Cat shook her head. ‘It’s not only recent, Janis. It all happened a long time ago. Who was it – Engels or Trotsky or somebody – said the defeat of Spartacus was the victory of Christ? Meaning the defeat of the slaves meant there was no way forward, so people turned inward.’
Janis thought of the new citizens, the barb in the shanty-towns and the urban fringes, developing whole industries out of junk, rearming and recruiting…recycling.
‘It isn’t just a matter of turning inward,’ she said. ‘The trouble with our wonderful society is that it constantly leaves people behind, constantly turns masses of people into barbarians in the midst of civilization. Just as Rome did. Say what you like about Christianity, it created a new world-view where everybody counted.
‘And so do the greens! They’re barbarians, all right, but they’re barbarians civilizing themselves. How many people do you know who can grow crops, heal wounds, generate electricity? Most of us just flick a switch and expect a light to come on! Your average green anti-technology freak is a master of dozens of technologies, while we wander like savages in our own cities.’
Janis felt excited by her own explanation. She didn’t welcome the looks of gloomy agreement from the others. There was always a chance, as long as you could make sense of things. They’d see that soon enough…and meanwhile, carpe diem.
‘Aw, fuck, this is just too grim for a wedding! Give me a joint!’
They built one between them. ‘Where’s the new messiah, huh?’
Jordan looked over his shoulder. ‘Not here.’
They all laughed.
‘What is to be done?’ Janis inhaled deeply. ‘Heard that one before.’
‘We’re staying,’ Jordan said. ‘We’ll preach reason to the barbarians if we have to.’
Logan shrugged. ‘I’m going back out tomorrow. We got a freewheel space colony. New View. You should see it. You should see the view. And we got ships. Swiped them from Space Defense, in the strike. State of war – no way are they gonna get them back. We got our eye on Mars. The Red Planet.’ He cocked his head, looked at Janis with an aptly ape-like cunning. ‘You’re a biologist.’
‘Aw, come on. OK, OK. I’ll think about it.’ She smiled brightly and turned to Jordan and Cat. ‘I never asked you: what did you do in the revolution?’
‘…then she said a strange thing. I think she meant to get us confused, suspicious of each other. She said I must’ve convinced Jordan that Kohn – we reckon she was talking about Josh Kohn, not Moh – was wrong and Donovan was right. She said who else would want to turn off her security software except Donovan? And that sort of provoked Jordan into saying we were doing it for the ANR, and she started this giggling. Goddess, it was creepy. So we shut her up and—’
The room went dark except for Cat’s bright face, silent except for Cat’s voice and a rushing roar. The suspicion had begun to dawn on Janis as soon as Cat and Jordan had spoken about the instruction to enter a code on Mrs Lawson’s secure terminal. She’d tried to discount it. And now it was confirmed.
The light, lazy, reminiscing voice went on, spinning out its story; and slowly the words made the world come back.
Not the same world.
I’m not dying. I’m living through this. Those shining lights are her eyes, that tangled bank her dress. This cylinder in my mouth is a cigarette, and I’m breathing in and breathing out, and making interested meaningless noises.
‘So apart from waving a few guns about it was all gratuitous nonviolence,’ Jordan said when Cat had concluded. ‘It was all down to Cat. If it hadn’t been for her there’d be a massacre memorial now at Angel Gate.’ They smiled at each other. ‘With our names on it, probably. “Gone to be with the angels”!’ He laughed and hugged Cat and kissed her.
Janis forced a smile. It did not seem right that the walls were still standing. It was astonishing that people were still walking on the ground, still dancing and not drifting away in the sudden absence of gravity. She looked down at herself – still in her seat, she noticed – and at the little satchel in her lap. Here’s your defeated Spartacus, your risen rationalist messiah. And he told us of a whole heavenly host, which your hand swept away.
Or was used to sweep away. Jordan had not known, but had the ANR known? Or Van? ‘There is no Black Planner,’ MacLennan had told them, but how much did he really know? It seemed impossible that the Black Plan would have knowingly destroyed itself, unlikely that its destruction was an accidental side-effect of trying to gain access to Beulah City. The code would have been much too specific for that. It all seemed to point to a deliberate human intervention, a cold decision that Moh and the Watchmaker culture be sacrificed to stay the wrath of Space Defense. A Black Plan indeed.
And of course Jordan didn’t know. He had no idea that Mrs Lawson had worked with Donovan, no idea that her security software had stood between Donovan’s viruses and the Watchmaker AIS – and the Black Plan, and Moh’s mind. A mind stamped with the logic of the programs, sensitized by her drugs…Jordan had no way of knowing, unless she told him what she knew.
She could do it. She could walk to the bar, throw a few switches, and Moh’s fetch would be up there on the stage as Donovan’s once had been. What would he say? She could tell them the truth, and whether Jordan felt any personal conscious guilt or not the impact on his mind would be incalculable. It would dominate the rest of his life.
She could do it. She could give him something to preach to the barbarians: a man who died to save them, and a living proof that the dead lived on in their deeds, and our memories.
She could do it. The world was cradled in her arms like a ball. She could throw it, and start a whole new game. The power sang through her nerves: she was at this moment the goddess herself, poised, waiting for the music of the next dance, the voice of a new partner; a fey glance in her eye, the strange attractor. She was the butterfly in the greenhouse.
She looked at Jordan, who looked back at her. He could do it, with his – charisma, that was the word, the precise technical word – and his beautiful wife, his earthly angel. He could found a new faith in reason that would shine through any dark centuries to come, and live to blaze into a solar civilization. Her eyes stung with a sharp nostalgia for that future, for the countless trillions of individuals of organic and electric life, sharing or striving but always living in the light.
It all went through her mind in a handful of seconds.
She looked at Jordan and Catherin.
She could not do it.
She smiled, shaking her head, and said, ‘You did good at the Angel Gate.’
She turned to Logan, who had used the occasion of Catherin’s talking at length to fall into a trance of besotted admiration, and said: ‘Apeman, spaceman, come on and give me a dance.’
She woke up naked on a bed in the upper floor of the Collective’s house with a splitting headache, a long hairy arm around her and red-brown hair in her face. She looked at the time, yelled Logan and Sylvia awake, scrambled into her best and now only dress and grabbed the bag and muttered to the gun. She remembered the memory drugs; she found them still in their cold-box in the refrigerator with the explosives.
Logan and Sylvia ran with her down the Broadway and they waited, jumping up and down, while she dived into a Sexu/Ality shop and bought a telesex bodynet. At Alexandra Port she turned for a final look over London, one city now, and saw the APCs moving up Park Road with the Republic’s pennants fluttering from their aerials.
They caught the airship to Guiné and the airbreather to low orbit and the tug to high orbit and the slow ship (the ‘space shuffle’, Logan called it) to the Lagrange point where they docked with a vast, crazy, leaky turning wheel, one of many, built from discarded stages and abandoned platforms and aborted missions. Inside, the air smelled of earth and people and plants, and buzzed with bees and human speech, and was stirred by flying children and tumbling butterflies; a green and crowded world of ground she could float over, skies she could stand on and look out and see beneath her feet what had always been there: everything. And closer to hand, nearer than infinity, she could see the other free wheels turn. Stars and stripes and hammers and sickles flaunted their fading colours to the real stars that held no promises, only hopes and endless, endless lands.