Eminent Domain

by Carl Neville

  Well that’s quite an expression to be greeted by, he says. I know I am not the plus belle Verona but still.

  I think the Timeline’s malfunctioning, he says, panicked that Dominic might have noticed something.

  Really? Dominic asks, takes a step or two closer, squints, scrutinizes. Looks fine to me. The same incontrovertible laws of history on display there, comrade. You haven’t taken a chronodelic on top of all the other things you are on, have you?

  No.

  Have you taken the Peon-E? I thought perhaps that might boost your confidence a little with regard to the aforementioned and, he smiles over Tom’s shoulder, alerting him, imminently arriving Julia Verona.

  Hi, Julia says.

  Evening, Dominic replies. Quick drink everybody? He ushers them into the nearest Canteen where Tom finds himself repeatedly glancing back toward the Timeline as Dominic fills up the glasses from the taps on the far wall. He’s glad Dominic is so garrulous, socially skilled, he is having trouble collecting his thoughts. He reaches into his pocket and rummages through his pill pouch till he finds a Dev, knows them by touch, discreetly swallows one.

  You’re off to the Circuit and then then the Farm, if you don’t get sucked into the Enthusiasm, of course, he says, raising his eyebrows in mock horror.

  Can it be right? The change to the Timeline. No surely not. Just a prank. No one has more interest in the traditions that lead to the establishment of the PRB than he does, surely?

  Why is it called the Enthusiasm exactly? Julia asks.

  They’re partly inspired by D.E. Forster, one of the big poets of the Autarchy. Still alive, still popular.

  He’s reciting as part of the Games, actually, Tom says, attention snagged by this sudden talk of poetry. Dismisses his other anxieties. Yes, a prank. Nothing more.

  Tom will know the lines better than I.

  It’s from a poem called “Saint Monday to Friday”, sort of a joke title but quite a serious poem, the lines are, he coughs and looks serious himself,

  Let us move and make

  In the world

  Give, take, love, hate

  Furl and unfurl

  Against the given rhythm

  Lie fallow, wilt, die

  And sweep to life

  Only in Enthusiasm

  A poem for every occasion, Dominic says with a smile. When can we expect your own magnum opus to be finally issued?

  Oh, Tom demurs, blushes slightly. It’s a long apprenticeship, poetry.

  An awkward pause.

  So how do you two know each other? Were you at school together or…? Julia asks.

  Dominic puts his glass down. Our parents were part of the same circles early on, theatre people. We got on together rather well as very young children and our bond has endured.

  So your Mom and Dad are…

  Ah, Dominic says, and Tom feels a protective urge, pushes the Timeline from his mind again, Dominic’s father has been, I think, rather unfairly…

  Dominic leans across the table confidentially. Tom is being very kind, but essentially my father is, was, the playwright Alan McFarlane. It’s something of an open secret. Tom and his South Academy friends have been trying to rehabilitate him, possibly out of kindness to me.

  Oh, she says. Tom showed the movie of Safety for the Apes when he was over in the States. So, he is in…

  The States in fact, he says, tilts his glass toward her. California. I am afraid I have no memories of him at all. Nor can I be persuaded that his work is anything other than reactionary.

  He senses Julia is a little flustered, having to negotiate the PRB’s tangled history of alternate child-rearing and educational experiments, doesn’t want to be high-handed but his anxiety, probably his I.P.S., means he wants to intervene.

  So, Dominic was raised partly by his grandparents, I was raised by my mother, perhaps a little too closely, he says.

  Nonsense, Dominic says, Juliette has done a fine job. Tom nods, cheeks a little red. So, he says, as is often the case here in the PRB, neither of us knows our father.

  Urkive/Artist/Alan McFarlane/Biography

  Place of birth: The fUK/PRB

  Date of birth: 06/09/69

  Alan McFarlane, initially recognized for his dramatic satirical early theatre productions and involvement with a number of agitpol collectives from the 1990s onwards (see McFarlane: works here) is now best known as one of the highest profile PRB defectors (see Dissidents in the terminology sections). His early work uses satire, symbolism and mixed media formats to critique both the emerging structures of the PRB and the Co-Sphere and the pretensions of the pre-socialist elites across “Europe”.

  During the period of most intense domestic upheaval (1996-97) it was alleged that McFarlane was passing on information to Royalist and Landowner groups within the PRB, gleaned from his close relationship to members of the SSF and the Republican community through his marriage to the actress Soldemaine Bewes (here).

  Post-defection, McFarlane has continued to write and produce works in the United States (see QuantumSuicide series here) as well as maintaining an interest in the Bleekhour corporation, of which he was a co-founder with a number of European defectors (DuHaine here; Altborg here; see Spoonbill Labs here). Seed money was disbursed from Connaught’s Blackwater Investment group (see Connaught biography here; see Election campaign here; see PCSDF here; see Bleekhour here).

  A Conversation About Democracy

  Jennifer has arrived, her ROD guiding her to the table they have found in one of the quieter, long narrow rooms that fan off the circular central bar, where a large improvised Passocon and percussion session seems to have developed. Very interesting but far too loud to talk and the Peon-E seems to have made Julia Verona even more loquacious than usual.

  Dominic has ordered a number of bottles of local beer and a tray with a variety of low impact flavoured pharms. Tom finds he has been munching his way through them without having checked if they are contraindicated for I.P.S. and feels as though he has lost his already limited capacity to impose himself on the conversation.

  So, I know you have to vote, but I still don’t totally get what the Vote is. It’s about SSF, right? Where you work? I saw news about it, on the plane.

  He tries to respond but finds he is just sitting open mouthed gazing at Julia Verona’s profile.

  Dominic smiles and explains. Essentially, it’s all about access to information — files, records, reports and so on — that are deemed important for internal security, and also the historic record of the PRB. Let me show you. He gets up out of the armchair, goes and sits next to her. The sofa is old and maybe the springs are a little loose; they both sink deeper into it, the angle of the cushions tilting them toward each other as Dominic taps through to the relevant section on her ROD, their shoulders almost touching.

  Well, Dominic says, we have these handy little programmes that we can download into the ROD to fulfil certain tasks plets, very unofficial. This one aggregates, on the basis of what I have voted for before, the political proposals I am most likely to agree with, and then it votes for me, or if it’s higher priority and I have to sign in I can have one tap and vote whatever way I probably would have voted if I had actually read the proposal instead of the ROD reading it for me.

  Doesn’t that sort of undermine the process?

  Well if it’s something really important most people make the effort. Of course at some point you have to check the plet as it can start to decouple through a recursive process in which, incrementally, you start to slide out of your own political interests, so it’s important to check and recalibrate and make sure you aren’t voting for something you actually don’t agree with. As I said, very unofficial. Jennifer certainly disapproves.

  Oh nonsense, Jennifer says, drops her voice, there’s too much democracy not to automate a good proportion of it, but I do try to actively engage as frequently as possible.

  Tom nods along. Is his mouth still open? He pretends to rest his chin thoughtfully on his han
d, elbow on the table, to push it closed. Takes another purple pill with the other hand. It tastes of some unidentifiable fruit, a pinkish nimbus in his vision now, senses telescoping, the drum patterns from the far room growing louder, crowding in on him and bouncing about in the back of his mind like big multicoloured cushions.

  It is argued, Dominic says, that as long as it’s checked intermittently it makes better decisions than I do. We let the RODs know as much about us as possible so they can act on our behalf, silently fulfilling our civic and democratic duties all the better for our ignoring them. He laughs.

  You remember there was brief period back in the Thirties when they argued about the market economy and the impossibility of calculating enough to plan an economy centrally and so on? They said only the market, which is the aggregate of a million different decisions can—

  The invisible hand, Jennifer says. I remember those debates rather well.

  Tom watches his own softly pulsing purple hand float into the tray again and then stop there, throbbing, the pills beneath his fingers suddenly feel fascinatingly intricate in their texture.

  Yes, that was it, well in principle here we have an area where that idea is really useful, I mean just on a personal level. If I stop and think about a given proposal my decision will be affected by all kind of circumstantial factors, the weather, time, concentration, the degree to which I have understood the question, more importantly perhaps the idea I have of myself, how I might want to appear to myself, but there may be a deeper, not deeper but truer, more coherent self that emerges out of what I do and say every day, my interactions, preferences, who my friends are and all that, a self that I can’t see, that only the ROD can read, and so I trust largely the ROD to be my self, to know me in important ways that I can’t. The invisible self! The ROD moulds itself to more than just the shape of the hand! That’s one of our modern proverbs.

  No it is not, Jennifer says with a laugh. Dominic do contain yourself.

  Tom old man, Dominic asks. Everything alright? You might want to take a breather in one of the restrooms. It is still only 8:30.

  The giddiness induced by Julia’s presence in conjunction with the pills has subsided now, and though Tom knows the layout of the Hub well enough he seems to have got himself a little lost on the way back. He glances around the periphery of the big central room. How long has he been in the restroom? Have they left? And then he remembers they are off in one of the side rooms. He smiles, realises his sense of time and space is getting collapsed, he is confusing being in the Hub with being up at the TV3 centre in Glasgow last year. A tremendous venue, an almost completely modular building, fully automated, so that rooms, corridors, facilities, kept being added and taken away from the central hall depending on the flow of people through the building, their response to particular events. How exhilarating that had been, the sense of interaction between the crowd and the building itself, until by the end of the night the initially closed and confined space had opened up into a series of interlocking, walled gardens. Those walls had slowly lowered too and a performance of Signoff’s “The Rhapsody of Kyoto” had spilled over into the surrounding heath.

  Quite an evening! That dizzying, endless discovery of a world always changing and expanding, new rooms to be encountered, new forms to be experimented with, as the building and the performance ebbed and flowed, a world made and unmade at every moment in accordance with the responses of those who moved and lived within it, in whom new responses were created, the collective unfolding an upward cycle of discovery and delight.

  He wishes he could have taken Julia to that, that magical evening as he threads through all the fellow citizens, chairs and tables, banks of Passocons, percussion instruments, portable speakers that have accumulated around one side of the bar, the music, momentarily paused, starting up again on a wave of laughter as he passes. Wishes he could have taken her to the North to see the real life of the PRB. And here they are, Dominic and Julia, away in the corner of the room he must have left them in, no sign of Jennifer anywhere. Dominic is leaning forward and saying something in Julia’s ear, hand cupped against the sudden barrage of noise, and then…

  Yes, Glasgow would have afforded him a perfect opportunity to take her in his arms and suddenly…

  They kiss.

  Kiss her.

  He turns instinctively on his heels. Ah! Doesn’t want to get too close to them, disturb the moment, almost an action beyond his control. It’s as though they have catapulted him away, through all the jubilant electroacoustic improvisers back to the restroom where he sits down in a different kind of daze on the bench and says to himself, ah now, perhaps it was not as it seemed, just a friendly action, an American thing he doesn’t quite grasp, but still rather sudden for all that and besides, and here he quickly scrutinizes himself, as his training has taught him, looks at his own feelings through the Analytic Schema he has drawn up with his analysis group, and considers perhaps that his own reaction is ridiculous and indeed unacceptable. He returns to the example his group sessions have drawn out from him of something he had collected and squirreled away as a child, a coloured rubber ball he had found in the street, and how yes, it had seemed to appear out of nowhere, magically, and he had wanted it to be exclusively his and had hidden it under his pillow. Julia Verona is not a coloured ball. This morbid tendency he had to agglutinate desire in things, a consequence of the inability of his mother to let go of him, let him become a full person. In the way, say, Dominic was, and so could he really resent Julia’s attraction to him?

  He strolls around the restroom trying to calm his thoughts but not wanting to take a Dev, saying repeatedly to himself…

  … the passions, we must not be a slave to them.

  Still, quite a surprise. He feels a burst of anger toward them both, but Dominic in particular, so free and easy with love and his pleasures. Perhaps all this helpfulness in bringing her over, perhaps when Tom showed him her photograph he felt an attraction too, organized things to get to just such a moment alone with her. He has been unusually attentive, surprising that he should be here at all given how busy he is, committed to work.

  He pushes out several short breaths. Well that’s fine, it’s just a moment, a thing that’s happened, as much of a surprise to the two of them as it has been to him, probably, and what can you do about these attractions that exist between people and some people’s greater capacity to act on them? Are they to blame? No, no it’s your own irresoluteness, that’s the problem, look to yourself first, Tom.

  Oh, give me that man that is not passion’s slave!

  Indeed. Then, moved by the line and well, Shakespeare may be out of fashion but he wasn’t proscribed in any way, and so, quietly, the bathroom empty, he begins,

  and I will wear him

  whispering to his reflection in the mirror

  In my heart’s core, ay

  And moved by the lines pulls a tissue carefully from a dispenser next to the sink.

  in my heart of hearts,

  dabs at his eyes

  As I do

  gentle upswing on the final word, slight wobble in his voice

  thee!

  Another deep breath, then, feeling better, more certain of himself and in control, he returns to find that Julia is alone. Dominic seemingly having left, she has fallen into conversation with a serious-looking couple at the next table, discussing Vernon Crane’s Resolution Way.

  A Conversation about Resolution Way

  That world? Well, it’s a world in which the Hungarian document never existed, or never achieved prominence.

  Yes. But a world can’t be made or unmade on the basis of a single document. History doesn’t really work that way.

  Or in which it existed, but more tragically it was never acted on. Would you say you knew how history worked, then?

  No, I would only claim to know how it doesn’t work.

  Of course many people disagree with its assessment.

  Of course but it became powerful as what Strickland calls
an “operative fiction”.

  I think Resolution Way is pitched at that moment when the second wave of the crises breaks, when the attempt to alleviate the first crises foments a crisis of its own.

  Of course the USSR appears to have disappeared completely somehow, which I think is the most unrealistic element of the book.

  So we must assume that the aitch-dee’s analysis of the problematics of the Soviet state as was were also correct. So, we have the collapse of the communist world, crisis and a kind of colonialism done through dollars and finance.

  Of course, but the book needs to spell that out at some point. How would workers in Europe have been crushed, would the USSR just have collapsed, who would have been the leaders through the period of crisis and so on, how would the decolonization and the formulation of a pan-African state have been prevented? And all without a major war? How would they even have de-unionized the PRB, stopped the growth of the institutions, the communist parties here and across Europe post-58?

  Of course, but the Hungarian document allowed us to say, yes this is the horizon of the failure of both systems, we must shift over to a different model, it was vital that the Russian leadership understood that it was heading for oblivion anyway and that it could be cancelled out ultimately by capitalism or it could self-negate through a move to a genuinely communist ownership system.