I toggled the output switch. Myra’s eyebrows flashed.
‘So?’
‘Sorry, Myra, no deal. Not our fight, and all that.’
Even on the tiny hand-held screen her face registered an increase in her weariness, but her voice conveyed no reproach when she said, ‘I understand. OK, Jon, I’ll try somewhere else. Signing off.’
‘Goodnight. See you again.’
She smiled as if this were some hopeless fancy. Her image shrank to a dot.
However momentous, in retrospect, my decision may seem, the fact is I slept well the rest of that night.
The next day the government lost a no-confidence motion (due to the abstention of only five MPs, the three Workers’ Power and two World Socialists) and fell, to be replaced by a more radical coalition drawing in support from the smaller parties. Neutrality was affirmed. The Upper House – elected now, but a transitional mix of old Lords and new Senators – debated the war issue separately, and came to a different conclusion. The first pro-war demonstrations, in the Midlands, were violently broken up by Republican Guards and Workers Power Party militants.
It was a bloody disgrace and we said so. At the same time – having won the argument in the committee – we started organising a campaign for neutrality and keeping out of the war. The UN imposed sanctions on Germany and Austria. The British ambassador walked out of the UN, a gesture which even I thought histrionic. It was to cost the Republic dear.
The Germans shelled Warsaw, live on CNN.
We didn’t hear from Eleanor over the whole of the following week. I have no memory of sleep in that week. Civil wars flared like secondary fires on the widening perimeter of the German advance. Britain edged close to it as the issue of joining the US/UN mobilisation against Germany became inseparable from the issue of the Republic. The government increasingly relied on support in the streets, as demonstrations against participation in the war multiplied and spread and clashed with pro-war demonstrations that demanded the old Britain back. The pro-war forces called us Huns. We called them Hanoverians. Neither side thought of the other as British any more.
The Germans reached the Ukrainian border, and stopped. The Poles, in headlong flight, plunged straight into the ongoing Ukrainian civil war. The British Chiefs of Staff presented an ultimatum to the government. Generals, leaders of the Unionist parties, and members of the pensioned-off, semi-privatised Royal Family made up a constant stream of visitors to the US Embassy. Reluctant Republican Guards, only doing their job, fought off determined demonstrators in Grosvenor Square. There was talk of a military coup.
Myra called again. The German offer had gone up to twenty million. I said no. Needless to say I never mentioned this to the rest of the committee.
My paging program almost reached Eleanor, at least twice.
There wasn’t a coup. Instead, the overseas parts of the British armed forces went to war without the government’s permission. Another government – civilian, spraying an inky cloud of constitutional justifications – was formed out of the opposition, the Lords and the King. It won immediate diplomatic recognition in the US and Britain’s vacant seat at the UN. It declared war on Germany.
The Poles regrouped, allied with a couple of Ukrainian factions and attacked the German concentrations. They used chemical weapons. Simultaneously, some Bosnian exiles – it was never established which nationality they came from – poisoned Hamburg’s water supply. The Germans rolled forward on all fronts. The French and Russians finally came off the fence on the Security Council.
The Republican government still controlled the internal forces of the country, while the Royal junta controlled the state’s external power. In a bizarre way they had to co-operate, or at least maintain a division of labour: while one was participating in American airdrops over the Balkans and naval manoeuvres in the Mediterranean, the other was frantically mobilising the civilian population for civil defence. In effect the Kingdom outlawed the past ten years of Britain’s history, while the Republic legalised a revolution.
It would have been an interesting revolution. Which of the competing extremisms – including ours – would have emerged victorious is still debated. As it is, I had an interesting week. The space movement really was as big as the old peace movement had been, and the rockets on our banners were our own. I left the demonstrations to those members of the committee who were good at that sort of thing, and spent my time obsessively organising militia and defence company patrols in the free-trade zones and the Greenbelt, negotiating with our contacts in the state apparatus and – in between times – writing more, faster, than ever. If I hadn’t been worried about Eleanor and in constant fear of German air-raids I’d have been even happier than I was. I had reached my Finland Station.
Someone was shaking my shoulder. I raised my head from my forearms and looked about. It was 10.15 a.m., and I was at my desk in the FreeSpace office. I must have closed my eyes for a moment about six hours earlier. The office was crowded but quiet. People were looking at screens, not at me; except for Annette, who was holding onto me, staring.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Somebody’s nuked Kiev.’
‘Oh, my God.’
I stood up. She buried her face in my shoulder. I held on to her as sobs made her quake, and glared about until someone silently pushed a screen into view. An entire German army had been wiped out by an airburst over the otherwise empty Ukrainian capital. Within minutes, as I watched, the same thing happened on the southern front, in Baku. The Russian and Turkish armies were both in action now, and news was coming through of British and American landings on the Aegean coast.
And Israel had declared war on Germany. It was ridiculous. What could they do? I thought, and then I suddenly realised that they’d probably just done it.
I flipped to N-TV for the reaction from Germany. A reporter was talking to the camera, in front of the Bundestag. He was saying something about Frankfurt, and he sounded terrified.
He clapped a hand to his ear, tilting his head.
His face paled, and the screen went white.
His voice, if you could call it that, continued for some time.
The war had ended. The peace process began. For Britain it began with stealth bombers and cruise missiles, and continued with paratroopers and teletroopers and lynch-mobs. The Royalist junta, its American allies and the British counter-revolutionary mobs between them killed about a hundred thousand people in six days. After that they had a country that knew its place in the New World Order.
It was still ungovernable. Under the Republic’s reforms, freeing up the housing, education and labour markets, there had already developed a tendency towards differentiation – self-ghettoisation, as I saw it, especially when it wasn’t spontaneous but promoted by the Republic’s unfortunate encouragement of identity politics. Bombing, invasion and civil war hardened the tendency into an irresistible force, as every minority fled to the dubious safety of its own tribe. Regional assemblies took the hint and drew old borders in fresh blood: North Wales, South Wales, Cumbria, West Scotland, East Scotland…even our own Greenbelt and free trade zones became safe havens, refugees piling in on top of refugees. The militias defended the area as best they could.
The final session of the Republic’s Federal Assembly passed its authority over to the Army Council, a body made up of the few senior officers who had stayed loyal. It called on the civilian population to avoid needless sacrifice and to resume armed resistance ‘at such time or times as the Army Council of the Army of the New Republic shall decide’. They thus gave a shred of legal cover to an indefinitely prolonged campaign of merciless terrorism, as they well knew. Then they all walked out of the former main workshop of the Ford Motor Company’s Dagenham site into the withering fire of the surrounding tanks.