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‘Yeah. A fun-loving, freedom-loving decadent blot.’

‘You said it.’

‘Well, actually, Wilde said it,’ Janis acknowledged. ‘And now they’re going to wreck the only good thing to come out of the Settlement. Goodbye to the fifth-colour country.’

Sylvia looked surprised, then smiled in agreement.

Janis noticed Jordan standing just a metre away, listening, and decided she’d underestimated his awareness of what was going on. She swung her head to indicate to him to come closer, and leaned inward to talk in a low voice to them both.

‘I know what you think I’m thinking. That it’s all very well doing this sort of thing to unpleasant little Free States, breeding grounds of reaction, but Norlonto’s different, Norlonto’s special because Norlonto’s free.

‘That’s not what I think at all.’ She took a long swallow, enjoying the looks they were giving her. ‘I think what we’re doing is wrong all down the line.’ There, she’d said it.

‘So what do you want then?’ Jordan asked, frowning. ‘Another Settlement? Let places like BC go on tyrannizing their inhabitants, poisoning their minds and screwing up their personalities? God, Janis, you don’t know what that kind of power is like!’

‘You don’t—’ she began. Then she recognized the song The Precentors were playing, just starting into the refrain again. She held up her hand. ‘Listen.’

If you had been whaur I hae been

ye wouldnae be sae canty-oh.

If you had seen what I hae seen

on th’ braes o’ Killiecrankie-oh…

They heard it out. Jordan turned to her, his ears burning.

‘Point taken,’ he said.

‘Is it that bad?’ Sylvia asked.

‘It’s bad,’ Janis said. ‘Don’t get me wrong – it’s not like it’s Afghanistan. I’m not talking about atrocities. But people’s lives are being devastated just to make a political point.’

‘But we had all of that under the Hanoverians,’ Jordan said. ‘The enclaves fought all the time—’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘Not all the time, and not like this. OK, OK. But it’s hard to stop. There’s a big sentiment for national unity, and against the mini-states.’

‘If the Republic wins,’ Janis said, ‘it isn’t going to be like Norlonto with taxes. It’s going to be like one big mini-state!’

She laughed for a moment at her own contradictory phrases, but Jordan looked at her sharply.

‘If—’

Janis felt her shoulders slump. ‘The fact is,’ she said, ‘we’re losing.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Jordan said lightly, catching someone’s eye and moving away. ‘I knew that.’

‘So what do we do?’ Janis said.

Syvlia snorted. ‘I know what I’m going to do. Move out.’

‘Move out – oh! To space.’

‘Yeah, while this place is still a spaceport, where you can hook on to something moving. While we still have space.’

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