Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

T

he thing is,’ Winter heard himself shouting to Andrea Al-Khayed, as he waved a bottle in one hand and clung to a pillar with the other, outside the Bright Contrail some time about mid-afternoon, ‘the thing is, see, that General Jacques, that, that, that bastard , has sold out the Returners again ! He’s done just what he done in the play last night! Just what he did back in Polarity! All over again! Son of a fucking bitch !’

She yelled something back.

‘What?’ he shouted. The music was loud. Vehicle traffic had stopped. The street was filling up with people drinking and dancing. More of the same was on the big screens, relaying views from right across the city, which was going wild with relief and exultation. It was being claimed that this would be the wildest party in the history of Eurydice. And why not, Winter thought dourly. They’d just survived what had seemed like certain disaster and emerged to find themselves—according to the more soberly reported news earlier—the potential future capital of the galaxy.

‘I said, “You’re right there!’ ” Al-Khayed shouted.

‘Oh, right.’ He nodded.

‘And you need this!’ She passed him a glass. He knocked it back. The music suddenly quietened. He could hear and see a lot more distinctly.

‘What the—’ He stopped, suddenly aware of how he’d been assailing her ears. No way to speak to a lady. ‘What was that?’

‘Iced umami tea.’

‘Ah. Thank you.’ He shook his head and looked around, realising that he had sobered up. ‘Jeeze.’

‘It won’t last,’ she warned. ‘But it’s good for hangovers, too.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. The mention of a hangover made him want another alcoholic drink. Fast, before it caught up with him. ‘Uh, can I fetch you a drink?’

‘I’m fine,’ said Andrea. ‘Catch you later.’

Evidently giving him up as a hopeless case, she swayed back through the crowd on the pavement to rejoin Ben-Ami, who was holding court at his usual table by the railing. Kowalsky was sitting beside him, Voigt opposite him and beside Calder, who’d somehow snagged her—or she him: the tall dancer, corseted and kirtled in black satin, petted him absently and intermittently as if he was a monkey. They were all talking as raucously as he had been a moment ago. Passersby, who all recognised them and might otherwise have nodded and smiled, passed tactfully on if they were more sober, or added to the press around the tables and slumped on the ground if they were more drunk.

Winter turned away, savouring his fleeting moment of moral superiority as he made his way to the drinks table in front of the cafe’s main, wide-open window. He was just reaching for a bottle of red wine and, with some surprise at his own self-restraint, a glass, when he saw Lucinda, Amelia, and a stocky, dark-skinned, black-clad man pushing through the crowd towards Ben-Ami’s table. They seemed to have a small crowd of their own behind them, a score or so—maybe more, it was hard to see in the crush—of people who looked like tourists, gawping around, wearing wild local clothes they obviously weren’t used to. As they approached, Amelia glanced over her shoulder and waved them towards the park, and with a lot of jostling they dispersed in that direction, leaving the two women Winter knew and the man he didn’t to step on to the pavement spread of the Bright Contrail. Amelia was in a very Eurydicean outfit of the day, bright blue, all carnival fronds and fringes, inconspicuous in the festivities. Lucinda wore the same off-white long dress in which Winter had last seen her, back at the gig. The effect was hallucinatory. He stared at her face, wondering if she looked different. It was hard to tell. Her appearance had always outdone his memory of her each time he’d seen her.

She noticed him just as she approached the table, and smiled and nodded briefly. She said something to Ben-Ami and seated Amelia and the man who had arrived with them down beside him, and then walked over to Winter. She was carrying the same enormous floppy hat, and a bottle.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘It’s good to see you again,’ said Winter. ‘To see you, uh … back.’

‘Back from the dead!’

‘As I think I said to you once, the experience is overrated.’

At that Lucinda did look changed. There was a thrawn weariness in her face that Winter hadn’t seen before.

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘You could say that.’ She looked down, then firmly up. ‘Well. A lot tae talk about. Could we, like, start again where we left off?’

He laughed. ‘Hence the antique frock, yeah?’

‘That was the idea, yes.’ She sounded embarrassed. ‘Dialled up a copy at the skyport, from my old hotel room.’

‘It’s still not you, but it’s a nice—’

‘—Oh, shut up—’

‘—thought.’

She flourished the bottle. ‘Talisker,’ she said. ‘From the captain’s table. Well, the captain’s drexler, tae be honest. Want some?’

‘Let’s find somewhere to sit.’ He glanced at Ben-Ami’s table.

‘Not there,’ she said.

T

ell him,’ said Amelia, pouring Ree a drink. His hand was shaking too much to pick up the glass. He withdrew it, looked Ben-Ami in the eye and said, ‘All my production brigade killed or dispersed and in hiding because we sold your work, Mr Ben-Ami.’

Ben-Ami closed his eyes and opened them again. ‘What?’ Everybody at the table was by now looking at Ree.

‘I owe you licence fee, of course,’ he said. ‘I am representative of Eighty-Seven Production Brigade. But I hope you will have it in your heart to defer requirement of payment.’

Ben-Ami waved a hand. ‘Forget about that. You said people have been killed for selling my work?’

‘Is my fault,’ said Ree. He sipped the neat whisky, then downed it in one gulp as if it was vodka. ‘Miss Carlyle sojourned at our brigade headquarters. She gave collected works of Mr Ben-Ami as payment. We all watched your wonderful play, Mr Ben-Ami, about great Prince Leonid. I was so moved by it that I had it transmitted as sample to several DK habitats in the same system. One of them, Man Conquers Space Collective, is very rigorous in interpretation and upholding of self-reliance idea. They took exception to it. Great exception. They were already disapproving of us because we were terraforming planet for Yank farmers. They said now we are corrupting self-reliant society with backward and decadent Yank ideas. There was ideological discussion, then dispute. They said Leonid was a revisionist. We knew this was not so, and we were even more convinced that it could not be, Mr Ben-Ami, because of your great play. We voted to continue selling your work to other brigades and collectives. Man Conquers Space Collective sent their self-defence force, aerospace militia division, to correct us. They attacked us from the sky, Mr Ben-Ami! We had no defences prepared! We did not expect this, even from dogmatists! I only escaped because I was far away, with my marine biology work, and even then they destroyed my place of work. I hid underwater and made my way through wormhole gate and waited for Miss Carlyle’s production brigade, which we already knew was going to pass through on way here to fight the Knights.’

‘What about the other production brigades on your planet?’ Amelia asked, tipping him another whisky.

‘Rest of Transformation of Nature Collective mostly afraid of Man Conquers Space,’ Ree said scornfully. ‘They have indeed become soft living on dirt like Yank. While hiding in the hills the past days and nights I have used my juche untraceable communications gear’—he tapped a pendant at his throat—‘to make clandestine agitation in DK settlements on and around Eurydice. I have made contact with many people, scores of people, who are most indignant and who are not afraid. We will fight these Man Conquers Space son of bitch bastards like Brezhnev fought Nazis and Yanks and Polacks and South African slaveholders, gaining his honourable scars.’