Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

Ree’s extended family, Eighty-Seven Production Brigade, lived in a small town or large village in a patch of the prairie that had already been made horticultural. The children looked after the gardens, and from the town the adults went forth every day in lifters to the big machines, to farm forest and cultivate jungle. And every evening, as now, the sky filled with darting lifters as they came home for dinner. There was a production brigade, or family or clan or whatever, every few hundred kilometres on this continent. Together they made up the Transformation of Nature Collective, the group that would eventually—soon, Ree said again—sell the planet.

Soon?

About fifteen years.

The lifter landed in a paved park amid low, spreading, ornate wooden buildings. Hundreds of children dropped whatever productive-educational task was to hand and pelted over and crowded round. They wore blue dungarees and a profusion of different-coloured silk shirts and hair knots. It was hard to tell the small boys and girls apart, which was not the case with the adults or the adolescents. The young men wore natty asymetric variations of khaki and olive-green shirt and trousers, the young women similarly military styles and textiles but elaborated into chrysanthemum frills and fluted sleeves and parachute-silk blouses. The older men, fathers she guessed, wore blue overalls and the mothers wore big traditional Korean hanbok dresses, pastel-shaded and floral-patterned, high-waisted and full-skirted, which made them look pregnant even in the rare cases when they weren’t. For all its egalitarianism—men and women who didn’t have a very young baby did the same work, in forest-field or nursery alike—it was the most intensely gender-typed and sexualised and natalist society Carlyle had ever seen.

After taking a shower she was invited to join the production brigade for dinner. Long hall, low tables. People sat around them on mats on the floor. Small children served, dipping into dishes as they did so, licking fingers. Carlyle was escorted to the top table; Ree came too, but she didn’t think he usually ate there, among the dozen or so matriarchs and patriarchs of the clan. They all spoke very good American and plied her with rice wine and something made mostly from peppers and pork.

‘This is a beautiful place,’ Carlyle said. ‘Surely you will miss it. Well, perhaps not you, but the younger folk who have grown up here.’

Jong, the oldest man here, an Earth veteran, shook his head. ‘Not at all.

Quite the opposite. We could adjust, we have come to like it. It’s like home.

But it is frustrating for the young ones. They have to travel long distance to other production brigades to find marriage partners.’ He circled a hand above his head. ‘In the habitats, many production brigades. Very close.

Thousands in every one.’

That led to a long family discussion, very explicit and naming names and lapsing often into Korean, that kept them all busy and Carlyle out of it until the end of the meal.

‘Now you must think about how you can pay,’ said Eighty-Seven Production Brigade San Ok, a great-grandmother whose face was as smooth and girlish as her great-granddaughters’.

Carlyle, thinking this must be a joke, gestured at empty bowls. ‘I can wash plates.’

San Ok laughed. ‘No, no. That is hospitality. But you wish transport to the spaceport. Many thousands of kilometres. Your starship fare is for the captain or the steward, not our problem, and as a Carlyle you will have credit with them. But more than the transport, you have put costs on us already, not your fault, but costs. The gate was to be our fortune. Now it is a danger. A loss. We require something else to sell. Can be idea, design, anything.’

‘Or you could stay here and work a few years,’ said someone else, sounding helpful.

Carlyle stared at them, thinking frantically, cold inside. ‘There are some useful features in my space suit… .’

‘Already examined,’ said Jong crisply. ‘It is quite backward.’

It would be, being Eurydicean. Shit.

She flapped a hand at her embroidered satin pyjamas. ‘Clothes pattern?’ A polite titter from the women, a rustle as they shifted comfortably and complacently in their big skirts.

She ran her hand along the utility belt she’d left on under her top. There must be some gadget on it they didn’t have … she started fingering through the flat pouches. As she did so she noticed a wide blank screen at the end of the hall, and her fingers encountered the card Ben-Ami had given her, with his complete works on it.

‘What is that screen for?’ she asked.

‘Entertainment and education,’ said San Ok. ‘We all watch it after dinner.’

‘Would you be interested in some new entertainment?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Jong.

‘If it was edifying as well as entertaining,’ said San Ok. ‘Not immoral or decadent.’

Carlyle took the card out. ‘All classical,’ she said. ‘Very edifying.’ She hoped it was. She thumbed through the catalogue, tiny titles flickering past.

Looked up, smiling. ‘Here is a good example. “ The Tragedy of Leonid Brezhnev, Prince of Muscovy. ”’

‘Brezhnev?’ said Jong, interested. ‘The friend of the Great Leader?’

‘The very same,’ said Carlyle, winging it.

San Ok stood up, clapped, and indicated to everyone that they should put on their translation headphones if they didn’t speak American. After a bit of fiddling about with the card and the interfaces, the big screen lit up with a picture of the interior of a vast room, lit by torches and a blazing fire, over which a pig on a spit turned. Bear furs, swords, and Kalashnikovs hung on the walls among oil-painted portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Twenty or so shadowed figures in fur cloaks sat around a huge oaken table, quaffing wine, feasting and talking. At the head of the table sat a burly giant of a man, his face stern and scarred, but sensitive and intelligent withal. Through a distant, creaking doorway a tall, thin-featured knight came in, and the tale began.

The Central Committee room, the Kremlin.

Enter . Yuri Andropov ( a spy ).

Brezhnev : How goes it, Yuri Andropov?

Andropov : Things go not well in Muscovy, my lord.

Our workers idle in the factories

and bodge their jobs. The managers

think plan fulfillment is but a game

and planners are their foes. The farmers let

crops rot and tractors rust. Our warriors

fight bravely; but on far-flung fronts—

Angola and Afghanistan— contra and muj

wreak havoc on our men. America

presses on us hard, its empire vast

now reaching into space, and from above

spies on us even now. In time to come

its missiles threaten us, its laser beams

may stab us in the back, deterrence gone.

Our intellectual men, and women too

are dissidents or hacks. Our bloody Jews—

their bags half-packed for Israel—

have lost all gratitude for what we’ve done

on their behalf. Timber, oil, and gold

are all we sell that willing buyers find, aside

from MiG and Proton and Kalashnikov—

aye, these sell well! But for the rest

our manufactured goods are crap, a standing joke

in all the markets of the world. The Lada—

Ligachev (interrupting) : I’ve heard men howl straitjacketed in Bedlam

for saying such stuff as this!

Andropov : ’Twas I who put them there.’ Tis not the saying

but publishing abroad that was their crime,

their plain insanity. In another time

your insolent crossing me would’ve had your gob

opened and shut by nine-mil from behind

as well you know. Let us speak freely… .