‘Before any entrepreneurs of the apocalypse rush forward, however, let me give you a warning.’
He turns and points a shaking finger at Wilde, who’s observing Reid’s performance with an expression of insolent detachment.
‘Don’t follow any suggestions from this…thing that calls itself Jonathan Wilde! This thing which admits it is a creature of the robot Jay-Dub!’
He pauses and takes a deep breath, and faces Talgarth. ‘Esteemed Senior, I have a heavy responsibility before the people of New Mars. I allowed the robot Jay-Dub to continue in existence, after I had grounds to suspect that it was corrupted by the original fast folk, in the Malley Mile. It has repeatedly, in person and through its golem here – and, for all we know, through manipulation over the years of the so-called abolitionist movement – urged on us the disastrous course of re-running the fast folk. Whose interests, I ask you, would that serve?’
Talgarth makes no reply.
Reid, as if in sudden disgust with the whole business, gives a backward shake of his arm above his head and stalks back to his seat. But he doesn’t sit down. His supporters rise with him, and others in the crowd stand too.
Reid reaches inside his jacket, and there’s a sudden frenzy of movement as the crowd separates – some fleeing the confrontation, others closing with one side or the other. Tamara, and some people Dee doesn’t know but Ax – going by his eager comments – does, form a barrier around Wilde. The cameras bob about, the factions face each other arms in hand.
Talgarth is speaking urgently into his right lapel, and making equally urgent gestures. Dee notices the weapons on the stockade’s iron walls swivel on their mounts, swing around and bear inward and down.
One floating camera suddenly spins and zooms in on the gate, which has opened, unnoticed. The rounded prow of a great armoured vehicle noses in. Dee looks away from the television window to the window screens, and sees another angle on the same view. The intruding vehicle is their own.
16
The Winter Citizen
I woke to the sound of armour in the streets, and lay on my back for a while staring up through the hexagon panes of the dome at the pale cold sky. It was ten o’clock. I’d slept in, but the ANR, as usual, had arrived on time. After yesterday’s exhausting round of television interviews and visits – actual and virtual – to militia units, I felt I had a right to a rest. I no longer even had the responsibility of being Norlonto’s nominal dictator – I’d resigned as chairman of the Defence Liaison Committee as soon as the last militia commander had come on side.
An airship floated by above, its shape distorted by the ripples of the glass. Then another, and another, close behind. I wondered if a lot of people were getting out before the state moved in. Doubtless there were those who didn’t want to hang around for questioning: Hanoverian recusants, spillover from the civil war, Army deserters…perhaps even space movement libertarian idealists, off to grab a place on a launch vehicle before Earth’s exit hatch shut down completely, as the more alarmist ones thought it might. And now, after twenty-odd years as a denizen of a functioning anarchy, I was a citizen again. The tanks and APCs continued to trundle by outside, the airships and helicopters to drift or buzz past above. Annette mumbled and stirred beside me. I ran my fingers over her long white hair and slid from under the duvet, hastily wrapped her fur coat around me and padded down the stair-ladder from our nest under the top of the dome.
I printed off newspapers and fired up a pot of coffee and went to the door. Our housing association’s cluster of domes was set back a little from the street, among paths and ponds, lawns and cannabis gardens. Children raced about, chickens strutted their fenced-in runs. Only the dogs still bothered to react to the Army’s passage.
The tanks, as always, moved faster and quieter than you’d expect. The soldiers sitting on them wore ANR uniforms customised with bandanas and bandoliers and the insignia of forces they’d defected from or defeated. They chewed or smoked and looked down their noses at us, discordant rock music blaring from sound-systems. I stood for a long time, shivering, shanks prickling, and watched.
Then I stooped and picked up our deliveries: juice, milk, eggs, bread and rolls. The bags and cartons had a fur of frost over them; they must have been there for hours. Not much petty crime in Norlonto. I wondered how long that would last. As I fried eggs and bacon and tore off pages from the papers a supermarket bill caught my eye. In our division of domestic labour, shopping was down to Annette. The price of coffee and cigarettes shocked me, the price of local foodstuffs gave some comfort. I checked the delivery bill.
Fruit juice cost about ten times as much as milk. Nothing to do with the inflation – that only applied to the Republic’s official joke currency, and we paid in good South African gold.
Crazy prices. What was the world coming to?
There I was, thinking like an old man. I shook my head and carried Annette’s breakfast and a wad of her favoured newspapers upstairs. Then I washed and dressed and settled down to my own breakfast and news, trying to figure it out.
I was on my second coffee and first cigarette before I remembered that these, like the fruit juice, were imported. For a wild moment I wondered if the Republic had slapped on taxes or tariffs, then realised that such an outrage would hardly have passed me by. I’d have heard about the riots; heck, I’d have been in the riots.
A trawl through the Economist’s database set me straight. Raw-material prices had risen sharply over the six months since the Fall Revolution, while the prices of finished goods and services had dropped. There were plenty of articles explaining why, which in my absorption in our little local difficulties I’d overlooked.
The defeat of the US/UN, and the collapse of its financial scams such as the IMF and World Bank, had had divergent effects. The primary products tended to come from the less developed areas, the old Second and Third Worlds. Their instabilities made our civil wars look like peaceful picketing. Without the empire to police them, protection costs and risk had gone up. Meanwhile, in the more advanced regions, the reduction in taxes – and the end of the headlock on technological development imposed by UN arms control – had allowed manufacturing to enjoy a spurt of growth. Even nanotechnology looked as if it might come on-line at last, if only somebody could entice its best minds out of hiding.
So much for the price of coffee. What was still bothering me was why we weren’t as poor as we should have been. My income from the university had dropped to a token stipend, as the only lectures currently being given there were from the ignorant to each other. (God, let them grow out of that. Soon.) Royalties from my writings had gone up, but not by much, because most of the increased circulation was of those I’d disdained to copyright. Our pension funds were paying out regularly, but they were pretty basic and they certainly hadn’t gone up. And yet – unlike most people since the Revolution – we hadn’t had to tighten our belts.
I keyed up our bank statements and almost spilled a mug of expensive instant coffee. An ordinary expensive cigarette smouldered undrawn to a butt. Our regular income had indeed dwindled, but the balance was being made up by increased payments from my small, almost-forgotten stake in Space Merchants. I cursed the fund-management software for letting me eat my capital, then called it up.
We weren’t eating my capital. We were using up part of the income, and a small part at that. The value of my stake had increased far more than I’d ever expected, and had almost doubled since the Revolution. We were moderately, comfortably, and inexplicably rich.