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Tamara looked taken aback.

‘But that would be –’

‘Anarchy?’ Wilde grinned at her.

‘You’re saying people can do anything?’

‘Literally, yes. In any half-decent society you’re far better off respecting the law and property and so on, but the bottom line is, it’s your choice. You always have the option of making war – on the whole world, if it comes to that.’

‘But you’d lose!’ Tamara said.

Wilde looked back at her, unperturbed.

‘You might not. Locke said you can always “appeal to heaven”, and God or Nature might find in your favour. What I’m saying is, Ax has made his choice, and Dee hers. Maybe they can justify that choice in front of a court, maybe not. Either way, it isn’t for us to decide, and I’d be more than happy to justify not warning their potential victims. But if you want to, by all means go ahead.’

Tamara rubbed her chin and looked down again at Ax’s screed. She looked at Dee’s picture, and Talgarth’s file. Then she looked up at Wilde and asked, as if wanting to settle one final question: ‘What do you do if science lets you down?’

Wilde laughed. ‘Trust to luck.’

He stubbed out his cigarette and jumped up.

‘The sooner we get to Eon Talgarth’s court, the better,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’

‘Yes,’ said Tamara. She rose and began to hunt around for maps and provisions and arms.

‘So how do we get there?’ asked Wilde. ‘Aircraft?’

Tamara was packing ammo clips. She turned to him and laughed.

‘Talgarth doesn’t take kindly to aircraft landing nearby,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t trust them, for some strange reason. Nah, we take just enough weapons and gadgets to get through the wild machines, and we walk. Everybody does.’ She grinned. ‘It’s the law. It reduces the chances of fights breaking out in court.’

‘There’s a lot I don’t know about this place,’ Wilde acknowledged wryly.

Tamara grunted, testing the weight of a pack. She took out a heavy pistol, and passed it over to Wilde. She shoved Talgarth’s file on Wilde across the table.

‘Take that and read it sometime,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot this place doesn’t know about you.’

10

Tested on Animals

You’ll have noticed by now that what I’m telling you here isn’t in the texts. As you’ll have guessed, that’s the point. Why should I duplicate my hagiographers?

So you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I take the story of how I used People for Progress (North British Mutual’s educational campaign) as a launch-pad for the space movement; how I used Space Merchants to seed FreeSpace, a libertarian radical group that had learned the left’s one sound lesson, Leninism; how we used the space movement as a popular front for our free-market anarchism, and how the space movement grew beyond even my expectations – if I take mein kampf, in short – as read.

And my political commentary and analysis, ephemeral as it seemed at the time, fading from the screens like a short-term memory, was all dutifully archived by the intelligence agencies of the day, and in due course (i.e. wars and revolutions later) passed into the public domain and is undoubtedly still hanging around out there – ‘it is always sometime, somewhere on the net’, so if you really want to know, it’s only a search away [note: lightspeed limitations may apply]. So I won’t repeat myself on that, either.

In my later years I was occasionally known to grumble about the youth of today, etc., and how they didn’t appreciate that there had been a revolution before The Revolution and how there wouldn’t have been a New Republic if there hadn’t been a Republic in the first place, and how much tougher it all was for us and by the way have I ever told you about the war?

So I’ll skip that, too.

But it remains worth saying that the United Republic didn’t just happen. People didn’t suddenly wake up that election morning in 2015 and think, ‘This time we’ve got to get the bastards out.’ As a matter of fact they did, but it took a lot of work to bring that reckless impulse to birth: decades of agitation, grumbling, constitution-drafting, sparsely attended meetings in poorly furnished