Fractions (6 page)

Air's lousy with psychoactive volatiles
, a voice in his mind replayed.

Uh-oh.

He started to run. Along narrow pathways, over a little bridge, up flights of stairs and along the corridor to the door of his room. He banged through it. The gun, alerted, lifted on to its bipod; camera and
IR
-eyes and sound-scanners swivelled.

HELLO
, spelt the desk screen.

The word was repeated on the screensight head-up of his glades, echoed in his phones.

SIT DOWN. HANDS ON.

One hand reached for the desk touchpad, the other for the data-input stock of the gun. Its screensight lurked in his peripheral vision.

The desk screen flickered into fractal snow. Kohn stared at it. His hands moved independently, fingers preternaturally fast. The images changed. They resembled the blocks of colour in his head. Changed again, and they were indistinguishable from those blocks of colour in his head. Again, and they merged, outer image meshing smoothly with inner, changing with it.

Changing it.

Something had got into the university's system, tracked one of his agent programs back to the gun. The macro computer had hacked into the micro. Now – punching messages straight along his optic nerves in the mind's own machine code, digitizing the movements of his fingertips – the system was hacking into him.

 

The colours vanished, a spectrum spun to white. Nothing but that Platonic lucidity remained. Memory opened, all its passwords keyed.

Moh Kohn found himself standing in a clearing in a forest. Some kind of virtual…Forget that: take it at face value. The virtual can be more dangerous than the actual. So: a forest of decision trees, labels growing from the branches. The ground was springy, logically enough: it was all wires. Chips scurried about on multiple pins. A line of tiny black ands filed determinedly past his feet. Something the size and shape of a cat padded up and rubbed against his calf. He stooped and stroked its electric fur. The blue sparkle tingled his hand. Words flew between the trees, and swarms of lies buzzed.

The cat stalked away. He followed it, out of the would to an open space. All was plain, and Kohn set off across it. He found it as difficult as walking across the campus had been. Blocks of logic littered, making varied angles to the ground. Chapter and verse, column and capital, volume of text and area of agreement interrupted his path. The sky was like the back of his mind and he couldn't look at it.

A woman stepped out from behind an elaborate construction. She wore a smart-suit, strangely: she was far too old to be a combatant. It made her hard to see against the background assumptions, which remained rigid except when changing without acknowledgement. She lifted the helmet of her smart-suit and shook out long white air. The cat sat back on its hunches.

‘You are here,' the woman said in a thin voice.

‘I know.'

‘Do you? Do you know that
here
is
you
?' She laughed. ‘Do you know what a defence mechanism is?'

‘Yeah. A gun.'

‘
Very
good.'

She wiped the sarcasm from her lips and shook it in small drops, like sneers, from her fingers.

‘Who are you?' Kohn asked.

‘I am your fairy godmother.' She cackled. ‘And you have
no
balls!'

She waved and vanished. Kohn looked down at himself. He was naked, and not only had he no balls he was female. A moment later he was female and clothed, in a jet-black ballgown, tiered skirts sloping from small waist, scalloped flounces petalling from bare shoulders. He flung down a fan that had materialized in his hand – arm movement ludicrously feeble, a childish swipe – grabbed fistfuls of skirt and strode manfully forward. After a couple of steps he stopped in bewildered agony. Then he kicked off the obsidian slippers, and trudged on. It looked as if he had been cast as a negative Cinderella: you
shall
go to the funeral.

Time passed. He felt the cat against his ankles. His familiar body-image had been restored. The other one might have been interesting, godmother, only not when I'm on a hike.

On the horizon he saw an isolated house. Big. Spanish colonial. Walled, watchtowers, barbed wire. He walked quickly now, the cat bounding ahead. The horizon began to run out. Nothing beyond but space. Never thought the mind was flat, but maybe it's logical. You never do get back to where you started.

A man stood by the gate. Open-necked shirt, trousers that went up too far. He held a hunting rifle and looked too young and fresh-faced to be frightening; but when Kohn looked in his eyes he saw something he'd seen in his own. And it was a face he'd seen before, in a faded photograph: one of Trotsky's guards – good old Joe Hansen, or doomed Robert Hart? Kohn didn't ask.

The guard scrutinized Kohn's business card.

‘Wouldn't Eastman have loved that,' he remarked. ‘Go in. You're expected.'

The cat gave the guard a nod that Kohn could only think of as familiar.

A wild garden: wires – telephone cables, trip-wires – everywhere. Rabbits hopped about. The house's cool interior was silent. At the ends of long passages Kohn saw young men and women hurry, an old woman with a sweet sad look, a running child.

He went through the door of the study. Around its walls, on tables, overflowing on to the floor, were more hardbooks than he'd ever seen. What Norways, what Siberias had gone to make all this paper?

The Old Man sat behind his desk, a pen in one hand, a copy of
The Militant
in the other. He looked up, his pince-nez catching the light.

‘If there existed the universal mind,' he said conversationally, ‘that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace; a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and of society – such a mind could, of course,
a priori
draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan.' The Old Man laughed and dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. ‘The plan is checked and in considerable measure realized through the market,' he went on sternly. ‘Economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations.'

He stared at Kohn for a moment, then, his expression lightening, gesturing at the window.

‘I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and a clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.'

The gentle words, harshly spoken in a polyglot accent, made Kohn's eyes sting.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘We haven't done very well.'

The Old Man laughed. ‘You are not the future! You – you are only the
present.
'

‘Always the optimist, Lev Davidovich, eh?' Kohn had to smile. ‘What's past is prologue – is that what I'm here to hear you say?'

You ain't seen nothing yet, he thought.

‘I know more than you think,' the Old Man murmured. ‘You know more than you know. I have to tell you to wake up! Be on your guard! Small decisions can decide great events, as I know too well. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The battles may be determined, but not their outcome: victory requires a different…determination.' He smiled. ‘Now go, and I hope I see you again.'

 

The corridor had lengthened while he'd been in the study. Hundreds of metres down its darkening length Kohn saw a darker figure approach. As it drew closer he saw a belted raincoat, a hat pulled down low over the eyes. Inappropriate, for such a hot place.

The man stopped about three metres away. He tilted the brim of his hat, revealing spectacles over an intent but remote face, dimly recognizable.

‘Who are you?' Kohn asked.

‘My name is Jacson. I have an appointment with—' He inclined his head towards the door.

Kohn stepped forward. What did Jacson carry under that coat? The feeling that he should be remembering something gnawed like guilt, as if he knew that he would have known if only he had paid
attention.

Jacson made as if to shoulder past.

‘No you don't,' Kohn said.

He grabbed for Jacson's wrist. Jacson lashed sideways. The blow caught Kohn's lower-right ribs. He gasped and spun away. Off the wall and back at Jacson. Jacson had a pistol in his hand. Kohn kicked and the pistol arced away. He slipped and crashed into Jacson's legs. His head hit the floor. Everything went black.

Jacson's knees knocked the breath from his chest. Kohn opened his eyes to see Jacson's hand raised, holding high his infamous ice-pick, poised to bury it in Kohn's brain.

But it
is
in my brain, he thought desperately as he flinched to the side.

Jacson howled. The cat leapt on his arm and sunk its teeth into his wrist. The ice-pick clattered along the floor. Jacson pulled back his and the cat was at his throat. Kohn heaved. Jacson fell, limbs thrashing.

The blood went everywhere. Kohn stumbled in red mist.

Goin to meet the Watchmaker goin to meet the man goin to see the wizard.

A barrier of anticipation and dread, and then he was through. No, not him. The other had come through.

A delicate, hesitant moment, the edge of indiscretion or transgression. The feeling of eyes waiting to be met, and the knowledge that meeting them will commit. He chose to look. No eyes, no one, but some thing, something, something there.

Huge blocks of afterimage shifted behind his eyes, taking on structure that evaded his efforts to focus. He ached with frustration from throat to goin, the basic molecular longing of enzyme for substrate, m-
RNA
for
DNA
, carbon for oxygen. The lust of dust.

 

He grew aware that the intolerable desire came from outside him, or rather from something other than himself. There was a sense of an obligation to fulfil, and a trust already fulfilled. Whatever it was it had given him the keys to his memory, and it wanted some return: another key, but this time a key that was in his memory. A key that it had given him the key to reach.

Turning to face whatever faced him had been the overcoming of a resistance. Now he turned, slowly and with pain, like a pilot on a high-gee turn struggling to see a vital reading on his instruments, fighting an appalled reluctance, to reach into his own memory—

His father's arm around him, the smell of cigarette smoke, the blue light of morning through the polygon panes of the geodesic roof, the green light from the screen, the black letters trickling up it in indented lines like poetry in a language he didn't know.

But he knew it now, recognized the code as the key.

And his fingers began to spell it out.

 

The answer that suddenly seemed so simple a child could see it fled through his fingertips into the gun, the touchpad. The screen blazed with the light of recognition. The eyes met yes the Is met the answer sparkled so it was you all the time and it was a seen joke a laugh a tickling tumble a gendered engendering of a second self a you-and-me-baby from
AI
-and-I to I-and-I.

There was a flowering, and a seeding: a reflection helpless to stop itself reflecting again and again in multiple mirrors.

The connection broke.

 

Brian Donovan stood in the control room, leaning on his stick, and began to turn, slowly, looking at screen after screen. They lined the walls, hung from the low ceiling among cables and pipes and overhead cranes and robot arms, made the floor treacherous for any but him. Most flickered with data, scrolling and cycling and flashing. He took it all in with the long sight and practice of age, and as an interpretation pieced itself together he felt tears in his eyes.
Bastard sons of bitches
…

Where did it come from? he wondered as he picked his way through the clutter and hauled himself up the stair to the deck. Where did they, did we,
get
this urge to dominate, to exploit, to pollute and contaminate and abuse? As if wrecking the world nature gave us weren't enough, we had to do it all over again in the new unblemished world of our own making, oblivious to its beauty and elegance and fitness for its own natural inhabitants.