Fractions (52 page)

‘Well, that was something,' I said. ‘I enjoyed that.'

‘Me too,' Annette said. ‘Cheers.' She sank half a pint of lager. ‘Mind you,' she went on, ‘throwing the littlest flower-girl in the air, swinging the bride onto your hips, and carrying her granny halfway across the room weren't all absolutely essential.'

‘Oh.' I thought back. ‘Did I do that?'

She grinned. ‘You sure did. Made me proud. Nobody's going to gripe now about me bringing along a strange Sassenach.'

‘I didn't know I was a subject of debate.'

‘Well, now it'll just be speculation.' She winked.

‘About us?'

‘Aha,' Annette said. ‘So there's an “us”?'

Face suddenly serious, haloed in red and black.

‘If you choose,' I said.

Her green eyes regarded me levelly.

‘And what do you choose?'

Around us people were shouting, reaching for drinks, brushing against us. The music was rocking again. I see and hear it only now. At the time there was nothing but her.

‘There's no choosing,' I said. I took a step forward and put my arms around her waist. Our foreheads touched. ‘It was all decided the second I saw you.'

‘Me too,' she said, and we kissed. It felt strange doing it at the same height. By the time we'd finished she'd slid off the stool. She looked up at me, smiling, and said: ‘But I saw you first.'

‘So what,' I asked in a bitter-tanged amazement, ‘have the past three months been all about?'

‘I'm like you,' she said. ‘I want to be free.'

‘You can be free with me!' I said. ‘Any time. Please.'

We were falling together laughing.

‘Yes,' she said.

And then it had all been said, and we were just standing together at the bar, having a drink.

Irene, the bride, clicked up to us in high heels and a smart blue two-piece, gave me a wary smile and whispered to Annette.

‘See you in a few minutes,' Annette said. I bowed to them both – and to this necessity – and watched their whispering progress out of sight.

 

Annette returned about a quarter of an hour later.

‘Everything okay?' I asked, sliding her a G&T. She looked a bit preoccupied.

‘Basically yes. Thanks,' she said, sipping carefully. ‘I just spent ten minutes hanging about in reception with Irene's wedding-dress in a plastic bag over my shoulder.
Finally
got someone to stash it till I leave. Couldn't leave it in the room. Some mix-up with keys.'

‘So it's not all fun, being a bridesmaid.'

‘Ha, ha. Little do you know.'

‘I think I'd rather not –'

I realised the music had stopped and somebody was trying to make himself heard above a hubbub.

‘Hey, come on!'

Annette swirled about and dashed away to the nearest exit, where Irene and her man were backing out of the doorway with a kind of female scrum going on around them –

Something sailed over the heads of the scrum. As I looked up, startled, Annette shot her hand in the air like an eager pupil with an answer, and caught it. She brandished the bouquet as she turned slowly around, acknowledging cheers and catcalls, and faced me with a broad smile.

‘Well,' she said. ‘Lucky me.'

Everybody trooped outside to send the new couple on their way. They'd cunningly called a taxi, and left behind a car covered with shaving foam and lipstick for the rain to wash.

Then more dancing, and more talking, and a long taxi ride to Annette's flat, with Irene's dress draped across our knees. As I paid the driver she ran to the steps of her house, laughing, her hems bunched in one hand and the other dress flying out behind her like a comet. I caught up with her as she unlocked the outer door. We went down the stairs and into her darkened flat, noisily trying to be quiet.

She took me straight to her bedroom, hooked the wedding-dress on its hanger over a wardrobe door facing the foot of her bed, and turned to me. I caught the tapes of the bow at her waist, yanked them and she twirled around, catching the pinafore as it came off and sending it sailing into a corner. I fumbled with buttons down the back of the dress, found a concealed zip and opened it. The dress fell around her feet. She stepped out of its circle in a long nylon slip, and deftly undid every button of my shirt while I got rid of my footwear, trousers and Y-fronts as fast as possible. The slip slid down to her feet with a rattle of static electricity. The rest of her underwear took enjoyably longer to remove.

I cupped her breasts in my hands and buried my mouth between them. Her skin tasted of talc and salt. Holding her away to look at her and holding her close to touch her led to a closer, quicker rhythm as we tumbled onto her bed.

‘Hey, hey, hey,' she said. She put her hand on my shoulder and held me away, reached behind her head and waved a small foil package in front of my face. Then she tore the package open with her teeth.

‘Get that on, you irresponsible bastard.'

‘Wouldn't want to be responsible for bastards,' I agreed. I rolled the condom onto my cock. ‘I do have some with me, I just forgot.'

‘If you ever say anything as feeble to me again you're outa here, Jon Wilde.'

I tried for a moment to think of some reply, and then put my tongue to a better use.

 

I woke in a room dim in the curtained light of mid-morning, my limbs still tangled with Annette's, and was momentarily startled by the apparition of the white gown looming over the end of the bed, its falls of lawn and drifts of lace protected by a shimmering forcefield of polythene, like a ghost from the future.

We take, first, a long view (longer than it looks) and catch the planet as it swings by from a hundred thousand kilometres out. It's red – no surprises there – but it's mottled with dark spills of blue and stains of green, and those spills and stains are beginning to be connected up by…channels, by…(and the thought is as fleeting as the glimpse)
canali
, so that New Mars really does look like the original Mars, really, didn't. (But didn't we wish.)

Flip the viewpoint to a thousand kilometres…
up
, now, not
out
…and we're crawling past it at a satellite's eye-level, taking in the whorled fingerprints of water-vapour, the planet's curving faceplate of atmosphere steamed-up with breath, the scrawled marks of life and the ruled lines of intelligence: yes, canals.

Dropping now, to a structure as unmistakably artificial as it's apparently organic: at first sight a black asterisk, like a capital city on a map, then (as the viewpoint hurtles in and the view reddens, bloodshot by the flames of air-braking) like a starfish stranded on the sand.

Cut, again, to a more leisurely airborne vantage, drifting above what is now clearly a city, its radial symmetry still its major feature but with its five arms visibly joined by the black threads of roads, streets, canals; and, at another level, invisible from the outside, by the cobweb cabling of
the nets.

And we're in. That old TCP/IP transaction protocol is still valid (from way back to the Mitochondrial Eve of all the systems) so we can hear, feel and see. But the big! numbers still count, so encryption hides much of the data in catacombs of dark. What we can access, on the open channels, is more than enough to show:

 

Four of the city's five arms are non-human domains. They look as if they were intended for human habitation, but nobody's home, except machines. There's a basic stratum, a sort of mechanical topsoil, where things are doing things to things. Simulacra of intelligence are going through the motions, bawling and toiling: empty automatic barges plough algae-clogged canals, servitor machines struggle to sweep dust from the floors of corridors whose walls are already thick with mould. In the streets it's a creationist's caricature of natural selection: half-formed mechanisms collide and combine and incorporate each other's parts, producing unviable offspring which themselves propagate further grotesque transitional forms.

This mindless level is preyed upon by more sophisticated machinery, which lurks and pounces, gobbles and cannibalises for purposes of its own. Artificial intelligences – some obsessive and focused, others chaotic and relaxed, some even sane – haunt a fraction of these machines. It's hard to identify the places where such minds reside. Lurching, unlikely structures may be steered by a sapient computer no bigger than a mouse, while some sleek and shining and, even, humanoid machine may well be moronic or mad.

The whole groaning junkyard is persistently pillaged by human beings, who risk everything from their fingertips to their souls in venturing into this jungle of iron and silicon. They have their mechanical allies, scouts and agents; but if machines, in general, have no loyalty to each other, they have even less to human friends or masters. It remains easier to reprogram a machine than to subvert a human.

And through it all, like germs, the minute molecular machinery of stray nanotechnology goes about its invisible and occasionally disastrous work. Immune systems have evolved, the equivalent of medicine is practised; public health measures are applied (they are not, exactly, enforced). But the smallest are the swiftest, and here evolution's race is most ruthlessly run.

 

The fifth arm is the human quarter. The nets are its mind. In them we find its good intentions, its evil thoughts, its wet dreams and its dull routines. This is not how it should be finally judged. But still –

Underlying everything is the reproduction of daily life, and it provides a huge proportion of the net traffic. Nobody's counting, but there are several hundred thousand human beings alive on New Mars, most of them in Ship City, the rest scattered in much smaller communities, fanning out across the planet. Every minute buzzes with thousands of conversations and personal communications. Business: orders, invoices, payments, transactions. Property rights – what people agree to let people do with things – have grown complex and differentiated, and the unbundling and repackaging and exchanging of these rights proceeds with card-sharp speed: time shares, organ mortgages, innovation futures, labour loans, birth benefits…it gets complicated. Hence conflicts, charges, settlements, crimes and torts.

Law and order lifts its eyes and teeth above the stream of business only occasionally, and the resulting cop-shows and courtroom dramas and camp comedies provide – in reality and in fiction – a staple of entertainment. Most of the torments and humiliations we see on the screens are – fortunately – just pornography. The trials by ordeal and combat are real.

Religion – some. The highest clerical dignitary is the bishop of New Mars. Reformed Orthodox Catholic, so while she has the odd qualm about exactly how the Succession passed to her, she knows she'll pass it on to one or more of her kids. She's friendly with the few Buddhists and the rabbi (like, you weren't
expecting
Jews?) and stern but charitable towards the lunatic heretics; their delusion that New Mars is the afterlife or some post-apocalyptic staging area is, in the circumstances, forgiveable.

Politics – none. It's an anarchy, remember? But it's an anarchy by
default.
There's no state because nobody can be bothered to set one up. Too much hassle, man. Keep your nose clean, don't stick your neck out, it's always been this way and nothing will ever change, and anyway (and especially)
what will the neighbours think
? (They'll never stand for it, is what. It's against human nature.)

The outside of the city's nervous system consists of its senses: cameras and microphones for news and surveillance, detectors of chemicals and stresses which monitor its health. Start at the top: on the highest and most central tower is a globe the size of a human head. It's just an all-round viewing-camera, an amenity stuck there in a flourish of public spirit or private speculation. From there we can peer down the dizzying sweep of tower-tops that eventually planes out to low, flat roofs, and ends in domes, shacks and sheds at the city limits.

Like each of the city's five radial arms, this one is an elongated kite-shape, first widening, then tapering. The buildings themselves are of two types: those that were grown, and those that were built. The shapes of the former can be analysed into intersecting polygons, regular or irregular: those of the latter, into rectangles. The layout and location of the latticed, cellular structures has the same quality of accidental inevitability as the boulders in a rock-fall or the pebbles in scree, and for the same reason: minimal occupation of available space. The constructed buildings obey a different principle of economy, and stick up or dig down as its unpredictable laws dictate.

Both types of buildings – both laws of location – follow the streets, and the streets follow the canals. The canals are a circulatory system: the Ring Canal encircles the central area, the Radial Canals bisect the arms, and each has innumerable tributaries and capillaries. Near the leftward edge of the arm we're looking down is an anomalous, long canal that first comes into view just below us and extends beyond the horizon: the Stone Canal.

 

The man leans into the recess of the window, supporting some of his weight on his spread fingertips. The cement is rough under his fingertips. He stares out of the window, which is high on the city's slope, looking along the Stone Canal. As he balances his weight on the balls of his feet and the tips of his fingers, the tensed muscles in his arms and shoulders show through the soft cloth of his jacket. The muscles flex and he straightens, turning around. His black hair flicks past his chin with the speed of his movement.

The other two men in the room are taller and bulkier than he is, but they both recoil slightly as he strides towards them. He stops a couple of metres away and glares at them.

‘You lost her,' he says. ‘To the abolitionists.' His speech has an accent not much heard in this city, something from the past, roughened and refined over a long time. It provides a rasping undertone to the modulation of his voice, which is likewise – consciously or not – a practised and accomplished instrument of his will. Accent and tone together are precisely gauged to convey his emotion: in this case, contempt.

‘She had an IBM franchise,' one of the men says. He licks his lips, withdraws his tongue abruptly into his mouth as if he's aware it's gone out too far. He wipes his chin.

‘That,' says the man, ‘is not an excuse. It's a description of failure.' He sighs, dusts his fingertips together. ‘All right. From the top.'

He stalks away to a big wooden desk, and half-sits on the edge of it.

‘OK, Reid,' says the other man, and launches into an account. He's spoken for a minute when Reid raises a hand.

‘A young man?' he says. ‘And a robot? Describe them.'

He listens, narrow-eyed, for another minute before interrupting with a downward gesture of the hand.

‘You thought he recognised her, Stigler?'

Stigler's lips are dry again.

‘He…thought he did.'

‘Oh,
Christ
!' The word comes out like a rod cracked down on the desk. Reid drums his fingers for a moment.

‘And you, Collins, I don't suppose your descriptive powers are in any better shape, no?'

‘I was giving cover, Reid,' Collins says. ‘Looking everywhere else, know what I mean?'

‘OK, OK.' Reid stands up and looks them over, speculatively. He might be considering profitable uses for their body-parts, and suitable methods of rendering. ‘You did the job we agreed, as well as you could. If I'd wanted to pull in a man on sus, I'd have needed a warrant. And that's what I'm going to need, gentlemen, so I'm afraid that rules you out. Full payment, no bonus.'

Collins and Stigler look relieved and turn to go. At the door Collins scratches his neck, looks at Reid. Reid looks up from the screen he's turned his attention to.

‘Yes?'

‘Uh, Reid, question. You don't happen to know who
owns
that robot?'

Reid thinks about this. His smile lets the two men know they're his good friends, and not a couple of greps who haven't come back with the data.

‘Stay on the case,' he tells them.

 

Wilde stood up and walked to the end of the quay, past the people and the intelligent apes and the machines that might have been intelligent. He stared across the Stone Canal, and then looked down into the water for a while. He found, perhaps, some answer in his reflection.

The robot, Jay-Dub, was still crouched at the edge of the quay, poised like a predatory water-bird. Patterns of liquid crystal shifted in its shadowed central band as Wilde returned. Wilde looked down at it.

‘We're not in Kazakhstan any more,' he said.

The machine made no reply.

‘What
happened
?' Wilde asked. He looked around. ‘Is it safe to talk?'

‘Safe enough,' said Jay-Dub. ‘I can pick up most attempts to overhear.'

‘All right,' said Wilde. ‘Tell me this: where did I hide my pistol?'

‘In the shower.'

‘What was the last thing I said?'

‘“Love never dies.”'

Wilde frowned.

‘What was the last thing I
decided
?'

‘That I'd – that you'd never smoke again.'

Wilde leaned down and tapped the machine's hull.

‘That's right. That's a promise I remember making, and you can go right on keeping.'

He took the coffee-glass to the breakfast-food stall and returned with the glass refilled and a packet of cigarettes and a lighter.

‘I don't approve of this,' Jay-Dub said as Wilde sat down beside it and lit up.

‘Fuck you,' Wilde said. ‘I want your story, not your opinions.'

He leaned back against the shell of the machine, which shifted its weight on its legs to compensate.

‘It's a long story. You have no idea how long.'

‘So make it short.' Wilde's eyes were closed.

‘“Yes, master,” said the robot,' said the robot. ‘OK, whatever you say. Basically, I died just after being shot. My brain was immediately scanned with a prototype neural imaging system and the pattern recorded.'

‘Come on,' Wilde said. ‘We don't – didn't have anything like that.'

‘Reid's people did. They were more advanced than anyone suspected. And I was the first. The first human, anyway. I believe most of the enhanced apes around here originate with the early experiments of that period. However, it was many years later – though not, of course, subjectively – that I opened my eyes and found myself in an impossible spacecraft. Comfortable, one-gee, but no rotation or acceleration was apparent when I looked outside. Virtual reality, of course. What was outside the windows was what was outside in the real world.'

It paused. A minute passed. The man reached his hand back and knocked the machine's side with his knuckles. Then he sucked his knuckles.

‘And what was outside was –?'

‘Ganymede, I think,' the robot said. ‘What was left of it. The machine that I inhabited was not much bigger than the one you see now. It, and thousands like it, were engaged in constructing a platform. All around the rings of Jupiter, other machines were engaged in related tasks.'

Again its voice trailed off.

‘The rings of
Jupiter
?' Wilde said. ‘Somebody had been busy.'

‘Guess who.'

‘Reid?'

‘And company.'

‘They'd done that? By when?'