Fractions (21 page)

Go to the
ANR
, Logan had said. The idea had its merits, not least that it would get him out of the whole mess with Donovan. Still leave the comrades in it, though – that was the problem. At some point he might have to approach the
ANR
in any case, although what they would make of his story was anybody's guess.

Moh turned and stepped out of the booth. Jordan and Janis looked up at him, but he nodded absently and ignored them. Asking them to keep a lookout had been careless: it wasn't what they did for a living, or what they habitually did to
keep on
living. He flipped his glades down and made a slow sweep of all he could see.

The streams of people entering and leaving the mall had, if anything, thickened. Smaller groups wandered around the outlying stalls in the building's shadow or in the harsh sunlight. The only breaches of the peace going on were knots of Neos swaying back from their lunchtime drinking sessions, raucously singing assorted national-communist anthems.

In the distance, traffic on the old flyover was stationary. Nothing unusual in that – it was a public road – but…

Some kind of commotion in the shanty-towns piled up below the road. Moh unclipped the gunsight and held it up, patching the image to his glades. Typical settlement scene, lots of visual clutter: the distracting diversity of the shacks, clothes-lines sagging across yards and paths, diverted power cables strung all over the place, aerials on jury-rigged pylons, grey gleam of sewage streams. In among it all, the gaudy colours of variegated costumes and flapping rags on…people moving, fast, scattering and scurrying from…

A spread-out line of black-clad, visored figures striding steadily through the narrow lanes.
Kingdom cops.
Moh could hardly believe the sight until he remembered that this wasn't legally part of Norlonto at all. It still seemed outrageously provocative of the Hanoverians to march in like this – the area was if anything more anarchistic than the anarchy around it.

He whirled around, calling to Janis and Jordan to look over there, and started checking for any reaction. Nobody'd noticed yet, or they were taking it calmly. Glancing from group to group he saw a familiar face in the crowd – couldn't be, wrong walk – wait a second, never saw her walking, why…

His attention, and a moment later his stepped-up vision, focused again on the girl who'd been at the space-movement table. She was threading her way purposefully through the crowd, more or less towards where he stood. Her whole manner and posture were at odds with her earlier pose. Thinking back Kohn could see that it had been doubly faked, imitating an imitation; some of the younger and sillier people in the space movement thought it a cool pose, and she'd been imitating that.

Might not mean anything, but suddenly everything had meaning – in a wash of good old communist paranoia:
comrades, this is no accident
– and Moh started walking, fast, in a direction he at first thought was random.

‘What's going on?' Jordan asked, loping beside him, Janis jogging to keep up. Moh stopped, throwing them both off-balance.

‘Jordan, time to split. You nip back in, help old Bernstein pack up. He has places to dive into around here. Hole up with him until it's over, then take the monorail back to our place. Start a search for Cat: you'll pick up the trace on the house phone; go from there and keep an eye on the net. Try to contact the
ANR
. I'll call you later.'

‘Until what's over?'

Jordan was puzzled; the situation was just beginning to dawn on Janis. Moh, fighting a surge of impatience, had to remind himself that neither of them was exactly streetwise.

‘Don't know,' he said. ‘Not staying to find out. You see the cops coming in? Just a show of strength maybe but with all those kids—'

He heard the crash of the first bottle.

‘Knew it,' he said. ‘Balls for brains, these guys. Move it. You got two minutes before this place is a—'

Something burst over the wall where they'd just been sitting. Long strands of sticky stuff drifted down on to a couple of reckless Neos, who instantly began a predictably counterproductive effort to swipe it away.

Kohn tugged Janis's arm and they both started to run. The last he saw of Jordan, when he glanced back a second or two later, the youth was standing, still dumbfounded, waving and moving backwards as if on a station platform: goodbye, goodbye.

 

Clutching her sunhat and backpack, Janis followed Moh as best she could as he hurried through an obscure exit from the shopping centre into a tiled tunnel lit with flickering fluorescent tubes and smelling of urine and disinfectant. Eventually they came out in a more open foyer where a man in a peaked cap and dark uniform stood by a robust barrier. There were posters – yellowing now, but once heartily colourful – on the walls; between them, damp paint bubbled and flaked. Another uniformed man looked out impassively from behind a pane of wired glass. Moh went over and pushed a few low-denomination coins through a space under the pane. After half a minute's deliberation, the man pushed a couple of tickets back the other way.

Moh handed Janis a ticket and walked in front of her, putting the ticket in a slot on the barrier. With a wheezing, sucking sound the barrier – a pair of padded jaws at hip-level – opened and Moh stepped through. Not half a second passed before the jaws thunked shut again, emitting a momentary groan as if cheated of their prey. Moh turned and snatched the ticket as the machine ejected it.

Janis went through with her eyes shut, then down some broken concrete steps covered with plastic shopping-bags and empty cans and dry leaves and out on to a broken concrete platform. There the litter had apparently metamorphosed into its adult form: overturned bins, shopping trolleys and the remains of small trees. From the edge of the platform railway tracks could be seen for a few tens of metres in either direction; beyond that, they vanished among weeds. But they were at least shiny, not rusty.

‘What
is
this place?' Janis asked.

Moh looked at her. ‘It's the Underground,' he said.

‘The
Tube
? Is it still running?'

‘Occasionally,' Moh said, looking anxiously up and down the track. ‘Main thing is, the Kingdom cops won't come here, not without a lot of hassle. We've crossed a border.'

‘Into what?' A second look along the platform revealed about a dozen people, most of them very old, sitting waiting as if they had been doing just that for a long time.

Moh sighed. ‘One faction of the Republic accepted the Settlement, and this is what they got for it. The rump of the public sector. It even gets a subsidy from the Kingdom. But it's a Free State in its own right.' He grinned. ‘Sort of a
reformistan.
'

‘I hope Jordan's
OK
,' Janis said. From the direction of the mall she could hear the sounds of breaking glass, yells, riot-poppers. Further away, the instantly recognizable black smoke from burning tyres rose above the shanty-town.

‘He'll be fine,' Moh said. He was gazing into the distance at a rapidly approaching aerostat. ‘Bernstein has forgotten more ways out of there than the cops'll ever know.'

‘What did they barge in here for anyway?'

‘The Hanoverians are always a bit touchy about history,' Moh said. ‘But right now I think it's the future that's bugging them.'

‘Don't you feel like
getting involved
?' Janis asked mischievously.

‘No point,' Moh said. ‘The cops are way outnumbered. They'll pull back or call in reinforcements. Either way…' He shrugged.

The aerostat – a thirty-metre black disc like a flying saucer from a hostile alien empire – slid across the sky overhead and, with a deafening blast as its propellers altered pitch, stopped. It descended slowly behind the shopping centre and laid down a brief barrage of gas. Rope-ladders uncoiled from it, and in a few minutes were swinging as the retreating cops scrambled up. As soon as they were on board the machine wobbled, tilted and wallowed off to the west.

‘Overloaded,' Moh observed in a satisfied tone. ‘They're good for terrifying crowds, but that's about it.'

People began straggling into the station, most of them arriving at a run and then losing much of their momentum and wandering around in a dazed manner, as if they'd been ejected from a pub into the street. They had bleeding heads, pouring noses, weeping eyes. Janis couldn't see any serious injuries, and felt a selfish relief there weren't any casualties that would make her feel obliged to help.

After about half an hour a series of increasingly frequent and agitated, but otherwise incomprehensible, bursts of sound from a
PA
system indicated that a train was due. After another half hour it arrived, carrying a swaying crowd of commuters: beggars and prostitutes, mostly, coming back from the early-to-late-morning shift in town.

A few seats were unoccupied but Janis had no intention of sitting on any of them. She stayed as close to the doors as she could, clinging to the handhold. Moh stood, stooped, beside her, keeping his balance unaided as the train lurched and laboured along. In low-voiced, brief sentences, barely audible above the noise – and falling silent whenever it ceased – he told her what he'd learned from Logan and from Donovan.

‘Sounds like this thing's into biology,' she said. ‘I'd have expected something political, but this…Goddess, it's
creepy.
'

‘Creepy crawlie.' Moh shook his head, his eyelids hooding an intense, abstracted gaze. ‘I know what you mean…but I don't think it's that, nothing sinister, like…the Watchmaker idea, creating new life or taking over the world or whatever. It's a lot more worrying than that.'

‘How?'

‘Something Logan said in passing: disaster recovery. That's the political meaning of what it's doing. It's worrying because –
it
's worried, so to speak. Fits in with how Josh thought – he used to talk about what he called the Fall, what might happen if we didn't get a' – Moh grimaced, as if embarrassed – ‘a new society. A saner world. We'd go back, to an older kind of society. Pre-capitalist.'

‘Instead of post-? Yeah, yeah.' She smiled up at him sceptically. ‘“A catastrophe threatens the entire culture of mankind”?'

Moh frowned. ‘Where did you get that from?'

‘It's in the transitional programme, the death-agony thing—'

‘So it is.' He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Trotsky…OK.' He opened his eyes again. ‘Had me confused there. Anyway. You get the point. The programme, again.'

‘Well,' she said, ‘he was wrong the last time, wasn't he. I mean, all that doom and gloom was written, when? 1938?'

Moh laughed and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘You've cheered me up, you really have. It's not like some kinda
global catastrophe
started in 1939, huh?'

 

They got off at a station which the Underground shared with the Elevated monorail. Both Underground and Elevated ran at ground-level here: Hein-leingrad, well inside the Greenbelt, where all the old placenames had been scraped away. The gutted Underground part of the station was scrawled with colourful graffiti and wilfully obscure slogans:

 

NEITHER DEATH NOR TAXES

QUANTUM NON-LOCALITY: THE UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR SPACE FIRST! NO COMPROMISE IN DEFENCE OF EARTH'S CHILDREN!

 

She nudged Moh. ‘One of yours?'

‘Nah. Just a bunch of extremists.'

The Elevated station had been built around a 1930s bus terminus decorated in the style of a futuristic past. They sat in the station's glass-fronted cafeteria, their backs against a grooved aluminium pillar, and had coffee and doughnuts. Janis watched the people come and go through what looked like a small set from
Things To Come
, apart from the outfits. Not a short tunic or a short-back-and-sides to be seen. Moh spent a few seconds flipping through maps on a computer.

‘Big drawback of the arrangements here,' he remarked as he slipped the machine into his shirt pocket, ‘is that there's no King's highway. Everything is private. Property and access can be a bit of a minefield.'

‘I hope you don't mean that literally.'

‘Not exactly, but if we do have to trespass I'll rely on my friend' – he patted his bag – ‘rather than legal precedents.'

‘That's where you've got the gun?'

‘Not so loud. Yeah. Comes apart.'

‘And I thought we were alone together at last.'

‘Better two and a bit than none, my dear.'

He was watching the crowd almost all the time. The few moments when he looked directly at her he would half-smile and she only had time to half-smile back before his glance darted away again. She wondered if to him it was a long, searching look…She couldn't complain: it was her drugs that had done things to his sense of time and his memory, and her money that was paying him to keep watch.

And she had fallen for him, hard. As in: a hard man is good to find. One part of her mind – the sceptical, analytical, scientific part – was looking on sardonically, with a knowing smirk, seeing her sudden swept-off-her-feet attachment to Moh as, ultimately, the springing of a genetically loaded trigger, a survival strategy: her best bet was someone strong and kind, dangerous to others and safe, safe, safe to her. The rest of her mind just felt weak whenever he looked at her. What her body felt was different, and weak did not come into it.

Moh was tapping at his phone. He slid it to where both of them could see it and nobody else could: the picture was set to flat, not holo.

Mary Abid's face appeared on the screen.

‘Oh, hi,' Mary said. ‘Jordan's back, if that's what you want to know. Threw him in at the deep end, didn't you?'