Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [40]
He didn’t read beyond the masthead.
‘The only red stars I know about,’ he said, ‘are dead, off the main sequence, and consist mostly of faintly glowing gas.’
Lynette was the only one who really got that.
‘They should call it Red Giant!’
Kohn smiled at her and looked at Stone, who scowled, taken aback.
‘I thought, you were good in the strike, you know how to organize, you always stick up for yourself…’
More than a hundred years, Kohn thought, and the word for a person like that is still bolshie. The old man would’ve been proud.
‘Nothing personal, yeah?’ Kohn said. ‘It’s just – don’t waste any time thinking about workers’ revolution. Crock a shit, man. It ain’t gonna happen. So no matter how clever some of it sounds, any idea that depends on it being practical can be dismissed out a hand.’
He sat back, feeling smug. He’d kept it cool, kept it logical. It hadn’t been one of those outbursts of loathing and contempt that sometimes escaped him.
‘Well,’ Annie said. ‘you don’t look like you’ve seen something dead. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
He smiled down at her upturned, concerned face.
‘Pale and shaking all over?’
‘Yes,’ she said soberly. ‘You are.’
‘Ah,’ Kohn said. ‘Maybe I did see a ghost.’ (Leon Trotsky, with an ice-pick in his head. The ghost of the Fourth International. The spectre of communism.) ‘Or maybe I’m just getting cold.’ He came down off the wall and pulled up a chair beside Annie. ‘Warm me up.’
Annie was happy to do that, but Stone wouldn’t let it lie.
‘They’ve got a big centre-spread about conditions on the space construction-platforms. Sounds more like a building site than anything else. The guy who wrote it tried to organize a union and got burned out—’
‘A union in space?’ Lynette said.
‘Yeah, and why not?’
‘What’s “burned out” mean?’ Moh asked.
Stone began scanning down the article but Annie beat him to it.
‘It’s an old company trick, happened to an uncle of mine who worked in a nuclear power-station. They had him marked as a troublemaker and instead of sacking him – that would have caused more trouble – they just made sure he got his year’s safe level of rads in about a week. By mistake, of course. Sorry, no more work. Against safety regulations.’
‘That’s awful!’ Lynette said. ‘What happened to him? Did he—?’
‘He’ – Annie paused dramatically – ‘’s still alive and kicking…with all three legs.’
An uneasy laugh was interrupted by Stone, eyes and index finger still on the paper, waving his other hand and saying, ‘Nah, the levels were dead safe anyway. Just rules. We’ve all had worse.’ An uneasy silence. ‘For this guy it was more, uh, genuine. They got him working outside during a solar flare. Had to go back on the next shuttle. Odds are he’ll be okay, but he’s grounded.’
‘For life?’ Kohn said, appalled.
‘Don’t know.’ Stone raised his face, smiling. ‘Anyway, you can ask him yourself. He’s speaking at a meeting tomorrow night.’
Kohn looked at him, his mind suddenly thrown into chaos. Until now it had not seemed quite real. He’d seen it as a ghost returned to haunt him but that was less unsettling than the thought that these people from the past were real and alive and walking the earth and that you could just go and fucking ask.
He opened his mouth and said, sounding stupid even to himself, ‘What kind of a meeting?’
‘A public meeting, space-head!’
Kohn nutted Stone, hard enough to hurt a little. ‘Gimme that.’
He dragged the paper back, looked at the boxed ad for the meeting at the bottom of the middle pages. ‘“Unionize the space rigs! No victimizations!” Right, with you there one hundred per cent, bros and sis…Ah here we are, the small print: “North London Town Red Star Forum.” Knew it. Build the fucking party, forward to the fucking revolution, workers of the world and off the world unite! Well count me out.’
He felt Annie’s gloved fingers on his cheek. ‘Nobody’s asking you to count yourself in, Moh,’ she said