Fractions (18 page)

She thought of what lay beyond Uxbridge, out to the west. Badlands all the way to Wales, a firebreak between that ineradicable hostility and London. A lot of people would privately admit they'd prefer the Welsh marching to the endless trickle of saboteurs from these new Marches.

‘Or all the way in,' Jordan said.

‘Yeah, the movement only got a slice of the pie. But look what they did with it!'

‘You sound proud of this place.' Janis couldn't square Moh's enthusiasm for Norlonto with his stubborn insistence that he was some kind of socialist.

‘We want to go beyond this, do better than it. Not go back from it.'

After a minute she stopped trying to figure it out.

 

The mall had been hit in the war and never reclaimed, due to an obscure dispute about property rights. Norlonto being nothing if not an enormous tangle of private properties, the shopping centre and its surroundings had come to suffer what in a different society would be called planning blight. By default it could be considered part of the Kingdom, although the state had so far shown not the slightest interest in it. The whole area had been squatted and homesteaded until it was like a carcase occupied by an entire colony of ants, a shipwreck crusted with coral.

They pushed past stalls and shops selling microwaves, cast-iron cooking pots, light machine-guns, heavy-metal records, spacesuits, wedding-dresses, holodisks, oil paintings, Afro-Pak takeaways,
VR
snuff tapes. They emerged from the concentric rings and radial passages of the market into the concourse. Bernstein's regular pitch occupied a small arc of a circle around what must once have been a fountain pond underneath a central skylight, forty-odd metres above, of now broken coloured glass.

It was unattended and bare. A skinny girl in a tool harness and little else affected a low-g loll behind the space-movement table in the adjacent quadrant.

‘Seen Bernstein?' Moh asked.

She shifted an earpiece and gave her head a languid shake. ‘Booked it,' she said. ‘If he don't take it, is 'is
agreno, jes
?'

Moh checked his watch. 11.30. Not like Bernstein to miss several hours' worth of sales. He turned to Jordan. ‘Anything going on?'

Jordan put his glades on with a flourish, tuned the downlink to his computer. ‘Damn' right there is,' he said. ‘Bomb scare in Camden High Street. Area's sealed off. Traffic reports are frantic.'

‘Oh, shit. Well, that could account for it.' Moh gazed around, willing Bernstein to appear. It didn't work.

‘I'll wait here and see if he turns up,' he told Jordan and Janis. ‘You guys want to wander around?'

Jordan looked at the conference area of the mall, the revisionist rally. ‘Yeah,' he said. ‘This is just incredible.' Janis smiled and shrugged and nodded in the direction of the surrounding markets. They wandered off in separate orbits.

Moh stood by the Movement stall and watched the old soldiers, their uniforms and medals mingling with the streetfighting clothes and antique badges of the young enthusiasts. Battle standards hung reverently across the area taken over for the occasion. Ostensibly a conference of dissentient historians, it was becoming a blatantly political event. Even some of the academic intellectuals, recognizable in their own uniforms of jeans and leather-patched tweed jackets, averted their eyes from the more sinister faces on the posters that were being indiscreetly hawked.

‘Hey,
man
!'

The stall had a customer, a kid who picked up a tee-shirt in its polythene wrap and gazed at it. He was obviously a Neo, a hero-worshipper, one of those who'd grown up after the defeat and in adolescent rebellion had turned to what he'd always been told were the bad guys. Who just didn't believe they could've been that bad, and had found an identity and a pride in identifying with those terrifying folk who'd posed perhaps the most radical threat the world had ever faced…but who had at the same time built a society that appealed to the conservative values of order and discipline and patriotism that most people assimilated like the isotopes in their mothers' milk.

‘The man who designed the rockets…' the kid breathed. Cropped hair, Europawehr combat jacket, ripped denim, knee-boots; scars on his smiling face and the faintest film of tear-flow in his eyes. The girl behind the stall looked back at him blankly.

‘It's good to meet someone who knows their heritage,' Kohn said. ‘Most people don't even know who he was.' He included the stall's oblivious minder in his disapproval.

‘Yeah, well, they've got us two ways, haven't they?' the kid said. ‘Yanks up there holdin us down, greens down here draggin us down.'

Kohn nodded. ‘Exactly.' He scanned the stall for recruitment material. ‘Well, some of us want to
do
something about it. Some of us believe in space, in the future. Look, mate, tell you what. Usually that's ten marks, but I can see you're keen, so I'll knock it down to eight-fifty and throw in a card and a badge for another one-twenty…Here's a pen.'

He tore off the card's counterfoil, checking to make sure the kid had written his name and address.

‘Thanks…Greg.' Kohn stuck out his hand. The kid looked up from pinning the blue enamel star to his lapel, grinned and clasped the hand.

‘See you again, mate.' They slapped shoulders. The kid carried the tee-shirt away like a trophy.

‘That's the way to do it,' Kohn told the girl. He put the counterfoil carefully into the empty recruitment box. ‘
Eble vi farus same.
' She still looked blank: her Esperanto smatter evidently as phony as her gravity-gets-me-down slouch.

An arm slipped between his elbow and his side.

‘Making new friends?' Janis's voice was dry, amused.

‘You know how it is,' Kohn said, turning. ‘All those fine young bodies.'

‘Hah!'

Janis frowned, suddenly serious.

‘Gives me the chills a bit, this whole show,' she said. ‘Nostalgia and militaristic kitsch and rewriting history: it's all a lie – millions didn't die, the soldiers were heroes even if they were misled by politicians, they were stabbed in the back…ugh! They're not really
your people
, are they?'

‘No, my love, they ain't.' He felt as if the sun had gone behind a cloud, for a moment. Then he thought of the lad with the bright eyes. ‘But some of them are on our side even if they don't know it. Real keen technological expansionists, hate the greens and the Yanks. Some of them're basically
sound.
'

Janis sighed and shrugged. ‘Maybe.'

Jordan came back with armfuls of literature and a newly bought ancient leather jacket. ‘I still don't believe this,' he said. ‘Free speech, sure, but talk about taking it to extremes.' He flipped his glades down. ‘Traffic's clearing,' he added. ‘
ANR
seems to be taking the flak for this one.'

The girl lifted herself out of her spacer pose and made some effort at salesmanship as Jordan leaned over the stall. It wasn't necessary: he stocked up with mission badges,
NASA
and Tass posters, tee-shirts with pictures of the rocket pioneer Korolev, of Gagarin and Titov and Valentina Tereshkova, and a space-movement card and star.

Kohn again shoved the counterfoil in the box, this time checking that Jordan hadn't given his address. The smells of frying and grilling had been tormenting him for half an hour.

‘Let's get some lunch before the rush,' he said. ‘Good place across the way – we can keep an eye out from there.'

‘Second you on that,' Janis said. Jordan straightened up from decorating his biker jacket with enamel shuttles and stars, looking less like a refugee from Beulah City if a bit self-conscious in his glade-masked cool. He nodded at Moh.

They walked through the crowd of aging veterans, the Afghantsi and Angolanos, and tough kids with their hammer-and-sickles and red stars (with a sprinkle of the movement's blue ones among them, as Moh indicated to Janis, who returned him a sceptical smile). They strolled past posters of Lenin and Stalin, Mao and Castro, Honneker and Ceaucescu and the rest, and over crumpled leaflets advertising lectures with titles like ‘The Great Leap Reconsidered' and ‘Croatia: The West's Killing Fields'. Moh led them to a first-floor Indian café overlooking the concourse, well away from the bars whose main feature for the day would be rip-off prices and drunk neo-Communists.

Chicken roti and a tall glass of vanilla lassi were what hit the spot for Moh. He ate in a corner seat, leaning against the window while Janis nibbled tikka and Jordan chomped through some kind of potato-in-pastry arrangement, turning over the pages of a prewar Khazakh cosmodrome brochure.

‘You really a communist, Moh?' he asked. ‘After all that's happened?'

Moh grunted, still watching out for Bernstein. ‘What's past is prologue,' he said. ‘The future is a long time. We ain't seen nothing yet.'

‘When have we seen enough?' Janis's voice had an edge to it. A double edge, Moh guessed: getting uneasy about hanging around here, getting dubious about the connections with the past which had seemed so obvious before.

‘I remember things,' he said, for her benefit as much as Jordan's. ‘I've seen the working class making days into history, and that's not something you forget.' The lost revolution grieved him like a phantom limb. ‘The thing to forget about is the communistans and the states these guys down there think weren't so bad after all. That ain't where it's at.'

Jordan was saying, ‘OK, but that's where it
ended up
—' when Moh raised a hand. He'd spotted a battery-powered vehicle hauling a tiny and overloaded trailer through the crowd.

‘There he is,' he said. ‘Hey,' he added as the others moved to rise. ‘Take it easy. Give the man time to catch a breath.'

He sucked up the last of the lassi noisily and, just to rub it in, lit a cigarette.

 

Kohn sometimes wondered idly if Bernstein were the actual genuine Wandering Jew. He wasn't young, but damned if he ever got any older. When he looked up with a snaggle-toothed grin of recognition he appeared exactly the same as when Moh had first stood alongside impatiently while his father haggled over some new acquisition (
Lenin and the End of Politics, Lenin and the Vanguard Party, Lenin as Election-Campaign Manager, Lenin as Philosopher, Lenin's Childhood, Lenin's Fight Against Stalinism, Lenin's Political Thought, Lenin's Trousers…
)

Bernstein clapped Moh's shoulder and shook hands with Janis and Jordan while Moh introduced them. He chatted with Jordan for a few minutes about the underground book-trade in Beulah City, then turned to Moh.

‘You got through the bomb scare all right, then,' Moh said.

‘Bomb scare?' Bernstein sounded startled. ‘All I saw was sodding Kingdom cops doing a sweep in Kentish Town. Had to take the long way round. Didn't fancy explaining where I got all those old
CC
minutes.'

Central Committee minutes. That could be revealing.

‘From before –?' Moh tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice.

Bernstein shook his head. ‘Post-war stuff. Split documents.'

Moh shrugged one shoulder.

‘What are you looking for this time, Moh?'

‘Not history,' Moh said wryly. ‘Politics.' But he couldn't resist looking over the stall, just once. He picked up a pamphlet, a nice edition that he didn't have, and in mint condition.
The Transitional Programme
, by Leon Trotsky. Introduction by Harry Wicks.

‘Good bloke,' Bernstein said. ‘Heard him speak, once.'

‘You heard
Trotsky
?' Jordan asked.

Bernstein gave him a forgiving grin. ‘I was talking about Wicks,' he said.

‘How much?' Moh asked.

‘Sixty million quid, in whatever you've got.'

‘Yeah, I'll take it,' Moh said, counting out twenty marks. ‘That really is a bit of history.' He was a sucker for this kind of thing.

‘It's not what you came for,' Bernstein remarked.

‘Not exactly,' Moh said. ‘What I wanted to ask you was – you don't happen to know where Logan is these days?'

Bernstein reached under the table and started flipping through a scuffed leather-bound book of pages held together by metal rings, some kind of hard-copy filing system. ‘Yeah, he's on a free-wheel space colony. New View. Utopian and scientific, geddit? Ah, here it is. Still got
PGP
, I see.'

Moh scanned the characters laboriously into his smart box.

‘Remember him going on about the Star Fraction?' he asked lightly. ‘Ever find out anything about it?'

‘Nah,' Bernstein said. ‘Saw Logan a couple years back, says he still gets the odd message.' He cackled. ‘An odd message, that's what it is all right. I reckon it's something Josh built into the Black Plan.'