Fractions (36 page)

‘Yeah, that's what I thought,' Kohn said. The vehicle lurched to a halt. MacLennan led them into the kitchen of the house, where Dr Van greeted them, bleary-eyed. He poured them coffee as they sat down around the table.

‘MacLennan has explained our findings?'

‘Yeah,' Kohn said. He lit the cigarette Van offered him. ‘Still doesn't explain these things I encountered, the Watchmaker
AIS
.'

Van steepled his fingers and talked around his cigarette like a diminutive Bogart. ‘We have to be very careful in drawing conclusions,' he said. ‘These programs are in some sense spin-offs, replications, reflections of an aspect of the Plan.'

Janis heard Kohn's indrawn breath.

‘The Plan has evolved considerably over the past twenty years,' Van continued. ‘Consequently, its products – we may suppose – are by many orders of magnitude more sophisticated than anything Josh Kohn originally intended. Nevertheless, they remain basically information-seeking software constructs, with a specific task.' He smiled, thin-lipped. ‘Such as cleaning out my company's databanks, and many others. Which they have accomplished.'

‘You're telling me they're just
gophers
?' Kohn sounded indignant. ‘That's not what I encountered. These things
think
, man.'

Van sighed out a cloud of smoke. ‘Comrade Kohn,' he said, ‘please, let us be objective. Your experience was subjective. And drug-mediated. That is not to say,' he went on hastily, ‘that it was necessarily invalid. The situation may indeed be as you perceived it. If so' – he shrugged – ‘time will tell, and soon. The fact remains that they are in a very real sense artificial
intelligences
, and ones to which you have an access which is for the moment unique. It is imperative, now that the final offensive is opening, that you contact them again and persuade them to keep a low profile. Will you do that?'

Moh turned to Janis as if searching her face for something. She didn't know what answer she gave, if any. He turned away, looked at the table for a moment.

‘Of course,' he said. ‘When?'

‘Now,' said MacLennan, standing up.

 

Moh had instructions. While he was trying to contact the Watchmaker entities, Van was to liaise with the Army Council by landlink…

‘And what about me?' Janis asked.

The big officer paused at the door, frowning.

‘Och, just guard them with your life,' he said, and disappeared down the stairs. The door slammed. A minute later they heard the helicopter take off.

Van went out and came back with an armful of televisions which he placed in a semicircle with a couple of chairs in the middle. He tossed a remote control to Janis.

‘Keep zapping the news channels,' he said. ‘Watch the local ones for the subtext until they start to come over to our side. For hard coverage go for the globals.
CNN
is fairly reliable on such occasions.'

Janis settled herself with a mug of coffee to hand and glanced at Moh, who was gazing out of the window. Van bent over the terminal.

‘You're very confident about taking some local stations,' she said wryly. ‘You really expect to get that far in the first hours?'

Van looked surprised.

‘Don't you understand…Oh, I'm sorry, we never explained it. If the system has decided it's time for us to strike it means we can take the
country
in the first hours. We intend to proclaim the republic on the six o'clock news from London. If things don't go smoothly, the news at ten. If we're wrong, or the system is flawed, then—'

He spread his hands.

‘You've been wrong before,' Moh said. ‘Four defeated offensives in fifteen years doesn't exactly inspire confidence.'

‘We didn't have all the bugs out of it,' Van admitted. ‘Call those campaigns user-acceptance testing.'

‘With live data,' Moh said.

Van's lips compressed for a moment. ‘I understand the offensives would have been attempted anyway,' he said. ‘The costs would have been higher without the system. And remember: the system learns from its mistakes.'

‘As does the state,' Janis pointed out. ‘And if you lose – if
we
lose – the best we can hope for is winning a bloody civil war.'

‘What do you think you're having already?' Van snapped. ‘The Hanoverian forces are being bled constantly by what you call the troubles. The local militias are mostly cynical mercenaries without conviction. The best of the autonomous communities will welcome an end to the war of all against all. Strikes and demonstrations are frequent in the major cities. This is the most violent and unstable country in Europe. You hear much about the
NVC
, but to be honest we are well behind the
ANR
.'

‘That's what I like to hear,' said Moh, settling again by the terminal. ‘All we have to worry about is the Yanks coming in and bombing the shit out of us. Again. Well, I'll try to convince the electric anarchists out there to keep their heads down.'

Van offered him the gun leads and the glades. Moh took them, his other hand already moving like a skilled weaver's.

Colours came up.

Van looked away to the other screens, where interesting items were appearing on local channels, usually in traffic reports.

 

‘Jesus wept,' Cat muttered as she and Jordan struggled along the crowded pavement of the Broadway. ‘Half the bloody country seems to have gone on strike.' Traffic was gridlocked, a knock-back effect of distant junctions blocked by buses whose drivers had simultaneously decided to exercise their right to a mid-morning break. Several office buildings were picketed by workers in white shirts and ties. Even with all the honking of horns and chanting of slogans, Norlonto seemed quieter than usual.

Jordan glanced sidelong at the good communist and loyal daughter of the revolution beside him and smirked. In the Modesty dress which she'd magically produced like a coloured scarf from an egg she could pass for a well brought-up young Beulah City lady, except…

‘Language,' he chided. ‘Apart from that you're doing fine. I'm amazed at how you've mastered the effortless glide.'

‘Effortless, hell,' Cat choked. ‘You have to kick the goddam petticoats out of the way with every step you take, and if I'm not careful I'll blow my foot off.'

She had jeans on underneath, two side-arms in boot holsters, and ammo strapped to her thighs.

Jordan took her elbow and ostentatiously steered her past a trodie who'd collapsed in the doorway of a Help the Waged charity shop.

‘The correct expression, my dear,' he said, ‘is: “My feet are killing me.”'

Cat laughed. ‘You're a sight yourself.'

‘Update me on it,' Jordan said, running a finger around the inside of his collar and leaving it even more sticky and uncomfortable. A frantic search of Moh's wardrobe had turned up a frightful 'thirties outfit, three-piece with cravat, which he'd apparently worn to the interview for the last respectable job he'd ever attempted to get, in some edited-out deviation from what he nowadays presented as a steady career progression from bricklayer to union organizer to mercenary. Jordan had insisted on taking Cat's jacket and his jeans in a carpet-bag: whatever it took to get into
BC
, he'd no intention of being seen like this attempting street oratory – for which, he gathered, street-credibility was a crucial requirement. Even by Beulah City's time-lapsed standards he looked a complete neuf. Cat, by exasperating contrast, didn't look out of place in Norlonto.

Overhead, air traffic was being diverted away from Alexandra Port and the sky was gradually filling up: airships at the lowest level; then re-entry gliders cracking past and drifting into the city's thermals, rising in great lazy spirals; above them the blue of the sky crosshatched with the contrails of airliners stacked above Heathrow or giving up and making a break for the Landmass.

Cat and Jordan found themselves part of a flow of people going down the hill. Looking back, Jordan saw that more and more people were pressing on from behind them. Almost every other vehicle in the road had been abandoned, and more occupants were joining the pedestrians by the minute. He'd worried about looking worried, but by the faces around him he could see it had been a misplaced concern.

‘I've just realized,' Cat said. ‘We're in the middle of a bunch of refugees. They're keeping very calm about it, for now, but I'll bet there's a flood building up of Norlonto's middle classes getting out of the way of the godless communists and under the wing of the godly capitalists.'

‘Nobody outside
BC
believes the
ANR
is communist,' Jordan murmured.

‘Oh yes they do,' Cat said. ‘You should hear them talking about “the cadres”.'

‘Mind who hears
us
talking about them.'

‘Just listen. Everybody else is.'

And they were. Complete strangers earnestly passed on scraps of information that they'd heard from the third person back from the one who'd just passed a car with the radio left on: Glasgow had fallen to the
ANR
, bombs had gone off in Victoria Street, the Dail had declared war on England…The crowds thinned a little as part of the stream turned left to add to the chaos at Alexandra Port's passenger terminals, then condensed as they funnelled in towards the
BC
frontier. Out of sheer devilment Cat told someone the greens were moving in on Birmingham, something she knew was flatly out of the question – she had a radio clipped in her hair, the phone curled behind her ear, and could flick channels unobtrusively by twitching it; nothing of any interest was being reported. Yet, before a hundred metres and ten minutes had gone past they'd heard from their fellow pedestrians that the greens had taken Birmingham, that the greens were evacuating Birmingham at gunpoint, and that the greens had evacuated Birmingham and destroyed the city centre with a tactical nuclear device.

Yes, she confirmed knowledgeably. They'd planted it where the Bull Ring used to be.

At the border the Warriors had given up trying to hold back the crowd. In most cases they just waved people through and acted as if it had been their idea all along; Christian charity, sanctuary. But not all: there was a Green Channel and a Red Channel, sheep and goats.

Jordan tried not to catch any visored eyes, to no avail. He and Cat were firmly directed into the Red Channel – the one that passed through the metal detector.

 

Moh came out of his trance with a jump. He turned to Van and Janis.

‘Yee-hah!' he said.

‘What?'

‘Watch Manchester.'

Janis flipped to the station just as the newsreader responded to a polite tap on the shoulder. The camera pulled back to show armed civilians wandering into the newsroom. A young woman sat down self-consciously in the newsreader's place and began reading a declaration. Others held up blue-white-and-green flags or Union Jacks with a hole cut out of the middle, waving them from side to side and chanting some slogan of which the only word that came over clearly was ‘united'.

The station went off the air just as the girl was reading the paragraph, traditional in such proclamations, calling on those who had been deceived into taking up arms for the enemy to come over to the side of the people.

‘Oh, my God,' Janis said.

‘Not to worry,' said Van. ‘Somebody always pulls the plug. We've still got the station, and the city.'

CNN
confirmed that Manchester was held by the insurgents. Heavy fighting was reported from the Bristol area. Tanks assembled by unknowing robots in Japanese-owned car factories were rolling down the
M
6. The Security Council had gone into emergency session, not over Britain but over the border clashes between Russia and the Turkish Confederacy and the Sino-Soviet capture of Vladivostok.

‘Told you they're overstretched,' Moh said.

‘Have you made any…contact yet?'

‘No, I've only encountered your systems,' Moh said. ‘Everything seems to be going fine. I'm going back in.' He smiled at them and turned to the screen.

 

Cat leaned back and whispered to Jordan. He straightened up, smiling at her protectively.

‘No X-rays, please,' he said. Cat blushed and flicked her eyelashes down and patted her belly. The Warrior keyed a switch and nodded. Cat stepped through the arched gate.

Beep.

She frowned and backed out, then laid her fingers across her mouth and opened her eyes wide. She groped in her handbag and gingerly lifted out a derringer and handed it to the guard, who sighed and slid it along the counter past the outside of the detector. Jordan watched this performance, tapping his foot while other people jostled behind him. Cat went under the arch again.

Beep beep beeeeep.

Cat stepped back, turned scarlet-faced to the guard and leaned over and murmured to him. She caught the side of her skirt between hip and knee latitudes and pushed it towards his hands. He felt it for a moment, as if flexing something. He let go of it. One hand went to the back of his neck. He looked around, took in the length of the queue and almost surreptitiously switched off the device and gestured to Cat. She sailed through, picked up her lady's handgun and waited for Jordan. To make up for this the guard inspected Jordan's carpet-bag with two minutes of awe-inspiring thoroughness, listening with obvious disbelief to the explanation that Earth's Angels was a Christian ecology study group, before letting him through.

Traffic was moving; the pavements were clearer in Park Road. No strikes here, and people had the sense to get off the streets. Jordan spotted a vacant pedicab and hailed it. He knew exactly how to help her in, which was just as well because she didn't.