Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [59]
Time to look for some live action.
Jordan paid his tab and lugged his pack outside the door. As he buckled the strap a woman’s face caught his eye. An open, friendly face which he recognized but couldn’t place. She looked at him as if the recognition were mutual, but puzzled. A man walked beside her and a flicker of annoyance creased his brow as she stopped and said hello to Jordan.
Her dress seemed made of flames, a friendly fire that licked and played around the movements of her body. Salamandrine faces peeped and winked between her breasts and thighs. Her eyes were amused, when he reached them.
‘Enjoying your first taste of life in space?’
When she spoke he remembered her: she was the woman who’d checked him in.
‘Oh, hello again,’ he said. ‘Yes, but. It’s all a bit intense.’
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Uh…Well I want to meet people to talk to about…radical ideas, radical politics, you know? And to be honest I’d rather do it somewhere a bit more—’
He hesitated, not wanting to offend.
‘Normal and natural?’ she teased.
‘Yes,’ he admitted.
‘OK.’ She turned to her companion. ‘Do we know anywhere reasonably conservative, but relaxed?’
He thought for a moment, then said, ‘You could come with us. The Lord Carrington. That’s where the revolutionaries hang out.’ To Jordan it seemed wild enough, as he stood at the bar and drank his first honest litre. There were pubs in Beulah City but they were the sort of place where the Salvation Army was the entertainment. The Christians had an almost miraculous talent for turning wine into water. He smiled to himself and looked around.
The couple who’d come with him had been instantly dragged into a group of people in urgent discussion, leaving Jordan with a not unfriendly wave. The guy had been right about the sort of place it was. Conservative, relaxed and revolutionary: it caught the style. Cotton and leather and denim, a fashion statement echoing down generations: from cattle drivers to factory hands to leftist students to pro-Western youth in the East and back to the workers the last time the West was Red, and now to those who remembered that period or hoped for its return – the Levi jacket as much a badge of dissent as any enamel emblem pinned to its lapels.
Some of the women dressed exactly like the men, others played with similar modes softened by decorative touches; most, however, seemed to be announcing that they came from peasant rather than proletarian stock, in ethnic skirts and dresses that no actual Bolivian or Bulgarian or Kurdish woman would be seen dead in nowadays. But, whatever they wore, they acted in a way that struck him as brash and bold and masculine: shouting and smoking and buying drinks. There was something exciting about it, exciting in a different way from what he’d seen on the streets.
He felt simultaneously conspicuous and invisible. This was no singles bar: everyone was in groups and/or couples. He was noticed as different, unknown to anyone, and then ignored. He scanned the crowd for anyone on their own or anyhow interested in meeting someone new.
His idle gaze stopped with a jolt at a woman who sat on the wall-seat behind a table at the window. There were others at the table, but there was space on either side of her, and she was looking around the pub with a curious, questioning eye. She certainly wasn’t waiting for her date to turn up. She looked relaxed and content, and out-of-place. Cascading red hair, just enough make-up, pale face and paler arms set off by a sleeveless black top. It all said class, and not working class.
She saw him looking, and made eye-contact for a fraction of a second, then glanced down at her drink. Her hair tumbled forward. She ran her hand over the glass, then picked it up and took a swallow. Jordan turned away before she looked at him again, but he felt her gaze like a long, cool finger.
Another place, a place unknown except as a rumour, like the Black Plan and the Last International