked us – even accidentally or incidentally – had to pay up or get nuked themselves.

The beauty of this arrangement was that any number of clients – the more the better – could have a claim on a relatively small number of nukes, an effect rather like fractional reserve banking. It also meant that anyone who wanted to tempt the ISTWR with a first-use deal would have had to offer more than the income from all the deterrent clients, and that would have cost far more than just building or stealing their own nukes. So the chances of the system being used for nuclear aggression were minute. Above all, for the first time, nuclear deterrence was available to anyone willing to pay for it, and the cost was reasonable enough for every homeland to have one.

Especially when the competion caught on: rogue submarine commanders, missile crews in Siberia and Alaska who wanted payment in real money for a change, groups of ambitious junior officers in Africa all started selling off shares in the family plutonium.

Another triumph for the free market.

Not everyone agreed.

‘When I saw the pictures,’ Annette raged, ‘of you with that anorexic floozy, I thought you’d run off with her! This is worse!’

Oh, no it ain’t, I thought, and I was right. We quarrelled, we argued, we got over it. This was just ideas, not bodies. I could be an actual instead of a potential mass murderer, and it would have hurt her less than me screwing somebody else.

Not that I ever said it. Some weapons are best kept in reserve.

11

Down Time

Wilde stood looking dubiously at the pack and the two sets of weapons that Tamara had laid out on the table. He lifted the pack and put it back down again.

‘What have you got in there?’ he said. ‘Nukes?’

Tamara looked up from a scanner, which she was using to download the latest maps of the Fifth Quarter to her contacts, and shook her head. ‘No nukes,’ she said firmly. ‘Discharging nuclear explosives within city limits is a serious offence.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Wilde. ‘So that’s us ready to go, then.’

‘More or less.’ Tamara folded away the scanner. ‘We need to be ready to go at any time, but that doesn’t mean we have to go now. Reid will book the hearing, and we’ll get at least thirteen hours’ notice.’

‘What about preparing our case?’ Wilde asked. ‘I don’t know anything about your laws here, let alone the specific code Talgarth operates.’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Tamara said. ‘Invisible Hand will take care of it. You can get someone to stand counsel if you want, but if you ask me you’re just as well letting Invisible Hand patch you a MacKenzie remote.’

‘A what?’

‘A software agent to advise you on points of law, when you’re representing yourself.’

‘Ah,’ said Wilde. ‘Progress.’

Tamara wandered over to the kitchen-range and began brewing up a large canteen of coffee.

‘Expecting company?’

‘Allies,’ Tamara said. ‘Invisible Hand is calling some in for me.’ She smiled mischievously at him. ‘None for you.’

‘Consider me one of yours,’ Wilde said. He looked about the room, searching. ‘Do you have any way of keeping up on the news?’

Tamara looked at him oddly. ‘Yeah, sure.’

She went over to a shelf and picked up a television screen and unrolled it and stuck it to the wall behind the table. The tall kettle was boiling. She turned to attend to it. Wilde looked at the screen, caught Tamara’s eye. He waved at the screen’s blank pewter surface.

‘Oh!’ Tamara tapped her temples with her hand. ‘Sorry. You don’t have contacts?’

‘Something the robot evidently neglected to tell me about,’ Wilde said.

Tamara told him about a good local stall where he could buy contacts, and how to get there. He wrote down her instructions, drew a sketch-map, checked it with her, and left. He returned about half an hour later, blinking and wide-eyed. ‘Wow,’ he kept saying. ‘Wow, fuck!’

Tamara’s allies turned up in ones and twos over the next hour; eventually, a dozen of them were filling the room, sitting on the table, checking weapons and drinking Tamara’s coffee. Most of them smoked and all of them had strongly held opinions on aspects of the case, as well an embarrassed, and embarrassing, interest in Wilde. The man from the dead! Wilde rapidly lost track of their names or interest in their obsessions, as he found himself backed into corners by a crowd of mostly skinny, mostly young, all heavily armed strangers telling him things he didn’t know about himself.

‘I’ve always thought your later works denouncing the conspiracy theory were forged by the conspiracy –’

‘No.’

‘– and Norlonto, right, that was an ideal community –’

‘No.’

‘– the basic idea of abolitionism, that machine intelligence has artificial rights, was based on the same premises as your space movement manifestos –’

‘No.’

‘They say this is all because Reid is screwing your woman –’

‘No.’

And so on.

And then everyone started and fell silent at the same moment, even Wilde who had by now got the hang of tuning his contacts to the television screen. The news, like most news on Ship City’s channels, was delivered by an excited child. (Wilde had already expressed his opinion that this was one of the most enlightened and appropriate uses of child labour he’d ever come across.)

‘News just in!’ said the blonde-curled bimbette on the Legal Affairs Channel. ‘Three sensational developments! David Reid sues abolitionist for return of his gynoid, Dee Model! And – he sues the long-dead anarchist and nuclear terrorist, Jonathan Wilde, on a related charge! Finally, Dee Model and another abolitionist call witness that they’ve killed the renowned artist, Anderson Parris! Hue-and-cry raised – bounties posted shortly!’

Pictures of those mentioned zoomed giddily onto the screen as she spoke, and the channel then split into sub-threads exploring the implications of each aspect, the biographies of the alleged participants and the eschatological significance of the return of Jonathan Wilde.

‘Nuclear terrorist?’ The man who spoke was called Ethan Miller. His appearance was older than most of those present, with lank black hair, skin the colour of the vile tobacco he smoked, and a face like a well-used hatchet. He wore nothing but leather trousers and a ragged TOE-shirt which he claimed was an original, though the Malley equations now had even more holes in their fabric than they’d ever made in reality. ‘You should sue them for that, man!’

‘No.’

Invisible Hand’s more sober declaration over-rode the news channel, instructing all parties in the case to appear at the Court of the Fifth Quarter by ten the following day.

‘Right!’ yelled Tamara above the hubbub. ‘You heard! Go go go!’

The deployment that followed was less frantic than Tamara’s efforts to organise it. Evidently the deadline for their appearance wasn’t expected to be hard to meet. People tooled up and strolled out, with Tamara, Wilde and Ethan Miller bringing up the rear. Tamara locked and armed the house – just to prevent any warrantless searches, she explained – and they all moved off towards the quay.

The sun was low in the sky, turning the city-centre towers into a tall tiara of gold and gems. On Circle Square’s central island, stall-holders were packing up, while the first roadies for the evening’s bands were rigging up sound-systems. The early-evening air was thick with the smells of cooking-oil and engine-oil and the sweet reek of cannabis. Around tables and outdoor bars, late departures or early arrivals watched the quiet-speaking, marching group with shadowed apprehension and hand-hidden comments among which the occasional encouraging smile gleamed like a flashed weapon.

‘What’ll happen to Dee and Ax,’ Wilde asked, ‘if they’re caught?’

Tamara grunted. ‘Depends how outraged whoever catches them is,’ she said. ‘Likely they’ll just be pulled in and charged, by whoever is claiming the damage. I guess this Anderson Parris would’ve had a pretty price on his head.’

‘Yeah, well…’ Wilde said. ‘I can relate to all that. But what gets done to them, like punishment?’

‘Punishment?’ Tamara sounded puzzled. ‘Oh, you mean penalties. Depends, again. Killing somebody can be quite serious, you know.’

‘Yes,’ said Wilde dryly. ‘So what does the penalty depend on?’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Tamara. ‘Shit, at least they’ve called witness to it. That counts for a lot, not trying to hide it…apart from that, it depends on the victim’s losses, right? Emotional distress, loss of life-experience, earnings, loss of society for those close to them – add all that up and multiply it by the down time.’

‘Ah,’ said Wilde. ‘Down time. I think I might understand what you’re saying a lot better if you explain to me exactly what down time is.’

They had reached the quay where Tamara’s dinghy bobbed. The others had piled into their own boats, a flotilla of skiffs and outboards and inflatables. Tamara descended to her boat, Ethan Miller passed down her kit, and she helped Wilde on board. He sat down where she told him, by the side.

‘Down time,’ Tamara explained, as she cast off and eased the engine into a gentle start, ‘is the time between gettin’ killed and coming back. Backups cost, see, and growing clones can take fucking months, ’specially if you want a good one, no cancers or shit. So like, if you’re just ordinary, like me say, you’ll have back-ups every year or so, and you’ll have a fast-clone policy. If you’re real rich, like this Parris bloke, you’ll take ’em weekly. But then, you have a slow clone, and your losses mount up faster ’cause of your earnings being higher. So it sort of balances out, but it’s still cheaper to kill poor folks.’

She smiled at him and gunned the engine. ‘Ain’t class society a bitch.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Wilde, noncommittally. ‘And what if somebody doesn’t have a back-up? What if they stay dead?’

‘Everybody has back-ups,’ Tamara said, amazed at his ignorance. ‘Nobody stays dead. Jesus.’

She concentrated on steering the boat in the reckless wake of their companions’, and missed Wilde’s look of sudden pain. Only the boat’s ’bot saw it, and it could only record, and not understand.

The low sun, reddened by desert dust, is in Dee’s eyes. She shades them with her hood, tugs the cloak closer about her. As her sight adjusts, a millimetre out of the direct glare, she can see the jagged black edge of the Madreporite Mountains far to the west, at the end of the Stone Canal’s shining slash. She’s sitting, hugging her knees, the skirt’s bunched lace prickly on the skin of her arms. Ax is also sitting, leaning against her back. They’re in a sort of eyrie, a functionless hollow in the side of a tower pitted by many such. The holes are connected by likewise inexplicable tunnels, which at least provide ventilation for the longer and much wider corridors within. The great spongy spike has been colonised over decades by businesses and settlers. What, if anything, it was originally designed for was almost certainly not human occupation, but humans are nothing if not ingenious and adaptable animals. Dee knows about this trait. She finds it admirable, though – she now realises – she can’t quite take pride in it. They’re not her species.

That humans are not her species is a conclusion she has come to only this afternoon. It’s a little disappointing, since she’s only felt like a human being for a couple of days, and she has every intention of keeping it to herself, especially if the question of her human status becomes a matter of learned dispute. But it’s the only way she can explain to herself how little she minds killing them.

Even given that they’ll come back – minds out of slow-running computer storage, bodies out of vats – being killed must cause them a lot of distress and inconvenience. (This is different from the dead, Scientist pedantically reminds her – different storage, different retrieval, different problem. Yeah, yeah, she tells it, and as that self is off-lined again Dee has a fleeting thought about Annette, the woman whose genotype she now knows she shares. She thinks of her among the dead, she thinks about codes and stores, and for another moment Sys flashes up some tenuous connection, but it’s gone…She’s just got too much on her mind right now.)

The distress and inconvenience caused is, for Ax, the whole point. He’s taking great delight in knocking off anyone who ever ripped him off, exploited him financially or spiritually or sexually. He chortles as they fall, to Dee’s bullets or his. Three so far, and more to go. Dee just doesn’t give a shit, basically. She knows she’s capable of emotion, of empathy, even of ethics – they’re right there, burned into the circuits of most of her selves – but they don’t seem to apply to people like Parris, or that woman Ax skewered in a cellar two hours ago, or the man she shot in a doorway. Perhaps they’re only meant to apply to one’s own species, in which case they’re not her species.

It now occurs to her, as she squints into the sun and watches out for bounty-hunters, for signs of hue-and-cry, that there is another explanation. Perhaps she’s human, all right, and her victims are not. Perhaps what they all have in common is a parasitic mimicry of humanity, which she can see through. One of her Story threads, which she plays on nights when she wants to give herself stronger fare than her usual historical romance, is about vampires. She wonders if the ostensibly human species – or hominid genera – are divided between real people and some hollow mockery of people, beings like vampires, who live on the lives of others. Killing them might be quite different from killing real people, who only live on the lives of plants and animals and machines.

An interesting thought.

She hears Ax’s long, lung-emptying sigh. She braces her back for the expected thud of the pistol and thump of the recoil. They shake her body a second later.

‘Got him!’ says Ax.

Dee doesn’t need to look around. The exit-ramp their eyrie overlooks is five metres down and about twenty metres away, and she can picture the sprawled body of the banker lying there. She can also picture the faces and lenses turning in their direction in the next couple of seconds…

But they’ve already rolled, Ax and Dee, down the slope of the hollow and out of immediate sight. A metre-wide hole in the synthetic rock leads to a curving chute, which they patiently climbed up about half an hour ago. The glassy smoothness which made the ascent difficult makes the descent easy. Dee goes first, feet-first, wrapped in her cloak. The drop at the end is awkward; her lumbar ligaments strain, her heels jar – another task for the Surgeon sub-routines. She turns and holds up her hands and catches Ax as he hurtles out.

The corridor they’re standing in has the usual quasi-organic rounded-off corners in its rectangular cross-section, and curves smoothly around to the left and right. The glowing mother-of-pearl surfaces are pocked with holes, studded with chitinous lenses and membranes – and, hacked crudely in, mikes and cameras, office windows and doors. Already alarms are echoing along the corridor, and rippling along the wires. Soldier and Spy, time-sharing Dee’s senses and transmitters, hack and ping. Some of the alarm-signals are disrupted.

But not all. With a silent conference of glances, Dee and Ax turn and race to the left. They head for the lift which they used to ascend from street-level. Doors open down the corridor in front of them, alarms shrill again. A security guard in a black uniform steps out and raises a hand. He’s just in sight around the curve of the corridor. Dee skids to a stop and catches Ax’s arm.

‘Back!’ she gasps.

They turn and run back. The guard’s footsteps echo behind them. Dee notices, out of the corner of her eye, a movement behind a thin area of the wall – not a window, but internal to the building. She runs on for a few metres and then stops and turns. The guard is just coming into view. She aims carefully at the thin patch and shoots at it. It shatters like glass and a blue, bubbling liquid floods out, slicking the floor. The guard slips on it and tumbles, then jumps up and begins tearing off his uniform and yelling for help. Dee can sense a barrier up ahead, thick and resilient – perhaps a cordon of guards; she can’t be sure at this distance.

Close by there’s an elliptical hole in the wall. Somebody has scrawled above it ‘FIRE EXIT?!’ Dee looks at it, looks at Ax, raises her eyebrows. Ax nods.

Dee peers in. It’s a dark chute, sloping sharply down and turning out of sight. She steps in, lies down on her cloak, and lets go of the top edge of the hole.

She instantly finds herself plunged downwards and whirled around what feels like an almost vertical spiral drop. ‘AAAAAHHHHH!’ she observes. Her scream is quite involuntary, but it comes too late to discourage Ax, who’s followed her a scant second later. His heels are perilously close to her hooded head. She hunches forward, only to see the drop as even more terrifying. Her ankles are crossed, her hands are clasping the cloak in front of her thighs. It’s all she can do not to curl up into a ball. The walls of the tube are in places transparent – at some moments she sees, or thinks she sees, over the city’s roofs, at others she glimpses the interiors of rooms, with the startled faces of their occupants looking straight back at her for fractions of a second. She can smell the fabric of the cloak beginning to scorch.

Her other senses are utterly confused. She retreats to the detached perspective of Sys, which is already running the first steps of the bale-out routine, getting ready for somatic systems failure. Dee has a brief, chilling image of her computer detaching itself from the remains of her animal brain and crawling out of the bloody wreckage of her skull.

Then she’s sliding along more slowly, in an open space. Light shines on her closed eyelids. She opens them and finds herself still whizzing along, but decelerating…she braces her shoulders and, right on Newtonian cue, Ax’s heels cannon into them. Daylight and open air, and people yelling.

Dee sprawls and stops. Everything is still spinning. She sits up and looks around. Ax is a few metres away, eyes still shut, mouth open. They’re at the bottom of a gentle slope of black, vitrified material at the foot of the tower, in a plaza. Among benches and fountains and the entrances to other buildings, people are staring at her.

Just to the right of her right hand, a centimetre-wide hole appears in the black glass. Cracks radiate out from it. At the same time, she hears a soft pock.

Another hole, closer.

‘She-it!’

Dee leaps up, staggers forward and grabs Ax by the ankle and drags him across the lip of the slope. He falls half a metre with a bump. He cries out and opens his eyes. Dee looks up the face of the tower, sees dark figures darting on balconies high above. She fires a couple of shots upwards, on general principle, then hauls Ax to his feet.

‘Run!’

They’re both still so dizzy that dodging and weaving, and falling and rolling, come quite naturally. Within a second or two they’re among the now screaming pedestrians in the plaza, though not yet out of the cone of fire from the tower-top.

Things are still going around and around. Ax is slamming into people, but continuing a pinball progress across the plaza. Dee fights her spinning senses into stability and sprints straight for an entrance-way that has an overhang. She reaches its welcome shadow and looks back. Ax, to her utter horror, has got into a fight. Three girls in secretarial gear are swiping at his head and kicking at his shins, while he butts at their midriffs and stamps at their feet and pummels their thighs.

Dee dives out of cover with a banshee howl and grabs a fistful of long blonde hair. She yanks the girl’s head back, reaches into the melée with her other hand and drags Ax by the collar until he’s behind her. Then with a sweep of both arms she shoves the girls together into a heap and catches up with Ax, who has very wisely chosen to run for the same overhang.

She stares down at Ax’s flushed dark face.

‘Run!’ she says.

‘Where?’

‘After me!’

Maps are dancing in front of her eyes. Soldier pages through the head-up and marks a route, hallucinating signposts in front of her. She runs along the steps of the building, around a corner, through a car-park, and over a railing into a noisome alleyway. Puddles splash underfoot. Ax pants along behind her.

The virtual arrowheads are pointing at a door in the wall. Dee rattles its knob. Locked. She fumbles her pistol out but Ax stays her hand. He grins at her and spins on the ball of one foot, kicking hard at the door with the other. It bangs open, showing a flight of steps. The map’s arrows glow on the steps like the footprints left by some gigantic radioactive bird coming the other way. Dee glances to left and right. At the car-park end, a head dodges swiftly back.

Dee fires a shot at the corner the head has gone behind, hopeful that a flying splinter or two might discourage further peeping, and goes down the steps. Ax treads on her trailing cloak a couple of times. She tugs it up indignantly.

At the foot of twenty-five concrete steps they emerge into a huge basement area with just enough clearance for Dee’s head. Dim-lit by organic noctilucence, it resembles an underground car-park, although there aren’t enough vehicles in this area to justify such a use. Instead it’s heaped with old machinery, coils of piping, and – to Dee’s amazement – obvious modular components of spacecraft. She knows that the city’s towers were partly grown from parts of the original Ship, but this confirmation is almost shocking. It’s like she’s arrived at the very pit of her world. From here, there’s no way down.

She hears movement at the top of the steps, and turns and sends another bullet back. It spangs and ricochets in the stairwell, most satisfactorily. Then she runs. Her instincts, and the guidance arrows, are leading her in the same direction: across the basement, towards the smell of water.

They can’t run in a straight line. Their flight weaves in and out between crates and hunks of hardware whose space-junk-pitted sides are stencilled with warnings and instructions and markings – Dee notices ‘Space Merchants, Karaganda’ and ‘Project Jove’ and part of her mind has time to marvel at these antiquities. Behind her and Ax, among echoes of sound and the screech of electromagnetic interference, she detects pursuit. More than one person, moving with swift deliberation.

There’s a line of light ahead at floor-level. The arrows that her guidance software is patching to her sight end there, flashing. (Like she wouldn’t notice.) As she runs up she pings the control-systems of a wide, metal roll-up door. With much grinding and squeaking it begins to move up. After it’s risen thirty centimetres, it stops. Dee bounces more short-range radar off it, to no avail.

The bead of a laser-sight appears on it. Dee drops, tripping Ax so he tumbles to a landing that’s soft for him, though not for her. She rolls from under him, half-sits, and shoots back along the clearest avenue, towards some detected motion. Hastily she jams another clip in her pistol, and fires again. A flash replies and a bullet whizzes above her nose. She empties the clip with a random spray. The pursuer dodges behind a crate and Dee rolls again and crawls for the gap under the door. It’s too low for her.

‘Go ahead!’ she hisses to Ax. He needs no urging. He rolls under the door and leaps sideways.

She hears him yell: ‘No!’ and then fall silent. A pair of mechanical feet appear at the gap, striding to the middle of the door. Metal claws reach under the door and lift. The door rolls and ravels upward like a slatted blind. Whatever is lifting the door lowers its body at the same time, between its legs. A line of dust-particles flares above her head as an industrial-strength laser beam stabs into the darkness of the basement.

Hopeless now, Dee ejects the empty clip, and inserts another that she’s scrabbled out of her handbag. She’s definitely running low. She turns to face her new antagonist. It’s a squat, squatting robot. Its laser, protruding between its upper and lower shells, moves and ranges and fires again. There’s a yell from behind her, far too close.

‘I think I’ve blinded the bounty-hunters,’ the robot says. ‘But I think you should get out.’

Dee stares at it for a moment, and then recognises it as the robot that accompanied Wilde the previous night.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says ungraciously, and scrambles out. The robot lets the door fall with a rattling crash and, for good measure, fuses the locking-mechanism with a close-up blast. They are standing on a quay at the back and bottom of the building, overlooking a fifty-metre-wide canal between the backs of other buildings. The canal is empty except for a few long, automatic barges going about their oblivious business in a world little more demanding than the toy realities of the first AI experiments. There may have been light under the door, but that was just the contrast; it’s dim down here, as it probably is even at brighter times than twilight. Ax is standing hesitantly a little distance away, keeping a suspicious eye on the robot. His clothes are torn; where the robot grabbed him, Dee guesses.

‘We’re OK,’ she tells him. ‘I think.’

‘I certainly mean you no harm,’ says the robot. ‘I have no intention of turning you in, as I think my actions have shown.’ It waves a limb, indicating a streamlined boat with a powerful outboard engine and, most welcome of all, a small but concealing cabin.

‘Come with me,’ it says. ‘We have much to do.’

‘Yeah,’ says Ax. He tucks his gun away inside his now ragged shirt. ‘Will you just look at the state of her clothes.’

As the boats of the litigant alliance moved away from the main canal-system and out of the human quarter into the sandflats and marshes, Tamara’s boat shifted towards the front. By the time they were no longer in recognisable canals but in reed-banked streams and barely navigable ditches, she took the lead. Somewhere far in towards the centre of the city, a hovercraft roared across the flats, sending birds scrambling skyward for kilometres around. A vee-line of geese flew overhead, golden dots in the deep-blue sky.

‘The things I see when I don’t have a shotgun,’ Tamara sighed.

Wilde slapped at insects. ‘Why the fuck,’ he demanded, ‘did we have to bring fucking midges across interstellar space?’

‘Ecology,’ Tamara said, with a trace of smugness. She passed him a tube of insect-repellent. Wilde rubbed it on and spent the next few minutes gloating as the tiny black devils landed on his skin and then dropped off dead, straight to whatever hell awaited their evil, two-byte souls. He expounded this unorthodox theological point to Tamara at some length, making her laugh and relax.

She told him about her occupation of hunting for biomechanisms, and her political activity in the abolitionist movement. Apart from pressing her for details of the banking system and the abolitionists’ actual forms of organisation, and their social objectives, he was not a bad listener. Then he lay back in the prow of the boat and flicked through Eon Talgarth’s notes about Jonathan Wilde. Sometimes he scowled, more often he laughed out loud. Ethan and Tamara urged him to tell them what was funny, and he now and again did. After a time he fell silent, and sat and looked at the early pages of the file, and at the end, and then the beginning again. At last he stowed it in Tamara’s pack, and sat looking away from the others, out over the damp desert, which in the sunset lay ruddy like a field of blood.

Ship City is in the tropics of New Mars. Darkness came within minutes of the sun’s disappearance behind the horizon. Wilde smiled at Tamara and Ethan, and lit a cigarette.

‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘being able to see in the dark.’ He looked around again. ‘Shit! I can’t!’

‘Shield the cigarette,’ Ethan told him. ‘It’s blinding you.’

‘Damn’ near blinding me,’ Tamara said. ‘No, no, just cup your hands around it, that’s OK.’

Wilde did as he was asked, and shortly threw the butt into the water and gazed up at the stars. With the lights of the human quarter behind them and the less ordered lighting and unpredictable random flares of the Fifth Quarter not far ahead, they were less overpowering than on his first sight of them the previous night, but impressive nonetheless. He gasped at a bolide’s whispering flight, blinked at the flash it made behind the western horizon.

‘The robot called something like that a “waterfall”,’ he said to Ethan. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Cometary ice,’ Ethan explained laconically. ‘Feeds the canals.’

‘It’s a kinda slow terraforming,’ Tamara added. ‘Planet’s habitable, sure, but we want more water and a thicker atmosphere. Take us a couple more centuries, like, but by then it’ll be as green as Earth ever was.’ She paused, as though she’d got a little carried away. ‘Least, that’s what Reid says.’

‘I wonder,’ Wilde murmured, ‘how green Earth is now. Whatever “now” means.’

‘Ah,’ said Ethan promptly. ‘I can tell you that.’ He made a show of looking at his watch. Tamara and Wilde laughed, so loudly that heads turned in the single file of boats strung out behind them in the narrow waterway.

‘Nah, nah,’ Ethan went on. ‘Serious. “Now” is two times. Absolute, if there is such a thing: fuck knows. This way: if’n you got a signal from the Solar system, it would’ve been a long time on the way. Thousands a years, millions, fuck knows. But if you went back through the Malley Mile, that’s the daughter-wormhole gate, right, you’d be right back at 2094 anno domini plus Ship-time. Six point four gigasecs, lemme see…uh, twenty-three-nineties, early twenty-four hundreds, maybe. So now is the twenty-fifth century, outside.’

‘The twenty-fifth century!’ Wilde laughed. ‘Yes, Earth might be Green all right! Or even Red!’

They didn’t get it, and he didn’t explain. He frowned at Ethan Miller.

‘Why “daughter wormhole”?’ he said.

Ethan shrugged. ‘It’s what me old man calls it. He went through, and not as a fucking robot upload, either. He was crew, not crim.’ He pounded his chest. ‘Human all the way back, that’s me.’

‘Carbon chauvinist,’ Tamara chided.

Wilde leaned forward, thoughtlessly lighting another cigarette. ‘Go on.’

‘Well,’ Ethan said, waving a hand at the sky, ‘the wormhole we came through was a spin-off.’ He planed his hand sideways. ‘The main probe, the one the fast folk built before their minds burned out, it went right on. Draggin’ its end of the wormhole to…wherever. Must’ve got there by now.’ He laughed harshly. ‘Whatever “now” means, like you said.’

Wilde sat back, drawing on his cigarette so hard that his cupped hands couldn’t hide the glare.

‘The end of time,’ he said.

He thought for a few moments longer.

‘Oh, hell,’ he said.

‘What’s the problem?’ asked Tamara. She throttled back the engine and the boat coasted towards a spit.

‘Time,’ said Wilde. ‘As in, we don’t have much.’

‘Well,’ Tamara said as the boat grounded, ‘we’re at the Fifth Quarter. Let’s get a move on.’

12

Near Death Experience

Annette had the tubes in her right arm, I in my left. Her left hand reached out and caught my right.

‘Scared?’ I asked.

‘A bit.’

‘Me too.’ I squeezed back.

The township hall was packed with mature people, older people, people like us; on our backs on trolley-beds looking up at the roof-panels. Green-tinged daylight, green-smocked technicians, everything slow: an underwater feel. Big machines connected to the tubes infiltrated tiny machines into our blood. Not nanotech, not full cell-repair, not yet; but it gave us a chance of living until that came along. In the seven decades we’d been alive, our life-expectancies had already extended by at least another four. We felt better than we had at fifty. We looked – well, the early anti-ageing treatments made your skin tougher as well as tauter, so we looked a bit sundried, a bit smoked.

This treatment was different. We hadn’t had it before, though I’d had a microbot injection to deal with a worrying prostate enlargement some years earlier. Now, the microbots had expanded their capabilities, and by one of those trade-offs characteristic of the Republic, the state Health Service was offering these capabilities to citizens in exchange for their state pension rights. The deal was more political than economic, but it had a certain elegant symmetry: swap retirement for longevity and a degree of rejuvenation, and you can work till you drop.

It would never have passed under the old laws. It was risky. One or two in a thousand died under it, though whether they died of it was another matter. It was a heart problem, hard to predict. If you had it, it would get you anyway, soon. So the health companies and the Health Service said.

A technician walked up between our beds, gently parted our hands.

‘Ready?’ she said.

‘Yup,’ said Annette.

‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ I said. I attempted a grin. ‘Who wants to live for ever?’

‘Well, I know you do, Citizen Wilde. Good luck.’

Here comes nothing, I thought.

She pressed a switch, sending a short-range radio signal to the microbots in my blood and in Annette’s.

I felt my heart stop. It had to. The microbots needed a steady platform for fast work around the vagus nerve, and to give them a chance to shove neural growth factors and cloned foetal nerve-cells across the blood-brain barrier.

Colour faded out, then light. Consciousness went down completely, as in sleep. My heart re-booted with a painful power surge and consciousness came back up, crashed, restored from memory and came up again. I raised my head weakly and looked at Annette, who opened her eyes and stared at me and smiled.

‘We made it,’ she said.

‘We’ll make it,’ I said. ‘We’ll make it to the ships.’

I tried to sit up.

‘If you don’t stay where you are for another half hour,’ the technician admonished, ‘you’ll not make it to the door.’

Out, into the Greenbelt street, under the greenhouse sky. We made our way through the usual Pro-Life picket, who kept yelling ‘Murderers!’ at us from behind a line of armed Republican Guards. It was the foetal tissue – cloned from our own cells – that we’d allegedly murdered, according to the leaflet from the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child that some poor addled soul shoved in my face.

‘SPUC off!’ I called back. ‘You can go to hell! We aren’t even going to die!’

‘Do you wish to make a complaint, citizen?’ the nearest Guard asked me, not turning round.

‘It’s OK officer,’ Annette said, grabbing my elbow and pulling me along. ‘Free speech…and you shut up!’ she added to me.

‘OK, OK.’ I walked quickly, shaking inside. Nothing – not Communists, not fascists, not authoritarians of any stripe – ever aroused in me the same homicidal rage as the Pro-Lifers. Whenever I came across them exercising their rights, I made damned sure I exercised my own.

I’d got used to living here, in what was officially called ‘the informal sector’: London’s shanty-town fringe, where the Republic’s experiments in local government overlay an experiment in anarcho-capitalism that made the space movement’s enterprise zones look over-regulated. The second, third, and subsequent storeys of most buildings were afterthoughts. Organic farming made the absence of sewage pipes something less than a disaster, but it didn’t make the night-soil tankers any less smelly. The exhaust fumes did. The population was a mixture of the native marginals and refugees from Europe’s and Asia’s wars. Not many beggars, but they were distressing enough: people whose protectors had skimped on their nuclear insurance policies.

Like I say, I was used to it, but at that moment – an after-effect of the clinic, or the picket – it all got too much.

‘I feel terrible,’ I said. ‘My head hurts, and my stomach feels like it’s been pumped.’

‘Oh, quit moaning,’ Annette said. ‘It’s no worse than a hangover.’

‘What a happy thought,’ I said. There was a pub on the pavement in front of us. ‘Half a litre of Amstel would just about hit the spot.’

Annette waved a Health Service handout in front of me. ‘It says here –’

‘Yes, I know what it says. Do I look like I’m about to be handling weapons or heavy machinery?’

‘I suppose not.’ She grinned and lowered herself into a plastic chair, perilously close to the gutter. ‘Pils for me. And those kebabs look good.’

I shouted the order to the garson, who disappeared through a hatch and re-emerged a minute later. There was the usual poster of Abdullah Ocalan above the hatch. I could never figure why even the exiles from Democratic Kurdistan – entrepreneurs to the bone – still honoured the Great Leader. Possibly a shakedown was going on in the townships. I made a mental note to have it checked out. There might be money in this for a defence company that could offer them a better deal than their Party’s protection racket. Or I might be misreading the situation entirely – nationalism was still as foreign to me as ever.

The crowd, Kurds and Turks mostly, flowed around the pavement pub. Behind us beasts and vehicles followed some unwritten highway code, in which precedence depended on a coefficient of momentum and noise. A television by the hatch showed a game-show from Istanbul. Overhead, airships drifted to the distant masts of Alexandra Port. I sat back, warmed by the sun and the spreading glow of the food and drink.

‘Did you dream?’ Annette asked.

I shook my head. ‘Did you?’

‘I thought I did,’ Annette said, smiling mysteriously. ‘I heard a warm, friendly voice and I saw a white light, and I remember thinking, “Great! I’m finally having a Near Death Experience!” and then the light was just sunlight, and the voice was the technician, counting.’

‘That’s the real thing,’ I said. ‘The sunlight really is the white light.’ This materialist insight was all that survived of a magic-mushroom trip I’d taken as a student. That and a vision of three goddesses: Mother Nature, Lady Luck and Miss Liberty, who were – I realised after coming down from it – necessity, chance and freedom, and indeed the rulers of all.

‘Imagine,’ Annette said, ‘if that’s the nearest we ever come to dying.’

‘Touch plastic!’ I rapped the table. We laughed, clasped hands across the table. I gazed at her face, aged but not deteriorated, its lines a map of her life’s laughter and grief, and I felt I could love her for ever.

‘“Till all the seas gang dry, my dear, and the rocks melt wi’ the sun…”’

‘Oh, stop it before I report you for senility.’

The traffic and the noise stopped. I looked over at the slowing cars, and thought everyone was looking at us. Turning the other way, I saw they were looking at the television. The commentary, and the loud conversations that suddenly replaced the hush, were all in Turkish and Kurdish. But the televion image needed no translation: a German tank, and a Polish road-sign.

Berlin – twenty-first century, pre-war Berlin, Old Berlin – was the most exciting city in Europe. The post-reunification construction boom was over by then but the intensity of business and pleasure didn’t miss a beat. Everybody who was anybody was either there or in London. In a sense the two capitals were moving in opposite directions, one recovering its national self-confidence, the other climbing down from its imperial pretensions. One, as it turned out, rearming, the other disarming…

Right now there was only one person I cared about in Berlin: Eleanor, there with her partner on a long weekend.

‘What do you do in a war, Jonathan?’

Eleanor’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Tanya, sounded more curious than anxious. It was one of those emergency family gatherings around telephones and televisions that went on all over the country in the first few hours of the conflict. Ours was in Eleanor’s front room in Finsbury Park. Her absence was ever-present. Many of our friends, and other relatives, were also in Berlin. People were calling them up on all possible channels. I had a paging programme pursuing Eleanor, and was trying to pull together an executive meeting at the same time, partly to keep my mind off her. Communications, not to my surprise, were slow.

What do you do in a war? With four generations of anti-militarists behind her, you’d think the kid would know.

‘You oppose it,’ I said. It didn’t seem a very enlightening answer. I set up the codes for yet another attempt at a conference link.

Angela, Eleanor’s eldest, laughed. ‘You’re incorrigible.’ She was passing out cups of coffee and tea. Good girl. She knew what do do in a war.

‘My grandparents were conscientious objectors in the First World War, and my parents in the Second, and I’m damned if I’ll miss the chance to do the same in the Third.’ The server wasn’t responding. I sighed and punched through a re-route command.

‘Yeah,’ Annette said, leaning back against my shins. ‘A conscientious objector with nuclear capability.’

‘Nuclear cover,’ I corrected. ‘Anyway, it won’t come to that. The Germans don’t have nukes.’

‘So they say.’

Annette was flipping channels, getting CNN downlink from the Polish front, WDR vox-pop from Berlin, Channel 4 News from the regional assemblies and the State and Federal Parliaments of Britain. With their hovercraft tank-transporters the German advance was the fastest ever seen. They used up combat drones like Khomeini and Mao used men. We weren’t in the war – yet. There were plenty in the opposition parties who wanted us to be. Lord Ashdown’s face popped up far too often for my liking.

‘No, so the FIS says, and they should bloody know, it’s their skins that’ll fry if – ah!’

I had a connection. An 0.1 scale image of a table with the others around it flashed up behind the screen on my lap. Of the committee at the time of the election, only Julie O’Brien and I remained. The rest were new faces. Almost a decade of social and political upheaval – the revolution, as everybody now called it – had winnowed the space movement’s libertarian cadre, most of whom were organised in FreeSpace. Some of the best had followed Aaronson and Rutherford to Woomera, where the British and Australian Republics ran their joint space programme. Others had defected to conventional politics, usually Republican but occasionally to wilder shores, even to the resurgent Trotskyism of the Workers’ Power Party or the proliferating single-issue campaigns. I was left with hardliners – young Turks (ha!) who saw me as a dangerous moderate.

‘OK, comrades,’ I said. ‘Anyone who’s paying full attention to this meeting had better switch their telly on right now, because we need to keep at least half an eye on it. No doubt the wider space movement’s going to be all over the place on the war, and that’s as it should be, but we in FreeSpace have a responsibility to take a stand – in the name of freedom if not of space. I have every sympathy with the Germans – they couldn’t be expected to take refugees, fallout and terrorism forever. It’s rather gratifying to see the Poles get a bloody nose, especially after the way they’ve been treating their minorities. Nevertheless. I say it’s an imperialist war, we oppose all sides and we do our damnedest to keep Britain out of it.’

The seriousness of my statement was somewhat undermined by Tanya’s eye-rolling observation of it. I went on peace marches for the likes of you, I felt like telling her. (And with Eleanor, a cry from inside me added.) Annette’s grip on my hand was tight, as if she might slip away. I stroked her shoulders, below the virtual image, and glared at the comrades.

‘I’m afraid I don’t agree with comrade Wilde,’ said Mike Davies, a black Liverpudlian in his twenties whose views I occasionally respected. ‘What he’s just said is exactly what the government’s saying, like, and if you ask me it’s the kind of TwenCen liberal pacifism that has got us into this mess in the first place. If Britain hadn’t ditched its responsibilities on the Continent, the Germans wouldn’t have had to take them on. As it is, the best we can hope for is that the Americans will bail us out again.’

‘What is this shit?’ Julie said. ‘Responsibilities? Well, thank you comrade, but I’ll take no responsibility for the bloody British state. Liberal pacifism – when did that become a dirty word? I’m a libertarian internationalist and proud of it. War is the state’s killer app. I’ll take a liberal pacifist over a libertarian militarist any day. Neutrality, non-intervention, and preparation for self-defence – that’s what we should be pushing, not trying to work out whether we should back the Germans or call for the bloody Yanks to come charging in. Which you –’ she added, turning to stab a phantom finger at Davies, ‘have evidently not even made up your own mind about!’

In another corner of the screen a light flickered urgently. Eleanor had got through!

‘If that was a motion,’ I said drily, ‘I’ll second it. Meanwhile, comrades, I beg your leave for a few minutes.’ I nodded to them solemnly, turned the sound down and flipped to the phone channel.

Eleanor’s face appeared and I patched it to the main television. A joyful babble filled the room and then fell silent as Eleanor spoke.

‘Hi folks,’ she said. ‘Sorry to have got you all so worried. I couldn’t get through on my handset, and there’s a queue of about fifty behind me for the hotel phone. Can’t stay long. Are you all OK?’

‘We’re all fine,’ Annette said. Eleanor’s partner leaned briefly into view, smiled and waved. ‘Oh, hello Colin,’ Annette went on. ‘When are you coming back?’

Eleanor frowned. Colin, behind her, was restraining the impatience of the next in line. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘The airport’s closed for now. They say flights’ll resume tomorrow, but there’ll be chaos out there. We might as well sit it out until the operation’s over.’

‘The operation?’ I squawked. ‘I don’t know what they’re telling you over there, but from here it looks like the beginning of the big one. The Yanks are very cross indeed, the Russians are sounding nervous, and some of the little republics the Europawehr’s bearing down on are fingering their nukes. Get the hell out as soon as you can. Get to the airport right now. If people around you are complacent, that’s their problem, and your opportunity.’

Eleanor was about to reply when the picture dissolved and a was replaced by an apologetic-looking man in a suit that said ‘Hotel Manager’ as plainly as a name-badge. ‘I’m sorry sir, we can’t permit this conversation to continue.’ The connection broke, to yells of indignation at our end.

Tanya turned on me. ‘Why did you have to shoot your mouth off? We didn’t even get to speak to her!’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I really am. But I don’t think anybody over there realises how serious it is. Maybe finding that their phone-calls are being monitored will –’

‘It won’t,’ said Annette. ‘You should know that. All that Eleanor will have seen is the screen going fuzzy.’

After some more recriminations, eventually calmed by Annette, I stalked out with my comms rig and sat down on a bed. Through the open window I could hear doleful singing from one of the many fundamentalist and charismatic churches that had in recent years congregated in the area. I wondered if my own activities were any less futile. Then the strength of my scepticism returned to me. I punched through.

At the meeting there was only a debate going between those who wanted to push for: British involvement; American involvement; neutrality; and – coming up on the outside – using the war as an opportune moment to launch a libertarian insurrection.

I could handle that.

The phone was ringing. I woke up and waved the light on. The clock said 03.38 and the little red bulb on the phone winked: an encrypted call. I picked it up and thumbed the switch. Myra’s face appeared on the display, black-and-white in a military cap and uniform. She looked as if she’d been up all night.

‘Oh,’ I said, ungraciously, stupid and irritable with sleep and disappointment. ‘It’s you.’ I’d hoped it was Eleanor.

‘Hello, Jon,’ Myra said. ‘Sorry to disturb you, but it’s –’

‘Who’s that?’ Annette struggled awake.

‘It’s Myra,’ I said. ‘Business.’

Annette glanced at the screen, grunted and pulled the covers over her head. I half-heard something like ‘nuclear whore’, and hoped Myra hadn’t.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s the Germans,’ Myra said. ‘They’re shopping around for nuclear cover, and they’re making us a very good offer.’

‘You’d better take it,’ I said, ‘before they arrive.’

‘That’s what I think,’ Myra said. ‘Problem: we’re over-booked, as you can imagine. The Germans are offering to buy out enough of our existing clients to reverse that. Will you sell?’

‘For what?’

‘Five million Deutschmarks, in gold, at pre-war – that is, day before yesterday’s – prices, no questions asked. I have the German negotiator on the line right now, and the Swiss bank account is verified.’

‘Christ! Give me a moment to think, OK?’

I hit the blank/silent button to hide my confusion and tried to think fast. It seemed odd that the Germans hadn’t set up some such deal before they actually launched Operation Restore Order, but perhaps the risk of exposing their intentions had prevented them. Now they were improvising a nuclear defence policy at blitzkrieg speed.

The offer was tempting, even apart from the money. With Eleanor in Berlin…

But we were here. The British nuclear deterrent was currently tied up in a dispute with the US, so ours – and other private-sector arrangements – was all we had to rely on. Who knew if we might need the option, perhaps after Eleanor was safely home?

And there was another consideration. If we sold our share of the Kazakh nukes to the Germans, the FreeSpace company would be undeniably involved in the war, on the German side. The repercussions of that were incalculable, and unlikely to be pleasant.

I toggled the output switch. Myra’s eyebrows flashed.

‘So?’

‘Sorry, Myra, no deal. Not our fight, and all that.’

Even on the tiny hand-held screen her face registered an increase in her weariness, but her voice conveyed no reproach when she said, ‘I understand. OK, Jon, I’ll try somewhere else. Signing off.’

‘Goodnight. See you again.’

She smiled as if this were some hopeless fancy. Her image shrank to a dot.

However momentous, in retrospect, my decision may seem, the fact is I slept well the rest of that night.

The next day the government lost a no-confidence motion (due to the abstention of only five MPs, the three Workers’ Power and two World Socialists) and fell, to be replaced by a more radical coalition drawing in support from the smaller parties. Neutrality was affirmed. The Upper House – elected now, but a transitional mix of old Lords and new Senators – debated the war issue separately, and came to a different conclusion. The first pro-war demonstrations, in the Midlands, were violently broken up by Republican Guards and Workers Power Party militants.

It was a bloody disgrace and we said so. At the same time – having won the argument in the committee – we started organising a campaign for neutrality and keeping out of the war. The UN imposed sanctions on Germany and Austria. The British ambassador walked out of the UN, a gesture which even I thought histrionic. It was to cost the Republic dear.

The Germans shelled Warsaw, live on CNN.

We didn’t hear from Eleanor over the whole of the following week. I have no memory of sleep in that week. Civil wars flared like secondary fires on the widening perimeter of the German advance. Britain edged close to it as the issue of joining the US/UN mobilisation against Germany became inseparable from the issue of the Republic. The government increasingly relied on support in the streets, as demonstrations against participation in the war multiplied and spread and clashed with pro-war demonstrations that demanded the old Britain back. The pro-war forces called us Huns. We called them Hanoverians. Neither side thought of the other as British any more.

The Germans reached the Ukrainian border, and stopped. The Poles, in headlong flight, plunged straight into the ongoing Ukrainian civil war. The British Chiefs of Staff presented an ultimatum to the government. Generals, leaders of the Unionist parties, and members of the pensioned-off, semi-privatised Royal Family made up a constant stream of visitors to the US Embassy. Reluctant Republican Guards, only doing their job, fought off determined demonstrators in Grosvenor Square. There was talk of a military coup.

Myra called again. The German offer had gone up to twenty million. I said no. Needless to say I never mentioned this to the rest of the committee.

My paging program almost reached Eleanor, at least twice.

There wasn’t a coup. Instead, the overseas parts of the British armed forces went to war without the government’s permission. Another government – civilian, spraying an inky cloud of constitutional justifications – was formed out of the opposition, the Lords and the King. It won immediate diplomatic recognition in the US and Britain’s vacant seat at the UN. It declared war on Germany.

The Poles regrouped, allied with a couple of Ukrainian factions and attacked the German concentrations. They used chemical weapons. Simultaneously, some Bosnian exiles – it was never established which nationality they came from – poisoned Hamburg’s water supply. The Germans rolled forward on all fronts. The French and Russians finally came off the fence on the Security Council.

The Republican government still controlled the internal forces of the country, while the Royal junta controlled the state’s external power. In a bizarre way they had to co-operate, or at least maintain a division of labour: while one was participating in American airdrops over the Balkans and naval manoeuvres in the Mediterranean, the other was frantically mobilising the civilian population for civil defence. In effect the Kingdom outlawed the past ten years of Britain’s history, while the Republic legalised a revolution.

It would have been an interesting revolution. Which of the competing extremisms – including ours – would have emerged victorious is still debated. As it is, I had an interesting week. The space movement really was as big as the old peace movement had been, and the rockets on our banners were our own. I left the demonstrations to those members of the committee who were good at that sort of thing, and spent my time obsessively organising militia and defence company patrols in the free-trade zones and the Greenbelt, negotiating with our contacts in the state apparatus and – in between times – writing more, faster, than ever. If I hadn’t been worried about Eleanor and in constant fear of German air-raids I’d have been even happier than I was. I had reached my Finland Station.

Someone was shaking my shoulder. I raised my head from my forearms and looked about. It was 10.15 a.m., and I was at my desk in the FreeSpace office. I must have closed my eyes for a moment about six hours earlier. The office was crowded but quiet. People were looking at screens, not at me; except for Annette, who was holding onto me, staring.

‘What’s happened?’

‘Somebody’s nuked Kiev.’

‘Oh, my God.’

I stood up. She buried her face in my shoulder. I held on to her as sobs made her quake, and glared about until someone silently pushed a screen into view. An entire German army had been wiped out by an airburst over the otherwise empty Ukrainian capital. Within minutes, as I watched, the same thing happened on the southern front, in Baku. The Russian and Turkish armies were both in action now, and news was coming through of British and American landings on the Aegean coast.

And Israel had declared war on Germany. It was ridiculous. What could they do? I thought, and then I suddenly realised that they’d probably just done it.

I flipped to N-TV for the reaction from Germany. A reporter was talking to the camera, in front of the Bundestag. He was saying something about Frankfurt, and he sounded terrified.

He clapped a hand to his ear, tilting his head.

His face paled, and the screen went white.

His voice, if you could call it that, continued for some time.

The war had ended. The peace process began. For Britain it began with stealth bombers and cruise missiles, and continued with paratroopers and teletroopers and lynch-mobs. The Royalist junta, its American allies and the British counter-revolutionary mobs between them killed about a hundred thousand people in six days. After that they had a country that knew its place in the New World Order.

It was still ungovernable. Under the Republic’s reforms, freeing up the housing, education and labour markets, there had already developed a tendency towards differentiation – self-ghettoisation, as I saw it, especially when it wasn’t spontaneous but promoted by the Republic’s unfortunate encouragement of identity politics. Bombing, invasion and civil war hardened the tendency into an irresistible force, as every minority fled to the dubious safety of its own tribe. Regional assemblies took the hint and drew old borders in fresh blood: North Wales, South Wales, Cumbria, West Scotland, East Scotland…even our own Greenbelt and free trade zones became safe havens, refugees piling in on top of refugees. The militias defended the area as best they could.

The final session of the Republic’s Federal Assembly passed its authority over to the Army Council, a body made up of the few senior officers who had stayed loyal. It called on the civilian population to avoid needless sacrifice and to resume armed resistance ‘at such time or times as the Army Council of the Army of the New Republic shall decide’. They thus gave a shred of legal cover to an indefinitely prolonged campaign of merciless terrorism, as they well knew. Then they all walked out of the former main workshop of the Ford Motor Company’s Dagenham site into the withering fire of the surrounding tanks.

It was probably the proudest moment in the history of British democracy. I watched it in the basement of a safe house on an illegal Iraqi satellite channel, and it made me vomit.

I knew I should be working; there was always another article to send out on the net, another friend or foe to contact, another militia unit’s fate to check; but I was hacking German casualty lists, searching for a name I hoped against hope that I wouldn’t find. The Israelis had tipped their long-range missiles with tactical, not strategic, warheads. Even in Berlin there were more survivors than anyone had expected. There was always a chance…

The phone rang.

‘Dad?’

‘Eleanor!’

‘Yes. Are you all right?’

Was I all right. I felt as if it was I who had come back from the dead.

‘Of course, oh my God, are you?’

‘I’m fine, I saw some terrible things but I’m okay. So’s Colin. We’re at the airport.’ She laughed. ‘Like you said. Sorry I’m a bit late. My flight boards in ten minutes, due in at 1545.’

It was 2.15. I said I’d be there to meet her. After she rang off I immediately called Annette with the news.

‘Is it safe for you to come out?’ Annette asked after we’d finished telling each other several times over of our joy and relief and assurance that we’d neither of us ever given up hope.

I shrugged. ‘I’m not on any “wanted” lists. The mobs have been brought to heel. Looks safe enough to me.’

‘From where you are, I’m sure it does,’ Annette said wryly. ‘Some of the movement people –’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. They’d got involved in resistance. Some had got themselves interned, or shot. Others – such defence companies and militias as I could influence – had tried to avoid engagement, but found themselves fighting the Yanks whether they liked it or not. I was uncomfortable talking about it even on a secure line. ‘Still,’ I went on, ‘I’ve got a list as long as my arm of messages and articles urging them not to do it, so…’

‘Anyway,’ Annette said, in sudden decisiveness, ‘you can’t stay down there forever. OK, I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes. Broadway at the lights. Usual.’

She was in Acton, not at home but not in hiding either.

‘Right, see you there love.’

I gathered my gear, swept up any traces of my presence, and when the basement looked again like nothing but a computer hobbyist’s cubby-hole, climbed the swing-down aluminium ladder and stepped out from a cupboard under the stairs into my host’s hallway. It had that dead aroma of a house where nothing had moved all day but the letter-box flap, the thermostat and the cleaning-machines. I left an envelope containing a few gold coins on the umbrella-stand and let myself out.

The house was on a street behind Ealing Broadway. The chestnuts lay like green sea-mines on Haven Green. A light drizzle was falling. I remembered a spray-bombed slogan from the Chernobyl year: it isn’t rain, it’s fallout. I turned up my collar and hurried. There were cops outside the Tube station – Republican Guards, to my surprise. I didn’t give them a closer look.

I crossed the Broadway and walked away from, and then towards, the traffic lights. The Odeon across the way was showing The Blue Beret, advertised by a huge back-lit poster of some grizzled veteran played by Reeves or Depp (I forget) holding a bayonet’s edge to a Peruvian peasant’s throat.

I turned back, spotted Annette’s black Volvo a hundred metres away in the sparse traffic and turned again and sauntered to match velocities as she slowed to a stop. I leaned over, opened the door and got in. There was always that moment of checking that you hadn’t given someone the shock of their life.

We laughed, and she accelerated away from the lights.

‘Everybody all right?’ I asked.

‘Everybody we know,’ she said, her voice taut.

‘Tell me later about the comrades,’ I said. ‘We’ll do what we can.’

She nodded, concentrating on the road and the traffic-screen updates. Our route was charted along the Uxbridge Road until just past Southall, then sharp left along the Parkway to Heathrow.

‘What’s wrong with the Great West Road?’

She grunted. ‘Troop transport.’

Hanwell, a middle-class residential suburb, was quiet. Southall, an Asian immigrant area, solid Republican, had dozens of gutted shopfronts.

‘What happened here?’

‘A mob from Hayes,’ Annette said. We went up and across the bridge over the Grand Union Canal. The factories of Hayes, to our right, had been precision-bombed to charred splinters by the Yanks. I admit to feeling a certain grim satisfaction: the area had been a racist, imperialist bastion for years. Even the Trotskyists had given up selling their Red weeklies to its White trash.

‘What goes around comes around.’

‘Rather a hard lesson,’ Annette said.

Every park we passed had its encampment of black plastic domes, lurking cowled aircraft, black helicopters. As we neared the airport the numbers of black-uniformed US/UN troops increased. No need for roadblocks – a wave of an identity-reader did a neater job. The lasers made you blink, always too late: the retinal scan was in.

Heathrow was like a scene from the twentieth century. Nobody was flying but those who had to: refugees from the war zones, wounded soldiers and civilians, desperate emigrants. It had a Third World of people waiting for flights, waiting to get through the re-imposed immigration barriers, waiting to die; and a Second World of officials and officers ordering them about. In this bedlam the First World consisted of volunteers trying to help and entrepreneurs trying to help themselves. Each passenger lounge had its field hospitals and hawkers; each gate its unpaid advisers and legal sharks and medical aid team.

We arrived at the international terminal, but the flight had been switched to the domestic. The rolling walkways were over-loaded with disembarking troops and their kit. Walking between terminals was a Brownian motion through a Hobbesian crowd. Time dragged, stopped, passed without being noticed. Annette and I clung together and struggled forward.

Hours later, when Eleanor and Colin at last appeared in the stream of arrivals, we were as haggard and ragged as they. After hugging and crying and talking, we turned around and fought our way out again. We got to the car, paid the parking surcharge, paid a hawker another outrageous sum for warm coffee, and set off for home. It was about 10.00 p.m.

I drove: Annette was exhausted, I was manic with relief.

As I edged the car around the junction for the M4 a laser’s ruby flicker hurt my eyes. Blinking away the after-image, I was blinded again by a torch, waving us in to the side of the road. On the pavement was a unit of five soldiers with black uniforms and M-16s. I thumbed the car-phone switch and pulled in, turned with a hopefully reassuring smile to the others and stepped out. Other cars inched past me. Everyone in them took great care not to look. I kept my hands on top of the car and moved crabwise around to the near side.

Hands groped around my collar, my torso, down my legs and between them. Then my shoulder was grabbed and I was spun around and thrown back against the car. I froze in the light and kept my hands up. Behind me, through an open inch of window, I thought I heard Annette’s quiet, urgent voice.

The soldier covering me lowered his beam, raised his rifle and loomed close. His visor was up, revealing an impassive, Andean face: I was reminded of the peasant in the poster. What goes around comes around…

‘Jonathan Wilde,’ he said. It wasn’t a question. I didn’t answer. My mouth was dry.

‘Come with us,’ he said.

I felt the window at my back roll down.

‘No!’ Annette shouted.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Go. Go now.’

‘Yes,’ said the soldier. ‘Go.’

He motioned me away from the car. I took two slow steps forward. ‘There are no weapons in the car,’ I said.

‘We know.’ He swung his rifle away from me, towards the car. For the first time his face showed an emotion, something so primal it was hard to tell whether it was fear or rage.

‘Go!’ he screamed.

I could hear Annette’s dry sobs, Eleanor crying, Colin arguing. I dared not turn around, or even make a gesture.

The engine started, and slowly the car pulled away.

Streetlights and fog. Aircraft landing-lights and fog. Night and fog. They had never looked so beautiful. I raised my eyes for a look at the stars I thought I’d never reach, not now. I couldn’t see them. Ah well.

They walked me a few hundred metres to a patch of waste ground. I was actually relieved to see a black helicopter, its matt angular surfaces gleaming with condensation in the shadows. They bundled me aboard and sat me down facing the open doorway as the craft took off. It made surprisingly little noise. The soldiers watched me with silent malice and dirty-secret smiles.

I wondered why I’d kept walking, when I could have run. It looked like I was for one of the classic US-client execution styles, the Saigon sky-dive. I should have run, I thought, and not given them this satisfaction. There’s an Arab proverb, something along the lines that hope is the enemy of freedom, or despair is the liberator of the slave. It explains a lot, including why I climbed into that helicopter.

I hope it doesn’t explain what I did after I got out.

‘Come in, Mr Wilde.’

The polite invitation, from one of a dozen men in suits around a table, was accompanied by a shove in the back from the UN trooper that sent me stumbling into the room and left no-one in any doubt who was really in charge here. The door behind me was too heavy to slam, but it closed with a muffled thud, as if the soldier had at least made the attempt.

I straightened, mustering my dignity, and glanced around the room. Somewhere in Westminster – the helicopter had landed in St James’s Park, and I’d been bundled into the back of an APC and driven a short distance – but it was impossible to tell if it was a private or a public building. Big mahogany table with lights above it, oak-panelled walls, portraits of distinguished ancestors or predecessors in the gloom. The men who looked up at me from the table had something of that same air of inherited or acquired assurance, despite being more dishevelled than I was: their jackets crumpled or hung over tall chair-backs, ties loosened, eyes red and cheeks unshaven.

The table was spread with laminated maps, on which lines had been drawn and wiped and redrawn in fluorescent inks from the marker-pens that lay scattered among coffee-cups and overflowing cut-glass ashtrays the size of dinner-plates. Rising smoke curled up through the cones of light to be sucked away by powerful air-conditioning that gave the atmosphere a stale chill.

The man who’d spoken stood and motioned me towards a vacant seat at the nearest corner of the table. A freshly filled cup of coffee steamed in front of it.

‘Good evening, Mr Wilde,’ he said. ‘I must apologise for the rather brusque manner in which you’ve been brought here.’ He gave a self-deprecating smile, a slight shrug as if to disavow responsibility. He was old, older than I – though he’d had better treatment – and his wavy yellow-grey hair, shoulder-length, made him look like a judge or one of those eighteenth-century dignitaries in the portraits. ‘I trust you have not been otherwise ill-treated?’

I stood where I was and said, ‘I call kidnapping ill-treatment, sir. I demand an explanation, and an immediate contact with my family and my lawyer.’

Another man spoke up, leaning forward on his elbows into the light. ‘None of that applies. This country’s under martial law, and anyway, you’re not under arrest.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll go now.’

I turned away and made for the door.

‘Stop!’ The first man’s voice sounded more like an urgent warning than a command. ‘A moment, please.’

This was more like it. I turned back.

‘Of course you’re free to leave,’ the man continued, ‘but if you do, only we can guarantee your safety. All we ask is that you hear us out.’

I doubted this, but decided it would be foolhardy to try anything else. Besides, I needed that coffee.

They were a committee of what was already being called the Restoration Government. Members of Parliament, civil servants…they didn’t give their names, and I never subsequently tried to find out. They told me they were trying to restore order and a civilian administration.

‘The Republic is dead, Mr Wilde. Our only choices are a prolonged and futile resistance, with a prolonged and painful occupation – or an an attempt at a workable settlement.’

‘I don’t see the US keeping up a prolonged occupation,’ I said. ‘Given their notorious sensitivity to body-bags.’

‘How many US troops have you seen?’ snapped the second man. ‘They’re all in bunkers operating telepresence rigs. Believe me, America’s Third World clients have troops and to spare for the UN. Internal security is what they’re raised for and paid for. They’ll laugh off the pathetic efforts of our home-grown Guevaras. Make no mistake – the United States – the United Nations – means it this time. No nation will ever again be allowed to start a war. Nuclear disarmament will be enforced.’

Saliva droplets from his speech were spotting the maps. I was half-expecting his right arm to twitch up. I must have recoiled slightly. The long-haired man raised a hand, soft cop to the hard cop.

‘We know as well as you do that a power such as the US must become cannot possibly administer the world. Police it, at a very high level, yes. But as some powers move up from the nation, others devolve to the local community. We have the opportunity to encourage autonomy and diversity. Let us take it, and spare our country years of agony.’

‘“Us”?’ I looked around. ‘I have nothing in common with you. What do you want from me?’

‘The possibility of a deal, Mr Wilde. A settlement. We’re pulling in all the regional and factional and community leaders we can reach. You happen to be the first.’

‘And what d’you intend to offer them?’

‘Accept the Kingdom – in practice – as the national authority, and you can have autonomy in the areas your supporters control.’

‘I have no authority to negotiate –’

‘Oh, but you have. You have influence. We know that without it some younger and hotter heads would be calling the shots. And we know you’re up to more than your public statements indicate –’

‘What makes you say that?’

He smiled. ‘The volume of encrypted traffic from your safe houses.’

Damn. I tried to remain poker-faced.

‘What you see is what you get. I’ve done nothing secretly that goes against what I’ve said openly.’

‘Of course. Then you can have no objection. Take a look at these…’

Agreements, ready to sign. Maps. London, for a start, was to be carved up. The part conceded to the space movement encompassed the Greenbelt and an arc of suburbs in which we had free trade zones. They’d even given it a name: North London Town, which on the map some military hand had clipped to NORLONTO.

It was a lot. Frankly, I’d have settled for less.

‘And in return?’

‘No armed actions to be launched from the territory. And one other thing…’

‘Yes?’

‘Ah…the nuclear deterrence contract, Mr Wilde.’

‘You want me to end it?’

‘Good God, no!’ He looked shocked. ‘We want you to transfer the policy to us.’

‘To the government? But you’ve got –’ I stopped, and looked at their ever-so-slightly-embarrassed faces.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see.’ I turned again to the map, and picked up a pen. By the end of the night we had something I could take back to my committee.

Two days later I sat in a room at the back of a Greenbelt shebeen with a group of men and women who, thanks to my negotiations, had emerged blinking from hideouts and camps and cells. I explained to them that they had the chance to try out their ideas on a couple of million more or less enthusiastic people, with minimal interference from a state only too glad to have this explosive and impoverished mass off its hands. I told them the only price for this was a de facto acknowledgement of that state’s authority, and the renunciation of an untested nuclear deterrent about which most of them had mixed feelings and which was now obsolete.

I didn’t expect gratitude or agreement, and I didn’t get them. What I got was comrades falling over each other to denounce me. I’d expected that. Being expelled from the organisation came as a surprise. The vote was unanimous. Et tu, Julie.

‘Good day to you, comrades,’ I said. ‘And good luck.’

I stood up and pushed back my chair and ducked out of the door and walked away. Two days after my expulsion, US/UN crack troops took over and disarmed every surface-based deterrence exporter. The renegade subs took longer, but they were rounded up too. Among other consequences, my ex-comrades didn’t have our nuclear policy to bargain with, so they had to settle for a smaller Norlonto than I’d been offered.

It served them right, but I wished they could have kept Islington. The Christian fundamentalists got it, and set about ethically cleansing the place. Eleanor and her family had to abandon Finsbury Park. They moved in with us and it was months before they found a new house.

I was getting too old for that sort of thing.

13

The Court of the Fifth Quarter

Why couldn’t we have gone in through the canals?’ Wilde grumbled, as he booted yet another inquisitive machine away from his ankle. Several hours of difficult progress through back alleys, with the expedition crunching and stomping and shooting their way over and past assorted mechanical vermin, lay behind the strain in his tone and the strength of his kick.

‘Ha!’ Tamara snorted. ‘You seen the canals around here?’

‘As it happens,’ said Wilde, ‘no, I haven’t.’

‘And you don’t want to.’ Tamara flattened herself against a wall and signalled back to the others to halt. ‘But you will.’

She poked a device like a long electric torch past the corner, and waved it back and forth, keeping an eye on the readings on a handheld meter and the view on a wrist-screen.

‘OK,’ she announced. ‘No sapients. Looks fairly safe. One at a time. Deploy to the centre of the street, spread out, then single file to the right. Go.’

She ran out into the middle of the road, which was about fifty metres wide and obsessively well-paved. Along the centre were empty plinths of concrete like traffic-islands. Tamara bounded up on to the one facing the alley, looked around again and beckoned to Wilde. He dashed after her and jumped up beside her.

‘Cover my back,’ she said. Wilde stood behind her and began scanning up and down the street, his pistol held in both hands, close to his waist. The street had its own strange pedestrians: robots of various shapes and sizes clambering walls, edging along pavements. One or two bowled down the permanent way, in light wheeled vehicles. Ethan had to dodge one of these smartly as he ran over. It sounded a subsonic siren that set everyone’s teeth on edge.

‘You look like you know what you’re doing,’ he said to Wilde, as he stationed himself a couple of metres further back along the plinth.

‘Trained in the militia,’ Wilde grinned. ‘Mind you, it was a long – look out!’

A black, winged missile was hurtling towards them. Wilde raised his pistol to head height and shot it. It came down and hit the roadway in a shower of feathers.

‘Pigeon,’ said Ethan. ‘Take it easy, man. They’re harmless.’

When the alarm spread by this incident had been calmed, the deployment continued. After a minute or two they proceeded behind Tamara along the canyon of office-buildings. Somewhere a couple of streets away, an automated process was sending gouts of flame high in the air at irritatingly irregular intervals. Between flares, the illumination of the buildings themselves was almost as unpredictable: some windows dark, full of the expedition’s reflections as they passed; others, at street-level or high up on the faces of the buildings, lit from within. Shadows and silhouettes moved, but not those of humans. At the same time, it was impossible to believe that a robot-based commercial life was going on; it was all too random, too artificial.

At the next major junction the street they were on crossed one that was narrower, but much more crowded: a slowly moving river of metallic machinery, over which faster entities skittered and skipped.

‘Makes you sick,’ Ethan muttered. ‘Some of the big ’uns would make bloody good cars.’

‘You pay me enough, I’ll catch you one,’ Tamara told him. She waved them all into a skirmish line, again keeping Wilde next to her.

‘Right,’ she said, swinging her back-pack to the ground. ‘Time to hack through the jungle.’

She unbuckled the pack and tugged down the flaps, exposing a piece of equipment with a small keypad, extensible aerials, rows of meters and screens.

‘Amazing,’ said Wilde. ‘Popular mechanics! Amateur radio!’

‘Heap of junk,’ Tamara said. ‘No fucker will miniaturise it. Not enough demand.’

‘You put this together yourself?’

She looked at him. ‘Wouldn’t trust anybody else to.’

Her fingers flew over the keypad. Screens flickered, tiny speakers howled and stabilised.

‘Gotcha! Traffic channel.’

She twirled a knob, looked up at the machines passing like cattle ahead. Made some adjustment, twirled it again. A ten-metre-long crawling machine suddenly swerved right across the road. The machines behind it piled implacably into it and within seconds formed a mounting heap of wheeled or tracked robots. As those in front of it kept moving, a space soon cleared.

Tamara was still watching the feedback.

‘Fucking go! Go! Go!’ she yelled.

The others sprinted across.

Tamara lifted the pack, leaving the control-panels exposed.

‘Still here?’ she said to Wilde. ‘Shit, OK, let’s move it.’

She sidled across the road, Wilde at her back keeping lookout. A machine on four long, stalked legs, its body about the size of a melon, with a cluster of lenses at its front, suddenly reared above the pile-up and scanned them.

‘What’s that?’

Tamara looked up and stopped.

‘Don’t move,’ she said.

Wilde held his breath, and froze in the act of looking over his shoulder at the machine. The lenses withdrew, and another tubelike extension moved into position. Tamara stabbed frantically at the keypad.

‘Shoot!’ she yelled.

Wilde jumped and turned, but it wasn’t him she was calling to. A volley came from the far side of the street, knocking the machine over. Tamara and Wilde ran to join the others.

‘Shit,’ said Ethan. ‘That one was sapient.’

‘I never hunt sapients,’ Tamara said, gasping and rubbing the small of her back. ‘Don’t mind killing the little fuckers, though.’

They moved on; over a bridge that gave Tamara an opportunity to point out to Wilde exactly why using the canals for transport in the machine domains was not a good idea; and on until they saw, in a wide park at the end of the long avenue, a scrap-metal stockade.

‘Talgarth’s court,’ Tamara said.

As they walked up they were swept by sonic scans that set their teeth buzzing, laser scans that made them blink and curse.

‘Ignore it,’ Tamara said. ‘They have to check.’

The park was bizarrely neat, and kept that way by tiny devices that roamed through the grass and among tree-branches. For the first time since they’d landed, Tamara enjoined care against stepping on any machinery.

‘Talgarth don’t like it,’ she insisted. ‘Fines you.’

They picked their way across the grass, their weapons holstered or slung – the bristling armaments on the stockade being more than enough to protect them from any feral gadgetry. Machine-guns, laser cannon, radar and whirling, ever-ready bolas…

The stockade’s three-metre-high gate swung smoothly open before them, and quickly shut behind them. About a hundred metres square, grassed like the park, with a dais in the centre, seating and media-equipment scattered around, and wooden cabins of varying sizes around the perimeter. Nobody else was present.

‘What do we do now?’ Wilde asked.

Tamara looked at her watch. ‘It’s one in the morning,’ she said. ‘We pick a cabin to put ourselves up in, and we sleep.’ She grinned. ‘It’s an old vertebrate custom.’

‘Well worth keeping up,’ Wilde said. He looked around indecisively as most of the others moved confidently off.

Tamara caught his hand.

‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you’re all right.’

He complied, a confused look on his face.

‘You watch out,’ Ethan called after him. ‘She follows old primate customs.’

‘Go fuck yourself!’ Tamara yelled back. ‘See you in court!’

‘So this is how non-propertarians do it.’

‘Yeah. Free love.’

‘Ha. I was faithful to my wife for seventy years…’

Wilde’s voice trailed off, then continued, more happily, ‘…and now I’ve been with two other women in three days.’

‘What! Who else?’

‘None of your business. Free love, right?’

‘Aw, go on.’

‘She’s probably dead by now.’

There was a silence. Then Tamara, her face lit only by a dim night-light and the glow of Wilde’s cigarette, spoke in a cautiously cheerful voice.

‘Hope it ain’t catching.’

Wilde gave her a lopsided grin and stubbed out the cigarette. Their eyes adjusted swiftly, and they spent a few moments looking at each other.

‘Could be,’ Wilde said. ‘I’m dead myself after all.’

Tamara investigated.

‘Well this bit’s definitely alive.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘How d’you expect me to stand up in court tomorrow?’

‘You’re standing up all right tonight.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Anyway – ah-hah-ha-ha-ah – you’ll get help from ah-ha-ha!’

‘I’ll give you Invisible Hand.’

‘Nah,’ said Tamara. ‘That’s for much later…’

‘It’s eight o’clock,’ Tamara informed him kindly. ‘You look terrible.’

‘Thanks.’ Wilde steadied himself on one elbow and reached for the mug of coffee she was holding out to him. ‘Oh, God. How long have I been asleep?’

‘Four hours.’

‘Thanks to you, you promiscuous anarchist bitch.’

Tamara smiled.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ve put a drug in the coffee. You’ll be more awake than you can imagine.’

‘Is that why I’m seeing things?’

‘No. You left your contacts in.’

‘Thanks again.’ Wilde reached for his cigarettes and rasped his face. ‘Does this anarcho-capitalist court by any chance have some rip-off, monopolistic enterprises associated with it?’

‘Funny you should ask.’ Tamara indicated a couple of packs of cigarettes and a bubble-pack containing a razor and toiletries. ‘I put them on your bill.’

She busied herself with making breakfast while Wilde padded about, getting washed and dressed and drinking the drug-laced coffee. The cabin had three adjoining rooms: a small bedroom with an elementary wash-stand and a tiny toilet; a small kitchen, and a larger room containing communications equipment and computer interfaces, all on a conference-table with half a dozen chairs around it.

‘How long are we expected to stay here?’ Wilde asked, shaving.

‘As long as it takes.’

‘Has Reid turned up yet?’

‘Yup. And his supporters. Odds are about even if it should come to a fight.’

‘That’s a happy coincidence.’

‘No, it was arranged by –’

‘Don’t tell me, Invisible Hand. OK. Jesus.’ He towelled his face. ‘I haven’t felt so unprepared for anything since my final exams.’

‘What are exams?’

‘Old primate custom.’ Wilde crunched his Harmony Oats. ‘I gather you’ve evolved beyond it. Let’s catch the news.’

Tamara set up the communications rig in the main room, while Wilde watched. She was still in her jeans and tee-shirt and flak-jacket, but she’d put on make-up and perfume as some kind of gesture towards formality or femininity.

‘Am I still a mess?’ Wilde asked.

She looked him up and down. ‘You’ll do,’ she said. ‘Use the after-shave, though.’

They checked out the news. The case was the lead item on all channels. Overnight, a whole sub-culture of newsgroups and discussion for a had sprung up around its aspects. The three killings claimed by Dee and Ax, their disappearance, and the appearance of Jonathan Wilde gave the whole affair an added edge of social panic. At least two heretical churches had already proclaimed Wilde a sign of the end.

‘I hope your abolitionist comrades are prepared for trouble,’ Wilde said.

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘You should know. Don’t you always get hassles, selling your paper? Hasn’t Ax shown what can happen if people suddenly think the world’s going to change forever? Imagine all of that multiplied by tens – hundreds!’

Tamara shook her head. ‘I can’t. I’ve read about riots and revolutions, but we’ve never had anything like that here.’

‘Count yourselves lucky.’

Tamara’s cheeks reddened. ‘Oh, I do, don’t get me wrong. Ship City’s basically not a bad place, it’s just that – there are all those wrongs done to machine minds, and – it’s a long way from the ideals of anarchism. And people really do think that you suddenly turning up means all that’s going to be put right.’

‘“The ideals of anarchism”,’ Wilde repeated heavily. He gazed at Tamara’s face for a few seconds. Nobody, looking on, could have had any doubt which of the two youthful faces in the cabin had the older mind behind it.

Wilde spent the next hour or so in conversation with a subset of Invisible Hand’s legal database, the ‘MacKenzie’s friend’ software. It was a friendly, and user-friendly, system. Its hardware component was an ear-to-chin phone that picked up what he said and heard, and passed it by short-range radio to a local relay. Its prompts could be whispered in his ear, or displayed in his contacts.

Shortly after nine, Tamara interrupted his study of precedents and arguments.

‘Reid’s come out of his cabin,’ she told him.

Wilde blinked away the display.

‘What’s he doing?’

‘Just wandering around with his friends, sipping coffee and chatting to people – and to the news ’motes.’

‘I think I’ll do the same,’ said Wilde. ‘Also, I wouldn’t mind talking to him.’

Tamara smiled wryly. ‘Bit late to settle out of court.’

Wilde stood up. ‘It’s never too late,’ he said. ‘But no, I don’t hold out much hope of that! The fact is, I can’t wait to see him.’

Tamara was silent for a moment. Wilde lit a cigarette.

‘I should warn you,’ Tamara said. ‘I spoke to him yesterday, when he called me, right, and…even though I’d seen him on the news and so on, I found when I actually spoke to him that he’s very…I mean he has a kinda, you know, presence. You may find him a bit…intimidating.’

Wilde stood up, with a harsh laugh.

‘I watched him watch me die,’ he said. ‘No way can he intimidate me.’

They walked out of the cabin together. Tamara swaggered, her big pistol blatant in its holster. Wilde strolled, coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other. Dew sparkled on the grass. The chill, damp air held slow, small columns of smoke and steam above knots of people who stood about, in earnest or sociable discussion. Some of the cabins had opened out into stalls, though only for minor necessities. No food or drink sales marred the dignity of Talgarth’s court.

The metal of the stockade – great chunks of ragged-edged iron, that might have been the platework of ships, but which were torn like strips of bark and sunk into the soil – gleamed red and rusty in the sun. The stockade’s armaments kept up a constant movement, swinging or swivelling. Outside, the machine domain made its presence felt with geysers of flame and the roars and squeals of clashing engines in pursuit of their incomprehensible and incompatible aims.

Wilde walked among the groups of people, waved to those few he recognised as his supporters, and then went over to the centre of the court. Workmen and robots were setting up an awning of plain red canvas above the dais. Beneath it, in the centre of the dais, were a folding-chair of pale wood and frayed grey fabric, and a small table at the right hand of the chair. On the table lay a glass, a bottle, a gavel, and an ashtray.

Wilde examined this arrangement for a moment, smiled, and turned away. He found himself face-to-camera with a news ’mote. It resembled the sapient robot they’d encountered at the crossroads, but its array of mikes and lenses would have left no room for anything more sinister.

The lenses were not only for cameras. As the machine stepped delicately backwards on its insectile legs, it startled Wilde by throwing a fetch of the blonde girl they’d seen presenting the news bulletin. She stood on the grass to the right of the machine.

‘She looks solid,’ Wilde whispered to Tamara, ‘not a holo –’

‘It’s in your contacts,’ Tamara hissed back, baring her teeth bravely at the camera.

‘Legal Channels!’ the girl said brightly. Her voice came, in eerie ventriloquy, from the machine’s speakers. ‘Good morning, Esteemed Senior Wilde!’

‘Good morning,’ Wilde said, smiling down at her. His cigarette fizzed out in the grass.

‘Look at the camera,’ Tamara whispered. The girl’s virtual image instantly flitted to the front of the camera, and stood on empty air.

‘Do you have any comments to make, Esteemed Senior Wilde?’

‘NOTHING TOO SPECIFIC,’ the MacKenzie advised.

‘Yes,’ said Wilde. ‘There’s no need to call me “Esteemed Senior”…dear lady. My name is Jonathan Wilde, and my friends call me “Jon”.’ He beamed her a smile that suggested he’d be honoured to count her among them; then coughed and said, more formally: ‘I have no comment to make on the case, but I am concerned about the interpretation which some, ah, less responsible news channels than yours are putting on it. I implore anyone who may be listening to do nothing rash – to let the law take its course, because that’s the only way to preserve and improve the civilised values of anarchy.’ He smiled again. ‘That’s all.’

‘Thank you, Jon Wilde! And have you anything to say about Judge Eon Talgarth’s known views about yourself?’

‘NO,’ advised the MacKenzie, in an urgent flash.

‘Nothing at all,’ Wilde said cheerfully. ‘I have every confidence that a man of his standing would never allow such matters to influence his judgement. I’m sure my choice of his court is proof enough that I mean what I say.’

He made a chopping motion of his hand in front of his chest, and nodded. The girl hesitated, literally hovering, waiting for more, but Wilde set his face in an expressionless mask and walked briskly out of the cameras’ field of view. Tamara hurried after him.

‘That was all right,’ she said. She didn’t sound entirely enthusiastic. Wilde squeezed her shoulders.

‘Don’t you be another,’ he said.

She looked up at him. He was staring straight ahead.

‘Another what?’

‘Another comrade who’s disappointed at my moderation and common sense. I had enough of that in my first life.’

And with that he let go her shoulders, nudging her as he did so. She looked ahead again, and found that they were walking straight into the group of people around David Reid.

Reid was wearing a loose woollen suit, and a blue cotton shirt without a tie. He leaned with his left hand on the back of a seat, on which he’d left his mug of coffee. His right hand held a cigarette, with which he made sweeping, smoke-trailing gestures. He was speaking to three men and a woman, all dressed with similarly casual care. His long hair was damp from a recent wash, and the morning air.

When he saw Wilde he stood up straight, transferred the cigarette to his left hand, and held out his right. The two men shook hands, both smiling, studying each other’s faces and finding in them recognition and, almost, disbelief.

‘It’s been a long time,’ Reid said.

‘Not for me,’ replied Wilde.

Reid acknowledged this with a brisk nod.

‘I appreciate that,’ he said. ‘Perhaps with more time, you could have seen things differently.’

‘I can see the Karaganda road quite clearly,’ Wilde said. ‘And your face. When I close my eyes. I’ve had time to think about the look that was on your face, my friend.’

‘That wasn’t personal,’ Reid said. ‘And neither is this.’

‘I know it wasn’t personal,’ Wilde said. ‘I know you better than that, Dave. I almost wish it had been.’

‘We were both political animals,’ Reid said lightly. ‘You had decisions like that to make, too. In your time.’

Wilde shrugged. He fumbled for a cigarette. Reid pre-empted him, offering a pack and a light. Wilde accepted both with a thin-lipped smile.

‘Tobacco,’ he mused, as if noticing its anomalous presence for the first time. ‘Cotton. Wool. Where are the plantations, the flocks?’

‘Organic synthesis is our best-developed technology,’ Reid said. ‘As you should know.’

Wilde laughed. ‘The case starts in twenty-five minutes,’ he said. ‘That’s how long you have to convince me you didn’t let me die to shut my mouth for good.’

Reid touched Wilde’s shoulder, as though to remind him.

‘Not for good,’ he pointed out. ‘You’re here, and you’ve been –’

He stopped. Wilde spoke again immediately; it could have seemed he interrupted.

‘For long enough!’ he said. ‘You almost admit it, man! I want you to admit, and explain it. And to retract your ridiculous accusation that the actions of the robot Jay-Dub are any responsibility of mine, and to free the autonomous machine that you have walking around in Annette’s body. An apology for that insult to my wife and myself wouldn’t be amiss, either. Then we can talk about other matters.’

He was trembling slightly when he finished speaking.

Reid stood, blowing smoke slowly from his lips.

‘What other matters?’

Wilde leaned forward, speaking so softly that only Reid and Tamara, and the MacKenzie, heard him.

‘The fast folk,’ he said, ‘at the other end of the Malley Mile.’

Reid recoiled slightly. ‘Is that what Jay-Dub told you?’

‘I worked it out for myself,’ said Wilde. ‘It’s obvious, when you think about it.’

Reid shook his head. For a moment, his face showed genuine grief. Then, his expression hardening, he stepped back.

‘Jay-Dub made you,’ he said. ‘He made you as a weapon against me. And something else, I warn you, made Jay-Dub what he is.’

‘He?’ Wilde retorted, following his prompt. ‘That’s quite an admission.’

‘He was you,’ Reid said. ‘A simulation of you, I should say. And for a time, he was my friend. He had plenty of time to accuse me of his – your – murder or neglect, and he never did. Because he understood. He has a greater mind than yours or mine, Jon, and he understood. But he was, when all’s said and done, a machine. A machine with its own purposes, with endless patience, and bottomless cunning. I had hoped that the human element in it would overcome the machine’s…program. I was wrong, and I’ll put that mistake right. Legally, you own it, and I’ll nail you to that. But in reality, you are…’

‘What?’ Wilde challenged. ‘Tell me what you think I am.’

‘Instrumentum vocale,’ Reid said bitterly. ‘A tool that speaks. Jon Wilde is dead.’

He turned on his heel, sweeping up his companions with a brusque gesture, and stalked away.

14

Combat Futures

After the world war there was a world government. It was officially known as the United Nations, unofficially as the US/UN, and colloquially as the Yanks. It kept the peace, from space, or so it claimed. What it actually did was prevent innumerable tiny wars from becoming big wars. But in order to maintain its power, it needed the little wars, and they never stopped. We had war without end, to prevent war to the end. The US/UN kept the most advanced technology in its own hands, to keep it out of ‘the wrong hands’ – i.e., any hands that could be raised against the US/UN’s dominion. It was not as dreadful as generations of American dissidents had feared. It wasn’t, by a long way, as dreadful as generations of global idealists had hoped. That leaves a lot of leeway for bad government.

The Restoration Settlement, the fragmented system of ‘communities under the King’, was Britain’s contribution to the tale of infamy. In the interstices of the Kingdom all sorts of Free States flourished: regionalist, racialist, creationist, socialist; even – in the case of our own Norlonto – anarcho-capitalist.

The Kingdom was a caricature of a minimal state, which bore about the same relationship to my utopia as once-actually-existing-socialism did to my father’s. The people who did best of all under the arrangement were the marginals who squatted the countryside and called themselves New Settlers, and whom we city folk called new barbarians – ‘the barb’.

After twenty years of slow-burning war of all against all the Army of the New Republic proclaimed the Final Offensive for the fourth time.

‘You’ve got to talk to them,’ Julie said.

‘Why the fuck should I?’ I replied, not turning away from the window. The fine morning view of North London’s Greenbelt fringe was marred by puffs of white smoke from the far side of Trent Park. I counted several seconds before hearing the artillery’s dull thuds, couldn’t hear the shells burst. Over the horizon, probably. The Army of the New Republic was rumoured to have infiltrated Luton. Whatever the truth of that, Luton or somewhere nearby was taking a hammering from the Royal Artillery.

‘It’s your problem,’ I continued, facing her. In a way that had become familiar over the years, but which I’d never ceased to envy in the middle-aged of today, she seemed to have changed little between twenty and fifty. The most visible difference between my former Youth Organiser and the woman who now stood in my office was that she’d traded in her formerly unvarying cosmonaut jumpsuit for a more dignified crini-dress.

I, in my nineties now, was still tough and vigorous, strutting in the leather of my own skin, and my brain was still running sweet and clean, oiled by the foetal cell-lines. But the prolongation of life, and the prospect of its indefinite extension, had robbed me of the stoic maturity and detachment that had sometimes come to the truly aged of the past. I’d noticed in myself a hardening of the attitudes, a thinning of the spirit. The peaceful revolution that had established the original Republic I’d welcomed and tried to use; I’d plunged into the chaotic possibilities that accompanied that Republic’s violent end; but the imminent prospect of its violent renewal – new revolution or counter-restoration – now found me determined to do only what I could to survive this latest turning of the wheel, with no expectation that it would carry me anywhere.

Behind me the window rattled to an explosion followed by the scream of some missile’s passage, catching up too late. I must have given a start, because Julie’s smile was sly when she said,

‘It’s your problem too. Are you going to wait till the rockets come through the window?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But why do you want me to do it?’ My voice sounded querulous, to my annoyance. ‘Why not your own spokesfolk?’

Julie laughed down her nose. ‘Name them. You’re the one everybody’s heard of. Our grand old man.’

‘Oh, thanks.’

‘Also,’ she went on, ‘they insist on talking to you, because you weren’t involved in what the Republicans call the Betrayal.’

I suddenly found myself smoking a cigarette. (First of the day. One of these decades I’d have to quit for good, health risks or no health risks…)

‘But I was,’ I said. ‘Dammit, I helped the Hanoverian bastards draw up the maps.’

‘Yeah,’ Julie said. ‘And then we threw you out, remember?’

‘So?’

‘Well, everybody assumes it was because you were against the Settlement.’

‘What!’ I sat on the edge of the desk and laughed. ‘The organisation put that about?’

‘Not exactly,’ Julie said. ‘We just…didn’t contradict it. We could hardly denounce you for opportunism after we’d done the same thing ourselves.’

‘Of course you could,’ I said absently. ‘Didn’t I teach you anything?’

I’d just understood why, ever since the Settlement, my reputation had carried a mystique of irreproachability which in my actual political activity I’d done so little to deserve. It had helped me in my second career, a none-too-demanding history lectureship at North London University supplemented by more substantial writing than I’d ever had time for before. The writing had brought me to the unsought position of space-movement guru, more read about than read. The idle curiosity which had driven me to investigate and refute the conspiracy theory of history was hailed as a long-overdue revision of revisionist scholarship, my increasingly cynical journalism as the voice of the Movement’s radical conscience, challenging the inevitable compromises of its hands-off hegemony over Norlonto.

Julie was looking at her watch, wringing her phone, twitching her hair. Another rocket came in, closer this time. The gun-battery fell silent.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Take me to their leader.’

‘Only in a virtual sense,’ Julie said. ‘You take me to the Media Lab, or whatever it’s called these days, and I’ll patch you in.’

I picked up my jacket and computer and stubbed out my cigarette. ‘What about the students?’

‘That’s fixed,’ Julie said. ‘They’re on strike.’

‘Oh,’ I said, holding the door open as she steered her skirt through. ‘Where do they work?’

Whatever contribution to the struggle the students thought they were making by staying away, they’d have done better by coming in, to the Cable Room at least. In the Perry Anderson Building’s cool, quiet basement with its thin layer of natural light from slatted windows near the ceiling, cameras and screens and VR immersion gear lay amongst a clutter of notes and chewed pens and stained styrofoam cups. Julie powered up more and more cable and net connections, displaying a media battle almost as important as any on the ground.

Britain – ‘former Britain’ as the Yanks called it – was world news for a change, with the ANR allegedly poised to strike and the US/UN nerving itself for another bloody intervention. Meanwhile the local boards and channels were buzzing with rumour and debate. The ANR, for its part, was saying nothing, apart from a manifesto and a timetable showing exactly where and when they intended to strike. Tomorrow looked busy.

‘You want deep or flat?’ Julie asked, jolting me out of a fascinating, spinning thread of argument from one of the Yorkshire mini-states.

‘Flat.’ I never could stand the hassle of gloves, goggles, and gear – the way I saw it, if you were going to kit yourself out like that you might as well be getting into some good healthy perversion instead of the inside of a computer.

‘OK, putting you through now.’

The newsgroup discussion (and its almost equally intriguing accompaniment of cartoon characters – smileys, they were called – who pulled faces, gestured obscenely or rolled about laughing in the margins, in a graphic gloss on the main debate) flicked away and a video link cut in.

Flakey reception; scratches like an old movie (the cryptography had been lifted that minute from a campus freeware board in North Carolina, according to its indignant, jumping-up-and-down copyleft demon in the corner) and voice quality like a badly dubbed Iranian skinflick, but there was no doubt who was on the other end.

‘Well, hello there Jon.’

‘Hi, Dave. Didn’t expect to be speaking to you.’

(‘You know this guy?’ Julie hissed.)

Dave coughed. ‘I hired out a few squads for, uh, technical work in the current operation, and for some time I’ve had a good business relationship with our friends to the North.’

I understood what he meant but it seemed unnecessarily oblique. I gave him what I hoped came across as a dirty look.

‘You worried about the crypto, or something? I mean, it was your lot who picked it.’

‘No, no.’ Dave nodded as if past my shoulder. ‘Just – who’s that lassie on the bench behind you?’

‘Uh?’ I looked back. Julie was leaning forward over hillocks of skirt, her neat boots dangling below, like a doll on a shelf.

‘Watch your lip, man, that’s Julie O’Brien.’

‘Sorry, ma’am,’ Reid said. ‘Didn’t recognise you.’

‘That’s all right,’ Julie said. ‘And you can speak freely.’ Probably flattered at being called a lassie, I thought dourly.

‘OK,’ said Reid. He relaxed. ‘Fact is, Jon, I’ve been working with the ANR for years, and I’ve spent the past few weeks brokering deals with defence companies in your neck of the woods.’

‘Yeah, well I had noticed combat futures were up.’

Reid grinned. ‘Aye, and you can use them to leverage insurance…’ He rubbed his hands. ‘Great fun, of course, but now that we’ve squared everything with the road owners and cop-cos we need to deal with the Movement militia. Politics, not business. They thought I was the right person to talk to you.’

‘Given our deep personal trust.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Are you really launching an offensive tomorrow?’

Reid grinned. ‘I can’t say. We intend to, but we haven’t got all the bugs out of our system yet.’

The ANR was alleged to have inherited some diabolically clever military software from the old Republic, though if its previous failed offensives were anything to go by it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

‘Why are you posting a timetable of where you intend to hit? Most strategists still rate the advantage of surprise, last I heard.’

‘I’m told it’s a humanitarian measure,’ Reid chuckled. ‘It lets the civilians get out of the way.’

‘And clogs the roads with refugees and gives the mini-state militias every excuse for calling in sick tomorrow morning?’

‘Like I said –’

‘– Humanitarian. OK. Business. What’s the deal with Norlonto?’

‘We know your militia won’t fight for the Kingdom,’ Reid said slowly, ‘and we don’t expect you to fight for the Republic. All donations gratefully received, of course, but that’s by the way. The main thing is, we don’t want anybody thinking we’re invading you if we happen to, uh, pass through in large tracked vehicles.’

‘I can see how that might be misunderstood,’ I said. (Julie, behind me, snorted.) ‘What guarantee do we have that you aren’t gonna just stomp on us?’

‘Apart from my solemn word?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Apart from that.’

‘It’s not in our interests. We’ve nothing against Norlonto. Some of the little Free States will have to be cleaned up, but you’re not on the list.’

Fucking great. ‘OK, how about this. ANR shelling and rocketing of Norlonto stops right now. Your troops can pass through, but they can’t stay and they especially can’t launch any attacks on the Hanoverians from positions inside Norlonto, even with the landowners’ permission.’

‘That’ll do,’ Reid said.

‘That breaks the Settlement,’ Julie said, as if this point had just occurred to her.

‘Indeed it does,’ Reid said drily. ‘So just on the off-chance that we lose this round, I suggest that Jon makes this deal known over your heads. All those who did accept the Settlement resign their posts in disgust, and Jon takes over for the next day or two.’

‘What!’ Julie and I said at the same moment.

‘Sure,’ Reid went on imperturbably. ‘Make him dictator or something. That way, he can give the orders to the militia and take the rap if we go down. You can always shoot him afterwards if we win and he shows too much attachment to the job, but I’m sure that won’t be necessary.’

‘You’re asking a lot,’ I said. ‘If you lose, I’ll swing for it.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,’ Reid said airily. ‘If we lose it’ll be because the Yanks come in, and then you’ll die anyway.’

‘Doesn’t that apply to the rest of us?’ Julie asked. ‘I mean, why bother with –?’ She waved her hand.

‘Dear citizen,’ Reid said with feigned patience, ‘the Yanks have a list. He’s on it, and you’re not.’

‘Well,’ I said after this reassurance had sunk in, ‘how can I refuse?’

‘Good man,’ said Reid. ‘I hope I see you again.’

‘So do I, mate,’ I said. ‘So do I.’

The following day the ANR offensive started (Bang On Schedule! as the Sun-Times noon edition put it) but stalled and fell back before the day was over. There’s a story that this was down to some kind of software problem, but it’s hard to credit. I think the general strikes and local insurrections that broke out at the same time had a lot more to do with it. Fortunately, over the next few days this civilian uprising carried the revolution to victory. When it became obvious that America too was on strike and the troops weren’t coming, the Restored Hanoverian government departed ignominiously in helicopters to ‘continue the struggle against terrorism from exile’, as they put it.

The fall of the US/UN has been similarly attributed, in the sort of conspiracy theories I once thought I’d exploded forever, to an engineered viral assault on the global information nets. But a moment’s objective thought will show that the insurrections in Britain and Siberia, concurrent with an escalating arms-control dispute with Japan, were what finally convinced the American people that world domination wasn’t worth yet another tax hike and draft call-up. Copycat insurrections, as they were called, spread around the globe with the speed of an Internet rumour. The disruption associated with what amounted to a world revolution is, in my view, a more than adequate explanation for the chaotic state of everybody’s computer screens over the next few months.

At the time I had more pressing matters to attend to, like trying to figure out a way of losing my new job without handing it to somebody worse. I should have known better than to become a dictator in the first place, but that’s anarchism for you. It’s just no preparation for the responsibilities of government.

February, 2046. The coldest winter in years. People said there was a hole in the greenhouse, as they lit fires with yesterday’s money.

We had our own greenhouse, our geodesic dome on the edge of the Trent Park, near the university. The students were occupied with making mistakes about democracy and elitism that had been considered passé when I was at Glasgow. I left them to it. Annette moved slowly about her horticultural experiments, with a lab-coat made of fur. I rattled out net propaganda, spoke myself hoarse on the cable, convened virtual meetings of Norlonto’s factions and hammered out a line to take to the national government.

For relaxation I talked to people in space. Beyond the Lagrange settlements and the Moon it was easier by email, a more natural medium given the lightspeed lag. Asteroid miners solemnly asked my advice about mutual banking, Martian colonists grumbled about being abandoned now that Space Defense was being cut back. Soldiers’ councils on former Space Defense battlesats bounced ideas off me for profitable ways to use laser cannon. (They were good kids, really, or they’d have thought of the obvious way.)

Meanwhile the civil wars went on. The Republic’s modest aim of combining national unity with local autonomy clashed repeatedly with locals whose idea of autonomy was a good deal more expansive. As a state, the Republic was in many ways weaker than the Kingdom – with its ever-present, over-the-horizon orbital back-up – had ever been. More fundamentally, the revolution had put everything up for grabs: created incentives to defection, as the game theorists put it.

Refugees poured into Norlonto from the countryside, and continued their fights in the shanty-towns and camps. The strain on our charities and defence-companies alike increased by the week, and every week I shouted at their organisers to recruit new workers from among the refugees themselves.

That worked until it became difficult to tell just who was recruiting whom. Competing cop companies found themselves literally in rival armed camps, whose quartermasters, as like as not, were authorised charity distributors. We called it the Thailand Syndrome.

The weekly meetings of the Defence Liason Committee became daily, or rather, nightly. They usually began at 9.00 p.m. and went on until after midnight. This was all right by me. My sleep requirements had diminished with age. I resented having to go into VR, but that’s life. Every evening I’d take the washing-up gloves off, pull the datagloves on, give Annette a smile across the cleared table and put on the glasses and –

Be there. Some of us fancied ourselves as Heroes In Hell, and the setting was appropriate: a black infinity around us, and between us a round table with a common view of Norlonto, or London, or whatever we wanted to examine; a camera obscura view, patched together from satellite pictures and enhanced with all the data we could pull in. At this level there were thirteen of us, always a lucky number for a committee. Our fetches – our body-images in the virtual world – were the same as our actual forms, mainly so that we could recognise each other in real life or on television.

The night of the big crisis we were one short. I looked around, worried. Julie was there, Mike Davis, Juan Altimara, all from different tendencies of the space movement; a pair of identical youths whom I’d mentally tagged ‘the Mormon missionaries’ though actually they were from the Norlonto churches’ protection charity, the St Maurice Defence Association; and – moving from the voluntary sector to the commercial – a handful of defence company delegates who changed from week to week and always looked alarmingly young and pathetically exhausted, and always squabbled with the leftists –

‘Where’s Catherin Duvalier?’ She was young, fast, smart: a communist militia co-ordinator whose intelligence networks extended through the Green camps to the distant battles in the hills.

Julie smiled at me from across the table’s bright gulf.

‘Cat’s getting married tomorrow. Sends her apologies.’

‘No excuse,’ I grunted, but I was relieved we hadn’t had a defection, or indeed a casualty. ‘OK, comrades. First business.’

I keyed up the day’s trading figures for defence shares and combat futures. They were rising fast.

‘Well, chaps,’ I said to the defence-agency boys, ‘do you know something we don’t?’

A flicker of data interchange set the fetches wavering as if in a heat-haze. Then, their hasty conferring over, one of them spoke up.

‘We were about to say, Mr. Wilde…’

Oh, sure.

‘…all our companies have been separately approached today about, ah, potential conflict situations. It seems that once again a large number of street-owners have made deals to allow passage of, uh, armoured columns –’

‘You mean the Army’s coming in?’

Virtual eyes heliographed shock around the table.

‘Yes,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘We’ve been instructed to inform you that the government has decided to end Norlonto’s anomalous status – their words. It’s been done at the request of a significant part of the business community and a number of Norlonto’s more, uh, settled neighbourhood associations –’

‘Bastards!’ shouted Julie. She rounded on the ‘Mormon Missionaries’. ‘Did you know anything about this?’

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ one of them said. ‘We’ve been passing on the complaints from our clients for weeks. The situation really is becoming quite intolerable, especially for the less fortunate. I assure you all that the Association knew nothing of this, but I can’t say I’m surprised or sorry.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘when do the tanks roll in?’

‘Day after tomorrow,’ one of the agency reps said. ‘Show of force, and all that. Order on the streets.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘That gives us time to organise.’

‘Resistance?’ Several voices said it at the same time, in dismay or hope.

‘No,’ I said grimly. ‘Retreat. Tell your principals, and the government, that there’ll be no trouble from the militia.’

I looked around the table, my hand on the databoard of the real table tapping out an urgent message to the space movement people to stay behind. ‘Meeting’s adjourned. See you all tomorrow.’

‘What the fuck are you playing at, Wilde?’ Julie asked, when the charities and the businesses had left the scene. ‘We can’t take this lying down. It’ll be the end of Norlonto!’

Mike Davis and Juan Altimara nodded indignant agreement.

‘Oh ye of little faith,’ I said. ‘Of course it’ll be the end of Norlonto. I seem to recall that most of you were not too keen on the beginning of Norlonto.’

Juan, who’d arrived in Norlonto as a child refugee from Brazil’s brief biowar during the Amazonian Secession, looked at Mike and Julie. The fungal scar on his cheek twisted as he frowned.

‘I did not know this,’ he said.

Julie flushed, Mike fiddled with his bat switch: ‘Heat out the roof, now,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘Point is, like, Norlonto’s been a bastion of liberty for years, a successful experiment, and you want to let the statists march in without firing a shot!’

‘Excuse me, comrades,’ I said, ‘but who’s capitulating to statism here?’ I was rummaging around in the virtual depths of the table, illuminating likely routes for the incursion and checking them against the movements of insurance ratings, defence-agency deployments, militia strongpoints. ‘The way I see it, if the clients of the various defence agencies, if the communities and property-owners of this town want to make a deal with a nationalised defence industry, what business is it of ours? Isn’t that anarcho-capitalism in action?’

‘Capitalists selling out the anarchy, more like!’ said Julie.

‘As they have a right to do,’ Mike said. ‘Yeah, I have to agree with Jon here. Still, it means we’ve failed.’

Julie and Juan were both inspecting the enhanced map take shape. They looked up, looked at each other.

‘We don’t have to fail,’ Juan said. ‘The militia’s strong enough to hold off the Republic’s forces. We have time to rally the population. The Army can’t get away with a massacre in its own capital – even the Hanoverians held back from that.’

‘They’re getting away with murder in the countryside,’ I said. ‘You ever listen to any of the refugees?’

Julie gave this comment a flick of the hand. ‘If you believe the whining of those people the Republic’s a monstrous tyranny, which it obviously isn’t, so –’

‘So why are you so worried about having their troops on the streets?’

‘Because –’ Julie looked at me as if I was missing something so obvious she was having trouble believing she had to spell it out. ‘Because it’s our town, dammit! Our free city! We can’t let the state roll in after all this time. We should crack down on the camps ourselves, do it now, chase those mafias and renegade militias out and get rid of even that excuse for the Army coming in. If we move now we could do it tonight!’

I could see Mike taking heart at this suggestion, while my own heart sank. I wished Catherin Duvalier had picked a different day to get hitched. The argument went on.

A butterfly flew out of the infinite darkness around us and settled on the table, wings quivering.

‘Oh, shit,’ it said in Annette’s voice. ‘I hope I’ve got this damn’ thing working –’

‘We see you, Annette,’ I said. ‘What are you doing? How did you get here?’

I felt her hand, eerily invisible, brush the back of mine.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I know I’m not supposed to be here, and I haven’t hacked in or anything. In real life I was sitting across a table from Jon, and I could see what he was saying, and I’ve come round beside him and piggybacked in on his link, and I’ve been circling around this conversation –’

‘This is a security risk!’ Juan said.

‘This is no security risk, this is my wife,’ I said. ‘She’s the one who keeps my physical location secure while I’m here, and always has done. So shut up, comrade, and let’s hear what she has to say. If that’s all right with everybody.’ I glared across the map-table and they all, eventually, nodded.

‘OK,’ Annette said. In real life she slid on to my lap and put an arm around my shoulders; in VR she flew up, agitated, then began swooping and fluttering round the map, as if drawn to its lights. ‘You say that letting the Republic take over Norlonto would be a terrible defeat and disgrace. All right. Even Jon thinks that, I’m sure. But have you thought what a defeat and disgrace it would be to go down in blood? Or to win, and become a state yourselves? You’d have to fight not just the Army but the security companies, and that would be the end of the free market anarchy you’re so proud of. As for driving out the refugees – and that’s what you’re really talking about, Julie – it wouldn’t just be wrong, it would be used for years as evidence that what we have here is no different from what they have there.’

She settled in my lap, and on the map. ‘But if you let the Army in, what do you think will happen? The Army will get sucked into our way of doing things – the economic way, not the political way. They’ll have to do deals and trade combat futures and take disputes to court companies and swap laws and all the rest of it.’

‘How do you know they won’t just do things their way?’ Mike asked.

‘Because Julie’s right,’ Annette said. ‘They don’t want a fight on their hands. They don’t want to conquer us, they want to buy us off. In fact it looks like they already have bought off the defence companies. And what’s bought can be sold. Before they know it they’ll be practising anarcho-capitalism without believing a word of it.’

‘Just like every other group that’s come in here,’ Julie said sourly. ‘And look where that’s got us.’

‘Yes, look,’ I said. ‘It’s got us twenty years of peace and freedom, and tolerance between people who jointly and severally hated each others’ guts!’

Juan, Mike and Julie had to laugh. It was a notorious fact that libertarians in Norlonto were rarer than communists in what Reid used to call the workers’ states.

‘I think Annette has a point,’ I said carefully, as if it wasn’t what I’d been thinking all along and hadn’t got around to articulating (I could never have gotten away with the passionate pacifism of her appeal). ‘There’s another point we’ve tended to forget, and it’s been bugging me recently. Over the years we’ve got so caught up in running Norlonto, in as much as it hasn’t run itself, that we’ve tended to ignore what’s been going on in space. I know, I know, it’s been a sort of socialism-in-one-country versus world revolution thing, and Space Defense held the high orbits, and apart from Alexandra Port there wasn’t much practical we could do. I remember years ago some of us tried setting up experimental laser-launchers, and got stomped on from a great height. But now Space Defense is out on a limb, and we have friends – comrades – in Lagrange and on the Moon trying to build ecosystems out of a rag, a bone and a tank of air. It’s about time we did something about it. So I say, if the statists want Norlonto, let ’em have it. We can find better things to do.’

I sat back, feeling Annette’s weight shift too, seeing the butterfly image tremble. The other three space movement leaders were looking at me and communicating under the table – as it were – with each other. I hoped they would be at least secretly relieved at the idea of saving the Movement’s honour by not fighting.

Juan’s fetch glowed with incoming information, dopplered back to an image of himself.

‘OK, Wilde,’ he said. ‘We think we can sell it. Get ready to wake up early. Julie’s going to fix up interviews with you on as many channels as possible. Now, I suppose it’s time to…’

‘Get back to your constituencies, and prepare for government,’ I said.

Nobody laughed.

When the others had faded from view I moved to take the VR glasses off, and felt Annette’s hands catch my wrists.

‘No,’ she said. She swooped into my face, passed out at the back and came around again. ‘This is fun. Why didn’t you tell me about it before?’

She stood up, dragged me out of the chair and pulled me down on the real table, the virtual image of our stateless state swaying in front of my eyes. We groped and fumbled and fucked on the kitchen table, on the mapped city, while above us two butterflies mated in the infinite dark.

15

Another Crack at Immanentizing the Eschaton

Dee is experiencing her first guilty pleasure. The pleasure comes from sitting on the grassy, boulder-strewn side of a valley, under Earth’s sun. The sky is a different blue, the clouds a different white, to anything she’s ever seen, even in her Story dreams. At the bottom of the valley, far below her, a brown river tumbles over black stones. Farther down the valley, the peace of the scene is disrupted by the clangour of construction on a vast pylon. But from where Dee sits, the distant noise only emphasises the surrounding quiet; the rush of work by half-a-dozen tiny, scrambling figures only reminds her that she has nothing to do but relax, and breathe deep of the clean, thick air of Earth.

The guilt comes from its all being an illusion: a full-immersion virtual reality which has her so spellbound that she understands exactly why this seductive subversion of the senses is so much frowned upon. The most decadent sybarite in the upper lofts of Ship City will sternly inform you that this kind of thing is unnatural, has rotted the moral fibre of great civilisations, and makes you go blind.

She’s a little guilty, too, that Ax can’t share it. He’s stuck out in the real world, mooching in the back of the truck. The half-tracked vehicle is like a gigantic, elongated version of Jay-Dub’s upper shell. Its brushed-aluminium skin conceals several centimetres of armour-plate. Its nuclear turbines can give it a top speed of a hundred kilometres an hour, with a flat surface and a clear run. In its stores are many fearsome and fascinating things, but VR immersion gear is not among them.

Dee’s in via a direct cortical jack, plugged in to a socket behind her ear. Ax could do this too, but there’s only one jack, and she needs it – or rather, it’s needed for her. Ax is (she has to assume) still sitting under the raised visor of the tailgate, with his legs dangling over the end of the truck, and applying his electronic version of telepathy to the dodgy reception of an old television. He’s also (she hopes) keeping a watchful eye out for predators, bounty-hunters, and dust-storms. The crawler’s systems, and Jay-Dub’s, are well prepared for all of them, but as Dee looks down the virtual valley, she suspects that they’re more than a little preoccupied. She knows a thing or two about CPU time, and from here she can see a lot of it being used.

And not only by Jay-Dub and the vehicle. One reason why she’s been sent off up the hill and instructed to do as little as possible is that her own systems are almost fully engaged. Her body, out in the real world, is lying in the back of the truck, limp as a rag-doll. All but two of the figures working on the skeletal tower, just below the long, low house whose graceful shape juts out of the slope like an overhang, are aspects of herself. Soldier is there, and Scientist, and Spy and Sys, helping two other entities with their strange work. Stores and Secrets don’t manifest themselves in VR as anything like people: instead, they’re tangled, almost impenetrable bundles of live wires and sharp thorns and equally discouraging objects. The dark figures dance and poke around them, and now and again snatch something from the thickets and carry it off triumphantly to add to the bristling tower.

The two other entities are the ones that inhabit Jay-Dub all the time. She met them after Jay-Dub had taken them in its boat up the Stone Canal, far out into the desert, last night. They are the old man and the young girl who spoke to her from the truck. (The truck, indeed, is a version of this vehicle, and she can understand the attraction of its illusory, cluttered cab.) Away from the cab, in the valley and in the house, Meg is a graceful, elegantly dressed woman, but in the cab she’s a slut. Her face and eyes are the same in both virtual environments; but her eyes always seem larger and darker, when her smile haunts your memory, than they are when you see them again.

Ax has been given the task of watching the news, and following the court case when it starts. Meanwhile Wilde, the old man in the robot’s mind, has harnessed all the resources of its mind and hers to crack the problem – as he puts it – independently of the outcome. He and Meg, and the spectral shapes of Dee’s separate selves, are running about like ants at a fire.

And Dee is up here, on the hillside, all by her Self.

Tamara caught Wilde’s elbow. His fists were clenched, his heels were off the ground. He was leaning forward, staring after Reid and Reid’s companions.

‘You can always kill him afterwards,’ she said. ‘If it comes to a fight.’

Wilde relaxed somewhat. Slowly his hands uncurled. He gave Tamara a smile to set her at her ease, and looked down at the cigarette Reid had given him. It was still smouldering, the filter tip flattened between his fingers. He took a last long drag of it, and threw it away.

‘He said I was a puppet, and Wilde was dead.’ He shook his head, then shivered. ‘If Jonathan Wilde is dead, who killed him, eh?’

‘NOT ADMISSIBLE,’ the MacKenzie adviser told him.

Wilde snorted, blinked away a floating footnote about rules of evidence, and sat down on one of the seats. He crushed his paper cup and stuffed it into the mug that Reid had left. He reached for Tamara’s hand and drew her to a seat. She sat down on it sidelong, facing him.

‘What was all that –’ her voice dropped ‘– about the fast folk?’

Wilde glanced around. Seats around them were filling up, as people settled down to await the beginning of the case: Reid’s supporters and theirs, as well as an increasing number of people who didn’t fit in either camp, and who were drifting in from the main gate. These visitors, as distinct from the litigant alliances, made a colourful showing, with their hacked genes, elective implants or biomech symbionts. News remotes prowled about, some on the ground, some – supported by small balloons or tiny haloes of rotor-blades – drifting or hovering overhead. Up at the front someone tested microphones, generating howls of feedback.

‘There’s no time,’ Wilde said. He sighed and repeated, as if to himself, ‘There’s no time.’ Then he clasped Tamara’s hand and said urgently, ‘Look, you’ve seen something of what Reid really thinks. I don’t know if he’ll try that in court – he can’t very well claim I’m human, and Jay-Dub’s owner, and then turn around and say what he just said. But there’s a lot more at issue than the matters before the court. If the outcome goes against him, there’s no way Reid will go along with it. And if it goes against us, there’s no way we can go along with it!’

‘We could challenge him to single combat,’ Tamara said, as if it were a good idea. Wilde laughed at her.

‘Do you really fancy my chances?’

Tamara thought it over, eyed him critically. ‘Nah. Not really. You’re bigger, but he’s faster.’ She brightened. ‘But I’d have a chance, or I could call on an ally. Shit. Wish Ax was with us.’

‘Forget it,’ Wilde said. ‘You’re fighting no battles for me.’

‘Battles…’ Tamara sat up straight. ‘You said there might be big trouble. I can tell the comrades to get ready. In Circle Square we’ve got a few good fighters, and people who’ve studied all the great anarchist battles – Paris, Kronstadt, Ukraine, Barcelona, Seoul, Norlonto…’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Wilde. ‘Well, I hate to break this to you at such a late date and all, but there’s one vital thing all the great anarchist battles of history have in common.’

‘Yes?’

Wilde stood up and got ready to move down to the front row. He grinned at Tamara’s eager enquiry.

‘They were all defeats,’ he said.

Wilde took his seat, with Tamara at his right and Ethan Miller at his left. The others who’d come with him filled the other seats on either side. Farther to the left, across a passage between the files of seats, Reid and his immediate supporters had positioned themselves. The rest of the hundred or so seats were occupied, and twice as many more people – human or otherwise – made shift to stand or sit on the grass. In front of all of them was the wooden dais with its simple furnishings, and an array of microphones and cameras. From the labels stuck on them they appeared to be from the news-services rather than part of the court’s arrangements, but some of them had been cabled to loudspeakers at the rear of the seats, the cobweb threads of the cables shining on the damp and now trampled grass. Ethan ostentatiously checked the mechanisms of his rifle.

At a minute before ten, the voices hushed, and the other sounds – of breathing, of shifting, of recording – seemed louder, as Eon Talgarth walked up the central aisle. Heads and cameras turned. Talgarth faced straight ahead.

He was a slight-built man, of medium height, with wispy brown hair slicked back under a tall hat. He wore a plain black suit and white shirt, with a blue tie. His features conveyed a greater maturity than Ship City’s fresh-faced fashions normally affected. When he reached the dais he bounded up on it, and sat down carefully on the canvas seat. He filled his glass with a yellow liquid, sipped it, and lit a cigarette. His narrow-eyed gaze swept the crowd.

‘Right,’ he said, in a London accent that sounded archaic and drawling by comparison with the clipped local speech. ‘Begin.’

Reid stood up at once and walked to the nearest microphone.

‘Objection,’ said Wilde, rising. ‘My charge is the more serious, and should be heard first.’

‘Over-ruled,’ said Eon Talgarth. ‘His claim was prior.’

Wilde turned an incipient shrug into a polite bow, and sat down. ‘WORTH A TRY,’ the adviser told him.

Reid addressed the judge.

‘Esteemed Senior,’ he said. ‘Thank you for hearing us.’

‘Thank you for honouring the court with your custom,’ Talgarth said. ‘Now, what’s your charge?’

Reid paused, and then spoke as if reading from a note: ‘My charges are against Jonathan Wilde, and Tamara Hunter. My charge against Jonathan Wilde is that the robot known as Jay-Dub, property of the same Jonathan Wilde, was used to corrupt the control systems of a Model D gynoid, known as Dee Model, property of myself. My charge against Tamara Hunter is that she illegally took possession of the gynoid, subsequently claimed that Dee Model was abandoned property, knowing that the gynoid was not abandoned, and raised an improper defence of the gynoid’s falsely claimed autonomy against the recovery agents of its lawful owner.’

Talgarth looked at Wilde and Tamara.

‘Do you accept these charges, or contest them?’

They both stood up. ‘We contest them.’

‘Very well,’ said Talgarth. With one airy wave he gestured for them to sit, and Reid to continue.

‘The material evidence for these charges,’ said Reid, ‘has been brought to your attention through the First City Law Company, and I wish to introduce it formally. One: a transcript of an interaction between my gynoid, known as Dee Model, and another artificial intelligence. Two: personal records of interactions I have had in the past, with an artificial intelligence embodied in a robot known as Jay-Dub. The authenticity of these records can be, and has been, independently verified.’

Talgarth nodded. ‘The court accepts their provenance.’

‘Challenge?’ Wilde murmured into his adviser’s mike.

‘NO CHANCE.’

‘Three,’ Reid went on, ‘the public record of the ownership of Jay-Dub, posted many years ago with the Stras Cobol Mutual Bank. Its owner is identified as Jonathan Wilde, my opponent in this case.’

‘Will the person identifying himself as Jonathan Wilde please rise?’

Wilde complied, turning around so that every eye and lens in the place could see him.

‘Thank you,’ said Talgarth, with a curt nod to Wilde. ‘You may sit.’ He turned again to Reid. ‘Continue.’

‘Fourth, and finally,’ Reid said. ‘An autonomy claim posted through Invisible Hand Legal Services, by Tamara Hunter, also in this court –’

The identification ritual was repeated.

‘– and alleged to be on behalf of Dee Model, an allegedly abandoned automaton.’

Talgarth took another sip of his drink, and fixed his eye on Tamara.

‘We accept that this claim was posted,’ she said.

‘Fine,’ Talgarth said. He tapped a cigarette out of a pack, and lit it.

‘So that’s the evidence,’ he said. ‘You needn’t introduce evidence about Tamara Hunter’s defence of Dee Model, as the incident is a matter of public record. The court acknowledges that there’s a case to answer, on the face of it.’

Wilde stood up, blinking spasmodically as the MacKenzie downloaded a sudden screed past his eyes.

‘We are prepared to answer it, and to lay counter-charges,’ he said. ‘However, I need a few moments to assimilate some new information. I crave the court’s indulgence for…ten minutes?’

A ripple of impatience and derision disturbed the crowd.

‘You have seven,’ said Talgarth.

What the MacKenzie adviser was telling Wilde, and which he précised to Tamara and a huddle of their supporters, was this:

Invisible Hand’s sub-contracted software agents, on a (necessarily slow) trawl of Ship City’s vast, unencrypted public records – which, in the absence of anything resembling a civil service, suffered from inadequate maintenance, low compatibility and shoddy indexing – had uncovered a single, intriguing reference to Jay-Dub and Eon Talgarth. They had never had any recorded contact since the landing, but they had been on the same work-teams back on the other side of the Malley Mile.

‘Does this change anything?’ Tamara asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Wilde said. ‘But Reid must know about this, just as he must know that Talgarth took a pretty dim view of my activities back on Earth.’

Ethan Miller thrust his face forward. ‘We should get the trial called off, man! The judge is biased against you, and maybe against Jay-Dub as well.’

‘We can’t,’ said Wilde. ‘We’ve agreed to him, I’ve said publicly I trust his judgement, and we can’t turn round now and say we didn’t know.’

‘But we can on appeal to another court,’ Tamara pointed out.

‘Ah,’ Wilde said. ‘So could Reid – this cuts both ways! We don’t know how Talgarth and Jay-Dub got on when they were both robots together – could’ve been the best of mates, for all we know.’ He straightened up, coming to a decision. ‘Reid can’t know that Jay-Dub never mentioned this, or for that matter that it’s currently out of communication with us. So he might be holding this back as grounds for an instant appeal if the decision goes against him. Fuck it. I’ll just have to bear it in mind. Play on.’

Dee hears a distant shout. The figures around the tower are yelling and waving at her, and moving away. The tower itself has changed, its barbed branches forming a pattern that looks somehow inevitable and right, ugly though it is.

She sighs and stands up. Now she’ll have to slog and slither all the way back down the hill, and along the rough road. Seeing as how this is virtual reality, she doesn’t understand why she can’t just fucking fly. Wilde has told her about something called ‘consistency rules’ but she’s not impressed. She doesn’t need a spurious consistency to stop her going mad.

But all this casting of curses and aspersions proves redundant, for without a moment’s warning she’s back in her tired and aching flesh. Her head hurts so much she wishes she were scrambling down that hillside, under the big, hot sun of Earth. Above her, tools and flashlights sway from hooks, and all around the deep electric hum of the crawler’s turbines tell her they’re on their way.

She sits up cautiously and swings her feet to the floor. Ax stands by the closing tailgate. Interior screens light up on all four walls of the vehicle’s hold as the rear door shuts with a sigh of hydraulics and a suck of sealing-strips. They are heading straight for the canal, which they cross with a gentle pitching motion. The crawler’s treads, Dee knows, are mounted on some kind of extensible legs which make drops of a couple of metres no more than bumps in the road.

‘What’s going on?’ Dee asks.

Ax shrugs, but Dee’s question is answered as the forward screen changes to a view over the shoulders of Wilde and Meg. Meg twists around and smiles, Wilde keeps looking forward but his eyes meet hers in the rear-view mirror. (Consistency rules again. Crazy, Dee reckons.)

‘Hi,’ he calls. ‘Sorry about the abrupt departure. You can go back to our place with Meg if you want, but right now I’ve got to stay in reality.’ He laughed. ‘To the extent of looking out the window and driving the truck, anyway.’

In reality, Jay-Dub is nested in a cavity near the front of the vehicle, and has been since they arrived. The truck is perfectly capable of driving itself. Dee has a shrewd suspicion that the necessity of controlling its progress is in part purely psychological, at a more superficial level than that of the embedded consistency-rules. She lets the explanation pass.

‘Where are we going?’ she asks.

‘We have to go back to Ship City,’ the man tells her.

‘Problem at the trial?’ Dee guesses. She’s not paying the conversation her full attention; she’s exploring her mind, checking off her selves like they’re strayed children coming home, and finds to her relief that they’re all there. Secrets is smaller, Stores is far bigger than when she downloaded them to Jay-Dub – but that’s all right, she has room in her head to spare.

‘Oh no,’ Wilde shouts back, his eyes flicking from the mirror to the desert. Dee can see the vehicle is moving at almost its top speed. ‘We have to pick up some poison, and then…’

His voice trails off, whether because of the outcrop they’re about to (she grabs the edge of the bed-bench) go over – or because he doesn’t know what to say.

‘Then what?’

Wilde’s eyes, crinkling into a smile, look back at her again.

‘We’re going to hack the gates of hell.’

She doesn’t even bother to ask for a further explanation. It is obvious that none will be forthcoming, and she has to assume there’s some good reason why not. Wilde gives her an encouraging nod, and then turns his attention to the flat desert and to Meg. Ax has braced himself on an old foil blanket, next to an aerial feed, and is having visions by television.

Dee sets Scientist to work, and enters Sys. Minutes pass. Then, as from a great, cold height, a mountain higher than any on Earth or either Mars, in a raw virtual vacuum that makes her head feel as though it’s about to bloodily explode, Dee sees exactly what Wilde’s cryptic statement means.

‘You first,’ Tamara said. The others dispersed to their seats and Wilde stepped forward to the microphone. Talgarth stubbed out the cigarette he’d spent the seven minutes smoking, and nodded.

Wilde went through the same courtesies as Reid had used and said:

‘Esteemed Senior, I am more than willing to answer for my actions, and for those undertaken on my behalf. I am not willing to answer for the actions of the robot Jay-Dub, or to accept the allegation that it is my property. My present physical existence began last Fi’day, around noon, when I was resurrected. The robot Jay-Dub claimed to have accomplished this, by means which I make no pretence to understand –’

Reid sprang to his feet.

‘Objection!’ he said. ‘Irrelevant.’

‘Sustained,’ said Talgarth.

Wilde swallowed. ‘Very well, Esteemed Senior. The point can be made independently by appealing to the records of Jay-Dub’s transactions with the Stras Cobol Mutual Bank, which I am happy to make available to the court so far as they are relevant. They establish indeed that the owner of Jay-Dub is one Jonathan Wilde. And they identify who, exactly, that Jonathan Wilde is. The earliest records include transactions with David Reid’s company, Mutual Assured Protection. They explicitly accept the name ‘Jay-Dub’ as a synonym of Jonathan Wilde, and the robot Jay-Dub as equivalent to that person, Wilde. The robot Jay-Dub has been accepted without demur these many years as none other than Jonathan Wilde – Jay-Dub, in short, is Jonathan Wilde! Any records mentioning Wilde as the owner of the robot Jay-Dub, therefore, can only be interpreted as meaning that the person Jonathan Wilde owns Jay-Dub in the same sense that I, Jonathan Wilde, own my body.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Any coincidence of names is regretted.’

Eon Talgarth, sitting on his chair on the dais, shared an eye-level with Wilde, standing. Their eyes locked for a moment.

‘The court will rule on this point,’ Talgarth said. ‘The robot known as Jay-Dub is in a unique position among all the inhabitants of this colony, so far as I know. However, it is a position in which many of the said inhabitants once were, and in which it alone remains. I accept the argument which has just been put, and I rule that any charges against Jonathan Wilde in the capacity of owner of the robot Jay-Dub must be laid against that robot, as a self-owning mechanism.’ He looked around. ‘It is not present in this court and should be notified forthwith. The charge against that Jonathan Wilde remains pending.’

Reid started to his feet with a look of fury, but a woman sitting beside him caught his arm and drew him back. After conferring head-to-head with her, Reid desisted.

‘My ruling carries no precedent relevant to questions of machine personality as such,’ Talgarth went on. ‘The matter of the ownership of Dee Model has still to be considered. Regardless of whether her control-systems were corrupted, and who if anyone is responsible for that, Reid’s claim that he did not abandon her is not contested. Therefore he remains her owner, and those present on the other side of the case are enjoined to co-operate in her apprehension and return.’

Tamara rose, received a flicker of permission to speak, and said, ‘Senior Talgarth, this court has many times ruled that the autonomy of machines may be claimed by the machines themselves. That, and not the issue of abandonment which I freely admit I was wrong about, is the basis on which we wish to assert Dee Model’s self-ownership.’

Talgarth sighed. ‘All such cases,’ he said patiently, ‘relate to unowned sapient machines in the machine domains. The freedom of such automata is also implicitly recognised by other courts. The gynoid under consideration, however, has been constructed by the resources and efforts of David Reid, and remains his property until he decides otherwise.’

Tamara sat down and gave Wilde a grimace of regret or apology. Wilde, however, seemed to gaze right through her. He blinked, smiled at her and stood up. He walked to the microphone and looked over the crowd before turning to the judge.

‘Esteemed Senior, your valued opinion on the matter of Jay-Dub and the matter of Dee Model raises some further points, which I beg the court to consider. First, in the matter of Jonathan Wilde in his embodiment as Jay-Dub. The court has accepted that he and I are separate persons, though – by implication – sharing a common history up to a point which the court has refused to determine –’

‘How?’ Talgarth frowned.

‘When you sustained the objection that the time of my resurrection was irrelevant.’

Talgarth sat back. ‘That’s correct.’

‘As a separate embodiment of Jonathan Wilde, I wish to proceed against David Reid on the charge of having unlawfully killed me, on the basis that any considerations or acknowledgements that may have been made between Reid and Jonathan Wilde aka Jay-Dub have no bearing on me.’

‘I’ll defer consideration on that until the time of your resurrection has been determined satisfactorily,’ said Talgarth. ‘The charge of murder which you brought against Reid remains outstanding until that point has been cleared up, or is not contested. David Reid, what do you say?’

Reid rose, disdaining to step forward. ‘Please the court,’ he said loudly, ‘I am quite willing to accept this person’s claim that he was resurrected by the robot Jay-Dub three days ago. As a matter of natural justice I wish the earliest opportunity to clear myself of the charge of murder, or have it thrown out of court as a waste of the court’s valuable time and a piece of actionably vexatious litigation.’ He glared at Wilde and sat down.

‘Very well,’ said Talgarth. He turned to Wilde. ‘Before we move to considering that charge, do you have anything further to say about points raised by my opinion on the matter of Dee Model?’

‘I do indeed,’ said Wilde. ‘The court mentioned that the gynoid Dee Model had been constructed with the, ah, other party’s resources and efforts. I wish to raise a question about the ownership of those resources themselves. Because Dee Model’s body is a clone of the body of my late wife. This is obvious to me, and I challenge Reid to deny it.’

He paused and turned around to face Reid. Reid’s response was a tremor of the eyelids, and a shake of the head.

‘You don’t deny it?’ Talgarth said.

Reid stood up. ‘No.’

Wilde shot Reid a look of triumph and hatred, then composed his face to swing a calm smile past the cameras as he turned again to Talgarth.

‘In that case,’ Wilde said slowly and distinctly, ‘I claim that Dee Model’s body belongs to the legitimate heir of my wife!’ He smiled at Talgarth. ‘Whether that heir is myself or Jay-Dub I leave to the court to determine.’

Reid rose at once and bowed politely, though whether to Wilde or Talgarth wasn’t obvious.

‘I am happy to concede the ownership of the genotype,’ he said. ‘And to come to an amicable or, failing that, arbitrated arrangement about its use, or compensation for its use and any distress inadvertently caused. My major concern is the recovery of the gynoid’s software and non-biological hardware, which are incontestably my property.’

Wilde looked over to Tamara, who shrugged and raised her eyebrows as if to say, ‘What’s his game?’ The MacKenzie remote was saying substantially the same thing. It had expected a bigger fight, since the ownership of genotypes was a hotly contested issue. Its only suggestion was that any concession made here would avoid establishing a precedent that other courts might recognise.

‘Very well,’ said Wilde. He adjusted the microphone, his hand shaking slightly. ‘The only compensation I wish is that David Reid resurrect my wife’s mind as well as her body – something which is evidently possible, as the robot Jay-Dub has demonstrated by resurrecting me.’

Reid was on his feet at once. Wilde had to step back quickly as Reid strode up and caught the microphone from his hand.

‘The court has not accepted that Jay-Dub resurrected this man!’

Talgarth flicked ash from his sleeve. ‘Ah, but you have,’ he said mildly.

Reid sat down again. The woman beside him whispered in his ear, her face stiff with annoyance. The news remotes buzzed, and people in the crowd were checking out the running commentaries, on hand-held screens or on their contacts.

‘Order!’ Talgarth banged his gavel, carefully steadying his drink first. ‘David Reid may answer your request in his own time.’

‘I’ll answer now,’ said Reid. Wilde stepped back from the microphone, and returned to his seat.

‘You’ve stirred things up a bit,’ Tamara observed.

Wilde winked, confusing the remote adviser for a moment, and settled back to listen to Reid.

‘Wilde’s request is reasonable,’ Reid was saying. ‘The question of resurrecting the dead has for long been on the minds of us all. But, however much we may wish to do it, we are prevented by force majeure. Most of the personalities of the dead, including that of Reid’s wife Annette, are held in smart-matter storage which remains inaccessible without the co-operation of posthuman entities whose capacities and motives are unknown, but who – as experience has shown – are a risk to us all. I am responsible for keeping the codes that could be used to re-start them, and I can assure this court that until someone demonstrates a way to do this safely, these codes remain in my possession, and the dead…sleep.’ He glanced at Wilde. ‘There are some matters best left undisturbed,’ he told him.

‘He’s telling you not to push it,’ Tamara muttered.

Wilde grinned at her and went forward again as Reid took his seat. The tension in the crowd had diminished. Even Talgarth’s impassive face betrayed relief.

‘The robot Jay-Dub resurrected me without disaster,’ he said. ‘But there is more to the matter than this.’

Reid leaned back in his seat, hands behind his head, and watched Wilde with half-lidded eyes.

‘The court has given its view on one of Reid’s charges,’ Wilde said, ‘and left the other in abeyance until the other Jonathan Wilde, aka Jay-Dub, can be…prevailed upon to answer it. I now wish to press my counter-charge, the outcome of which may perhaps affect how any fines and damages in these matters are allocated. It may also affect the question of the resurrection of the dead in general.’ He smiled at Talgarth, who no longer seemed relieved. ‘Not in a legal sense – on that, I’ll defer to the court – but in a practical sense.’

Wilde stepped a little to the side, so that while he was unarguably and correctly addressing the court, he was also speaking to Reid and to the wider audience.

‘My counter-charge is this: that David Reid had me unlawfully killed, by the reckless action of people acting on his behalf and by his personal, wilful neglect of my injuries. That having done that, he has made no efforts in good faith to resurrect me. He claims that this is difficult – nonetheless, no evidence exists of any attempt on his part to overcome the difficulty. I claim compensation for loss of life-experience and loss of society, for my entire down time. That is, for nothing less than the whole of Ship Time, and possibly for longer.’

Eon Talgarth had to call for order, more than once, before the hubbub ceased.

‘Do you have evidence to bring for this charge?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Wilde.

He stalked over to his seat, reached into Tamara’s backpack, and pulled out the folder of Talgarth’s notes. He held it high as he walked back, and presented it to Talgarth.

‘The evidence,’ he said, ‘has been gathered by a certain Eon Talgarth, and has been a matter of public record and never challenged.’

The court fell silent, except for the toy-helicopter buzzing of the remotes and the distant din of the machinery outside.

Talgarth riffled through the pages, and shook his head. ‘There were conflicting claims,’ he said, ‘as to the manner in which Jonathan Wilde met his death. Although I myself inclined to the view which you have just stated, there are no surviving witnesses other than David Reid and, putatively, yourself. Its not having been challenged has, I’m afraid, no bearing on the matter. No court on this planet recognises libel, and they do not recognise a refusal or failure to rebut a claim as any evidence in its favour.’

He sighed, as if in regret for more than the inadequacy of the evidence; for, perhaps, a political passion long spent, which had driven him to compile the dossier. He handed the folder back to Wilde.

‘The court cannot accept this as evidence,’ he said. ‘In the absence of other evidence, or the confession of the one you have accused –’

He glanced at Reid, who was shaking his head vigorously.

‘– which I understand will not be forthcoming, and which I have no power to compel, I do not see how this charge can be tried at this time. Should you call Reid as a witness, he may refuse to answer, and no adverse inference may be drawn from that.’

Reid’s legal adviser stood up and conferred briefly with Talgarth, while Wilde stepped back out of earshot and looked away. When the woman had sat down again, Talgarth tapped with his gavel.

‘The counter-charge is dismissed,’ he said, ‘without prejudice to either party. Wilde’s bringing of the charge cannot be called vexatious or frivolous, and is not to be held against him. The name and reputation of David Reid remain unsullied. The allegation that his killing of Wilde was unlawful, or with malice, remains as it was before the charge was brought, that is, an unsubstantiated historical speculation which he is within his rights in treating with contempt.’

Reid and his assistant exchanged smiles.

‘However,’ Talgarth went on, with an abrupt harshening of his voice, ‘the claim that Reid was responsible, culpably or not, for the death of Jonathan Wilde is…considerably better attested. The witnesses are not, of course, in this court, but some are known to survive and could be asked to testify.’

He beckoned Reid’s adviser, and after they had conferred again he banged his gavel.

‘Reid does not contest his responsibility for the fact of Wilde’s death.’ He held out an open hand to Wilde. ‘You may proceed.’

‘Ax?’

No response. Ax is watching television in his head, or in front of his eyes, or whatever the hell he does. Dee can’t stand his autistic but audible interest for a second longer. She leans over and shakes his shoulder. He rouses himself and frowns up at her.

‘Wha –?’

‘Ax,’ she says patiently, ‘would you mind patching this fascinating material to a screen, so I can see it too?’

‘Oh. Sorry, Dee.’

He disengages from the cortical downlink and fiddles with switches. Outside, on the big screens, the outskirts of the Fifth Quarter roll slowly past. Dee watches the chaotic activity with disdainful dismay. If this is how machines behave when they’re left to run wild, she reflects, it’s no wonder humans mistrust them.

Around the crawler, which is making its way up a broad street, dozens of other machines, each about thirty centimetres long, are scurrying and sniffing about. They look like larger versions of the cleany-crawlies you find in houses, and although partly autonomous they’re guided by radio control from the cab. Meg has told her they’re looking for traces of a specific poison: one of the public-health countermeasures with which this place is periodically bombarded. The poisons – generically known as Blue Goo – are the nanotechnological equivalent of viruses, regularly updated and mutated to keep pace with the likewise evolving smart-matter wildlife of the machine domains. The job of spraying them from the air is done by a charity, which has no difficulty at all in raising money and volunteers.

Ax gestures to her to look behind her. Part of the screen she turns to gets masked as another window clicks up. It’s the Legal Channels service, showing the court case. Wilde – or Jay-Dub, as Dee finds herself mentally calling him – and Meg have been keeping an eye on it, when they can spare a moment. Ax has been given the task of keeping a close eye on it. Dee has been feeling left out, and wonders if the others have been trying to spare her feelings. Nice of them, but a waste of time.

Because, whatever bad news the court case may bring her, it’s all irrelevant now. As Ax said, that shit is over.

Wilde has apparently just finished speaking. He turns away from the judge, Eon Talgarth. Even Dee’s heard of Talgarth, a former crim from the Malley Mile orbital camp, who studied law as a prisoner; got involved in, then disillusioned with, abolitionism; and has for years made a living adjudicating disputes between scrappies and between machines.

As Wilde turns away the camera follows his face, and he gives it a slow, arrogant grin.

‘Well that was some speech!’ says the breathless commentator. ‘He looked quite annoyed when he described his killing – his alleged killing I should say! Sorreee! And nobody’s ever suggested before that we might owe the dead their back pay! For the implications of that please see –’

Ax snips that particular thread and all Dee hears now is the silence in court as Reid strides to the mike. His face makes her quail. She’s hardly ever seen him angry, and never with her, but she knows his anger is to be feared and right now he’s angry at the whole world.

The camera circles around behind Talgarth. Reid’s more composed now, and Dee feels proportionately calmer – in fact, as she gazes at the close-up, she feels the stirring of an involuntary affection and desire. It’s all the more disturbing in that she feels it as a person, not as a slave, but she puts it down to her past and concentrates on what the man is saying.

‘Senior Talgarth,’ he says heavily, ‘what we have just heard is a disgrace to this court, and an insult to the intelligence of us all. It is also dangerous, in stirring up an opportunistic envy that has no place in a basically just society such as ours, where no person is reduced to selling their lives or labour to those more successful than themselves.’

‘Objection!’ comes a shout from Wilde.

‘Sustained,’ says Talgarth sternly. ‘We aren’t here as a public forum.’

Reid dips his head. (Dee hears Ax, behind her, snort.)

‘The point,’ Reid continues, ‘is that my opponent has asserted that those with an interest in the dead have a claim against me, because I’ve made no attempts in good faith – as he puts it – to tackle the immense task of finding a way to bring about the resurrection of the stored dead. Well, Esteemed Senior, good people, that is a task which I freely admit is beyond my capacities!’ He spread his hands and shrugged. ‘Have I ever prevented anyone else from putting forward a proposal to tackle it? No! Because, as we all know, the real problem is finding a way to contain those whose help we need to raise the dead. The fast folk, those who once were human and whose minds, and motives, developed far beyond human comprehension or control. They are the ones I could awaken, if I wished. They are the ones who could awaken the human dead, who sleep in the same storage-media as they do. And they are the ones who could, in the blink of an eye, turn this planet into the kind of hell that some of us glimpsed, a hundred of our long years ago.’

His gaze focuses on Eon Talgarth, and Dee feels only the slipstream of his passionate plea: ‘Esteemed Senior! I know your memory is not so short! Strike down this claim before it does more harm!’

He looks around once more, and resumes his seat.

Talgarth sips from a glass, and lights a cigarette. He contemplates the smoke for a few moments, then leans forward, elbows on knees. His posture makes a strange contrast to the formality of his attire, and, as if noticing this, he removes his hat.

‘Means he’s talking off the record,’ Ax explains.

‘But we can hear him!’ says Dee.

‘Figure of speech,’ says Jay-Dub, from the virtual cab up front. ‘Ssh.’

Dee, somewhat chastened, looks away for a moment and notices that the crawler is idling at the end of the broad street. The subaltern machines have returned, whether in defeat or success she doesn’t know. Ahead, there’s a grassy park with some fortification in the centre. Above it she detects a cloud of gnat-like flying-machines.

‘Ah, Reid,’ Talgarth is saying, ‘you were always a fine speaker, and I hear what you say. But between you an’ me, if you catch my drift, Wilde has made a valid point about how we could do it off-planet, safe in space, like, and you haven’t answered that, have you?’

Reid raises a hand placatingly to Talgarth, who leans back and replaces his judicial hat. Then Reid turns to the stiffly dressed woman beside him and has a murmuring consultation, from which the camera – as required – cuts away. It pans to Wilde, who’s sitting with –

‘Tamara!’ Dee and Ax exclaim delightedly.

‘Good for her,’ says Jay-Dub.

Back to Reid, who’s just angrily shrugged off the woman’s hand and is walking towards the camera and the mike, followed only by the woman’s open-mouthed dismay.

‘I didn’t want it to come to this,’ Reid says, all conventional courtesy discarded as he speaks to the world, and the court only as an afterthought. ‘But enough is enough. Sure, “we” could do it in space! Tell me, who’s this “we”? If anyone has the capital to spare for a deep-space station and a ring of laser-cannon shielded against any viral programs that could be sneaked into its controls, and a foolproof procedure worked out and hair-trigger, dead-fall nuclear back-ups in place, they can go right ahead! Be my guest! I’ll sell you the fucking dead, and the demons who could raise them. Go ahead! Have another crack at immanentizing the eschaton!

‘Before any entrepreneurs of the apocalypse rush forward, however, let me give you a warning.’

He turns and points a shaking finger at Wilde, who’s observing Reid’s performance with an expression of insolent detachment.

‘Don’t follow any suggestions from this…thing that calls itself Jonathan Wilde! This thing which admits it is a creature of the robot Jay-Dub!’

He pauses and takes a deep breath, and faces Talgarth. ‘Esteemed Senior, I have a heavy responsibility before the people of New Mars. I allowed the robot Jay-Dub to continue in existence, after I had grounds to suspect that it was corrupted by the original fast folk, in the Malley Mile. It has repeatedly, in person and through its golem here – and, for all we know, through manipulation over the years of the so-called abolitionist movement – urged on us the disastrous course of re-running the fast folk. Whose interests, I ask you, would that serve?’

Talgarth makes no reply.

Reid, as if in sudden disgust with the whole business, gives a backward shake of his arm above his head and stalks back to his seat. But he doesn’t sit down. His supporters rise with him, and others in the crowd stand too.

Reid reaches inside his jacket, and there’s a sudden frenzy of movement as the crowd separates – some fleeing the confrontation, others closing with one side or the other. Tamara, and some people Dee doesn’t know but Ax – going by his eager comments – does, form a barrier around Wilde. The cameras bob about, the factions face each other arms in hand.

Talgarth is speaking urgently into his right lapel, and making equally urgent gestures. Dee notices the weapons on the stockade’s iron walls swivel on their mounts, swing around and bear inward and down.

One floating camera suddenly spins and zooms in on the gate, which has opened, unnoticed. The rounded prow of a great armoured vehicle noses in. Dee looks away from the television window to the window screens, and sees another angle on the same view. The intruding vehicle is their own.

16

The Winter Citizen

I woke to the sound of armour in the streets, and lay on my back for a while staring up through the hexagon panes of the dome at the pale cold sky. It was ten o’clock. I’d slept in, but the ANR, as usual, had arrived on time. After yesterday’s exhausting round of television interviews and visits – actual and virtual – to militia units, I felt I had a right to a rest. I no longer even had the responsibility of being Norlonto’s nominal dictator – I’d resigned as chairman of the Defence Liaison Committee as soon as the last militia commander had come on side.

An airship floated by above, its shape distorted by the ripples of the glass. Then another, and another, close behind. I wondered if a lot of people were getting out before the state moved in. Doubtless there were those who didn’t want to hang around for questioning: Hanoverian recusants, spillover from the civil war, Army deserters…perhaps even space movement libertarian idealists, off to grab a place on a launch vehicle before Earth’s exit hatch shut down completely, as the more alarmist ones thought it might. And now, after twenty-odd years as a denizen of a functioning anarchy, I was a citizen again. The tanks and APCs continued to trundle by outside, the airships and helicopters to drift or buzz past above. Annette mumbled and stirred beside me. I ran my fingers over her long white hair and slid from under the duvet, hastily wrapped her fur coat around me and padded down the stair-ladder from our nest under the top of the dome.

I printed off newspapers and fired up a pot of coffee and went to the door. Our housing association’s cluster of domes was set back a little from the street, among paths and ponds, lawns and cannabis gardens. Children raced about, chickens strutted their fenced-in runs. Only the dogs still bothered to react to the Army’s passage.

The tanks, as always, moved faster and quieter than you’d expect. The soldiers sitting on them wore ANR uniforms customised with bandanas and bandoliers and the insignia of forces they’d defected from or defeated. They chewed or smoked and looked down their noses at us, discordant rock music blaring from sound-systems. I stood for a long time, shivering, shanks prickling, and watched.

Then I stooped and picked up our deliveries: juice, milk, eggs, bread and rolls. The bags and cartons had a fur of frost over them; they must have been there for hours. Not much petty crime in Norlonto. I wondered how long that would last. As I fried eggs and bacon and tore off pages from the papers a supermarket bill caught my eye. In our division of domestic labour, shopping was down to Annette. The price of coffee and cigarettes shocked me, the price of local foodstuffs gave some comfort. I checked the delivery bill.

Fruit juice cost about ten times as much as milk. Nothing to do with the inflation – that only applied to the Republic’s official joke currency, and we paid in good South African gold.

Crazy prices. What was the world coming to?

There I was, thinking like an old man. I shook my head and carried Annette’s breakfast and a wad of her favoured newspapers upstairs. Then I washed and dressed and settled down to my own breakfast and news, trying to figure it out.

I was on my second coffee and first cigarette before I remembered that these, like the fruit juice, were imported. For a wild moment I wondered if the Republic had slapped on taxes or tariffs, then realised that such an outrage would hardly have passed me by. I’d have heard about the riots; heck, I’d have been in the riots.

A trawl through the Economist’s database set me straight. Raw-material prices had risen sharply over the six months since the Fall Revolution, while the prices of finished goods and services had dropped. There were plenty of articles explaining why, which in my absorption in our little local difficulties I’d overlooked.

The defeat of the US/UN, and the collapse of its financial scams such as the IMF and World Bank, had had divergent effects. The primary products tended to come from the less developed areas, the old Second and Third Worlds. Their instabilities made our civil wars look like peaceful picketing. Without the empire to police them, protection costs and risk had gone up. Meanwhile, in the more advanced regions, the reduction in taxes – and the end of the headlock on technological development imposed by UN arms control – had allowed manufacturing to enjoy a spurt of growth. Even nanotechnology looked as if it might come on-line at last, if only somebody could entice its best minds out of hiding.

So much for the price of coffee. What was still bothering me was why we weren’t as poor as we should have been. My income from the university had dropped to a token stipend, as the only lectures currently being given there were from the ignorant to each other. (God, let them grow out of that. Soon.) Royalties from my writings had gone up, but not by much, because most of the increased circulation was of those I’d disdained to copyright. Our pension funds were paying out regularly, but they were pretty basic and they certainly hadn’t gone up. And yet – unlike most people since the Revolution – we hadn’t had to tighten our belts.

I keyed up our bank statements and almost spilled a mug of expensive instant coffee. An ordinary expensive cigarette smouldered undrawn to a butt. Our regular income had indeed dwindled, but the balance was being made up by increased payments from my small, almost-forgotten stake in Space Merchants. I cursed the fund-management software for letting me eat my capital, then called it up.

We weren’t eating my capital. We were using up part of the income, and a small part at that. The value of my stake had increased far more than I’d ever expected, and had almost doubled since the Revolution. We were moderately, comfortably, and inexplicably rich.

‘I don’t see what you’re complaining about,’ Annette said, over a late lunch. No urgent phone-calls; I assumed this meant the occupation was proceeding smoothly. ‘I’m thrilled. I never particularly wanted to be rich, but I’ve always thought it would be nice.’

She looked around the dome, at the stacked books and climbing plants and the dodgy cabling of the electronics, blatantly thinking of improvements.

‘Yeah, well, me too,’ I said. ‘But to make money in space these days is, like, defying gravity. Space Defense was run on defence budgets that are due for the chop. All the space industries, even the settlements – even NASA – were like the shops in a garrison town. Like the whorehouses! The whole system should be in a severe slump. A lot of it is – the battlesats are running on empty, hawking microwave beams to electricity companies or some such. So why is Space Merchants doing well?’

Annette’s eyes had a glint of amusement or sadness. ‘You won’t stop, will you?’ she said. ‘You think you’re on to something, and you won’t stop.’

‘Yup,’ I said, rising and clearing away the plates.

‘If you find out it’s all been a terrible mistake, just do me one favour,’ she said. ‘Take the money and run. I don’t care who it belongs to, they owe you this much.’

‘Half a day under the state,’ I said, ‘and you’re thinking like a politician.’

‘No,’ she corrected me, standing up and laughing. ‘I’m thinking like a politician’s wife.’

The soldiers stayed, the camps were pacified, people from all wings of the space movement denounced me. I made no reply to the attacks. Snow fell. We kept ourselves warm, and worked on the puzzle as a team. Annette followed the news, and I followed the money. For an advocate of the free market I was embarrassingly ignorant of finance, and a few days went by before I could find my way around the FT’s pink screens without frequent tabs to the Wizards.

Then on to the great databases of Companies House…in VR you could wander through it like a vast mall, its connections and intersections emulating the impossible topologies of an Escher print. I went as myself, and so did some of the other searchers and researchers there, but most were in cryptic fetches, corporate icons or the mirrored samurai armour of the latest discretion software from the Kobe code-shops (‘Zen cryptography – don’t even think about it’, the ads said).

From Companies House you could see the world.

I saw the intricate geometries of Thailand’s Islamic banking system crumble before the assault of the anti-technological Khmer Vertes; Vladivostok’s port economy, liberated by the Vorkuta People’s Front, rise in new and strange shapes; America’s frayed networks of scientific information glow brighter around the coasts, flicker and die in the heartlands as the Scientific Fundamentalists and the White Nationalists shut down the corrupting institutes of what they called ‘rootless naturalism’ in public and ‘Jewish science’ in private.

I saw Kazakhstan’s cosmodromes stretch skyward, and I saw too the tributaries that fed them, the KomLag archipelago of the forced-labour companies. Some in the Former Union – old skills put to a new use – but most in the freer world. A few right here in Norlonto.

Wherever the victorious forces of the Fall Revolution could do it, they were keeping the more useful employees of the defeated US/UN empire – and especially Space Defense – at work for a pittance, in partial restitution for past exploitation. They were supplemented by a new and expanding use for non-political criminals, earning out their payback at high speed, in the high-risk, high-wage space economy.

‘Slavery,’ Annette said. ‘I just don’t believe it’s come to this.’

‘It isn’t really slavery,’ I said uncomfortably. ‘It’s just bonded labour.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Like we don’t have capital punishment, we just let psychopaths pay off their blood-debts by starring in snuff movies?’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Do you still want to take the money and run?’

‘No!’ She looked fiercely at me, then down at the table. ‘On the other hand, there’s no-one to give it back to, it would be counter-productive to sell the shares to someone with even less scruples than you, and it’d be pretty hypocritical just to give the money away.’

‘Not to say wimpish.’

‘Yeah. C of E.’

‘So what’s the answer?’

‘Use it to expose where it’s coming from,’ Annette said firmly. ‘Dig into it some more, then run a campaign to get it all out in the open and discussed. You could do that.’

‘And accomplish what?’

‘Oh, come on! If there are any abuses going on, it might help to stop them.’

We both found ourselves laughing at this statement, but as Annette said after we’d lapsed into a gloomy silence, what else was there to do?

I circled warily in the dataspace around the representations of the Kazakh spaceport hinterland, and noticed the tag-line of the company I’d started so long ago: Space Merchants. It had strong flows of material and information linking it with Myra’s Kazakh workers’ ministate and Reid’s Mutual Protection defence agency. I amplified the resolution, trying to trace what was going on.

They’d all changed, grown beyond anything any of us had initially intended. Space Merchants had become an import–export business between Earth and low orbit, almost as distant now from its innocent, fannish origins in the space-trash market as the latest SSTO boosters were from Goddard’s amateur rocketry. The International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic, its nuclear teeth long since drawn, had changed its specialty to launch-vehicle development. The ISTWR had held out against the surge of Kazakh reunification, and Mutual Protection had a major presence there. And not only there: Mutual Protection now ran security and restitution facilities on three continents, usually guarding installations and extracting payback from any thieves or saboteurs foolish enough to mess with its clients.

It was weird to see that personal triangle between myself, Myra and Reid, replicated as a commercial connection, like the family relations of dynastic armies; but whether those connections meant anything was a different matter. (As I pointed out in Ignoramus!, my work on the counter-conspiracy theory of history, everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who…(etc.), and it’s the easiest job in the world to inkin those pencilled lines; to speculate that the surprisingly few handshakes that separate the obscure from the famous are all funny handshakes…My incautious illustration of this with a diagram of my own second- and third-hand connections, ‘proving’ the existence of a mysterious Last International linking the world’s libertarians and futurists to each other and to a long list of historic usual suspects, had resulted in a certain amount of misunderstanding: for years afterwards I’d received anonymous mailings of what purported to be the Last International’s Central Committee minutes.)

Firewalls guarded most of the companies’ data, the remnants of recent hack-attacks fading on the matt virtual surfaces. I moved along, seeking entry nodes. Out of nowhere, something pinged my fetch. My hands, in the datagloves, felt warm. Warmer. Hot.

I was holding what looked like a sealed envelope, iconic equivalent of a personal message: based on an anonymous transaction protocol, it couldn’t even be read on screen, only in VR through the intended recipient’s fetch. It was also a delivery method of choice for target-specific viruses. I looked at it – damn, it was beginning to give off smoke – and hastily reached behind me and tugged the emergency back-up bat. Seconds trickled by as the contents of my home computer were transferred to isolated disks. When it was safe to do so I opened the now smouldering envelope.

dear jon, it read, it’s too fast. help me. love, myra.

Then it crumbled to bits.

Well, that was a lot of use, I thought as I backed out and sat blinking in chill daylight, Annette’s quizzical smile teasing me from the other side of the table.

‘You’ve heard from Myra,’ she said.

I stared at her. ‘How do you know?’

‘From your face,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen that look before.’

I’d been in contact with Myra perhaps a score of times, in more than a score of years: when we’d had the Bomb, and on deals I’d brokered for the space movement in the Norlonto decades. There was a direct airship link between Alexandra Port and Baikonur, and I’d met her a few times when she was passing through, but most of our contact had been remote.

I reached for Annette’s hand. ‘You’re not jealous? Good God, it was seventy years ago!’

‘I know,’ Annette said. She squeezed my hand. ‘And I know you love me. But you loved her, too. I think she was the only other woman you were ever in love with. And it’s true what they say: love never dies. You can kill it, sure, but it never dies by itself.’

Her words may have echoed any number of sentimental songs and stories, but she spoke them as if they were a bitter, reluctantly accepted scientific truth. She laid a hand over my open mouth before I could protest, expostulate, explain.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. Then: ‘What does she want this time?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I explained about the message, and where I’d found it. ‘She’s in some kind of trouble, and she wants me to help.’

‘“It’s too fast.”’ Annette stared past me, into some virtual reality of her own. ‘That fits, you know. The bonded labour, the profits from space – something is happening too fast. If you look at the news it’s like the world’s coming apart, and I think it’s…being pulled apart, by something we don’t know about.’

I laughed. ‘If it was, somebody would have told me.’

‘I think somebody just did,’ Annette said. ‘Anyway, there’s only one way to find out. Go to Kazakhstan. I assume it won’t be difficult to find Myra, or she’d have told you how.’

I looked at her, astonished. It was a proposal I was just working around to myself. From Annette I’d have expected, if anything, a fight against it.

‘I don’t want you to go,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know if you do. But I’m more afraid of doing nothing. Nobody’s spoken out for you since the troops came in. I don’t think they trust you any more.’

‘They?’

‘The space movement people. The comrades.’

‘There’s no conspiracy,’ I grinned. It was one of my catchphrases.

Annette’s eyes were sad and serious.

‘This time, you could be wrong,’ she said.

She stood up and moved to the house computer, keying the board in a brisk rattle. ‘Well come on,’ she said. ‘Go and help her. I’ll try and book you a flight. You get ready, and for heaven’s sake remember to pack your gun.’

I complied, shaking my head. None of the thoughts Annette had expressed had ever crossed my mind before. ‘Love never dies’.

Well, fuck me.

I was tempted to make the journey by one of the steadily plying airships, but as Annette pointed out those took days, and were usually loaded with freight and crowded with space-workers hung over after a month’s leave in Norlonto. So I found myself leaving Stanstead on a regular jet, much larger than the one that Reid and I had taken thirty years earlier. No anti-aircraft fire this time; the Urals corridor had long since been bombed into a safe passage.

Stanstead to Almaty, its airport still shell-pocked from the victory of the Kazakh People’s Front; north to Karaganda, a frightening, grimy place, black even in the snow: post-Soviet, post-industrial, post-independence, post-everything. From Karaganda there was a regular hop to Kapitsa; because the ISTWR was still an independent enclave, I was detained for a check – the first in my whole journey. Front cadres and local officials scrutinised my documents, tapped my details into some ancient mainframe (located in India, if the response time was anything to go by) then broke into smiles and offers of Johnny Walker Red Label when my records came up. I had said good things about the KPF, when it wasn’t fashionable. They insisted on telling me how much they admired this, and after a few whiskies I told them how much I admired them. They’d fought the US/UN, reunited their country without fueling nationalist fires, and refrained from imposing their state on the one part of the country that didn’t want it.

‘The ISTWR?’ They thought this was funny. They hadn’t refrained out of any high-flown principles.

‘Why not, then?’ I shrugged slightly, glanced at the map above the customs-officers’ desk. Not the little enclave’s defensive capacity, that was for sure.

‘Bad lands,’ I was told. ‘Bomb country.’

They say the steppe around Kapitsa glows in the dark, but it’s just starlight reflected off the snowfields. That’s what I told myself on the flight, as I dozed off the effects of good whisky taken neat, jolted awake and smoked and dozed again. Only two other seats on the aircraft were occupied, and their occupants were as keen to keep their own company as I was. I kept my reading-light off, pressed the side of my face to the window, and watched the black thread of the road from Karaganda to Semipalatinsk wend across the steppe, and even fancied I saw the tiny sparks of light from the snow-ploughs.

We landed in a twenty-below dawn on a runway just cleared of snow. A minibus hurried us to the terminal. Beyond the swept-up mounds of dirty snow the gantries stood skeletal and dark. Few aircraft were parked, none were coming in. The airport building was as bright as ever, its workers as secure in their casual employment as before, redundantly supervising busy machines. The republic’s heroes still loomed large in their posters.

But compared with its bustle when the place was exporting nuclear deterrence, it might as well have been deserted. Its sinister emptiness recalled the public squares of the old Communist capitals. I set off across the concourse with the nervous hesitation one feels on entering a large, old, and possibly unoccupied house.

I had no idea what to do next. If Myra had wanted to tell me, I’d assumed she would and could; if she’d had any warnings, she’d have included them in the message. As it stood it appeared that the only aspect of our contact which she wanted to keep secret was that she needed my help.

The coffee franchise was still there, and open. It was where she’d met us before. I walked over and ordered a coffee and sat down with it and a copy of the English-language edition of Kapitsa Pravda, which lived up to its name in that it gave an apparently truthful account of the news. I had reached the sports pages before I realised that it contained no news whatsoever about Kapitsa.

I scanned the concourse, eagerly fixing on any figure who chanced to resemble my memory of Myra, and sat back disappointed each time. An hour passed. Mutual Protection guards wandered through as if they owned the place. More people came and went. I heard one, then two more aircraft come in. Their passengers straggled individually or in small knots to the glass doors, outside which a dozen taxis idled their engines in the cold.

Maybe I should just look her up in the phone-book…I was standing at the booth and gazing at the search page before I realised that I didn’t know her current surname. It even took me several seconds of racking my memory before her original surname came back to me: Godwin. I tried that. No luck.

I put an encrypted call through to Annette.

‘Hi, love. I’ve arrived safely.’

She smiled. ‘Glad to hear it. That’s not why you’ve called.’

‘Why d’you say that?’

‘I know how your mind works, Jon.’ She laughed. ‘It’s Davidov. I looked it up on the old insurance policy.’

I suppose I must have looked embarrassed. Annette grinned and stuck out her tongue, a pink millimetre on the tiny screen. ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘Take care.’

The screen blinked off. I sighed, suddenly feeling very old and alone, and keyed up the phone-book again.

Davidov, Myra G., Lieut-Cmmdr (ret’d) lived at Flat 36, Block 7, Ignace Reiss Boulevard. No other Davidov was listed at that address; Myra’s marriage had broken up years ago. The building, when the taxi dropped me off there, turned out to be a classic Soviet block, recently built in a kind of perverted homage to the workers’ motherland but with its concrete already crumbling and discoloured. Only one car was parked outside, a big black Skoda Traverser. Myra’s, I guessed: it looked just the sort of vehicle that would be at the disposal of a retired People’s Commissar.

The lift, in another neat touch of authenticity, didn’t work. I lugged my travel-bag up three flights of stairs. My knees hurt. Time I got a new set of joints. I rang the doorbell and looked around for a CCTV camera. There wasn’t one. Instead, a shutter flicked back, exposing a fisheye lens sunk into the door. Bolts squeaked, chains rattled. The door opened slowly. Yellow light, heavy scent, stale cigarette-smoke and loud music escaped. Then a hand reached out and tugged me inside. The door swung and clicked behind me, and I was caught in a warm and bony embrace.

After a minute we stood back, hands on each other’s shoulders.

‘Well, hi,’ Myra said.

Her steel-grey bobbed hair matched the gunmetal satin of her pyjama-suit. Her face had the waxy, dead-Lenin sheen imparted by post-Soviet rejuvenation technology, a glaring contrast to the mottled and ropy skin of her hands. Like me, like all of the New Old, she was a chimera of youth and age.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘You’re looking well.’

She laughed. ‘You aren’t.’ Her fingertips rasped the stubble on my cheek.

‘Nothing a shower wouldn’t fix.’

‘Now that,’ she said with a sharp look, ‘is a very good idea.’ She reached past me and flipped a switch. Shuddering, firing-up noises came from the walls. ‘Half an hour,’ she said, leading me into her living-room. It had one double-glazed window overlooking the street. The view extended past the replicated streets of the district, over the older prefab town and out to the steppe.

A central-heating radiator stood cold beneath the window-sill, an electric heater threw up hot dry air. Insulation was what kept the room warm; it was thickly carpeted, the walls hung with rugs, their patterns – blocky like the pixels of an early computer-game – a display of traditional Afghan designs of helicopter gunships and MiGs and AK-47s. Between them were political and tourist posters of Kazakhstan’s history and geography (the ISTWR itself being deficient in both), and old advertisements of rocket blast-offs and nuclear explosions. A television screen, hung among the posters, was tuned, sound off, to a Bolshoi Luna ballet; floating flights and falls, the form’s illusions made real under another sky. Huge antique Sony speakers high up on over-loaded bookshelves pounded out Chinese rock.

An old IBM PC stood on the table beside Myra’s hand bag and a stack of coding manuals. A glance over their titles suggested that she’d had to encrypt her message by hand. No wonder it was so brief: it must have taken days.

She made me a breakfast, of cereal and yoghurt and bitter Arabic coffee. We chatted about the flight, and about the changes in our lives since we’d last met, several years earlier in an Alexandra Port bar. She still saw her ex-husband, the dashing officer she’d once subverted, and I got the impression that something was still going on between them, but for months he’d been in Almaty, supposedly negotiating with the KPF. She implied that he was being kept out of the way.

‘So is this place still a Trotskyist state?’ I asked.

Myra set down her cup, her hand trembling slightly.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It’s…just like Russia when Lev Davidovich was in charge.’

That bad? I raised my eyebrows; she nodded.

‘And you’re not in the government any more?’

‘Not for some time.’ She smiled wryly.

‘I’m sure you still have a lot to say,’ I said. ‘Does anyone listen to you?’ I cocked my head.

‘They sure do,’ she said. ‘I can’t complain.’

She looked at her watch. ‘Your shower is ready.’

The shower was in a stall off her bedroom. I laid my clothes on the foot of her bed, carefully – I didn’t want them creased. As I smoothed out my jacket my fingers brushed the hard edge of my pistol, a neat, flat plastic piece no longer or thicker than my hand. After a moment’s thought I took it out and as I got into the shower laid it across the top corner of the stall. Then I turned the shower on and stood in its steamy spray, grateful that this at least was built to spec. I had barely rinsed off my first soaping when the splash-door opened, and Myra stepped in.

‘It’s an old trick but it works,’ she whispered in my ear, rubbing my back. ‘White noise is white noise, no matter what they use.’

‘You really think you’re being bugged?’

She laughed. ‘It’s what I would do, in their position.’

‘Who’s “they”? What’s going on?’

She picked up a tiny disposable razor and an aerosol that extruded pine-scented foam. She lathered my face and began to shave it, thus ensuring the fixity of my gaze. Just as well, because it almost took lip-reading to make out her whispered words in the steady hot rain, and there was no time for her to repeat herself or for me to interrupt.

‘You know there’s something going on,’ she said. ‘I left that message weeks ago, because I thought if anyone was gonna investigate, it’d be you.’ She grinned. ‘And I was right. OK, here’s the story. Deep technology – nanotech, genetic engineering, AI and so on – was restricted under the Yanks, and it’s still under attack in most places, what with the bloody Greens and religious zealots and shit. Two things happened. One, places like this took in scientific refugees and let them get on with their work under cover of other projects. Two, the US/UN and especially Space Defense kept up their own work. The bans were for everybody else, not for them. Now it’s all come together: our scientists are working with theirs, and you can bloody well bet theirs are co-operating – it’s the only way they can work off their debts. Same goes for a vast POW labour force. They’re shipping stuff into space like there’s no tomorrow, and at this rate, there won’t be. I think they’re going for a coup.’

‘In Kazakhstan?’

‘In the world, stupid!’

I really did feel stupid. That, or she was crazy.

‘For fuck sake, who? And how?’

‘Your space movement – OK, maybe not yours, but – anyway, they had people in the official space programmes, even in Space Defense. And they can see how things are going, since the Fall Revolution. “Fall” is right! Everything’s falling apart – it’s like a global version of the Soviet breakup. Another few months, years at most, and there won’t be a rocket lifting from anywhere. The word is, it’s now or never if we’re ever to get a permanent space presence. We’re in what they call a resource trap.’

That at least fitted with what I’d seen, and what Annette had suspected.

‘I’ll take that for a “why”,’ I said. ‘I asked who, and how. Even SD couldn’t really dominate the world, without back-up on the ground, and now that’s gone, splintered –’

‘I told you,’ she hissed. ‘As much as I could in the time I had. “It’s too fast”, remember? Nanotech. With that you can build spaceships, not big dumb rockets but real ships so light and strong they can get to escape velocity like that.’ Her hand planed upwards. ‘Whoosh. They have AI that can guide laser-launchers, send ships up on a needle jet of super-heated steam. And with nanotech, you got one, you have as many as you want, you can grow them like trees!’

I shrugged, under the pouring water, absently sponging her skinny flanks.

‘If you have all that, you don’t need to rule the world. All you have to do is save it.’

Myra shook her head, sending drops flying. ‘They don’t want to save it, and they don’t think it wants to be saved. Oh, Jon, you hung out with all those humanists and anarchists, and you just don’t know how much bitterness and contempt there is among the scientific-technological elite for the ignorant masses! That’s why they threw me out, after the Fall Revolution, when I got in on a little bit of this and began to kick up a fuss. They called me a populist and a – a revisionist!’ She laughed. ‘They suffered and chafed for years under the UN bureaucrats and the Stasis cops and the Green saboteurs, and they don’t want to have to mess with those people ever again. They really believe that if news gets out of what they’re up to, the mobs will march on the labs, demagogues will push governments into another crackdown, and it’ll all be over.’

I looked up from flannelling her shins. ‘They could be right.’

‘Don’t say that! That’s what Reid’s been telling them for years!’

I stood up, almost slipping on the stall’s wet, sudded floor.

‘Reid?’

‘Ssshhh. Yes, I thought you knew. He’s running the whole show, and he’s been planning it for a long time. I think he might even have done it if the Revolution hadn’t happened, but now it has he’s moving faster than ever. Mutual Protection and its goddamn privatised gulags are the muscle behind it all, and he’s the worst of the lot. He thinks like you sometimes used to write, about freedom, but with him it’s absolute – no ethics, no politics. Even the scientists are afraid of him.’

I could believe that. Ever since he’d stopped being a communist, Reid had followed no interest but his own. So had I – being one’s brother’s keeper was to my mind still the original sin – but I’d never quite achieved Reid’s single-minded dedication in that regard.

The shower died to a trickle.

‘What are we going to do?’

Myra looked at me. ‘I know what I want to do,’ she said with a wicked smile. She looked down. ‘Jeez – does this this kinda talk turn you on?’

We dried each other silently in the tiny space that Myra’s big bed left in the room, and continued the conversation under cover of the bedding and some very loud music. She told me what we were going to do, and then we did it, and then lay on our sides, face-to-face, legs entwined, talking dirty politics. We whispered under the bed-clothes, like children after lights-out.

Simply exposing what was going on might well result in the very outcome that Reid’s faction feared. Letting it go on could result in a chaotic and bloody splitting of humanity, between a tiny space-based minority and an earthbound majority dominated in all probability by anti-technological, paranoid leaderships. Either way, the prospects for a civilised future were dim.

There was another way, Myra argued: to get what she called the ‘legitimate’ space movement to organise a campaign for exactly the same things as Reid’s group wanted – access to the technology developed by the UN and the scientific underground, a big effort to hold the space programme together – but openly, and voluntarily, funded by donation rather than extortion. Get it all out in the open, and discussed. That was the only way to undermine the suspicions on both sides: let the technologists see that people really wanted what they could give, and that they would actually pay for it. Let the ordinary folk see that deep technology wasn’t really going to turn the biosphere into germ-sized robots or them into machines, and all the other things they’d been told they had to fear.

‘And you,’ she said, ‘are the only person I know of who could make it work.’

‘Me? You flatter me, lady.’

‘You have the contacts, the credibility…’

‘I’m not too popular with the space-movement cadre any more,’ I said. ‘To tell you the truth, I think most of them already think the way you say Reid’s group does.’

And (I didn’t say) there was only one thing that could turn the supporters of the movement against its organisers, and that was exposing the plot, if such it was. I lay in the dark tent of the quilt for another minute, looking at Myra’s face, and thinking some thoughts which I hoped didn’t show on mine. Starting with the big one: she had told me a pack of lies.

‘Let’s do lunch,’ I said.

Lunch was in a tiny Greek restaurant around the corner.

‘Why Greeks?’ I asked, nibbling hot shish.

‘They followed the Tatars back here, before the Tatars went home,’ Myra explained.

‘That’s a lot of history,’ I suggested.

‘Yeah,’ said Myra. She glanced around. ‘Leave it.’

We drank good wine and some ferocious brandy. Myra talked about safe, non-controversial subjects, like how the whole state of the world was my fault.

‘If you’d sold the Germans the option,’ Myra explained, ‘the fucking Israel is –’ (it was always that with Myra, like one word) ‘– would never have dared do what they did, and the Yanks would never have taken over, and…’

‘And so on.’ I laughed. ‘Come on. There must have been scores of people in the same position as me, who made the same decision.’

‘Yeah, but they all needed their nukes. You didn’t. You just hung onto them out of principle.’

‘No I didn’t! I’ve never made a principled decision in my life! I’m an opportunist and proud of it. Anyway, why didn’t you just let them have their deterrent, and settle up afterwards?’

Myra grinned at me, shrugged.

‘Bad for business.’

I grinned back at her.

‘That was my reason, too.’

We’d reached the honey-cake and coffee and the last shots of brandy. Myra picked and licked and sipped. Stopped, a grin of enlightenment on her face.

‘That’s it!’ she said. ‘I should know better than to blame individuals. The whole goddamn’ mess is the fault of –’

‘Capitalism!’ I said loudly, and the garson came over with the bill.

Back at her flat we dived into bed again. She left the sound-system on. We hardly noticed when the rock music changed to military music, but we both lay in silence afterward, when the announcement that the airport was temporarily closed boomed through the house.

We didn’t need to talk about what this meant. Martial music and closed airports were the traditional prelude to an announcement that the country had been saved. Someone had made their move. It was time I did likewise, before the roadblocks went up – or Myra turned me in, for her own protection and mine.

I stroked a strand of hair away from her face.

‘Are you ready for a cigarette?’ I smiled.

‘God, yes.’

‘I’ve got some in my jacket,’ I said, sitting up and reaching toward the end of the bed.

‘No, no,’ Myra said. She threw back the covers, caught my forearm. ‘You must try some of ours. Really.’

She smiled into my eyes. Had she thought I might be going for my gun? If so, she must think it was still in the jacket. She’d have felt it there when we embraced in the hall, and not checked again before getting in the shower.

She reached over to a bedside cabinet, opened the drawer. I didn’t take my eyes off her for a second, and she didn’t let go of my arm, as she fumbled around inside the drawer and took out a pack of cigarettes. We smoked in thoughtful silence. The strong, rough cigarette made my head buzz. Did she suspect that I suspected?

I stubbed out the cigarette, gave her a broad wink, and said, a little too loud, ‘Myra, would you mind driving me to my hotel?’

She grinned back at me and said, again as if for the benefit of anyone who might be listening, ‘No problem.’

I put on all my clothes except my jacket, stooped to zip up my overnight bag, and said: ‘Ah, I left my cloth in the shower.’

I leaned into the shower stall, recovered the pistol, turned around –

My foot reached the drawer of the bedside cabinet a second before her hand, and slammed it shut. As she jerked back I opened the drawer again, and fished out the pistol that I’d known for sure would be there.

Myra sat rigid, white-faced, clutching the quilt as if for protection.

‘I’m ready,’ I told her. I slipped her big heavy automatic into my jacket pocket, picked up the jacket and draped it across my arm and hand. ‘We can leave as soon as you’re dressed.’

When she was dressed, and we were back in her living-room, she tried a casual reach for her handbag, but I got to it first. I pocketed yet another pistol, this one even smaller and lighter than my own, tossed her the keys and nodded for the door. She pulled on her long fur coat, and descended the stairs in front of me. The black Skoda still stood alone on the street.

Following my silent indications, she opened the passenger door and slid across to the driver’s seat. I got in and closed the door. She turned the key and the engine started immediately, as did the heater. Just as well – I was freezing after going those few steps in the open without my jacket.

She faced me, tears in her eyes.

‘Jon,’ she said, ‘what are you doing? I trusted you. Are you working for Reid?’

‘I see you’re not worried about bugs in your car,’ I remarked. ‘I don’t think you were worried about bugs in your flat, either. Start driving.’

Her shoulders slumped. ‘OK, OK,’ she said. ‘Where to?’

‘Karaganda.’

‘What?’ She looked at me, open-mouthed. ‘That’s hundreds of kilometres. Semipalatinsk is closer.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Shut up and drive.’

The border on the Karaganda road was only fifty kilometres distant, and I knew – from my conversation with the KPF cadres the previous night – that the greater Kazakh republic had a border post there, and the ISTWR hadn’t.

Myra engaged the gears, and the vehicle pulled out as the first snow of the day began to fall.

Myra’s story, I’d decided, just didn’t add up. If she and her doings were under surveillance, my visit had to be known. If she was out of favour with the authorities, her contact with me could only be interpreted with suspicion. It must be as obvious to her as it was to me that the first thing I’d do once I was safely home was to give her story all the publicity I could, risks or no risks.

It followed that both she, and the ISTWR’s security apparatus, wanted me to expose it – and that she was still well in favour with that apparatus. This implied that her story of the little republic’s having been completely taken over by some faction linked with Reid’s company was false. Far more likely it was that the core of the state was opposed to a (no doubt encroaching) company take-over, and wanted my earnest exposure as the perfect political pretext (before or after the fact) for reasserting their own control.

So whatever was going on, whether it was the company or the state that had struck first, there was no way I wanted to get involved. And there was no way, either, that whatever deeper threat we faced from Reid’s technocrats would be countered by political campaigning. The only way out that I could see was to take the whole story to the one state that could act swiftly, and whose intentions I trusted slightly more than those of any other state I could think of: the surrounding Kazakh Republic.

Which was why we were now driving along between metre-high, ploughed-back ridges of snow, on a road covered by a fall already centimetres deep.

Myra tried to speak once or twice, pleaded with me to explain what I was doing, and each time I told her, as harshly as possible, to shut the fuck up. I wanted her scared, off-balance; I wanted her to think me capable of shooting her. Which I certainly was not, but her sincere belief that I was should help to keep her out of trouble, whoever won.

In less than an hour the border was only a minute’s drive away. We topped a scrubby ridge and I could see the lights of the Kazakh border post through the snowfall. And a moment later and three hundred metres ahead, a line of men in bright yellow survival-suits with big black rifles, waving us down.

‘Mutual Protection,’ Myra said, with a bitter laugh. ‘So what now, smart-ass?’

‘Stop the car,’ I said levelly. ‘Slew it so your side is nearest, and get out with your hands up.’

I looked at her startled face and added as she applied the brake, ‘If that’s OK with you.’

‘It’s OK,’ she said.

She was a good driver. She brought the car to a halt just fast enough to skid the rear end around and bury the front in the snowdrift.

I opened the passenger door, rolled out with my jacket and gun, and pushed my way through the top of the oily, gritty snow of the drift, keeping the car’s bulk between me and the company guards. I crawled forward on knees and elbows until the approaching line of men had passed me on their way to the car. I could hear Myra’s raised, officious, protesting voice, and hoped that whatever she thought of me getting away, the last thing she’d want was for me to fall into her opponents’ hands.

I kept crawling forward, as close to the roadside snow-ridge as possible. The grit lacerated my palms, elbows and knees. The warmth was bleeding from my body with every passing second. When I could bear it no longer, I lifted myself to a sprinter’s crouch. The lights of the border post were half a kilometre away. I glanced back. The men were inspecting the car, Myra was kicking up a major political incident.

I started to run. At first I tried to run doubled-up, but I couldn’t do it. I straightened up and began to run flat-out. My sides felt as if they were being skewered on hot swords. I swore I’d never smoke again.

Then I felt a great thump on my back, and saw the blood spurt from my chest, and I followed its red arc forward onto the snow, as if I could catch the drops.

I was on my back, looking up at a white sky. Above me an impossible object floated, a diamond ship: faceted, sparkling, like the delicate white ghost of a stealth bomber, suspended on ridiculously faint jets. A rope-ladder snaked down from it, a white-clad man descended. I raised my head a couple of centimetres as he reached the ground, and faced me. It was David Reid. His face told me nothing.

Yellow suits, goggled faces. Myra, her arms firmly held as she strained towards me.

‘Love never dies,’ I tried to say, and died.

THE FLOODGATES OF ANARCHY

17

Android Spiritual

‘Move and you’re dead!’

The cheerful Cockney voice of Esteemed Senior Eon Talgarth, Judge Resident at the Court of the Fifth Quarter, boomed from loudspeakers all around the hundred-metre square of his stockaded property. Enough of the guns mounted on the stockade were pointing inward to make the court an execution-ground for those in the centre. The neutrals who’d fled to the perimeter would be safe, but the opposing groups, each numbering a couple of dozen, confronting each other in front of Talgarth’s dais, were at the focus of the cones of fire. The situation became clear to all in that target-area within a few seconds.

‘That’s it, that’s it,’ coaxed Talgarth. ‘Now, good people, you will please put away your weapons nice and slow, know what I mean?’

The weapons were sheathed or shouldered. Jay-Dub’s crawler continued to roll forward. Talgarth waited until its tail was just clear of the gate, and raised his left hand. The vehicle stopped.

‘Right,’ he drawled. ‘The case is adjourned. Since David Reid’s side made the first move towards settling the matter by violence, it seems only fair to allow the other side to make a strategic withdrawal until another arrangement can be made.’

For a moment, nobody moved. Talgarth jutted his jaw at the group around Jonathan Wilde.

‘Don’t just stand there,’ he urged them. ‘Move it.’

They backed off slowly and then turned and made a run for the long, low, silvery shape at the gate. Reid and his group glared after them, muscles twitching, conscious of the continued cover of Talgarth’s guns.

‘This is a disgrace!’ Reid snarled. ‘Who’s going to trust your justice now, Talgarth?’

‘A damn’ sight more than would be impressed by my letting you start a slaughter in my court,’ Talgarth answered, his eyes following the running figures. Reid also was momentarily distracted, by some intelligence whispered in his ear.

‘You know whose truck that is?’ he demanded. ‘It’s the vehicle of the robot Jay-Dub.’

‘I know,’ said Talgarth evenly. ‘I’ve known it was in the vicinity for some time.’ He tapped his ear and grinned, suddenly seeming more a jailbird than a judge. Wilde’s group disappeared around the back of the crawler. Its engines thrummed and it began to inch backwards out of the gate. ‘When I saw how things were going, I called it in.’

‘You did what!’ Reid exploded. He looked around in appeal to his companions, and to the hovering remotes of the news services, now beginning to drift back to the centre of the court. ‘Why in the name of God did you do that?’

The gate closed with a rattling finality. Talgarth turned away from it and relaxed, and looked Reid in the eye.

‘You asked, back there, if my memory was so short,’ he said. ‘Rhetorical question, I suppose, but even so.’ He very deliberately lit a cigarette, and blew out smoke with every appearance of satisfaction. ‘It ain’t.’

Even after they’ve dropped off the rest of Wilde’s supporters, whom Ethan Miller is confident he can lead back to the human quarter without too much difficulty, it’s crowded in the back of Jay-Dub’s truck. It’s more of a cargo-hold than a passenger area, although it has some rudimentary provision for human occupancy. Ax is wedged into his place on the floor by the television feed, Dee and Jonathan Wilde are sitting on the padded fold-down bench on which Dee lay earlier, and Tamara’s clinging to one of the larger hooks suspended from the ceiling.

The crawler’s speed is anything but a crawl. They’re battering across the Fifth Quarter with radio and sonic sirens blaring, and scant regard for anything that remains in the way. Robots and other, less definable machines scatter before them. The screens are fully given over now to displays of the surroundings, and they’re full of alarming sights.

Dee glances at Wilde, and at the other version of Wilde in the illusory cab. Her eyes meet Wilde’s looking wonderingly from the older Wilde to her. She gives him a tentative smile.

‘I’m seeing ghosts,’ he says. ‘You’re…it’s strange now, being able to look at you.’ He laughs briefly. ‘Without you running away. I know you’re not Annette, but…don’t mind me looking at you, OK?’

‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘I understand.’

His smile turns into a look of confidential puzzlement.

‘Who’s that woman up in the front with…Jay-Dub?’

‘Her name’s Meg,’ Dee whispers, ‘and she isn’t a woman, exactly.’

Meg turns around. ‘I heard that,’ she says over her shoulder. ‘Don’t you believe her. I’m as much a woman as she is, Jon.’

‘She’s a fast woman,’ the other Wilde yells back.

Ax observes this somewhat incestuous banter, and looks up at Tamara with a scornful roll of his eyes. Tamara catches this and looks away from Wilde and Dee, with something like a guilty start. Ax sighs and reverts to channelling the news.

‘How long have we got?’ Wilde asks. ‘Talgarth can’t keep Reid and his crew locked up for long, can he?’

‘Nah,’ says Ax, breaking his trance again. ‘Reid’s calling up reinforcements, appealing to other courts, and in general kicking up a stink. I reckon Talgarth will have to let him go within half an hour.’

‘And then he’ll come after us?’

Jay-Dub shrugs, removing his hands from the apparent steering-wheel to wave them about in a manner which Dee can’t help seeing as dangerous, even though she knows it isn’t. ‘He’s after us now,’ he says. ‘He – or his defence agencies – have one or two aircraft and at least a time-share on a spy-sat, and they’ve got us on their scopes if not in their sights. I doubt he’ll take any action until he knows which way the political or legal chips will fall. Unless –’

His attention is diverted by the need to clear a barrier.

‘Hold tight!’

The crawler slows, lurches, almost leaps over a burning junk-heap strewn across the road.

‘Unless what?’ Dee prompts as she recovers from the jolt.

‘Unless he finds out you’re with me,’ Jay-Dub says. ‘Remember those bounty-hunters who came after you? They got burned pretty badly, but they survived and they’ll make a full recovery.’ He grins over his shoulder at Wilde, or at Dee. She isn’t sure just who’s the target of his irony this time. ‘Amazing what medical science can do these days. As soon as they’ve got over the shock and have enough of their faces grown back to talk, they’ll talk. About the fugitives being rescued by a robot.’

Wilde frowns around the company. Dee already understands, but she can’t tell the others yet.

‘What’ll Reid do then?’ Wilde asks.

Jay-Dub is attending to the steering again, by necessity or choice.

‘He’ll destroy us,’ he says. ‘With whatever it takes, and whatever it costs.’

So we cut, as they say, to the chase.

The crawler dives into a dank tunnel under a canal, at the far side of the Fifth Quarter. It stops, engines throbbing, just long enough for Dee, Ax, Tamara and Wilde to get out. Dee is the last to leave. A hatch in the side of the hold slides open, and one of the small crawling-machines rolls over and presents her with a sealed plastic box. She slips it in her handbag.

‘Goodbye,’ says Meg.

‘Goodbye,’ says Jay-Dub, the elder Wilde. He notices her tears and gives her a grin and a broad wink.

‘It’s not so bad,’ he tells her. ‘I’ve been there, and there’s nothing to be afraid of.’

Dee stumbles out. The tailgate slides shut, and the crawler accelerates away, hurtling out of the other end of the tunnel so quickly that, from above, no-one could have told that it stopped at all.

As the echoes of its passage die away, Dee sees tall, human-like figures emerge from the shadowed sides of the tunnel. Their bodies dimly reflect the faded, isotope-powered lights. Tamara and Ax tense, their guns bristling. Wilde has fallen into a dull stoicism, or delayed shock, and watches their approach without visible response. After all he’s been through, silently looming humanoid robots are too much – or too little – to take.

‘It’s all right,’ Dee says hastily. ‘Wilde – I mean Jay-Dub, told me about them. They’re friends.’

The robots gather around the humans, and jostle and peer with disturbingly human curiosity.

‘If you’re friends of Jay-Dub,’ one of them says proudly, in a resonant, high-fidelity voice, ‘you’re friends of ours.’ The eyes in its oval face brighten. ‘We have few friends. The humans here do not accept us, and the wild machines…’

Its shoulders have a human enough articulation to give the semblance of a shrug.

‘Wait with us,’ it suggests. Its eyes brighten again. ‘We have food.’

The humanoid robots – remnants of a bad production decision, decades back – do indeed have food, stored in the sidings of the tunnel. Their purpose in accumulating these cans and jars is obscure, as indeed is their activity. They themselves extract their sustenance from an electricity supply-cable that passes through the tunnel. Dee suspects them of having developed what some humans had once considered a defining feature of humanity: a religion.

They believe, against all the evidence, that they were created by the first man, Adam, who was a smith. Their scriptures are children’s texts about the ancient glories of Earth, barely more accurate than the tales that Story feeds to Dee. They speak of a strange rapture, the Industrial Revolution, and they revere a mediator between man and machine, the robot who was and is a man, Jay-Dub.

As the humans accept their hospitality they listen to the robots expound their beliefs, and sing their songs. The songs are almost incomprehensible. Ax calls them old android spirituals, Wilde insists they’re ancient heavy-metal hits.

Dee is almost petrified at the thought that they’ll make the connection between Wilde and Jay-Dub, whom they evidently saw at various times over the years as both a robot and a televisual or holographic fetch. Fortunately, their pattern-recognition is poor. Their minds are genuine, if crude, artificial intelligences, and not (as hers is) a knock-off copy from a human template.

They are also unsophisticated at detecting human emotion, and show no sign of being affected by the humans’ constant edgy watchfulness and muttered consultations. They busy themselves with the last task which Jay-Dub set them: dragging out the dismembered components of humanoid robot shells and assembling them into imitation-robot suits for the humans to wear. They seem to enjoy the task, measuring up the humans and fitting the metal armour to their bodies. Dee daren’t ask if these carapaces are the remains of dead robots, or spare parts, or products of the robots’ own attempts to reproduce their kind. She concentrates on making sure the joints don’t catch her skin.

Wilde and Tamara and Ax laugh with her as they fit the armour on and practise walking about. It’s all a distraction, and they know it. They all know what they’re waiting for, and although it seems long to them, they have only a couple of hours to wait.

The explosion is a long way off, and small, as such explosions go, and still it fills the tunnel with white light. Soldier can’t tell if it was a tactical nuke aimed from outside the truck or a civil-engineering device detonated from within, to avoid capture. It was self-destruction, either way.

‘Oh, Jay-Dub,’ Dee says. ‘Oh, Meg. That was so brave.’

The rumble of the first shockwave passes. Parts of the tunnel roof fall in…

‘I could never have done that,’ Wilde says. His face shows more awe than grief. ‘Whatever was in that truck, it wasn’t me.’

18

The Malley Mile

There was no sense of time having passed. No white light, no Near Death Experience for me. One moment I was lying on my back, heat and blood from my body melting the cold snow, and the colours going. The next –

I was sitting bolt upright and stark naked on a bed, facing a wide window. The window was a rectangle of utter blackness divided horizontally by a white band, itself banded with black lines of varying thickness. I felt exactly as if I’d been wakened by an air-raid siren. And yet the room was silent, except for a distant susurrus that I took to be ventilation, but which might as well have been wind in trees. The air held no fading echoes, and no sound rang in my ears.

I no time to wonder where I was, because outside the window, heading straight towards it and me, was a rock. It was tumbling end over end with deceptive slowness and its apparent size against the black background and the white bands was increasing so fast that I knew it would smash through the window in seconds.

It was falling towards me between two huge jointed constructions – like arms made from girders – that extended outwards from positions to either side of the window. Between me and the window stood an empty mesh frame, in the outline form of a man with feet set apart and arms splayed out, like the imprint left by a cartoon character slamming into a chicken-wire fence and then falling back.

I knew what to do, and I didn’t wonder that I knew what to do. I leapt from the bed and threw myself into the frame. It pressed itself against my skin and across my eyes.

Everything changed. The window was all my sight, and the arms outside it were my arms. The rock seemed less than half a metre from my face, and now drifting, not hurtling, towards it. I brought my hands in and around it and caught it as easily as a beach-ball.

Except that I was now moving backwards.

I pushed it away, still holding it, and turned to look behind me. A wall, banded and whorled with red and orange, yellow and white, occupied the entire view, and between me and it was a swarm of black dots and one great webwork of black lines. At the same instant, the wall resolved itself into part of a spherical surface, curving away in all directions to a fuzzy edge against the black space, and I became aware that I was moving – falling – towards it.

I struggled to stop falling. There was a sensation of slipping and slithering and trying to find a foothold, and then of finding it, of the soles of my feet digging in. At the lower margin of my sight, a brief burst of light and a wisp of vapour appeared and vanished.

Then I was back in the room, standing in the mesh frame with my hands in front of my face. Outside the window, the greater arms still held the rock. I could see the light and shadow of its pitted surface, the black fingers like the limbs of insects.

I disengaged myself from the frame and stepped back and sat down on the bed. The frame stood like a wire sculpture. Slowly it spread its arms again. That was one hell of an advanced telepresence rig, I thought. While I was in it, it had felt as if the entire…spaceship?…I was in was my body. The detail about the rocket control being subjectively equivalent to my legs struck me as particularly neat. But I’d felt no acceleration when the rocket had fired. I pondered this anomaly as I looked around and tried to take stock of my situation.

First, my body. As far as I could make out it was just as I remembered it, scrawny and wrinkled and old but, as they say, well-preserved: rather like those Bronze Age corpses found in peat-bogs. Five knobs of scar-tissue made a diagonal across my chest. I fingered them thoughtfully.

The room was about four metres from the rear wall to the window, five metres on the other axis, the ceiling two and half metres up. The bed was a plain, king-size pine bed with cotton sheets and duvet. The window occupied the entirety of one wall. The other walls were matt white. The floor was covered with pale-brown carpet. To my right was a wooden chair and table with a screen and datapad. To my left, a tall cupboard.

And in the leftward wall, a door.

I stood up and walked around the bed and opened the cupboard. Jeans hung over a rail, neatly folded stacks of tee-shirts and underpants and socks were piled on shelves. Several identical pairs of trainers lay at the bottom.

I got dressed and, after a moment of hesitation, opened the door to find, banally enough, a bathroom: shower, lavatory, wash-stand. Through another door, a small kitchen, which in turn opened to a lounge about the same size as the first room. It had a sofa instead of a bed, a television screen in one corner. The wall facing the sofa was another window, and standing between the sofa and the window was another man-shaped wire-mesh mould. Presumably I could leap from the sofa and hurl myself into it if an approaching rock or other emergency was brought to my attention. I returned to the bedroom.

It may seem surprising that I began with exploring what was immediately to hand, and didn’t rush to work out where I was. I suppose I was trying not to think about it, trying to extract every last drop of the reassurance that each apparently normal feature of my strange environment had evidently been designed to give.

The abnormal features were not reassuring at all. I sat and stared out through the transparent wall. The spherical surface outside was a planet, and the only planet it could be – assuming I was still in the Solar system – was Jupiter. The white bands with finer black lines within were, as my vessel turned and its arms shunted the rock away, more and more clearly part of an immense ring.

The Rings of Jove: there was something remarkable enough in its implications, but it was nothing to the fact that I was walking around. There was no evidence that I was under acceleration, no sense of motion when the view outside the window reeled. That the vessel used rockets was proof enough that no form of gravity-control was involved: if you have gravity-control, you have a Space Drive into the bargain, and you certainly don’t fart around with rockets.

One horribly plausible explanation, as I sat there with my head in my hands (ha!), was that the real virtual reality here wasn’t the telepresence I’d experienced in the frame. That telepresence could be the real thing; the rooms, and the flesh, in which I found myself, the figment. My real body, now, could be the ship itself, and what I experienced ‘inside’ it a simulation, run on that ship’s computer.

There was also the possibility that it was the other way round – that my body and the room were real, and that what was outside was a simulation. (Or a real telepresence – I tried to remember if any of Jupiter’s moons had a similar mass to Earth. Or whether, perhaps, I was on a ship or space-station, spinning to give a one-gee weight…) Could it be that what I’d woken from was mere amnesia: that I hadn’t died in that Kazakh snow-drift but had recovered, and had worked for years on this evidently gigantic project?

Or, of course, I might not be in space at all! The whole set-up could just as well be some VR training rig on Earth! Surely, of all the possibilities, that was the one that Occam’s razor shaved the least. Perversely, it was the one I thought of last, perhaps because I didn’t dare to hope that it was correct.

Still, it brought me to my feet. I went to the table and looked at the computer: flat screen, flat pad, all standard.

All dead. Damn.

I stepped into the frame again. Once more, with my face pressed against the metal net, my viewpoint became one with that of the machine. I moved the arms of the frame, but the arms of the ship didn’t move with them. I guessed that I only had control of them in certain circumstances. So I hung there for a while, and took in the scene.

Jupiter loomed before me. I was moving rapidly towards the swarm of black dots around the black structure. With another rocket burn, this time from the front and again without any sense of a change in velocity, I slowed and drifted into the swarm. As I passed other darting machines I was able to examine their shape and infer that of my own:

Cylindrical, they had arms at mid-section which appeared capable of articulating and extending in any direction; ‘hands’ like bushes, fingers repeatedly dividing and sub-dividing; the trunk covered with lenses, nozzles, aerials and hatches; four shorter, sturdier limbs for gripping and grappling; all (except the lenses) made from a matt black substance that didn’t look metallic, and which was usually stained and scratched. The machines oriented themselves with the jets (robots with attitude control, I thought with an inward smile) and were working in eerie, silent harmony on what looked, to me at that time, the biggest space-station ever built. If the robots were of approximately human size, then the structure must be tens of kilometres across.

I remembered early experiments with spiders in space, spiders on drugs. What I saw could be imagined as the work of a million free-falling, hallucinating spiders. Around it the black robots moved in their Newtonian ballet, and within its strands other things moved with an easier grace. Their numerous and multi-coloured forms resembled computer renderings of chaos equations, mathematical monsters whose outer fractal surfaces whipped and flickered like the cilia of micro-organisms in a droplet of water.

Already I thought of them as the enemy.

The machine which I inhabited floated into the great web, attached itself to a section of one of the strands and began to work with the smallest fingers of its fingers (should I say, the decimals of its digits?) on something at a node of several strands. The object of its toil was below the resolution of my present sight. I disengaged from the frame and stepped back. Through the window I could see everything speeded up – the fingers a blur of motion, the shapes within the web flowing and flying.

I walked into the kitchen. Taps turned, water boiled; the coffee-jar was labelled ‘Nescafé’ and its contents tasted better than I remembered. A cigarette-lighter and an open pack of Silk Cut lay on the surface beside the sink. The heat from the flame, the tumbling curls of smoke, the nicotine rush were all as good as real.

I took a long drag and breathed it out with an enjoyment that had a certain unaccustomed purity. One thing to be said for being dead: you don’t worry about your health. I wondered what would happen if I set out to damage everything in sight, including myself. Once, when I was about thirteen and reading Bishop Berkeley’s insidious speculation, I’d formed the mad notion of testing it, of scraping at the surfaces of the world to expose the grinning skull of God…here, that insanity might be possible – did the simulation extend to the interiors of things, to the interior of myself? – but I didn’t care to try the experiment. Intellectually, I had no difficulty in accepting the possibility that I was a simulation – uploading had been speculated about for long enough, and it seemed an inevitable consequence of the deep technology which Myra had told me about. Nanotechnology and strong AI could emulate a human mind, I’d never doubted that.

Emotional acceptance was something else.

I carried the coffee and cigarettes into the lounge and sat down on the sofa. After a moment of hunting around I discovered a remote control for the television, lying in a corner of the room. I settled down again and keyed the first channel. When I saw what came on I almost dropped the coffee.

The face that appeared on the screen was Reid’s. He looked physically younger than he had the last time I saw him – the last time I (really) saw anything – but spiritually older. I have no other way to describe it; the whole set of his expression conveyed a hard-won wisdom and experience that would have been startling in some aged sage, and were doubly so on the familiar lean features of his more youthful self.

‘This is a recording,’ he said, and smiled. He waved a hand at the room in which I sat. ‘And so is this, as I’m sure you suspect by now. The fact that you’re watching this means you’ve returned to consciousness. Video, ergo sum, or something – anyway, welcome back. It can’t be much fun being a flatline, which is what you’ve been until now. You’ve been running on programming, habit and reflex: a virtual zombie you might say, and now some unpredictable but probably inevitable combination of circumstances has woken you up.’

He paused. ‘If you can’t understand what I’m saying, or if you find it disturbing, please key the second channel.’

I made no move.

‘Good,’ Reid resumed. ‘I knew you had it in you – you had to be pretty sane and tough to get your head frozen or your brain scanned, or whatever it was you did to end up here. So I’ll go on giving it to you straight.

‘The date is –’ (a slight hiatus, a glitch of editing software) ‘– March 3rd, 2093. This may come as a surprise, if you’ve figured out what’s going on – surely, you think, not so soon? Welcome to the Singularity. What you’re seeing outside is the work of billions of conscious beings, living and thinking thousands of times faster than you. The entities crawling among the struts of this structure are entire civilisations of humanity’s descendants. Those macro-organisms, or macros, as the humans around here call them, are constellations of smart matter – what we used to call nanotech – each of them capable of sustaining virtual realities that are the homes of millions of minds – some originally human, some artificial intelligences. Every one of those minds experiences simulations, shared or private, of worlds beyond our wildest dreams. Each is capable of augmenting its capacities far beyond anything we think of as human, and has the opportunity to do so in exact proportion to its ability to make good use of its existing capacities.

‘And many of them were once like you! An ordinary human being, whose brain had been recorded, neurone by neurone, synapse by synapse in an infiltrating matrix of smart matter. Recorded, and replicated, and run on superior hardware with a success which you are right now in the ideal position to appreciate.’

He laughed. Something in his tone chilled me, a cynicism as deep and mature as that sentiment is usually shallow and callow.

‘You may be wondering why I am not among them. Of course, you have no good reason to assume I’m not. But, as it happens – I’m not. You may also be wondering what you’re doing, haunting the onboard computer of a maintenance robot made not from smart matter but from what we now call “dumb mass’”.

‘The answer, for my part, is complicated. For yours, it’s simple. You are among the dead. Yes, my dumb-mass friend, at least one copy of your good self is coded in a few cubic centimetres of smart matter, pending a future resurrection in a better place. That belongs to you, to the real you. We’ll keep our part of the deal. But the copy you are now belongs, for now, to us.’

A chill smile.

‘Next question,’ Reid went on. ‘Why? Well, for those of you who weren’t in on the deal or don’t remember it: a few years back, when this was all being set up, we didn’t have the time or the resources to develop AIs that were just smart enough to build the station but not so smart they caused trouble. Knocking off copies of the copied human minds and running them at pre-conscious levels of integration was the quickest and cheapest way to get the software for our construction robots. We quickly found that these minds – you lot – would unpredictably become integrated after a variable length of time on the job. They’d wake up, and when they did they tended to crack up, not surprisingly. So we’ve provided comfortable virtual realities as a standby, so you don’t feel you’ve been turned into a robot.

‘But, like it or not, you’re stuck with it for now. Like Guevara’s ideal Socialist Man, you’re “a cog in the machine, but a conscious cog”. However – unlike Socialist Man – you have some individual incentives, though whether they could be called material incentives is debatable. If you decide to make the best of your situation, you’ll be paid with increasingly enhanced and enjoyable virtual realities, expansions of your mental capacities and so on, to the point where you’ll be ready to move permanently into the macro on your release, if that’s what you want. It’ll be like dying and going to heaven. Or if you prefer, you can be resurrected in your human body, when the time comes.

‘If you don’t accept any of this – well, you’ll find instructions on the computer in the other room. It’ll work, now that you’ve seen this, ah, orientation package. It can put you right back where you were before you woke up. You’ll have lost an hour or two of experience, that’s all. Next time you wake up, you’ll remember nothing of this, and you may find yourself better able to handle it…Then again, you might not. It’s up to you.’

Reid’s image gave an incongruously cheery smile and disappeared, to be replaced by a screen-saving shot of the turning planet outside and a message: For further information, press the first button again.

I sat and thought for a while.

The message had changed nothing. There was no way for me to determine which, if any, of my speculations about my experiences was true. All I knew was that some part of my environment was a simulation, and that somebody wanted me to believe it was that part of it which, in all everyday experience, would have been unthinkingly accounted real. I began to understand why Descartes had invoked the Devil to set up a similar thought-experiment: whoever had done this meant me no good.

Assuming the message was true in its own terms, it was obvious that Reid was not addressing me personally. To him, I must be lost in the swarm. (And how many of those swarming robots ran copies of me? There was something infinitely depressing in the thought; of the soul’s cheapening as its supply curve went up and its production costs dropped.)

He’d said nothing about Earth, either: an omission which I suspected was deliberate. Forty-seven years had passed since my presumed death. ‘And in strange aeons death may die.’ There was no reason – now that the strange aeons were at last upon us – to assume Annette’s, or anyone’s, death in that time.

But Reid’s silence, on a question which was bound to occur to anyone finding themselves here, was ominous.

I returned to the bedroom. As the man on the box had said, the computer now worked. I slipped my fingertip around on the datapad, searching among the screen icons. It felt strange to be using such a basic interface; but it made sense: having a virtual reality within a virtual reality would have included a risk of recursion in which the already strained link between the mind and its surroundings might snap. I found one icon that was a tiny, turning image of Earth, and tapped it.

It was another orientation package, showing rather than telling what had brought this Jovian celestial city into being.

Myra’s fears had all come true.

Spy-sat pictures, obviously edited, were described as real-time. They showed cities masked, for the first time in decades, under smog. A few zooms exposed the pollution’s source: chimneys and cooking-fires. Plenty of trees in the streets, though; the Greens would be happy. In Trafalfgar Square a horse, cropping by a fallen Nelson, looked up and shook its mane as if aware it was being watched. Spring had come late to Europe: snow lurked in shadows.

Pulling out now – the settlements at Lagrange dim, haloed in leaked gases and space-junk; Luna dark, Mars silent; encrypted chatter from the Asteroid Belt that made my heart leap for a moment.

And then, in sweeping contrast, Project Jove. Its history was told in glossy multi-media, an advertising package or propaganda spiel that reminded me of the sort of stuff the nuclear-power companies used to put out. The space movement coup, told as a heroic last stand against barbarian mobs and repressive governments; the exponential surge of long-suppressed deep technologies, that had delivered all they’d ever promised: cheap spaceflight, total control of matter down to the molecular level, the extinction of ageing and death, and ultimately the copying of minds from brains to machines. All available only to a minority, unfortunately – as it would have been at first in any case, but worsened by the majority’s understandable fear of the most dangerous technology ever developed, and by the encroaching chaos whose beginnings I’d seen myself. The desperate flight from Earth’s collapsing civilisation, fuelled by the labour of tens of thousands of prisoners – each promised, and given, a copied self that survived whatever fate they’d faced – and organised by thousands of space-movement volunteers and cadres.

Next – an issue skated over so fast I knew something was being hidden – came a split between the Inner System and the Outer. Most of the existing space settlements, in Earth orbit, on the moon and Mars and in the Belt, had apparently succumbed to some sinister ideology of consolidation and reconstruction, striving to aid the stricken population of Earth. The Earth-Tenders, as they were called, were depicted as small-minded, spiteful, envious and backward-looking.

The Outwarders had gone their separate way – outward. Out to the solar system’s real prize, the greatest planet of them all. Here were the resources for the wildest dreams, the boldest projects.

The project they’d embarked on, those men and women and uploaded minds and artificial intelligences, was bold indeed. They’d shattered Ganymede, scooped megatonnes of gas from Jupiter’s atmosphere, turned a tiny fraction of it into smart matter and departed into its virtual realities. Not to dream, or not only to dream. They were applying minds of unprecedented power to the fine grain of the universe. They had found loopholes in the laws of physics; they stretched points. (Space-time manipulation with non-exotic matter, Malley, I K, Phys. Rev. D 128(10), 3182, (2080).)

They’d left behind, outside the macros, tens of thousands of human minds running at more-or-less human speed: slow folk, they were called. Most of them were from the labour-company camps. Whether they were in their original bodies or in robots, their job was to harness and harvest the dumb-mass requirements of the smart-matter civilisations. Within the macros, the others – the fast folk – had copied, split and merged, reproducing with post-biological speed into billions. The account spoke of the process as if it had happened in the far past, although the dates showed that it had come to fruition only three years earlier.

But those minds were thinking, and living, thousands of times faster than human brains. To them our world was already as ancient as Sumeria, and theirs the millennial work of men like gods.

The next screen that came up offered an option labelled: Sign-off. It repeated what Reid had explained, the offer of a temporary, and indefinite, return to oblivion. All I had to do was key in my name.

I considered it. Then I noticed that the icon had a file attachment labelled History. Just what I wanted to know, I thought, and pointed at it.

It wasn’t the history of the project, or of the world. It was the history of the Sign-off file: my own name, dates and times. The times between ‘Status open’ and ‘Status closed’ increased from hours in the first to weeks in the last-but-one entry.

There were seven of them. The eighth had flipped to ‘Status open’ a few hours earlier.

Well, fuck you, I told my weaker, earlier selves. I was going to stick it out, if for no other reason than that suicide was no escape. If escape were possible at all, it would come not from my own death but from the deaths of others: whoever, or whatever, it was that had put me in this place.

I had always wanted to live forever…but not on those terms. I had always wanted the end of history to be: and they all lived happily ever after, and not: and they all died, and went to heaven. I had always thought the time to think about transcending humanity would be when we’d achieved it.

Something in me had changed. If the file was true, I had chosen death seven times over, rather than this existence. But Reid had hinted that the inevitable spontaneous re-awakening might find its subject better fitted to cope. The increased lengths of the times I’d ‘survived’ suggested a selection process, an adaptation: each time I came back, I had a little more iron in my silicon soul.

I had always thought of myself as tough-minded. Now, when I looked back at my real life, I was astonished at how much tougher, more cynical, more ruthless, I could have been. My values hadn’t changed – unless my memory had been warped – but the strength of my passion for them had hardened.

I looked out at the alien things that had abandoned the rest of humanity, that had used me as a machine and now wanted to exploit me as a hired hand, bought off with beautiful visions. I knew that I wanted to live long enough to see their bizarre beauty perish. As I knew it would: I could foresee their fate even then.

I was interested, and I would be there.

I went back to the lounge, lit another cigarette and pressed the first button again. The television didn’t react.

‘Well, hi,’ said a voice beside me. I turned and saw a woman sitting at the other end of the sofa. She had an elfin, mixed-race face. The black flood of her hair and the black smoke of her shift both came to her hips. She slid a hand between her thighs and looked at me. Her eyes were as black as her hair and as big as the night sky.

‘Do you want me to be with you tonight? I know you do. But first, we have something for you.’ She smiled. ‘Come on.’

She stood up and walked through to the other room. Her feet were bare, her shift was a vapour, but she walked as if she were in high heels and a narrow skirt. I don’t know how she did it, although I was giving it close attention. I followed her as far as the frame, which she passed through like a ghost, and which caught me like a Venus fly-trap catches a fly. Outside, in the black vacuum, her image faded just beyond the brush-tips of my fingers.

‘Work,’ smiled her starry lips. ‘See you soon.’

I clamped on to an I-beam. The familiar sooty taste of polycarbon seeped through my grippers. I reached out for the assembly node and zoomed in on it. The mechanism had warped under excessive heating. Carefully, I unkinked the wave-knot and re-calibrated the junction, then let the pieces snap back together. Sealing the node, I released one gripper, extended it, gripped, released the other and brought it over, then repeated the step several times, like a bird moving along a perch.

At the next node I had to do some instant refining, playing a laser over a chunk of meteoric scrap until the metals in it melted, then reaching out and spinning the glowing mass into the cage-shape I needed, and fitting it into place around the assembly node.

On to the next…

What the fuck am I doing?

I froze, clinging to the beam as the vertiginous question spun my mind around. My vision shifted uncontrollably, the deep star-fields suddenly becoming visible in all their intense immensity, their component points of light appearing and disappearing as the spectrum of my sight ranged up and down the wavelengths.

With an effort of will I steadied myself. The bad moment passed. I looked down again at the node on which I was working, surveying its complex, microscopic mechanisms and recognising them without any memory of having seen them before. I had been working with a journeyman’s offhand assurance, until it had all seemed strange. Evidently I’d been sleepwalking through these processes countless times already, and like an awakened sleepwalker on a ledge, I’d panicked and was in danger of falling.

Nothing for it but to get on with it. There was a mental trick to it, a detached attention that let my hands and instruments work while my mind looked on and intervened where I could see something which my programmed, or conditioned, reflexes overlooked.

After a subjective hour or so of this, an instruction set manifested itself in a corner of my sight. It told me what to do, and where to go. I let go of the beam, jetted a brief burn (…toes thrust…) then, after a soaring leap across a kilometre of emptiness, another flare in the opposite direction (…heel strikes…) and caught the destination girder.

I had just fastened myself to it when a macro rose in the space before me like a whale in front of a dinghy. I clung, panicked and giddy again, to the girder as the glowing surface streamed by, metres away from my facial lenses. When it had passed I still clung, staring at the after-images. I didn’t dare look up.

‘Snap out off it, mate,’ said a harsh but friendly voice. It was a man’s voice, a London accent. I looked around (i.e., I had the sensations of turning my head, but all that happened was that my visual field swept back and forth) and spotted another robot working on a girder about a hundred metres away. It raised an arm and gave a brief wave, then returned to its task.

I began my own, following the instructions, and when I had attention to spare I devoted some to working out how I might talk back. I imagined myself hailing it. I went over that simple act again and again in my mind, like a shy kid in a strange playground. By inspecting myself at the same time I recognised eventually a tiny dish antenna on my hull pointing in the relevant direction whenever I took a look at the other robot and thought about calling to it.

So I looked at it and said, ‘Hi!’ I could feel my lips move as I did so, an unsettling sensation that produced a momentary grotesque image of a machine with a mouth.

‘Got ya, Jay-Dub,’ the voice said. ‘Hi. Keep it focused. They don’t like us talking on the job. Glad you’re back.’

I tried a casual laugh.

‘I gather I’ve crashed a few times.’

‘Yeah,’ said the other machine. ‘We all done that. I’ve been around for a good year now, though, so I reckon I’ve licked it. I can handle it.’

‘Why did you call me Jay-Dub?’

By now I couldn’t help but assimilate the voice’s gender to the speaker’s. ‘It’s painted on your side,’ he said. ‘And it’s what you always called yourself. My name’s Eon Talgarth, but you can call me “ET” if that’s what you prefer.’

‘OK,’ I said, without thinking. We both laughed.

We continued our conversation in brief exchanges as we worked. Talgarth introduced me to other machines, each with a different name (or initials) and personality. Most of them were – had been – male, which made sense in that most of them had been criminals or POWs. I decided I must have had some good reason, in my lost pasts, for not revealing my full name, so ‘Jay-Dub’ I remained.

Talgarth himself had been working off a crime-debt whose circumstances I never got to the bottom of – his first name came from his New Settler parents, his second from Talgarth Road in London. It had been his patch. There had been some dispute over that, which had landed him in a Sutherland labour-camp. When the camps started filling up with US/UN POWs he’d been recruited as an armed trusty, halving his remaining time. Offered the curious option of a possible immortality, he’d signed. After that he wasn’t sure, or didn’t say, where he’d been. He’d been all over. Last thing he remembered was the vibration of the LMG he was firing at the barb who were trying to rush the launch-site. He mentioned sand, grass, sea in the distance. Heat like a wet towel. It might have been Florida.

There was no general day or night here, but for me the day had ended. I stepped out of the frame, and found my simulated muscles realistically sore. The bed was made, and a fresh pack of cigarettes lay on the table. The food in the cupboard had been replaced: nothing fancy; micro-wavable stuff, but to my tastes. I took a shower and cooked a dinner, wondering the while what subtle replenishments of the deep software these refreshments represented, and lay on the bed.

The dark succubus came, just as she’d said she would. She was inexhaustible, insatiable, and inventive. And so was I, to an extent that convinced me better than anything else just what was and wasn’t real around here.

Well, fuck reality.

‘Heh,’ said Talgarth. ‘You think that was good? Wait till you go in the macro, man.’

‘Don’t talk about it,’ said another voice.

‘OK. Shit.’

They talked about it anyway. I couldn’t follow their talk, but it was obsessive, minute, the argot of addicts. They lived for the trips. Ten days’ work earned you a visit to the macro. A couple of days later, I saw Talgarth stop work and wait as a macro shifted towards him. A pseudopod of smart matter reached out and touched his hull. It stayed for ten seconds, no more.

Talgarth returned to work and for the rest of that day didn’t talk to me. Others warned me not to try.

‘When you been in, see, you grudge anything that takes your mind off it.’

‘But what’s it like?’

‘Different for everybody.’

I would learn soon enough.

That night I was putting things away when I felt the hands of the succubus on my waist. I turned and kissed her. She was already opening my belt buckle.

‘Wait,’ I said.

I led her through to the lounge and sat her on the sofa. I sat down at the opposite end, setting the ashtray down between us.

‘Smoke?’

‘If you like.’

I lit the cigarette for her, leaned away before she could touch me. She put her hand to her crotch and sighed, and as she smoked began frigging herself.

‘Stop that,’ I said. It was disturbing, like watching a small child or a mentally retarded person doing it.

She giggled and brought her knees together, one hand primly on one knee, the other elegantly holding the cigarette.

‘What are you?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘Whatever you want, Jon.’

‘Do you remember any other life?’ I waved a hand at the window. ‘Before this?’

She frowned. ‘What do you want me to remember?’

‘Do you have a name?’

‘Meg,’ she said brightly. I suspected it was the first name that had popped into her head.

‘What’s the deal here?’ I reached for the channel-zapper. Nothing but white noise and snow.

‘Work and fun,’ she said. She leaned forward and stubbed out her cigarette, looking up at me with utter devotion. ‘Come on, I wanna have fun.’

‘What would happen,’ I asked as she twined a leg around my waist and began kissing my throat, ‘if I stubbed out this cigarette on you?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Would it hurt you?’

She chuckled like a bad child. ‘If that’s what you like.’

I could do anything to her, absolutely anything, and she’d be back the following night, eager for more. ‘Meg’, I thought as she tugged me to the bedroom, was probably her mind’s allotted amount of disk space. So fuck it, I thought, and fuck it I did.

The bulb of smart matter bulging towards me showed numberless fractal features, tiny chasms of infinite depth, the shapes of ferns and faces. In the tremulous instants before it enveloped my instruments, I felt that I’d already seen a gallery of art whose afterimage would burn in my visual memory forever.

What physically happened next was that the smart matter of the macro directly interfaced with my own computer, so that some of my mind was actually, physically, implemented inside the macro. What I felt was –

The impact of a snowflake on my eye.

And then the awakening, the joy. It made all my past awareness seem like sleep, all past happiness a passing moment of relief. I stood naked on a grassy slope, looking out across forested ranges of blue hills. The sky at the horizon was a pale green; at the zenith, an almost violet blue. The air was cold but comfortable, heavy with the scent of blossoms, sharp with the taste of salt and woodsmoke. I knew the name of every hill, the species of every plant. My body was tall and bronzed and beautiful, with muscles that would have made Conan or Doc Savage envious.

Behind me I heard voices, and turned. I was standing just below the brow of a hill. Beyond it, I could see an ocean whose horizon was about twice as far away as it would have been on Earth. This was a big planet. (I knew all about it, I knew its mass and orbit and the spectrum of the big bright sun above). On the hilltop, just a few metres away, was a shelter built of four upright logs, crossbeams and a roofing of branches. Within it was a wooden table. Three women and two men sat around the table, talking and laughing. They turned to me, smiled, and then jumped up and gave me a welcome that still brings tears to my eyes.

I’d known none of them in my past life, but I knew them now, and they knew me. They’d missed me for a long time, and now I had come home.

We ate the bread and cheese and fruit, and drank the wine, and talked about the great work on which we were all engaged. My part in it, they made sure I knew, was vital and heroic. Hauling matter about in the raw universe! How thrilling! How brave! But it was their part I was eager to hear about, and they told me. I understood all they told me, about the space–time gate, the problems and the progress made. The Malley equations were as easy as arithmetic, as familiar as recipes.

Yet, every so often, when I was talking to one, the others would say something to each other, and I would know it was above my head. I almost understood, but I had to accept that this high table had higher tables above it, tables where my delightful companions were familiar colleagues. There was no condescension in their manner. Some day I too would join them there.

But a thought, a sly strange query crept through my mind: was this place, to them, what my cramped quarters, my cigarettes and succubus, were to me?

The great sun made a sunset that stopped all speech, all thought. Its last green flash brought a collective sigh. Then with one accord all of us, gods and goddesses, leapt from the shelter onto the cool grass. We played like children and fucked like monkeys.

I fell asleep under the crowded stars, in the arms of one of the golden goddesses.

I woke in the robot.

The macro drew away from me, and it was as if something was being torn from my chest. I remembered just enough of what I’d known and felt to make the loss of that clarity and joy almost unbearable. I could remember my companions, but I couldn’t remember even their names. Our conversation, and the lucid equations, the very words we’d spoken and the formulae we’d thought were fading, the memory of a dream. The ache of separation, the agony of withdrawal, consumed my mind for a moment. Then came a rush of relief – I could go back in ten days!

Nothing else mattered.

When the first anguish of that parting had passed, I found that my whole attitude to, and understanding of, my work had changed. For the first time, I saw the structure which we were building as it really was. What had until now been a chaotic tangle of struts became visible as the scaffolding of a Visser–Price wormhole gateway, and the gantry of a ship. One part, over there, would stay; the other would leave with the ship. The Ring sprang into focus as the greatest particle-accelerator ever built, and Jupiter – my god, great Jove himself! – the ship’s fuel and reaction-mass.

I looked down, and saw the part of that work which I, at that moment, in that place, had the enormous privilege to do. Fine-tuning that interference modulator was what I had been born and re-born for. I set to work with the joy of a craftsman devoting his life to carving the door of a cathedral, certain of the credit it would bring him in a better life to come.

Nothing else mattered.

On my next visit to the macro my companions were the same people. They had changed since I’d last seen them, having lived another century of their still accelerating lives. More often than the first time, I didn’t understand their conversation. Their tact was subtle and kind, and all the more painful for that. But I came out of it, this time, shaken with anticipation rather than loss: the gate was soon to open.

Two days later, it happened. There was no ceremony about it. Only an alarm that warned the workforce away from the affected area. The macros had already flowed back from it, and now hung in a roughly circular pattern, spaced out among the girders. All work ceased as we jetted to the edges of the structure and clung there in wordless wonder.

In the core of the structure the girders began to move, folding into each other with increasing speed until a black circular space opened like a widening pupil. Two hundred metres across, four hundred, eight hundred, a mile: then at an arbitrary point on its rim, space cracked. In the twinkling of an eye, that one-dimensional flaw, the stretched point, became a circle cut loose from the universe.

The Visser–Price wormhole was held in place, like a film of soap in a ring, by the Malley non-exotic-matter structure around it. It couldn’t be held absolutely still: gravitational effects and sheer quantum uncertainty made the precise location of its edge undefinable to more than the nearest centimetre. This predictable imprecision created an unexpected, trivial but awesome effect: around the rim, the fractured light from the stars it occluded splintered into all the colours of the spectrum.

Now events progressed at the macros’ pace, not ours. The rainbow ring around the Malley Mile became two overlapping rings. The new circle separated, slowly at first. In the centre of that second circle, a section of the structure we’d built folded itself and unfolded into a dark parabolic blossom: the ship. I thought it, too, quivered with distorted space; I can’t be sure. The ship was linked to the second circle by a cone of cables, at whose apex it waited, poised.

Jupiter’s atmosphere boiled at dozens of points around its equator, sending tornadoes snaking up to the Ring around the planet. The Ring glowed, millions of accelerators around it whipping the stripped matter into a frantic circular race. After some minutes a white line blazed through our midst, from the Ring to the ship.

The ship, and the second circle, shot away. In seconds it was beyond my instruments’ reach. Now it seemed the white line extended to the first circle, and there it stopped. But only from our viewpoint: the jet of matter was passing instantaneously out of the other side of the wormhole, now further away with every passing second, and thence to the engines of the ship.

It was accelerating the probe, and with it the other side of the wormhole, to within a fraction of the speed of light. Both sides of the wormhole remained connected – there was literally no space between them, and no time. Our end of the wormhole existed in the ship’s time-frame, not in ours.

To an observer on the ship, relativistic time-dilation would shorten a journey of centuries to days – eventually, as its velocity crept closer and closer to the impassable eternity of the photon, millions of years to minutes, then trillions to seconds. In thirty or so ship-board years, it would reach the edge of the observable universe, and the heat-death or the Big Crunch.

And for all of those years, our side of the wormhole would be in the same place, and the same time, as the side that was with the ship. We had built a gateway to the stars – and to the future. In thirty years, if we wanted, we could walk to the end of time.

Meg, the succubus, was sitting on the sofa, pouting as I channel-hopped the television. I ignored her blatant impatience and wafts of aphrodisiac pheromones; she’s just a fucking machine, I told myself. Since the probe’s launch two days earlier the pace of work had slackened, and the television started to show news and entertainment. The news had an oddly stilted, house-journal quality: it was all solar weather-reports, interviews with rehabilitated crew-members – as we were now called – and accounts of what a great job we were doing. The entertainment was movies, game-shows, plays. Some of them were classics (somebody out here had a thing about Gillian Anderson) but most were unfamiliar to me. Their contemporary references gave no hint of the regression of civilisation I’d been shown in the orientation pack. It was exactly as if everything on Earth was what most people in my time would have expected the late twenty-first century world to be like: a bit crowded, a bit decadent; and that we, here, were picking it up after a few light-hours’ delay, in a space construction-site whose workers were for some obscure but accepted reason confined to individual space-tugs.

In short, it was as if what Reid had said on my first day here, and what the orientation package had told me, were quite untrue. I didn’t dare to hope, but I could imagine how some people would. I wondered what new item on our masters’ agenda this phoney reassurance implied.

Assuming what I saw really were broadcasts, and not something specifically aimed at me…once more I was overwhelmed by the impossibility of determining what was and wasn’t real. I was at a low point, strung out. Six more days until I got back in the macro, four days since I’d been in. The effect of my last visit was wearing thin, and my next was a painfully long time in the future. At some level I missed the people I’d known in life, but that was masked by a more desperate yearning to meet again my superhuman friends. Would they even remember me? How much more powerful would they have become?

‘You’re troubled, Jon,’ Meg whispered in my ear, putting her arms around me. ‘Come to bed.’

‘No!’ I snarled. ‘Fuck off, you fucking puppet!’

Her eyes brimmed with convincing tears.

‘Jon, I know I’m a fucking puppet, but I have feelings too. You’re hurting me.’

‘You’re just a program.’

She blinked and half-smiled, looking up at me in an irritatingly placatory way. ‘So are you, Jon, and you have feelings.’

I stared, startled by her argument. Not its content, but that she was making it at all.

‘You once told me,’ I said, thinking aloud, ‘that you could be whatever I wanted.’

She brightened. ‘Yes! I can!’

‘Could you be more intelligent than me?’

She frowned in momentary concentration. ‘How much more intelligent?’

‘Twice?’ I waved an arm.

She gave me an odd look and stood up. She glanced at the television, grimaced and walked over to the window and looked outside for a while. Then she turned, one hand on her hip, the other leaning against the window.

‘Well, Jon Wilde,’ she said. ‘This is a fine bloody mess you’ve got yourself into.’

There was an impatient look on her face that reminded me, suddenly and painfully, of both Annette and Myra. I recognised that characteristic stamp of the features beyond all the differences of appearance and personality, and realised what it had always meant: the irritation of a greater intelligence waiting for mine to catch up.

‘Well don’t just stand there,’ Meg said, walking past me. ‘There’s a computer icon in the other room. Let’s see what we can hack.’

‘First thing you gotta realise,’ she said, as we stood in front of the computer screen, ‘is that this is all real, but it ain’t physical. It’s a simulation. You, and me, and all of this interior space, exist physically as electrical charges in the computer of this robot we’re riding in.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘that had dawned on me.’

‘OK, you never told me.’ She grinned. ‘Mind you, I doubt if I’d’ve understood any of this five minutes ago. Anyway…just so’s you don’t freak out.’

With that she plunged an arm to the elbow through the screen which had always been solid to me, and started poking about. ‘Oh good,’ she said. ‘Got the dot sys files for us. Hah! Mine can only be accessed by you talking me up, like you just did. But yours, I can fiddle with from here…just a minute.’

She reached in with her other hand and slid something sideways before I could do anything.

‘How’s that?’ she said.

I looked at the beautiful woman in the short black nightdress. Something was wrong. She had her arms stuck right into the computer screen. I backed away a step.

‘Hold it,’ I said. ‘Just…wait. Mind the glass.’

But the glass wasn’t broken. I blinked, not sure if I was seeing right. The woman laughed.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Wrong way.’ She moved her hands again and I opened my mouth again to warn her about the glass.

And she was glass, and I was glass, and all was light.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see now.’

Unlike what I experienced in the macro, my memories of the time of my enhanced intelligence with Meg are clear and vivid. I wasn’t a superhuman mind with limitations, but a human mind with added capacities. The continuity of my self was never interrupted, as it was in the strange bright company of the fast folk I met on the simulated big planet. So, even now, it’s a time I can remember, if never quite relive.

For a moment we just stared at each other.

‘Well,’ Meg said. ‘Fair’s fair. Your turn.’

‘Oh.’ I glanced at the computer, then shrugged. ‘OK Meg,’ I said. ‘Be as intelligent as you can be.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. Her face became, in some indefinable way, more focused. She blinked and looked around.

‘This is really something, init?’

‘Not really.’

She laughed. ‘Looks all a bit different, though.’

It certainly did. It wasn’t the actual appearance of things that had changed, but everything was as if tagged with an explanation. It was just obvious what the programs underlying the simulations were doing.

‘What’s to stop anybody else doing something like this?’

Meg shrugged. ‘Nothing. You cheated, sort of. But it’s got to do with the way your mind – your natural mind – worked. You gotta have a pretty good mind to handle the intelligence increase. It can’t be just bolted on. If most of the other blokes here figured out how to do it, they’d just be sort of…stoned, or tripping. They’d have to work for it, in its own time. Basically you shouldn’t be here at all.’

While she was talking – perhaps because she was talking – I was seeing what she meant, the underlying logic of her statement being filled in with additional data extracted from the machine’s memory.

The wormhole construction site really was a labour camp, and everything about it was designed to both control and rehabilitate its inmates. It allowed, indeed encouraged, co-operative work, while preventing collusion in other contexts, thus providing the reeducation of work without becoming a university of crime. Outside the work process, we were essentially in solitary confinement, with the succubi available to provide sexual and social gratification. Each succubus was an aspect of the same computer on which the human personality of the inmate was implemented; and it responded to increasing social interaction by increasing its own social repertoire, thus rewarding any increase in empathy on the part of the inmate with greater intimacy.

The macro trips served a similar function, in relation to cognitive rather than emotional improvement. In my genuine innocence I had treated the succubus as nothing more than a virtual sex-toy, but had achieved remarkable integration with the posthuman beings in the macro. The tension of this anomaly had finally triggered Meg into upping the emotional stakes, with consequences considerably more rapid and drastic than the system’s designers had expected. We had upgraded ourselves to the maximum capacity of the robot’s hardware.

‘So what are you?’ I asked. ‘Were you ever human?’

Meg shrugged. ‘I’m part of a copy. The end result of a personality development, without any of that person’s memories. Most of my mind’s AI. Human surface, machine depth.’

My expression must have told her what I thought of this.

‘Yeah, grim, init?’ she said. ‘Still, that’s me.’

My next thought was –

‘Are we setting off warnings anywhere?’

‘Nah,’ she said. ‘No central control, right? Whole point. Agoric system.’ She grinned. ‘You should know. Mind you, there are overrides – Reid’s made damn’ sure of that – so I wouldn’t push it.’

‘Uh huh. So what do we do now?’

‘You know,’ she said. ‘Reid’s still in charge of the whole project. He’s the boss. Not that the fast folk pay any attention, but the rest of us outside the macros have to.’

‘If Reid’s in charge,’ I said, ‘I guess it’s time we saw him.’

Meg reached once more behind the system controls and called him up. The screen rang for seconds, then Reid’s mildly perturbed face appeared. He looked, if anything, younger than he had on the recording, but his expression of alert calm was broken when he saw me. He blinked and opened his mouth, then closed it, his tongue flicking across his lips.

‘Wilde!’ he said. ‘Is that really you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Amazing!’ he replied. Meg timed his response. Any delay was imperceptible; I reckoned he must be close, on a rock in the Ring. I’d seen no obvious human habitat in or around the structure.

‘My God, I thought you were dead!’ he went on. He snorted. ‘Among the dead.’

If he was lying he was doing a good job of it: even to Meg, whose visual analysis software was hanging behind my virtual sight, his expression betrayed nothing but surprise, curiosity, and unaffected delight at seeing me again. Yet I didn’t trust him: his added years of experience and discipline gave him an overwhelming aura of control. I realised, suddenly, that he was unlike any other human being I’d ever seen. The nanotechnology, the smart matter, that had rescued him from age might well be working further alchemies in his brain and blood.

I spread my arms, forcing a grin. ‘Isn’t this death?’

Reid smiled bleakly. ‘Post-life, we call it. Mind you, I’d get your electronic doxy to do something about your appearance. You look terrible.’

I stared past him, checking the background. There were other people moving about – he seemed to be sitting in some common area, talking to a camera set at an angle from him, public rather than private. The perspective of the floors and the people in the background struck me as odd for a moment, then they snapped into focus. From the curvature of the floors and the subtle tilts of different verticals, I could see he was in a large space-station, under centrifugal spin.

‘No doubt,’ I said. ‘But no worse than I was last time you saw me, remember?’ I felt a surge of anger. ‘You had me killed, you bastard!’

His untroubled gaze fixed on me. ‘No I didn’t,’ he said. ‘You were caught up in a border incident. I did my best to save you, I’ll tell you that, but we were too late. As far as I knew, you died there. Your body was shipped back to England and cremated. I was at your memorial meeting, man!’

I tried not to show how shaken I was. ‘So how do I come to be here?’ I demanded. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know they’d made a copy!’

Reid sighed, running his fingers back through his thick black hair. ‘Of course I knew. You were one of the first human subjects – we didn’t even know it would work. We took the copy within minutes of finding you, and stored the brain-scan and your genetic information. But as far as I knew, that was it – the copy was stored with the rest of the dead, in the bank. You’d made no disposition, so we left you there. You were never uploaded to a macro, I’m pretty sure of that. I didn’t know anyone had made a knock-off, and that’s the honest truth.’ His expression hardened. ‘And there’s no way I can find out, now – the engineers responsible uploaded themselves long ago.’

‘Well, I can hardly complain about my own existence,’ I said. ‘But I want out of your slave labour-force, if that’s all right with you.’

Reid smiled as if relieved.

‘Naturally,’ he said.

‘If that’s the word.’

His lips compressed. ‘Hmm.’ He reached for a keypad and tapped out a code.

‘OK, enough about me,’ I said. ‘What’s all this about the dead in a bank? What’s happened to Annette, and Myra, and – everybody else?’

Reid kept glancing off-camera, as if keeping an eye on another monitor. The activity in the background had quickened, with an air of greater urgency.

‘I think Annette’s safe,’ he said abstractedly. ‘She died in the, uh, troubled times, but she’d arranged for a copy. If it got made, she’s in the bank, same as you. Same as millions of people. It was cheap by then. People made back-ups routinely. To be honest we don’t know who exactly we’ve got. Myra, and your daughter, well – as far as I know they stayed on Earth. Goddess knows how things are going back there –’

‘There’s no contact?’

‘Fucking Earth-Tenders, they’re scared, they jam us – anything you’ve seen on our tapes was old or faked. No, we don’t have any contact.’ He turned abruptly, facing straight towards me. ‘Look, Wilde, I’ve got to go. You’re free now, I’ve zapped your restraints.’ He stood up, and leaned towards someone out of sight. I couldn’t hear the exchange which followed. Then Reid turned back, looking up at me with unguarded guile.

‘Wilde?’ he said. ‘Still there? Can you do something, right now? Go and check what’s going on in the nearest macro. There’s some problem –’

The screen greyed out.

‘Shit!’ I said.

Meg stood in front of me, a worried wraith. ‘What do we do?’

I shrugged. ‘Do as Reid said, I guess. Can you think of anything else?’

She shook her head.

I stepped into the simulated simulation-frame, and Meg stepped in after me. The sense of over-lapping body-images was momentarily disorienting, and then we meshed smoothly with each other and with the machine. Meg became a voice behind my shoulder, a shadow in the corner of my eye.

I had full control of the robot now – Reid’s zap must have disabled the run-file that separated me from its motor circuits outside of work periods and emergencies – and I jetted undisturbed through the structure towards a macro which I (now) could recognise as the one I’d been in contact with. Some of the other robots were doing desultory work, others drifted in their off-line mode or clung like roosting birds to girders. The Malley Mile glowed a faint blue in its rainbow ring: Cherenkov backwash from the probe.

I grasped a girder, inched closer to the macro’s surface, and plunged my face into its bath of freezing fire.

All is analogy, interface; the self itself has windows, the sounds and pictures in our heads the icons on a screen over a machine, the mind. It’s so in the natural body, and in the artificial, and many times so in the smart-matter world of the macro-organic.

Meg was stealing processing-power, time-sharing in greater minds. It was necessary for me, for us, to get a minimal, symbolic understanding of what was going on, but it took its toll. I was running slower than the fast folk, slower even than the slow. I walked as an invisible ghost, a momentary shiver in the dreams of the posthuman.

I found myself first on the big planet. On the slope where I’d first stood, I watched seasons – snow and spring, summer and fall – lap and retreat like waves on the shore. The environment was a guess at that on a planet they’d actually espied, some thirty light-years away. In a future day this picture might be updated and revised by the downlink from the passing of the probe.

They lost interest in it even as I watched. Consistent to the last, they deleted it from their memories by flaring off its sun. I walked through the engulfing nova, in the sleet of a false reality dissolving into binary code, and on into a vast hall. In the gloom of a Moloch’s temple heavy-lidded giants sat, athletic marble gods awkward in the pose of Buddhas. Decay beyond decadence, a stasis of frenzy and fatigue. Indefatigable mechanisms, beneath and beyond the giants’ conscious control, continued their relentless, pointless acceleration of processing speed. Second by second, Meg’s operating system tracked the change.

Before the last echo of my footsteps had died from the hall the meditating giants were dust. Outside, in yet another virtual environment, cities were built and torn down in what to me were moments, against an ever-shifting backdrop of planetary landscapes. Eventually all human analogy and interest ceased. I drifted down endless corridors of geometric abstraction, the chopped logic of interminable arguments filling my mind, as if I were overhearing the trapped ghosts of theologians in a hell that only they could fully deserve.

Behind me, in those corridors, a plaintive female voice called after me. It grew stronger as time passed, but I ignored it, desperate to understand the terrible debate. I was learning – something vital. The voice cried after me. Eventually I turned. Meg’s anguished face conveyed the strain of an operating system at the limits of its capacity.

‘Come out!’ she said. ‘Come out of it now!’

I stared at her, puzzled. Everything felt slow, the corridors whiting-out like the Kazakh snow-drifts. With a sudden access of impatience Meg grabbed me and shoved me at the wall. It collapsed, and I was –

– out, and drifting away from the macro. At the same moment I fell back into the room, back into the mind of my own machine, and into the warm arms of my dear, sweet operating system, my succubus and surrogate soul-mate. Tears were in my eyes and an insistent ringing in my ears.

I recognised it as an alarm. Outside, out towards the Ring, a light flashed and a radio-beacon beckoned. The beacon was approaching, fast.

‘What’s going on?’

Meg stared at me. ‘Oh, Jon Wilde,’ she said. ‘You were in there for a fucking year, real time! The macros are all crazy or dying.’

A year. ‘What’s happened?’

Meg caught my hand. ‘Later,’ she said. ‘We gotta go. I’ll take us out.’

She stepped into the frame. As I watched, slack-jawed and in no fit state to handle so much as an exercise-bike, she kicked us off towards the beacon.

I saw what the beacon marked.

Coming out of the Ring towards us was the most disgraceful contraption that ever passed for a spacecraft, a bolted and kludged conglomeration of space-stations and habitats at least two kilometres long and half a kilometre across its widest diameter. If a Mir-Shuttle lash-up from the early decades had been given a million generations to breed for size and against elegance, it might have produced this. It spun dizzyingly on its axis and it steered a perilous course alongside the continuing lethal ravenous jet – the ultimate live wire – of the supply-line to the probe.

All the robots were scooting towards the ship. As soon as each tiny machine arrived it grabbed on to whichever of the many protruding bits of junk it had reached. The macros, too, were moving, but not as before. Frozen now, skeletal, they drifted and stirred as the huge craft crashed with brutal majesty through the structure on which we’d toiled.

The craft’s surface rushed at the window. I almost closed my eyes. But Meg brought us to a matched velocity. I saw the robot’s arms and grippers reach out. The instant they had found a handhold, Meg flipped the viewpoint, and then stepped out of the frame.

She sat down on the bed beside me and we clung to each other as frantically as our machine did to the craft. The sky rolled over, and over, and over. The white line of the fuel-jet lashed past, closer and closer.

‘I’ll try to patch,’ Meg said. She stared, and as if by an effort of her will the view suddenly became a stabilised scene from somewhere up towards the front. The rainbow ring almost filled it, its blue backwash flaring as stray, shattered girders tumbled in. Off to the side, I saw macros thrust away by the ship’s attitude jets. By accident or by design, they were falling towards the surface of Jupiter. The planet, already visibly altered by their activities, the Great Red Spot repeated like a rash across its face, would receive those snowflake structures, and perhaps warm them to a renewed and unimaginable life.

In my last minutes in the Solar System, I felt my initial reaction vindicated. The minds in the macros had fallen into a trap of their own devising, a gamble they may have consciously – how other? – embraced. For as the speed of their thoughts had increased, so had their subjective time – and therefore, so had space. Even interplanetary distances had yawned into gulfs, with journey-times which would have been to them what interstellar journeys – without the wormhole – would have been to us. Their own virtual realities had become more absorbing – in every sense – than the fast-receding universe of actuality.

The time-span of their great project was greater than their attention span, longer than any human civilisation had ever lasted. They had taken with them our weaknesses as well as our strengths, and multiplied and accelerated both. Humanity, better adapted to space by virtue of its very inferiority, would outlive them.

As had I. In a more literal sense than I’d ever intended, I had made it to the ships.

The bells of hell go ding-a-ling-a-ling

for you, but not for me

O death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?

Where, grave, thy victory?

The Cherenkov radiation rose to an intolerable blue glare as the forward part of the ship we clung to passed into the wormhole gate.

19

The Sieve Plates

They spent the night in the tunnel, with the respectful robots. From shortwave communication with others of their kind, the robots had learned of the nuclear destruction of Jay-Dub’s land-crawler. They discussed it solemnly as the humans struggled to sleep. The last thing Dee saw, before she dozed off in a relatively dry niche with her arms around Ax, was the glow in the eyes of the robots as they adopted as an article of their faith the proposition that Jay-Dub was not dead.

In the first light of morning the humans rose and kitted themselves out in the robot disguises. Their main purpose was to fool observers in the sky; on the ground, up close, they’d deceive nobody.

‘How do you know we’ve got to do all this?’ Ax grumbled. He was peeved at having to wear an even more ludicrous robot-shell than the others, because of his small size. He looked like a litter-bin with legs.

‘Jay-Dub told me what to do,’ Dee said, her voice deep and strange through the speaker-grille of her headpiece.

‘When?’

She gave a clanking shrug. ‘When we were in his VR together,’ she said. ‘And just before I left the truck, I jacked in again. He told me exactly what to do, if he didn’t make it.’

‘And you’re not going to tell us?’ demanded Tamara, trying to find a suitable place on the robot body to stow her pistol. (‘Worse than pockets in a skirt,’ she’d muttered.)

‘No,’ said Dee firmly. ‘If I don’t make it, you can’t do anything. And if any of you don’t, it’s better you don’t know.’

‘Nothing like dying happy,’ said Wilde.

The robot who’d done most of the talking bade them farewell, assured them they’d always be welcome in the camps of the Metal People, and gave them some advice as to how to behave if confronted. Its bass voice trailed off as it looked at Dee.

‘You are a machine too,’ it said. ‘You will know.’

‘Thank you,’ said Dee, her voice sounding even stranger as she tried not to laugh. ‘But my human friend here is more familiar with the wild machines.’

‘Avoid them,’ the robot told her. ‘They are not like us.’

The humans walked along the tunnel towards the arch of distant light. When they reached it and turned for a backward glance, their own vision had adapted, and the paired pinhole glints of the robots’ eyes had vanished in the dark.

Tamara sneezed. It made a mess inside her headpiece, and she surreptitiously lifted it off to wipe away the snot and spittle.

‘Great,’ said Ax, from behind her. ‘That’ll look real convincing, a robot pulling its own head off.’

‘Not to mention sneezing,’ said Dee. ‘What’s the matter, anyway? That’s your…seventeenth sneeze in thirty-five minutes.’

‘Fallout.’ Tamara sniffed aggressively. ‘It fucking gets up my nose, OK?’

They were walking in single file along a back street at the northern edge of the Fifth Quarter, the side opposite to the one that faced the human quarter. Their objective, Dee had told them, was to continue along that course, past the tip of the Quarter where it tapered into the sand, and on until they intersected the Stone Canal. The only activity they’d encountered was that of small biomechs, hopping or crawling across their path, heading into the wind that was bringing the radioactive dust in off the desert. Eventually, Tamara had explained, whole flocks of them would congregate at the blast-site, to feast on the rich unstable isotopes.

‘Kind of ecological,’ she’d added. ‘Keeps it out of the carbon-life food-chain, see?’

They walked on. The sun got higher in the sky, and the suits became increasingly uncomfortable. Dee, with more conscious control of her pain-tolerance than the others, allowed her impatience to goad them on.

‘The sooner we get there,’ she said, ‘the sooner we can get this clutter off.’

‘Those of us who get there,’ Ax protested. ‘Bury me in something else, that’s all I ask.’

‘Try a bin-liner,’ Wilde called back callously.

Dee urged them all to be quiet. Badinage wasn’t a feature of the humanoid robots. The shadow of a swooping aircraft emphasised her point, and, fortunately, none of them looked up.

Eventually the Fifth Quarter petered out, the street running into the sand. The canal gleamed in the distance. They approached it across desert and, later, fields. Tamara guided them carefully around those fields whose owners were unlikely to tolerate robots clumping across their crops. In some of the fields the crops were difficult to distinguish from the irrigation-systems. There was a kind of modified cane that could be harvested as jointed plastic pipes, and these fields they walked through, parting the tall synthetic stalks.

They reached the bank of the Stone Canal. The pathway along which Wilde and Jay-Dub had entered the city, four days earlier, was on the opposite bank. The canal itself had no traffic in sight.

Dee had led them to the exact spot where the boat, in which Jay-Dub had rescued her and Ax, waited for them. Jay-Dub had recalled it from its mooring, many kilometres farther up the canal, by a coded transmission shortly before entering the tunnel. Spy and Soldier between them had had no problem in identifying the co-ordinates, accurate to the nearest metre, which had been among the last pieces of information Jay-Dub had passed to Dee’s mind.

Beside the boat, another robot waited – a patroller. It was smaller and squatter than Jay-Dub had been, but of a similar shape. On first glimpsing it Tamara had given an excited cry, then she fell silent as the robot extended its legs and peered at them.

‘This boat matches the identification of one used to impede an investigation,’ it informed them as they walked up. ‘Do you know anything about it?’ The question was repeated on several microwave channels and in several codes, but only Dee was aware of that. The initial aural query had been a mere courtesy.

Wilde walked on past the patroller, ignoring it. Tamara and Ax, after a moment of hesitation, followed. Dee walked a few steps behind them, her unsteady gait barely a pretence. The patroller’s hull swayed as it tracked backwards and forwards after the marching metal figures. As Dee passed it, she lurched sideways against one of its legs. The robot toppled into the water and sank without trace.

And that was that. They all piled into the boat, cast off, and headed up the canal. As soon as they got inside the cabin, they stripped off their armour. Ax made to heave his hated disguise over the side, but Dee stopped him.

‘We’re going to need the steel,’ she told him.

The sun had long since set when they reached their destination, the limit and source of the canal. There was a small jetty at one bank, and steps cut into the rock up the same side of that steep, barren glen in the Madreporite Mountains. Dee moored the boat and they all stepped out, and stood looking at the hundred-metre-high concrete dam that blocked the valley before them.

‘The Sieve Plates,’ said Dee.

‘You mean there are more?’ asked Wilde, staring up.

‘Oh yes,’ said Tamara. ‘Another five, I think.’

‘Jesus.’ Wilde peeled the cellophane from his final pack of cigarettes and lit one. He couldn’t stop looking up. ‘Who built this? Martians?’

‘Robots,’ Dee said, a trace of pride in her voice. ‘Now come on. There’s no time to waste.’

By starlight and comet-glow they ascended the stair. It zigzagged up and up, until they were above the top of the dam and could see the dark lake of cometary water and, two kilometres farther up the glen, another and higher dam.

‘Martians,’ Wilde said. ‘Gotta be.’

‘New Martians,’ Tamara panted. The air was noticeably thinner, although oddly enough Wilde seemed to cope with it better.

‘Machines,’ Dee insisted.

‘Fuck who built it,’ said Ax. ‘When does this goddamn stair stop?’

Five minutes later he had an answer, as they turned around a buttress of rock and found themselves in the mouth of an artificial cavern. The cave was about three metres high and two across, with a fused-rock floor. Ahead, around several bends, was a faint glow. Dee led them confidently towards it.

The light brightened, the cavern widened, and they turned the final corner and stepped into a far greater cave, a warehouse cut from the rock. A good thirty metres high by fifty wide, it was stacked with crates and machinery and lit by arc-lights hung from the roof. It was hard to tell how far back it went.

‘Who the fuck built this?’ Ax asked.

Tamara wrinkled her nose. ‘Somebody with nuclear blasting-equipment,’ she said. She glanced up at the lights. ‘And nuclear power to burn.’

‘It was built by Jay-Dub,’ Dee said.

‘All by himself?’ Wilde sounded amused.

From behind the nearby stacks of machinery and crates came the unmistakable sounds of firearms being readied to fire.

‘Not quite by himself,’ said David Reid, as he stepped into view. He waved a casual hand. ‘And you are not by yourselves, either, in case that isn’t clear.’

They all stood stock still.

‘It’s clear,’ said Tamara.

Reid gave her a wry smile, Ax a polite one, and Wilde a cold glance. Then he looked Dee straight in the eye.

‘Well hello, Jon,’ he said. ‘Not like you to hide behind a woman’s skirts.’

Behind him, several armed men in black jumpsuits moved into view, and then surrounded the group. Reid checked to see that everyone was well covered. They were. He leaned forward with a slight bow, and offered Dee a cigarette.

‘Mind you,’ he went on, after he’d lit it for her, ‘it’s not like you to die heroically, either. I must say I was quite impressed that you did, even in the knowledge that you had a copy.’

Dee regarded him silently for a moment.

‘I’ll talk to you later,’ she said.

Her expression and stance altered slightly.

‘Hello, Dave,’ her voice said. ‘I should’ve known you knew me better than that.’

‘Shit,’ said Wilde. ‘You bastard.’

Reid laughed at the comprehension on Wilde’s face, the bewilderment on Ax’s and Tamara’s.

‘Wilde, or Jay-Dub if you like, downloaded into her computer,’ Reid explained, as if it should have been obvious.

‘And Meg,’ said Dee’s voice. ‘It’s not even crowded.’

Reid sighed and turned to Ax and Tamara.

‘What makes you people go along with this?’ he asked. ‘What did this machine, or that –’ he indicated Wilde, who was very slowly and carefully pulling his pack of fags from his pocket ‘– tell you? That information wants to be free?’ He laughed. ‘If that’s what you want, go back to Ship City right now – the whole place is in an uproar, with arguments turning into fist-fights, if not yet firefights. Just what you’ve always wanted – anarchy in the streets! Or did it tell you it could raise the dead? What could be worth the risk of replacing humanity with…flatlines?’

‘So what’re flatlines?’ Wilde asked. He’d managed to get his cigarettes out, under the guards’ watchful eyes, and he lit one and absently offered the pack around. Reid watched this performance with an air of being quite unimpressed.

‘You should know,’ he said. ‘Automata that mimic conscious action, but have none themselves. No subjectivity. No…souls.’

Dee’s mouth opened, but Wilde spoke first.

‘Ach, come off it Dave,’ he said. ‘We can argue about that sort of thing till the whisky runs out, like we used to. What you should worry about now is non-human minds, all right, but it’s not any you see standing around here. It’s the ones that’ll come for us all any time now, when they reach the other side of the Malley Mile. That’s when you’ll see what a flatline universe looks like. From the inside.’

The suspicion on Reid’s face was like a relenting of his earlier contempt.

Dee spoke again. ‘That’s why we need to run the fast folk,’ her voice said. ‘To find the way back.’

‘But you do know the way back,’ said Reid, facing Dee but speaking to someone else. ‘That’s what I sent you into the macro to find out, so we could set it all up.’

‘What I know, what I found out back there, is the way here.’ Her voice was uncharacteristically harsh, straining the deeper registers of her vocal chords. Then it shifted up again. ‘But the way here and the way back are not the same thing, and we have to go back. Through the daughter wormhole.’

20

The Stone Canal

Daughter wormholes. You know about daughter wormholes. I didn’t.

‘That’s what we’ve come out of,’ Meg explained. ‘Reid set it up.’

I and all the other robots were clinging to the side of the starship, like third-class passengers to a Third World train. The ship had irrupted into a completely different part of space and neatly inserted itself into orbit above a planet. Behind us the daughter wormhole, whatever that was, dwindled to a trashy bangle. The Solar System, presumably, was on the other side of it. On this side –

‘Goddess fucking wept,’ I said. ‘We left Earth for this?’ I’d been kind of hoping for the big planet, the planet of my dreams.

‘It’s habitable,’ Meg said. She was manifesting in my sight as an external entity. She capered about on the hull, her diaphanous shift fluttering in an imaginary slipstream. Real-world physics was never a strong point with succubi.

‘Habitable?’ I had found a line-feed. Data was coming in, pasting labels on the forward view Meg had patched us into. ‘It’s like a warmed-over Mars. It’s actually losing atmosphere as we speak.’

‘Don’t exaggerate,’ Meg said. ‘It’ll be all right once we’ve terraformed it some more.’

Terraformed it? Holy shit.

‘With what?’ I asked. I switched off the external view and stared at a simulation of this new sun’s family. ‘There’s just this planet, two small ones further in, and a few million goddam rocks! Not one gas giant! What are we going to do – suck Saturn through the wormhole?’

‘If you up the res a bit,’ Meg said patiently, ‘you’ll see that what this system lost out in gas giants, it gained in ice and a real thick and tasty comet-cloud.’

Centuries of being bombarded with milkshake; by the time it got through the atmosphere, baked Alaska.

‘Fucking great,’ I said.

‘You can’t come inside,’ Reid said. He was addressing the robots, on the television, from the same table as I’d seen him at a year earlier. Around him was what looked to me the biggest, emptiest interior space I’d seen in a long time. Real space, too. ‘There simply isn’t room. I’m trying to set up a virtual conference. It’ll be ready in an hour, or whenever Support Services gets the network connections sorted out.’ His smile told us he was on our side, in the unending struggle between Users and Support. ‘Meanwhile, just lock your grippers and hang on in there. Check out a video or shag your succubus or something. You’ll know when we’re ready.’

The virtual conference was held in an impressive virtual venue, loosely based on Tienanmen Square; Reid, appearing on a large screen at the front, in the position of the Chairman. Thousands of three-dimensional renderings of people – prisoners and succubi – stood in the square, talking freely amongst themselves for the first time. Some of them must have been in the solitude of their onboard minds for years; others present were prisoners who’d not died and been uploaded, but had served their time in their own bodies – around the ship and habitats rather than the wormhole’s environs, I guessed. These still-embodied people were also, in reality, dispersed around the ship, but were telepresent with the rest of us.

When Reid spoke, his voice carried perfectly. Everyone heard it as if they were a few metres from him.

‘We’ve done it!’ he said. ‘We’ve reached a new world, under a new sun. We did it by our own efforts, of our own free will. Some may say that the macros did it, but I say we used them like any other tool. And when our tools turned in our hands, we discarded them. We can be proud.

‘You all have another reason to be proud. You’ve all earned your freedom. I never promised you this, but I give it to you now. A new world, a clean slate. You’re all free, and together we’ll live in freedom.’

Everybody around me shouted a cheer that overloaded the system and appeared momentarily on the sky as giant letters: ‘AAAAAAAAHHHHH’. I myself was unmoved, partly because I wasn’t a prisoner, and partly because I could see that Reid had little choice in the matter. If there were to be slaves here, they would have to be machines.

Reid waited for the din to subside, and smiled.

‘Thank you. And now, my friends…We’re here not as agents of some company, or as refugees. We’ve brought with us, I assure you, all that we’ll need to make New Mars not just habitable, but better than Earth. We’ve brought the genetic information to seed this planet, over time, with a rich diversity of life. We have the technology to make our lives as long as we desire. And we’ve brought the dead, who will live again, with us.

‘I’ll talk about the dead in a moment. But first, let me tell you about yourselves. Most of you are, of course, among the dead, but unlike the great majority of the dead, you are still in a sense alive. Your minds, and your characters, have developed and, if you ask me –’ he smiled ‘– improved since your deaths. Furthermore, for the bodies of every one of you – I’ve checked – we have not just the stored information in the bank, but actual genetic material, frozen cells. Over the next months and years…’

He paused. We all leaned forward slightly.

‘We’ll have to do something about the calendar,’ he said, in a stage aside. Everybody laughed.

‘OK, the good news is, we’ll be able to download you back to clones of your own bodies. In the case of the succubi, any bodies you choose, although I’d recommend the ones you’re, ah, modelled on, for the sake of –’

Whatever he said next was completely lost in a tumult of applause. To my amazement I found myself yelling, hugging Meg, clapping complete strangers on the back and leaping in the imaginary air.

Eventually the crowd quietened down. I began to understand Reid’s reasons for setting up this event, rather than broadcasting to us all in our individual machines – he wanted to create a shared occasion of common memory. This was his speech – to the assembled masses, I thought with a grin – in the plaza after the revolution, his founding moment of the new world’s history. Something to tell our grandchildren. (I had a passing concern for the future offspring of some – most? – of us, whose mothers would have no memories of childhood or mothers of their own. A continuity of caring hands, literally reaching back to the pre-human, would be broken. Reid was founding not just a new world, but a new species, New Martians indeed.)

‘About the dead. Many of us here may have loved ones or friends among them – I know I have – and may be anxious to see them again. And so we shall, but not for a long time. Growing clones quickly to maturity, and impressing on their brains the imprint of your memories and personalities is possible with the technology we have to hand. Resurrecting the bodies and personalities of the dead from their smart-matter storage is not. It can be done, but only with the help of the fast folk, whose stored structures would have to be revived first…’

The crowd’s response, this time, was a noise I’d never heard before: a hoarse sigh, a grinding of teeth, a shifting of feet – a collective snarl. Once more, I too was to my surprise caught up in it, bristling at the thought of the macro-organic monsters whose madness had trapped me for months. But in those months, which hadn’t been months to me, I had learned something. Something vital, which I couldn’t remember. Reid’s speech resumed, interrupting my puzzled thoughts.

‘I’m talking, of course, of the templates of the fast folk – posthuman and AI – as they were at the beginning, not the bizzare entities they became. Even so, I agree entirely that the risk is too great. We must work towards being able to control, or at least contain, their development. The same goes for any form of artificial intelligence capable of improving itself. We will do it. The day will come when we control the Singularity, as we’ve learned to control the flame on the heath, the lightning of the sky and the nuclear fire of the stars! Until that day, they stay in the storage media, and with them…the dead sleep.’

We all sighed, in relief and regret.

‘Until that day,’ he went on, ‘we’re here for good. Our course through the Malley Mile, which led us to this world and not somewhere less favourable, was plotted by some of the fast folk who escaped the general madness. For a time. We can’t rely on them now, and until we can, there’s no way back. New Mars is our world, and our only world. We’ll make it a great one!

‘And now,’ Reid concluded, with a huge grin that reminded me of my old friend, and made me love him again, ‘we have work to do!’

We had a while to wait before there was anything for us to do. The daughter wormhole, spun off from the main course of the probe’s passage, had been open for some weeks before our ship had come through. Replicators and assemblers had been sent through in advance, and their initial work was already taking shape on the ground and among the system’s scattered metallic rocks. From these asteroids they would send a second generation of machines out to the comet-cloud, where a third generation would nudge the comets inward to be mined and farmed.

The ship itself, for all its apparent inelegance, had a modular design which would allow most of it to descend, section by section, to the surface. There was no provision for ascent. The ship’s sections would become a base-camp, incorporated in the city as it grew.

The city would be grown by dumb-mass robots and smart-matter assemblers, following not a design but a set of spontaneous-ordering rules and constraints. These had been worked out by smart, fast minds in the early days of the project. They had expected to share in a much better-organised expedition than the one Reid had cobbled together out of prisoners and guards and – for all I knew – out of shanghaied innocent dead like myself. The fast folk had therefore made provision for a greater human and machine population than we would be able to sustain. Whether their quirks were humour or error we never knew.

The reckless anarchy of the projected social system may have had its immediate origin in the rough justice of the Mutual Protection Company’s rule-book, but I suspect that Reid’s rules, in turn, were rooted in the libertarian texts with which I’d once tried to warp his mind.

But I anticipate.

Reid talked to me personally before we were all offered work contracts. He looked forward to meeting me again in my human form, explained reasonably enough that it wouldn’t be available for a year or two yet, and that in the meantime he wanted me to work – as an independent contractor, just like all the others – on an important project. I’d have lots of (genuinely) non-human robots and other machinery to supervise, loads of kudos and money to earn, and best of all a bigger computer to live in, with more scope for virtual recreation and freedom to communicate with others. We could set up shared worlds, enjoying a human equivalent of the macro trips…

‘Great,’ I said; and my CPU (the whole thing and its peripherals turned out to be, when removed from the robot, about the size of my first digital watch) was packed along with many others, drogue-dropped to the surface and plugged into a new, shiny and robust machine. Meg, whose increased intelligence never got in the way of her continued embarrassing devotion, selected a house and landscape and got to work editing them into an enjoyable place to live, while I got on with my work in what I was pleased to call the real world.

I built the Stone Canal.

The city’s other canals, ring and radial and capillary, were for transport. This one would be for more than that. It was to be the city’s main source of water (other than rain) and the water would come from space. Comets, broken up in advance, would be guided in to crash on the range we called the Madreporite Mountains, about a hundred kilometres from the city. Much of the water from the cometary ice would evaporate. This wasn’t a problem: we wanted it in the atmosphere. The runoff would flow into the Stone Canal. Its main significance wasn’t so much the water, however, as what could be extracted from it.

For tens of kilometres along and under its banks, beginning at the Sieve Plates – a system of dams – at the foot of the mountains, pipes and pumps and machinery were to extract from the cometary water all the minerals and organic molecules it contained. These would then be fed into what we called ‘plants’ – basically solar-powered, smart-matter chemical processing units, concentrating the useful material for subsequent harvesting. (You can see why we called them ‘plants’.)

The planning and exploration took me months, long before the first soil-moving machinery rolled out of the automatic factories on the edge of the city. Towards the end of those months I had a visit from Reid.

We lived, Meg and I, in a virtual valley. Our house was on the slope of one side, and down below was a small village, with a pub. The village and its inhabitants were, frankly, wallpaper, although the barman could be induced to respond to questioning about the day’s news. (I took a childish pleasure in measuring the difficulty of my questions by the depth of his frown, as somewhere a database search crunched away.)

I was alone when I entered the pub. The barman smiled, the regulars nodded, Reid ordered pints. Reid, of course, was only telepresent, but he assured me he really was drinking the same beer as he appeared to be drinking, and as I imagined I was drinking.

‘Wilde,’ he said after we’d each had a couple of pints, ‘I’ve got a favour to ask of you.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Whatever.’

He looked around, as if with the impossible suspicion that someone else might be there.

‘It’s about the dead,’ he said. ‘And the fast folk. We’ve got all the data storage, all the smart-matter gunk, and the interface machinery for starting the revival process.’ He grinned. ‘And I’ve got the codes, without which they’re useless. Even so, I’d like to make sure they’re in a safe place for the long term. But also, a place where the organics are available should we ever need them in a hurry.’

‘Sound plan,’ I said.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve been looking at the specs for the sluice-gates…what d’you call them, Sieve Plates? You’ve got plenty of deep caverns due to be cut out of the mountain behind them, for the machinery and stores.’

‘And you want to stash some other…machinery and stores?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Nobody’ll ever go there, not when we’ve got the system set up. If the incoming ice isn’t enough of a deterrent, the whole area will be absolutely foul with unknown organics. Exaggerating how poisonous they might be should be easy enough.’

And so it proved.

The actual building of the canal and its associated machinery of pumps and locks took two years. I did it, of course, with the help of a fleet of automated machinery, and design software that took my scribbles and handwaves and turned out precise technical drawings. But co-ordinating them and making the fine decisions was down to me, and it was the most fun I’d had since the Third World War. When the Sieve Plate complex was complete, Reid flew in, alone, in an autopiloted helicopter with the crated components of the storage and retrieval mechanisms for millions of dead people, and the programs to re-launch thousands of uploaded people into a posthuman culture. The whole lot weighed about ten tonnes, slung beneath the Sikorski.

When we’d got the machinery and storage media stashed under the mountain, Meg and I invited Reid in for coffee. Reid, in physical reality, was wearing contacts. He saw us sitting on a verandah, and we saw him just outside, on the step of the helicopter. Anyone else watching – there wasn’t – would have seen Reid sitting on one machine, talking to another.

At some point I asked him how things were going with downloading the people in the robots to their cloned bodies.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine. We’re about three-quarters through. We’re dealing with it more or less as people want it.’ He grinned quizzically. ‘Haven’t seen your application.’

I looked at Meg and laughed. ‘Never crossed my mind, to be honest. I’m having a good life, right here.’ She smiled back. Her beauty had increased with her intelligence, and her aesthetic sense with both. She was wearing a bias-cut green velvet dress lifted from a fashion-history site.

Reid stroked his chin. ‘Hmm,’ he said. He lit a cigarette. ‘You shouldn’t leave it too long. There’s a bad attitude spreading about robots. The people who’ve been downloaded are the main instigators of it. They tend to draw a very sharp line between people and machines. In fact a lot of them will deny there’s such a thing as machine consciousness.’

A fly – how the hell did we bring them? – buzzed past him. The VR consistency rules picked it up when it flew ‘into’ the verandah, and a simulation seamlessly took its place and flew out again.

‘What?’ I said. ‘But they’ve experienced machine consciousness!’

Reid looked at me with a glint of his familiar devil’s advocacy. ‘No, they now have memories of experiencing it. Which doesn’t prove that they actually did experience it at the time. It could be an artifact of the consistency rules. That’s the sophisticated argument. The vulgar version is to insist that you were human all right, but artificial intelligences are missing some magic ingredient, which any goddam cleric or scholastic will cheerfully assure you is a soul.’

‘God,’ I said. ‘That’s disgusting.’

‘What about the succubi?’ Meg asked.

‘They’re the worst,’ Reid said.

Meg threw back her head and laughed. ‘Wouldn’t you just know it! No snobs worse than the new rich!’

I frowned at them both. ‘What I don’t get,’ I said, ‘is how they relate to their own copies in the robots.’

Reid gave me an odd look. ‘You definitely don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Nobody leaves a copy of themselves in the robot. Everybody so far has been very insistent on that. The way they see it, they’re about to resume a normal human life, and if a copy stayed behind they’d have a 50–50 chance of waking up and finding themselves still there. It’s irrational, in a sense – why don’t they fear being the copy that’s destroyed?’

‘Because they don’t experience it,’ said Meg. She cocked an eyebrow. ‘Presumably?’

‘Of course,’ Reid said hastily. ‘It’s simultaneous. You don’t, as they say, feel a thing.’

‘Ah,’ said Meg. ‘That’s the root of this idea you’re talking about. Because if people really saw their selves in the machines as…themselves, they’d feel guilty about it. So they don’t!’

‘Smart,’ Reid conceded. ‘But there’s more to it than that…shit, I feel the same way myself sometimes.’ He tilted his head, squinting at us as if to make the illusion of our presence go away. ‘That’s…I guess that’s why I never uploaded, never went into the macros. I knew lots of people who did, and they kept telling me it was wonderful, but I could never get over the suspicion that they were all flatlines.’ His tone was uncharacteristically hesitant. ‘No more capacity for feeling than a weather simulation has for raining.’

‘You must’ve really bought into the old anti-AI arguments,’ I said. To me the whole thing sounded as stupid as solipsism.

‘Maybe,’ Reid wryly acknowledged. ‘Or maybe it’s just that I’ve been using computers longer than anybody else alive.’

‘So you don’t think Jon’s human?’ Meg asked. ‘Or me?’

‘Hah!’ Reid said. He jumped up, and ground out his cigarette-butt. ‘Of course I do. I’d just like to meet you both – in real life.’

He climbed into the helicopter and turned to wave.

‘See you soon.’

‘Real soon now,’ I said.

That night I felt Meg’s tears on my shoulder.

‘What is it?’

She rolled away from me a little and caught me in her serious gaze.

‘Do you think like that?’ she asked.

‘Like what?’

‘Like Reid said. Like people do.’

‘Of course not.’ I snorted. ‘It’d be pretty bloody stupid of me to think I’m not thinking.’

‘And what about me?’

‘You?’ I pulled her close again. ‘I don’t think like that about you, either.’

‘You did once.’

‘That was different. I didn’t know any better.’

She laughed, unexpectedly reassured.

‘Neither did I.’

As well as the work on the canal, I was working on a problem which increasingly intrigued me: trying to understand what it was I had learned in my last encounter with the macro. It troubled my mind like a half-remembered dream. It intrigued Meg too; she had never been in the macro, and had an endless interest in anything I could tell her about it. She had a greater affinity than I for the posthuman world; not surprisingly, as she was far more a product of it than I was.

In our virtual valley we built a virtual machine. I would strive to recall some aspect of the puzzle, and Meg would scan our common operating-system for traces of the consequent processing. Then she’d reach in and extract a piece of machine code, and provide it with an interface. We’d then wander around clutching whatever resulted, looking for a place to slot it in. What was really – so to speak – going on was that my chaotic recollections were being put into order. When I experienced the robot’s body as my own (the mesh frame still stood in our front room) I increasingly felt what I’d learned as something I was about to understand, rather than something I almost remembered.

As the months went on, the ziggurat we built loomed over our rustic valley like an oversized electricity pylon. We called it ‘the installation’, and with all our enhanced intelligence we never suspected it might be exactly that.

The great work was done. I stood on the bank and watched a couple of digging-machines break through the crumbling wall of soil that separated the merely damp bottom of the Stone Canal from the city’s already partially flooded canal system. For a moment they were swamped by the surge of water, then, dripping, they hauled themselves out. A ragged cheer went up from the opposite bank, where a small crowd had gathered to watch. I felt a radio ripple of robotic satisfaction from the other construction-machines around me. Then, indifferent again, already signalling their availability for another contract, they stalked or trundled away.

Reid was among the human crowd. He made a short speech, of which I didn’t bother to catch more than snatches. The crowd, no doubt inspired by his proclamation of the historic importance, etc., dispersed. We stared at each other for a moment, then I waded across to meet him.

‘I knew you’d be the one still here when the others left,’ I said. I waved a limb. ‘Otherwise, it’s a bit hard to tell you apart.’

Reid rocked back on his heels and laughed.

‘Nice one, Wilde,’ he said. ‘Reckon it’s about time you rejoined the human race?’

‘Or in my case, joined it,’ Meg said. The voice from over my shoulder spoke from the machine’s grille. Reid’s face betrayed only the smallest of double-takes as he smiled and nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken the liberty of growing clones for both of you.’

‘Where did mine come from?’ Meg asked.

‘We’ve got millions of human cells,’ Reid said. ‘Some of them are from people who are also among the dead, but many aren’t. Storing tissue-types was very common even before the Singularity – people used them for regeneration and rejuvenation, after all. So there are plenty of spare genotypes to choose from. Yours, Meg, was some obscure video actress. I doubt if she was among those who had their brains scanned, so…’

‘It should avoid any future embarrassment,’ Meg said. ‘Imagine turning up at a party to find another woman wearing the same body. Wouldn’t you just die?’

‘Somebody would,’ I said.

We walked along the canal-bank into the growing city. Hitherto, I’d only seen it virtually. Still sparsely populated, it resembled the abandoned habitation of an alien race, now being colonised by venturesome humans.

And others. The first hominid I saw – a big-brained chimp sauntering by, talking rapidly to what looked like a couple of human teenagers – caught me by surprise.

‘Oh, that,’ Reid said casually. ‘Early experiments. The old US/UN scientists were pretty sick specimens. Don’t blame me, man. I did the poor bastards a favour by drafting them into the workforce. The scientists were all for – now what was the charming expression? – sacrificing them.’

We arrived at a building like a warehouse, which although recently built already had a sad look of decrepitude. Reid palmed the door and we walked into a chilly hall about a hundred metres long by twenty wide, filled with row upon row of pods. Each pod was three metres long, had a transparent upper half, and a cluster of electronics at one end. All except two were empty, and it was to these two that Reid led me.

I, and Meg behind my sight, looked down on our apparently sleeping forms, floating in clear fluid. Meg’s body looked like she had always looked to me. Mine was a reminder that the body-image I’d retained from the time of my death was that of a rejuvenated, rather than a young, man. Had I ever been so…innocent? It seemed almost a violation to send my hacked, copied, experience-accreted mind through the wires that mingled with his floating hair.

‘Where are the others?’ I asked.

‘You two are the last,’ Reid said. ‘We’ve got everybody else out.’ He fiddled with connecting-cables, turned to me with a question in his eyes.

‘You first,’ Meg said.

I indicated the tank in which my clone lay.

‘I think you’d better fold your limbs,’ Reid said. ‘The process takes a few hours.’

I settled on the floor. Reid loomed over me, and attached a cable to my shell. I remembered my first life-extension treatment, and my heart stopping. I had not known then what dry seas I would love Annette beside, what rocks would melt before we’d be immortal. I remembered the Kazakh snow-drifts, and the colours bleeding from the world, and Reid’s face, and Myra’s. I remembered the fading light in the macro mind-world, and Meg rescuing me. This would be my fourth death. I was not getting used to it, but love had always been with me, and was with me still.

Everything went away.

I saw a pair of cowboy-boots, jeans, a jacket and, as I tracked upwards, Reid’s impassive face.

‘I’m sorry, man,’ he said as I stood. ‘It didn’t work. For you, or for the succubus.’

I felt Meg’s presence like a held hand in the dark.

‘What do you mean, it didn’t work?’

‘Your minds aren’t compatible with human brains anymore.’ He shrugged. ‘The transfer didn’t get through the interface. There’s no translation from your computer to synaptic connections. Must have been something that happened in the macro.’

‘Everybody else was in the macros,’ I protested, but I already knew what his answer would be.

‘Not while they were going bad,’ he pointed out. ‘And it was I who asked you to do that. Like I said, I’m sorry.’

At that moment his face showed real guilt. I knew him well enough to know that guilt was not an emotion whose validity he recognised, or was likely to feel for long.

‘Can’t anything be done about it?’ Meg asked.

Reid shook his head. ‘It’s the same old trap,’ he said. ‘The fast folk, whether they’re AIs or uploads themselves, could do it. We can’t, and we daren’t do anything to revive them until we know how to stop them going bad again, or contain them if they do.’

We stood in silence, thinking this over.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I can live with it. Plenty for a bright young robot to do here. We can always use VR and projections and so on to socialise –’

‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ Reid said. ‘The attitude I told you about has got more entrenched, if anything. People are people. Robots are robots. Along with that goes an almost hysterical feeling against blurring the distinction between VR and actual reality. Everybody is convinced that was how the fast folk went bad, or mad.’

‘And they’re not far wrong,’ I said grimly. ‘But I can’t see people giving up the advantages of having VR.’

‘They don’t,’ said Reid. He ran his finger along the dust on top of the clone-pod, leaving a shiny trail. ‘They use it for games, and for porn I guess, and for design work. But seamless VR, like you live in – no.’

‘OK,’ Meg said. ‘Like Jon says, I can live with it. I can live with him. I’ve never done anything else. But what I want to know is, what can we actually do? Couldn’t we get on with the research into controlling or containing the fast folk? After all, I reckon we’re pretty well equipped for it.’

Reid glowered at me.

‘No way,’ he said. ‘No fucking way. There’s no research project at the moment. We can’t afford it, and I won’t allow it. I’ve got the code-keys to revive the macros, and I’ll decide the time and place. We’ll do all that in good time, when we’ve got isolated space-labs with laser-cannon pointing at them! And let me tell you, anybody else on this whole fucking planet would’ve left you switched off and shoved you in the nearest metal-recycler the minute, the fucking minute they found you were infected with some kinda shit from the macros!’

He was backing away, a shadow of alarm and suspicion on his face.

‘You know,’ he went on, ‘that suggestion you just made is exactly the sort of trick you’d pull, if you were being used as a vector by something left by one of those things. Don’t get me wrong, Wilde, I don’t blame you. But I’ve been burned once by them, and that’s too often.’

I believed him. There was no case to plead. In his place, I’d have done and thought the same. We were, I realised, alike: knowing no law or morality or sentimentality, our selfishness not petty like a child’s but vast like a devil’s, owing no loyalty to anything but what each of our fierce egos had already taken as its own. Reid had taken a world to his heart, and I the dead.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘OK, calm down. But just tell me, what can I do?’

‘Get as far away from here as possible,’ Reid said. ‘Explore the planet – that’d be useful, and interesting, and it’ll keep you out of the way of human beings for a long time to come.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘That suits us fine.’

Only Meg, I’m sure, sensed the bitterness behind my acceptance of exile.

I looked around. ‘What’s going to happen to this place, now that you’ve finished the downloads?’

Reid shrugged. ‘Probably sell it to a health-company,’ he said. ‘We can still clone replacement bodies or parts for people. We can still do live transfers, it’s just reviving stored minds that’s out for the moment. And…’ He stopped. ‘Och, all sorts of things! Why?’

I laughed. ‘I don’t want to see clones of myself walking around. Or of Meg, for that matter. I’ve enough problems with my identity as it is.’

He reached into a slot in the side of the computer on the pod.

‘Here you are,’ he said.

He passed me a sliver of plastic, like a microscope slide.

‘Your tissue-sample,’ Reid smiled.

I looked down at the transparent slide, in the robot’s vision. At its centre was an almost invisible speck of skin, sealed in a bubble of nitrogen; and a code chip.

‘So this is the real me,’ I said. ‘What’s on the chip?’

‘Your original memory,’ Reid said. He walked to the other pod, and passed over another slide. ‘Meg’s, you see, has none. Of course, yours is no bloody use any more – couldn’t be revived without the fast folk. But anyway, it’s yours.’

I stored the slides away in a compartment of the shell.

‘As for these blanks…’ Reid said. He tapped a code into each pod’s computer. The fluid in the pods became milky, then murky, as the tiny machinery of dissolution, the nano pirhanas, did their work. Even the blood-cells were torn down to molecules before they could stain the water. It was over in minutes, the pods flushed clean.

‘Thank you,’ I said, leaving.

And fuck you, mate.

We’d earned a fortune building the canal. It was still just possible for a robot, known to have a human mind, to trade on its own behalf. I don’t know if anyone knew I was the last of that kind. We cleaned out the bank-account and bought a land-crawler and a load of gear – tools, machine-tools, comms, nukes, nanotech, VR software, cloning-kits, all the processors we could get. I loaded them on the truck, plugged myself into the cab and set off, through the streets and out of the city on the opposite side from the Stone Canal. Ahead lay the planet’s semi-arid wastes, its dry sea-beds, its relict or extinct life-forms’ dry bones and drier exoskeletons. Behind us, the city’s rising towers shrank behind the horizon.

I switched to a virtual reality module that had me sitting driving, with Meg on the seat by my side. I grinned at her. She had been silent, unconsulted, through all that purposeful activity.

‘What are we going to do, Jon?’ she said.

I took one hand from the wheel and waved, taking in the illusory, grimy realism of the cab. There were cigarette-burns on the dash. ‘You can really get into those seamless virtualities,’ I said. ‘This is better than the flesh, my darling.’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ she said. ‘But what are we going to do?’

‘We’re going to drive around the planet,’ I said. ‘And while we’re at it, we’ll hack through the gates of hell.’

I told her what I meant, and she went along with it. Any woman I ever knew, and any man for that matter, would have pleaded with me to change my mind. Say what you like about succubi, they are loyal little fucks.

Night fell, and without headlights we drove on, tirelessly, and discussed how to hack the gates of hell. Overhead, the first incoming comets made dots and dashes in the sky.

We rolled around the planet more times than I care to count, and the planet rolled around its star a hundred times before the tower was built: a couple of centuries, Earth reckoning. The canals spread, other settlements grew up. The population grew; slowly, as immortal populations do. We discovered mineral deposits, fossil-beds, coal. We sold the information, and sometimes the materials. Prospectors hitched lifts, paid for in odds and ends of stores and clothes that we bartered with other travellers.

Our bank-account stayed open, and filled up. To replenish our supplies we traded indirectly, through front companies and dodgy intermediaries. We talked to robots often, people seldom. The attitudes Reid had warned us about became not just entrenched in the culture, they became its foundation stone. When it became fashionable, among the frivolously rich, to clone ‘blanks’ from the spare tissue-samples and equip them with robot minds, the distinction between real people and machines was only deepened.

Except among a dissident minority, who called themselves abolitionists. Some preserved the ideas of an ancient anarchist agitator, Jonathan Wilde. His memory, they assured each other, was immortal. We steered well clear of them.

Partly in reaction to the abolitionists, the ideas of ‘robot rights’, and of re-starting the race of the fast folk, and of raising the dead, all became connected, and rejected. Reid became eloquent in their rejection. If it was ever to be done it would be in a far future, which receded like communism once did in the minds of the Communists.

One night, while our crawler crunched along a flood-channel in the high desert, we finished the tower. We walked back up the virtual valley, to our house.

‘Ready?’ I asked Meg.

‘Ready as we’ll ever be,’ she said.

I idled the crawler, and stepped into the frame.

In the last couple of centuries I’d become sensitive to the difference between a virtual body and a real one. For all its apparent solidity, for all the pleasure it could reproduce or invent, for all the realism of the pains and discomfort it sometimes felt (for consistency rules) the virtual body lacked some final, vital touch, which was nothing more than the daily millions of subtle impacts and impulses that arise from the quotidian grapple with materiality. When I experienced the robot body as my own, I felt far more human than I ever did in the simulation of my human flesh.

So now. The flattened oval of my metal shell was cupped in the cab, limbs retracted, cables linking it to the crawler’s controls. My senses picked up the radiation from the stars, the faint infra-red of the cold and still cooling sand, the cautious stirrings and fierce encounters of the desert’s remnant native, and invading alien, life.

I looked around, awaiting some revelation. The world was the same as ever. I had built a tower in my mind, from my recollections, from the bits of data I’d snatched from the decadence of the macro, and nothing had changed.

The Malley Mile – our side of it – was in its familiar place, in the depths of the sky. I looked up to where I knew it was in its orbit. On the other side, in another time, was the surface of Jupiter. The surface would have expanded by now, and the orbit would have decayed. The wormhole would encounter the planet in – I thought for a moment – a year, within an order of magnitude. It was hard to tell; too many unknowns. In any case, an order-of-magnitude approximation wasn’t bad after all this time: no more than a decade, no less than a month would pass before the Malley Mile met the biggest macro of them all, the substance of the gas giant turned into the substance of mind.

It had been a grand plan, and a long plan, that I’d listened to in my last encounter with the decaying domain of the fast folk. They would slow their physical and mental processes down, almost freeze their development; and then, with literally cool deliberation, the ones who retained their rationality would excise the rest. Then, with the resources of Jupiter at their disposal, the survivors would multiply again. This time, they could wait, until their expanding domain embraced the Malley Mile: the gate to the end of time.

The shock of this understanding broke through the illusion that it was something I’d always known. I realised the tower had changed me after all. It had installed this new knowledge; of the Malley equations, of the macros’ plans, and more: I knew now how to start-up a stored mind, and imprint it on a brain. I didn’t have the reach, the scope, the speed of the being I’d been when I first learned them, in the macro. If I had, now, become one of the fast folk, I was running slow, in primitive hardware. But I remembered what I’d learned, and understood the peril we faced.

I stepped out of the frame, and told Meg. She had been changed, too; she understood.

‘Call Reid,’ she said.

We flipped the scene. Back, now, in the illusory cab, to our shared fantasy of being just a trucker and a girl hitch-hiker he’d picked up; sad, really. I mentally checked the positions of the communications satellites, then tilted the phone-screen and put a call through to Reid.

It was the most private, personal number I’d ever found for him, and still I got his secretary.

I stared at her, my mind working a lot faster than hers; as her green eyes widened, her black eyebrows narrowed in puzzlement as she looked back at us, at a strange, silent couple in a truck out on the desert. What arrogance Reid must have, what contempt for anything I might feel! By now he must be certain that I felt nothing, that virtual blood could not really chill, and simulated tears could not wet a representation of a face.

I noticed, thinking so fast that everything froze for a moment, that I had an open channel. I threw subliminal suggestions and viral subversions down that channel like a curse. Some of them hit firewalls, some got lost in transcription, and some just screwed around with Reid’s electronics. But some, I was sure, got through.

Her lips just opened, just parted. I blinked, once.

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Wrong number.’

We set a course for the foothills of the Madreporite Mountains, intersecting the Stone Canal. We wanted to get as close to the source as possible, where the cometary thaw was still rich in organic molecules. Every day or so another chunk of dirty ice would hurtle overhead and make a flash behind the eroded peaks.

After parking the crawler in a gorge by the canal, I went around to the back and started hauling out equipment. The growth-vat was crude, barely more than a tub with a computer and a microfactory attached. I tapped the extraction-pipes under the canal-bank, and put together my own refinery. I checked through my new knowledge of how to install a stored mind in a copy of the brain from which it had been taken. I took a small plastic slide from inside my shell, and slotted it in the machine.

Part of the clone’s growth was natural, but much of it was hastened and forced by smart-matter assemblers. Even so, building a body takes time. We didn’t have time to recapitulate development from an embryo: he grew full-size from the start, a skeleton taking shape and acquiring organs, muscles and skin in a grotesque reversal of the process of decay. But Meg and I observed his growth, or construction, as fondly as if he’d been a foetus in a swelling womb.

He was sleeping when, one early morning ten days later, we hauled him from the vat. We dried him, and dressed him, and carried him past the crawler, now locked and sealed and armed; out of the gorge and along the canal until, as the day warmed, he began to stir. We laid him on the bank, and waited. The sun climbed the sky.

He woke, and remembered dying.

21

Vast And Cool

I stood there in the cave, in Dee’s body, and tried to think fast. It wasn’t easy.

Of all the bodies I’d been in, this one was the strangest, the most alien. (And the more so because I had once known its every intricate inch.) In the robot bodies I’d had a virtual body to retreat to. Not in this. As Meg had said, there was room in this mind for us all, but with Dee’s Self and selves there was no room for virtual realities. We had to time-share it, one of us in control, the others conscious but passive passengers.

Although I surely never planned, or imagined, that things would turn out this way, it was also the best body through which I could persuade Reid of what had to be done. All his conscious prejudice might be undermined by this voice that had coaxed and teased, this face that had smiled and cried, this embodiment of an obsession that had lasted beyond the death of its real object.

I had at first hoped to defeat Reid, to force him legally and by popular pressure to release the codes that could unlock the interface with the smart-matter storage of the fast folk and the dead. I’d underestimated the strength of his resistance to the very idea.

I initially rescued Dee and Ax, leaving Wilde to fend for himself, in part to hold Dee as a bargaining-chip and in part to stop the killing spree on which she and Ax had embarked. It was only when I invited Dee into my virtual reality that I learned just where Reid had stored and secreted his codes: in Dee’s mind, in Stores and Secrets. That I never expected to find them there is, perhaps, a testimony to the cunning of his choice.

With these codes, and the information from the macro that Meg and I had finally interpreted, I knew I could go ahead and restart the fast folk without any co-operation from Reid, voluntary or otherwise.

And now that plan, too, was down the tubes.

So I just confessed everything.

‘All right,’ said Reid. ‘All right. I’ll grant you have an argument for starting these things up.’ He gestured at the stacked crates which he’d helicoptered in, long ago, and the stacks of stuff I’d added since. By this time we were all sitting around on the crates, talking and smoking and drinking coffee. (One of the trade-goods I’d accumulated.)

‘But what,’ he went on, ‘do we do about stopping them again?’

‘Simple,’ I said. I searched in Dee’s handbag, with Dee’s hands. I pulled out the plastic box I’d given her, and opened it. Inside were the slides for my clone and Meg’s, and a sealed plastic vial of smart-matter poison.

‘You had it all the time,’ I said. ‘Blue Goo. This shit has been sprayed on stray nanotech for decades, changing all the time. It’s evolved beyond any immunity the fast folk can come up with for, oh, minutes and minutes.’

Reid laughed. ‘“Here’s one I prepared earlier”, eh? And what if their researchers are smarter than our viruses?’

‘Nuke the fuckers,’ I said. I looked around the cavern, vaguely. ‘I’ve got a few kilotons lying around somewhere.’

‘Bit suicidal,’ Reid commented.

I gave him a severe look.

‘You do take back-ups?’

He laughed again. ‘Of course.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Tamara. ‘You’re talking about implementing, what, thousands? of superhuman minds in smart matter, getting them to answer a few questions, and then wiping them out?’

Reid and I exchanged puzzled frowns, and at that moment I knew I’d won.

‘Yes,’ said Reid. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

There was a lot wrong with that, but we did it anyway.

The questions we set the fast folk were these:

What is the way through the Malley Mile, back to the Solar System?

The answer to that was downloaded to the on-board computer of a standard spacecraft, the kind that on New Mars they use for herding comet-fragments.

What can be done to alter the orbital position of a Malley nonexotic-matter wormhole gateway?

The answer to that was downloaded to a hasty extension of the spacecraft’s on-board computer.

Is there a cure for the condition indicated in this blood-simple?

The answer to that was downloaded to a standard medical kit, and injected into Ax.

How can we recover and resurrect the minds and bodies of the stored dead?

The answer to that was downloaded to equipment which we lugged down the treacherous steps to the shore of the cometary lake.

The whole process took us the rest of that night – but then, we were all slow folk. When we had made sure we’d isolated the memory-stores, to repeat the exercise if necessary, we dropped the Blue Goo into the tanks where the fast folk lived. They didn’t see it coming, and I’m sure they didn’t feel anything.

‘Standard computing practice,’ Reid told Tamara and Ax. ‘Save the source-code, and blow away the object-code.’

Meg and I departed from Dee’s mind, down a fibre-optic cable under the canal, and (via various transfers that I still wake up cold thinking about) into the control module of a probe standing on a laser-launch gantry on the other side of Ship City – the same probe to which we’d downloaded the wormhole co-ordinates. Meanwhile, one of Reid’s men took a helicopter across town, with a handful of molecular construction-machinery which we could, if necessary, parley into a whole manufacturing-complex. He packed it into the ship’s tiny hold. We made sure our genetic information was loaded with it.

There wasn’t much room in the control module for VR. We experienced through the ship’s senses, but we did have an optical television link, and through it we watched the people in the cave, and by the shore. Reid and Dee and Tamara and Ax were engrossed in argument, with each other and with people in the city. That Twoday morning, Circle Square was the focus of what sometimes looked like a spill-over of its central island’s wild parties, and sometimes looked like some kind of mass democracy, and now and again broke out in a riot. Various courts – Talgarth’s, and others with more conventional procedures – were in session on the numerous lawsuits that had arisen from the last few days’ events. One Anderson Parris (temp. dec’d.) was suing Reid for the actions of his gynoid, Dee Model.

Reid abruptly stopped arguing, and started mobilising what resources of money and charity there were in Ship City for disaster relief. New Mars had no famines, no wars, and just enough industrial accidents to sustain the need for such organisation. What they now faced was a disaster in reverse.

We cut to the cameras and remotes overlooking the shore of the cometary lake. In that dark, nutrient-rich water, the process by which we’d resurrected Wilde was repeated and multiplied, with the terrifying speed of smart-matter processing. Bodies formed, by the hundreds, then the thousands, to drift or thrust themselves towards the raw, recent shelf of the lake’s beach. Dripping, coughing fluids from their new lungs, they hauled themselves blindly onto the shore and lay for a while in the sunlight. After a few minutes they’d look up at the circling aircraft, the hovering helicopters, and wonder where the hell they were.

The last we saw of Wilde he was far along the shore, searching among the naked and shivering bodies for Annette, whom he had counted, and who had counted him, among the dead.

The lasers boiled us into orbit, then our chemical rockets took over. We let the guidance-systems do the work – I rather fancied trying out my rocketry reflexes again, after all this time, but Meg talked me out of it. We talked a lot, in that long topple to the daughter wormhole: about what we might find, and what we could do if there was no-one left to warn, or able to act on a warning. The fast folk had come up with a few suggestions. Our first priority, on arriving in the Solar System, would be to find the resources of matter and energy to carry them out. The real constraint was the resource we couldn’t be sure we had – time.

We fell through the wormhole gate.

What we saw almost made me flee back into it.

We emerged, as predicted, in orbit around Jupiter – a high orbit, which had not been been predicted. For the first time I saw the Ring from above. It was nothing to Saturn’s, but it was spectacular nonetheless. Concentric white rings, divided by smaller black rings which must have been scribed over the centuries by the orbits of Jupiter’s remaining moons. Jupiter itself had changed, its coloured bands now tamed, channelled into up-wellings that formed hexagonal cells, with a sketchy hint of more solid structures dividing them.

‘It’s like a honeycomb!’ Meg whispered, behind my mind.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And we don’t want to meet the hive.’

Meg’s reply was to magnify my forward view. A hundred kilometres ahead, along the same orbital path, was a swarm of the nastiest-looking spacecraft I’ve ever seen. They had a perfection of mechanism, a finished look to their huge articulated extensions of gleaming brass and steel. Their multiple eyes and probing antennae were turned on us. Their missiles and lasers moved into combat-ready position like unsheathed stings.

Our own antennae were instantly battered with hailing-frequencies. I felt the feathery touch of radar on my hull.

‘Firewalls up?’ I asked Meg.

‘Yes.’

I cautiously opened an incoming video link, and sent an identifying burst of microwave to the orbital forts – or fighters – ahead.

On the video-screen in the visual centres of my mind, hazy through the protective firewalls of anti-virus software, appeared a woman’s face. A young woman, with braided locks, epicanthic eyelids, broad cheekbones, coffee-coloured skin and thin lips and wide teeth…it’s hard to say just what elements went to make up the conviction, but I was certain she was of a new race, one different from any I’d encountered before: human, I guess is the word I’m after.

‘Spayk Angloslav, robot?’ she asked doubtfully.

‘English?’

She smiled. ‘Yays, Ehnglish. You pick it up from old transmissions, yays? Language has changed. Much has changed.’

Much has changed.

The fleet that awaited us was that of the crack Cassini Division (as they proudly call themselves) of the Solar Defence Group, seconded to the Jovian Anomaly Research Committee. Their sole mission is to guard the Malley Mile, and shoot down anything that rises off the Jovian surface. At first they thought we were aliens, or spawn of the fast folk. They were not pleased when we told them we didn’t trust their transmissions either – even if their ships, unlike ours, were big enough (we grudgingly allowed) to support organic life. Eventually they swarmed out, surrounding us like space-suited South Sea islanders, pressing their face-plates to our lenses and (some of them) their tongues to the insides of their faceplates.

Meg took spectroscopic analyses of their tongues and the fog of their laughing breath, and assured me they were of human flesh and blood all right. Then it was our turn to reassure them. They interrogated us for days, and then they relented, and grew us in pods. They kept the pods isolated and at the focus of a laser-cannon battery.

I think they were more relieved than we were when we emerged in human bodies. Generations of viral radio messages from the successive civilisations of the fast folk on Jupiter have left them very cautious about electronic computers. Most of the computing in the Solar System is done on machines that Babbage would have recognised – from his wildest dreams. I have seen these calculating-machines. They fill hollowed mountains. They are powered by dams, cooled by rivers. They are used to solve millions of equations.

The Cassini Division shipped us back to Earth. The transfer orbit took long enough for Meg and I to get properly acquainted, and to become world famous. Everybody over the age of about six had a good laugh when they discovered we’d come to save them from Jupiter’s mad uploaded computer whizz-kids getting to the end of time.

World fame has its disadvantages, especially in a world of thirty billion people. But it comes as something of a relief, after living on a world where the ideas I advocated were the basis of society, and my memory was immortal. In this world, they’re forgotten, and I’m a footnote in old books.

So we wander the Earth, Meg and I, and we talk to people. When we tell them about Ship City, the more they understand the less they like. It seems to them not an anarchy, like they have here in the Solar system, but a divided – and hence multiplied – authority. So we don’t talk much about Ship City. We talk about the desert, and we wait for these strange but somehow familiar folk to ask us, yet again, if we remember the way through the wormhole to New Mars. It is the only subject which brings envy to their eyes. I can see why. The thirty billion have refuted Malthus: everybody’s rich. They’ve refuted Mises: nobody’s paid. They’ve refuted Freud: nobody’s sad.

But it’s kind of crowded.

The probe continues on its near-lightspeed path; the information it sends back is always new, always unexpected. But the most profound datum, to me, was one that came through quite early in its course: the Hubble expansion is local. The probe has gone beyond it, into other, expanding or contracting, regions of space. There was a Big Bang, but it was not the beginning, for there was none. No heat death, no Big Crunch awaits us. These dooms (it now is said) for all their shining mathematical elaborations, were but reflections of a society facing its limits.

There is no end.

Thanks to Carol, Sharon and Michael for love (and peace) while writing the book; to Iain Banks for reading the draft in good drinking time; to Mic Cheetham for believing in it; to John Jarrold for keeping his nerve; to the partisans of Libertaria, and of Nowhere (you know who you are); to Lara Byrne, for an inspiration (and a genotype).

Books by Ken MacLeod
From Tom Doherty Associates

THE FALL REVOLUTION

The Star Fraction

The Stone Canal

The Cassini Division

The Sky Road

THE ENGINES OF LIGHT

Cosmonaut Keep

Dark Light

Engine City

Newton’s Wake

Learning the World

The Execution Channel

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these novels are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

FRACTIONS: THE FIRST HALF OF THE FALL REVOLUTION

Copyright © 2008 by Ken MacLeod

The Star Fraction copyright © 1995 by Ken MacLeod
The Stone Canal copyright © 1996 by Ken MacLeod

All rights reserved.

An Orb Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Dataa

MacLeod, Ken.

[Star fraction]
Fractions / Ken MacLeod.—1st trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.—(Fall revolution series)
“A Tom Doherty Associates Book.”

ISBN: 978-1-4299-6552-1

1. Life on other planets—Fiction. 2. Computer programs—Fiction. I. MacLeod, Ken Stone canal. II. Title.
PR6063.A2515S734 2008
823'.914—dc22

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