Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [41]
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll go. Tomorrow night. Do you want to come?’
‘To a communist meeting? You must be joking, I’ve got better things to do. Isn’t that right, Lyn?’
Lynette tossed her hair and announced an intention to wash it the next evening.
As soon as he walked into the tiny hired hall, an upstairs room of a freshly redecorated pub called the Lord Carrington, Moh was smitten with the emotional backwash of wondering what age he’d been when he first sat at the back of just such a room, sometimes reading or playing on a game, sometimes listening. There was a table at the far end with two chairs behind it; at the near end was another table, this one stacked with copies of Red Star, hot off the press, and spread with pamphlets whose covers were frayed and furred with age. The rest of the room was optimistically filled with maybe forty stackable plastic chairs.
About twenty people came to hear the space-rigger, a stocky, long-limbed man called Logan with a severe case of sunburn. Stone listened engrossed, clenching his fists, and stood up at the end and made wild promises to raise money, spread the word. (He kept them.) Kohn listened for subtexts and structures, and sussed after about two minutes that this man wasn’t just a militant on a Party platform, but a Party militant. It didn’t seem possible he was in the same league as the old man up there beside him and the old woman who sat behind the literature table. They really did look like ghosts, wispy-haired, the paper of their pamphlets as yellow as their teeth.
The ghost of the Fourth International…The old man talked about solidarity, and Solidarity, and the miners’ strike of 1984–5 which had first opened his eyes to the reality of capitalism…Ghosts. And yet this phantom apparatus, this coelacanth of an organization, had convinced a young man to risk his livelihood and possibly his life to take its message into space. In its own way it was as impressive a feat as that of the Soviet degenerated workers’ state getting into space first. (After they’d scraped Sergei Korolev and his colleagues out of the camps where they’d been sent for…Trotskyism. Kohn smiled to himself. Suppose it had been true, and it was the Fourth International that had put Gagarin into orbit!)
He realized with a shock the exact reason for the generation-gap represented on the platform: old enough to be his grandparents, young enough to be his brother; none of an age to have been his parents. It was the classic population profile of annihilating defeat.
Cars racing through the streets, men with guns sitting half in and half out, yelling and shooting. The cars that came around later, and the men getting out, and shooting. The plastic that bit the wrists, and stumbling feet, and blood trickling thickly down a drain. And the people, our people, our side, our class, who stood and watched and did nothing.
Before he knew it the meeting was finished. People were milling around, getting drinks in, clustering at the literature table, shoving chairs out of rows and into circles…Moh was wondering how to get talking to someone when the space-rigger walked over.
‘Fancy a pint, lads?’
Moh spun a couple of chairs into position. ‘I’ll get them,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who’s out of work.’
Logan laughed. ‘I’m still one of the orbital labour aristocracy,’ he said, ‘and you’ve just been on strike, jes? So – what you having?’
He came back from the bar a few minutes later and started talking, mostly with Stone but including Moh in the conversation with quick glances and remarks. He’d obviously noted Stone’s contribution and picked him out as a good militant and potential recruit. Moh, who had assimilated the Dale Carnegie school of Trotskyist party-building from the age of about eight,