Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

on the losing side it will change
sides, or work for both sides, and it will win. Its only real
enemies are rival AIs, such as those of the space movement, and
those strange ghosts of genius that some of the spacers are
trying to turn into. It will defeat them, or absorb them, and
then it will be content in its… singular godhood,
spreading with humanity to all the worlds to come. It will look
after our best interests, whether we like it or not.’
    ‘Hah, come on. You can’t possibly know
that’
    Jordan sat back and looked at her with an ironic expression.
‘Oh, yes I can, but call it an educated guess if it makes
you feel better. If the British Republic were to come in on your
side, I’m sure they’d be delighted to get their old
planning-system back. They’d jump at any offers it made
them. Or they would accept similar Greek gifts from the space
movement’s AIs. So whoever wins – the Western powers,
the space movement or the Sheenisov – humanity will be
living inside some machine or other, for ever.’
    ‘Would that be so bad?’
    ‘No,’ said Jordan. ‘That’s what
I’m afraid of.’
    He jumped up. ‘But what the hell. You do as seems best.
If you still want to ally with the British when you get to
London, go right ahead. Much good it’ll do you.’
    He downed his remaining brandy and looked around at the
others, then at Myra. ‘Come on,’ he said.
‘I’ll take you to the road.’
     
    She rode along beside the red-haired man, troubled but
unconvinced by his strange tirades. Wet branches of beech and
birch brushed past them, making her duck and blink. The stony
path led up the side of the hill above the settlement. Myra
looked back down at it before it passed from view.
    ‘How do you people live?’ she asked. ‘You
can’t live just on raiding, and some day soon, according to
you, there’ll be nothing left to raid. Like, who pays for
these anti-missile missiles?’
    ‘We all do,’ Jordan said. ‘We don’t
have taxes, that’d be a laugh. We – not just this
village, all of the free people – have a couple of simple
economic principles that have been applied in communities like
this for nearly a hundred years now. One is that we don’t
have rent, but land ain’t free – God ain’t
making any more of it, but we keep right on making more people.
So we apply the equivalent of rent to community purposes, like
defence. The other is that any individual, or any group, can
issue their own currency, backed up at their own risk. No
landlords, no usurers, and no officials.’
    ‘Oh, great,’ said Myra. ‘A peasant’s
idea of Utopia.
    Single tax and funny money! Now I’ve heard
everything!’
    ‘It does work,’ Jordan said. ‘We, as you can
see, flourish. We’re the future.’
    Jordan,’ she said, ‘you know I found some clips of
you on my encyclopaedia? Well, from them I’d never have
figured you for going over to the Green Slime. Or for a preacher,
come to that.’
    Jordan laughed, unoffended. ‘The world will fall to the
barbarians or to the machines. I chose the barbarians, and I
chose to spread some enlightenment among them. Hence the
preaching, which was – to begin with – of a kind of
rationalism. I can honestly say I have led many of my people away
from the dark, heathen worship of Gaia, and from witchcraft and
superstition. But I also found, like many another missionary,
that I preferred their way of life to the one from which
I’d come. And along with loving nature, I came to love
nature’s God.’
    ‘You were an atheist.’
    ‘So I believed. I later realised that I was an agnostic.
A militant agnostic, if you like. All theology is
idolatry, all scripture is apocrypha. All we can say is that God
is One. God encompasses the world, there is nothing outside him,
and nothing opposed to him. How could there be? So God approves
of all that happens, because all that happens is his will. God
loves the world, all of it, from the Hubble to the Planck, from
the Bang to the Crunch. God is in the hawk hovering up there and
in the mouse that cowers from its claws in yonder field. God is
in the sickle and the sheaf, the hammer and the hot iron, the
sword and the wound. God is in the fire and in the sun and in the
holocaust. God was in the spy I had killed today, and in the man
who killed him.’
    Antinomianism was, Myra knew, a common enoughheresy in periods
of revolution or social breakdown. Four hundred