Their questions about the Solar System were carefully general. We answered with similar care. They expressed relief that Earth was well populated, respect at our assurance that it was prosperous, and only wry regret that it had all ‘gone communist’ (as they put it) since their demise.
‘I don’t think you’d find it anything like what you think of as communist, ’ Malley said. ‘And I’m not part of their society, so maybe you can take my word for it.’
‘I’m sure you folks like it just fine,’ said Abigail soothingly. ‘But for ourselves, we like it here.’
‘Every man under his own vine and under his own fig tree, and no one to make him afraid,’ added Andrew.
‘Things must have changed a bit since Jonathan Wilde left,’ I suggested.
‘Since he
left
? Oh—I see what you mean.’ Abigail shook her head. ‘Now
that I do call unnatural, having another copy running. Anyway, you’re right, things sure have changed. You know, in the old days, before the Abolition, they didn’t even give civil rights to robots who were as smart as any human being, if not a darn sight smarter!’
‘They had androids and gynoids walkin’ about, lookin’ just like people,’ said Andrew. ‘God only knows if they have souls, but they sure do have minds of their own, and anybody could just own one like it was a brute beast!’
Before we could respond—our looks of surprise, perhaps even, in my case, of shock having been interpreted by Andrew as sharing his dim view of this unenlightened past state of affairs—there was a distant chime.
‘That’ll be the big shots’ delegation now,’ said Andrew. He looked down at a panel on the table, which hadn’t been grey and glowing last time I looked. ‘Landing in a couple of minutes. Best get up to the patio.’
As we rose to our feet Abigail said: ‘Just one thing … it was courteous of you ladies to turn on those pretty dresses for visiting us, but I think when you’re going to be on television and all, you’d best
look
like you’d just stepped out of a spaceship, and not out of a cab on the way to a dance, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
Oh, well, I thought, there’d be other chances to show off. But I felt a slight pang as my layered chiffon, Yeng’s brocade cheongsam, Andrea’s tiered lace and Suze’s silver velvet sheath melted and flowed back into variants of high-gravity, on-duty gear.
Andrew grinned as the transformation was completed. ‘There’s already a group on the nets that says the whole thing’s a fake got up by the defence companies to drum up business. Don’t know if you looking like spacers will make them any less suspicious.’
Abigail approved of my blue denims and high boots. ‘But you want to put some darker colour in that jacket, and maybe a mission patch or two …’ So when we all marched up the stairs, around the balcony and out on to the patio, we each had a round blue patch with Earth’s starry plough and a picture of the
Terrible Beauty
over our hearts.
The wide patio was also sunken, about six feet below ground level, open, and brightly lit. Over to the left, above the banking around it, was another flat illuminated space, on which a small helicopter was parked. Above it a much larger helicopter hovered, silent apart from the
whap
of the rotorblades. It slowly descended close by the smaller one, beside which it looked like the adult of a strange species standing over its infant. I think it was something clever in the ground plan, and not any more advanced technology, that kept the downdraught blowing above our heads and not into our faces.
The helicopter’s side door folded away, and a set of steps folded out. In
the moment before anyone appeared, it occurred to me that I felt as if we, and not they, were waiting to meet the aliens.
A man stepped down the ladder, with a slow dignity which was only partly due to the care which he had to take with the high heels of his tall boots. His medium height and slim build were further extended by a stovepipe hat and an open frock coat, both black, and a colourful waistcoat over a white shirt with a black bootlace tie. A holstered pistol completed the look: the law west of Pecos, to the life. He walked over to the rim of the patio, looked to left and right, found the steps and made his way down.
Close behind him followed another man and two women, with a whole crowd of other people behind them. I just had time to recognise the second man—it was David Reid, who’d supplied the Outwarders with bonded labour, including some of ours. Our old enemy—
And then the man in the tall hat was shaking my hand.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘My name’s Eon Talgarth. I’m pleased to welcome you to Ship City, of which’—his smile twisted a little—‘I’m the somewhat reluctant Chief Justice. And you must be Ellen May Ngwethu, acting captain of this expedition?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Pleased to meet you, neighbour.’ His voice and accent reminded me, oddly, of the London non-cos; he’d stabilized his age at about forty, but he was much older than that, possibly older than I was—an eerie thought, which impressed me more than his ridiculous judicial fig.
‘Yeah, I reckon we’re all neighbours now,’ he said. He turned as if to introduce these new neighbours, but any opportunity for formal introductions had been lost: everybody on one side was indiscriminately shaking hands with everybody they could find on the other and introducing themselves or introducing somebody else. Talgarth looked momentarily at a loss, even taken aback, before he shrugged and relaxed. Reid, I noticed, was working the little crowd expertly—probably avoiding me, for the moment, and trying to make a friendly impression on my comrades. Abigail and Andrew, on a sudden inspiration, began handing out drinks, and shortly we were all behaving as if we’d just arrived at a slightly formal party.
‘Comrade?’ someone said in a friendly, but slightly diffident, voice. I turned, smiling at this unexpected greeting.
The girl in front of me had long fair hair that sprouted straight up from her scalp and then fell back in a mane between her shoulder blades. She wore a belted jump suit which showed off her muscular but definitely female frame. Almost as tall as me; big blue eyes, wide grin, thin, sharp nose; striking rather than beautiful, but I was inured to beauty.
‘Ellen? Hi.’ She stuck out her hand and I shook it. ‘My name’s Tamara Hunter,’ she went on. ‘Very pleased to meet you.’
‘Likewise,’ I said politely. ‘What’s your—’
‘—part in all this?’ She scratched her head. ‘I put up a bit of a fight to get on this delegation. Just so the business folk and the judges didn’t have it all to themselves. I’m a union official, actually, in the inter-syndical.’
‘You negotiate terms for the wage slaves?’
‘Exactly!’ she said, looking pleased. ‘A dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.’
‘We have these too,’ I said, wryly.
Tamara looked around, as if concerned that she might be overheard.
‘Is it really true,’ she asked, leaning closer, ‘that in the Solar System you have anarcho-communism?’
I thought over this unfamiliar word. ‘We don’t have to sell ourselves, and nobody tells us what to do, so I suppose you could call it that.’
‘Wow!’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘Just knowing that is
possible
, that it can
work
, will make a huge difference here.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, mentally comparing what Abigail and Andrew considered modest prosperity with the conditions that had brought about Earth’s social revolution. ‘It’s not just a question of ideas in people’s heads—’
‘Stop plotting there, Hunter!’ a man’s loud voice said. ‘Time enough for that later.’
The man who spoke came up and firmly grasped my hand. He had black hair down to the collar of his sharply cut cotton jacket; dark brown eyes, thick black eyebrows, smoothly tanned skin; and the look of ease and unshakeable self-confidence which in our society marked out the ‘old comrades’, and in this one, I guessed (correctly, as it turned out), the rich.
But there was more than that. He was terrifyingly old, among the oldest people alive, and unlike even his contemporary Wilde, he’d lived as the same body, the same man, for over three hundred and fifty years. Again unlike Wilde, he had both the desire and the capacity for power, and had grown strong and proficient in its use.
‘Hi, Ellen May,’ he said. ‘My name’s Dave Reid. I’m happy to meet you, at last. You know, I heard about you back in the old days, from, well—’ he laughed ‘—the Outwarders, I have to say!’
‘Your former clients send their regards,’ I said, rather more coldly than I had intended, ‘and their assurance of no hard feelings about your … departure.’
‘Do they, indeed?’ He seemed surprised and pleased. ‘Well, as I say, later for that. This is a great occasion.’
I sipped my drink. ‘So everyone keeps telling me.’
He grinned, unperturbed. ‘It is a bit of a mêlée, isn’t it? I don’t think anyone ever worked out the protocols for contact between socialist and capitalist anarchies. Your comrades in the
Carbon Conscience
have been telling reporters all about your society. Fascinating stuff.’
‘I’m sure it is,’ I said, wishing I’d briefed Boris and Jaime on what and what not to say.
‘Used to be a socialist myself, you know,’ Reid went on. ‘Gave it up as a bad job.’ He grinned at Tamara. ‘Maybe I should have stuck with it.’
Then he looked at me, and through me, his face momentarily bleak. With a shake of his head he smiled again.
‘“Battles long ago”,’ he said. ‘Speaking of which, Ellen, Dee has something to tell you—’
A woman was stepping delicately towards us on stiletto heels. She wore a short dress of black lace over a longer one of white crepe, all wow and flutter. She had black hair, pale skin, green eyes, broad cheekbones and a warm smile.
‘Hi, Ellen,’ she said. ‘I’m Dee. Pleased to meet you.’
‘Hello,’ I said, trying to keep the ice from my voice.
‘I’m Dave’s partner,’ she went on. ‘I used to be his, ah—’
His mechanical squeeze. A clone with a computer in its skull. Just a fucking machine.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Wilde told us about you.’
The gynoid woman shook my hand; I felt, or perhaps imagined, an electric tingle in her touch. She smiled up at me with disconcertingly wide, bright eyes and parted lips.
‘So he made it back,’ she said quietly. ‘And Meg too?’
Meg—Wilde’s companion, the artificial woman. Another walking doll, another fucking machine.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They both made it.’
‘Ellen,’ Dee said. She caught my hands. ‘My mind works … differently from yours. I have access to all the old company records, and to the city’s nets. I have something to tell you. Many of the people here, as you know, were revived from the fast folk’s robotized workforce. Your parents were … not among them.’
‘They were never among them?’ I asked. ‘It’s not just that they didn’t make it in the ship?’
‘We all made it in the ship,’ Reid said. ‘I made damn’ sure of that. I didn’t leave behind anyone, human or ex-human, alive or dead, who’d been conscripted or volunteered to my company.’
I looked down at him and unclenched my teeth and nails. ‘I’m relieved to hear that,’ I said. ‘I truly am. I am happy to know that my two hundred years of nightmares about them being enslaved in robot bodies were only
bad dreams, even if it does mean I’ll never see even their copies again.’ I stopped and took a deep breath through my nostrils. ‘I can live with that, Reid, but I can’t forget who killed them.’
Reid shook his head firmly. ‘It wasn’t me, or my company, who carried out those raids,’ he said. ‘It was all the doing of the Outwarders. I just saved what could be saved, and gave people a chance of a new life. For which I’ve received no complaints.’
‘Very well,’ I said. I grasped his shoulder and smiled at him, in a way that made a very satisfying shadow of fear show briefly on his face. ‘Now I know who I’m looking for, and I’ll take your word that it isn’t you.’
Reid took a step backwards as I let go of his shoulder. His jacket was creased there, and damp. I automatically wiped my hand on my thigh. The two women looked at me with expressions of indistinguishable compassion. Eon Talgarth, the judge, perhaps drawn to the edge of our little group by the intensity of our conversation, broke an uneasy silence.
‘If it’s justice you want, Ellen, if that’s among your reasons for coming all this way, you can find it here.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I lowered my voice. ‘This is a great occasion, a happy occasion, and I don’t want to spoil it.’ I indicated the more cheerful fraternization going on around us, hoping that the comrades didn’t take it too far. ‘But you should know something about us, about me. I don’t seek justice. We don’t believe in justice. We have the true knowledge. There is no justice. But there is defence, and deterrence, and revenge. That’s what I want. And I will have them all.’
Reid, to my surprise, smiled and stepped forward again. Though shorter than I, he held my gaze as though it was he who was looking down.
‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘I’ve been there. If you want to take your revenge on the fast folk, be my guest!’ He waved his arm expansively. ‘I can fly you at a moment’s notice to the place where we store their templates. You can revive them, tell them exactly what you’re going to do to them and why, and make them die a thousand deaths before we flood the tanks with Blue Goo. And then, if you want, you can do it again. And again. And—’