• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Moh sighed. ‘One faction of the Republic accepted the Settlement, and this is what they got for it. The rump of the public sector. It even gets a subsidy from the Kingdom. But it’s a Free State in its own right.’ He grinned. ‘Sort of a reformistan.’

‘I hope Jordan’s OK,’ Janis said. From the direction of the mall she could hear the sounds of breaking glass, yells, riot-poppers. Further away, the instantly recognizable black smoke from burning tyres rose above the shanty-town.

‘He’ll be fine,’ Moh said. He was gazing into the distance at a rapidly approaching aerostat. ‘Bernstein has forgotten more ways out of there than the cops’ll ever know.’

‘What did they barge in here for anyway?’

‘The Hanoverians are always a bit touchy about history,’ Moh said. ‘But right now I think it’s the future that’s bugging them.’

‘Don’t you feel like getting involved?’ Janis asked mischievously.

‘No point,’ Moh said. ‘The cops are way outnumbered. They’ll pull back or call in reinforcements. Either way…’ He shrugged.

The aerostat – a thirty-metre black disc like a flying saucer from a hostile alien empire – slid across the sky overhead and, with a deafening blast as its propellers altered pitch, stopped. It descended slowly behind the shopping centre and laid down a brief barrage of gas. Rope-ladders uncoiled from it, and in a few minutes were swinging as the retreating cops scrambled up. As soon as they were on board the machine wobbled, tilted and wallowed off to the west.

‘Overloaded,’ Moh observed in a satisfied tone. ‘They’re good for terrifying crowds, but that’s about it.’

People began straggling into the station, most of them arriving at a run and then losing much of their momentum and wandering around in a dazed manner, as if they’d been ejected from a pub into the street. They had bleeding heads, pouring noses, weeping eyes. Janis couldn’t see any serious injuries, and felt a selfish relief there weren’t any casualties that would make her feel obliged to help.

After about half an hour a series of increasingly frequent and agitated, but otherwise incomprehensible, bursts of sound from a PA system indicated that a train was due. After another half hour it arrived, carrying a swaying crowd of commuters: beggars and prostitutes, mostly, coming back from the early-to-late-morning shift in town.

A few seats were unoccupied but Janis had no intention of sitting on any of them. She stayed as close to the doors as she could, clinging to the handhold. Moh stood, stooped, beside her, keeping his balance unaided as the train lurched and laboured along. In low-voiced, brief sentences, barely audible above the noise – and falling silent whenever it ceased – he told her what he’d learned from Logan and from Donovan.

‘Sounds like this thing’s into biology,’ she said. ‘I’d have expected something political, but this…Goddess, it’s creepy.’

‘Creepy crawlie.’ Moh shook his head, his eyelids hooding an intense, abstracted gaze. ‘I know what you mean…but I don’t think it’s that, nothing sinister, like…the Watchmaker idea, creating new life or taking over the world or whatever. It’s a lot more worrying than that.’

‘How?’

‘Something Logan said in passing: disaster recovery. That’s the political meaning of what it’s doing. It’s worrying because – it’s worried, so to speak. Fits in with how Josh thought – he used to talk about what he called the Fall, what might happen if we didn’t get a’ – Moh grimaced, as if embarrassed – ‘a new society. A saner world. We’d go back, to an older kind of society. Pre-capitalist.’

‘Instead of post-? Yeah, yeah.’ She smiled up at him sceptically. ‘“A catastrophe threatens the entire culture of mankind”?’

Moh frowned. ‘Where did you get that from?’

‘It’s in the transitional programme, the death-agony thing—’

‘So it is.’ He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Trotsky…OK.’ He opened his eyes again. ‘Had me confused there. Anyway. You get the point. The programme, again.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘he was wrong the last time, wasn’t he. I mean, all that