Fractions (43 page)

 

‘You knew Moh Kohn?'

The man who spoke to her was short and stocky, with very short greying hair and with wrinkles around his eyes, but otherwise looked a bit younger than these features suggested. He waved out a long arm and invited her to a seat at the table where he sat, slightly stooped, over a drink.

‘Yes, I knew him.' She sat down. ‘Did you?'

‘I heard he was killed in the revo. Sorry to hear it. Name's Logan, by the way. Not Slogan.' He laughed at what was obviously an old joke and reached across the table to shake her hand.

‘Logan! My God!' She grabbed his hand.

‘Well,' he said, ‘that's a welcome I didn't expect! What's the story?'

‘My name's Janis Taine, I'm – that is, I was a biologist, and I was…working with Moh when he
contacted
you about' – she lowered her voice – ‘the Star Fraction.'

‘The Star Fraction!' Logan shouted. ‘Yee fucking
hah
!' His fist in the air carried her hand, rather painfully, with it.

‘Sorry about that,' he said as she sucked her knuckles.

‘It isn't a secret any more?'

He shook his head. ‘Not here.'

‘Did it work? Did you get the data, or—?'

‘It worked fine,' Logan said. ‘We got it all, just before Dissembler went down. It's all out there now. The whole fucking Genome Project databank. We could grow the world from a bean.'

‘That's good to know,' Janis said. She felt a weight of concern, a concern that had grown so familiar she'd ceased to notice it, go. At least that much had worked: the systems that Josh Kohn had set up had performed to specification.

She let herself relax.

‘Maybe you can tell me something,' she said. ‘You knew Moh for a long time, right?'

‘Just met him now and again over the years. Starting with the first time I was victimized. Overdose of rads. Anyway, it's water out the jet now. Fifteen years ago. I must've been, oh, twenty and counting. I was speaking at a meeting the local comrades did.'

‘He told me about that,' Janis said. ‘When he was looking for the Star Fraction…One thing I never did figure out. He was a communist, or a socialist, yeah, and I can see why he backed the Republic in the end. But why was he so keen on this place?'

‘The Lord Carrington?'

‘No!' Janis snorted. ‘Idiot. Norlonto.'

‘He never explained that? Bastard. It's something him and me figured out years ago, arguing with that old geezer, whatsisname, Wilde. See, what we always meant by socialism wasn't something you forced on people, it was people organizing themselves as they pleased into co-ops, collectives, communes, unions. Now look at this place. Look at space, come to that. It's crawling with them! And if socialism really is better, more efficient than capitalism then it can bloody well
compete
with capitalism. So we decided, forget all the statist shit and the violence: the best place for socialism is the closest to a free market you can get!' He leaned back and laughed. ‘I had one hell of a faction-fight over that one!'

‘Well,' Janis said, ‘that makes some kind of sense. I suppose.' She gave him a conspiratorial wink. ‘Moh told me about fractions and factions.'

‘Yeah?'

‘Just what party was the Star Fraction a fraction of?'

Logan grinned and held up four fingers. Janis remembered Moh, doodling symbols in spilt wine.

‘Oh. The International.'

‘The Fourth.' Then he spread both hands: not to indicate
ten
, Janis realized, but something opening. ‘And the Last.'

Janis frowned. ‘I thought the Last International was a myth!'

‘Yeah, it is.' Logan laughed. ‘That's the point! It gets around all the old problems of recruitment and security by having no membership, no apparatus, nothing except front organizations. The fronts are real; the party behind them is a mirage. A virtual organization!'

‘But what does it stand for? What's it about?'

‘Freedom,' Logan said flatly. Then, as if that were too grandiose a statement, added: ‘And defeating all its enemies, of course.'

‘A conspiracy of paranoids?'

‘Absolutely,' Logan agreed cheerfully. ‘And Josh roped in lots of them to his virtual conspiracy, because he thought back then that the war was coming,
right
, that it would go nuclear,
right
, and that would be it. The end, the fall.
Wrong.
We pulled through that one. But now, the way things are going—'

‘Why does everybody keep talking about the way things are going? I thought things were going your way?'

Logan guffawed, then looked apologetic. ‘Sorry, no offence, mizz.' (Mizz?) ‘What we thought was the revolution,' he said slowly, as if spelling something out to himself, ‘was only a moment in the fall.'

‘That's what they call it in America,' Janis said, laughing. ‘The Fall Revolution!'

Logan didn't take it as a joke. ‘That's what it was, all right,' he said. ‘We defeated the Kingdom,
jes
, and the
US/UN
, but we have too many of our own defeats behind us.'

‘Who's this “we”?' she challenged him. ‘The socialists?'

Logan sighed. ‘No. The workers. The city folk. We've been bled for over a century now by wars and depressions and purges and peace processes, and every one of them took more of our best away. Those of us who are left' – he grinned sourly – ‘are the bottom of the barrel.' He drained his drink. ‘Myself very much included.'

‘That's not what I've heard about you,' Janis said. She punched his shoulder as she went to the bar.

‘What have you been doing since the revo?' Logan asked when she returned.

‘Cheers…I've been in the army.'

‘I gathered that,' Logan said with a lopsided smile. ‘And what have you been doing? Recently.'

She thought about it. ‘Falling back,' she admitted. It was no secret.

‘Yeah,' Logan said. ‘We all are.'

Jordan and Cat had silently joined them at the table. The black and the white, the right and the left, the light and the fair.

‘We can't just be going down like that,' Janis protested. ‘Just because of a few ambiguous victories? Contradictory situations. Come on, give it some mips. We had the revolution. It just wasn't
your
revolution. So what? I knew Moh; he told me some things. I know how you guys think. You just keep coming back.'

Cat shook her head. ‘It's not only recent, Janis. It all happened a long time ago. Who was it – Engels or Trotsky or somebody – said the defeat of Spartacus was the victory of Christ? Meaning the defeat of the slaves meant there was no way forward, so people turned inward.'

Janis thought of the new citizens, the barb in the shanty-towns and the urban fringes, developing whole industries out of junk, rearming and recruiting…recycling.

‘It isn't just a matter of turning inward,' she said. ‘The trouble with our wonderful society is that it constantly leaves people behind, constantly turns masses of people into barbarians in the midst of civilization. Just as Rome did. Say what you like about Christianity, it created a new world-view where
everybody counted.

‘And so do the greens! They're barbarians, all right, but they're barbarians
civilizing themselves.
How many people do you know who can grow crops, heal wounds, generate electricity? Most of us just flick a switch and expect a light to come on! Your average green anti-technology freak is a master of dozens of technologies, while we wander like savages in our own cities.'

Janis felt excited by her own explanation. She didn't welcome the looks of gloomy agreement from the others. There was always a chance, as long as you could make sense of things. They'd see that soon enough…and meanwhile,
carpe diem.

‘Aw, fuck, this is just too grim for a wedding! Give me a joint!'

They built one between them. ‘Where's the new messiah, huh?'

Jordan looked over his shoulder. ‘Not here.'

They all laughed.

‘What is to be done?' Janis inhaled deeply. ‘Heard that one before.'

‘We're staying,' Jordan said. ‘We'll preach reason to the barbarians if we have to.'

Logan shrugged. ‘I'm going back out tomorrow. We got a freewheel space colony. New View. You should see it. You should see the view. And we got ships. Swiped them from Space Defense, in the strike. State of war – no way are they gonna get them back. We got our eye on Mars. The Red Planet.' He cocked his head, looked at Janis with an aptly ape-like cunning. ‘You're a biologist.'

‘Aw, come on. OK, OK. I'll think about it.' She smiled brightly and turned to Jordan and Cat. ‘I never asked you: what did you do in the revolution?'

 

‘…then she said a strange thing. I think she meant to get us confused, suspicious of each other. She said I must've convinced Jordan that Kohn – we reckon she was talking about Josh Kohn, not Moh – was wrong and Donovan was right. She said who else would want to turn off her security software except Donovan? And that sort of provoked Jordan into saying we were doing it for the
ANR
, and she started this
giggling.
Goddess, it was creepy. So we shut her up and—'

The room went dark except for Cat's bright face, silent except for Cat's voice and a rushing roar. The suspicion had begun to dawn on Janis as soon as Cat and Jordan had spoken about the instruction to enter a code on Mrs Lawson's secure terminal. She'd tried to discount it. And now it was confirmed.

The light, lazy, reminiscing voice went on, spinning out its story; and slowly the words made the world come back.

Not the same world.

I'm not dying. I'm living through this. Those shining lights are her eyes, that tangled bank her dress. This cylinder in my mouth is a cigarette, and I'm breathing in and breathing out, and making interested meaningless noises.

 

‘So apart from waving a few guns about it was all gratuitous nonviolence,' Jordan said when Cat had concluded. ‘It was all down to Cat. If it hadn't been for her there'd be a massacre memorial now at Angel Gate.' They smiled at each other. ‘With our names on it, probably. “Gone to be with the angels”!' He laughed and hugged Cat and kissed her.

Janis forced a smile. It did not seem right that the walls were still standing. It was astonishing that people were still walking on the ground, still dancing and not drifting away in the sudden absence of gravity. She looked down at herself – still in her seat, she noticed – and at the little satchel in her lap. Here's your defeated Spartacus, your risen rationalist messiah. And he told us of a whole heavenly host, which your hand swept away.

Or was used to sweep away. Jordan had not known, but had the
ANR
known? Or Van? ‘There is no Black Planner,' MacLennan had told them, but how much did he really know? It seemed impossible that the Black Plan would have knowingly destroyed itself, unlikely that its destruction was an accidental side-effect of trying to gain access to Beulah City. The code would have been much too specific for that. It all seemed to point to a deliberate human intervention, a cold decision that Moh and the Watchmaker culture be sacrificed to stay the wrath of Space Defense. A Black Plan indeed.

And of course Jordan didn't know. He had no idea that Mrs Lawson had worked with Donovan, no idea that her security software had stood between Donovan's viruses and the Watchmaker
AIS
– and the Black Plan, and Moh's mind. A mind stamped with the logic of the programs, sensitized by her drugs…Jordan had no way of knowing, unless she told him what she knew.

She could do it. She could walk to the bar, throw a few switches, and Moh's fetch would be up there on the stage as Donovan's once had been. What would he say? She could tell them the truth, and whether Jordan felt any personal conscious guilt or not the impact on his mind would be incalculable. It would dominate the rest of his life.

She could do it. She could give him something to preach to the barbarians: a man who died to save them, and a living proof that the dead lived on in their deeds, and our memories.

She could do it. The world was cradled in her arms like a ball. She could throw it, and start a whole new game. The power sang through her nerves: she was at this moment the goddess herself, poised, waiting for the music of the next dance, the voice of a new partner; a fey glance in her eye, the strange attractor. She was the butterfly in the greenhouse.

She looked at Jordan, who looked back at her. He could do it, with his – charisma, that was the word, the precise technical word – and his beautiful wife, his earthly angel. He could found a new faith in reason that would shine through any dark centuries to come, and live to blaze into a solar civilization. Her eyes stung with a sharp nostalgia for that future, for the countless trillions of individuals of organic and electric life, sharing or striving but always living in the light.

It all went through her mind in a handful of seconds.

She looked at Jordan and Catherin.

She could not do it.

She smiled, shaking her head, and said, ‘You did good at the Angel Gate.'

She turned to Logan, who had used the occasion of Catherin's talking at length to fall into a trance of besotted admiration, and said: ‘Apeman, spaceman, come on and give me a dance.'

 

She woke up naked on a bed in the upper floor of the Collective's house with a splitting headache, a long hairy arm around her and red-brown hair in her face. She looked at the time, yelled Logan and Sylvia awake, scrambled into her best and now only dress and grabbed the bag and muttered to the gun. She remembered the memory drugs; she found them still in their cold-box in the refrigerator with the explosives.