Fractions (38 page)

‘We've done it!' he said. ‘They'll have no reason to hit the datasphere now. There will be no gigadeaths.'

 

Billions died.

Billions of living things, conscious minds, with subtler and sharper feelings, with higher joys and deeper hurts than any human would ever know.

They died: ruptured like cells in strong saline, exploded from within like the 15psi house, blasted from without like a head struck by a bullet, vaporized like a satellite in a particle beam, vanished like flesh in a firestorm.

Moh had seen them all, the classic slo-mos, the freeze-frames, the stills, the instantaneous archaeology of recent and sudden death. He had never flinched from facing the deaths he had dealt out himself. These – image and reality inseparable memories now – provided him with the signs for what he saw, what he heard and felt as choking smoke boiled out of the ground, out of the air, and every particle of the smoke became a ravening engine of destruction that devoured one bright artificial intelligence, then twisted and turned unsated for the next. Thought of his thought, mind of his mind, sharing the vanishing point of his reflection of the self that knew: the minute fraction of their anguish that he experienced was pain beyond endurance, loss beyond recovery.

The black smoke engulfed the world, and was gone: it cleared to show the world as it had been, unchanged except for the extinction of its newest life. Moh stared at the wasted planet for a long second, and saw that the smoke had not dispersed as it had cleared: it had concentrated to a point, a black hole in the datasphere, the pupil of a single eye with a single thought behind it. It looked at him. It saw the signature of the software that ran his window on the system, and dilated. His eyes, in helpless reflex, dilated in response. The flickering lethal morse found an answer in the software that shared his brain.

White-hot needles stabbed through his eyes into his head, into his brain: a new environment for the information viruses, where they replicated, forming snarls of complex logic that entangled him, clanking mechanisms that pursued him from one thought to another, down corridors of memory and forgotten rooms of days.

 

He heard the rattle of keyboard keys and turned to see Josh working on the
CAL
system. He reached out to warn him.

There was a splintering crash and an iron arm burst from the screen. Servomechanical fingers grasped his father's head. The whole metal monster followed the arm out of the ruined screen and reared up on the table, lifting the man by the head. Bits of plastic and glass and circuitry slipped from its head and down its sides; blood dripped from Josh Kohn's. The hand opened and the body thudded to the ground. The clustered sensors on the thing's head unit swung, seeking, scanning, but Moh was out of the window
crash
and running, a man again, but without a gun.

 

teletrooper ducked through the doorway shielded lenses scanned gun-arm swung to cover

 

two youths in tracksuits and bandanas followed it into the flat
M
-16s like toys beside its armaments and they like boys blonded hair and two days' worth of thin stubble

 

fucking traitor commie cunt

 

HEY MAN YOU CAN'T DO THAT

 

the blue roundel on the brow of its dome the white circle of olive-leaves the line-scored globe

 

OK YOU CAN TAKE THEM OUT NOW

 

death is not lived through

 

He ran up the Coyoacan corridor gasping in the heat and burst into the Old Man's study. There was no one at the desk. Dust-motes danced in the yellow shaft from the window. He reached out for the paper on the desk. It crumbled as he picked it up, and as he looked around the room he saw the shelves emptying and the books crumble and rot: there was a momentary, overpowering and disgusting whiff of mildewed paper.

dark now

 

He saw them as teletroopers, an endless and ever increasing army of marching metal, that hacked into all the systems, all the hard ware and the soft: the neural networks burned, the programs corrupted and degenerated.

 

He was driven back and back as they pried into, levered apart and splintered memory, intellect, feeling, sense; until the last shard of his shattered mind was broken smaller than the quantum of reflection, and he died.

 

A single cry came from him, and his head crashed forward and down on to the databoard. Janis leaped to his shoulder, with Van a moment behind her. They lifted him and tilted him back in the seat. Janis stared into his unblinking eyes as she felt his neck for a pulse. There was none.

Van helped her lower him to the floor, then snatched a phone. As soon as he put it down it rang again. He listened, hardly speaking, then turned to where she laboured to save Moh's life. For minutes they took turns blowing into his lungs, hammering his breastbone. A screeching stop; feet on the stairs. Janis paused, drew back, drew breath. Two paramedics stuck trodes to his head, stabbed a needle into his heart, pumped oxygen into his mouth, slapped shock-pads to his chest.

Then they looked at each other, looked at her and Van, and stood back.

‘I'm sorry,' one of them said. ‘There's nothing—'

‘Nothing you can do?' she whispered.

‘Nothing there. Not a reflex, nothing. The nerves aren't even carrying the shocks.' He paused as if appalled at what he had said. ‘What
happened
to him?'

‘I don't know, I don't know, I don't know!'

Janis threw herself over the body and howled.

They told her she had to get out, and she refused. They told her the Black Plan had been lost, the whole momentum and direction of the offensive thrown into disorder, and she nodded. They told her that the revolution was on the edge of defeat, that the regime could recover its balance and strike back at any moment, and she agreed.

She would not leave.

Van and the paramedics left, taking Moh's body with them. Van had looked almost ashamed to ask, mumbling about ‘practical considerations', fumbling with a pathetically irrelevant organ-donor card they'd found on him. She knew they wouldn't give a part of this body to their worst enemies. They would dissect it with remotes in a sealed room, and when they'd learned what they could from its ravaged nerves they'd ash it.

They left the contents of his pockets: a few cards, a knife, a phone; and the helmet, the glades and the gun, tools of his trade. Van paused in the doorway and glanced from the gun to her, and back.

She shook her head fiercely. ‘I wouldn't do it,' she said. Perhaps missing the English ambiguity, Van left. She heard racing trucks, and a helicopter taking off. There was a fine research facility at Nairn, the Republic's provincial capital: that was where it was headed. She might go there someday, find out if it had been the drugs that had killed him. Or the lack of drugs.

MacLennan's words came back. She hadn't been a good guard, a good soldier.

Not even a good scientist.

 

The memories that had eluded her on the hilltop came back now, clear and bitter. She remembered the war. The War of European Integration, when Germany had led a desperate bid to unite the continent under the star-circled banner, snuff out the national conflicts fuelled by
US/UN
meddling and create a counterweight to the New World Order.

Just a lass, not really understanding. The stifling heat of the Metro shelter had made her gasp and cry. Her mother shouted at her for walking over the bedding spread on the platforms. The three-metre-high screens curved to the subway walls showed the progress of the war.

They weren't in this war: they were neutral; and yet British soldiers were fighting in it. Some of the channels spoke as if Britain itself were fighting. It was confusing and terrifying, especially as some people down in the shelter cheered when British soldiers appeared while others shouted with anger.

Her mother tried to explain. ‘It's the King's men who are in the war, love, not us. But the King's government has a seat at the
UN
—'

She paused, not sure if Janis had understood. The girl nodded firmly. ‘The den of thieves and slaves,' she said.

‘That's right. And they're fighting against the Germans on the side of the
UN
, that really means the Americans, so that when the war's over the Americans will help the King and all his men to come back here and rule us again, or the Germans will attack us before the war's over and then we'll be defeated another way.'

She had been playing in one of the side corridors when she heard a roar of voices, and rushed to the subway platform to look at the screens and take in the excited words. Germany had stopped fighting. The war was over. She didn't stop to see her parents; she didn't see or hear them shove through through the crowds and call after her as she turned to race up the stationary escalators.

She had known only what was over, not what was beginning. She didn't know that Berlin and Frankfurt had been incinerated in Israel's last favour for its old protector. She didn't know that this would be the pretext the
US
needed to make itself the arbiter of the planet. Nothing her parents had told her, nothing even in the political-education classes, could have prepared her for the next six days: the bombers roaming the undefended skies, the pillaging, rampaging assault of the
US/UN
's illiterate conscripts and barbarian levies, the teletroopers punching through walls and crushing the defenders in steel fists, the demoralized crowds cheering peace and surrender and Restoration, turning on the radical regime that they blamed for their plight, joining in the witch-hunts and roundups and lynchings.

She didn't know that the wind was from the east and that the rain washing away her sweat and stink was laden with fission products from the earlier obliteration of Kiev and Baku. Until her frantic mother dragged her back into the shelter she celebrated the peace.

 

Jordan and Cat walked hand in hand along the centre of Blackstock Road, in the middle of the crowd. They were not the only ones carrying weapons, and in other ways, too, their appearance was inconspicuous. It was a safe bet that no one here had ever seen Jordan on cable television. The people around them were Beulah City inhabitants: a very different section of the population from those who had come in at the northern border. They were machine-minders, waiters and waitresses, domestic servants, vehicle mechanics, drivers, warehousemen, storekeepers, street-cleaners, porters, nurses…Jordan had never realized before how vast and diverse was the invisible army of men and women whose labour was too cheap or too complicated to automate, but which made the kind of work he was familiar with possible.

‘That's why the offices were empty,' Cat said. ‘They were the ones who were on strike!'

They were probably all Christians. They carried signs hand-lettered with biblical texts, the lines about oppression and liberty and the poor and the rich and the weak and the powerful that
BC
's preachers glossed over. They sang the discomfiting, awkward hymns and psalms seldom selected for the congregations.

‘Bash out de brains of de babies of Babylon,' Cat hummed, gleefully paraphrasing, until Jordan nudged her to stop.

The thought that there were thousands of people in Beulah City who felt suffocated under the tutelage of the Elders, cheated in their dealings with their employers by the master-servant regulations, tormented by guilt and frustration, sceptical about the interpretations of scripture foisted on them (as if the interpretations themselves were anything but the opinions of men), angered at how conveniently God was on the dominant side of every relationship…Jordan found it almost unbearably exciting.

And also shaming, because it had never occurred to him at all.

‘It feels strange to be marching along like this,' Cat said. Jordan smiled at her shining eyes.

‘I thought you'd been on a lot of demonstrations.'

‘Oh, sure, but first I used to be selling papers, later I'd be running up and down, walking backwards with a loud-hailer, covering the side-streets with a gun.' She laughed. ‘Come to think of it, I've never just been part of the masses before.'

‘Perhaps we shouldn't be just marching along,' Jordan worried aloud. ‘Maybe we should be doing these things.'

Cat hissed quietly. When he glanced at her she flicked her gaze from side to side. He started looking out of the corners of his eyes himself, and noticed that, every ten metres or so along the sides of the march, sharp-eyed, hard-faced kids were walking. They'd vary their pace, faster or slower than the crowd, sometimes walking backwards, craning their necks; counting heads, meeting eyes. The Reds, the kids, the cadres.

‘This is
organized
?' he said. The horizon all around was joined to the sky by loose black threads. Every few seconds another distant explosion shook the air. Small-arms fire crackled on the edge of hearing. ‘Whose idea was it, walking into a war zone?'

‘It'll work,' Cat said. ‘The fighting's concentrated.'

‘For now.'

‘Don't
worry
,' Cat said. Her tone belied her advice.

Past Highbury Fields, down Upper Street. As they passed on their left the large, old pillared building which the Elders used as administrative offices the songs trailed off and people started shouting. The discordant yells were suddenly swamped by all the kids, the cadres, calling out at once.

‘Settle for what?
DEMOCRACY
! Restore it when?
NOW
!'

They varied it with
FREE – DOM
! and
EQUAL RIGHTS
! After a minute it caught on, leaving some of the cadres free to argue desperately with those in the crowd who were pushing out, trying to start a charge up the steps. Jordan saw them pointing at the doorways and balconies, and noticed with a shock the black muzzles pointing back.

‘Time to move up,' Cat said. She tugged his hand. He followed as she expertly threaded her way through the march. Her high, clear voice floated back snatches of whatever the group they happened to be moving through was singing. ‘“So is our soul set free”…'scuse me ma'am…“thus escapèd we”…come
on
, Jordan.'

At the end of Islington High Street (the couple of hundred metres of office blocks at the foot of Upper Street) was the southern boundary of Beulah City, known derisively from the other side of it as Angel Gate. The checkpoint barriers were down, and a score of Warriors were spaced out across the road. They held tear-gas launchers pointing upwards and had submachine-guns slung on their shoulders. Jordan, by now in the front rank, couldn't see any of the cadres – in fact, the front rank were almost all women. Cat squeezed his hand.

The crowd stopped about forty metres short of the cops. One of them stepped forward with a loud-hailer.

‘
THEECE EECE EN EELLEEGAL GETHEREENG
—'

The loud-hailer had not the volume to match the shout of fury and disgust from the crowd. Jordan rolled his eyes upward. Thank you, God. They couldn't have made a worse choice. Exiles from South Africa were popular with the Warriors, and with nobody else.

Another officer hastily took the mike and continued.

‘
I MUST ASK YOU TO DISPERSE! RETURN TO YOUR HOMES
!'

‘Go home, ya bums, go home,' the women sang back at them. Thousands of voices behind took up the chant with enthusiasm. Jordan wondered wildly where they could have heard it before, until he remembered that one of Beulah City's preaching stadia had once been a football ground.

‘
THIS IS A NATIONAL EMERGENCY
!'

‘We shall not, we shall not, we shall not be moved!'

‘The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!' Oh, so there were cadres up here: female cadres. That chant didn't get taken up, probably because nobody could believe it.

Jordan heard distant, rhythmic shouting from the other side of the boundary. Behind the Warriors' heads he saw the banners, red flags and tricolours of another demonstration passing along City Road, swinging down into Pentonville Road.

He climbed on to a telecom box and stared. The crowds were less than a hundred metres apart; he could make out faces turning to look and then turning away. The shouts he heard didn't sound friendly. Baffled, Jordan looked back over the crowd he was with and saw it as if from the outside: a forest of weird black-lettered slogans on white sheets and placards, crosses waving here and there. Like a mob of religious nutcases. He caught the eye of a woman who seemed to know what was going on, and mimed a walkie-talkie. She shook her head and spread her hands.

‘The workers! United! Shall never be defeated!'

That one too fizzled out, and certainly couldn't have carried across the barrier. The Warrior boomed on about
REBELS
and
COMMUNISTS.
Jordan looked down at Cat. She reached out for something that was being passed from hand to hand, and passed it up to him. A loud-hailer, as if this were what he wanted.

‘Weren't the cadres ready for this?' he asked. Cat shook her head.

‘Expected the Warriors to be busy somewhere else. Drop didn't come off. Comms are going haywire.'

‘Oh, shit! There's got to be something—' He squatted down, one eye on the wavering crowd, and said, ‘Cat! Think! Is there some slogan or song or something that sounds religious enough for this lot but, you know, would let the others know we're on their side?'

Cat frowned up at him and then broke into a huge smile. She held out a hand to him and he tried to haul her up, but she tugged and he jumped down. ‘Hold the hailer high,' she said, and took the mike. ‘Don't look back.' She began to walk backwards, step by deliberate step, beckoning with one hand to the women at the front of the crowd. Jordan walked beside her, holding the hailing horn over his head.

‘Here goes nothing,' she said, and switched on the mike.

‘And did those feet in ancient time…'

She paused for a moment, making a lifting gesture until the second line was taken up:

‘
WALK UPON ENGLAND'S MOUNTAINS GREEN
?'

The crowd began to move forward. The voices were distorted, echoing between the buildings, but the tune was unmistakable and the gathering numbers joining in drowned the amplified squawking that got closer and closer to their backs. By the time they reached the
DARK SATANIC MILLS
Jordan could hear other voices from behind, another multitude taking up the lines of England's anthem, when it had been a state of the United Republic.

Then there was a bang at his back. His whole body contracted in a reflex jolt that brought his head down and his feet up off the ground. At the same moment something whooshed above him. As his feet jarred back down he saw a burst of smoke between two ranks about twenty metres from the front. People around it scattered. Some fell, but scrambled to their feet and ran, hands to their mouths. An acrid whiff reached his nostrils. For a couple of seconds his lungs felt as if he'd inhaled acid. Through a wretched, racking cough he heard more bangs. Black tumbling shapes scythed the air overhead. He saw a woman raise an arm to fend one off, stagger back as a length of planking clattered to the street. She walked on for a few paces, then sagged and was grabbed by the woman next to her. Somebody else snatched up the wood and hurled it back. Jordan glanced over his shoulder and saw that most of the missiles – smashed bits of barrier, stones, placards, cans – were falling on the Warriors from both sides, but it was the stray shots that were doing all the damage: it wasn't the marchers who had armour. Cat kept right on singing, her voice thin and hoarse.