The Star Fraction

14

Combat Futures

After the world war there was a world government. It was officially known as the United Nations, unofficially as the US/UN, and colloquially as the Yanks. It kept the peace, from space, or so it claimed. What it actually did was prevent innumerable tiny wars from becoming big wars. But in order to maintain its power, it needed the little wars, and they never stopped. We had war without end, to prevent war to the end. The US/UN kept the most advanced technology in its own hands, to keep it out of ‘the wrong hands’ – i.e., any hands that could be raised against the US/UN’s dominion. It was not as dreadful as generations of American dissidents had feared. It wasn’t, by a long way, as dreadful as generations of global idealists had hoped. That leaves a lot of leeway for bad government.

The Restoration Settlement, the fragmented system of ‘communities under the King’, was Britain’s contribution to the tale of infamy. In the interstices of the Kingdom all sorts of Free States flourished: regionalist, racialist, creationist, socialist; even – in the case of our own Norlonto – anarcho-capitalist.

The Kingdom was a caricature of a minimal state, which bore about the same relationship to my utopia as once-actually-existing-socialism did to my father’s. The people who did best of all under the arrangement were the marginals who squatted the countryside and called themselves New Settlers, and whom we city folk called new barbarians – ‘the barb’.

After twenty years of slow-burning war of all against all the Army of the New Republic proclaimed the Final Offensive for the fourth time.

‘You’ve got to talk to them,’ Julie said.

‘Why the fuck should I?’ I replied, not turning away from the window. The fine morning view of North London’s Greenbelt fringe was marred by puffs of white smoke from the far side of Trent Park. I counted several seconds before hearing the artillery’s dull thuds, couldn’t hear the shells burst. Over the horizon, probably. The Army of the New Republic was rumoured to have infiltrated Luton. Whatever the truth of that, Luton or somewhere nearby was taking a hammering from the Royal Artillery.

‘It’s your problem,’ I continued, facing her. In a way that had become familiar over the years, but which I’d never ceased to envy in the middle-aged of today, she seemed to have changed little between twenty and fifty. The most visible difference between my former Youth Organiser and the woman who now stood in my office was that she’d traded in her formerly unvarying cosmonaut jumpsuit for a more dignified crini-dress.

I, in my nineties now, was still tough and vigorous, strutting in the leather of my own skin, and my brain was still running sweet and clean, oiled by the foetal cell-lines. But the prolongation of life, and the prospect of its indefinite extension, had robbed me of the stoic maturity and detachment that had sometimes come to the truly aged of the past. I’d noticed in myself a hardening of the attitudes, a thinning of the spirit. The peaceful revolution that had established the original Republic I’d welcomed and tried to use; I’d plunged into the chaotic possibilities that accompanied that Republic’s violent end; but the imminent prospect of its violent renewal – new revolution or counter-restoration – now found me determined to do only what I could to survive this latest turning of the wheel, with no expectation that it would carry me anywhere.

Behind me the window rattled to an explosion followed by the scream of some missile’s passage, catching up too late. I must have given a start, because Julie’s smile was sly when she said,

‘It’s your problem too. Are you going to wait till the rockets come through the window?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But why do you want me to do it?’ My voice sounded querulous, to my annoyance. ‘Why not your own spokesfolk?’

Julie laughed down her nose. ‘Name them. You’re the one everybody’s heard of. Our grand old man.’

‘Oh, thanks.’

‘Also,’ she went on, ‘they insist on talking to you, because you weren’t involved in what the Republicans call the Betrayal.’

I suddenly found myself smoking a cigarette. (First of the day. One of these decades I’d have to quit for good, health risks or no health risks…)

‘But I was,’ I said. ‘Dammit, I helped the Hanoverian bastards draw up the maps.’

‘Yeah,’ Julie said. ‘And then we threw you out, remember?’

‘So?’

‘Well, everybody assumes it was because you were against the Settlement.’

‘What!’ I sat on the edge of the desk and laughed. ‘The organisation put that about?’

‘Not exactly,’ Julie said. ‘We just…didn’t contradict it. We could hardly denounce you for opportunism after we’d done the same thing ourselves.’

‘Of course you could,’ I said absently. ‘Didn’t I teach you anything?’

I’d just understood why, ever since the Settlement, my reputation had carried a mystique of irreproachability which in my actual political activity I’d done so little to deserve. It had helped me in my second career, a none-too-demanding history lectureship at North London University supplemented by more substantial writing than I’d ever had time for before. The writing had brought me to the unsought position of space-movement guru, more read about than read. The idle curiosity which had driven me to investigate and refute the conspiracy theory of history was hailed as a long-overdue revision of revisionist scholarship, my increasingly cynical journalism as the voice of the Movement’s radical conscience, challenging the inevitable compromises of its hands-off hegemony over Norlonto.

Julie was looking at her watch, wringing her phone, twitching her hair. Another rocket came in, closer this time. The gun-battery fell silent.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Take me to their leader.’

‘Only in a virtual sense,’ Julie said. ‘You take me to the Media Lab, or whatever it’s called these days, and I’ll patch you in.’

I picked up my jacket and computer and stubbed out my cigarette. ‘What about the students?’

‘That’s fixed,’ Julie said. ‘They’re on strike.’

‘Oh,’ I said, holding the door open as she steered her skirt through. ‘Where do they work?’

Whatever contribution to the struggle the students thought they were making by staying away, they’d have done better by coming in, to the Cable Room at least. In the Perry Anderson Building’s cool, quiet basement with its thin layer of natural light from slatted windows near the ceiling, cameras and screens and VR immersion gear lay amongst a clutter of notes and chewed pens and stained styrofoam cups. Julie powered up more and more cable and net connections, displaying a media battle almost as important as any on the ground.

Britain – ‘former Britain’ as the Yanks called it – was world news for a change, with the ANR allegedly poised to strike and the US/UN nerving itself for another bloody intervention. Meanwhile the local boards and channels were buzzing with rumour and debate. The ANR, for its part, was saying nothing, apart from a manifesto and a timetable showing exactly where and when they intended to strike. Tomorrow looked busy.

‘You want deep or flat?’ Julie asked, jolting me out of a fascinating, spinning thread of argument from one of the Yorkshire mini-states.

‘Flat.’ I never could stand the hassle of gloves, goggles, and gear – the way I saw it, if you were going to kit yourself out like that you might as well be getting into some good healthy perversion instead of the inside of a computer.

‘OK, putting you through now.’

The newsgroup discussion (and its almost equally intriguing accompaniment of cartoon characters – smileys, they were called – who pulled faces, gestured obscenely or rolled about laughing in the margins, in a graphic gloss on the main debate) flicked away and a video link cut in.

Flakey reception; scratches like an old movie (the cryptography had been lifted that minute from a campus freeware board in North Carolina, according to its indignant, jumping-up-and-down copyleft demon in the corner) and voice quality like a badly dubbed Iranian skinflick, but there was no doubt who was on the other end.

‘Well, hello there Jon.’

‘Hi, Dave. Didn’t expect to be speaking to you.’

(‘You know this guy?’ Julie hissed.)

Dave coughed. ‘I hired out a few squads for, uh, technical work in the current operation, and for some time I’ve had a good business relationship with our friends to the North.’

I understood what he meant but it seemed unnecessarily oblique. I gave him what I hoped came across as a dirty look.

‘You worried about the crypto, or something? I mean, it was your lot who picked it.’

‘No, no.’ Dave nodded as if past my shoulder. ‘Just – who’s that lassie on the bench behind you?’

‘Uh?’ I looked back. Julie was leaning forward over hillocks of skirt, her neat boots dangling below, like a doll on a shelf.

‘Watch your lip, man, that’s Julie O’Brien.’

‘Sorry, ma’am,’ Reid said. ‘Didn’t recognise you.’

‘That’s all right,’ Julie said. ‘And you can speak freely.’ Probably flattered at being called a lassie, I thought dourly.

‘OK,’ said Reid. He relaxed. ‘Fact is, Jon, I’ve been working with the ANR for years, and I’ve spent the past few weeks brokering deals with defence companies in your neck of the woods.’

‘Yeah, well I had noticed combat futures were up.’

Reid grinned. ‘Aye, and you can use them to leverage insurance…’ He rubbed his hands. ‘Great fun, of course, but now that we’ve squared everything with the road owners and cop-cos we need to deal with the Movement militia. Politics, not business. They thought I was the right person to talk to you.’

‘Given our deep personal trust.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Are you really launching an offensive tomorrow?’

Reid grinned. ‘I can’t say. We intend to, but we haven’t got all the bugs out of our system yet.’

The ANR was alleged to have inherited some diabolically clever military software from the old Republic, though if its previous failed offensives were anything to go by it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

‘Why are you posting a timetable of where you intend to hit? Most strategists still rate the advantage of surprise, last I heard.’

‘I’m told it’s a humanitarian measure,’ Reid chuckled. ‘It lets the civilians get out of the way.’

‘And clogs the roads with refugees and gives the mini-state militias every excuse for calling in sick tomorrow morning?’

‘Like I said –’

‘– Humanitarian. OK. Business. What’s the deal with Norlonto?’

‘We know your militia won’t fight for the Kingdom,’ Reid said slowly, ‘and we don’t expect you to fight for the Republic. All donations gratefully received, of course, but that’s by the way. The main thing is, we don’t want anybody thinking we’re invading you if we happen to, uh, pass through in large tracked vehicles.’

‘I can see how that might be misunderstood,’ I said. (Julie, behind me, snorted.) ‘What guarantee do we have that you aren’t gonna just stomp on us?’

‘Apart from my solemn word?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Apart from that.’

‘It’s not in our interests. We’ve nothing against Norlonto. Some of the little Free States will have to be cleaned up, but you’re not on the list.’

Fucking great. ‘OK, how about this. ANR shelling and rocketing of Norlonto stops right now. Your troops can pass through, but they can’t stay and they especially can’t launch any attacks on the Hanoverians from positions inside Norlonto, even with the landowners’ permission.’

‘That’ll do,’ Reid said.

‘That breaks the Settlement,’ Julie said, as if this point had just occurred to her.

‘Indeed it does,’ Reid said drily. ‘So just on the off-chance that we lose this round, I suggest that Jon makes this deal known over your heads. All those who did accept the Settlement resign their posts in disgust, and Jon takes over for the next day or two.’

‘What!’ Julie and I said at the same moment.

‘Sure,’ Reid went on imperturbably. ‘Make him dictator or something. That way, he can give the orders to the militia and take the rap if we go down. You can always shoot him afterwards if we win and he shows too much attachment to the job, but I’m sure that won’t be necessary.’

‘You’re asking a lot,’ I said. ‘If you lose, I’ll swing for it.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,’ Reid said airily. ‘If we lose it’ll be because the Yanks come in, and then you’ll die anyway.’

‘Doesn’t that apply to the rest of us?’ Julie asked. ‘I mean, why bother with –?’ She waved her hand.

‘Dear citizen,’ Reid said with feigned patience, ‘the Yanks have a list. He’s on it, and you’re not.’

‘Well,’ I said after this reassurance had sunk in, ‘how can I refuse?’

‘Good man,’ said Reid. ‘I hope I see you again.’

‘So do I, mate,’ I said. ‘So do I.’

The following day the ANR offensive started (Bang On Schedule! as the Sun-Times noon edition put it) but stalled and fell back before the day was over. There’s a story that this was down to some kind of software problem, but it’s hard to credit. I think the general strikes and local insurrections that broke out at the same time had a lot more to do with it. Fortunately, over the next few days this civilian uprising carried the revolution to victory. When it became obvious that America too was on strike and the troops weren’t coming, the Restored Hanoverian government departed ignominiously in helicopters to ‘continue the struggle against terrorism from exile’, as they put it.

The fall of the US/UN has been similarly attributed, in the sort of conspiracy theories I once thought I’d exploded forever, to an engineered viral assault on the global information nets. But a moment’s objective thought will show that the insurrections in Britain and Siberia, concurrent with an escalating arms-control dispute with Japan, were what finally convinced the American people that world domination wasn’t worth yet another tax hike and draft call-up. Copycat insurrections, as they were called, spread around the globe with the speed of an Internet rumour. The disruption associated with what amounted to a world revolution is, in my view, a more than adequate explanation for the chaotic state of everybody’s computer screens over the next few months.

At the time I had more pressing matters to attend to, like trying to figure out a way of losing my new job without handing it to somebody worse. I should have known better than to become a dictator in the first place, but that’s anarchism for you. It’s just no preparation for the responsibilities of government.

February, 2046. The coldest winter in years. People said there was a hole in the greenhouse, as they lit fires with yesterday’s money.

We had our own greenhouse, our geodesic dome on the edge of the Trent Park, near the university. The students were occupied with making mistakes about democracy and elitism that had been considered passé when I was at Glasgow. I left them to it. Annette moved slowly about her horticultural experiments, with a lab-coat made of fur. I rattled out net propaganda, spoke myself hoarse on the cable, convened virtual meetings of Norlonto’s factions and hammered out a line to take to the national government.

For relaxation I talked to people in space. Beyond the Lagrange settlements and the Moon it was easier by email, a more natural medium given the lightspeed lag. Asteroid miners solemnly asked my advice about mutual banking, Martian colonists grumbled about being abandoned now that Space Defense was being cut back. Soldiers’ councils on former Space Defense battlesats bounced ideas off me for profitable ways to use laser cannon. (They were good kids, really, or they’d have thought of the obvious way.)

Meanwhile the civil wars went on. The Republic’s modest aim of combining national unity with local autonomy clashed repeatedly with locals whose idea of autonomy was a good deal more expansive. As a state, the Republic was in many ways weaker than the Kingdom – with its ever-present, over-the-horizon orbital back-up – had ever been. More fundamentally, the revolution had put everything up for grabs: created incentives to defection, as the game theorists put it.

Refugees poured into Norlonto from the countryside, and continued their fights in the shanty-towns and camps. The strain on our charities and defence-companies alike increased by the week, and every week I shouted at their organisers to recruit new workers from among the refugees themselves.

That worked until it became difficult to tell just who was recruiting whom. Competing cop companies found themselves literally in rival armed camps, whose quartermasters, as like as not, were authorised charity distributors. We called it the Thailand Syndrome.

The weekly meetings of the Defence Liason Committee became daily, or rather, nightly. They usually began at 9.00 p.m. and went on until after midnight. This was all right by me. My sleep requirements had diminished with age. I resented having to go into VR, but that’s life. Every evening I’d take the washing-up gloves off, pull the datagloves on, give Annette a smile across the cleared table and put on the glasses and –

Be there. Some of us fancied ourselves as Heroes In Hell, and the setting was appropriate: a black infinity around us, and between us a round table with a common view of Norlonto, or London, or whatever we wanted to examine; a camera obscura view, patched together from satellite pictures and enhanced with all the data we could pull in. At this level there were thirteen of us, always a lucky number for a committee. Our fetches – our body-images in the virtual world – were the same as our actual forms, mainly so that we could recognise each other in real life or on television.

The night of the big crisis we were one short. I looked around, worried. Julie was there, Mike Davis, Juan Altimara, all from different tendencies of the space movement; a pair of identical youths whom I’d mentally tagged ‘the Mormon missionaries’ though actually they were from the Norlonto churches’ protection charity, the St Maurice Defence Association; and – moving from the voluntary sector to the commercial – a handful of defence company delegates who changed from week to week and always looked alarmingly young and pathetically exhausted, and always squabbled with the leftists –

‘Where’s Catherin Duvalier?’ She was young, fast, smart: a communist militia co-ordinator whose intelligence networks extended through the Green camps to the distant battles in the hills.

Julie smiled at me from across the table’s bright gulf.

‘Cat’s getting married tomorrow. Sends her apologies.’

‘No excuse,’ I grunted, but I was relieved we hadn’t had a defection, or indeed a casualty. ‘OK, comrades. First business.’

I keyed up the day’s trading figures for defence shares and combat futures. They were rising fast.

‘Well, chaps,’ I said to the defence-agency boys, ‘do you know something we don’t?’

A flicker of data interchange set the fetches wavering as if in a heat-haze. Then, their hasty conferring over, one of them spoke up.

‘We were about to say, Mr. Wilde…’

Oh, sure.

‘…all our companies have been separately approached today about, ah, potential conflict situations. It seems that once again a large number of street-owners have made deals to allow passage of, uh, armoured columns –’

‘You mean the Army’s coming in?’

Virtual eyes heliographed shock around the table.

‘Yes,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘We’ve been instructed to inform you that the government has decided to end Norlonto’s anomalous status – their words. It’s been done at the request of a significant part of the business community and a number of Norlonto’s more, uh, settled neighbourhood associations –’

‘Bastards!’ shouted Julie. She rounded on the ‘Mormon Missionaries’. ‘Did you know anything about this?’

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ one of them said. ‘We’ve been passing on the complaints from our clients for weeks. The situation really is becoming quite intolerable, especially for the less fortunate. I assure you all that the Association knew nothing of this, but I can’t say I’m surprised or sorry.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘when do the tanks roll in?’

‘Day after tomorrow,’ one of the agency reps said. ‘Show of force, and all that. Order on the streets.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘That gives us time to organise.’

‘Resistance?’ Several voices said it at the same time, in dismay or hope.

‘No,’ I said grimly. ‘Retreat. Tell your principals, and the government, that there’ll be no trouble from the militia.’

I looked around the table, my hand on the databoard of the real table tapping out an urgent message to the space movement people to stay behind. ‘Meeting’s adjourned. See you all tomorrow.’

‘What the fuck are you playing at, Wilde?’ Julie asked, when the charities and the businesses had left the scene. ‘We can’t take this lying down. It’ll be the end of Norlonto!’

Mike Davis and Juan Altimara nodded indignant agreement.

‘Oh ye of little faith,’ I said. ‘Of course it’ll be the end of Norlonto. I seem to recall that most of you were not too keen on the beginning of Norlonto.’

Juan, who’d arrived in Norlonto as a child refugee from Brazil’s brief biowar during the Amazonian Secession, looked at Mike and Julie. The fungal scar on his cheek twisted as he frowned.

‘I did not know this,’ he said.

Julie flushed, Mike fiddled with his bat switch: ‘Heat out the roof, now,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘Point is, like, Norlonto’s been a bastion of liberty for years, a successful experiment, and you want to let the statists march in without firing a shot!’

‘Excuse me, comrades,’ I said, ‘but who’s capitulating to statism here?’ I was rummaging around in the virtual depths of the table, illuminating likely routes for the incursion and checking them against the movements of insurance ratings, defence-agency deployments, militia strongpoints. ‘The way I see it, if the clients of the various defence agencies, if the communities and property-owners of this town want to make a deal with a nationalised defence industry, what business is it of ours? Isn’t that anarcho-capitalism in action?’

‘Capitalists selling out the anarchy, more like!’ said Julie.

‘As they have a right to do,’ Mike said. ‘Yeah, I have to agree with Jon here. Still, it means we’ve failed.’

Julie and Juan were both inspecting the enhanced map take shape. They looked up, looked at each other.

‘We don’t have to fail,’ Juan said. ‘The militia’s strong enough to hold off the Republic’s forces. We have time to rally the population. The Army can’t get away with a massacre in its own capital – even the Hanoverians held back from that.’

‘They’re getting away with murder in the countryside,’ I said. ‘You ever listen to any of the refugees?’

Julie gave this comment a flick of the hand. ‘If you believe the whining of those people the Republic’s a monstrous tyranny, which it obviously isn’t, so –’

‘So why are you so worried about having their troops on the streets?’

‘Because –’ Julie looked at me as if I was missing something so obvious she was having trouble believing she had to spell it out. ‘Because it’s our town, dammit! Our free city! We can’t let the state roll in after all this time. We should crack down on the camps ourselves, do it now, chase those mafias and renegade militias out and get rid of even that excuse for the Army coming in. If we move now we could do it tonight!’

I could see Mike taking heart at this suggestion, while my own heart sank. I wished Catherin Duvalier had picked a different day to get hitched. The argument went on.

A butterfly flew out of the infinite darkness around us and settled on the table, wings quivering.

‘Oh, shit,’ it said in Annette’s voice. ‘I hope I’ve got this damn’ thing working –’

‘We see you, Annette,’ I said. ‘What are you doing? How did you get here?’

I felt her hand, eerily invisible, brush the back of mine.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I know I’m not supposed to be here, and I haven’t hacked in or anything. In real life I was sitting across a table from Jon, and I could see what he was saying, and I’ve come round beside him and piggybacked in on his link, and I’ve been circling around this conversation –’

‘This is a security risk!’ Juan said.

‘This is no security risk, this is my wife,’ I said. ‘She’s the one who keeps my physical location secure while I’m here, and always has done. So shut up, comrade, and let’s hear what she has to say. If that’s all right with everybody.’ I glared across the map-table and they all, eventually, nodded.

‘OK,’ Annette said. In real life she slid on to my lap and put an arm around my shoulders; in VR she flew up, agitated, then began swooping and fluttering round the map, as if drawn to its lights. ‘You say that letting the Republic take over Norlonto would be a terrible defeat and disgrace. All right. Even Jon thinks that, I’m sure. But have you thought what a defeat and disgrace it would be to go down in blood? Or to win, and become a state yourselves? You’d have to fight not just the Army but the security companies, and that would be the end of the free market anarchy you’re so proud of. As for driving out the refugees – and that’s what you’re really talking about, Julie – it wouldn’t just be wrong, it would be used for years as evidence that what we have here is no different from what they have there.’

She settled in my lap, and on the map. ‘But if you let the Army in, what do you think will happen? The Army will get sucked into our way of doing things – the economic way, not the political way. They’ll have to do deals and trade combat futures and take disputes to court companies and swap laws and all the rest of it.’

‘How do you know they won’t just do things their way?’ Mike asked.

‘Because Julie’s right,’ Annette said. ‘They don’t want a fight on their hands. They don’t want to conquer us, they want to buy us off. In fact it looks like they already have bought off the defence companies. And what’s bought can be sold. Before they know it they’ll be practising anarcho-capitalism without believing a word of it.’

‘Just like every other group that’s come in here,’ Julie said sourly. ‘And look where that’s got us.’

‘Yes, look,’ I said. ‘It’s got us twenty years of peace and freedom, and tolerance between people who jointly and severally hated each others’ guts!’

Juan, Mike and Julie had to laugh. It was a notorious fact that libertarians in Norlonto were rarer than communists in what Reid used to call the workers’ states.

‘I think Annette has a point,’ I said carefully, as if it wasn’t what I’d been thinking all along and hadn’t got around to articulating (I could never have gotten away with the passionate pacifism of her appeal). ‘There’s another point we’ve tended to forget, and it’s been bugging me recently. Over the years we’ve got so caught up in running Norlonto, in as much as it hasn’t run itself, that we’ve tended to ignore what’s been going on in space. I know, I know, it’s been a sort of socialism-in-one-country versus world revolution thing, and Space Defense held the high orbits, and apart from Alexandra Port there wasn’t much practical we could do. I remember years ago some of us tried setting up experimental laser-launchers, and got stomped on from a great height. But now Space Defense is out on a limb, and we have friends – comrades – in Lagrange and on the Moon trying to build ecosystems out of a rag, a bone and a tank of air. It’s about time we did something about it. So I say, if the statists want Norlonto, let ’em have it. We can find better things to do.’

I sat back, feeling Annette’s weight shift too, seeing the butterfly image tremble. The other three space movement leaders were looking at me and communicating under the table – as it were – with each other. I hoped they would be at least secretly relieved at the idea of saving the Movement’s honour by not fighting.

Juan’s fetch glowed with incoming information, dopplered back to an image of himself.

‘OK, Wilde,’ he said. ‘We think we can sell it. Get ready to wake up early. Julie’s going to fix up interviews with you on as many channels as possible. Now, I suppose it’s time to…’

‘Get back to your constituencies, and prepare for government,’ I said.

Nobody laughed.

When the others had faded from view I moved to take the VR glasses off, and felt Annette’s hands catch my wrists.

‘No,’ she said. She swooped into my face, passed out at the back and came around again. ‘This is fun. Why didn’t you tell me about it before?’

She stood up, dragged me out of the chair and pulled me down on the real table, the virtual image of our stateless state swaying in front of my eyes. We groped and fumbled and fucked on the kitchen table, on the mapped city, while above us two butterflies mated in the infinite dark.