Divisions Read Free

something.’
    ‘Oh, you know,’ I said. ‘Perhaps we can talk about it later?’
    She was looking up at me, a small frown on her smooth brow.
    ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Things should quiet down, soon.’
    I laughed. ‘You mean, like when Wilde’s spoken to everybody?’ ‘Something like that.’ She drew me to a nearby seat, just outside the huddle, and I sat down with her. ‘This is all a bit exhausting,’ she said absently. She stroked one bare foot with the other, and stubbed out her cigarette. The monkey hopped from my shoulder and clutched the edge of the ashtray, its big eyes entreating me. I shook my head at it. It bared its teeth, then turned away from me and let Meg play with it.
    Wilde’s voice, carrying:
    ‘—this whole thing: turning his sayings into a scripture, and him into a martyred prophet—it’s almost the only irrationality you people have left! I think he would have laughed !’ And with that Wilde’s laugh boomed, and those around him joined in, hesitantly. The conversation broke up over the next few minutes, and Wilde ambled over and sat down beside me. The three of us were perched as if on a log in an eddied swirl. Around us people partied on; now and again someone would drift over, see no response signalled, and turn away. Some left, but most hung around, tactfully out of earshot.
    We exchanged greetings and then Wilde leaned away from me and sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Meg.
    ‘Well, Ellen,’ he said. ‘You got us where you want us.’ He lit a cigarette and accepted a shot of vodka. He looked down at his glass. ‘This has already had several other drinks in it,’ he observed. ‘Nice thing about vodka, of course, is it doesn’t matter. Any taste is an improvement. I’m drunk already. So if there’s anything you forgot to ask us, in the debriefing—’
    ‘Interrogation.’ I always hated the old statist euphemisms.
    ‘—go right ahead. Now’s your chance.’ He swayed farther back and looked at me with a defiant grin.
    ‘You know what I want, Wilde,’ I said heavily. I was a bit drunk myself, and more than a little tired. Gravity gets you down (and space sucks, but that’s life). ‘Don’t ask me to spell it out.’
    He leaned forward. I could smell the smoke and spirits on his breath.

    ‘Oh, I know better than that,’ he said. ‘The same old question. Well, it’s the same old answer: no. There is no way, no fucking way I’m going to give you people what you are so carefully not asking for.’
    ‘Why not?’
    Always the same question, which always got the same answer:
    ‘I won’t let you lot get your hands on the place.’
    I felt my fists clench at my sides, and slowly relaxed them.
    ‘We don’t want the wretched place!’
    ‘Hah!’ said Wilde, with open disbelief. ‘Whatever. It won’t be me who gives you the means to take it.’
    It would have to be somebody else who did, then, I thought. I kept my voice steady, and quiet.
    ‘Not even to fight the Outwarders?’
    ‘You don’t need it to fight the Outwarders.’
    ‘Isn’t that for us to judge?’
    Wilde nodded. ‘Sure. You make your judgements, and I’ll make mine.’
    I wanted to shake the answer out of him. I would have had no compunction about it. As far as I was concerned, he wasn’t a human being, just a clever copy of one.
    I also, paradoxically, wished I could regard him as a fellow human, as a neighbour. This just served to increase my frustration. If I could have taken Wilde into my confidence, and let him know just how how bad, how fast, things were going, he might very well have agreed to tell me all I needed to know. But the Division trusted him even less than he trusted us. Telling him the full truth might trigger things far, far worse. Wilde and Meg had both been in the hands of the enemy, were quite literally products of the enemy, and even now we weren’t one hundred percent confident that they were—or were only—what they claimed, and seemed, to be. I thought for a