Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [108]
‘…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