Kohn frowned. ‘Just a minute. Don’t see any of the workers on that picket line.’
He jumped out and went over to talk to one of the building workers, a steward he knew.
‘Hi, Mike. What’s the problem? I thought I’d have heard about a strike.’
Mike grimaced. ‘It’s not a strike, Moh, it’s a fuckin demo. Greens. They don’t like what we’re building.’
‘Well, fuck them.’ He looked over the small crowd. Lumpens and petty bourgeois, no doubt about it. Not an honest-to-God proletarian to be seen. The placards had slogans like STOP THE DEATH BEAMS. ‘What is this shit? This isn’t—’ He stopped to think. ‘It’s not a scam, is it, Mike? They haven’t got us working on some military job without telling us, have they?’
‘No,’ Mike said. ‘It’s all legit. Research lab, space-movement sponsored. Nice contract.’
Nice contract all right, Moh thought. Massive walls, klicks of cable, flashy electronics. Test-bed for laser launchers – ‘steam-beams’, as the nickname went. Stick your payload on top of a tank of water, point a tracking laser at it, boil the sucker into orbit.
‘So it’s not a picket line, right? So why don’t we just—’
He noticed Mike pointing with his chin, turned and checked over the nearest greens. Big, tough. Tougher than building workers. Looked like farmers, travellers, bikers. And tooled up: monkey wrenches, very thick sticks on the placards. Heavy electric torches sticking out of pockets. Peasants with torches.
‘Where’s the movement militia then?’
Mike shrugged. ‘Never there when you need them.’
Kohn looked at him, baffled. That wasn’t what he knew of the militia. Before he could say anything a tall, long-haired and long-bearded man in homespun trousers and a greased jacket loomed over them and said, ‘Yeah, the space cadets ain’t comin, so piss off.’
Kohn had already sized up the balance of forces: it was a small site; the workforce wouldn’t be more than a dozen even when they all came in. So he just said ‘OK’, and turned away. He paused for a moment to say to Mike: ‘Get all the guys and gals together, pile on our truck. Talk about it at the union, OK, no trouble.’
Mike nodded and stepped quickly to pull his folk out of the rising heat of arguments. Kohn made a pacifying gesture to Stone, who was standing by the truck, and paused a moment to check that the workers were catching the drift.
‘Move yo ass, krautkiller!’ the big guy who’d spoken to him shouted at his back.
Kohn turned, more amazed than incensed at the racial sneer. Never thought of myself as…until until until…He looked at the man and felt a fastidious contempt.
‘“We are on the edge of darkness”,’ he said, quoting a recurrent green slogan. The man looked puzzled. Kohn waited until they were all on the truck and moving off before leaning out of the window and yelling as he passed, ‘and you are the darkness!’
He felt quite gratified by the banging the side of the truck took for that. At the union office, an old shopfront floor, his reminiscent smirk faded. They found a distinct lack of interest in their problem from the local officials. The lab-site crew stood around the scratched Formica tables in the refreshment corner and drank coffee while Mike made call after call – to the militia, to the client, to the union security – and got nowhere.
‘OK,’ Kohn said. ‘No more mister nice guy.’
He connected his phone to his computer and retrieved Logan’s public key, then tapped in Logan’s twenty-digit phone number and his own key. Logan’s voice came back, anonymous and toneless as a cheap chip. The processors couldn’t spare much for fidelity when they were crunching prime numbers that made the age-of-the-universe-in-seconds look like small change. The up-side was that cracking the encryption would take about as long.
‘This better be urgent, Moh. I’m vac-welding right now.’
‘OK. Greens blockading a job, nobody wants to know. Union, movement, militia. Something heavy leaning on them is my guess.’
‘Mine too. Talk to Wilde.’
Kohn watched his phone-meter’s right-hand numbers blurring for about five seconds.
‘Jonathan Wilde?’ he croaked at last.
‘The same. Tell him you’re from the light company. Gotta go.’
This time Moh was relieved to see the connection broken. He made a performance of putting away his phone and computer, while his mind raced. He stood up and looked around a dozen sceptical faces.
‘I think we got things moving,’ he said. He flashed them a rueful smile. ‘Finally. Mike, Stone, maybe you should get the union lawyer on to this one. Threaten to sue the research company. Breach of contract, condoning intimidation, whatever. Make something up. Same with whatever street-owner is allowing that so-called demo. Rest of us might as well call it a day. They’ll cough up our pay anyway.’ He sounded more convinced than he felt.
‘What about you?’ Stone wanted to know.
‘I’m going to meet The Man,’ Kohn said.
Wilde wasn’t exactly The Man – he didn’t employ anyone apart from a few research assistants now and again. The only position he held was a fairly nominal history lectureship at the University of North London Town. Now in his seventies, he’d been an anomalous figure for decades, regarded as a left-winger in the space movement, a libertarian space nut by the Left. He’d written some of the movement’s earliest manifestos (No More Earthquakes, The Earth is a Harsh Mistress) and numerous pamphlets, articles and books documenting what he called the counterconspiracy theory of history, which maintained that many otherwise incomprehensible historical events could be explained by identifying the conspiracy theories held by the protagonists. He’d discovered a surprising number of cases where prominent political, military and law-enforcement figures had been (openly or secretly) conspiracy theorists. In the course of researching and expounding this thesis he had developed a vast and complex range of mutually antagonistic contacts and sources of information. He was widely regarded as the movement’s éminence grise, a suspicion which all the evidence of his lack of power, position and money only strengthened. Rumour had it that he had been behind whatever it had taken – blackmail, currency speculation, nuclear threats – to get the relevant committee of the Restoration government to agree to Norlonto’s existence.
Moh had a rented flat in Kentish Town. He stopped off to change into his newest and sharpest suit, and to place his call. He got a voice-only link, and introduced himself; feeling self-conscious and stupid, he said he was from the light company.
‘Come straight away,’ Wilde said. ‘You know where to find me.’
An hour later Kohn knocked at the door of Wilde’s office.
‘Come in.’
The office was small and bright, with a window overlooking Trent Park: grass, trees, gliders coming in. It smelled of paper and cement. Wilde sat at a plain desk behind a terminal. He finished saving a file and stood. Skinny, nearly bald, tanned, hook-nosed. Back straight as an old soldier’s. Handshake firm.
‘Well, comrade,’ he said, gesturing Kohn to sit in one of a pair of standard university chairs made from pine, sacking, rubber bands and polyurethane, ‘what can I do for you?’
Comrade? Kohn wondered if the man were being polite or ironic, and responded with a tight-lipped smile before giving an account of the morning’s events.
‘Hmm,’ Wilde said. ‘My guess is pressure from Space Defense.’
Kohn opened and closed his mouth. ‘What they got to do with the greens?’
‘More than you think,’ Wilde said. ‘Oh, there’s no conspiracy, as I am notorious for saying. I’m sure the smelly little vermin would be against the project anyway. But it’s SD that’s leaning on the space movement’s higher councils, which lean on the R&D company, which tells the union and the militia that this is one to write off against insurance.’ He smiled. ‘Act of Goddess.’