Fractions (72 page)

One floating camera suddenly spins and zooms in on the gate, which has opened, unnoticed. The rounded prow of a great armoured vehicle noses in. Dee looks away from the television window to the window screens, and sees another angle on the same view. The intruding vehicle is their own.

I woke to the sound of armour in the streets, and lay on my back for a while staring up through the hexagon panes of the dome at the pale cold sky. It was ten o'clock. I'd slept in, but the ANR, as usual, had arrived on time. After yesterday's exhausting round of television interviews and visits – actual and virtual – to militia units, I felt I had a right to a rest. I no longer even had the responsibility of being Norlonto's nominal dictator – I'd resigned as chairman of the Defence Liaison Committee as soon as the last militia commander had come on side.

An airship floated by above, its shape distorted by the ripples of the glass. Then another, and another, close behind. I wondered if a lot of people were getting out before the state moved in. Doubtless there were those who didn't want to hang around for questioning: Hanoverian recusants, spillover from the civil war, Army deserters…perhaps even space movement libertarian idealists, off to grab a place on a launch vehicle before Earth's exit hatch shut down completely, as the more alarmist ones thought it might. And now, after twenty-odd years as a denizen of a functioning anarchy, I was a citizen again. The tanks and APCs continued to trundle by outside, the airships and helicopters to drift or buzz past above. Annette mumbled and stirred beside me. I ran my fingers over her long white hair and slid from under the duvet, hastily wrapped her fur coat around me and padded down the stair-ladder from our nest under the top of the dome.

I printed off newspapers and fired up a pot of coffee and went to the door. Our housing association's cluster of domes was set back a little from the street, among paths and ponds, lawns and cannabis gardens. Children raced about, chickens strutted their fenced-in runs. Only the dogs still bothered to react to the Army's passage.

The tanks, as always, moved faster and quieter than you'd expect. The soldiers sitting on them wore ANR uniforms customised with bandanas and bandoliers and the insignia of forces they'd defected from or defeated. They chewed or smoked and looked down their noses at us, discordant rock music blaring from sound-systems. I stood for a long time, shivering, shanks prickling, and watched.

Then I stooped and picked up our deliveries: juice, milk, eggs, bread and rolls. The bags and cartons had a fur of frost over them; they must have been there for hours. Not much petty crime in Norlonto. I wondered how long that would last. As I fried eggs and bacon and tore off pages from the papers a supermarket bill caught my eye. In our division of domestic labour, shopping was down to Annette. The price of coffee and cigarettes shocked me, the price of local foodstuffs gave some comfort. I checked the delivery bill.

Fruit juice cost about ten times as much as milk. Nothing to do with the inflation – that only applied to the Republic's official joke currency, and we paid in good South African gold.

Crazy prices. What was the world coming to?

There I was, thinking like an old man. I shook my head and carried Annette's breakfast and a wad of her favoured newspapers upstairs. Then I washed and dressed and settled down to my own breakfast and news, trying to figure it out.

I was on my second coffee and first cigarette before I remembered that these, like the fruit juice, were imported. For a wild moment I wondered if the Republic had slapped on taxes or tariffs, then realised that such an outrage would hardly have passed me by. I'd have heard about the riots; heck, I'd have been
in
the riots.

A trawl through the
Economist
's database set me straight. Raw-material prices had risen sharply over the six months since the Fall Revolution, while the prices of finished goods and services had dropped. There were plenty of articles explaining why, which in my absorption in our little local difficulties I'd overlooked.

The defeat of the US/UN, and the collapse of its financial scams such as the IMF and World Bank, had had divergent effects. The primary products tended to come from the less developed areas, the old Second and Third Worlds. Their instabilities made our civil wars look like peaceful picketing. Without the empire to police them, protection costs and risk had gone up. Meanwhile, in the more advanced regions, the reduction in taxes – and the end of the headlock on technological development imposed by UN arms control – had allowed manufacturing to enjoy a spurt of growth. Even nanotechnology looked as if it might come on-line at last, if only somebody could entice its best minds out of hiding.

So much for the price of coffee. What was still bothering me was why we weren't as poor as we should have been. My income from the university had dropped to a token stipend, as the only lectures currently being given there were from the ignorant to each other. (God, let them grow out of that.
Soon.
) Royalties from my writings had gone up, but not by much, because most of the increased circulation was of those I'd disdained to copyright. Our pension funds were paying out regularly, but they were pretty basic and they certainly hadn't gone up. And yet – unlike most people since the Revolution – we hadn't had to tighten our belts.

I keyed up our bank statements and almost spilled a mug of expensive instant coffee. An ordinary expensive cigarette smouldered undrawn to a butt. Our regular income had indeed dwindled, but the balance was being made up by increased payments from my small, almost-forgotten stake in Space Merchants. I cursed the fund-management software for letting me eat my capital, then called it up.

We weren't eating my capital. We were using up part of the income, and a small part at that. The value of my stake had increased far more than I'd ever expected, and had almost doubled since the Revolution. We were moderately, comfortably, and inexplicably rich.

 

‘I don't see what you're complaining about,' Annette said, over a late lunch. No urgent phone-calls; I assumed this meant the occupation was proceeding smoothly. ‘I'm thrilled. I never particularly wanted to be rich, but I've always thought it would be
nice.
'

She looked around the dome, at the stacked books and climbing plants and the dodgy cabling of the electronics, blatantly thinking of improvements.

‘Yeah, well, me too,' I said. ‘But to make money in space these days is, like,
defying gravity.
Space Defense was run on defence budgets that are due for the chop. All the space industries, even the settlements – even NASA – were like the shops in a garrison town. Like the whorehouses! The whole system should be in a severe slump. A lot of it is – the battlesats are running on empty, hawking microwave beams to electricity companies or some such. So why is Space Merchants doing well?'

Annette's eyes had a glint of amusement or sadness. ‘You won't stop, will you?' she said. ‘You think you're on to something, and you won't stop.'

‘Yup,' I said, rising and clearing away the plates.

‘If you find out it's all been a terrible mistake, just do me one favour,' she said. ‘Take the money and run. I don't care who it belongs to, they owe you this much.'

‘Half a day under the state,' I said, ‘and you're thinking like a politician.'

‘No,' she corrected me, standing up and laughing. ‘I'm thinking like a politician's wife.'

 

The soldiers stayed, the camps were pacified, people from all wings of the space movement denounced me. I made no reply to the attacks. Snow fell. We kept ourselves warm, and worked on the puzzle as a team. Annette followed the news, and I followed the money. For an advocate of the free market I was embarrassingly ignorant of finance, and a few days went by before I could find my way around the
FT
's pink screens without frequent tabs to the Wizards.

Then on to the great databases of Companies House…in VR you could wander through it like a vast mall, its connections and intersections emulating the impossible topologies of an Escher print. I went as myself, and so did some of the other searchers and researchers there, but most were in cryptic fetches, corporate icons or the mirrored samurai armour of the latest discretion software from the Kobe code-shops (‘Zen cryptography –
don't even think about it
', the ads said).

From Companies House you could see the world.

I saw the intricate geometries of Thailand's Islamic banking system crumble before the assault of the anti-technological Khmer Vertes; Vladivostok's port economy, liberated by the Vorkuta People's Front, rise in new and strange shapes; America's frayed networks of scientific information glow brighter around the coasts, flicker and die in the heartlands as the Scientific Fundamentalists and the White Nationalists shut down the corrupting institutes of what they called ‘rootless naturalism' in public and ‘Jewish science' in private.

I saw Kazakhstan's cosmodromes stretch skyward, and I saw too the tributaries that fed them, the KomLag archipelago of the forced-labour companies. Some in the Former Union – old skills put to a new use – but most in the freer world. A few right here in Norlonto.

Wherever the victorious forces of the Fall Revolution could do it, they were keeping the more useful employees of the defeated US/UN empire – and especially Space Defense – at work for a pittance, in partial restitution for past exploitation. They were supplemented by a new and expanding use for non-political criminals, earning out their payback at high speed, in the high-risk, high-wage space economy.

‘Slavery,' Annette said. ‘I just don't believe it's come to this.'

‘It isn't really slavery,' I said uncomfortably. ‘It's just bonded labour.'

‘Yeah, yeah. Like we don't have capital punishment, we just let psychopaths pay off their blood-debts by starring in snuff movies?'

‘Exactly,' I said. ‘Do you still want to take the money and run?'

‘No!' She looked fiercely at me, then down at the table. ‘On the other hand, there's no-one to give it back to, it would be counter-productive to sell the shares to someone with even less scruples than you, and it'd be pretty hypocritical just to give the money away.'

‘Not to say wimpish.'

‘Yeah. C of E.'

‘So what's the answer?'

‘Use it to expose where it's coming from,' Annette said firmly. ‘Dig into it some more, then run a campaign to get it all out in the open and discussed. You could do that.'

‘And accomplish what?'

‘Oh, come on! If there are any abuses going on, it might help to stop them.'

We both found ourselves laughing at this statement, but as Annette said after we'd lapsed into a gloomy silence, what else was there to do?

 

I circled warily in the dataspace around the representations of the Kazakh spaceport hinterland, and noticed the tag-line of the company I'd started so long ago: Space Merchants. It had strong flows of material and information linking it with Myra's Kazakh workers' ministate and Reid's Mutual Protection defence agency. I amplified the resolution, trying to trace what was going on.

They'd all changed, grown beyond anything any of us had initially intended. Space Merchants had become an import–export business between Earth and low orbit, almost as distant now from its innocent, fannish origins in the space-trash market as the latest SSTO boosters were from Goddard's amateur rocketry. The International Scientific and Technical Workers' Republic, its nuclear teeth long since drawn, had changed its specialty to launch-vehicle development. The ISTWR had held out against the surge of Kazakh reunification, and Mutual Protection had a major presence there. And not only there: Mutual Protection now ran security and restitution facilities on three continents, usually guarding installations and extracting payback from any thieves or saboteurs foolish enough to mess with its clients.

It was weird to see that personal triangle between myself, Myra and Reid, replicated as a commercial connection, like the family relations of dynastic armies; but whether those connections meant anything was a different matter. (As I pointed out in
Ignoramus!
, my work on the counter-conspiracy theory of history, everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who…(etc.), and it's the easiest job in the world to inkin those pencilled lines; to speculate that the surprisingly few handshakes that separate the obscure from the famous are all
funny
handshakes…My incautious illustration of this with a diagram of my own second- and third-hand connections, ‘proving' the existence of a mysterious Last International linking the world's libertarians and futurists to each other and to a long list of historic usual suspects, had resulted in a certain amount of misunderstanding: for
years
afterwards I'd received anonymous mailings of what purported to be the Last International's Central Committee minutes.)

Firewalls guarded most of the companies' data, the remnants of recent hack-attacks fading on the matt virtual surfaces. I moved along, seeking entry nodes. Out of nowhere, something pinged my fetch. My hands, in the datagloves, felt warm. Warmer.
Hot.

I was holding what looked like a sealed envelope, iconic equivalent of a personal message: based on an anonymous transaction protocol, it couldn't even be read on screen, only in VR through the intended recipient's fetch. It was also a delivery method of choice for target-specific viruses. I looked at it – damn, it was beginning to give off smoke – and hastily reached behind me and tugged the emergency back-up bat. Seconds trickled by as the contents of my home computer were transferred to isolated disks. When it was safe to do so I opened the now smouldering envelope.

Then it crumbled to bits.

Well, that was a lot of use, I thought as I backed out and sat blinking in chill daylight, Annette's quizzical smile teasing me from the other side of the table.

‘You've heard from Myra,' she said.