Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [89]
But most of it was normal and respectable. Mutually compatible areas had found it profitable to adjoin, or buy up linking corridors, or sponsor rapid transport between them. You could travel widely through Norlonto and never see anything that would have looked out of place in Bangkok. A sidestep away you could see and do things that would be banned in Tehran.
Each new locality they crossed into was another stream to wash away their trail. Everywhere they found an undertone of caution, the racket of protection being strengthened, the buzz of departing money; fortunes, capitals as Moh called them, queued up on the wires like birds preparing to migrate. Every time the government announced the rebels were bluffing and the situation was under control, more smart money took wing for warmer climes.
Moh kept calling Jordan every few hours except through the night: the ANR was still unreachable; Jordan was building up an elaborate hack on Beulah City’s shipping companies and fashion houses, but he had no progress to report yet; and Donovan’s challenge was arousing some interest among various bounty-hunting agencies. Much to Moh’s disgust, a new newsgroup had opened, alt.fan.moh-kohn, for enthusiastic amateurs to report sightings of him and discuss the case; so far, none of the sightings had been authentic. Moh took out a policy for himself and Janis with the Mutual Protection Agency; the understanding was that he wouldn’t tell the company their location but Mutual Protection would download a map of areas where they could guarantee delivery of reinforcements within ten minutes of a call.
‘What if we do get attacked or something,’ Janis asked, ‘and the attacker has a contract with another agency? Do they shoot it out?’
‘Give it some mips,’ Moh said. ‘Proper channels are part of the deal. The agencies take any differences to a court they both acknowledge is fair—’
‘And suppose an agency popped up that didn’t accept any court that Mutual Protection suggested?’
‘Then a court they didn’t accept would find against them, without them even defending themselves, and they’d lose customers. In serious cases they’d be hunted down like dogs. What the agencies sell is legal protection as well as physical. If you want to protect criminal acts you just need your own guns, or preferably a state – that’s a real lawless defence agency for you, and run like any other monopoly to boot: rip-off prices, lousy service, rude staff.’
‘You’re not talking about the forces of the Crown by any chance?’
‘Now what gives you that idea?’
Janis had another objection. ‘You’re forgetting about the poor,’ she said. ‘How are they covered?’
Moh replied as if he’d been over this a few hundred times. ‘We all pay for security in every facility we use anyway, but if all else fails, if somebody’s kicking your shack down or putting the screws on you and you’ve not bothered to do without maybe a packet of smokes a week to pay for protection, you can always call on charity. The Black Cross, the St Maurice Defence Association, the Emancipation Army. Or us, if we’re in a generous frame of mind.’
They were sitting at a pavement café. The waiter brought Janis her vodka-cola. She took it and smiled down at him, gave him a quarter. He thanked her with a gap-toothed grin and ran back inside.
Moh looked after him sadly.
‘Anarcho-capitalism works,’ he said. ‘As much as any kind of capitalism works. It’s that sort of thing I find hard to take. Child labour. Prostitution. Slavery—’
‘What!’
‘Oh, it’s not legally enforceable. But on the other hand you can’t prevent people selling themselves for life, and some do. And there’s legal slavery as well, to pay off crime-debts, though that’s a lot different.’
‘All the same, slavery…’
‘It’s a feature of most utopias,’ Moh said gloomily. ‘It comes with the property.’
Late morning, two days and nights after Jordan had watched Janis and Moh dodge the shopping-centre riot, the comms room was hot and airless. He