Engine City by Ken MacLeod

then, you are Fabians?”
    “Yes,” said Ennius. “Just as Wells was.”
    Volkov felt relieved that he’d got the connection right. It was about all he knew about Wells—another piece of trivia remembered from his philosophy classes. Other than that, the name of Wells conjured nothing for him but a vague image of heat rays and tentacles. Where did that come from? Ah, yes, The War of the Worlds. And there was something else, another title that had been mentioned in the lecture on the history of socialism . . . 
    He raised his half-empty glass. “To the war of the worlds,” he said. “And the modern Utopia!”
    Julia de Zama was inspecting him with a sardonic but admiring eye. She clinked her glass on his.
    “To the new Machiavelli,” she said.

    Lydia twirled, sending the pleats from the waist at the back of her chrysanthemum-print kimono-like robe flaring out, then tottered and grabbed the nearest pillar. She pushed away from it, recovering her balance and holding out her arms, the sunray-pleated sleeves opening like fans. She walked as though on a tightrope across the grass of the roof terrace to the table where Esias sat under a fixed umbrella with a jug of iced fruit juice and a stack of newspapers.
    “The platform shoes take some getting used to,” she admitted, taking a seat.
    So that was why she looked so tall.
    “But the main thing I like about this,” she went on, “is that it’s office wear. Isn’t it beautiful?”
    “Very pretty,” said Esias. “Gorgeous, in fact.”
    Lydia poured herself a drink and pouted around the straw. “You don’t sound too enthusiastic.”
    Esias rocked his seat back and waved a hand. “No, no, nothing to do with you. You’re lovely. I’m a bit disgruntled, that’s all. Our friend Volkov is up to his old tricks.”
    Lydia blushed, as well she might. Esias still simmered with disapproval over her involvement with Volkov’s intrigues on Croatan, a few jumps and a few months behind them, and he still harbored a deep suspicion that the Cosmonaut’s intentions toward his daughter were honorable. If they were having an affair, it was none of his business, any more than it had been when Volkov and Faustina had been going at it like rabbits. But if Volkov were to make a proposal, and Lydia were to accept, then he would find it difficult—in fact, outright embarrassing—to refuse it. And then he would lose his number seven daughter forever, unless—forlorn hope—Volkov’s project of remixing the elixir came to fruition in something less than a lifetime.
    But Lydia’s reply showed she’d kept her composure. “Trying to assemble a coalition of progressive forces, is he?”
    Esias groaned. The smatter of ugly jargon Lydia had picked up from the incorrigible ancient Communist was not the least of his bad influences.
    “It’s worse,” he said. “He seems to have found one.”
    He told her about the morning’s meetings. “This Modern Society”—he flicked at the stack of newspapers—“seems to be quite influential. It’s all talk, because the guilds and workshops are as conservative here as they are anywhere else—they’ll gladly seize on new machines, but not on great disruptions to their methods of work. Grand ideas about giant assembly lines don’t really appeal to them. But they have the most confused and exaggerated ideas about Earth, about the great independent achievements of mankind back in the Solar System, all based on the snippets that dribbled in from the ships that came back before we did. Heaven knows what’s going to happen when Volkov speaks to the Senate—they’ve already summoned him, and everyone knows it. There’s not a chance of that session’s being held in camera, and not a chance of his being discreet. The whole place is primed for Volkov to detonate.”
    Lydia gazed out over the upper tiers of the city shimmering in the heat haze, then back at her father.
    “I’m not so sure about that,” she said. “It’s not like Croatan was, with all that social discontent in Rawliston and their funny