Fractions (63 page)

‘The twenty-fifth century!' Wilde laughed. ‘Yes, Earth might be Green all right! Or even Red!'

They didn't get it, and he didn't explain. He frowned at Ethan Miller.

‘Why “daughter wormhole”?' he said.

Ethan shrugged. ‘It's what me old man calls it. He went through, and not as a fucking robot upload, either. He was crew, not crim.' He pounded his chest. ‘Human all the way back, that's me.'

‘Carbon chauvinist,' Tamara chided.

Wilde leaned forward, thoughtlessly lighting another cigarette. ‘Go on.'

‘Well,' Ethan said, waving a hand at the sky, ‘the wormhole we came through was a spin-off.' He planed his hand sideways. ‘The main probe, the one the fast folk built before their minds burned out, it went right on. Draggin' its end of the wormhole to…wherever. Must've got there by now.' He laughed harshly. ‘Whatever “now” means, like you said.'

Wilde sat back, drawing on his cigarette so hard that his cupped hands couldn't hide the glare.

‘The end of time,' he said.

He thought for a few moments longer.

‘Oh, hell,' he said.

‘What's the problem?' asked Tamara. She throttled back the engine and the boat coasted towards a spit.

‘Time,' said Wilde. ‘As in, we don't have much.'

‘Well,' Tamara said as the boat grounded, ‘we're at the Fifth Quarter. Let's get a move on.'

Annette had the tubes in her right arm, I in my left. Her left hand reached out and caught my right.

‘Scared?' I asked.

‘A bit.'

‘Me too.' I squeezed back.

The township hall was packed with mature people, older people, people like us; on our backs on trolley-beds looking up at the roof-panels. Green-tinged daylight, green-smocked technicians, everything slow: an underwater feel. Big machines connected to the tubes infiltrated tiny machines into our blood. Not nanotech, not full cell-repair, not yet; but it gave us a chance of living until that came along. In the seven decades we'd been alive, our life-expectancies had already extended by at least another four. We felt better than we had at fifty. We looked – well, the early anti-ageing treatments made your skin tougher as well as tauter, so we looked a bit sundried, a bit
smoked.

This treatment was different. We hadn't had it before, though I'd had a microbot injection to deal with a worrying prostate enlargement some years earlier. Now, the microbots had expanded their capabilities, and by one of those trade-offs characteristic of the Republic, the state Health Service was offering these capabilities to citizens in exchange for their state pension rights. The deal was more political than economic, but it had a certain elegant symmetry: swap retirement for longevity and a degree of rejuvenation, and you can work till you drop.

It would never have passed under the old laws. It was risky. One or two in a thousand died under it, though whether they died of it was another matter. It was a heart problem, hard to predict. If you had it, it would get you anyway, soon. So the health companies and the Health Service said.

A technician walked up between our beds, gently parted our hands.

‘Ready?' she said.

‘Yup,' said Annette.

‘Ready as I'll ever be,' I said. I attempted a grin. ‘Who wants to live for ever?'

‘Well, I know you do, Citizen Wilde. Good luck.'

Here comes nothing, I thought.

She pressed a switch, sending a short-range radio signal to the microbots in my blood and in Annette's.

I felt my heart stop. It had to. The microbots needed a steady platform for fast work around the vagus nerve, and to give them a chance to shove neural growth factors and cloned foetal nerve-cells across the blood-brain barrier.

Colour faded out, then light. Consciousness went down completely, as in sleep. My heart re-booted with a painful power surge and consciousness came back up, crashed, restored from memory and came up again. I raised my head weakly and looked at Annette, who opened her eyes and stared at me and smiled.

‘We made it,' she said.

‘We'll make it,' I said. ‘We'll make it to the ships.'

I tried to sit up.

‘If you don't stay where you are for another half hour,' the technician admonished, ‘you'll not make it to the
door.
'

 

Out, into the Greenbelt street, under the greenhouse sky. We made our way through the usual Pro-Life picket, who kept yelling ‘Murderers!' at us from behind a line of armed Republican Guards. It was the foetal tissue – cloned from our own cells – that we'd allegedly murdered, according to the leaflet from the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child that some poor addled soul shoved in my face.

‘SPUC off!' I called back. ‘
You
can go to hell!
We
aren't even going to
die
!'

‘Do you wish to make a complaint, citizen?' the nearest Guard asked me, not turning round.

‘It's OK officer,' Annette said, grabbing my elbow and pulling me along. ‘Free speech…and you shut up!' she added to me.

‘OK, OK.' I walked quickly, shaking inside. Nothing – not Communists, not fascists, not authoritarians of any stripe – ever aroused in me the same homicidal rage as the Pro-Lifers. Whenever I came across them exercising their rights, I made damned sure I exercised my own.

 

I'd got used to living here, in what was officially called ‘the informal sector': London's shanty-town fringe, where the Republic's experiments in local government overlay an experiment in anarcho-capitalism that made the space movement's enterprise zones look over-regulated. The second, third, and subsequent storeys of most buildings were afterthoughts. Organic farming made the absence of sewage pipes something less than a disaster, but it didn't make the night-soil tankers any less smelly. The exhaust fumes did. The population was a mixture of the native marginals and refugees from Europe's and Asia's wars. Not many beggars, but they were distressing enough: people whose protectors had skimped on their nuclear insurance policies.

Like I say, I was used to it, but at that moment – an after-effect of the clinic, or the picket – it all got too much.

‘I feel terrible,' I said. ‘My head hurts, and my stomach feels like it's been pumped.'

‘Oh, quit moaning,' Annette said. ‘It's no worse than a hangover.'

‘What a happy thought,' I said. There was a pub on the pavement in front of us. ‘Half a litre of Amstel would just about hit the spot.'

Annette waved a Health Service handout in front of me. ‘It says here –'

‘Yes, I know what it says. Do I look like I'm about to be handling weapons or heavy machinery?'

‘I suppose not.' She grinned and lowered herself into a plastic chair, perilously close to the gutter. ‘Pils for me. And those kebabs look good.'

I shouted the order to the
garson
, who disappeared through a hatch and re-emerged a minute later. There was the usual poster of Abdullah Ocalan above the hatch. I could never figure why even the exiles from Democratic Kurdistan – entrepreneurs to the bone – still honoured the Great Leader. Possibly a shakedown was going on in the townships. I made a mental note to have it checked out. There might be money in this for a defence company that could offer them a better deal than their Party's protection racket. Or I might be misreading the situation entirely – nationalism was still as foreign to me as ever.

The crowd, Kurds and Turks mostly, flowed around the pavement pub. Behind us beasts and vehicles followed some unwritten highway code, in which precedence depended on a coefficient of momentum and noise. A television by the hatch showed a game-show from Istanbul. Overhead, airships drifted to the distant masts of Alexandra Port. I sat back, warmed by the sun and the spreading glow of the food and drink.

‘Did you dream?' Annette asked.

I shook my head. ‘Did you?'

‘I thought I did,' Annette said, smiling mysteriously. ‘I heard a warm, friendly voice and I saw a white light, and I remember thinking, “Great! I'm finally having a Near Death Experience!” and then the light was just sunlight, and the voice was the technician, counting.'

‘That's the real thing,' I said. ‘The sunlight really is the white light.' This materialist insight was all that survived of a magic-mushroom trip I'd taken as a student. That and a vision of three goddesses: Mother Nature, Lady Luck and Miss Liberty, who were – I realised after coming down from it – necessity, chance and freedom, and indeed the rulers of all.

‘Imagine,' Annette said, ‘if that's the nearest we ever come to dying.'

‘Touch plastic!' I rapped the table. We laughed, clasped hands across the table. I gazed at her face, aged but not deteriorated, its lines a map of her life's laughter and grief, and I felt I could love her for ever.

‘“Till all the seas gang dry, my dear, and the rocks melt wi' the sun…”'

‘Oh, stop it before I report you for senility.'

The traffic and the noise stopped. I looked over at the slowing cars, and thought everyone was looking at us. Turning the other way, I saw they were looking at the television. The commentary, and the loud conversations that suddenly replaced the hush, were all in Turkish and Kurdish. But the televion image needed no translation: a German tank, and a Polish road-sign.

 

Berlin – twenty-first century, pre-war Berlin, Old Berlin – was the most exciting city in Europe. The post-reunification construction boom was over by then but the intensity of business and pleasure didn't miss a beat. Everybody who was anybody was either there or in London. In a sense the two capitals were moving in opposite directions, one recovering its national self-confidence, the other climbing down from its imperial pretensions. One, as it turned out, rearming, the other disarming…

Right now there was only one person I cared about in Berlin: Eleanor, there with her partner on a long weekend.

‘What do you
do
in a war, Jonathan?'

Eleanor's nineteen-year-old daughter, Tanya, sounded more curious than anxious. It was one of those emergency family gatherings around telephones and televisions that went on all over the country in the first few hours of the conflict. Ours was in Eleanor's front room in Finsbury Park. Her absence was ever-present. Many of our friends, and other relatives, were also in Berlin. People were calling them up on all possible channels. I had a paging programme pursuing Eleanor, and was trying to pull together an executive meeting at the same time, partly to keep my mind off her. Communications, not to my surprise, were slow.

What
do
you do in a war? With four generations of anti-militarists behind her, you'd think the kid would know.

‘You oppose it,' I said. It didn't seem a very enlightening answer. I set up the codes for yet another attempt at a conference link.

Angela, Eleanor's eldest, laughed. ‘You're incorrigible.' She was passing out cups of coffee and tea. Good girl.
She
knew what do do in a war.

‘My grandparents were conscientious objectors in the First World War, and my parents in the Second, and I'm damned if I'll miss the chance to do the same in the Third.' The server wasn't responding. I sighed and punched through a re-route command.

‘Yeah,' Annette said, leaning back against my shins. ‘A conscientious objector with nuclear capability.'

‘Nuclear
cover
,' I corrected. ‘Anyway, it won't come to that. The Germans don't have nukes.'

‘So they say.'

Annette was flipping channels, getting CNN downlink from the Polish front, WDR vox-pop from Berlin, Channel 4 News from the regional assemblies and the State and Federal Parliaments of Britain. With their hovercraft tank-transporters the German advance was the fastest ever seen. They used up combat drones like Khomeini and Mao used men. We weren't in the war – yet. There were plenty in the opposition parties who wanted us to be. Lord Ashdown's face popped up far too often for my liking.

‘No, so the FIS says, and they should bloody know, it's their skins that'll fry if – ah!'

I had a connection. An 0.1 scale image of a table with the others around it flashed up behind the screen on my lap. Of the committee at the time of the election, only Julie O'Brien and I remained. The rest were new faces. Almost a decade of social and political upheaval – the revolution, as everybody now called it – had winnowed the space movement's libertarian cadre, most of whom were organised in FreeSpace. Some of the best had followed Aaronson and Rutherford to Woomera, where the British and Australian Republics ran their joint space programme. Others had defected to conventional politics, usually Republican but occasionally to wilder shores, even to the resurgent Trotskyism of the Workers' Power Party or the proliferating single-issue campaigns. I was left with hardliners – young Turks (ha!) who saw me as a dangerous moderate.

‘OK, comrades,' I said. ‘Anyone who's paying full attention to this meeting had better switch their telly on right now, because we need to keep at least half an eye on it. No doubt the wider space movement's going to be all over the place on the war, and that's as it should be, but we in FreeSpace have a responsibility to take a stand – in the name of freedom if not of space. I have every sympathy with the Germans – they couldn't be expected to take refugees, fallout and terrorism forever. It's rather gratifying to see the Poles get a bloody nose, especially after the way they've been treating their minorities. Nevertheless. I say it's an imperialist war, we oppose all sides and we do our damnedest to keep Britain out of it.'

The seriousness of my statement was somewhat undermined by Tanya's eye-rolling observation of it.
I went on peace marches for the likes of you
, I felt like telling her. (And with Eleanor, a cry from inside me added.) Annette's grip on my hand was tight, as if she might slip away. I stroked her shoulders, below the virtual image, and glared at the comrades.

‘I'm afraid I don't agree with comrade Wilde,' said Mike Davies, a black Liverpudlian in his twenties whose views I occasionally respected. ‘What he's just said is exactly what the government's saying, like, and if you ask me it's the kind of TwenCen liberal pacifism that has got us into this mess in the first place. If Britain hadn't ditched its responsibilities on the Continent, the Germans wouldn't have had to take them on. As it is, the best we can hope for is that the Americans will bail us out again.'

‘What
is
this shit?' Julie said. ‘Responsibilities? Well, thank you comrade, but I'll take no responsibility for the bloody British state. Liberal pacifism – when did that become a dirty word? I'm a libertarian internationalist and proud of it. War is the state's killer app. I'll take a liberal pacifist over a libertarian militarist any day. Neutrality, non-intervention, and preparation for self-defence – that's what we should be pushing, not trying to work out whether we should back the Germans or call for the bloody Yanks to come charging in. Which you –' she added, turning to stab a phantom finger at Davies, ‘have evidently not even made up your own mind about!'

In another corner of the screen a light flickered urgently. Eleanor had got through!