Fractions (25 page)

‘Please make sure this is delivered to the person mentioned in it,' Kohn said, handing over a second copy to the Rough Trader. ‘She's currently resident at this block.'

‘OK.'

Kohn walked back to the truck and climbed in, to find that Janis had been covering the whole incident with his previously discarded pistol. He smiled, kissed his finger and thumb at her and strapped in. The Rough Trader was striding towards the apartment block; the crank agents were talking into a mike in their disabled van. Laughing, Kohn eased the truck out of the square and along a narrow street, forcing a ridiculously broad pink Cadillac to mount the pavement as it came towards them. Then, after a few more back streets, they were on the clearway again.

Janis said, ‘Explanation time.'

‘Parachutes,' Kohn said.

‘Huh?'

‘That place is an
ANR
front. The whole femininism thing is a cover-up.' They both laughed. ‘They're busy making parachutes and fabric panels for microlites and hang-gliders, using manual sewing-machines. No software, see? Nothing to trace. Bulk orders on the Black Plan, like Jordan told us. They must be preparing for something big soon. And, think of it, all these dolly secretaries and so on must make pretty good spies.'

‘What about the ones who really believe in it?'

‘I doubt if there are many, and they can be kept harmlessly occupied. That was what all that fussy domestic craftwork crap was about in the first place, if I remember my social-history books.'

Janis looked as if she had caught up with herself.

‘Yes, but what
happened
back there?'

He told her: how the shapes hadn't seemed right, and what Valery had told him; finding Catherin, and how and why she'd set him up. Janis already knew about his earlier relationship with Catherin – they'd spent hours of the past days and nights telling each other everything. But she was upset.

‘Oh, Moh!' Janis stared straight ahead.

‘I know I shouldn't have—'

‘No, it's just – why did you do it in the first place? Why did she try to get back at you like that? Sounds to me like two people out to hurt each other. A particularly nasty lovers' quarrel.'

‘I never thought of it like that,' he said, considering. ‘It was business, politics. I felt she'd betrayed what we had stood for, that she fucking deserved it, working for these creatures from the swamp after, after—'

He was reduced to hand-waving.

‘After standing shoulder to shoulder with you for scientific-technological socialism?'

Kohn gave her a half-amused grimace that admitted the explanation lacked plausibility. ‘Something like that.'

She squeezed his knee. ‘It's all right, I'm not jealous. Well, I am, actually. But I know what I'm up against.'

‘Yeah,' Kohn said. ‘No competition at all.'

‘Why did they let you get away?'

‘There's a formula,' Kohn said, ‘a password for these situations. Goes a bit further than the old
Civis Britannicus sum.
You say it to the right person, you're a citizen of the Republic. That's what I did when I saw it was our only way out. The Republic, the
ANR
, they don't give a damn for the militia rules of engagement. So now things are, like, different.'

‘Meaning what?'

‘Well, any sort of little skirmishes we get into now are gonna be war. It won't be like being a mercenary or even just defending ourselves the way we did back there.'

‘You're telling me you've joined the
ANR
?'

‘Not exactly, but I've agreed to carry out its lawful orders, as a citizen of the Republic.' He looked over at her, feeling he had more explaining to do. ‘It wasn't just to get out of Cat's clutches. I've been thinking about it. The Republic's the only place I'll ever find the answers to what's happened to me. Like Logan said, it's the safest place for us. And for whatever data is stashed in the gun's computer. As for the politics of it, hell, if Josh could square whatever he was doing with working for the Republic, so can I.'

Janis was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘I want to join, too. Be a citizen. How do I do it?'

‘I told you the first time this came up: you're still a citizen. From school, remember? If you want to be an active citizen, you contact another one, and volunteer. Like I just did.'

‘Damn, I could've done it back there, now I'll have to wait till we…' She stopped, hit her forehead with the heel of her hand and said, ‘
Civis Britannicus sum
, all right? That's me in?'

She looked so keen and pleased with herself that Kohn felt ashamed of his reluctance, but he had to ask.

‘You're sure you—?'

Janis burst out laughing. ‘I love the way you keep warning me off – it's either charming or you must think I'm a vac-head. Look, Kohn, I know we're in trouble. The only place I have a chance to live now is on this side of all those burning bridges.' She punched his arm, like she didn't want to risk anything but fraternal greetings at this moment. ‘My country is where you live, wherever that is.'

‘You know where it is,' he said. ‘The fifth-colour country.
Gens una sumus.
'

They left the Stonewall Dykes and then Norlonto itself; they were on the King's highway now, the public roads. Kohn felt the momentary pang of unease which always accompanied his crossing into the domain of the state. An emotional toll. They passed a high blue-and-white sign with a vertical arrow and one word on it: ‘North.' The clearway flowed into an eight-lane motorway. The diesel kicked in. Janis squirmed down in her seat like a happy child.

‘I love that sign,' she said.

‘Uh-oh,' Kohn said.

Janis sat up straight. ‘What?'

Kohn pointed at the rear-view screen. Far behind them in the traffic was a pink blob with a wide chrome grin.

Dilly Foyle lay on her chest in long grass. A few hundred metres away, across a culvert-floored green glen, the motorway made its humming and buzzing and howling music. Great bulks of irreplaceable minerals and petrochemicals were hurtling in both directions, cancelling each other out. It had always been for her the perfect example, the paradigm, of how trade and exchange were an intrinsically wasteful plundering of the planet. The combustion engine, the consumer society…The words (if nothing else in the arrangement) were a give-away.

The Human Reich.

To attack it directly was a sure road to dying. One bolt from the crossbow that lay at her hand could blow out a tyre and, with luck, scatter burning wreckage and snarl up miles. But that was only worth doing to harass a military sweep already under way – to do it any other time would only invite one. So the GreenWar partisans preferred to pursue a subtler quarrel, building their Cumbrian communities in abandoned farms and the ruins of the tourism that had been their earliest and softest target. The Lake District was theirs now, in plain view of the towns. On a clear day you can see the revolution…

Her nose, untainted by foul habits or city air, could have told her where she was in the dark. Petrol fumes and damp earth, the oiled steel of the crossbow, the old wood of the stock…her comrades…their horses cropping quietly in a hollow. And, ahead and to her left, the service area, where the reek of exhaust and battery mingled with burnt coffee and wasted food and plastic in all its extruded and expanded, gross and bloated forms.

Synthetic shit.

She didn't need binoculars to scan the vehicles entering and leaving the service area, and she wouldn't need glades when night fell. Already the place had its lights on (waste, waste). She would know what to do if the signal came. And, if it didn't come to her, it would come to other partisans, at other points up and down the motorway. The orders today had been very specific, and urgent.

She waited.

 

They ran into a local war a few kilometres north of Lancaster. Farm buildings and factories burned. Tanks elbowed across the road. Helicopters racketed overhead. The traffic on the M6 barely kept pace with the refugees trailing along on the hard shoulder.

‘It's like something out of the twentieth century,' Janis said.

‘They're not being strafed,' Kohn remarked.

‘What's that supposed to mean? Progress?'

Kohn slid the truck forward a little, then idled it again. The engine's note dropped below audibility. ‘Progress is like this,' he said.

‘That car still behind us?'

Kohn scanned. ‘Yeah.'

The sky, eventually, cleared of smoke. Red Crescents and Crosses came out after the camouflage. The gaps between vehicles widened. A polite, hesitant, mechanical cough here and there, and then a roar of combustion engines rose like applause. The truck settled to a steady hundred kilometres per hour in the slow lane. The Cadillac paced it, now edging closer, now dropping back.

‘This is beginning to get
severely
under my nails,' Kohn said.

‘What can we do about it?'

‘Don't know. Ah, fuck it…kill them at the first opportunity.'

‘Do you really mean that?'

‘Way I see it,' Kohn said, ‘there's no way whoever's in that tuna-tin are terrs. Not their style, you know? They go for dispersed forces, raids, guerilla tactics. The military –
UK
or
SD
– would go for roadblocks, flagdowns. Tailing, now, that's cop
MO
. Using a civilian car isn't, especially one so obvious. That smells of political police. Or Stasis.'

‘The Men In Black.' Janis shivered. ‘Wonder why they do that – the suits, the cars?'

‘Checked it out once,' Kohn said. ‘It's a fear thing. They were set up years ago when there was that big panic about, I don't know, messages from space getting into the datasphere and churning out copies of alien software that would take over the world. Remember the
TV
shows?
The Andromeda Strangers. Night of the Living Daylights.
Nah, just after the war. Before your time.'

‘After my bedtime.'

‘Looking back now, I'll bet they planted these stories. Anything to keep people worried about dangerous technologies falling into the wrong hands, and not worried about whose hands it was in already.'

‘You know,' Janis said thoughtfully, ‘people used to talk about the Breakthrough, the Singularity, when all the technological trends would take off and the whole world would change:
AI
, nanotech, cell repair, uploading our minds into better bodies and living forever, yay! And it always almost happens but never quite: we get closer and closer but never get there. Maybe we never get there
because we're being stopped.
'

‘Stopped by Stasis…and by Space Defense enforcing arms control…yeah, that's how it works: software cop, hardware cop!'

‘Yes, let's kill them,' Janis said fiercely. ‘They're a waste of space.'

‘Soon be dark,' Kohn said.

 

Another border: Cumbria. Another armful of fine work taken from the back of the truck. Tax-in-kind: with most of the economy over the event horizon of cryptography, it was the only way to collect if the owners hadn't cut a deal and let the state have the code keys. Tax-in-kind went all the way from roadblock rip-offs to
US/UN
sanctions where entire buildings, warehouses, factories were seized. Usually the owners agreed to operate in the open, where at least you knew the percentages. Except in Norlonto, of course: there they hid their money and handed over the goods at gunpoint if they had to.

At least so far no one had searched the truck. There was an etiquette to those matters, and transaction costs.

After a bit Kohn glanced at the fuel gauge and said, ‘Time to pull in. Could do with a stretch, anyway. Next service area.'

‘What about—?' Janis jerked her head backwards.

‘We'll see what they do,' Kohn sighed.

‘Then kill them?'

‘You're getting into this, aren't you?'

The twilight became darkness the instant the truck glided into the halogen floods of the service area. Janis envied Kohn his glades. She could see the writing scribed on the sidepiece nearest her: mil spec 00543/09008. Kohn first drove to the refuelling points, paying cash for diesel oil and charged-up power cells, which were swapped for the spent ones.

‘That's exactly what I need to do,' Janis said.

‘Well, they don't give part-exchange for body waste,' Kohn said. ‘Recycling hasn't gone that far.' He restarted the truck and moved it around to the parking bays.

‘Our friends are just over there,' he said, pointing to the far corner of the car park where she couldn't see a thing. ‘Still sitting in the car. Probably don't eat or shit, just need an oil-change every ten thousand klicks.'

‘I wish I had military specs,' Janis said. She didn't understand Kohn's hoot of laughter, but was grateful when he reached into his pack and pulled out another set of glades.

‘They're my only spares,' he said, after he'd shown her how the cheek controls worked. ‘Watch them carefully.'

He put the helmet under his arm.

‘Set the glades to shade,' he said. ‘We'll look like tourists.'

‘Heavily armed tourists.'

‘That's the only kind around here.'

Jumping down and walking across the tarmac to the cafeteria, Janis kept looking around her. These things didn't just polarize light, they integrated it: the bright lights were stepped down, the dim enhanced.

‘They're brilliant!'

‘Turn them down a bit then.'

‘Ha, ha. How do they work, anyway?'

‘I don't know, but I suspect they're not strictly speaking transparent – the front is a lot of micro-cameras, the back is screens, and in between there's a nanoprocessor diamond film.'

She paused outside the toilets and stared at the pink Cadillac.

‘Huh,' she said. ‘They're eating doughnuts and drinking coffee from a flask. So much for your theory.'

‘That's what they want you to think,' Kohn said darkly.

Janis looked again. One black man, one white.

‘I'm sure they're the ones who came to my lab,' she said. ‘Goddess, to think I came all this way to get away from them.'

‘You have got away from them,' Kohn said. He nudged her away from looking at the car. ‘Don't you worry about that.'

The queues at the meal-machines were short.

‘Ten marks,' Kohn said indignantly. ‘Each!'

‘Don't be stingy.'

‘I spilled blood for that money.'

They chose a table by the plate-glass window where they could see the car and the truck. The glades disposed of the reflections, too. Janis found it disorienting to glance from the strip-lit interior – with its truck-drivers eating fast, families eating slowly, youths wandering around sizing up who might or might not be a user – out to the parked or crawling vehicles, and see it all as one scene. What effect, she wondered, would years of seeing like this – no shadows, no reflections, almost no darkness, no comforting distinctions between in here and out there – have on the mind? It matched, it fell into place with one aspect at least of Kohn's, well,
outlook.

She smiled at the thought, and saw Moh smile back.

 

Bleibtreu-Fèvre brushed sugar from the tips of his fingers, licked them, and replaced the plastic cup on top of the thermos flask. Always a damn dribble of dark liquid. He sighed and looked at his colleague, Aghostino-Clarke. The other man was dressed identically to himself, in a black jacket and trousers, white shirt and a tie the exact colour of coffee-stains. His suit was getting shiny in the same wrong places. His skin was very black and his eyes were brown.

It was lucky they had been prepared; but then, Bleibtreu-Fèvre thought smugly, preparation creates its own luck. When Donovan's call came through, indicating that Cat had revealed her location and Moh's, they'd been cruising around the perimeter of Norlonto. They'd been ready to do what they did – send the car into a screaming dash along one of the fast-access roads, the ones that normally only the rich and the emergency services could afford. He'd been right not to put much trust in Donovan's ability to field a large enough force in a short enough time to deal with the problem, right to have the green partisans on stand-by alert.

That the Women's Peace Community was near the border had been luck, however: pure luck.

They were going to need some more.

Aghostino-Clarke smiled. ‘Scared?' he said. His voice was deep: the upward inflection of the question raised it to bass.

‘Nervous.' Bleibtreu-Fèvre coughed and, as if reminded, lit a ciagarette.

‘It's what we've been trained for.'

‘That's why I'm nervous.' He laughed briefly and stared again at the distant shapes of the man and the woman. ‘He behaves so normally, it's as if he hasn't a care in the world. One might almost think he's not afraid of us.'

‘He? Or it?'

Bleibtreu-Fèvre looked at Aghostino-Clarke and nodded thoughtfully. ‘Indeed,' he said. ‘We can make no assumptions about
what
we may face.'

A literal drug fiend, a man with machine-code in his mind, or just a crazy spacist merc…

‘It would be easy to take him out.'

‘Those days are gone.' Bleibtreu-Fèvre sighed again. ‘I can feel the footprints of those damn spy sats like shadows passing over the back of my neck…Speaking of which—'

Aghostino-Clarke looked at his watch, rotating his forearm slowly as he scanned the lines of data. ‘We have a six-minute window in two minutes,' he said. ‘The next is four in twenty-three.'

‘Right,' said Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘Let's go for green, huh?'

 

‘Smoke?'

‘Nah,' Kohn said. ‘Time to go.'

He stood up and tossed plates and scraps into the recycler. He put on the helmet and connected the comms to the gun. (Hi.) (Active.) He kept his eyes on the car as they went out through the doors. The car park was now more sparsely occupied, and the Cadillac stood on its own in an airbrushed gleam. How easy it would be to take them out. But if he were to blast them, right now, it would be difficult to hop into the truck and slip away unnoticed. They'd just have to wait. He ran scenarios of turning off into side-roads, jack-knifing the truck and coming out shooting.

The doors of the Cadillac opened; the two men inside got out and stood behind the doors. Janis made some kind of sound.

‘Keep going,' Kohn said, not looking at her. ‘Stand on the running-board behind the door – just like them – and start up the truck. Do it.'

He veered away from her and began to walk across the fifty metres or so of tarmac between him and the car. The men didn't react. He wondered if the doors were proof against steel-jacketed uranium slugs. He doubted it. Perhaps the Stasis agents expected him to negotiate.