‘Huh?’
‘That place is an ANR front. The whole femininism thing is a cover-up.’ They both laughed. ‘They’re busy making parachutes and fabric panels for microlites and hang-gliders, using manual sewing-machines. No software, see? Nothing to trace. Bulk orders on the Black Plan, like Jordan told us. They must be preparing for something big soon. And, think of it, all these dolly secretaries and so on must make pretty good spies.’
‘What about the ones who really believe in it?’
‘I doubt if there are many, and they can be kept harmlessly occupied. That was what all that fussy domestic craftwork crap was about in the first place, if I remember my social-history books.’
Janis looked as if she had caught up with herself.
‘Yes, but what happened back there?’
He told her: how the shapes hadn’t seemed right, and what Valery had told him; finding Catherin, and how and why she’d set him up. Janis already knew about his earlier relationship with Catherin – they’d spent hours of the past days and nights telling each other everything. But she was upset.
‘Oh, Moh!’ Janis stared straight ahead.
‘I know I shouldn’t have—’
‘No, it’s just – why did you do it in the first place? Why did she try to get back at you like that? Sounds to me like two people out to hurt each other. A particularly nasty lovers’ quarrel.’
‘I never thought of it like that,’ he said, considering. ‘It was business, politics. I felt she’d betrayed what we had stood for, that she fucking deserved it, working for these creatures from the swamp after, after—’
He was reduced to hand-waving.
‘After standing shoulder to shoulder with you for scientific-technological socialism?’
Kohn gave her a half-amused grimace that admitted the explanation lacked plausibility. ‘Something like that.’
She squeezed his knee. ‘It’s all right, I’m not jealous. Well, I am, actually. But I know what I’m up against.’
‘Yeah,’ Kohn said. ‘No competition at all.’
‘Why did they let you get away?’
‘There’s a formula,’ Kohn said, ‘a password for these situations. Goes a bit further than the old Civis Britannicus sum. You say it to the right person, you’re a citizen of the Republic. That’s what I did when I saw it was our only way out. The Republic, the ANR, they don’t give a damn for the militia rules of engagement. So now things are, like, different.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Well, any sort of little skirmishes we get into now are gonna be war. It won’t be like being a mercenary or even just defending ourselves the way we did back there.’
‘You’re telling me you’ve joined the ANR?’
‘Not exactly, but I’ve agreed to carry out its lawful orders, as a citizen of the Republic.’ He looked over at her, feeling he had more explaining to do. ‘It wasn’t just to get out of Cat’s clutches. I’ve been thinking about it. The Republic’s the only place I’ll ever find the answers to what’s happened to me. Like Logan said, it’s the safest place for us. And for whatever data is stashed in the gun’s computer. As for the politics of it, hell, if Josh could square whatever he was doing with working for the Republic, so can I.’
Janis was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘I want to join, too. Be a citizen. How do I do it?’
‘I told you the first time this came up: you’re still a citizen. From school, remember? If you want to be an active citizen, you contact another one, and volunteer. Like I just did.’
‘Damn, I could’ve done it back there, now I’ll have to wait till we…’ She stopped, hit her forehead with the heel of her hand and said, ‘Civis Britannicus sum, all right? That’s me in?’
She looked so keen and pleased with herself that Kohn felt ashamed of his reluctance, but he had to ask.
‘You’re sure you—?’
Janis burst out laughing. ‘I love the way you keep warning me off – it’s either charming or you must think I’m a vac-head. Look, Kohn, I know we’re in trouble. The only place I have a chance to live now is on this side of all those burning bridges.’ She punched his arm, like she didn’t want to risk anything but fraternal greetings at this moment. ‘My country is where you live, wherever that is.’
‘You know where it is,’ he said. ‘The fifth-colour country. Gens una sumus.’
They left the Stonewall Dykes and then Norlonto itself; they were on the King’s highway now, the public roads. Kohn felt the momentary pang of unease which always accompanied his crossing into the domain of the state. An emotional toll. They passed a high blue-and-white sign with a vertical arrow and one word on it: ‘North.’ The clearway flowed into an eight-lane motorway. The diesel kicked in. Janis squirmed down in her seat like a happy child.
‘I love that sign,’ she said.
‘Uh-oh,’ Kohn said.
Janis sat up straight. ‘What?’
Kohn pointed at the rear-view screen. Far behind them in the traffic was a pink blob with a wide chrome grin.
13
The Horsemen of the Apocrypha
Dilly Foyle lay on her chest in long grass. A few hundred metres away, across a culvert-floored green glen, the motorway made its humming and buzzing and howling music. Great bulks of irreplaceable minerals and petrochemicals were hurtling in both directions, cancelling each other out. It had always been for her the perfect example, the paradigm, of how trade and exchange were an intrinsically wasteful plundering of the planet. The combustion engine, the consumer society…The words (if nothing else in the arrangement) were a give-away.
The Human Reich.
To attack it directly was a sure road to dying. One bolt from the crossbow that lay at her hand could blow out a tyre and, with luck, scatter burning wreckage and snarl up miles. But that was only worth doing to harass a military sweep already under way – to do it any other time would only invite one. So the GreenWar partisans preferred to pursue a subtler quarrel, building their Cumbrian communities in abandoned farms and the ruins of the tourism that had been their earliest and softest target. The Lake District was theirs now, in plain view of the towns. On a clear day you can see the revolution…
Her nose, untainted by foul habits or city air, could have told her where she was in the dark. Petrol fumes and damp earth, the oiled steel of the crossbow, the old wood of the stock…her comrades…their horses cropping quietly in a hollow. And, ahead and to her left, the service area, where the reek of exhaust and battery mingled with burnt coffee and wasted food and plastic in all its extruded and expanded, gross and bloated forms.
Synthetic shit.
She didn’t need binoculars to scan the vehicles entering and leaving the service area, and she wouldn’t need glades when night fell. Already the place had its lights on (waste, waste). She would know what to do if the signal came. And, if it didn’t come to her, it would come to other partisans, at other points up and down the motorway. The orders today had been very specific, and urgent.
She waited.
They ran into a local war a few kilometres north of Lancaster. Farm buildings and factories burned. Tanks elbowed across the road. Helicopters racketed overhead. The traffic on the M6 barely kept pace with the refugees trailing along on the hard shoulder.
‘It’s like something out of the twentieth century,’ Janis said.
‘They’re not being strafed,’ Kohn remarked.
‘What’s that supposed to mean? Progress?’
Kohn slid the truck forward a little, then idled it again. The engine’s note dropped below audibility. ‘Progress is like this,’ he said.
‘That car still behind us?’
Kohn scanned. ‘Yeah.’