Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [9]
The earth belongs unto the Lord
and all that it contains
except for the West Highland piers
for they belong to MacBraynes.
His grandmother had told him that mildly blasphemous variant on a psalm when he was a little kid, teasing the limits of propriety. Even his father had laughed, briefly. It expressed a truth about their own time, a truth about the Cable. The Elders did their best to censor and exclude the unclean, the doubtful in the printed word, but there was damn all they could do about the Cable, the fibre-optic network that the godless Republic had piped to every corner of every building in what was then a land, linking them to the world. The autonomy of all the Free States, the communities under the king, depended on free access to it. You could do without it as easily as you could do without air and water, and nobody even tried any more.
Jordan stood for a moment on the steps of his family’s three-storey house at the top of Crouch Hill. To his left he could see Alexandra Palace, the outer limit of another world. He knew better than to give it more than a glance. Norlonto’s free…
The air was as cold as water. He clattered down the steps and turned right, down the other side of the hill. Behind him the holograms above the Palace faded in the early sun. In his mind, they burned.
The lower floor of the old warehouse near Finsbury Park was a gerbil’s nest of fibre-optics. Jordan glimpsed their tangled, pulsing gleam between the treads of the steel stairs he hammered up every morning. Most of Beulah City’s terminals had information filters elaborately hardwired in, to ensure that they presented a true and correct vision of the world, free from the biases and distortions imposed by innumerable evil influences. Because those evils could not be altogether ignored, a small fraction of the terminals had been removed from private houses and businesses, their cables carefully coiled back and back, out of freshly re-opened trenches and conduits, and installed at a dozen centres where their use could be monitored. This one held about a hundred in its upper loft, a skylit maze of paper partitions.
Jordan pushed open the swing doors. The place at that moment had a churchy quiet. Most of the workers would arrive half an hour later: draughtsmen, writers, artists, designers, teachers, software techs, business execs, theologists. Jordan filled a china mug from the coffee machine – Salvadorean, but he couldn’t do anything about that – and walked carefully to his work-station.
The night trader, MacLaren, stood up, signing off and spinning the seat to Jordan. In his twenties, already slowing.
‘Beijing’s down,’ he said. ‘Vladivostok and Moscow up a few points, Warsaw and Frankfurt pretty shaky. Keep an eye on pharmaceuticals.’
‘Thanks.’ Jordan slid into his seat, put down his coffee and waved as he clocked in.
‘God go with ya,’ MacLaren mumbled. He picked up his parka and left. Jordan keyed the screen to a graphic display of the world’s stock markets. Screens were another insult: they didn’t trust you to use kit they couldn’t see over your shoulder. He blew at the coffee and munched at the bacon roll he’d bought on the way in, watched the gently rolling sea of wavy lines. As the picture formed in his mind he brought up prices for Beulah City’s own products, dancing like grace-notes, like colour-coded corks.
Stock-exchange speculation was not what it was about, though he and MacLaren sometimes kidded each other that it was. Beulah City imported textiles and information and chemicals, sold clothes and software and specialized medicines. Jordan and MacLaren, and Debbie Jones on the evening