The Star Fraction

12

Near Death Experience

Annette had the tubes in her right arm, I in my left. Her left hand reached out and caught my right.

‘Scared?’ I asked.

‘A bit.’

‘Me too.’ I squeezed back.

The township hall was packed with mature people, older people, people like us; on our backs on trolley-beds looking up at the roof-panels. Green-tinged daylight, green-smocked technicians, everything slow: an underwater feel. Big machines connected to the tubes infiltrated tiny machines into our blood. Not nanotech, not full cell-repair, not yet; but it gave us a chance of living until that came along. In the seven decades we’d been alive, our life-expectancies had already extended by at least another four. We felt better than we had at fifty. We looked – well, the early anti-ageing treatments made your skin tougher as well as tauter, so we looked a bit sundried, a bit smoked.

This treatment was different. We hadn’t had it before, though I’d had a microbot injection to deal with a worrying prostate enlargement some years earlier. Now, the microbots had expanded their capabilities, and by one of those trade-offs characteristic of the Republic, the state Health Service was offering these capabilities to citizens in exchange for their state pension rights. The deal was more political than economic, but it had a certain elegant symmetry: swap retirement for longevity and a degree of rejuvenation, and you can work till you drop.

It would never have passed under the old laws. It was risky. One or two in a thousand died under it, though whether they died of it was another matter. It was a heart problem, hard to predict. If you had it, it would get you anyway, soon. So the health companies and the Health Service said.

A technician walked up between our beds, gently parted our hands.

‘Ready?’ she said.

‘Yup,’ said Annette.

‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ I said. I attempted a grin. ‘Who wants to live for ever?’

‘Well, I know you do, Citizen Wilde. Good luck.’

Here comes nothing, I thought.

She pressed a switch, sending a short-range radio signal to the microbots in my blood and in Annette’s.

I felt my heart stop. It had to. The microbots needed a steady platform for fast work around the vagus nerve, and to give them a chance to shove neural growth factors and cloned foetal nerve-cells across the blood-brain barrier.

Colour faded out, then light. Consciousness went down completely, as in sleep. My heart re-booted with a painful power surge and consciousness came back up, crashed, restored from memory and came up again. I raised my head weakly and looked at Annette, who opened her eyes and stared at me and smiled.

‘We made it,’ she said.

‘We’ll make it,’ I said. ‘We’ll make it to the ships.’

I tried to sit up.

‘If you don’t stay where you are for another half hour,’ the technician admonished, ‘you’ll not make it to the door.’

Out, into the Greenbelt street, under the greenhouse sky. We made our way through the usual Pro-Life picket, who kept yelling ‘Murderers!’ at us from behind a line of armed Republican Guards. It was the foetal tissue – cloned from our own cells – that we’d allegedly murdered, according to the leaflet from the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child that some poor addled soul shoved in my face.

‘SPUC off!’ I called back. ‘You can go to hell! We aren’t even going to die!’

‘Do you wish to make a complaint, citizen?’ the nearest Guard asked me, not turning round.

‘It’s OK officer,’ Annette said, grabbing my elbow and pulling me along. ‘Free speech…and you shut up!’ she added to me.

‘OK, OK.’ I walked quickly, shaking inside. Nothing – not Communists, not fascists, not authoritarians of any stripe – ever aroused in me the same homicidal rage as the Pro-Lifers. Whenever I came across them exercising their rights, I made damned sure I exercised my own.

I’d got used to living here, in what was officially called ‘the informal sector’: London’s shanty-town fringe, where the Republic’s experiments in local government overlay an experiment in anarcho-capitalism that made the space movement’s enterprise zones look over-regulated. The second, third, and subsequent storeys of most buildings were afterthoughts. Organic farming made the absence of sewage pipes something less than a disaster, but it didn’t make the night-soil tankers any less smelly. The exhaust fumes did. The population was a mixture of the native marginals and refugees from Europe’s and Asia’s wars. Not many beggars, but they were distressing enough: people whose protectors had skimped on their nuclear insurance policies.

Like I say, I was used to it, but at that moment – an after-effect of the clinic, or the picket – it all got too much.

‘I feel terrible,’ I said. ‘My head hurts, and my stomach feels like it’s been pumped.’

‘Oh, quit moaning,’ Annette said. ‘It’s no worse than a hangover.’

‘What a happy thought,’ I said. There was a pub on the pavement in front of us. ‘Half a litre of Amstel would just about hit the spot.’

Annette waved a Health Service handout in front of me. ‘It says here –’

‘Yes, I know what it says. Do I look like I’m about to be handling weapons or heavy machinery?’

‘I suppose not.’ She grinned and lowered herself into a plastic chair, perilously close to the gutter. ‘Pils for me. And those kebabs look good.’

I shouted the order to the garson, who disappeared through a hatch and re-emerged a minute later. There was the usual poster of Abdullah Ocalan above the hatch. I could never figure why even the exiles from Democratic Kurdistan – entrepreneurs to the bone – still honoured the Great Leader. Possibly a shakedown was going on in the townships. I made a mental note to have it checked out. There might be money in this for a defence company that could offer them a better deal than their Party’s protection racket. Or I might be misreading the situation entirely – nationalism was still as foreign to me as ever.

The crowd, Kurds and Turks mostly, flowed around the pavement pub. Behind us beasts and vehicles followed some unwritten highway code, in which precedence depended on a coefficient of momentum and noise. A television by the hatch showed a game-show from Istanbul. Overhead, airships drifted to the distant masts of Alexandra Port. I sat back, warmed by the sun and the spreading glow of the food and drink.

‘Did you dream?’ Annette asked.

I shook my head. ‘Did you?’

‘I thought I did,’ Annette said, smiling mysteriously. ‘I heard a warm, friendly voice and I saw a white light, and I remember thinking, “Great! I’m finally having a Near Death Experience!” and then the light was just sunlight, and the voice was the technician, counting.’

‘That’s the real thing,’ I said. ‘The sunlight really is the white light.’ This materialist insight was all that survived of a magic-mushroom trip I’d taken as a student. That and a vision of three goddesses: Mother Nature, Lady Luck and Miss Liberty, who were – I realised after coming down from it – necessity, chance and freedom, and indeed the rulers of all.

‘Imagine,’ Annette said, ‘if that’s the nearest we ever come to dying.’

‘Touch plastic!’ I rapped the table. We laughed, clasped hands across the table. I gazed at her face, aged but not deteriorated, its lines a map of her life’s laughter and grief, and I felt I could love her for ever.

‘“Till all the seas gang dry, my dear, and the rocks melt wi’ the sun…”’

‘Oh, stop it before I report you for senility.’

The traffic and the noise stopped. I looked over at the slowing cars, and thought everyone was looking at us. Turning the other way, I saw they were looking at the television. The commentary, and the loud conversations that suddenly replaced the hush, were all in Turkish and Kurdish. But the televion image needed no translation: a German tank, and a Polish road-sign.

Berlin – twenty-first century, pre-war Berlin, Old Berlin – was the most exciting city in Europe. The post-reunification construction boom was over by then but the intensity of business and pleasure didn’t miss a beat. Everybody who was anybody was either there or in London. In a sense the two capitals were moving in opposite directions, one recovering its national self-confidence, the other climbing down from its imperial pretensions. One, as it turned out, rearming, the other disarming…

Right now there was only one person I cared about in Berlin: Eleanor, there with her partner on a long weekend.

‘What do you do in a war, Jonathan?’

Eleanor’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Tanya, sounded more curious than anxious. It was one of those emergency family gatherings around telephones and televisions that went on all over the country in the first few hours of the conflict. Ours was in Eleanor’s front room in Finsbury Park. Her absence was ever-present. Many of our friends, and other relatives, were also in Berlin. People were calling them up on all possible channels. I had a paging programme pursuing Eleanor, and was trying to pull together an executive meeting at the same time, partly to keep my mind off her. Communications, not to my surprise, were slow.

What do you do in a war? With four generations of anti-militarists behind her, you’d think the kid would know.

‘You oppose it,’ I said. It didn’t seem a very enlightening answer. I set up the codes for yet another attempt at a conference link.

Angela, Eleanor’s eldest, laughed. ‘You’re incorrigible.’ She was passing out cups of coffee and tea. Good girl. She knew what do do in a war.

‘My grandparents were conscientious objectors in the First World War, and my parents in the Second, and I’m damned if I’ll miss the chance to do the same in the Third.’ The server wasn’t responding. I sighed and punched through a re-route command.

‘Yeah,’ Annette said, leaning back against my shins. ‘A conscientious objector with nuclear capability.’

‘Nuclear cover,’ I corrected. ‘Anyway, it won’t come to that. The Germans don’t have nukes.’

‘So they say.’

Annette was flipping channels, getting CNN downlink from the Polish front, WDR vox-pop from Berlin, Channel 4 News from the regional assemblies and the State and Federal Parliaments of Britain. With their hovercraft tank-transporters the German advance was the fastest ever seen. They used up combat drones like Khomeini and Mao used men. We weren’t in the war – yet. There were plenty in the opposition parties who wanted us to be. Lord Ashdown’s face popped up far too often for my liking.

‘No, so the FIS says, and they should bloody know, it’s their skins that’ll fry if – ah!’

I had a connection. An 0.1 scale image of a table with the others around it flashed up behind the screen on my lap. Of the committee at the time of the election, only Julie O’Brien and I remained. The rest were new faces. Almost a decade of social and political upheaval – the revolution, as everybody now called it – had winnowed the space movement’s libertarian cadre, most of whom were organised in FreeSpace. Some of the best had followed Aaronson and Rutherford to Woomera, where the British and Australian Republics ran their joint space programme. Others had defected to conventional politics, usually Republican but occasionally to wilder shores, even to the resurgent Trotskyism of the Workers’ Power Party or the proliferating single-issue campaigns. I was left with hardliners – young Turks (ha!) who saw me as a dangerous moderate.

‘OK, comrades,’ I said. ‘Anyone who’s paying full attention to this meeting had better switch their telly on right now, because we need to keep at least half an eye on it. No doubt the wider space movement’s going to be all over the place on the war, and that’s as it should be, but we in FreeSpace have a responsibility to take a stand – in the name of freedom if not of space. I have every sympathy with the Germans – they couldn’t be expected to take refugees, fallout and terrorism forever. It’s rather gratifying to see the Poles get a bloody nose, especially after the way they’ve been treating their minorities. Nevertheless. I say it’s an imperialist war, we oppose all sides and we do our damnedest to keep Britain out of it.’

The seriousness of my statement was somewhat undermined by Tanya’s eye-rolling observation of it. I went on peace marches for the likes of you, I felt like telling her. (And with Eleanor, a cry from inside me added.) Annette’s grip on my hand was tight, as if she might slip away. I stroked her shoulders, below the virtual image, and glared at the comrades.

‘I’m afraid I don’t agree with comrade Wilde,’ said Mike Davies, a black Liverpudlian in his twenties whose views I occasionally respected. ‘What he’s just said is exactly what the government’s saying, like, and if you ask me it’s the kind of TwenCen liberal pacifism that has got us into this mess in the first place. If Britain hadn’t ditched its responsibilities on the Continent, the Germans wouldn’t have had to take them on. As it is, the best we can hope for is that the Americans will bail us out again.’

‘What is this shit?’ Julie said. ‘Responsibilities? Well, thank you comrade, but I’ll take no responsibility for the bloody British state. Liberal pacifism – when did that become a dirty word? I’m a libertarian internationalist and proud of it. War is the state’s killer app. I’ll take a liberal pacifist over a libertarian militarist any day. Neutrality, non-intervention, and preparation for self-defence – that’s what we should be pushing, not trying to work out whether we should back the Germans or call for the bloody Yanks to come charging in. Which you –’ she added, turning to stab a phantom finger at Davies, ‘have evidently not even made up your own mind about!’

In another corner of the screen a light flickered urgently. Eleanor had got through!

‘If that was a motion,’ I said drily, ‘I’ll second it. Meanwhile, comrades, I beg your leave for a few minutes.’ I nodded to them solemnly, turned the sound down and flipped to the phone channel.

Eleanor’s face appeared and I patched it to the main television. A joyful babble filled the room and then fell silent as Eleanor spoke.

‘Hi folks,’ she said. ‘Sorry to have got you all so worried. I couldn’t get through on my handset, and there’s a queue of about fifty behind me for the hotel phone. Can’t stay long. Are you all OK?’

‘We’re all fine,’ Annette said. Eleanor’s partner leaned briefly into view, smiled and waved. ‘Oh, hello Colin,’ Annette went on. ‘When are you coming back?’

Eleanor frowned. Colin, behind her, was restraining the impatience of the next in line. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘The airport’s closed for now. They say flights’ll resume tomorrow, but there’ll be chaos out there. We might as well sit it out until the operation’s over.’

‘The operation?’ I squawked. ‘I don’t know what they’re telling you over there, but from here it looks like the beginning of the big one. The Yanks are very cross indeed, the Russians are sounding nervous, and some of the little republics the Europawehr’s bearing down on are fingering their nukes. Get the hell out as soon as you can. Get to the airport right now. If people around you are complacent, that’s their problem, and your opportunity.’

Eleanor was about to reply when the picture dissolved and a was replaced by an apologetic-looking man in a suit that said ‘Hotel Manager’ as plainly as a name-badge. ‘I’m sorry sir, we can’t permit this conversation to continue.’ The connection broke, to yells of indignation at our end.

Tanya turned on me. ‘Why did you have to shoot your mouth off? We didn’t even get to speak to her!’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I really am. But I don’t think anybody over there realises how serious it is. Maybe finding that their phone-calls are being monitored will –’

‘It won’t,’ said Annette. ‘You should know that. All that Eleanor will have seen is the screen going fuzzy.’

After some more recriminations, eventually calmed by Annette, I stalked out with my comms rig and sat down on a bed. Through the open window I could hear doleful singing from one of the many fundamentalist and charismatic churches that had in recent years congregated in the area. I wondered if my own activities were any less futile. Then the strength of my scepticism returned to me. I punched through.

At the meeting there was only a debate going between those who wanted to push for: British involvement; American involvement; neutrality; and – coming up on the outside – using the war as an opportune moment to launch a libertarian insurrection.

I could handle that.

The phone was ringing. I woke up and waved the light on. The clock said 03.38 and the little red bulb on the phone winked: an encrypted call. I picked it up and thumbed the switch. Myra’s face appeared on the display, black-and-white in a military cap and uniform. She looked as if she’d been up all night.

‘Oh,’ I said, ungraciously, stupid and irritable with sleep and disappointment. ‘It’s you.’ I’d hoped it was Eleanor.

‘Hello, Jon,’ Myra said. ‘Sorry to disturb you, but it’s –’

‘Who’s that?’ Annette struggled awake.

‘It’s Myra,’ I said. ‘Business.’

Annette glanced at the screen, grunted and pulled the covers over her head. I half-heard something like ‘nuclear whore’, and hoped Myra hadn’t.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s the Germans,’ Myra said. ‘They’re shopping around for nuclear cover, and they’re making us a very good offer.’

‘You’d better take it,’ I said, ‘before they arrive.’

‘That’s what I think,’ Myra said. ‘Problem: we’re over-booked, as you can imagine. The Germans are offering to buy out enough of our existing clients to reverse that. Will you sell?’

‘For what?’

‘Five million Deutschmarks, in gold, at pre-war – that is, day before yesterday’s – prices, no questions asked. I have the German negotiator on the line right now, and the Swiss bank account is verified.’

‘Christ! Give me a moment to think, OK?’

I hit the blank/silent button to hide my confusion and tried to think fast. It seemed odd that the Germans hadn’t set up some such deal before they actually launched Operation Restore Order, but perhaps the risk of exposing their intentions had prevented them. Now they were improvising a nuclear defence policy at blitzkrieg speed.

The offer was tempting, even apart from the money. With Eleanor in Berlin…

But we were here. The British nuclear deterrent was currently tied up in a dispute with the US, so ours – and other private-sector arrangements – was all we had to rely on. Who knew if we might need the option, perhaps after Eleanor was safely home?

And there was another consideration. If we sold our share of the Kazakh nukes to the Germans, the FreeSpace company would be undeniably involved in the war, on the German side. The repercussions of that were incalculable, and unlikely to be pleasant.

I toggled the output switch. Myra’s eyebrows flashed.

‘So?’

‘Sorry, Myra, no deal. Not our fight, and all that.’

Even on the tiny hand-held screen her face registered an increase in her weariness, but her voice conveyed no reproach when she said, ‘I understand. OK, Jon, I’ll try somewhere else. Signing off.’

‘Goodnight. See you again.’

She smiled as if this were some hopeless fancy. Her image shrank to a dot.

However momentous, in retrospect, my decision may seem, the fact is I slept well the rest of that night.

The next day the government lost a no-confidence motion (due to the abstention of only five MPs, the three Workers’ Power and two World Socialists) and fell, to be replaced by a more radical coalition drawing in support from the smaller parties. Neutrality was affirmed. The Upper House – elected now, but a transitional mix of old Lords and new Senators – debated the war issue separately, and came to a different conclusion. The first pro-war demonstrations, in the Midlands, were violently broken up by Republican Guards and Workers Power Party militants.

It was a bloody disgrace and we said so. At the same time – having won the argument in the committee – we started organising a campaign for neutrality and keeping out of the war. The UN imposed sanctions on Germany and Austria. The British ambassador walked out of the UN, a gesture which even I thought histrionic. It was to cost the Republic dear.

The Germans shelled Warsaw, live on CNN.

We didn’t hear from Eleanor over the whole of the following week. I have no memory of sleep in that week. Civil wars flared like secondary fires on the widening perimeter of the German advance. Britain edged close to it as the issue of joining the US/UN mobilisation against Germany became inseparable from the issue of the Republic. The government increasingly relied on support in the streets, as demonstrations against participation in the war multiplied and spread and clashed with pro-war demonstrations that demanded the old Britain back. The pro-war forces called us Huns. We called them Hanoverians. Neither side thought of the other as British any more.

The Germans reached the Ukrainian border, and stopped. The Poles, in headlong flight, plunged straight into the ongoing Ukrainian civil war. The British Chiefs of Staff presented an ultimatum to the government. Generals, leaders of the Unionist parties, and members of the pensioned-off, semi-privatised Royal Family made up a constant stream of visitors to the US Embassy. Reluctant Republican Guards, only doing their job, fought off determined demonstrators in Grosvenor Square. There was talk of a military coup.

Myra called again. The German offer had gone up to twenty million. I said no. Needless to say I never mentioned this to the rest of the committee.

My paging program almost reached Eleanor, at least twice.

There wasn’t a coup. Instead, the overseas parts of the British armed forces went to war without the government’s permission. Another government – civilian, spraying an inky cloud of constitutional justifications – was formed out of the opposition, the Lords and the King. It won immediate diplomatic recognition in the US and Britain’s vacant seat at the UN. It declared war on Germany.

The Poles regrouped, allied with a couple of Ukrainian factions and attacked the German concentrations. They used chemical weapons. Simultaneously, some Bosnian exiles – it was never established which nationality they came from – poisoned Hamburg’s water supply. The Germans rolled forward on all fronts. The French and Russians finally came off the fence on the Security Council.

The Republican government still controlled the internal forces of the country, while the Royal junta controlled the state’s external power. In a bizarre way they had to co-operate, or at least maintain a division of labour: while one was participating in American airdrops over the Balkans and naval manoeuvres in the Mediterranean, the other was frantically mobilising the civilian population for civil defence. In effect the Kingdom outlawed the past ten years of Britain’s history, while the Republic legalised a revolution.

It would have been an interesting revolution. Which of the competing extremisms – including ours – would have emerged victorious is still debated. As it is, I had an interesting week. The space movement really was as big as the old peace movement had been, and the rockets on our banners were our own. I left the demonstrations to those members of the committee who were good at that sort of thing, and spent my time obsessively organising militia and defence company patrols in the free-trade zones and the Greenbelt, negotiating with our contacts in the state apparatus and – in between times – writing more, faster, than ever. If I hadn’t been worried about Eleanor and in constant fear of German air-raids I’d have been even happier than I was. I had reached my Finland Station.

Someone was shaking my shoulder. I raised my head from my forearms and looked about. It was 10.15 a.m., and I was at my desk in the FreeSpace office. I must have closed my eyes for a moment about six hours earlier. The office was crowded but quiet. People were looking at screens, not at me; except for Annette, who was holding onto me, staring.

‘What’s happened?’

‘Somebody’s nuked Kiev.’

‘Oh, my God.’

I stood up. She buried her face in my shoulder. I held on to her as sobs made her quake, and glared about until someone silently pushed a screen into view. An entire German army had been wiped out by an airburst over the otherwise empty Ukrainian capital. Within minutes, as I watched, the same thing happened on the southern front, in Baku. The Russian and Turkish armies were both in action now, and news was coming through of British and American landings on the Aegean coast.

And Israel had declared war on Germany. It was ridiculous. What could they do? I thought, and then I suddenly realised that they’d probably just done it.

I flipped to N-TV for the reaction from Germany. A reporter was talking to the camera, in front of the Bundestag. He was saying something about Frankfurt, and he sounded terrified.

He clapped a hand to his ear, tilting his head.

His face paled, and the screen went white.

His voice, if you could call it that, continued for some time.

The war had ended. The peace process began. For Britain it began with stealth bombers and cruise missiles, and continued with paratroopers and teletroopers and lynch-mobs. The Royalist junta, its American allies and the British counter-revolutionary mobs between them killed about a hundred thousand people in six days. After that they had a country that knew its place in the New World Order.

It was still ungovernable. Under the Republic’s reforms, freeing up the housing, education and labour markets, there had already developed a tendency towards differentiation – self-ghettoisation, as I saw it, especially when it wasn’t spontaneous but promoted by the Republic’s unfortunate encouragement of identity politics. Bombing, invasion and civil war hardened the tendency into an irresistible force, as every minority fled to the dubious safety of its own tribe. Regional assemblies took the hint and drew old borders in fresh blood: North Wales, South Wales, Cumbria, West Scotland, East Scotland…even our own Greenbelt and free trade zones became safe havens, refugees piling in on top of refugees. The militias defended the area as best they could.

The final session of the Republic’s Federal Assembly passed its authority over to the Army Council, a body made up of the few senior officers who had stayed loyal. It called on the civilian population to avoid needless sacrifice and to resume armed resistance ‘at such time or times as the Army Council of the Army of the New Republic shall decide’. They thus gave a shred of legal cover to an indefinitely prolonged campaign of merciless terrorism, as they well knew. Then they all walked out of the former main workshop of the Ford Motor Company’s Dagenham site into the withering fire of the surrounding tanks.

It was probably the proudest moment in the history of British democracy. I watched it in the basement of a safe house on an illegal Iraqi satellite channel, and it made me vomit.

I knew I should be working; there was always another article to send out on the net, another friend or foe to contact, another militia unit’s fate to check; but I was hacking German casualty lists, searching for a name I hoped against hope that I wouldn’t find. The Israelis had tipped their long-range missiles with tactical, not strategic, warheads. Even in Berlin there were more survivors than anyone had expected. There was always a chance…

The phone rang.

‘Dad?’

‘Eleanor!’

‘Yes. Are you all right?’

Was I all right. I felt as if it was I who had come back from the dead.

‘Of course, oh my God, are you?’

‘I’m fine, I saw some terrible things but I’m okay. So’s Colin. We’re at the airport.’ She laughed. ‘Like you said. Sorry I’m a bit late. My flight boards in ten minutes, due in at 1545.’

It was 2.15. I said I’d be there to meet her. After she rang off I immediately called Annette with the news.

‘Is it safe for you to come out?’ Annette asked after we’d finished telling each other several times over of our joy and relief and assurance that we’d neither of us ever given up hope.

I shrugged. ‘I’m not on any “wanted” lists. The mobs have been brought to heel. Looks safe enough to me.’

‘From where you are, I’m sure it does,’ Annette said wryly. ‘Some of the movement people –’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. They’d got involved in resistance. Some had got themselves interned, or shot. Others – such defence companies and militias as I could influence – had tried to avoid engagement, but found themselves fighting the Yanks whether they liked it or not. I was uncomfortable talking about it even on a secure line. ‘Still,’ I went on, ‘I’ve got a list as long as my arm of messages and articles urging them not to do it, so…’

‘Anyway,’ Annette said, in sudden decisiveness, ‘you can’t stay down there forever. OK, I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes. Broadway at the lights. Usual.’

She was in Acton, not at home but not in hiding either.

‘Right, see you there love.’

I gathered my gear, swept up any traces of my presence, and when the basement looked again like nothing but a computer hobbyist’s cubby-hole, climbed the swing-down aluminium ladder and stepped out from a cupboard under the stairs into my host’s hallway. It had that dead aroma of a house where nothing had moved all day but the letter-box flap, the thermostat and the cleaning-machines. I left an envelope containing a few gold coins on the umbrella-stand and let myself out.

The house was on a street behind Ealing Broadway. The chestnuts lay like green sea-mines on Haven Green. A light drizzle was falling. I remembered a spray-bombed slogan from the Chernobyl year: it isn’t rain, it’s fallout. I turned up my collar and hurried. There were cops outside the Tube station – Republican Guards, to my surprise. I didn’t give them a closer look.

I crossed the Broadway and walked away from, and then towards, the traffic lights. The Odeon across the way was showing The Blue Beret, advertised by a huge back-lit poster of some grizzled veteran played by Reeves or Depp (I forget) holding a bayonet’s edge to a Peruvian peasant’s throat.

I turned back, spotted Annette’s black Volvo a hundred metres away in the sparse traffic and turned again and sauntered to match velocities as she slowed to a stop. I leaned over, opened the door and got in. There was always that moment of checking that you hadn’t given someone the shock of their life.

We laughed, and she accelerated away from the lights.

‘Everybody all right?’ I asked.

‘Everybody we know,’ she said, her voice taut.

‘Tell me later about the comrades,’ I said. ‘We’ll do what we can.’

She nodded, concentrating on the road and the traffic-screen updates. Our route was charted along the Uxbridge Road until just past Southall, then sharp left along the Parkway to Heathrow.

‘What’s wrong with the Great West Road?’

She grunted. ‘Troop transport.’

Hanwell, a middle-class residential suburb, was quiet. Southall, an Asian immigrant area, solid Republican, had dozens of gutted shopfronts.

‘What happened here?’

‘A mob from Hayes,’ Annette said. We went up and across the bridge over the Grand Union Canal. The factories of Hayes, to our right, had been precision-bombed to charred splinters by the Yanks. I admit to feeling a certain grim satisfaction: the area had been a racist, imperialist bastion for years. Even the Trotskyists had given up selling their Red weeklies to its White trash.

‘What goes around comes around.’

‘Rather a hard lesson,’ Annette said.

Every park we passed had its encampment of black plastic domes, lurking cowled aircraft, black helicopters. As we neared the airport the numbers of black-uniformed US/UN troops increased. No need for roadblocks – a wave of an identity-reader did a neater job. The lasers made you blink, always too late: the retinal scan was in.

Heathrow was like a scene from the twentieth century. Nobody was flying but those who had to: refugees from the war zones, wounded soldiers and civilians, desperate emigrants. It had a Third World of people waiting for flights, waiting to get through the re-imposed immigration barriers, waiting to die; and a Second World of officials and officers ordering them about. In this bedlam the First World consisted of volunteers trying to help and entrepreneurs trying to help themselves. Each passenger lounge had its field hospitals and hawkers; each gate its unpaid advisers and legal sharks and medical aid team.

We arrived at the international terminal, but the flight had been switched to the domestic. The rolling walkways were over-loaded with disembarking troops and their kit. Walking between terminals was a Brownian motion through a Hobbesian crowd. Time dragged, stopped, passed without being noticed. Annette and I clung together and struggled forward.

Hours later, when Eleanor and Colin at last appeared in the stream of arrivals, we were as haggard and ragged as they. After hugging and crying and talking, we turned around and fought our way out again. We got to the car, paid the parking surcharge, paid a hawker another outrageous sum for warm coffee, and set off for home. It was about 10.00 p.m.

I drove: Annette was exhausted, I was manic with relief.

As I edged the car around the junction for the M4 a laser’s ruby flicker hurt my eyes. Blinking away the after-image, I was blinded again by a torch, waving us in to the side of the road. On the pavement was a unit of five soldiers with black uniforms and M-16s. I thumbed the car-phone switch and pulled in, turned with a hopefully reassuring smile to the others and stepped out. Other cars inched past me. Everyone in them took great care not to look. I kept my hands on top of the car and moved crabwise around to the near side.

Hands groped around my collar, my torso, down my legs and between them. Then my shoulder was grabbed and I was spun around and thrown back against the car. I froze in the light and kept my hands up. Behind me, through an open inch of window, I thought I heard Annette’s quiet, urgent voice.

The soldier covering me lowered his beam, raised his rifle and loomed close. His visor was up, revealing an impassive, Andean face: I was reminded of the peasant in the poster. What goes around comes around…

‘Jonathan Wilde,’ he said. It wasn’t a question. I didn’t answer. My mouth was dry.

‘Come with us,’ he said.

I felt the window at my back roll down.

‘No!’ Annette shouted.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Go. Go now.’

‘Yes,’ said the soldier. ‘Go.’

He motioned me away from the car. I took two slow steps forward. ‘There are no weapons in the car,’ I said.

‘We know.’ He swung his rifle away from me, towards the car. For the first time his face showed an emotion, something so primal it was hard to tell whether it was fear or rage.

‘Go!’ he screamed.

I could hear Annette’s dry sobs, Eleanor crying, Colin arguing. I dared not turn around, or even make a gesture.

The engine started, and slowly the car pulled away.

Streetlights and fog. Aircraft landing-lights and fog. Night and fog. They had never looked so beautiful. I raised my eyes for a look at the stars I thought I’d never reach, not now. I couldn’t see them. Ah well.

They walked me a few hundred metres to a patch of waste ground. I was actually relieved to see a black helicopter, its matt angular surfaces gleaming with condensation in the shadows. They bundled me aboard and sat me down facing the open doorway as the craft took off. It made surprisingly little noise. The soldiers watched me with silent malice and dirty-secret smiles.

I wondered why I’d kept walking, when I could have run. It looked like I was for one of the classic US-client execution styles, the Saigon sky-dive. I should have run, I thought, and not given them this satisfaction. There’s an Arab proverb, something along the lines that hope is the enemy of freedom, or despair is the liberator of the slave. It explains a lot, including why I climbed into that helicopter.

I hope it doesn’t explain what I did after I got out.

‘Come in, Mr Wilde.’

The polite invitation, from one of a dozen men in suits around a table, was accompanied by a shove in the back from the UN trooper that sent me stumbling into the room and left no-one in any doubt who was really in charge here. The door behind me was too heavy to slam, but it closed with a muffled thud, as if the soldier had at least made the attempt.

I straightened, mustering my dignity, and glanced around the room. Somewhere in Westminster – the helicopter had landed in St James’s Park, and I’d been bundled into the back of an APC and driven a short distance – but it was impossible to tell if it was a private or a public building. Big mahogany table with lights above it, oak-panelled walls, portraits of distinguished ancestors or predecessors in the gloom. The men who looked up at me from the table had something of that same air of inherited or acquired assurance, despite being more dishevelled than I was: their jackets crumpled or hung over tall chair-backs, ties loosened, eyes red and cheeks unshaven.

The table was spread with laminated maps, on which lines had been drawn and wiped and redrawn in fluorescent inks from the marker-pens that lay scattered among coffee-cups and overflowing cut-glass ashtrays the size of dinner-plates. Rising smoke curled up through the cones of light to be sucked away by powerful air-conditioning that gave the atmosphere a stale chill.

The man who’d spoken stood and motioned me towards a vacant seat at the nearest corner of the table. A freshly filled cup of coffee steamed in front of it.

‘Good evening, Mr Wilde,’ he said. ‘I must apologise for the rather brusque manner in which you’ve been brought here.’ He gave a self-deprecating smile, a slight shrug as if to disavow responsibility. He was old, older than I – though he’d had better treatment – and his wavy yellow-grey hair, shoulder-length, made him look like a judge or one of those eighteenth-century dignitaries in the portraits. ‘I trust you have not been otherwise ill-treated?’

I stood where I was and said, ‘I call kidnapping ill-treatment, sir. I demand an explanation, and an immediate contact with my family and my lawyer.’

Another man spoke up, leaning forward on his elbows into the light. ‘None of that applies. This country’s under martial law, and anyway, you’re not under arrest.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll go now.’

I turned away and made for the door.

‘Stop!’ The first man’s voice sounded more like an urgent warning than a command. ‘A moment, please.’

This was more like it. I turned back.

‘Of course you’re free to leave,’ the man continued, ‘but if you do, only we can guarantee your safety. All we ask is that you hear us out.’

I doubted this, but decided it would be foolhardy to try anything else. Besides, I needed that coffee.

They were a committee of what was already being called the Restoration Government. Members of Parliament, civil servants…they didn’t give their names, and I never subsequently tried to find out. They told me they were trying to restore order and a civilian administration.

‘The Republic is dead, Mr Wilde. Our only choices are a prolonged and futile resistance, with a prolonged and painful occupation – or an an attempt at a workable settlement.’

‘I don’t see the US keeping up a prolonged occupation,’ I said. ‘Given their notorious sensitivity to body-bags.’

‘How many US troops have you seen?’ snapped the second man. ‘They’re all in bunkers operating telepresence rigs. Believe me, America’s Third World clients have troops and to spare for the UN. Internal security is what they’re raised for and paid for. They’ll laugh off the pathetic efforts of our home-grown Guevaras. Make no mistake – the United States – the United Nations – means it this time. No nation will ever again be allowed to start a war. Nuclear disarmament will be enforced.’

Saliva droplets from his speech were spotting the maps. I was half-expecting his right arm to twitch up. I must have recoiled slightly. The long-haired man raised a hand, soft cop to the hard cop.

‘We know as well as you do that a power such as the US must become cannot possibly administer the world. Police it, at a very high level, yes. But as some powers move up from the nation, others devolve to the local community. We have the opportunity to encourage autonomy and diversity. Let us take it, and spare our country years of agony.’

‘“Us”?’ I looked around. ‘I have nothing in common with you. What do you want from me?’

‘The possibility of a deal, Mr Wilde. A settlement. We’re pulling in all the regional and factional and community leaders we can reach. You happen to be the first.’

‘And what d’you intend to offer them?’

‘Accept the Kingdom – in practice – as the national authority, and you can have autonomy in the areas your supporters control.’

‘I have no authority to negotiate –’

‘Oh, but you have. You have influence. We know that without it some younger and hotter heads would be calling the shots. And we know you’re up to more than your public statements indicate –’

‘What makes you say that?’

He smiled. ‘The volume of encrypted traffic from your safe houses.’

Damn. I tried to remain poker-faced.

‘What you see is what you get. I’ve done nothing secretly that goes against what I’ve said openly.’

‘Of course. Then you can have no objection. Take a look at these…’

Agreements, ready to sign. Maps. London, for a start, was to be carved up. The part conceded to the space movement encompassed the Greenbelt and an arc of suburbs in which we had free trade zones. They’d even given it a name: North London Town, which on the map some military hand had clipped to NORLONTO.

It was a lot. Frankly, I’d have settled for less.

‘And in return?’

‘No armed actions to be launched from the territory. And one other thing…’

‘Yes?’

‘Ah…the nuclear deterrence contract, Mr Wilde.’

‘You want me to end it?’

‘Good God, no!’ He looked shocked. ‘We want you to transfer the policy to us.’

‘To the government? But you’ve got –’ I stopped, and looked at their ever-so-slightly-embarrassed faces.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see.’ I turned again to the map, and picked up a pen. By the end of the night we had something I could take back to my committee.

Two days later I sat in a room at the back of a Greenbelt shebeen with a group of men and women who, thanks to my negotiations, had emerged blinking from hideouts and camps and cells. I explained to them that they had the chance to try out their ideas on a couple of million more or less enthusiastic people, with minimal interference from a state only too glad to have this explosive and impoverished mass off its hands. I told them the only price for this was a de facto acknowledgement of that state’s authority, and the renunciation of an untested nuclear deterrent about which most of them had mixed feelings and which was now obsolete.

I didn’t expect gratitude or agreement, and I didn’t get them. What I got was comrades falling over each other to denounce me. I’d expected that. Being expelled from the organisation came as a surprise. The vote was unanimous. Et tu, Julie.

‘Good day to you, comrades,’ I said. ‘And good luck.’

I stood up and pushed back my chair and ducked out of the door and walked away. Two days after my expulsion, US/UN crack troops took over and disarmed every surface-based deterrence exporter. The renegade subs took longer, but they were rounded up too. Among other consequences, my ex-comrades didn’t have our nuclear policy to bargain with, so they had to settle for a smaller Norlonto than I’d been offered.

It served them right, but I wished they could have kept Islington. The Christian fundamentalists got it, and set about ethically cleansing the place. Eleanor and her family had to abandon Finsbury Park. They moved in with us and it was months before they found a new house.

I was getting too old for that sort of thing.