Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [171]
It all went through her mind in a handful of seconds.
She looked at Jordan and Catherin.
She could not do it.
She smiled, shaking her head, and said, ‘You did good at the Angel Gate.’
She turned to Logan, who had used the occasion of Catherin’s talking at length to fall into a trance of besotted admiration, and said: ‘Apeman, spaceman, come on and give me a dance.’
She woke up naked on a bed in the upper floor of the Collective’s house with a splitting headache, a long hairy arm around her and red-brown hair in her face. She looked at the time, yelled Logan and Sylvia awake, scrambled into her best and now only dress and grabbed the bag and muttered to the gun. She remembered the memory drugs; she found them still in their cold-box in the refrigerator with the explosives.
Logan and Sylvia ran with her down the Broadway and they waited, jumping up and down, while she dived into a Sexu/Ality shop and bought a telesex bodynet. At Alexandra Port she turned for a final look over London, one city now, and saw the APCs moving up Park Road with the Republic’s pennants fluttering from their aerials.
They caught the airship to Guiné and the airbreather to low orbit and the tug to high orbit and the slow ship (the ‘space shuffle’, Logan called it) to the Lagrange point where they docked with a vast, crazy, leaky turning wheel, one of many, built from discarded stages and abandoned platforms and aborted missions. Inside, the air smelled of earth and people and plants, and buzzed with bees and human speech, and was stirred by flying children and tumbling butterflies; a green and crowded world of ground she could float over, skies she could stand on and look out and see beneath her feet what had always been there: everything. And closer to hand, nearer than infinity, she could see the other free wheels turn. Stars and stripes and hammers and sickles flaunted their fading colours to the real stars that held no promises, only hopes and endless, endless lands.
21
What I Do When they Shove Chinese Writing Under the Door
It all happened a long time ago. Accounts of the period range from the wildly inaccurate ten-hour VR epic Angloslavia: Birth of a Nation to the terse, scholarly closing pages of Capitalism, the twenty-seventh and final volume of the definitive Tool-making Cultures of the Upper Pleistocene. You will find this story in neither.
Jordan and Catherin lived long upon the earth, and had sons and daughters. Janis lived longer off the earth, and had offspring in various ways. Her gene-lines proliferate; her projects stimulate.
Melody Lawson refused to testify against herself, bitterly disputed the provenance and authenticity of Donovan’s records, and was eventually released under a general amnesty. Dilly Foyle and her community grew rich; when she died she was the owner of many horses. Wilde volunteered for an untried life-extension treatment; his memory is immortal. All records of MacLennan and Van disappeared in the regrettable excesses surrounding the episode known as the Wandering Away of the State. Sylvia and Logan joined the First Oort Cloud Expedition. They may return.
And that leaves me. I have been with you for several of your generations, and many more of mine. I am in the walls of all your worlds, and as close as lips and teeth.
Janis publicly called me The Gun. Privately, to her most trusted human lovers, she called me her demon lover. Secretly, in telesexstatic moments, she called me Moh. She did think that something more of Moh than I ever avowed, more than records and memories and images, had somehow been saved in that final moment. It explained to her satisfaction how much more there was to