‘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.’
10
Tested on Animals
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.