Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [47]
‘Sounds like what we’ve got already,’ Kohn said, ‘only…’
Wilde snorted. ‘This century,’ he said, ‘is as much a travesty of my ideas as the last one was of yours. Mini-states instead of minimal states. Hah.’
‘Blame the world wars,’ Kohn said.
‘How…internationalist of you to put it that way,’ Wilde said. ‘I have difficulty convincing some of my lot not just to blame the Germans.’
‘That’s bourgeois nationalism for you.’
‘Quite.’
‘Looks like we’re not going to settle this.’
‘Not here. Space will…settle it.’
‘Space settlement!’
They both laughed.
‘It’s true,’ Wilde said. ‘Reality will turn out different from my utopia, and yours. The good thing about space is it holds out the chance that it might turn out better than we can imagine instead of worse. Not a promised land but a whole new infinite America where we’ll be the Indians, all our tribes expanding into a wilderness where we’ll bring the passengers pigeons and the bison and seed the forests from scratch, from rock and ice!’
Moh nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes, that’s it. Like Engels said, man’s natural environment doesn’t exist yet: he has to create it for himself.’
‘Engels said that?’
‘More or less. Not in so many words. I’ll look it up for you.’
‘Yes, you do that. Man’s natural environment is artificial – yeah, I like it. What we have to do is keep that possibility open, like the Bering bridge—’
‘Between Siberia and Alaska!’
At the time Siberia had a Communist government, Alaska a Libertarian. Wilde grinned back at him.
‘Exactly.’
At lunch Kohn looked round the noisy refectory, shrugged off any worries about security and said, ‘We still have a problem. What we gonna actually do about that lot down at the lab-site gate?’
Wilde shrugged. ‘Not much. The militia won’t touch them, and none of the independent agencies are likely to stick their necks out.’
‘Aha,’ said Kohn. ‘I think you might just have put your finger on—’
Wilde finished the sentence with him: ‘—a gap in the market!’
That night the green picket was still staked out at the lab site.
‘What’s that?’ The one who’d hassled Kohn turned at a noise. He found his cheek meeting a gun muzzle. Muffled sounds came from all around.
‘Your worst nightmare,’ said a voice from the darkness, about a metre away. ‘A yid kid with an AK and attitude.’
7
The Uploaded Gun
THE BRITISH PEOPLE
ENTHUSIASTICALLY COMMEMORATE
THE GLORIOUS
VICTORY OVER
THE GERMAN FASCIST BARBARIANS!
The slogan, freshly painted in metre-high letters on the gable end of the house, and the mural that illustrated it (a Soviet soldier raising the Red Flag over the ruined Reichstag) were all that distinguished the headquarters of the Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence Collective from the other four-storey blocks in the street just off Muswell Hill Broadway.
‘Some of the local kids did that when we weren’t looking,’ Kohn said. ‘Not exactly internationalist, but it’s one in the eye for our Hanoverian friends.’
Janis paused outside the car. She looked up. An airship – cloud and constellation in one – passed low overhead, drifting towards the forest of mooring masts on the immediate horizon where a rambling and ornate building stood, surmounted by holograms of gigantic human figures that reached out for the stars in a Stalinist statuary of light. As clouds dimmed the pale September sun the holograms brightened by the minute.
A low wall, a metre and a half of garden. Kohn opened the door.
‘After you, lady,’ he said.
She went in. Kohn dumped her bags in the entrance lobby and ushered her into a long room. At the far end was a kitchen. The near end contained couches, chairs, weapons, electronic gear and a battered table. The long room had obviously been made by knocking two rooms together. It had a rough, unfinished look: the furniture was old chairs and