• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Janis had looked at her pack as its solar-powered flexor frame made random movements in a patch of sunlight. ‘This,’ she’d announced in an aggrieved tone to the world in general, ‘is what I call a make-up bag.’

Now it sat in her lap like a small fat animal with bulging cheek-pouches, its phototropics hopelessly confused by the flicker of stanchion shadows. Janis had a seat by the window. She couldn’t look away from the view.

‘I always knew it was there,’ she said. ‘It’s just…’

‘Yeah, isn’t it just?’ Moh grinned at her from the opposite seat, the gun between his knees.

The Greenbelt. Ahead of them it sprawled to left and right, all along the horizon. A whole new London of shanties and skyscrapers, streets, factories, nuclear power plants; the sky alive with light aircraft, airships, aerostats – a chaos that even as she watched resolved itself into complexity, a pattern of differences like small fields seen from a great height. She looked at it through Moh’s binoculars, scanning slowly, lost in the endlessly deepening detail of it all. She remembered Darwin: It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank…

‘It’s like an ecosystem,’ she said at last.

‘That’s the real Norlonto,’ Moh said. ‘The core, except it isn’t central. The leading edge.’

‘Pity it doesn’t stretch all the way round.’

She thought of what lay beyond Uxbridge, out to the west. Badlands all the way to Wales, a firebreak between that ineradicable hostility and London. A lot of people would privately admit they’d prefer the Welsh marching to the endless trickle of saboteurs from these new Marches.

‘Or all the way in,’ Jordan said.

‘Yeah, the movement only got a slice of the pie. But look what they did with it!’

‘You sound proud of this place.’ Janis couldn’t square Moh’s enthusiasm for Norlonto with his stubborn insistence that he was some kind of socialist.

‘We want to go beyond this, do better than it. Not go back from it.’

After a minute she stopped trying to figure it out.

The mall had been hit in the war and never reclaimed, due to an obscure dispute about property rights. Norlonto being nothing if not an enormous tangle of private properties, the shopping centre and its surroundings had come to suffer what in a different society would be called planning blight. By default it could be considered part of the Kingdom, although the state had so far shown not the slightest interest in it. The whole area had been squatted and homesteaded until it was like a carcase occupied by an entire colony of ants, a shipwreck crusted with coral.

They pushed past stalls and shops selling microwaves, cast-iron cooking pots, light machine-guns, heavy-metal records, spacesuits, wedding-dresses, holodisks, oil paintings, Afro-Pak takeaways, VR snuff tapes. They emerged from the concentric rings and radial passages of the market into the concourse. Bernstein’s regular pitch occupied a small arc of a circle around what must once have been a fountain pond underneath a central skylight, forty-odd metres above, of now broken coloured glass.

It was unattended and bare. A skinny girl in a tool harness and little else affected a low-g loll behind the space-movement table in the adjacent quadrant.

‘Seen Bernstein?’ Moh asked.

She shifted an earpiece and gave her head a languid shake. ‘Booked it,’ she said. ‘If he don’t take it, is ’is agreno, jes?’

Moh checked his watch. 11.30. Not like Bernstein to miss several hours’ worth of sales. He turned to Jordan. ‘Anything going on?’

Jordan put his glades on with a flourish, tuned the downlink to his computer. ‘Damn’ right there is,’ he said. ‘Bomb scare in Camden High Street. Area’s sealed off. Traffic reports are frantic.’

‘Oh, shit. Well, that could account for it.’ Moh gazed around, willing Bernstein to appear. It didn’t work.

‘I’ll wait here and see if he turns up,’ he told Jordan and Janis. ‘You guys want to wander around?’

Jordan looked at the conference area of the mall, the revisionist rally. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘This is just incredible.’ Janis