T he crude placards lined the Mu for kilometres cit side of Cambridge. Large kelpboard squares, spra~ with fluoro-pink lettering that dribbled like a windo condensation. They flapped beneath sturdy sun-blistered ~ signs, themselves so old the few legible names had distan in miles.
CAKE AND EAT IT Now!
‘What’s the matter with them?’ Gabriel exclaimed irrita as the Duo passed Little Shelford. ‘Do they want those blo card carriers back in power?’
KRILL DON’T HAVE BOLLOCKS THEY JUST TASTE LIKE THEM
‘You are deep into student country,’ Greg told her, amw by her reaction. ‘What did you expect? They just don’t 1 governments, full stop. Any sort of government. Never ha never will. They think demonstrating political awareness exciting. You should encourage questing young minds.’
DIGNITY NOT ECONOMIC tHEORY
The Duo’s cooler was going full blast, grinding uncomfortable gusts of frigid air. Gabriel’s grunt was lost the noise of the fans. ‘They can’t have it both ways,’ she said. ‘Two years there wasn’t any food at all. Inflation is the price you pay a free-market economy. Wages rise to cope, it’s cyclic.’ ‘But do student grants rise as well?’ CHAPTER EIGHTEEN MINDSTAR RISING 167 ‘Christ, whose side are you on? If they’re so bloody aware they should know freedom isn’t perfect. If they’d tried protesting when Armstrong was running the country they would’ve become non-people before you could say community respon;ibility.’ ‘So put up your own banners, tell them, not me.’ The motorway was in surprisingly good condition. Dead sycamores with peeling bark and bleached wood rose out of the scrub tangle at the edge of the hard shoulder. Greg toed the brake as they approached a large densely packed patch of carlet flowers shining with livid intensity under the Sahara-bright sun. He thought they were poppies at first, except they were too big. A single palm-sized petal, waxy; thousands of them waving in the breeze. ‘Someone agrees with you,’ he said drily, inclining his head. Two young men in sombreros and dirty jeans were ripping lown one of the kelpboard placards. Their bicycles lay on the [tinge of the flamingo flower carpet. He spotted badges with the deep-blue crown of the New Conservative party emblem pinned on theiз T-shirts. Gabriel nodded with tight approval at this vandalism of ~rafflti. Greg returned to the tarmac ahead. Crazy world. He turned off the nearly deserted road at junction ten, on to the A505. There was a new brightly painted green and gold sign at the side of the sliproad.
DUXFORD Event Horizon Astronautics Institute
Freshly torn scraps of kelpboard littered the grass below it, flappmg like broken butterflies in the hot dry breeze. The Astronautica Institute was an all-new construction that’d sprung up out of the ruins of the Imperial War Museum. ALrmstrong’s extremist followers had gleefully set about eradi~atmg the museum’s exhibitions and aircraft collection after they d come to power, calling it a war pornography monument. The cabinet declared that Duxford was to become the National Resource Rec~jnatjon Centre, intended as the prestigious 168 PITIR F. HAMILTON
mainstay of the PSP’s self-sufficiency policy. They said it would dismantle the war machines scrapped under their de.. militarization programme and turn them into useful raw material for industry. Greg remembered the hundreds of APVs and Challenger IV tanks parked in the Chunnel marshalling yards after he got back from Turkey. All earmarked for Duxford and ignominy. But all Duxford had ever achieved was to smash up the beautifully restored aircraft displays, and the first few train-loads of redundant Army vehicles. The promised smelters had never materialized, and the dole-labour conscripts had rioted. For eight years the abandoned hammer-mangled wrecks on the runway had snowed rust flakes on to the concrete, oil and hydraulic fluid seeping through the cracks, poisoning the soil. Then after the PSP fell, Philip Evans chose the site to be the foundation of his dream. The Astronautics Institute had been visible as a gleaming blister on the horizon ever since the Duo passed junction eleven outside Cambridge. After that Greg found himself constantly readjusting his perspective to accommodate the size of the thing. It was huge. He’d spent a few minutes the previous evening reviewing~ the data which he’d been given at Wilholm. But it’d completely failed to prepare him for what he was seeing now. The main building was a five-storey ring of offices, research labs, and engineering shops, eight hundred metres in diameter, presenting a blank wall of green-silvered glass to the outside world. The area it enclosed had been capped by a solar-collector roof, giving the staff a voluminous hangar-like assembly hail for space hardware. Construction crews were still finishing it off; two motionless cranes stood on opposite sides, piles of scaffolding littered the raw packed limestone surround, ranks of silent contractor vehicles were drawn up across the parking yards. Standard transit containers full of Event Horizon’s own cybernetics were stacked outside the assembly hall’s sliding doors, waiting to be installed. A saucer-shaped McDonnell Douglas helistat hovered overhead, its five rotors generating an aggressive MINDSTAR RISING 169 down-draught as it struggled to maintain its position against the light north-easterly wind. A container was being winched down out of its belly hold, sWaying like a pendulum in the gusts. Two more heistats waited high overhead. Greg could see machinery and gear being moved from their temporary accommodation in patched-up Museum buildings into the Institute. With the bulk of the structure complete, Event Horizon’s research, design, and management teams were starting to take up permanent residence. A rag-tag army of scrap merchants had been let loose on the old airport piling vans and horse-drawn carts high with the twisted shards of metal which were still strewn across the runway and taxi lanes. One of the merchants had modified an )ld street-cleaning lorry to sweep up the thick stratum of rust, md a dense cloud of orange dust foamed up from its bald tyres as it thundered up and down the concrete strip. Philip Evans had built his mindchild with an eye to the future. Its proximity to the University colleges had proved subversively addictive, offering finance and top-range research facilities to bu~iget-starved faculties. A move which put the cream of the country’s intellect at his disposal. Physically, the Institute was a totally self-contained complex, taking the concept of centralization right to its extreme. It could design and fabricate mission hardware ranging from torque-neutralizing screwdrivers for orbital riggers right up to the refineries which would latch on to asteroids and leach out the ores, minerals, and metals. Independent and efficient. And with the money the giga-conductor royalties would bring in, Greg realized, quite capable of achieving the space-activist dream: exploiting the solar system’s wealth. It also housed the team which had cracked the giga-conductor. Philip Evans had brought Dr Ranasfari back to England after the Second Restoration, wanting to keep a tight rein on his Company’s resident genius. Setting him up at the Astronautics Institute had been Morgan Walshaw’s idea. With so many recently assembled research and design Kroups scattered throughout the old museum buildings while they waited for their new facilities to be completed, the place 170 PITIR P. HAMILTON was in a constant state of flux. Ranasfari’s team could est~ themselves in an office and laboratory unit at the centre remain unnoticed amongst the flustered crowd. The l~ plain view concept had worked for two years. ‘No wonder Evans was so upset when the memox began to affect Event Horizon’s profit margin,’ Greg sditl they drew close to the Institute’s gates. ‘How much d~ lunatic conceit cost him, for Christ’s sake?’ The data sc from Philip Evans’s NN core into his cybofax concernin Institute had only given him generalities, PR gloss. No financial facts. Gabriel answered with a shrug. He sensed a cold trick intimidation damping her thought currents. The Institute was circled by a mushroom ring of ten geodesic spheres housing the satellite uplinks. On the eastern side was a peculiar horn-shaped antenna, unprotected from the elements. It had a temporary look to it. People were wa1kining among the dove-grey Portacabins at its base, ant size. damn thing must’ve been thirty metres high. Scale here something else again. Greg had a shrewd idea that that was the source of Gabriel’s dismay. She’d grasped the Institute at once. With him, the ego-ablating effect was taking time, a slow dawning of his own utter insignificance. A four-metre chain fence topped by razor-wire marked out the perimeter. There was a smaller fence inside, fine granite chippings between the two. A guard-dog run, or at least some form of hunt animal. The entrance road was split into five channels, each with a pole barrier. Greg chose number one. The Duo had to pass over ratchet spikes before they got to the red-and-white striped barrier. ‘What does he keep in here?’ Gabriel muttered. ‘Crown jewels?’ ‘Oh no, something far more valuable than that. Knowledge.’ A company bus drew up in lane two, full of sanitized young technical types, all of them wearing pale shirts and neat ties. MINDSTAR RISING 171 Greg showed his new Card to the white watchman pillar, and the barrier raised itself obediently. ‘But can we get out so easily?’ Gabriel asked. ‘Your department.’ There were three parking yards. He found a space in the first, in the shadow of a big JCB. Gabriel climbed out, twisting her pearls self-consciously. The air was stifling, so Greg slung his leather jacket over his shoulder. ‘We don’t belong here,’ Gabriel declared. She’d turned a complete circle, taking in the strange conflation of creaky old buildings, chaotically jumbled wreckage, and new mega-structure with a childlike expression of awe. ‘You and I. It’s not our world.’ Her mind state verged on depression. ‘Don’t be such a Luddite,’ he said. She gave him a soft, pitying smile. ‘You don’t understand. This place, it has destiny. I can feel it, portent after portent, the weight of them pressing down, suffocating. Future history, eager to be enacted, glories waiting to be born.’ Her words triggered his own instinct, a feedback reinforcing misgivings. Another reason Gabriel lived alone, even he bad to take her in small doses. What she saw, rambled about, there was no escape from knowing it was all true. Suppose she was to hint the approach of his own death? There was a work crew laying the last stretch of paving slabs between the yard and the main building. A clump of bedraggled and confused daffodils were sprouting in one of the concrete troughs beside the entrance. ‘Ready?’ he asked just before they went in. ‘Shouldn’t take long.’ ‘You’re telling me this?’ He grinned at the old reliably cranky Gabriel and waved the magic card at the door pillar.