Fractions (33 page)

 

Stone and Dafyd gave him grins full of knowing surprise and complete misunderstanding as he passed.

‘See you back at the house,' Cat called to them over her shoulder as he held the door for her. ‘Don't be long.'

After the pub's interior the evening sky was bright.

‘Look at those clouds.' Catherin tilted her head back. Jordan looked at the clouds, lit by the sunset, a rippled formation like wave-marks on sand.

‘Like ruched peach satin…' Cat said, then laughed at herself. ‘Listen to me!'

‘The femininists were getting to you, were they?'

‘Yeah. They were.'

She barely glanced at him as she spoke, threading her way through the crowd with a constant alertness that made his own progress feel clumsy. The street appeared to Jordan even busier, and with even more business going on in it, than usual: more people walking, hurrying, talking; more openly carried weapons.

Streetfighters out on the streets
…

Cat had already had herself re-entered in the house's security system, and he followed her through the door with a strange feeling that he was the stranger, the guest. They found Mary Abid busy with the Cable-editing console, Tai studying maps spread on the table, Alasdair doing something with a soldering iron to a piece of kit Jordan didn't recognize. The children were counting bullets and loading them into magazines, sticky-taping together the curving
AK
clips. Nobody gave Cat more than a glance as she breezed through the haze of flux, coffee aroma and cigarette smoke. Evidently she'd roped everybody at the house into whatever she was up to before going to the pub to find him. She'd left a couple of carpet-bags and a strappy bundle of belts and holsters and pistols in a corner, more or less out of the way.

The comms room was fully occupied. Cat turned to him.

‘You got personals?'

‘Sure.' He tapped the case of the computer and glades on his belt.

‘You're staying in Moh's room?'

‘Yes.'

‘OK, there's a port there.'

In the room she tossed her jacket on to the bed and looked around, as if checking a returned-to, familiar place. Her gaze stopped at the two pictures of herself on the wall. She gave Jordan a quirky smile and turned to the stacks of pamphlets in which he'd found the book by Wilde.

‘Aha,' she said. ‘You've started.' She sat down in the clutter, bringing her hem to her ankles and her knees to her chin, wrapped her arms around her legs and looked up at Jordan expectantly, like a small girl waiting for a story.

He frowned down at her, puzzled.

‘OK, Jordan,' she said, patting the floor. ‘Let's not piss around with what we can and what we can't say. We've got a bit of time, and there's a lot that we
can
talk about.'

Jordan pushed aside some pamphlets with the edge of his shoe and sat down facing her, the soles of his feet on the floor, his elbows on his knees.

‘For a start,' Cat continued, ‘who are you, and what are you and Moh up to? I know Moh's running scared of Donovan catching him, and that ain't like him at all. We've all been in the Body Bank, and the
CLA
do fast trade-offs, you know? I mean, shit, Moh's done time. What's going on?'

Some question. Jordan tried to think fast. It seemed that the deal was that Cat wouldn't talk about whatever linked the femininists with the
ANR
, and he wasn't expected to talk about whatever Moh had wanted to keep secret: the drugs, the Black Plan…The Black Plan was in both their secrets, their controlled zones of conversation.

‘I don't know for sure,' he said. It was true, up to a point. ‘As far as I know, Donovan was after Moh to settle accounts because of you. Janis – that's this scientist Moh's going around with – she's in some kind of trouble with Stasis.' A thought struck him. ‘What if Donovan and Stasis are working together?'

‘Oh, goddess.' Cat's face betrayed dismay. ‘That would explain a lot.'

‘Which you won't?'

‘That's right.'

They locked looks for a second.

‘Just one thing,' Jordan said, gathering his thoughts. ‘Moh's made contact with the
ANR
. Can you confirm that?'

Cat thought about it for a moment, then nodded.

‘All right,' Jordan said. He smiled with relief. ‘I guess he's off my hands.'

‘You could say that,' Cat said dryly.

‘As to who I am…Basically, I'm from Beulah City. I owned part of a business there. I left a few days ago because…I got a very unusual business proposition, yeah, and it gave me the chance to leave and…a rather urgent
reason
to leave.'

‘Did you need one, beyond not being a believer?'

Jordan felt himself go red before her unblinking blue-eyed scrutiny. ‘Maybe I was irresolute, maybe a bit too reluctant to hurt my folks.' He tasted gall. ‘Maybe cowardly.'

‘Crap,' she said. ‘Don't be so hard on yourself. That's how those places bloody
work
, dammit – all the ideologies you were ranting about tonight. You start to doubt them and before you know it you doubt
yourself
, you feel guilty because you're going against what's been rammed into you and you feel guilty because you're being dishonest about it every day.' She paused, eyebrows raised.

‘
Yes
! that's it. Exactly.'

‘OK. Well, I'm sure you've sussed out by now that there's nothing wrong with you.' The very casualness of the way she said the words sent them straight to his solar plexus, where they glowed. ‘What you probably don't realize is you're not alone: there are people in all the mini-states – even in
BC
, take it from me – who're as alienated as you were.'

‘Could be.' He didn't see it himself. ‘Anyway, Moh seemed to think there might be some mileage in that. He wanted me to help him with' – Jordan waved his hands, smiling – ‘this bit of trouble he's in, and later in tracking you down, but he definitely wanted me to do a bit of ranting, like you said, as well. Can't see it making much difference to whatever's gonna happen, though.'

‘Me neither.' Cat grinned disarmingly. ‘But you said you thought people were changing their minds by the hour, coming round to thinking: ah, fuck it, the
ANR
is in with a chance, yeah? Well look at this place, they're all doing just that.'

‘That's down to you?'

Cat nodded. ‘Yup.' She grinned. ‘Easiest bit of agitation I ever pulled.' Again her gaze was inescapable. ‘And you?'

‘Yeah, I…I'd like to see them win, sure, but…that's as far as it goes. It's not some kind of conversion.'

‘That's all it ever is, in these situations,' Cat said. There was a moment while they both paused, reflecting. In these situations…Revolution was like a war, Jordan thought. You just never knew how you'd react when something like that loomed. Patriots could become pacifists overnight, and vice versa; cynical bright young men fly off and die for king and country. And an individualist who loathed the suffocating clots of conformity known as the Free States could suddenly see the virtue of bulldozing them all flat, into a united republic…

Cat broke into his thoughts.

‘OK, so that's one thing you can do. Speak, write, patch stuff from anything on the net or here that catches your eye' – she waved a hand at the mass of pamphlets – ‘whatever. Don't talk about the
ANR
– talk about how stupid the Free States are, and the Kingdom and the
UN
. And get as much information as you can about what's going on, how things are lining up.' Her eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, yeah. Something else. You say you were a businessman? Know anything about stock trading?'

Jordan found he'd bounded to his feet. ‘Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact I do.'

Cat stood up. ‘Great,' she said. ‘I'll get the comrades to shove some of the money they've been sitting on into your work-space. Any time you get a moment, speculate.' She paused, frowning. ‘Can you actually make money in a falling market?'

Jordan grinned broadly. ‘You bet.'

‘OK,' Cat said. She picked her way across the untidy floor. ‘Got to it. Stop about, oh, not long after midnight.'

‘Then what?'

Cat looked at him over her shoulder from the doorway. ‘Sleep,' she said. ‘You're soon going to need all the sleep you can get.'

And with that ambiguous promise she was gone.

Jordan, up to his eyeballs and elbows in virtual reality, was occasionally aware of Cat's feral, feline, female presence as she whispered in his ear, disturbed the air around him, brushed against his back. It fired him up and drove him, and it was more bearable and less distracting than being haunted by her image, tormented by her absence.

She'd shaken him awake at 05.30. He sat up, staring at her with a sense of unreality. She struck a pose like a good fairy, in the shimmer and sparkle of the same dress she'd worn the previous night, and she held out a mug of coffee and a plate with a bacon sandwich on it.

‘Good morning.' He swallowed. ‘Thank you.'

She passed him the breakfast and said, ‘Hi. Mary said to tell you Vladivostok's fallen, Tokyo's down, and the pound's two point three million to the mark and rising.'

‘
Rising
?' The central banks must be desperate. Jordan found himself at the small table where the glades and computer were jacked in. By the time he had formed a picture from the market reports the coffee and sandwich were finished. A pause after shifting some yen into sterling brought a vague feeling of disquiet. He came back to actual reality to find that he had no clothes on. It didn't bother him; he guessed that it hadn't bothered Cat. After another quick look at the market he showered and pulled on jeans and a tee-shirt and hurried down to the comms room.

He spent the morning and early afternoon doing as Cat had suggested, flipping from the agitated, agitating chatter of the newsgroups and information channels to the consequences in the markets. He was on a roll, he was ahead of the game…As soon as nerves rattled by the fall of Vladivostok (to what the channels described as the Vorkuta Popular Front) settled down, a surge of hot money flowed back into Britain. The investors and speculators seemed impressed with the government's steady hand; there was a lot of smart advice about how the
ANR
offensive wasn't shaping up.

Hah
!

Convinced he knew better, Jordan rode the upswing as far as he dared and sold out around midday, moving as sharply as he could into gold after doubling his own stake as well as the Collective's; the latter was a disgracefully large sum to have left in a low-interest savings account. Mercenaries just weren't mercenary enough, he thought.

He returned his attention to the news networks, flipping channels, sifting through screeds to build more or less by natural selection a filter program that focused on what he found interesting. He contributed a small amount himself, both spoken and written rants. Coming out of the
VR
he leaned back and watched the screen on flat, letting the program choose what to sample.

Cat appeared at his elbow.

‘How's it going?'

‘Not too bad.'

A strange face appeared on the screen – gaunt, unshaven, red-eyed, talking hoarsely about the iniquities of the Free State system: ‘…you may be free to leave, but if you are systematically denied any accurate information about what you might find if you do leave, what freedom is that? We need to break down the walls…'

It was only the words that he recognized as his own.

‘Hey, that's good,' Cat was saying.

‘Good goddess.' Jordan waved the sound down. ‘Do I look like that? I'm a bloody disgrace.'

‘No,' Cat said. ‘You're not.' She reached over and brought up the source of the segment, a Cable station in the Midlands. ‘See, you're getting picked up—' She hit a search sequence, showing a tree diagram of the groups and channels that had taken up something Jordan had said or written – an impressive structure, visibly growing at the tips.

‘I don't get it,' Jordan said. ‘Nobody's ever heard of me.'

‘That's the point.' Cat sat up on the bench and looked down at him, layers of her dress fluttering in the inadequate draughts from the machinery's fans. ‘Street-cred. You even
look
like a refugee from some godawful repressive mini-state.'

Jordan smiled sourly. ‘That's what I am.'

‘Exactly,' Cat said. ‘You'll see. What you got on the politics?'

Jordan stared at the screen, unseeing again. ‘The Left Alliance is churning it out; still nothing from the
ANR
; space-movement politicos are arguing like, well, you'd expect; Wilde's made some cryptic remarks that suggest he's negotiating with the
ANR
…'

‘That reactionary old bastard?' Catherin snorted. ‘Moh used to rate him.'

‘Yeah, well so do I.'

‘Might've known,' Catherin said. She gave a not unfriendly smile. ‘Speaking of capitalist bastards, how's the speculation coming on?'

‘Fine,' Jordan said. ‘We're sterling billionaires.'

‘Ha, ha.'

‘Don't worry, it's all gold and guns now.'

He reached in and twitched up the
FT
Ten Thousand Share Index.

The market had peaked, and turned, and was dropping—

And then everything went haywire—

Twisting bands of colour, fragments of news, gabble, snow—

‘Hey, what the fuck!' Shouts of annoyance came from the others in the room as they jacked out or pulled off glades and stood rubbing their eyes. Jordan just sat and watched it.

‘What's happening?'

Catherin was looking from the mess on the screens and holos to his face, and back, and seeming more worried by the second.

‘It's OK,' Jordan said. ‘It'll pass. It's something I've seen before.'

Oh, my God, he was thinking. Moh's done it again!

 

Donovan watched Bleibtreu-Fèvre stiffly descend the helicopter's steps and limp across the landing-pad. Unlike everybody else Donovan had ever seen, the Stasis agent did not duck as he walked beneath the still-whirling blades. He ignored the rig's various crew-members moving about their tasks, but – Donovan noticed – they did not ignore him as he came down the ladder from the helipad, using only the handrail, and walked across the sea-slicked deck with a confidence that might have been due to inexperience. As he approached the doorway Donovan saw to his disgust that the Stasis agent looked exactly the same in the flesh, if that was the word, as he had in the virtual.

‘So you blew it,' Donovan said by way of greeting. Bleibtreu-Fèvre smiled thinly and followed him inside and down the stairladder.

‘We've all made mistakes,' he acknowledged, lowering himself into a chair by a workbench. The thumping of rotor blades outside became increasingly weary, then stopped. Donovan palmed a sensor as he sat in one of his command seats. Hissing and clanking noises came from a distant corner of the vast clutter.

‘Indeed,' Donovan said. He was beginning to regret having had anything to do with Bleibtreu-Fèvre. Airlifting him out of the dell had been a risky business, undertaken only because the operative was in trouble with his superiors: Space Defense had made a formal complaint about his incursion into Norlonto, and no doubt both of the rivalrous arms of the
US/UN
's security system were investigating the situation right now.

‘My green allies have taken to the trees, ha, ha,' Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘All I can raise of my usual contact is an answer-fetch. Its answers are far from reassuring. I suspect they are too busy with other plans of their own to spare much real time for this emergency. Unfortunately the security forces are themselves overcommitted and unable to penetrate whatever the barb are about to perpetrate.'

Donovan wondered how true this was and whether the agent could detect evasion from tones and expressions. He decided to be honest.

‘There's some kind of upsurge coming down the line,' he said. ‘We may find a lot of separate campaigns
thinking globally
and
acting locally
in the next few days. All at the same time, which could be disruptive. I've already called my troops out of it, which is all I can do from here. Has that Beulah City woman come up with anything?'

A server whirred across the floor, lurched to a stop by the workbench and slid back its cover to reveal two beakers of coffee, each about two-thirds full, the remainder having slopped out. Donovan gestured and Bleibtreu-Fèvre took his first, wiped the bottom of the beaker with his tie and sipped. He grimaced and put it down on the bench.

‘Excellent,' he said. ‘Ah, this is a delicate point. Mrs Lawson reports that the increase in net traffic is continuing, but she has just found a sudden increase in system problems.' He took another sip of coffee. A small but visible shudder followed the liquid down his gullet. ‘Her exact words when I spoke to her a few minutes ago were, no offence, “Oh, and tell that son-of-a-witch Donovan to lay off like he promised.”'

Donovan's sip turned into a scalding gulp. He slammed the beaker on to the solder-snotted formica and rose to his feet. Supported by one hand on the bench he waved his stick around at the screens all about them.

‘Are you calling me a liar? Can't you see for yourself, man? What do you see on these screens, eh?'

Bleibtreu-Fèvre's glance darted about, flicking back and forth from the screens to the lashing, slicing stick.

‘Nothing,' he said, ‘that I can interpret.'

Donovan's rage subsided and he sank back to his seat.

‘I forgot,' he whispered. He took a few deep breaths. The red mist faded. ‘I've customized the displays so many times, and each time they're clearer to me and I forget…I stayed awake for over forty hours trapping, leashing, tethering hunter-killer viruses, turning my best against my second-best, generation against generation, and I assure you that they're almost all in dead cores.'

‘So what is it that Lawson's finding?' Bleibtreu-Fèvre asked, as if to himself.

They stared at each other.

‘Oh,
shit
!'

Bleibtreu-Fèvre looked about. ‘Do you have some interface I can use?'

‘Better do this between us,' Donovan said.

They hacked and patched the Stasis metrics with some of Donovan's less toxic software. The disruption was back, even worse than it had been the day the Watchmaker entity had first made its presence felt. It was getting worse by the minute.

‘Oh, Jesus,' Donovan groaned. ‘There's no way this won't set off alarms, especially with your lot and Space Defense getting on each other's nerves.' He glared at Bleibtreu-Fèvre, who shifted uncomfortably, then suddenly smiled.

‘There
is
a way to divert their suspicions,' he said. He leaned forward, his eyes glowing in the gloom. (Just a reflection from the screens, Donovan reassured himself.) ‘Claim it, Donovan! Claim it! Say
you
did it!
Boast
about it!'

Donovan shot him a look of respect. ‘That's an excellent idea,' he said. He started keying out standard communiqués even as he spoke, flashing releases to news agencies. ‘And meanwhile I can use it to test the countersystems I've developed!' He rose triumphantly to his feet. ‘They might even work first time…God, if we could kill this thing right now…'

He was too wise in the ways of computer systems to really believe it: nothing ever worked the first time. But he wanted, now, to get Bleibtreu-Fèvre involved. He was going to need all the help he could get, and he'd just been impressed with the man's skills. Already, responses to the
CLA
's claim of responsibility were battering against the rig's systems like heavy seas against the rig itself. Donovan mobilized his crew to deal with that and turned to showing Bleibtreu-Fèvre the results of his past days of work.

‘This is really interesting,' he explained as spidery diagrams spread across screens all over the control room. ‘You may remember that I found Moh Kohn's own software constructs, some tentacle of the Black Plan, and the new entity – all in the same locale, and hard to distinguish at certain points. Well, I've been working on that, and you can see what I've found.' He hot-keyed a sequence and the diagrams simplified to a mere few thousand branching lines. Bleibtreu-Fèvre watched them glassy-eyed. ‘Common features!' Donovan went on. ‘Moh Kohn must have his father's programming style burnt into his mind, although of course it's expressed in creating much smaller programs, his data-raiders and so forth. As for the Watchmaker itself, it appears to be a…descendant of the Black Plan—'

‘You're not saying Josh Kohn created the
Watchmaker
, are you?'

Donovan shook his head with a rueful laugh. ‘On top of Dissembler and the Black Plan? I think that would have been beyond even his capacities…especially twenty years ago. No, I think that, whatever its origin, it has learned to exploit the…openings Josh Kohn evidently built into Dissembler, and the abilities he built into the Plan.'

Bleibtreu-Fèvre's face went from pale to grey, as if the bones were showing.

‘And you have developed specifics for all of them?'

‘Yes,' Donovan said. He couldn't keep the pride out of his voice. ‘We can destroy the Watchmaker, and the Black Plan, and Kohn's little efforts as well – if they matter.'

‘And Dissembler?'

‘Ah.' It gave him pause. ‘I hadn't considered that.'

‘Oh, well, ha, ha,' said Bleibtreu-Fèvre flatly. ‘Might as well be hanged for a cop as a dealer, what?'

Donovan dismissed the matter with the thought that losing Dissembler would be a small price for saving the world, whether from the Watchmaker itself or from the efforts of Space Defense. He punched up a new set of displays, flinching slightly at the sight of the ongoing havoc – traffic systems down, hospitals on emergency backup, markets going frantic – that he'd taken the blame for. Then he flipped to a search program that spun out thousands of agent programs to trace the Watchmaker. Nothing active, not yet: just to see if they could find the thing…