Fractions (61 page)

‘Microwaved, huh,' Reid grumbled. ‘Waved in front of the radar for a bit, more likely.'

‘Might account for the turbulence,' I said.

‘Turbulence?' Reid snorted. ‘That was anti-aircraft fire, man.'

‘What!' I turned in alarm to the window.

‘Don't worry,' Reid said. ‘Just bandits. They couldn't hit a 777 at this height.'

Our bodyguard, Predestination Ndebele, nodded slowly. A lithe, wiry Zimbabwean, one of Reid's employees.

‘You think this is bad,' he said, ‘you try landing at Adnan.'

‘I'll take your word for it, Dez.'

Reid looked up from his papers. ‘Last I heard,' he said with a vague frown, ‘it was called Grivas.'

 

We flew for hours over a terrifyingly featureless plain, and then, in the middle of all that nowhere, descended to a full-sized international airport buzzing with military and civilian craft. In the far distance a clutter of launch silos and gantries; closer by, a town of low pre-fabs: Kapitsa, capital (and only) city of the International Scientific and Technical Workers' Republic, aka the Number Three Test Area, in the wasteland somewhere between Karaganda and Semiplatinsk. Part of former Kazhakstan.

‘I have a suprise for you,' Reid said as we waited for the transit bus.

‘What's that?'

‘You'll see.'

I looked at him and shrugged, huddled against the dust-dry wind and trying not to breathe too much. The levels were supposed to be safe by now, but I was already interpreting the effects of jet-lag as incipient radiation sickness.

The airport main building was like any such, a neon-lit space of seating and screens and PA systems, but the differences were striking. The duty-free wasn't in a separate area, because there was no customs barrier. No passport control, either – just a cursory weapons registration and a walk through a scanner. The only thing anyone could smuggle in here that could make any difference was an actual atomic bomb, and they're not easily hidden. No tourists: all the arrivals and departures were of serious-looking customers: men in suits or uniforms. Very few women, apart from among the airport workers, who all – even the cleaners, I noticed – moved about their tasks with an almost insolent lack of haste, under enormous posters of Trotsky, Koralev and Kapitsa. The men who gave the Soviets the Red Army, the rocket, and the Bomb and who all got varied doses of Stalin's terror in return.

From every part of the concourse came an irritatingly frequent popping of flashbulbs. Photographers roamed the crowd, scanned faces hungrily, snapped officers and officials and company reps as eagerly as they would video stars. Their subjects responded in a similar manner. All over the place, poses were being struck by ugly, scowling men: shaking hands, bear-hugging, standing shoulder to shoulder and mugging like mad.

‘Where to now?' I asked, as Ndebele and myself hesitated for a moment at the edge of the concourse. Reid glanced at me with a flicker of impatience.

‘This is it,' he said. ‘This is where the deals get done. It's gotta be public, that's the whole point.'

He set off purposefully towards an open-plan Nicafé franchise. I hurried after him.

‘Hence the paparazzi?'

‘Of course. Stay cool,' he added to Dez, who was glowering at anyone who looked at us.

We sipped our first decent coffee of the day around a table too low to be comfortable, as if designed to hasten the through flow of customers. On the television four pretty Southeast Asians in pink satin ballgowns sang raucously in English, thrashed instruments and leapt about the stage. The continuity caption gave their name: Katoi Boys.

‘Boys?' Dez raised his eyebrows.

‘Thai refugees,' I said. ‘My youngest granddaughter tells me they're the latest pre-teen heart-throbs.'

‘Kinky, man,' Dez said with severe Calvinist disapproval. ‘Decadent.'

‘Yeah, that's what the Islamic Republic told them.' Reid spoke idly, scanning the crowd. He stood up.

I turned. A tall, slender woman in an ankle-length fur coat was walking up to us, with a wide and welcoming smile. Photographers trotted behind her, at a respectful distance. I nearly fell back into my seat as I recognised her: Myra, my long-ago ex from the Soviet Studies Institute in Glasgow.

‘Well, hi guys,' she said. She caught my hands and put her cheek to mine and whispered, ‘Smile, dammit!' and I turned with an idiot grin to face the flash.

 

One of my earliest memories, oddly enough, concerns the Soviet Union, space, and the Bomb. (I don't remember being born, but I'm assured that event took place on 5 March 1953, the day Stalin died. Make of that what you will.) I was playing on the carpeted floor of our house in Streatham, a suburb of the city of London. I was playing with a toy rocket. If you put your eye to the hole in the end you could see part of a picture of trees on the inner surface, because the toy had been made in Hong Kong from a recyled tin can. This wasn't because of ecological concern, which at that time hadn't been invented. It was because it was cheap.

My father, sitting at the breakfast table, peered at me over his copy of the
Manchester Guardian.

‘The Russians have sent a rocket into space,' he told me. ‘Way up in the sky, going right around the world.' He traced a circle in the air with his forefinger.

I felt disturbed by this. The Russians were in my mind a vague, vast menace. They had done something unpleasant and unfair to a friend of my father's, an old gentleman whose photograph was framed above the fireplace: Karl Marx. The Russians had
distorted
him. Whatever that was, it sounded painful.

I zoomed the toy rocket up and when it reached the limit of my arm's reach, I turned it and brought it down, nose-first. Its shape, I noticed for the first time, was just like a bomb. I had once seen a bomb being craned cautiously out of a garden at the end of the road, in front of two policemen, a dozen soldiers and a fascinated crowd. It had been buried in the ground for ten years after the war between the British and the German capitalists.

‘Does that mean they can send bombs through space?'

My father had returned to his paper, perhaps disappointed by my preoccupied response to his exciting news, and now lowered it again and gave me a brightening look.

‘Yes!' he said cheerfully. ‘That's exactly what it means. Very clever, Jonathan. And now the Americans and everybody else will build rockets and put bombs on them.'

My mother frowned at him.

‘But it's all right,' my father hastened to add, as he stood up and shook out his napkin and folded his paper. ‘The workers won't let them use the bombs. We'll stop them, won't we?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘We'll stop them.'

I knew from playing with other boys in the street that my parents' views were not widely held in Streatham, but I also knew that all around the world, even in far-away countries like Austria and New Zealand, there were people who agreed with them. Altogether there were
hundreds and hundreds
of them.

This mighty force would stop the bomb. I went back to playing happily with my rocket, and my father went whistling off to catch the train that carried the wage-slaves to work.

 

‘Reid told me he had a surprise,' I babbled, ‘but I must say I'm knocked flat. How on earth did you end up here?'

Myra smirked. She looked well, and I could almost believe she hadn't aged much in forty years, but that was just part of the same illusion that kept me from feeling old myself. You could see the papery texture of her skin, the crinkles in its still impressive tightness.

‘I came here in the 'nineties,' she explained, ‘to do research, and then I just realised that these people needed help and that I enjoyed giving it. They still had a lot of bad shit from the tests, and they had one hell of a brain-drain as well. They needed any educated person they could get, and I was able to fix a lot of aid from US medical charities. Then I fell for an army officer, we got married, and luckily for us he was on the winning side of several civil wars and military coups and the re-revolution. So here I am, People's Commissar for Social Policy.' She waved a hand. ‘They let me sign treaties whenever I want, so I don't feel like I'm stuck with the domestic issues.' She laughed. ‘You know, women's work!'

I shook my head. ‘So Reid's become a capitalist, and you've become a bureaucrat – dammit, I'm the only one who's still a revolutionary!'

‘I am
not
a bureaucrat,' Myra said, with some hauteur. ‘I was elected, in a real election. We do have democracy, you know.'

Reid was taking documents from his briefcase and spreading them on the table. ‘Yes Myra, you sure won over your dashing young lieutenant. His faction has given a whole new meaning to the expression “deformed workers' state”.'

‘Old joke,' Myra said, but I could see she wasn't annoyed. ‘I'll tell you an older one. Soviet. “How do we know Marxism is a philosophy? Because if it was a science, they'd have tried it out first on
dogs.
”'

There was such withering proletarian contempt in her voice that we all had to laugh, and then Myra shot back: ‘Well comrades, these people were the dogs, and they've made
something
work. I wish you could stay for a few days and see it. Or even come and visit in October.'

‘Why October?'

‘Centenary celebrations,' Myra said. ‘We're planning a
real impressive
fireworks display.'

‘I'll bet,' Reid said dryly. ‘The biggest in the world, no doubt. Unfortunately, we have our own revolution to get back to.'

Myra sighed. ‘Business…You ready with those forms?'

‘Ready when you are.'

We signed, flashbulbs popped, and that was it. The world would know that I had the Bomb.

 

When the Soviet Union broke up, Kazakhstan had for a while found itself playing the unfamiliar role of a Great Power, because it had on its territory a number of nuclear weapons. When Kazakhstan broke up, one of its fragments had retained some (different, and better) nuclear weapons, with the additional difference that the International Scientific and Technical Workers' Republic – initially nothing more than a division of the ex-Soviet Rocket Forces, a few thousand nuked-upon Kazakhs and a strip of steppe – had known what to do with them.

They exported nuclear deterrence. Not the weapons themselves – that, perish the thought, would have been illegal – but the salutary effect of possessing them. Our contract was pretty standard, and it simply gave us an option to call in a nuclear strike on anyone who used nuclear weapons against us, and who
didn't provide full compensation.
Anyone who nuked us – even accidentally or incidentally – had to pay up or get nuked themselves.

The beauty of this arrangement was that any number of clients – the more the better – could have a claim on a relatively small number of nukes, an effect rather like fractional reserve banking. It also meant that anyone who wanted to tempt the ISTWR with a first-use deal would have had to offer more than the income from
all
the deterrent clients, and that would have cost far more than just building or stealing their own nukes. So the chances of the system being used for nuclear aggression were minute. Above all, for the first time, nuclear deterrence was available to anyone willing to pay for it, and the cost was reasonable enough for every homeland to have one.

Especially when the competion caught on: rogue submarine commanders, missile crews in Siberia and Alaska who wanted payment in real money for a change, groups of ambitious junior officers in Africa all started selling off shares in the family plutonium.

Another triumph for the free market.

 

Not everyone agreed.

‘When I saw the pictures,' Annette raged, ‘of you with that anorexic floozy, I thought you'd run off with her! This is
worse
!'

Oh, no it ain't, I thought, and I was right. We quarrelled, we argued, we got over it. This was just ideas, not bodies. I could be an actual instead of a potential mass murderer, and it would have hurt her less than me screwing somebody else.

Not that I ever said it. Some weapons are best kept in reserve.

Wilde stood looking dubiously at the pack and the two sets of weapons that Tamara had laid out on the table. He lifted the pack and put it back down again.

‘What have you got in there?' he said. ‘Nukes?'

Tamara looked up from a scanner, which she was using to download the latest maps of the Fifth Quarter to her contacts, and shook her head. ‘No nukes,' she said firmly. ‘Discharging nuclear explosives within city limits is a serious offence.'

‘I'm glad to hear it,' said Wilde. ‘So that's us ready to go, then.'

‘More or less.' Tamara folded away the scanner. ‘We need to be ready to go at any time, but that doesn't mean we have to go now. Reid will book the hearing, and we'll get at least thirteen hours' notice.'

‘What about preparing our case?' Wilde asked. ‘I don't know anything about your laws here, let alone the specific code Talgarth operates.'

‘Oh, that's all right,' Tamara said. ‘Invisible Hand will take care of it. You can get someone to stand counsel if you want, but if you ask me you're just as well letting Invisible Hand patch you a MacKenzie remote.'

‘A what?'

‘A software agent to advise you on points of law, when you're representing yourself.'

‘Ah,' said Wilde. ‘Progress.'

Tamara wandered over to the kitchen-range and began brewing up a large canteen of coffee.

‘Expecting company?'

‘Allies,' Tamara said. ‘Invisible Hand is calling some in for me.' She smiled mischievously at him. ‘None for you.'

‘Consider me one of yours,' Wilde said. He looked about the room, searching. ‘Do you have any way of keeping up on the news?'

Tamara looked at him oddly. ‘Yeah, sure.'

She went over to a shelf and picked up a television screen and unrolled it and stuck it to the wall behind the table. The tall kettle was boiling. She turned to attend to it. Wilde looked at the screen, caught Tamara's eye. He waved at the screen's blank pewter surface.

‘Oh!' Tamara tapped her temples with her hand. ‘Sorry. You don't have contacts?'

‘Something the robot evidently neglected to tell me about,' Wilde said.

Tamara told him about a good local stall where he could buy contacts, and how to get there. He wrote down her instructions, drew a sketch-map, checked it with her, and left. He returned about half an hour later, blinking and wide-eyed. ‘Wow,' he kept saying. ‘Wow, fuck!'

 

Tamara's allies turned up in ones and twos over the next hour; eventually, a dozen of them were filling the room, sitting on the table, checking weapons and drinking Tamara's coffee. Most of them smoked and all of them had strongly held opinions on aspects of the case, as well an embarrassed, and embarrassing, interest in Wilde. The man from the dead! Wilde rapidly lost track of their names or interest in their obsessions, as he found himself backed into corners by a crowd of mostly skinny, mostly young, all heavily armed strangers telling him things he didn't know about himself.

‘I've always thought your later works denouncing the conspiracy theory were forged by the conspiracy –'

‘No.'

‘– and Norlonto, right, that was an ideal community –'

‘No.'

‘– the basic idea of abolitionism, that machine intelligence has artificial rights, was based on the same premises as your space movement manifestos –'

‘No.'

‘They say this is all because Reid is screwing your woman –'

‘No.'

And so on.

And then everyone started and fell silent at the same moment, even Wilde who had by now got the hang of tuning his contacts to the television screen. The news, like most news on Ship City's channels, was delivered by an excited child. (Wilde had already expressed his opinion that this was one of the most enlightened and appropriate uses of child labour he'd ever come across.)

‘News just in!' said the blonde-curled bimbette on the Legal Affairs Channel. ‘Three sensational developments! David Reid sues abolitionist for return of his gynoid, Dee Model! And – he sues the long-dead anarchist and nuclear terrorist, Jonathan Wilde, on a related charge! Finally, Dee Model and another abolitionist call witness that they've killed the renowned artist, Anderson Parris! Hue-and-cry raised – bounties posted shortly!'

Pictures of those mentioned zoomed giddily onto the screen as she spoke, and the channel then split into sub-threads exploring the implications of each aspect, the biographies of the alleged participants and the eschatological significance of the return of Jonathan Wilde.

‘
Nuclear terrorist
?' The man who spoke was called Ethan Miller. His appearance was older than most of those present, with lank black hair, skin the colour of the vile tobacco he smoked, and a face like a well-used hatchet. He wore nothing but leather trousers and a ragged TOE-shirt which he claimed was an original, though the Malley equations now had even more holes in their fabric than they'd ever made in reality. ‘You should sue them for that, man!'

‘No.'

Invisible Hand's more sober declaration over-rode the news channel, instructing all parties in the case to appear at the Court of the Fifth Quarter by ten the following day.

‘Right!' yelled Tamara above the hubbub. ‘You heard! Go go go!'

The deployment that followed was less frantic than Tamara's efforts to organise it. Evidently the deadline for their appearance wasn't expected to be hard to meet. People tooled up and strolled out, with Tamara, Wilde and Ethan Miller bringing up the rear. Tamara locked and armed the house – just to prevent any warrantless searches, she explained – and they all moved off towards the quay.

The sun was low in the sky, turning the city-centre towers into a tall tiara of gold and gems. On Circle Square's central island, stall-holders were packing up, while the first roadies for the evening's bands were rigging up sound-systems. The early-evening air was thick with the smells of cooking-oil and engine-oil and the sweet reek of cannabis. Around tables and outdoor bars, late departures or early arrivals watched the quiet-speaking, marching group with shadowed apprehension and hand-hidden comments among which the occasional encouraging smile gleamed like a flashed weapon.

‘What'll happen to Dee and Ax,' Wilde asked, ‘if they're caught?'

Tamara grunted. ‘Depends how outraged whoever catches them is,' she said. ‘Likely they'll just be pulled in and charged, by whoever is claiming the damage. I guess this Anderson Parris would've had a pretty price on his head.'

‘Yeah, well…' Wilde said. ‘I can relate to all that. But what gets done to them, like punishment?'

‘Punishment?' Tamara sounded puzzled. ‘Oh, you mean penalties. Depends, again. Killing somebody can be quite serious, you know.'

‘Yes,' said Wilde dryly. ‘So what does the penalty depend on?'

‘Don't worry,' said Tamara. ‘Shit, at least they've called witness to it. That counts for a lot, not trying to hide it…apart from that, it depends on the victim's losses, right? Emotional distress, loss of life-experience, earnings, loss of society for those close to them – add all that up and multiply it by the down time.'

‘Ah,' said Wilde. ‘Down time. I think I might understand what you're saying a lot better if you explain to me exactly what
down time
is.'

They had reached the quay where Tamara's dinghy bobbed. The others had piled into their own boats, a flotilla of skiffs and outboards and inflatables. Tamara descended to her boat, Ethan Miller passed down her kit, and she helped Wilde on board. He sat down where she told him, by the side.

‘Down time,' Tamara explained, as she cast off and eased the engine into a gentle start, ‘is the time between gettin' killed and coming back. Backups cost, see, and growing clones can take fucking
months
, 'specially if you want a good one, no cancers or shit. So like, if you're just ordinary, like me say, you'll have back-ups every year or so, and you'll have a fast-clone policy. If you're real rich, like this Parris bloke, you'll take 'em weekly. But then, you have a slow clone, and your losses mount up faster 'cause of your earnings being higher. So it sort of balances out, but it's still cheaper to kill poor folks.'

She smiled at him and gunned the engine. ‘Ain't class society a bitch.'

‘Uh-huh,' said Wilde, noncommittally. ‘And what if somebody doesn't have a back-up? What if they stay dead?'

‘Everybody has back-ups,' Tamara said, amazed at his ignorance. ‘Nobody
stays dead.
Jesus.'

She concentrated on steering the boat in the reckless wake of their companions', and missed Wilde's look of sudden pain. Only the boat's 'bot saw it, and it could only record, and not understand.

 

The low sun, reddened by desert dust, is in Dee's eyes. She shades them with her hood, tugs the cloak closer about her. As her sight adjusts, a millimetre out of the direct glare, she can see the jagged black edge of the Madreporite Mountains far to the west, at the end of the Stone Canal's shining slash. She's sitting, hugging her knees, the skirt's bunched lace prickly on the skin of her arms. Ax is also sitting, leaning against her back. They're in a sort of eyrie, a functionless hollow in the side of a tower pitted by many such. The holes are connected by likewise inexplicable tunnels, which at least provide ventilation for the longer and much wider corridors within. The great spongy spike has been colonised over decades by businesses and settlers. What, if anything, it was originally designed for was almost certainly not human occupation, but humans are nothing if not ingenious and adaptable animals. Dee knows about this trait. She finds it admirable, though – she now realises – she can't quite take pride in it. They're not her species.

That humans are not her species is a conclusion she has come to only this afternoon. It's a little disappointing, since she's only felt like a human being for a couple of days, and she has every intention of keeping it to herself, especially if the question of her human status becomes a matter of learned dispute. But it's the only way she can explain to herself how little she minds killing them.

Even given that they'll come back – minds out of slow-running computer storage, bodies out of vats – being killed must cause them a lot of distress and inconvenience. (This is different from
the dead
, Scientist pedantically reminds her – different storage, different retrieval, different problem. Yeah, yeah, she tells it, and as that self is off-lined again Dee has a fleeting thought about Annette, the woman whose genotype she now knows she shares. She thinks of her among the dead, she thinks about codes and stores, and for another moment Sys flashes up some tenuous connection, but it's gone…She's just got too much on her mind right now.)

The distress and inconvenience caused is, for Ax, the whole point. He's taking great delight in knocking off anyone who ever ripped him off, exploited him financially or spiritually or sexually. He chortles as they fall, to Dee's bullets or his. Three so far, and more to go. Dee just doesn't give a shit, basically. She knows she's capable of emotion, of empathy, even of ethics – they're right there, burned into the circuits of most of her selves – but they don't seem to apply to people like Parris, or that woman Ax skewered in a cellar two hours ago, or the man she shot in a doorway. Perhaps they're only meant to apply to one's own species, in which case they're not her species.

It now occurs to her, as she squints into the sun and watches out for bounty-hunters, for signs of hue-and-cry, that there is another explanation. Perhaps she's human, all right, and her victims are not. Perhaps what they all have in common is a parasitic mimicry of humanity, which she can see through. One of her Story threads, which she plays on nights when she wants to give herself stronger fare than her usual historical romance, is about vampires. She wonders if the ostensibly human species – or hominid genera – are divided between real people and some hollow mockery of people, beings like vampires, who live on the lives of others. Killing them might be quite different from killing real people, who only live on the lives of plants and animals and machines.

An interesting thought.

She hears Ax's long, lung-emptying sigh. She braces her back for the expected thud of the pistol and thump of the recoil. They shake her body a second later.

‘Got him!' says Ax.

Dee doesn't need to look around. The exit-ramp their eyrie overlooks is five metres down and about twenty metres away, and she can picture the sprawled body of the banker lying there. She can also picture the faces and lenses turning in their direction in the next couple of seconds…

But they've already rolled, Ax and Dee, down the slope of the hollow and out of immediate sight. A metre-wide hole in the synthetic rock leads to a curving chute, which they patiently climbed up about half an hour ago. The glassy smoothness which made the ascent difficult makes the descent easy. Dee goes first, feet-first, wrapped in her cloak. The drop at the end is awkward; her lumbar ligaments strain, her heels jar – another task for the Surgeon sub-routines. She turns and holds up her hands and catches Ax as he hurtles out.

The corridor they're standing in has the usual quasi-organic rounded-off corners in its rectangular cross-section, and curves smoothly around to the left and right. The glowing mother-of-pearl surfaces are pocked with holes, studded with chitinous lenses and membranes – and, hacked crudely in, mikes and cameras, office windows and doors. Already alarms are echoing along the corridor, and rippling along the wires. Soldier and Spy, time-sharing Dee's senses and transmitters, hack and ping. Some of the alarm-signals are disrupted.

But not all. With a silent conference of glances, Dee and Ax turn and race to the left. They head for the lift which they used to ascend from street-level. Doors open down the corridor in front of them, alarms shrill again. A security guard in a black uniform steps out and raises a hand. He's just in sight around the curve of the corridor. Dee skids to a stop and catches Ax's arm.