Fractions (13 page)

‘Next little problem, and this is where the good music starts, is…last night I winged Cat. She's OK, right, no worries. But she was on a crank bomb team. Talked to her in hospital, and it looks like the Left Alliance have put their muscle where their mouth's been for a long time, about gan-gin up with the greens and all that lot. Big push coming. We're talking, like, soon. Weeks, days. Plus the
ANR
. Cat was going on about them holding out – you know what she's like.
My
guess is it's only a matter of time before they come to some kind of arrangement.

‘You don't need me to tell you this puts us in a bit of a sticky position.' He laughed as if to himself. ‘Sticky position, hah, that's a good one.' He was standing now, leaning his fists on the table. ‘What I want to know is,
why the fuck did we not know about this
?'

He sat down again, turned to Janis and added, in a tone of casual explanation: ‘Felix Dzerzhinsky
Collective
, my ass.'

The argument went on from there.

 

If Moh had hoped to divert them into mutual recrimination over a setback on the intelligence front, he didn't succeed for long. Most of them insisted they'd logged all the rumours they'd run across, and found them evaluated as just that: rumours.

What really agitated them was the prospect of more situations like the one Moh had unwittingly found himself in, of shooting at people who, in terms of their political affiliations and personal relations, were on the same side as themselves. Much of the increasingly heated discussion went past Janis's ears, but she could see a polarization taking place: Moh, Dafyd and Stone took the view that it changed nothing, while Mary and Alasdair argued for calling off any engagements that would bring them into conflict with the Left. The others were being pulled one way or the other. Moh, to her surprise and relief, contributed little to the debate other than the odd sardonic laugh or dry chuckle, such as when someone used the expression ‘what these comrades fail to understand…'.

But it was Moh who brought the discussion to an end, with a cough and a slight shrug of his shoulders.

He stood up again. ‘OK,' he said, ‘we can't take a vote now, too many of us're out on active. What I propose is this: as a co-op we honour existing contracts. Any individual members who find they have a problem with defending particular installations, ask to be relieved beforehand. Anyone who takes an assignment and then bottles out is considered to have gone independent and takes full liability. And let's get this in perspective, OK? We've always used minimum force.'

He paused, as if trying to work something out, then continued. ‘My conscience is clear. One more thing:
if
this goes beyond isolated sabbing and turns into a real offensive, all bets are off. That's in the small print of all our contracts anyway. Everyone go along with that?'

They did, though Alasdair was the last and most reluctant to nod agreement.

‘What about if there
is
an
ANR
offensive?' Dafyd asked. Everyone else laughed. He looked offended. Moh leaned over and grasped his shoulder.

‘If that happens, man,' he said, ‘we do exactly what it says in the contract; we give our full support to the legitimate authorities!'

As Janis watched the laughter, the visible relaxation that this comment brought, she reflected on what it meant. Not its literal meaning but its studied ambiguity – Moh, or somebody, must have taken great delight in smuggling that clause into the small print. With all their disagreements, with their obvious cynicism and scepticism about the
ANR
, they took it for granted that its aims and arms were just.

As did she: it was an underlying premise, now that she came to think of it, for most of the people she knew. Long before they had come to power the Republicans had referred to the British state, the old establishment, as ‘the Hanoverian regime', and now, long after the Republic's fall, everybody called the restored Kingdom by that derisory name. Few took seriously the
ANR
's claim to be the legal government, but few dismissed it entirely. In its controlled zones, dispersed and remote, and in the back of people's minds, the Republic still existed. It had hegemony. That much it had already won.

Stone interrupted the now more social conversation with a remark about some people having jobs to go to. There was a sudden scramble for weapons, and in a few minutes she was alone with Moh and Mary Abid.

‘Time for the news,' Mary said. Janis looked around for a
TV
screen.

Mary smiled. ‘We roll our own,' she said.

She cleared a space in the electronic clutter, sat down, adjusted a light, and suddenly was a professional-looking newscaster, expertly patching together agency material with jerky head-camera stuff from comrades on demonstrations, in street fights, unionizing space rigs, crawling through dangerous industrial processes…Janis, watching it on a monitor, was rather unwillingly impressed. Most defence agencies televised their own activities and used the results as both crime programme and self-advertisement, but this group seemed to be trying to make a genuine political intervention as well.

‘How many subscribers have you got?' she asked when Mary had signed off.

Mary shook out her hair, which she'd tied back for her screen image. ‘A few hundred,' she said. ‘It doesn't bring in much, except when one of the bigger opposition networks picks up something we've put out. Lots of groups do it, swap stories and ideas and so on all the time, on the net. Gets to people who don't want to sift through all that but don't want to rely on the standard filters.'

‘All the anti-
UN
groups feed off each other,' Moh said. ‘It's a global conspiracy of paranoids. The Last International.'

Mary shot him a black look from under her black hair.

‘Janis is all right,' Moh said. The banter had gone out of his voice. Mary looked at him for a moment, frowning, then turned to Janis with a smile that didn't hide her embarrassment.

‘No offence?' she said. Janis shook her head, feeling she'd missed something. Before she could ask what it was Moh said: ‘Oh well, might as well see what the other side has to say.'

The main news filters were, for once, agreed about what the lead item was: Turkish troops had fired on a demonstration on Sofia. The Russians had warned that they shared a ‘Christian and orthodox heritage' (or, on some readings, ‘Orthodox'; war critics earnestly debated whether they meant Orthodox Christian or orthodox Communist) with the Bulgars and would not tolerate indefinitely these outrages. The President of Kurdistan was shown boarding a
KLM
Tupolev for Moscow on what was officially described as a routine meeting with the President of the Former Union.

Mary made a gloating O-sign and left.

The news item about the day's software disruptions, now irremovably pinned on the cranks, came well after the news about a
US/UN
warning to a Japanese car company.

‘Not a word about wildcard
AIS
and smart drug breakthroughs,' Moh said as he switched the screen off. ‘Knew it. Capitalist media cover-up!'

‘Didn't see anything in your alternative media,' Janis said.

‘Lucky for us.'

‘Yeah…Aren't you going to tell the…comrades anything about all of that?'

Moh scratched his head. ‘Not as such.'

‘Hardly comradely, is it?'

‘Oh, but it is. It'd be difficult to explain, and they don't need to know. It wouldn't lessen any danger they might be in. Might even increase it, what you don't know can't be—'

Can't be got out of you, she thought. She nodded sombrely.

‘So what are we going to do?'

‘There was this guy I met years ago, name of Logan. A space-rigger who was grounded. He was in the Fourth International—'

In response to her puzzled look, Moh dipped his finger in a splash of wine on the table and traced the hammer-and-sickle-and-4 while saying, ‘Tiny socialist sect, would-be world socialist party. Trotskyists. Same organization as my father was in. Logan was kind of intrigued to meet me. It was like…he was expecting something from me. He asked me if I knew about the “Star Fraction”. He was in the space fraction. That was something else.'

‘Sounds close enough,' Janis smiled, trying to cheer him up. ‘A different faction, perhaps?'

‘Not the same thing. Faction and fraction. Not the same thing.'

‘What's the difference?'

‘You can have a faction inside a fraction,' he told her with self-mocking pedantry, ‘but not a fraction inside a faction.'

‘That really clears it up. Why can't you have a—'

‘Democratic centralism. Or maybe dialectical materialism.' He grinned at her. ‘I forget.'

‘Where's Logan now? Back in space?'

‘Yeah, he got off Earth again, but he was blacklisted to the Moon and back. I lost touch with him after a few jumps. The only person who might know where he is is Bernstein.'

‘Who's Bernstein?'

Moh looked surprised. ‘Everybody knows Bernstein.'

‘I don't. Is he on the net?'

Moh laughed. ‘No, the old bastard's done too much time on semiotics charges for that. He's a hard-copy man, is Bernstein.'

Janis decided to let that lie.

‘All right, so what do we do now?'

‘Well, I'm expecting to find a few people down at the local pub who might know more about what's going on. Check out a few things with them, maybe get some leads. After that we can stay here overnight, look up Bernstein in the morning, then hit the road.'

‘The road to where?'

Moh grinned at her. ‘Ah, I haven't thought that far ahead yet. Let's discuss it in the pub.'

‘Now you're talking.' The desire to relax in a sociable civilian place, to let a little alcohol smooth over the rough day, came into her like a thirst. Her mouth felt dry. ‘Where can I crash out afterwards?'

‘My room's free,' Moh said. There was no insinuation in his tone.

‘And what about you?'

‘I'll find a place.'

It could mean anything. She gave him a speculative smile. ‘Do you ever sleep?'

‘I took a tab.'

‘Oh yeah. You didn't score it at that disco, did you? Off a blonde girl?'

She could see his eyes widen. ‘How the fuck did you know?'

‘“Wakesh you up jusht like zhat”,' she mimicked derisively. ‘Well, let me tell you, in another four hours you're gonna fall asleep jusht like zhat.'

They lugged her bag upstairs. Moh's room was on the second floor at the back of the house. It was bigger than she'd expected, with a double bed, a large wardrobe. Lots of old political posters, a metre-wide video screen.

‘I need a shower,' Moh said, ‘and all my stuff's here—' He sounded almost apologetic.

‘Get on with it, idiot.'

She idly flicked through Moh's collection of diskettes while he disappeared into the adjoining shower room. One box was labelled ‘
CLASSICS
', and the worn sleeves suggested the films had been watched many times:
El Cid, Battle of Algiers, 2001, Z, Life of Brian
…She smiled.

He had few books, but racks and stacks of political pamphlets: she found a copy of
The Earth is a Harsh Mistress
, the original manifesto of the space movement, glossy with old holograms;
The Secret Life of Computers
, which had the same scriptural status for the
AI
-Abolitionists; a neo-Stalinist tract called
Did Sixty Million Really Die?
; she turned over the brittle pages of a pamphlet published a century ago in New York,
The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International
– it was subtitled
The Transitional Program.
Weird, she thought. Did they have computers back then?

She glanced over the first couple of pages: ‘Mankind's productive forces stagnate. Already, new inventions and improvements fail to raise the level of material wealth.' Oh, so they did have computers. ‘Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.' She didn't get it; she had what she knew was a commonplace notion that communists were basically OK, always banging on about markets and democracy and sensible stuff like that, whereas anything to do with socialism was a catastrophe that threatened the entire culture of mankind. It was something she'd have to sort out sometime. Not now. She put the pamphlet back.

Among the posters was a black-and-white photograph of a strikingly pretty young woman in overalls, looking up apparently from repairing an internal-combustion engine; she was caught with eyes widening, a smile just starting, pushing her hair back with the wrist of an oily hand.

She guessed this must be Cat.

Moh emerged wearing a collarless shirt, black leather trews and waistcoat. She didn't give him time to leave again while she rummaged through her own costly bales, asking him trivial questions about the household while taking off the blouse and culottes and sliding into trousers and top and shawl jacket, all black silk.

‘How do I look?' she asked. ‘Sort of normal for this area?'

She still thought of Norlonto as basically a vast bohemian slum, where expensive gear could incite suspicion or robbery.

‘If you walked around in nothing but that fancy corset of yours,' Kohn said, ‘nobody'd look twice.'

‘Thanks a bunch.'

Jordan laid his rucksack on the ground and leaned against the small and unoccupied bit of wall between a telesex shop and a dive called The Hard Drug Café. He felt every face that passed as a soft blow against his own, and a vague, guilty nausea, like a boy after his first cigarette. Ever since he'd walked up that hill and on to the Broadway he had been sent reeling by the bizarre and decadent impressions of the place. It was wilder than his wildest imaginings, and this was just the fringe. Neon and laser blazed everywhere, people did things in shop windows that he never suspected anyone did in a bedroom, fetches and hologhosts taunted and flaunted through the solid bodies around him. The bodies themselves astonished him, even after he had stopped gawping at the women, some of whom wore clothes that exposed their breasts, buttocks and even legs. A space-adaptee cut across the pavement in an apparatus spawned from a bicycle out of a wheelchair which he vigorously propelled with arms and – well, arms, which he had as lower limbs. Now and then, metal eyes with no iris or pupil met his glance and sent it away baffled. This, he knew, was known as culture shock. Knowing what it was didn't make it go away.

After several people had broken stride as they passed and looked at him as if expecting something he realized that all he'd have to do would be to hold out a cupped hand, and they would put money in it. Furious, he straightened his back, then stooped and lifted his pack again. He was a businessman, not a beggar, and he had business to attend to.

The Hard Drug Café looked a good place to start.

 

Its name was traditional, a bad-acid flashback to an earlier time. The only drugs going down here were coffee by the litre, amphetamines by the mil and anti-som by some unit of speed. Steamed wall-mirrors multiplied the place's narrow length; virtual presences fleshed out its sparse clientele to a crowd. Looks from behind glades glanced off him as he picked his way to the counter; then they returned to their animated conversations. He took a pleasure more perverse than any he'd seen so far in being thus accepted. Another nerd.

He ordered a coffee and a sandwich whose size didn't quite justify its name, Whole Earth; declined the offer of smart or fast drugs. He lowered the pack and himself into a corner seat, and familiarized himself with the table modem while the order was being prepared. When it arrived he sat eating and drinking for a few minutes.

It felt weirdly like starting work in the morning…Then the thought of how different it was gave him a jolt and a high which he was sure must be better than any drug on the menu could have given him. He took from his pocket a tough plastic case, opened it and lifted a set of glades and a hand-held from the styrofoam concavities inside. He'd bought them at the first hardware shack he'd reached. They still had an almost undetectable friction that indicated, not stickiness, but the absence of the ineradicable microslick of human oils on plastic. His fingertips destroyed as they confirmed the certainty that they were the first to touch them. He eased them on and looked around to find nothing visibly different but his reflection in the mirrors. Wiping the wall beside him with his sleeve he inspected himself sidelong. For a giddy moment he was drawn into the image of his own reflection in the reflected glades. Then he pulled back and indulged a brief surge of vanity over how much more serious and dangerous and mysterious he looked.

He caught a passing smirk, and turned away.

He brushed his hand back through his bristly hair, then felt behind his ear for a tiny knob at the end of the sidepiece. When he pulled, it drew out a slender cable; it came with the resistance of a weighted reel, withdrawing if he relaxed the pull. He extended it all the way and connected it to the hand-held, then jacked into the modem.

His first explorations were modest, tentative: after installing and booting the software and setting up a default fetch he opened an account with a local branch of the Hong Kong & Shanghai, then arranged for them to liquidate his share in his company. It was a tidying up, a formality: his two partners came out of it richer in increased stock than he did in ready cash. He just counted himself lucky the Deacons hadn't frozen his assets. Even through all the levels of anonymity, the transaction made his bones quake. When it was over, he had no property in Beulah City. He leaned back and signalled for another coffee. When it came he stared into it, forcing himself to think.

Froth on the top went around: spiral arms held in their whorl by the hot dark matter beneath, turning one way while the rest of the universe went the other…
e pur si muove.
The argument from design. The Blind Watchmaker.

This could have been the last day: the hour of the Watchmaker. Mrs Lawson's fear had seemed genuine. It was there and it was everywhere, in all the fractured cultures; godless or godly, they all had at the back of their minds the insidiously replicating meme which said that one day a system would wake up and say to its creators: ‘Yes,
now
there is a God.'

Blessed are the Watchmakers, for they shall inherit the earth.

Jordan had been raised with a sense of imminence, an ability to live with the possibility that The End Was At Hand. Disappointments dating from the turn of the millennium had shaped the Christian sects, a lesson reinforced by the inconclusive Armageddon that had been over before he was born. The interpreters of
Revelation
had been made to look foolish, even to people who still tolerated the equally uninspired interpreters of
Genesis.
The conviction that the imminent end was unpredictable strengthened the expectation: two thousand years and counting, and still
Coming Soon.

If they could do it, Jordan thought, then so could he. Bracketing the outside chance that all speculation was about to be rendered irrelevant, what did he had to go on? A contact with a (claimed) Black Planner; a wad of money; some worries from an unreliable source about odd happenings on the networks; and an undeniable series of spectacular system crashes.

Well, he could do a search on that, cross-reference them and see what came up. He drained his cup, smoothed out the instruction leaflet and poked out a key sequence that everyone else here could probably do with their eyes shut.

DoorWays
^™
opened on to the world: the kingdoms and republics; the enclaves and principalities; the anarchies, states and utopias. With a silent yell he flung himself into the freedom of the net.

In virtual space Beulah City was far, far away.

The sky came down to the rooftops here, same as anywhere else. As he walked along the high street Kohn saw past the near horizon in an inescapable awareness that the sky before him was as far away as the sky above, a dizzying horizontal height. He was as conscious of the motion of the earth as previously he'd been of the time of day. Not for the first time he was impressed by the dauntless gaiety of the species. Whirled away from the sun's fire to face again the infinite light-raddled dark, they took it when they could as their chance to go out and have fun.

Janis walked beside him with a dancer's step, a warm lithe body naked in cool clothes, her fingers rediscovering his hand every few seconds. He was not sure what that electric contact meant to her. What it meant to him was like the new reordering of his mind, a delight he felt almost afraid to test, yet constantly renewed by the merest look at her, or within himself.

They walked along faster and easier than anyone else on that pavement, Kohn effortlessly finding an open path among the moving bodies. After they crossed the road, strolling between humming cars and hurtling bikes and whistling rickshaws, Janis looked at him as if to say something, and then just shook her head.

Norlonto had the smell of a port city, that openness to the world: the sense that you had only to step over a gap to be carried away to anywhere. (Perhaps the sea had been the original fifth-colour country, but it had been irretrievably stained with the bloody ink from all the others.) And it had also the feel that the world had come to it. In part this was illusory: most of the diversity around them had arrived much earlier than the airships and space platforms, yet here and there Kohn could pick out the clacking magnetic boots, the rock-climber physique, the laid-back Esperanto drawl of the orbital labour aristocracy. Men and women who'd hooked a lift on a reentry glider to blow a month's pay in a shorter time, and in more inventive ways, than Khazakhstan or Guiné or Florida could allow.

Those who helped them do it made their mark in the crowd and among the shopfronts: prostitutes of all sexualities, gene-splicing parlours, hawkers of snacks and shots,
VR
vendors and drug and drink establishments.

The Lord Carrington, down a side street, wasn't one of them.

‘It's our local,' Kohn said proudly as he pushed open the saloon-bar doors of heavy wood and glass and brass. The smells of alcohol, of hash and tobacco smoke, struck him with all their associations of promise and memory, fraud and forgetting. He didn't know if he could take this intensity all his life. Maybe it was something you got used to. Poets had died for it; some said, of it. Perhaps it was wasted on him; or his very crudity, his fighter's callousness, would save him.

What the hell.

Janis eased past him, through the door, and he stepped through and let it swing back.

The room was long and cool. The bar was divided along its length with apparently mirrored partitions that showed not reflections but views of other bars. You could tell the timezone the images came from by the state the drinkers had reached. The first one Kohn noticed looked like Vladivostok. Fortunately the sound was turned down. The real pub had not many in it yet, the hologram stage showing only swimming dolphins.

Janis beat him to the bar, turned with her elbow on the counter and asked, ‘What'll you have?'

‘
Eine
bitter,
bitte.
'

Janis ordered two litres. They found an alcove where they could sit and see the stage and a window overlooking a tenth of London. Kohn sat down, shifting the belt pouch in which the gun's smart-box nestled, easing the hip holster of the dumb automatic which was all the hardware the pub's by-laws permitted. Janis watched with a faint smile and raised her heavy glass.

‘Well, here's to us.'

‘Indeed. Cheers.'

The first long gulp. Kohn decided to appreciate the taste as long as he could before lighting up.

A man walked through the dolphins and announced the first set, a new Scottish band called The Precentors. The sea-scene cleared and two lads and a lass, playing live from Fort William, launched into the latest old rebel song.

Janis looked at him, then at her drink, then looked up again more sharply, her hair falling back. Her shoulders were swaying almost imperceptibly to the music.

‘Tell me about yourself,' she said.

‘Not much to tell…I grew up around here, North London Town before and after it became Norlonto. My mother was a teacher, my father was – well, he made a living as a software tech but he was a professional revolutionary. Member of the Workers' Power Party, which back then was what he used to call a nearly-mass Party. A near-miss Party.' Kohn chuckled darkly. ‘The Fourth International had a few good national sections in those days, and they were one of the best. Industrial-grade Trotskyism. He was a union organizer, community activist in various Greenbelt townships. My mother got elected to the local council under the Republic.'

He stopped. Normally it was not difficult to talk about this. Now, the enhanced memories crowded him like hysterical relatives at a funeral. His fist was on the table. Janis's fingers clasped over it.

‘And that was why they were killed?'

‘No! That was all legal. They were rejectionists, sure, but they weren't in the armed groups that became the
ANR
or anything like that. Mind you, in the Peace Process you didn't have to be, to get killed. I used to think that was the point.' He disengaged his hand, unthinking, and lit a cigarette. ‘I thought that was the whole fucking point.'

‘I don't see it.'

‘Terror has to be random,' he said. ‘That's how to really break people, when they don't know what rules to follow to keep them out of trouble.' He gave her a sour grin. ‘You know all that. It's been tried out on rats.'

‘But you don't even think that was why—'

‘That was part of it. The killing was a joint operation, local thugs and a
US/UN
teletrooper. I never did understand that, until – actually it was Bernstein who gave me the idea it had to do with the day job. The software work.'

‘And that could be—?' The excitement of discovery lifted her voice.

He hushed her with a small movement of his hand, and nodded.

Janis was silent for a few moments.

‘What did you do after that?'

‘I had a kid sister.' He laughed. ‘Still have, but she's married, settled and respectable now. Doesn't like to be reminded of me.'