‘Or all the way in,’ Jordan said.
‘Yeah, the movement only got a slice of the pie. But look what they did with it!’
‘You sound proud of this place.’ Janis couldn’t square Moh’s enthusiasm for Norlonto with his stubborn insistence that he was some kind of socialist.
‘We want to go beyond this, do better than it. Not go back from it.’
After a minute she stopped trying to figure it out.
The mall had been hit in the war and never reclaimed, due to an obscure dispute about property rights. Norlonto being nothing if not an enormous tangle of private properties, the shopping centre and its surroundings had come to suffer what in a different society would be called planning blight. By default it could be considered part of the Kingdom, although the state had so far shown not the slightest interest in it. The whole area had been squatted and homesteaded until it was like a carcase occupied by an entire colony of ants, a shipwreck crusted with coral.
They pushed past stalls and shops selling microwaves, cast-iron cooking pots, light machine-guns, heavy-metal records, spacesuits, wedding-dresses, holodisks, oil paintings, Afro-Pak takeaways, VR snuff tapes. They emerged from the concentric rings and radial passages of the market into the concourse. Bernstein’s regular pitch occupied a small arc of a circle around what must once have been a fountain pond underneath a central skylight, forty-odd metres above, of now broken coloured glass.
It was unattended and bare. A skinny girl in a tool harness and little else affected a low-g loll behind the space-movement table in the adjacent quadrant.
‘Seen Bernstein?’ Moh asked.
She shifted an earpiece and gave her head a languid shake. ‘Booked it,’ she said. ‘If he don’t take it, is ’is
Moh checked his watch. 11.30. Not like Bernstein to miss several hours’ worth of sales. He turned to Jordan. ‘Anything going on?’
Jordan put his glades on with a flourish, tuned the downlink to his computer. ‘Damn’ right there is,’ he said. ‘Bomb scare in Camden High Street. Area’s sealed off. Traffic reports are frantic.’
‘Oh, shit. Well, that could account for it.’ Moh gazed around, willing Bernstein to appear. It didn’t work.
‘I’ll wait here and see if he turns up,’ he told Jordan and Janis. ‘You guys want to wander around?’
Jordan looked at the conference area of the mall, the revisionist rally. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘This is just incredible.’ Janis smiled and shrugged and nodded in the direction of the surrounding markets. They wandered off in separate orbits.
Moh stood by the Movement stall and watched the old soldiers, their uniforms and medals mingling with the streetfighting clothes and antique badges of the young enthusiasts. Battle standards hung reverently across the area taken over for the occasion. Ostensibly a conference of dissentient historians, it was becoming a blatantly political event. Even some of the academic intellectuals, recognizable in their own uniforms of jeans and leather-patched tweed jackets, averted their eyes from the more sinister faces on the posters that were being indiscreetly hawked.
‘Hey, man!’
The stall had a customer, a kid who picked up a tee-shirt in its polythene wrap and gazed at it. He was obviously a Neo, a hero-worshipper, one of those who’d grown up after the defeat and in adolescent rebellion had turned to what he’d always been told were the bad guys. Who just didn’t believe they could’ve been that bad, and had found an identity and a pride in identifying with those terrifying folk who’d posed perhaps the most radical threat the world had ever faced…but who had at the same time built a society that appealed to the conservative values of order and discipline and patriotism that most people assimilated like the isotopes in their mothers’ milk.
‘The man who designed the rockets…’ the kid breathed. Cropped hair, Europawehr combat jacket, ripped denim, knee-boots; scars on his smiling face and the faintest film of tear-flow in his eyes. The girl behind the stall looked back at him blankly.
‘It’s good to meet someone who knows their heritage,’ Kohn said. ‘Most people don’t even know who he was.’ He included the stall’s oblivious minder in his disapproval.
‘Yeah, well, they’ve got us two ways, haven’t they?’ the kid said. ‘Yanks up there holdin us down, greens down here draggin us down.’
Kohn nodded. ‘Exactly.’ He scanned the stall for recruitment material. ‘Well, some of us want to do something about it. Some of us believe in space, in the future. Look, mate, tell you what. Usually that’s ten marks, but I can see you’re keen, so I’ll knock it down to eight-fifty and throw in a card and a badge for another one-twenty…Here’s a pen.’
He tore off the card’s counterfoil, checking to make sure the kid had written his name and address.
‘Thanks…Greg.’ Kohn stuck out his hand. The kid looked up from pinning the blue enamel star to his lapel, grinned and clasped the hand.
‘See you again, mate.’ They slapped shoulders. The kid carried the tee-shirt away like a trophy.
‘That’s the way to do it,’ Kohn told the girl. He put the counterfoil carefully into the empty recruitment box. ‘Eble vi farus same.’ She still looked blank: her Esperanto smatter evidently as phony as her gravity-gets-me-down slouch.
An arm slipped between his elbow and his side.
‘Making new friends?’ Janis’s voice was dry, amused.
‘You know how it is,’ Kohn said, turning. ‘All those fine young bodies.’
‘Hah!’
Janis frowned, suddenly serious.
‘Gives me the chills a bit, this whole show,’ she said. ‘Nostalgia and militaristic kitsch and rewriting history: it’s all a lie – millions didn’t die, the soldiers were heroes even if they were misled by politicians, they were stabbed in the back…ugh! They’re not really your people, are they?’
‘No, my love, they ain’t.’ He felt as if the sun had gone behind a cloud, for a moment. Then he thought of the lad with the bright eyes. ‘But some of them are on our side even if they don’t know it. Real keen technological expansionists, hate the greens and the Yanks. Some of them’re basically sound.’
Janis sighed and shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
Jordan came back with armfuls of literature and a newly bought ancient leather jacket. ‘I still don’t believe this,’ he said. ‘Free speech, sure, but talk about taking it to extremes.’ He flipped his glades down. ‘Traffic’s clearing,’ he added. ‘ANR seems to be taking the flak for this one.’
The girl lifted herself out of her spacer pose and made some effort at salesmanship as Jordan leaned over the stall. It wasn’t necessary: he stocked up with mission badges, NASA and Tass posters, tee-shirts with pictures of the rocket pioneer Korolev, of Gagarin and Titov and Valentina Tereshkova, and a space-movement card and star.
Kohn again shoved the counterfoil in the box, this time checking that Jordan hadn’t given his address. The smells of frying and grilling had been tormenting him for half an hour.
‘Let’s get some lunch before the rush,’ he said. ‘Good place across the way – we can keep an eye out from there.’
‘Second you on that,’ Janis said. Jordan straightened up from decorating his biker jacket with enamel shuttles and stars, looking less like a refugee from Beulah City if a bit self-conscious in his glade-masked cool. He nodded at Moh.
They walked through the crowd of aging veterans, the Afghantsi and Angolanos, and tough kids with their hammer-and-sickles and red stars (with a sprinkle of the movement’s blue ones among them, as Moh indicated to Janis, who returned him a sceptical smile). They strolled past posters of Lenin and Stalin, Mao and Castro, Honneker and Ceaucescu and the rest, and over crumpled leaflets advertising lectures with titles like ‘The Great Leap Reconsidered’ and ‘Croatia: The West’s Killing Fields’. Moh led them to a first-floor Indian café overlooking the concourse, well away from the bars whose main feature for the day would be rip-off prices and drunk neo-Communists.