Kohn spread his hands. ‘But why?’
‘What else,’ Wilde asked, like a lecturer posing a problem, ‘could you do with a very powerful, very accurate ground-based fast-tracking laser, assuming one could be developed?’ He sighted along his pointed finger and swung it slowly upwards.
Kohn suddenly got it, and laughed at himself for not realizing it sooner. ‘Down battlesats,’ he said.
‘Yup,’ said Wilde. ‘Apparently our R&D actually didn’t know that laser-launchers were originally promoted as a civilian spin-off from an ABM system. Space Defense, needless to say, has a better memory.’
‘So that’s it,’ Kohn said.
‘You think so?’ Wilde’s voice rang sharp; his eyes narrowed.
Kohn thought for a moment, stood up and stalked to the window as his gall rose.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t have it. OK, you can’t fight SD. We build the laser lab, they’ll lase it. But the greens…oh, shit.’
‘What do you feel about them?’
Kohn whirled. ‘One of them called me “krautkiller”, you know that? Fuck them and their nazi economics.’ He punched his palm. ‘Protection. Conservation. Restriction. Deep ecology. Give me deep technology any day. They don’t scare me. I’m damned if I’ll crawl, my children’s children crawl on the earth in some kind a fuckin harmony with the environment. Yeah, till the next ice age or the next asteroid impact. “Krautkiller”, huh? Chosen people, huh?’ He remembered the old taunts. Never thought of myself as…until until until…He took a deep breath, shook his head. ‘It’s them or us, man, and I’ve chosen people.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Wilde said, ‘Now sit down and let me…enlighten you on a few things.’
Kohn listened, and saw the light. The ‘light company’ was evidently a codename for the Space and Freedom Party, the militant faction of the space movement that Logan had talked about at the meeting a couple of years earlier. It had pulled in people with diverse views in terms of conventional politics, who disagreed about everything but the struggle for space: the ultimate united front, nothing conceded, nothing compromised, but still holding something of the forbidden thrill of—
‘There’s no conspiracy,’ Wilde said.
As if to confirm it, he provoked Kohn into defending his own standpoint. Kohn tried – and felt he failed – to articulate the inchoate vision he held of a socialist society that would be even wilder and more free-wheeling than Norlonto, freer than the free market, where the common knowledge that could not but be common property would become the greatest wealth, shared without sacrifice or stint. Wilde countered with his own vision of a world where the market was only the framework, but the only framework, for ways of life as diverse as human inclination could devise; not Social Darwinism but a Darwinian selection of societies.
‘Sounds like what we’ve got already,’ Kohn said, ‘only…’
Wilde snorted. ‘This century,’ he said, ‘is as much a travesty of my ideas as the last one was of yours. Mini-states instead of minimal states. Hah.’
‘Blame the world wars,’ Kohn said.
‘How…internationalist of you to put it that way,’ Wilde said. ‘I have difficulty convincing some of my lot not just to blame the Germans.’
‘That’s bourgeois nationalism for you.’
‘Quite.’
‘Looks like we’re not going to settle this.’
‘Not here. Space will…settle it.’
‘Space settlement!’
They both laughed.
‘It’s true,’ Wilde said. ‘Reality will turn out different from my utopia, and yours. The good thing about space is it holds out the chance that it might turn out better than we can imagine instead of worse. Not a promised land but a whole new infinite America where we’ll be the Indians, all our tribes expanding into a wilderness where we’ll bring the passengers pigeons and the bison and seed the forests from scratch, from rock and ice!’
Moh nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes, that’s it. Like Engels said, man’s natural environment doesn’t exist yet: he has to create it for himself.’
‘Engels said that?’
‘More or less. Not in so many words. I’ll look it up for you.’
‘Yes, you do that. Man’s natural environment is artificial – yeah, I like it. What we have to do is keep that possibility open, like the Bering bridge—’
‘Between Siberia and Alaska!’
At the time Siberia had a Communist government, Alaska a Libertarian. Wilde grinned back at him.
‘Exactly.’
At lunch Kohn looked round the noisy refectory, shrugged off any worries about security and said, ‘We still have a problem. What we gonna actually do about that lot down at the lab-site gate?’
Wilde shrugged. ‘Not much. The militia won’t touch them, and none of the independent agencies are likely to stick their necks out.’
‘Aha,’ said Kohn. ‘I think you might just have put your finger on—’
Wilde finished the sentence with him: ‘—a gap in the market!’
That night the green picket was still staked out at the lab site.
‘What’s that?’ The one who’d hassled Kohn turned at a noise. He found his cheek meeting a gun muzzle. Muffled sounds came from all around.
‘Your worst nightmare,’ said a voice from the darkness, about a metre away. ‘A yid kid with an AK and attitude.’
7
The Uploaded Gun
THE BRITISH PEOPLE
ENTHUSIASTICALLY COMMEMORATE
THE GLORIOUS
VICTORY OVER
THE GERMAN FASCIST BARBARIANS!
The slogan, freshly painted in metre-high letters on the gable end of the house, and the mural that illustrated it (a Soviet soldier raising the Red Flag over the ruined Reichstag) were all that distinguished the headquarters of the Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence Collective from the other four-storey blocks in the street just off Muswell Hill Broadway.
‘Some of the local kids did that when we weren’t looking,’ Kohn said. ‘Not exactly internationalist, but it’s one in the eye for our Hanoverian friends.’
Janis paused outside the car. She looked up. An airship – cloud and constellation in one – passed low overhead, drifting towards the forest of mooring masts on the immediate horizon where a rambling and ornate building stood, surmounted by holograms of gigantic human figures that reached out for the stars in a Stalinist statuary of light. As clouds dimmed the pale September sun the holograms brightened by the minute.
A low wall, a metre and a half of garden. Kohn opened the door.
‘After you, lady,’ he said.
She went in. Kohn dumped her bags in the entrance lobby and ushered her into a long room. At the far end was a kitchen. The near end contained couches, chairs, weapons, electronic gear and a battered table. The long room had obviously been made by knocking two rooms together. It had a rough, unfinished look: the furniture was old chairs and sofas made comfortable and colourful with throws and cushions, the table was gashed and stained, the whitewashed walls plastered with posters and children’s art. The kitchen equipment along one wall had probably been thrown out by other households, more than once; around the cooking area shelves held indiscriminate mixtures of books and jars of herbs. The lighting was full-spectrum strips, turned low: a twilight effect. Only the weapons and computers, the cameras and screens and comms, glittered new.
‘Most of the comrades won’t be back for a couple of hours,’ Moh said. ‘Time we did some hacking and tracking. Want some coffee first?’