Hulius wouldn’t be ready to fly without a work-up that would take nearly four weeks. Nor would it be prudent to make face-to-face contact with Elizabeth again and risk the renewed attention of her guards until it was almost time to go. So he went about his routine, refreshing his aviator’s training, getting used to the Cirrus, and familiarizing himself with the streets and people of the other Berlin, in readiness for the day of extraction.
NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020
Meanwhile, in New London, the business of the Party was ongoing.
“Good morning, Mrs. Bishop. And how are you today?”
Margaret Bishop inclined her head stiffly. “As well as can be expected, at my age: still happy to be alive. And yourself, Mr. Holmes?”
Adrian Holmes, Chairman of the Party Secretariat beamed. “I’m fine, fine. Won’t you take a seat? I’m so glad you could make time for me in your busy schedule.” He stepped around his desk and pulled the heavy visitor’s armchair out, making room. Mrs. Bishop shuffled forward and leaned on his arm as she lowered herself into it. The years had not been easy on her, and she had already been over fifty in the year of the revolution. Arthritis was taking its toll on the former coordinator of the New England Underground, who had chaired the Commonwealth Resilience Committee during the crazy years following the overthrow of the Crown and the near–civil war that had followed. In contrast, Holmes was young enough to be her son. He was the sort of son any mother ought to want, for he was both handsome and personable, energetic and intelligent. Indeed, he was the very model of a highflyer in the ranks of the Radical Party, the animating armature at the heart of the Commonwealth. However, their relationship was barely cordial, and anything but familial.
“You wanted to talk to me,” Mrs. Bishop cut through the niceties. “I’ll not withhold my portfolio’s full cooperation on matters of state, but I hope this isn’t to be a canvassing session. You’re wasting your time.”
Holmes returned to his seat. “I think we both know where we stand,” he said, pleasantly enough. “So no, I do not expect you to reverse yourself on the matter of the succession. Frankly, I would be worried if you did: the Party needs men and women of integrity, not courtiers. But yes, this is about the succession—indirectly.”
Margaret cocked her head to one side and regarded him warily. “If you didn’t invite me here to canvass my support, then what possible reason is there to discuss it?”
“Well, now. You know I intend to put my name forward as a candidate when the Council of Guardians meets? It’s possible that I will be the next First Man; or perhaps some other candidate will make the cut. Regardless, whoever the new First Man is, you will have to work with him—or her. And so will I: after all, we are both loyal servants of the revolution. The reason I wanted to talk to you is that very soon after the succession is announced—if not before—we are going to face two very serious threats, and I think it is important to have some idea of how we are going to respond to them while our leadership is paralyzed or absent.”
“Threats.” Margaret Bishop fixed him with a gimlet stare. “I’m aware of two threats. Are they, perchance, the same as yours?”
“I don’t know. What are you afraid of?”
“A threat from overseas, and a threat from overtime. Overseas: the Pretender would be an imbecile not to realize that this is going to be his last opportunity to attack the Commonwealth for at least a decade, if not ever. He or his daughter will make a play to return to American soil, either in the name of reconciliation or with a French grand fleet at their back. Probably the former: I am told that a face-off between their ships of the line and our Navy’s new supercarriers can only end in the adversary’s defeat. The other threat is rather more complex, but if I am to believe the daily briefings, we have intercepted unmanned drones sent by the United States of America—do you know anything about that? And the attack alert the other month was part of one such interception. So we may have to deter two different types of enemy simultaneously: a Monarchist pretender with delusions of popular support, and what our analysts call a pseudo-democracy or inverted totalitarian state intruding from a parallel world where history took a different path from our own.” She paused. “Your nightmares now, Adrian?”
“They’re not totally dissimilar, actually,” Holmes admitted. “But I think I have some fresh light to shed on both threats. Unfortunately, it’s not very encouraging. Which is why I think it best to build bridges and seek consensus now, before the headsman sharpens his axe for us.”
“New light? What kind of new light?”
Holmes shook his head, as if troubled by a fly, but there were none about, it being fall, and the office well provisioned with insecticide strips. “You know as well as I do that we are riven by factionalism. It’s the besetting vice of our revolutionary constitution, by design: if you can’t trust one pillar of the state, set up another to keep it honest. A tripod is more stable than a bipod, as Adam puts it. My office—part of my office’s remit—is to keep watch over the structures we depend on, and to provide early warning to the Council of Guardians if it appears that a faction is preparing to slip the leash. It’s not as if we haven’t seen what can happen when an agency, or group of agencies, decide that their mission supervenes all the other requirements of good governance.” He fixed Bishop with a mild-eyed gaze. “The United States, for example. The situation reports from the Department of Para-historical Research make for frightening reading. That nation’s obsession with security in the wake of the admittedly heinous attack on their capital led them to pour resources into a monstrous precautionary bureaucracy. They’re nominally a democratic republic, but they could give the Bourbon Crown lessons in how to run its secret police. And then there’s the DPR itself, and MITI.”
Margaret’s spine stiffened against the back of her chair. “What do your informers tell you about MITI, Adrian?” Her tone was deceptively gentle.
“‘Trust but verify.’ That’s what Adam told the first council of guardians he had dealing with Mrs. Beckstein—Burgeson, now. The First Man accepted her Clan’s offer of service in return for refuge during the revolutionary crisis, but kept them under lock and key for nearly two years, until satisfied that their intentions were aligned with those of the Commonwealth. Yes, I went back and reread the original minutes, Margaret. And yes, I think it was well worth it to give them their head back then. Mrs. Burgeson is an able and energetic commissioner, and her ministry has brought incalculable benefits to the Commonwealth. MITI is a huge success, anybody can see that. And so we’ve placed an awful lot of responsibility on her shoulders. But it seems to me that we have been slack in our attention to verification of late, so six months ago I took steps to enhance my understanding of MITI and the DPR’s current activities.”
He sounded weary beyond his years. Margaret sat in silence for almost a minute, processing. Finally she responded, in a low monotone. “What did your agents provocateurs dig up?”
“Firstly, they aren’t agents provocateurs.” A faintly aggrieved tone rose in Holmes’s voice. “I wanted information, Margaret, not a pretext. Only a maniac would want to slaughter a goose that lays a continuous stream of golden eggs. Our GDP has grown by eleven percent per year, on average, for seventeen consecutive years. Growth is actually trending upwards at present, and we have a series of new technologies arriving in the next decade that are like something out of a philosophical romance: atom-powered spaceships to the planets, pocket computers with wireless data networks connecting them to the sum total of human knowledge, artificial organs, cures for cancer. We can’t even cast doubt on these claims, because they’re here right now in the DPR’s laboratories, borrowed from the world next door. I’ve seen them.
“But Margaret, technologies are not value-free. If you choose a technology, you are implicitly accepting the political imperatives that provide the context the technology operates within. If you want railroads, you must accept coal and steel industries, compulsory seizure of land for rights-of-way, standard
railway time, and central stations. If you want magical pocket computers with glowing sapphire screens that give you access to a vast communications network, then you accept the politics of communications surveillance, the interests of cable laying combines that carry the backhaul signal, the ownership of the airwaves.
“So I set two types of agent to work on MITI and the DPR. The regular informers are mundane enough, and what they told me was worrying but not unexpected. There are signs of mission creep, of the DPR undertaking adventures both in the United States and across the water, in the Empire, on its own cognizance.” He leaned toward her: “They have at least two operations in train right now that have the potential to blow up into huge scandals, Margaret. And one of these borders on outright treason, which is why I wanted to bring it to your attention: I would be very grateful if you could investigate these and tell me whether I am overreacting.”
He picked up a slim document folder and held it out toward her. She accepted it warily.
“What’s in here?” she asked.
“The DPR’s attempt to meddle directly in succession politics. Frankly, I think their scheme is harebrained and dangerous, but unlikely to succeed … still, someone—someone who they do not consider to be an enemy or a dangerous rival—should take Mrs. Burgeson in hand and suggest to her that trying to organize defections exceeds the remit of her commission, and might well be misinterpreted by some of our more excitable colleagues. The scope for blowback is enormous and would tarnish not just her own reputation, but that of the Party as a whole.” He gave a small, self-deprecating smile. “But there is worse. I have included a report by a couple of magistrates from the assembly on a tour of a secret DPR research site that has been soaking up quite amazing amounts of money for some time. You might want to take her aside and ask her just how she thinks our rivals across the water will respond to this, this JUGGERNAUT, should they learn of it? Because, while I am sure she thinks it nothing but an excellent contraption for exploring new time lines, His Imperial Highness won’t see it that way at all. And of course there’s a third matter, but my agents are still investigating for the time being, because if true it’s a deadly threat to the revolution. I’ll be sure to share my notes with you as and when there is something concrete to report, but until then I would prefer not to alarm you unduly.”
Margaret Bishop tucked the file under one arm. She’d always had a good poker face, but to Holmes’s eye her expression was somewhat more glassy-eyed than normal: somewhere between stunned and poleaxed. He gave her another gentle smile, then continued.
“This stuff is, well, it’s all about individual projects. They should be investigated and either endorsed by the council, or quietly terminated. I leave these matters in your competent hands—hands which, unlike mine, the Burgesons will not shy from reflexively. But the projects my informers have unearthed are all individual operations, and as such they are trivial. I’m far more worried about what my analysts are telling me.
“I asked them for a report on the cultural and social impact of the MITI Ten Year Plan for the period 2020 to 2030, based on the technologies they intend to introduce—the ones that they told us they are in the process of introducing via the National Incubator Program and start-up grants. The report was to address three key questions. Firstly, in broad strokes: what is their likely impact on the general economy and well-being of the Commonwealth. Then, a step back: what are the political issues that will be raised by the introduction of these new tools? The equivalent of eminent domain for railroads, only for heart transplants and hypertext and moon rockets, so to speak. These are quite alarming. And a final step back, to reopen the trust-but-verify question: if the world-walkers of MITI and the DPR are planning to benefit from these technologies at the expense of the Commonwealth, how might they go about doing so?
“Margaret, their report makes for very scary reading indeed.” Adrian slid another folio toward her. His smile disappeared. “I think we’ve been too trusting. The Clan was, as well we know, a political power in its own realm before their final disastrous encounter with the government of the United States. For fifteen years they have been building a power base within the Commonwealth. This report”—he tapped the cover—“is speculative: it analyzes the capabilities implicit in the technologies they benevolently shower upon us.” He took a deep breath. “It doesn’t look good.”
“Tell me.” She took the folio.
“Ever since their nuclear war, the United States of America has been spiraling down the slope of increasing internal repression. But unlike our neighbors in the old world, their police state is based on the ubiquitous deployment of surveillance technologies, rather than armies of informers and agents. My analysts tell me that the latest MITI plan proposes the introduction of too many of the enabling technologies for such surveillance for my peace of mind. I have a very bad feeling that Mrs. Beckstein is, with the enthusiastic support of her ministry—which is one of the most important players in our industrial and educational sphere—laying the groundwork for an internal coup, and the creation of a counter-revolutionary police state. And the worst part is, I’m not even sure that she’s consciously aware of what she’s doing, or whether she’s being manipulated by a faction among the world-walkers whose first loyalty is still, and always has been, to their aristocratic Clan relatives rather than to our revolution…”
AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, UNDISCLOSED TIME LINE, AUGUST 2020
For the first six hours of her detention, Paulie’s life narrowed to a concrete-walled tunnel of pain, humiliation, and fear. Then it broadened out into a windowless cell: pain and humiliation swapped shifts with boredom and despair, while fear did a quick costume change and reappeared on stage as the black dog of depression.
For the past eighteen years she had been expecting a day like this to come. It seemed to her that ordinary people got to angst quietly about ordinary horrors: assailed in the privacy of their own skulls by the nighttime specters of heart attacks, cancer, car crashes, debt, despair, suicide—their own or their loved ones. Almost everybody had morbid thoughts and depressive ideation from time to time, even if they denied it—just like masturbation. But Paulette Milan had drunk from an extra-special fount of gloom, and she had drunk so deeply that it had warped her entire adult life.
Twenty-two years ago she’d landed a job as a researcher and junior sub on a local tech magazine called The Industry Weatherman. It was back in the days when advertisers paid for glossy print on paper and investigative journalism was still a thing. She’d worked with a highflyer, predestined to rise to her own syndicated column if she kept going long enough: a woman called Miriam Beckstein. But Miriam had gotten them both shitcanned for sticking her nose in the wrong money-laundering operation, and then her distant relatives had come crawling out of the woodwork to drag her down to an alien time line without modern conveniences like flush toilets and electricity—
And somehow one thing had led to another, and then another and another, until Paulette, dragged along in Miriam’s charismatic undertow, came to the full apprehension of her destiny only as she was frog-marched in shackles down a stained concrete-walled corridor in a slaughterhouse for human animals. Her head pounded from whatever knock-out fix they’d hit her with, and her stomach felt as if she’d been gut-punched. She couldn’t see where she was going—they’d hooded her—but as the clouds cleared, replaced by a throbbing hangover layered atop the usual aches and pains of middle age, she realized that her personal doom had arrived.
Hi. I’m Paulette Milan, and for the past seventeen years I’ve been spying on the United States of America for a hostile superpower. They told me that the antibiotic formulae that I stole from Big Pharma saved eighteen million babies from dying of diarrhea. Do I get a medal?
They removed the shackles and hood then left her alone in a windowless coffin-shaped cell. No questions were asked: they knew who she was, and at least some of what she’d done. The only furniture was a thin foam pad on top of a metal platform bolted to the floor
, and a stainless steel toilet/washbasin combo behind a low modesty wall. The lights were recessed into the ceiling, flat LED panels behind wired glass. They’d taken her clothes and put her in something like hospital scrubs. A loose V-necked top and pants, cotton so thin it would tear before she could twist it into a noose. The sink and toilet were designed to prevent drowning. She looked up and counted at least six pinhead-sized cameras watching her from the ceiling, like a malignant constellation of black holes: holes that sucked light in, seeing all, returning nothing.
The boredom and dread were bad—the dread less so: she knew her life was effectively over, that from now on her hours were to be spent in spaces like this cement oubliette—but gradually the light began to bug her. It was constant. Utterly constant, invariant over time, never dimming, never changing. Once in a while a slot at the bottom of the door would open and a cardboard tray would slide through, loaded with something that United or Delta would have been ashamed to serve the self-loading freight in coach class. It was just barely edible. She had to eat it off the tray, and the first time she’d taken it a stentorian synthesized voice had warned her there’d be no more food unless she returned the tray within fifteen minutes. Whatever a minute was in this timeless, shadowless void. But there had been several meals since then, and a couple of sleeps (despite the undimming lights). Food, she suspected, came at fixed intervals. She’d tried to keep count, but lost it after five or six—what if a meal came while she was asleep, retracting silently on the quarter hour mark?
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