Fractions (46 page)

She has her pistol in both hands in front of her and the table's kicked over and Tamara's beside her. The bar falls silent except for the thudding music and the baying of a stadium audience on the television.

‘Out the back!' Tamara says through clenched teeth. She shifts, guiding Dee to the right, walking backwards, pushing through a door that swings shut in front of them. They're in a corridor, dark except for smudges of yellow light and thick with smells of beer and fish.

Dee enhances her vision and sees Tamara blinking hard as she whirls around. From the way she's moving it's obvious that Tamara can see in the dark at least as well as Dee can.

‘Come on!' Tamara calls, and plunges along the corridor. Dee kicks off her shoes, snatches them up and races after Tamara, down a flight of steps and around a couple of corners into an even darker, smellier corridor, in fact a tunnel. Dee can hear the traffic overhead and taste the water-vapour in the air increasing with every step. She glances back and there's no indication of pursuit. The water in the air tastes rusty as they slide to a halt before a heavy metal door at the end. Tamara fumbles with bolts at the top and bottom of the door until they clang back. She pauses, listening, then pulls the door slowly open, keeping herself behind it until it's almost parallel to the wall. She peers around it all the while, looking out and not behind.

‘Wait,' she whispers. The warning isn't necessary: Soldier has kicked in and Dee is standing flat to the wall of the tunnel two metres from the doorway and only very slowly edging forward. As her cone of vision widens she sees that the door opens on to a narrow stone shelf barely above the surface of the canal, which is about fifty metres wide at this point. The lights from the opposite street, Rue Pascal, are reflected in the canal's choppy black wavelets, stirred up by the frequent wakes of plying boats. From the sound of the slap and sigh of water she knows that the outboard motor, just at the edge of her view, belongs to a small dinghy moored close to the door.

On the metre-wide quay a shadow moves – her own.

She turns to look back down the tunnel. A light, far back in the corridor, has just come on and something is moving between here and the source. Tamara, a moment later, notices it too and she steps from behind the door. She glances at Dee, points outwards, and then makes a two-fingered chopping motion to left and right. Together they jump out of the door, turning in opposite directions as they steady themselves, crouching on the quay.

Dee sees the walled bank of the canal rising three metres to street level, and the quay running alongside the canal to a junction a few hundred metres away. Boats and barges are moored along it, doors and tunnel-mouths punctuate it. There's nobody moving on it at the moment.

Over her shoulder she sees a similar view in the opposite direction, except that the canal extends out to the dark of the desert. She hears at least one set of running footsteps, now about half-way along the tunnel. She gestures frantically to Tamara.

‘Get in the boat!' Tamara says. She hauls the rope and the little inflatable bumps against the quay's lip. It barely rocks as Tamara steps in, sways wildly as Dee follows. She finds herself flat on her back in the wet well of the boat on top of her purse and shoes, her feet getting in the way of Tamara's as the human woman casts off and starts the engine. Dee's glad she's in this undignified position as Tamara opens the throttle and the engine's whine rises to a scream and the front of the boat lifts. The boat surges out across the water and Tamara brings it over in a long curve that has them shooting straight along the middle of the canal to yells and curses from other boats by the time a distant figure appears at the mouth of the tunnel.

It's the man who recognised her. He shouts after them, but whatever he says is lost in the engine's note. Tamara slews the tiller again and they swing around in a wall of spray and head for an opening, passing under Stras Cobol and into a branch canal that runs between high windowless walls less than five metres apart. Tamara eases off the engine and Dee cautiously sits up.

‘Lucky for us the boat was there,' she says.

Tamara snorts. ‘It's my boat! I left it there an hour ago when I started my round of the bars.'

Dee smiles wanly. ‘Where are we going?'

‘Circle Square,' Tamara says. ‘Precinct of the living dead. Crawling with bad artists, freethinking machines, and anarchists arguing about what to do in an anarchy. Safe.'

Dee isn't sure how to take this.

‘Thanks for getting me out.'

Tamara looks past Dee, at the dark water. ‘Yeah well…I gotta admit I'm not sure what I got you out
from.
That guy and the robot didn't look like greps to me. Did you recognise them, or what?'

Dee's already been through this in her head. ‘No,' she says, her voice cold. ‘But he recognised me. I'm certain of that.'

‘Me too,' Tamara says dryly. ‘Just I don't think it was from a pic. He looked like he wanted to kill you, that first moment. Kill somebody, anyway, but shit, coulda been shock or some'ing – hey!' She stares at Dee's face. ‘You ain't
dead
, are you? You and him might've had previous.' She looks quite pleased at this speculation. ‘It's all right, you can tell me. We're cool about the dead as well as machines, OK?'

Dee doesn't know much about the dead. Once, when she was new, she'd thought that she could hear the dead: press her ear to the wall and hear them talking, furiously, in dead languages. But it was just the sough of the machinery, the 'ware, the marrow in the city's cold bones.

So her owner had told her, his laughter almost kind. With a harsher tone in his voice he'd added: ‘The dead are gone. And they aren't coming back. Most of them…ah, forget it.'

And obediently, she had.

She isn't sure whether to be annoyed at Tamara's speculation, but it's just the woman's human limitations after all: in a way she's making the same animistic mistake – thinking that machinery that sounded alive must at the very least be dead – that she herself had made way back when she was just getting her brain into gear.

So she gives Tamara a smug smile and says, ‘You can scan my skull if you like, and you'll see me for yourself.'

‘S'pose your body's a copy? A clone?'

Dee hasn't thought of this before, and the idea shakes her more than she cares to show. She shrugs. ‘It's possible.'

‘There you go,' Tamara says. ‘That'd make whatever it was with that guy just a case of mistaken identity. No worries.'

She guns the engine again. Swept from the walls' dank ledges, seal-rats squeak indignantly in their wake.

 

‘It
isn't her
,' said the robot, its voice more like a radio at low volume than a human speaking quietly. ‘So forget it. Chasing after her won't get you anywhere. She's just a fucking machine.'

Wilde had trudged back up the tunnel, apologised to the barkeeper, paid for the breakages and ordered a stiff drink as well as a large beer to accompany his grilled fish. The robot, propping itself up with a chair opposite him, had attracted no comment.

Wilde wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and glared at the machine.

‘She didn't look like a machine. She looked like a real woman. She looked like –'

He stopped, in some distress.

‘Cloned,' the machine said implacably.

‘But why? Why her? Who would –?'

He stared at the impervious pod. ‘No!'

‘Yes,' said the machine. ‘He's here.'

I remember him leaning his elbow on the bar in the Queen Margaret Union, waiting for our pints, and saying: ‘We'll be there, Wilde! We'll see it!
One
fucking computer, that's all it'll take, one machine that's smarter than us and away they'll go.'

Reid's eyes were shining, his voice happy. He was like that when an idea took hold of him, and he prophesied. It sounds prophetic enough now, but it wasn't an original idea even then, in December 1975. (That's
AD
, by the way.) He'd got it from a book.

‘How d'you mean, “away”?' I asked.

‘If we,' he said, slowing down, ‘can make a machine that's smarter than us, it can make another machine that's smarter than the first. And so on, faster and faster. Runaway evolution, man.'

‘And where does that leave us?'

Reid pushed a heavy mug of cider towards me.

‘Behind,' he said happily. ‘Like apes in a city of people. Come on, let's find a seat.'

Glasgow University's original Students' Union dated back to before women were accepted as students. It still hadn't quite caught up. The female students had their own union building, the QM, which did allow students of both sexes. It was therefore the one in which the more radical and progressive male students hung out, and the better by far for picking up girls.

Which was what we had in mind: a few pints with our mates in the bar for the first part of the evening, and then down to the disco about ten o'clock and see if anybody fancied a dance. The reason for getting in as much drinking as you could beforehand was that diving into the queue in front of the disco bar was best reserved for when you had to buy a round for your companions or – better – a drink for a girl who'd just danced with you.

The bar – the union bar rather than the disco bar – was fairly quiet at this time in the evening. So we got a good seat in the place, the one that ran most of the way around the back wall, from which we could see everybody who came in and – just by getting up slightly and turning around – could check out the state of play on the dance-floor below.

I rolled a skinny Golden Virginia cigarette and raised my pint of Strong-bow.

‘Cheers,' Reid said.

‘Slainte,' I said.

We grinned at our respective manglings of each other's national toast – to my ear, Reid had said something like ‘Cheeurrsh', and to his I'd said ‘Slendge.' Reid was from the Isle of Skye, where his great-grandfather had come to work as a shepherd after the Clearances. I was from North London, and we were both somewhat out of place in Central Scotland. We hadn't known each other very long, having met a month earlier at a seminar on War Communism. The seminar was sponsored by
Critique
, a left-wing offshoot of the Institute for Soviet Studies, where I was doing a one-year $.Sc. course in the Economics of Socialism.

I didn't agree with their ideas, but I'd found the
Critique
clique (as I privately called them) congenial, and stimulating. They were the Institute's Young Turks, Left Opposition, Shadow Cabinet and Government-In-Exile. They regarded both mainstream and Marxist critical theories of the Soviet Union as all of a piece with the most starry-eyed, fellow-travelling naivety in their assumption that it was at least a new system, when it was hardly even a society.

The seminar was a lunchtime session. As always, it was crowded, not so much because of its popularity but because of a shrewd tactic of always booking a room just a little smaller than the expected attendance. In that ill-assorted congregation of exiles – from America, from Chile, from South Africa and from the Other Side itself – Reid, hunched in a new denim jacket, constantly relighting, puffing and forgetting his roll-up, his lank black hair falling around his young and good-looking but somehow weathered face, seemed entirely at home, and the question he'd asked the speaker afterwards showed at least that he knew what he was asking about. But none of us had seen him before, and in the pub later (these seminars had several features in common with socialist meetings, especially the pub afterwards) he'd admitted to being a Trotskyist, which was not surprising, and a computer science student, which was.

The woman sitting next to me was American and also a Trotskyist. Reid was getting up to buy a round and asked her, ‘What will you be having?'

‘Tomato juice,' she said. He nodded, frowning.

‘How come you've not met him, Myra?' I asked as he slouched off to the bar. ‘Aren't you in the IMG too?' I'd picked this up while chatting to her occasionally over coffee in the Institute – almost chatting her up, to be honest, because I was rather taken with her. She was tall and incredibly slim, with a blonde bob and a perky, peaky face, the concavities of her orbits and cheeks looking like they'd been delicately, lovingly smoothed into shape with broad thumbs, her grey eyes bright behind huge round glasses.

‘I don't go much to meetings,' she admitted with a shake of her head. ‘Like I got pissed with comrades urging me to do more in the fight against the fucking Leninist-Trotskyist Faction? I mean, what do these guys think I came to England to get away
from
?'

‘You mean Scotland, England?' I drawled derisively, unable to comment on her – to me – utterly incomprehensible remark.

Myra laughed. ‘Go give the guy a hand. He seems to be having a problem.'

Reid turned to me with relief. ‘I've got everybody's except Myra's. What the hell are “tamadages”?'

‘And one tomato juice!' I said to the bar-tender.

‘Oh, thanks,' Reid said. He looked up at me. (He'd unconsciously pulled himself up to his full height, something folk often did around me, but he was still looking up.) ‘What you were saying back there about the market, that was interesting. The millions of equations stuff.'

‘Yeah,' I said, gathering up some of the drinks. ‘The millions of equations. And that's not the half of it.' I knew what was coming next, having been around the block several times already on this one.

‘Why can't we just use computers?'

‘Because,' I said over my shoulder as I threaded my way back to the table, ‘without a market, you won't
have
the fucking computers!'

Myra was laughing as I put down the drinks. ‘Don't worry about Jon's bourgeois economics,' she said to Dave Reid as we sat down. ‘Even the Soviet Union has computers.' She waited for some sign of reassurance in his honestly puzzled face, and added: ‘The biggest in the world!'

Reid smiled but went on doggedly: ‘Look at IBM. Do
they
bother about market forces? Do they fuck! Friend of mine worked at their factory in Inverkip one summer. He said they supply spare parts anywhere in the world within forty-eight hours, even if it means taking an axe to a mainframe that's already built – and pulling the parts out!'

‘Yeah, that sounds just like the Soviet Union,' I said, to general laughter. ‘And you sound just like my old man.'

‘Is he a socialist?' Reid asked. He sounded incredulous.

‘Lifelong SPGB member,' I said.

‘SPGB? Oh, brilliant!' Reid said.

‘What's the SPGB?' Myra asked. Reid and I both began to say something, then Reid smiled, shrugged and deferred.

I took a long swallow, but it wasn't the beer that I smelt but some strange remembered whiff of mown grass, dog-shit, and vanilla: Speaker's Corner. ‘The Socialist Party of Great Britain,' I explained, falling almost automatically into the soapbox cadence of the autodidact agitator, ‘set out in 1904, with less than a hundred members, to win a majority of the workers of the world. They already have 800, so they're well on their way. At that rate, the best projections put them on course for a clear majority by the twenty-fifth century.'

‘You gotta be kidding,' Myra said.

‘He is,' Reid said sternly. ‘It's, well, not a bad caricature, I'll give you that. But I've read some of their stuff, and I've never seen that calculation.'

‘OK,' I admitted. ‘I made that part up. Well actually, my dad made it up. He's a true believer, but he does have a sense of humour and he once wrote a wee program based on population growth and the Party's growth, and ran it on a computer at work.'

‘He's a programmer as well, is he?'

‘Oh yes. For the London Electricity Board. When he started, debugging meant cleaning the moths off the valves, and I am
not
making that up!'

Reid and Myra and several of the others around the table laughed. I'd never really held forth like this before, and I had the feeling that I'd made some kind of good impression on the clique.

‘The point being,' I added, while everyone was still listening, ‘that I've heard all these arguments about how computers will make economic planning a doddle, and I don't buy 'em.'

‘You're missing several points here,' Myra interjected, and went on to make them, her moral passion a mirror-image of mine. So I shifted my ground to another passion.

‘I don't want a planned society anyway,' I said. ‘It doesn't fit in with
my
plans.'

That got a cheap laugh.

‘So what are you?' Reid asked. ‘A right-winger?'

I sighed. ‘I'm an individualist anarchist, actually.'

‘“Ey'm en individualist enerchist, eckchelly”,' Myra mimicked. ‘More like an anachronism. It's a tragedy,' she added with a flourish to the gallery. ‘The kid learns some kinda Marxism at his daddy's knee, and he ends up a goddam Proudhonist!'

‘Yup,' I said. ‘Though it's your compatriot Tucker that I think got it all together.'

‘So who's Tucker?' somebody asked.

‘Well…' I began.

 

We hadn't got any work done that afternoon, but – looking back at it in an economic, calculating kind of way – it was worth it. Most of us ended up drinking cans and coffees back in a basement room of the Institute. Reid and I sat at opposite sides of Myra at the corner of the big table. Sometimes she talked to both of us, sometimes to other people, and again to one of us or the other. When she talked to Reid it was like overhearing the gossip of an extended family quarrel, and I tuned out or turned to other conversations. But she always brought me back into it, with some remark about Vietnam or Portugal or Angola: the real wars and revolutions over which the factions waged their intercontinental fight.

After some time I became aware that there were only the three of us left in the room. I remember Myra's face, her elbows on the table, her thin hands moving as she talked about New York. I was thinking that it sounded just the place I wanted to go, when Reid's chair scraped on the floorboards and he stood up.

‘I'll have to be off,' he said. He smiled at Myra for a moment then looked at me and said: ‘See you around then, Jon.'

‘Yeah, looks like we hang out in the same places,' I said with a grin. ‘If I don't bump into you in the next day or two I'll probably see you in the QM on Friday.'

‘Don't you disappear on us, Dave,' Myra said. ‘Make sure you come to the next seminar, yeah? We need guys like you around
Critique.
You know, like not just academic?'

Reid flushed slightly and then laughed and said, ‘Aye, that's what I was thinking myself!' He slung a duffel bag over his shoulder and with a wiping motion of his spread hand waved goodbye.

We heard his desert-boots padding up the stair, the outer door's Yale click shut. It came to me for the first time that he and I had spent the afternoon competing for Myra's regard – or she had spent it testing us. (That was how it started: with Myra. And not, as I thought long afterwards, with Annette. For if Myra had gone with Reid from the first, and I with Annette…)

Myra settled her chin in her hands, jiggled her specs and looked at me through them.

‘Well,' she said. ‘An interesting guy, huh?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Very serious.'

‘I'm not in the mood for serious, right now.'

She looked at me steadily for a moment and smiled and said: ‘Do you want to burn some grass?'

I thought this was some obscure Americanism for sex, and only realised my mistake when she started building an elaborate joint back at her bedsit; but as it turned out I was not that mistaken, after all.

 

Myra and I didn't have an affair, more a succession of one-night stands. Ten days that shook the world. Neither of us pretended, but I like to think both of us hoped, that more might come of it. But publicly, to each other, we were being very sophisticated, very cool, very liberated about it.

Then she fell for a Chilean resistance hero with a black moustache, and I was astonished at how angry and jealous and possessive I felt. There was a moment, around three in the morning after the evening that Myra told me how, you know, it was very nice, and she really liked me, but she had quite unexpectedly found her feelings for this Latin Leninist just so powerful, so unlike anything she'd ever experienced before, that, well for a start she was seeing him in, like, five minutes…there was a moment of drinking black coffee from a grubby mug and looking with unbelieving loathing at the ashtray spilling tarry twists of paper while my fingers rolled yet another just to feel the burn on my tongue, when all my circadian rythms troughed at once in an ebb of the blood, a bleeding of the body's heat, when I felt I never wanted to go again to a bed that didn't enfold the promise of Myra's pelvic bones rocking on mine.

And all the time another part of my mind was working away, analysing how absurd it was that this jealousy should be a surprise, and yet another level of my awareness was congratulating myself on being sufficiently stoical and self-understanding to understand that, and to know that this as a straightforward primate emotion which could be borne, and would pass.

I picked up a Pentel and scrawled on a pad:
Pleistocene people with looking-glass eyes
, so I wouldn't forget this cloth-eared insight in the morning, and crashed out. Still aching, but suddenly confident I had the measure of jealousy and unexpected, unrequited love.