Fractions (35 page)

‘Bust-up with Moh. Political got personal, or maybe the other way round. That's how it goes.'

Jordan looked at her, puzzled. ‘Moh didn't strike me as someone who'd turn political disagreements into personal fights.'

‘Hah!' Cat snorted. ‘That was the trouble!'

‘How do you mean?'

‘I really loved him,' she said. ‘I still think he's, well, an amazing man. But just thinking about him makes me angry; it calls up all the things we fought about.' She laughed, swirling her drink and looking into it. ‘Mostly about fighting. I always believed you had to…believe, to fight. Like you said. Goddess, was I the original fanatic! I doubt if you ever believed in religion the way I believed in the politics, if you ever read the Bible like I read the latest perspectives document from the faction leadership. But Moh I could never figure out. I got to think he was cynical.'

‘A gun for hire?'

‘That's it. I suppose you've met the gun.' She shared a smile with him. ‘A dedicated follower of Comrade Kalashnikov. But back there in the hospital I found that he thought
I
was the loose cannon. The opportunist. Huh. He's got a side all right, but I don't know what it is.'

Jordan pointed upwards. ‘That's his side.'

Catherin frowned for a moment, then nodded.

‘Space…yeah, he was always into that. What he really believes in is us getting into space – I mean, like the space movement wants to, getting out there past the Yanks – and for him the left and the right, the plan and the market, are just—'

‘Launch vehicles!'

They both laughed.

‘And what about you?' Jordan asked.

Catherin was sitting facing him along the couch. She took her feet out of her shoes and curled her legs and gazed again into the peaty pool in her glass.

‘I never saw it,' she said, looking up as if she'd found some answer. ‘The way it seemed to me was we were aiming for a better society here on earth, starting with here in Britain. Space – yeah, sure – but why make that the one and the zero? I
like
this planet, dammit! I was happy to side with the greens against the people who're wrecking it, even if these people have something to do with getting a few more thousand of us off it.' She smiled at herself. ‘I'm a party animal – in both senses.'

She jumped up and went over to the music deck and slid in a disk. The room filled with the folky, smoky melody of an old hit from a band called Whittling Driftwood. Catherin twirled and held out a hand to him.

‘Come on, you devil's chaplain,' she said. ‘Dance with me.'

Jordan had never danced before. He stood, and Catherin stepped up to him with her hands raised in front of her, fingers opened out. He lifted his hands in the same way and their fingers interlocked. He guessed the trick was to step lightly in time with the music, and to sort of move your hips to a different but mysteriously related time, fraction or multiple of the music's rhythm, and to pull towards and away from your partner in yet another periodicity.

Oh, yes, and to maintain eye contact. He looked up from his and her feet.

After a couple of tracks the music changed, got slower, and there didn't seem to be any provision for pulling away. He brought their arms down and let go of her fingers and slid his hands behind her, and his elbows to her waist, and she did the same with him. They turned slowly, feet more careful now. The track ended. He stood still and kissed her. Her tongue entered his mouth like an alien animal, a blindly urgent exploratory probe, and then drew his tongue back with it, a startled abductee. Her mouth tasted of whisky and water and something ranker, carnivorous. They swayed together for an interval, and suddenly they were both gasping in atmosphere again.

‘Catherin,' he said. ‘Earth's angel.
Cat.
' His hands were moving on her flanks and waist, feeling the heat and shape of her through varying textures. He found a row of buttons and opened one, then another. Catherin dived a hand blatantly down the back of his jeans. A cool fingertip pressed his coccyx, traced up his lower spine. Then she took her hand out and caught his arms.

‘It's easier from the top,' she said.

‘So let's go up.'

‘Yes.'

‘Relax, the man said.' Moh kicked a pebble from the shingle out across the still water of the sea-loch. Janis was not surprised to see that it skipped several times before sinking. He did it again and the same thing happened. ‘This is worse than waiting for a
US/UN
deadline to pass.'

Janis caught his hand. ‘Walk,' she said.

They continued on around the shoreline to where it curved out to a narrow spit of land that led to a peninsula about four hundred metres long and thirty or forty metres high. It was known locally – with what Janis considered a peculiarly Gaelic logic – as The Island. She squinted into a low morning sun that was lifting the dew and night-mist in the promise of another fine day.

Moh, though still tense and moody, looked a lot better than he'd done the previous afternoon when he'd come out of his encounter. They probably had MacLennan to thank for that. With an almost motherly admonition about Building Up Your Strength, the
ANR
cadre had treated them to a dinner of smoked salmon followed by venison at the village hotel.

Janis had been charmed by MacLennan. He might look like a farmer but he acted and spoke like an officer and a gentleman, with fascinating tales to tell of the years of the Republic and the struggle. The one thing he would not talk about, that he instantly and politely quashed the slightest allusion to, was the events of that afternoon and their implications.

The hotel overlooked a golf course so low on the shore that clumps of dried seaweed were scattered on its greens. The bar, where they'd had what was by Moh's standards a very quiet drinking session, had filled up over the evening with the entire reduced population of the village. Janis had watched incredulously as the locals enjoyed what
they
considered a few quiet, civilized drinks – four or five litres of beer helped along by liberal shots of whisky – and then gone off to drive home. The vehicles ranged from sports-cars to articulated lorries but were all driven in much the same way.

It was the sound of vehicles in the morning that had wakened them: a slow, revving chug on all the roads. When they walked down to the village after breakfast they'd found the whole place deserted, an eerie clearance complete…

A sheep-track led them through long wet grass and gorse to the top of the Island, where a low roofless brick building stood. As they approached, a head appeared over the wall, and then a young woman came out. She couldn't have been more than fourteen; dark hair, bright eyes. She wore an
ANR
jumpsuit and carried a weapon that looked too big for her: a metre-long rocket on a launcher with a pistol-grip.

‘Hello,' she said shyly. ‘You'll be the computer people.'

Moh laughed. ‘Have you ever heard of need-to-know?'

‘We all need to know,' she said, sounding baffled by the question.

‘What do you do?' Janis asked.

‘Air defence,' the girl said.

Inside the walls was a trodden area of sheep droppings and earth; a camping stool, binoculars, a dozen more rockets.

‘It's an old observation post,' the girl explained. ‘From the last war, that is' – her brow furrowed momentarily – ‘that is, the war before the last but you know what the old folk are like.'

Moh nodded soberly. ‘And you're using it for air defence?'

‘Yes.' She whipped the launcher into position with startling speed. ‘The stealth fighters: they fly low, they can fool radar and instruments, they don't make a sound but they're not invisible.' She patted the nose of the rocket. ‘Tail-chaser. I've got two seconds to get down after it's launched, then the fusion engine kicks in. Voom.'

‘Yeah,' Moh said. ‘“Voom.” You don't want to be standing behind one of them. And stay down and keep your eyes shut till you see the flash.'

‘Oh, I know that,' the girl said. She shuffled and looked at everything except her visitors.

‘Guess we better go,' Moh said. ‘All the best.'

When they were halfway back down the track Janis asked: ‘How could she see the flash with her eyes shut?'

‘Laser-fuser warhead. She'd see it.'

Moh's phone beeped. He listened, nodding. ‘OK, right, see ya.'

‘What's up?'

‘MacLennan's coming to meet us. Says there's been some developments.'

A kilometre and a half away, a humvee started up.

 

Cat slept, lightly curled on her side. Some of the alertness, the knowingness, of her characteristic expression was relaxed away, so that she seemed a younger person who hadn't discovered sex and violence. Jordan, propped on one elbow, looked at that face over the curve of her shoulder, basked in the skin-to-skin human warmth, his breathing careful so as not to disturb the spontaneous rhythm of hers.

Something in him had changed – some baseline had shifted with that release, that bonding. Until now he'd felt like a fellow-traveller of the human race, a sympathizer rather than a paid-up, card-carrying member. Now, as the bars of morning sunlight from the armour-slatted window millimetred their way across the ceiling, he still had the same ideas but with a different attitude. Still an individualist, but without the edgy selfishness. At a level beneath all calculation of advantage he was no longer afraid of dying. It was he who had opened, encompassed and received, and now found for the first time within his fiercely defended core a person other than himself.

She woke with a wild where-am-I? look, saw him and smiled.

‘You're still here.'

‘Still here.'

‘You been awake long?'

Jordan shrugged. ‘Some time.'

‘What you been doing?' She rolled over and put an arm and a leg over him.

‘Watching you sleep.'

Her hand explored. ‘Hmm…that must've been exciting.'

‘Not as exciting as seeing you awake.' She dived.

‘Now you.'

The estuarine smell and taste of it, salt and rank, ocean and swamp.

Then chin to chin, lip to lip, tongue to tongue; pubis to pubis. She grabbed his hand and guided it with urgent precision and abandoned his finger there, a trapped digit doing its little bit between their blind beat. As suddenly she dragged it away, digging her nails into the small of his back and taking him over the edge with her in an arching, bucking, yelling fall.

They landed in a tangled heap.

‘Wuh.'

‘They don't call you Cat for nothing.'

She grinned and rolled her eyes and ran her tongue along her teeth. Then she sat up and reached for a handful of tissues and, still cat-like, wiped and mopped.

‘I'm going to have a shower,' she said.

‘Oh good,' Jordan said. ‘So am I.'

She pushed him away and jumped off the bed.

‘Another time,' she said. ‘Right now it would be…self-defeating.'

She skipped into the shower stall.

‘Hey, lover,' she shouted as the water came on, ‘there's something you can do for me.'

‘Yes?'

‘Get me some breakfast.'

 

well hi there jordan

Jordan was watching a kettle not boiling when the low, flat, uninflected voice came from the air behind him. He turned in a poor imitation of a fighting crouch and saw the face of the Black Planner on a small television tile propped in a corner of the kitchen counter. He stared open-mouthed for a moment, and the animated line-drawing of a face smiled, apparently in response. One of the telecams on a nearby shelf had a tiny red eye beside its lens's unwinking stare – he was sure it hadn't been on before.

sorry to startle you

The voice came from the speakers of the room's sound system, an eerily perfect reproduction of words that didn't bother to pretend they came from a human throat.

‘I'm pleased to see you again,' he said. ‘Thank you for the money. It made a big difference to my life.'

so i understand i have been watching your progress with interest your new girlfriend has no doubt told you that an offensive is imminent

Jordan nodded, dry-mouthed. There was something disturbingly familiar about the face, familiar beyond the fact of his having seen it before. He felt he had encountered it somewhere else. Possibly the Black Planner himself was an
ANR
cadre who walked unmarked in the streets of Norlonto, a face he'd passed by in the crowd.

do not be offended that she has not told you all she knows this is nothing personal it is because she is basically a good communist loyal daughter of the revolution and mother of the new republic though she would laugh if you said so to her face the offensive is no longer imminent it is current and i again have a proposition for you the risk is considerable and there is no monetary reward however i think you will obtain satisfaction out of the high probability that your actions will result in a very substantial reduction in the human cost of the insurrection do i have your interest

‘Yes.'

i urgently require access to some systems from which i am currently excluded once again it is just a matter of entering a code on a terminal the code in question will follow your agreement to proceed as will the relevant passwords the terminal is the high-security terminal in the office of melody lawson and the time is as soon as you can get there

‘Oh,
that
terminal.' He hoped the routines the Planner was manipulating could pick up voice-tones, even if it couldn't transmit them. ‘And how do you expect me to get back into
BC
, let alone into the office? And what about getting out again?'

entering the enclave will not be a problem as you shall see if you attempt it as for the office you are to do this by deception if possible and subsequently you are to effect your safe exit by mass agitation if necessary i understand you are a persuasive speaker when you are telling the truth and a plausible liar when you are not comrade duvalier is at this moment being asked to accompany you and her combat skills will provide some backup i can assure you that other disruption will be provided but i do not deny that the risk is considerable on the other hand the risks involved in staying here particularly if your task is not carried out are an order of magnitude greater

It took a moment for Jordan to turn the quiet statement over.

‘You're saying that doing nothing is ten to a hundred times more dangerous than your crazy scheme?'

correct

‘Well, in that case,' Jordan said slowly, grinning back at the Planner, ‘it's all perfectly justifiable selfish cowardice, so I'll do it.'

you did not think i would ask you to carry out an act of reckless courage did you

The drawn face smiled in a way that made Jordan wish he could talk to the real person behind it.

‘I hope I see you again,' he said, understanding for the first time something of what the catchphrase meant: afterwards…

goodbye jordan i hope i see you again

Numbers came up.

‘Two bits of news,' MacLennan said, looking back over his shoulder and taking one hand from the steering-wheel to gesticulate. ‘The first is that the Army Council has decided to go for it. The offensive is under way.'

‘Yee-
hah
!' Kohn yelled.

They bumped up a pitted tarmac strip between willows and beeches and turned on to the main road. ‘The second is, we've cracked the thing with the Star Fraction.'

‘What?' Janis leaned forward from the back seat, clutching her seat-belt.

‘The Star Fraction,' MacLennan repeated, raising his voice. He shifted gears and the engine note dropped. ‘When the systems settled down yesterday we – that is, Doctor Van and some of our security people – got in touch with your friend in outer space.' He waved a hand skywards, just in case they didn't know where that was. ‘Logan was quite happy to cooperate. Between them they think they've figured it out. We got through to people from the old days who knew Josh, and who have been in this Star Fraction for years without knowing what it was. And without telling anyone,' he added disgustedly. ‘These God-damned Trotskyites, excuse my English, Doctor Taine. The long and the short of it is that Josh didn't just prepare for the fall of the Republic, which he had every right to do, but for the fall of civilization itself! He set up these unauthorized programs in the Black Plan to seek out and store biological data, and he compiled a mailing list, would you believe, of people who could make use of it. But he never fired it off, and it just beavered away for two decades getting things ready. A Black Plan inside the Black Plan.'

The humvee swerved on to the road up to the house they were staying in. ‘I don't see how that worked,' Kohn said. ‘Logan couldn't have been on any list that Josh drew up.'

‘It was a very intelligent mailing list,' MacLennan said. ‘And then the other day you triggered the main program. At some other time maybe not much would have happened, but in the present situation…'