‘Any chance of a lift, mate?’ he yelled. The driver, a lad about Jordan’s age, looked at him doubtfully for a moment, noticed the rucksack and leaned over to open the door.
‘Thanks.’ Jordan followed the rucksack inside.
His disconcerting capacity to lie went into overdrive.
‘Oh, man,’ he said, ‘am I glad to see you! My company does a lot of business with this lot, and just before we closed today they asked me to nip up to the port and deliver a stack of manuals and catalogues to one of their reps.’ He hefted his luggage. ‘Weighs a ton, too. You’d think in this day and age…’
‘Yeah,’ said the driver. ‘Don’t I know it? They just don’t trust the networks, that’s why they have to put that stuff on paper. Don’t want their ideas ripped off, you know? Mind you, between you and me I dunno why they bother. Know what I’ve got in the back?’
Jordan settled back into the seat. ‘Medicines?’ he hazarded.
‘Modified diamorphine for hospices! Designer heroin for the dying, if you want to be crude about it. Stops pain, but it doesn’t get you so high you can’t take in the message of salvation. Now, I don’t agree with gambling and all that, but if I did…how much would you bet some poor militiaman wouldn’t spare a sample for some kind officer who comes to shake his hand? And before you know it they’ll be using it to psych people up before combat. No guarantee it’ll only get to Christian militias either. Makes you think, dunnit?’
‘It sure does,’ Jordan said.
The first border post, the Beulah City one, was just before the road forked. To the left it went up to Muswell Hill, to the right into Alexandra Port. Each road had its Norlonto border post, with a couple of guards, and behind them, strung out along the roadside, a welcoming party of drug dealers, prostitutes, cultists, atheists, deprogrammers, newsvendors…Twenty or so Warrior guards devoted most of their attention to the incoming traffic, which their efforts had backed up to somewhere over the hill on both roads.
One of them opened the door on the driver’s side and leaned in. Black uniform, visored helmet, knuckles and buckles. He scrutinized the driver’s pass.
‘Don’t see anything about a passenger,’ he said.
‘Sorry officer, last minute…’
The Warrior pointed at the rucksack.
‘Let’s have a look in there.’
Jordan was reaching towards it when a hand grasped his wrist. It was the driver’s.
‘Don’t you touch it, mate. That’s confidential to the company.’ He turned to the Warrior. ‘If you want to open that bag, you’ll have to account for it to my boss. And his.’ He held out the laptop. ‘Form’s on there somewhere, shouldn’t take more’n oh I dunno ten minutes, fifteen outside.’
The guard hesitated.
‘It’s all right,’ the driver said. ‘We’re not in a hurry.’
Jordan noticed how cold the sweat felt as it dried.
‘Ah, gerron with you,’ the guard muttered. He backed out.
The engine whined into life.
‘Thanks,’ Jordan said.
‘It’s nothing. I’m used to them.’ The driver grinned at Jordan. ‘Lucky I’m a better liar than you, huh? What you got in there, anyway?’
‘Oh.’ Jordan felt hot again. ‘A load of irreligious books, actually.’
‘Good on you.’ Jordan thought: What? ‘Flog them where they can’t do no harm, get some money off the bastards. Can’t expect the Elders and the cops to see it that way, mind.’ He slowed at the junction. ‘You’ll be wanting the other road, the town not the port. See ya.’
Jordan wanted to say something grateful, shake the guy’s hand, give him some money, but the driver barely looked at him, concentrating on the traffic. So he just said ‘Good luck’, and jumped out.
He walked past the cars up to where a bored-looking young woman toting a rifle took a piece of plastic from each driver going in. Mostly she handed the plastic back. She turned to him. Dusty freckled face under a black knotted headband with a blue enamel star. Space-movement militia.
‘Got a chit?’
Jordan shook his head.
‘Got any money?’
Jordan took out, cautiously, a fraction of his fortune. She fanned the wad.
‘That’ll do,’ she said. He thought she was going to keep it, but she handed it back. ‘You can live on that till you get work, if you want. But you’ll have to give me a hundred if you’re going in.’
She gave him a receipt, a thin stiff plastic card. ‘Hang on to this chit and you won’t have to pay again, no matter how many times you come back or how long you stay. You’ll have to pay for services, but that’s up to you.’
‘Services?’
She gestured impatience. ‘Protection. Some roads. All that.’
Jordan pocketed the chit. ‘What does this pay for?’
‘The space you take up,’ she said. ‘And the air you breathe.’
Jordan walked slowly up the hill. The air felt free.
6
The Space and Freedom Party
It all began with the space movement.
Under the Republic, the libertarians – whose attitudes to the Republic were even more conflicting, and conflictual, than those of the socialists – had started talking about space the way some socialists had once talked about peace. Somewhat to their surprise, it had worked for them, too, giving an extreme and unpopular minority hegemony over a large popular movement. By the time the Republic fell, the space movement had too much support, weapons and money to be suppressed at a bearable cost.
So, like most of the other popular movements that had flourished under the Republic, it had to be bought off.
The area now called Norlonto had been ceded to the space movement as part of the Restoration Settlement. At the time it had been considered almost valueless, including as it did a swathe of shanty-towns (obscurely known as the Greenbelt) and a vast refugee population, legacy of the Republic’s free immigration and asylum policy. The space movement had developed it as an entrepôt for European trade with the space stations and settlements. Most commercial launch-sites were tropical. Most airports were liable to military or paramilitary requisitioning, to say nothing of assault. Airship traffic had turned out to be viable, and less vulnerable than conventional airfreight to increasingly unpredictable weather. Alexandra Port’s trade quickly diversified.
Norlonto never quite became respectable enough to be a new Hong Kong or even a new Shanghai, and the ending of drug prohibition undercut it, but it retained its attraction as a tax and data haven, enterprise zone and social test-bed. The space movement had evolved into a hybrid of joint-stock corporation and propaganda campaign, and had tried to create in the territory it disdained to govern a condition approximating the stateless market which its early idealists and investors had intended for space itself.
Above the atmosphere, above the graves where the pioneers shared blessed ignorance with the Fenians and Jacobins and Patriots and Communards and Bolsheviks, the lords of the Earth and their liegemen rode high, couching lances of laser fire. From the battlesats out to the Belt, the state had space, and freedom.
Kohn let the automatics guide the car through Norlonto’s crowded streets, and allowed the new pathways in his mind to carry him back to where it had all begun.
They were building the future and getting paid by the hour, and they’d worked like pioneers; like kibbutzniks; like communists. Each day after work Kohn would watch the cement dust sluice away, and think hot showers the best amenity known to man, something he’d kill to keep. He’d take his clean clothes from the locker, bundle his overalls into the laundry hopper and swagger off the site, his day’s pay next to his heart. It was the best yet of his fifteen summers: the space boom just starting to pick up where the post-war reconstruction had left off, scars healing, new buildings going up. Long evenings when he could hit the streets, take in the new music, meet girls. There seemed to be girls everywhere, of his own age and older. Most of them had independence, a job and a place to crash, no hassles with parents. School really was out forever. If you wanted education you could get it from the net, as nature intended.