Fractions (60 page)

Dee sees he's already crossed off one name, and that there are a lot more to go.

 

Tamara looked at the little stack of incriminating material on the table: the Talgarth file on Wilde, the picture Dee had made, and a scrawled apocalyptic rant from Ax. Wilde had just finished reading it.

‘God,' he said. ‘I've heard of suicide notes, but this is the first time I've ever come across a
murder
note.'

Tamara was holding her hands to the sides of her head.

‘
I
'll murder the little pervert, if I ever get my hands on him,' she said. ‘Honestly, Comrade Wilde, if I'd even suspected he was capable of going off the fast end like this I'd never've let Dee out of my sight.'

Wilde reached over and caught her hand.

‘Easy,' he said, ‘easy. What have I ever done to you to make you call me “Comrade Wilde”? My name's Jon, OK? And you're no more responsible for losing Dee than I am for losing Jay-Dub. They're both free agents, isn't that what this is all about?'

‘I suppose so,' Tamara said. ‘And Ax is claiming he wasn't, when he did some…degrading things. I can see why, too, in a way, but then…Aaach! It's so complicated! What do we do?'

‘Tamara,' Wilde said gently, letting go of her hand and sitting down, ‘how long have you lived?'

‘Twenty years.'

Wilde lit a cigarette.

‘New Mars years?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well then,' said Wilde. ‘You've lived in an anarchy twice as long as I ever managed to, and you surely know the answer to that, or the way of finding the answer.'

Tamara sat down at the table and looked back at him, baffled and defiant.

‘I don't get you,' she said.

‘Look,' Wilde said, ‘when we want to know whether something was worth making, we look for the answer in a discovery machine called the market. When we want to know how something works, we have another discovery machine, called science. When we want to know if somebody was right to kill somebody else, we have a discovery machine called the law.'

‘Yes,' said Tamara. ‘I know that. It's not going to be much help to Ax and Dee, if they get caught. Or us, if we wait too long before trying to stop them.'

‘It's worth a try, OK? And if the law really lets you down, and you can't live with it, then –' He spread his hands, smiling.

‘What?'

‘You're back in the state of nature. You fight. OK, you might die, but so what? Same as if the market lets you down. It does happen. You're starving. You steal.'

Tamara looked taken aback.

‘But that would be –'

‘Anarchy?' Wilde grinned at her.

‘You're saying people can do anything?'

‘Literally, yes. In any half-decent society you're far better off respecting the law and property and so on, but the bottom line is, it's your choice. You always have the option of making war – on the whole world, if it comes to that.'

‘But you'd
lose
!' Tamara said.

Wilde looked back at her, unperturbed.

‘You might not. Locke said you can always “appeal to heaven”, and God or Nature might find in your favour. What I'm saying is, Ax has made his choice, and Dee hers. Maybe they can justify that choice in front of a court, maybe not. Either way, it isn't for us to decide, and I'd be more than happy to justify not warning their potential victims. But if you want to, by all means go ahead.'

Tamara rubbed her chin and looked down again at Ax's screed. She looked at Dee's picture, and Talgarth's file. Then she looked up at Wilde and asked, as if wanting to settle one final question: ‘What do you do if
science
lets you down?'

Wilde laughed. ‘Trust to luck.'

He stubbed out his cigarette and jumped up.

‘The sooner we get to Eon Talgarth's court, the better,' he said. ‘Am I right?'

‘Yes,' said Tamara. She rose and began to hunt around for maps and provisions and arms.

‘So how do we get there?' asked Wilde. ‘Aircraft?'

Tamara was packing ammo clips. She turned to him and laughed.

‘Talgarth doesn't take kindly to aircraft landing nearby,' she said. ‘He doesn't trust them, for some strange reason. Nah, we take just enough weapons and gadgets to get through the wild machines, and we walk. Everybody does.' She grinned. ‘It's the law. It reduces the chances of fights breaking out in court.'

‘There's a lot I don't know about this place,' Wilde acknowledged wryly.

Tamara grunted, testing the weight of a pack. She took out a heavy pistol, and passed it over to Wilde. She shoved Talgarth's file on Wilde across the table.

‘Take that and read it sometime,' she said. ‘There's a lot this place doesn't know about you.'

You'll have noticed by now that what I'm telling you here isn't in the texts. As you'll have guessed, that's the point. Why should I duplicate my hagiographers?

So you'll forgive me, I hope, if I take the story of how I used People for Progress (North British Mutual's educational campaign) as a launch-pad for the space movement; how I used Space Merchants to seed FreeSpace, a libertarian radical group that had learned the left's one sound lesson, Leninism; how we used the space movement as a popular front for our free-market anarchism, and how the space movement grew beyond even my expectations – if I take
mein kampf
, in short – as read.

And my political commentary and analysis, ephemeral as it seemed at the time, fading from the screens like a short-term memory, was all dutifully archived by the intelligence agencies of the day, and in due course (i.e. wars and revolutions later) passed into the public domain and is undoubtedly still hanging around out there – ‘it is always
sometime, somewhere
on the net', so if you really want to know, it's only a search away [note: lightspeed limitations may apply]. So I won't repeat myself on that, either.

In my later years I was occasionally known to grumble about the youth of today, etc., and how they didn't appreciate that there had been a revolution before
The
Revolution and how there wouldn't have been a New Republic if there hadn't been a Republic in the first place, and how much tougher it all was for us and by the way have I ever told you about the war?

So I'll skip that, too.

But it remains worth saying that the United Republic didn't just happen. People didn't suddenly wake up that election morning in 2015 and think, ‘This time we've
got
to get the bastards out.' As a matter of fact they did, but it took a lot of work to bring that reckless impulse to birth: decades of agitation, grumbling, constitution-drafting, sparsely attended meetings in poorly furnished halls, letters to the editor, noisy demonstrations, and all the rest. And bloody hard work it was. I know, because I was there and I didn't do any of it.

 

FreeSpace (the name had once seemed trendy, but now dated us painfully – ‘very TwenCen', as I'd overheard someone say) had its modest offices above a Space Merchants franchise just across the road from the Camden Lock market. (I'd quit running Space Merchants, kept enough shares and options in it to keep a steady if small income, and left it alone. It had moved into selling actual space products now, most just novelties – moon-rock jewellery, free-fall crystals and so forth – but also some of practical use. Microgravity manufacturing had come up with unexpected applications, as I'd known it would.) We'd had the offices for ten years, and they still smelled of fresh paint and new wood and cement. The concrete walls were decorated with space movement posters and NASA Inc hologram views, but the first thing anyone saw when they came through the doorway was my desk with a huge notice behind it saying YOU'RE WELCOME TO SMOKE. I no longer smoked myself – although medical science had already beaten what we (misleadingly, nowadays) called ‘the big C', there was no easy fix for the habit's bronchial consequences, and at sixty-two I needed all the breath I could get. The notice was a matter of principle, like the washroom soap-dispenser's mischievous little sticker announcing that its contents had been
Tested On Animals.

The morning after the election I was the only person in the office who wasn't late in and hung over. Each bleary-eyed arrival was greeted by me looking up from the online news (panic in Whitehall, pound in free fall, riots in Kensington, airports mobbed) and saying: ‘Oh, you stayed up for the results? Who won?'

Having thus protected my anarchist credibility I'd have another secret gloat at the results. The composition of the new government wasn't official yet, they were still arguing, but it looked like it would be Republican, New Labour, True Labour, and a couple of Radicals on the government side, with the Unionists the official opposition and the small parties in the wings. Plenty of the last – even the World Socialists (the new name of the SPGB) had scraped together enough first preferences to get one MP elected. Sadly, my parents hadn't lived to see it. It had taken the party a hundred and eleven years to get into Parliament, but they were still on course for that twenty-fifth-century global majority.

Then I'd get back to organising an emergency executive committee meeting for 11.00 that morning. No answer, not even an answering-program, from two of the members: Aaronson (research) and Rutherford (international liaison). Hmmm. I immediately contacted several potential rivals for each position – rather than our internal security group, who were
prima facie
most likely to be police spies anyway – and set them to work investigating.

But the other seven duly popped up on my screen, and all of us on each other's. I decided to say nothing about Aaronson and Rutherford, and just shrugged when their absence was remarked in the pre-meeting chit-chat as people shuffled paper, booted up notepads, settled in their seats and looked at me expectantly.

‘OK, comrades,' I began, ‘from here it looks like we've woken up to not just a new government, but a new regime. Now, call me a romantic old fool, but I think it's the start of a revolution. A very British revolution, I'll give you that, but it's been a long time coming and revolutions are a law unto themselves more or less by definition. I wouldn't bet on this one staying in the proper channels. This could be good news for us, or bad, depending on how things turn out. The question is, can we make a difference?'

All the eyes on the screen made a laughably simultaneous swivel as everybody checked everybody else's reaction. Ewan Chambers, the Scottish rep, spoke first.

‘I agree with Jon. Things were looking pretty wild in Glasgow last night, something a bit more than a street party and no' quite a riot. And from what I can see there's a kindae uneasy calm in Edinburgh. The Workers' Power Party is carrying on like it won the election instead ae just a couple of seats.'

‘It's the same down here,' said Julie O'Brien, our South London youth organiser, ‘but I don't think we have to worry just yet about the Trots taking over and everybody starving to death. If you look at how the new government's put together, right, there's no doubt at all that we're gonna get a Republic, but beyond that the kind of programme they've been talking about is a real mish-mash of libertarian and statist. On the one side – easing immigration controls, ending prohibition, pulling the troops out of Greece and all that, but on the other hand the Labour parties are pushing this
industrial policy
, cabling up everything on one big system and all sorts of TwenCen shit.'

‘Including a space programme, funnily enough,' I said. ‘Any thoughts on that?'

A wrangle followed which I cut across as soon as somebody mentioned Ayn Rand. ‘Here's what I suggest,' I said. ‘We don't support it, don't oppose it, and if it ever flies, demand they privatise it.'

Nothing like a moment of shared cynicism for pulling a committee together. ‘Right,' I said when we'd stopped chuckling, ‘serious business. Good bloody riddance to the Hanoverian regime, but as Julie says the question is what happens afterwards. The political structure's going to be pretty flexible for a while. How about we try to get our hands on some derelict area and make it an enterprise zone or freeport or something, and put our money where our mouth is?'

Adrian Moss frowned. He was in charge of the movement's lobbying activities, such as they were. ‘We could probably swing it,' he said, ‘but why? Free zones are better left to real businesses, not political organisations.' His smile flicked around the screen. ‘You know, that reminds me of some fringe ideology I've heard about!'

‘I'll tell you why,' I said. ‘If things work out smoothly, fine, a few more of our ideas get tested. But this country might be headed for a breakup. We've all seen what that means, time and time again. Everybody grabs what they can. Having a bit of land to call our own might give us a head start.'

This caused some commotion. Only Julie and Ewan were in favour. I feigned demurral and suggested that we put it to a poll of the membership. Those against my suggestion agreed, confident that it would be rejected.

By this time the absence of Aaronson and Rutherford had pushed itself onto the agenda. I donned my moderate hat and managed to convince the committee that if it turned out that they'd been spies all along and had now fled the country, we would quite definitely not have them assassinated.

Late that afternoon the investigations I'd initiated revealed that they'd both been discreetly offered jobs in the promised National Space Authority, and had been too embarrassed to tell us. At this point I was quite tempted to have them assassinated, but after some thought decided just to throw them off the committee.

In the membership referendum on making a bid for a local enterprise area my position won overwhelmingly, as I knew it would. With all the political excitement, even a rabble of libertarians couldn't help wanting to do something constructive for a change.

A year later FreeSpace had control of an abandoned North London industrial estate with a few blocks of empty high-rise flats thrown in by a local council desperate to get rid of them. Six months after that we had the place swarming with enthusiastic volunteers and Adrian was pulling in outside investment hand over fist. After a further six months a delegation of workers' and employers' representatives told the committee that they were very happy with the security our militia provided, but there was one little extra assurance they wanted.

Just for their peace of mind.

Julie said it was immoral, Ewan said it was illegal, Adrian said it was far too expensive and I said I knew a man who could get it for us cheap.

 

Transcript of telephone conversation, released 01/10/50 under Freedom of Information (Previous Governments) Act.

We hit turbulence over the southern Urals. I was standing in the narrow corridor towards the tail, braced against the sides and looking straight out of the last window. As the aircraft dipped I got a clear view of the mountains. In the long shadows of dawn they looked remarkably like a papier-maché model of mountains. Not too far below, a regular series of small white clouds were simultaneously dispersing. Curious.

Another wing-dip, another moment of free-fall, then a rapid climb. A yell came from the tiny toilet.

‘Are you all right?'

‘I'm fine,' Reid shouted. ‘Just cut myself.'

‘What are you
doing
in there?'

‘Shaving.'

Ten, no, fifteen minutes earlier I'd seen him sand down his cheeks and chin with an electric razor, just before I'd recklessly given him precedence for the toilet. My bladder sent me a sharp note of protest. You may have had surgical microbots crawling around your plumbing, it told me, but there
are
limits…It was high time, I thought, for me to start practising the egoism I preached.

‘Shaving
what
? Your legs?'

‘The – backs – of – my – hands,' said Reid. I could hear the clenched teeth. ‘Forgot the fucking rubber gloves, first time I used the scalp treatment.'

He came out with a sheepish grin on his face and shaving-foam on his cuffs. I didn't stop to gloat. My flood of relief made the spittoon-sized aluminium toilet-bowl ring. Then I splashed cold water on my face, opened a few more buttons on my shirt and smeared deodorant awkwardly under each armpit, dried my beard, brushed my short-back-and-sides, rubbed a towel over my bald top and put on a tie. As I had to stoop or squat throughout, and the mirror would have been about adequate on a ladies' pocket compact, the overall effect wasn't easy to judge. I was still chuckling over the reason why Reid's hair, though as grey as mine, was so long and thick.

Gene-fixing shampoo, indeed! What vanity, I thought, as I held the mouthwash for a minute to do its work, then spat it out and checked the gleam of my teeth.

 

North British Mutual had spawned a security agency, and Reid had been heavily involved in its management buy-out several years earlier. If this flight was anything to go by, the Mutual Assured Protection Company were doing well. The
biznesman-jet
they'd hired for this leg of the trip might be a little cramped, a little Spartan, but it did have its own stewardess, an Uzbek lass with a fixed smile and no English. Breakfast had been served by the time I returned to my seat: microwaved croissants and a coffee which, I guessed after the first sip, had also been microwaved. Neither was quite hot.