Fractions (32 page)

‘Come on guys, sober up,' he called over his shoulder. ‘I'm going to stand you some drinks.'

They were up like a shot.

 

At the Lord Carrington, The Many Worlds Interpretation was playing to a quiet midweek crowd. The band evidently believed in using the potential of the medium to go beyond the illusion of presence, and had a trick of swapping around unpredictably. Somebody would sing one and a half lines, then another member of the band would be standing there delivering the next phrase, while the original singer would be dripping sweat on to the guitar. The first five times this happened it was amusing.

Jordan had never been out with Dafyd and Stone before, and was surprised and relieved to find they drank more moderately than they smoked. They'd take about half an hour over a litre, speaking in low voices, chain-smoking tobacco cigarettes. They talked shop, about factions and alliances, and Jordan was privately pleased with himself that he was able to make a perceptive comment now and again. It had been part of his job, after all. One reason for their relative sobriety soon became apparent, although only to a close observer: they were unobtrusively checking out the women.

It was Jordan who saw her first, though, walking in as if the place were one small franchise in her chain. She moved like a dancer, glanced around like a fighter. She had a shining halo of blonde hair, bright blue eyes, skin the colour of pale honey, high cheekbones and the kind of jawline that the rest of humanity would take about half a million years to evolve. She wasn't tall, but she had long legs, covered to just below the knee by a dress that had quite plainly been made out of cobwebs beaded with morning dew. Over it she wore a faded denim jacket several sizes too big. As she went to the bar to order a drink, Jordan saw that it had an intricate embroidered patch on the back: Earth from space, almost floating behind her shoulders, with the words
EARTH'S ANGELS
around it.

She was served a drink in seconds. She turned around, and saw him looking at her across ten metres of smoky half-light. He stared, still unable to believe it was really her. Far away, just beside his ear, he heard Dafyd call out delightedly, ‘Cat!' The woman gave a heart-stopping smile and walked over.

Jordan moved faster than the others to make a space for her. She gave him a nod and a quick, tentative smile, and sat down beside him. She reached over the table-top to Dafyd and Stone and grabbed their hands.

‘Hi, guys. It's great to see you again.'

‘You too, Cat.'

‘Been a long time,' Stone said. He grinned at her. ‘We missed you.'

‘No you fucking didn't!' Cat stretched out her left arm, showing a plastic cast. ‘You hit me!'

Stone looked back, untroubled. ‘Business is business,' he said.

Cat smiled. Even from the side, Jordan could feel the warmth.

‘Yeah, that's OK, come on.' She shrugged, retracting her arm, and took a sip of her drink.

‘You get the tangle with Moh sorted out?' Dafyd asked.

‘Oh,' said Catherin. ‘Yeah, I have. How d'you know about it?'

Stone guffawed. ‘Moh told us. Eventually. Even if he hadn't, we'd have heard.' He laughed again. ‘What an idiot. Where is he now?'

Stone, Jordan noticed, was looking at Cat intently.

‘Off somewhere with his lady scientist,' Cat said. Her tone was vague and light, as if passing on a piece of idle gossip. Stone frowned, looked away from her, and seemed to see Jordan for the first time since Cat had come in.

‘Ah, Cat, this guy here is Jordan Brown, he's staying with us for a bit—'

‘I know,' she said. She turned to Jordan. ‘I've been looking for you.' She put down her drink. ‘I'm Catherin Duvalier,' she said, holding out her right hand.

Jordan felt like kissing it. He shook it.

‘You've been
looking
for me?' he said.

‘Yes.'

Jordan's whole face felt like a beacon. He said the first thing that came into his head. ‘I've been looking for you, too.' His mouth was dry and he took a gulp of beer.

Catherin laughed. ‘Looking, hell,' she said. ‘You found me!'

‘Yeah, well, you weren't—'

‘Hey.' Cat ducked her head forward, then looked up, pushing the hair back from her eyes with her wrist and grinning at him mischievously. ‘That?'

‘That.'

‘Smart.' She shifted in her seat, half-turned away. ‘But it wasn't that. It was the way you got to that.' Her narrowed eyes looked at him sidelong.

‘Oh, the—'

Cat raised a hand quickly, edge-on to the others, spread palm facing him. ‘Later.' Her eyes flicked away; she caught her lower lip momentarily in her teeth.

Stone looked from Cat to Jordan, frowning. ‘What's goin on here?'

Cat rested her elbows on the table, her chin on her knuckles. ‘None of your business.' She smiled brightly at Dafyd and Stone. ‘So…how
is
business?'

Dafyd shrugged. ‘Still running on the kind of contracts you didn't like,' he said. ‘The movement stuff's drying up a bit, but there's plenty of site-protection work coming in. What you doing yourself?'

‘Nothing risky.'

‘Ah,' said Stone.

‘I didn't come here to look for a job,' Catherin said. She leaned further across the table. ‘What you said about movement work drying up – how d'you explain that?'

‘People holding back,' Stone said. ‘You know why.'

Dafyd grunted. ‘The
ANR
's talking about the final offensive. Mind you, they did the same five years back and it was just a few raids came of it. Wouldn't account for all that's going on – or not going on, more like.'

‘Loss of confidence in the political-violence industry,' Jordan said, feeling he should make a contribution. ‘Why shell out on bombing today what's gonna be bombed tomorrow?' He dropped into a cockney girn. ‘Bad for business, innit, all this talk about final offensives. Leads to stockpiling. Hell, some outfits are gonna be putting streetfighters out on the streets.'

He laughed at their uneasy laughs.

‘You got it,' Catherin said, turning to him. ‘It's part of the plan. Tactics, comrade, tactics.'

‘Huh?'

‘Think about it. “Streetfighters out on the streets.” They're not going to sit around with their comm helmets upside down beside them and a bit of cardboard saying “Out of ammo – please help”.' She waited for their smiles to fade and continued. ‘Actually…there
is
something coming in. Don't know when, but any day now. The
ANR
and the Alliance – I don't know which is intending to use the other as a cover, but they'll both hit at the same time. This is fac.'

Jordan thought over what he'd learned and what he'd already known about the forces and dispositions of the fragmented opposition. Difficult to quantify, given the Representation of the People (Temporary Provisions) Act, but between them they could probably muster about a third of the population, and history showed that was enough when it wasn't votes that counted. Hairs prickled down the back of his neck.

‘You know, if this offensive comes off, we're talking about a revolution,' he said to Catherin. He said it unself-consciously, just imparting information.

She nodded, just as seriously.

Jordan felt his eyes sting.

‘
Yee
-hah,' he said.

‘You pleased about this?' Stone asked. ‘I heard you tonight. Thought you were against fighting.'

Jordan stared at him, shaken at how easy it was to be a bit too subtle.

‘I'm gonna have to work on that,' he said sourly. ‘What I meant was, I'm against all the stupid fighting that's going on now. Fighting to end it, that's different. So is
not
fighting to keep it all going, which is what I was trying to suggest.'

‘The war to end war,' Dafyd said dryly.

Cat turned her head sharply. ‘What's wrong with that?'

‘Precedents aren't too good,' Stone said. ‘World War Three, for starters.'

Jordan choked briefly on his beer.

‘You should read books,' he spluttered. He snorted hop-smelling froth out of his sinuses, grinning apologetically. ‘Ah, forget it. You been on the net recently?'

Stone and Dafyd shook their heads. Catherin was watching him. He glanced at her only occasionally as he talked, or so he thought at the time; afterwards, looking back, all he remembered of the conversation was her face and a vague recollection of what he'd said. At the time everything was clear: all the bits of information he'd picked up on the net and the street coming together, the buzz that was suddenly so loud in the aching silence left now the
ANR
had gone quiet. He spun a story of the shifts he'd noticed, in a way that he thought would make sense to the two (or three? what was Catherin into?) politically motivated fighters. And all the time he knew he was winging it, that it was in part guesswork which he could only hope was inspired.

‘Something's happening,' he concluded. ‘Happening fast. People are changing their minds, making up their minds by the hour. And they're coming down on the side of the
ANR
, or at least against the Kingdom and the Free States.'

Catherin looked interested, Dafyd and Stone sceptical. Jordan spread his hands. ‘Check it out, guys.'

They started to argue. Jordan got another round in. Cat moved over, not looking at him, still arguing, and he sat down beside her, on the outside of the seat this time.

‘No point us talking about it,' Catherin was saying. ‘You've been out on active for a week, and out of your heads when you weren't, yeah?'

Stone and Dafyd acknowledged the justice of this with hoots.

‘So go and talk to somebody else, OK!' she said. Something in her fierce stare made the two men suddenly notice some comrades at the bar. They left to join them.

‘Can you help me out of this jacket?'

She turned away in a silky movement. Jordan slid the jacket from her shoulders, resisted the temptation to bury his face in her hair or trace the botanic filigree of thread on the back of her elflandish dress. He looked again at the floating planet, the flaring letters.

‘“Earth's Angels”,' he said. ‘This is your gang, is it?' He began to fold the sleeves when he felt something heavy and bulky in an inside pocket. Catherin took the jacket from his hands at the same moment and laid it carefully along the back of the seat. She rested her arm lightly on it, and settled in a sideways position, facing him.

‘Yeah,' she said. ‘Polluters tremble when we ride into town on our bicycles…No, I just thought it sounded good.'

‘It's not “earth” as in “Mother Earth”, it's “earth” as in “earthly”. Earth's angel.' He dared to look at her, to take her all in in a long unbreathing draught of sight. ‘Yes, it's you.'

She returned his gaze with an appraising look that made him think, Is this how we look at them?, and feel a surge of lust more intense than being the sender of such a look had ever aroused in him. Whosoever looketh on a woman to…he was committed already in his heart.

‘And you're earth's preacher,' she said. ‘I saw you tonight, on the tel.'

‘Oh, that's, that's great.' He took a swallow of beer, his ears burning. ‘What did you think?'

‘I…kind of agreed with it,' she said. She smiled. ‘But that…isn't why I'm here.'

He tried not to sound disappointed. ‘I didn't think so.' He looked at her, for the first time not seeing her, but thinking. ‘You said something about, uh, how I found you?'

Catherin nodded.

‘And how,' Jordan asked, ‘do you know about that?'

Her face showed nothing. Jordan was suddenly aware of how little he knew about her, a thought which rapidly changed to how much he wanted to find out…about her, Moh, her and Moh, what had happened…

He smote his forehead with the heel of his hand.

‘Agh!' he said. Of course. ‘You saw Moh today!'

Catherin smiled. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘I did.'

‘That place you were at, is it—?'

She tilted her head, shook it slowly. Not
no
, but
you don't ask.

‘I got something to tell you,' she said.

The level of sound in the place would have made it impossible to overhear their conversation from a metre away. Catherin glanced around, then brought her mouth up to his ear. He felt her warm breath and forced himself to attend to the words she breathed.

‘What you did –
don't do it again.
'

She straightened up and looked at him, her expression as awkward and embarrassed as was (he felt sure) his own. What he had done…when he found her…surely nobody, not her, not whoever had sent her, could object to his hacking into a system in
BC
? His mind went back over the trail, the
SILK.ROOT
program, and he suddenly realized exactly what he'd been doing when he'd traced the silk consignment to the Women's Peace Community.

He had been hacking the Black Plan.

Possibly blundering around in something pretty sensitive, if the offensive were as imminent as she'd said.

‘Ah.' His lips felt dry. ‘I get it.'

Catherin smiled up from under her eyebrows. ‘Well. OK. That's that done.' Head back, hair pushed back with her wrist, she laughed with a sound of relief. ‘Hey, Jordan. There's things I can't tell you. If you've been mixed up with Moh, there must be things you can't tell me, yeah?'

‘Uh-huh.' He had been thinking about that.

‘Get used to it. You're in the revolution now.'

‘Oh, I am, am I?'

She knocked back her drink. ‘You better believe it.'

She stood up and put on her jacket, patted an inside pocket. ‘Come on,' she said. ‘We've got work to do.'