Fractions (30 page)

Moh sighed and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I take your point about the dangers if Space Defense notices what's going on. But they'll find out anyway, so our only chance is to hit hard and hit fast.'

‘And what happens,' said a sarcastic voice, ‘when they hit
us
hard and fast?'

MacLennan had come in silently. They all turned to face him.

‘Let them,' Moh said. ‘Remember they're counting on breakdowns to do their work for them, not mainly direct effects. They don't have the ammo for that, anyway. So we're still the best chance because we'll be able to replace the electronic organization with our own organization – crude maybe, but enough to tide us over for the few weeks it'll take to get the comms working again.'

‘A nice theory,' MacLennan said. ‘You can be sure we have no intention of testing it. The Hanoverians will be quite enough for us to deal with. A few minutes ago the Black Plan indicated that an opportunity for us to launch the uprising is coming in the next twenty-four hours.'

They looked at him in silence. Kohn realized with a chill that the stirring forest, the waking giant, the walking dead he had walked among had been almost certainly a vision of the
ANR
's revolutionary expert system coming to the conclusion that it was time for the days that shook the world to come round again.

‘Well,' Janis said, ‘what is to be done?'

MacLennan lit his pipe, squinting at them through the flare of a match. ‘The Army Council are no doubt considering it. As for us – Kohn, you are not to do again whatever you did today, until the offensive itself.' He raised a hand as Moh opened his mouth. ‘Taine and I talked about it earlier, and I can see with my own eyes what that process does to you. You look like a ghost yourself, man. You have also, I might add, set off more disruptions in the net this afternoon than anyone has seen since the dates turned over in the year 2000. If you can believe that!'

He shook out the match. ‘So we do the time-honoured military thing in these circumstances. We wait.'

He laughed. ‘Try to relax.'

She sat down at the sewing-machine, hitching up her skirt and petticoats to free her foot for the control pedal. This wasn't like the basic machines in the workshop: it had so much software built into it that a complete beginner could produce marvellous work within an hour. So it claimed, in a bright voice, as Catherin paged through its menus and selected stitches and colours and sizes. She placed the denim jacket under the needle's foot, bringing it over the pieces and outlines she'd made. When she'd started she'd intended to finish it unaided, in an attempt to fit into the community's pattern. Now she no longer had a reason to fight down her seething impatience with the finicky tediousness of handicraft. She just wanted to finish it.

After Valery had returned from seeing Moh off they'd had a few minutes of tense recrimination. Valery had told her that the reason she'd been invited here in the first place was to keep her – and Moh – out of Donovan's reach. Cat had known all along, having explained her situation to the sisters, that they were trying to get Moh here and that for some reason they had to do it indirectly – hence her fleeting appearance in the videophone call – but she was annoyed to find their main purpose was not to clear her name but to rope Moh in for some purpose of their own. Valery tactfully pointed out that Cat, too, had had a trick up her sleeve.

Cat's outrage had subsided somewhat. It was a valid point, she grudgingly conceded.

‘All right,' she'd said. ‘Fair enough. But can you just tell me – what the hell's going on?'

‘How d'you mean?'

‘Oh come on. I'm sure you were gratified when Moh Kohn suddenly decided to rally to the flag, but you know as well as I do that he must have done it to get out of a desperate situation. I've never seen him look like he did when I told him the
CLA
were sending a couple of agents round, and I've been under heavy fire with that guy. He's like a lot of fighters – he's not foolhardy but he's, uh, fatalistic, you know?'

Valery nodded. ‘I've been there,' she said. ‘There's one with your name on it; what's for you won't go past you, it'll go through you; when your number comes up your number comes up. All that crap. As if we hadn't heard that Chaos exists and God doesn't.'

‘Yeah.' Cat grinned, seeing Valery for the first time as someone a bit like herself, a fighter. ‘It is like a superstition, isn't it? Huh. If you put all the fighters' shit-kickin superstitions and all their red-handed scruples together you'd end up with some kind of caveman religion. Anyway, what it all adds up to is that when they can't see no way out they're just stupidly brave. I mean, I've seen that guy in action, and he
laughs at death.
It's literally true. OK. Well, when I told him about the cranks, he was
shitting
himself. He was white. And then he just sort of smiled and relaxed. That must have been when he sussed this place was
ANR
.'

‘No, I'd already told him. And, even before then, he'd recognized the parachutes. We must find out how he did that…we've shown hundreds of people around the areas he saw and nobody's suspected a thing.' Valery snorted. ‘He's taken the Republic's shilling now, so no doubt he'll have to tell us.'

‘And what can you tell me?' Cat persisted.

Valery looked at her, frowning distantly. ‘I'm not sure,' she said. ‘I have some things to check out. Meanwhile…' And she'd suggested that Cat go to this shared but private workroom. One corner was a sewing area, with the machine, a dressmakers' dummy, and a chest-of-drawers full of fabrics. In the opposite corner stood a computer terminal and a locked rack of diskettes. The walls were an apple-green shade of white; one of them was almost covered by a television screen, with a comprehensive array of subscriber attachments.

she cursored, and the sewing-machine console's ammo-belt of reels rattled around and slotted one into place. The thread was caught by a pair of clicking pincers and pulled through guides and finally the needle's eye. ‘Begin,' said the machine, with what she thought an understandable smugness.

For a while Catherin lost track of time altogether; one part of her mind absorbed the shades and shapes as another part worked away in another place. She began to understand how the sisters could combine their super-ficially frivolous occupations with…preoccupations, in hard and cold and logical thought about logistics and politics, strategy and tactics.

As she now did. She'd thought she had set Moh up, and now saw that she herself had been – first by the
ANR
, and then by the
CLA
. As far as she knew she was free to go, now the cranks had cleared her name. She was back on the Committee for a Social-Ecological Intervention's databases as a gun for hire – she'd checked that as soon as the rent-cop had given her Moh's receipt and left. But she had no intention of working for the
CLA
again, united front or no united front. It was obvious that Donovan was out to get Moh, and that something bloody big – big and bloody both – was coming down.

for the lettering. <90mm. serif.>

Rumours of yet another
ANR
final offensive had circulated throughout the summer and into the autumn. On the very reasonable assumption that it would be a surprise when it came, she'd discounted the story even while spreading it. This hadn't been irresponsible, in her view. It was perfectly legitimate disinformation, because the Alliance, the spectrum coalition brought together by a faction of the official wing of the Labour Party, was definitely planning a hot autumn of demonstrations and fraternizations, with a few daring armed actions by the Red Rose Brigades thrown in. So, at least, the state media alleged, and the free media denied and confirmed and debated.

The lettering was finished. She smiled at the words. Now back to outlining the appliqué, filling in the spaces.

Anything to get the enemy as confused as we are. Talk about poor bloody infantry. She felt a sudden surge of anger at it all, the deception and manipulation and calculation, the trade-offs and stand-offs, the violence to vulnerable human flesh. Something had genuinely attracted her, she saw now, in the femininists' cover story, the make-up and veiling of their sinews of war.

It was finished. Cat looked at the clock icon, surprised at how many hours had passed. She snipped and tied off the last threads and took the jacket out of the machine. She stood up and admired it at arm's-length for a minute, then draped it around her and admired it again, looking over her shoulder in a mirror.

‘That's really good.'

She turned quickly to see Valery standing in the doorway. The jacket slipped from her shoulders.

‘Yes, I'm quite pleased with it, even if using this machine was a bit of a cheat.' She half-knelt to pick it up. Her skirt settled in slow billows, like a parachute.

‘Nonsense, Cat, it's the design and the carrying of it through that matters. The method is just technical.'

‘Like, the end justifies the means?' Cat straightened, smoothed the skirt, and looked at Valery with a demure smile.

‘Hah!' Valery swivelled the console's chair and sat down. ‘We never claimed to be pacifists, you know.'

Cat shook her head, as if to rattle her synapses back to their old pattern, and stood up.

‘What a scam. You had me worried there. I thought I was going soft myself when all the time I was being – softened up! To work for the
ANR
, of all the macho elitist gangs!' She caught the sides of her skirt and swirled it around her in a joyous flurry.

‘That's not how I see it,' Valery said, a half-embarrassed smile on her lips. ‘As it happens…we have a job for you to do. A job for the
ANR
.' Her smile broadened. ‘Usual rates.'

Cat considered this. ‘And the alternative is staying here, right?'

Valery nodded. ‘We can't risk letting you go back to Donovan's gang. All right, all right, you can say you won't, but unless you have a contract with us there'll be nothing to stop you changing your mind as soon as you're out the door. So either you do this job – nothing too risky, by the way – or you sit out the insurrection behind a sewing-machine, making parachutes.'

Cat knew that Valery was putting it to her gently. The
ANR
had a short temper and a long memory.

‘I'll do the job,' Cat said hastily, fighting off a panicky, smothered feeling. ‘What is it?'

‘That's the spirit,' said Valery. ‘Good girl.'

 

Jordan looked at the message in the work-space, restraining an impulse to bat the reply tag yet again.

Moh says search over, do your own thing.

It wasn't just the gnomic brevity of the message that frustrated him. The sender, the Women's Peace Community, had vanished from the nets as if it had never existed. Jordan had sent a dozen responses, all of which had bounced. His suspicion that the femininist community was connected to the
ANR
intensified.

Moh, wherever he was, wasn't taking calls either. Jordan had little doubt that the message came from him; it echoed what Moh had said when he'd first asked Jordan to help him. And now, apparently, he expected Jordan to drop the investigation. Some chance, comrade. Jordan had spent the afternoon since contacting Moh and Janis in a succession of net trawls. He'd detected the effect of Moh's settlement of the dispute with Donovan, and the clearing of Cat's status. In the narrow, fiercely contested fringe where Norlonto's private defence agencies and political-military groupuscules fought indistinguishably in the dark, Catherin Duvalier was a respected minor player. Every so often, through the afternoon, the thought would come back to Jordan of Cat returning to that.

Mary Abid had gone back to work on the other side of the world, oblivious. The comms room was still airless, and hot. Jordan pulled in the original message, the videophone call, and froze it at the exact moment when Cat looked up, brushing her hair from her face. He trimmed away the rest of the image, enlarged and enhanced the picture of Cat and printed it on
A
4. It came off as a good-quality colour photograph. Jordan powered down the machines he'd been working on, left the room quietly and went upstairs to Moh's room, where he stuck the picture beside the photograph of Cat on the wall. He stood back and looked at them.

There was no question that they were of the same girl, making the same gesture and the same caught half-smile. Only the clothes she wore were different: the dirt-stiff overalls, too big, the sleeve rolled back, a streak of oil smeared on her forehead by the passage of her wrist; the starch-stiff frill of the pinafore over the precisely fitted dress, a fall of lace from the cuff snagging slightly as it brushed across the hair at the side of her face. Jordan found a disturbingly erotic charge in the contrast: a passing thought vaguely associated the second picture with the Modesty advertisements that had been the pin-ups in his bedroom. The oddity was that neither outfit was intended to look sexy – in fact, the opposite, the one sexless and shapeless like the uniform of some puritan communistan, the other chaste, a model of modesty indeed – and yet Cat's sexuality burned through both of them.

Or so it seemed. Perhaps it was just his own frustration. One of the liberating discoveries he'd made in reading the humanist philosophers was the innocence of furtive masturbation, but that was not much comfort here. By historical standards Beulah City wasn't too bad: its churches denounced premarital sex but encouraged early marriage; its laws forbade homosexuality (theoretically on pain of death, but in practice it was almost impossible to bring a conviction, and anybody charged with it had every opportunity to shake the dust of Beulah City from their feet) and abortion, although they tolerated contraception. The only grounds for divorce that it recognized were adultery or desertion, but the complete ban on any public explicitness about sex was coupled with a reasonable provision of counselling for legally married couples. Even so, that left plenty of room for sexual ignorance, incompatibility and misery, to say nothing of hypocrisy.

Coming from that environment into this part of Norlonto was like stepping from an air-conditioned building into a hurricane. The pervasive pornography and prostitution had repelled him. He wasn't sure whether his objection derived from the Christian beliefs he'd rejected or the humanist principles he'd embraced. The people in the Collective showed no interest in commercial sex, but he felt they disapproved of it. Their own sexual attitudes and relationships were difficult to figure out with social skills developed for an entirely different society. Mary, Alasdair, Dafyd, Lyn, Tai, Stone and the rest were to him so many black boxes, connected by arrows of desire.

Mary Abid's long black hair and large dark eyes had been a target for some of
his
arrows, but she had a thing going with Stone (that relationship, at least, had been easy to identify). Jordan had also quite fancied Tai, and had even – shyly, obliquely – attempted some chatting up until he'd realized the slim, small, pretty Singaporean wasn't a girl. And wasn't gay either, just in case that still-unthinkable thought had crossed his mind. So until now he'd made do with highly unrealistic fantasies about Janis, whose image had floated in and out of the background of his communications with Moh.

He felt absurdly ashamed of that now as he looked at the two pictures of Cat. He didn't want a fantasy of Cat; he wanted – it was a distinction realized, a revelation, a resolve – the reality of her. You couldn't fall in love with someone you didn't know, with a face in a picture; but looking at those pictures he wanted nothing else but to find this woman, to have her and hold her and protect her. And if she wouldn't have that, if she wouldn't have
him
, he could at the very least try to dissuade her from putting her beautiful body on the line in those futile fights.