The Star Fraction

6

The Space and Freedom Party

It all began with the space movement.

Under the Republic, the libertarians – whose attitudes to the Republic were even more conflicting, and conflictual, than those of the socialists – had started talking about space the way some socialists had once talked about peace. Somewhat to their surprise, it had worked for them, too, giving an extreme and unpopular minority hegemony over a large popular movement. By the time the Republic fell, the space movement had too much support, weapons and money to be suppressed at a bearable cost.

So, like most of the other popular movements that had flourished under the Republic, it had to be bought off.

The area now called Norlonto had been ceded to the space movement as part of the Restoration Settlement. At the time it had been considered almost valueless, including as it did a swathe of shanty-towns (obscurely known as the Greenbelt) and a vast refugee population, legacy of the Republic’s free immigration and asylum policy. The space movement had developed it as an entrepôt for European trade with the space stations and settlements. Most commercial launch-sites were tropical. Most airports were liable to military or paramilitary requisitioning, to say nothing of assault. Airship traffic had turned out to be viable, and less vulnerable than conventional airfreight to increasingly unpredictable weather. Alexandra Port’s trade quickly diversified.

Norlonto never quite became respectable enough to be a new Hong Kong or even a new Shanghai, and the ending of drug prohibition undercut it, but it retained its attraction as a tax and data haven, enterprise zone and social test-bed. The space movement had evolved into a hybrid of joint-stock corporation and propaganda campaign, and had tried to create in the territory it disdained to govern a condition approximating the stateless market which its early idealists and investors had intended for space itself.

Above the atmosphere, above the graves where the pioneers shared blessed ignorance with the Fenians and Jacobins and Patriots and Communards and Bolsheviks, the lords of the Earth and their liegemen rode high, couching lances of laser fire. From the battlesats out to the Belt, the state had space, and freedom.

Kohn let the automatics guide the car through Norlonto’s crowded streets, and allowed the new pathways in his mind to carry him back to where it had all begun.

They were building the future and getting paid by the hour, and they’d worked like pioneers; like kibbutzniks; like communists. Each day after work Kohn would watch the cement dust sluice away, and think hot showers the best amenity known to man, something he’d kill to keep. He’d take his clean clothes from the locker, bundle his overalls into the laundry hopper and swagger off the site, his day’s pay next to his heart. It was the best yet of his fifteen summers: the space boom just starting to pick up where the post-war reconstruction had left off, scars healing, new buildings going up. Long evenings when he could hit the streets, take in the new music, meet girls. There seemed to be girls everywhere, of his own age and older. Most of them had independence, a job and a place to crash, no hassles with parents. School really was out forever. If you wanted education you could get it from the net, as nature intended.

He was sinking foundations; he was getting in on the ground floor…the sheer hubris of taking this place and declaring it an outpost of space made him feel as if a taut string were vibrating in his chest. An open universe, unowned, was there for the taking, sixty-five kilometres away – straight up. Out there you could build the ground you walked on, and the possibility of doing so went on forever. One day he’d do it, one day he’d carve out his chunk of it, and there would always be enough and as good left over. Space offered the ultimate freedom and the ultimate justice. Earth had not anything to show more fair.

But that was only a potential, an aching longing, as long as the reality of space development was turned against itself, literally turned inwards, by Space Defense. The US/UN held that high ground, cynically supervising the planet’s broken blocs. The Peace Process: divide-and-rule replicating downwards in a fractal balkanization of the world. Britain’s version of the Peace Process gave each of the former oppositions and interests their own bloodstained bone to chew on, as Free States under the Kingdom. They called it the Restoration Settlement.

The irreconcilables and recusants of the defeated regime called it the Betrayal. Driven back to some snowline of social support in the cleared silicon glens of Scotland, the blackened ghettoes of the Midlands or the pitted guts of Wales, the handful who still held on to their weapons and their politics proclaimed themselves the Army of the New Republic.

One of those long evenings Kohn was sitting on the low forecourt wall of a pub in Golders Green, sipping with caution at a litre of Stella Artois. He wore shades in the twilight. The round, white-enamelled table where the others sat was jammed against the wall, enabling him to lean gently on the shoulder of his current girlfriend, Annie. Like most of the girls around (that was where the shades came in, for covert appraisals) she was wearing a skin-tight catsuit that covered everything up to her chin, including each finger and toe. The gauzy, floaty shift which covered it somehow made its contours no less detailed or revealing. As one of his older workmates had remarked appreciatively when the fashion had first drifted down the street, it was filf, pure filf.

Anyway, they were all workmates here. Himself, Annie, the tall Brummie about his own age that they called Stone, and Stone’s girlfriend, Lynette – all worked on the same site. Stone was a labourer like himself; Lynette was training to be an engineer. He didn’t like to think about what Annie did, but every so often he’d get a chill sweat at the thought of her walking along the high girders. Women were good at that, she kept telling him. Look at all those gymnasts. Yeah, yeah.

‘Well, we won,’ Stone said. ‘We fuckin beat them.’

They all grinned at each other. They’d just won a fairly audacious pay-and-conditions gain out of a short, sharp strike.

‘This old gel came along to the picket line a couple of days ago,’ Stone said. ‘Lecturer at the college. Gave us some money from the students for the strike fund. Didn’t really need it, you know? Union’s been solid. Anyway, they’d gone to the trouble of taking a collection, so I thanked her and said I’d put it in the branch account for the next time.’ He laughed. ‘She said damn’ right, there’d always be a next time. She sold me this paper.’

Kohn thought: Oh, no. His glass banged as he put it down. Stone hauled a tattered tabloid from the inside of his jacket and spread it on the table.

‘Red Star,’ Stone said. ‘It’s a bit extreme, but some of the things they say make sense. Thought you might be interested, Moh.’

Does it show? Kohn wondered wildly. Is there some mark of Cain branded on my forehead that identifies me to everybody else, no matter what I say or don’t say, no matter how much I want to put it all behind me? He picked the paper up reluctantly, took his shades off to read. There it was, the banner with the strange device: a hammer-and-sickle, facing the opposite way from the traditional Soviet one, with a ‘4’ over the hammer.

He didn’t read beyond the masthead.

‘The only red stars I know about,’ he said, ‘are dead, off the main sequence, and consist mostly of faintly glowing gas.’

Lynette was the only one who really got that.

‘They should call it Red Giant!’

Kohn smiled at her and looked at Stone, who scowled, taken aback.

‘I thought, you were good in the strike, you know how to organize, you always stick up for yourself…’

More than a hundred years, Kohn thought, and the word for a person like that is still bolshie. The old man would’ve been proud.

‘Nothing personal, yeah?’ Kohn said. ‘It’s just – don’t waste any time thinking about workers’ revolution. Crock a shit, man. It ain’t gonna happen. So no matter how clever some of it sounds, any idea that depends on it being practical can be dismissed out a hand.’

He sat back, feeling smug. He’d kept it cool, kept it logical. It hadn’t been one of those outbursts of loathing and contempt that sometimes escaped him.

‘Well,’ Annie said. ‘you don’t look like you’ve seen something dead. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

He smiled down at her upturned, concerned face.

‘Pale and shaking all over?’

‘Yes,’ she said soberly. ‘You are.’

‘Ah,’ Kohn said. ‘Maybe I did see a ghost.’ (Leon Trotsky, with an ice-pick in his head. The ghost of the Fourth International. The spectre of communism.) ‘Or maybe I’m just getting cold.’ He came down off the wall and pulled up a chair beside Annie. ‘Warm me up.’

Annie was happy to do that, but Stone wouldn’t let it lie.

‘They’ve got a big centre-spread about conditions on the space construction-platforms. Sounds more like a building site than anything else. The guy who wrote it tried to organize a union and got burned out—’

‘A union in space?’ Lynette said.

‘Yeah, and why not?’

‘What’s “burned out” mean?’ Moh asked.

Stone began scanning down the article but Annie beat him to it.

‘It’s an old company trick, happened to an uncle of mine who worked in a nuclear power-station. They had him marked as a troublemaker and instead of sacking him – that would have caused more trouble – they just made sure he got his year’s safe level of rads in about a week. By mistake, of course. Sorry, no more work. Against safety regulations.’

‘That’s awful!’ Lynette said. ‘What happened to him? Did he—?’

‘He’ – Annie paused dramatically – ‘’s still alive and kicking…with all three legs.’

An uneasy laugh was interrupted by Stone, eyes and index finger still on the paper, waving his other hand and saying, ‘Nah, the levels were dead safe anyway. Just rules. We’ve all had worse.’ An uneasy silence. ‘For this guy it was more, uh, genuine. They got him working outside during a solar flare. Had to go back on the next shuttle. Odds are he’ll be okay, but he’s grounded.’

‘For life?’ Kohn said, appalled.

‘Don’t know.’ Stone raised his face, smiling. ‘Anyway, you can ask him yourself. He’s speaking at a meeting tomorrow night.’

Kohn looked at him, his mind suddenly thrown into chaos. Until now it had not seemed quite real. He’d seen it as a ghost returned to haunt him but that was less unsettling than the thought that these people from the past were real and alive and walking the earth and that you could just go and fucking ask.

He opened his mouth and said, sounding stupid even to himself, ‘What kind of a meeting?’

‘A public meeting, space-head!’

Kohn nutted Stone, hard enough to hurt a little. ‘Gimme that.’

He dragged the paper back, looked at the boxed ad for the meeting at the bottom of the middle pages. ‘“Unionize the space rigs! No victimizations!” Right, with you there one hundred per cent, bros and sis…Ah here we are, the small print: “North London Town Red Star Forum.” Knew it. Build the fucking party, forward to the fucking revolution, workers of the world and off the world unite! Well count me out.’

He felt Annie’s gloved fingers on his cheek. ‘Nobody’s asking you to count yourself in, Moh,’ she said in a reasonable voice. The kind that meant: don’t push it, mate. He turned his head to her, letting the hand slip down to his throat, and gazed at her for a moment. Her wavy black hair, her sharp and slender features, made her (he secretly thought) look like a smaller, more elegant version of himself. Next year’s model.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll go. Tomorrow night. Do you want to come?’

‘To a communist meeting? You must be joking, I’ve got better things to do. Isn’t that right, Lyn?’

Lynette tossed her hair and announced an intention to wash it the next evening.

As soon as he walked into the tiny hired hall, an upstairs room of a freshly redecorated pub called the Lord Carrington, Moh was smitten with the emotional backwash of wondering what age he’d been when he first sat at the back of just such a room, sometimes reading or playing on a game, sometimes listening. There was a table at the far end with two chairs behind it; at the near end was another table, this one stacked with copies of Red Star, hot off the press, and spread with pamphlets whose covers were frayed and furred with age. The rest of the room was optimistically filled with maybe forty stackable plastic chairs.

About twenty people came to hear the space-rigger, a stocky, long-limbed man called Logan with a severe case of sunburn. Stone listened engrossed, clenching his fists, and stood up at the end and made wild promises to raise money, spread the word. (He kept them.) Kohn listened for subtexts and structures, and sussed after about two minutes that this man wasn’t just a militant on a Party platform, but a Party militant. It didn’t seem possible he was in the same league as the old man up there beside him and the old woman who sat behind the literature table. They really did look like ghosts, wispy-haired, the paper of their pamphlets as yellow as their teeth.

The ghost of the Fourth International…The old man talked about solidarity, and Solidarity, and the miners’ strike of 1984–5 which had first opened his eyes to the reality of capitalism…Ghosts. And yet this phantom apparatus, this coelacanth of an organization, had convinced a young man to risk his livelihood and possibly his life to take its message into space. In its own way it was as impressive a feat as that of the Soviet degenerated workers’ state getting into space first. (After they’d scraped Sergei Korolev and his colleagues out of the camps where they’d been sent for…Trotskyism. Kohn smiled to himself. Suppose it had been true, and it was the Fourth International that had put Gagarin into orbit!)

He realized with a shock the exact reason for the generation-gap represented on the platform: old enough to be his grandparents, young enough to be his brother; none of an age to have been his parents. It was the classic population profile of annihilating defeat.

Cars racing through the streets, men with guns sitting half in and half out, yelling and shooting. The cars that came around later, and the men getting out, and shooting. The plastic that bit the wrists, and stumbling feet, and blood trickling thickly down a drain. And the people, our people, our side, our class, who stood and watched and did nothing.

Before he knew it the meeting was finished. People were milling around, getting drinks in, clustering at the literature table, shoving chairs out of rows and into circles…Moh was wondering how to get talking to someone when the space-rigger walked over.

‘Fancy a pint, lads?’

Moh spun a couple of chairs into position. ‘I’ll get them,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who’s out of work.’

Logan laughed. ‘I’m still one of the orbital labour aristocracy,’ he said, ‘and you’ve just been on strike, jes? So – what you having?’

He came back from the bar a few minutes later and started talking, mostly with Stone but including Moh in the conversation with quick glances and remarks. He’d obviously noted Stone’s contribution and picked him out as a good militant and potential recruit. Moh, who had assimilated the Dale Carnegie school of Trotskyist party-building from the age of about eight, gave the conversation half his attention. At some point Logan would get some commitment out of Stone – a meeting arranged, phone numbers exchanged, a subscription bought – and then switch his main attention to Moh.

He looked around for anyone he might recognize, sadly thinking the old comrades hadn’t been such old comrades after all, and saw an unchanged, familiar face frowning down at the now-deserted table of pamphlets. Moh bounded over.

‘Bernstein!’ The face that turned to him, though lined and leathery, hadn’t gained a line in the six years since Moh had last seen it. The receding shock of white hair hadn’t receded further. For a moment Moh was puzzled that Bernstein didn’t recognize him; then he remembered that the last time he’d looked at this face he’d been looking up.

‘I’m Moh Kohn,’ he said.

Bernstein stared at him, then shook his hand vigorously. ‘Amazing!’ he said. ‘I would never have known you.’

‘You haven’t changed.’

Bernstein nodded absently. ‘What brings you here?’ He patted the stack of books and pamphlets he was about to buy, and added, ‘You know what brings me here. Real collector’s pieces, this lot.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Bernstein had fallen out with (and from) the Fourth International as a result of some split that he was by now the only living person able to explain, and had embarked on the sisyphean project of writing the movement’s definitive history. An indefatigable archivist in his own right, he made some kind of living by trading in rare items of every conceivable persuasion of radical literature. Moh’s father had been one of his regular customers.

Moh wasn’t sure how to answer his question. What had brought him here?

He shrugged. ‘Curiosity,’ he said.

Bernstein looked past him and said, ‘Let’s join your friends.’

‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘Thought you’d never ask. Guinness, please.’

When Moh returned from the bar he found Stone, Bernstein, Logan and the old man and woman around the table in an animated discussion. After a few minutes Logan turned to him and said, ‘And you’re Moh Kohn, right?’

‘Hi.’ Moh raised his glass. ‘Pleased to meet you, too.’

They talked for a bit about working in space and about their respective unions. Moh found himself beginning to relax. Then Logan shot him an awkward glance.

‘You’re Josh Kohn’s son?’

‘Yes,’ Moh said. ‘If it matters.’

Logan looked back at him calmly, then leaned closer. ‘Something I wanted to ask you,’ he said. ‘Do you know anything about the Star Fraction?’

‘The “Star Fraction”?’ He could see from Logan’s face that he’d spoken too loudly, and out of the corner of his eye he could see why: Bernstein had cocked an ear in their direction. ‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘It…sort of…rings a bell, but…’ He shook his head. ‘Nah. It’s gone. Sounds like what you must be in.’

‘I guess you could say I’m in the space fraction.’ Logan laughed. ‘I am the space fraction.’

‘Must make for interesting internal discussions.’

‘Jes, it does.’

‘So what is this Star Fraction?’

Logan glanced at Bernstein, then at the two old cadres. Moh saw the old man nod slightly. Logan leaned forward, elbows on knees, held out his open hands. ‘We don’t know. Josh was the Party’s, the International’s, software wizard. He really pushed for using the net, using crypto and all that, from way back. You could say he got us into cyberspace. There were big arguments…faction fights…about that. Hard to believe, now.’

Bernstein snorted. Logan smiled and continued. ‘Anyway, some of the systems he set up survived the war, the EMP hits and all that and escaped the big clean-outs during the Peace Process. Impressive. We, that is the FI, still use them as far as we can.’

‘How d’you know that they aren’t compromised by now?’ Bernstein asked.

‘There are test protocols,’ the old man said. He was not going to explain further. Moh thought he understood. There must be ways of testing the security of any such system by running schemes that, if intercepted, would have to provoke a response.

Hairy, and not the sort of thing you’d want to talk about.

‘Every so often,’ Logan continued, ‘we come across references to the Star Fraction. Sometimes urgent messages telling its – members? whatever – not to do anything. Yet.’

He sat back with a what-do-you-make-of-that? expression.

‘Probably one of Josh’s test protocols,’ Bernstein said, raising a laugh.

‘Could be,’ Logan said. ‘If you ever find anything about it, Moh, tell us. Please.’

Moh looked at the young cadre and the old cadres with some bitterness. ‘If I ever find anything – that’s a good one. We lost everything. The fucking Yanks took the house apart and took it away, after…after…’ He couldn’t go on. ‘And I’ve never known why. None of you bastards ever told us.’

The bright, bare room was silent. Everyone else had gone home or into the main part of the pub. Down to the hard core again.

‘I’m looking for some answers,’ Moh said.

The old woman reached out and laid a hand on his arm. ‘How could we tell you? You and your sister disappeared. And we don’t know, ourselves. The Party lost a lot of people in the Peace Process, but that was down to the Restoration forces, the Hanoverians. Hell, you know that. Josh and Marcia were the only ones the US/UN came after.’ She drew a deep breath and shuddered. ‘Mandatory summary execution, asset forfeiture – that was standard Yank practice at the time, for arms and drugs.’

‘But they weren’t—’ Moh began indignantly, then stopped. It was entirely possible that they were. Arms, anyway.

‘And black software,’ Bernstein said. ‘Makes sense, from what you’ve said.’

Moh felt a surge of relief and gratitude. Black software – yes. For the first time it did all make sense: it wasn’t just an arbitrary atrocity. But if that was the answer it raised further questions.

‘What kept him working on it right up to—?’

‘Not us,’ the old woman said. ‘I would have known if he was doing a job for the Party. He wasn’t.’

She sounded sincere, and Moh warmed to her warmth, but he didn’t trust her statement. As far as he was concerned, anybody who held a Party or a programme, a political project spanning centuries, as their highest value was perfectly capable of lying in their teeth. If you could die for something you could lie for it.

But he’d found part of the answer, something that connected his parents’ deaths with their lives. Some of his inward tension eased, some of his hostility to the Party relaxed.

Logan stayed on after Bernstein and the old comrades had gone away. He took Stone and Moh into the bar and stood them a few more rounds and told them what the Party was trying to do.

Moh listened, not seeing ghosts any more but seeing as if through the transplanted retinae of a dead man’s eyes. You never lost that vision. You saw the patterns recur: endless orbit, permanent revolution. The phylogeny of parties, the teratology of deformed workers’ states, the pathology of bureaucratic degeneration…Now the space movement was at it, running its little anarcho-capitalist enclaves here on Earth and coexisting with the Yanks everywhere else.

‘That’s where we come in,’ Logan said. ‘We need to build a fighting left wing of the space movement, turn it into something that’ll do more against the US/UN than sponsoring private rocketry and asteroid mining. And when I say “left wing” I don’t mean socialist, I mean militant. Because you don’t need me to tell you that any serious attempt to get out of this shit is gonna have to take on the state, and these days that ultimately means Space Defense.’

Stone frowned, struggling with the scale and audacity of what the tiny organization Logan spoke for was aiming at. ‘You mean,’ he said doubtfully, ‘you’re working in the space movement, to turn it into—’

‘The Space and Freedom Party!’ Kohn said gleefully.

He knew what was going on. The Party (the real Party, the hard core, the International) had always had two aspects. One, the one Kohn remembered from the days of the Republic, was public, in-your-face: the unfurled banner, the open Party, the infuriating newspaper. The other, the way of surviving bad times, was when its members became faces in the crowd, known only to each other.

Like the Star Fraction, Moh thought.

‘Well,’ he said, when he and Stone finally, reluctantly, had to leave, ‘you can forget about recruiting me. I won’t be told what to do.’ He saw Logan about to interject. ‘Don’t try to tell me that isn’t what it’s like. But – I’m a paid-up, smart-card-carrying member of the union and of the space movement, and if there’s something you want done…you can always ask.’

‘OK,’ Logan said. ‘OK. Good night, comrades.’

Good years, years when he faced no threats, just dangers: no problems, only difficulties. Building the union and building Norlonto’s towers flowed in his mind into one constructive task, a matter of organizing, of coordinating work. He took on more responsibilities for the union at the same time as he upgraded his skills, learning to handle the new machines – space-platform spin-offs, mostly – that were making on-site work less like trench warfare against raw nature. After a while he came under pressure from the union to become a full-time organiser, from the company management to become a supervisor. He took the union job, got bored after a year, but found it difficult after that to get taken on again by any company. He and Stone set up as a subcontracting cooperative – capitalists themselves. They got work that way all right, and stayed scrupulously in the union’s good books, as well as on its membership list.

He occasionally heard from Logan, or ran into him in bars around the spaceport. Logan had adopted the same solution to his employment problems. He never called Moh to do anything for the Party but would occasionally admit or boast that some piece of political infighting in the space movement was not entirely accidental.

Early one summer morning they pulled up their truck outside a site entrance near Alexandra Port to find their way blocked by a score of people with placards. Some building workers stood arguing with the pickets.

‘Oh, shit,’ Stone said. ‘A strike. Well, that’s it.’ He reached for the ignition key.

Kohn frowned. ‘Just a minute. Don’t see any of the workers on that picket line.’

He jumped out and went over to talk to one of the building workers, a steward he knew.

‘Hi, Mike. What’s the problem? I thought I’d have heard about a strike.’

Mike grimaced. ‘It’s not a strike, Moh, it’s a fuckin demo. Greens. They don’t like what we’re building.’

‘Well, fuck them.’ He looked over the small crowd. Lumpens and petty bourgeois, no doubt about it. Not an honest-to-God proletarian to be seen. The placards had slogans like STOP THE DEATH BEAMS. ‘What is this shit? This isn’t—’ He stopped to think. ‘It’s not a scam, is it, Mike? They haven’t got us working on some military job without telling us, have they?’

‘No,’ Mike said. ‘It’s all legit. Research lab, space-movement sponsored. Nice contract.’

Nice contract all right, Moh thought. Massive walls, klicks of cable, flashy electronics. Test-bed for laser launchers – ‘steam-beams’, as the nickname went. Stick your payload on top of a tank of water, point a tracking laser at it, boil the sucker into orbit.

‘So it’s not a picket line, right? So why don’t we just—’

He noticed Mike pointing with his chin, turned and checked over the nearest greens. Big, tough. Tougher than building workers. Looked like farmers, travellers, bikers. And tooled up: monkey wrenches, very thick sticks on the placards. Heavy electric torches sticking out of pockets. Peasants with torches.

‘Where’s the movement militia then?’

Mike shrugged. ‘Never there when you need them.’

Kohn looked at him, baffled. That wasn’t what he knew of the militia. Before he could say anything a tall, long-haired and long-bearded man in homespun trousers and a greased jacket loomed over them and said, ‘Yeah, the space cadets ain’t comin, so piss off.’

Kohn had already sized up the balance of forces: it was a small site; the workforce wouldn’t be more than a dozen even when they all came in. So he just said ‘OK’, and turned away. He paused for a moment to say to Mike: ‘Get all the guys and gals together, pile on our truck. Talk about it at the union, OK, no trouble.’

Mike nodded and stepped quickly to pull his folk out of the rising heat of arguments. Kohn made a pacifying gesture to Stone, who was standing by the truck, and paused a moment to check that the workers were catching the drift.

‘Move yo ass, krautkiller!’ the big guy who’d spoken to him shouted at his back.

Kohn turned, more amazed than incensed at the racial sneer. Never thought of myself as…until until until…He looked at the man and felt a fastidious contempt.

‘“We are on the edge of darkness”,’ he said, quoting a recurrent green slogan. The man looked puzzled. Kohn waited until they were all on the truck and moving off before leaning out of the window and yelling as he passed, ‘and you are the darkness!’

He felt quite gratified by the banging the side of the truck took for that. At the union office, an old shopfront floor, his reminiscent smirk faded. They found a distinct lack of interest in their problem from the local officials. The lab-site crew stood around the scratched Formica tables in the refreshment corner and drank coffee while Mike made call after call – to the militia, to the client, to the union security – and got nowhere.

‘OK,’ Kohn said. ‘No more mister nice guy.’

He connected his phone to his computer and retrieved Logan’s public key, then tapped in Logan’s twenty-digit phone number and his own key. Logan’s voice came back, anonymous and toneless as a cheap chip. The processors couldn’t spare much for fidelity when they were crunching prime numbers that made the age-of-the-universe-in-seconds look like small change. The up-side was that cracking the encryption would take about as long.

‘This better be urgent, Moh. I’m vac-welding right now.’

‘OK. Greens blockading a job, nobody wants to know. Union, movement, militia. Something heavy leaning on them is my guess.’

‘Mine too. Talk to Wilde.’

Kohn watched his phone-meter’s right-hand numbers blurring for about five seconds.

‘Jonathan Wilde?’ he croaked at last.

‘The same. Tell him you’re from the light company. Gotta go.’

This time Moh was relieved to see the connection broken. He made a performance of putting away his phone and computer, while his mind raced. He stood up and looked around a dozen sceptical faces.

‘I think we got things moving,’ he said. He flashed them a rueful smile. ‘Finally. Mike, Stone, maybe you should get the union lawyer on to this one. Threaten to sue the research company. Breach of contract, condoning intimidation, whatever. Make something up. Same with whatever street-owner is allowing that so-called demo. Rest of us might as well call it a day. They’ll cough up our pay anyway.’ He sounded more convinced than he felt.

‘What about you?’ Stone wanted to know.

‘I’m going to meet The Man,’ Kohn said.

Wilde wasn’t exactly The Man – he didn’t employ anyone apart from a few research assistants now and again. The only position he held was a fairly nominal history lectureship at the University of North London Town. Now in his seventies, he’d been an anomalous figure for decades, regarded as a left-winger in the space movement, a libertarian space nut by the Left. He’d written some of the movement’s earliest manifestos (No More Earthquakes, The Earth is a Harsh Mistress) and numerous pamphlets, articles and books documenting what he called the counterconspiracy theory of history, which maintained that many otherwise incomprehensible historical events could be explained by identifying the conspiracy theories held by the protagonists. He’d discovered a surprising number of cases where prominent political, military and law-enforcement figures had been (openly or secretly) conspiracy theorists. In the course of researching and expounding this thesis he had developed a vast and complex range of mutually antagonistic contacts and sources of information. He was widely regarded as the movement’s éminence grise, a suspicion which all the evidence of his lack of power, position and money only strengthened. Rumour had it that he had been behind whatever it had taken – blackmail, currency speculation, nuclear threats – to get the relevant committee of the Restoration government to agree to Norlonto’s existence.

Moh had a rented flat in Kentish Town. He stopped off to change into his newest and sharpest suit, and to place his call. He got a voice-only link, and introduced himself; feeling self-conscious and stupid, he said he was from the light company.

‘Come straight away,’ Wilde said. ‘You know where to find me.’

An hour later Kohn knocked at the door of Wilde’s office.

‘Come in.’

The office was small and bright, with a window overlooking Trent Park: grass, trees, gliders coming in. It smelled of paper and cement. Wilde sat at a plain desk behind a terminal. He finished saving a file and stood. Skinny, nearly bald, tanned, hook-nosed. Back straight as an old soldier’s. Handshake firm.

‘Well, comrade,’ he said, gesturing Kohn to sit in one of a pair of standard university chairs made from pine, sacking, rubber bands and polyurethane, ‘what can I do for you?’

Comrade? Kohn wondered if the man were being polite or ironic, and responded with a tight-lipped smile before giving an account of the morning’s events.

‘Hmm,’ Wilde said. ‘My guess is pressure from Space Defense.’

Kohn opened and closed his mouth. ‘What they got to do with the greens?’

‘More than you think,’ Wilde said. ‘Oh, there’s no conspiracy, as I am notorious for saying. I’m sure the smelly little vermin would be against the project anyway. But it’s SD that’s leaning on the space movement’s higher councils, which lean on the R&D company, which tells the union and the militia that this is one to write off against insurance.’ He smiled. ‘Act of Goddess.’

Kohn spread his hands. ‘But why?’

‘What else,’ Wilde asked, like a lecturer posing a problem, ‘could you do with a very powerful, very accurate ground-based fast-tracking laser, assuming one could be developed?’ He sighted along his pointed finger and swung it slowly upwards.

Kohn suddenly got it, and laughed at himself for not realizing it sooner. ‘Down battlesats,’ he said.

‘Yup,’ said Wilde. ‘Apparently our R&D actually didn’t know that laser-launchers were originally promoted as a civilian spin-off from an ABM system. Space Defense, needless to say, has a better memory.’

‘So that’s it,’ Kohn said.

‘You think so?’ Wilde’s voice rang sharp; his eyes narrowed.

Kohn thought for a moment, stood up and stalked to the window as his gall rose.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t have it. OK, you can’t fight SD. We build the laser lab, they’ll lase it. But the greens…oh, shit.’

‘What do you feel about them?’

Kohn whirled. ‘One of them called me “krautkiller”, you know that? Fuck them and their nazi economics.’ He punched his palm. ‘Protection. Conservation. Restriction. Deep ecology. Give me deep technology any day. They don’t scare me. I’m damned if I’ll crawl, my children’s children crawl on the earth in some kind a fuckin harmony with the environment. Yeah, till the next ice age or the next asteroid impact. “Krautkiller”, huh? Chosen people, huh?’ He remembered the old taunts. Never thought of myself as…until until until…He took a deep breath, shook his head. ‘It’s them or us, man, and I’ve chosen people.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Wilde said, ‘Now sit down and let me…enlighten you on a few things.’

Kohn listened, and saw the light. The ‘light company’ was evidently a codename for the Space and Freedom Party, the militant faction of the space movement that Logan had talked about at the meeting a couple of years earlier. It had pulled in people with diverse views in terms of conventional politics, who disagreed about everything but the struggle for space: the ultimate united front, nothing conceded, nothing compromised, but still holding something of the forbidden thrill of—

‘There’s no conspiracy,’ Wilde said.

As if to confirm it, he provoked Kohn into defending his own standpoint. Kohn tried – and felt he failed – to articulate the inchoate vision he held of a socialist society that would be even wilder and more free-wheeling than Norlonto, freer than the free market, where the common knowledge that could not but be common property would become the greatest wealth, shared without sacrifice or stint. Wilde countered with his own vision of a world where the market was only the framework, but the only framework, for ways of life as diverse as human inclination could devise; not Social Darwinism but a Darwinian selection of societies.

‘Sounds like what we’ve got already,’ Kohn said, ‘only…’

Wilde snorted. ‘This century,’ he said, ‘is as much a travesty of my ideas as the last one was of yours. Mini-states instead of minimal states. Hah.’

‘Blame the world wars,’ Kohn said.

‘How…internationalist of you to put it that way,’ Wilde said. ‘I have difficulty convincing some of my lot not just to blame the Germans.’

‘That’s bourgeois nationalism for you.’

‘Quite.’

‘Looks like we’re not going to settle this.’

‘Not here. Space will…settle it.’

‘Space settlement!’

They both laughed.

‘It’s true,’ Wilde said. ‘Reality will turn out different from my utopia, and yours. The good thing about space is it holds out the chance that it might turn out better than we can imagine instead of worse. Not a promised land but a whole new infinite America where we’ll be the Indians, all our tribes expanding into a wilderness where we’ll bring the passengers pigeons and the bison and seed the forests from scratch, from rock and ice!’

Moh nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes, that’s it. Like Engels said, man’s natural environment doesn’t exist yet: he has to create it for himself.’

‘Engels said that?’

‘More or less. Not in so many words. I’ll look it up for you.’

‘Yes, you do that. Man’s natural environment is artificial – yeah, I like it. What we have to do is keep that possibility open, like the Bering bridge—’

‘Between Siberia and Alaska!’

At the time Siberia had a Communist government, Alaska a Libertarian. Wilde grinned back at him.

‘Exactly.’

At lunch Kohn looked round the noisy refectory, shrugged off any worries about security and said, ‘We still have a problem. What we gonna actually do about that lot down at the lab-site gate?’

Wilde shrugged. ‘Not much. The militia won’t touch them, and none of the independent agencies are likely to stick their necks out.’

‘Aha,’ said Kohn. ‘I think you might just have put your finger on—’

Wilde finished the sentence with him: ‘—a gap in the market!’

That night the green picket was still staked out at the lab site.

‘What’s that?’ The one who’d hassled Kohn turned at a noise. He found his cheek meeting a gun muzzle. Muffled sounds came from all around.

‘Your worst nightmare,’ said a voice from the darkness, about a metre away. ‘A yid kid with an AK and attitude.’