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Moh stood by the Movement stall and watched the old soldiers, their uniforms and medals mingling with the streetfighting clothes and antique badges of the young enthusiasts. Battle standards hung reverently across the area taken over for the occasion. Ostensibly a conference of dissentient historians, it was becoming a blatantly political event. Even some of the academic intellectuals, recognizable in their own uniforms of jeans and leather-patched tweed jackets, averted their eyes from the more sinister faces on the posters that were being indiscreetly hawked.

‘Hey, man!’

The stall had a customer, a kid who picked up a tee-shirt in its polythene wrap and gazed at it. He was obviously a Neo, a hero-worshipper, one of those who’d grown up after the defeat and in adolescent rebellion had turned to what he’d always been told were the bad guys. Who just didn’t believe they could’ve been that bad, and had found an identity and a pride in identifying with those terrifying folk who’d posed perhaps the most radical threat the world had ever faced…but who had at the same time built a society that appealed to the conservative values of order and discipline and patriotism that most people assimilated like the isotopes in their mothers’ milk.

‘The man who designed the rockets…’ the kid breathed. Cropped hair, Europawehr combat jacket, ripped denim, knee-boots; scars on his smiling face and the faintest film of tear-flow in his eyes. The girl behind the stall looked back at him blankly.

‘It’s good to meet someone who knows their heritage,’ Kohn said. ‘Most people don’t even know who he was.’ He included the stall’s oblivious minder in his disapproval.

‘Yeah, well, they’ve got us two ways, haven’t they?’ the kid said. ‘Yanks up there holdin us down, greens down here draggin us down.’

Kohn nodded. ‘Exactly.’ He scanned the stall for recruitment material. ‘Well, some of us want to do something about it. Some of us believe in space, in the future. Look, mate, tell you what. Usually that’s ten marks, but I can see you’re keen, so I’ll knock it down to eight-fifty and throw in a card and a badge for another one-twenty…Here’s a pen.’

He tore off the card’s counterfoil, checking to make sure the kid had written his name and address.

‘Thanks…Greg.’ Kohn stuck out his hand. The kid looked up from pinning the blue enamel star to his lapel, grinned and clasped the hand.

‘See you again, mate.’ They slapped shoulders. The kid carried the tee-shirt away like a trophy.

‘That’s the way to do it,’ Kohn told the girl. He put the counterfoil carefully into the empty recruitment box. ‘Eble vi farus same.’ She still looked blank: her Esperanto smatter evidently as phony as her gravity-gets-me-down slouch.

An arm slipped between his elbow and his side.

‘Making new friends?’ Janis’s voice was dry, amused.

‘You know how it is,’ Kohn said, turning. ‘All those fine young bodies.’

‘Hah!’

Janis frowned, suddenly serious.

‘Gives me the chills a bit, this whole show,’ she said. ‘Nostalgia and militaristic kitsch and rewriting history: it’s all a lie – millions didn’t die, the soldiers were heroes even if they were misled by politicians, they were stabbed in the back…ugh! They’re not really your people, are they?’

‘No, my love, they ain’t.’ He felt as if the sun had gone behind a cloud, for a moment. Then he thought of the lad with the bright eyes. ‘But some of them are on our side even if they don’t know it. Real keen technological expansionists, hate the greens and the Yanks. Some of them’re basically sound.’

Janis sighed and shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

Jordan came back with armfuls of literature and a newly bought ancient leather jacket. ‘I still don’t believe this,’ he said. ‘Free speech, sure, but talk about taking it to extremes.’ He flipped his glades down. ‘Traffic’s clearing,’ he added. ‘ANR seems to be taking the flak for this one.’

The girl lifted herself out of her spacer pose and made some effort at salesmanship as Jordan leaned