Janis stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s a lot of talk about cutting back. A good deal of the space effort was a Space Defense boondoggle, let’s face it. Now they’ve suddenly realized how vulnerable they are to the space unions. Space is still bloody expensive. Maybe if we’d had the steam-beams – ah, shit.’
‘So why go there?’
Sylvia grinned all over her face. ‘We’ll be there. The settlements can survive. There just won’t be much coming up. Maybe none.’ She swirled what remained of her litre moodily, and added as if changing the subject, ‘You hear the Khmer Vertes hit Bangkok?’
‘You getting all this?’
‘Yes.’
‘You OK?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine, Janis. Gotta admit it’s fucking weird, though.’
She touched the tiny phone behind her ear, smiling.
‘Take your word for it, gun.’
She circulated. There were a lot of space-movement people here, the comrades, some of Jordan’s…she didn’t know what to call them. Not, she hoped, followers. She talked, she drank, and sometimes she talked to herself without moving her lips.
Turing said if you could talk to it and you couldn’t tell if it was a person or not, it was a person. Searle said, suppose you had a man in a room who didn’t understand a language, say Chinese, and the room was full of books of rules for combining words in that language, and you shoved some writing in that language under the door, would…?
And Korzybski said a difference that makes no difference is no difference.
She could live with that.
‘You knew Moh Kohn?’
The man who spoke to her was short and stocky, with very short greying hair and with wrinkles around his eyes, but otherwise looked a bit younger than these features suggested. He waved out a long arm and invited her to a seat at the table where he sat, slightly stooped, over a drink.
‘Yes, I knew him.’ She sat down. ‘Did you?’
‘I heard he was killed in the revo. Sorry to hear it. Name’s Logan, by the way. Not Slogan.’ He laughed at what was obviously an old joke and reached across the table to shake her hand.
‘Logan! My God!’ She grabbed his hand.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s a welcome I didn’t expect! What’s the story?’
‘My name’s Janis Taine, I’m – that is, I was a biologist, and I was…working with Moh when he contacted you about’ – she lowered her voice – ‘the Star Fraction.’
‘The Star Fraction!’ Logan shouted. ‘Yee fucking hah!’ His fist in the air carried her hand, rather painfully, with it.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said as she sucked her knuckles.
‘It isn’t a secret any more?’
He shook his head. ‘Not here.’
‘Did it work? Did you get the data, or—?’
‘It worked fine,’ Logan said. ‘We got it all, just before Dissembler went down. It’s all out there now. The whole fucking Genome Project databank. We could grow the world from a bean.’
‘That’s good to know,’ Janis said. She felt a weight of concern, a concern that had grown so familiar she’d ceased to notice it, go. At least that much had worked: the systems that Josh Kohn had set up had performed to specification.
She let herself relax.
‘Maybe you can tell me something,’ she said. ‘You knew Moh for a long time, right?’
‘Just met him now and again over the years. Starting with the first time I was victimized. Overdose of rads. Anyway, it’s water out the jet now. Fifteen years ago. I must’ve been, oh, twenty and counting. I was speaking at a meeting the local comrades did.’
‘He told me about that,’ Janis said. ‘When he was looking for the Star Fraction…One thing I never did figure out. He was a communist, or a socialist, yeah, and I can see why he backed the Republic in the end. But why was he so keen on this place?’
‘The Lord Carrington?’
‘No!’ Janis snorted. ‘Idiot. Norlonto.’
‘He never explained that? Bastard. It’s something him and me figured out years ago, arguing with that old geezer, whatsisname, Wilde. See, what we always meant by socialism wasn’t something you forced on people, it was people organizing themselves as they pleased into co-ops, collectives, communes, unions. Now look at this place. Look at space, come to that. It’s crawling with them! And if socialism really is better, more efficient than capitalism then it can bloody well compete with capitalism. So we decided, forget all the statist shit and the violence: the best place for socialism is the closest to a free market you can get!’ He leaned back and laughed. ‘I had one hell of a faction-fight over that one!’
‘Well,’ Janis said, ‘that makes some kind of sense. I suppose.’ She gave him a conspiratorial wink. ‘Moh told me about fractions and factions.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Just what party was the Star Fraction a fraction of?’
Logan grinned and held up four fingers. Janis remembered Moh, doodling symbols in spilt wine.
‘Oh. The International.’
‘The Fourth.’ Then he spread both hands: not to indicate ten, Janis realized, but something opening. ‘And the Last.’
Janis frowned. ‘I thought the Last International was a myth!’
‘Yeah, it is.’ Logan laughed. ‘That’s the point! It gets around all the old problems of recruitment and security by having no membership, no apparatus, nothing except front organizations. The fronts are real; the party behind them is a mirage. A virtual organization!’
‘But what does it stand for? What’s it about?’
‘Freedom,’ Logan said flatly. Then, as if that were too grandiose a statement, added: ‘And defeating all its enemies, of course.’
‘A conspiracy of paranoids?’
‘Absolutely,’ Logan agreed cheerfully. ‘And Josh roped in lots of them to his virtual conspiracy, because he thought back then that the war was coming, right, that it would go nuclear, right, and that would be it. The end, the fall. Wrong. We pulled through that one. But now, the way things are going—’
‘Why does everybody keep talking about the way things are going? I thought things were going your way?’
Logan guffawed, then looked apologetic. ‘Sorry, no offence, mizz.’ (Mizz?) ‘What we thought was the revolution,’ he said slowly, as if spelling something out to himself, ‘was only a moment in the fall.’
‘That’s what they call it in America,’ Janis said, laughing. ‘The Fall Revolution!’
Logan didn’t take it as a joke. ‘That’s what it was, all right,’ he said. ‘We defeated the Kingdom, jes, and the US/UN, but we have too many of our own defeats behind us.’
‘Who’s this “we”?’ she challenged him. ‘The socialists?’
Logan sighed. ‘No. The workers. The city folk. We’ve been bled for over a century now by wars and depressions and purges and peace processes, and every one of them took more of our best away. Those of us who are left’ – he grinned sourly – ‘are the bottom of the barrel.’ He drained his drink. ‘Myself very much included.’
‘That’s not what I’ve heard about you,’ Janis said. She punched his shoulder as she went to the bar.
‘What have you been doing since the revo?’ Logan asked when she returned.
‘Cheers…I’ve been in the army.’
‘I gathered that,’ Logan said with a lopsided smile. ‘And what have you been doing? Recently.’
She thought about it. ‘Falling back,’ she admitted. It was no secret.
‘Yeah,’ Logan said. ‘We all are.’
Jordan and Cat had silently joined them at the table. The black and the white, the right and the left, the light and the fair.
‘We can’t just be going down like that,’ Janis protested. ‘Just because of a few ambiguous victories? Contradictory situations. Come on, give it some mips. We had the revolution. It just wasn’t your revolution. So what? I knew Moh; he told me some things. I know how you guys think. You just keep coming back.’