Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [56]
Norlonto had the smell of a port city, that openness to the world: the sense that you had only to step over a gap to be carried away to anywhere. (Perhaps the sea had been the original fifth-colour country, but it had been irretrievably stained with the bloody ink from all the others.) And it had also the feel that the world had come to it. In part this was illusory: most of the diversity around them had arrived much earlier than the airships and space platforms, yet here and there Kohn could pick out the clacking magnetic boots, the rock-climber physique, the laid-back Esperanto drawl of the orbital labour aristocracy. Men and women who’d hooked a lift on a reentry glider to blow a month’s pay in a shorter time, and in more inventive ways, than Khazakhstan or Guiné or Florida could allow.
Those who helped them do it made their mark in the crowd and among the shopfronts: prostitutes of all sexualities, gene-splicing parlours, hawkers of snacks and shots, VR vendors and drug and drink establishments.
The Lord Carrington, down a side street, wasn’t one of them.
‘It’s our local,’ Kohn said proudly as he pushed open the saloon-bar doors of heavy wood and glass and brass. The smells of alcohol, of hash and tobacco smoke, struck him with all their associations of promise and memory, fraud and forgetting. He didn’t know if he could take this intensity all his life. Maybe it was something you got used to. Poets had died for it; some said, of it. Perhaps it was wasted on him; or his very crudity, his fighter’s callousness, would save him.
What the hell.
Janis eased past him, through the door, and he stepped through and let it swing back.
The room was long and cool. The bar was divided along its length with apparently mirrored partitions that showed not reflections but views of other bars. You could tell the timezone the images came from by the state the drinkers had reached. The first one Kohn noticed looked like Vladivostok. Fortunately the sound was turned down. The real pub had not many in it yet, the hologram stage showing only swimming dolphins.
Janis beat him to the bar, turned with her elbow on the counter and asked, ‘What’ll you have?’
‘Eine bitter, bitte.’
Janis ordered two litres. They found an alcove where they could sit and see the stage and a window overlooking a tenth of London. Kohn sat down, shifting the belt pouch in which the gun’s smart-box nestled, easing the hip holster of the dumb automatic which was all the hardware the pub’s by-laws permitted. Janis watched with a faint smile and raised her heavy glass.
‘Well, here’s to us.’
‘Indeed. Cheers.’
The first long gulp. Kohn decided to appreciate the taste as long as he could before lighting up.
A man walked through the dolphins and announced the first set, a new Scottish band called The Precentors. The sea-scene cleared and two lads and a lass, playing live from Fort William, launched into the latest old rebel song.
Janis looked at him, then at her drink, then looked up again more sharply, her hair falling back. Her shoulders were swaying almost imperceptibly to the music.
‘Tell me about yourself,’ she said.
‘Not much to tell…I grew up around here, North London Town before and after it became Norlonto. My mother was a teacher, my father was – well, he made a living as a software tech but he was a professional revolutionary. Member of the Workers’ Power Party, which back then was what he used to call a nearly-mass Party. A near-miss Party.’ Kohn chuckled darkly. ‘The Fourth International had a few good national sections in those days, and they were one of the best. Industrial-grade Trotskyism. He was a union organizer, community activist in various Greenbelt townships. My mother got elected to the local council under the Republic.’
He stopped. Normally it was not difficult to talk about this. Now, the enhanced memories crowded him like hysterical relatives at a funeral. His fist was on the table. Janis’s fingers