‘What?’ Wilde challenged. ‘Tell me what you think I am.’
‘Instrumentum vocale,’ Reid said bitterly. ‘A tool that speaks. Jon Wilde is dead.’
He turned on his heel, sweeping up his companions with a brusque gesture, and stalked away.
14
Combat Futures
After the world war there was a world government. It was officially known as the United Nations, unofficially as the US/UN, and colloquially as the Yanks. It kept the peace, from space, or so it claimed. What it actually did was prevent innumerable tiny wars from becoming big wars. But in order to maintain its power, it needed the little wars, and they never stopped. We had war without end, to prevent war to the end. The US/UN kept the most advanced technology in its own hands, to keep it out of ‘the wrong hands’ – i.e., any hands that could be raised against the US/UN’s dominion. It was not as dreadful as generations of American dissidents had feared. It wasn’t, by a long way, as dreadful as generations of global idealists had hoped. That leaves a lot of leeway for bad government.
The Restoration Settlement, the fragmented system of ‘communities under the King’, was Britain’s contribution to the tale of infamy. In the interstices of the Kingdom all sorts of Free States flourished: regionalist, racialist, creationist, socialist; even – in the case of our own Norlonto – anarcho-capitalist.
The Kingdom was a caricature of a minimal state, which bore about the same relationship to my utopia as once-actually-existing-socialism did to my father’s. The people who did best of all under the arrangement were the marginals who squatted the countryside and called themselves New Settlers, and whom we city folk called new barbarians – ‘the barb’.
After twenty years of slow-burning war of all against all the Army of the New Republic proclaimed the Final Offensive for the fourth time.
‘You’ve got to talk to them,’ Julie said.
‘Why the fuck should I?’ I replied, not turning away from the window. The fine morning view of North London’s Greenbelt fringe was marred by puffs of white smoke from the far side of Trent Park. I counted several seconds before hearing the artillery’s dull thuds, couldn’t hear the shells burst. Over the horizon, probably. The Army of the New Republic was rumoured to have infiltrated Luton. Whatever the truth of that, Luton or somewhere nearby was taking a hammering from the Royal Artillery.
‘It’s your problem,’ I continued, facing her. In a way that had become familiar over the years, but which I’d never ceased to envy in the middle-aged of today, she seemed to have changed little between twenty and fifty. The most visible difference between my former Youth Organiser and the woman who now stood in my office was that she’d traded in her formerly unvarying cosmonaut jumpsuit for a more dignified crini-dress.
I, in my nineties now, was still tough and vigorous, strutting in the leather of my own skin, and my brain was still running sweet and clean, oiled by the foetal cell-lines. But the prolongation of life, and the prospect of its indefinite extension, had robbed me of the stoic maturity and detachment that had sometimes come to the truly aged of the past. I’d noticed in myself a hardening of the attitudes, a thinning of the spirit. The peaceful revolution that had established the original Republic I’d welcomed and tried to use; I’d plunged into the chaotic possibilities that accompanied that Republic’s violent end; but the imminent prospect of its violent renewal – new revolution or counter-restoration – now found me determined to do only what I could to survive this latest turning of the wheel, with no expectation that it would carry me anywhere.
Behind me the window rattled to an explosion followed by the scream of some missile’s passage, catching up too late. I must have given a start, because Julie’s smile was sly when she said,
‘It’s your problem too. Are you going to wait till the rockets come through the window?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But why do you want me to do it?’ My voice sounded querulous, to my annoyance. ‘Why not your own spokesfolk?’
Julie laughed down her nose. ‘Name them. You’re the one everybody’s heard of. Our grand old man.’
‘Oh, thanks.’
‘Also,’ she went on, ‘they insist on talking to you, because you weren’t involved in what the Republicans call the Betrayal.’
I suddenly found myself smoking a cigarette. (First of the day. One of these decades I’d have to quit for good, health risks or no health risks…)
‘But I was,’ I said. ‘Dammit, I helped the Hanoverian bastards draw up the maps.’
‘Yeah,’ Julie said. ‘And then we threw you out, remember?’
‘So?’
‘Well, everybody assumes it was because you were against the Settlement.’
‘What!’ I sat on the edge of the desk and laughed. ‘The organisation put that about?’
‘Not exactly,’ Julie said. ‘We just…didn’t contradict it. We could hardly denounce you for opportunism after we’d done the same thing ourselves.’
‘Of course you could,’ I said absently. ‘Didn’t I teach you anything?’
I’d just understood why, ever since the Settlement, my reputation had carried a mystique of irreproachability which in my actual political activity I’d done so little to deserve. It had helped me in my second career, a none-too-demanding history lectureship at North London University supplemented by more substantial writing than I’d ever had time for before. The writing had brought me to the unsought position of space-movement guru, more read about than read. The idle curiosity which had driven me to investigate and refute the conspiracy theory of history was hailed as a long-overdue revision of revisionist scholarship, my increasingly cynical journalism as the voice of the Movement’s radical conscience, challenging the inevitable compromises of its hands-off hegemony over Norlonto.
Julie was looking at her watch, wringing her phone, twitching her hair. Another rocket came in, closer this time. The gun-battery fell silent.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Take me to their leader.’
‘Only in a virtual sense,’ Julie said. ‘You take me to the Media Lab, or whatever it’s called these days, and I’ll patch you in.’
I picked up my jacket and computer and stubbed out my cigarette. ‘What about the students?’
‘That’s fixed,’ Julie said. ‘They’re on strike.’
‘Oh,’ I said, holding the door open as she steered her skirt through. ‘Where do they work?’
Whatever contribution to the struggle the students thought they were making by staying away, they’d have done better by coming in, to the Cable Room at least. In the Perry Anderson Building’s cool, quiet basement with its thin layer of natural light from slatted windows near the ceiling, cameras and screens and VR immersion gear lay amongst a clutter of notes and chewed pens and stained styrofoam cups. Julie powered up more and more cable and net connections, displaying a media battle almost as important as any on the ground.
Britain – ‘former Britain’ as the Yanks called it – was world news for a change, with the ANR allegedly poised to strike and the US/UN nerving itself for another bloody intervention. Meanwhile the local boards and channels were buzzing with rumour and debate. The ANR, for its part, was saying nothing, apart from a manifesto and a timetable showing exactly where and when they intended to strike. Tomorrow looked busy.