Fractions (55 page)

‘But he used you,' Ax persists. ‘Whether you wanted to or not.'

‘I always wanted to,' Dee says, but her Sex–y smile hides a new and gnawing doubt as to how much that consent was worth, now, looking back. Ax watches her, and she sees him see the doubt grow.

He opens a drawer in the table and reaches in, and brings out a knife. It isn't a kitchen-knife. It has a black wooden handle, a brass guard, and thirty centimetres of blade. Almost casually, Ax bangs the sharp point of the knife into the table and lets go of the handle, so it springs back a bit and it vibrates.

‘Now you know who you are,' Ax says quietly. Dee isn't sure he's talking to her. All the shaking has gone out of his body, out of his voice, and into that quivering blade. ‘You're a person. You're free. Have you ever thought – what you would like to do to people who've treated you like
meat
?'

 

Out here, in the damp-desert flats between two arms of the city, it's quiet even for a Sic'day morning. The only sounds are the thrum of the dinghy's motor, the occasional hiss of a jet transport overhead, and the cries of the adapted birdlife: the lost-satellite bleep of rustshanks, the quacking of mucks, and the caw-cawing of sandgulls. Sic'day is for most folk a day when some work is done, but not much.

(Tamara has heard the opinion that the day is called that because of the number of people working – or not working – with hangovers, but this is a myth. More than a Neo-Martian century ago, Reid expressed the opinion that continuing to name the days after the gods of the Solar system would be inappropriate. Nobody could agree on other names, so the week goes: Wunday, Twoday, Thirday, Fourday, Fi'day, Sic'day, Se'nday. There are twenty-five hours and ten minutes in a day; for convenience there are twenty-five hours in the first six days and twenty-six on Se'nday. There are a hundred and ten weeks in a year. More or less. All serious chronology is done in SI multiples of seconds, reckoning from the moment the Ship's clock came out of the Malley Mile, around 6.4 gigaseconds ago.)

Tamara's boat bumps against the canal-bank as she drifts along under minimal power. She's on a capillary of the Ring Canal. The shallow artificial rivulet is carrying her away from the centre of the city, towards the fields. The human quarter is on her right, the Fifth Quarter on her left. Between them is this expanse of waste, not quite mud-flat, but no longer desert, and not yet fields. In it, venturing out from the machine domain of the Fifth Quarter, can be found biomechanisms, Tamara's habitual prey.

A sandgull descends, screaming, about a hundred and fifty metres ahead and thirty from the left bank. Tamara ups the revs and lowers her profile as other gulls dive to join it. They squawk and squabble around a black thing. The boat cuts diagonally across the canal. Tamara zooms her right eye. The black thing has a flailing appendage. A stubborn gull clings to it, taking some of the momentum out of the shaking in moments of hopping near-flight.

‘Stay,' Tamara tells the boat's 'bot, and it obediently idles the engine and hooks the bank as Tamara steps out, clutching a long grapple. She draws her pistol as she sprints forward. The bang of a blank scatters the gulls into wheeling indignation overhead. As Tamara's feet thud over the damp sand and skip over tussocks of grass, the black object – a warty, rubbery ball about a third of a metre across, with at least a metre of flail – starts hauling itself towards the nearest patch of what looks suspiciously like quicksand. When she's about four metres away Tamara feels a tickle behind the bridge of her nose. She stops and sniffs. The tickle stays constant – good. That means the radioactivity is contained, not airborne. Still, the thing's uncomfortably hot. Not dangerous, but she has to be careful.

She circles it gingerly, getting between it and the wet area. It moves towards her: whip, tug, bounce; whip, tug, bounce. It stops. The tip of the flail rises and sways from side to side, then presses against the ground. Tamara steps forward, stumbles as her left foot comes up from the ground with an unexpected sucking noise. The rubbery limb recoils.

Tamara squats down and reaches out with her grapple, a simple mechanism a couple of metres long which has a primitive robot hand at the far end and a pair of handles for her to grasp, one-handed, and thus extend her clutch. She eases it across the ground and grabs the flail at the root. In obliging reflex, the tentacular appendage wraps around the grapple and starts trying to crush it to death.

Tamara lifts it off the ground and heads back to the boat. The biomech, evolved or designed at the interface between domains, is not a bad catch. It has senses, reflexes, and apparently a capacity to concentrate radioactives within its tough skin. Somewhere in the human quarter there's a technician who is looking for just such a genotype, or so she hopes.

She's just sat down in the boat and in the middle of manoeuvring the grapple and its load, awkwardly trying to keep her distance from it (at less than two metres the tickle in her geiger-sense is becoming a pain) while selecting and opening a container, when there's a ringing in her left ear.

‘Damn,' she says loudly. She tenses her throat-muscles to turn on the mike, winks up the phone-screen, and with a rightward flick of her eyes accepts the call. The first screen to come up is clunky, even as it hangs with hallucinatory vividness in the space between her and the end of the grapple. It's like a camera is looking at a monitor screen, in some primitive glimmer of machine self-awareness. Text scrolls down it, a voice-over spell-checks itself along.

‘Invisible Hand Legal Services,' it intones. ‘Incoming challenge call from –' and here it hesitates, as if even this august implementation of the voice of the IBM is amazed at its own temerity ‘– David Reid. Will you accept?'

‘Yes,' gulps Tamara.

The screen is instantly minimised to the corner of her eye, and the main view is taken by a solid image of a face she's seen many times before, but never before speaking to her. The window floats in front of her eyes, with Reid's head and shoulders at a comfortable speaking distance behind it. Behind him, she can see different parts of a room, a bright window (real, apparently). He's pacing about as he talks.

‘Tamara Hunter?' he says.

‘Yes.'

He grins, peering past her.

‘I can see why you call yourself that. Well, to business m'lady. You're currently in possession of one of my machines, a Model D gynoid, and I want it back. Now.'

Tamara takes a deep breath.

‘I'm not in possession of it – her. She's claiming self-ownership and I'm defending her. So are several sworn allies of mine, and other clients of Invisible Hand.'

‘Crap,' Reid retorts. ‘She doesn't even have the wit to claim self-ownership.'

‘She does now, and did, before witnesses.'

‘To a fucking IBM, you mean. Your legal expert-system couldn't pass the Turing itself, let alone administer it.'

‘I RESENT THAT.'

‘Shaddap,' says Tamara, still struggling with the grapple. The thing on the end is rolling like a badly held forkful of spaghetti. ‘Sorry, Reid. That wasn't for you.'

‘I appreciate that,' says Reid dryly. ‘You were saying?'

‘I can get human witnesses to testify before any court you like. The gynoid ain't your pet zombie any more.'

Reid's eyes narrow. ‘That's because she's been
hacked.
It's still not an autonomous development, even if that matters, which it doesn't.'

‘It's time it did,' Tamara says levelly. ‘I'm willing to fight you on this.'

‘Have it your way,' says Reid. ‘In court, then.'

‘It's your challenge,' Tamara points out.

‘OK, the first bid's yours.' He bows.

Tamara winks up the Invisible Hand screen again. It displays a list of courts in descending order of preference. It's a short list. She goes for the first, but her voice is not hopeful as she says: ‘Eon Talgarth, Court of the Fifth Quarter.'

‘Accepted,' Reid says at once.

Tamara shrinks the IBM screen and stares at Reid, who looks blandly back.

‘What?' she says. Then: ‘Confirm, please.'

‘I accept,' Reid says, with emphatic formality, ‘that the decision be put to the Court of the Fifth Quarter in the case of myself versus Tamara Hunter and allies as represented by Invisible Hand Legal Services and-stroke-or themselves, to be held at the earliest convenience of all parties.'

‘And I too,' says Tamara.

The IBM repeats what they've said.

‘And meanwhile, no grepping?' Tamara asks suspiciously.

‘Of course, no grepping,' says Reid. He gives her a smile that, despite everything, despite herself, brings a slight warmth to her cheeks. ‘See you in court, lady.'

The screen vanishes in time for Tamara to see the black biomech unwind itself smoothly from the grapple, drop into the canal and, with a sinuous motion of its flail, swim away.

 

‘All right,' said Jay-Dub. ‘Have it your way. I suppose I can work something out.' It stopped at the junction of the pier and the street. ‘But before we go rushing off, I have a couple of suggestions.'

Wilde stopped and looked back. ‘Yes?'

‘Get yourself a gun,' said Jay-Dub. ‘And some better clothes. You look like you've just walked in off the desert or something. Also, if you want to head for the main abolitionist hang-out, it's quicker by boat.'

‘You have a point there,' said Wilde.

An hour later he was wearing a baggy black jacket, shirt and trousers, all of some warm fabric that he'd been assured was knife-proof, and studying a bulky metal automatic as he sat in a crowded
vaporetta.
The other passengers, mostly young, paid him a gratifying lack of attention. Wilde sat, aloof by the side of the boat, and looked at the canal-bank scenes and cocked his ears to his fellow-passengers' slangy, accented English. Jay-Dub, limbs retracted, lay at his feet like luggage. It was the only robot on board, apart from the helmsman, a chunk of solid-state cybernetics on the prow.

Scoop-nets on the side of the boat trawled bobbing balls of plastic from the water, and flicked them, rattling, into a hold beneath the deck. The boat left the commercial gaiety of the Stone Canal and passed into a succession of tunnels and narrow, high-banked canals. Here, in the green algae soggy on the walls, smaller balls could be seen. They moved downwards very slowly, but their course could be inferred: the closer to the water they sank, the larger they grew, until they dropped off and floated away. Wilde refrained from asking the machine about the economics and ecology of this bio-industrial process.

They reached their destination forty minutes after leaving. The boat pulled up with much coughing of engine and thrashing of propellers alongside a little jetty with steps leading to a narrow canal-side street. The boat's only human crew-member, who'd done nothing but collect the fares, opened his eyes and waved a hand.

‘Circle Square, two hundred metres,' he announced, and laid a short gang-plank to the steps. Wilde took care to be the last off the boat. He smiled at the boatman.

‘You're a Kazakh Greek,' he said.

The man's eyes widened. He gripped Wilde's hand, and said something in another language.

‘We've all come a long way,' Wilde said.

‘Win friends and influence people,' Jay-Dub sneered,
sotto voce
, at the top of the steps. ‘Always the goddamn agitator, eh?'

 

About thirty people walked along the street, Wilde and the robot a few metres behind the rest. Ahead, Circle Square's market island was just tuning up to its daily discord. The street was lined with tiny pavement cafés and stalls, and broken by alleys down which even tinier shops plied some kind of trade from windows and doorways.

They were a few steps away from one such alley-mouth, at the opposite corner of which a couple of perilously small tables were in use for serving coffee in proportionately minute cups, when Jay-Dub said urgently, ‘Stop!'

At the same moment Wilde too noticed the two men – the same two men who'd come searching in the pub. They sat at one of those little tables, staring back at him from behind dark glasses. His hand froze in the act of reaching for his new gun as the others did so for theirs.

Into this momentary impasse came a peculiar vehicle: a platform on wheels, with a crane-like handling-apparatus at either end. It nosed out of the alleyway without warning. Wilde jumped back. Mechanical arms unfolded from the cranes and snatched past him. He turned in time to see the claws of those arms clamp around Jay-Dub's lower limbs. They lifted the struggling machine right over his head, and placed it firmly on the flatbed's platform.

Wilde squatted down, grabbed the platform with both hands, and lifted. Jay-Dub lurched against the constraints at the right moment, and over the whole thing went. As people reacted, a cascade of tables toppled as well. Wilde dived across Jay-Dub's hull, rolled with a kick at the legs of the two men – on their feet now, with steaming stains on their thighs – and a moment later was up and running. A frantic backward glance showed the two men a few steps behind, in his wake of jostled vistors and tumbled furniture.

Circle Square was just ahead of him, the crowd denser.

‘Help!' Wilde yelled, plunging into the crowd.

‘Proceed no further,' ordered a booming voice from ahead and above. It might have come from one of the loudspeakers hung from cabling among trees and lamp-posts. Wilde stopped, and looked behind him again. The two men chasing him had halted a few metres away, dithering at the edge of a pavement, just where the end of the narrow street met the parapet of a bridge.

One of them made a move for the inside of his jacket. Before Wilde could react, something else reacted faster. Something spidery and light, a ball of stiff stalks that skimmed over the heads of the crowd and flew at the two men. As it struck them its stalks became flexible, and wrapped around them both, from their shoulders to their thighs.