Fractions (31 page)

Tired and restless, he threw himself face-down on the bed. For a few minutes he slept, then woke with a dribble of spittle and sweat on the pillow under the corner of his mouth. He rolled over and lay with his hands behind his head. Posters shouted down at him from the walls. British Troops Out Of English Troops Out Of London Troops Out Of Federal Troops To. Solidarity with this. Solidarity with that. Solidarity with Solidarity. (Now, what the heck did
that
mean?)

There was a sort of reproof in their conflicting urgencies. Moh had wanted him to speak his mind, to push his ideas up the Collective's tiny entry ramp to the information highways, and he must have had some reason. Jordan thought he saw part of it: as a cover story for the comrades – they were all expecting him to do something like that, and had assumed that his investigations were research for it. In a sense, they were – he'd learned a great deal in the past couple of days, a lot of details of what was going on in the world which Beulah City, even at its most exposed interface to that world, screened out. It had only deepened the conviction he'd expressed to Moh and the urge to tell people they could live their lives better – and longer – if they would only walk away from their fights.

He had little new to say, he reflected wryly, about what they could do if they did walk away from them. The godless gospels had answers to that, answers he agreed with, which essentially amounted to making the fullest use of the one life that was all and enough. They disagreed about how to do it, of course. From the same starting-point, one lot would suggest we all marched off to the left, another that we raced off to the right, while a substantial body of enlightened opinion held that the best bet was to sort of
wander about
with our eyes and options open.

Jordan sat up with a jolt, open-eyed himself. There was a name for that attitude, that outlook, a name that had recently gained currency: post-futurism. Pragmatic, disillusioned, refusing to hold up images of an ideal society or to crank out small-scale models of it on patches of contested ground, it had been widely denounced as radically conservative or blindly subversive. There had been a big fuss a few years back when someone had applied the label to the
ANR
, in some fashionable, controversial book – what was it called?

On a sudden hunch Jordan jumped up and searched through Moh's collection of political literature, digging through drifts of pamphlets for the solid chunk of the occasional hardbook. And there it was:
Towards the End of the Future
by Jonathan Wilde, the old space-movement guru. He picked it up and flipped through it, smiling at Moh's pencilled underlinings and scrawled, misspelt remarks. One proposition which had met with heavy black lines, exclamation marks and ‘Yup' was Wilde's comment that:

Intrigued, Jordan went back to the beginning of the book and read it the whole way through. It took him about an hour and a half, sitting down or wandering up and down the stairs for coffee, book in hand. When he'd finished he dug out Wilde's earlier works from Moh's collection and read them:
The Earth is a Harsh Mistress, No More Earthquakes
– short, blazing manifestos that he scanned in minutes. Wilde hadn't changed his principles – he was still the libertarian space nut that he'd been as long as anyone could remember – but his sense of the historical possibilities had subtly altered since the heady, crusading excitement of the space movement's early days. He no longer seemed to think the ideas he propounded were about to sweep the world, nor did he even want them to: a respect for diversity which had been theoretical, tolerant, in his earlier writing had by now deepened to a commitment to diversity for its own sake rather than as a pool for selection in which the one true way might be found.

Post-futurism was Wilde's way of coping with living on, into his own imagined future – albeit in a constricted, local form – and finding it, as he'd said, merely the present. Jordan doubted if Moh fully sympathized with this view – still a believer in a socialist future, still a receiver of news from nowhere – but the connection between post-futurism and Jordan's own detestation of the competing ideologies of the mini-states helped to clarify why Moh had been so keen on getting Jordan's ideas out on the Cable.

Cunning bastard, Jordan thought. Moh had wanted him to attack the ideologies, do his best to weaken the mini-states because, in doing so, he'd be doing his little bit to help the
ANR
! Not that Moh had shown much faith in the
ANR
but, as he'd said, ‘anything rational would be better than those smelly, cosy subtotalitarianisms'. And it couldn't be a short-term thing, either: there was not enough time before the
ANR
's offensive for anybody's words to make much difference.

But after the offensive – when the
ANR
's future, its New Republic, had itself become the present – then it might make a difference. Places like the one Jordan had come from, the ideal society a few kilometres down the road, might fall militarily at a good push. Undermining their self-confidence would be a slower process.

Well, why not?

Wasn't that what he thought anyway? Wasn't that what he had to say?

And there was one particular person he wanted to say it to. Even if she never heard it. He went out of Moh's room and down the stairs and along the corridor to that other room where the cameras waited.

 

His voice was hesitant at first, becoming more confident as he found his pace.

‘This is Jordan Brown, with…the Global Village Atheist Show. I'm here to entertain, enlighten, and enrage.

‘Since this time yesterday, another forty thousand people, plus or minus the odd thousand, have been killed. Killed quite legally, according to the famous Annexe to the Geneva Convention, in recognized conflicts around the world. All the noncombatant deaths were inflicted under Paragraph 78, section 10, subsection 3. That's the one saying that civilians can be killed only by explosive devices aimed at legitimate military targets, and yes, I have checked, and I can assure you that no instances of poisoning, machine-gunning in front of freshly dug trenches, release of radiation or radioactive substances, or throat-cutting have come to the attention of the relevant authorities.

‘And how do we know? We know because we're watching. The whole world is watching. About fifty years ago somebody in Edinburgh came up with a video-camera the size of a coin. Within a few years they were in mass production, and getting smaller and cheaper by the year. And they started turning up on the killing fields of Central Europe, in the torture chambers of the Americas, on the blighted plains of Africa.

‘Now they're so small that you can take someone apart bit by bit before you discover that one of those cockroaches on the floor was a bio-comp news-gatherer, heading for home with some very interesting pictures. And that your face is on satellite television, your genetic fingerprints are on public databases, and various public-spirited if not – ha, ha – public-funded agencies are bidding up the price of your head. Just think: there was a time when torturers only had to worry about getting
letters
from Amnesty International!

‘So, whereas once it was possible to bomb entire countries – Laos – bludgeon a tenth of the population to death – Cambodia – or wipe out a third – East Timor – and
plausibly deny that it had ever happened
(the “ongoing process of holocaust revisionism”, as I think a famous linguist called it), they couldn't get away with it any more. The silent slaughter ceased. The blood dried on the walls of the torture chambers. Starvation simply had to be wiped out, and it was, as efficiently as populations once had been, and often with the same equipment.

‘That was when this century's first great discovery was made: the use of nuclear weapons. Until then, they didn't have a
use.
A threat, a deterrent effect – even Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, in a sense, only a threat. A demonstration atrocity. It was an unknown genius in Azerbaijan who discovered what nuclear weapons are actually
good for.
Intercommunal massacre. Tactical nuclear intercommunal massacre. We know the result.

‘Naturally, this had to be stopped. Hence the next great discovery: a use for space-based lasers and indeed for space-based nukes. They were originally designed to drive the communist bloc to beggary, which they did, and shortly afterwards they drove the
USA
to bankruptcy – all of this before they were
even built at all
! Like the mythical tachyon bomb which destroys the target before it's launched, orbital weapons struck backwards through time. But of course they were built anyway, and they keep the peace today by zapping any facility that looks as if it conceivably might be used to build nukes down here.

‘So there you have it: the wonderful checks and balances which have freed us from starvation, from the fear of nuclear war, from inescapable tyranny, and allow us all to go to hell in our own way. But with fourteen million, six hundred thousand combat deaths a year, we have surpassed the kill-rate of the Second World War on a permanent basis. It's not all that different from the bad old days when we all went to hell together.

‘Don't get me wrong: I'll take my chances with animal-liberators, machine-wreckers, or born-again Christian militias any day rather than face new Hitlers, Stalins or Johnsons. But I'd like anyone who's watching to entertain the possibility that maybe we could do better than this. And to ask yourself: where's the vulnerable point in this multiple-choice totalitarianism? It seems…seamless. What can an individual do against it?

‘I'll tell you. One of the ancestors of our modern militias was a group called the Falange. They had a slogan:
Credere. Obedere. Combatere.
“Believe. Obey. Fight.” I suggest that you doubt, disobey, desert. Particularly if you are called upon to fight against those who insist, against all the evidence, that
we are one people.
'

He paused for a moment, as if to indicate that he knew exactly what he was saying.

‘But, of course, that's only my opinion.

‘And now, a word from my sponsors, the Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers' Defence Collective, who have very different opinions. Goodnight. Go without God, or the goddess, if you're godless; and, if not, go with.'

 

Jordan drained the coffee mug and put it down, too hard. Drained was how he felt. He watched the comrade whose turn it was to wash up without even a twitch of that impulse to help which had so amused the others on his first evenings here.

When he'd finished speaking and Mary was tidying the cameras away after their regular slot, she'd said, not looking at him: ‘That was really…something. Where d'you learn to talk like that?'

Jordan sighed. ‘Televangelists,' he said bitterly. ‘I've sat through enough of them. Must've soaked it up.'

Pre-adapted for speaking on the Cable, just as his job had pre-adapted him for seeking on the nets. It was an eerie, deterministic thought, like Calvinism…

Oh, shit. This wasn't getting him anywhere. He jumped up, had a shower, changed and went downstairs again. The table in the long room had been cleared, the studio gear tilted away.
Havana Vice
was on the television. Dafyd and Stone were sitting on a sofa by the window-screen (a metre-by-two version of the glades, which made him feel exposed even while knowing it was one-way and armoured), sharing a joint and cleaning their weapons.

‘Hi, Jordan.'

‘Hi, guys.' He sat down on one arm of the sofa, inhaling sidestream smoke and watching with a not coincidentally increasing fascination the intricate pattern the men's hands made as they rubbed and scraped, bolted and fitted, stripped and re-assembled, drew and passed. They worked and smoked in silence except for the occasional cryptic remark, usually followed by helpless laughter.

‘Don't put all your progs on one diskette.'

‘Oiling the cormorant, that was.'

‘So he looked at the judge and said, “These things are sent to try us.”'

That one killed them. The two mercenaries rolled off the couch and attacked the floor. After a minute of kicking and hammering it was clear that the floor had won. They lay on their backs, wiping away tears.

‘What was all that about?'

Stone recovered first.

‘It was something us 'n' Moh did once, ended up in court, and
AAH HA HA AH HAAA
,' he explained.

Jordan looked at them and shook his head. He walked over to the terminal and jammed his card in it. His speech seemed to have been taken up, and was spreading as people replayed it and passed it on. Not many, but there was a thin trickle coming in of royalties and his own cut of the usual donations. He felt he should donate some of it to a worthy cause himself.