He was sinking foundations; he was getting in on the ground floor…the sheer hubris of taking this place and declaring it an outpost of space made him feel as if a taut string were vibrating in his chest. An open universe, unowned, was there for the taking, sixty-five kilometres away – straight up. Out there you could build the ground you walked on, and the possibility of doing so went on forever. One day he’d do it, one day he’d carve out his chunk of it, and there would always be enough and as good left over. Space offered the ultimate freedom and the ultimate justice. Earth had not anything to show more fair.
But that was only a potential, an aching longing, as long as the reality of space development was turned against itself, literally turned inwards, by Space Defense. The US/UN held that high ground, cynically supervising the planet’s broken blocs. The Peace Process: divide-and-rule replicating downwards in a fractal balkanization of the world. Britain’s version of the Peace Process gave each of the former oppositions and interests their own bloodstained bone to chew on, as Free States under the Kingdom. They called it the Restoration Settlement.
The irreconcilables and recusants of the defeated regime called it the Betrayal. Driven back to some snowline of social support in the cleared silicon glens of Scotland, the blackened ghettoes of the Midlands or the pitted guts of Wales, the handful who still held on to their weapons and their politics proclaimed themselves the Army of the New Republic.
One of those long evenings Kohn was sitting on the low forecourt wall of a pub in Golders Green, sipping with caution at a litre of Stella Artois. He wore shades in the twilight. The round, white-enamelled table where the others sat was jammed against the wall, enabling him to lean gently on the shoulder of his current girlfriend, Annie. Like most of the girls around (that was where the shades came in, for covert appraisals) she was wearing a skin-tight catsuit that covered everything up to her chin, including each finger and toe. The gauzy, floaty shift which covered it somehow made its contours no less detailed or revealing. As one of his older workmates had remarked appreciatively when the fashion had first drifted down the street, it was filf, pure filf.
Anyway, they were all workmates here. Himself, Annie, the tall Brummie about his own age that they called Stone, and Stone’s girlfriend, Lynette – all worked on the same site. Stone was a labourer like himself; Lynette was training to be an engineer. He didn’t like to think about what Annie did, but every so often he’d get a chill sweat at the thought of her walking along the high girders. Women were good at that, she kept telling him. Look at all those gymnasts. Yeah, yeah.
‘Well, we won,’ Stone said. ‘We fuckin beat them.’
They all grinned at each other. They’d just won a fairly audacious pay-and-conditions gain out of a short, sharp strike.
‘This old gel came along to the picket line a couple of days ago,’ Stone said. ‘Lecturer at the college. Gave us some money from the students for the strike fund. Didn’t really need it, you know? Union’s been solid. Anyway, they’d gone to the trouble of taking a collection, so I thanked her and said I’d put it in the branch account for the next time.’ He laughed. ‘She said damn’ right, there’d always be a next time. She sold me this paper.’
Kohn thought: Oh, no. His glass banged as he put it down. Stone hauled a tattered tabloid from the inside of his jacket and spread it on the table.
‘Red Star,’ Stone said. ‘It’s a bit extreme, but some of the things they say make sense. Thought you might be interested, Moh.’
Does it show? Kohn wondered wildly. Is there some mark of Cain branded on my forehead that identifies me to everybody else, no matter what I say or don’t say, no matter how much I want to put it all behind me? He picked the paper up reluctantly, took his shades off to read. There it was, the banner with the strange device: a hammer-and-sickle, facing the opposite way from the traditional Soviet one, with a ‘4’ over the hammer.
He didn’t read beyond the masthead.
‘The only red stars I know about,’ he said, ‘are dead, off the main sequence, and consist mostly of faintly glowing gas.’
Lynette was the only one who really got that.
‘They should call it Red Giant!’
Kohn smiled at her and looked at Stone, who scowled, taken aback.
‘I thought, you were good in the strike, you know how to organize, you always stick up for yourself…’
More than a hundred years, Kohn thought, and the word for a person like that is still bolshie. The old man would’ve been proud.
‘Nothing personal, yeah?’ Kohn said. ‘It’s just – don’t waste any time thinking about workers’ revolution. Crock a shit, man. It ain’t gonna happen. So no matter how clever some of it sounds, any idea that depends on it being practical can be dismissed out a hand.’
He sat back, feeling smug. He’d kept it cool, kept it logical. It hadn’t been one of those outbursts of loathing and contempt that sometimes escaped him.
‘Well,’ Annie said. ‘you don’t look like you’ve seen something dead. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
He smiled down at her upturned, concerned face.
‘Pale and shaking all over?’
‘Yes,’ she said soberly. ‘You are.’
‘Ah,’ Kohn said. ‘Maybe I did see a ghost.’ (Leon Trotsky, with an ice-pick in his head. The ghost of the Fourth International. The spectre of communism.) ‘Or maybe I’m just getting cold.’ He came down off the wall and pulled up a chair beside Annie. ‘Warm me up.’
Annie was happy to do that, but Stone wouldn’t let it lie.
‘They’ve got a big centre-spread about conditions on the space construction-platforms. Sounds more like a building site than anything else. The guy who wrote it tried to organize a union and got burned out—’
‘A union in space?’ Lynette said.
‘Yeah, and why not?’
‘What’s “burned out” mean?’ Moh asked.
Stone began scanning down the article but Annie beat him to it.
‘It’s an old company trick, happened to an uncle of mine who worked in a nuclear power-station. They had him marked as a troublemaker and instead of sacking him – that would have caused more trouble – they just made sure he got his year’s safe level of rads in about a week. By mistake, of course. Sorry, no more work. Against safety regulations.’
‘That’s awful!’ Lynette said. ‘What happened to him? Did he—?’
‘He’ – Annie paused dramatically – ‘’s still alive and kicking…with all three legs.’
An uneasy laugh was interrupted by Stone, eyes and index finger still on the paper, waving his other hand and saying, ‘Nah, the levels were dead safe anyway. Just rules. We’ve all had worse.’ An uneasy silence. ‘For this guy it was more, uh, genuine. They got him working outside during a solar flare. Had to go back on the next shuttle. Odds are he’ll be okay, but he’s grounded.’
‘For life?’ Kohn said, appalled.
‘Don’t know.’ Stone raised his face, smiling. ‘Anyway, you can ask him yourself. He’s speaking at a meeting tomorrow night.’