by Carl Neville
Were your own people realists in 1917, in 1958, in 1987? Were they not told; this is not the moment? Were they not branded agents of a foreign power?
Indeed. But this is not the moment. Let us push toward world co-operation, the far east will soon be with us, twenty, thirty years, the Americans will be fatefully weakened, in a minority, they will collapse, they know this.
How would you feel if we spent our time snooping around in your security apparatus and then sent you a list of commands? Evans enquires.
So it is merely pride? Solchenko asks. British pride? Where was your pride, your British independence in 1978, when you sent your delegations to us? Waterston, when you came to us and begged us to take our own society to brink of war with Americans to support your island in its historic moment?
Are we equal partners or not?
So it is pride, Solchenko says. And again, I ask, where is your British pride when 90 percent of your technology, medicine and infrastructure is developed in the east, when your contribution to Co-Sphere research is under 5 percent? We understand, comrades, the history, the battles, the darkness, the desire to break with toil and struggle. But have we struggled less, seen less darkness? Well comrades, we enjoyed a, what was it? a holiday from history, some said even it had ended, we Russians even. Perhaps you thought here in the PRB that you had made yourself so small a target that no one would pay attention to you, that you could stand off to one side, be half in, half out of the Sphere, but, I am here to tell you, you cannot.
Have you come here to pull rank on us then?
Yes! Solchenko says and spreads his arms and laughs. Comrades, comrades, we who have shared so much. Let me be clear then. We cannot allow your democratic experiment to go ahead, for many reasons, or rather it may go ahead but not fully. Things which may be embarrassments to us, gentlemen, to you too, good propaganda for our enemies at crucial time may be revealed. We cannot accept this.
So this is why you have been locking files? Who has given you the authority to do that?
Waterston can’t help it; he looks around to Squires.
Once the Games are over, we will…
No, comrades, no. Solchenko chuckles. Action is needed immediately. We see danger imminent, as do you I believe, but a strange inertia has taken you, you know, yet you are incapable of acting, you have lost the taste for imposing your authority.
You’ll be calling us a bunch of bloody liberals next.
Solchenko spreads his arms again and smiles. As I said, we have the necessary manpower waiting, not merely Russian, from many Co-Sphere partners, you need merely request it. It would be best to request it, he says. Reflect on what we are offering you gentlemen.
The Clarion 07/04/2018
Reflections on the Breach Twenty Years On: Bill Evans
It’s as much a blessing as a curse to have lived as long as I have. A blessing in that there’s them of us such as myself that can still remember the 1930s, the 1940s, that had the tales of parents and grandparents passed onto us as bairns; a curse that we have lived to see people start to take for granted, question the things we fought tooth and nail for, that comrades died for, and I know that some of the brothers and sisters who went on before me had a peace of mind I won’t have because they thought it was all over and done with. We have beaten them! There’s no going back now! And then to see our own side, our own people, who’ve never known nothing of what we suffered through, whose birthright has been, not as ours was, wage slavery, but common ownership, to see that way of organizing things come under attack, well… Now we need to start expelling people, simple as that comrades. We have done it before, but we have lost a bit of the mettle we had before when it was life and death for us, and we need to nip it in the bud now or we’ll find in a few years that suddenly the tide has turned and I am not so complacent to think that we can’t go back. We’ve got shy about a bit of discipline. No one likes the word anymore but that’s what we need, people need to toe the line and stop undermining the principles the Republic was founded on.
I am not shy to use the word purge if that’s what’s needed.
Among his morning letters, the white and manila envelopes, there is one, duck-egg blue, no stamp, hand-delivered, hand-written in an elegant looping script that he recognizes immediately as Jennifer Bewes’s. Waterston takes it tenderly to the kettle, lets a little of the steam unseal the adhesive. He uses a knife on the official documents, ruthlessly and mechanically slitting them open, but the knife on such a fragile almost fleshy package is unthinkable.
He imagines it might be a declaration of love, and then he imagines it is a letter that she planned to send him long ago and which she put aside, and which has sat yellowing in a drawer. Margaret too had a drawer filled with sentimental objects, whereas Waterston has none, almost none perhaps, or rather he has made his objects indivisible from his trade; the teak globe, the pen set, the heavy leather-bound books, he has hidden all his sentiment in plain sight.
All these thoughts revolve in a burst of reverie as the kettle boils, gurgling and shaking on the stand, then clicks off. He is distracted at a time of crisis and for a moment he is irritated and another thought, Women! flashes through his mind. Now then Waterston, he chides himself as he holds the envelope over the fragrant steam coming up from the teacup, it’s you old boy, you not them. Your attachments.
On the paper there is the impress of the page above, the ducts and runnels, valleys, of her free-flowing cursive, the overlay of another letter in the thick-ish, shiny page. A letter addressed to someone else entirely perhaps, but holding it to the light, using his old spy techniques he can see that the name on the page above corresponds to the name below. His name, Waterston. For a moment he considers sending it off to be analysed, using a simple technique for lifting the text of the invisible, unsent letter off the page beneath, but dismisses the idea.
He addresses himself to the sent letter instead, and he is both disappointed and relieved, a standard thank you for the visit, an insistence that he visit again, some tacit acknowledgement her marriage to Bewes was not easy on him and that he should consider them old friends still, comrades.
A strange inertia has taken you.
Well, God moves the player. He has found himself repeating that line to himself. A poem, surfaced in his mind somehow. Where is that from? The next line is...
He finds his feet have stopped moving and he is gazing down, absorbed by the way the roots of a tree in the central courtyard are cracking the bricks, making a metre or so perimeter around the base broken and uneven, stands puzzling over it and can’t seem to regain his momentum.
Feels the spaces between things, the gaps in the structure of the seemingly solid world, burgeon darkly. A thin layer of anti-matter, a black contiguous sheet threads through the interstices of the day, expands slowly, prizing the world apart, creating deeper fissures and thicker demarcations between thought and action. Dilute hypnagogia that has begun to daily grow more concentrated.
Weeds sprout in the crumbling edges and the tumbled cobbles and a sudden surge goes through him; he has a brain tumour.
But no.
He has had a medical within the past few weeks. Perhaps he has been exposed to a virus, some bioware, that is slowly colonizing him.
Unknowable, too much speculation on the invisible, the unfathomable… he of all people should not get caught up in that.
Crisis, endless crisis, things are moving too fast for him and his diminishing support networks, chains of people who can process information for him or offer expanded ideas have all gone now, Bewes, Collinson. Only the increasingly erratic Evans remains. Well…
What is the world to me? Not nothing yet, but it’s slipping beyond his grasp and he should…
… shouldn’t he? Hasn’t he done his duty?
Finds himself in his office, in his chair. The knock at the door.
Come, he says. Reaches down for a moment and lays his hand on the desk, strokes it. Old desk, old friend. Things, one grows attached to t
hem, heavy solid things, this last one that has anchored him, maintained a place for him in the world. He has his desk as his father had his coat.
Dead Words
Civil servant, yes. His father a
policeman: dead word
of all things, the town
mayor: dead word
in the end, in a working-class town, a rare achievement for an avowed
conservative: dead word
at that time, in that place,
Newport, Monmouthshire: dead word
He relishes the savour of that, deadest of all on his tongue, splits it up into syllables to savour it all the more. Mon-mouth-shire. Old Bill Waterston; he became mayor not because of his politics but because they knew of his sense of public responsibility, his overriding belief in justice and fairness.
How hard it had been to make him see that the Autarchy, the Breach, the words they used now instead of
revolution: dead word
had been in many respects a continuation, a strengthening of the deeper principles of his
civic: dead word
conservatism: dead word
How many had died, like his father, of sheer inability to adapt, who woke up every morning in a world they could not understand? How many upon whom some hex, some terrible
anomie: dead word
and sense of desolation had fallen? How many lives were foreshortened by that? But then, how many lengthened by the lifting of
toil: dead word
from them, the room to grow and breathe, of spirits that had been crushed for generations in
mines: dead word
and factories: dead word
docks: dead word
domestic work: dead words
in offices and armies?
Pan-Co-Sphere meeting 04/04/2018 (audio file g6743) *011034211/nyrehs)
Drews: Our approach has always been piecemeal, raise the healthcare system, enforce certain diets, nudge people into exercise, have a reproduction system for organs and the gradual replacement of neural systems by prosthesis, a kind of stealth if not immortality then sustained increase in longevity, carefully planned in relation to improvements in efficiency and reduction in ecological impact and so on, our surveys told us a century of good health was optimal, with minimal signs of aging after forty, people wanted to grow and change but stay at a certain stage physically then disappear off one night suddenly in their sleep. But the Americans have jumped forward, over us.
Evans: They’ve done it then haven’t they, the Yanks?
Solchenko: You have read the report?
Evans: So much for our productive capacity being limitless under bloody communism then.
Drews: They have focused on different things, their infant mortality rates are far higher, their general life expectancy lower. For god’s sake Bill, they still rely on oil….
Evans: And your lot?
Solchenko: We, we, comrades are a year or so behind. This is their great strategic advantage, if they can offer immortality and we cannot, if they can say this is the prize of the capitalist system, they will have out-competed us. They will kill us by offering life everlasting. And for those chosen few, the Rapture, spiralling up to everlasting life in the arms of big Daddy Connaught aboard his space station.
(laughter)
Solchenko: I laugh comrades because it is so grotesque, obscene. We must have, then, communist immortality, Immortality for All! If we do not, what then? If we stop the defectors, and there will be many, we are murderers, condemning them to death.
Evans: We need to do it democratically.
Solchenko: This fetish for direct democracy. If we put it to the vote? Shall we have a vote on it? It will be like the bad joke the Americans have about democracy, no one thinks if 51 percent vote to shoot the other 49 percent in the morning, that is acceptable. Our citizens will be against each other in the most fundamental ways. It must be a universal provision, only in this way can we maintain legitimacy of…
Waterston: What does Zoloff say?
Solchenko: Zoloff believes we are already immortal anyway.
(laughter)
Solchenko: There it is, brothers and sisters. If the Americans offer it and we do not, what will the consequence be? Of course, we have never had to face this question before.
Dusjevic: If we are to have immortality for all we must become cosmonauts again, we need more planets to sustain us, we will have to make them habitable, to do this will take tremendous resources and we believe this is what has underpinned the increase in aggressiveness from the American Administration, we have the resource they need, the fuel, the land, the minerals to launch themselves and their own acolytes out on whatever….
Evans: Where will they go? They don’t have the technology to get any further than Mars.
Solchenko: Then perhaps they will start there. Perhaps they are ready to destroy this planet, which they believe they have lost for a planet of their own.
Evans: Science bloody fiction…. they have been listening to too many of your bloody dissidents filling their heads with nonsense.
Solchenko: As many of your British aristocrats involved as our Russian exiles and defectors. The lamentable British propensity to kill too few people. Or the wrong people.
Dusjevic: The contract, the unspoken agreement between the spheres was that we would inch life expectancy forward as the technology that allowed us to stay in homeostasis was developed. But that contract has been violated.
Waterston/Squires
Squires has arrived in Waterston’s office, a nervous-looking young gentlemen with a very prominent Adam’s apple who Waterston has never seen before in tow. Where’s Sylvie? he asks. Squires glances toward the young man.
I have been deputizing for her, I have stepped in in a temporary capacity.
Old Sylvie gone now too. If Waterston’s wisdom has made him the Guarantor, Sylvie’s tenacity and inflexibility has made her the Gatekeeper.
A rest period. Interdepartmental frictions, some indiscretion, Squires says.
He nods, the gate now more or less unguarded if his first impressions of this young gentleman prove to be accurate. He wonders whether he might be in this position because he is one of Squires’s lovers, a favour bestowed, but Squires is far too rigid in his adherence to departmental protocol for that.
Well, shall we begin?
SSF1 Meeting log audio file g9986 *011034212/grenm
Waterston: Problems with Barrow?
Squires: I agreed to the appointment, of course, but under a certain degree of duress. Shortage of manpower. Hardly the optimal choice, damaged goods and so on.
Waterson: I am aware of Barrow’s history. As you say, it’s a question of manpower.
Squires: Needs must, no doubt. However, it has been logged that Barrow is repeatedly trying to access locked files. Can’t of course and has been sending in access requests.
Waterston: Which files?
Squires: His own. Crane’s.
Waterston: Why Crane? What possible relation could he have to the current situation?
Squires: Well indeed. His interest in Crane is what has led him down this blind alley with regard to the South Academy’s rather predictable pranksterism at the Games, which leads one to wonder whether there might not be some additional motive, conscious or otherwise, for Barrow returning to active service. His partner is one of Crane’s old acquaintances, Rose Adonor.
Waterston: Could it be germane to the investigation?
Squires: Well. There has been renewed interest of course, since one of Crane’s files leaked. There has been some suggestion that the Vote was orchestrated precisely to get access to the rest of Crane’s file.
Waterston: One oddity, quiddity of our imminent vice-president, looking through Bewes’s correspondences with the American delegation, is that Altborg had requested that we set up a meeting with Crane. Out of the question of course, Crane’s too far along now, a shell, a husk, and we explained it as such, but still a very peculiar request.<
br />
Squires: McFarlane’s influence?
(Squires looks toward his new assistant)
PRB 76593-0: Probably, he is the Administration’s current favourite dissident. We think he may be the source of the rumours going around about Crane being an experimental psy-ops subject during the Breach and the Soviet thought-worm that was tested on him being the source for Everlasting Yeah.
Waterston: Are there such rumours?
Squires: This and similar speculations and theories are legion. We, SSF, the PCSDF have people in positions within the South Academy, the OLF even. Some excellent operatives, PRB 1912732 among them. Citizens whose commitment is to, well, I believe the term they use now is…
(Squires leans toward his assistant)
PRB 76593-0: “Necessarily asymmetrical transparency.”
Waterston: Spying, you mean?
A moment of rare good humour between them: an amused grunt from Waterston, a tremor around Squire’s lower jaw. They haven’t always been so adversarial, back around the Breach they were comrades, but then, that was a matter of mutual survival and the differences that have come to define them were pushed aside.
For a moment Waterston is about to ask, why did you go to Bewes’s house the night he died? Exploit this sudden depth of association between them. But just as he is angling for a form of words:
PRB 76593-0: It’s believed that the leaked documents on Crane prove this.
Waterston: And do they?
Squires: We have no copy of it, we only discovered it was missing as we set about digitising the records. You would know though. Having been more active than I in that area, at that time.
Is Squires signalling to him that he does not trust his new assistant? Perhaps he has arranged to bring him in here at the highest level to have him hear this claim denied. It was so long ago, so many things happening simultaneously, his own involvement so fragmentary across so many domains, but in his role as the Guarantor he knows what is expected of him.