Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [256]
Right now there was only one person I cared about in Berlin: Eleanor, there with her partner on a long weekend.
‘What do you do in a war, Jonathan?’
Eleanor’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Tanya, sounded more curious than anxious. It was one of those emergency family gatherings around telephones and televisions that went on all over the country in the first few hours of the conflict. Ours was in Eleanor’s front room in Finsbury Park. Her absence was ever-present. Many of our friends, and other relatives, were also in Berlin. People were calling them up on all possible channels. I had a paging programme pursuing Eleanor, and was trying to pull together an executive meeting at the same time, partly to keep my mind off her. Communications, not to my surprise, were slow.
What do you do in a war? With four generations of anti-militarists behind her, you’d think the kid would know.
‘You oppose it,’ I said. It didn’t seem a very enlightening answer. I set up the codes for yet another attempt at a conference link.
Angela, Eleanor’s eldest, laughed. ‘You’re incorrigible.’ She was passing out cups of coffee and tea. Good girl. She knew what do do in a war.
‘My grandparents were conscientious objectors in the First World War, and my parents in the Second, and I’m damned if I’ll miss the chance to do the same in the Third.’ The server wasn’t responding. I sighed and punched through a re-route command.
‘Yeah,’ Annette said, leaning back against my shins. ‘A conscientious objector with nuclear capability.’
‘Nuclear cover,’ I corrected. ‘Anyway, it won’t come to that. The Germans don’t have nukes.’
‘So they say.’
Annette was flipping channels, getting CNN downlink from the Polish front, WDR vox-pop from Berlin, Channel 4 News from the regional assemblies and the State and Federal Parliaments of Britain. With their hovercraft tank-transporters the German advance was the fastest ever seen. They used up combat drones like Khomeini and Mao used men. We weren’t in the war – yet. There were plenty in the opposition parties who wanted us to be. Lord Ashdown’s face popped up far too often for my liking.
‘No, so the FIS says, and they should bloody know, it’s their skins that’ll fry if – ah!’
I had a connection. An 0.1 scale image of a table with the others around it flashed up behind the screen on my lap. Of the committee at the time of the election, only Julie O’Brien and I remained. The rest were new faces. Almost a decade of social and political upheaval – the revolution, as everybody now called it – had winnowed the space movement’s libertarian cadre, most of whom were organised in FreeSpace. Some of the best had followed Aaronson and Rutherford to Woomera, where the British and Australian Republics ran their joint space programme. Others had defected to conventional politics, usually Republican but occasionally to wilder shores, even to the resurgent Trotskyism of the Workers’ Power Party or the proliferating single-issue campaigns. I was left with hardliners – young Turks (ha!) who saw me as a dangerous moderate.
‘OK, comrades,’ I said. ‘Anyone who’s paying full attention to this meeting had better switch their telly on right now, because we need to keep at least half an eye on it. No doubt the wider space movement’s going to be all over the place on the war, and that’s as it should be, but we in FreeSpace have a responsibility to take a stand – in the name of freedom if not of space. I have every sympathy with the Germans – they couldn’t be expected to take refugees, fallout and terrorism forever. It’s rather gratifying to see the Poles get a bloody nose, especially after the way they’ve been treating their minorities. Nevertheless. I say it’s an imperialist war, we oppose all