Modem Times 2.0 - Michael Moorcock [27]
Jerry said, “OK. I give up. When can you get me connected?”
“It depends.” Burroughs frowned, either making a calculation or pretending to make one. “It depends how much memory you want. Four to seven days?” His long, sad face contemplated some invisible chart. His thin fingers played air computer. “Any options?”
Jerry had become impatient. “Only connect,” he said. God, how he yearned for a taste of the real world. The world he had been sure he knew. Even Norbury.
The old trees they knew as the Manor grew in ground surrounding the Barclay’s Bank and were more or less public until the cricket club became more conscious of its privacy. The egalitarian spirit disappeared rapidly with the success of the first postwar Conservative government.
The best woods lay on top of Biggin Hill where one of wartime Britain’s most active airfields had lain in the flat delta where two valleys met. Croydon had been another. Then Norbury Cross, carved out of Mitcham Common and restored, when Jerry first went back, to a replica of its prewar appearance.
It didn’t do to get sentimental. Jerry felt cold again. His breath was thick on the rapidly cooling air. But he had spent too many years finding this place to risk losing it completely.
High elms where the rooks nested making the sharpness of an autumn evening, the smell of wood smoke, the red and orange skies on the horizon, the noise of the returning birds. Like laughter. Sneering, quarrelsome laughter.
Once real wealth came into the equation, the seeds of fresh class warfare were sewn as the salaries grew farther apart and bonuses became a kind of Danegeld to dissuade directors from taking their strength elsewhere. Most of that strength lay in guilty secrets.
“What the bloody hell do ya think you’re doing sitting there dreaming, ya silly-looking toad! Go and get us some fish and chips.”
“Yes, mum.” He climbed out of the sheet under whichhe’d been hiding to frighten his brother Frank.
“Can you smell pee?” she asked anxiously as he went out through the front door. “Tell me if ya can smell it when ya come in, love.”
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BRUSSELS: A Belgian high school today sacked a Muslim maths teacher after she insisted she would continue to wear the burqa while taking classes.
—The Times of India, June 9, 2010
“WHAT I CAN’T understand about you, Mr. Cornelius,” Miss Brunner said, opening a cornflower blue sunshade only slightly wider than her royal blue Gainsborough hat, “is why so many of your mentors are gay. Or Catholic. Or both.”
“Or Jewish,” said Jerry. “You can’t forget the Jews. It’s probably the guilt.”
“You? Guilt? Have you ever felt guilt?” “That’s not the point.” He found himself thinking again of Alexander, his unborn son. Invisibly, he collected himself. “I reflect it.”
“That’s gilt. Not guilt.”
“Oh, believe me. They’re often the same thing.”
From somewhere beyond the crowd a gun cracked.
She brightened, quickening her high-heeled trot. “They’re off!”
Jerry tripped behind her. There was something about Surrey he was never going to like.
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The creator of the Segway is one of the most successful and admired inventors in the world. He leads a team of 300 scientists and engineers devoted to making things that better mankind. But Dean Kamen won’t feel satisfied until he achieves his greatest goal: reinventing us.
—Popular Mechanics, June 2010
BACK IN ISLAMABAD Jerry read the news from New Orleans. He wondered if the French were going to regret their decision to buy it back. How could they possibly make it pay? The cleanup alone had already bankrupted BP. It hadn’t been a great couple of years for the oligarchs. Of course, it did give France the refineries and a means of getting their tankers up to Memphis, but how would the American public take to the reintroduction of the minstrels on the showboats?
“People who are free, who live in a real republic, are never offended,