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Authors: Ken MacLeod

BOOK: Divisions
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‘Why?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s the least obtrusive way of keeping a presence. And if we ever need to increase it, the canals have the great advantage of going round the back, especially with hovercraft.’
‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I wonder if we could get away with borrowing a hovercraft. ’
‘Too noisy. The tourists don’t like it, and it makes the locals expect trouble.’
At the car-pool we selected a rugged, low-slung buggy with wheels that could, according to the spec, cope with any pothole or tree root in London. The controls were standard, but I didn’t yet trust my reflexes in this gravity, so Suze took the wheel. We drove down the long, curving road to the southern exit, through a crowd of importunate people (for me, a new and alarming experience; for Suze: ‘Just beggars and pedlars; you’ll get used to it’), up and over a hill, and down into the wild woods.
 
 
The vehicle’s compact electric engine was quiet. As we drove slowly along the muddy trackways, in the shade of tall oaks and elms dripping with the previous night’s rain, we could hear constant birdsong, the occasional howl of a wolf or bark of a fox, and the far-off, uncanny whooping laugh of gibbons. Kestrels hovered high above the forest paths. Wood pigeons clattered among the trees, and now and again the vivid flash of a parakeet passed before our startled eyes. Every so often a small deer would bound on to the path, take one look at us and sprint away, its thudding hooves unexpectedly loud.
Most of the ruins on either side were covered with ivy, its green cables silently and slowly dragging the crumbled brickwork back into the earth. Some of the walls, however, bore the marks of recent repair, with clay and wattle or bricks cannibalized from other ruins making good the gaps, and the roofs—usually a floor or two lower than the originals—beamed and thatched. There were clearings where entire villages had been built from recycled materials, with not a trace of the original buildings left standing. We got used to treating rising smoke ahead as a signal to slow down and watch out for scuttling chickens, ambling pigs, barking dogs and racing, yelling children. The interest of the adults varied from covert and sullen to open and servile, the latter type frantically drawing our attention to wares that were depicted or described on garish signboards.
I put to Suze a question that had occurred to me from comparing old political maps with the current geographical ones: that the present communities might be remnants of the ancient, with Christian fundamentalists flourishing here, anarchic tribes around Alexandra Port, usurers still haunting the leaning towers down by the river, Muslims to the east and Hindus to the west … but she disabused me of this fanciful notion. The vast migrations of the Death and the dark century had literally walked over the great city, leaving of its former fractious cultures not a trace.
The human traffic on the path increased as, over the next hour, we approached Camden Market. There were few powered vehicles, and horse-drawn ones were only a little more frequent. Pedestrians generally walked in groups: gay parties of tourists with rucksacks and rifles, who waved and greeted us as we passed; and serious squads of non-cos, tramping with heavy loads on their backs, or on overburdened animals, or on similarly overloaded carts. The non-cos usually spared us no more than a calculating glance or a canny smile.
Camden Lock Market, a vast, trampled clearing at the intersection of several roads and a major canal, had the look of a place which the trees—and their worshippers—had never conquered. Like Alexandra Port, but for economic rather than strategic reasons, it had remained alive and functioning through all the disasters that had befallen the city. In physical extent it was actually larger than it had been in the twenty-first century, because some of London’s other traditional markets, in the East, were now six feet under the Thames estuary at low tide.
Our first stop was the Union depot, a stockaded area on the edge of the market. Inside the casually guarded gate were a low garage, a warehouse, and a rest-and-recreation building. Suze gave the last a disparaging glance.
‘For wimps,’ she remarked. ‘What’s the point of coming here if you’re not willing to mix?’
After we’d garaged the vehicle, hoisted our packs, holstered our pistols
and wandered around for a few minutes, I began to see exactly what the point was. The place was guaranteed to give most Union people a severe culture shock. To me it looked like utter chaos, and sounded—to use words whose roots lie in ancient experiences of similar situations—like a barbarous babel.
The market consisted of: long fenced-off areas packed with sad-eyed beasts; marble tables running with the blood, piled with the flesh of beasts; fish swimming in glass tanks or flopping on slabs; canopied wooden tables stacked with pottery, weaponry, books, machinery, clothes, textiles, herbs, drugs, antiquities, foodstuffs; racks from which coats swayed and dresses fluttered in the warm breeze.
Each of the stalls and tables had behind it someone whose fulltime occupation was minding it, watching over it, talking to anybody on the other side of the table and passing wares over and taking money back. The sellers and the buyers filled the air with the sound of their dickering, bickering, joking, teasing, offering, refusing; and with the recorded music which every stall-holder, and most of their customers, discordantly inflicted on everybody else, played at an unsociable volume from portable devices which were aptly called loudspeakers.
Then there were the smells: of the animals and their dung and their slaughter, of the people and their sweat and the scents which failed to disguise it, of smoked herbal drugs which were, I began to suspect, not a recreation here but a necessity.
I stopped in front of a stall on which dried leaves of tobacco and hemp were laid out in labelled bundles, neatly sorted into open-topped boxes. The woman behind the stall was prettily dressed in an embroidered cotton blouse and a printed cotton long skirt, gathered at the waist with a drawstring. It was hard to work out her age—like many of the adult non-cos, she seemed to combine the detached watchfulness of age with the innocent selfishness of youth, and, on top of that, her cosmetics made a baffling mask: her cheeks reddened, the rest of her face whitened, eyes darkened and lips flushed, as if she’d been awake all night and was now in a state of sexual arousal. But she had an attractive smile.
‘Suze,’ I said, nudging, ‘could we—?’
Suze grinned and nodded, then, when I reached into the pocket of my rucksack, frowned and shook her head.
‘I’ll do it,’ she murmured.
She looked up at the woman behind the table, and fingered a leaf labelled ‘Kent Ganja’.
‘How much you got on this?’
‘Best stuff, lady,’ the woman said. ‘Two grams gold, five grams silver an ounce.’
(That’s what I later worked out she said. At the time her strange singsong went into my ears as: ‘Besstuff laidy, two gramzgold five gramzsilveranahnce. ’)
Suze recoiled. ‘Fackinell!’ she said. ‘Thassexpensiv init?’ (I still haven’t figured that one; I’ll leave it as it sounded.)
‘Nah,’ said the woman. ‘From cross the riveh, thatiz. Transport’s fackin criminal. You won’t get cheaper anywhere.’
She waved around at the rest of the market. ‘Try ’t an’ see f’ y’selves. You’ll be back.’
‘Not likely,’ said Suze, taking me by the elbow and firmly steering me away. We’d gone only a few steps when the woman called out: ‘Awright, I’ll give you a special, just to try it aht. Frow in paypas, too.’
Back we went and the bargain, after a few more verbal exchanges, was concluded. To my surprise both the woman and Suze were smiling at each other, both apparently satisfied with an outcome which they had each insisted would, if repeated too often, reduce one or the other to complete wretchedness.
We sat down at a table a few yards away and ordered coffee and bread rolls stuffed with cooked meat which had almost certainly not been grown from blue-greens. I’m not sentimental about beasts, but I tried not to think about it too much—marine molluscs are one thing, vertebrates are something else. When we’d finished eating Suze built a small joint of tobacco and hemp, lit it and passed it to me after a few appreciative puffs.
‘Good stuff,’ she said.
I tested and confirmed this. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just like the woman said it was. But won’t she … dislike you for the way you made her accept such a small amount of silver for it?’
Suze guffawed. ‘She got a very good price—an acceptable amount of silver—for it. She’s happy with the silver, and we’re happy with the hemp. Oh, thanks.’
I looked at her as she drew on it again. ‘So you were both lying?’
‘No, of course not,’ Suze chuckled. ‘It’s a convention. Like bluffing in a strategy game.’
‘But why did you bother to go through it? Why didn’t you just give her what she asked in the first place? I mean …’ I shrugged, having enough nous to understand that saying out loud how much metal we had on us might not be a good idea.
‘Ah,’ said Suze. ‘That’s an interesting point. In theory, OK, all the Union tourists here could bring as much, uh, negotiables as they could carry, and buy anything they wanted. All that would happen is that the amount the locals expected for their goods would go up, and everybody would be worse off all round. That’s one of the things that get explained to first-timers. It
used to be called inflation when there were states.’ She frowned. ‘Sort of, except they used pretend money—’
I cut her off hastily, not wanting to get my head around yet another complication (
pretend
money? Say
what
?).
‘OK, but if the woman had stuck with her first offer, what—oh! I see. You’d have gone to another stall.’
Suze grinned, passing back the joint. ‘Make an economist of you yet.’
‘Hah! Hard to believe, now, that the whole world was once run like this.’ Suze nodded soberly. ‘This, and various combinations of this and pushing people around. Weird.’
We got up to leave, and were recalled by an indignant yell from the food-stall minder.
‘Sorree!’ Suze said to him, blushing as she passed him a silver coin. ‘Keep the change.’
It took her even longer to explain to me about that: the custom of a price that wasn’t a price, on top of the price; a sum that was never asked for, but whose omission was always resented. We wandered on towards the stalls of books and machines. The smoke, and the coffee and food, had shifted my brain chemistry in the way I’d hoped. They were helping me to adjust to what was going on around me, but I still let Suze do the talking.
She browsed the bookstalls and machine shops and nanotech tanks, making the occasional small purchase and apparently idle inquiries after Malley. Sometimes she used his full name, sometimes she just wondered aloud if anyone had heard of ‘the scientist’ or ‘the old doc’. Most of the sellers seemed to know her by sight, and gave her less of a hard bargain than some other Union tourists were getting. At the last stall she picked up and leafed through an obsolete textbook of physics which she’d dug up from one of the plastic boxes at the foot of the stall.
‘I wish I knew someone who could explain this to me,’ she said, casually handing the book to the seller. He was plump, even for a non-co, pink-skinned, and wrapped in a curious multicoloured patchwork coat that made him look like some tubby wizard. He glanced at the book; his eyes narrowed and his grip suddenly tightened. He pulled the book back.
‘Sorry, miss,’ he said. ‘Not for sale.’
Suze gave him her best innocent-tourist look.
‘Oh? That’s a shame. Why not?’
‘I’ve been asked to save anything by this bloke Wheeler for the professor. ’
‘Sure,’ said Suze. ‘Professor Malley, isn’t it?’ She seemed to forget the matter, leaning forward and pouncing on a copy of the rare
Home Workshop Nanotech
(Loompanics, 2052). ‘Hey, look at this!’ She passed it to me and looked again at the stall-holder, eyebrows raised.
‘Yeah, Malley,’ he said. ‘He comes by now and again. Ain’t seen him for a few weeks, though.’
‘He’s still running a school down Ealing way, ain’t he?’
‘That’s right,’ said the stall-holder. His accent blended in with the local speech, but his diction was clearer, at least to me. Suze glanced at the price pencilled on the book’s inside cover, and passed the man a gold coin, without her customary haggling. He seemed to take this as a payment for a little more than the book (I was beginning to grasp how these people’s minds worked, I thought smugly) and went on:
‘Funny you should be asking after him.’ He scratched the stubble on his upper chin. ‘Couple of your lot—’ he coughed ‘—uh, Union members were through the other day, looking for him.’
I felt a jolt of surprise.
‘Yes, he’s quite famous really,’ Suze responded lightly. ‘I’m sure lots of people want to talk to him. I wonder if they’re anyone I know?’
He shrugged. ‘Hard to say, you people all—what I mean is, they were two blokes, right, about your age—real age—and about her height.’ He indicated me. ‘Tall, dark, but not—uh, more sort of Indian-looking than you ladies, if you know what I mean.’
‘Did you notice,’ I asked carefully, ‘anything unusual in the way they moved?’

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