‘Capitalists selling out the anarchy, more like!’ said Julie.
‘As they have a right to do,’ Mike said. ‘Yeah, I have to agree with Jon here. Still, it means we’ve failed.’
Julie and Juan were both inspecting the enhanced map take shape. They looked up, looked at each other.
‘We don’t have to fail,’ Juan said. ‘The militia’s strong enough to hold off the Republic’s forces. We have time to rally the population. The Army can’t get away with a massacre in its own capital – even the Hanoverians held back from that.’
‘They’re getting away with murder in the countryside,’ I said. ‘You ever listen to any of the refugees?’
Julie gave this comment a flick of the hand. ‘If you believe the whining of those people the Republic’s a monstrous tyranny, which it obviously isn’t, so –’
‘So why are you so worried about having their troops on the streets?’
‘Because –’ Julie looked at me as if I was missing something so obvious she was having trouble believing she had to spell it out. ‘Because it’s our town, dammit! Our free city! We can’t let the state roll in after all this time. We should crack down on the camps ourselves, do it now, chase those mafias and renegade militias out and get rid of even that excuse for the Army coming in. If we move now we could do it tonight!’
I could see Mike taking heart at this suggestion, while my own heart sank. I wished Catherin Duvalier had picked a different day to get hitched. The argument went on.
A butterfly flew out of the infinite darkness around us and settled on the table, wings quivering.
‘Oh, shit,’ it said in Annette’s voice. ‘I hope I’ve got this damn’ thing working –’
‘We see you, Annette,’ I said. ‘What are you doing? How did you get here?’
I felt her hand, eerily invisible, brush the back of mine.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I know I’m not supposed to be here, and I haven’t hacked in or anything. In real life I was sitting across a table from Jon, and I could see what he was saying, and I’ve come round beside him and piggybacked in on his link, and I’ve been circling around this conversation –’
‘This is a security risk!’ Juan said.
‘This is no security risk, this is my wife,’ I said. ‘She’s the one who keeps my physical location secure while I’m here, and always has done. So shut up, comrade, and let’s hear what she has to say. If that’s all right with everybody.’ I glared across the map-table and they all, eventually, nodded.
‘OK,’ Annette said. In real life she slid on to my lap and put an arm around my shoulders; in VR she flew up, agitated, then began swooping and fluttering round the map, as if drawn to its lights. ‘You say that letting the Republic take over Norlonto would be a terrible defeat and disgrace. All right. Even Jon thinks that, I’m sure. But have you thought what a defeat and disgrace it would be to go down in blood? Or to win, and become a state yourselves? You’d have to fight not just the Army but the security companies, and that would be the end of the free market anarchy you’re so proud of. As for driving out the refugees – and that’s what you’re really talking about, Julie – it wouldn’t just be wrong, it would be used for years as evidence that what we have here is no different from what they have there.’
She settled in my lap, and on the map. ‘But if you let the Army in, what do you think will happen? The Army will get sucked into our way of doing things – the economic way, not the political way. They’ll have to do deals and trade combat futures and take disputes to court companies and swap laws and all the rest of it.’
‘How do you know they won’t just do things their way?’ Mike asked.
‘Because Julie’s right,’ Annette said. ‘They don’t want a fight on their hands. They don’t want to conquer us, they want to buy us off. In fact it looks like they already have bought off the defence companies. And what’s bought can be sold. Before they know it they’ll be practising anarcho-capitalism without believing a word of it.’
‘Just like every other group that’s come in here,’ Julie said sourly. ‘And look where that’s got us.’
‘Yes, look,’ I said. ‘It’s got us twenty years of peace and freedom, and tolerance between people who jointly and severally hated each others’ guts!’
Juan, Mike and Julie had to laugh. It was a notorious fact that libertarians in Norlonto were rarer than communists in what Reid used to call the workers’ states.
‘I think Annette has a point,’ I said carefully, as if it wasn’t what I’d been thinking all along and hadn’t got around to articulating (I could never have gotten away with the passionate pacifism of her appeal). ‘There’s another point we’ve tended to forget, and it’s been bugging me recently. Over the years we’ve got so caught up in running Norlonto, in as much as it hasn’t run itself, that we’ve tended to ignore what’s been going on in space. I know, I know, it’s been a sort of socialism-in-one-country versus world revolution thing, and Space Defense held the high orbits, and apart from Alexandra Port there wasn’t much practical we could do. I remember years ago some of us tried setting up experimental laser-launchers, and got stomped on from a great height. But now Space Defense is out on a limb, and we have friends – comrades – in Lagrange and on the Moon trying to build ecosystems out of a rag, a bone and a tank of air. It’s about time we did something about it. So I say, if the statists want Norlonto, let ’em have it. We can find better things to do.’
I sat back, feeling Annette’s weight shift too, seeing the butterfly image tremble. The other three space movement leaders were looking at me and communicating under the table – as it were – with each other. I hoped they would be at least secretly relieved at the idea of saving the Movement’s honour by not fighting.
Juan’s fetch glowed with incoming information, dopplered back to an image of himself.
‘OK, Wilde,’ he said. ‘We think we can sell it. Get ready to wake up early. Julie’s going to fix up interviews with you on as many channels as possible. Now, I suppose it’s time to…’
‘Get back to your constituencies, and prepare for government,’ I said.
Nobody laughed.
When the others had faded from view I moved to take the VR glasses off, and felt Annette’s hands catch my wrists.
‘No,’ she said. She swooped into my face, passed out at the back and came around again. ‘This is fun. Why didn’t you tell me about it before?’
She stood up, dragged me out of the chair and pulled me down on the real table, the virtual image of our stateless state swaying in front of my eyes. We groped and fumbled and fucked on the kitchen table, on the mapped city, while above us two butterflies mated in the infinite dark.
15
Another Crack at Immanentizing the Eschaton
Dee is experiencing her first guilty pleasure. The pleasure comes from sitting on the grassy, boulder-strewn side of a valley, under Earth’s sun. The sky is a different blue, the clouds a different white, to anything she’s ever seen, even in her Story dreams. At the bottom of the valley, far below her, a brown river tumbles over black stones. Farther down the valley, the peace of the scene is disrupted by the clangour of construction on a vast pylon. But from where Dee sits, the distant noise only emphasises the surrounding quiet; the rush of work by half-a-dozen tiny, scrambling figures only reminds her that she has nothing to do but relax, and breathe deep of the clean, thick air of Earth.