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‘Got a chit?’

Jordan shook his head.

‘Got any money?’

Jordan took out, cautiously, a fraction of his fortune. She fanned the wad.

‘That’ll do,’ she said. He thought she was going to keep it, but she handed it back. ‘You can live on that till you get work, if you want. But you’ll have to give me a hundred if you’re going in.’

She gave him a receipt, a thin stiff plastic card. ‘Hang on to this chit and you won’t have to pay again, no matter how many times you come back or how long you stay. You’ll have to pay for services, but that’s up to you.’

‘Services?’

She gestured impatience. ‘Protection. Some roads. All that.’

Jordan pocketed the chit. ‘What does this pay for?’

‘The space you take up,’ she said. ‘And the air you breathe.’

Jordan walked slowly up the hill. The air felt free.

6

The Space and Freedom Party

It all began with the space movement.

Under the Republic, the libertarians – whose attitudes to the Republic were even more conflicting, and conflictual, than those of the socialists – had started talking about space the way some socialists had once talked about peace. Somewhat to their surprise, it had worked for them, too, giving an extreme and unpopular minority hegemony over a large popular movement. By the time the Republic fell, the space movement had too much support, weapons and money to be suppressed at a bearable cost.

So, like most of the other popular movements that had flourished under the Republic, it had to be bought off.

The area now called Norlonto had been ceded to the space movement as part of the Restoration Settlement. At the time it had been considered almost valueless, including as it did a swathe of shanty-towns (obscurely known as the Greenbelt) and a vast refugee population, legacy of the Republic’s free immigration and asylum policy. The space movement had developed it as an entrepôt for European trade with the space stations and settlements. Most commercial launch-sites were tropical. Most airports were liable to military or paramilitary requisitioning, to say nothing of assault. Airship traffic had turned out to be viable, and less vulnerable than conventional airfreight to increasingly unpredictable weather. Alexandra Port’s trade quickly diversified.

Norlonto never quite became respectable enough to be a new Hong Kong or even a new Shanghai, and the ending of drug prohibition undercut it, but it retained its attraction as a tax and data haven, enterprise zone and social test-bed. The space movement had evolved into a hybrid of joint-stock corporation and propaganda campaign, and had tried to create in the territory it disdained to govern a condition approximating the stateless market which its early idealists and investors had intended for space itself.

Above the atmosphere, above the graves where the pioneers shared blessed ignorance with the Fenians and Jacobins and Patriots and Communards and Bolsheviks, the lords of the Earth and their liegemen rode high, couching lances of laser fire. From the battlesats out to the Belt, the state had space, and freedom.

Kohn let the automatics guide the car through Norlonto’s crowded streets, and allowed the new pathways in his mind to carry him back to where it had all begun.

They were building the future and getting paid by the hour, and they’d worked like pioneers; like kibbutzniks; like communists. Each day after work Kohn would watch the cement dust sluice away, and think hot showers the best amenity known to man, something he’d kill to keep. He’d take his clean clothes from the locker, bundle his overalls into the laundry hopper and swagger off the site, his day’s pay next to his heart. It was the best yet of his fifteen summers: the space boom just starting to pick up where the post-war reconstruction had left off, scars healing, new buildings going up. Long evenings when he could hit the streets, take in the new music, meet girls. There seemed to be girls everywhere, of his own age and older. Most of them had independence, a job and