‘Welcome to the Republic,’ he said. ‘My name’s Colin MacLennan. I’d like you to meet a man who’s very keen to meet you.’ He turned to the small man with a flourish.
‘Our scientific adviser, Doctor Nguyen Thanh Van.’
‘We have to look very closely at the influence of Gnosticism, right, because there we can see a major opposition to Paul’s misogyny, OK, which was later on to manifest itself in the so-called heresies of the Middle Ages—’
Bleibtreu-Fèvre slithered sideways, made a frantic grab for a handhold, caught a bunch of something like hair, and got heaved off the animal’s back for the fifth time. He ran after the beast and remounted, while four anarcho-barbarist terrorists looked politely away. He almost wished he were lying forward strapped to the horse’s neck, like Aghostino-Clarke. On the other hand, if they’d both been as helpless he wouldn’t have put it past this lot to butcher them and black-market the bionics.
The horses were picking their way down a slope along a barely visible path between birch trees. Water dripped on him and added irritation to discomfort. As soon as he was more or less settled on the horse, the leader of the gang, Dilly Foyle, continued her enthusiastic explanation of her political ideas. She was NF: National Feminist. Patriarchy, she’d already told him at some length (five kilometres, so far), was a Jewish invention, as was obvious from the Bible. Its function was to assist the effete city-dwellers in their struggle against the free barbarians, by turning the free barbarian men against the free barbarian women. She’d already given her estimate of the optimum human population of the planet: about fifty million.
‘…of course the whole defence of living in cities that’s wrecking the world right now comes not entirely but primarily from people who’ve adapted, you could even say degenerated…’
I bet you could, he thought.
‘…into dependency, and there’s only one ethnic group that has literally been urban without interruption for thousands of years. Now I’m not saying this to be anti-Semitic, far from it, but I think it’s no coincidence that socialism and capitalism are the two main industrialist ideologies, and when you find that Tony Cliff’s real name was Ygael Gluckstein and Ayn Rand’s was Alice Rosenbaum…’
He fell off again. After a couple more falls and a statistical analysis of the ethnic composition of media ownership which was only about one hundred per cent wrong, Bleibtreu-Fèvre murmured that he’d certainly look into the matter as soon as possible. Foyle thanked him for his interest, and fell into a thoughtful silence which worried him more than her talk.
Better to burn one city than to curse the darkness…now where had he heard that? Bleibtreu-Fèvre cursed the darkness, and he cursed the coherent light that had burned the car. Goddamn Space Defense. He was sure, still, that they weren’t on to the case: it was just their way of handling jurisdictional disputes, like they handled arms-control violations. They didn’t like Stasis, and they especially didn’t like Stasis shooting people. It would all have worked out fine if the goddamn greens hadn’t been so incompetent. Of course, he had known that the target killed greens as a profession, but his contacts had sworn by these. No low-risk lab-sabs them, but real guerillas, who’d fought off the native army itself on occasion. So much for the native army. Probably bought it off, more like.
It became obvious the path was going diagonally down the side of a hill. The trees thinned out and were replaced by gorse bushes, then the long wet grass of a meadow. Cows ignored their passing. He heard water, and a dog barking. They passed some of the traditional buildings of low-tech organic farming: Fuller domes, Nissen huts, a wind-power generator. Battered old cars with cylinders on their roofs that stank of methane. The horses were walking on moss-outlined stones now. They stopped, and those who could dismounted.
Within a minute people from the green community were all around, starting to help with their three injured comrades. Bleibtreu-Fèvre, with minutely directed help from a green who claimed to be a traditional healer and had bones through his ears to prove it, lifted Aghostino-Clarke off the horse and laid him on a stretcher. The black man moaned and opened his eyes.
‘You’re going to be all right,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said.
‘What…happened?’
‘The target’s moll shot you. And then the target shot you. He could have killed you, but he didn’t.’
‘Should…have,’ Aghostino-Clarke muttered, and closed his eyes again. Bleibtreu-Fèvre palped his arm gently until he found the drug panel, flush with the skin, and pushed the morphine key for another dose. His colleague had enough bionics and prosthetics and by-passes built into him to survive, just as long as none of them were hit.
They moved the wounded man into a house apart from the others, who were helped or carried to their own dwellings. Bleibtreu-Fèvre keyed himself a shot of anti-som and sat by a window until dawn. In the early light he saw what he was waiting for: a tiny automatic helicopter, a remote, drifting in across the wet pastures.
He went outside to speak to it. He’d barely completed giving it a message to arrange a pick-up later in the morning when he sensed the presence of Dilly Foyle at his side, glaring suspiciously at the hovering, insectile shape over the sights of her crossbow.
‘It’s all right,’ he told her. ‘We’re as anxious to keep this secret as you are.’ The little machine buzzed up towards the low cloud. Foyle still tracked it. ‘Remember what Jesus said.’
The machine disappeared from sight.
‘What?’
‘Don’t worry about the ’mote,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said grimly. ‘Worry about the beam.’
14
Spectres of Albion
Peace surrounded him. Silence rang in his ears.
Kohn leaned on the veranda railing and took some deep breaths of clean air, the scents of pine and creosote mingling. The reflection of the nearest range of hills across the sea-loch made slowly moving sine waves on the water. Behind that range other hills receded, rank on rank, each paler and less substantial until the last was invisible on the shining grey of the sky. Long banks of cloud lurked in the glens between the hills, like airships awaiting a heliographed signal to rise. The forested slope on which the low wooden house stood dropped sharply away before him, down to the raised beach with another scatter of houses – stone and concrete this time – and then there was another slope down about ten metres to the shore.
His coughing fit echoed like gunfire.
The ride in the humvee and the helicopter hop that had brought them here had been accompanied by absolutely no explanations. MacLennan and Van had assured them that all would be made plain. In the helicopter Van had lapsed into a tense, jumpy, rauchen verboten silence, while MacLennan had talked about the international situation. The Japanese were taking heavy losses in Siberia. A coalition of communistans from both sides of the Ussuri had fielded a force that grandly called itself the Sino-Soviet Union. Ragtag remnants of Red armies…MacLennan had been enthusiastic about it. He particularly admired the way na Sìnesov (as they were called around here) had struck hardest while the Japanese were preoccupied over an arms-control dispute with the Yanks.
‘Kyoto suburbs,’ Janis had mumbled. ‘Lasers, precision munition attrition.’ She fell asleep unnoticed against Kohn’s shoulder while MacLennan praised her erudition. Kohn could barely remember going to sleep himself, but he did remember his dreams, full of colour and pain. Dreams might turn out to be a problem. He could recall every last one from every sleep since he’d interfaced with the mind in the machine. All meaningless, all random reconfigurations of the events of the day or things that had been in his thoughts: he could match them up like a data dictionary. He wondered if the AI had had an analogous problem since it had looked into his reflection. Do AIS dream in electric sleep?