Fractions (12 page)

Kohn had already sized up the balance of forces: it was a small site; the workforce wouldn't be more than a dozen even when they all came in. So he just said ‘OK', and turned away. He paused for a moment to say to Mike: ‘Get all the guys and gals together, pile on our truck. Talk about it at the union, OK, no trouble.'

Mike nodded and stepped quickly to pull his folk out of the rising heat of arguments. Kohn made a pacifying gesture to Stone, who was standing by the truck, and paused a moment to check that the workers were catching the drift.

‘Move yo ass, krautkiller!' the big guy who'd spoken to him shouted at his back.

Kohn turned, more amazed than incensed at the racial sneer.
Never thought of myself as…until until until
…He looked at the man and felt a fastidious contempt.

‘“We are on the edge of darkness”,' he said, quoting a recurrent green slogan. The man looked puzzled. Kohn waited until they were all on the truck and moving off before leaning out of the window and yelling as he passed, ‘and
you
are the darkness!'

He felt quite gratified by the banging the side of the truck took for that. At the union office, an old shopfront floor, his reminiscent smirk faded. They found a distinct lack of interest in their problem from the local officials. The lab-site crew stood around the scratched Formica tables in the refreshment corner and drank coffee while Mike made call after call – to the militia, to the client, to the union security – and got nowhere.

‘OK,' Kohn said. ‘No more mister nice guy.'

He connected his phone to his computer and retrieved Logan's public key, then tapped in Logan's twenty-digit phone number and his own key. Logan's voice came back, anonymous and toneless as a cheap chip. The processors couldn't spare much for fidelity when they were crunching prime numbers that made the age-of-the-universe-in-seconds look like small change. The up-side was that cracking the encryption would take about as long.

‘This better be urgent, Moh. I'm vac-welding right now.'

‘OK. Greens blockading a job, nobody wants to know. Union, movement, militia. Something heavy leaning on them is my guess.'

‘Mine too. Talk to Wilde.'

Kohn watched his phone-meter's right-hand numbers blurring for about five seconds.

‘Jonathan Wilde?' he croaked at last.

‘The same. Tell him you're from the light company. Gotta go.'

This time Moh was relieved to see the connection broken. He made a performance of putting away his phone and computer, while his mind raced. He stood up and looked around a dozen sceptical faces.

‘I think we got things moving,' he said. He flashed them a rueful smile. ‘Finally. Mike, Stone, maybe you should get the union lawyer on to this one. Threaten to sue the research company. Breach of contract, condoning intimidation, whatever. Make something up. Same with whatever street-owner is allowing that so-called demo. Rest of us might as well call it a day. They'll cough up our pay anyway.' He sounded more convinced than he felt.

‘What about you?' Stone wanted to know.

‘I'm going to meet The Man,' Kohn said.

 

Wilde wasn't exactly The Man – he didn't employ anyone apart from a few research assistants now and again. The only position he held was a fairly nominal history lectureship at the University of North London Town. Now in his seventies, he'd been an anomalous figure for decades, regarded as a left-winger in the space movement, a libertarian space nut by the Left. He'd written some of the movement's earliest manifestos (
No More Earthquakes, The Earth is a Harsh Mistress
) and numerous pamphlets, articles and books documenting what he called the counterconspiracy theory of history, which maintained that many otherwise incomprehensible historical events could be explained by identifying the conspiracy theories held by the protagonists. He'd discovered a surprising number of cases where prominent political, military and law-enforcement figures had been (openly or secretly) conspiracy theorists. In the course of researching and expounding this thesis he had developed a vast and complex range of mutually antagonistic contacts and sources of information. He was widely regarded as the movement's
éminence grise
, a suspicion which all the evidence of his lack of power, position and money only strengthened. Rumour had it that he had been behind whatever it had taken – blackmail, currency speculation, nuclear threats – to get the relevant committee of the Restoration government to agree to Norlonto's existence.

Moh had a rented flat in Kentish Town. He stopped off to change into his newest and sharpest suit, and to place his call. He got a voice-only link, and introduced himself; feeling self-conscious and stupid, he said he was from the light company.

‘Come straight away,' Wilde said. ‘You know where to find me.'

An hour later Kohn knocked at the door of Wilde's office.

‘Come in.'

The office was small and bright, with a window overlooking Trent Park: grass, trees, gliders coming in. It smelled of paper and cement. Wilde sat at a plain desk behind a terminal. He finished saving a file and stood. Skinny, nearly bald, tanned, hook-nosed. Back straight as an old soldier's. Handshake firm.

‘Well, comrade,' he said, gesturing Kohn to sit in one of a pair of standard university chairs made from pine, sacking, rubber bands and polyurethane, ‘what can I do for you?'

Comrade? Kohn wondered if the man were being polite or ironic, and responded with a tight-lipped smile before giving an account of the morning's events.

‘Hmm,' Wilde said. ‘My guess is pressure from Space Defense.'

Kohn opened and closed his mouth. ‘What
they
got to do with the greens?'

‘More than you think,' Wilde said. ‘Oh, there's no conspiracy, as I am notorious for saying. I'm sure the smelly little vermin would be against the project anyway. But it's
SD
that's leaning on the space movement's higher councils, which lean on the
R&D
company, which tells the union and the militia that this is one to write off against insurance.' He smiled. ‘Act of Goddess.'

Kohn spread his hands. ‘But why?'

‘What
else
,' Wilde asked, like a lecturer posing a problem, ‘could you do with a very powerful, very accurate ground-based fast-tracking laser, assuming one could be developed?' He sighted along his pointed finger and swung it slowly upwards.

Kohn suddenly got it, and laughed at himself for not realizing it sooner. ‘Down battlesats,' he said.

‘Yup,' said Wilde. ‘Apparently our
R&D
actually didn't know that laser-launchers were originally promoted as a civilian spin-off from an
ABM
system. Space Defense, needless to say, has a better memory.'

‘So that's it,' Kohn said.

‘You think so?' Wilde's voice rang sharp; his eyes narrowed.

Kohn thought for a moment, stood up and stalked to the window as his gall rose.

‘
No
,' he said. ‘I won't have it. OK, you can't fight
SD
. We build the laser lab, they'll lase it. But the greens…oh, shit.'

‘What do you feel about them?'

Kohn whirled. ‘One of them called me “krautkiller”, you know that? Fuck them and their nazi economics.' He punched his palm. ‘Protection. Conservation. Restriction. Deep ecology. Give me deep technology any day. They don't scare me. I'm damned if I'll crawl, my children's children crawl on the earth in some kind a fuckin harmony with the environment. Yeah, till the next ice age or the next asteroid impact. “Krautkiller”, huh? Chosen people, huh?' He remembered the old taunts.
Never thought of myself as…until until until
…He took a deep breath, shook his head. ‘It's them or us, man, and I've
chosen people.
'

‘That's what I thought,' Wilde said, ‘Now sit down and let me…enlighten you on a few things.'

Kohn listened, and saw the light. The ‘light company' was evidently a codename for the Space and Freedom Party, the militant faction of the space movement that Logan had talked about at the meeting a couple of years earlier. It had pulled in people with diverse views in terms of conventional politics, who disagreed about everything but the struggle for space: the ultimate united front, nothing conceded, nothing compromised, but still holding something of the forbidden thrill of—

‘There's no conspiracy,' Wilde said.

As if to confirm it, he provoked Kohn into defending his own standpoint. Kohn tried – and felt he failed – to articulate the inchoate vision he held of a socialist society that would be even wilder and more free-wheeling than Norlonto, freer than the free market, where the common knowledge that could not but be common property would become the greatest wealth, shared without sacrifice or stint. Wilde countered with his own vision of a world where the market was only the framework, but the only framework, for ways of life as diverse as human inclination could devise; not Social Darwinism but a Darwinian selection of societies.

‘Sounds like what we've got already,' Kohn said, ‘only…'

Wilde snorted. ‘This century,' he said, ‘is as much a travesty of my ideas as the last one was of yours. Mini-states instead of minimal states. Hah.'

‘Blame the world wars,' Kohn said.

‘How…internationalist of you to put it that way,' Wilde said. ‘I have difficulty convincing some of my lot not just to blame the Germans.'

‘That's bourgeois nationalism for you.'

‘Quite.'

‘Looks like we're not going to settle this.'

‘Not here. Space will…settle it.'

‘Space settlement!'

They both laughed.

‘It's true,' Wilde said. ‘Reality will turn out different from my utopia, and yours. The good thing about space is it holds out the chance that it might turn out better than we can imagine instead of worse. Not a promised land but a whole new infinite America where
we
'll be the Indians, all our tribes expanding into a wilderness where we'll bring the passengers pigeons and the bison and seed the forests from scratch, from rock and ice!'

Moh nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes, that's it. Like Engels said, man's natural environment doesn't exist yet: he has to create it for himself.'

‘Engels said that?'

‘More or less. Not in so many words. I'll look it up for you.'

‘Yes, you do that. Man's natural environment is artificial – yeah, I like it. What we have to do is keep that possibility open, like the Bering bridge—'

‘
Between Siberia and Alaska
!'

At the time Siberia had a Communist government, Alaska a Libertarian. Wilde grinned back at him.

‘Exactly.'

At lunch Kohn looked round the noisy refectory, shrugged off any worries about security and said, ‘We still have a problem. What we gonna actually do about that lot down at the lab-site gate?'

Wilde shrugged. ‘Not much. The militia won't touch them, and none of the independent agencies are likely to stick their necks out.'

‘Aha,' said Kohn. ‘I think you might just have put your finger on—'

Wilde finished the sentence with him: ‘—
a gap in the market!
'

 

That night the green picket was still staked out at the lab site.

‘What's that?' The one who'd hassled Kohn turned at a noise. He found his cheek meeting a gun muzzle. Muffled sounds came from all around.

‘Your worst nightmare,' said a voice from the darkness, about a metre away. ‘A yid kid with an
AK
and
attitude.
'

THE BRITISH PEOPLE

ENTHUSIASTICALLY COMMEMORATE

THE GLORIOUS

VICTORY OVER

THE GERMAN FASCIST BARBARIANS!

 

The slogan, freshly painted in metre-high letters on the gable end of the house, and the mural that illustrated it (a Soviet soldier raising the Red Flag over the ruined Reichstag) were all that distinguished the headquarters of the Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers' Defence Collective from the other four-storey blocks in the street just off Muswell Hill Broadway.

‘Some of the local kids did that when we weren't looking,' Kohn said. ‘Not exactly internationalist, but it's one in the eye for our Hanoverian friends.'

Janis paused outside the car. She looked up. An airship – cloud and constellation in one – passed low overhead, drifting towards the forest of mooring masts on the immediate horizon where a rambling and ornate building stood, surmounted by holograms of gigantic human figures that reached out for the stars in a Stalinist statuary of light. As clouds dimmed the pale September sun the holograms brightened by the minute.

A low wall, a metre and a half of garden. Kohn opened the door.

‘After you, lady,' he said.

She went in. Kohn dumped her bags in the entrance lobby and ushered her into a long room. At the far end was a kitchen. The near end contained couches, chairs, weapons, electronic gear and a battered table. The long room had obviously been made by knocking two rooms together. It had a rough, unfinished look: the furniture was old chairs and sofas made comfortable and colourful with throws and cushions, the table was gashed and stained, the whitewashed walls plastered with posters and children's art. The kitchen equipment along one wall had probably been thrown out by other households, more than once; around the cooking area shelves held indiscriminate mixtures of books and jars of herbs. The lighting was full-spectrum strips, turned low: a twilight effect. Only the weapons and computers, the cameras and screens and comms, glittered new.

‘Most of the comrades won't be back for a couple of hours,' Moh said. ‘Time we did some hacking and tracking. Want some coffee first?'

Janis laid a hand on the nearest rifle. ‘Kill for it,' she said.

While Moh clattered about in the kitchen area Janis looked over the hardware until she found a telephone.

‘Can you put an untraceable call through from here?' she asked.

Moh looked up, surprised for a moment, then waved a hand.

‘You're in space now,' he reminded her. ‘You can put an untraceable call through from
anywhere you like.
'

Janis called up her sponsors, whose number was an anonymous code without regional identification. Relieved to find herself talking to an answering-machine, she told it there had been an accident at the lab, that the damage was being repaired and that she was taking the opportunity for a few days off. She put the phone down before the answering-machine could question her, then contacted the university's system to make the previous message true. It looked as if the raid and the fire had been logged as a single incident, an ordinary terrorist attack, and was being dealt with through the usual channels: insurance company informed, security-company penalty clauses invoked, a routine request to the Crown forces for retaliation (this would probably be granted in that a fraction of a payload they were going to drop anyway on some
ANR
mountain fastness would be registered as justified by it).

She raised a contract with the Collective for her personal protection, using money paid back under the penalty-clause provisions. The university's system, she was relieved to see, had Moh's little gang on its list of approved suppliers. Her unspecified sabbatical wasn't a problem either. She had a backlog of unused leave for the past year: like most research scientists, she found the concept of time off from work a bit hard to grasp.

‘Through the back,' Moh said, carrying two mugs of coffee and the gun past her as she rang off. The common areas of the house – the corridors and stairwells – had the look of a castle in which there had been many wild knights. Weapons on the walls; Chobham plate visible behind holes in the plaster. Suits of body armour stood or slumped in corners. Moh elbowed open the door of a room, chinned a light-switch and stood back to let her in. The room was small, smelled of scents and metal and sweat, and was crammed with
VR
equipment: simulator seats and suits, goggles and gauntlets. Moh cleared some space on a table, hauled up a pair of worn gimballed chairs.

‘Forgot something,' Janis said. ‘The magic-memory molecules.'

‘Oh. Right.'

 

Moh brought in the cold-box of drug samples, plastered it with biohazard stickers and stuck it in the back of a fridge that hummed to itself out in one of the back corridors.

‘Sure it's safe there?'

‘It better be,' he said. ‘That's where we keep the explosives.'

Moh watched the tension ease from Janis's shoulders and neck as she sipped her coffee, ignored the tiny wrinkles of irritation on her nose as he lit another cigarette. She was taking this well, if finding herself inside a small fortress of communist mercenaries gave her a sense of
security.

She looked at him through narrowed eyes.

‘How's your head?'

He inhaled and leaned back. Suck in and hold your breath and dive down into that limpid depth…it gave him a way in, an entry code.

‘Strange,' he said, exhaling as if he'd just happened to remember how. ‘But OK, I think. Think is what I do.'

She seemed to take this as data.

‘You could try mainframing again.' Wicked smile.

‘I don't even want to consider it.'

‘All right. So what are we going to do in here?'

‘Interrogate this little bastard, for a start.' He pointed down at the gun, on the floor between his boots. ‘I set it to track your project – OK, OK – and it might just have some traces from before whatever it was happened. Might give us an indication of whether it was all in my mind or not. I think that's
fairly
important.'

‘Oh, yes.' Her tone was ironic.

‘There's a bit more to it than the state of my head,' he said mildly. ‘We could now be at the mercy of' – he put on a voice-over voice – ‘“intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” that could hijack every piece of hardware that has any connection with the global comm networks. In short, everything. Mankind: the complete works. On disk.'

‘Cheerful bastard, aren't you?'

‘Yes, I am! Because the whole goddamn datasphere is meaningless without humans
doing things
with it. What I remember from the entity I encountered is this total overwhelming curiosity. And a desire to survive which in a sense is derived from that curiosity: it wants to stick around to see what happens next.'

‘Let's hope it's an
idle
curiosity.'

‘There is that.'

‘OK, let's assume this entity of yours isn't about to pull the plug on us. You're sure Stasis can't get at us here. What else do we have to worry about?'

Kohn grimaced. She wasn't going to like this.

‘First off, the good news is we won't be easy to track. Our armored car has signature-scrambling hardware that can make any lock-on spy sat blink and rub its eyes and decide it must have made a mistake. The car will have pinged with the tollgate arch as we went in, but the militia's privacy code is strict to the point of paranoia. Means of enforcement is outlawry, so it tends to be observed.'

Janis frowned. ‘What's outlawry?'

‘Loss of legal status.' It didn't register. ‘Like, you become an
unowned resource.
'

‘Oh.'

‘Don't look so horrified. Goes on the insurance.'

‘Tell me the bad news.'

‘It's just that my gang has trodden on a lot of fingers in its time, and the enemies we've made – the state, the cranks and creeps – are exactly the people you can count on to have big plans for anyone who messes with deep technology. You saw what happened to the lab. I don't think that was down to Stasis.'

‘They did the break-in, didn't they?'

‘That's possible. It's also possible that, whoever it was, the cranks were giving them cover. If somebody already knows what the drugs are, they're sure to come after the missing pieces. They won't come unprepared.'

He powered up the chunky Glavkom kit, then unclipped the gun's smart systems and connected them. He put the goggles and phones on and slid his hands into the data gauntlets. Their fuzzy grip went up to his elbows, sensual and relaxing. Corporate logos and threatening copyright declarations floated past his eyes for a few seconds. Whoever had pirated this version of DoorWays
^™
had evidently not bothered to take them out.

Option selection was look-and-wink, which left the hands and head free. He blinked on Stores, found himself looking around a roomful of labelled dials indicating how much space the gun's programs and databases currently used.

Needles on full, wherever he looked.

‘Shee-it,' he said. He heard Janis's querying response faintly through the phones.

‘Gun's fucking
loaded
,' he said.

He waved reassuringly at her grunt of concern, causing an agitated flurry among some menu screens to his right. He calmed them down and continued investigating. The last time he'd used this front-end to look inside the gun it had represented the internals as a ramshackle collection of armoured bunkers with banks of instruments, a small lab, a snug fire-control module, all connected by a sort of Viet Cong tunnel system…all there, still, but now burrowed under a vast complex of warehouses, libraries, engine-rooms. He didn't recognize the goods; the books were in languages he didn't know; and what the machines were doing made no sense at all. He backed out in a hurry.

Sweat slicked the goggles as he slid them off.

‘Found anything?'

Kohn looked morosely at the little pile of processors: dull glitter, sharp edges – a scatter of fool's gold. ‘Terabytes,' he said. ‘Passive data storage, most of it. Encrypted, too. Damn.'

He slotted them back together, one by one, and slammed the final assembly into place like a magazine. Lights winked as systems checked in; drives purred and fell silent. It was ready.

‘Can you still rely on it?' Janis asked.

‘Oh, yeah,' he said. ‘That isn't a worry. You can't corrupt
AK
firmware. Been tried. Im-fucking-possible. Nah, I'll tell you what's worrying. It's who
else
could be relying on it.'

She sighed and put her elbows on the table, held her chin in her hands. ‘Let's try and get this straight,' she said. ‘Whatever happened back there, somebody or something downloaded scads of data to your gun's memory, and you think it's using the gun's own software to guard it?'

He saw the light in her eyes, the heat in her cheeks, and knew it had nothing to do with them: it was the feral excitement of tracking down an idea. He felt it himself.

‘That makes
sense
,' he said admiringly.

‘And not just the software,' she went on. ‘It's guarding it with the gun, and with—'

Her teeth flashed momentarily:
Got it.

‘Yes,' he said. He saw it too. ‘With my life.'

He hauled himself to his feet. Better to look down at that gaze she was giving him, that scientific and speculative examination.

He shrugged and stretched. ‘So what's new?' he said. ‘The hell with it. I'm hungry.'

 

They returned to the long room to find a dozen young adults and a couple of kids eating and talking around the table. Janis felt her mouth flood, her belly contract at the smell and sight of chicken korma and rice.

Everybody stopped talking and looked at her.

‘Janis Taine,' Kohn announced. ‘A guest. A person who's put herself under our protection. And a good lady.' He put an arm around her shoulder. ‘Come on, sit down.'

After a moment two vacant places appeared at the table. As soon as she sat Janis found a heaped plate and a glass of wine in front of her. She ate, exchanging nods and smiles and occasionally words as Kohn introduced the others: Stone, tall with a building worker's build and hands, who had worked with Moh to establish the Collective; Mary Abid, who'd found life too peaceful back home after the stories she'd heard from her grandfather; Alasdair Hamilton, a slow-voiced Hebridean demolition man; Dafyd ap Huws, a former
ANR
cadre…They looked the most reassuringly dangerous bunch of nice people she'd ever met.

They didn't ask her about herself, or even mention her call of that afternoon (some etiquette applied), so she didn't tell. She occasionally glanced sideways at Moh, who just grinned awkwardly back when he caught her eye. He looked tired, running on emergency; grim when he didn't know anyone was looking at him. After the meal finished he took a couple of Golds and broke them up to build a large joint, with the same detached mechanical competence he'd shown when reassembling the gun. She waved the joint past her to Stone.

Stone drew on the smoke and blew it out past his nostrils and said, ‘OK, Moh, we're waiting.'

One of the children was taking the plates away. Janis turned from puzzling at the puzzled look her thanks brought, hearing her last word, ‘anyway…', hang on a sudden silence around the table. Moh lit a cigarette and tilted back his chair.

‘Comrades,' he said, ‘we are in deep shit.' He rocked forward, elbows on the table, looking everyone in the eye. ‘First off, Janis here. She's a scientist. She's come here to get away from Stasis, and from whoever put some demons down the wire to her lab. So…I'm giving her close protection, yeah, and we're gonna be away from here, but everybody keep that in mind. Don't want to say any more about that, so don't nobody ask.