He tipped his head back and began glossolaliat-ing in Morse code, da-da-dit-di-da-dididididah… Cat and Fix cocked their heads, listening, and after a minute grinned and guffawed.
Jordan looked a little smug at this demonstration. “See, I can joke in tongues. We have our own Internet, and our own International. Don’t bother looking for a leak from yours.”
“Besides,” said Fix, speaking up for the first time, “we know this thing from way back. Jordan and Cat fought in the revo, and so did it. It was called the Black Plan, and it was used by—or it used—the Army of the New Republic. We’ve all encountered it, and we know where it went. To New View, your commie-cult commune in space.”
“And we know how it thinks,” said Cat. “We can see its hand in what the Sheenisov are doing, in their tactics and in their strategy. It’s not exactly malevolent, but it is… ambitious.”
“So?” Myra shrugged, trying hard to stay cool, and to reassert her control over the conversation. “We—that is, my country, Kazakhstan—” there, she had said it, and the words my country, Kazakhstan could not be unsaid “—we are not relying on this thing. We take no orders from it, not since—well, it got on the wrong side of me, put it that way. I don’t say I believe you about its taking the side of the Sheenisov, but—let’s say I wouldn’t put that past it. If you’re so worried about it, why do you object to my getting help to stop it?”
“Because,” said Jordan, emphasising each word with a chop of the hand, “it can not be stopped. Not by fighting it. If it finds itself on the losing side it will change sides, or work for both sides, and it will win. Its only real enemies are rival AIs, such as those of the space movement, and those strange ghosts of genius that some of the spacers are trying to turn into. It will defeat them, or absorb them, and then it will be content in its… singular godhood, spreading with humanity to all the worlds to come. It will look after our best interests, whether we like it or not.”
“Hah, come on. You can’t possibly know that.”
Jordan sat back and looked at her with an ironic expression. “Oh, yes I can, but call it an educated guess if it makes you feel better. If the British Republic were to come in on your side, I’m sure they’d be delighted to get their old planning-system back. They’d jump at any offers it made them. Or they would accept similar Greek gifts from the space movement’s AIs. So whoever wins—the Western powers, the space movement or the Sheenisov—humanity will be living inside some machine or other, for ever.”
“Would that be so bad?”
“No,” said Jordan. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
He jumped up. “But what the hell. You do as seems best. If you still want to ally with the British when you get to London, go right ahead. Much good it’ll do you.”
He downed his remaining brandy and looked around at the others, then at Myra. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you to the road.”
She rode along beside the red-haired man, troubled but unconvinced by his strange tirades. Wet branches of beech and birch brushed past them, making her duck and blink. The stony path led up the side of the hill above the settlement. Myra looked back down at it before it passed from view.
“How do you people live?” she asked. “You can’t live just on raiding, and some day soon, according to you, there’ll be nothing left to raid. Like, who pays for these anti-missile missiles?”
“We all do,” Jordan said. “We don’t have taxes, that’d be a laugh. We—not just this village, all of the free people—have a couple of simple economic principles that have been applied in communities like this for nearly a hundred years now. One is that we don’t have rent, but land ain’t free—God ain’t making any more of it, but we keep right on making more people. So we apply the equivalent of rent to community purposes, like defence. The other is that any individual, or any group, can issue their own currency, backed up at their own risk. No landlords, no usurers, and no officials.”
“Oh, great,” said Myra. “A peasant’s idea of Utopia.
Single tax and funny money! Now I’ve heard everything!”
“It does work,” Jordan said. “We, as you can see, flourish. We’re the future.”
Jordan,” she said, “you know I found some clips of you on my encyclopaedia? Well, from them I’d never have figured you for going over to the Green Slime. Or for a preacher, come to that.”
Jordan laughed, unoffended. “The world will fall to the barbarians or to the machines. I chose the barbarians, and I chose to spread some enlightenment among them. Hence the preaching, which was—to begin with—of a kind of rationalism. I can honestly say I have led many of my people away from the dark, heathen worship of Gaia, and from witchcraft and superstition. But I also found, like many another missionary, that I preferred their way of life to the one from which I’d come. And along with loving nature, I came to love nature’s God.”
“You were an atheist.”
“So I believed. I later realised that I was an agnostic. A militant agnostic, if you like. All theology is idolatry, all scripture is apocrypha. All we can say is that God is One. God encompasses the world, there is nothing outside him, and nothing opposed to him. How could there be? So God approves of all that happens, because all that happens is his will. God loves the world, all of it, from the Hubble to the Planck, from the Bang to the Crunch. God is in the hawk hovering up there and in the mouse that cowers from its claws in yonder field. God is in the sickle and the sheaf, the hammer and the hot iron, the sword and the wound. God is in the fire and in the sun and in the holocaust. God was in the spy I had killed today, and in the man who killed him.”
Antinomianism was, Myra knew, a common enough heresy in periods of revolution or social breakdown. Four hundred years ago, these same words could have been ranted forth on those very hills. There was nothing new in what Jordan said, but Myra felt sure it would not disturb him in the slightest to point this out. He had probably read Winstanley and Christopher Hill for himself.
“You seem to know a lot about this unknowable God of yours.”
That I do.”
“Is God in the machines, in the AIs that you fear?”
“That too, yes.”
“What’s the difference between a God who makes no difference and takes no side and no God at all?”
They had reached the crest of the hill. Jordan reined in his horse. Myra stopped too, and looked down the hill at the grey ribbon of the motorway and the white blocks of a service-station.
So close, all the time.
“You can walk from here,” Jordan said dryly. He took her horse’s reins as Myra dismounted. He soberly returned her holstered weapon, her passport and her phone.
“Oh, and to answer your question. There is no difference, in a sense. But to believe that God is in everything, and is on your side whatever you do and whatever happens, gives one a tremendous access of energy.” He grinned down at her. “Or so I’ve found.”
And with that, the agnostic fanatic was gone, swift on his horse.
Myra slogged down the hill to the service area, cleaned up, made some phone calls while she ate in the cafeteria, and hired a car to take her to London.
She arrived, through all the obstacles thrown up by the small battles on the way, on the evening of the following day. She had long since missed her appointment with the Foreign Office; she had told them that in advance, and they’d asked her to call back when she arrived, to make another.