‘Do you wish to make a complaint, citizen?’ the nearest Guard asked me, not turning round.
‘It’s OK officer,’ Annette said, grabbing my elbow and pulling me along. ‘Free speech…and you shut up!’ she added to me.
‘OK, OK.’ I walked quickly, shaking inside. Nothing – not Communists, not fascists, not authoritarians of any stripe – ever aroused in me the same homicidal rage as the Pro-Lifers. Whenever I came across them exercising their rights, I made damned sure I exercised my own.
I’d got used to living here, in what was officially called ‘the informal sector’: London’s shanty-town fringe, where the Republic’s experiments in local government overlay an experiment in anarcho-capitalism that made the space movement’s enterprise zones look over-regulated. The second, third, and subsequent storeys of most buildings were afterthoughts. Organic farming made the absence of sewage pipes something less than a disaster, but it didn’t make the night-soil tankers any less smelly. The exhaust fumes did. The population was a mixture of the native marginals and refugees from Europe’s and Asia’s wars. Not many beggars, but they were distressing enough: people whose protectors had skimped on their nuclear insurance policies.
Like I say, I was used to it, but at that moment – an after-effect of the clinic, or the picket – it all got too much.
‘I feel terrible,’ I said. ‘My head hurts, and my stomach feels like it’s been pumped.’
‘Oh, quit moaning,’ Annette said. ‘It’s no worse than a hangover.’
‘What a happy thought,’ I said. There was a pub on the pavement in front of us. ‘Half a litre of Amstel would just about hit the spot.’
Annette waved a Health Service handout in front of me. ‘It says here –’
‘Yes, I know what it says. Do I look like I’m about to be handling weapons or heavy machinery?’
‘I suppose not.’ She grinned and lowered herself into a plastic chair, perilously close to the gutter. ‘Pils for me. And those kebabs look good.’
I shouted the order to the garson, who disappeared through a hatch and re-emerged a minute later. There was the usual poster of Abdullah Ocalan above the hatch. I could never figure why even the exiles from Democratic Kurdistan – entrepreneurs to the bone – still honoured the Great Leader. Possibly a shakedown was going on in the townships. I made a mental note to have it checked out. There might be money in this for a defence company that could offer them a better deal than their Party’s protection racket. Or I might be misreading the situation entirely – nationalism was still as foreign to me as ever.
The crowd, Kurds and Turks mostly, flowed around the pavement pub. Behind us beasts and vehicles followed some unwritten highway code, in which precedence depended on a coefficient of momentum and noise. A television by the hatch showed a game-show from Istanbul. Overhead, airships drifted to the distant masts of Alexandra Port. I sat back, warmed by the sun and the spreading glow of the food and drink.
‘Did you dream?’ Annette asked.
I shook my head. ‘Did you?’
‘I thought I did,’ Annette said, smiling mysteriously. ‘I heard a warm, friendly voice and I saw a white light, and I remember thinking, “Great! I’m finally having a Near Death Experience!” and then the light was just sunlight, and the voice was the technician, counting.’
‘That’s the real thing,’ I said. ‘The sunlight really is the white light.’ This materialist insight was all that survived of a magic-mushroom trip I’d taken as a student. That and a vision of three goddesses: Mother Nature, Lady Luck and Miss Liberty, who were – I realised after coming down from it – necessity, chance and freedom, and indeed the rulers of all.
‘Imagine,’ Annette said, ‘if that’s the nearest we ever come to dying.’
‘Touch plastic!’ I rapped the table. We laughed, clasped hands across the table. I gazed at her face, aged but not deteriorated, its lines a map of her life’s laughter and grief, and I felt I could love her for ever.
‘“Till all the seas gang dry, my dear, and the rocks melt wi’ the sun…”’
‘Oh, stop it before I report you for senility.’
The traffic and the noise stopped. I looked over at the slowing cars, and thought everyone was looking at us. Turning the other way, I saw they were looking at the television. The commentary, and the loud conversations that suddenly replaced the hush, were all in Turkish and Kurdish. But the televion image needed no translation: a German tank, and a Polish road-sign.
Berlin – twenty-first century, pre-war Berlin, Old Berlin – was the most exciting city in Europe. The post-reunification construction boom was over by then but the intensity of business and pleasure didn’t miss a beat. Everybody who was anybody was either there or in London. In a sense the two capitals were moving in opposite directions, one recovering its national self-confidence, the other climbing down from its imperial pretensions. One, as it turned out, rearming, the other disarming…
Right now there was only one person I cared about in Berlin: Eleanor, there with her partner on a long weekend.
‘What do you do in a war, Jonathan?’
Eleanor’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Tanya, sounded more curious than anxious. It was one of those emergency family gatherings around telephones and televisions that went on all over the country in the first few hours of the conflict. Ours was in Eleanor’s front room in Finsbury Park. Her absence was ever-present. Many of our friends, and other relatives, were also in Berlin. People were calling them up on all possible channels. I had a paging programme pursuing Eleanor, and was trying to pull together an executive meeting at the same time, partly to keep my mind off her. Communications, not to my surprise, were slow.
What do you do in a war? With four generations of anti-militarists behind her, you’d think the kid would know.
‘You oppose it,’ I said. It didn’t seem a very enlightening answer. I set up the codes for yet another attempt at a conference link.
Angela, Eleanor’s eldest, laughed. ‘You’re incorrigible.’ She was passing out cups of coffee and tea. Good girl. She knew what do do in a war.
‘My grandparents were conscientious objectors in the First World War, and my parents in the Second, and I’m damned if I’ll miss the chance to do the same in the Third.’ The server wasn’t responding. I sighed and punched through a re-route command.
‘Yeah,’ Annette said, leaning back against my shins. ‘A conscientious objector with nuclear capability.’
‘Nuclear cover,’ I corrected. ‘Anyway, it won’t come to that. The Germans don’t have nukes.’
‘So they say.’
Annette was flipping channels, getting CNN downlink from the Polish front, WDR vox-pop from Berlin, Channel 4 News from the regional assemblies and the State and Federal Parliaments of Britain. With their hovercraft tank-transporters the German advance was the fastest ever seen. They used up combat drones like Khomeini and Mao used men. We weren’t in the war – yet. There were plenty in the opposition parties who wanted us to be. Lord Ashdown’s face popped up far too often for my liking.
‘No, so the FIS says, and they should bloody know, it’s their skins that’ll fry if – ah!’
I had a connection. An 0.1 scale image of a table with the others around it flashed up behind the screen on my lap. Of the committee at the time of the election, only Julie O’Brien and I remained. The rest were new faces. Almost a decade of social and political upheaval – the revolution, as everybody now called it – had winnowed the space movement’s libertarian cadre, most of whom were organised in FreeSpace. Some of the best had followed Aaronson and Rutherford to Woomera, where the British and Australian Republics ran their joint space programme. Others had defected to conventional politics, usually Republican but occasionally to wilder shores, even to the resurgent Trotskyism of the Workers’ Power Party or the proliferating single-issue campaigns. I was left with hardliners – young Turks (ha!) who saw me as a dangerous moderate.