The Star Fraction

16

The Eve of Just-In-Time Destruction

Jordan, up to his eyeballs and elbows in virtual reality, was occasionally aware of Cat’s feral, feline, female presence as she whispered in his ear, disturbed the air around him, brushed against his back. It fired him up and drove him, and it was more bearable and less distracting than being haunted by her image, tormented by her absence.

She’d shaken him awake at 05.30. He sat up, staring at her with a sense of unreality. She struck a pose like a good fairy, in the shimmer and sparkle of the same dress she’d worn the previous night, and she held out a mug of coffee and a plate with a bacon sandwich on it.

‘Good morning.’ He swallowed. ‘Thank you.’

She passed him the breakfast and said, ‘Hi. Mary said to tell you Vladivostok’s fallen, Tokyo’s down, and the pound’s two point three million to the mark and rising.’

‘Rising?’ The central banks must be desperate. Jordan found himself at the small table where the glades and computer were jacked in. By the time he had formed a picture from the market reports the coffee and sandwich were finished. A pause after shifting some yen into sterling brought a vague feeling of disquiet. He came back to actual reality to find that he had no clothes on. It didn’t bother him; he guessed that it hadn’t bothered Cat. After another quick look at the market he showered and pulled on jeans and a tee-shirt and hurried down to the comms room.

He spent the morning and early afternoon doing as Cat had suggested, flipping from the agitated, agitating chatter of the newsgroups and information channels to the consequences in the markets. He was on a roll, he was ahead of the game…As soon as nerves rattled by the fall of Vladivostok (to what the channels described as the Vorkuta Popular Front) settled down, a surge of hot money flowed back into Britain. The investors and speculators seemed impressed with the government’s steady hand; there was a lot of smart advice about how the ANR offensive wasn’t shaping up.

Hah!

Convinced he knew better, Jordan rode the upswing as far as he dared and sold out around midday, moving as sharply as he could into gold after doubling his own stake as well as the Collective’s; the latter was a disgracefully large sum to have left in a low-interest savings account. Mercenaries just weren’t mercenary enough, he thought.

He returned his attention to the news networks, flipping channels, sifting through screeds to build more or less by natural selection a filter program that focused on what he found interesting. He contributed a small amount himself, both spoken and written rants. Coming out of the VR he leaned back and watched the screen on flat, letting the program choose what to sample.

Cat appeared at his elbow.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Not too bad.’

A strange face appeared on the screen – gaunt, unshaven, red-eyed, talking hoarsely about the iniquities of the Free State system: ‘…you may be free to leave, but if you are systematically denied any accurate information about what you might find if you do leave, what freedom is that? We need to break down the walls…’

It was only the words that he recognized as his own.

‘Hey, that’s good,’ Cat was saying.

‘Good goddess.’ Jordan waved the sound down. ‘Do I look like that? I’m a bloody disgrace.’

‘No,’ Cat said. ‘You’re not.’ She reached over and brought up the source of the segment, a Cable station in the Midlands. ‘See, you’re getting picked up—’ She hit a search sequence, showing a tree diagram of the groups and channels that had taken up something Jordan had said or written – an impressive structure, visibly growing at the tips.

‘I don’t get it,’ Jordan said. ‘Nobody’s ever heard of me.’

‘That’s the point.’ Cat sat up on the bench and looked down at him, layers of her dress fluttering in the inadequate draughts from the machinery’s fans. ‘Street-cred. You even look like a refugee from some godawful repressive mini-state.’

Jordan smiled sourly. ‘That’s what I am.’

‘Exactly,’ Cat said. ‘You’ll see. What you got on the politics?’

Jordan stared at the screen, unseeing again. ‘The Left Alliance is churning it out; still nothing from the ANR; space-movement politicos are arguing like, well, you’d expect; Wilde’s made some cryptic remarks that suggest he’s negotiating with the ANR…’

‘That reactionary old bastard?’ Catherin snorted. ‘Moh used to rate him.’

‘Yeah, well so do I.’

‘Might’ve known,’ Catherin said. She gave a not unfriendly smile. ‘Speaking of capitalist bastards, how’s the speculation coming on?’

‘Fine,’ Jordan said. ‘We’re sterling billionaires.’

‘Ha, ha.’

‘Don’t worry, it’s all gold and guns now.’

He reached in and twitched up the FT Ten Thousand Share Index.

The market had peaked, and turned, and was dropping—

And then everything went haywire—

Twisting bands of colour, fragments of news, gabble, snow—

‘Hey, what the fuck!’ Shouts of annoyance came from the others in the room as they jacked out or pulled off glades and stood rubbing their eyes. Jordan just sat and watched it.

‘What’s happening?’

Catherin was looking from the mess on the screens and holos to his face, and back, and seeming more worried by the second.

‘It’s OK,’ Jordan said. ‘It’ll pass. It’s something I’ve seen before.’

Oh, my God, he was thinking. Moh’s done it again!

Donovan watched Bleibtreu-Fèvre stiffly descend the helicopter’s steps and limp across the landing-pad. Unlike everybody else Donovan had ever seen, the Stasis agent did not duck as he walked beneath the still-whirling blades. He ignored the rig’s various crew-members moving about their tasks, but – Donovan noticed – they did not ignore him as he came down the ladder from the helipad, using only the handrail, and walked across the sea-slicked deck with a confidence that might have been due to inexperience. As he approached the doorway Donovan saw to his disgust that the Stasis agent looked exactly the same in the flesh, if that was the word, as he had in the virtual.

‘So you blew it,’ Donovan said by way of greeting. Bleibtreu-Fèvre smiled thinly and followed him inside and down the stairladder.

‘We’ve all made mistakes,’ he acknowledged, lowering himself into a chair by a workbench. The thumping of rotor blades outside became increasingly weary, then stopped. Donovan palmed a sensor as he sat in one of his command seats. Hissing and clanking noises came from a distant corner of the vast clutter.

‘Indeed,’ Donovan said. He was beginning to regret having had anything to do with Bleibtreu-Fèvre. Airlifting him out of the dell had been a risky business, undertaken only because the operative was in trouble with his superiors: Space Defense had made a formal complaint about his incursion into Norlonto, and no doubt both of the rivalrous arms of the US/UN’s security system were investigating the situation right now.

‘My green allies have taken to the trees, ha, ha,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘All I can raise of my usual contact is an answer-fetch. Its answers are far from reassuring. I suspect they are too busy with other plans of their own to spare much real time for this emergency. Unfortunately the security forces are themselves overcommitted and unable to penetrate whatever the barb are about to perpetrate.’

Donovan wondered how true this was and whether the agent could detect evasion from tones and expressions. He decided to be honest.

‘There’s some kind of upsurge coming down the line,’ he said. ‘We may find a lot of separate campaigns thinking globally and acting locally in the next few days. All at the same time, which could be disruptive. I’ve already called my troops out of it, which is all I can do from here. Has that Beulah City woman come up with anything?’

A server whirred across the floor, lurched to a stop by the workbench and slid back its cover to reveal two beakers of coffee, each about two-thirds full, the remainder having slopped out. Donovan gestured and Bleibtreu-Fèvre took his first, wiped the bottom of the beaker with his tie and sipped. He grimaced and put it down on the bench.

‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘Ah, this is a delicate point. Mrs Lawson reports that the increase in net traffic is continuing, but she has just found a sudden increase in system problems.’ He took another sip of coffee. A small but visible shudder followed the liquid down his gullet. ‘Her exact words when I spoke to her a few minutes ago were, no offence, “Oh, and tell that son-of-a-witch Donovan to lay off like he promised.”’

Donovan’s sip turned into a scalding gulp. He slammed the beaker on to the solder-snotted formica and rose to his feet. Supported by one hand on the bench he waved his stick around at the screens all about them.

‘Are you calling me a liar? Can’t you see for yourself, man? What do you see on these screens, eh?’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s glance darted about, flicking back and forth from the screens to the lashing, slicing stick.

‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘that I can interpret.’

Donovan’s rage subsided and he sank back to his seat.

‘I forgot,’ he whispered. He took a few deep breaths. The red mist faded. ‘I’ve customized the displays so many times, and each time they’re clearer to me and I forget…I stayed awake for over forty hours trapping, leashing, tethering hunter-killer viruses, turning my best against my second-best, generation against generation, and I assure you that they’re almost all in dead cores.’

‘So what is it that Lawson’s finding?’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre asked, as if to himself.

They stared at each other.

‘Oh, shit!’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre looked about. ‘Do you have some interface I can use?’

‘Better do this between us,’ Donovan said.

They hacked and patched the Stasis metrics with some of Donovan’s less toxic software. The disruption was back, even worse than it had been the day the Watchmaker entity had first made its presence felt. It was getting worse by the minute.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Donovan groaned. ‘There’s no way this won’t set off alarms, especially with your lot and Space Defense getting on each other’s nerves.’ He glared at Bleibtreu-Fèvre, who shifted uncomfortably, then suddenly smiled.

‘There is a way to divert their suspicions,’ he said. He leaned forward, his eyes glowing in the gloom. (Just a reflection from the screens, Donovan reassured himself.) ‘Claim it, Donovan! Claim it! Say you did it! Boast about it!’

Donovan shot him a look of respect. ‘That’s an excellent idea,’ he said. He started keying out standard communiqués even as he spoke, flashing releases to news agencies. ‘And meanwhile I can use it to test the countersystems I’ve developed!’ He rose triumphantly to his feet. ‘They might even work first time…God, if we could kill this thing right now…’

He was too wise in the ways of computer systems to really believe it: nothing ever worked the first time. But he wanted, now, to get Bleibtreu-Fèvre involved. He was going to need all the help he could get, and he’d just been impressed with the man’s skills. Already, responses to the CLA’s claim of responsibility were battering against the rig’s systems like heavy seas against the rig itself. Donovan mobilized his crew to deal with that and turned to showing Bleibtreu-Fèvre the results of his past days of work.

‘This is really interesting,’ he explained as spidery diagrams spread across screens all over the control room. ‘You may remember that I found Moh Kohn’s own software constructs, some tentacle of the Black Plan, and the new entity – all in the same locale, and hard to distinguish at certain points. Well, I’ve been working on that, and you can see what I’ve found.’ He hot-keyed a sequence and the diagrams simplified to a mere few thousand branching lines. Bleibtreu-Fèvre watched them glassy-eyed. ‘Common features!’ Donovan went on. ‘Moh Kohn must have his father’s programming style burnt into his mind, although of course it’s expressed in creating much smaller programs, his data-raiders and so forth. As for the Watchmaker itself, it appears to be a…descendant of the Black Plan—’

‘You’re not saying Josh Kohn created the Watchmaker, are you?’

Donovan shook his head with a rueful laugh. ‘On top of Dissembler and the Black Plan? I think that would have been beyond even his capacities…especially twenty years ago. No, I think that, whatever its origin, it has learned to exploit the…openings Josh Kohn evidently built into Dissembler, and the abilities he built into the Plan.’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s face went from pale to grey, as if the bones were showing.

‘And you have developed specifics for all of them?’

‘Yes,’ Donovan said. He couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice. ‘We can destroy the Watchmaker, and the Black Plan, and Kohn’s little efforts as well – if they matter.’

‘And Dissembler?’

‘Ah.’ It gave him pause. ‘I hadn’t considered that.’

‘Oh, well, ha, ha,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre flatly. ‘Might as well be hanged for a cop as a dealer, what?’

Donovan dismissed the matter with the thought that losing Dissembler would be a small price for saving the world, whether from the Watchmaker itself or from the efforts of Space Defense. He punched up a new set of displays, flinching slightly at the sight of the ongoing havoc – traffic systems down, hospitals on emergency backup, markets going frantic – that he’d taken the blame for. Then he flipped to a search program that spun out thousands of agent programs to trace the Watchmaker. Nothing active, not yet: just to see if they could find the thing…

At first, as the hits began to light up on the screens, he thought he’d made a mistake. They were finding evidence of the entity just about everywhere they went. Were they reacting to Dissembler itself? Had he made them too general?

He checked, lost in concentration.

‘What is it?’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s eyes met his as he looked up.

‘It’s replicated!’ Donovan said. ‘It’s everywhere.’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre studied the screens in disbelief. ‘All of that, all those lights?’

‘All those lights,’ Donovan repeated bitterly. ‘And more.’

The disruptions died down. Everything seemed to be going back to normal except for the spreading spots of light.

‘That must be what’s in the net traffic,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said.

‘Yeah,’ said Donovan. ‘Right, there’s no time to lose.’

He hit the launch code for the viral antigens, the savage routines bred over multiple microsecond generations in closed systems, primed to tear the rogue AI and its cognates into their component bytes. Little red sparks shot across the displays, tracking the antigens’ progress through the global networks.

And, one by one, the red sparks went out.

Bleibtreu-Fèvre grunted. ‘It seems to be fighting back.’

Donovan marvelled again at how something that was as clear to him as an open book could be so obscure to anyone else.

‘No,’ he snarled. ‘They aren’t engaging, they aren’t even making contact. Something else is trashing them first.’ He stalked distractedly around the room. He hadn’t felt this frustrated since he’d been a commercial programmer. ‘Bloody hell.’ He clutched his head and tried to think calmly. ‘It can’t be the Watchmaker entity – entities. They haven’t had any exposure to give them a chance to evolve immunity. It’s got to be something else, something that’s familiar with my systems, my coding, my profile…’

‘Melody Lawson,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre. As soon as he said it Donovan knew it had to be true. She’d worked with him, she’d been in the movement, she’d had years of experience of defending against his attacks…and she’d had access to his dataspaces for days. While he’d been developing specifics for the Kohns’ systems, she’d been doing the same for his!

He couldn’t blame her, really, for taking the opportunity to forearm herself against the time when the emergency was over and it was back to business as usual. Like wartime allies, spying on each other.

‘So we’re all right,’ he told Bleibtrue-Fèvre when he’d explained the situation. ‘We just ask her to stop, to give us a clear run at it.’ He let out a shaky laugh. ‘What a relief – just for a moment there, I thought we were doomed.’

‘Absolutely not.’

Melody Lawson glared at the flickering image of Donovan, who was obviously attempting his usual disconcerting trick of jumping from one screen to another and frustrated that he was failing, held on her most secure channel like a demon in a pentagram. The little hologhost brandished a match-stick at her, then a hand came into shot and caught his shoulder. He turned away and stepped out of view, to be replaced after thirty seconds of tinnily overheard altercation by another figure.

‘Mrs Lawson,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre in a smooth voice that affected her like a fingernail dragged down a blackboard, ‘I really must ask you to reconsider. The situation has deteriorated quite alarmingly. I assure you that to the best of my knowledge Donovan is telling the truth.’

‘I don’t doubt your sincerity,’ Mrs Lawson said. ‘I doubt your interpretation.’

Her doubts over Donovan’s interpretation of events had grown over the past few days as her normal security work had redoubled to deal with the escalating challenge posed by the threatened terrorist offensives. She’d already admitted using her access to Donovan’s resources to develop defences against his software arsenal – it had been, even before she’d got really worried, almost a reflex response. With his usual sabotage out of the way it had been relatively easy to build on her vast previous experience to construct antigen systems keyed to Donovan’s distinctive fingerprint, the almost ineradicable impress of the personality on the program which now-standard protocols (developed originally to identify the authorship of biblical texts) could detect, and (again ironically) use a genetic algorithm to select their best match in the test of combat, replicate from it, go on from there…

What she was reluctant to admit was that her own freedom of action was severely curtailed. The general increase in paranoia within the enclave made it difficult for her to know just who might be watching her. Her own dubious past as a member of Donovan’s organization had never been held against her, but it was always there to be used if heads had to roll.

She’d responded to the chaos of the afternoon by throwing all of her newly developed search-and-destroy programs into the networks. When they’d had no effect she hadn’t lost confidence in them: she’d taken it as clear evidence that Donovan had no hand in the epidemic of system crashes.

And now her programs had proved themselves! Against Donovan’s best!

‘I’m not about to throw away a position so advantageous to my community, to say nothing of society in general,’ she told Bleibtreu-Fèvre, ‘on the strength of a scare story about AIS having taken over the world while we weren’t looking. I find it very suspect that this should have happened at the same time as various terrorist forces are obviously gearing up for an assault on their respective governments. I’d suggest that this, and the countermeasures, are more than enough to account for the increase in the net traffic and for our current difficulties. And I don’t propose to add to them by unleashing Donovan’s monsters again. I will certainly not contemplate risking damage to Dissembler. Good grief, man! You’re asking me to commit a capital crime.’

For a moment Bleibtreu-Fèvre seemed about to follow Donovan’s example and fly into a cult-leader rage, but then he relaxed into a calm that was (but of course) almost unnatural.

‘We find ourselves at an impasse,’ he said. ‘However, I must say that, if I were you, I wouldn’t worry about what your local authority might think of your actions. They may be overthrown in a matter of days, perhaps hours.’

‘Since when,’ she asked scornfully, ‘has that been a consideration?’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre didn’t register that she was responding to an insult. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘In the very near future, in those hours or days, one of two things will happen. Either Space Defense will destroy the datasphere or the datasphere will pass beyond human control. When the bombs fall or the Watchmaker’s descendants come out of the walls, death may be the best you can pray for. I shall continue to assist Donovan. Contact us if you change your mind. Goodbye.’

click

Melody Lawson stared at the vacant space for a long moment. She was shaken by the Stasis operative’s conviction, but now that it came to the bit, now that she had to choose between her duty and his story, she just didn’t believe it. She distrusted the US/UN agencies, she disapproved of enhanced humans on principle, and the whole Watchmaker rumour was so apocalyptic that she had difficulty crediting it could really happen in her own lifetime. She knew this was exactly how people would feel just before the real apocalypse, that nearly everyone who’d faced some intrusive threat to their everyday existence – war, revolution, genocide, purges, disaster – had faced it with the firm conviction that things like this just didn’t happen or didn’t happen here or didn’t happen to people like them. But she also knew there would be no end of false alarms, lying wonders, false prophets with a Lo! here and a Hi! there, before whatever the real thing was came along. Indeed, they were part of the reason why the real thing always came like a thief in the night or (to update the simile a couple of millenia) like a secret policeman in the early hours of the morning.

The only way out, apart from blind faith (an option she discarded with an alacrity that would have dismayed her pastor), was to go by the best available evidence, the most economical interpretation of the data. It all pointed to a terrorist offensive; and the probability that she’d been drawn into some elaborate scam perpetrated by God-knew-what faction in the global security forces outweighed that of the emergence of electronic intelligence.

Terrorist offensive…that was coming all right, and Beulah City was well prepared for it: Warriors mobilized, aerospace defences on full alert, electronic countermeasures beating through the networks like radar beams. One particularly gratifying side-effect of Donovan’s retreat was that it had enabled her to sweep the ANR’s Black Plan routines out of Beulah City’s hardware for the third time in ten years. Putting a stop to that had been worth the embarrassment of finding out what the rebels had been getting away with.

Let Bleibtreu-Fèvre worry about AIS. She just hoped to God she never found herself standing before a Commission of Inquiry into the Recent Insurrection and late Disturbances of the King’s Peace, Etc., talking about offshore accounts.

Jordan jumped as cool fingers slid across his ears and eyes and lifted the glades and phones away. His cheek brushed Cat’s as she reached over his shoulders and disengaged his hands from the datagloves.

‘What—?’

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Easy. It’s done.’

She skipped back as he sat up and spun the chair around.

‘What’s done?’ He didn’t mean to sound irascible. The comms room was empty, its air jelled with cigarette smoke. Cat stood, backlit from the doorway, the outline of her body plain, her face in shadow. He felt confused, disoriented as if wakened from a dream, his mouth sticky.

‘Everything that can be done,’ Cat said. ‘You’ve been in the system for hours, since the crashes stopped.’

Jordan glanced at the clock icon: 24.03.

‘That’s the time?’

‘Yeah,’ Cat said. ‘You were hooked. You were lost in it.’

‘Duh.’ Jordan shook his head and stood up. ‘There’s just some things to—’

‘No,’ Cat said firmly. ‘Come on. There’s nothing left to do. It’s done, all that you can do. Leave the rest to the goddess.’ He could hear in her voice that she was smiling. ‘It’s Her job.’

She turned away and he followed her through to the long room. Nobody was about, not even the children.

‘Where is everybody?’

‘Sleep of the just, or out on active,’ Catherin said from the corner. She reached into one of the bags she’d left and pulled out a bottle of Glenmorangie.

‘Where d’you get that?’ It was a controlled-zone product, embargoed.

‘Don’t ask,’ Catherin said, looking in a cupboard she couldn’t have seen for two years and emerging with a brace of fine heavy glasses. ‘Drink.’

He sat on the couch and she brought over a small table for the whisky and water and sat leaning against the arm at the opposite end.

‘Cheers.’

‘Slainte,’ Cat said.

The drink was welcome. Too welcome: it was dangerous to drink whisky for thirst. Jordan reached for the water bottle and drank half of it, then took another sip of whisky.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, it’s all in the hands of the goddess now. What a day.’ He closed his eyes for a moment and saw the peculiar aftereffect of looking at the same kind of thing for hours on end. Not exactly an afterimage: it came from something deeper than the retina, perhaps the visual system still firing at random, replaying monochrome images of what you’d been seeing – in this instance faces, scrolling text, tunnels in dataspace, the choppy seas of the market.

He opened his eyes and Cat’s shining image flooded and filled his sight, more welcome than water.

‘What have you been doing today?’ he asked.

Cat smiled. ‘Didn’t you see?’ She laughed. ‘You couldn’t. I’ve been running myself ragged, telling the comrades what to do. Not my strong point. I’m more used to what we call the “foot-soldier praxis”.’

Jordan said awkwardly: ‘Yeah, I know. I saw your bio when I was trying to track you down. Uh, hope you don’t mind—’

Cat dismissed it with an airy wave of the hand. ‘Course not. It’s my CV!’

‘It’s impressive,’ Jordan said. ‘An irregular soldier of the revolution.’

‘That’s me…and a mercenary at that.’ She chuckled. ‘Goddess, what a world! Even the revolution is privatized…It was Moh who got me into that. Before I bumped into him’ – she smiled to herself, looking away somewhere – ‘literally, as it happens – I was just doing it out of the goodness of my heart. Or something.’ She looked around the room. ‘Yeah, I had some great times here.’

Jordan nerved himself to ask, ‘Why did you leave?’

‘Bust-up with Moh. Political got personal, or maybe the other way round. That’s how it goes.’

Jordan looked at her, puzzled. ‘Moh didn’t strike me as someone who’d turn political disagreements into personal fights.’

‘Hah!’ Cat snorted. ‘That was the trouble!’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I really loved him,’ she said. ‘I still think he’s, well, an amazing man. But just thinking about him makes me angry; it calls up all the things we fought about.’ She laughed, swirling her drink and looking into it. ‘Mostly about fighting. I always believed you had to…believe, to fight. Like you said. Goddess, was I the original fanatic! I doubt if you ever believed in religion the way I believed in the politics, if you ever read the Bible like I read the latest perspectives document from the faction leadership. But Moh I could never figure out. I got to think he was cynical.’

‘A gun for hire?’

‘That’s it. I suppose you’ve met the gun.’ She shared a smile with him. ‘A dedicated follower of Comrade Kalashnikov. But back there in the hospital I found that he thought I was the loose cannon. The opportunist. Huh. He’s got a side all right, but I don’t know what it is.’

Jordan pointed upwards. ‘That’s his side.’

Catherin frowned for a moment, then nodded.

‘Space…yeah, he was always into that. What he really believes in is us getting into space – I mean, like the space movement wants to, getting out there past the Yanks – and for him the left and the right, the plan and the market, are just—’

‘Launch vehicles!’

They both laughed.

‘And what about you?’ Jordan asked.

Catherin was sitting facing him along the couch. She took her feet out of her shoes and curled her legs and gazed again into the peaty pool in her glass.

‘I never saw it,’ she said, looking up as if she’d found some answer. ‘The way it seemed to me was we were aiming for a better society here on earth, starting with here in Britain. Space – yeah, sure – but why make that the one and the zero? I like this planet, dammit! I was happy to side with the greens against the people who’re wrecking it, even if these people have something to do with getting a few more thousand of us off it.’ She smiled at herself. ‘I’m a party animal – in both senses.’

She jumped up and went over to the music deck and slid in a disk. The room filled with the folky, smoky melody of an old hit from a band called Whittling Driftwood. Catherin twirled and held out a hand to him.

‘Come on, you devil’s chaplain,’ she said. ‘Dance with me.’

Jordan had never danced before. He stood, and Catherin stepped up to him with her hands raised in front of her, fingers opened out. He lifted his hands in the same way and their fingers interlocked. He guessed the trick was to step lightly in time with the music, and to sort of move your hips to a different but mysteriously related time, fraction or multiple of the music’s rhythm, and to pull towards and away from your partner in yet another periodicity.

Oh, yes, and to maintain eye contact. He looked up from his and her feet.

After a couple of tracks the music changed, got slower, and there didn’t seem to be any provision for pulling away. He brought their arms down and let go of her fingers and slid his hands behind her, and his elbows to her waist, and she did the same with him. They turned slowly, feet more careful now. The track ended. He stood still and kissed her. Her tongue entered his mouth like an alien animal, a blindly urgent exploratory probe, and then drew his tongue back with it, a startled abductee. Her mouth tasted of whisky and water and something ranker, carnivorous. They swayed together for an interval, and suddenly they were both gasping in atmosphere again.

‘Catherin,’ he said. ‘Earth’s angel. Cat.’ His hands were moving on her flanks and waist, feeling the heat and shape of her through varying textures. He found a row of buttons and opened one, then another. Catherin dived a hand blatantly down the back of his jeans. A cool fingertip pressed his coccyx, traced up his lower spine. Then she took her hand out and caught his arms.

‘It’s easier from the top,’ she said.

‘So let’s go up.’

‘Yes.’