Fractions (14 page)

‘Can't imagine why.'

‘Anyway…we both just took off, disappeared into the Greenbelt. I sort of dragged her up, you know? Did all sorts of casual work, usual stuff, until I was old enough to get steady jobs in construction.'

‘Christ.' Janis looked almost more sympathetic at this part of the story than at what had come before. ‘Did you ever think of going off to the hills and joining the
ANR
?'

‘Thought about it? – I fucking
dreamt
about it. But the baseline was, I never rated their chances.' He snorted. ‘Looks like I might have been wrong, huh? Anyway, knocking the Hanoverians off their perch wouldn't be enough. At least the space movement understands that. You gotta defeat the Evil Empire, man! And the green slime, all the species of cranks and creeps. Protect the launch sites, protect the net, and defend the workers. That's our line.'

‘The thin Red line.'

‘Damn' right,' he said with a proud grin. ‘The last defenders.'

‘How did you become a – what do you call yourself? – a security mercenary?'

‘Started with defending building sites against green heavies. Went on from there.' He shrugged and smiled. ‘Talk about it another time…How did you get to be a mad scientist?'

Janis took a long swallow. ‘This must sound like a sheltered upbringing. A bit of that old middle-class privilege, you know? Grew up in Manchester. It's all straight Kingdom, no autonomous communities. Not much violence.
ANR
sparrow units knock off soldiers and officials now and again…

‘My parents are both doctors.' She gave a self-deprecating smile. ‘Real doctors. Uh, physicians. Two brothers, both younger than me. One's a mining engineer in Siberia, the other's in medical school. I was always interested in medical research – all the code-cracking breakthroughs happened when I was just old enough to understand. Grammar school, university, research. I only came down here because of the restrictions – not enough F S Zees up north.'

Kohn nodded slowly. ‘And now Norlonto. Just a natural progression.'

Janis grimaced. ‘I wouldn't want to get mixed up in black technology.'

It was a cant phrase for the sort of research that was rumoured to go on in Norlonto. Not quite deep technology, but treading the edge; neural-electronic interfacing, gene-splicing, potentially lethal life-extension techniques, all tested on higher animals or human subjects whose voluntary status was distinctly dubious: debtors, crime-bondees, kids who didn't know what they were getting into, the desperate poor, mercenaries…

He lit another cigarette and leaned back, blowing smoke past his nostrils and looking at her along his nose. ‘That's a good one,' he remarked, ‘in the circumstances.'

‘There's a bloody difference!'

‘Explain that to the cranks.'

‘What can we do, then?' Janis glanced around the now livening bar as if checking for infiltrators.

She looked so worried that Kohn relented. He'd made his point.

‘Don't worry about it,' he said. ‘This place is a black hole for the state and for the terrs – nothing to stop them getting in; it's getting out they find difficult. Nobody's signed the Convention here; the Settlement doesn't apply; we're not in the
UN
. We don't have any of these stand-offs in a state of war. What we have instead is a trade-off, anarchy and what the movement calls
law and order.
Anybody can carry a gun, and anybody who uses one without good cause is liable to get wasted. So they'll have to work their way round to us, and before they do – give it a few days – we have lots of options. Vanishing into the crowd by going deeper into Norlonto. Going public and datagating the whole deal. Taking to the hills. Crossing the water—'

‘Ireland?' Janis looked shocked.

Kohn had been there, handling security at one of the many conferences that could be safely held only outside the Kingdom. It was a strange place, that other Republic, a black-and-white photograph of the colourful enthusiasms he remembered from his childhood. United, federal, secular and social democratic, a welfare state where you got liberalism shoved down your throat from an early age, with vitamin supplements…It had been a disturbing experience because of its very ambiguity, like tales his grandmother had recounted of visits to East Germany. He tried to shrug away what he suspected was on Janis's part a lingering prejudice from years of Hanoverian disinformation.

‘Think of it like cryonics,' he said, getting up to go to the bar.

‘How d'you mean?'

‘As an alternative to death there's a lot to be said for it.'

Her laughter followed him, but he could see she wasn't convinced.

 

Jordan snatched the
VR
glasses off and pressed the heels of his hands against his tight-shut eyes. The dull kaleidoscope of false light made the other afterimages go away. Then he opened his eyes and reassured himself of the solid and insubstantial realities around him.

He had been looking for information about the Black Plan. The
ANR
itself denied all knowledge: his cautious inquiry resulted in its garish
VR/PR
office dwindling abruptly to a dot in the distance. Then he had turned to the competing newslines of the radicals and libertarians and socialists, his search patterns hauling in a succession of titles that floated up past him as he checked them out one by one:

That last one had been a mistake. It had rattled his nerves so much that coffee could only calm them, not still them entirely. The whole net, this evening, was like jangled nerves. The afternoon's system crashes had set off claims and counterclaims, wars of rumour. Cross-tracing Black Plan and Watchmaker references had scored dozens of hits as transitory anomalous events – from the crashes to bombings to disappearances of well known militants to emergency hands-on audits in Japanese-owned car factories – were attributed to one or the other, or both.

Jordan sipped coffee and ran the rumours through the hand-held's freeware evaluation routines and his own mind. It took him about a quarter of an hour to arrange the possibilities in a spectrum. At one extreme of inferences from the net the Black Plan
was already
the Watchmaker, and was being used by the Illuminati through the Last International and its front organizations – including the Fourth International and the Fifth International and the International Committee for the Reconstruction of the Libertarian International – to
take over the world
by flooding the market with Black Plan products recognizable by barcodes all of which contained the number 666. At a minimum, though, there was definitely something happening on the Left, using the term in a fairly broad and paranoid sense to include the
ANR
and the Left Alliance and parts of the space movement, but the signal-to-noise ratio was so high there was no way to get much further without a reality check.

Time to look for some live action.

Jordan paid his tab and lugged his pack outside the door. As he buckled the strap a woman's face caught his eye. An open, friendly face which he recognized but couldn't place. She looked at him as if the recognition were mutual, but puzzled. A man walked beside her and a flicker of annoyance creased his brow as she stopped and said hello to Jordan.

Her dress seemed made of flames, a friendly fire that licked and played around the movements of her body. Salamandrine faces peeped and winked between her breasts and thighs. Her eyes were amused, when he reached them.

‘Enjoying your first taste of life in space?'

When she spoke he remembered her: she was the woman who'd checked him in.

‘Oh, hello again,' he said. ‘Yes, but. It's all a bit intense.'

‘What are you looking for?'

‘Uh…Well I want to meet people to talk to about…radical ideas, radical politics, you know? And to be honest I'd rather do it somewhere a bit more—'

He hesitated, not wanting to offend.

‘Normal and natural?' she teased.

‘Yes,' he admitted.

‘OK.' She turned to her companion. ‘Do we know anywhere reasonably conservative, but relaxed?'

He thought for a moment, then said, ‘You could come with us. The Lord Carrington. That's where the revolutionaries hang out.' To Jordan it seemed wild enough, as he stood at the bar and drank his first honest litre. There were pubs in Beulah City but they were the sort of place where the Salvation Army
was
the entertainment. The Christians had an almost miraculous talent for turning wine into water. He smiled to himself and looked around.

The couple who'd come with him had been instantly dragged into a group of people in urgent discussion, leaving Jordan with a not unfriendly wave. The guy had been right about the sort of place it was. Conservative, relaxed and revolutionary: it caught the style. Cotton and leather and denim, a fashion statement echoing down generations: from cattle drivers to factory hands to leftist students to pro-Western youth in the East and back to the workers the last time the West was Red, and now to those who remembered that period or hoped for its return – the Levi jacket as much a badge of dissent as any enamel emblem pinned to its lapels.

Some of the women dressed exactly like the men, others played with similar modes softened by decorative touches; most, however, seemed to be announcing that they came from peasant rather than proletarian stock, in ethnic skirts and dresses that no actual Bolivian or Bulgarian or Kurdish woman would be seen dead in nowadays. But, whatever they wore, they acted in a way that struck him as brash and bold and masculine: shouting and smoking and buying drinks. There was something exciting about it, exciting in a different way from what he'd seen on the streets.

He felt simultaneously conspicuous and invisible. This was no singles bar: everyone was in groups and/or couples. He was noticed as different, unknown to anyone, and then ignored. He scanned the crowd for anyone on their own or anyhow interested in meeting someone new.

His idle gaze stopped with a jolt at a woman who sat on the wall-seat behind a table at the window. There were others at the table, but there was space on either side of her, and she was looking around the pub with a curious, questioning eye. She certainly wasn't waiting for her date to turn up. She looked relaxed and content, and out-of-place. Cascading red hair, just enough make-up, pale face and paler arms set off by a sleeveless black top. It all said class, and not working class.

She saw him looking, and made eye-contact for a fraction of a second, then glanced down at her drink. Her hair tumbled forward. She ran her hand over the glass, then picked it up and took a swallow. Jordan turned away before she looked at him again, but he felt her gaze like a long, cool finger.

 

Another place, a place unknown except as a rumour, like the Black Plan and the Last International and the Twilight of the Icons. The Clearing House: a hierarchical hotline, the secret soviet of the ruling class, a permanent party – in both senses, an occasion and an organization of the privileged – where everybody who was anybody could socialize in privacy. The place where the Protocols of the Elders of Babylon could be hammered out.

Donovan was the only participant who had never received the standing invitation that came in some form to almost everyone who became conspicuously successful, terrorist and trillionaire alike. He had hacked his way in. The feat was so unprecedented and alarming that it had caused a five-minute global financial crash and an immediate arrangement to the effect that his electronic warfare would not bring down the wrath of Space Defense. Handling more localized retaliation would remain his own business.

Tonight he received an urgent summons, his first in years. It flashed around his screens, interrupting his interrogations of the entities that slunk and prowled in forgotten reaches of the datasphere. He dismissed them and subvocalized the passwords, and in an instant he was there, out of it. He needed no
VR
gear to be there, to be out of it – he took it straight from the screens, his mind vaulting unaided into the lucid dream of mainframing.

Free fall in black space, faint fall of photons. Step up the magnification and resolution to:

 

A distant galaxy, a chalk thumbprint whorl, a cloud of points of light, a hovering firefly swarm, a crowded cloud of bright fantastic bodies, a multi-level masquerade where everyone was talking but no one could overhear. Donovan's fetch – the body-construct that other users saw – was based on a younger self, not out of vanity but because he couldn't be bothered to update it. Others inclined to the Masque of the Red Death approach. It looked like a heaven for the wicked.

‘Glad to see you, Donovan.'

The angel that spoke to him had chubby pink cheeks, iridescent feathered wings, a shining robe and an uncertain halo that wavered over her head like a smoke-ring.

‘I don't think we've been introduced.'

The angel simpered, a visual effect so cloying that Donovan felt metaphysically sick.

‘My name is Melody Lawson. Do you remember me?'

Donovan struggled to sustain the illusion of telepresence as (‘back' at the rig, as he couldn't help thinking) he fumbled with a hot-key databoard. Melody Lawson's details flickered past the corner of his eye.

‘Of course,' he said. ‘You and your husband left the movement – oh, it must be nearly twenty years ago. But I seem to recall a few very welcome sums of' – he smiled – ‘angel money.' Conscience money, more like. ‘What are you doing now, and why have you called me?'