Fractions (39 page)

Two Warriors charged past him and ploughed into the front of the crowd, lashing out with long truncheons. In a moment all the people seemed to be running, in different directions. Then, as if through clearing smoke, Jordan saw that nearly everybody he could see had a hand-gun and was raising it but not bringing it to bear. Jordan dropped the hailer and turned to Cat. Her red-eyed, tear-streaked, mucus-slimed face barely registered surprise as he caught her by the shoulder and pulled her down with him. The pistol she'd given him was in his hand. He had no idea how to use it.

He saw the now ragged line of Warriors, the wreckage of the border barrier a few metres ahead across a stone-strewn gap, and other weapons brandished by the other crowd. Still, silent seconds passed. A Warrior officer waved his arms, crossing and uncrossing them above his head. Warriors who'd run into the crowds were propelled out of them. With slow and cautious steps all the Warriors retreated to the sides of the street.

Cat stood up and Jordan followed, then had to run to keep up as everybody else moved forward and the two crowds became one. There was an overwhelming, confusing moment of handshakes and hugs, of swaying and shouting, and then they all started walking forward, into Pentonville Road. The song was taken up again.
BRING ME MY ARROWS OF DESIRE
. Jordan looked sideways at Cat, who for some reason had chosen that moment to look at him.

The streets from Islington to Marybone, to Primrose Hill and St John's Wood, were builded over with pillars of gold, and there Jerusalem's pillars stood.

 

Janis watched the uprising on television, as she had watched the war.

The crowds were moving now, partly refugees from the fighting that had reached the suburbs, partly demonstrators taking the fight to the centre.
ANR
and Left Alliance agitators laboured to turn the one into the other. Along Bayswater and Whitechapel and Gray's Inn Road they converged, and merged. Across the city, and across all the other cities that seemed to be one city as she flicked from channel to channel, the walls were coming down, the divided communities breaking through and discovering that they were one people. The front ranks of soldiers tore insignia off, surrendered rifles. The harder corps backed off, taking up new positions or vanishing into obscure doorways while the crowds ran past them.

And elsewhere, outside the cities, shown on shaky cameras from cover, from quickly detected and obliterated 'motes, other forces were beginning to move. The barb, alerted like sharks to the smell of blood.

Even from here she could see it wasn't over, that nothing had been settled yet. But the crowds thought it was over, cheering, splashing in fountains, ransacking offices, pulling down statues and dancing in the streets.

Janis watched the crowds, her face wet, remembering herself thinking it was all over and dancing in the street, dancing in the hard rain.

 

This time she knew what to expect. She systematically went through the house, packing what portable and non-perishable food she found. Without sentiment she divided the contents of Moh's baggage and hers, ending up with a single backpack whose priority content was ammo. She kept one eye on the televisions – showing squares and streets still crowded in the dusk, euphoria giving way to tension and determination – and scanned the screen of the gun, adjusting the sights to her size, committing its protocols to memory.

She looked into its deep storage, as Moh had done when he'd first checked it out. What she saw was incomprehensible, a blurred flicker of motion; definitely not, as he'd described it, passive data storage. She backed out quickly.

The phone beeped. She thumbed the receiver. Snow and lines appeared, then the machine cycled through backup systems. When the image stabilized it was of Van's face. The quality was worse than she'd seen in years.

‘Hello, Janis. Are you all right?'

‘I'm fine. Now. For now. How are things with you?'

Van grimaced. ‘Complicated. The offensive has been aborted, but our unreliable allies in the Left Alliance have triggered a civilian uprising, which we are trying to direct. There are grave dangers, because we have not annihilated the key enemy units. They are holding off from decisive engagement, expecting
UN
intervention at any moment. So are we. The situation in Britain has gone right to the top of all agendas. Leave the settlement as soon as you're ready. The first thing they'll do is hit known
ANR
camps.'

‘This is an
ANR
camp?'

‘No, it's an undefended civilian settlement. That's why we evacuated it.'

‘Oh.' Yes, that was the thing to do when you expected to be fighting the
US/UN
. Hurry the civilians out of civilian areas, carry the wounded out of anything with a Red Cross on it.

‘Dr Van.'

‘Yes.'

‘Can you tell me – have you found out anything yet?'

Van nodded, his face looking ancient. ‘I can tell you now. The whole comm network is compromised; we have nothing to lose. This afternoon Donovan's organization launched a massive virus attack. It was apparently targeted on the Watchmaker
AIS.
If any of them remain they are in isolated hardware. That was when we lost our system, what you call the Black Plan. And Dissembler.' He shrugged. ‘They may have been destroyed at the same time. And it would seem likely that—'

‘You're telling me he was killed by a
computer virus
?' The monstrous comedy of it fought in her eyes and throat.

‘I know,' Van said, ‘it seems grotesque. At some level I think we didn't believe that what Kohn reported was really happening. But I've seen the
EMG
s of his synapses, and they are…unique. Even in my experience.'

A slight undertone of his voice brought the thought to mind that there were more monstrous deaths than this, worse and weirder ways to go. Janis took a deep breath.

‘I'm ready,' she said.

She picked up the gun.

 

Van told her where to find directions to the nearest deep shelter, and she walked that night for kilometres along dark roads. At a hydroelectric power station she stopped and called out the passwords, and a hand came out of the darkness and guided her inside a mountain. In the morning she saw outside on the window screens, and was absurdly reassured to see that this mountain and all the other hills about it were patterned with varied shades of red-brown and yellow and faded green, like camouflage.

Later that morning she was pulled excitedly to watch a replay of an incident that had just happened. A fighter-bomber flashed along the glen, then exploded in an airburst that turned the screen white. As the explosion faded they saw the fireball rolling and tumbling and shedding wreckage for several kilometres before everything hit the ground, setting heather alight.

They replayed it lots of times, always with the same cheers. She hoped the girl in the observation post had kept her head down and her eyes shut.

She never learned how many people lived inside that mountain. Hundreds. The fighters were somewhere else; their absence made little difference to the structure of the population here – there were young men and women as well as old, and there were parents who worried about children who were with the fighters.

The screens that showed the news were at first jammed. As the communities had come together the government had extended what grip it could. It could not hide the mounting waves of demonstrations and strikes that broke against it, or the harassment of its forces by units of the
ANR
, now fallen back to guerilla fighting but on a far wider scale than before the offensive.

The
US
President announced a new levy of conscription.

The censorship and jamming stopped. There was talk of a new constitution, a revision of the Settlement. A day later there was talk about the revolution, as if it had already happened. They offered a New Kingdom.

 

‘I don't go much for intuition,' Jordan said, ‘but I've got a real bad feeling about this.'

It was the fourth day since the faltering offensive had been taken up and taken over by the rising crowds, and the biggest demonstration yet, overflowing Trafalgar Square. The Hanoverian troops were nowhere to be seen, but everyone knew where they were. Invisible lines were not crossed.

The sky was a red shout above the black streets. News-hawks circled overhead, their mikes and lenses and pheromone detectors out like vibrissae, alert for the rumour, the glance, the smell of fear. Jordan and Cat sat on the steps of the National Gallery, drinking coffee from styrofoam cups and muching doner kebabs. (Thirty-five marks: the petty bourgeoisie had thrown itself into the revolution in its own inimitable way.)

‘I know what you mean,' Cat said. ‘It's
intended.
The whole City of Westminster is intended to make you feel like that. Nothing but shops and offices and official buildings and statues. It all belongs to capital or the state. No, it's more than that. It's ornate, gross. Centuries of surplus value stored up like fat. This time I hope we
level
the place.'

‘Well, that's part of it,' Jordan said, gazing over the knots of arguing people that filled the square. ‘Not all. We seem to have all this power, the government's on the run, but we haven't won.'

‘Damn right we haven't,' Cat said. ‘That's why we're here. We're gonna keep coming here until the Hanoverians come out of their bunkers and barracks with their hands up, or come out shooting.'

‘At least some of us will be shooting back.'

Cat looked at him. ‘Not for long.' She leaned back against the stone, closed her eyes and began to sing as if to herself:

He didn't know the song, but he recognized it with a shiver down his spine: he'd heard it as background noise on history tapes of other demonstrations, in other squares, other cities – Seoul and São Paulo, Moscow and Jo'burg and Berlin. After it the gas-shells would cough, the rifles speak, the bullets sing.

Something had happened. A gasp, a whisper, a rumour spread through the crowd in visible shockwaves. Cat broke off singing and sat up, one hand on her ear. She turned and pressed his ear, too, against the tiny speaker. He heard the news of the century's turning-point while leaning on her cheek with her hair across his face.

America was on strike from coast to coast.

Cat had such a look of triumph that it was as if she'd pulled the whole thing off herself. ‘We always knew this would happen!' she said. ‘“The West shall rise again” – remember? The American workers have finally told the imperialists to shove it! Yeah, man! Yee fucking hah!' She jumped to her feet and cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled: ‘
US
!
UN
! Remember the West shall rise again!
Vive la quatrième internationale
!'

A few metres away from them an old man from the Beulah City contingent burst into speech, leaning back and looking upwards at the news-hawks, his fists raised above his head. ‘“Sit thou silent, and get thee into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans: for thou shalt no more be called, The lady of kingdoms. Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee!”'

He wandered off through the crowd, still shouting imprecations.

‘What's all that about?' Cat asked. Jordan grinned at the joy and puzzlement on her face.

‘Babylon is fallen,' he said.

 

‘Does that mean we've won?' Janis asked, when the dangerous driving and the firing into the air had stopped. The four men who shared with her the front seat of the truck all shouted ‘Yes!' or ‘No!', and then laughed. As soon as the news had come through she had been told to leave the shelter. The small convoy had picked her up (gun on the ground, one hand on her head, the other with a thumb stuck out) at the Strathcarron junction. They were heading south at a speed that forced her to look into the far distance or at the faces of her companions – anywhere but at the road.

‘That's your answer for you,' said the man between her and the door. Donald Patel had an accent like MacLennan's and it seemed incongruous with his delicate dark features. ‘It means the Americans are not coming, that's for sure. They won't be seeing much of
the rocket's red glare
over there for a while.' More laughter.

After half an hour news came through that His Majesty's Government had decided to continue the struggle against terrorism from exile. A new voice interrupted, announcing that the United Republic had been restored, and a provisional government established. The Hanoverian forces on the ground, bidding to negotiate an end to the conflict short of actual surrender, were politely informed this was not an option.

Janis realized, as the trucks lurched and swayed towards Glasgow and the traffic got heavier all the time, that the men's jubilation at the victory of the Republic was not that of soldiers being demobilized. Most of the people on the road had just been
mobilized.
They were going to war. And she wouldn't be waving them a cheery goodbye and catching the red-eye to Heathrow.

At Buchanan Street Bus Station the convoy stopped. They all piled out and were pointed to a huge marquee where she was stamped and registered and sworn in again, stripped and showered and tagged. She was a soldier.