February, 2046. The coldest winter in years. People said there was a hole in the greenhouse, as they lit fires with yesterday’s money.
We had our own greenhouse, our geodesic dome on the edge of the Trent Park, near the university. The students were occupied with making mistakes about democracy and elitism that had been considered passé when I was at Glasgow. I left them to it. Annette moved slowly about her horticultural experiments, with a lab-coat made of fur. I rattled out net propaganda, spoke myself hoarse on the cable, convened virtual meetings of Norlonto’s factions and hammered out a line to take to the national government.
For relaxation I talked to people in space. Beyond the Lagrange settlements and the Moon it was easier by email, a more natural medium given the lightspeed lag. Asteroid miners solemnly asked my advice about mutual banking, Martian colonists grumbled about being abandoned now that Space Defense was being cut back. Soldiers’ councils on former Space Defense battlesats bounced ideas off me for profitable ways to use laser cannon. (They were good kids, really, or they’d have thought of the obvious way.)
Meanwhile the civil wars went on. The Republic’s modest aim of combining national unity with local autonomy clashed repeatedly with locals whose idea of autonomy was a good deal more expansive. As a state, the Republic was in many ways weaker than the Kingdom – with its ever-present, over-the-horizon orbital back-up – had ever been. More fundamentally, the revolution had put everything up for grabs: created incentives to defection, as the game theorists put it.
Refugees poured into Norlonto from the countryside, and continued their fights in the shanty-towns and camps. The strain on our charities and defence-companies alike increased by the week, and every week I shouted at their organisers to recruit new workers from among the refugees themselves.
That worked until it became difficult to tell just who was recruiting whom. Competing cop companies found themselves literally in rival armed camps, whose quartermasters, as like as not, were authorised charity distributors. We called it the Thailand Syndrome.
The weekly meetings of the Defence Liason Committee became daily, or rather, nightly. They usually began at 9.00 p.m. and went on until after midnight. This was all right by me. My sleep requirements had diminished with age. I resented having to go into VR, but that’s life. Every evening I’d take the washing-up gloves off, pull the datagloves on, give Annette a smile across the cleared table and put on the glasses and –
Be there. Some of us fancied ourselves as Heroes In Hell, and the setting was appropriate: a black infinity around us, and between us a round table with a common view of Norlonto, or London, or whatever we wanted to examine; a camera obscura view, patched together from satellite pictures and enhanced with all the data we could pull in. At this level there were thirteen of us, always a lucky number for a committee. Our fetches – our body-images in the virtual world – were the same as our actual forms, mainly so that we could recognise each other in real life or on television.
The night of the big crisis we were one short. I looked around, worried. Julie was there, Mike Davis, Juan Altimara, all from different tendencies of the space movement; a pair of identical youths whom I’d mentally tagged ‘the Mormon missionaries’ though actually they were from the Norlonto churches’ protection charity, the St Maurice Defence Association; and – moving from the voluntary sector to the commercial – a handful of defence company delegates who changed from week to week and always looked alarmingly young and pathetically exhausted, and always squabbled with the leftists –
‘Where’s Catherin Duvalier?’ She was young, fast, smart: a communist militia co-ordinator whose intelligence networks extended through the Green camps to the distant battles in the hills.
Julie smiled at me from across the table’s bright gulf.
‘Cat’s getting married tomorrow. Sends her apologies.’
‘No excuse,’ I grunted, but I was relieved we hadn’t had a defection, or indeed a casualty. ‘OK, comrades. First business.’
I keyed up the day’s trading figures for defence shares and combat futures. They were rising fast.
‘Well, chaps,’ I said to the defence-agency boys, ‘do you know something we don’t?’
A flicker of data interchange set the fetches wavering as if in a heat-haze. Then, their hasty conferring over, one of them spoke up.
‘We were about to say, Mr. Wilde…’
Oh, sure.
‘…all our companies have been separately approached today about, ah, potential conflict situations. It seems that once again a large number of street-owners have made deals to allow passage of, uh, armoured columns –’
‘You mean the Army’s coming in?’
Virtual eyes heliographed shock around the table.
‘Yes,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘We’ve been instructed to inform you that the government has decided to end Norlonto’s anomalous status – their words. It’s been done at the request of a significant part of the business community and a number of Norlonto’s more, uh, settled neighbourhood associations –’
‘Bastards!’ shouted Julie. She rounded on the ‘Mormon Missionaries’. ‘Did you know anything about this?’
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ one of them said. ‘We’ve been passing on the complaints from our clients for weeks. The situation really is becoming quite intolerable, especially for the less fortunate. I assure you all that the Association knew nothing of this, but I can’t say I’m surprised or sorry.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘when do the tanks roll in?’
‘Day after tomorrow,’ one of the agency reps said. ‘Show of force, and all that. Order on the streets.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘That gives us time to organise.’
‘Resistance?’ Several voices said it at the same time, in dismay or hope.
‘No,’ I said grimly. ‘Retreat. Tell your principals, and the government, that there’ll be no trouble from the militia.’
I looked around the table, my hand on the databoard of the real table tapping out an urgent message to the space movement people to stay behind. ‘Meeting’s adjourned. See you all tomorrow.’
‘What the fuck are you playing at, Wilde?’ Julie asked, when the charities and the businesses had left the scene. ‘We can’t take this lying down. It’ll be the end of Norlonto!’
Mike Davis and Juan Altimara nodded indignant agreement.
‘Oh ye of little faith,’ I said. ‘Of course it’ll be the end of Norlonto. I seem to recall that most of you were not too keen on the beginning of Norlonto.’
Juan, who’d arrived in Norlonto as a child refugee from Brazil’s brief biowar during the Amazonian Secession, looked at Mike and Julie. The fungal scar on his cheek twisted as he frowned.
‘I did not know this,’ he said.
Julie flushed, Mike fiddled with his bat switch: ‘Heat out the roof, now,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘Point is, like, Norlonto’s been a bastion of liberty for years, a successful experiment, and you want to let the statists march in without firing a shot!’
‘Excuse me, comrades,’ I said, ‘but who’s capitulating to statism here?’ I was rummaging around in the virtual depths of the table, illuminating likely routes for the incursion and checking them against the movements of insurance ratings, defence-agency deployments, militia strongpoints. ‘The way I see it, if the clients of the various defence agencies, if the communities and property-owners of this town want to make a deal with a nationalised defence industry, what business is it of ours? Isn’t that anarcho-capitalism in action?’