by Carl Neville
They carried a certain symbolism, of course, totems of the old order no doubt, and initially taboo, but soon Care and Repair had stripped everything of its former association by necessity and besides, it had to be conceded, the quality of the workmanship, the durability of the materials, the reliability if not their efficiency was commendable. There are thick crystal glasses in the mini-bar and he takes one out, holds it, feels its weight. The mingling of old leather and wood warmed by a spring sun, the carpet, the luxuriousness of it, a certain elegance, a certain style, all the signifiers of power and class, position, the Empire at its height.
This particular model has been converted to run on electricity, rechargeable overnight through the panels on the Headquarters’ roof and the mini turbines in the gaps along the sides of the building and so it was permissible he felt, the harmless indulgence of a fond old man that he should ask the driver to stay below 60mph to luxuriate in the car itself, the empty road, to delay seeing Jennifer Bewes a little
It will be a good opportunity to see Dominic Bewes as well, try to persuade him of the necessity of moving up now to SSF1, seniority be damned. To survive in their present form they needed someone as gifted as Dominic was with data. Someone as diplomatic as he could be when required. Yes, for all his flamboyance, his work on the Connaught administration had been exceptionally thorough, few of the older boys could demonstrate a better grasp of the rules and procedures of SSF and related institutional process. It was a term no one these days would want applied to them, but he was a superb bureaucrat.
Bureaucrat. Dead word. Civil servant. He says it quietly to himself, enjoys the sibilance, the dry rustle of it. That can go in his list, he opens up his Passocon, finds the Dead Words file and adds them. Another indulgence of his, itemising the ways words fall into disuse, out of speech and thought. A little surprised to find them so cold, so inert, the feel of those words in the mouth, in the mind.
Tastes them, the dust, the mildew. He slides open a door in the mini-bar and takes out a small label-less bottle he knows is a miniature Speyside 23. Unscrews the top, holds it under his nose.
Speyside, magical word, closes his eyes and breathes it all in, the mineral rich streams running clear and sparkling in the sun, the loam and the towering purple mountains over which the shadows of the tumbling clouds ran like ghosts, that summer when he almost declared his love. Almost proposed.
He reseals the bottle, puts it back in its box. He shouldn’t arrive with whisky on his breath, though for a moment he was tempted to wash their taste away, he should wait until he’s offered one.
Picks up the glass again. He has become attached to heavy things rather as his father did. Remembers how even in the summers his father wore that cashmere greatcoat, as though it could pin him in the world, ballast his lightening bones, thin and frail as coral, his whole frame shifting and creaking under its weight.
He reflects on his father for a while, noting down the dead words as they come to him. The empty motorway and then, entering the city, the smoothly inter-looping ramps with only the occasional electric bus going past in its designated lane, sleek and almost silent.
He hasn’t seen Jennifer Bewes for a few years. He remembers the first time he saw her with piercing clarity, but the last? He remembers the wedding, the taking of Bewes’s name, controversial among their circles even then and not something that would have been acceptable a decade later when she was at the height of her influence.
Stands up out of the car, a spring breeze cuts down the street, the dull receding edge of winter still tangible through the swelling warmth.
There she is…
… at the window, the street and sky reflected in the glass lending a phantom, a dreamlike depth and remove. She seems to be caught between overlapping worlds. The widow in her bower, flowers, silkily ablaze, thronging the room behind her, steel-grey hair scraped back, tight and harnessed, sprays of pink carnations foaming up from the crystal vase on the sill. A light green cardigan, the brown shawl draped over her shoulders as protection against the elements; the late spring chill leaching through the glass, the squalling cold fevers of grief.
Hard not to remember, for an instant almost paralysed there on the pavement, the time when they were both young. He has a little poetry left in him still, perhaps, and thoughts of those early days move through him with a pang that makes him straighten up, pain rearing and cresting to a short, sharp point behind his eyes like the long slow coil and crack of a whip catching up with him half a century late. He offers her a smile. Odd to think that for all he has seen, all the spent passion, all the enthusiasm reduced to a mechanical routine, still the presence of the beloved can somehow return one to yearning.
One is never cured of that.
Pan-Co-Sphere meeting 04/04/2018 (audio file g6743) *011034211/nyrehs)
Dusjevic: Gentleman, thank you. We return to items which have been on the agenda for many years, and over which we have received numerous assurances, all areas of Pan-Co-Sphere co-operation and integration in which the PRB has been, let us say, inconsistent in its implementation. Shall we address the use of plets first?
Evans: Aye why not? You’re very quiet Squires.
Squires: I share comrade Dusjevic’s concerns.
Evans: Won’t be sticking up for the home team then?
Squires: I don’t believe the purpose of all we have been through is for us to remain in opposing teams, Bill.
Evans: Very enlightened!
Dusjevic: Gentlemen. May we? The plets. Is their existence not an indication that you have too much democracy, that the population is overloaded? Your own statics show that 67 percent of all votes were cast through autonomous systems. Our independent research…
Evans: Oh aye!
Dusjevic: … tells us that of that 67 percent, almost 90 percent of votes were not subsequently checked or altered within the available window. Approximately 40 percent of these votes were on issues flagged as High Level. You have outsourced the democratic system you insist upon to programmes and machines because the population cannot or will not engage at this level. Then there is of course the question of how susceptible this process is, not just to error or drift as we have already indicated, but to interference. It seems you are caught in a trap, every time you try to submit a proposal to limit the amount of decisions put to a popular vote the bias in the system, which is that everyone believes in full democracy, means the system automatically defeats the vote, increasing the likelihood the next attempt will be defeated and so on. This is a structural defect.
Evans: So this is how you are going to declare the recent vote null and void is it?
Dominic Bewes brings them tea as he settles into the chair, adjusts a spray of fronds on the table next to it so they are not intruding into Waterston’s vison. Should I pour, Dominic asks?
Yes, thank you dear, Jennifer says.
He addresses himself to Waterston with a slight, sympathetic smile. Biscuit? Waterston takes one from the plate, then Dominic puts them down on the table, says, well, turns to leave.
Dominic, Waterston calls out, let me speak to you before I leave, unless…
No, no I’ll be here, he says.
And Dominic. My condolences. Your grandfather was an exceptional defender and promoter of the interests of the international working class.
Won’t you stay dear? Jennifer says.
Dominic hesitates for a moment then sits. Well, perhaps a quick cup of tea. Settles into a chair by the window.
And you, Jennifer. I am sorry for your loss. It is a loss to us all.
She smiles. He lived long enough to see his desires fulfilled and not long enough to see them destroyed. We have a span, I suppose. And his was I think, the best that one could hope for.
Waterston grows grave, wonders if Dominic Bewes may have discussed more than he should, but dismisses the idea. Everyone who is paying attention knows that the world is approaching another inflexion point. Perhaps some of us have already lived too long to avoid witnessing
at least some attempt at destruction, he says.
Now, now, Dominic says, there are plenty of us left to fight for the freedoms that have been won. New battles with new weapons. For the old necessities.
Well, Jennifer says, I have been cooped up in here all day. Would you like a stroll? Around the park. Some fresh air, the Daffodils are out I hear.
Waterston nods.
Dominic, a word, he says as Jennifer goes out to find her coat.
You saw Solchenko the night your grandfather died.
Yes, Dominic registers surprise. He has been a fairly frequent visitor to the family home over the years.
What did you discuss that night?
Well, Dominic laughs, we were a little distracted by the presence of a young American girl, an exchange student. Even some of the older boys, so most of it was on a potted history of the Co-Sphere, lengthy disquisitions on the superiority of our system, questions about the current government from the citizen’s perspective, and so on.
Well, Waterston says, as Dominic holds his coat open and he slips it on, goes out onto the steps, let’s leave all that aside, at least for today. Leave it for the office, but he continues a little anyway regardless. Has Squires contacted you since your grandfather’s passing, any flowers, condolences?
Nothing so far as I am aware.
Waterston glances away for a moment to the park at the end of the road, a park they have strolled through many times, the row of old ash trees above the neat red-brick wall, supporting the sky with their dark and slender upstretched branches, black buds buttoned into the sagging clouds, here and there a tentative early bloom shivering in the inhospitable climate they have rushed into.
Convenient for Squires’s agenda in many ways that this break-in should occur so close to the Games when they are maximally stretched for resources. A few eyebrows have been raised by his appointing of Barrow and Squires has insisted on oversight there, but for a supervisory and facilitatory role Barrow should be adequate. He has a sense that men like Barrow may be needed again, that others too perhaps will be called back, allowed to remember, to reconnect with those impulses that were once, it seems so long ago even to Waterson, necessary to ensuring that any obstacles in the way of history’s advancing were cleared away. That a path was beaten.
Curiosity seizes him and he goes into Barrows file on the SSF database, clicks through to the dream archive, his last session with Frith.
In which my hands were clean…
Yes, the Breach, he still has some memory of it all then. Tributes are paid in the abstract, the ideals celebrated on these anniversaries, but he remembers comrades killed by the aristocrats’ squads and militia, the strike breakers and the army men who fired on Dockers in Southampton and caused the revolt within the forces itself. They have lost lives, plenty of them, but it has become inconvenient to talk about the deaths on either side, sacrifices, dead word, heroism, dead word.
Flesh and blood men and women he knew, barely recognizable after their torture, beatings, executions, piled up in the makeshift morgues, the splayed limbs, an inertness and absence no one could mistake for sleep, tallow flesh stippled with bruises of the most remarkable colours, like fireworks, or exotic flowers. In the back of a butcher’s shop in Todmorden he had to pull aside a few he half knew, before he got to see that yes, his old friend, the great organizer of the shipyard strikes, Mason, was among them.
Mason: dead name.
He would like to recite all those dead names, name the parties and the organizations that fought for the world in which they now live, but even he who risked death alongside them can barely say words like class, party, union anymore. He is among the last of a dying breed, they have lived too long, their own names taste of dust and ash in their mouths. There will be no more men like Barrow, men equal in their violence to the violence that was wrought against them. He was banished really to the north of the country after the Breach, an endless tedious round of tracking smugglers in and out of the Nordic belt, the drudgery and a weekly dose on Frith’s couch designed to make sure he kept his impulses under control. His reward for having done what was necessary was the suppression of his own past. There will be no statues, no streets named in his honour, nor memorial plaques, only the most aseptic tributes as though all that death and killing was something to be forgotten, suppressed as quickly and as fully as possible. Wipe that stained old world away.
Well the expats will never forget it, they dwell in it, brood on it.
Pan-Co-Sphere meeting 04/04/2018 (audio file g6744) *011034211/nyrehs)
Solchenko: On to other matters, then. This large group you have gathering on the other side of your Thames River.
Evans: Purely domestic concern.
Solchenko: Domestic? Are we not true internationalists gentleman? Post-internationalists for whom there is no domestic, no local, or are we only so when it suits us?
Evans: Send in the goon squad, is that it? Some of us were on the other end of that treatment forty years ago.
Waterson: They want a different form of organization that the technology now allows, isn’t that what we have always argued for?
Solchenko: I remind you gentleman that the very technology they use, the material foundation for this attempt to break free, was developed elsewhere in Co-Sphere, the minerals it needs, mined elsewhere in Co-Sphere, the factories in which it was produced and the infrastructure which has allowed its dispersal, all created elsewhere in Co-Sphere.
Evans: This sounds like what we used to call bourgeois economics, comrade, free-riders you are saying, what happened to from each according to his ability?
Solchenko: But what is your ability here? To give space and support to American subversive groups and put whole Co-Sphere at risk? And we should say, oh well, the PRB, you know, it has its own way of doing things, its eccentricities, its traditions?
Dusjevic: The continued use of money, even its proliferation, the resultant unquantified elements of the economy, leakage into the non-Co-Sphere economy, trade for dollars and American goods, especially narcotics, nano-narcotics, technologies that are adapted to non-Co-Sphere domains, you understand that this continued existence of money has a distortionary effect on our ability to achieve a fully efficient production and distribution system.
Solchenko: If we have been able to eliminate it across rest of Co-Sphere, aggregate all that information into an efficient production network, we have to ask how is it that such a small island has not been able to do likewise. This strikes us as a question of political will.
Evans: We have put it to the people repeatedly.
Dusjevic; And we have repeatedly advised you that you are throwing out the optimal functioning of the Pro/Diss system, as is your repeated failure to enforce mandated patch use. Our technicians look around the Co-Sphere, gentleman, and we see nothing but a beautiful, sublime, crystalline interlinking of networks and information flows, interfacing with our most advanced AI and robotics to mediate production and distribution on a scale, vaster, faster and more complex than any system before it, except here is a black spot, a sunken area, a void that is twisting and warping all the rest out of shape, and it is the PRB. We could tolerate this for a while but now, with Connaught, with the decision to democratize and open up the whole of the Co-Sphere security network to scrutiny, to attack…
Evans: This is you launching a coup is it? And you’re the inside man, Squires.
He wakes early, after a fitful few hours, lifted on some tremendous, lancing compound of emotions, insights and revelations, understandings whose exact meanings elude him, that cannot be translated back across the threshold of sleep.
He goes into the bathroom, touches his face, it is already wet. Has he splashed the water yet? No and so what is this then? And well, cups the water in his hands and lowers his face to the sink, straightens again, the distance from the bowl to his face so much shorter now than it was even a few years ago. He can feel the slack skin on the back of his arms swinging, the way his sagging breasts sit on hi
s jutting belly and anyway, anyway there are things to think about. This waking with his face wet with tears. Has he been sobbing in his sleep? Did he wake himself? Margaret would laugh in her sleep sometimes, giggle girlishly even when she was old, before the illness set in, perhaps it portended it, he was surprised, still somewhere there was the capacity for some basic joy. Do I ever laugh in my sleep? he asked her one day. I have never heard you, she said, though you have started to grind your teeth again.
He knows even before he logs into his updates on the Passocon that there have been developments. The autopsy results are back. Perhaps he knew all along, anticipated them. A wild thought revolves around the outside of his mind and he lets it enter. Perhaps they have identified Bewes as the mole and so Solchenko has had him killed, poisoned with an American-based chemical to throw off suspicion. Credible?
The autopsy report has been followed hot on the heels by a communique from Squires about the need to expand the investigation, a political assassination now, bring in PCSDF.
He stalls until he has arrived in his office and received the message Barrow has sent him. Replies tersely to Squires that he will give Barrow and his team an expanded remit for the moment. Replies to Barrow: Aware of gravity of situation. Manpower in short supply. Barrow hold fort for now. Upgraded from supervisory to lead role. Report direct to W. Bypass Squires. Use this channel.
The Meeting 04/04/2018
We have lost our best minds to the east you mean, and your worst minds have come here to loll about? Evans asks.
What I am explaining to you again, as we have explained for years, is that your principles here are not generalizable, by all means be a holiday camp but build a good fence around it. Protect its structures from the excesses of the revellers, those who are drunk or worse, those who lack political realism.