Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘Adrian Kowalsky, actor,’ Hoffman added more audibly, by way of introduction. ‘Hi, Adrian.’

‘Delighted to meet you, sir,’ said Carlyle.

‘Enchantè,’ Kowalsky bowed. ‘You have rewritten all our scripts.’

She shrugged her bare, naked-feeling shoulders and sipped her drink. The glass was an inverted cone on a straight stem. The idea was, you didn’t put it down. There were racks for them somewhere.

‘Cannae be helped, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, that wasn’t a criticism. Good grief. It’s only now I’m beginning to appreciate how desperately sad everything seemed, only last week.’ He inhaled steam from his tube, eyes lidding for a moment, opening shining. ‘The isolation, the futility, the sense of enclosure.’

Carlyle shook her head. ‘I don’t quite follow.’

‘Do you read the classics?’ Kowalsky waved a hand. ‘Assuming you have the same. We were a Diaspar. Dancers at the end of time. You know? Eloi with ennui?’

‘All dressed up and nowhere to go?’ she suggested.

‘Yes!’ said Kowalsky. It seemed he’d never heard the stale phrase before. He touched her elbow. ‘You have no idea… . By the way, there is something I would like to ask you.’

‘Yes?’ She awaited one of the many frequently asked questions.

‘What’s he really like? General Jacques?’

She blinked and looked around. ‘Isn’t he here?’

Hoffman shook his head. ‘He’s not the flavour of the day.’

Carlyle raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh well. I’ve only met him two or three times since I arrived. If you’ve watched the television, you’ll have seen what he’s like. Very straight, direct, laconic. Off camera he’s no different. A bit less formal, maybe.’

‘And his personal life?’ asked Hoffman, smiling.

‘I didn’t ask! He lives with a woman somewhere, that’s all I know.’

Hoffman looked, a little, as if a daydream had been dashed. Kowalsky, on the other hand, brightened.

‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘What you see is what you get, that’s what you’re saying.’

‘As far as I know,’ said Carlyle. ‘Why?’

Kowalsky leaned in, confidentially. ‘I’m hoping to play him.’

‘Jacques Armand? The man I, uh, met?’

‘The very same.’

‘What’s this?’ Hoffman asked. ‘Instant drama?’

‘No, no,’ said Kowalsky. ‘Something historical.’ He stretched out an arm. ‘And histrionic!’

‘Good heavens,’ said Hoffman. ‘Not one of Ben-Ami’s spectacles, I hope.’

‘What else?’

‘How unutterably vulgar,’ said Hoffman. He turned to Carlyle, grinning. ‘You haven’t seen Adrian’s Macbeth, his Iago, his Gorbachev … do try to keep it that way.’

‘Judas,’ said Kowalsky, imperturbably. He winked at Carlyle. ‘Come to think of it, Judas is precisely the way—’

‘Armand will sue you!’ said Hoffman.

Kowalsky flipped a hand. ‘You can’t libel the dead. This performance will have nothing to do with his present life.’

‘A play about the rebellion ?’ Hoffman asked, frowning. ‘Isn’t that a trifle … impolitic, in the circumstances?’

‘That’s exactly why it’s worth doing.’ Kowalsky tapped his nose, theatrically. ‘Benjamin is well aware of the political undertones. This is not going to be a vulgar spectacle, Paul. Not that I accept that description of his previous work.’

‘Oh come on, ’ said Hoffman. ‘The reactor explosion in Leonid ? The gunfight between the Bushes and the Bin-Ladens in West Side Story ? The tank battle in the Scottish play? The—’

‘Look,’ said Kowalsky, ‘if you had never read or seen performances of the classics, you would never have thought Benjamin’s productions of them were anything but brilliant and moving.’

Hoffman snorted, a sip getting up the back of his nose. He coughed and waved apologetically. ‘Yes! If I’d never seen Webber’s Evita I’d never have laughed all the way through Ben-Ami’s Guevara !’

‘That was deliberate pastiche,’ said Kowalsky frostily. ‘My point is—’ He hesitated.

‘Yes, darling?’ drawled Hoffman.

‘This is going to be real. It’s going to be real history, with real songs from the period, and it’ll be like nothing you’ve ever seen before.’

‘How do you know all this?’ asked Carlyle, trying to get a word in.

‘Because Benjamin says that every time,’ said Hoffman.

Kowalsky folded his arms. ‘My lips are sealed.’

‘I’ll take that as a challenge,’ Hoffman said. He touched Kowalsky on the tip of the nose. ‘Only not tonight.’

He steered her away, and on.

There’s a lot of confidential conversations I can see up there,’ Carlyle remarked, sitting on a stool at the bar at the side of the cavernous ballroom. Its size and chandeliers were beginning to remind her disquietingly of the posthuman relic, though she tried to put that thought down to side-stream steam from other people’s alkaloid tubes. She waved a languid hand at giant figures on the walls, many of which were in elegant, fast-talking huddles. ‘Can the hoi polloi no lip-read?’

‘Can’t you?’ asked Hoffman.

‘Well, yes, usually, but not now.’ She looked again at the walls and shook her head. ‘Are they speaking a different language when we’re out of earshot?’

‘No,’ said Hoffman. ‘The lip-synch is scrambled, that’s all. All you’d ever pick up from the screens is “rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb.” ’

‘Oh, hell,’ said Carlyle, looking again. ‘It is an aw.’ She smote her forehead. ‘What a maroon.’

‘Speaking of speech,’ said Hoffman, staring at the glass of beer in his hand as if he’d never seen one before, ‘I couldn’t help noticing that your accent, or perhaps your dialect, fluctuates.’

‘Oh. Ah. Aye.’ She felt embarrassed. ‘I can speak American, but I tend tae revert tae English under stress.’ She laughed, the palm of her hand going to her mouth. ‘Like the now.’

‘English!’ Hoffman sounded amused. ‘That is not the language of Shakespeare, my dear, or even of Ben-Ami.’

‘Shakespeare’s language, huh, you should see what happened to his land.’ It was as if the lights had dimmed, the temperature dropped. ‘Airstrip bloody One.’

She might have said too much, or said it too bitterly. Hoffman knew what she was talking about, all right.

‘That was all before my time,’ he said. ‘A previous generation. Ancient history, though not quite so ancient as we’d thought. Take it up with the Joint Chiefs, or with General Jacques, for that matter.’

‘Aye, well, there’ll be a time and a place for that.’ She smiled, eager to change the subject. ‘General Jacques, yes, I’d gathered from your chat with the actor fellow that he was resurrected. So he goes back to the final war, I take it?’

‘He didn’t mention that?’ Hoffman raised his eyebrows. ‘He’s too modest. Or even ashamed. He was a great man, a big military man back then, and now he runs a defence company that’s basically little more than a squad of park rangers.’

‘Aren’t they all?’

‘Not the space defence forces. And there’s some internal policing. The Joint Chiefs keep him well away from both.’

‘War, crime, and politics.’ Carlyle grinned. ‘And there was me thinking you had utopia. What with everybody being so rich.’

‘Don’t you have cornucopia machines?’

‘Oh, sure. But we have—’

‘Other things to fight over. So have we.’

‘It’s not the same—’

‘It isn’t?’ He laughed, looking around. ‘Maybe not. There’s even a saying about it: “The fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small.” Everybody here has got here by intense competition, moderated by character assassination.’ He frowned into the crowd. ‘Take that one over there, for instance—’