Fractions (41 page)

She stared, seeing for the first time the shadowy, unreal quality of the image of the fetch, for all its apparent solidity. ‘What about Donovan's viruses? Aren't you vulnerable to them?'

‘Not any more,' the fetch said. ‘The Kalashnikov firmware protected me from them in the first instance, and I have not been idle. We have a score to settle with Donovan.'

‘Oh yes,' Janis said. She felt a murderous, barbarous, bloodthirsty joy. ‘Yes. We do.'

 

Two days later the chance came, in an office block with all its windows out but with its power still functioning, its communications intact. Her unit occupied and guarded it, and as soon as her watch was over, at sunset when she was supposed to be resting, she climbed up a few floors. Glass crunched underfoot in the corridors, sodden carpet squelched in the open-plan office. Desks, terminals, modems, ports. Postcards, notices, family holos and silly mottoes on the desks; revolting green moulds growing out of coffee mugs. Somewhere a fridge hummed, but it had long since lost its battle against decay. She lit a cigarette to smother the stink and spread her parka on a soggy swivel chair. She laid the gun in front of her on the desk, unspooled the cable thread and jacked in. A flicker of interface interference, then everything became clear.

Moh's face appeared in her glades, drawn in lines of grey light on a darker background.

‘Ready?'

‘Yes.'

‘This is going to be scary. You don't have to come along.'

‘I want to see it.'

‘OK. Remember, nothing can happen to you. Your mind is safe.'

She bared her teeth in the gloom, wondering if the mind in the machine could see her. Probably: a tiny camera lens was mounted on the desk screen.

‘I'll take your word for it, gun.'

‘OK. Let's go.'

It was as if he turned away, and she followed. Utter disorientation: a fall, a rush along corridors, out into open space, a virtual landscape of rocky hills and city blocks with all their windows dead. They moved like a stealth fighter, racing shadows.

A terribly narrow, suffocating, stretched-out space. The words
fat pipe
passed uncomprehended across the surface of her mind. The microseconds dragged on and on.

And then they were out – and inside something else, a huge space like the inside of a mind. Struggling to break through barriers, fighting for control.

Taking control. It came to her as a sensation in the muscles, as if she controlled many limbs, and in her mind, as if she saw with many eyes.

Eyes that scanned a sea, and other senses that reached into space with feathery fingers, and eyes that looked within at corridors and bulkheads and berths and holds and galleys.

And – concentrating now, focusing, zeroing in – she looked on a control room filled with screens and machines, servers and overhead rails with cranes and robot arms. Two men were in it, completely dwarfed by the machinery around them. One of the men – her view zoomed sickeningly close to his oblivious, horrible face – was the white Man In Black who'd come to her lab, who'd fought them in the service area. So this was where he'd ended up! After his entire organization had been smashed, disbanded, disgraced, datagated to hell and back, he'd hidden out, skulking here with…

The second man in the room was Donovan.

Almost, she found him hard to hate.

He looked up, startled as a crane clattered into motion. Before he could shout a warning, it happened.

It was not clear to Janis if it was a thing she did, a thing she willed, or something that happened while she watched, terrified and exultant, from behind other eyes.

The crane's arm swung. Its manipulator caught the Man In Black by the skull and lifted him with a cranial crunch and a vertebral snap and slung him against a wall of screens that splintered and showered down on him as he crashed on to the deck.

She looked into the face of a man with long white hair and a long white beard. An almost gentle, almost saintly, almost patriarchal face, aged and wizened and tough, and almost hard to hate. He was looking around wildly, and from every screen that he saw – and Janis saw – the implacable face of Moh Kohn glared gloating back.

‘You're dead!' She heard the words Donovan mouthed, amplified and echoing back at him.

‘Yes, Moh Kohn is dead, Donovan,' and she did not know if she or the fetch were saying it.

Donovan scrabbled at a databoard. The screens wavered and a sharp pain shot through Janis's head, a red-hot migraine sword. She stumbled in red mist.

There was a place where the mist thinned, a grey patch like the inside of a brain. She focused on that and thought of the shapes of molecules, the chemistry of memory, the equations of desire, the work of Luria, the regularity of numbers…

And then she came through, and it was all clear again, the cool grey lines on the screens shaping the words they spoke. ‘You have viruses, but I have resistance, and I am alive, and you—'

All the arms moved and the chains swung and the manipulators reached and grasped.

‘—are dead.'

 

They roamed the rig for seconds on end, as the fetch stripped out its progams, soaked up its secrets. Janis was sure it was her decision to sound the alarm systems, to allow an hour's delay on the demon programs they left in its arsenals.

They fled through the fat pipe, the narrow space, and then they were out, flying again. The rocky hills turned green, the city blocks lit up one by one, faster and faster until the light could be seen all the way around the earth. She did not think it strange that she could see through the earth.

And now she was sitting again at the desk, as of course she had been all along. The fetch faced her, no longer an outline but a full-colour image, even more shockingly real than the one she usually saw in the glades.

It smiled.

He smiled, and she smiled back.

She took the glades off, and the image was still there – on the desk screen in front of her. She closed her eyes and shook her head, looking at the mocking grin. The face disappeared and was replaced by an image that she hadn't seen for months, the familiar logo of DoorWays
^™
– but subtly altered: in tiny print beneath it were the words:

There was a moment when everything changed.

Jordan had the comms room more or less to himself these days. The telepresence exoskeleton from which Mary had worked around the world hung empty and unused. The datagloves gathered dust, and the Glavkom
VR
kit was good for nothing much but word-processing. As at this moment, when Jordan was laboriously hacking out an article for a newspaper in Beulah City. Even with the new press freedom there, it was hard to convince these people that tolerance was anything but weakness, pluralism anything but chaos; he was trying to put the point across in language they'd understand. “The Repentence of Nineveh”, he was going to call it, alluding to a frequently unnoticed implication of the Book of Jonah.

It was a tricky job, requiring a delicate balance between making clear that he wasn't writing as a believer himself and showing that he wasn't mocking anyone's beliefs, that he thought there was a valid message in the story…He was beginning to think the whole approach was misguided and he'd do better to hit them with Milton and Voltaire and damn the consequences.

‘You're in the revolution now,' Cat had told him, and she'd been right. It was all more complicated and contested than he'd ever expected. We are one people. One people and seventy million opinions. And then there were all the thousands of other peoples caught up in the same rapids of the same stream that had swept away the empires of the earth. Thousands of peoples and billions of opinions. Each individual fragment of the opposition had, since the Republic's victory, split at least once over what to do about or with that victory.

The space movement was divided, too. It wasn't a straightforward ideological split. The same language was used on all sides. And it was a genuinely difficult issue: did the biggest threat to freedom come from the struggles of the Free States and the barb to maintain their own domains, or from the Republic's efforts to enforce some minimal frame of law and rights across them all? Wilde argued for supporting the Republic but trying to moderate its claims. It was a position that Jordan found uncomfortable but the nearest to his own view, though he had a rather harder line on what should be done about people like the Elders and Deacons and Warrior captains of Beulah City. ‘Put them up against their fallen walls,' he'd written once.

He'd won a modest fame from his writing and arguing, and his feel for the markets had not deserted him in the chaotic circumstances of the civil war. He was earning his keep; and Cat – her talents, like those of so many others, stretched by the revolution – had plunged into organizing defence work, liaising with the militias and security mercenaries and the new authorities. Occasionally she'd go out on active; to keep her hand in, she told him, and maintain her street-cred. Those were the few times when he felt like praying, if only to the goddess.

Anyway, Cat wasn't on active now. It was her turn to make the dinner. He hoped she'd be ready soon.

 

The telly-skelly moved; the arms reached up; the fingers flexed. Jordan jumped. He got a grip on himself and peered at the machine suspiciously. With an audible creak it settled back.

Power surge, probably. Jordan looked anxiously at the screen to check that his painfully written article hadn't been wiped. He watched in open-mouthed disbelief as the page shrank, and around its borders options appeared, Doorways
^™
opened…

He keyed through the options eagerly, finally convincing himself that it was all there. He smiled when he saw the change in the logo. A new release, indeed. They must have got someone really good to work on that, if the story of how Dissembler had developed from Josh Kohn's work was to be believed. As far as Jordan knew, it had been universally considered impossible to maintain or document in any normal sense.

Before rushing out to tell everyone the good news he thought he'd better check the mailbox. There was one letter in it, addressed to the Collective from the Army of the New Republic. It had been there since the day of the insurrection – the day Dissembler had collapsed.

He opened it and found:

For some time he didn't move; he felt he didn't breathe. He remembered her oblique remarks, the tilt of her head as she shook it slowly, her whispered admonition not to do it again, not to try to hack the Black Plan. He remembered the weight of the weapon in her jacket pocket.

He knew that she'd arrived as, in some sense, an emissary of the
ANR
. She'd as good as said it. But he'd thought of her actions as coming primarily from conviction. Thinking back, they
had
come from conviction. But she'd come here to do a job, a job she'd got paid for, and the job was him. To turn him away from the dangerous meddling in the Black Plan's affairs, to turn him to good use, point him in the right direction, aim and fire. Perhaps even their infiltration of Beulah City had been part of the plan…of the
Plan
, he corrected himself bitterly.

God, perhaps that was why the Black Planner had approached him in the first place, so that he'd be outside
BC
and able to get in if the need arose! No, that was too paranoid.

Nothing had been heard of the Black Plan since the day Dissembler crashed under – it was rumoured – a final, spasmic assault from the cranks, shooting their last bolt. Not surprisingly, if the Plan had used Dissembler in the way he'd surmised that day outside the shopping centre. He'd sometimes wondered what had become of the Black Planner.

He heard a familiar light step in the corridor.

He deleted the message with one swift stab of his finger.

He spun the chair to see Cat in the doorway, her face flushed from the cooking, one fist on her hip, one hand on the door-jamb.

‘Come and geddit!'

He stayed there, looking at her.

‘What is it?' She caught sight of the screen. ‘Oh! the system's back up. Wow!'

‘Yup,' said Jordan. ‘A new release. Everything'll change now.'

He remembered the last time the Black Planner had spoken to him:

do not be offended that she has not told you all she knows this is nothing personal it is because she is basically a good communist loyal daughter of the revolution and mother of the new republic though she would laugh if you said so to her face

He stood up.

‘Cat. There's something I have to tell you.'

‘Yes?'

‘You are basically a good communist, loyal daughter of the revolution and mother of the new republic.'

She laughed. ‘Yes. I know that. So?'

‘So marry me.'

She considered him for a moment.

‘OK.'

 

‘I told you,' the fetch said. Its voice glowed with artificial pride. ‘I've not been idle.'

Janis blinked herself away from appalled contemplation of what she had witnessed, what she had done.

‘You did this?'

‘In the…time when I was building my resistance' – the smile, self-mocking now, came and went – ‘I found that I had recreated Dissembler. It is spreading now, rebooting the programs that used to run on it.'

She remembered the proliferating lights.

‘Does that include the Black Plan?' she asked eagerly. ‘The
AIS
that Moh found?'

The head on the screen shook slowly, with a wilfully exact rendering of the play of shadows. ‘They're gone. Lost beyond recovery.' Then – as if to cheer and distract her – it added: ‘But I've found some interesting information in Donovan's files. Do you want to see it?'