The Star Fraction

10

Tested on Animals

You’ll have noticed by now that what I’m telling you here isn’t in the texts. As you’ll have guessed, that’s the point. Why should I duplicate my hagiographers?

So you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I take the story of how I used People for Progress (North British Mutual’s educational campaign) as a launch-pad for the space movement; how I used Space Merchants to seed FreeSpace, a libertarian radical group that had learned the left’s one sound lesson, Leninism; how we used the space movement as a popular front for our free-market anarchism, and how the space movement grew beyond even my expectations – if I take mein kampf, in short – as read.

And my political commentary and analysis, ephemeral as it seemed at the time, fading from the screens like a short-term memory, was all dutifully archived by the intelligence agencies of the day, and in due course (i.e. wars and revolutions later) passed into the public domain and is undoubtedly still hanging around out there – ‘it is always sometime, somewhere on the net’, so if you really want to know, it’s only a search away [note: lightspeed limitations may apply]. So I won’t repeat myself on that, either.

In my later years I was occasionally known to grumble about the youth of today, etc., and how they didn’t appreciate that there had been a revolution before The Revolution and how there wouldn’t have been a New Republic if there hadn’t been a Republic in the first place, and how much tougher it all was for us and by the way have I ever told you about the war?

So I’ll skip that, too.

But it remains worth saying that the United Republic didn’t just happen. People didn’t suddenly wake up that election morning in 2015 and think, ‘This time we’ve got to get the bastards out.’ As a matter of fact they did, but it took a lot of work to bring that reckless impulse to birth: decades of agitation, grumbling, constitution-drafting, sparsely attended meetings in poorly furnished halls, letters to the editor, noisy demonstrations, and all the rest. And bloody hard work it was. I know, because I was there and I didn’t do any of it.

FreeSpace (the name had once seemed trendy, but now dated us painfully – ‘very TwenCen’, as I’d overheard someone say) had its modest offices above a Space Merchants franchise just across the road from the Camden Lock market. (I’d quit running Space Merchants, kept enough shares and options in it to keep a steady if small income, and left it alone. It had moved into selling actual space products now, most just novelties – moon-rock jewellery, free-fall crystals and so forth – but also some of practical use. Microgravity manufacturing had come up with unexpected applications, as I’d known it would.) We’d had the offices for ten years, and they still smelled of fresh paint and new wood and cement. The concrete walls were decorated with space movement posters and NASA Inc hologram views, but the first thing anyone saw when they came through the doorway was my desk with a huge notice behind it saying YOU’RE WELCOME TO SMOKE. I no longer smoked myself – although medical science had already beaten what we (misleadingly, nowadays) called ‘the big C’, there was no easy fix for the habit’s bronchial consequences, and at sixty-two I needed all the breath I could get. The notice was a matter of principle, like the washroom soap-dispenser’s mischievous little sticker announcing that its contents had been Tested On Animals.

The morning after the election I was the only person in the office who wasn’t late in and hung over. Each bleary-eyed arrival was greeted by me looking up from the online news (panic in Whitehall, pound in free fall, riots in Kensington, airports mobbed) and saying: ‘Oh, you stayed up for the results? Who won?’

Having thus protected my anarchist credibility I’d have another secret gloat at the results. The composition of the new government wasn’t official yet, they were still arguing, but it looked like it would be Republican, New Labour, True Labour, and a couple of Radicals on the government side, with the Unionists the official opposition and the small parties in the wings. Plenty of the last – even the World Socialists (the new name of the SPGB) had scraped together enough first preferences to get one MP elected. Sadly, my parents hadn’t lived to see it. It had taken the party a hundred and eleven years to get into Parliament, but they were still on course for that twenty-fifth-century global majority.

Then I’d get back to organising an emergency executive committee meeting for 11.00 that morning. No answer, not even an answering-program, from two of the members: Aaronson (research) and Rutherford (international liaison). Hmmm. I immediately contacted several potential rivals for each position – rather than our internal security group, who were prima facie most likely to be police spies anyway – and set them to work investigating.

But the other seven duly popped up on my screen, and all of us on each other’s. I decided to say nothing about Aaronson and Rutherford, and just shrugged when their absence was remarked in the pre-meeting chit-chat as people shuffled paper, booted up notepads, settled in their seats and looked at me expectantly.

‘OK, comrades,’ I began, ‘from here it looks like we’ve woken up to not just a new government, but a new regime. Now, call me a romantic old fool, but I think it’s the start of a revolution. A very British revolution, I’ll give you that, but it’s been a long time coming and revolutions are a law unto themselves more or less by definition. I wouldn’t bet on this one staying in the proper channels. This could be good news for us, or bad, depending on how things turn out. The question is, can we make a difference?’

All the eyes on the screen made a laughably simultaneous swivel as everybody checked everybody else’s reaction. Ewan Chambers, the Scottish rep, spoke first.

‘I agree with Jon. Things were looking pretty wild in Glasgow last night, something a bit more than a street party and no’ quite a riot. And from what I can see there’s a kindae uneasy calm in Edinburgh. The Workers’ Power Party is carrying on like it won the election instead ae just a couple of seats.’

‘It’s the same down here,’ said Julie O’Brien, our South London youth organiser, ‘but I don’t think we have to worry just yet about the Trots taking over and everybody starving to death. If you look at how the new government’s put together, right, there’s no doubt at all that we’re gonna get a Republic, but beyond that the kind of programme they’ve been talking about is a real mish-mash of libertarian and statist. On the one side – easing immigration controls, ending prohibition, pulling the troops out of Greece and all that, but on the other hand the Labour parties are pushing this industrial policy, cabling up everything on one big system and all sorts of TwenCen shit.’

‘Including a space programme, funnily enough,’ I said. ‘Any thoughts on that?’

A wrangle followed which I cut across as soon as somebody mentioned Ayn Rand. ‘Here’s what I suggest,’ I said. ‘We don’t support it, don’t oppose it, and if it ever flies, demand they privatise it.’

Nothing like a moment of shared cynicism for pulling a committee together. ‘Right,’ I said when we’d stopped chuckling, ‘serious business. Good bloody riddance to the Hanoverian regime, but as Julie says the question is what happens afterwards. The political structure’s going to be pretty flexible for a while. How about we try to get our hands on some derelict area and make it an enterprise zone or freeport or something, and put our money where our mouth is?’

Adrian Moss frowned. He was in charge of the movement’s lobbying activities, such as they were. ‘We could probably swing it,’ he said, ‘but why? Free zones are better left to real businesses, not political organisations.’ His smile flicked around the screen. ‘You know, that reminds me of some fringe ideology I’ve heard about!’

‘I’ll tell you why,’ I said. ‘If things work out smoothly, fine, a few more of our ideas get tested. But this country might be headed for a breakup. We’ve all seen what that means, time and time again. Everybody grabs what they can. Having a bit of land to call our own might give us a head start.’

This caused some commotion. Only Julie and Ewan were in favour. I feigned demurral and suggested that we put it to a poll of the membership. Those against my suggestion agreed, confident that it would be rejected.

By this time the absence of Aaronson and Rutherford had pushed itself onto the agenda. I donned my moderate hat and managed to convince the committee that if it turned out that they’d been spies all along and had now fled the country, we would quite definitely not have them assassinated.

Late that afternoon the investigations I’d initiated revealed that they’d both been discreetly offered jobs in the promised National Space Authority, and had been too embarrassed to tell us. At this point I was quite tempted to have them assassinated, but after some thought decided just to throw them off the committee.

In the membership referendum on making a bid for a local enterprise area my position won overwhelmingly, as I knew it would. With all the political excitement, even a rabble of libertarians couldn’t help wanting to do something constructive for a change.

A year later FreeSpace had control of an abandoned North London industrial estate with a few blocks of empty high-rise flats thrown in by a local council desperate to get rid of them. Six months after that we had the place swarming with enthusiastic volunteers and Adrian was pulling in outside investment hand over fist. After a further six months a delegation of workers’ and employers’ representatives told the committee that they were very happy with the security our militia provided, but there was one little extra assurance they wanted.

Just for their peace of mind.

Julie said it was immoral, Ewan said it was illegal, Adrian said it was far too expensive and I said I knew a man who could get it for us cheap.

Transcript of telephone conversation, released 01/10/50 under Freedom of Information (Previous Governments) Act.

[reception-program voice ends].

JW: Hi, Dave.

DR: Oh, hello you old bastard. What can I do you for?

JW: Uh, this encrypted?

DR: No, but I’m sure you know what to say.

JW: Fuck, [pause] We’re thinking of going private for, uh, the big one. [pause]

DR: Are you outa your fucking mind?

JW: Don’t think so. I, gather some of your friends in the communistans –

DR: – deformed workers’ statelets – [laughter].

JW: – might have the best deals. Can you swing it?

DR: Oh, sure. We’ve got policies,

JW: Better than politics, [laughter]

DR: I can’t see you needing it, that’s all.

JW: Not much of a salesman, are you? [pause]

DR: Oh well, it’s your life. Lemme check. Shit, okay, make it next week…Tuesday, oh-nine-thirty, Stanstead. Charter desk,

JW: See you there mate.

DR: Great. Love to the wife and weans, [laughter]

JW: Likewise, to your mistresses and bastards.

DR: Well, thank you mate. Cheers,

JW: Slandge. [human voice ends]

We hit turbulence over the southern Urals. I was standing in the narrow corridor towards the tail, braced against the sides and looking straight out of the last window. As the aircraft dipped I got a clear view of the mountains. In the long shadows of dawn they looked remarkably like a papier-maché model of mountains. Not too far below, a regular series of small white clouds were simultaneously dispersing. Curious.

Another wing-dip, another moment of free-fall, then a rapid climb. A yell came from the tiny toilet.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ Reid shouted. ‘Just cut myself.’

‘What are you doing in there?’

‘Shaving.’

Ten, no, fifteen minutes earlier I’d seen him sand down his cheeks and chin with an electric razor, just before I’d recklessly given him precedence for the toilet. My bladder sent me a sharp note of protest. You may have had surgical microbots crawling around your plumbing, it told me, but there are limits…It was high time, I thought, for me to start practising the egoism I preached.

‘Shaving what? Your legs?’

‘The – backs – of – my – hands,’ said Reid. I could hear the clenched teeth. ‘Forgot the fucking rubber gloves, first time I used the scalp treatment.’

He came out with a sheepish grin on his face and shaving-foam on his cuffs. I didn’t stop to gloat. My flood of relief made the spittoon-sized aluminium toilet-bowl ring. Then I splashed cold water on my face, opened a few more buttons on my shirt and smeared deodorant awkwardly under each armpit, dried my beard, brushed my short-back-and-sides, rubbed a towel over my bald top and put on a tie. As I had to stoop or squat throughout, and the mirror would have been about adequate on a ladies’ pocket compact, the overall effect wasn’t easy to judge. I was still chuckling over the reason why Reid’s hair, though as grey as mine, was so long and thick.

Gene-fixing shampoo, indeed! What vanity, I thought, as I held the mouthwash for a minute to do its work, then spat it out and checked the gleam of my teeth.

North British Mutual had spawned a security agency, and Reid had been heavily involved in its management buy-out several years earlier. If this flight was anything to go by, the Mutual Assured Protection Company were doing well. The biznesman-jet they’d hired for this leg of the trip might be a little cramped, a little Spartan, but it did have its own stewardess, an Uzbek lass with a fixed smile and no English. Breakfast had been served by the time I returned to my seat: microwaved croissants and a coffee which, I guessed after the first sip, had also been microwaved. Neither was quite hot.

‘Microwaved, huh,’ Reid grumbled. ‘Waved in front of the radar for a bit, more likely.’

‘Might account for the turbulence,’ I said.

‘Turbulence?’ Reid snorted. ‘That was anti-aircraft fire, man.’

‘What!’ I turned in alarm to the window.

‘Don’t worry,’ Reid said. ‘Just bandits. They couldn’t hit a 777 at this height.’

Our bodyguard, Predestination Ndebele, nodded slowly. A lithe, wiry Zimbabwean, one of Reid’s employees.

‘You think this is bad,’ he said, ‘you try landing at Adnan.’

‘I’ll take your word for it, Dez.’

Reid looked up from his papers. ‘Last I heard,’ he said with a vague frown, ‘it was called Grivas.’

We flew for hours over a terrifyingly featureless plain, and then, in the middle of all that nowhere, descended to a full-sized international airport buzzing with military and civilian craft. In the far distance a clutter of launch silos and gantries; closer by, a town of low pre-fabs: Kapitsa, capital (and only) city of the International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic, aka the Number Three Test Area, in the wasteland somewhere between Karaganda and Semiplatinsk. Part of former Kazhakstan.

‘I have a suprise for you,’ Reid said as we waited for the transit bus.

‘What’s that?’

‘You’ll see.’

I looked at him and shrugged, huddled against the dust-dry wind and trying not to breathe too much. The levels were supposed to be safe by now, but I was already interpreting the effects of jet-lag as incipient radiation sickness.

The airport main building was like any such, a neon-lit space of seating and screens and PA systems, but the differences were striking. The duty-free wasn’t in a separate area, because there was no customs barrier. No passport control, either – just a cursory weapons registration and a walk through a scanner. The only thing anyone could smuggle in here that could make any difference was an actual atomic bomb, and they’re not easily hidden. No tourists: all the arrivals and departures were of serious-looking customers: men in suits or uniforms. Very few women, apart from among the airport workers, who all – even the cleaners, I noticed – moved about their tasks with an almost insolent lack of haste, under enormous posters of Trotsky, Koralev and Kapitsa. The men who gave the Soviets the Red Army, the rocket, and the Bomb and who all got varied doses of Stalin’s terror in return.

From every part of the concourse came an irritatingly frequent popping of flashbulbs. Photographers roamed the crowd, scanned faces hungrily, snapped officers and officials and company reps as eagerly as they would video stars. Their subjects responded in a similar manner. All over the place, poses were being struck by ugly, scowling men: shaking hands, bear-hugging, standing shoulder to shoulder and mugging like mad.

‘Where to now?’ I asked, as Ndebele and myself hesitated for a moment at the edge of the concourse. Reid glanced at me with a flicker of impatience.

‘This is it,’ he said. ‘This is where the deals get done. It’s gotta be public, that’s the whole point.’

He set off purposefully towards an open-plan Nicafé franchise. I hurried after him.

‘Hence the paparazzi?’

‘Of course. Stay cool,’ he added to Dez, who was glowering at anyone who looked at us.

We sipped our first decent coffee of the day around a table too low to be comfortable, as if designed to hasten the through flow of customers. On the television four pretty Southeast Asians in pink satin ballgowns sang raucously in English, thrashed instruments and leapt about the stage. The continuity caption gave their name: Katoi Boys.

‘Boys?’ Dez raised his eyebrows.

‘Thai refugees,’ I said. ‘My youngest granddaughter tells me they’re the latest pre-teen heart-throbs.’

‘Kinky, man,’ Dez said with severe Calvinist disapproval. ‘Decadent.’

‘Yeah, that’s what the Islamic Republic told them.’ Reid spoke idly, scanning the crowd. He stood up.

I turned. A tall, slender woman in an ankle-length fur coat was walking up to us, with a wide and welcoming smile. Photographers trotted behind her, at a respectful distance. I nearly fell back into my seat as I recognised her: Myra, my long-ago ex from the Soviet Studies Institute in Glasgow.

‘Well, hi guys,’ she said. She caught my hands and put her cheek to mine and whispered, ‘Smile, dammit!’ and I turned with an idiot grin to face the flash.

One of my earliest memories, oddly enough, concerns the Soviet Union, space, and the Bomb. (I don’t remember being born, but I’m assured that event took place on 5 March 1953, the day Stalin died. Make of that what you will.) I was playing on the carpeted floor of our house in Streatham, a suburb of the city of London. I was playing with a toy rocket. If you put your eye to the hole in the end you could see part of a picture of trees on the inner surface, because the toy had been made in Hong Kong from a recyled tin can. This wasn’t because of ecological concern, which at that time hadn’t been invented. It was because it was cheap.

My father, sitting at the breakfast table, peered at me over his copy of the Manchester Guardian.

‘The Russians have sent a rocket into space,’ he told me. ‘Way up in the sky, going right around the world.’ He traced a circle in the air with his forefinger.

I felt disturbed by this. The Russians were in my mind a vague, vast menace. They had done something unpleasant and unfair to a friend of my father’s, an old gentleman whose photograph was framed above the fireplace: Karl Marx. The Russians had distorted him. Whatever that was, it sounded painful.

I zoomed the toy rocket up and when it reached the limit of my arm’s reach, I turned it and brought it down, nose-first. Its shape, I noticed for the first time, was just like a bomb. I had once seen a bomb being craned cautiously out of a garden at the end of the road, in front of two policemen, a dozen soldiers and a fascinated crowd. It had been buried in the ground for ten years after the war between the British and the German capitalists.

‘Does that mean they can send bombs through space?’

My father had returned to his paper, perhaps disappointed by my preoccupied response to his exciting news, and now lowered it again and gave me a brightening look.

‘Yes!’ he said cheerfully. ‘That’s exactly what it means. Very clever, Jonathan. And now the Americans and everybody else will build rockets and put bombs on them.’

My mother frowned at him.

‘But it’s all right,’ my father hastened to add, as he stood up and shook out his napkin and folded his paper. ‘The workers won’t let them use the bombs. We’ll stop them, won’t we?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’ll stop them.’

I knew from playing with other boys in the street that my parents’ views were not widely held in Streatham, but I also knew that all around the world, even in far-away countries like Austria and New Zealand, there were people who agreed with them. Altogether there were hundreds and hundreds of them.

This mighty force would stop the bomb. I went back to playing happily with my rocket, and my father went whistling off to catch the train that carried the wage-slaves to work.

‘Reid told me he had a surprise,’ I babbled, ‘but I must say I’m knocked flat. How on earth did you end up here?’

Myra smirked. She looked well, and I could almost believe she hadn’t aged much in forty years, but that was just part of the same illusion that kept me from feeling old myself. You could see the papery texture of her skin, the crinkles in its still impressive tightness.

‘I came here in the ’nineties,’ she explained, ‘to do research, and then I just realised that these people needed help and that I enjoyed giving it. They still had a lot of bad shit from the tests, and they had one hell of a brain-drain as well. They needed any educated person they could get, and I was able to fix a lot of aid from US medical charities. Then I fell for an army officer, we got married, and luckily for us he was on the winning side of several civil wars and military coups and the re-revolution. So here I am, People’s Commissar for Social Policy.’ She waved a hand. ‘They let me sign treaties whenever I want, so I don’t feel like I’m stuck with the domestic issues.’ She laughed. ‘You know, women’s work!’

I shook my head. ‘So Reid’s become a capitalist, and you’ve become a bureaucrat – dammit, I’m the only one who’s still a revolutionary!’

‘I am not a bureaucrat,’ Myra said, with some hauteur. ‘I was elected, in a real election. We do have democracy, you know.’

Reid was taking documents from his briefcase and spreading them on the table. ‘Yes Myra, you sure won over your dashing young lieutenant. His faction has given a whole new meaning to the expression “deformed workers’ state”.’

‘Old joke,’ Myra said, but I could see she wasn’t annoyed. ‘I’ll tell you an older one. Soviet. “How do we know Marxism is a philosophy? Because if it was a science, they’d have tried it out first on dogs.”’

There was such withering proletarian contempt in her voice that we all had to laugh, and then Myra shot back: ‘Well comrades, these people were the dogs, and they’ve made something work. I wish you could stay for a few days and see it. Or even come and visit in October.’

‘Why October?’

‘Centenary celebrations,’ Myra said. ‘We’re planning a real impressive fireworks display.’

‘I’ll bet,’ Reid said dryly. ‘The biggest in the world, no doubt. Unfortunately, we have our own revolution to get back to.’

Myra sighed. ‘Business…You ready with those forms?’

‘Ready when you are.’

We signed, flashbulbs popped, and that was it. The world would know that I had the Bomb.

When the Soviet Union broke up, Kazakhstan had for a while found itself playing the unfamiliar role of a Great Power, because it had on its territory a number of nuclear weapons. When Kazakhstan broke up, one of its fragments had retained some (different, and better) nuclear weapons, with the additional difference that the International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic – initially nothing more than a division of the ex-Soviet Rocket Forces, a few thousand nuked-upon Kazakhs and a strip of steppe – had known what to do with them.

They exported nuclear deterrence. Not the weapons themselves – that, perish the thought, would have been illegal – but the salutary effect of possessing them. Our contract was pretty standard, and it simply gave us an option to call in a nuclear strike on anyone who used nuclear weapons against us, and who didn’t provide full compensation. Anyone who nuked us – even accidentally or incidentally – had to pay up or get nuked themselves.

The beauty of this arrangement was that any number of clients – the more the better – could have a claim on a relatively small number of nukes, an effect rather like fractional reserve banking. It also meant that anyone who wanted to tempt the ISTWR with a first-use deal would have had to offer more than the income from all the deterrent clients, and that would have cost far more than just building or stealing their own nukes. So the chances of the system being used for nuclear aggression were minute. Above all, for the first time, nuclear deterrence was available to anyone willing to pay for it, and the cost was reasonable enough for every homeland to have one.

Especially when the competion caught on: rogue submarine commanders, missile crews in Siberia and Alaska who wanted payment in real money for a change, groups of ambitious junior officers in Africa all started selling off shares in the family plutonium.

Another triumph for the free market.

Not everyone agreed.

‘When I saw the pictures,’ Annette raged, ‘of you with that anorexic floozy, I thought you’d run off with her! This is worse!’

Oh, no it ain’t, I thought, and I was right. We quarrelled, we argued, we got over it. This was just ideas, not bodies. I could be an actual instead of a potential mass murderer, and it would have hurt her less than me screwing somebody else.

Not that I ever said it. Some weapons are best kept in reserve.