‘Until what’s over?’
Jordan was puzzled; the situation was just beginning to dawn on Janis. Moh, fighting a surge of impatience, had to remind himself that neither of them was exactly streetwise.
‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Not staying to find out. You see the cops coming in? Just a show of strength maybe but with all those kids—’
He heard the crash of the first bottle.
‘Knew it,’ he said. ‘Balls for brains, these guys. Move it. You got two minutes before this place is a—’
Something burst over the wall where they’d just been sitting. Long strands of sticky stuff drifted down on to a couple of reckless Neos, who instantly began a predictably counterproductive effort to swipe it away.
Kohn tugged Janis’s arm and they both started to run. The last he saw of Jordan, when he glanced back a second or two later, the youth was standing, still dumbfounded, waving and moving backwards as if on a station platform: goodbye, goodbye.
Clutching her sunhat and backpack, Janis followed Moh as best she could as he hurried through an obscure exit from the shopping centre into a tiled tunnel lit with flickering fluorescent tubes and smelling of urine and disinfectant. Eventually they came out in a more open foyer where a man in a peaked cap and dark uniform stood by a robust barrier. There were posters – yellowing now, but once heartily colourful – on the walls; between them, damp paint bubbled and flaked. Another uniformed man looked out impassively from behind a pane of wired glass. Moh went over and pushed a few low-denomination coins through a space under the pane. After half a minute’s deliberation, the man pushed a couple of tickets back the other way.
Moh handed Janis a ticket and walked in front of her, putting the ticket in a slot on the barrier. With a wheezing, sucking sound the barrier – a pair of padded jaws at hip-level – opened and Moh stepped through. Not half a second passed before the jaws thunked shut again, emitting a momentary groan as if cheated of their prey. Moh turned and snatched the ticket as the machine ejected it.
Janis went through with her eyes shut, then down some broken concrete steps covered with plastic shopping-bags and empty cans and dry leaves and out on to a broken concrete platform. There the litter had apparently metamorphosed into its adult form: overturned bins, shopping trolleys and the remains of small trees. From the edge of the platform railway tracks could be seen for a few tens of metres in either direction; beyond that, they vanished among weeds. But they were at least shiny, not rusty.
‘What is this place?’ Janis asked.
Moh looked at her. ‘It’s the Underground,’ he said.
‘The Tube? Is it still running?’
‘Occasionally,’ Moh said, looking anxiously up and down the track. ‘Main thing is, the Kingdom cops won’t come here, not without a lot of hassle. We’ve crossed a border.’
‘Into what?’ A second look along the platform revealed about a dozen people, most of them very old, sitting waiting as if they had been doing just that for a long time.
Moh sighed. ‘One faction of the Republic accepted the Settlement, and this is what they got for it. The rump of the public sector. It even gets a subsidy from the Kingdom. But it’s a Free State in its own right.’ He grinned. ‘Sort of a reformistan.’
‘I hope Jordan’s OK,’ Janis said. From the direction of the mall she could hear the sounds of breaking glass, yells, riot-poppers. Further away, the instantly recognizable black smoke from burning tyres rose above the shanty-town.
‘He’ll be fine,’ Moh said. He was gazing into the distance at a rapidly approaching aerostat. ‘Bernstein has forgotten more ways out of there than the cops’ll ever know.’
‘What did they barge in here for anyway?’
‘The Hanoverians are always a bit touchy about history,’ Moh said. ‘But right now I think it’s the future that’s bugging them.’
‘Don’t you feel like getting involved?’ Janis asked mischievously.
‘No point,’ Moh said. ‘The cops are way outnumbered. They’ll pull back or call in reinforcements. Either way…’ He shrugged.
The aerostat – a thirty-metre black disc like a flying saucer from a hostile alien empire – slid across the sky overhead and, with a deafening blast as its propellers altered pitch, stopped. It descended slowly behind the shopping centre and laid down a brief barrage of gas. Rope-ladders uncoiled from it, and in a few minutes were swinging as the retreating cops scrambled up. As soon as they were on board the machine wobbled, tilted and wallowed off to the west.
‘Overloaded,’ Moh observed in a satisfied tone. ‘They’re good for terrifying crowds, but that’s about it.’
People began straggling into the station, most of them arriving at a run and then losing much of their momentum and wandering around in a dazed manner, as if they’d been ejected from a pub into the street. They had bleeding heads, pouring noses, weeping eyes. Janis couldn’t see any serious injuries, and felt a selfish relief there weren’t any casualties that would make her feel obliged to help.
After about half an hour a series of increasingly frequent and agitated, but otherwise incomprehensible, bursts of sound from a PA system indicated that a train was due. After another half hour it arrived, carrying a swaying crowd of commuters: beggars and prostitutes, mostly, coming back from the early-to-late-morning shift in town.
A few seats were unoccupied but Janis had no intention of sitting on any of them. She stayed as close to the doors as she could, clinging to the handhold. Moh stood, stooped, beside her, keeping his balance unaided as the train lurched and laboured along. In low-voiced, brief sentences, barely audible above the noise – and falling silent whenever it ceased – he told her what he’d learned from Logan and from Donovan.
‘Sounds like this thing’s into biology,’ she said. ‘I’d have expected something political, but this…Goddess, it’s creepy.’
‘Creepy crawlie.’ Moh shook his head, his eyelids hooding an intense, abstracted gaze. ‘I know what you mean…but I don’t think it’s that, nothing sinister, like…the Watchmaker idea, creating new life or taking over the world or whatever. It’s a lot more worrying than that.’
‘How?’
‘Something Logan said in passing: disaster recovery. That’s the political meaning of what it’s doing. It’s worrying because – it’s worried, so to speak. Fits in with how Josh thought – he used to talk about what he called the Fall, what might happen if we didn’t get a’ – Moh grimaced, as if embarrassed – ‘a new society. A saner world. We’d go back, to an older kind of society. Pre-capitalist.’
‘Instead of post-? Yeah, yeah.’ She smiled up at him sceptically. ‘“A catastrophe threatens the entire culture of mankind”?’
Moh frowned. ‘Where did you get that from?’
‘It’s in the transitional programme, the death-agony thing—’
‘So it is.’ He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Trotsky…OK.’ He opened his eyes again. ‘Had me confused there. Anyway. You get the point. The programme, again.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘he was wrong the last time, wasn’t he. I mean, all that doom and gloom was written, when? 1938?’
Moh laughed and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘You’ve cheered me up, you really have. It’s not like some kinda global catastrophe started in 1939, huh?’
They got off at a station which the Underground shared with the Elevated monorail. Both Underground and Elevated ran at ground-level here: Hein-leingrad, well inside the Greenbelt, where all the old placenames had been scraped away. The gutted Underground part of the station was scrawled with colourful graffiti and wilfully obscure slogans:
NEITHER DEATH NOR TAXES