DoorWays™ opened on to the world: the kingdoms and republics; the enclaves and principalities; the anarchies, states and utopias. With a silent yell he flung himself into the freedom of the net.
In virtual space Beulah City was far, far away.
The sky came down to the rooftops here, same as anywhere else. As he walked along the high street Kohn saw past the near horizon in an inescapable awareness that the sky before him was as far away as the sky above, a dizzying horizontal height. He was as conscious of the motion of the earth as previously he’d been of the time of day. Not for the first time he was impressed by the dauntless gaiety of the species. Whirled away from the sun’s fire to face again the infinite light-raddled dark, they took it when they could as their chance to go out and have fun.
Janis walked beside him with a dancer’s step, a warm lithe body naked in cool clothes, her fingers rediscovering his hand every few seconds. He was not sure what that electric contact meant to her. What it meant to him was like the new reordering of his mind, a delight he felt almost afraid to test, yet constantly renewed by the merest look at her, or within himself.
They walked along faster and easier than anyone else on that pavement, Kohn effortlessly finding an open path among the moving bodies. After they crossed the road, strolling between humming cars and hurtling bikes and whistling rickshaws, Janis looked at him as if to say something, and then just shook her head.
Norlonto had the smell of a port city, that openness to the world: the sense that you had only to step over a gap to be carried away to anywhere. (Perhaps the sea had been the original fifth-colour country, but it had been irretrievably stained with the bloody ink from all the others.) And it had also the feel that the world had come to it. In part this was illusory: most of the diversity around them had arrived much earlier than the airships and space platforms, yet here and there Kohn could pick out the clacking magnetic boots, the rock-climber physique, the laid-back Esperanto drawl of the orbital labour aristocracy. Men and women who’d hooked a lift on a reentry glider to blow a month’s pay in a shorter time, and in more inventive ways, than Khazakhstan or Guiné or Florida could allow.
Those who helped them do it made their mark in the crowd and among the shopfronts: prostitutes of all sexualities, gene-splicing parlours, hawkers of snacks and shots, VR vendors and drug and drink establishments.
The Lord Carrington, down a side street, wasn’t one of them.
‘It’s our local,’ Kohn said proudly as he pushed open the saloon-bar doors of heavy wood and glass and brass. The smells of alcohol, of hash and tobacco smoke, struck him with all their associations of promise and memory, fraud and forgetting. He didn’t know if he could take this intensity all his life. Maybe it was something you got used to. Poets had died for it; some said, of it. Perhaps it was wasted on him; or his very crudity, his fighter’s callousness, would save him.
What the hell.
Janis eased past him, through the door, and he stepped through and let it swing back.
The room was long and cool. The bar was divided along its length with apparently mirrored partitions that showed not reflections but views of other bars. You could tell the timezone the images came from by the state the drinkers had reached. The first one Kohn noticed looked like Vladivostok. Fortunately the sound was turned down. The real pub had not many in it yet, the hologram stage showing only swimming dolphins.
Janis beat him to the bar, turned with her elbow on the counter and asked, ‘What’ll you have?’
‘Eine bitter, bitte.’
Janis ordered two litres. They found an alcove where they could sit and see the stage and a window overlooking a tenth of London. Kohn sat down, shifting the belt pouch in which the gun’s smart-box nestled, easing the hip holster of the dumb automatic which was all the hardware the pub’s by-laws permitted. Janis watched with a faint smile and raised her heavy glass.
‘Well, here’s to us.’
‘Indeed. Cheers.’
The first long gulp. Kohn decided to appreciate the taste as long as he could before lighting up.
A man walked through the dolphins and announced the first set, a new Scottish band called The Precentors. The sea-scene cleared and two lads and a lass, playing live from Fort William, launched into the latest old rebel song.
Janis looked at him, then at her drink, then looked up again more sharply, her hair falling back. Her shoulders were swaying almost imperceptibly to the music.
‘Tell me about yourself,’ she said.
‘Not much to tell…I grew up around here, North London Town before and after it became Norlonto. My mother was a teacher, my father was – well, he made a living as a software tech but he was a professional revolutionary. Member of the Workers’ Power Party, which back then was what he used to call a nearly-mass Party. A near-miss Party.’ Kohn chuckled darkly. ‘The Fourth International had a few good national sections in those days, and they were one of the best. Industrial-grade Trotskyism. He was a union organizer, community activist in various Greenbelt townships. My mother got elected to the local council under the Republic.’
He stopped. Normally it was not difficult to talk about this. Now, the enhanced memories crowded him like hysterical relatives at a funeral. His fist was on the table. Janis’s fingers clasped over it.
‘And that was why they were killed?’
‘No! That was all legal. They were rejectionists, sure, but they weren’t in the armed groups that became the ANR or anything like that. Mind you, in the Peace Process you didn’t have to be, to get killed. I used to think that was the point.’ He disengaged his hand, unthinking, and lit a cigarette. ‘I thought that was the whole fucking point.’
‘I don’t see it.’
‘Terror has to be random,’ he said. ‘That’s how to really break people, when they don’t know what rules to follow to keep them out of trouble.’ He gave her a sour grin. ‘You know all that. It’s been tried out on rats.’
‘But you don’t even think that was why—’
‘That was part of it. The killing was a joint operation, local thugs and a US/UN teletrooper. I never did understand that, until – actually it was Bernstein who gave me the idea it had to do with the day job. The software work.’
‘And that could be—?’ The excitement of discovery lifted her voice.
He hushed her with a small movement of his hand, and nodded.
Janis was silent for a few moments.
‘What did you do after that?’
‘I had a kid sister.’ He laughed. ‘Still have, but she’s married, settled and respectable now. Doesn’t like to be reminded of me.’
‘Can’t imagine why.’
‘Anyway…we both just took off, disappeared into the Greenbelt. I sort of dragged her up, you know? Did all sorts of casual work, usual stuff, until I was old enough to get steady jobs in construction.’
‘Christ.’ Janis looked almost more sympathetic at this part of the story than at what had come before. ‘Did you ever think of going off to the hills and joining the ANR?’
‘Thought about it? – I fucking dreamt about it. But the baseline was, I never rated their chances.’ He snorted. ‘Looks like I might have been wrong, huh? Anyway, knocking the Hanoverians off their perch wouldn’t be enough. At least the space movement understands that. You gotta defeat the Evil Empire, man! And the green slime, all the species of cranks and creeps. Protect the launch sites, protect the net, and defend the workers. That’s our line.’
‘The thin Red line.’
‘Damn’ right,’ he said with a proud grin. ‘The last defenders.’
‘How did you become a – what do you call yourself? – a security mercenary?’