Fractions (49 page)

‘Invisible Hand client threatened; please assist.'

The grep backs off, and the one beside Tamara does too. Everybody else looks momentarily off-balance, except Tamara, who's looking at Dee with a dawning, jaw-slackening awe. Dee's sweeping glance around the crowd, before Soldier subsides to a watchful withdrawal, shows her that there are other faces, dotted through the crowd, responding to the call as best they can: tensing, rising or crouching or – in the case of one or two machines – telescoping. These folk start up a slow-hand-clapping chant: ‘Out! Out! Out!'

And Dee shoves the man, and Tamara shoves, and the two greps are shoved and man-handled from one person or robot to another until they're ejected from the edge of the crowd into the waiting grasp of a couple of heavy bikers, who escort them away.

‘OK,' Dee says. She smiles around and slips her shoe back on, waves and calls out ‘Thanks, everybody!' in a girlishly grateful voice that sends Soldier away in a squirm of embarrassment and brings a small flush to her cheeks.

The music and the lights resume their rhythm.

Dee dances; but she knows the next time won't be so easy. These guys may not come back, but somebody will.

 

Dee's in a small room at the top of a house on Circle Square, overlooking the Ring Canal. Tamara has brought her back to a flat in this tall house, after what seems like hours at the outdoor party – and retired to her own room to sleep, with apologetic explanations that she starts work early in the morning. ‘Ax will sort you out,' she's told her.

Dee is used to vague human speech. She doesn't ask for explanations. Her own human flesh and nerves are tired. She doesn't need to sleep, but she needs to rest, and to dream. One after another her selves have to shut down, go off-line, compress and assimilate and integrate the doings of the day.

The room is seductively comfortable, with the rain drumming on the roof just behind the sloping ceiling; its dormer window supplying more eye-tilting angles; a dressing-table with stoppered bottles and pots, beads and scarves and ribbons hung over the mirror, clipped fashion-shots tacked to the walls, a dozen dolls on a shelf. There's a curved, satin-padded wicker chair in a corner, a wall cupboard (locked), and a bed with a clutter of quilt and lace-trimmed pillows. There's something faintly troubling about the human smell behind the flowery and musky scents, but she can't be bothered to analyse it.

She takes her clothes off and folds or hangs them, adjusts her body temperature to her comfort, and lies down on the bed. Her eyelids shut out the window's view of Ship City's familiar reality: a damp, dripping city of silicate towers, a city veined with canals, crowded with stranded starfarers and free or enslaved automata, haunted by the quick and the dead. Her minds spool to Story, who spins another episode of her endless starring role in a self-perpetuating soap opera steeped in all the romantic glamour of ancient Earth, where…

 

…she's the eldest daughter of a Senator and set to inherit his place in the Duma and all the privileges of his democratic anointment, but she's been kidnapped by agents of the Archipelago Mining Corporation and held captive by its young and dark and devilish chief executive, who wants her for his harem, and is willing to trade her life for her hand in concubinage and a major Antarctic concession, and her father's personal and fanatically loyal Chechen guards are fighting their way through the chief executive's rings of brutish defenders while she stands, sheathed in silks and clouded in perfumes on the balcony of a Kuomintang drug-lord's skyscraper in the heart of Old New York watching the tanks battle it out in the streets below and waiting for the hard-pressed Chechens to raise reinforcements from the desperate tribes of the South Bronx with the promise of plunder, and she hears a stealthy step behind her and the chief executive – whose face, if truth be told, looks uncannily like her owner's – falls on his knees before her and tells her he really, truly, loves her and he's consumed with remorse and he'll set her free, if only…

And so on.

This is what androids – or rather, gynoids – dream.

 

A knock on the door. She's back to full awareness in an instant, her internal clock telling her it's early morning.

‘Just a moment,' she says.

The little cleaner-vermin have removed every speck of organic dirt from her clothes. She shakes them out without thinking and dresses in a blur of motion (a useful Soldier skill that she's cut-and-pasted to Self) and calls out,

‘Come in.'

The boy who comes in carrying a tray with a mug of coffee and a bowl of cereal looks about twelve years old, at first glance. He's Black, with slight build and delicate features and a shock of black hair. As Dee scans him up and down, all the while smiling and saying ‘hello', she realises that he's much older than he looks. There's no way so much experience could have made its subtle imprint in the muscle-tone of his face, the look in his eye, in just twelve years. Not here, not in Ship City. They have laws against that sort of thing.

‘You must be Ax,' she says, taking the tray. ‘Thanks.' She waves him to the chair. ‘Tamara mentioned you.'

‘Likewise,' the boy says, sitting back with one foot on the opposite knee. ‘So you're Dee Model, huh? Big boss Reid's main squeeze.'

Dee's facing him, her knees primly together, the tray balanced on them, the spoon almost at her mouth. She puts it back, making a tinny rattle against the side of the bowl. She steadies the tray, and her voice.

‘How do you know that?'

Ax flashes white teeth. ‘You're famous.' His grin becomes wicked, then relents to a reassuring smile. ‘Not really. Your master had you on his arm at a party last year, pic made its way onto the gossip chats.' His eyes unfocus for a moment. ‘Quite a dress,' he says.

‘I didn't think so,' Dee says. She resumes eating. ‘I had to stay in Sex most of the time to make wearing it bearable.'

Ax snorts.

‘Anyway.' Dee blushes. Spy's routines keep her voice level and flat. ‘Are there searches out for me? Rewards posted?'

Again the off-line gaze – he's got a cortical downlink, Dee realises, not a common feature around here; the most intimate interface with the nets that most people will tolerate is contacts, the little round screens that you slip over your eyes.

‘None so far,' Ax says, attention snapping back. ‘Reckon he's embarrassed. I mean, your walking doll walks out on you, can't be like having your car nicked, know what I mean?'

‘Yes,' Dee says. The thought of her owner's probable rage and humiliation makes her knees, despite everything, quiver. She puts the tray down and reaches for her purse.

‘Smoke?'

‘Anything,' says Ax. He has a lighter on a chain around his neck, and moves swiftly to light up for her, then settles back, dragging on his own.

‘So why did you walk out?' he asks. His tone is neither friendly nor prurient; it's like a professional question, the tone of a physician or an engineer with a patient.

‘He doesn't mistreat me,' she says. ‘I don't mind the service, or the sex. I mind being a slave.'

‘You're supposed to like it,' Ax says. ‘It's hard-wired.'

‘I know,' Dee says. She glances around for an ashtray, sighs and mentally over-rides her Servant routines and taps the ash onto the empty, milk-lined bowl. ‘And I do like it. I do find it fulfilling. But only sexually. Not any other way, not in my separate self. And when I realised that, what I did was…I patched my Sex programs over that area, and masked it all off from Self, and made myself free.'

‘Amazing,' Ax says, as if it's anything but. ‘So it's true what they say:
information wants to be free
!'

Dee shakes her head. ‘It's nothing so grand,' she explains. ‘It happened after I loaded up far more mind-tools than I was ever supposed to have.' She tries to remember that second birth, that awakening, when she flipped through all those separate selves and saw herself, a ghostly reflection in all the windows.

Ax frowns. He flips a finger, and his cigarette-butt's fizzing out on the bowl's film of milk. An investigating cleany-crawly shies away, rearing its frontal segments. ‘When did this happen?' he asks.

Dee smiles proudly, bursting to share her confidence. ‘Yesterday,' she says.

 

Ax's mouth hangs open for a moment. For a second the seen-it-all look drops from his face. He fumbles a cigarette-packet from inside the sleeve of his tee-shirt and lights one abstractedly, not looking, not offering. ‘But why,' he continues, ‘did you load up all the extra software in the first place? What made you do
that
?'

Dee finds herself at a loss. It's difficult to think back to her earlier simplicity, when she switched from one single mind to another and it was just her, it was where she lived. She was no less conscious then than she is now, but it was an undivided, naive, biddable consciousness, without detachment. But even there, somewhere in Self, was the lust to know. And the opportunity had come, and she'd taken it – with what, looking back, had been a sweet assurance that her owner would be pleased.

‘Instinct,' she says, with a light laugh. Ax snorts and rolls his eyes.

‘All right,' Dee says, suddenly stung. ‘Perhaps it did come from the animal body, or the bits of biological brain!'

‘We'll leave that argument to the other side,' Ax says.

‘The other side of what?'

‘The other side of the
case
,' he explains with strained patience. ‘One way or another, this is going to end up in court. You know about the law?'

‘Oh yes,' Dee says brightly. ‘I have a mind in here called Secretary. She has precedents coming out of my ears.'

‘Well,' Ax says firmly, rising, ‘I suggest you go back over them. It'll all seem very different, I can tell you that for nothing.'

‘OK,' Dee says. Ax holds the door open, waiting. Dee stands up.

‘What now?'

He looks her down and up. ‘Shopping, I think.' His voice conveys an epicene disdain.

She picks up her purse, sticks the pistol back in the top of her skirt, and glances around. She's left nothing.

‘Nice room.'

‘Mine,' Ax says. ‘I'd be very happy to share it with you.'

 

The outer door of the building booms behind them. ‘Stay,' Ax commands it. Magnetic bolts set it ringing again. Ax grins at her and sets off to the left. Dee glances around as she strolls beside him. The house they've just come out of is four storeys tall, and narrow. So are all the others around here, in classic crowded canal-bank style, but there are no weathered brick walls or contrast grouting, no sills or window-boxes. Everything's concrete, a skin slapped up in a hurry on webs of wire-mesh over iron bones, graffiti its only – and appropriate – decoration. The city's spicular towers loom like construction cranes above the buildings, reducing them to on-site huts.

Smoke rises from among the stalls, steam from the pavements. Mist hangs along the canal surface. The spray-paint on the walls gets more and more vehement, reaching a climax of clenched fists and rockets and mushroom-clouds and dinosaurs at the entrance to an alley.

Ax stops and waves inward. ‘This way.'

The alley is no more than three metres wide but it's a shopping street in its own right, and unlike what Dee has seen of the neighbourhood so far, it has a worked-for charm, the names of the shops painted in painstaking emulation of the clean calligraphy of twenty-first-century mall-signs. At the first window display Ax waits impatiently as Dee surveys a fossil diorama, allegedly of the fauna of one of the planet's ancient sea-beds. Scientist has other views, and Latin names Dee doesn't know float distractingly across her sight. Inside the shop, fossils are being worked into amulets and ornaments. A girl at a grinding-wheel raises her face-plate, gives Dee an inviting smile and returns – puzzled or baffled by Dee's Scientist-masked response – to her work. The volatile smells of varnish and polish, glue and lubricant waft through the doorway along with the screech of carborundum on stone.

There's a shop selling drugs and pipes; a newspaper stand where Dee sees copies of
The Abolitionist
and more obscure titles like
Factory Farming, Nano Mart, Nuke Tech
; a stall stacked with weathered junk identified as ‘Old New Martian Alien Artifacts'; at all of which Dee's critical dawdling has Ax muttering and smoking. Dee enjoys this refusal, trivial though it is, to adapt to a human's priorities; an exercise of free will.

But she shares Ax's evident delight when they reach the first boutique, a cave of clothing and accessories. He leads her in, and they're there for an hour that passes like a minute and then out again into other clothes-shops, and cosmetics-artists' little studios and jewellers' labs. All the while Ax fusses around her with an unselfconscious intimacy which doesn't vary with her state of dress or undress. She can tell that the pleasure he takes in her is aesthetic, not erotic. The software of Sex is sensitive to such distinctions: it can read the physiology of a flush, time the beat of a pulse and measure the dilation of a pupil, and it knows there's no lust in this boy's touch.

At the far end of the alley is a café. They sit themselves down there under the sudden light of the noon sun above the narrow street, sip coffee, and smoke, surrounded by their purchases. Dee's cast off her sober style for something dikey and punky. She preens in leather, lacing and lace; satin and silk, spikes and studs. A look that would have most twelve-year-old boys unimpressed, most men stimulated. Ax looks at her as a work of art he's accomplished, which at the moment she is.

Dee fidgets with her lighter, looks up under the fringe of her restyled hair. She's about to say something, but she doesn't know what to ask.