The Restoration Game (21 page)

“There was a great deal of that—as I have just said. But for the rest, the other hundred thousand, I mean something quite different. The possessing classes, the classes from which you come, have a culture of their own, and great political experience. Experience acquired over centuries—over millennia! Their schoolboys did not study the classics of antiquity for nothing! But it is not learned from books. The lower classes, the working classes, no matter what their standard of living may be at any given time, have nothing of that kind.”

“That's ridiculous!” I said. “Look at any big bookshop—Waterstone's in Princes Street—they have
walls
of classics, in cheap editions. The working classes can read Aristotle if they want.”

Not that they want to, I forbore to add.

“Ah, now Aristotle—” Ross began, but I hadn't finished.

“Not to mention all the other education and culture ordinary people have access to, that they never did in the past, that's far more than slaves or serfs ever—”

“Exactly!” said Yuri. “The working classes have
access
to culture—we can argue about how real that access is, but yes. The fact remains that the only culture they have is that of the classes above them—because they have none of their own. Likewise in politics.”

“What about the Labour Party?” Ross demanded.

Yuri joined in my hollow laugh.

Ross made a face. “All right.”

“Now,” Yuri went on, “let us imagine that in some particular country, the working classes acquire first a party, then a state, then a culture. We are speaking of a revolution, of course, but imagine—armies, universities, secret police, diplomats, millions of people who all have to at least pretend to believe that they are in the service of the working class. You can imagine it, yes?”

“Kind of,” I said, grudgingly. “It sounds scary.”

“Precisely!” cried Yuri, finger upraised. “Now—imagine what it would take to destroy that.” He brought the finger slicing down.
“That
was 1937.”

“Just as I've always said.” Ross's voice had the tone of someone slipping into the deep, comfortable ruts of an old argument. “Stalin destroyed the Party.”

“The Party was destroyed, yes, but that was not Stalin's doing,” said Yuri. “It was Yezhov's.”

“Ah, of course, Yezhov,” said Ross, sarcastically. “Stalin's loyal executioner!”

“Disloyal,” said Yuri, making it sound like a pedantic correction. “Or so he confessed.”

Ross snorted. “He confessed to the secret police that he was a traitor who had, as head of the secret police, had the secret police beat and torture countless innocent people until they confessed to being traitors…you see the problem?”

“Of course I see the problem. The evidence is thin, I agree, and tainted, but…” He shrugged, and spread his hands. “It's what we have.”

“But Yuri,” I said, “I thought the people whom this guy Yezhov slaughtered were supposed to be part of a conspiracy to overthrow Stalin and restore capitalism.”

“They were supposed to be, yes. Some of them were, at least to the extent that they hoped to remove Stalin forcibly from office and return to a market economy—like Deng Xiaoping did in China, though in his case the revolutionary tyrant was removed by natural causes. Anyway—Yezhov was part of the conspiracy, or of an overlapping or rival conspiracy. He killed many innocent people, as well as rival conspirators, to cover for the conspiracy and to advance
his own
aims. Stalin started the Terror, but it ran out of his control, and struck down far more people than he had intended—which number was, God knows, large enough.”

“But that's—” I shook my head. “It's like saying Hitler didn't know about the Holocaust.”

Yuri stood up. “I need some fresh air,” he said, taking his cigarette pack and lighter from his jacket pocket as he left.

“Now you've pissed him off,” said Ross. “Don't worry, it'll blow over.”

“Is he really a Stalinist?”

Ross laughed. “Not in the least. He just has a bee in his bonnet about his conspiracy theory. And you're right, it's—” He shrugged one shoulder. “I mean, who could imagine Soviet secret policemen and veteran Party members and Western leftwingers and Western intelligence services getting all tangled up together in a plot to restore capitalism?”

I glared at him. “Are you having a laugh?”

“No,” said Ross. “I have no idea at all why Yuri could think that was even a little bit plausible.”

He stretched, sighed, and signalled a waiter for same-again coffee.

“Christ,” he said, “I could do with a smoke myself. That pipe got me back on the old nicotine treadmill. Maybe I'll bum a fag off Yuri when we leave.”

Yuri returned just as the second round of coffees arrived.

“Anyway,” said Ross, settling back into the argument as Yuri settled in his seat, “you're wrong, Yuri, about the working class having no culture of its own.” He jabbed a self-mocking thumb on his waistcoated chest.
“I'm
from the working class, mate, and we bloody well do have a culture. And politics. And traditions—ah!” He smiled. “When you mentioned Aristotle, Lucy, I remembered a lovely example. When I lived in London back in the eighties I shared a squat in Camden with a few people, one of them a nurse. Cockney born and bred, she was. One night I was mouthing off about Aristotle, as one does, and she said she had an old book by Aristotle. I was well impressed to hear this. Off she goes to her room and brings back the book. It was a reprint of some seventeenth or eighteenth-century work on gynecology. Illustrated with the most grotesque woodcuts—you can imagine. And it's supposedly by Aristotle. His name's right there on the title page. So I say to Lynne, that was her name, look, this can't possibly be by Aristotle. He never wrote a work on gynecology. It's
obviously
written with seventeenth-century knowledge. And so on.”

“She wasn't having any of it. Aristotle was a very clever man, she said, knew lots of things, wrote about everything. He could
easily
have written this book.”

Ross leaned back, with a self-satisfied smile.

“I don't get it,” I said.

“My point,” said Ross, tipping himself forward again and jabbing a fore-finger, “is that if my friend the Cockney nurse was anything to go by, somewhere in the working class of inner London there was a tradition handed on by word of mouth, quite independent of official education and so on, about
Aristotle.
The universal genius and the great philosopher. Handed down for centuries—maybe longer, maybe since the
Romans!
So don't tell me the working classes don't have an independent culture.”

To my surprise, Yuri didn't seem to think, as I did, that this was a bit of a stretch.

“They may remember Aristotle,” he said sadly. “They don't remember Spartacus.”

This mention of the Romans and Spartacus reminded me of something and I was about to chip in and divert the discussion to a subject less depressing than (and yet in a frustrating tip-of-my-tongue way obscurely
connected with
) dead bloody Russians when Ross glanced at his Rolex and called for the bill.

4.

What I'd been reminded of was the first time I'd walked into the Auld Hoose, one Wednesday night in July 2006. I didn't know anyone there, but it wasn't difficult to identify the SF fans from the way they all
talked in italics.
The previous Saturday I'd spent exploring the Grassmarket. I'd bought the black-net-over-red-satin skirt and the spangly top I was wearing in a vintage store, Armstrong's, and almost next door to that shop had found Transreal, an SF book-shop where I picked up a paperback of the latest Ellen Kushner and from the friendly owner a few pointers to the haunts of SF fans in Edinburgh.

And to one of those haunts, that Wednesday evening in July 2006, I went.

I checked out the vast range of unfamiliar beers and settled for a bottle of Miller Lite, then sidled to the periphery of a conversation going on around a couple of adjacent tables. Some people were standing, others sitting. A guy with a ponytail was sitting behind the table beside a woman whose long hair brushed the threads and busy needle of a beadwork project in her hands. Two guys—one with dark curly hair, the other with a blond buzz-cut of hair and beard—standing at the corner of the table were in conversation with this couple, or at least listening with the others around the table while the ponytailed guy held forth.

“…so we looked for some way to get Romans on Mars,” he was saying, “and we came up with Spartacus, who was—”

Cue ragged chorus of: “I am Spartacus!” with one voice saying: “I am Neil Kinnock!” followed by a yell of “Splitter!” and then a short round of
Life of Brian
jokes.

Ponytailed guy sat out the flurry and continued: “Spartacus gives us a time-line where there wouldn't have fucking
been
a People's Front of Judea, and where there would have been Romans on Mars. Here's how. Suppose the armies of Spartacus take Rome, and there's a general slave uprising as the news spreads. The empire collapses. There's no barbarian threat at this point, the migrations haven't started. But the work still has to be done. A lot of the economy just goes to peasant farming. No doubt they get screwed by taxes and moneylenders, but that's all. The sort of proto-feudal stuff that got fastened on them after the fall in our time-line hasn't had time to develop. But what about the urban slaves? Well, the former gladiators and soldiers who are now in charge are already familiar with a way of getting people to work without directly forcing them: pay them. Salary,
salarium
, get it?”

The long-haired woman said something about soldiers being paid in salt, and someone chipped in with the derivation of
sarariman
, and on the edge of the ensuing fannish digression I stood clutching my Miller Lite and flicking through my mental thesaurus for something on the tip of my tongue, some word that
salarium
reminded me of and that seemed important, like a fragment of a dream recalled in the middle of the day, but before I could retrieve it the ponytailed guy managed to get a word in to the interruption.

“My
point is,”
he said, “that paying wages already exists, even if it's peripheral. And the Roman world already has loads of knowledge and technology that it's never been profitable to implement in a slave-labour economy—look at Hero of Alexandria's steam engine—OK, a toy, but the principle's there—and the Antikythera mechanism. There are even some factories employing waged workers in very narrow specialised areas—perfume-making, I think it was. So—what happens if all these come together, and wage labour takes off in a big way? You get to capitalism without going through feudalism, you jump from Antiquity to the Industrial Revolution without a Dark Age or the Middle Ages in between, you don't lose all the books the Christians burned, you get history with fifteen hundred years of misery left out!”

“How does Christianity drop out of the picture?” someone asked.

“Slave religion,” said the cuter (the curly-haired one) of the two guys standing at the table. Somebody laughed.

“No, seriously,” said the ponytailed guy. “We worked it all out. Judea drops off the Roman map. No Hasmoneans or Herodians or whatever. And anyway, no decline and fall, no hopelessness, no transfer of hope to the after-life….” He waved a hand. “Look, give us a fucking break, OK? It's just a premise, it doesn't have to be rigorous. The upshot is you get the Industrial Revolution about AD 300 instead of AD 1800, except there's no AD of course, and space flight AD 500 at the earliest, but realistically ha-ha a bit later and anyway even on worst-case assumptions you can
easily
have Roman astronauts fighting rogue AIs on Mars in what would be our sixteenth century. Hence our game, Olympus, tadah!
Except
…”

At this point he leaned forward and buried his face in his hands, and his presumed girlfriend looked up from her beading project and grinned around and said: “Having done all that—spread-sheeted the economics, Googled up history details, heaved their arses to the library and cracked a book or two
and
adapted the fucking physics engine
and
sketched the artwork—the poor fuckers haven't got a story!”

For some reason this got everyone within earshot roaring with laughter, as people will at tales of misfortune.

The curly haired guy noticed me looking puzzled on the sidelines, and brought me up to speed a bit, and that was how I got to meet Sean, Joe, and Matt, as well as Sean's girlfriend, Janine. It was how I started flirting with Matt.

It was while I was listening to Joe explaining at great length how the whole gameplay scenario of Olympus had gotten bogged down in the sands of Mars that I found a thought bugging away at the back of my mind, a thought that had—maddeningly—some connection with that word I couldn't recall, and I blurted out of nowhere into a sudden moment of silence: “Why don't you turn it around and set it back on Earth?”

Heads turned and looked at me with the characteristic vague fannish new-person-meeting expression that suggests they can't place who you are but can't quite bring themselves to ask because for all they know they might have met you before.

Joe blinked. Sean cocked his head. “Explain.”

“You're basically trying to fit dark fantasy into an alternate history space-opera setting,” I said. “It's one twist too many. That's why you keep tripping over yourselves. Like finding a rationale for swordplay. Why not just drop the space-opera angle, and rejig it all as basically dark fantasy? Turn the AI lab into, I don't know, a fucking magic castle or something, turn the desert into a mountain, make the rogue AI program the Holy Grail or whatever—just be honest about what you're doing, and everything falls into place, because you don't have to keep twisting it sideways to fit.”

“Boring,” said Sean. “Sorry, been there, done that, got the chain mail.”

He looked about to make sure this witticism was fully appreciated, got a well-deserved cuffing around the head from Janine, and went on: “There's any amount of games like that—we need something original.”