Fractions (17 page)

‘Yeah,' said Janis. ‘Not to mention the drugs. Tell me about yourself, Jordan.'

Jordan took another hit. He still couldn't identify any effect. His mind felt clear and calm, and he couldn't look at anything but Janis. She had flared when she spoke, and now was settled back to a steady flame with a flickering hint of mischief. They talked quietly while Kohn watched something else, and said nothing.

 

Moh saw the darkness and the lights of the city around them as if the walls were transparent; and the new strange company he kept, the bright city of clean sharp logic at the back of his mind. It ran pictures for him, eidetic memories that played like
VR
diskettes, of the world that had made the world he walked in now:

 

the bright world
the banner bright the symbol plain the greenbelt fields the greenfield streets the Fuller domes the crowds the quiet dark moments

 

the plastic model spaceships
hanging from black threads the old Warsaw Pact poster of a little girl cradling the Earth
DEFEND PEACE
the stacked clutter of toys and books and tapes the
VR
space-helmet

 

the war.
The Republic didn't disdain the help of children. The party set up a special militia, the Young Guards. Moh toted his first rifle then, a lightweight British
SLR
, in boring nights of watching the entrance to an office tower. (The trick was that he was guarding it secretly, from a safe-house window across the street: the government was already behaving like a resistance movement.) The days were more exciting: demonstrations and street fights, the tensions of the struggle to maintain neutrality, to keep out of the war. Josh and Marcia made jokes that he didn't get, about fighting for peace. They were literally doing that, kicking into demonstrations of what they called the War Party: royalists and tories and fascists. Sometimes the police joined in on both sides.

Moh, later, found himself surprisingly ignorant of the details of the actual course of the War of European Integration. At the time he picked up the assumption that the news was all propaganda, and only caught glimpses of it on television. German tanks rode battering sleds of air, carrying the star-circled banner into Warsaw and Bucharest and Zagreb. German MiGs cleared the skies.

 

The Peace Process.
No, not that. He jolted himself awake, gulped cold coffee and thought about something else.

 

Jordan was explaining to Janis the distinction between Dispensationalism and Pre-Millenarianism (which seemed very important but difficult to grasp) when he heard Moh's mocking laughter and saw him stand up, looking as if he'd had a good night's sleep.

‘It's time I went to bed,' Moh said.

‘I think it's time I did,' Janis said. She yawned, stretched, and jumped to her feet.

‘D'you mind just crashing here, Jordan, just for tonight?'

‘That's fine. That's great. Thanks.'

‘Okay. See you in the morning, Jordan.'

‘Goodnight.'

Janis waved, smiling. A moment later they were gone, like birds through a hole in the roof. Jordan sat still for some time and then took most of his clothes off, wrapped himself in blankets from the back of the sofa, and stretched out on it and stayed awake for a long time.

 

‘Well?' she said, leaning against the door of his room.

‘Well what?'

‘Have you found a place?'

‘Yeah,' Kohn said.

‘Good. Well…I feel like another joint before turning in.' She raised her eyebrows and looked at him. He still seemed wide awake, and he grinned back at her as if this were the most unexpected and delightful suggestion he'd heard in a long time.

‘Yeah, why not?'

She turned and opened the door, watching him. His arm came into the room, past her shoulder; he did something with a switch. Small lights glowed on in the corners as she kicked off her shoes and sat down on the edge of the bed. He sat beside her, leaned an elbow against the pillow and offered her the now depleted and battered pack. She took one out and lit up.

‘Do you want to share?'

‘No, thank you,' he said. ‘Lipstick
tastes.
'

She caught him just as he reached for the pack, with her right hand suddenly behind his head. Her fingers dug into his curls. She drew in the smoke to her throat, held it, and grudged the breath that escaped as she whispered, ‘Taste
this…
'

She brought their mouths (hers open, his opening) together and breathed out while he breathed in. They both broke away, gasping. The second time she gave less attention to fire and more to water, darting her tonguetip against his.

‘You took me by surprise,' Kohn said.

‘Really?'

‘Yes.'

‘I've been wanting to do this for
hours.
'

‘Wanton woman.'

‘Abandoned,' she agreed. ‘An outcast of society.'

She stubbed out the filter roach. Kohn kicked off his boots, shrugged out of his waistcoat, then leaned forward and drew her on to him. She trailed her hair from his shoulders down to his hips, then did the same with her lips and tongue, discovering as she did so that it was time to get his trousers off. She straddled him and took her time with the belt and zip. She moved on her knees down over his thighs, tugging the trews and shorts away, and then suddenly it got urgent and she pulled them fiercely over his feet. She sat on his bare thighs, facing away from him, while he pulled the silk top over her head and unlaced her basque. She slipped her own trousers and pants off. She leaned forward, letting her hair tickle his toes, until the pale opalescent shell of the basque fell away from her chest, and his arms slid around her waist. His erection pressed against the small of her back. She turned over on her knees and put her hands on his shoulders and he lay back and she moved forward and up and Moh rose to meet her and she moved, slowly up and swiftly down, and so they continued, the cannabis in their racing blood stretching time.

She did not know when it was she spoke his name and got no answer; and looking down at him, smiled to see that he had fallen asleep just like that.

Moh woke with a jump from a dream of shouting, a dream of fighting, a dream of falling.

Janis stirred and mumbled beside him, then pulled the quilt even more firmly around her, leaving only a tuft of red hair on the pillow like a squirrel's tail to indicate her presence. Moh let his shoulders adapt to the chill as he lay back with his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling.

Cautiously, as if tonguing a loose tooth, he turned his attention to the back of his mind. The new thing was still there, the sense of lines where there had been tangles, of sky where there had been floor. He could still lean over that cliff and look out at the bottomless chasm of his past. But it no longer sent him whirling with dizziness, hurtling with fear. He could turn away from it, he could walk confidently along its edge.

He had the feeling that he had forgotten something. He smiled at the thought, and continued to lie and think. Whatever was going on in his head, whether it was an effect of the drugs or of the entity he'd encountered or of their interaction, it was real and it had not gone away. He was awed by it, and annoyed. It had always been a matter of pride if not of principle that he didn't have any fixes, any patches; that he never touched smart drugs. (Only stupid ones, he reflected ruefully. Whatever else might be going on in his head, it ached.)

There was the problem of what to tell Jordan, and what not to tell the others. A shadow of guilt crossed his mind, about not taking Stone into his confidence: good comrade, best mate, years together…but all that still seemed like a good reason for keeping him out of it. If something should go drastically wrong (death, madness, things like that) the Collective would need someone uncontaminated by whatever had happened.

Not that he had a clear view of what it would mean for things to go right. Despite the inscrutable download to the gun, he wasn't certain that whatever he'd encountered had an objective existence anything like what it had seemed. The net had spawned a whole subculture of people who claimed that free and conscious
AIS
spoke to them, gave them messages of profound import for humanity, incited them to perform violent or bizarre acts…a dream meme of
AIS
, successors to the angels and aliens of former times. Meanwhile the real breakthrough, the indubitable emergence of genuinely other minds, remained on a receding horizon – whether because of the intrinsic difficulty of the endeavour; the restrictions imposed by Stasis and by the cruder, more
hardware-oriented
interventions of Space Defense; or the ceaseless sabotage of the cranks.

The cranks – Christ,
that
was what he'd forgotten! He had to contact Cat, tell her he was coming to see her, ask her to stay put or arrange a meeting. Last night he'd been too high on alcohol and hash and adrenaline and on whatever-it-was to think straight. He should have done it then. The drugs were no excuse. What had he been thinking of—?

The major distraction, the prime reason why he hadn't thought straight last night chose that moment to roll over and wake up. She looked at him, momentary bewilderment giving way to a distractingly self-satisfied smile.

‘Hi.'

‘Good morning.'

‘You must be freezing. Come in here.' She flipped the quilt over him and pulled him in, kissed and cuddled and nuzzled him and just when he was warming up again said, ‘God, I could do with a coffee.'

Moh disengaged reluctantly. ‘With you in a minute.' He rolled out of bed and wrapped himself in the warmest towelling robe he had. He crept downstairs and started up the coffee. Jordan was still fast asleep on the couch. Moh went to the comms room and called up Hillingdon Hospital.

The account for Catherin Duvalier, charged to the Collective, was closed. After a few minutes of brushing through the layers of answer-fetches Moh reached an administrator who confirmed that, yes, the patient was gone. Hours earlier, without any forwarding trace.

Moh broke the connection and stared at the vacant screen, feeling like banging his head against it. There was no way to get back to Cat. He didn't know what faction she was in. Not that it would help: after her unconditional release they wouldn't want to know her. If he couldn't meet Donovan's challenge, he and maybe the whole Collective could end up with an indictment against them in the so-called Geneva courts, the ones that handled intercommunal and intermovement disputes. No self-respecting defence agency in Norlonto ever appealed to them, not when there were reputable court companies vying for customers. The Geneva Convention courts were for terrorists and states to squabble in with their extorted money. Even if Donovan's case wouldn't stand up for five minutes, that five minutes and however many months it took to get there could cost the Collective a fortune and a reputation.

He had to find Cat. He had to fix things with Donovan, or just hope the revolution came before they lost too much business. If the
ANR
won they would sweep the Geneva courts away. Some chance.

There were other slim chances. He sent out a general message to the Collective's entire mailing list, asking urgently for information about Catherin Duvalier's present location. Then he sent a personal, encrypted message, explaining the problem and asking for some grace on the deadline, to the only publicly known address for Donovan: [email protected].

Giving himself a hard time, he made the coffee and went upstairs. Explaining this whole mess to Janis wouldn't be easy, but it would be a fine warm-up for explaining it to the comrades.

 

‘You,' she told him when he'd finished, ‘are a fucking idiot.'

Yes, he agreed silently. And clinically insane as well, probably. At least in Norlonto that's a victimless crime.

Another thought came to him as he watched genuine anger fighting against a sort of stoical, appalled amusement for possession of her face: And obsessed with you.

He saw the anger win.

‘Is this how you guys
function
?' she asked. ‘Drink and dope and drop-dancing and goddess knows what else shit in your head?'

‘Not when I'm on active,' Kohn said. ‘Bear that in mind.'

‘You were on active, dammit,' she said. ‘We got a contract, remember?'

‘Yeah, OK, OK.'

Her anger subsided. ‘Couldn't you sort of…
hack into
the hospital's records, see if they've got anything that might give us a clue, trace her agency?'

‘We're talking about a hospital, Janis,' he reminded her gently. ‘Not a university or some kinda
secret research establishment.
Same goes for the Body Bank.'

She didn't get it. ‘I thought the university had good security. They use our own crypto and
AI
, state-of-the-art.'

He rolled on the bed, caught her and made her laugh. ‘If you ever come across a bank that guards its vaults with a crowd of recidivist safe-crackers and apprentice locksmiths, supervised by guys who can't remember ten digits without writing them down somewhere – just let me know and I'll cut you in on it, yeah?'

 

Jordan woke up on the long couch to find the long room full of people either coming in and removing kit or tooling up and going out. He saw a dark-haired woman put on camouflage like make-up, select weapons like accessories, smile at him and at herself in a wall mirror, and leave. He saw a tired and dirty man grilling bacon. The man saw him and brought over a roll and a huge mug of black coffee. Jordan accepted them gratefully and, when he had finished eating, gathered the blanket around him and dug clothes and a towel out of his rucksack.

‘Bathroom?'

‘Second left down the corridor.'

He stepped through a half-open door to find a room full of not enough steam to conceal two women and a small boy in a bath and a man sitting naked on a lavatory reading a newspaper. He nearly backed out, then remembered that he'd come here to live rationally.

Closing the shower curtain was just to avoid splashing the floor.

He found Moh and Janis sitting at the table in the main room, eating cereals while giving their attention to newspapers. Janis was tearing them off as they printed out and passing them to Kohn to read. Kohn always had one in his hand; Janis had a growing stack beside her.

If he was reading them it was fast.

Jordan joined them.

‘What's the news?'

Janis looked at him.

‘Oh, good morning. Don't mind Moh. He gets like this sometimes. Now,' she added oddly, vaguely. She passed a sheet into Moh's outstretched hand. ‘News is nothing – well, what you'd expect. Russland–Turkey, everybody. London
Sun–Times
thinks second big story is Yanks hit Kyoto suburbs – lasers, precision.
Nihon Keizai Shimbun
, on the other hand, reports loss of Army convoy in Inverness-shire. Lhasa
Rimbao
prays for peace. No surprises.'

‘Looking for surprises,' Moh said around a mouthful of muesli. ‘Shoosh.'

A little later he stopped and became civil. ‘How are you this morning?' He crunched up a page of hard copy and chucked it into a trash can on the other side of the room.

‘Fine. Well, I will be. Maybe another coffee…You know, I think hash really does make holes in your brain.'

‘Nah, that's the drink,' Kohn said. ‘Proven fact. Brains of rats and that.' He grinned at Janis, apparently unaware that he'd binned a dozen balls of paper, one by one, without looking. ‘Anyway, Jordan, time to fill you in.' He glanced at a whiteboard markered with scrawled words and snarled-up arrows. ‘Comms room is clear. Talk about it there.'

 

‘That's some story,' Jordan said when they'd finished. Moh and Janis looked back at him hopefully, like clients. ‘Sounds like a load of
serdar argic.
' (He'd picked up the net-slang unconsciously, used it self-consciously; it referred to the lowest layer of paranoid drivel that infested the Cable, spun out by degenerate, bug-ridden knee-jerk auto-post programs. Kill-file clutter.) He looked down at the workbench, picked at a solder globule. ‘But I believe it.' He laughed. ‘Well, I believe you.'

‘Can you do it?'

They wanted him to hack-and-track for them, follow lines back, be their eyes on the net. He ached to get on with it, but was uncertain if he had the skill to match.

‘Sure,' he said.

‘That's OK,' Moh said. ‘You'll pick it up.'

‘So what's the plan for today?' Janis asked. She sounded edgy.

‘Find Bernstein,' Moh said. ‘Take it from there.'

‘Bernstein!' Jordan said. ‘The booklegger?'

Moh nodded, turned to smirk at Janis. ‘Told you,' he said. ‘Everybody knows Bernstein.'

‘I've got his phone number,' Jordan said. ‘Somewhere.' He searched his memory, then dived into the main room and ran back with the small book he'd stuck in his jacket pocket. He flipped it open to look at the purple ink of the seller's rubber-stamped logo on the inserted bookmark. It opened at the frontispiece.

‘Jesus Christ,' he swore, for the first time in his life. ‘Will you look at that.'

He held the book forward for them to see: the old photogravure of a statue of a man in a hooded robe or cloak, hands outspread, eyes faint white marks in the cowled shadow.

Kohn looked up, puzzled. ‘Who is it?'

Jordan screwed up his eyes and shook his head.

‘Giordano Bruno. He was burned at the stake in 1600 for saying the planets might be inhabited, among other things. First space-movement martyr.' He gave an imitation of a hollow, echoing laugh. ‘I just realized what his name would be in English. “Jordan Brown”!'

He looked at it again, hairs prickling on his neck. Moh clapped his shoulder.

‘Bernstein's way of saying hello, Jordan,' he said. ‘So give the man a call, already.'

After a few rings a reply came on the line, from not an answer-fetch but a flat tape. ‘Hello,' said a thick-tongued voice. ‘Thank you for calling. Solly Bernstein isn't in at the moment, but you can find him at' – pause, clunk – ‘Brent Cross Shopping Centre. Usual place. Look for the revisionist rally.'

Moh refused to explain what was funny about that.

 

They took the monorail north. Moh had insisted they all brought some gear, on the assumption they might not be coming back. He'd pulled a couple of
JDF
-surplus backpacks from under a bench, packed his in moments and gone into a huddle with Jordan over the household computer, filling him in on the tasks rota.

Janis had looked at her pack as its solar-powered flexor frame made random movements in a patch of sunlight. ‘This,' she'd announced in an aggrieved tone to the world in general, ‘is what I call a
make-up bag.
'

Now it sat in her lap like a small fat animal with bulging cheek-pouches, its phototropics hopelessly confused by the flicker of stanchion shadows. Janis had a seat by the window. She couldn't look away from the view.

‘I always knew it was there,' she said. ‘It's just…'

‘Yeah, isn't it just?' Moh grinned at her from the opposite seat, the gun between his knees.

The Greenbelt. Ahead of them it sprawled to left and right, all along the horizon. A whole new London of shanties and skyscrapers, streets, factories, nuclear power plants; the sky alive with light aircraft, airships, aerostats – a chaos that even as she watched resolved itself into complexity, a pattern of differences like small fields seen from a great height. She looked at it through Moh's binoculars, scanning slowly, lost in the endlessly deepening detail of it all. She remembered Darwin:
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank…

‘It's like an ecosystem,' she said at last.

‘That's the real Norlonto,' Moh said. ‘The core, except it isn't central. The leading edge.'

‘Pity it doesn't stretch all the way round.'