The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories by Ian Watson, Ian Whates Read Free Book Online
Authors: Ian Watson, Ian Whates
bright gibbous moon. The sea is calm tonight, and I am a very lucky man.
<>
* * * *
Sidewinders
Ken MacLeod
1. The Trafalgar Gate
I bought a kilo of oranges in Soho - Covent Garden would have none at this time of year - and walked down Whitcomb Street and around the corner on Pall Mall to the Square. The Gate faced me, a concrete henge straddling the entrance to Duncannon Street. There wasn’t much of a queue, just a line four abreast filling the pavement along the front of the National Gallery and St Martin’s in the Fields. I passed the two hours it took me to get to the front reading the latest Amis fils in paperback. I turned the last page and chucked the Penguin to a hurrying, threadbare art student seconds before I’d have had to relinquish the book to the security bin.
“Papers, please.”
I resisted the temptation to monkey the guard’s cockney. String bag slung on the thumb, rope of my duffel bag clutched in the fingers of one hand, I passed the documents over with the other, for a frowning moment of scrutiny. Then the guard waved me on to the Customs table. Wanded, searched, duffel bag contents spread out and thrust back in any old how. Passport scanned and stamped. One orange taken “for random inspection”. I’ve paid worse tolls. As long as the stack of Marie Therese thalers and the small change in my boot-heels made it through, I was good to go anywhere.
I walked under the arch and into Scotland.
* * * *
They don’t like you to call it Scotland, of course. Officially, East London is the capital of the GBR (which - the tired joke notwithstanding - doesn’t actually stand for “Gordon Brown’s Republic” but is the full name of the state, derived from the standard ISO abbreviation for “Great Britain” and accepted as its legal designation at the exhausted end of the 1978 UN Security Council session that imposed the settlement, ending the bloody civil war that followed the Colonels’ Coup of ‘73). But it’s mostly Scottish accents you hear on the streets, along with Asian and African and Islingtonian - the few thousand white working-class Londoners who stayed in the East are in high demand as faces and voices for the regime: actors, diplomats, border guards. North Britain (another name they don’t like) speaks to the world in a cockney accent.
I walked up Duncannon Street, avoiding eye contact with anyone in a plastic fake-leather jacket. The bank is still called the Royal Bank and the currency is still called the pound. Come to think of it, the Party is still called Labour. Zigzagging the Strand and Kingsway, I was 100 metres from Holborn when I noticed I was being followed. Usual stuff - corner of the eye, shop-window reflection, tail still there after I’d dashed across the four lanes (GBR traffic’s mercifully two-stroke, and sparse) and walked on. Worse, when I checked again in a parked wing-mirror the guy vanished in plain sight. (In my plain sight, that is. No one else noticed.)
Another sidewinder, then. One who knew I was on to him. Shit. Jack Straw’s boys (and girls) I could dodge with my eyes shut. This was different.
There’s a procedure for everything. For this situation, SOP is to take a long step sideways - chances are, the sidewinder who’s spotted you spotting him has just hopped into an adjacent probability (like, one where you took a different route) and is sprinting ahead to hop back further up the road (following his SOP, natch). But he’d know that, so if he knew I was a sidewinder... but I had no evidence of that, yet. Either way, the trick was to take a bigger or a smaller jump than he’d expect, but one that would still keep me on track to catch an Edinburgh train at King’s Cross.
I turned sharp left onto High Holborn and walked briskly towards the border. Long before I’d reached Princes Circus, I was the only person on the street. There isn’t a wall between East and
<
* * * *
Sidewinders
Ken MacLeod
1. The Trafalgar Gate
I bought a kilo of oranges in Soho - Covent Garden would have none at this time of year - and walked down Whitcomb Street and around the corner on Pall Mall to the Square. The Gate faced me, a concrete henge straddling the entrance to Duncannon Street. There wasn’t much of a queue, just a line four abreast filling the pavement along the front of the National Gallery and St Martin’s in the Fields. I passed the two hours it took me to get to the front reading the latest Amis fils in paperback. I turned the last page and chucked the Penguin to a hurrying, threadbare art student seconds before I’d have had to relinquish the book to the security bin.
“Papers, please.”
I resisted the temptation to monkey the guard’s cockney. String bag slung on the thumb, rope of my duffel bag clutched in the fingers of one hand, I passed the documents over with the other, for a frowning moment of scrutiny. Then the guard waved me on to the Customs table. Wanded, searched, duffel bag contents spread out and thrust back in any old how. Passport scanned and stamped. One orange taken “for random inspection”. I’ve paid worse tolls. As long as the stack of Marie Therese thalers and the small change in my boot-heels made it through, I was good to go anywhere.
I walked under the arch and into Scotland.
* * * *
They don’t like you to call it Scotland, of course. Officially, East London is the capital of the GBR (which - the tired joke notwithstanding - doesn’t actually stand for “Gordon Brown’s Republic” but is the full name of the state, derived from the standard ISO abbreviation for “Great Britain” and accepted as its legal designation at the exhausted end of the 1978 UN Security Council session that imposed the settlement, ending the bloody civil war that followed the Colonels’ Coup of ‘73). But it’s mostly Scottish accents you hear on the streets, along with Asian and African and Islingtonian - the few thousand white working-class Londoners who stayed in the East are in high demand as faces and voices for the regime: actors, diplomats, border guards. North Britain (another name they don’t like) speaks to the world in a cockney accent.
I walked up Duncannon Street, avoiding eye contact with anyone in a plastic fake-leather jacket. The bank is still called the Royal Bank and the currency is still called the pound. Come to think of it, the Party is still called Labour. Zigzagging the Strand and Kingsway, I was 100 metres from Holborn when I noticed I was being followed. Usual stuff - corner of the eye, shop-window reflection, tail still there after I’d dashed across the four lanes (GBR traffic’s mercifully two-stroke, and sparse) and walked on. Worse, when I checked again in a parked wing-mirror the guy vanished in plain sight. (In my plain sight, that is. No one else noticed.)
Another sidewinder, then. One who knew I was on to him. Shit. Jack Straw’s boys (and girls) I could dodge with my eyes shut. This was different.
There’s a procedure for everything. For this situation, SOP is to take a long step sideways - chances are, the sidewinder who’s spotted you spotting him has just hopped into an adjacent probability (like, one where you took a different route) and is sprinting ahead to hop back further up the road (following his SOP, natch). But he’d know that, so if he knew I was a sidewinder... but I had no evidence of that, yet. Either way, the trick was to take a bigger or a smaller jump than he’d expect, but one that would still keep me on track to catch an Edinburgh train at King’s Cross.
I turned sharp left onto High Holborn and walked briskly towards the border. Long before I’d reached Princes Circus, I was the only person on the street. There isn’t a wall between East and
Similar Books
Always You
Jill Gregory
Mage Catalyst
Christopher George
The Princess of Sparta: Heroes of the Trojan War
Aria Cunningham
Into the Future: A Callahan Novel
Celya Bowers
Exile's Gate
C. J. Cherryh
4 Terramezic Energy
John O'Riley
Ed McBain
Learning to Kill: Stories
Love To The Rescue
Brenda Sinclair
The Expeditions
Karl Iagnemma
The String Diaries
Stephen Lloyd Jones