Night Sessions, The Read Online Free Page B

without setting a bad example. He would see it for himself and walk out, never to enter such a den of iniquity again but confident that he had its measure.
    This was his fourth night in Edinburgh. His first day, after he'd met the elders, had been a complete washout and write-off. He'd crashed out on his hotel bed, woken around midnight, gone out hungry and had dinner at an all-night noodle shop behind the Gazprom tower. Then he'd crashed again, waking mid-morning as the cleaning robot nudged the door.
    His conclusion from the next three days of wandering around was that the streets of Edinburgh showed the benefits and drawbacks not of secular republicanism but of whopping military defeat. Campbell could see more clearly than ever why people in Britain, the US, and their former allies used the expression “the Faith Wars” for what everyone else referred to as the Oil Wars. Calling the catastrophes of the first two decades of the century the Faith Wars was the only way the former coalition countries could kid themselves they had won. They'd certainly defeated militant Islam, with secular republics now implanted throughout the Middle East. The Israel–Palestine issue could be regarded as solved, at least until the radiation dropped to a level that made the territory worth fighting over again.
    In every other respect, the US and the UK had been defeated: armies destroyed, economies bankrupted, the region they'd fought to dominate now preferring to do business with the energy-hungry rising powers of their competitors. All they'd got out of the whole mess was the Oil for Blood Programme, which funded generous benefits for coalition war veterans. The main internal political consequence was the Great Rejection, in which the religious factions who'd pushed for the war had had the unwelcome experience of seeing a nasty gleam in the eyes of the returning veterans, a little glint that said: You're next!
    But the later and longer consequences of that defeat were, Campbell now thought, far more profound. The UK had depended on US military dominance, and on its own partnership in that, to live off oil, arms deals and finance while letting its manufacturing and agriculture go hang. The loss of this privileged position had forced its successor states to fend for themselves, just as it had in the United States. The political consequences in Britain had been less drastic than the US civil war, but the industrial results were manifest everywhere: in the fragrant steam from the pavement stalls hawking late-night snacks to the Festival crowds, in the beetle-wing carapaces of the compressed-air cars hissing past on the wet street, in the whizz of bicycles weaving between them, in the neon signs on the new buildings that rose high in the gaps between the old, and in the quiet spiralling descent of the night flights overhead.
    Campbell reached the entrance of the Carthaginian. He wondered how many who went in would recognise the surely deliberate allusion to the building's name when it had been a church: St. Augustine's. The entrance way was dark, the booth a rectangle of light on the left. Knees quivering, eyes shifty, Campbell handed over his cash, accepted the ticket-stamp on the back of his hand, waved it at the scanner and stepped into the main hall.
    The room was dimly lit, crowded with people bopping and noisy with people talking. Roving spotlights and low-intensity lasers showed up coils and drifts of smoke in the air. At the far end was a pulpit, in which a tall man dressed in black and wearing a white clerical collar worked his machines. To the left of the entrance was a bar, with a cluster of seats and tables, all taken. Campbell decided to walk once around the room, buy a drink at the bar, observe some more and walk out.
    Everyone writhed and jived to the same rhythm, and when they spoke they leaned close to each other, some even speaking mouth to ear, but Campbell could hear no music. Now and then most of the faces Campbell could see