Fractions (22 page)

‘Can I speak to him?' Moh said impatiently.

‘Sure…passing you over.'

Jordan looked up at them, evidently via a camera mounted on the top of a screen he was working at. He had a black eye and a few scratches.

‘You all right, Jordan?'

‘Yes,' he replied cheerfully. ‘We got into a bit of a scuffle, but that was all. You should have seen the police, Moh. They ran like rabbits.'

‘Yeah, well, I told you the Neos—'

Jordan smiled. ‘It wasn't your commie headbangers that chased them off – it was the market ladies!'

‘Good for them. And they're not
my
commie headbangers, as I keep telling you. Did Sol Bernstein get away OK?'

‘Yes. Never saw anyone so old move so fast. He had his books packed up by the time I reached him, and we chugged off on his electric tractor right through where a fight was going on. That was when I got a few knocks, but it was nothing really.'

He obviously felt it was a bit more than that and was quite pleased with himself. Janis hoped Moh wouldn't burst Jordan's little bubble of satisfaction at getting through his first rumble.

‘Sounds like you did all right,' Moh said. ‘How are you getting on with the net searches?'

Jordan's expression flipped from smug to serious.

‘Well…first, about Catherin…Cat. There was a queue of replies to your message when I logged on. Nobody's seen her. One or two people have mentioned that Donovan's got a call out for her as well.'

‘I bet he has,' Moh said. ‘What about the
ANR
?'

Jordan sighed in exasperation. ‘I can't raise them. All the messages bounced. At first I thought I was doing something incorrect, and I got the comrades to check. But by then it was all over the news. The
ANR
has gone off-line, left all their phones off the hook. Well, not exactly: you get an answer-fetch giving a standard spiel.' He passed a hand across his eyes. ‘It gets irritating after the twentieth time.'

‘What's it saying?'

‘Basically, a bit of rousing propaganda and then something to the effect that, if your message can't wait until after the final offensive, they'll know about it through other channels anyway.'

‘Modesty was never their strong point—'

‘Modesty!' Jordan's sudden grin was blocked by the fish-eye loom of his delighted air-punch or clenched-fist salute. ‘Yo! Never thought of that!'

‘What?'

‘The Black Planner yesterday, he ordered a load of silk through this Beulah City fashion company. I might be able to track the consignment, get a lead to the
ANR
that way.'

‘Nice one,' Moh said. ‘But I doubt if they can be tracked that easily.'

‘I know, but Modesty can be! I saw a Modesty truck yesterday, might have been headed for Norlonto. I'm sure I could hack in, work backwards from there. Most of their deliveries are finished goods, right? Import fabric, export fancy frocks. So if I find any fabric
exports…
'

Moh shook his head. ‘Bills of lading are the easiest things to switch, and that's assuming the Black Plan was actually pulling in silk in the first place. More likely that was a cover as well, and what they got from China was a cargo of knock-off Kalashnikovs.'

Jordan looked a bit discouraged, and Janis said quickly: ‘It's worth a try anyway, Jordan. It's all we've got to go on.'

‘Fair enough,' Moh said. ‘OK, Jordan, you do that, and keep looking for Cat any way you can think of. Pass on any bit of news you find interesting.'

‘Hah! Getting back to that…you know about the space-traffic crackdown?'

‘Logan told me.'

‘Fine. OK, the other thing is Donovan's citizen's arrest thing. He's posted the offer to lots of newsgroups.'

‘That figures.'

‘Anything I can do about it?'

‘Ask the comrades to toss out countercharges, challenges on my behalf and so on. Get our lawyers to issue a few nasty messages. Make it look like a real tangle. Might scare off any casual adventurers.'

‘OK, I got that. What are you going to do?'

Moh laughed. ‘Keep jumping borders,' he said. ‘Like the libertarian comrades say: Norlonto ain't the law of the jungle, it's a jungle of laws.'

 

For the next two days they wandered through a tiny proportion of that jungle of laws, the disparate communities of Norlonto. Unlike the patchwork of the Kingdom, these were not separate fiefs but layered, interwoven properties and neighbourhoods. Some welcomed anyone passing through. Some had gates on the streets, or took a toll, or turned back anyone who hadn't been invited by a resident. Carrying weapons on the street might be prohibited, permitted or required. It was a matter for the street-owners, like wearing ties in restaurants, smoking or non-smoking. There were sinister, seedy areas that had been all bought up by nazis and made most of their money from tourists and memorabilia. There were women-only territories. There was a whole district called Utopia University, which consisted of experimental communities being crawled over by sociologists (who were mostly funded by estate agents doing market research). One sharply delimited estate, the Singularity Sink, had no laws or morality at all: anyone who entered was deemed to have renounced any protection but their own. It had a certain appeal for suicides and psychopaths, and for adolescent macho adventurers. (There was of course nothing to prevent violent rescue missions, either, and very rich and desperate relatives had been known to send in armoured columns.)

But most of it was normal and respectable. Mutually compatible areas had found it profitable to adjoin, or buy up linking corridors, or sponsor rapid transport between them. You could travel widely through Norlonto and never see anything that would have looked out of place in Bangkok. A sidestep away you could see and do things that would be banned in Tehran.

Each new locality they crossed into was another stream to wash away their trail. Everywhere they found an undertone of caution, the racket of protection being strengthened, the buzz of departing money; fortunes,
capitals
as Moh called them, queued up on the wires like birds preparing to migrate. Every time the government announced the rebels were bluffing and the situation was under control, more smart money took wing for warmer climes.

Moh kept calling Jordan every few hours except through the night: the
ANR
was still unreachable; Jordan was building up an elaborate hack on Beulah City's shipping companies and fashion houses, but he had no progress to report yet; and Donovan's challenge was arousing some interest among various bounty-hunting agencies. Much to Moh's disgust, a new newsgroup had opened, alt.fan.moh-kohn, for enthusiastic amateurs to report sightings of him and discuss the case; so far, none of the sightings had been authentic. Moh took out a policy for himself and Janis with the Mutual Protection Agency; the understanding was that he wouldn't tell the company their location but Mutual Protection would download a map of areas where they could guarantee delivery of reinforcements within ten minutes of a call.

‘What if we do get attacked or something,' Janis asked, ‘and the attacker has a contract with another agency? Do they shoot it out?'

‘Give it some mips,' Moh said. ‘Proper channels are part of the deal. The agencies take any differences to a court they both acknowledge is fair—'

‘And suppose an agency popped up that didn't accept any court that Mutual Protection suggested?'

‘Then a court they didn't accept would find against them, without them even defending themselves, and they'd lose customers. In serious cases they'd be hunted down like dogs. What the agencies sell is legal protection as well as physical. If you want to protect criminal acts you just need your own guns, or preferably a state – that's a real lawless defence agency for you, and run like any other monopoly to boot: rip-off prices, lousy service, rude staff.'

‘You're not talking about the forces of the Crown by any chance?'

‘Now what gives you that idea?'

Janis had another objection. ‘You're forgetting about the poor,' she said. ‘How are they covered?'

Moh replied as if he'd been over this a few hundred times. ‘We all pay for security in every facility we use anyway, but if all else fails, if somebody's kicking your shack down or putting the screws on you and you've not bothered to do without maybe a packet of smokes a week to pay for protection, you can always call on charity. The Black Cross, the St Maurice Defence Association, the Emancipation Army. Or us, if we're in a generous frame of mind.'

They were sitting at a pavement café. The waiter brought Janis her vodka-cola. She took it and smiled down at him, gave him a quarter. He thanked her with a gap-toothed grin and ran back inside.

Moh looked after him sadly.

‘Anarcho-capitalism works,' he said. ‘As much as any kind of capitalism works. It's that sort of thing I find hard to take. Child labour. Prostitution. Slavery—'

‘What!'

‘Oh, it's not legally enforceable. But on the other hand you can't prevent people selling themselves for life, and some do. And there's legal slavery as well, to pay off crime-debts, though that's a lot different.'

‘All the same, slavery…'

‘It's a feature of most utopias,' Moh said gloomily. ‘It comes with the property.'

 

Late morning, two days and nights after Jordan had watched Janis and Moh dodge the shopping-centre riot, the comms room was hot and airless. He paused for a moment before running his latest program, giving it a final check in his mind before committing it. He found his thought processes warping under the influence of the other person in the room.

Mary Abid was working through the day on night watch in a chemical factory in Auckland,
NZ
. The satellite link didn't make for fast reflexes, but she didn't need them; the semi-autonomous robots that she guided around had reflexes of their own, and her main task was to put some human common sense in the loop.

Whatever she was doing, sitting and swivelling in a basic-model telepresence exoskeleton, it involved stretching and switching and sweating and cursing, and something in her sweat or scent or swearing was transmitted to Jordan as a distracting subliminal sexual tension. He barely associated it with the Kurdish woman in the telly-skelly. During the hours he'd been sitting hunched at the Glavkom
VR
apparatus, spinning an elaborate web of nuance and inference, looking for a trail of silken thread, and looking for Cat, it had been the photograph of Cat on the wall of Moh's bedroom that Mary's female pheromones brought unbidden to his mind.

Cat. He'd extracted a patchy biography of her from the Collective's records. A teenage rebellion against a staid petty-bourgeois background – her parents ran a
VR
rental franchise on the fringe of Alexandra Port – had led her into a loosely leftist militia. She'd literally bumped into Moh Kohn during the Southall Jihad, worked with the Collective for two, three years until some inextricably intertwined doctrinal/personal dispute had taken her away into a succession of idealistic combat units and one or two of the numerous factions that made up the Left Alliance.

The Left Alliance, unlike the
ANR
, was taking calls, but Jordan had a distinct impression that they had more pressing matters on their minds. Any people or systems he'd contacted about Cat had simply referred him to the standard cadre-availability databases, all of which had Cat down as damaged goods. The group she was currently in – he'd eventually tracked it down, the Committee for a Social-Ecological Intervention – had been barely willing to acknowledge that she might possibly have had some association with them at some indefinite time in the past.

Of course, as all concerned admitted, if Cat's current little legal difficulty could only be sorted out…

Jordan felt a rising indignation at what Moh had done to her, much as he could see Moh's point about the dubious nature of the coalitions that Cat's political trajectory embraced.

He'd made more progress on the Beulah City/Black Plan connection, or so he hoped.

‘
RUN SILK.ROOT
?'

The system message floated in front of his eyes like an afterimage. Jordan took a deep breath.

He nodded, chinning Enter.

Hacking into Beulah City's systems directly had proved difficult. Quite apart from his earlier – and, he now thought, overhasty – action in liquidating his business interests there, a data-security crackdown was evidently in progress. Mrs Lawson, he guessed, was busy. Nevertheless, he retained access rights to a few of the smaller systems which had, so far, not been revoked. This had given him one angle of attack. Next, he had set up a completely spurious trucking company (created with an apparent age, he wryly told himself, like the stars in 4004
BC
). As far as one of Modesty's subsidiaries was now concerned, River Valley Distribution Ltd had an excellent record of deliveries within Norlonto. The phantom details would be discovered at the next audit, but that wasn't due for another month.

The program now running in
SILK.ROOT
had Jordan's virtual company inquiring about the possibility of putting in a bid for more work. It was asking for some background information – just a breakdown of Modesty's deliveries to British locations in the past month. If he'd set up the right parameters on the systems he had managed to hack into, they'd accept this highly irregular request without a blink.

He found he had his eyes closed, his fingers crossed.

Ping.
And there it was, on twenty pages of spreadsheet: dates, times, companies, goods sent. He excluded finished garments, reducing it to five pages, and tabbed down through the list of fabric sales. He was beginning to think he might as well have called up the Yellow Pages for dressmakers when he noticed – among all the Lauras and Angelas and Blisses and Bonnys – a customer called the Women's Peace Community.