Fractions (50 page)

‘Let me spare you,' Ax says. ‘If embarrassment is in your repertoire, that is. Sexually speaking, I'm not in the game.
On
the game, sometimes, perhaps.' He flicks fingertips. ‘Not gay, not neuter. Just a boy: a permanent pre-pubescent.'

‘Why?' Dee asks. ‘Is it an illness?'

‘Terminal,' Ax grins. ‘Something down where the genes meet the little machines: a bug. A virus. Something my parents picked up on the long trip. Fortunately it doesn't kick in unless I go through puberty. So I've fixed my biological age a bit younger than most.'

‘And there's no help for it?'

Ax turns down the corners of his mouth. ‘If there is, it's with the fast minds. Best advice would be to forget it, in other words. But I couldn't forget it. One reason I got into abolitionism…' He laughs. ‘My chances of becoming a man are right up there with the dead coming back and the fast minds running again. Pffft.'

‘Hmmm.' Dee feels sad. What a waste. A brighter thought comes to her. ‘You could grow up as a woman,' she says.

‘Well, thank you,' Ax replies, pouting and posing for a moment. ‘I'd consider it, but the fixers tell me the bug reacts to the hormones of either sex. So I'm stuck with neither, and after the predictable raging and sulking I decided I might as well make a career of being someone a jealous male could trust alone with his female.' He draws in smoke and exhales it elegantly. ‘Freelance professional eunuch and part-time catamite.'

While Dee's still thinking about this, and wondering if Ax's lot isn't, all things considered, any worse than hers, he adds:

‘Before I found out about my condition, I was quite a normal little lad.' He sighs. ‘The effeminacy's just a pose, Dee, just a pose. And in case anyone forgets, I can also be extremely violent.'

‘Why didn't you specialise in that? Be a guard or a fighter or –'

‘And risk getting killed?' Ax guffaws. ‘Do I
look
stupid?'

‘No.' Dee gives him a friendly, sisterly (now that she's figured out their only possible relationship) smile, but she stops feeling sorry for him. She reckons he's doing all right. Queer as a coot, she finds herself thinking, and as they get up to leave she sets Scientist grumpily searching ancient, inherited databases to find out what the fuck a coot
is.

 

‘So I made it to the ships,' Wilde said. He raised himself on one elbow and peered around the room, in which he'd been lying awake for ten minutes.

‘Good morning,' said the machine. It was resting on the floor in the corner of the room. The room was upstairs in the Malley Mile, cheap to rent and containing a wash-stand, a chair and a bed. It was remarkably free of dust, due to machines about the size and shape of large woodlice that scuttled about the floor.

Wilde stared at the machine. ‘What have you been doing all night?'

‘Guarding you,' the machine said. It stretched out its limbs momentarily, then folded them back. ‘Scanning the city's nets. Dreaming.'

Wilde remained leaning on one elbow, looking at the machine with a suddenly reckless curiosity. ‘I didn't know machines dreamed.'

‘I also reminisce,' said the machine. ‘When there's time.'

Wilde grinned sourly. ‘I suppose time is what you have plenty of, thinking so much faster –'

‘No,' the machine snapped. ‘I told you. I'm a human-equivalent machine. My subjective time is much the same as yours. No doubt my connections are faster than your reactions, but the consciousness they sustain moves at the same pace.'

‘Does it indeed?' Wilde got out of bed, looked down at his body with a flicker of renewed surprise, smiled and washed his face and neck and put his clothes on.

‘So tell me, machine,' he said as he tugged on his boots, ‘what am I to call you? Come to that, what are you?'

‘Basically,' said the machine, detaching a filament from a wall socket and winding it slowly back into its casing, ‘I'm a civil-engineering construction rig, autonomous, nuclear-powered, sand-resistant. As to my name.' It paused. ‘You may call me anything you like, but I have been known as Jay-Dub.'

Wilde laughed. ‘That's great! That'll do.'

‘“Jay-Dub” is fine,' said the machine. ‘Not undignified. Thanks, Jon Wilde.'

‘Well, Jay-Dub,' Wilde said with a self-conscious smile, ‘let's go and get breakfast.'

‘You do that,' Jay-Dub said. It unfolded its limbs and stood up, revealing a litter of torn foil carapaces with now-stilled tiny legs and dulled lenses. ‘I've eaten.'

 

The Malley Mile was silent, the bar shuttered and swept and polished and hung with damp cloths when they picked their way downstairs and out through a one-way-locked door.

‘Trusting,' Wilde remarked, as he let the door click back.

‘It's an honest place,' Jay-Dub said. ‘There's little in the way of petty crime. For reasons which I'm sure you know.'

The small sun was low above the towers, laying lacey shadows on the street. Boats and barges floated down the canal, heading out of town.

‘Where are they going?' Wilde asked. The man and the robot were strolling towards a small dock a hundred or so metres up the street. There were food-stalls on the dock.

‘Mines or farms,' the robot said. ‘They aren't entirely distinct, here. They're both a matter of using nanotech – natural or artificial – to concentrate dispersed molecules into a usable form.'

‘And people work at that? What are the robots doing?'

‘Heh-heh-heh.' Jay-Dub's voice-control had advanced: it could now parody a mechanical laugh. ‘Robots are either useless for such purposes, or far too useful to waste on them.'

The small dock was busy. People – mostly human, but with a few other hominid types among them – were embarking, or unlading sacks of vegetables or minerals from long narrow barges. Electric-powered trucks were backing on to the quay, loading up. A family of what looked like gibbons with swollen skulls hauled a net-full of slapping, silvery fish along the quay and spilled them into a rusty bath behind one of the stalls, where a burly woman immediately began to gut and grill the fish. Wilde stopped there and, somewhat hesitantly and with a lot of pointing, got her to put together fish and leaves and bread. Coffee was for sale in glass cups, deposit returnable.

Wilde took his breakfast to the edge of the quay and sat down, legs dangling, and slowly ate, looking all around. The robot hunkered down beside him.

‘Time you told me things,' Wilde said. ‘You said you made me. What did that mean?'

‘Cloned you from a cell,' the machine said. ‘Grew you in a vat. Ran a program to put your memories back on your synapses.' It hummed, remotely. ‘That last could get you killed, so keep it to yourself.'

‘Why did you do it?'

‘I needed your help,' said Jay-Dub. ‘To fight David Reid, and to change this world.'

Wilde looked at the machine for a long time, his face as inscrutable as the machine's blank surface.

‘You've already told me what you are,' he said. ‘But
who
are you? The truth, this time. The whole truth.'

‘What I
am
,' the machine said, so quietly that Wilde had to lean closer, his ear to a grille between its metal shells, ‘is a long and complex question. But I
was
you.'

‘If you're interested, you'll be there.'

The train lurched. Carlisle's sodium-lit brown buildings began to slide by.

‘What?' Startled out of a train-induced trance, I wasn't sure I hadn't dreamed the remark. The man on the opposite side of the so-called Pullman table wore a cloth cap and a jacket of some shiny substance that might once have been corduroy. His faded check shirt looked like a pyjama-top. He'd been drinking with silent determination from a half-bottle of Bell's all the long afternoon from Euston.

Now he rubbed a brown hand along his jaw, rasping white stubble over sallow skin, and repeated his utterance. I smiled desperately.

‘I see,' I lied. ‘Very true.'

‘You'll be there,' he said. He reached for the bottle, judged its remaining contents by weight and replaced it on the table, then began to roll a cigarette with the other hand. His gaze, sharp with an occasional lapse into bleariness, stayed on me all the while.

‘Where?' I looked away, flipped open a packet of Silk Cut (my gesture towards healthy living). My reflection flared in a brief virtual image outside the train. The sodden February countryside seeped past.

‘Disnae matter,' the man said, exhaling smoke and the sour odour of digested whisky. ‘Wherever. Ah kin tell. You're interested.' He paused, cocked his head and gave me a cunning look. ‘You're one a they international socialists. Ah kin tell.'

I smiled again and shook my head. ‘I'm sorry, but you're mistaken, I'm –' I stopped, helpless to explain. I'd spent a week researching in the LSE library and arguing with my father. My head was buzzing with Marxisms.

‘Ach, it's aw right son,' he said. ‘Ah ken youse have aw kinds i wee divisions. I dinnae bother about them. You're an intellectual and Ah'm just a retired working man. But you're wannay uz.'

With that he opened the bottle, took a sip from it and passed it to me, kindly wiping his hand on his thigh and then around the rim as he did so, to remove any harmful germs.

 

‘And then what happened?' Reid asked.

We turned, hunched against the drizzle, into Park Road, past the pseudo-Tudor frontage of the Blythswood Cottage pub and ducked into the doorway of Voltaire & Rousseau, the best second-hand bookshop in Glasgow. I'd run into Reid at lunchtime, after not having seen him for some weeks – partly because I was working hard on my dissertation and partly because Reid was either politically active or out with Annette. In the first month of their relationship I'd once or twice had a few drinks with both of them, but I'd found it too awkward to continue.

‘He fell asleep,' I laughed. ‘I left the bottle severely alone and woke him up at the Central. He seemed to have forgotten the whole incident. Looked like he didn't recognise me.'

By this time we were both moving crabwise, heads tilted, systematically scanning the shelves that covered the narrow shop's walls. First we'd scour the politics and philosophy section, then – if we had any spare cash left – move on to the back room to hit the SF paperbacks. One of the shop's owners – a tall, tubby, cheerful chap with thin hair and thick glasses – looked up from his book at the till with a smile and a nod. He, I'd decided, must be Rousseau; his gaunt and gloomy partner, Voltaire.

‘Probably an old ILP'er or something,' Reid muttered, pouncing on a blue Charles H. Kerr & Co. volume of Dietzgen. He blew dust off it and sneezed.

‘One pound fifty!' he said in a low voice, so that Rousseau couldn't overhear his delight and guess what a bargain they'd let slip. He twisted back to his search, a read-head moving along the memory-tape of shelves.

‘You know,' he went on, ‘it makes me sick sometimes to think of all those old militants selling off their libraries to eke out their pensions. Or dying, and their kids – God, I can just imagine them, middle-aged, middle-class wankers who've always been a bit ashamed of the
bodach
's rambling reminiscences – rummaging through his pathetic stuff and finding a shelf of socialist classics and about to heave them on the tip when suddenly the little gleam of a few quid lights up their greedy eyes!'

‘Just as well for us that it does,' I said, wedging my fingers between two books to ease out a lurking pamphlet. ‘It's the ones that end up on the tip that I – hey, look at this!'

I didn't care who overheard. This was almost certainly unique, a living fossil: a wartime Russia Today Society pamphlet called
Soviet Millionaires.
It hadn't stayed in circulation long, not after the SPGB had seized on it as irrefutable proof that behind the socialist facade the USSR concealed a class of wealthy property-owners.

‘I've heard about it from my father,' I told Reid. ‘But even he'd never had a copy. I'll send it to him.'

‘Told you!' Reid grinned down at me from a step-ladder. ‘You're such an unselfish bastard! That's what the old bloke saw in you! You're a
hereditary
socialist!'

‘Ideology is hereditary?' I scoffed. ‘And what does that make you?'

‘A grasping kulak, I guess,' he said happily. ‘Ah, now what about this?' He opened a book and studied the fly-leaf. ‘Stirner,
The Ego and His Own
, property of the Glasgow Anarchist Workers' Circle, 1943. Five pounds.'

I stared up at him, open-mouthed. I didn't realise I was reaching for it until he pulled it away. ‘Uh-uh. Finders keepers.'

‘It's of no interest to you,' I said.

‘Oh, I don't know.' Reid stepped down the ladder, holding the book like a black Grail in front of my eyes. ‘Young Hegelians,
German Ideology
and all that. Marxist scholarship.'

‘You're having me on!'

‘Yes, I am,' Reid said. ‘But I do have a use for it. I'm going to buy it, and as soon as we get outside I'm going to sell it to you for a tenner.'

No lunches for a fortnight, and back to roll-ups. I could manage that.

‘It's a deal!' I almost shouted.

Reid stepped back and scrutinised me.

‘Just testing,' he said. He shoved the book into my hands. ‘You passed.'

 

In the grey leaded light of the Union smoking-room, the air thick with the unappetising smell of over-percolated coffee-grounds, we sat in worn leather armchairs and flipped through our acquisitions. I smiled at the twisted dialectics of the wartime apologist, frowned over the laboured wit of the great amoralist. Fascism, communism and anarchism traced their ancestry back to the same Piltdown, the Berlin bars of the 1840s. Give me turn-of-the-century Vienna any day, I thought, its Ringstrasse a particle-accelerator of ideas.

We both sat back at the same moment. Reid toyed with the bamboo holder of the previous day's
Guardian.
The MPLA had taken Huambo, not for the last time.

‘How's Annette?' I asked with guarded casualness.

‘Fine, as far as I know,' Reid said. He turned over a page.

‘Not seen her for a bit?'

Reid laid down the paper and leaned forward, looking at me intently. ‘We've kind of…I don't know…fallen out, drifted apart.'

‘That's a shame,' I said. ‘How did that happen?'

Reid spread his hands. ‘She's got a real sharp mind, but she's the most unpolitical person I've ever met. She never reads newspapers. It's very hard to find things to talk about.' He smiled ruefully. ‘Sounds stupid, I know, but there it is.'

I nodded sympathetically: yes, women are hard to figure out. I was trying to remember the location of the Zoology Department.

 

I walked up University Avenue, the broad Victorian edifice – Gilmoreghast, as one rag-mag wit had called it – on my left, the Wellsian 'thirties Reading Room on my right. (I hadn't used it since discovering that everything about it was perfect, except its acoustics, which were those of a whispering-gallery.)

At the top of the hill the pedestrian crossing was at red. I waited for the little green man, and wondered if I shouldn't turn around right there, and wait until seeing Annette again could be passed off as a casual encounter…

No
, I told myself firmly.
If you're interested, you'll be there.
I crossed and continued on down to the junction at the bottom, then left along an internal roadway between massive grey sandstone buildings set among patches of grass with flowerbeds and tall trees. The Zoology Department was another of those ancient buildings, solid as a church and founded on a rock of greater age. Inside, polished wood, tiling, the smell of small-animal droppings. From behind a glass partition a receptionist peered at me incuriously. I decided to be bold and asked him where Annette was working. He glanced at a clock and a timetable and told me.

The laboratory at first appeared to be empty. Then I saw Annette, her back to me, laying down sheets of paper along a bench at the far end. I pushed open the double doors and walked up. She turned at my footsteps, saying:

‘Excuse me, the practical isn't – Oh, hello Jon.'

Her hair was tied back, her figure hidden in a white lab-coat. Still no less desirable.

‘Hi,' I said. Her green eyes examined me quizzically.

‘Let me guess,' she said. ‘You suddenly developed an interest in invertebrate anatomy, right?'

She gestured at the bench. I looked down at a round glass dish, half-filled with water, in which a few small sea-urchins lay – or rather, moved, as I saw when I looked closer. Laid out along the benches were sheaves of notes, diagramming the echinoderm's organs, the nomenclature beautiful and strange: ampulla, pedicellaria, tube-feet, madreporite, radial canal, ring canal, stone canal…

‘Not exactly.' I fidgeted with sturdy tweezers, laid out like cutlery to break the delicate harmless creatures apart.

‘So what brings you here?'

‘Uh…' I hesitated. ‘I just wondered if you'd fancy going out for a drink or something.'

Her face reddened slightly.

‘Does this have anything to do with Dave?'

‘No,' I said, wondering what she was getting at. ‘Only that he told me he wasn't going out with you any more.'

‘Oh! And when did he tell you that?'

‘About twenty minutes ago,' I admitted.

She laughed. ‘What took you so long?'

‘I thought jumping up the minute he told me might be a bit insensitive.'

It was as if the implications of my statement were too direct, too blatant. She looked away and glanced back with a half-smile.

‘It's very nice of you to think of me,' she said. ‘Lonely and forlorn as I am. I'm not sure I'm ready for such kindness.'

If she could tease, I could tease right back. ‘I don't expect you to stay that way long.'

‘Well,' she said, ‘no, I haven't been washing my hair every night!'

‘Losing yourself in the giddy social whirl?'

‘Yep.'

‘So,' I persisted. ‘Perhaps you can find room in your hectic life for a quiet drink?'

‘Or something.'

‘Or something.'

She smiled, this time dropping her ironic look.

‘OK,' she said. ‘How about nine o'clock tonight in the Western Bar?'

‘I'll see you there,' I said.

The doors banged open and a commotion of students came in.

‘You better go,' she said. ‘See ya.'

At the door I looked back, and saw her looking up. She smiled and turned away.

I jogged off down the corridor. ‘
Yes
!' I told the world, with a jump and an air-punch that startled a few stragglers and narrowly missed an overhead fluorescent light.

 

The Western was a quiet pub, tarted up with some attempt at appropriate (i.e., cowpoke) decoration. I arrived about ten minutes early and was standing at the bar, half a pint and one smoke down, when Annette walked in just as the TV heralded the nine o'clock news. The barman reached up and flipped channels. (There were three, all controlled by the government).

Her hair was loose (and bouncy, and shiny, and just washed). She wore a mid-calf denim skirt and a black silk blouse under a puffy jacket which she unzipped and shrugged out of as she walked up. I bought her a lager-and-lime and we found a table by the wall.

‘Smoke?'

‘Yes, thanks.'

I lit her cigarette and we looked at each other for a moment. Annette laughed suddenly.

‘This is silly,' she said. ‘We know each other just enough to skip the ice-breaking chit-chat, but not well enough to know what to say next.'

Sharp mind alright.

‘That's a good point,' I said, treading water. ‘Actually I don't know anything about you, apart from having seen you across a table or a room a few times.'

‘Didn't Dave talk about me?' There was an undertone of curiosity to her pretended pique.

‘No,' I said. ‘Mind you, he did tell me one very important thing about you…'

‘Oh yes?'