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Authors: Ken MacLeod

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‘Enough,’ I said. ‘We got work to do. Jaime, Andrea, could you please haul yourselves over to the nav gear and the long-range viewing-kit. We need to track all the moving matter around us, all the ships and missiles and especially all the cometary junk. We don’t want to wander into the path of one of
their
comet-trains.’
(
Indeed we don’t
, I thought to myself.)
‘Don’t worry about our deep-space radar being pinged,’ I added. ‘They know we’re here, and they know we’re not hostile.’
‘We’ve paid for our protection,’ Suze reminded me.
‘Handy stuff, gold,’ I agreed. ‘And Yeng, I’d like you to help Andrea and Jaime with mapping comet-streams—their courses and timing
must
be public knowledge somewhere. As well as that, I need two channels—one to see if there’s any readable information coming from their comms drogue …’
‘Newscasts, probably,’ Suze said. ‘Subscriber only, if I know them.’
‘So try subscribing,’ I said.
Yeng grinned. ‘And the other channel?’
‘Same as before,’ I said. ‘Patch us in to the Command Committee.’ I caught Malley’s
you’re for it now
smile, and smiled defiantly back. ‘Time to find out what the democratically elected delegate of socialist humanity thinks of what the heroic defenders of socialist humanity have been getting up to.’
 
 
I recognized the Solar Council delegate at once, which surprised me. As the Solar Council—like all the other councils, from local to global—was directly elected, and I was theoretically one of its constituents, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Local councils tended to be made up of people with local reputations, and so on up. The Solar Council’s delegates should have been known to everyone in the Solar System, usually for their decades if not centuries of good, competent work in relevant fields; the re-gerontocracy, as some of our younger and more cynical neighbours put it. But by and large I trusted the people in the rest of the Union to choose people whose previous experience
and reputation they trusted (and now and again to throw in some absolute beginner who had made enough of a fuss about something to get their name bruited about) so, apart from my recently lost position on the Jovian Anomaly Research Committee, I generally stuck to my little intrigues in the Division and left wider affairs alone. However, even I had heard of Mary-Lou Radiation Nation Smith.
She was, I think, Navaho, if it matters; in any case, a member of one of the all-too-many tribes—Aleutian, Kazakh, Aboriginal, Uighur, etc.—who’d been unwilling or unwitting participants in the old society’s nuclear tests, and who now formed a loose but active lobby calling itself the Radiation Nation. They were united, not by ethnicity—which the Union only encouraged as a basis for cultural, and definitely not for administrative, association—but by a quite understandable though, I sometimes thought, exaggerated concern that we were a little too careless with our civil-engineering and outbreak-zapping and forest-clearing nukes.
Yes
, they’d say,
we can stop cancer and fix chromosomes and regenerate ecosystems, but there could be unknown losses, uncalculated risks
… it was a legitimate point of view, despite all the mutterings about Greens under the machines, and as a respected biologist and statistician, Mary-Lou Radiation Nation Smith had the qualifications to back it up.
Black bangs framed her face, dark eyes shone out of it. She was sitting beside Tatsuro, whose uncharacteristically frayed appearance—the hairs of his head, eyebrows, and moustache sticking out as if static-charged—contrasted with her well-groomed composure.
‘Ellen May Ngwethu,’ she said, as if it were the name of some particularly loathsome disease. ‘Comrades and friends.’ She swept us all with a glance, making a similarly distasteful diagnosis. ‘And the distinguished non-cooperator Dr Malley. I’m pleased to meet you all at last, even at such a distance.
Especially
at such a distance, I should say. Your energy and enterprise are quite astonishing. We on the Council had
no idea
you were planning such bold initiatives. Not only have you set up a scheme to destroy the Jovians, you’ve simultaneously entered into negotiations with them! No doubt you have already worked out what to do if these superhuman minds see through your
highly plausible
cover-story, and respond. I look forward eagerly to our surprise when you demonstrate your surefire, foolproof stratagem to prevent their entirely predictable fury from wiping us out. Don’t spoil my suspense by telling me in advance—not that telling us
anything
in advance is one of your habitual faults.’
She paused, placed the palms of her hands together and the fingertips under her chin.
‘Well?’ she said. ‘I’ve heard the CC comrades’ … explanations. What do
you
have to say for yourself?’
‘Comrade, ah, neighbour Radiation Nation Smith—’
‘Just call me Mary-Lou,’ she said sweetly. ‘Or neighbour Smith, if you prefer formality. My middle names are a soubriquet—like your last.’
From her point of view it may have been an inappropriate reminder of just
why
I’d chosen that old slogan for my name.
Ngwethu!
Freedom! I had it, and at the relevant point of application, perhaps more than she. The sting of her whiplash sarcasms faded, and (embarrassing to relate, but there it is) a few half-forgotten bars of that haunting anthem
Nkosi Sikelele Afrika
hummed through the back of my mind.
‘OK, Mary-Lou,’ I replied. ‘We in the Division have a mandate to contain and destroy the Outwarder threat, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. I’ve assumed all along that our actions would be accountable to the Union, and that if necessary a global poll would be taken before the final decision—the issues are well known, and have long been discussed, so there should be no problem.’
‘
No problem
,’ she said, in a dead level tone. ‘Of course, keeping our decision a secret from the Jovians is simply a matter of radio silence and complete self-discipline by billions of people, many of whom would be appalled at the suggestion of what you plan to do, not to mention what you’ve already done. You know, I can
almost
imagine that being possible, were it not for your other impressive feat. Opening contact
and
hostilities with the Jovians wasn’t enough for you.’
She shook her head. ‘Oh, no. As a final flourish, you manage—a mere hour before my arrival—to open the Solar System to a vigorously expanding capitalist society, and an anarcho-capitalist one at that. I’m sure if you’d had the choice between New Mars and some tedious statist tyranny with whose tedious statist tyrants we could at least have made some kind of deal that
might actually stick
, you’d still have picked New Mars, out of pure scientific curiosity as to which anarchy would subvert the other first. Let me tell you that your curiosity may be well justified … Dr Malley!’
Malley jumped (in as much as one can, in free fall) like a student caught dozing in a lecture.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m in no position to remonstrate with you—as a non-cooperator, you can’t be expected to live by our rules. However, you do have to live with the consequences of your actions. Here are some consequences of yours: after decades of virtual radio silence from Earth, your brave experiment in encouraging your students to make and use radios has led to something of a happy babble of electronic communication. Our non-co friends heard that I was on my way out here, and decided to spread the news to the handful of non-cos in
space
. You’d be surprised to learn how much ill-informed comment on my well known concerns has flashed around the Solar System in
the last few days. Evidently the New-Martian traders have monitored it closely—not difficult, because in absolute terms there isn’t much radio traffic,
yet
. A couple of hours ago, I received a
personal message
from one of these ships, offering me “an unrepeatable, ground-floor offer”—whatever that is—for an “import concession”—I know what that is, thank you—for “alpha-emitter-assimilating biomechanisms”—whatever
they
may be.’
‘How did you respond?’ asked Malley, with what I thought commendable nerve.
‘I told them to shop off,’ was the somewhat coarse reply. ‘However, we shortly afterwards picked up another version of the same offer, beamed towards Earth for anyone who cares to take it up. It’s one of
thousands
of similar propositions directed at Earth, which in turn are the merest
fraction
of the communications going on between the traffickers’ fleet and Jupiter. Most of the latter are heavily encrypted, so we don’t even know what the offers they’re making
are
.’
None of this came as a surprise, but it was all happening faster than I’d expected. I hadn’t foreseen that the inevitable contact between the dominant non-cos of New Mars and the marginal non-cos of Earth would result in so much information leakage that keeping our plans from the Jovians would be well nigh impossible.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I see your point. That just means we’ll have to act first and take the vote later—that’s if most people aren’t so relieved to be rid of the Jovian threat that it’ll be obvious to anyone what the majority view is.’
Mary-Lou Smith lost her expression of detached, ironic appraisal. She shot me a look of hot fury.
‘Act first, vote later?’ she said. ‘On an issue like this? What a disgusting attitude to your fellow human beings!’
‘It isn’t my attitude,’ I protested. ‘It’s what’s required by the realities of the situation.’
‘Yes! Realities which you’ve brought about!’ For a moment she looked as if she were about to start banging her head on the table. Then she drew her shoulders back and took a deep breath.
‘Enough,’ she said. ‘We must deal with the situation as it is, and uncover the reasons for this mess when we have time. The whole relationship between the Union and the Division has to—’
She stopped herself, stood up and took a few steps backwards, so she could see all of the Committee as well as all of us. ‘As I say, enough. Here’s what I propose to transmit to the Solar Council, and what—on my mandate from the Solar Council—I
instruct
you to implement immediately, pending the Council’s decision. One, you absolutely must not provoke the Jovians by giving them any reason whatever to fear a cometary bombardment. That means you must divert the comet-train into a wider and irreversibly safe
orbit
now
. Second, you must step up fighter-bomber patrols on this side of the wormhole, and make no compromises with the New Martians on that. We have to make clear to them that they’re here on our sufferance. Third, you must prepare to jam all radio transmissions within the Jovian sub-system, and between it and the Inner System, whether from the Jovians, the New Martians, or the non-cos.’
She strode forward and sat down again. ‘That is all,’ she said. ‘Any questions? ’
Nobody said anything. Quickly scanning the faces of the others on the Committee, I registered that most of them showed nothing but relief; in the case of Clarity and one or two others, more than relief. I took in their tentative smiles, keeping my own face carefully neutral. Only Joe Lutterloh showed anger, which he was equally visibly restraining. Tatsuro looked at me gravely. The tiny downtilt of his head could have been a cryptic nod, or an unconscious bowing to the inevitable. Mary-Lou might not have much immediate power to bring to bear on us, but a greater constraint applied. The Division couldn’t go against the explicit will of the Union, or even of its authorized delegate; without being irretrievably split. And if we tore ourselves apart, we risked being easy prey for the enemy.
Well, if the others were too intimidated to talk, I was not.
‘You propose a risky course,’ I said. ‘We’ve taken some risks too, I admit, but we always had the final fail-safe of the comet-strike to fall back on. Anything conceded to the Jovians—or the New Martians—could still be negated with that. Now you want to strike this weapon from our hands, and leave us defenceless.’
Smith jumped to her feet and leaned forward, fists on the table.
‘Ellen May Ngwethu!’ she shouted. ‘I have had
enough
of your inflexible attitudes! I’ve heard
more
than enough of your devious speeches! I’ve had it up to—’
She stopped, leaned back, drew breath. She bowed her head for a moment and massaged her temples, then looked up at me and smiled.
‘Excuse my outburst, neighbour. I understand your situation better than you do. You’ve endured two centuries of apparently endless conflict, two centuries for your personal dislikes to rankle into hatred. You’ve had even longer for the harshest aspects of the true knowledge—its dark side, if you will—to overwhelm its truth. Because the truth is the
whole
, and in raising the aspect of struggle way out of proportion to that of cooperation, you’ve turned it into a
lie
. If you could see yourself—as I have, I’ve had time to sample the records of this Committee, and those which you and your comrades have been sending back—in all your implacable belligerence, your
imperviousness
to the reasonable appeals of rational beings, whether the
Jovian speaker or the New-Martian gynoid, to be recognized as such … if you could see all that, I hope there is still something in you that would be ashamed.’

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