Read Divisions Online

Authors: Ken MacLeod

Divisions

To Mairi Ann Cullen
 
Thanks to Carol, Sharon and Michael; to John Jarrold and Mic Cheetham; to Iain Banks and Svein Olav Nyberg; to Andy McKillop, Jo Tapsell, Paul Barnett and Kate Farquhar-Thompson.
 
Thanks also to Tim Holman for editorial work at Orbit; to David Angus for pointing me to the map of Callisto; and to the socialists, for the Earth.
 
Man is a living personality, whose welfare and purpose is embodied within himself, who has between himself and the world nothing but his needs as a mediator, who owes no allegiance to any law whatever from the moment that it contravenes his needs. The moral duty of an individual never exceeds his interests. The only thing which exceeds those interests is the
material power
of the generality over the individuality.
—JOSEPH DIETZGEN, “The Nature of Human Brain Work”
There are, still, still photographs of the woman who gate-crashed the party on the observation deck of the Casa Azores, one evening in the early summer of 2303. They show her absurdly young—about twenty, less than a tenth of her real age—and tall; muscles built-up by induction isotonics and not dragged down by gravity; hair a black nebula; dark skin, epicanthic eyelids, a flattish nose, and thin lips whose grin is showing broad white teeth. She carries in her right hand a litre bottle of carbon-copy Lagrange 2046. Her left hand is at her shoulder, and on its crooked forefinger is slung a bolero jacket the colour of old gold, matching a gown whose almost circular skirt’s hem is swinging about her ankles as she strides in. What looks like a small monkey is perched on her right, bare, shoulder
.
 
 
Something flashed. I blinked away annular afterimages, and glared at a young man clad in cobalt-blue pyjamas who lowered a boxy apparatus of lenses and reflectors with a brief apologetic smile as he ducked away into the crowd. Apart from him, my arrival had gone unnoticed. Although the deck was a good hundred metres square, it didn’t have room for everybody who was invited, let alone everybody who’d turned up. The natural progress of the evening, with people hitting off and drifting away to more private surroundings, would ease the pressure, but not yet.
There was room enough, however, for a variety of activities: close dancing, huddled eating, sprawled drinking, intense talking; and for a surprising
number of children to scamper among them all. Cunningly focused sound systems kept each cluster of revellers relatively content with, and compact in, their particular ambience. The local fashions seemed to fit the party, loose and fluid but close to the body: women in saris or shifts, men in pyjama-suits or serious-looking togas and tabards. The predominant colours were the basic sea-silk tones of blue, green, red, and white. My own outfit, though distinctive, didn’t seem out of place.
The centre of the deck was taken up by the ten-metre-wide pillar of the building’s air shaft. Somewhere in one of the groups around it, talking above the faint white noise of the falling air, would be the couple whose presence was the occasion for the party—the people I’d come to speak to, if only for a moment. There was no point in pushing through the crowd—like anyone here who really wanted to, I’d reach them eventually by always making sure I was headed in their direction.
I made my way to a drinks table, put down my bottle and picked up a glass of Mare Imbrium white. The first sip let me know that it was, aptly enough, very dry. My slight grimace met a knowing smile. It came from the man in blue, who’d somehow managed to appear in front of me.
‘Aren’t you used to it?’
So he knew, or had guessed, whence I came. I made a show of inspecting him, over a second sip. He was, unlike me, genuinely young. Not bad-looking, in the Angloslav way, with dirty-blonde tousled hair and pink, shaved face; broad cheekbones, blue eyes. Almost as tall as me—taller, if I took my shoes off. His curious device hung on a strap around his neck.
‘Comet vodka’s more to my taste,’ I said. I handed the glass into the monkey-thing’s small black paws and stuck out my hand. ‘Ellen May Ngwethu. Pleased to meet you, neighbour.’
‘Stephan Vrij,’ he said, shaking hands. ‘Likewise.’
He watched as the drink was returned.
‘Smart monkey,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ I replied, unhelpfully. Smart spacesuit, was the truth of it, but people down here tended to get edgy around that sort of stuff.
‘Well,’ he went on, ‘I’m on the block committee, and tonight I’m supposed to welcome the uninvited and the unexpected.’
‘Ah, thanks. And to flash bright lights at them?’
‘It’s a camera,’ he said, hefting it. ‘I made it myself.’
It was the first time I’d seen a camera visible to the naked eye. My interest in this wasn’t
entirely
feigned in order to divert any questions about myself, but after a few minutes of his explaining about celluloid film and focal lengths he seemed unsurprised that my glazed-over gaze was wandering. He smiled and said:
‘Well, enjoy yourself, Ellen. I see some other new arrivals.’
‘See you around.’ I watched him thread his way back towards the doors. So my picture would turn up in the building’s newspaper, and a hundred thousand people would see it. Fame. But not such as to worry about. This was the middle of the Atlantic, and the middle of nowhere.
The Casa Azores was (is? unlikely—I’ll stick to the past tense, though the pangs are sharp) on Graciosa, a small island in an archipelago in the North Atlantic, which is (probably, even now) an ocean on Earth. It was so far from anywhere that, even from its kilometre-high observation deck, you couldn’t observe its neighbouring islands. The sea and sky views might be impressive, but right now all the huge windows showed was reflected light from within. The lift from which I’d made my entrance was at the edge, and I had to get to the central area within the next few hours, sometime after the crowd had thinned but before everyone was too exhausted to think.
I drained the glass, picked up a bottle of good Sungrazer Stolichnya, gave the monkey a clutch of stemmed goblets to hold in its little fingers, and set out to work the party.
 
 
‘Nanotech’s all right in
itself
,’ a small and very intense artist was explaining. ‘I mean, you can
see
atoms, right? Heck, with the bucky waldoes you can
feel
them, move them about and stick them together. It’s mechanical linkages all the way up to your fingers. And to your screen, for that matter. But all that electronic quantum stuff is, like,
spooky
…’
She had other listeners. I moved on.
 
 
‘You’re from space? Oh, great. I work with the people in the orbitals. We do zaps. Say you’ve got a replicator outbreak somewhere, natural or nano, like it makes a difference …
anyway
, before the zap we all sorta wander around the evac zone, one, to check there’s nobody there and, two, just to soak up and record anything that might get lost. You don’t get much time, you’re in an isolation suit that has to be flashed off you before you come out, for obvious reasons—takes most of your body hair with it, too—but even so, you can see and feel and hear a lot, and for hours or days, depending on how fast the outbreak’s spreading, there’s nobody else around for tens of kilometres. You know, just about every one I’ve done, I’ve picked up a species that wasn’t in the bank. Genus, sometimes. Not known to science, as they say. Ran out of girlfriends to name them after, had to start on my actual
relatives
. And then you come out, and you sit around with the goggles and watch the zap. I mean, I like to see the flash, it’s the next best thing to watching a nuke go off.’
The ecologist stopped and took another deep hit on the hookah. I waved away his offer of a toke. He sighed.
‘The times when there’s nobody around but you … You just gotta love that wilderness experience.’
I had reached halfway across to the centre of the room. I wanted to offer the stoned scientist a shot of vodka, but the monkey had, in a moment of abstraction, devoured my last spare glass. The man didn’t mind. He assured me he’d remember my name, and that some beetle or bug or bacterium would, one day, be named in my honour. I realised that I couldn’t remember his name. Or perhaps he hadn’t told me, or perhaps … a certain amount of passive smoking was going on around here. I thanked him, and moved on.
‘And don’t
do
things like that,’ I murmured. ‘It’s conspicuous.’ A cold paw teased my ear, and a faint, buzzing voice said:
‘We’re low on silicates.’
I scratched the little pseudo-beast in response, and hoped no one had noticed my lips move. I felt a sudden pang of hunger and a need for a head-clearing dose of coffee, and stopped at the nearest buffet table. A woman wearing a plain, stained white apron over a gorgeous green sari ladled me a hot plate of limpets in tomato sauce. (All real, if it matters. I guess it must: my mouth waters at the memory, even now.) I decided on a glass of white wine. There were empty chairs around, so I sat. The woman sat, too, at the other side of the table, and chatted with me as I ate.
‘I’ve just spoken to our special guests,’ she said. She had an unusual accent. ‘Such interesting people. An artificial woman, and a man from the stars! And back from the dead, in a sense.’ She looked at me sharply. ‘Perhaps you’ll have met them before, being from space yourself?’
I smiled at her. ‘How come everyone knows I’m from space?’
‘Your dress, neighbour,’ she said. ‘Gold is a space thing, isn’t it? It isn’t one of our colours.’
‘Of course,’ I said. For a moment I’d thought she’d guessed it was a spacesuit. After she’d spoken, after I’d had a minute to observe how she moved, the subtle way her face cast its expressions, it was obvious that she was well into her second century. There would be no fooling her. She looked right back at me, her eyes shining like the pins in her piled-up black hair.
‘Gold is such a useful metal,’ she said. ‘You know, Lenin thought we’d use it for urinals …’
I laughed. ‘Not his only mistake!’
Her reply was a degree or two cooler that her first remarks. ‘He didn’t make many, and those he did were the opposite of … what’s usually held against him. He thought too highly of people, as individuals and in the mass. Anyway,’ she went on, complacently, ‘some of us still think highly of
him
.’
I’d placed her accent now. ‘In South Africa?’ They were a notoriously conservative lot. Some of them were virtually Communists.
‘Why, yes, neighbour!’ She smiled. ‘And you’re from … now don’t tell me … not near-Earth; not Lagrange … and you’re no Loony or Martian, that’s for sure.’ She frowned, watching as I lifted my glass, looking past me at, perhaps, her memory of how I’d walked up to the table. Weighing and measuring my reflexes. ‘Yes!’ She clapped her hands. ‘You’re a Callistan girl, aren’t you? And that means …’
Her eyes widened a fraction, her brows rose.
‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘The Cassini Division. And yes, I’ve seen your guests before.’ I winked, ever so slightly, and made a tiny downward movement with my fingers as I reached across the table for a piece of bread. Not one in a hundred would have as much as noticed the gesture. She understood it, and smiled, and talked about other things.
 
 
The Cassini Division
… In astronomy, the Cassini Division is a dark band in the rings of Saturn. In the astronautics of the Heliocene Epoch, the Cassini Division was the proud name—originally given in jest—of a dark band indeed, a military force in the ring of Jupiter. You know about the ring of Jupiter—but to us it was more than a remarkable product of planetary engineering, it was a standing reminder of the power of our enemies. It was our Guantanamo, our Berlin Wall. (Look them up. Earth history. There are files.)
The Cassini Division was the Solar Union’s front-line force, our collective fist in the enemy’s face. In our classless society it was the closest thing to an élite; in our anarchy, the nearest we came to a state; in our commonwealth, it held the greatest share of riches. Its recruits chose themselves, and not many could meet a standard of that rigour. In terms of sheer fire power the Division could have flattened all the states Earth ever knew, and still had enough left over for a bit of target practice to occupy the afternoon. The resources it controlled could have bought everything on Earth, in the age when that world was owned—and it still stood ready for the exchange, to give as good as it got, to pit our human might against the puny wrath of gods.
In other words … the Division was there to kick post-human ass. And we did.
(And yes. I’m still proud of it.)
 
 
The South African woman might have had unsound views about Vladimir Ilyich, but she turned out to be one of the ‘old comrades’. Although the International had long since dissolved into the Union, its former members maintained their contacts, their veterans’ freemasonry. I’d never really approved of this, but it helped me here. She introduced me to one of her
friends, who introduced me to another, and so on. By an unspoken agreement they passed me along their chain of acquaintance, moving me through the crowd a lot faster than I’d managed on my own. Only half-an-hour after I’d finished my coffee, I found myself among a small cluster of people, at the focus of which were the party’s special guests: the artificial woman, and the man who had come back from the stars, and from the dead. Even five years after their arrival, they could still pull a crowd—all the more so because they seldom did, preferring to wander around and talk to people they happened to meet.
The artificial woman was called Meg. She didn’t look artificial right now, and indeed her body—cloned from that of some long-dead Malaysian-American porn actress, I understand—was in some respects more natural than mine. Only her personality was artificial. It was a human personality in every way we’d ever been able to observe, but it was—she’d always insisted—running on top of a genuine artificial intelligence.

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