of unreality the city inspired, the sense of
continually stepping from one continuum to
another.Instead of the West running everything on
its side, and the East everything on its, the East ran
the S-bahn (above ground) on both sides, the West
the U-bahn (underground) on both sides; the U-
bahn served those ghostly stations under the East
and the S-bahn had its own tumbledown, weed-
strewn stations in the West.Both ignored the wall,
indeed, because the S-bahn went over the top of
it.And the S-bahn went underground in places.And
the U-bahn surfaced frequently.Let me labour the
point and say that even double-decker buses and
double-decker trains added to the sense of a multi-
layered reality.In a place like Berlin, wrapping the
Reichstag up like a parcel wasn't even remotely as
weird an idea as the city was itself.
I went once via Friedrichstrasse and once through
Checkpoint Charlie, into the East.Sure enough,
there were places where time seemed to have
stopped there too, and many of the buildings and
signs looked as though a patina of dust had started
settling over them thirty years ago, and never been
disturbed since.There were shops in the East
where one could only spend foreign
currency.Somehow they just didn't look like real
shops; it was as though some seedy entrepreneur
from a degenerate semi-socialist future had tried to
create a fairground display modelled on a late
twentieth-century capitalist shop, and failed,
through lack of imagination.
It wasn't convincing.I wasn't convinced.I was a
little shaken, too.Was this farce, this gloomy
sideshow trying to mimic the West - and not even
doing that very well - the best job the locals could
make of socialism?Maybe there was something so
basically wrong with them even the ship hadn't
spotted it yet; some genetic flaw that meant they
were never going to be able to live and work
together without an external threat; never stop
fighting, never stop making their awful, awesome,
bloody messes.Perhaps despite all our resources
there was nothing we could do for them.
The feeling passed.There was nothing to prove this
wasn't just a momentary, and - coming so early -
understandable aberration.Their history wasn't so
far off the mean track, they were going through
what a thousand other civilizations had gone
through, and no doubt in the childhood of each of
those there had been countless occasions when all
any decent, well-balanced, reasonable and
humanely concerned observer would have wanted
to do was scream in despair.
It was ironic that in this so-called Communist
capital they were so interested in money; at least a
dozen people came up to me in the East and asked
me if I wanted to change some.Would this
represent a qualitative or quantitative change?I
asked (blank looks, mostly). 'Money implies
poverty,' I quoted them.Hell, they should engrave
that in stone over the hangar door of every GCU.
I stayed for a month, visiting all the tourist haunts,
walking and driving and training and busing
through the city, sailing on and swimming in the
Havel, and riding through Grunewald and Spandau
forests.
I left by the Hamburg corridor, at the ship's
suggestion.The road went through villages stuck in
the fifties.The eighteen fifties, sometimes; chimney
sweeps on bikes wore tall black hats and carried
their black-caned brushes over their shoulders like
huge sooty daisies stolen from a giant's garden.I
felt quite self-conscious and rich in my big red
Volvo.
I left the car on a track by the side of the Elbe that
night.A module sighed out of the darkness, dark on
dark, and took me to the ship, which was over the
Pacific at the time, tracking a school of sperm
whales directly beneath and plundering their great
barrel-brains with its effectors while they sang.
4: Heresiarch
4.1:Minority Report
I should have known not to tell Li'ndane about
Paris and Berlin, but I did.I was floating in the AG
space with a few other people after a dip in the
ship's pool.I'd actually been talking to my friends,
Roghres Shasapt and Tagm Lokri, but Li was there,
eavesdropping avidly.
'Ah,' he said, floating over to wag one finger under
my nose. 'That's it.'
That's what?'
'That monument.I see it now.Think about it.'
'The memorial to the Deportation, in Paris, you
mean.'
'Cunt.That's what I mean.'
I shook my head. 'Li, I don't think I know what
you're talking about.'
'Ah, he's just lusting,' Roghres said. 'He pined
when you left last time.'
'Nonsense,' Li said, and flicked a blob of water at
Roghres. 'What I'm talking about is this; most
memorials are like pricks; cenotaphs;
columns.That monument Sma saw is a cunt; it's
even in a divide of the river; very pubic.From this,
and Sma's overall attitude, it's obvious that Sma is