Divisions by Ken MacLeod Read Free Book Online

the map, then traced it to another thin line ‘—then down into Ealing.’
    ‘You sure the canal’s quickest?’
    Suze nodded briskly. ‘The roads are kept up by the non-cos, and they’re just what you’d expect. The waterways are ours. Everything from the dredging to the lock-keeping is done by Union machines.’
    ‘Why?’
    She shrugged. ‘It’s the least obtrusive way of keeping a presence. And if we ever need to increase it, the canals have the great advantage of going round the back, especially with hovercraft.’
    ‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I wonder if we could get away with borrowing a hovercraft. ’
    ‘Too noisy. The tourists don’t like it, and it makes the locals expect trouble.’
    At the car-pool we selected a rugged, low-slung buggy with wheels that could, according to the spec, cope with any pothole or tree root in London. The controls were standard, but I didn’t yet trust my reflexes in this gravity, so Suze took the wheel. We drove down the long, curving road to the southern exit, through a crowd of importunate people (for me, a new and alarming experience; for Suze: ‘Just beggars and pedlars; you’ll get used to it’), up and over a hill, and down into the wild woods.
     
     
    The vehicle’s compact electric engine was quiet. As we drove slowly along the muddy trackways, in the shade of tall oaks and elms dripping with the previous night’s rain, we could hear constant birdsong, the occasional howl of a wolf or bark of a fox, and the far-off, uncanny whooping laugh of gibbons. Kestrels hovered high above the forest paths. Wood pigeons clattered among the trees, and now and again the vivid flash of a parakeet passed before our startled eyes. Every so often a small deer would bound on to the path, take one look at us and sprint away, its thudding hooves unexpectedly loud.

    Most of the ruins on either side were covered with ivy, its green cables silently and slowly dragging the crumbled brickwork back into the earth. Some of the walls, however, bore the marks of recent repair, with clay and wattle or bricks cannibalized from other ruins making good the gaps, and the roofs—usually a floor or two lower than the originals—beamed and thatched. There were clearings where entire villages had been built from recycled materials, with not a trace of the original buildings left standing. We got used to treating rising smoke ahead as a signal to slow down and watch out for scuttling chickens, ambling pigs, barking dogs and racing, yelling children. The interest of the adults varied from covert and sullen to open and servile, the latter type frantically drawing our attention to wares that were depicted or described on garish signboards.
    I put to Suze a question that had occurred to me from comparing old political maps with the current geographical ones: that the present communities might be remnants of the ancient, with Christian fundamentalists flourishing here, anarchic tribes around Alexandra Port, usurers still haunting the leaning towers down by the river, Muslims to the east and Hindus to the west … but she disabused me of this fanciful notion. The vast migrations of the Death and the dark century had literally walked over the great city, leaving of its former fractious cultures not a trace.
    The human traffic on the path increased as, over the next hour, we approached Camden Market. There were few powered vehicles, and horse-drawn ones were only a little more frequent. Pedestrians generally walked in groups: gay parties of tourists with rucksacks and rifles, who waved and greeted us as we passed; and serious squads of non-cos, tramping with heavy loads on their backs, or on overburdened animals, or on similarly overloaded carts. The non-cos usually spared us no more than a calculating glance or a canny smile.
    Camden Lock Market, a vast, trampled clearing at the intersection of several roads and a major canal, had the look of a place which the trees—and their worshippers—had never