Fractions (20 page)

He thought of Johnny Smith, the Hizbollah fighter who'd died in his arms (
Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye!
) and whose heroic death had inspired a dozen others, which in their turn…now there was a Johnny Smith Martyr of the Southall Jihad Memorial Children's Home.

He thought of Guevara, whose words Bernstein had quoted:

The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living…as Marx said. Yes, there were generations of the dead and they reproduced themselves…just as there were generations of the living and
they
reproduced themselves.

He thought of Josh and Marcia, how they had joined the generations of the dead. He looked down at his hands on the warm metal of the assault rifle across his knees. Some part of the weapon Josh had wielded was now buried in this gun, in its cryptic, encrypted memories.

And in his.

‘Yes,' he said at last. ‘I activated something. And I did it with a code I remembered from working with Josh on the Black Plan.'

‘Logan was part of the space fraction,' Janis pointed out. ‘If this idea about the political programme having been sort of built into the computer program is right—'

‘Then
it
's reaching into space,' Moh said. ‘Oh, yeah, I get the point. It could just go on. Building parties, raising armies, raising hell. Forever.'

‘Centuries, anyway,' Jordan said. ‘The future is a long time.'

Moh looked at the sky. Glades off, it hurt. Something to do with there not being enough air pollution to keep out the ultraviolet. Or something.

‘Time we called Logan,' he said.

Donovan's mail filter routinely discarded 98.3 per cent of incoming messages: sabotage attempts by enraged systems administrators, enquiries from journalists, advertising shots for everything from nuclear depth-charges to anti-fouling paint. That still left a lot, and it was just lucky that Moh's message caught his eye. As he read it he laughed at the desperate naivety of the mercenary's direct approach.

So Catherin had taken his advice and disappeared.

Too soon.

Donovan stood up and tried to massage his stiff shoulders with his aching hands. He'd been up all night, winding down the mechanical ferocity of his virtual hordes. It would probably be another day before the process was complete and they'd have a clear sight of whatever the Watchmaker entity was doing.

A girl in denims and deck-shoes came up from the galley with his breakfast coffee. He nodded to her and motioned her over. She approached with an air-hostess smile that relaxed to gratitude and relief when he asked her to massage his shoulders and neck. The insistent pressure and warmth of her fingers soothed his mind as well as his muscles. He drank the coffee and scanned the news. The increasingly fraught international situation came almost as a relief: it might give the
CLA
and Stasis time to deal with the Watchmaker entity while Space Defense was busy iraqing the Japanese.

He turned around in his seat. ‘Thank you,' he told the girl. ‘You can go now.'

‘You're…welcome, Mr Donovan,' she said, and walked, very carefully, across the floor and down the ladder. Donovan waited until the sound of her footsteps was lost in the sough of the sea and the sigh of ventilation, and put out a call for Bleibtreu-Fèvre.

Within seconds the Stasis agent's face appeared on a flat screen. If he had been up all night he certainly didn't look it. Used to it, perhaps: Donovan had a vague image of him sleeping through the day, hanging upside down by his feet. Bleibtreu-Fèvre apparently mistook Donovan's momentary amusement for cordiality, and returned him a thin-lipped smile.

‘I'm about halfway there,' Donovan said. ‘How are your people reacting?'

‘There is no panic,' replied Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘I have reported my suspicions, but the consensus is still that it was sabotage, if not by your movement then by some freelance hacker. The disruption seems to be over, for the moment. However, Mrs Lawson reports a small but persistent unaccounted increase in net traffic since the…event. Barely detectable, unless one is specifically looking and applying appropriate diagnostics. Like global warming.' Another thin smile. ‘It is rising – by a very small fraction, but it is rising. It will be obvious to the dimmest sysadmin within about three days, to the rest of my agency some time before that and, no doubt, to Space Defense some indeterminate time after…How banal it will seem,' he added, ‘if the first tangible evidence of a new intelligence on our planet should be unexpectedly high telephone bills, ha, ha.'

‘Some would say it's been with us a long time,' Donovan said, sourly acknowledging the joke but smarting inwardly: Bleibtreu-Fèvre was playing back to him an idea he'd advanced a little too seriously in
Secret Life.
‘What about Dr Van?'

‘There we may have a problem,' Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘I have not heard from him for some hours. He has an infuriatingly vague answer-fetch which takes the form of a pretty young lady who sounds as if she is promising to put him in touch with you immediately, but as soon as the call is over one realizes she has promised precisely nothing.'

‘Probably an actual person,' Donovan said as gravely as he could manage. ‘The skill is almost impossible to automate.'

‘Any progress with Kohn?'

Donovan flipped Kohn's message into Bleibtreu-Fèvre's field of view.

‘So much for that scheme,' the Stasis agent remarked after reading it.

‘Perhaps,' Donovan said reluctantly. ‘However, Catherin Duvalier is almost certain to contact me if Kohn does find her. It's in her interests to have the matter settled.'

‘I suggest you put out another call for a freelance arrest,' Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘Please inform me of any contact immediately. This man may be extremely dangerous, possibly even an informational plague carrier for the
AI
entity. Given who he is – who his father was, and what happened to him – we cannot expect his cooperation. I will attempt to bring him in personally.'

‘Isn't that a risk for you while he's in Norlonto?' Donovan asked. Space Defense had a way of overreacting if Stasis crossed into even notionally extraterrestrial territory.

‘Yes,' said Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘But it's a risk we may have to take.'

‘And if he leaves Norlonto?'

‘I have thought of that,' Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘In my line of work, as in yours no doubt, one cultivates contacts who may be a little – shall we say? –
irregular
in their ways, but who are on fundamental issues basically sound.'

The barb. Green partisans. Give them a few trinkets, tell them this machine or that person was an enemy of the earth: aim and fire. Donovan nodded enthusiastically, reflecting that, as far as Stasis was concerned, he was little more than a useful barbarian himself.

 

The phone-booth was a bubble of scratched plastic bolted to the outer wall of the shopping centre, the exchange itself a bevelled black chunk, like a small version of the monolith in
2001.
And, also like that, the exchange had resisted everything up to and including laser fire. Kohn ducked into the booth while the others stood facing outwards, giving him a modicum of privacy. He linked his throat-mike, the gun and the telecom box and ran the key for Logan.

A holo appeared in the black depths, a show-off display of the signal's path: Alexandra Palace – Telecom Tower – Murdoch GeoStat – bounce around a few more comsats – ping to Lagrange where a sargasso of space habitats rolled in the gravitational wake of Earth and Moon. There the line vanished into a scribble of local networks. The right-hand digits of the bill's running total were flickering as fast as they had the last time he'd called Logan, when it had been a voice-only link, no fancy graphics (
mips are cheaper than bandwidth
). Somewhere in there: Dissembler, his father's work.

Logan's face appeared abruptly, at a slant; behind and around him plants, fishtanks, cable, tubing, everything stacked and looking as if it were about to topple; an overhead window with passing bars of light in constant unsettling motion behind it.

‘Moh Kohn! I was
expecting
—' He stopped. ‘Hey, man, this a secure feed?'

‘It's your crypto,' Moh said wryly.

Logan responded with the usual delay. It looked slow-witted, as always until your mind adjusted, pacing the light-seconds. ‘
Jes
, well, the
Amerikanoj
haven't cracked it, but – you slot in some of your own?'

Moh thumbed a hot-key. The pictures dissolved to snow, graphic characters, a vertiginous glimpse of crawling low-level
ASCII
, then snapped back.

‘Safe now?' Logan asked. Behind him a chicken flapped inelegantly past, its beak open as if in surprise at remaining airborne.

‘We're talking infinite monkeys,' Moh said. ‘Shoot.'

‘OK. This about the Star Fraction?'

‘Yes!'

‘Uh-huh. The old code. It's gone active.
Years
it's been following me around, every so often this message comes up: don't do anything. This time yesterday, suddenly it's
Move your ass, comrade, this is the big one.
And what's it telling me? Crack out the ammo? Even crank out the leaflets? Hell, no, it's: buy fucking lab equipment! Sequencers, cryogenics, neurochemicals, dedicated hardware. I mean, we got stuff like this up to here, up here' – he waved at the scene behind him – ‘but this is like
way
beyond what we need to run our ecology. Meanwhile I'm getting calls from comrades I never knew I had. Space movement,
Internaciistoj
,
ANR
, the lot. All of them think the program (whatever the fuck it is) thinks
they're
in the Star Fraction (whatever the fuck
it
is). And it's telling them to – well, depends where they are. Ground, it's ship stuff out. Orbit, pull it in and put it together. All bio gear, communications software and computer kit with backup storage like they use for disaster recovery. Core memory that can ride out near-miss nukes.'

Near-miss nukes.
Moh thought of the news: the Kyoto suburbs, the Sofia streets. A memory of shelter sweat made his skin itch.

‘And are you doing all this?' was all he could think of to say.

‘Course I am. I got calls on hold right now, man.'

‘How are you paying for it?'

Logan grunted a laugh. ‘Checked our earthside account. Money's coming in, earmarked. Could be capital investment from a Bolshevik bank robbery back in 1910 for all I know.'

‘Close enough,' Moh said. ‘It's from the Black Plan.'

Logan stared at him for a longer time than the transmission lag could account for.

‘How do you know that?'

‘I think it was me that stirred it up,' Moh said. ‘I was poking around yesterday. Something in the system asked me for a code that I remembered from way back when Josh was writing it. That was when things started to happen—'

‘
Josh
wrote the Black Plan?'

‘So Bernstein says.'

Logan nodded. ‘Go on.'

‘It's something to do with the Star Fraction, I know that much. Fact is, my mind's got a bit – shit, I don't know, maybe screwed up with some memory drugs I got exposed to. Good to get some confirmation, yeah? The other thing that happened is this load of encrypted data got downloaded to my gun's computer, and I wondered if you might have some idea what to do with it.'

Logan frowned. ‘Could be pre-emptive backup. If I set up the rig that the program's telling me, it'll be able to pick up tight-beam transmissions. That's real dicey, especially if it's encrypted. Lose one digit and it's junk. OK, you can get around that, throw redundancy at it like there's no tomorrow. Even so, if nukes are in the picture you get emps, you get borealis hits, comms out for days.'

‘You think that's on the cards?'

‘Nukes?
Ne.
If you're right, though, about when the thing was set up, you can see why—'

‘Shit! That's it! Just before the last one!' Goddess, that was a relief. Up to a point.

‘—it's got a real sensitive ear for rumours of war.'

‘So. What d'you reckon, I should take this into space?' Moh crushed a stray syringe under his boot, wondering how he'd scrape the fare together. Work his passage, ride shotgun…

‘You kidding? Haven't you heard, man?'

Moh shook his head, suppressing the impulse to give Jordan a kick. Eyes on the net, that's the sodding job description…

‘Yanks have declared an emergency; space traffic and launches are bottlenecked. Nobody with any form's gonna get out until the face-off with Japan's over. With a load of encrypted data? – forget it.'

‘What about all this stuff you've ordered?'

‘It's all clean,' Logan said. ‘Empty storage, legitimate supplies. And it's on its way. Expedited before the crackdown.'

‘Neat,' Moh said. Somehow it didn't surprise him. ‘So what do I do with this chunk of non-access
RAM
?'

‘Go to the
ANR
,' said Logan. ‘Safest place.'

‘Ha fucking ha.'

‘I'm serious. The
knaboj
, they'll look after you. Anyway, it's theirs. The Black Plan.'

‘You know what I think?' Moh said, looking down at the gun's memory case. (The Party must always command the gun; the gun must never command the Party. Mao.) He looked up just as his words reached Logan. ‘They're
its.
'

Logan stirred, shifting without noticeable attention into one of the isometric exercise routines that low-g folk had to keep up if they were ever to be one-g folk again. ‘There's a lot going on,' he said. ‘A lot coming down the line. We know about the offensives and…things are moving out here, too. The space-movement fraction I told you about, we've made progress, we'll do what we can—'

‘Hey,' said Moh, ‘is there any connection between these comrades and the ones in the Sta—?'

Logan smiled, his face moving towards and away from the camera.

‘Don't even ask,' he said. ‘Gotta go. Take care.'

Click to black. Then, unexpectedly, the screen came on again:

Moh hesitated, wondering whether anything nastier than a message might arrive. He decided that, since the Kalashnikov firmware had withstood everything ever thrown at it, there was little risk. There was not the slightest possibility that his reading the message would give its sender any trace of his physical location. In a sense he wouldn't even be reading it here; his agent programs would have automatically done a search of the standard maildrop host machines as soon as he'd linked into the communication net. He hit Enter.

No pathway listing; pretty good anonymity. Just: