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Authors: Ken MacLeod

BOOK: Divisions
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‘Sounds like a raw deal,’ Myra said. ‘Imagine waking up and finding you’re living in a silicon chip, and you have to work for the benefit of your selfish original. Jesus. I’d go on strike.’ She struck a guitar-holding pose, sang nasally, ‘Ain’t gonna play Sim City …’
Sadie laughed. ‘Until your management reboots you.’
Myra was laughing too, but it chilled her to think of this new way for the rich to desert the Earth, not to space but to cyberspace, with their bank accounts; to live for ever on television, where their faces had always been. And what a laugh it would be if, in their silicon heaven, they were to meet the General …
Ah, shit. Back to business.
‘Is this car secure to talk?’ she asked, suddenly sure that the restaurant wouldn’t be.
Sadie waved a languid hand. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I know what you have to offer—the fact that you asked to see
me
kinda gives it away, yeah?’
‘Seeing you put it like that … but the devil’s in the details.’
‘We don’t need to worry about the details,’ Sadie said. ‘Not tonight. Just a little discretion and circumlocution, and we’ll be fine.’
Myra smiled thinly. Probably Sadie knew a lot of the details. It was still her job to keep track of nuclear deployments. Her eyeband—Myra guessed the fine sparkly band around Sadie’s forehead was an eyeband—would show her every suspected tac nuke on Earth and off it. And she’d have a shrewd idea where Myra’s strategic nukes were, too.
Myra glanced out of the window. The car was making reasonable speed up … Amsterdam Avenue, getting to the high numbers. The old buildings were blistered, the pavements cluttered with nano-built squatter shacks like spider bubbles, linked by webbed stairways and ladders and swing-ropes. Their dwellers, and the people on the street, were in this part mostly white. Office-workers, mostly black and Hispanic, threaded their way among the crowds, ignoring their importunity.
‘Middle-American refugees,’ Sadie said. ‘Okies.’
The restaurant, when they reached it a few minutes later, was well into the Harlem spillover. Black flight had long since changed the character of the area; Myra and Sadie stepped across the stall-cluttered pavement under the incurious, inscrutable stares of Peruvians and Chileans. It looked like an America where the Indians had won. In fact, these Indians had lost everything they had to the Gonzalistas, a decade or two earlier. The Gonzalistas had been defeated, but their intended victims had no intention of leaving the US. Now the former refugees’ petty commerce filled the offices and shopfronts and spilled on to the pavements, just as their huge families filled the old public-housing projects.
But still, Myra thought, getting away from the killing peaks at all was winning. The Gonzalistas had been a nasty bunch, even for commies; the kind who would dismiss Pol Pot as a revisionist.
The restaurant was called Los Malvinas. Inside it was crowded, mainly with young old-money Latinos, preppily dressed, snootily confident of their social and racial superiority over the newer immigrants on the streets but exploiting—in their fashion-statements as in other ways—their cultural connection. The air smelt meaty and smoky, the walls had huge posters of Perón, Eva, Che, Lady Thatcher and Madonna. Sadie was welcomed by name by an attentive head waiter who escorted them to a table out the back, in a small yard enclosed by trees and creeper-covered walls.
‘Nice place,’ Myra said. She looked down the menu. ‘Doesn’t look like it’ll take a big chunk out of the company card, either.’
‘Knew you’d like it,’ Sadie said. She shrugged her bolero on to the chairback, revealing her bare shoulders. ‘Jug of sangria?’
‘Good idea.’ Myra tapped the menu. ‘You’ll have to advise me on this. Just as well I’m not a vegetarian.’
They put together an order which Sadie assured her would be both good and huge, and sipped sangria and smoked a joint and gnawed garlic-oil-dipped bread while waiting for it.
‘OK,’ said Myra. She glanced around, reflexively. Half a dozen Venezuelan oil engineers, in shirts and shorts, were talking loudly around the only other occupied table; she shrugged and shook her head. ‘OK. Let’s talk. Hope you don’t mind me saying, but, hell. You got authority to negotiate at the level we’re talking about?’
‘Sure,’ Sadie told her. ‘Don’t worry about that. Straight line to the top. Not that this is one of the Boss’s top priorities, mind you.’
‘How about on the UN side?’
Sadie waved a chunk of bread dismissively. ‘That’s all squared.’
‘No change there then, huh?’
‘Changes, yeah, but we’ve rolled to the top again. For what it’s worth.’
‘Right, I know what you mean. “For what it’s worth” seems to come up in conversation a lot these days. Anyway. Here’s the deal. We sell you exclusive rights to the package, you back us up against the commie hordes. Shopping-list to follow, but like you say, later for details.’
The waiter arrived with a hot platter and a couple of dishes; a girl followed with bowls of salad and rice. The main dish was like a salad of meat, in which most possible cuts from a cow were represented, along with the tastier internals and a few of the less tasty.
‘Enjoy your meal, ladies.’
‘Thank you,’ said Sadie. She stubbed out the roach. ‘Oh, and another sangria, please.’
Myra was ravenous, her appetite honed even keener by the joint, and spent about twenty minutes in atavistic carnivorous ecstasy and exclamation before slacking off enough to take up the conversation properly again.
‘So, Sadie.’ She put down a rib, wiped her fingers and chin. ‘What do you say?’
Sadie took a long swig of sangria, the ice chinking slushily.
‘You know, that guy we sent to speak to you? From the Company?’
‘Bit hard to forget him.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Sadie sighed. ‘Well, Myra, sorry about this, but.’ She scratched her ear. ‘It’s still the deal, basically. We can give you some kit, sure, but nothing like what you’re asking. Definitely no alliance.’
Myra rocked back. She heard the feet of her metal chair scrape the flagstones.
‘That’s even
with
what we’re offering?’
‘Even with.’ Sadie picked up something intestinal-looking, dragged it through her teeth. ‘Because we can’t take it. It’s no use to us anyway, frankly.’
‘Oh my God. Oh, shit.’ Myra reached for her cigarettes. ‘Mind if—’
‘Go ahead. Yes please.’
‘What’s the problem with our package?’
‘Skill sets and legacy systems, basically.’ Sadie looked at the tip of her cigarette, wrinkled her nose and sucked grease from her lips. ‘Look above my head. Up. What do you see?’
Myra gazed southward and upward.
‘Top of the Two Mile Tower?’
‘Right. Know what’s in it? Squatters, mostly. Damn thing damn near built itself, like a stone tree. But the builders couldn’t find enough businesses to rent work-space in it.’
‘That sort of thing’s common enough,’ Myra said. ‘Speculative spectacular buildings are usually finished just before the recession hits, and stay empty until the next boom.’
‘If there is another boom …’ Sadie said gloomily.
Myra remembered Shin Se-Ha’s version of the Otoh equations. ‘There will be,’ she said. One more, anyway, she didn’t say. ‘What’s your point?’
‘We’re losing people,’ Sadie said. ‘It’s no secret. The coup has succeeded in more ways than it’s failed. A hell of a lot of our best scientists and engineers have migrated to the orbital colonies, and they support the faction that Mutual Protection have been running supplies for.’
‘The Outwarders.’
‘Yeah. Think civilisation on Earth is doomed, and they’re getting out. And, more to the point, so is a lot of the big money. Most of the corporations have been headquartered in orbital tax-havens since at least the Fall Revolution. Now they’ve got the muscle—technical, military—to back that up. And the on-site personnel. They’ll finance us, all right, but strictly as user fees, like hiring a defence agency, and only as long as we don’t step out of line. You may think of the US as the old imperialist oppressor, but these days we’re just another banana republic. The whole Earth is one Third World. Big money and skilled labour are in space, and what’s left down below is mostly surplus population.’ Sadie smiled wryly. ‘And bureaucrats, like you and me.’
‘So you’re saying the US empire still exists,’ Myra said. ‘But its capital—in both senses—is now in orbit.’
‘Yeah, exactly!’
‘Fair enough,’ said Myra, ‘but how does that affect our offer?’
‘Well.’ Sadie leaned back, took a short draw, like a sip, on her cigarette. ‘Let me draw you an analogy. Suppose, just hypothetically, for the sake of argument, that the US wanted to go back to a strategic nuclear posture.
Leave aside the fact that the Third World War did for nukes what the First did for gas. At least in terms of using them on Earth—the UN got away with the Heaviside Layer blasts, but that was a bit of a fluke. Leave aside the fact that the big money in orbit is becoming virtually Green with paranoia about nukes in space, too.’
Aha, Myra thought. She would not leave that aside, at all. This was the crux, however valid the rest of Sadie’s points were.
‘Leave aside the fact that there simply aren’t that many big nukes left around. Suppose somebody came to us with, I dunno, a stash of old post-Soviet city-busters: laser-fusion jobs, long shelf-life, low maintenance. They still wouldn’t be any use to us, because our whole military doctrine has shifted away from reliance on nukes. There’s a lot more to maintaining a credible strategic nuclear deterrent than maintaining the actual weapons. You need missile and bomber crews, tactical boys, analysts, constant practice. Hell, I should know, I worked hard enough at dispersing the teams and scrubbing the records, back in my disarmament days. We don’t have people with the relevant skills any more, and we don’t have the people to train new ones. We need all our available skill pool to keep our stealth fighters flying, and our teletroopers, smart-battle tactics and techniques up to scratch.’
‘I think I see your point,’ Myra said dryly. ‘So, by the same kind of reasoning, our offer of, uh, mining rights in Kazakhstan isn’t really of interest.’
‘You could say that. That is the analogy, yes.’
Myra doubted that their reversal of analogy and actuality would have fooled any snoop for a second, but there was a protocol to be followed on these things. It was, she recalled, illegal for public officials under UN jurisdiction—after the Fall Revolution as much as before—to even
discuss
nuclear deterrence as a serious policy option.
And of course they hadn’t. Not in a way that would stand up in court, which was all that mattered.
‘There is of course one advanced country that isn’t a banana republic just yet …’ Myra said. ‘Never even rejoined the UN, come to that.’
Sadie shrugged. ‘Go to the Brits if you like,’ she said; lightly, but she acknowledged the implied threat. ‘Not my problem. But it will be somebody else’s.’
‘Just so long as we know where we stand,’ Myra said, likewise taking the hint. ‘OK. Forget about the package deal. What about ground troops and air support?’
‘The latter, maybe. At a pinch. And hardware. Hardware, we got. Troops, no.’
‘Oh, come on. Even mercenaries. We can pay good rates.’
‘Mercenaries?’ Sadie laughed. ‘Mercenaries are the best
we
have. We use them to put some backbone into our crack regiments. And the crack troops
are about all that’s left. It’s become just about impossible to raise ordinary grunts. Conscription? Don’t even think about it.’
Myra still looked sceptical. ‘I’ll show you,’ Sadie told her.
They chatted amiably for a while longer, agreeing to dump on Khamadi and Ibrayev the detailed work of negotiating what little aid the US had to give; but basically, the discussion was over. Myra settled the bill, left a generous tip and followed Sadie out. As they recrossed the crowded pavement to the limo, Sadie startled Myra by walking boldly up to a bunch of Andean lads hanging around a headware stall. The boys looked her up and down, lazily curious.
‘Hi, guys,’ she said. ‘How’re you doin’?’
‘Fine, lady, fine.’
‘How ’bout work?’
‘This our work.’ They grinned at the stall’s owner, who smiled resignedly back.
‘Ever thought of joining the Army? Good pay, great conditions. Tough guys like you could make a good go of it.’
They had to hold each other up, they were laughing so hard.
‘Not gone get killed fighting hicks and geeks,’ one of them said. The sweep of his arm took in everything from the Two Mile Tower to the stall’s bristling headware whiskers. He spat away, on to the pavement.
‘You preferred tech to men,’ he said. ‘Let tech defend you.’
I followed Druin out of the tunnel and into the gallery of the seer-stone growers without any idea of what he intended to do. Like him, I had my rifle slung and my hands empty. He strolled across the floor to a central aisle between the ranks of stone troughs and turned down it, walking in the same overall direction as we had been following in the tunnel—downwards, towards the old power-station.
‘Hey!’
One of the growers came hurrying up. He was a stocky, dark man with sharp, darting eyes. His overalls were blue, dusted with white powder that caught the light like ground glass. He stopped a couple of metres in front of us and glared.
‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded. ‘How did you get in?’
‘We’re—’
Druin motioned to me to be quiet.
‘We’re just passing through,’ he said. He gazed around the chamber with an expression of slack-jawed wonder. The other tinkers had stopped work and stood about watchfully. ‘It’s a fascinating place you’ve got here, I must say.’
‘How did you get in here?’ the tinker repeated, taking a step closer.
Druin jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Oh, we were out chasing the deer,’ he explained casually. ‘We came across a kind of—’ he looked at me, as if searching for a word ‘—a manhole, would you call it? In the woods up
there. We went down it for a bit of a lark, like, and made our way down through yon tunnel.’
Druin hitched his thumb under the rifle’s strap and added, ‘So if you don’t mind, we’ll just be on our way.’
The tinker showed more real amazement than Druin had feigned.
‘You came through the tunnel?’
‘Aye,’ said Druin. ‘It’s got some real eerie hollows in it,’ he added, with an appreciative wink. He began to walk forward, and I beside him. To my surprise the tinker stepped aside, with a glance and a small shake of the head to his colleagues. I suspected that no outsider had made it past the cavern’s spectral guardians for a long time, and that the tinkers here just didn’t know what to make of us.
On either hand of us were the stone troughs; the ones we passed first each contained a layer of tiny stones, gravel almost; subsequent ranks had larger and fewer stones, until we reached the very end, where a trough—or rather, by this point, a large circular tub—might contain a single boulder. On the floor below the troughs were oddly shaped stones, apparently discarded; some of these casualties of quality-control had evidently ended up in the tunnel. However, we saw no hollows in that chamber, and I wondered if I’d misunderstood the implied sequence of events, or if the light in there was too bright for such displays.
Within the stones themselves, queerly distorted by the rippling water, strange fleeting scenes played themselves out with a coherence that increased with the size of the stones. I had no leisure to inspect them, but several times I felt that the faces flickering across these smooth surfaces were faces I had seen in the tunnel.
The walls and ceiling of the unnatural cave converged to an entranceway to another passage, about two and a half metres high and two wide. It continued for about thirty metres ahead of us, beyond which a darker doorway loomed. This corridor was unmistakably artificial, its squared walls and ceiling being made of the same glazed substance as the shaft. Its lighting, too, was subtly different from that of the growing-gallery—though it came from similar glass panels, it had that overtone of yellow which marked it as ordinary electric lighting, if more powerful than usually encountered. Our footsteps rang on the ceramic floor, echoing sharply.
‘You carried yourself cool in there,’ I said to Druin.
‘Ah, it’s all bluff,’ he said. ‘They’ve got used to folks being scared by
their
bluff. But I reckon we’ll soon meet some who’re ready for us—our friends back there will have signalled ahead.’
‘You’re not bothered?’
‘Not a bit.’
I was, but I wasn’t going to show it. My heart was hammering and my
head was buzzing with bewildered images, like the seer-stones themselves, and my hand clutching the rifle’s strap was slick with sweat.
The response that Druin had expected—or, possibly, a stronger response—came when we were about two-thirds of the way down the corridor. Fergal and two other men appeared in the exit, barring our way. They carried rifles of an unfamiliar design, not aimed at us but ready for use. We walked forward. He stepped out in front of the others and raised a hand.
‘Stop right there!’ he ordered.
We stopped.
‘What are you here for?’ Fergal asked.
I decided it was about time I spoke up for myself.
‘I’m here to see you,’ I said. ‘And Merrial.’
‘You’re seeing me,’ Fergal said. He waved a dismissive hand. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’ He stalked closer, to a few metres away, and stared at Druin. ‘I know you,’ he said venomously.
Druin shrugged. ‘You’ll have seen me around.’
Fergal’s weapon was instantly aimed square at Druin’s gut. My companion made a twitch towards his rifle strap, then raised both hands above his head. The other two tinkers brought their rifles to bear at the same moment.
‘I know who you
are
,’ Fergal said slowly, ‘and what you are. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you now.’
Druin took a deep breath. ‘Och, man, if you have to ask that there is no help for you,’ he said in a steady voice. I looked at him sideways, frozen except for a severe shaking in my jaw and my knees. ‘You see,’ Druin went on conversationally, ‘if you were to kill me, now, my friend Clovis here would some time soon have to kill you. He would kill you and cut your head from your neck, and carry it to my widow and my weans to prove that you were dead and the matter was at an end.’
He glanced at me. ‘You would, aye?’
‘I would,’ I swore. I had eaten under Druin’s roof, and could not well refuse the task, if required. The thought of it made me feel sick, but it didn’t shake my resolve. I had no idea why Fergal might want to kill Druin in the first place, and I didn’t care. That he was willing to contemplate murder told me all I needed to know about him.
‘Well, there you are,’ said Druin. ‘You could kill Clovis too, I suppose, but that would just double your problem.’
I did not find this last consideration quite as definite and reassuring as Druin made it sound.
Fergal’s glance flicked between the two of us, his tongue unconsciously touching his lips. He backed off a little.
‘Put down your weapons,’ he said, then added, as we lowered our rifles, ‘all of them.’
As I unbuckled my belt I looked at Druin. He shook his head, almost imperceptibly. I placed my knife and pistol and multi-tool beside the rifle.
‘The
sgean dhu
as well.’
I felt naked when I stood up. Quick hands passed over or patted my body.
‘They’re clean.’
Fergal picked up my gear, and one of the other tinkers picked up Druin’s. Fergal jerked his chin at the exit and moved around behind us.
‘This way.’
We walked forward to the end of the corridor. Beyond it was the open interior space of the old power-station; we descended a short flight of steps to a concrete floor and were told to halt. Behind us I could hear some low-voiced consultation. We waited for its decision, hands on our heads, and I looked about. The turbine, of course, was long since gone, as were most of the original fittings; all that remained was a haunting afterlife of odours, of flaked paint and rusted metal and antique brickwork. Above these whiffs rose the newer smells of concrete and solder. The whole big cuboidal building, with its long windows, had been turned into a complex factory full of workshops and walkways, noisy and bright with the screech and sparks of metalwork. From the number of people I glimpsed at their benches or hurrying along, I guessed that about a hundred tinkers were at work in the building.
Strangely I felt on safer ground here, amid those scores of busy people, and hard by the road and rail of civilisation. I knew this comfort was delusory, but clung to it anyway. The thought of calling out for help crossed my mind; then I reflected that Fergal and his comrades would hardly be so bold if their actions were unknown to the rest.
Suddenly the tinkers clattered down the steps behind us and we were each roughly jostled away, in opposite directions. I heard a door slam, from the other side of the stair, just before I was pushed through another.
The room into which I stumbled was a few metres square, with an overhead light, a table and a couple of chairs. Along its sides rough stacks of copper piping, coils of cable, sacks and so forth suggested that the room was one that currently didn’t have a definite use, and was used indifferently as a store, a meeting-place and—now—an interrogation cell. There was even, as somehow seemed inevitable, a sink and an electric kettle and some grotty opened bags of coffee, sugar and tea.
Fergal stepped past me, spun a chair into place on the opposite side of the table and gestured to the other.
‘Have a seat.’
He put the weapons he’d taken off me on the draining-board, keeping his own rifle trained on me all the while. Then he sat down, not at the table
but tilting his chair against the far wall, and cradling the black rifle with its odd, curving ammunition clip.
‘OK, man,’ he said. ‘Looks like I underestimated you, Clovis.’ I let this flattery pass. He rocked the chair forward again, gazing at me intently. ‘You’ve got yourself into a bit of a mess,’ he continued in a confidential tone, ‘and the others are pretty riled with you, but I think I can square it with them. We can sort this out.’
I said nothing.
‘Do you know what Druin is?’
After waiting a moment for some response, he went on, ‘He’s a management spy, that’s what. He works for the site security committee of the ISS at Kishorn. He reports on union activists, among other things.’
Fergal said this in such a tone of loathing that I was surprised. The minor hassles between the unions and the contractors and subcontractors seemed to me hardly a matter for such moral outrage, let alone death threats. I folded my arms and cocked my head slightly to one side. Fergal leaned back again.
‘He pushed to have you sacked, you know,’ he said. ‘That’s why he was in the bar at The Carronade.’
I admit I felt slightly shaken by this, because it was entirely plausible and because it implied that someone in the bar had been watching us, but I still made no reply.
‘He has not come here, with you, to spy on us. He’s here to spy on
you
, to find out what your real connections to us are.’
‘If that’s what he’s doing, it sounds reasonable enough to me,’ I said, goaded at last. ‘I’m sure none of what you’re doing is a threat to the project, anyway. That’s why I helped Merrial in the first place. So what’s the problem with his being here?’
‘Oh, it has nothing to do with that. Merrial told you the truth—we think there’s a possible threat to the ship, we’re investigating it urgently and if we find evidence for it we’ll present the evidence to the project’s management. No. Druin—and whoever is behind him—are looking for any stick to beat the tinkers with. He’s out to discredit us, and arouse hostility to us.’
I shook my head. ‘No—he’s never shown any hostility to the tinkers, as far as I know.’
‘Naturally,’ Fergal said derisively.
‘Why should he or anyone want to do that, anyway?’
‘God, you are so fucking naïve!’ Fergal waved a hand to indicate everything outside the room and inside the building. ‘We’re a somewhat privileged group, by virtue of our monopoly on skills which, frankly, are not hard to learn. Why should you depend on us to build and run your computers?’ He laughed. ‘You’ve seen how we make them. It’s an ancient technology,
called
nanotech.
We don’t understand it, but we can apply it. A farmer could do it, just as a farmer can grow crops without understanding how the molecular genetics and replication work. A competent mechanic, with maybe a skilled jeweller or watchmaker for the fiddly bits, could incorporate the seer-stones, as you call them, into machinery.’
‘They’d have to know the white logic.’
‘That too is not hard to learn. So what’s stopping you?’
‘Me?’
‘Your
people
,’ he said impatiently.
‘Funnily enough,’ I said, ‘I asked Druin that very question. He said it was—well, tradition, you would call it. It works, it goes back to the Deliverance, no point questioning it. That’s what he said.’
‘No doubt. And it wouldn’t have been long before he was complimenting you, saying he’d mulled it over and he thought it was a good question.’
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ I asked. I wanted to give the impression of weakening; my craving made it credible.
‘Sure, go right ahead,’ said Fergal.
I took the materials from my pocket and lit up.
‘What I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘is why you’re so bothered by his turning up here. You even threatened to kill him. Maybe that was a bluff—’

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