Fractions (68 page)

‘Well,' I said after this reassurance had sunk in, ‘how can I refuse?'

‘Good man,' said Reid. ‘I hope I see you again.'

‘So do I, mate,' I said. ‘So do I.'

 

The following day the ANR offensive started (Bang On Schedule! as the
Sun-Times
noon edition put it) but stalled and fell back before the day was over. There's a story that this was down to some kind of software problem, but it's hard to credit. I think the general strikes and local insurrections that broke out at the same time had a lot more to do with it. Fortunately, over the next few days this civilian uprising carried the revolution to victory. When it became obvious that America too was on strike and the troops weren't coming, the Restored Hanoverian government departed ignominiously in helicopters to ‘continue the struggle against terrorism from exile', as they put it.

The fall of the US/UN has been similarly attributed, in the sort of conspiracy theories I once thought I'd exploded forever, to an engineered viral assault on the global information nets. But a moment's objective thought will show that the insurrections in Britain and Siberia, concurrent with an escalating arms-control dispute with Japan, were what finally convinced the American people that world domination wasn't worth yet another tax hike and draft call-up. Copycat insurrections, as they were called, spread around the globe with the speed of an Internet rumour. The disruption associated with what amounted to a world revolution is, in my view, a more than adequate explanation for the chaotic state of everybody's computer screens over the next few months.

At the time I had more pressing matters to attend to, like trying to figure out a way of losing my new job without handing it to somebody worse. I should have known better than to become a dictator in the first place, but that's anarchism for you. It's just no preparation for the responsibilities of government.

 

February, 2046. The coldest winter in years. People said there was a hole in the greenhouse, as they lit fires with yesterday's money.

We had our own greenhouse, our geodesic dome on the edge of the Trent Park, near the university. The students were occupied with making mistakes about democracy and elitism that had been considered passé when I was at Glasgow. I left them to it. Annette moved slowly about her horticultural experiments, with a lab-coat made of fur. I rattled out net propaganda, spoke myself hoarse on the cable, convened virtual meetings of Norlonto's factions and hammered out a line to take to the national government.

For relaxation I talked to people in space. Beyond the Lagrange settlements and the Moon it was easier by email, a more natural medium given the lightspeed lag. Asteroid miners solemnly asked my advice about mutual banking, Martian colonists grumbled about being abandoned now that Space Defense was being cut back. Soldiers' councils on former Space Defense battlesats bounced ideas off me for profitable ways to use laser cannon. (They were good kids, really, or they'd have thought of the obvious way.)

Meanwhile the civil wars went on. The Republic's modest aim of combining national unity with local autonomy clashed repeatedly with locals whose idea of autonomy was a good deal more expansive. As a state, the Republic was in many ways weaker than the Kingdom – with its ever-present, over-the-horizon orbital back-up – had ever been. More fundamentally, the revolution had put everything up for grabs: created incentives to defection, as the game theorists put it.

Refugees poured into Norlonto from the countryside, and continued their fights in the shanty-towns and camps. The strain on our charities and defence-companies alike increased by the week, and every week I shouted at their organisers to recruit new workers from among the refugees themselves.

That worked until it became difficult to tell just who was recruiting whom. Competing cop companies found themselves literally in rival armed camps, whose quartermasters, as like as not, were authorised charity distributors. We called it the Thailand Syndrome.

 

The weekly meetings of the Defence Liason Committee became daily, or rather, nightly. They usually began at 9.00 p.m. and went on until after midnight. This was all right by me. My sleep requirements had diminished with age. I resented having to go into VR, but that's life. Every evening I'd take the washing-up gloves off, pull the datagloves on, give Annette a smile across the cleared table and put on the glasses and –

Be there. Some of us fancied ourselves as Heroes In Hell, and the setting was appropriate: a black infinity around us, and between us a round table with a common view of Norlonto, or London, or whatever we wanted to examine; a
camera obscura
view, patched together from satellite pictures and enhanced with all the data we could pull in. At this level there were thirteen of us, always a lucky number for a committee. Our fetches – our body-images in the virtual world – were the same as our actual forms, mainly so that we could recognise each other in real life or on television.

The night of the big crisis we were one short. I looked around, worried. Julie was there, Mike Davis, Juan Altimara, all from different tendencies of the space movement; a pair of identical youths whom I'd mentally tagged ‘the Mormon missionaries' though actually they were from the Norlonto churches' protection charity, the St Maurice Defence Association; and – moving from the voluntary sector to the commercial – a handful of defence company delegates who changed from week to week and always looked alarmingly young and pathetically exhausted, and always squabbled with the leftists –

‘Where's Catherin Duvalier?' She was young, fast, smart: a communist militia co-ordinator whose intelligence networks extended through the Green camps to the distant battles in the hills.

Julie smiled at me from across the table's bright gulf.

‘Cat's getting married tomorrow. Sends her apologies.'

‘No excuse,' I grunted, but I was relieved we hadn't had a defection, or indeed a casualty. ‘OK, comrades. First business.'

I keyed up the day's trading figures for defence shares and combat futures. They were rising fast.

‘Well, chaps,' I said to the defence-agency boys, ‘do you know something we don't?'

A flicker of data interchange set the fetches wavering as if in a heat-haze. Then, their hasty conferring over, one of them spoke up.

‘We were about to say, Mr. Wilde…'

Oh, sure.

‘…all our companies have been separately approached today about, ah, potential conflict situations. It seems that once again a large number of street-owners have made deals to allow passage of, uh, armoured columns –'

‘You mean the
Army
's coming in?'

Virtual eyes heliographed shock around the table.

‘Yes,' he said uncomfortably. ‘We've been instructed to inform you that the government has decided to end Norlonto's anomalous status – their words. It's been done at the request of a significant part of the business community and a number of Norlonto's more, uh, settled neighbourhood associations –'

‘Bastards!' shouted Julie. She rounded on the ‘Mormon Missionaries'. ‘Did you know anything about this?'

‘Don't look at me like that,' one of them said. ‘We've been passing on the complaints from our clients for weeks. The situation really is becoming quite intolerable, especially for the less fortunate. I assure you all that the Association knew nothing of this, but I can't say I'm surprised or sorry.'

‘So,' I said, ‘when do the tanks roll in?'

‘Day after tomorrow,' one of the agency reps said. ‘Show of force, and all that. Order on the streets.'

‘Good,' I said. ‘That gives us time to organise.'

‘
Resistance
?' Several voices said it at the same time, in dismay or hope.

‘No,' I said grimly. ‘Retreat. Tell your principals, and the government, that there'll be no trouble from the militia.'

I looked around the table, my hand on the databoard of the real table tapping out an urgent message to the space movement people to stay behind. ‘Meeting's adjourned. See you all tomorrow.'

‘
What
the fuck are you playing at, Wilde?' Julie asked, when the charities and the businesses had left the scene. ‘We can't take this lying down. It'll be the end of Norlonto!'

Mike Davis and Juan Altimara nodded indignant agreement.

‘Oh ye of little faith,' I said. ‘Of course it'll be the end of Norlonto. I seem to recall that most of you were not too keen on the
beginning
of Norlonto.'

Juan, who'd arrived in Norlonto as a child refugee from Brazil's brief biowar during the Amazonian Secession, looked at Mike and Julie. The fungal scar on his cheek twisted as he frowned.

‘I did not know this,' he said.

Julie flushed, Mike fiddled with his bat switch: ‘Heat out the roof, now,' he said uncomfortably. ‘Point is, like, Norlonto's been a bastion of liberty for years, a successful experiment, and you want to let the statists march in without firing a shot!'

‘Excuse me, comrades,' I said, ‘but who's capitulating to statism here?' I was rummaging around in the virtual depths of the table, illuminating likely routes for the incursion and checking them against the movements of insurance ratings, defence-agency deployments, militia strongpoints. ‘The way I see it, if the clients of the various defence agencies, if the communities and property-owners of this town want to make a deal with a nationalised defence industry, what business is it of ours? Isn't that anarcho-capitalism in action?'

‘Capitalists selling out the anarchy, more like!' said Julie.

‘As they have a right to do,' Mike said. ‘Yeah, I have to agree with Jon here. Still, it means we've failed.'

Julie and Juan were both inspecting the enhanced map take shape. They looked up, looked at each other.

‘We don't have to fail,' Juan said. ‘The militia's strong enough to hold off the Republic's forces. We have time to rally the population. The Army can't get away with a massacre in its own capital – even the Hanoverians held back from that.'

‘They're getting away with murder in the countryside,' I said. ‘You ever
listen
to any of the refugees?'

Julie gave this comment a flick of the hand. ‘If you believe the whining of those people the Republic's a monstrous tyranny, which it obviously isn't, so –'

‘So why are you so worried about having their troops on the streets?'

‘Because –' Julie looked at me as if I was missing something so obvious she was having trouble believing she had to spell it out. ‘Because it's our town, dammit! Our free city! We can't let the state roll in after all this time. We should crack down on the camps ourselves, do it
now
, chase those mafias and renegade militias out and get rid of even
that
excuse for the Army coming in. If we move now we could do it tonight!'

I could see Mike taking heart at this suggestion, while my own heart sank. I wished Catherin Duvalier had picked a different day to get hitched. The argument went on.

A butterfly flew out of the infinite darkness around us and settled on the table, wings quivering.

‘Oh, shit,' it said in Annette's voice. ‘I hope I've got this damn' thing working –'

‘We see you, Annette,' I said. ‘What are you doing? How did you get here?'

I felt her hand, eerily invisible, brush the back of mine.

‘Excuse me,' she said. ‘I know I'm not supposed to be here, and I haven't hacked in or anything. In real life I was sitting across a table from Jon, and I could see what he was saying, and I've come round beside him and piggybacked in on his link, and I've been circling around this conversation –'

‘This is a security risk!' Juan said.

‘This is no security risk, this is my wife,' I said. ‘She's the one who keeps my physical location secure while I'm here, and always has done. So shut up, comrade, and let's hear what she has to say.
If that's all right with everybody.
' I glared across the map-table and they all, eventually, nodded.

‘OK,' Annette said. In real life she slid on to my lap and put an arm around my shoulders; in VR she flew up, agitated, then began swooping and fluttering round the map, as if drawn to its lights. ‘You say that letting the Republic take over Norlonto would be a terrible defeat and disgrace. All right. Even Jon thinks that, I'm sure. But have you thought what a defeat and disgrace it would be to go down in blood? Or to win, and become a state yourselves? You'd have to fight not just the Army but the security companies, and that would be the end of the free market anarchy you're so proud of. As for driving out the refugees – and that's what you're really talking about, Julie – it wouldn't just be wrong, it would be used for years as evidence that what we have here is no different from what
they
have
there.
'