Fractions (67 page)

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.

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.'