The Sky Road

“Anyway,’Jordan went on, Tve no wish to get into a pissing-contest. I have something more important to say to you. So. Are you willing to have a serious conversation?”

Myra shrugged, looking around theatrically. “Why not? I don’t see any better entertainment.” She poured a brandy chaser, again without false courtesy.

Jordan Brown leaned forward on his bare forearms, took a swig of brandy and began to speak.

^You’ve come to Britain to get military aid against the Sheenisov. You might even get it. What I want to tell you is two things. One, don’t do it. It won’t do you any good. You can’t fight communism with imperialism. It’s just throwing napalm on the fire.”

Myra favoured him with a look that said she’d heard this before. “If you say so. And what else do you have to tell me? Try and make it something that’s news to me, how about that?”

“You’re in worse trouble than you think,” Jordan said. “The entity you call the General is working for the Sheenisov.”

Myra almost choked on her sip of brandy. She coughed fire for a moment. She felt totally disoriented.

“What? And how the hell would you know?”

“Strictly speaking,’Jordan Brown said, “the Sheenisov are working for it. As to how I know He held out a hand towards Cat. She leaned forward as Jordan leaned back.

“Myra,” she said earnesdy, “I may be a barbarian now, but I used to be like you. I used to be in the International.”

“Oh, Jesus!” Myra exploded. “Half the fucking world is run by ex-Trots! Tell me something I don’t know, like how you heard about the FI mil org—the General.”

“I was coming to that,” Gat said, mildly enough—but Myra could read the younger woman’s face like a computer screen, and she could see the momentary spasm of impatient rage. This barbarian lady was someone who’d got dangerously used to not being interrupted. Cat forced a smile. T still hear rumours.”

“Rumours? That’s what you’re relying on?”

“It seems you’ve just confirmed one,” Jordan said, dryly.

Myra acknowledged that she had. But it seemed a situation where stonewalling would be less productive than admitting that the General existed, and trying to find out where the rumour came from. Parvus hadn’t spotted anything like that…

“Did you pick this up off the net, or what?”

Jordan looked at Fix and Cat, and all three of them laughed. To Myra, it sounded like a mocking laugh.

“God, you people,” Jordan said. His tone changed as he went on, becoming an invocation, or an imprecation. “You have a screen between you and the world all the time. We have the human world, and the natural world. We have the whole world that you call marginal, the scattered society of free humanity. We have the whisper in the market, the gesture on the road, the chalked mark on the pavement. The twist of a leaf, the turning of a twig. We have the smell carried on the wind. We have the night sky and the names of all its fixed and moving and falling stars. We have our friends in all your cities and camps and armies. We have the crystal radio that receives and the spark-gap that transmits, in codes you have forgotten, on wavelengths you no longer monitor, in languages that you disdained to learn.”

He tipped his head back and began glossolaliat-ing in Morse code, da-da-dit-di-da- dididididah… Cat and Fix cocked their heads, listening, and after a minute grinned and guffawed.

Jordan looked a little smug at this demonstration. “See, I can joke in tongues. We have our own Internet, and our own International. Don’t bother looking for a leak from yours.”

“Besides,” said Fix, speaking up for the first time, “we know this thing from way back. Jordan and Cat fought in the revo, and so did it. It was called the Black Plan, and it was used by—or it used—the Army of the New Republic. We’ve all encountered it, and we know where it went. To New View, your commie-cult commune in space.”

“And we know how it thinks,” said Cat. “We can see its hand in what the Sheenisov are doing, in their tactics and in their strategy. It’s not exactly malevolent, but it is… ambitious.”

“So?” Myra shrugged, trying hard to stay cool, and to reassert her control over the conversation. “We—that is, my country, Kazakhstan—” there, she had said it, and the words my country, Kazakhstan could not be unsaid “—we are not relying on this thing. We take no orders from it, not since—well, it got on the wrong side of me, put it that way. I don’t say I believe you about its taking the side of the Sheenisov, but—let’s say I wouldn’t put that past it. If you’re so worried about it, why do you object to my getting help to stop it?”

“Because,” said Jordan, emphasising each word with a chop of the hand, “it can not be stopped. Not by fighting it. If it finds itself on the losing side it will change sides, or work for both sides, and it will win. Its only real enemies are rival AIs, such as those of the space movement, and those strange ghosts of genius that some of the spacers are trying to turn into. It will defeat them, or absorb them, and then it will be content in its… singular godhood, spreading with humanity to all the worlds to come. It will look after our best interests, whether we like it or not.”

“Hah, come on. You can’t possibly know that.”

Jordan sat back and looked at her with an ironic expression. “Oh, yes I can, but call it an educated guess if it makes you feel better. If the British Republic were to come in on your side, I’m sure they’d be delighted to get their old planning-system back. They’d jump at any offers it made them. Or they would accept similar Greek gifts from the space movement’s AIs. So whoever wins—the Western powers, the space movement or the Sheenisov— humanity will be living inside some machine or other, for ever.”

“Would that be so bad?”

“No,” said Jordan. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He jumped up. “But what the hell. You do as seems best. If you still want to ally with the British when you get to London, go right ahead. Much good it’ll do you.”

He downed his remaining brandy and looked around at the others, then at Myra. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you to the road.”

She rode along beside the red-haired man, troubled but unconvinced by his strange tirades. Wet branches of beech and birch brushed past them, making her duck and blink. The stony path led up the side of the hill above the settlement. Myra looked back down at it before it passed from view.

“How do you people live?” she asked. “You can’t live just on raiding, and some day soon, according to you, there’ll be nothing left to raid. Like, who pays for these anti-missile missiles?”

“We all do,” Jordan said. “We don’t have taxes, that’d be a laugh. We—not just this village, all of the free people—have a couple of simple economic principles that have been applied in communities like this for nearly a hundred years now. One is that we don’t have rent, but land ain’t free—God ain’t making any more of it, but we keep right on making more people. So we apply the equivalent of rent to community purposes, like defence. The other is that any individual, or any group, can issue their own currency, backed up at their own risk. No landlords, no usurers, and no officials.”

“Oh, great,” said Myra. “A peasant’s idea of Utopia.

Single tax and funny money! Now I’ve heard everything!”

“It does work,” Jordan said. “We, as you can see, flourish. We’re the future.”

Jordan,” she said, “you know I found some clips of you on my encyclopaedia? Well, from them I’d never have figured you for going over to the Green Slime. Or for a preacher, come to that.”

Jordan laughed, unoffended. “The world will fall to the barbarians or to the machines. I chose the barbarians, and I chose to spread some enlightenment among them. Hence the preaching, which was—to begin with—of a kind of rationalism. I can honestly say I have led many of my people away from the dark, heathen worship of Gaia, and from witchcraft and superstition. But I also found, like many another missionary, that I preferred their way of life to the one from which I’d come. And along with loving nature, I came to love nature’s God.”

“You were an atheist.”

“So I believed. I later realised that I was an agnostic. A militant agnostic, if you like. All theology is idolatry, all scripture is apocrypha. All we can say is that God is One. God encompasses the world, there is nothing outside him, and nothing opposed to him. How could there be? So God approves of all that happens, because all that happens is his will. God loves the world, all of it, from the Hubble to the Planck, from the Bang to the Crunch. God is in the hawk hovering up there and in the mouse that cowers from its claws in yonder