Fractions (2 page)

 

She rode along the paths, steering clear of snails making suicidal dashes for greener grass. On one lawn a foraging party of students moved slowly, stooped, looking for magic mushrooms. Some of them would be for her. Janis smiled to herself, feeling like a great lady watching her peasants. Which the students looked like, in their sweeping skirts or baggy trousers and poke bonnets or broad-brimmed hats, patiently filling baskets.

In the wall of the ground floor of the biology block a three-metre hole gaped like an exit wound.

Janis dismounted, wheeled the bike mechanically to its stand. She'd half expected this, she now realized. Her hands flipped up her lace veil and twisted it back around the crown of her hat. Up the stairs: two flights, forty steps. The corridor tiles squeaked.

The door had been crudely forced; the lock hung from splinters. A strip of black-and-yellow tape warned against entry. She backed away, shaken. The last time she'd seen a door like this it had opened on smashed terminals, empty cages, shit-daubed messages of drivelling hate.

Behind her somebody coughed. It was not a polite cough; more an uncontrollable spasm. She jumped, then turned slowly as reason caught up with reflex. A man stood leaning forward, trying to look alert but obviously tired. Tall. Thin features. Dark eyes. Skin that might have acquired its colour from genes or a sunlamp. He wore a dark grey urban-camo jumpsuit open at the throat, Docs, a helmet jammed on longish curly black hair; some kind of night-vision glasses pushed up over the front, straps dangling, phones and mike angling from its sides. He looked about thirty,
quite
a bit older than her, but that might just have been the light. A long, complicated firearm hung in his right hand.

‘Who are you?' he asked. ‘And what are you doing here?'

‘That's just what I was about to ask
you.
I'm Janis Taine and this is my lab. Which it seems was broken into last night. Now—'

He raised a finger to his lips, motioned to her to back off. She was ten paces down the corridor before he stepped forward and scanned the door with the gun. His lips moved. He put his back to the wall beside the door and poked it open with the gun muzzle. A thin articulated rod shot out of the weapon and extended into the lab. After a moment it came back, and the man stepped forward, turning. He swept the tape away from the door and shook it off his hand after several attempts. He glanced at her and disappeared into the room.

‘It's OK,' she heard him call; then another bout of coughing.

The lab was as she'd left it. A high-rise block of cages, a terminal connected to the analyser, a bench, fume cupboard, glassware, tall fridge-freezer – which stood open. The man was standing in front of it, looking down at the stock of his gun, puzzled. He coughed, flapping his free hand in front of his mouth.

‘Air's lousy with psychoactive volatiles,' he said.

Janis almost pushed him aside. The test-tubes racked in the fridges were neatly lined up, labels turned to the front as if posed for a photograph. Which they might very well have been. No way had she left them like that. Each – she was certain – was a few millilitres short.

‘Oh,
shit
!'

Everything gets everywhere…

‘What's the problem? The concentrations aren't dangerous, are they?'

‘Let's have a look. Where did you get this? No, they shouldn't be, it's just – well, it may have completely fucked up my experiments. The controls won't be worth a damn now.'

She suddenly realized she was cheek-to-cheek with him, peering at a tiny screen as if they were colleagues. She moved away and opened a window, turned on the fume cupboard. Displacement activity. Useless.

‘Who are you, anyway?'

‘Oh. Sorry.' He flipped the gun into his left hand and pulled himself straight, held out his right.

‘Name's Moh Kohn. I'm a security mercenary.'

‘You're a bit late on the scene.'

He frowned as they shook hands.

‘Slight misunderstanding there. I was on a different patch last night. I'm just dropping by. Who's responsible for guarding this block?'

Janis shrugged into her lab coat and sat on a bench.

‘Office Security Systems, last time I noticed.'

‘Kelly girls,' Kohn sneered. He pulled up a chair and slumped in it, looked up at her disarmingly.

‘Mind if I smoke?'

‘I don't.' She didn't. She didn't give a damn any more. ‘And thanks, I don't.'

He fingered out a packet of Benson & Hedges Moscow Gold and lit up.

‘That stuff's almost as bad for you as tobacco,' Janis couldn't forbear to point out.

‘Sure. Life expectancy in my line's fifty-five and falling, so who gives a shit?'

‘Your line? Oh, defence. So why do that?'

‘It's a living.' Kohn shrugged.

He laid a card on the lab bench beside her. ‘That's us. Research establishments, universities, worthy causes a speciality.'

Janis examined the hologrammed business card suspiciously.

‘You're commies?'

Kohn inhaled deeply, held his breath for seconds before replying.

‘Sharp of you to notice. Some of us are, but the main reason we picked the name was so we'd sound really heavy but, you know, right-on. Later – when we could afford market research – we found out most people thought Felix Dzerzhinsky was in the Bolshoi, not the Bolsheviks.'

Janis spread her hands.

‘Doesn't mean anything to me,' she said. ‘It was just the “Workers' Defence” bit. I'm not into…all that. In my experience politics is guys with guns ripping me off at roadblocks.'

‘Aha,' Kohn said. He looked like the
THC
was getting to him. ‘A liberal. Maybe even a liber
tarian.
Remember school?'

‘What?'

He gave her a disconcertingly objective look.

‘Maybe the first couple years of primary school, for you.' He raised his right hand. ‘“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Republic, and to the States for which it stands, three nations, individual—”'

‘Jesus Christ! Will you
shut up
!'

Janis actually found herself looking over her shoulder. It had been
years
—

‘I thought this was an F S Zee,' Kohn said mildly.

‘High treason is taking it a bit far!'

‘OK. So I won't ask you if you've ever,
ever
consciously and publicly repudiated that. I haven't.'

‘You're not—?'

Janis glanced sidelong, swivelled her eyes back.

‘
ANR
? Good goddess no. They're
terrorists
, Doctor. We are a legal co-op and, uh, to be honest I'm touting for business. Now, just what has been going on here?'

She told him, briefly, while she did her rounds. At least the mice were all right. Apart from her precious drug-free controls being stoned out of their little skulls.

‘Very odd. I thought it was creeps when it happened – you know, animal liberationists. Doesn't look like that,' he remarked.

‘You said it.'

‘Mind you – this isn't what I imagined an animal-research lab would look like.'

Janis stopped feeding cornflakes to the mice for a moment.

‘What did you expect? Monkeys with trodes in their heads? Do you know what monkeys
cost
?'

‘Marmosets thirty K,' said a tiny, tinny voice. ‘Rhesus macaques fifty K, chimps two hundred—'

‘Oh, shut up, gun.' Kohn's face reddened. ‘Didn't even know the damn' thing had a speaker. I must have thought it was a mike.'

‘An easy mistake.' She was struggling not to laugh.

Kohn moved on quickly: ‘What do you do, anyway, if that's not an awkward question?'

‘It's no secret. Basically we dose the mice with various drugs to see if they act any smarter.'

‘Smarter?' he said. ‘
Mice
?'

‘Faster learning. Longer attention span. Greater retention.'

Kohn looked away for a moment, looked back. ‘You're talking about memory drugs.' His voice was flat.

‘Of course.'

‘Any success?'

‘Well,' she said, ‘there
was
one batch that looked promising, but they built a little paper hang-glider and escaped through that window…Naw, all we've had is stoned rodents. They take even longer to run the mazes. A result some of us could take to heart. Still…we're like Edison. We ransack nature. And unlike him we have computers to give us variations that nature hasn't come up with.'

‘Who's paying for it?'

‘Now
that
's a secret. I don't know. But a team from a front for a subsidiary for an agency of whoever it is will be here in – oh god, an hour, so would you mind?'

Kohn looked embarrassed again. ‘Sorry, Doctor Taine. I'll get out of your way, I'm behind schedule myself. I have to, uh, visit someone in hospital and then release some prisoners.'

‘I'm sure.' She smiled at him indulgently, dismissively. ‘Bye. Oh, and I will ask our admin to check out your rates.'

‘Thank you,' he said. ‘You'll find we're very competitive.' He stood up and patted his gun. ‘Let's go.'

When he'd gone she had the nagging feeling that more than one person had left.

 

The hand writhed, gesticulated autonomously as if to accompany an entirely different conversation. Plastic sheathed the forearm. A drip-feed and a myoelectric cable looped away from it.

Kohn sat on the bedside chair fiddling with the torn sleeve of Catherin Duvalier's denim jacket. It had been washed and pressed, but not repaired, leaving an image of what his shot had done to the flesh and bone inside. The nurses' quick soft steps, the steady pacing of the guards, set off alarms in his nerves. Again and again, in the secure ward, insecure. Catherin's clear blue eyes, in her light-Black face with its surrounding sunburst of springy fair hair, accused.

Defensive, Kohn attacked first.

‘I have to ask you,' he said heavily, ‘just what you think you were doing in that attack squad?'

She smiled from far away. ‘What were you doing, defending that place?'

‘Doing my job. Only giving orders. You know where it's at…Cat.'

She winced. The nickname was her own, but one they'd all shared, as a collective named after what some people, as he'd told the scientist, thought was a ballet dancer, some thought was a cartoon cat, and only a handful recognized as the founder of a once highly successful security agency. A fine company they were, and – in her ideas, her ferocity, her speed – she'd held out the promise of becoming one of the best. Defending union offices and opposition demonstrations against the lumpen muscle-men of the Hanoverian regime, she was someone Kohn had been glad to have at his back. Success had brought more contracts – plenty of establishments needed security which the security forces, occupied with their own protection, couldn't supply. But, one night a couple of years ago, she'd been on a squad that took out a Green Brigade sabotage team on behalf of some multinational. As the Green Brigade regarded that company's employees as fair game and had dozens of workers' deaths in its debit column, Kohn hadn't given the contract a second's thought.

Catherin had rejected her blood money and walked out.

She and Kohn had been lovers, before. A classic case: their eyes had met across a crowded fight. It was like hitting it off at a disco. They were both
having fun.
Some shock of recognition at the preconscious, almost the prehuman, level. He'd once joked that the australopithecine ancestors had come in two types, robust and gracile: ‘I've got
robustus
genes,' he'd said. ‘But you're definitely
gracilis.
' Just a romantic conceit: those slender limbs, tough muscles under skin that still ravished him just to look at; that face prettily triangular, wide eyes and small bright teeth – they'd been built by genes recombined out of a more recent history, crossing and recrossing the Atlantic in everything from slave ships to international brigades…a thoroughly modern girl.

Dear
gracilis.
He'd missed her at his back, and he'd missed her everywhere else. The word was that she was working for other coops, more purist outfits that took only politically sound contracts. Kohn had wished her luck and hoped to see her again. He'd never expected to find her in his sights.

 

Her hand, moved by the muscles that tirelessly re-knit the shattered radius and ulna, beckoned and dismissed.

‘You don't understand,' she said. ‘I'm still on the same side.' She looked around. ‘Can we talk?'

‘Sure.' Kohn waved airily. ‘The guards are screened for all that.'

He didn't believe it for a moment.

Catherin looked relieved. She started talking, low and fast.

‘You know it's gonna be a hot autumn. The
ANR
's planning another of its final offensives. Believe that when I see it, but the Kingdom's for sure under pressure, from the greens and the nationalists and the Muslims and the Black Zionists as well as the workers' movements. Right now it's fighting them all, and the stupider of the Free States're fighting each other. So – you know, the Party?'

‘The real Party?' Stupid question.

‘No, the
Labour
Party. There's been a conference, over in – well, over the water. Bringing all the Party factions together, and some of the movements. Decided on joint actions with all the forces actually fighting the state, all those who want to undo the Restoration Settlement.'

‘I know about the Left Alliance. I didn't know the cranks were part of it.'

She returned him a level look.

‘You just don't know what they're up to in these
AI
labs, do you? Their idea of a glorious future is a universe crawling with computers that'll remember us. Which is what those nerds think
life
is all about. Meanwhile the state's using them, just like the Nazis used the rocket freaks. They're itching to get their hands on some kind of intelligent system that'll keep tabs on everything. And it's all linked up with the other lot, the
NC
guys.'