‘So, whereas once it was possible to bomb entire countries – Laos – bludgeon a tenth of the population to death – Cambodia – or wipe out a third – East Timor – and plausibly deny that it had ever happened (the “ongoing process of holocaust revisionism”, as I think a famous linguist called it), they couldn’t get away with it any more. The silent slaughter ceased. The blood dried on the walls of the torture chambers. Starvation simply had to be wiped out, and it was, as efficiently as populations once had been, and often with the same equipment.
‘That was when this century’s first great discovery was made: the use of nuclear weapons. Until then, they didn’t have a use. A threat, a deterrent effect – even Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, in a sense, only a threat. A demonstration atrocity. It was an unknown genius in Azerbaijan who discovered what nuclear weapons are actually good for. Intercommunal massacre. Tactical nuclear intercommunal massacre. We know the result.
‘Naturally, this had to be stopped. Hence the next great discovery: a use for space-based lasers and indeed for space-based nukes. They were originally designed to drive the communist bloc to beggary, which they did, and shortly afterwards they drove the USA to bankruptcy – all of this before they were even built at all! Like the mythical tachyon bomb which destroys the target before it’s launched, orbital weapons struck backwards through time. But of course they were built anyway, and they keep the peace today by zapping any facility that looks as if it conceivably might be used to build nukes down here.
‘So there you have it: the wonderful checks and balances which have freed us from starvation, from the fear of nuclear war, from inescapable tyranny, and allow us all to go to hell in our own way. But with fourteen million, six hundred thousand combat deaths a year, we have surpassed the kill-rate of the Second World War on a permanent basis. It’s not all that different from the bad old days when we all went to hell together.
‘Don’t get me wrong: I’ll take my chances with animal-liberators, machine-wreckers, or born-again Christian militias any day rather than face new Hitlers, Stalins or Johnsons. But I’d like anyone who’s watching to entertain the possibility that maybe we could do better than this. And to ask yourself: where’s the vulnerable point in this multiple-choice totalitarianism? It seems…seamless. What can an individual do against it?
‘I’ll tell you. One of the ancestors of our modern militias was a group called the Falange. They had a slogan: Credere. Obedere. Combatere. “Believe. Obey. Fight.” I suggest that you doubt, disobey, desert. Particularly if you are called upon to fight against those who insist, against all the evidence, that we are one people.’
He paused for a moment, as if to indicate that he knew exactly what he was saying.
‘But, of course, that’s only my opinion.
‘And now, a word from my sponsors, the Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence Collective, who have very different opinions. Goodnight. Go without God, or the goddess, if you’re godless; and, if not, go with.’
Jordan drained the coffee mug and put it down, too hard. Drained was how he felt. He watched the comrade whose turn it was to wash up without even a twitch of that impulse to help which had so amused the others on his first evenings here.
When he’d finished speaking and Mary was tidying the cameras away after their regular slot, she’d said, not looking at him: ‘That was really…something. Where d’you learn to talk like that?’
Jordan sighed. ‘Televangelists,’ he said bitterly. ‘I’ve sat through enough of them. Must’ve soaked it up.’
Pre-adapted for speaking on the Cable, just as his job had pre-adapted him for seeking on the nets. It was an eerie, deterministic thought, like Calvinism…
Oh, shit. This wasn’t getting him anywhere. He jumped up, had a shower, changed and went downstairs again. The table in the long room had been cleared, the studio gear tilted away. Havana Vice was on the television. Dafyd and Stone were sitting on a sofa by the window-screen (a metre-by-two version of the glades, which made him feel exposed even while knowing it was one-way and armoured), sharing a joint and cleaning their weapons.
‘Hi, Jordan.’
‘Hi, guys.’ He sat down on one arm of the sofa, inhaling sidestream smoke and watching with a not coincidentally increasing fascination the intricate pattern the men’s hands made as they rubbed and scraped, bolted and fitted, stripped and re-assembled, drew and passed. They worked and smoked in silence except for the occasional cryptic remark, usually followed by helpless laughter.
‘Don’t put all your progs on one diskette.’
‘Oiling the cormorant, that was.’
‘So he looked at the judge and said, “These things are sent to try us.”’
That one killed them. The two mercenaries rolled off the couch and attacked the floor. After a minute of kicking and hammering it was clear that the floor had won. They lay on their backs, wiping away tears.
‘What was all that about?’
Stone recovered first.
‘It was something us ’n’ Moh did once, ended up in court, and AAH HA HA AH HAAA,’ he explained.
Jordan looked at them and shook his head. He walked over to the terminal and jammed his card in it. His speech seemed to have been taken up, and was spreading as people replayed it and passed it on. Not many, but there was a thin trickle coming in of royalties and his own cut of the usual donations. He felt he should donate some of it to a worthy cause himself.
‘Come on guys, sober up,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘I’m going to stand you some drinks.’
They were up like a shot.
At the Lord Carrington, The Many Worlds Interpretation was playing to a quiet midweek crowd. The band evidently believed in using the potential of the medium to go beyond the illusion of presence, and had a trick of swapping around unpredictably. Somebody would sing one and a half lines, then another member of the band would be standing there delivering the next phrase, while the original singer would be dripping sweat on to the guitar. The first five times this happened it was amusing.
Jordan had never been out with Dafyd and Stone before, and was surprised and relieved to find they drank more moderately than they smoked. They’d take about half an hour over a litre, speaking in low voices, chain-smoking tobacco cigarettes. They talked shop, about factions and alliances, and Jordan was privately pleased with himself that he was able to make a perceptive comment now and again. It had been part of his job, after all. One reason for their relative sobriety soon became apparent, although only to a close observer: they were unobtrusively checking out the women.
It was Jordan who saw her first, though, walking in as if the place were one small franchise in her chain. She moved like a dancer, glanced around like a fighter. She had a shining halo of blonde hair, bright blue eyes, skin the colour of pale honey, high cheekbones and the kind of jawline that the rest of humanity would take about half a million years to evolve. She wasn’t tall, but she had long legs, covered to just below the knee by a dress that had quite plainly been made out of cobwebs beaded with morning dew. Over it she wore a faded denim jacket several sizes too big. As she went to the bar to order a drink, Jordan saw that it had an intricate embroidered patch on the back: Earth from space, almost floating behind her shoulders, with the words EARTH’S ANGELS around it.