Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘Wow,’ breathed Winter. ‘That’s your—’

Ben-Ami raised a hushing finger, intent on the stage. The song began.

If you could hie to Koresh in the twinkling of an eye,

And then continue onward with that same speed to fly,

Do you think that you could ever, through all eternity,

Find out the generation where Gods began to be?

The works of God continue, and worlds and lives abound;

Improvement and progression have one eternal round.

There is no end to matter; there is no end to space;

There is no end to spirit; there is no end to grace.

There is no end to virtue; there is no end to might;

There is no end to wisdom; there is no end to light.

There is no end to union; there is no end to youth;

There is no end to learning; there is no end to truth.

There is no end to glory; there is no end to love;

There is no end to being; there is no death above.

There is no end to glory; there is no end to love;

There is no end to being; there is no death above.

‘Curtain,’ said Ben-Ami. There was no curtain, but the stage lights went off and the room lights came on. The people on stage stood blinking and smiling self-consciously. Applause, scattered but fervent, echoed around the building. Ben-Ami leaned back, smiling. His surprise, and his entrepreneurial flair, had worked—seizing the literally heaven-sent opportunity of having all this talent and historical authenticity fall from the sky. The America Offline population included a remarkable number of trained and practised singers, mostly choral—tabernacle, temple, gospel, union—and some individual, whose rural and religious roots meshed perfectly with the show’s themes.

‘Did you write that?’ asked Calder.

Ben-Ami leaned his elbow on a beam at the side of the room, near the table around which the cast and crew were taking their lunch-break, and sipped umami tea and looked anxiously at Winter and Calder. Calder had taken up tobacco-smoking again in a big way since the AO folk had arrived. It was frowned upon by most of their sects, and was therefore a gesture of rebellion. The hunchbacked musician was taking this for all it was worth. Ben-Ami could see the point, but preferred to stay upwind of it. Winter eyed choristers in leotards.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Ben-Ami, ‘a moment. What did you think?’

Calder stubbed his cigarette. ‘The choir, that was good,’ he said. ‘Makes a neat sort of backwards link between us and the new cultures that we didn’t know about. Not so sure about the run-up, though. The war and Singularity stuff.’

‘Ah,’ said Ben-Ami. That was what he’d been worried about, but he still felt a stab of dismay. He’d put a lot of effort and thought into that scenario.

‘Visually it’s fine,’ said Calder, sounding slightly apologetic. ‘It’s just not very clear what’s going on, you know? Not even with one of our most crap songs as commentary. Half the people in your audience, maybe more, wouldn’t have a clue what “USA” and “EUR” stood for—in any sense of the words.’

‘Well, that’s hardly relevant,’ said Winter. ‘Everybody knows there was a world war and that one side’s forces and most of its population went through a hard-take-off Singularity in its first minutes. That’s all they need to know.’

‘Exactly!’ said Ben-Ami.

‘But that’s not the problem,’ Winter went on. ‘It’s too bloody abstract and evenhanded. I mean, I know “Giant Lizards from Another Star” is kind of bitter about both sides, but fuck. They attacked us .’

‘Correction,’ said Calder. ‘ We attacked them . I’m sure you do remember that.’

Winter moved his hand as though dashing something to the ground. ‘Technicality. It was a preemptive strike, everybody knew it was us or them. They were the ones going for one world empire. It doesn’t give the feel of how it was, back in the old Axis. We felt we were standing up for humanity, for Earth , against a fucking inhuman machine , and in the end that was what the USA literally became.’

Ben-Ami crushed his empty cup and threw it away. ‘You’re missing the point,’ he said. ‘This is just a prelude. An overture. An introduction! What I’m trying to do here is show the catastrophe, the tragedy of it all, for both sides and for everyone. The whole tone changes later, as you know, you have seen it, when it’s the remnants of Europe and the space settlers and space forces against the war machines. But for this part, you have to remember, we had—we have—people originally from the American side in the resistance—scientists, astronauts, even space marines who didn’t get caught up in the Hard Rapture thanks—ironically enough—to the superior firewalls built to guard them from our side’s hacking. Certain of our institutions are of American origin: for one, the Joint Chiefs . I hope you understand me. Yes? We cannot beat the anti-American drum too hard here. Later for patriotism, my friends. Let us show… decorum in how we treat the final war.’

‘Yeah,’ said Calder, ‘fair enough, but you haven’t shown how the civilians got caught up—’

‘Fine, fine,’ said Ben-Ami, furiously. ‘I shall make sure we have at least five people off to one side watching television or on-line or playing virtuality games and becoming entrained like the soldiers. Would that satisfy you?’

‘Sure,’ said Calder. ‘You can’t have everything, but you got to be realistic.’

‘I’ll try to bear that in mind,’ snarled Ben-Ami, and stalked off to talk to the nearest Latter Day Adventist.

It took another day to get on to rehearsing the second act, in which ragged people scrabbled in polystyrene ruins and squinted along rifle barrels while holograms and models of ESA aerospace fighter-bombers strafed war machines and the choir sang The Battle Hymn of the Republic . Ben-Ami watched and supervised from a platform in the wings.

‘ That isnae how it wis !’

Ben-Ami’s first thought, on hearing the raised female voice, simultaneously scornful and indignant, was that Lucinda Carlyle had come back. Looking down at the rehearsal stage, he could see that Winter had had a similar startled thought—the musician had whipped around and was looking at the voice’s source with his nose forward and his body quivering like a pointing dog. Ben-Ami’s second thought was along the lines of oh fuck, not another one . But this time, it wasn’t one of the girls in the chorus, stepping out of the line, interrupting the song, and brandishing her script. It was some woman who’d joined the rehearsal’s unofficial audience, now having an altercation with the stage manager. This was a relief.

As he clattered down the stairs to the stage in the hobnailed boots that were this week’s must-have, Ben-Ami reflected that if his newly recruited chorus and session singers went on impugning his script’s historical accuracy much more or much longer, he’d do better to sack the lot of them and start from scratch. A hard core of people among them had actually been there: they had lived on Earth before, during and after the Hard Rapture, and they thought ‘artistic licence’ was something you got from the government. The more intelligent they were, the more doggedly literal they seemed about anything literary. Some of them talked about ‘sacred writings’ and ‘holy books,’ a notion that made Ben-Ami scratch his head.

He hopped up on the stage and strode across the chewed-up rubber mats that marked out places to stand and move, and incidentally protected the boards from the fashionable boots. The woman who’d objected was standing a bit off one of the strips, still arguing with the stage manager, who seemed to be retreating.