Divisions by Ken MacLeod Read Free Book Online Page A

conquered. Like Alexandra Port, but for economic rather than strategic reasons, it had remained alive and functioning through all the disasters that had befallen the city. In physical extent it was actually larger than it had been in the twenty-first century, because some of London’s other traditional markets, in the East, were now six feet under the Thames estuary at low tide.
    Our first stop was the Union depot, a stockaded area on the edge of the market. Inside the casually guarded gate were a low garage, a warehouse, and a rest-and-recreation building. Suze gave the last a disparaging glance.
    ‘For wimps,’ she remarked. ‘What’s the point of coming here if you’re not willing to mix?’
    After we’d garaged the vehicle, hoisted our packs, holstered our pistols
and wandered around for a few minutes, I began to see exactly what the point was. The place was guaranteed to give most Union people a severe culture shock. To me it looked like utter chaos, and sounded—to use words whose roots lie in ancient experiences of similar situations—like a barbarous babel.
    The market consisted of: long fenced-off areas packed with sad-eyed beasts; marble tables running with the blood, piled with the flesh of beasts; fish swimming in glass tanks or flopping on slabs; canopied wooden tables stacked with pottery, weaponry, books, machinery, clothes, textiles, herbs, drugs, antiquities, foodstuffs; racks from which coats swayed and dresses fluttered in the warm breeze.
    Each of the stalls and tables had behind it someone whose fulltime occupation was minding it, watching over it, talking to anybody on the other side of the table and passing wares over and taking money back. The sellers and the buyers filled the air with the sound of their dickering, bickering, joking, teasing, offering, refusing; and with the recorded music which every stall-holder, and most of their customers, discordantly inflicted on everybody else, played at an unsociable volume from portable devices which were aptly called loudspeakers.
    Then there were the smells: of the animals and their dung and their slaughter, of the people and their sweat and the scents which failed to disguise it, of smoked herbal drugs which were, I began to suspect, not a recreation here but a necessity.
    I stopped in front of a stall on which dried leaves of tobacco and hemp were laid out in labelled bundles, neatly sorted into open-topped boxes. The woman behind the stall was prettily dressed in an embroidered cotton blouse and a printed cotton long skirt, gathered at the waist with a drawstring. It was hard to work out her age—like many of the adult non-cos, she seemed to combine the detached watchfulness of age with the innocent selfishness of youth, and, on top of that, her cosmetics made a baffling mask: her cheeks reddened, the rest of her face whitened, eyes darkened and lips flushed, as if she’d been awake all night and was now in a state of sexual arousal. But she had an attractive smile.
    ‘Suze,’ I said, nudging, ‘could we—?’
    Suze grinned and nodded, then, when I reached into the pocket of my rucksack, frowned and shook her head.
    ‘I’ll do it,’ she murmured.
    She looked up at the woman behind the table, and fingered a leaf labelled ‘Kent Ganja’.
    ‘How much you got on this?’
    ‘Best stuff, lady,’ the woman said. ‘Two grams gold, five grams silver an ounce.’

    (That’s what I later worked out she said. At the time her strange singsong went into my ears as: ‘Besstuff laidy, two gramzgold five gramzsilveranahnce. ’)
    Suze recoiled. ‘Fackinell!’ she said. ‘Thassexpensiv init?’ (I still haven’t figured that one; I’ll leave it as it sounded.)
    ‘Nah,’ said the woman. ‘From cross the riveh, thatiz. Transport’s fackin criminal. You won’t get cheaper anywhere.’
    She waved around at the rest of the market. ‘Try ’t an’ see f’ y’selves. You’ll be back.’
    ‘Not likely,’ said Suze, taking me by the elbow