Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

They crossed the road—he’d already become dangerously habituated to automated traffic, and stepped out with barely a glance—and went up to the station pillar and the spiral steps to the platform. Winter thumbed up Lesser Lights Lane in his phone and it told him which shuttle to take. When the right one arrived it was empty. They sat opposite each other, knees to knees. Looked each other in the eye, looked away, looked back, laughed.

‘What?’ asked Amelia.

‘Nothing,’ said Winter. ‘It’s stupid.’ He looked away again. Whizz of the line, lights, and drops.

‘No, go on.’

He rubbed his stubble. He knew it would only make it itch. ‘It’s strange meeting someone who’s listened to our music longer than we’ve been alive.’

‘Aye, well. It’s strange meeting you. After all this time.’ She put her knuckles to her lips, knocking at the door of her mouth. Somebody must have answered. It opened. ‘I had a crush on you when I was a wee lass. In my teens, like.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘No, really I did.’

‘Well, I’m flattered,’ He laughed. ‘I hope I’m not a disappointment… .’ He nearly said in the flesh .

‘You look younger than you did in the pictures.’

At last a chance to change the subject. ‘I should bloody hope so. I was twenty-odd then. I’m only fifty-something now. What’s it like living, what, five times longer than that? Do you get wiser as well as older?’

Amelia shook her head, curls bouncing. ‘You get cannier. Mair cunning. That’s it. I think a lot ae what folk used tae call maturity was just fatigue poisons.’

‘Damn,’ said Winter. ‘And there was me thinking I had that to look forward to.’

‘What?’

‘Better impulse control.’

‘For that, you can go tae the Knights. I’ve never seen the attraction myself.’

‘Still impulsive, then.’

‘Oh, aye.’

He was kind of hoping she would demonstrate it, but she didn’t.

Instead she talked about the music and what it had meant to her. It was a conversation Winter had become used to; he could predict the questions and comments and come up with the responses while thinking about something else; but more than usual, he felt a burning shame at where he’d been coming from all those years ago. The songs that had given voice to many people’s hatred of the war machines and the posthumans had been adapted from songs that had given voice, before the war, to a more sinister hatred. It was not that he and Calder had shared it themselves, not exactly, not in their better moments, not when they were sober and in the daylight. They had adapted to it. They had literally played along to it if it had gone down well with the audience. All those pubs and halls: the English electric folk scene, the Scottish radical left, rabid in their patriotic passion and pro-war zeal. You could pick up an old Phil Ochs number or Billy Bragg cover version and twist it into something that made people want to go out and kill Americans.

The offices of Blue Water Landings in Lesser Lights Lane were smaller and scruffier than Winter had expected. Name in discreet pale grey LEDs above the door, dust in the corners of the sheet-diamond windows, a neglected pot-plant yellowing on the sill beside a sheaf of scribbled-on plastic transparencies going milky in the sunlight. When he and Amelia turned up at the door Armand paged them in and sat them down in what was obviously a reception area, with no receptionist and no other staff. The former general looked tired and not a little alarmed to see them.

‘Ah, James, good afternoon.’

‘Jacques. This is Amelia Orr, from—’

Armand raised a hand to silence him, then shook Orr’s.

‘Your name is familiar to me,’ he said, smiling. ‘A moment, please.’

He ducked into his own office, rattled at a keyboard and came out, closing the door behind him.

‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Hush fields up. Just making sure.’ He perched on the reception desk, waved Winter to a coffee machine. ‘Please. Help yourselves. For me, au lait .’

As Winter sorted out the coffees he realised that Armand probably was less competent with the machine than he was, and was rather clumsily concealing that fact. How small are our vanities sometimes, he thought.

‘I did not expect you,’ said Armand to Orr. ‘So soon. Is there a problem?’

‘No exactly,’ said Orr. ‘I’ve come tae you with a proposition fae the Carlyles.’

Armand lifted an eyebrow. ‘Another one?’

‘Someone’s approached you already?’

‘Of course,’ said Armand. ‘Did Lucinda Carlyle not tell you?’

‘No, she did not.’

‘Ah.’ Armand shifted uneasily. ‘That raises certain difficulties. Perhaps you could put your proposition to me, and I can tell you if it’s compatible with the one I’ve already agreed to.’

‘That question,’ said Orr, ‘disnae arise at all .’

‘Oh, but I’m afraid it does. Lucinda is, after all, a Carlyle.’

Orr almost slopped her coffee. ‘I don’t know what she’s been telling you, but her name gie’s her nae privileges where this is concerned.’

Armand gave a downward wave of his palm. ‘I make no presumptions about your family’s internal affairs. I’ve just noted the names of the people who’ve been making such earnest entreaties to the Joint Chiefs.’

Winter knew that the question on the tip of Orr’s tongue was You know about that? He would have been disappointed if she’d asked it, and she didn’t. Instead her face became a mask of calm.

‘That’s true,’ she said, ‘and I’m on the same team. Just checking the back door, so tae speak, while the high heid yins are knocking on the front.’

‘An illuminating metaphor,’ said Armand, as though breathing out the smoke of a fine cigar. ‘Please go on.’

‘We can offer you … mair than one starship tae back you up if you move your forces tae dislodge the Knights fae around the relic.’

‘Oh! Is that all?’

‘It’s no sic a big deal as you might think,’ said Orr. ‘Militarily ye’re mair than a match for them. That gun you used on our search engine—killing me and a few others, I may add, so I know what I’m talking about—is better than anything the Knights possess. Their only advantage over you is the starships, and like I said, we can take care of that.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you can, and I’m sure we are. The only problem is that my company, and any others I could muster, are a minority of Eurydice’s armed forces. We would be facing not just the Knights but our own people—more of them, and better armed.’

‘Not if they were otherwise engaged.’

‘In what?’

‘In putting down a riot in the city, for example.’

Armand laughed. ‘We don’t use troops for internal security. It is known as the principle of posse commitatus . In any case, I don’t see any occasion for a riot in the near future.’

‘I do,’ said Orr. ‘Your friend Ben-Ami’s play.’

Armand stared at her. ‘You are not completely mad,’ he said. ‘You are, however, quite unfamiliar with our ways. Yes, there is every possibility that fights will break out in the audience, if what I hear is anything to go by. No, there is not the slightest chance of even the municipal militia’s having to intervene. A few bravoes will be stabbed or shot, a few dozen heads will be broken, and the hospitals and resurrection clinics will have a busy and profitable week. That is all.’

‘I wish you had put this plan to me before you took it to Armand,’ said Winter. He was as embarrassed on her behalf as he was furious with her on his own.

Orr looked quite unperturbed. ‘Not a problem,’ she said. ‘Sure, you’re mair familiar wi the facts on the ground. So you come up with something.’