Fractions (10 page)

‘Services?'

She gestured impatience. ‘Protection. Some roads. All that.'

Jordan pocketed the chit. ‘What does this pay for?'

‘The space you take up,' she said. ‘And the air you breathe.'

Jordan walked slowly up the hill. The air felt free.

It all began with the space movement.

Under the Republic, the libertarians – whose attitudes to the Republic were even more conflicting, and conflictual, than those of the socialists – had started talking about
space
the way some socialists had once talked about
peace.
Somewhat to their surprise, it had worked for them, too, giving an extreme and unpopular minority hegemony over a large popular movement. By the time the Republic fell, the space movement had too much support, weapons and money to be suppressed at a bearable cost.

So, like most of the other popular movements that had flourished under the Republic, it had to be bought off.

The area now called Norlonto had been ceded to the space movement as part of the Restoration Settlement. At the time it had been considered almost valueless, including as it did a swathe of shanty-towns (obscurely known as the Greenbelt) and a vast refugee population, legacy of the Republic's free immigration and asylum policy. The space movement had developed it as an entrepôt for European trade with the space stations and settlements. Most commercial launch-sites were tropical. Most airports were liable to military or paramilitary requisitioning, to say nothing of assault. Airship traffic had turned out to be viable, and less vulnerable than conventional airfreight to increasingly unpredictable weather. Alexandra Port's trade quickly diversified.

Norlonto never quite became respectable enough to be a new Hong Kong or even a new Shanghai, and the ending of drug prohibition undercut it, but it retained its attraction as a tax and data haven, enterprise zone and social test-bed. The space movement had evolved into a hybrid of joint-stock corporation and propaganda campaign, and had tried to create in the territory it disdained to govern a condition approximating the stateless market which its early idealists and investors had intended for space itself.

Above the atmosphere, above the graves where the pioneers shared blessed ignorance with the Fenians and Jacobins and Patriots and Communards and Bolsheviks, the lords of the Earth and their liegemen rode high, couching lances of laser fire. From the battlesats out to the Belt, the state had space, and freedom.

Kohn let the automatics guide the car through Norlonto's crowded streets, and allowed the new pathways in his mind to carry him back to where it had all begun.

 

They were building the future and getting paid by the hour, and they'd worked like pioneers; like kibbutzniks; like communists. Each day after work Kohn would watch the cement dust sluice away, and think hot showers the best amenity known to man, something he'd kill to keep. He'd take his clean clothes from the locker, bundle his overalls into the laundry hopper and swagger off the site, his day's pay next to his heart. It was the best yet of his fifteen summers: the space boom just starting to pick up where the post-war reconstruction had left off, scars healing, new buildings going up. Long evenings when he could hit the streets, take in the new music, meet girls. There seemed to be girls everywhere, of his own age and older. Most of them had independence, a job and a place to crash, no hassles with parents. School really
was
out forever. If you wanted education you could get it from the net, as nature intended.

He was sinking foundations; he was getting in on the ground floor…the sheer hubris of taking this place and declaring it an outpost of space made him feel as if a taut string were vibrating in his chest. An open universe, unowned, was there for the taking, sixty-five kilometres away – straight up. Out there you could build the ground you walked on, and the possibility of doing so went on forever. One day he'd do it, one day he'd carve out his chunk of it, and there would always be enough and as good left over. Space offered the ultimate freedom and the ultimate justice. Earth had not anything to show more fair.

But that was only a potential, an aching longing, as long as the reality of space development was turned against itself, literally turned inwards, by Space Defense. The
US/UN
held that high ground, cynically supervising the planet's broken blocs. The Peace Process: divide-and-rule replicating downwards in a fractal balkanization of the world. Britain's version of the Peace Process gave each of the former oppositions and interests their own bloodstained bone to chew on, as Free States under the Kingdom. They called it the Restoration Settlement.

The irreconcilables and recusants of the defeated regime called it the Betrayal. Driven back to some snowline of social support in the cleared silicon glens of Scotland, the blackened ghettoes of the Midlands or the pitted guts of Wales, the handful who still held on to their weapons and their politics proclaimed themselves the Army of the New Republic.

 

One of those long evenings Kohn was sitting on the low forecourt wall of a pub in Golders Green, sipping with caution at a litre of Stella Artois. He wore shades in the twilight. The round, white-enamelled table where the others sat was jammed against the wall, enabling him to lean gently on the shoulder of his current girlfriend, Annie. Like most of the girls around (that was where the shades came in, for covert appraisals) she was wearing a skin-tight catsuit that covered everything up to her chin, including each finger and toe. The gauzy, floaty shift which covered
it
somehow made its contours no less detailed or revealing. As one of his older workmates had remarked appreciatively when the fashion had first drifted down the street, it was filf, pure filf.

Anyway, they were all workmates here. Himself, Annie, the tall Brummie about his own age that they called Stone, and Stone's girlfriend, Lynette – all worked on the same site. Stone was a labourer like himself; Lynette was training to be an engineer. He didn't like to think about what Annie did, but every so often he'd get a chill sweat at the thought of her walking along the high girders. Women were good at that, she kept telling him. Look at all those gymnasts. Yeah, yeah.

‘Well, we won,' Stone said. ‘We fuckin beat them.'

They all grinned at each other. They'd just won a fairly audacious pay-and-conditions gain out of a short, sharp strike.

‘This old gel came along to the picket line a couple of days ago,' Stone said. ‘Lecturer at the college. Gave us some money from the students for the strike fund. Didn't really need it, you know? Union's been solid. Anyway, they'd gone to the trouble of taking a collection, so I thanked her and said I'd put it in the branch account for the next time.' He laughed. ‘She said damn' right, there'd always be a next time. She sold me this paper.'

Kohn thought: Oh, no. His glass banged as he put it down. Stone hauled a tattered tabloid from the inside of his jacket and spread it on the table.

‘
Red Star
,' Stone said. ‘It's a bit extreme, but some of the things they say make sense. Thought you might be interested, Moh.'

Does it show? Kohn wondered wildly. Is there some mark of Cain branded on my forehead that identifies me to everybody else, no matter what I say or don't say, no matter how much I want to put it all behind me? He picked the paper up reluctantly, took his shades off to read. There it was, the banner with the strange device: a hammer-and-sickle, facing the opposite way from the traditional Soviet one, with a ‘4' over the hammer.

He didn't read beyond the masthead.

‘The only red stars I know about,' he said, ‘are dead, off the main sequence, and consist mostly of faintly glowing gas.'

Lynette was the only one who really got that.

‘They should call it
Red Giant
!'

Kohn smiled at her and looked at Stone, who scowled, taken aback.

‘I thought, you were good in the strike, you know how to organize, you always stick up for yourself…'

More than a hundred years, Kohn thought, and the word for a person like that is still
bolshie.
The old man would've been proud.

‘Nothing personal, yeah?' Kohn said. ‘It's just – don't waste any time thinking about workers' revolution. Crock a shit, man. It ain't gonna happen. So no matter how clever some of it sounds, any idea that depends on it being practical can be dismissed out a hand.'

He sat back, feeling smug. He'd kept it cool, kept it logical. It hadn't been one of those outbursts of loathing and contempt that sometimes escaped him.

‘Well,' Annie said. ‘you don't look like you've seen something dead. You look like you've seen a ghost.'

He smiled down at her upturned, concerned face.

‘Pale and shaking all over?'

‘Yes,' she said soberly. ‘You are.'

‘Ah,' Kohn said. ‘Maybe I did see a ghost.' (Leon Trotsky, with an ice-pick in his head. The ghost of the Fourth International. The spectre of communism.) ‘Or maybe I'm just getting cold.' He came down off the wall and pulled up a chair beside Annie. ‘Warm me up.'

Annie was happy to do that, but Stone wouldn't let it lie.

‘They've got a big centre-spread about conditions on the space construction-platforms. Sounds more like a building site than anything else. The guy who wrote it tried to organize a union and got burned out—'

‘A union in
space
?' Lynette said.

‘Yeah, and why not?'

‘What's “burned out” mean?' Moh asked.

Stone began scanning down the article but Annie beat him to it.

‘It's an old company trick, happened to an uncle of mine who worked in a nuclear power-station. They had him marked as a troublemaker and instead of sacking him – that would have caused more trouble – they just made sure he got his year's safe level of rads in about a week. By mistake, of course. Sorry, no more work. Against safety regulations.'

‘That's awful!' Lynette said. ‘What happened to him? Did he—?'

‘He' – Annie paused dramatically – ‘'s still alive and kicking…with all three legs.'

An uneasy laugh was interrupted by Stone, eyes and index finger still on the paper, waving his other hand and saying, ‘Nah, the levels were dead safe anyway. Just rules. We've all had worse.' An uneasy silence. ‘For this guy it was more, uh, genuine. They got him working outside during a solar flare. Had to go back on the next shuttle. Odds are he'll be okay, but he's grounded.'

‘For life?' Kohn said, appalled.

‘Don't know.' Stone raised his face, smiling. ‘Anyway, you can ask him yourself. He's speaking at a meeting tomorrow night.'

Kohn looked at him, his mind suddenly thrown into chaos. Until now it had not seemed quite real. He'd seen it as a ghost returned to haunt him but that was less unsettling than the thought that these people from the past were real and alive and walking the earth and that
you could just go and fucking ask.

He opened his mouth and said, sounding stupid even to himself, ‘What kind of a meeting?'

‘A
public
meeting, space-head!'

Kohn nutted Stone, hard enough to hurt a little. ‘Gimme that.'

He dragged the paper back, looked at the boxed ad for the meeting at the bottom of the middle pages. ‘“Unionize the space rigs! No victimizations!” Right, with you there one hundred per cent, bros and sis…Ah here we are, the small print: “North London Town Red Star Forum.” Knew it. Build the
fucking
party, forward to the
fucking
revolution, workers of the world and off the world unite! Well count me out.'

He felt Annie's gloved fingers on his cheek. ‘Nobody's asking you to count yourself
in
, Moh,' she said in a reasonable voice. The kind that meant: don't push it, mate. He turned his head to her, letting the hand slip down to his throat, and gazed at her for a moment. Her wavy black hair, her sharp and slender features, made her (he secretly thought) look like a smaller, more elegant version of himself. Next year's model.

‘All right,' he said. ‘I'll go. Tomorrow night. Do you want to come?'

‘To a communist meeting? You must be joking, I've got better things to do. Isn't that right, Lyn?'

Lynette tossed her hair and announced an intention to wash it the next evening.

 

As soon as he walked into the tiny hired hall, an upstairs room of a freshly redecorated pub called the Lord Carrington, Moh was smitten with the emotional backwash of wondering what age he'd been when he first sat at the back of just such a room, sometimes reading or playing on a game, sometimes listening. There was a table at the far end with two chairs behind it; at the near end was another table, this one stacked with copies of
Red Star
, hot off the press, and spread with pamphlets whose covers were frayed and furred with age. The rest of the room was optimistically filled with maybe forty stackable plastic chairs.

About twenty people came to hear the space-rigger, a stocky, long-limbed man called Logan with a severe case of sunburn. Stone listened engrossed, clenching his fists, and stood up at the end and made wild promises to raise money, spread the word. (He kept them.) Kohn listened for subtexts and structures, and sussed after about two minutes that this man wasn't just a militant on a Party platform, but a Party militant. It didn't seem possible he was in the same league as the old man up there beside him and the old woman who sat behind the literature table. They really did look like ghosts, wispy-haired, the paper of their pamphlets as yellow as their teeth.

The ghost of the Fourth International…The old man talked about solidarity, and Solidarity, and the miners' strike of 1984–5 which had first opened his eyes to the reality of capitalism…Ghosts. And yet this phantom apparatus, this coelacanth of an organization, had convinced a young man to risk his livelihood and possibly his life to take its message into space. In its own way it was as impressive a feat as that of the Soviet degenerated workers' state getting into space first. (After they'd scraped Sergei Korolev and his colleagues out of the camps where they'd been sent for…Trotskyism. Kohn smiled to himself. Suppose it had been true, and it was the Fourth International that had put Gagarin into orbit!)