Divisions (26 page)

Read Divisions Online

Authors: Ken MacLeod

BOOK: Divisions
3.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Airports are quiet places, where people make their leisurely way along covered walkways to the waiting craft. Around the sides of the concourse are tables with drinks and snacks, open-sided rooms with stores of the kind of supplies you might need and are likely to forget, racks and shelves where you can browse and, if you like, take away a book or journal or disk. There’s a knack, a
politesse
, of picking just enough entertainment for you to have finished at the end of your journey, or at the end of one of its stages, so that you can casually place it on another airport’s shelves. At some airports there’ll be a group of musicians or a troupe of acrobats or whatever. You can stay within sight and sound of them, or move away. The only barriers you’ll encounter are to keep you from wandering into danger. Sometimes you’ll help other people with their luggage, sometimes you’ll ask for a hand. If you have a long wait for your flight, you might feel like joining in some of the support activities, making sure that more hurried passengers get their refreshments or books or help with heavy luggage or small children. That’s what airports are like.
Not in capitalism, they’re not. When I emerged at the end of a long corridor from the busy landing field into the main concourse of Ship City’s aerospace port, with my comrades beside me and the leading citizens behind them, I was greeted by hundreds of enthusiastic people behind a barrier, a swooping flock of reporters, a dazzle of clashing colours and a blare of sound. Every square yard that wasn’t absolutely required for passengers
or people waiting for them was occupied by a stall or shop or kiosk, each of which had its own fluorescent rectangle above it advertising flights or drugs or socks or cosmetics or lingerie or insurance or back-ups or cabs or hotels. The public-address system thumped out urgent-sounding music made all the more unsettling by frequent, and equally urgent-sounding, interruptions.
Meanwhile, other activity, apparently unrelated to our arrival, was going on. The wide passage between us and the welcoming crowd was being traversed from right to left by a succession of small automatic vehicles slowly hauling laden trailers, and of briskly striding men and women and—this was my first such encounter—what looked like ape-men of various species. Among them robots, few of which were remotely humanoid, stalked or skittered. Outside the terminal building, at the far end of the landing field, the distant sounds and flares of heavy lifting shook the air and lit the night. None of the humans or hominids or robots hurrying past in front of us spared us more than a curious, if friendly, glance.
I hesitated, unsure about how to get across this stream of light but persistent and swift traffic. Talgarth walked past me and strode out into the midst of it and, facing the oncoming flow, held up his hand. This imperious gesture enabled us to get across to just in front of the barriers. Yells and smiles greeted us, hands reached out to touch us; recorders and babies were held above heads. Talgarth led us past them all, along the barriers and around a corner into a quieter area, from which even the tiny news-copters were turned back. There were padded benches along the walls. Jaime and Boris were sitting there, looking somewhat drained, but talking earnestly to two young women in identical sky-blue jackets and matching skirts. When they saw us approaching they said their goodbyes to the women (who immediately stood up and assumed strange fixed smiles) and rejoined us.
Andrea hugged Jaime and I hugged Boris and everybody milled about for a few minutes, until Talgarth herded us all together again like a supervisor on a children’s outing and led us between a pair of big glass sliding doors to the edge of a flat expanse of tarmac, where a lot of vehicles were parked, one of which awaited us.
It was about twenty-five feet long and eight feet high, with large windows at the side and a low-slung chassis. A man in a grey uniform, wearing a grey peaked cap, stood outside its open door and gave us another example of that oddly impersonal smile. Talgarth stepped aside and motioned to us to enter the vehicle. Inside there were rows of seats covered with something like leather, a fitted carpet on the floor, and a smell of fresh plastic in the air. I made my way to the rear seat and sat down beside Boris. Talgarth sat in the seat in front of us, and the rest of the crew filled up the adjacent seats. Reid, Dee and Tamara all got on too. The others who’d been with them stayed
behind, waving at us from the kerb, looking simultaneously self-important and left out.
As the driver closed the door and got behind the steering wheel I said to Talgarth, ‘It’s neighbourly of you to lay this on for us.’
‘The mini-coach?’ He smiled. ‘They’re standard airport-to-city transport. ’
‘Well, thanks anyway,’ I said. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Reid’s booked a hotel floor for you, in the same building as his offices,’ Talgarth explained. ‘We’ll go to his offices first, if that’s agreeable, because we’d like a chat with you all privately before we arrange any other social functions.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘We have a lot to discuss.’
 
 
The airport was between the proximal ends of two of the city’s arms. Behind it lay miles of open flat ground, some of it apparently water-covered: as I glanced back through the big curved and rounded rear window, pools flashed back reflections of the jet of a rising rocket. As it faded, another flared. There was a
lot
of heavy lifting going on. Ahead, along a couple of miles of wide, open road, rose the centre of the city. The buildings in the two converging arms on either side of us became higher the closer they were to the centre, which was dominated by a cluster of tall, slender towers. They were not as tall as the towers of Earth, or the trees of the Lunar crater-domes, but they were more graceful than either, lifting the gaze and catching the breath. Their lower reaches were linked by spiral or otherwise curving ramps, giving the whole complex an appearance like the fine metalwork of a decorative headdress. Among them were other buildings, rounded, polyhedral; and tall glass rectangles like those I’d—only a fortnight ago—watched
Terrible Beauty
land beside.
All the buildings blazed with lights, from windows and flood-lamps and displays. We stared ahead, entranced.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Suze said. Reid, sitting in front of her, turned around and said over his shoulder:
‘It is, and it’s also a little joke on us. The more delicate towers and the elegant geodesic domes were designed by the fast folk, based on old illustrations of futuristic cities—just to say to us, “look, we can do this better.”’
‘They did, too,’ said Malley. His chuckle resounded above the electric hum of the bus. ‘I remember those old skiffy covers myself. Bloody spiral ramps—nobody ever got them looking right, but whoever built this did.’
The driver, I noticed, wasn’t doing very much, and most of the other vehicles on the road seemed to be driverless. The driver was a formality, a gesture towards the notion of some people serving others, being at their beck
and call; another of those capitalist things, like the air stewardesses that Boris had been talking to, and was now telling me about … I listened sceptically: he seemed unduly impressed by their wage-slavish solicitude.
‘But are they any more friendly and helpful than neighbours helping out with refreshments on a transport?’ I asked, my mind going back to how I and Suze had met.
Boris shrugged. ‘Maybe not,’ he said grudgingly. ‘But they do it all the time, and they do it to get what they need to live on, and that makes it all more … intense.’
‘Ha!’ I caught his arm and snuggled up beside him. ‘That’s
kinky
, that is,’ I murmured in his ear. ‘You’re just an old Sheenisov state-capitalist at heart. Bet you’ve been secretly into employer-and-employee sex-games for years.’
‘I have
not
,’ he growled indignantly, then turned and touched the side of my nose with the tip of his and grinned. ‘Couldn’t never get anyone to play, anyway, but if that’s what
you
want—’
‘Go employ yourself,’ I told him, very quietly. No one even in the adjacent seats could have overheard my crudity. But Dee must have had—perhaps not surprisingly—superhuman hearing, because she turned around and looked back at us from the front of the bus with a friendly and wicked smile, as though she knew exactly what we were talking about. I felt my cheeks burn a little, and I looked away.
The mini-coach was now gliding along a street, between tall buildings. At the bases of the tall buildings the pavements were quite wide, and quite crowded, even at this late hour in the evening. The traffic was denser here, and slower-moving, and as we passed, people (and the startling, ubiquitous quasi-people, the enhanced apes and re-engineered hominids and the autonomous machines) on the street would turn and stare for a moment, and look around them and smile.
‘How do they know we’re in this bus?’ I asked.
Dave Reid, up at the front, snorted. He gestured at a flat grey screen behind the driver’s seat. ‘It’s because we’re—ah, sorry—’ It seemed that all he did was to snap his fingers, irritably, and the screen suddenly showed a picture of our coach, from above and behind. I looked back through the rear window, and spotted the pursuing remotes. The others on the bus laughed. ‘Don’t encourage them,’ Talgarth said, as I faced the screen again and saw the back of my head in a zoomed-in shot which then zoomed disappointedly out.
The news-copters were still hovering above us when we stopped at the foot of a tower like a great concrete treetrunk, with tall windows distributed apparently at random, close to the centre of the city. Talgarth and Reid preceded us out of the coach, gesturing at the remotes as if waving away flies. As I got off I thanked the driver and said goodbye to him, making eye
contact for the first time. He smiled with a slightly startled look, and smiled a bit more when Dee paused on her way out and slipped him a tip.
Inside, the building was furnished in fake leather and real wood and the inevitable potted plants and indoor ivy, with some of the walls left as bare concrete. The vast, deep-carpeted reception area had the polite hush of posh. The lift, which had a grey-uniformed attendant to push the buttons, was big enough to take us all, comfortably. It was also fast, its acceleration almost enough to make my knees buckle.
Reid escorted us to a room along the corridor from the lift. It was a large anteroom to a small office, whose heavy wooden desk and deep-set window were visible through its open doorway. An oblong arrangement of deep fake-leather armchairs and sofas, around a long, low wooden table with glass ashtrays; subdued ambient light; black-cylindered spotlights picking out wall pictures, plants, and the drinks cabinet.
‘Sit yourselves down,’ Reid said. He took off his jacket and slung it over the back of a seat at the top of the table, marking his own territory, then busied himself at the drinks cabinet. Talgarth hung up his hat and coat, pushed back his shirtsleeves and sat down, unbuttoning his waistcoat. Dee and Tamara waited for us to take our seats, and then sat down together.
The chair I found myself in, with Boris on my right and Malley on my left, faced one of the large, well-lit framed photographs on the wall. Most of them showed Reid posing with new weapons systems or talking to what I guessed were capitalists and their hired men. The one opposite me showed Reid and Dee standing together on a wide step outside a vast arched doorway with a crowd of people around them.
The man standing beside Reid looked just like Jonathan Wilde, and the woman standing beside Dee looked just like Dee: same height, same build, same face. I realised with a start that I was looking at Dee’s original, and Wilde’s copy, the one who had stayed here. The two men wore black coats and trousers and colourful ties, and the woman standing beside Dee was wearing a long, narrow green dress of understated elegance.
Dee was wearing a smug smile and a very fancy white satin dress with fitted bodice, gigot sleeves and a full floor-length skirt, all decorated with beadwork, cutwork, panelling, stitching, lace trimming and organza fluting: not one expensive cheap trick of exuberant, eye-filling excess had been missed. On her head she wore a silver tiara from which a waterfall of embroidered tulle cascaded down her back and across the wide, ruffled pool of the skirt’s train. The whole saccharine confection seemed to be the costume for some carnival where considerations of visual impact overrode those of taste; I nudged the suit to record it, for the next time I wanted to make a big entrance at one of our wilder parties.
Reid placed some trays of glasses on the table, then bottles of spirits,
beer, tonic water, plain water, and cola. ‘Help yourselves,’ he said, and while we were doing so he sat down in the seat at the top of the table with a bottle of beer in front of him. When we were all sorted for drinks he leaned back in his chair and ran his fingers through his long, thick black hair several times, in a rather distracted way, then lit a cigarette. He let out a long, smoky sigh.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Nothing like a bit of peace and quiet. This room is about as secure as you can get, and it’s also inside a Faraday cage. Chicken wire in the concrete, I understand; quite effective.’ He glanced at what looked like a wristwatch, and then at me. ‘So, Ellen, I’m afraid your encrypted television signal won’t get beyond the walls.’ He grinned. ‘Just letting you know; it’s not a problem. Feel free to record anything and report back to your committee or whatever—I’ll give you comms facilities and complete privacy, afterwards, if you want.’

Other books

A Catered Romance by Cara Marsi
No More Lonely Nights by Charlotte Lamb
Relative Strangers by Kathy Lynn Emerson
Theirs Was The Kingdom by Delderfield, R.F.
Fairy Circle by Johanna Frappier