Two days later I sat in a room at the back of a Greenbelt shebeen with a group of men and women who, thanks to my negotiations, had emerged blinking from hideouts and camps and cells. I explained to them that they had the chance to try out their ideas on a couple of million more or less enthusiastic people, with minimal interference from a state only too glad to have this explosive and impoverished mass off its hands. I told them the only price for this was a de facto acknowledgement of that state’s authority, and the renunciation of an untested nuclear deterrent about which most of them had mixed feelings and which was now obsolete.
I didn’t expect gratitude or agreement, and I didn’t get them. What I got was comrades falling over each other to denounce me. I’d expected that. Being expelled from the organisation came as a surprise. The vote was unanimous. Et tu, Julie.
‘Good day to you, comrades,’ I said. ‘And good luck.’
I stood up and pushed back my chair and ducked out of the door and walked away. Two days after my expulsion, US/UN crack troops took over and disarmed every surface-based deterrence exporter. The renegade subs took longer, but they were rounded up too. Among other consequences, my ex-comrades didn’t have our nuclear policy to bargain with, so they had to settle for a smaller Norlonto than I’d been offered.
It served them right, but I wished they could have kept Islington. The Christian fundamentalists got it, and set about ethically cleansing the place. Eleanor and her family had to abandon Finsbury Park. They moved in with us and it was months before they found a new house.
I was getting too old for that sort of thing.
13
The Court of the Fifth Quarter
Why couldn’t we have gone in through the canals?’ Wilde grumbled, as he booted yet another inquisitive machine away from his ankle. Several hours of difficult progress through back alleys, with the expedition crunching and stomping and shooting their way over and past assorted mechanical vermin, lay behind the strain in his tone and the strength of his kick.
‘Ha!’ Tamara snorted. ‘You seen the canals around here?’
‘As it happens,’ said Wilde, ‘no, I haven’t.’
‘And you don’t want to.’ Tamara flattened herself against a wall and signalled back to the others to halt. ‘But you will.’
She poked a device like a long electric torch past the corner, and waved it back and forth, keeping an eye on the readings on a handheld meter and the view on a wrist-screen.
‘OK,’ she announced. ‘No sapients. Looks fairly safe. One at a time. Deploy to the centre of the street, spread out, then single file to the right. Go.’
She ran out into the middle of the road, which was about fifty metres wide and obsessively well-paved. Along the centre were empty plinths of concrete like traffic-islands. Tamara bounded up on to the one facing the alley, looked around again and beckoned to Wilde. He dashed after her and jumped up beside her.
‘Cover my back,’ she said. Wilde stood behind her and began scanning up and down the street, his pistol held in both hands, close to his waist. The street had its own strange pedestrians: robots of various shapes and sizes clambering walls, edging along pavements. One or two bowled down the permanent way, in light wheeled vehicles. Ethan had to dodge one of these smartly as he ran over. It sounded a subsonic siren that set everyone’s teeth on edge.
‘You look like you know what you’re doing,’ he said to Wilde, as he stationed himself a couple of metres further back along the plinth.
‘Trained in the militia,’ Wilde grinned. ‘Mind you, it was a long – look out!’
A black, winged missile was hurtling towards them. Wilde raised his pistol to head height and shot it. It came down and hit the roadway in a shower of feathers.
‘Pigeon,’ said Ethan. ‘Take it easy, man. They’re harmless.’
When the alarm spread by this incident had been calmed, the deployment continued. After a minute or two they proceeded behind Tamara along the canyon of office-buildings. Somewhere a couple of streets away, an automated process was sending gouts of flame high in the air at irritatingly irregular intervals. Between flares, the illumination of the buildings themselves was almost as unpredictable: some windows dark, full of the expedition’s reflections as they passed; others, at street-level or high up on the faces of the buildings, lit from within. Shadows and silhouettes moved, but not those of humans. At the same time, it was impossible to believe that a robot-based commercial life was going on; it was all too random, too artificial.
At the next major junction the street they were on crossed one that was narrower, but much more crowded: a slowly moving river of metallic machinery, over which faster entities skittered and skipped.
‘Makes you sick,’ Ethan muttered. ‘Some of the big ’uns would make bloody good cars.’
‘You pay me enough, I’ll catch you one,’ Tamara told him. She waved them all into a skirmish line, again keeping Wilde next to her.
‘Right,’ she said, swinging her back-pack to the ground. ‘Time to hack through the jungle.’
She unbuckled the pack and tugged down the flaps, exposing a piece of equipment with a small keypad, extensible aerials, rows of meters and screens.
‘Amazing,’ said Wilde. ‘Popular mechanics! Amateur radio!’
‘Heap of junk,’ Tamara said. ‘No fucker will miniaturise it. Not enough demand.’
‘You put this together yourself?’
She looked at him. ‘Wouldn’t trust anybody else to.’
Her fingers flew over the keypad. Screens flickered, tiny speakers howled and stabilised.
‘Gotcha! Traffic channel.’
She twirled a knob, looked up at the machines passing like cattle ahead. Made some adjustment, twirled it again. A ten-metre-long crawling machine suddenly swerved right across the road. The machines behind it piled implacably into it and within seconds formed a mounting heap of wheeled or tracked robots. As those in front of it kept moving, a space soon cleared.
Tamara was still watching the feedback.
‘Fucking go! Go! Go!’ she yelled.
The others sprinted across.
Tamara lifted the pack, leaving the control-panels exposed.
‘Still here?’ she said to Wilde. ‘Shit, OK, let’s move it.’
She sidled across the road, Wilde at her back keeping lookout. A machine on four long, stalked legs, its body about the size of a melon, with a cluster of lenses at its front, suddenly reared above the pile-up and scanned them.
‘What’s that?’
Tamara looked up and stopped.
‘Don’t move,’ she said.
Wilde held his breath, and froze in the act of looking over his shoulder at the machine. The lenses withdrew, and another tubelike extension moved into position. Tamara stabbed frantically at the keypad.
‘Shoot!’ she yelled.
Wilde jumped and turned, but it wasn’t him she was calling to. A volley came from the far side of the street, knocking the machine over. Tamara and Wilde ran to join the others.
‘Shit,’ said Ethan. ‘That one was sapient.’
‘I never hunt sapients,’ Tamara said, gasping and rubbing the small of her back. ‘Don’t mind killing the little fuckers, though.’
They moved on; over a bridge that gave Tamara an opportunity to point out to Wilde exactly why using the canals for transport in the machine domains was not a good idea; and on until they saw, in a wide park at the end of the long avenue, a scrap-metal stockade.
‘Talgarth’s court,’ Tamara said.
As they walked up they were swept by sonic scans that set their teeth buzzing, laser scans that made them blink and curse.