Newton's Wake

‘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—’

Carlyle inclined her head. ‘Her?’

‘No, the other one, the blonde in the sort of reddish dress—shit, it’s like I’ve gone colour-blind—the cerise duchesse shift.’

‘Got ya.’

‘Well, just last month, she … ’

Carlyle listened patiently, eyes and mouth widening at—she hoped—appropriate moments, to Hoffman’s account, which she suspected was as much a character assassination in itself as it was the story of one. There was a moment when her attention drifted, and she noticed that she could make out what people were saying up on the walls.

‘—coming—’

‘—over by the bar—’

‘—any minute—’

‘—what she has to say—’

Then most of the screens showed herself and Hoffman, his pictured lips in synch with what she was hearing, and the cameras were all around them like angry bees, and on other screens a man walked confidently through the parting crowd, and she turned to see him coming towards her. A stocky man, black hair thick from a high hairline, walking with a bar-brawler’s roll, a small hard-man’s shoulder-swagger. He wore black formals, wrecking the effect with a row of pens in his jacket’s breast-pocket. Black eyes that saw right through her. She slid off the stool and faced him. Standing on the floor felt safer. He stopped just out of swinging distance, poised on the balls of his feet.

‘Good evening, Lucinda,’ he said.

She recognised the voice.

‘Good evening, Professor Shlaim,’ she said.

Behind him, her image mouthed the same words. She realised that the show was live, was sound and vision, that the world was watching and that she was on. On air. Silence spread through the huge room, making that archaic expression real. She took a deep breath and focused on speaking American.