She and Kohn had been lovers, before. A classic case: their eyes had met across a crowded fight. It was like hitting it off at a disco. They were both having fun. Some shock of recognition at the preconscious, almost the prehuman, level. He’d once joked that the australopithecine ancestors had come in two types, robust and gracile: ‘I’ve got robustus genes,’ he’d said. ‘But you’re definitely gracilis.’ Just a romantic conceit: those slender limbs, tough muscles under skin that still ravished him just to look at; that face prettily triangular, wide eyes and small bright teeth – they’d been built by genes recombined out of a more recent history, crossing and recrossing the Atlantic in everything from slave ships to international brigades…a thoroughly modern girl.
Dear gracilis. He’d missed her at his back, and he’d missed her everywhere else. The word was that she was working for other coops, more purist outfits that took only politically sound contracts. Kohn had wished her luck and hoped to see her again. He’d never expected to find her in his sights.
Her hand, moved by the muscles that tirelessly re-knit the shattered radius and ulna, beckoned and dismissed.
‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I’m still on the same side.’ She looked around. ‘Can we talk?’
‘Sure.’ Kohn waved airily. ‘The guards are screened for all that.’
He didn’t believe it for a moment.
Catherin looked relieved. She started talking, low and fast.
‘You know it’s gonna be a hot autumn. The ANR’s planning another of its final offensives. Believe that when I see it, but the Kingdom’s for sure under pressure, from the greens and the nationalists and the Muslims and the Black Zionists as well as the workers’ movements. Right now it’s fighting them all, and the stupider of the Free States’re fighting each other. So – you know, the Party?’
‘The real Party?’ Stupid question.
‘No, the Labour Party. There’s been a conference, over in – well, over the water. Bringing all the Party factions together, and some of the movements. Decided on joint actions with all the forces actually fighting the state, all those who want to undo the Restoration Settlement.’
‘I know about the Left Alliance. I didn’t know the cranks were part of it.’
She returned him a level look.
‘You just don’t know what they’re up to in these AI labs, do you? Their idea of a glorious future is a universe crawling with computers that’ll remember us. Which is what those nerds think life is all about. Meanwhile the state’s using them, just like the Nazis used the rocket freaks. They’re itching to get their hands on some kind of intelligent system that’ll keep tabs on everything. And it’s all linked up with the other lot, the NC guys.’
‘NC?’
‘Natural Computing. Some of the big companies and armies are trying to get a handle on ways to enhance human intelligence, connect it directly with large-scale integration on the machine side. Sinister stuff like that.’
‘“Sinister stuff”? I can’t believe I’m hearing this shit. Christ, woman! I’ve just been in one these mad-evil-scientist laboratories, and they’re still trying things out on mice! The cranks are out to wreck the datasphere, and one day they might just do it. There’s just no way the Left should do deals with those shitwits. It’s madness.’
‘They’ve no chance of shutting down the whole thing, and you know it,’ Cat said. ‘But they’re damn’ good at sabbing, they’re brave and resourceful, and we need those skills to hit the state.’
Kohn jumped to his feet.
‘Yeah, right, and they need you to give them hardware support. Who’s using who in this campaign? Greens onside too, huh? Got the comrades helping to take out some of that evil technology? Know their way round the factories – yeah, fucking great.’
‘We’ve all fought alongside people we didn’t exactly see eye to eye with.’ She smiled, almost tenderly, almost conspiratorially. ‘“There is only one party, the Party of God”, remember?’
Kohn struggled momentarily with the politics of that particular past conflict and found it was all either too simple or too complicated.
‘The Muslims are civilized,’ he said. ‘The gang you were with are enemies of humanity.’
Catherin shrugged, with one shoulder. ‘At the moment they’re the enemies of our enemies, and that’s what counts. That’s what’s always counted.’
There were times when Kohn loathed the Left, when some monstrous stupidity almost, but never quite, outweighed the viciousness and venality of the system they opposed. Ally with the barbarians against the patricians and praetorians…think again, proletarians!
‘What does the ANR think of this brilliant tactic?’
Catherin’s face warped into scorn.
‘They’re being macho and sectarian and elitist as usual. Anyone who wants to fight the Hanoverian state should go through the proper channels – them!’
That was a relief. The Army of the New Republic had an almost mythical status on the Left. Claiming the legitimacy of the final emergency session of the Federal Assembly (held in an abandoned factory in Dagenham while the US/UN teletroopers closed in), it fought the Hanoverians and, it sometimes seemed, everybody else.
‘They’re history,’ Catherin said. ‘And if your little gang of mercenaries can’t get it together to stop defending legitimate targets, you are too.’
Kohn felt old. She was just a kid, that was what it was. Too young to remember the United Republic, hating the Hanoverian regime so much that any alliance against it seemed only common sense…There had to be more, you had to hold on to some sense of direction, even if it was only a thread. Growing up in the Greenbelt shanty-towns, Moh had learned that from his father. A fifth-generation Fourth Internationalist, paying out the thread, the thin line of words that connected past to future. The Party is the memory of the class, he used to say; meanwhile, the workers of the world did anything and everything except unite. Now he, Gaia shield his soul, had thought the Republic a rotten unstable compromise, but that didn’t stop him fighting to save it when the US/UN came in…welcomed, of course, by cheering crowds.
Kohn had no illusions. Most of the opposition would welcome the broadening of the Alliance, even if they saw it as only tactical and technical – a joint action here, a bit of covering fire there. The price would be that the list of legitimate targets would become a good deal longer. His co-op had lived by defending what he still saw as the seeds of progress – the workers’ organizations and the scientists and, if necessary, the capitalists – against the enemies of that modern industry on which all their conflicting hopes relied. The delicate balance, the ecological niche for the Cats, would be gone. For the first time he understood all that his father had meant by betrayal.
His rage focused on the wounded woman.
‘You’re free to go,’ he told her. ‘I’m not claiming ransom. I’m not hostage-swapping. Not pressing charges in any currency. I’ll clear you from our account.’
She sank back into the pillow.
‘You can’t do this to me!’
‘Watch my legs.’
He stalked out, leaving her free. Unemployed and unemployable. Only burned-out, squeezed-dry traitors, double and triple agents several times over, were ever released unconditionally.
At the time he thought it just.
2
Evidence for Aeroplanes
Tomorrow, Jordan thought, tomorrow he would start to live rationally. Tomorrow he would make the break, walk out and leave them, let them weep or curse. Light out for North London Town. Norlonto’s free, the whisper ran. You can get anything with money. Force has no purchase there.