Fractions (11 page)

He realized with a shock the exact reason for the generation-gap represented on the platform: old enough to be his grandparents, young enough to be his brother; none of an age to have been his parents. It was the classic population profile of annihilating defeat.

Before he knew it the meeting was finished. People were milling around, getting drinks in, clustering at the literature table, shoving chairs out of rows and into circles…Moh was wondering how to get talking to someone when the space-rigger walked over.

‘Fancy a pint, lads?'

Moh spun a couple of chairs into position. ‘I'll get them,' he said. ‘You're the one who's out of work.'

Logan laughed. ‘I'm still one of the orbital labour aristocracy,' he said, ‘and you've just been on strike,
jes
? So – what you having?'

He came back from the bar a few minutes later and started talking, mostly with Stone but including Moh in the conversation with quick glances and remarks. He'd obviously noted Stone's contribution and picked him out as a good militant and potential recruit. Moh, who had assimilated the Dale Carnegie school of Trotskyist party-building from the age of about eight, gave the conversation half his attention. At some point Logan would get some commitment out of Stone – a meeting arranged, phone numbers exchanged, a subscription bought – and then switch his main attention to Moh.

He looked around for anyone he might recognize, sadly thinking the old comrades hadn't been such old comrades after all, and saw an unchanged, familiar face frowning down at the now-deserted table of pamphlets. Moh bounded over.

‘Bernstein!' The face that turned to him, though lined and leathery, hadn't gained a line in the six years since Moh had last seen it. The receding shock of white hair hadn't receded further. For a moment Moh was puzzled that Bernstein didn't recognize him; then he remembered that the last time he'd looked at this face he'd been looking
up.

‘I'm Moh Kohn,' he said.

Bernstein stared at him, then shook his hand vigorously. ‘Amazing!' he said. ‘I would never have known you.'

‘You haven't changed.'

Bernstein nodded absently. ‘What brings you here?' He patted the stack of books and pamphlets he was about to buy, and added, ‘You know what brings me here. Real collector's pieces, this lot.'

‘Uh-huh.' Bernstein had fallen out with (and from) the Fourth International as a result of some split that he was by now the only living person able to explain, and had embarked on the sisyphean project of writing the movement's definitive history. An indefatigable archivist in his own right, he made some kind of living by trading in rare items of every conceivable persuasion of radical literature. Moh's father had been one of his regular customers.

Moh wasn't sure how to answer his question. What
had
brought him here?

He shrugged. ‘Curiosity,' he said.

Bernstein looked past him and said, ‘Let's join your friends.'

‘Can I get you a drink?'

‘Thought you'd never ask. Guinness, please.'

When Moh returned from the bar he found Stone, Bernstein, Logan and the old man and woman around the table in an animated discussion. After a few minutes Logan turned to him and said, ‘And you're Moh Kohn, right?'

‘Hi.' Moh raised his glass. ‘Pleased to meet you, too.'

They talked for a bit about working in space and about their respective unions. Moh found himself beginning to relax. Then Logan shot him an awkward glance.

‘You're Josh Kohn's son?'

‘Yes,' Moh said. ‘If it matters.'

Logan looked back at him calmly, then leaned closer. ‘Something I wanted to ask you,' he said. ‘Do you know anything about the Star Fraction?'

‘The “Star Fraction”?' He could see from Logan's face that he'd spoken too loudly, and out of the corner of his eye he could see why: Bernstein had cocked an ear in their direction. ‘No.' He hesitated. ‘It…sort of…rings a bell, but…' He shook his head. ‘Nah. It's gone. Sounds like what you must be in.'

‘I guess you could say I'm in the space fraction.' Logan laughed. ‘I
am
the space fraction.'

‘Must make for interesting internal discussions.'

‘
Jes
, it does.'

‘So what is this Star Fraction?'

Logan glanced at Bernstein, then at the two old cadres. Moh saw the old man nod slightly. Logan leaned forward, elbows on knees, held out his open hands. ‘We don't know. Josh was the Party's, the
International
's, software wizard. He really pushed for using the net, using crypto and all that, from way back. You could say he got us into cyberspace. There were big arguments…faction fights…about that. Hard to believe, now.'

Bernstein snorted. Logan smiled and continued. ‘Anyway, some of the systems he set up survived the war, the
EMP
hits and all that and escaped the big clean-outs during the Peace Process. Impressive. We, that is the
FI
, still use them as far as we can.'

‘How d'you know that they aren't compromised by now?' Bernstein asked.

‘There are test protocols,' the old man said. He was not going to explain further. Moh thought he understood. There must be ways of testing the security of any such system by running schemes that, if intercepted, would have to provoke a response.

Hairy, and not the sort of thing you'd want to talk about.

‘Every so often,' Logan continued, ‘we come across references to the Star Fraction. Sometimes urgent messages telling its – members? whatever –
not to do anything.
Yet.'

He sat back with a what-do-you-make-of-that? expression.

‘Probably one of
Josh's
test protocols,' Bernstein said, raising a laugh.

‘Could be,' Logan said. ‘If you ever find anything about it, Moh, tell us. Please.'

Moh looked at the young cadre and the old cadres with some bitterness. ‘If I ever find anything – that's a good one. We lost everything. The fucking Yanks took the house apart and took it away, after…after…' He couldn't go on. ‘And I've never known why. None of you
bastards
ever told us.'

The bright, bare room was silent. Everyone else had gone home or into the main part of the pub. Down to the hard core again.

‘I'm looking for some answers,' Moh said.

The old woman reached out and laid a hand on his arm. ‘How could we tell you? You and your sister disappeared. And we don't know, ourselves. The Party lost a lot of people in the Peace Process, but that was down to the Restoration forces, the Hanoverians. Hell, you know that. Josh and Marcia were the only ones the
US/UN
came after.' She drew a deep breath and shuddered. ‘Mandatory summary execution, asset forfeiture – that was standard Yank practice at the time, for arms and drugs.'

‘But they weren't—' Moh began indignantly, then stopped. It was entirely possible that they were. Arms, anyway.

‘And black software,' Bernstein said. ‘Makes sense, from what you've said.'

Moh felt a surge of relief and gratitude. Black software – yes. For the first time it
did
all make sense: it wasn't just an arbitrary atrocity. But if that was the answer it raised further questions.

‘What kept him working on it right up to—?'

‘Not us,' the old woman said. ‘I would have known if he was doing a job for the Party. He wasn't.'

She sounded sincere, and Moh warmed to her warmth, but he didn't trust her statement. As far as he was concerned, anybody who held a Party or a programme, a political project spanning centuries, as their highest value was perfectly capable of lying in their teeth. If you could die for something you could lie for it.

But he'd found part of the answer, something that connected his parents' deaths with their lives. Some of his inward tension eased, some of his hostility to the Party relaxed.

Logan stayed on after Bernstein and the old comrades had gone away. He took Stone and Moh into the bar and stood them a few more rounds and told them what the Party was trying to do.

Moh listened, not seeing ghosts any more but seeing as if through the transplanted retinae of a dead man's eyes. You never lost that vision. You saw the patterns recur: endless orbit, permanent revolution. The phylogeny of parties, the teratology of deformed workers' states, the pathology of bureaucratic degeneration…Now the space movement was at it, running its little anarcho-capitalist enclaves here on Earth and coexisting with the Yanks everywhere else.

‘That's where we come in,' Logan said. ‘We need to build a fighting left wing of the space movement, turn it into something that'll do more against the
US/UN
than sponsoring private rocketry and asteroid mining. And when I say “left wing” I don't mean socialist, I mean militant. Because you don't need me to tell you that any serious attempt to get out of this shit is gonna have to take on the state, and these days that ultimately means Space Defense.'

Stone frowned, struggling with the scale and audacity of what the tiny organization Logan spoke for was aiming at. ‘You mean,' he said doubtfully, ‘you're working in the space movement, to turn it into—'

‘The
Space and Freedom Party
!' Kohn said gleefully.

He knew what was going on. The Party (the real Party, the hard core, the International) had always had two aspects. One, the one Kohn remembered from the days of the Republic, was public, in-your-face: the unfurled banner, the open Party, the infuriating newspaper. The other, the way of surviving bad times, was when its members became faces in the crowd, known only to each other.

Like the Star Fraction, Moh thought.

‘Well,' he said, when he and Stone finally, reluctantly, had to leave, ‘you can forget about recruiting me. I won't be told what to do.' He saw Logan about to interject. ‘Don't try to tell me that isn't what it's like. But – I'm a paid-up, smart-card-carrying member of the union and of the space movement, and if there's something you want done…you can always ask.'

‘OK,' Logan said. ‘OK. Good night, comrades.'

 

Good years, years when he faced no threats, just dangers: no problems, only difficulties. Building the union and building Norlonto's towers flowed in his mind into one constructive task, a matter of organizing, of coordinating work. He took on more responsibilities for the union at the same time as he upgraded his skills, learning to handle the new machines – space-platform spin-offs, mostly – that were making on-site work less like trench warfare against raw nature. After a while he came under pressure from the union to become a full-time organiser, from the company management to become a supervisor. He took the union job, got bored after a year, but found it difficult after that to get taken on again by any company. He and Stone set up as a subcontracting cooperative – capitalists themselves. They got work that way all right, and stayed scrupulously in the union's good books, as well as on its membership list.

He occasionally heard from Logan, or ran into him in bars around the spaceport. Logan had adopted the same solution to his employment problems. He never called Moh to do anything for the Party but would occasionally admit or boast that some piece of political infighting in the space movement was not entirely accidental.

Early one summer morning they pulled up their truck outside a site entrance near Alexandra Port to find their way blocked by a score of people with placards. Some building workers stood arguing with the pickets.

‘Oh, shit,' Stone said. ‘A strike. Well, that's it.' He reached for the ignition key.

Kohn frowned. ‘Just a minute. Don't see any of the workers on that picket line.'

He jumped out and went over to talk to one of the building workers, a steward he knew.

‘Hi, Mike. What's the problem? I thought I'd have heard about a strike.'

Mike grimaced. ‘It's not a strike, Moh, it's a fuckin demo. Greens. They don't like what we're building.'

‘Well, fuck
them.
' He looked over the small crowd. Lumpens and petty bourgeois, no doubt about it. Not an honest-to-God proletarian to be seen. The placards had slogans like
STOP THE DEATH BEAMS.
‘What is this shit? This isn't—' He stopped to think. ‘It's not a scam, is it, Mike? They haven't got us working on some military job without telling us, have they?'

‘No,' Mike said. ‘It's all legit. Research lab, space-movement sponsored. Nice contract.'

Nice contract all right, Moh thought. Massive walls, klicks of cable, flashy electronics. Test-bed for laser launchers – ‘steam-beams', as the nickname went. Stick your payload on top of a tank of water, point a tracking laser at it,
boil
the sucker into orbit.

‘So it's not a picket line, right? So why don't we just—'

He noticed Mike pointing with his chin, turned and checked over the nearest greens. Big, tough. Tougher than building workers. Looked like farmers, travellers, bikers. And tooled up: monkey wrenches, very thick sticks on the placards. Heavy electric torches sticking out of pockets. Peasants with torches.

‘Where's the movement militia then?'

Mike shrugged. ‘Never there when you need them.'

Kohn looked at him, baffled. That wasn't what he knew of the militia. Before he could say anything a tall, long-haired and long-bearded man in homespun trousers and a greased jacket loomed over them and said, ‘Yeah, the space cadets ain't comin, so piss off.'