Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [169]
‘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.’
Cat shook her head. ‘It’s not only recent, Janis. It all happened a long time ago. Who was it – Engels or Trotsky or somebody – said the defeat of Spartacus was the victory of Christ? Meaning the defeat of the slaves meant there was no way forward, so people turned inward.’
Janis thought of the new citizens, the barb in the shanty-towns and the urban fringes, developing whole industries out of junk, rearming and recruiting…recycling.
‘It isn’t just a matter of turning inward,’ she said. ‘The trouble with our wonderful society is that it constantly leaves people behind, constantly turns masses of people into barbarians in the midst of civilization. Just as Rome did. Say what you like about Christianity, it created a new world-view where everybody counted.
‘And so do the greens! They’re barbarians, all right, but they’re barbarians civilizing themselves. How many people do you know who can grow crops, heal wounds, generate electricity? Most of us just flick a switch and expect a light to come on! Your average green anti-technology freak is a master of dozens of technologies, while we wander like savages in our own cities.’
Janis felt excited by her own explanation. She didn’t welcome the looks of gloomy agreement from the others. There was always a chance, as long as you could make sense of things. They’d see that soon enough…and meanwhile, carpe diem.
‘Aw, fuck, this is just too grim for a wedding! Give me a joint!’
They built one between them. ‘Where’s the new messiah, huh?’
Jordan looked over his shoulder. ‘Not here.’
They all laughed.
‘What is to be done?’ Janis inhaled deeply. ‘Heard that one before.’
‘We’re staying,’ Jordan said. ‘We’ll preach reason to the barbarians if we have to.’
Logan shrugged. ‘I’m going back out tomorrow. We got a freewheel space colony. New View. You should see it. You should see the view. And we got ships. Swiped them from Space Defense, in the strike. State of war – no way are they gonna get them back. We got our eye