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‘Oh, thanks.’

‘Also,’ she went on, ‘they insist on talking to you, because you weren’t involved in what the Republicans call the Betrayal.’

I suddenly found myself smoking a cigarette. (First of the day. One of these decades I’d have to quit for good, health risks or no health risks…)

‘But I was,’ I said. ‘Dammit, I helped the Hanoverian bastards draw up the maps.’

‘Yeah,’ Julie said. ‘And then we threw you out, remember?’

‘So?’

‘Well, everybody assumes it was because you were against the Settlement.’

‘What!’ I sat on the edge of the desk and laughed. ‘The organisation put that about?’

‘Not exactly,’ Julie said. ‘We just…didn’t contradict it. We could hardly denounce you for opportunism after we’d done the same thing ourselves.’

‘Of course you could,’ I said absently. ‘Didn’t I teach you anything?’

I’d just understood why, ever since the Settlement, my reputation had carried a mystique of irreproachability which in my actual political activity I’d done so little to deserve. It had helped me in my second career, a none-too-demanding history lectureship at North London University supplemented by more substantial writing than I’d ever had time for before. The writing had brought me to the unsought position of space-movement guru, more read about than read. The idle curiosity which had driven me to investigate and refute the conspiracy theory of history was hailed as a long-overdue revision of revisionist scholarship, my increasingly cynical journalism as the voice of the Movement’s radical conscience, challenging the inevitable compromises of its hands-off hegemony over Norlonto.

Julie was looking at her watch, wringing her phone, twitching her hair. Another rocket came in, closer this time. The gun-battery fell silent.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Take me to their leader.’

‘Only in a virtual sense,’ Julie said. ‘You take me to the Media Lab, or whatever it’s called these days, and I’ll patch you in.’

I picked up my jacket and computer and stubbed out my cigarette. ‘What about the students?’

‘That’s fixed,’ Julie said. ‘They’re on strike.’

‘Oh,’ I said, holding the door open as she steered her skirt through. ‘Where do they work?’

Whatever contribution to the struggle the students thought they were making by staying away, they’d have done better by coming in, to the Cable Room at least. In the Perry Anderson Building’s cool, quiet basement with its thin layer of natural light from slatted windows near the ceiling, cameras and screens and VR immersion gear lay amongst a clutter of notes and chewed pens and stained styrofoam cups. Julie powered up more and more cable and net connections, displaying a media battle almost as important as any on the ground.

Britain – ‘former Britain’ as the Yanks called it – was world news for a change, with the ANR allegedly poised to strike and the US/UN nerving itself for another bloody intervention. Meanwhile the local boards and channels were buzzing with rumour and debate. The ANR, for its part, was saying nothing, apart from a manifesto and a timetable showing exactly where and when they intended to strike. Tomorrow looked busy.

‘You want deep or flat?’ Julie asked, jolting me out of a fascinating, spinning thread of argument from one of the Yorkshire mini-states.

‘Flat.’ I never could stand the hassle of gloves, goggles, and gear – the way I saw it, if you were going to kit yourself out like that you might as well be getting into some good healthy perversion instead of the inside of a computer.

‘OK, putting you through now.’

The newsgroup discussion (and its almost equally intriguing accompaniment of cartoon characters – smileys, they were called – who pulled faces, gestured obscenely or rolled about laughing in the margins, in a graphic gloss on the main debate) flicked away and a video link cut in.

Flakey reception; scratches like an old movie (the cryptography had been lifted that minute from a campus freeware board in North Carolina, according to its indignant, jumping-up-and-down copyleft demon in the corner) and voice quality like a badly dubbed Iranian skinflick, but