Divisions (4 page)
Authors: Ken MacLeod
I scratched my ear and looked out of the window. We were again above some low cloud, and through its dazzling white a town rose on our left. ‘Swindon tower,’ Suze remarked. Ahead of us the airship’s shadow raced like a rippling fluke across the contours of the clouds. I looked back at Suze.
‘No, I don’t mind you asking,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you the answers once we have a bit more privacy. And then, it’ll be up to you whether you want to come along with me or not.’
‘That’s OK,’ she said.
‘Tell me what you’ve found out about London,’ I said, and she did. By the time she had finished, we were almost there. We looked out at woodlands and marshes, ruins and the traces of streets and arterial roads, at the junctions of which smoke drifted up from the chimneys of huddled settlements. Suze began excitedly pointing out landmarks: Heathrow airport, its hexagram of runways only visible from the air, like the sigil of some ancient cult addressed to gods in the sky; the Thames Flood Barrier far to the east, a lonely line of silver dots in the Thames flood plain; Hyde Park with its historic Speaker’s Corner, where the Memorial to the Unknown Socialist rose a hundred metres above the trees, gazing in the disdain of victory at the fallen or falling towers of the City; and, as the airship turned and began to drift lower, our destination, the proud pylons of Alexandra Port.
The sight of Alexandra Port set the hairs of my nape prickling. It had been one of the early centres of the space movement which was the common
ancestor of the Outwarders and ourselves; there were people alive today whose journey into space had begun in its crowded concourses, waiting for the airship connection to the launch sites of Guiné and Khazakhstan. Its mooring masts were their Statue of Liberty, their Ellis Island.
ancestor of the Outwarders and ourselves; there were people alive today whose journey into space had begun in its crowded concourses, waiting for the airship connection to the launch sites of Guiné and Khazakhstan. Its mooring masts were their Statue of Liberty, their Ellis Island.
Or their Botany Bay. My fingernails were digging into my palms. I turned away and prepared to disembark.
The airship settled, its motors humming as they steadied its position, just above the terminal’s flat roof. A wheeled stairway rolled up to the exit and we all trooped down. Two or three people working on maintenance boarded the dirigible and began checking it over; although its automated systems were more than adequate to the task, there’s something about aviation which keeps the habit of human supervision alive.
From the terminal’s roof we could see an almost panoramic view of London, its rolling hills hazy with woodsmoke. The trees were interrupted here and there by towers whose steel and concrete had survived two centuries of neglect, and by broad corridors around ancient roadways. To the east the Lee Water broadened out to the Hackney marshes and the distant gleam of the Thames. On the nearby hills to the west the ruins of the old brick buildings and streets were still, barely, visible as crumbling walls and cracked slabs among the trees.
It was a common misconception—one which, to be honest, none of us had ever found it politic to publicly correct, though the facts were there for anyone who cared to look—that the Green Death was a single plague, the result of a virus genetically engineered by some Green faction in a fit of Malthusian overkill. More sober epidemiology has revealed that it was several diseases, probably natural, all of which hit at the same time and which were spread by soldiers, refugees and settlers. The disorder, and the weakening of the social immune-systems of medicine and science, were indeed partly the responsibility of the Green gangs and their many allies and precursors, going back through a century or more of irrationalism and antihumanism. Indeed, the panicky abandonment of the cities as plague-centres was itself, in part, the outcome of that way of thinking, and it probably led to more deaths than the diseases ever did. So, while the Greens weren’t quite as responsible as folk once thought for the billions of deaths, I find it hard to reproach anyone for the so-called ‘excesses’ after the liberation. (The execution figures were inflated by over-enthusiastic local committees, anyway. It wasn’t more than a hundred thousand, worldwide. Tops. Honestly.)
The long-term effect of the Green Death wasn’t on the size of the population—which bounced back sharply after the social revolution, and was now coming along very nicely, thank you—but on its distribution. Most
of the old metropoles remained empty, long after they became perfectly safe to live in. They were happily left, quite appropriately, to those who rejected the new society and preferred some version of the old.
of the old metropoles remained empty, long after they became perfectly safe to live in. They were happily left, quite appropriately, to those who rejected the new society and preferred some version of the old.
The countryside, too, was reverting to the wild, as agriculture was replaced by aquaculture, hydroponics, and artificial photosynthesis. It was less frequently ceded to the non-cos than the old cities, however, because of its recreational value to people from the dense arcologies of the Union.
Alexandra Port itself had changed little, because it had never been abandoned to the ravages of nature or man. In the Green Death it had been a conduit for refugees going out and relief flowing in, and even in the West’s century of collapse it had been maintained by the earthbound remnant of the Space Movement, its boundaries guarded, its personnel supplied from outside, a garrison in the midst of desolation.
It was all just like in the old pictures, I thought as we descended to the concourse: the People’s Palace, retro-styled even when it was new, back in the twentieth century, and the newer, twenty-first-century terminal buildings and workshops sprawling across the crown of the hill under the high pylons. The only evidence of modern technology I could see was the escalator down which we rode and its continuation in the walkway which carried us to the exit. Their seamless flow of plastic—not nanotech, just clever—would have baffled the complex’s early engineers.
We walked over to the People’s Palace, now a guesthouse as well as a home for the people working in the port. I looked at the sun, and at my watch.
‘Shall we stay here for the night?’ I suggested. ‘Go on our travels in the morning?’
Suze nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s too late to go travelling,’ she said. ‘I do know some places to sleep in London, but they’re strictly something you do for the experience.’ We checked at the board in the foyer and found there were plenty of vacancies; most of our fellow tourists apparently preferred the dubious glamour and adventure of finding accommodation in one of London’s native inns or shooting lodges. We selected a double room in the west wing, and took our stuff up. There was a small stove, coffee, and other supplies in the room, and an invitation to the evening meal and/or later social activities. While Suze was showering, I asked the suit to make an unobtrusive sweep of the room. It found nothing, apart from the expected wildlife and the standard cleany-crawlies. There were definitely none of the other kind of bugs—not that I seriously expected any, but it was routine, like the airship inspection.
Suze stepped out of the shower just as the suit’s agent was reporting back.
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘A pet mouse. How sweet!’
‘Grrr,’ said the suit, but I’m sure all Suze heard was a squeak. I took a shower myself, and emerged to find that Suze had brewed some coffee and dressed for dinner.
‘Thanks,’ I said, taking the coffee. ‘Nice dress.’
Suze looked down at it smugly. ‘Fortuny pleats, they’re called,’ she said. ‘You can just ball it up in a rucksack, and when you shake it out it still looks great.’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I have something to show you.’
I climbed back into my clothes, which were still sweaty and crumpled from travelling. They all added up to only part of the suit—the rest being the mouse, and the rucksack with its contents—but there was still enough for it to do the Cinderella trick, and mimic net and lace from an archived memory of debutante froth. I twirled, and grinned at Suze’s open mouth.
‘Smart-matter spacesuit,’ I explained, sitting down and patting its bouffant skirts. Suze was still goggle-eyed.
‘You’re from space?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The Cassini Division, in fact.’
‘Wow!’ Suze’s amazed look turned to an awed, and slightly guilty, excitement which I’d encountered before. In a world of abundance, of peace and security, the Division was the biggest focus for the dangerous appeal of danger, the sexy thrill of violence. There were those who despised and feared it for that very reason, and those who—sometimes secretly, even from themselves—loved it. Suze, it seemed, was among the latter.
‘That’s why I want to talk to Malley,’ I said.
‘About the wormhole?’ Sharp girl.
‘Yes. We want him to show us how to get through it. To New Mars.’
‘Start our
own
settlement?’
own
settlement?’
I shook my head firmly. ‘We don’t need another lot of deserts!’
Something—some sudden light in her eyes—told me her secret answer: we do, we do! Not everybody would feel that way, but I knew that enough did for Wilde to have seen that look all the many times he told his tales. No wonder he had the crazy notion that if we could go through, we’d colonize the place.
‘So why do we need to go through?’ Suze asked. ‘Why now?’
‘We need to go through,’ I said carefully, ‘because there’s a chance that the people on the other side of the wormhole are tinkering about with the same entities that the Outwarders became—the Jovians—on this side. We’re going to go through, and stop them, with whatever it takes.’ (This was true, as far as it went, which was not very far.) Suze sat back in one of the armchairs and looked at me, shaking her head.
‘Why don’t people
know
about this? Why haven’t we been told?’
know
about this? Why haven’t we been told?’
‘We’re not keeping it exactly secret,’ I said. ‘It’s just that we’ve released
the information in scientific reports and so on, rather than making a big splash of it. So far, everybody who’s managed to figure out what’s going on must have agreed with us that there’s no need to panic.’
the information in scientific reports and so on, rather than making a big splash of it. So far, everybody who’s managed to figure out what’s going on must have agreed with us that there’s no need to panic.’
‘That may be right,’ she said indignantly, ‘but there is a need to discuss it! You can’t just go and
do
something like that, without any, any—’
do
something like that, without any, any—’
‘Authorization? Actually, we
can
, in the sense that nobody could stop us. We wouldn’t want to do that, because we—that is, the Division—would fall apart if we ever went against the Union, because we’d have a strong and well-armed minority who
didn’t
want to go against the Union. But as a matter of fact, we do have authorization. We’re mandated to protect the Inner System from outside threats, and if a possible post-human invasion coming out of the wormhole isn’t one, I don’t know what is.’
can
, in the sense that nobody could stop us. We wouldn’t want to do that, because we—that is, the Division—would fall apart if we ever went against the Union, because we’d have a strong and well-armed minority who
didn’t
want to go against the Union. But as a matter of fact, we do have authorization. We’re mandated to protect the Inner System from outside threats, and if a possible post-human invasion coming out of the wormhole isn’t one, I don’t know what is.’
Suze still looked troubled. ‘What about the New Martians?’ she asked. ‘I don’t see them going along with it.’
I laughed. ‘If they’re still people … they’re just a bunch of non-cos. And we know how to deal with
them
.’
them
.’
Suze shot me an odd glance, and seemed about to speak, but whatever was on her mind, she thought better of it.
‘Well,’ she said brightly, ‘enough of this. Let’s go and grab ourselves some aircraftmen.’
Dinner was in the great hall, with one of the daily planning-meetings before it (we sat it out in the bar) and a dance afterwards. The hall, a former exhibition centre, was decorated with murals depicting episodes from London’s history: the Plague, the Fire, the Blitz, the Death; the battles of Cable Street, Lewisham, Trafalgar Square, Norlonto; the horrors of life under the Greens (one particularly imaginative panel showed some persecuted rationalist tied to a tree and left to die of starvation and dehydration, gloating Green savages dancing around and a woman loyally lurking in nearby bushes, recording the words of the black gospel he croaked from his parched mouth); the joy and vengeance of liberation, cheering crowds welcoming the Sino-Soviet troops (the Sheenisov, as everybody still calls them) and stringing up Green chiefs and witchdoctors from their own sacred trees; the tense balloting of the social revolution. Uplifting stuff.
The other decoration in the hall, that of its occupants, was more attractive. Costume on Earth tends to follow local traditions and techniques; here, it was a native style, picked up (as we later noticed) from the non-cos: cotton, with lots of dyes and embroidery. Some of the clothes worn after work were far more beautiful than ours, but at least our party frocks marked us out as visitors. We had no lack of attention, and we did, indeed, pull an aircraftman each.
Early the next morning we made our separate ways back to the room in which neither of us had spent the night, gathered up our gear, and had breakfast in the main hall. In the daylight the murals looked lurid and naive rather than heroic. The sunlight through the roof panels was bright and warm. Suze spread out a map.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘where are we going today?’
‘Our friend currently lives in Ealing Forest,’ I said. ‘I have a kind of address for him. He hangs out in some non-co technical college, and he’s known to scour the markets for old books and gear.’
‘Easy,’ said Suze. ‘We drive down the main path to Camden Market, stash the car at the Union depot, then take a boat up the canal to the North Circular—’ her finger jabbed at a trail marked on the map, then traced it to another thin line ‘—then down into Ealing.’
‘You sure the canal’s quickest?’
Suze nodded briskly. ‘The roads are kept up by the non-cos, and they’re just what you’d expect. The waterways are ours. Everything from the dredging to the lock-keeping is done by Union machines.’
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