Free Divisions by Ken MacLeod Page A

to say, for now.’
    He rested his chin on a cat’s-cradle of fingers and looked at me.
    ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Interesting. That used to be called the Wolff gambit.’
    I raised my eyebrows; he shrugged. ‘Look it up.’ (I never did.) ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘you’re too late.’ He refilled his tumbler, and raised it to me in an ironic toast:
    ‘Here’s to the scientific genius of Isambard Kingdom Malley.’ He knocked
it back and slammed the tumbler down. ‘And here’s what has long since pissed it away. This, advancing age, and corrupting youth.’
    ‘No!’ I stood up. ‘You’re wrong! Those are symptoms. Your real problem is this: you worked out the most beautiful and successful physical theory a human being ever developed, and then superhuman beings went right ahead, used it, applied it, took it to the limits and disproved it ! And you have never gotten over the suspicion that, to go beyond your theory, you’d have to go beyond your human limitations. And now, you can’t even do that!’
    ‘Precisely,’ he said. He refilled the tumbler, again. ‘Thanks to you people!’
    ‘Us?’ I said, stung by the injustice of this accusation.
    ‘Yes, you—with your armlock on space development and on computer work, your endless cold war with the Jovians. The Cassini Division has a very cushy number out there, while the rest of the human population gets fobbed off with a sort of static comfort. Restricted without their noticing, rationed without knowing what they’re missing. The rations are generous, I’ll give you that, but basically what you so grandly call the Solar Union is the civilian hinterland of a war economy.’
    This was beyond arguing about.
    ‘Think what you like,’ I said. ‘But why not come and see for yourself?’
    Malley took out a penknife, unfolded a yellowed steel spike and began poking about in the bowl of his pipe. I looked away. There was a scrape of flint and the now-familiar smell of burning dried weed refreshed itself in the room.
    ‘It’s tempting,’ Malley acknowledged. ‘To be honest, I’d love to see the gate—the Malley Mile, ha-ha!—up close. I’d be delighted to find a way through it to the world Wilde described, which sounds so much more interesting than this one.’ (I almost jumped—I hadn’t even raised the matter of navigating the wormhole, which was what we really wanted him to do.) ‘But like I said, it’s a waste of time. I can’t handle the math any more. It’s a young man’s game, and the young man who was Malley is no more.’
    He really was sounding dangerously close to maudlin. I sat down again, and leaned across the desk and looked earnestly into his somewhat bloodshot eyes.
    ‘Age and alcoholism,’ I said, ‘are curable. As you well know. A couple of treatments and you’ll feel better than you can remember, better than you can now even imagine . You’ll have access to the biggest computers the Division has, the best instruments, decades of observations. All we want you to do is show us the way to New Mars. If you do that, you can do whatever else you can get away with, just like the rest of us.’
    Malley leaned back, sucking on his pipe. I’d never noticed before the horrible bubbling sound the tar and spittle make in the things.

    ‘It’s a deal,’ he said.
    It took me a moment to work out that this meant he agreed.
    ‘You mean, we have a plan?’
    ‘Yes!’ Malley chuckled. ‘Indeed we do. We have a plan.’
     
     
    My plan, at this point, was to retrace my route to Alexandra Port, and get the next airship connection to a flying-wing flight to Guiné, and the next laser-launcher to rendezvous with the Terrible Beauty , the fusion clipper on which I’d arrived, which was currently parked in low Earth orbit. On the way—a recent update—I intended to show or describe to Malley some of the features of Union society, from which he’d so carefully exiled himself these past one hundred years: the gigantic Babbage engines churning