He beckoned Reid’s adviser, and after they had conferred again he banged his gavel.
‘Reid does not contest his responsibility for the fact of Wilde’s death.’ He held out an open hand to Wilde. ‘You may proceed.’
‘Ax?’
No response. Ax is watching television in his head, or in front of his eyes, or whatever the hell he does. Dee can’t stand his autistic but audible interest for a second longer. She leans over and shakes his shoulder. He rouses himself and frowns up at her.
‘Wha –?’
‘Ax,’ she says patiently, ‘would you mind patching this fascinating material to a screen, so I can see it too?’
‘Oh. Sorry, Dee.’
He disengages from the cortical downlink and fiddles with switches. Outside, on the big screens, the outskirts of the Fifth Quarter roll slowly past. Dee watches the chaotic activity with disdainful dismay. If this is how machines behave when they’re left to run wild, she reflects, it’s no wonder humans mistrust them.
Around the crawler, which is making its way up a broad street, dozens of other machines, each about thirty centimetres long, are scurrying and sniffing about. They look like larger versions of the cleany-crawlies you find in houses, and although partly autonomous they’re guided by radio control from the cab. Meg has told her they’re looking for traces of a specific poison: one of the public-health countermeasures with which this place is periodically bombarded. The poisons – generically known as Blue Goo – are the nanotechnological equivalent of viruses, regularly updated and mutated to keep pace with the likewise evolving smart-matter wildlife of the machine domains. The job of spraying them from the air is done by a charity, which has no difficulty at all in raising money and volunteers.
Ax gestures to her to look behind her. Part of the screen she turns to gets masked as another window clicks up. It’s the Legal Channels service, showing the court case. Wilde – or Jay-Dub, as Dee finds herself mentally calling him – and Meg have been keeping an eye on it, when they can spare a moment. Ax has been given the task of keeping a close eye on it. Dee has been feeling left out, and wonders if the others have been trying to spare her feelings. Nice of them, but a waste of time.
Because, whatever bad news the court case may bring her, it’s all irrelevant now. As Ax said, that shit is over.
Wilde has apparently just finished speaking. He turns away from the judge, Eon Talgarth. Even Dee’s heard of Talgarth, a former crim from the Malley Mile orbital camp, who studied law as a prisoner; got involved in, then disillusioned with, abolitionism; and has for years made a living adjudicating disputes between scrappies and between machines.
As Wilde turns away the camera follows his face, and he gives it a slow, arrogant grin.
‘Well that was some speech!’ says the breathless commentator. ‘He looked quite annoyed when he described his killing – his alleged killing I should say! Sorreee! And nobody’s ever suggested before that we might owe the dead their back pay! For the implications of that please see –’
Ax snips that particular thread and all Dee hears now is the silence in court as Reid strides to the mike. His face makes her quail. She’s hardly ever seen him angry, and never with her, but she knows his anger is to be feared and right now he’s angry at the whole world.
The camera circles around behind Talgarth. Reid’s more composed now, and Dee feels proportionately calmer – in fact, as she gazes at the close-up, she feels the stirring of an involuntary affection and desire. It’s all the more disturbing in that she feels it as a person, not as a slave, but she puts it down to her past and concentrates on what the man is saying.
‘Senior Talgarth,’ he says heavily, ‘what we have just heard is a disgrace to this court, and an insult to the intelligence of us all. It is also dangerous, in stirring up an opportunistic envy that has no place in a basically just society such as ours, where no person is reduced to selling their lives or labour to those more successful than themselves.’
‘Objection!’ comes a shout from Wilde.
‘Sustained,’ says Talgarth sternly. ‘We aren’t here as a public forum.’
Reid dips his head. (Dee hears Ax, behind her, snort.)
‘The point,’ Reid continues, ‘is that my opponent has asserted that those with an interest in the dead have a claim against me, because I’ve made no attempts in good faith – as he puts it – to tackle the immense task of finding a way to bring about the resurrection of the stored dead. Well, Esteemed Senior, good people, that is a task which I freely admit is beyond my capacities!’ He spread his hands and shrugged. ‘Have I ever prevented anyone else from putting forward a proposal to tackle it? No! Because, as we all know, the real problem is finding a way to contain those whose help we need to raise the dead. The fast folk, those who once were human and whose minds, and motives, developed far beyond human comprehension or control. They are the ones I could awaken, if I wished. They are the ones who could awaken the human dead, who sleep in the same storage-media as they do. And they are the ones who could, in the blink of an eye, turn this planet into the kind of hell that some of us glimpsed, a hundred of our long years ago.’
His gaze focuses on Eon Talgarth, and Dee feels only the slipstream of his passionate plea: ‘Esteemed Senior! I know your memory is not so short! Strike down this claim before it does more harm!’
He looks around once more, and resumes his seat.
Talgarth sips from a glass, and lights a cigarette. He contemplates the smoke for a few moments, then leans forward, elbows on knees. His posture makes a strange contrast to the formality of his attire, and, as if noticing this, he removes his hat.
‘Means he’s talking off the record,’ Ax explains.
‘But we can hear him!’ says Dee.
‘Figure of speech,’ says Jay-Dub, from the virtual cab up front. ‘Ssh.’
Dee, somewhat chastened, looks away for a moment and notices that the crawler is idling at the end of the broad street. The subaltern machines have returned, whether in defeat or success she doesn’t know. Ahead, there’s a grassy park with some fortification in the centre. Above it she detects a cloud of gnat-like flying-machines.
‘Ah, Reid,’ Talgarth is saying, ‘you were always a fine speaker, and I hear what you say. But between you an’ me, if you catch my drift, Wilde has made a valid point about how we could do it off-planet, safe in space, like, and you haven’t answered that, have you?’
Reid raises a hand placatingly to Talgarth, who leans back and replaces his judicial hat. Then Reid turns to the stiffly dressed woman beside him and has a murmuring consultation, from which the camera – as required – cuts away. It pans to Wilde, who’s sitting with –
‘Tamara!’ Dee and Ax exclaim delightedly.
‘Good for her,’ says Jay-Dub.
Back to Reid, who’s just angrily shrugged off the woman’s hand and is walking towards the camera and the mike, followed only by the woman’s open-mouthed dismay.
‘I didn’t want it to come to this,’ Reid says, all conventional courtesy discarded as he speaks to the world, and the court only as an afterthought. ‘But enough is enough. Sure, “we” could do it in space! Tell me, who’s this “we”? If anyone has the capital to spare for a deep-space station and a ring of laser-cannon shielded against any viral programs that could be sneaked into its controls, and a foolproof procedure worked out and hair-trigger, dead-fall nuclear back-ups in place, they can go right ahead! Be my guest! I’ll sell you the fucking dead, and the demons who could raise them. Go ahead! Have another crack at immanentizing the eschaton!