There was a sort of reproof in their conflicting urgencies. Moh had wanted him to speak his mind, to push his ideas up the Collective’s tiny entry ramp to the information highways, and he must have had some reason. Jordan thought he saw part of it: as a cover story for the comrades – they were all expecting him to do something like that, and had assumed that his investigations were research for it. In a sense, they were – he’d learned a great deal in the past couple of days, a lot of details of what was going on in the world which Beulah City, even at its most exposed interface to that world, screened out. It had only deepened the conviction he’d expressed to Moh and the urge to tell people they could live their lives better – and longer – if they would only walk away from their fights.
He had little new to say, he reflected wryly, about what they could do if they did walk away from them. The godless gospels had answers to that, answers he agreed with, which essentially amounted to making the fullest use of the one life that was all and enough. They disagreed about how to do it, of course. From the same starting-point, one lot would suggest we all marched off to the left, another that we raced off to the right, while a substantial body of enlightened opinion held that the best bet was to sort of wander about with our eyes and options open.
Jordan sat up with a jolt, open-eyed himself. There was a name for that attitude, that outlook, a name that had recently gained currency: post-futurism. Pragmatic, disillusioned, refusing to hold up images of an ideal society or to crank out small-scale models of it on patches of contested ground, it had been widely denounced as radically conservative or blindly subversive. There had been a big fuss a few years back when someone had applied the label to the ANR, in some fashionable, controversial book – what was it called?
On a sudden hunch Jordan jumped up and searched through Moh’s collection of political literature, digging through drifts of pamphlets for the solid chunk of the occasional hardbook. And there it was: Towards the End of the Future by Jonathan Wilde, the old space-movement guru. He picked it up and flipped through it, smiling at Moh’s pencilled underlinings and scrawled, misspelt remarks. One proposition which had met with heavy black lines, exclamation marks and ‘Yup’ was Wilde’s comment that:
Aside from the space movement itself (which, paradoxically, is oriented to a former future which has now become merely the present, with all the problems of the present), the thinking which I have provisionally labelled ‘post-futurist’ is most strongly – if unconsciously – embodied in the diverse and ineradicable resistance movements against US/UN hegemony: the Khazakh People’s Front, the ex-neo-Communists of the NVC, the nonexistent but influential conspiracy known as the Last International, the Army of the New Republic, and many more.
No shared ideal unites them – on the contrary. Having every cause to rebel, they need no ideal, no ‘cause’. One stubborn conviction is common to all of them: No More New World Orders.
I will not conceal my own conviction that in this they are right.
For we have seen the future – we have by now centuries of experience of the future – and we know it doesn’t work. It’ll be a great day when the future goes away! It’ll be a great day of liberation, when the armies, the functionaries, the camp-followers, the carpet-baggers of the future go away and leave us in peace to get on with the rest of our lives!
Intrigued, Jordan went back to the beginning of the book and read it the whole way through. It took him about an hour and a half, sitting down or wandering up and down the stairs for coffee, book in hand. When he’d finished he dug out Wilde’s earlier works from Moh’s collection and read them: The Earth is a Harsh Mistress, No More Earthquakes – short, blazing manifestos that he scanned in minutes. Wilde hadn’t changed his principles – he was still the libertarian space nut that he’d been as long as anyone could remember – but his sense of the historical possibilities had subtly altered since the heady, crusading excitement of the space movement’s early days. He no longer seemed to think the ideas he propounded were about to sweep the world, nor did he even want them to: a respect for diversity which had been theoretical, tolerant, in his earlier writing had by now deepened to a commitment to diversity for its own sake rather than as a pool for selection in which the one true way might be found.
Post-futurism was Wilde’s way of coping with living on, into his own imagined future – albeit in a constricted, local form – and finding it, as he’d said, merely the present. Jordan doubted if Moh fully sympathized with this view – still a believer in a socialist future, still a receiver of news from nowhere – but the connection between post-futurism and Jordan’s own detestation of the competing ideologies of the mini-states helped to clarify why Moh had been so keen on getting Jordan’s ideas out on the Cable.
Cunning bastard, Jordan thought. Moh had wanted him to attack the ideologies, do his best to weaken the mini-states because, in doing so, he’d be doing his little bit to help the ANR! Not that Moh had shown much faith in the ANR but, as he’d said, ‘anything rational would be better than those smelly, cosy subtotalitarianisms’. And it couldn’t be a short-term thing, either: there was not enough time before the ANR’s offensive for anybody’s words to make much difference.
But after the offensive – when the ANR’s future, its New Republic, had itself become the present – then it might make a difference. Places like the one Jordan had come from, the ideal society a few kilometres down the road, might fall militarily at a good push. Undermining their self-confidence would be a slower process.
Well, why not?
Wasn’t that what he thought anyway? Wasn’t that what he had to say?
And there was one particular person he wanted to say it to. Even if she never heard it. He went out of Moh’s room and down the stairs and along the corridor to that other room where the cameras waited.
His voice was hesitant at first, becoming more confident as he found his pace.
‘This is Jordan Brown, with…the Global Village Atheist Show. I’m here to entertain, enlighten, and enrage.
‘Since this time yesterday, another forty thousand people, plus or minus the odd thousand, have been killed. Killed quite legally, according to the famous Annexe to the Geneva Convention, in recognized conflicts around the world. All the noncombatant deaths were inflicted under Paragraph 78, section 10, subsection 3. That’s the one saying that civilians can be killed only by explosive devices aimed at legitimate military targets, and yes, I have checked, and I can assure you that no instances of poisoning, machine-gunning in front of freshly dug trenches, release of radiation or radioactive substances, or throat-cutting have come to the attention of the relevant authorities.
‘And how do we know? We know because we’re watching. The whole world is watching. About fifty years ago somebody in Edinburgh came up with a video-camera the size of a coin. Within a few years they were in mass production, and getting smaller and cheaper by the year. And they started turning up on the killing fields of Central Europe, in the torture chambers of the Americas, on the blighted plains of Africa.
‘Now they’re so small that you can take someone apart bit by bit before you discover that one of those cockroaches on the floor was a bio-comp news-gatherer, heading for home with some very interesting pictures. And that your face is on satellite television, your genetic fingerprints are on public databases, and various public-spirited if not – ha, ha – public-funded agencies are bidding up the price of your head. Just think: there was a time when torturers only had to worry about getting letters from Amnesty International!