Fractions (27 page)

The horses were picking their way down a slope along a barely visible path between birch trees. Water dripped on him and added irritation to discomfort. As soon as he was more or less settled on the horse, the leader of the gang, Dilly Foyle, continued her enthusiastic explanation of her political ideas. She was
NF
: National Feminist. Patriarchy, she'd already told him at some length (five kilometres, so far), was a Jewish invention, as was obvious from the Bible. Its function was to assist the effete city-dwellers in their struggle against the free barbarians, by turning the free barbarian men against the free barbarian women. She'd already given her estimate of the optimum human population of the planet: about fifty million.

‘…of course the whole defence of living in cities that's wrecking the world right now comes not entirely but primarily from people who've adapted, you could even say degenerated…'

I bet you could, he thought.

‘…into dependency, and there's only one ethnic group that has literally been urban without interruption for thousands of years. Now I'm not saying this to be anti-Semitic, far from it, but I think it's no coincidence that socialism and capitalism are the two main industrialist ideologies, and when you find that Tony Cliff's real name was Ygael Gluckstein and Ayn Rand's was Alice Rosenbaum…'

He fell off again. After a couple more falls and a statistical analysis of the ethnic composition of media ownership which was only about one hundred per cent wrong, Bleibtreu-Fèvre murmured that he'd certainly look into the matter as soon as possible. Foyle thanked him for his interest, and fell into a thoughtful silence which worried him more than her talk.

Better to burn one city than to curse the darkness…now where had he heard that? Bleibtreu-Fèvre cursed the darkness, and he cursed the coherent light that had burned the car. Goddamn Space Defense. He was sure, still, that they weren't on to the case: it was just their way of handling jurisdictional disputes, like they handled arms-control violations. They didn't like Stasis, and they especially didn't like Stasis shooting people. It would all have worked out fine if the goddamn greens hadn't been so incompetent. Of course, he had known that the target killed greens as a profession, but his contacts had sworn by these. No low-risk lab-sabs them, but real guerillas, who'd fought off the native army itself on occasion. So much for the native army. Probably bought it off, more like.

It became obvious the path was going diagonally down the side of a hill. The trees thinned out and were replaced by gorse bushes, then the long wet grass of a meadow. Cows ignored their passing. He heard water, and a dog barking. They passed some of the traditional buildings of low-tech organic farming: Fuller domes, Nissen huts, a wind-power generator. Battered old cars with cylinders on their roofs that stank of methane. The horses were walking on moss-outlined stones now. They stopped, and those who could dismounted.

Within a minute people from the green community were all around, starting to help with their three injured comrades. Bleibtreu-Fèvre, with minutely directed help from a green who claimed to be a traditional healer and had bones through his ears to prove it, lifted Aghostino-Clarke off the horse and laid him on a stretcher. The black man moaned and opened his eyes.

‘You're going to be all right,' Bleibtreu-Fèvre said.

‘What…happened?'

‘The target's moll shot you. And then the target shot you. He could have killed you, but he didn't.'

‘Should…have,' Aghostino-Clarke muttered, and closed his eyes again. Bleibtreu-Fèvre palped his arm gently until he found the drug panel, flush with the skin, and pushed the morphine key for another dose. His colleague had enough bionics and prosthetics and by-passes built into him to survive, just as long as none of
them
were hit.

They moved the wounded man into a house apart from the others, who were helped or carried to their own dwellings. Bleibtreu-Fèvre keyed himself a shot of anti-som and sat by a window until dawn. In the early light he saw what he was waiting for: a tiny automatic helicopter, a remote, drifting in across the wet pastures.

He went outside to speak to it. He'd barely completed giving it a message to arrange a pick-up later in the morning when he sensed the presence of Dilly Foyle at his side, glaring suspiciously at the hovering, insectile shape over the sights of her crossbow.

‘It's all right,' he told her. ‘We're as anxious to keep this secret as you are.' The little machine buzzed up towards the low cloud. Foyle still tracked it. ‘Remember what Jesus said.'

The machine disappeared from sight.

‘What?'

‘Don't worry about the 'mote,' Bleibtreu-Fèvre said grimly. ‘Worry about the beam.'

Peace surrounded him. Silence rang in his ears.

Kohn leaned on the veranda railing and took some deep breaths of clean air, the scents of pine and creosote mingling. The reflection of the nearest range of hills across the sea-loch made slowly moving sine waves on the water. Behind that range other hills receded, rank on rank, each paler and less substantial until the last was invisible on the shining grey of the sky. Long banks of cloud lurked in the glens between the hills, like airships awaiting a heliographed signal to rise. The forested slope on which the low wooden house stood dropped sharply away before him, down to the raised beach with another scatter of houses – stone and concrete this time – and then there was another slope down about ten metres to the shore.

His coughing fit echoed like gunfire.

The ride in the humvee and the helicopter hop that had brought them here had been accompanied by absolutely no explanations. MacLennan and Van had assured them that all would be made plain. In the helicopter Van had lapsed into a tense, jumpy,
rauchen verboten
silence, while MacLennan had talked about the international situation. The Japanese were taking heavy losses in Siberia. A coalition of communistans from both sides of the Ussuri had fielded a force that grandly called itself the Sino-Soviet Union. Ragtag remnants of Red armies…MacLennan had been enthusiastic about it. He particularly admired the way
na Sìnesov
(as they were called around here) had struck hardest while the Japanese were preoccupied over an arms-control dispute with the Yanks.

‘Kyoto suburbs,' Janis had mumbled. ‘Lasers, precision munition attrition.' She fell asleep unnoticed against Kohn's shoulder while MacLennan praised her erudition. Kohn could barely remember going to sleep himself, but he did remember his dreams, full of colour and pain. Dreams might turn out to be a problem. He could recall every last one from every sleep since he'd interfaced with the mind in the machine. All meaningless, all random reconfigurations of the events of the day or things that had been in his thoughts: he could match them up like a data dictionary. He wondered if the
AI
had had an analogous problem since it had looked into
his
reflection. Do
AIS
dream in electric sleep?

He hoped it had nanosecond nightmares.

 

‘Hi,' said a thick voice behind him. He stepped back through the sliding glass doors into the bedroom. Janis was sitting up, the duvet hauled around her. She gave him a brief, gummy kiss, then asked for coffee and disappeared again under the quilt. Kohn went into the kitchen and poured two mugs from the just-filled jug on the coffee-maker. Probably the sound and smell had woken her.

‘God,' Janis said some minutes later. ‘That's better. Where are we?'

‘Wester Ross, I think,' Kohn said. ‘There are a dozen other houses just like this one around here. Probably oil-company office-workers' housing, once.'

‘What time is it?'

‘Eight-thirty-two.'

‘Oh.' Janis looked at him, eyes quirking. ‘Shouldn't you put some clothes on?'

‘Not just yet.'

 

Her disorderly red hair around her on the pillow, her white skin transformed by a mounting flush, her green eyes that did not close even when her mouth opened in that high-g smile that said, we have ignition, we have lift-off…He loved her for all of that.

It was Janis who woke with a start, half an hour after, waking him at the same moment.

‘What—?'

She sat up and looked down at him with a flicker of triumph, a shadow of alarm. ‘I remember now. Dr Nguyen Thanh Van. I knew it sounded familiar!'

Kohn raised himself on one elbow, bringing his skin into range of the warmth of hers. ‘Explain.'

She lay back beside him and stared up at the ceiling, as if reading off it. ‘Nguyen Thanh Van. PhD, University of Hanoi, 2022:
Continuing Genetic Effects of Dioxin in the Ben Tre District.
Lecturer, Polytechnic Institute of Hue, 2023 to 2027. Currently Projects Coordinator for Da Nang Phytochemicals. Probably one of the sponsors of my research – dammit, I got enough of his offprints! So what's he doing here with the
ANR
?'

‘Do you think it was the
ANR
who broke into your lab?'

‘No, I…What made you think of that? Sounds more likely the more I think about it. Hell,
yes.
Not the creeps – they'd have wrecked the place. Not academic espionage – they'd have hacked into the data. Not the state – they'd have just marched in and taken it. Somebody who wanted the physical stuff because they couldn't reproduce it easily, but who knew what to do with it. But why would they do it? They're not anti-tech.'

‘The crank raid on the
AI
block at the same time, could that just have been a coincidence?' Kohn moved his fingertip around on her impressively flat belly, as if doodling. ‘Or a joint action? Nah, that'd be too cynical – the
ANR
really hates the cranks. Now why do they hate them – ah-
ha
! Got it!'

‘Ouch.'

‘Sorry. It's like this, see. The
ANR
is heavily into the Cable – it's the Republic's baby after all – not to mention the Black Plan. After the state and security systems, their worst enemy has got to be Donovan's campaign of nasty infections. So they must at the very least keep a close watch on
CLA
activities, actual and virtual. Uh-huh. They knew about that raid and used the opportunity.'

Janis shrugged. ‘OK, but I still don't see why they should be interested in my research.'

‘Because it was part of
their
research?' Kohn sat up with a jolt, then turned around and caught Janis's shoulders. ‘Could the whole thing have been meant for me, planned all along? Could your whole damn project have been set up just to jog my fucking
memory
?'

‘No,' Janis said. ‘That's crazy. That's just too paranoid.'

He wasn't reassured. He felt his stomach muscles and his jaw tense, and willed them to relax. He rolled away on to his back and let his arm flop over the side of the bed. His fingertips touched the gun.

The gun
! He put one hand on the floor and with the other heaved the gun on to the bed and across his knees.

‘Wha—' Janis sat up too as Moh hooked up the weapon's comm gear and fumbled for his glades.

‘Your project was the last thing I sent the gun's programs chasing after,' he explained, ‘before this all started and the weird stuff got downloaded…Never thought to ask it what it found.'

‘Find project definition/Taine/Brunel,' he told it.

‘Hey, that might be—'

White light flared in the glades; white noise blared in the phones. Kohn cursed and ducked and pushed the equipment off his head.

‘—risky,' Janis finished. ‘Are you all right?'

‘What the hell was that?'

‘Watchdog proggie,' Janis said. She sounded mildly amused. ‘One of those university in-house security jobs you were so
cutting
about. Your gun must've saved it.'

Kohn rubbed his eyes and ears. ‘
Wipe that
!' he snarled at the gun, which was still wasting power setting his teeth on edge. The distant-sounding screech stopped.

‘Anything behind that shield?' he asked the gun.

‘Not…translatable,' came from the tiny speaker, with what sounded like effort.

‘So much for that.'

Janis had stolen the bedcover again. ‘What about going round the back?' she suggested. ‘Could you call Jordan from here, see if he could hack it?'

Kohn scanned the room and spotted the familiar white plastic plate of a net-port low down on one of the walls. ‘I could if I wanted to,' he said slowly, ‘but…I left a message for him to get off the case and get on with his life, and I've taken the gun off-line even from shortwave, because…well, the rumour I heard is that some levels of security might be unreliable, right? That was why the femininists were so coy about contact. Small risk, yeah, but it ain't worth it.'

Janis looked back at him silently. He laid a cold hand on her warm shoulder and squeezed gently.

‘Come on,' he said. ‘Let's get up, let's see what our new republic has in store for us.'

The house had only the most basic supplies. Something in the smell of the place told that it hadn't been occupied recently. In a small room upstairs, at a window overlooking the loch, was a desk with a terminal. Kohn looked at the terminal and looked away again, out of the window. Below, the village was silent, a silence broken after a few minutes by the distant note of the humvee, coming closer.

Janis appeared, towelling her hair.

‘Soft water,' she said. ‘Now what do we do about breakfast?'

Moh pointed out of the window. ‘I think it's on its way.'

When the humvee pulled up they went downstairs and stood blinking in the sunlight, screwing up their eyes to see MacLennan and Van standing on the doorstep. They were both wearing chinos and open-necked shirts and carrying large brown paper bags.

‘Breakfast, citizens,' MacLennan said.

‘Thanks,' Kohn said, the smell of fresh rolls and bacon reminding him of how long it had been since he'd eaten. ‘Come on in.'

Kohn and MacLennan dragged a table and four chairs out on the veranda. Van, who seemed familiar with the layout of the house, helped Janis find plates and cutlery. While they were eating, the two
ANR
cadres pointedly avoided talking about anything more than the weather and the food. Van smoked Marlboros, more or less between bites. Kohn accepted one after he'd finished eating. MacLennan tilted his chair back and began filling a pipe. Janis moved upwind of all three, arm-hopped her backside on to the veranda railing and leaned forward, elbows on knees.

‘Well?' she said.

‘Well, indeed,' MacLennan said. He had a strong Highland or perhaps Island accent, both guttural and nasal, a carrier-wave white noise behind his speech. ‘You want some explanations. So do we. We are not at all happy with what's been going on in the system in recent days. Not at all,' he repeated slowly, jabbing with the stem of his pipe and beetling his brows at Kohn. ‘What – have – you – done?'

‘How do you know I've done anything?' Kohn asked.

‘We know who you are,' said MacLennan. ‘We know about your parents, and we suspect that you have released something your father left in the system.'

‘How?'

‘I'll tell you,' Van said. ‘First, I take it you are familiar with my work and my position?'

Janis nodded and Moh said, ‘Yeah, she told me. How come you're a scientific adviser to the
ANR
?'

‘I have been seconded to that position by a fraternal organization, the Lao Dong.'

‘Aha,' said Kohn.
Of course
they would be allies.

Janis frowned. ‘What's that?'

‘What you know as the
NVC
,' Van explained, ‘has a core, which has had many names. Currently it's called the Vietnam Workers' Party: Vietnam Lao Dong.'

‘What does it stand for?'

Van's back straightened as he said: ‘National unification. Independence. A free-market economy.'

‘Oh, right,' Janis said. ‘The communists.' She sounded as if something had just made sense.

‘That is correct,' Van said proudly. ‘We have always held that nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.'

‘I take it that doesn't apply to Da Nang Phytochemicals,' Janis said wryly.

Van laughed. ‘It isn't a front company, if that's what you're thinking. But –' He paused, his gaze focusing on the glowing coal of his cigarette. He looked up. ‘At least not for my Party. Some of our research has – I have now realized – been coordinated by some other organization. Most of it has been innocuous, constructing databases of gene sequences for as many species as possible.'

‘The Genome Project?' Kohn remembered reading about it – controversy had raged on the nets for, oh, hours and hours once about whether it was a beneficial, conservationist measure or just a scam by ruthless Yanomamo-owned drug companies.

‘That, yes,' said Van. ‘However, it seems that another area was research into learning and memory—'

‘You didn't know what I was doing?' Janis asked.

‘Oh, yes,' Van said. ‘In general terms. But not that it violated the deep-technology guidelines. A few days ago, we learned' – he waved a smoke-trailing hand – ‘through sources that need not concern you that Stasis were about to audit your laboratory. We arranged for the comrades in the
ANR
to…salvage some samples.'

He shot a knowing glance at Janis. ‘Our representatives were impressed with your aplomb in not mentioning the incident.'

Janis flushed, with pride or embarrassment.

‘And then something happened,' Van continued. He told them about the Clearing House (‘You mean it really exists?' Kohn interjected) and what had gone on there. Kohn felt a grim relief to learn that others besides himself believed he had somehow triggered the emergence of a new
AI
. Not crazy after all.

It was, he thought, a rather self-centred relief.

He held his tongue between his teeth when Van mentioned the pattern of extracts of biological data from Van's company's subsidiaries, and when he described the retrieval of
US/UN
records: how his name had led them to the files on his father. Why Bleibtreu-Fèvre's and Donovan's plan to find him had fallen through was that they hadn't known Van was even higher in the councils of the Lao Dong than he was in the company. Within minutes, Van had alerted the
ANR
, who had put their nearest agents – the nurse and the Body Bank teller – on to the task of getting Cat out of the way and pulling Moh in. Van had then caught the next shuttle to Sydney and the suborbital to Glasgow.