The Star Fraction

17

The Good Sorcerer

‘Relax, the man said.’ Moh kicked a pebble from the shingle out across the still water of the sea-loch. Janis was not surprised to see that it skipped several times before sinking. He did it again and the same thing happened. ‘This is worse than waiting for a US/UN deadline to pass.’

Janis caught his hand. ‘Walk,’ she said.

They continued on around the shoreline to where it curved out to a narrow spit of land that led to a peninsula about four hundred metres long and thirty or forty metres high. It was known locally – with what Janis considered a peculiarly Gaelic logic – as The Island. She squinted into a low morning sun that was lifting the dew and night-mist in the promise of another fine day.

Moh, though still tense and moody, looked a lot better than he’d done the previous afternoon when he’d come out of his encounter. They probably had MacLennan to thank for that. With an almost motherly admonition about Building Up Your Strength, the ANR cadre had treated them to a dinner of smoked salmon followed by venison at the village hotel.

Janis had been charmed by MacLennan. He might look like a farmer but he acted and spoke like an officer and a gentleman, with fascinating tales to tell of the years of the Republic and the struggle. The one thing he would not talk about, that he instantly and politely quashed the slightest allusion to, was the events of that afternoon and their implications.

The hotel overlooked a golf course so low on the shore that clumps of dried seaweed were scattered on its greens. The bar, where they’d had what was by Moh’s standards a very quiet drinking session, had filled up over the evening with the entire reduced population of the village. Janis had watched incredulously as the locals enjoyed what they considered a few quiet, civilized drinks – four or five litres of beer helped along by liberal shots of whisky – and then gone off to drive home. The vehicles ranged from sports-cars to articulated lorries but were all driven in much the same way.

It was the sound of vehicles in the morning that had wakened them: a slow, revving chug on all the roads. When they walked down to the village after breakfast they’d found the whole place deserted, an eerie clearance complete…

A sheep-track led them through long wet grass and gorse to the top of the Island, where a low roofless brick building stood. As they approached, a head appeared over the wall, and then a young woman came out. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen; dark hair, bright eyes. She wore an ANR jumpsuit and carried a weapon that looked too big for her: a metre-long rocket on a launcher with a pistol-grip.

‘Hello,’ she said shyly. ‘You’ll be the computer people.’

Moh laughed. ‘Have you ever heard of need-to-know?’

‘We all need to know,’ she said, sounding baffled by the question.

‘What do you do?’ Janis asked.

‘Air defence,’ the girl said.

Inside the walls was a trodden area of sheep droppings and earth; a camping stool, binoculars, a dozen more rockets.

‘It’s an old observation post,’ the girl explained. ‘From the last war, that is’ – her brow furrowed momentarily – ‘that is, the war before the last but you know what the old folk are like.’

Moh nodded soberly. ‘And you’re using it for air defence?’

‘Yes.’ She whipped the launcher into position with startling speed. ‘The stealth fighters: they fly low, they can fool radar and instruments, they don’t make a sound but they’re not invisible.’ She patted the nose of the rocket. ‘Tail-chaser. I’ve got two seconds to get down after it’s launched, then the fusion engine kicks in. Voom.’

‘Yeah,’ Moh said. ‘“Voom.” You don’t want to be standing behind one of them. And stay down and keep your eyes shut till you see the flash.’

‘Oh, I know that,’ the girl said. She shuffled and looked at everything except her visitors.

‘Guess we better go,’ Moh said. ‘All the best.’

When they were halfway back down the track Janis asked: ‘How could she see the flash with her eyes shut?’

‘Laser-fuser warhead. She’d see it.’

Moh’s phone beeped. He listened, nodding. ‘OK, right, see ya.’

‘What’s up?’

‘MacLennan’s coming to meet us. Says there’s been some developments.’

A kilometre and a half away, a humvee started up.

Cat slept, lightly curled on her side. Some of the alertness, the knowingness, of her characteristic expression was relaxed away, so that she seemed a younger person who hadn’t discovered sex and violence. Jordan, propped on one elbow, looked at that face over the curve of her shoulder, basked in the skin-to-skin human warmth, his breathing careful so as not to disturb the spontaneous rhythm of hers.

Something in him had changed – some baseline had shifted with that release, that bonding. Until now he’d felt like a fellow-traveller of the human race, a sympathizer rather than a paid-up, card-carrying member. Now, as the bars of morning sunlight from the armour-slatted window millimetred their way across the ceiling, he still had the same ideas but with a different attitude. Still an individualist, but without the edgy selfishness. At a level beneath all calculation of advantage he was no longer afraid of dying. It was he who had opened, encompassed and received, and now found for the first time within his fiercely defended core a person other than himself.

She woke with a wild where-am-I? look, saw him and smiled.

‘You’re still here.’

‘Still here.’

‘You been awake long?’

Jordan shrugged. ‘Some time.’

‘What you been doing?’ She rolled over and put an arm and a leg over him.

‘Watching you sleep.’

Her hand explored. ‘Hmm…that must’ve been exciting.’

‘Not as exciting as seeing you awake.’ She dived.

‘Now you.’

The estuarine smell and taste of it, salt and rank, ocean and swamp.

Then chin to chin, lip to lip, tongue to tongue; pubis to pubis. She grabbed his hand and guided it with urgent precision and abandoned his finger there, a trapped digit doing its little bit between their blind beat. As suddenly she dragged it away, digging her nails into the small of his back and taking him over the edge with her in an arching, bucking, yelling fall.

They landed in a tangled heap.

‘Wuh.’

‘They don’t call you Cat for nothing.’

She grinned and rolled her eyes and ran her tongue along her teeth. Then she sat up and reached for a handful of tissues and, still cat-like, wiped and mopped.

‘I’m going to have a shower,’ she said.

‘Oh good,’ Jordan said. ‘So am I.’

She pushed him away and jumped off the bed.

‘Another time,’ she said. ‘Right now it would be…self-defeating.’

She skipped into the shower stall.

‘Hey, lover,’ she shouted as the water came on, ‘there’s something you can do for me.’

‘Yes?’

‘Get me some breakfast.’

well hi there jordan

Jordan was watching a kettle not boiling when the low, flat, uninflected voice came from the air behind him. He turned in a poor imitation of a fighting crouch and saw the face of the Black Planner on a small television tile propped in a corner of the kitchen counter. He stared open-mouthed for a moment, and the animated line-drawing of a face smiled, apparently in response. One of the telecams on a nearby shelf had a tiny red eye beside its lens’s unwinking stare – he was sure it hadn’t been on before.

sorry to startle you

The voice came from the speakers of the room’s sound system, an eerily perfect reproduction of words that didn’t bother to pretend they came from a human throat.

‘I’m pleased to see you again,’ he said. ‘Thank you for the money. It made a big difference to my life.’

so i understand i have been watching your progress with interest your new girlfriend has no doubt told you that an offensive is imminent

Jordan nodded, dry-mouthed. There was something disturbingly familiar about the face, familiar beyond the fact of his having seen it before. He felt he had encountered it somewhere else. Possibly the Black Planner himself was an ANR cadre who walked unmarked in the streets of Norlonto, a face he’d passed by in the crowd.

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 the offensive is no longer imminent it is current and i again have a proposition for you the risk is considerable and there is no monetary reward however i think you will obtain satisfaction out of the high probability that your actions will result in a very substantial reduction in the human cost of the insurrection do i have your interest

‘Yes.’

i urgently require access to some systems from which i am currently excluded once again it is just a matter of entering a code on a terminal the code in question will follow your agreement to proceed as will the relevant passwords the terminal is the high-security terminal in the office of melody lawson and the time is as soon as you can get there

‘Oh, that terminal.’ He hoped the routines the Planner was manipulating could pick up voice-tones, even if it couldn’t transmit them. ‘And how do you expect me to get back into BC, let alone into the office? And what about getting out again?’

entering the enclave will not be a problem as you shall see if you attempt it as for the office you are to do this by deception if possible and subsequently you are to effect your safe exit by mass agitation if necessary i understand you are a persuasive speaker when you are telling the truth and a plausible liar when you are not comrade duvalier is at this moment being asked to accompany you and her combat skills will provide some backup i can assure you that other disruption will be provided but i do not deny that the risk is considerable on the other hand the risks involved in staying here particularly if your task is not carried out are an order of magnitude greater

It took a moment for Jordan to turn the quiet statement over.

‘You’re saying that doing nothing is ten to a hundred times more dangerous than your crazy scheme?’

correct

‘Well, in that case,’ Jordan said slowly, grinning back at the Planner, ‘it’s all perfectly justifiable selfish cowardice, so I’ll do it.’

you did not think i would ask you to carry out an act of reckless courage did you

The drawn face smiled in a way that made Jordan wish he could talk to the real person behind it.

‘I hope I see you again,’ he said, understanding for the first time something of what the catchphrase meant: afterwards…

goodbye jordan i hope i see you again

Numbers came up.

‘Two bits of news,’ MacLennan said, looking back over his shoulder and taking one hand from the steering-wheel to gesticulate. ‘The first is that the Army Council has decided to go for it. The offensive is under way.’

‘Yee-hah!’ Kohn yelled.

They bumped up a pitted tarmac strip between willows and beeches and turned on to the main road. ‘The second is, we’ve cracked the thing with the Star Fraction.’

‘What?’ Janis leaned forward from the back seat, clutching her seat-belt.

‘The Star Fraction,’ MacLennan repeated, raising his voice. He shifted gears and the engine note dropped. ‘When the systems settled down yesterday we – that is, Doctor Van and some of our security people – got in touch with your friend in outer space.’ He waved a hand skywards, just in case they didn’t know where that was. ‘Logan was quite happy to cooperate. Between them they think they’ve figured it out. We got through to people from the old days who knew Josh, and who have been in this Star Fraction for years without knowing what it was. And without telling anyone,’ he added disgustedly. ‘These God-damned Trotskyites, excuse my English, Doctor Taine. The long and the short of it is that Josh didn’t just prepare for the fall of the Republic, which he had every right to do, but for the fall of civilization itself! He set up these unauthorized programs in the Black Plan to seek out and store biological data, and he compiled a mailing list, would you believe, of people who could make use of it. But he never fired it off, and it just beavered away for two decades getting things ready. A Black Plan inside the Black Plan.’

The humvee swerved on to the road up to the house they were staying in. ‘I don’t see how that worked,’ Kohn said. ‘Logan couldn’t have been on any list that Josh drew up.’

‘It was a very intelligent mailing list,’ MacLennan said. ‘And then the other day you triggered the main program. At some other time maybe not much would have happened, but in the present situation…’

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought,’ Kohn said. The vehicle lurched to a halt. MacLennan led them into the kitchen of the house, where Dr Van greeted them, bleary-eyed. He poured them coffee as they sat down around the table.

‘MacLennan has explained our findings?’

‘Yeah,’ Kohn said. He lit the cigarette Van offered him. ‘Still doesn’t explain these things I encountered, the Watchmaker AIS.’

Van steepled his fingers and talked around his cigarette like a diminutive Bogart. ‘We have to be very careful in drawing conclusions,’ he said. ‘These programs are in some sense spin-offs, replications, reflections of an aspect of the Plan.’

Janis heard Kohn’s indrawn breath.

‘The Plan has evolved considerably over the past twenty years,’ Van continued. ‘Consequently, its products – we may suppose – are by many orders of magnitude more sophisticated than anything Josh Kohn originally intended. Nevertheless, they remain basically information-seeking software constructs, with a specific task.’ He smiled, thin-lipped. ‘Such as cleaning out my company’s databanks, and many others. Which they have accomplished.’

‘You’re telling me they’re just gophers?’ Kohn sounded indignant. ‘That’s not what I encountered. These things think, man.’

Van sighed out a cloud of smoke. ‘Comrade Kohn,’ he said, ‘please, let us be objective. Your experience was subjective. And drug-mediated. That is not to say,’ he went on hastily, ‘that it was necessarily invalid. The situation may indeed be as you perceived it. If so’ – he shrugged – ‘time will tell, and soon. The fact remains that they are in a very real sense artificial intelligences, and ones to which you have an access which is for the moment unique. It is imperative, now that the final offensive is opening, that you contact them again and persuade them to keep a low profile. Will you do that?’

Moh turned to Janis as if searching her face for something. She didn’t know what answer she gave, if any. He turned away, looked at the table for a moment.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘When?’

‘Now,’ said MacLennan, standing up.

Moh had instructions. While he was trying to contact the Watchmaker entities, Van was to liaise with the Army Council by landlink…

‘And what about me?’ Janis asked.

The big officer paused at the door, frowning.

‘Och, just guard them with your life,’ he said, and disappeared down the stairs. The door slammed. A minute later they heard the helicopter take off.

Van went out and came back with an armful of televisions which he placed in a semicircle with a couple of chairs in the middle. He tossed a remote control to Janis.

‘Keep zapping the news channels,’ he said. ‘Watch the local ones for the subtext until they start to come over to our side. For hard coverage go for the globals. CNN is fairly reliable on such occasions.’

Janis settled herself with a mug of coffee to hand and glanced at Moh, who was gazing out of the window. Van bent over the terminal.

‘You’re very confident about taking some local stations,’ she said wryly. ‘You really expect to get that far in the first hours?’

Van looked surprised.

‘Don’t you understand…Oh, I’m sorry, we never explained it. If the system has decided it’s time for us to strike it means we can take the country in the first hours. We intend to proclaim the republic on the six o’clock news from London. If things don’t go smoothly, the news at ten. If we’re wrong, or the system is flawed, then—’

He spread his hands.

‘You’ve been wrong before,’ Moh said. ‘Four defeated offensives in fifteen years doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.’

‘We didn’t have all the bugs out of it,’ Van admitted. ‘Call those campaigns user-acceptance testing.’

‘With live data,’ Moh said.

Van’s lips compressed for a moment. ‘I understand the offensives would have been attempted anyway,’ he said. ‘The costs would have been higher without the system. And remember: the system learns from its mistakes.’

‘As does the state,’ Janis pointed out. ‘And if you lose – if we lose – the best we can hope for is winning a bloody civil war.’

‘What do you think you’re having already?’ Van snapped. ‘The Hanoverian forces are being bled constantly by what you call the troubles. The local militias are mostly cynical mercenaries without conviction. The best of the autonomous communities will welcome an end to the war of all against all. Strikes and demonstrations are frequent in the major cities. This is the most violent and unstable country in Europe. You hear much about the NVC, but to be honest we are well behind the ANR.’

‘That’s what I like to hear,’ said Moh, settling again by the terminal. ‘All we have to worry about is the Yanks coming in and bombing the shit out of us. Again. Well, I’ll try to convince the electric anarchists out there to keep their heads down.’

Van offered him the gun leads and the glades. Moh took them, his other hand already moving like a skilled weaver’s.

Colours came up.

Van looked away to the other screens, where interesting items were appearing on local channels, usually in traffic reports.

‘Jesus wept,’ Cat muttered as she and Jordan struggled along the crowded pavement of the Broadway. ‘Half the bloody country seems to have gone on strike.’ Traffic was gridlocked, a knock-back effect of distant junctions blocked by buses whose drivers had simultaneously decided to exercise their right to a mid-morning break. Several office buildings were picketed by workers in white shirts and ties. Even with all the honking of horns and chanting of slogans, Norlonto seemed quieter than usual.

Jordan glanced sidelong at the good communist and loyal daughter of the revolution beside him and smirked. In the Modesty dress which she’d magically produced like a coloured scarf from an egg she could pass for a well brought-up young Beulah City lady, except…

‘Language,’ he chided. ‘Apart from that you’re doing fine. I’m amazed at how you’ve mastered the effortless glide.’

‘Effortless, hell,’ Cat choked. ‘You have to kick the goddam petticoats out of the way with every step you take, and if I’m not careful I’ll blow my foot off.’

She had jeans on underneath, two side-arms in boot holsters, and ammo strapped to her thighs.

Jordan took her elbow and ostentatiously steered her past a trodie who’d collapsed in the doorway of a Help the Waged charity shop.

‘The correct expression, my dear,’ he said, ‘is: “My feet are killing me.”’

Cat laughed. ‘You’re a sight yourself.’

‘Update me on it,’ Jordan said, running a finger around the inside of his collar and leaving it even more sticky and uncomfortable. A frantic search of Moh’s wardrobe had turned up a frightful ’thirties outfit, three-piece with cravat, which he’d apparently worn to the interview for the last respectable job he’d ever attempted to get, in some edited-out deviation from what he nowadays presented as a steady career progression from bricklayer to union organizer to mercenary. Jordan had insisted on taking Cat’s jacket and his jeans in a carpet-bag: whatever it took to get into BC, he’d no intention of being seen like this attempting street oratory – for which, he gathered, street-credibility was a crucial requirement. Even by Beulah City’s time-lapsed standards he looked a complete neuf. Cat, by exasperating contrast, didn’t look out of place in Norlonto.

Overhead, air traffic was being diverted away from Alexandra Port and the sky was gradually filling up: airships at the lowest level; then re-entry gliders cracking past and drifting into the city’s thermals, rising in great lazy spirals; above them the blue of the sky crosshatched with the contrails of airliners stacked above Heathrow or giving up and making a break for the Landmass.

Cat and Jordan found themselves part of a flow of people going down the hill. Looking back, Jordan saw that more and more people were pressing on from behind them. Almost every other vehicle in the road had been abandoned, and more occupants were joining the pedestrians by the minute. He’d worried about looking worried, but by the faces around him he could see it had been a misplaced concern.

‘I’ve just realized,’ Cat said. ‘We’re in the middle of a bunch of refugees. They’re keeping very calm about it, for now, but I’ll bet there’s a flood building up of Norlonto’s middle classes getting out of the way of the godless communists and under the wing of the godly capitalists.’

‘Nobody outside BC believes the ANR is communist,’ Jordan murmured.

‘Oh yes they do,’ Cat said. ‘You should hear them talking about “the cadres”.’

‘Mind who hears us talking about them.’

‘Just listen. Everybody else is.’

And they were. Complete strangers earnestly passed on scraps of information that they’d heard from the third person back from the one who’d just passed a car with the radio left on: Glasgow had fallen to the ANR, bombs had gone off in Victoria Street, the Dail had declared war on England…The crowds thinned a little as part of the stream turned left to add to the chaos at Alexandra Port’s passenger terminals, then condensed as they funnelled in towards the BC frontier. Out of sheer devilment Cat told someone the greens were moving in on Birmingham, something she knew was flatly out of the question – she had a radio clipped in her hair, the phone curled behind her ear, and could flick channels unobtrusively by twitching it; nothing of any interest was being reported. Yet, before a hundred metres and ten minutes had gone past they’d heard from their fellow pedestrians that the greens had taken Birmingham, that the greens were evacuating Birmingham at gunpoint, and that the greens had evacuated Birmingham and destroyed the city centre with a tactical nuclear device.

Yes, she confirmed knowledgeably. They’d planted it where the Bull Ring used to be.

At the border the Warriors had given up trying to hold back the crowd. In most cases they just waved people through and acted as if it had been their idea all along; Christian charity, sanctuary. But not all: there was a Green Channel and a Red Channel, sheep and goats.

Jordan tried not to catch any visored eyes, to no avail. He and Cat were firmly directed into the Red Channel – the one that passed through the metal detector.

Moh came out of his trance with a jump. He turned to Van and Janis.

‘Yee-hah!’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Watch Manchester.’

Janis flipped to the station just as the newsreader responded to a polite tap on the shoulder. The camera pulled back to show armed civilians wandering into the newsroom. A young woman sat down self-consciously in the newsreader’s place and began reading a declaration. Others held up blue-white-and-green flags or Union Jacks with a hole cut out of the middle, waving them from side to side and chanting some slogan of which the only word that came over clearly was ‘united’.

The station went off the air just as the girl was reading the paragraph, traditional in such proclamations, calling on those who had been deceived into taking up arms for the enemy to come over to the side of the people.

‘Oh, my God,’ Janis said.

‘Not to worry,’ said Van. ‘Somebody always pulls the plug. We’ve still got the station, and the city.’

CNN confirmed that Manchester was held by the insurgents. Heavy fighting was reported from the Bristol area. Tanks assembled by unknowing robots in Japanese-owned car factories were rolling down the M6. The Security Council had gone into emergency session, not over Britain but over the border clashes between Russia and the Turkish Confederacy and the Sino-Soviet capture of Vladivostok.

‘Told you they’re overstretched,’ Moh said.

‘Have you made any…contact yet?’

‘No, I’ve only encountered your systems,’ Moh said. ‘Everything seems to be going fine. I’m going back in.’ He smiled at them and turned to the screen.

Cat leaned back and whispered to Jordan. He straightened up, smiling at her protectively.

‘No X-rays, please,’ he said. Cat blushed and flicked her eyelashes down and patted her belly. The Warrior keyed a switch and nodded. Cat stepped through the arched gate.

Beep.

She frowned and backed out, then laid her fingers across her mouth and opened her eyes wide. She groped in her handbag and gingerly lifted out a derringer and handed it to the guard, who sighed and slid it along the counter past the outside of the detector. Jordan watched this performance, tapping his foot while other people jostled behind him. Cat went under the arch again.

Beep beep beeeeep.

Cat stepped back, turned scarlet-faced to the guard and leaned over and murmured to him. She caught the side of her skirt between hip and knee latitudes and pushed it towards his hands. He felt it for a moment, as if flexing something. He let go of it. One hand went to the back of his neck. He looked around, took in the length of the queue and almost surreptitiously switched off the device and gestured to Cat. She sailed through, picked up her lady’s handgun and waited for Jordan. To make up for this the guard inspected Jordan’s carpet-bag with two minutes of awe-inspiring thoroughness, listening with obvious disbelief to the explanation that Earth’s Angels was a Christian ecology study group, before letting him through.

Traffic was moving; the pavements were clearer in Park Road. No strikes here, and people had the sense to get off the streets. Jordan spotted a vacant pedicab and hailed it. He knew exactly how to help her in, which was just as well because she didn’t.

‘What on earth did you tell him was setting it off?’

‘Steel hoops,’ said Cat smugly.

‘Guess he was too embarrassed to check.’

Cat looked sideways at him. ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘The guns and the shell-cases are all plastic.’

They reached the top of Crouch Hill. The pedicab’s backup electric motor stopped; there was a moment of poise as the driver took the weight on the pedals again. Jordan looked at the city, sharp and clear, less hazy than usual, in early-autumn sunlight. He didn’t glance at the house from which he’d seen this view so many times. The silver dirigibles moved above it, their paths intricate, crossing over each other.

‘Look at the airships!’ Cat said.

‘Yeah, I’ve never seen so many in one—’

‘No, look!’

Things were dropping from the airships, black dots – Jordan turned to look at the closest, floating above Finsbury Park. He saw the canopies open, and tried to scan the whole sky, see everything at once. All around, as far as human eye could see, parachutes and hang-gliders descended on the open spaces of the city like a selective fall of multicoloured snow.

‘Air hostesses!’ Cat said, and then wouldn’t say anything else.

The nearest parachutes came down out of sight, a kilometre or so eastward. Jordan was relieved they hadn’t landed at the near end of the park—they were probably going for the tactically more important junction at Seven Sisters.

Fonthill Road was deserted. Jordan paid the cabbie in B-marks, gaining a surprised look of thanks, and walked with Cat to the doorway of the block where he’d last worked, less than a fortnight ago. A Warrior stood outside. His submachine-gun covered their approach. The sensation that at any second he could be ripped in half was a new one for Jordan.

‘What’s your business, sir?’

‘River Valley Distribution,’ Jordan said, passing him a laminated card.

‘And who have you come to see?’

Jordan smiled politely. ‘MacLaren & Jones.’ If he knew his former partners, nothing short of shells coming through the window would keep them away from their desks.

The Warrior passed the card swiftly through a reader, and peered at the result. Jordan tried not to hold his breath. His fictitious company’s status as an approved supplier, left over from his SILK.ROOT program, was the nearest he had to a security clearance.

The guard nodded and handed the card back. ‘You’ll find them up the stairs and on the right.’

He stepped aside. Jordan held the door open for Cat. She went up the stairs with surprising speed, and let Jordan lead the way into the offices. The great workroom was almost empty, most of the screens dead.

Debbie Jones, who’d usually worked evenings when Jordan had been her partner, was standing by the desk they’d serially shared. She faced the door, evidently alerted she had a visitor. The screen behind her bled with the colours of falling shares.

‘Jordan! I never expected to see you back here!’ She sounded half-welcoming, half-disapproving. Jordan had always thought of her as quite a nice girl, intelligent but conventional; unmemorable oval face, straight long hair, straight long dress. Her glance flicked to Cat and back to Jordan with a look of marginally increased understanding that he was beginning to find irritatingly familiar. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Do you know why I left?’

She shook her head. ‘And I’m not interested, frankly.’ Another glance at Cat. ‘It was a bit inconsiderate of you. Though in all fairness we didn’t do too badly out of your selling out to us.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ Jordan said. ‘I’m sorry about the inconvenience I must have caused you.’ He wondered if she knew he’d left Beulah City entirely. If she hadn’t, it suggested Mrs Lawson had been more anxious to cover up than to investigate.

‘Actually,’ he went on with an embarrassed-sounding laugh, ‘I’m not here to see you at all. I just have some matters to clear up with Mrs Lawson. Security stuff, you know?’

Debbie frowned. ‘I don’t see—’

Jordan looked past her. ‘Hey, what’s happened to the Dow Jones?’

Debbie looked over her shoulder. ‘Oh, rats!’ She sat down and started rapid-fire keying. In the thirty seconds of distraction this afforded Jordan walked briskly to Mrs Lawson’s office.

‘Where is everybody?’ Cat asked, looking around.

‘They must be on strike.’

‘Ha, ha.’

He knocked on Mrs Lawson’s door.

‘Come in.’

Jordan looked at Cat. ‘After you, lady.’

Cat opened the door and sailed through. Jordan hung back for a moment, then stepped in and closed it. Mrs Lawson was standing behind her pine desk, her hands on top of her head. Her whole attention was on Cat’s derringer; her face showed shocked bewilderment.

Then she looked up and saw Jordan. Her expression deepened to one of utter dismay. Her mouth opened…

Cat raised one hand. Mrs Lawson’s lips clenched.

Jordan climbed over the desk to the terminal, avoiding passing between her and Cat. He tapped in the code and hit Enter.

The ghosts were gone now, and the animal mind of the gun. He was on his own, looking down at the country like a god. It was more than a map, more than a view from a fantastic unclouded height. A moment’s attention was all it took to take him close. He saw armoured columns, and he could zoom in on individual tanks. He saw the sinking silk, the rising smoke, and focused in on a city centre where ANR fighters attacked a police barracks with nerve-shattering ferocity. He heard the yelled slogans, the shouted pain.

He was there and he wanted to be there. He looked at London, saw the converging lines, the closing circles, the bright sector of Norlonto and, just to its south, a dark patch, a blindspot. It too lit up, flickering (hand over bank of switches), and he turned away.

He looked up and saw them beside him in the imagined sky. They were exactly like the tiny sparks of light he’d sometimes seen when gazing at a clear blue sky. On this scale they were shining silver ships, UFOs insolently dancing in the air over Britain, alien intelligences waiting to be noticed.

He reached out to warn them.

Jordan turned away from the terminal.

Cat chucked him a roll of heavy-duty tape from her handbag.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lawson,’ he said, peeling off a metre of it. ‘You know how it is. Nothing personal.’

Mrs Lawson nodded. ‘That’s quite all right, Jordan.’

He taped her securely to the office chair, after checking as best he could that the chair itself didn’t conceal any alarm switches. If she had one about her person, she’d probably used it already, and in any case they could hardly remove her teeth one by one. Then he taped the chair to the radiator at the window.

When he was about to tape her mouth she shook her head.

‘No need,’ she said. ‘The room’s completely soundproof. I’d appreciate it if you’d let someone know where I am once you feel safe.’

‘No problem about that, but I’ll still have to do it. Voice activation.’

Mrs Lawson looked at him as if she’d never heard of it.

‘You’re taking this very well,’ said Cat, still keeping her covered. ‘Something we should know, yeah?’

Mrs Lawson laughed. ‘Oh, no, nobody’s on the way. It’s only that I’m quite used to interpreting finger movements as keystrokes – years of watching people enter passwords. You were rather fond of Engels and Lucretius, weren’t you Jordan? I recognized the code you tapped in just now.’ She looked from him to Cat, and back. ‘Is this the Catherin Duvalier I’ve heard so much about? Did she persuade you that Kohn was wrong and Donovan was right?’

‘What’s Donovan got to do with this?’ Jordan snapped at her, baffled. He didn’t understand the reference to Kohn either.

Mrs Lawson gave him an impatient, scornful look. ‘Oh, stop playing games, Jordan. Who else would want to turn off my security software?’

‘The ANR, if you must know,’ Jordan said, stung by her insinuations.

She stared at him for a moment and then began to giggle, at first in a schoolgirlish, sniggering tone and then with a rising pitch that bordered on hysterical. In a surge of fury and disgust he slapped the tape across her mouth.

‘You’re the one who’s playing games,’ he said bitterly.

Tears leaked from her eyes and her shoulders quaked.

‘Breathe OK?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

He moved behind Cat and opened the door. They backed out and walked quickly to the exit. Debbie Jones leapt up from her seat.

‘What’s going on?’ she demanded.

Jordan hesitated. Debbie turned away from him and pointed to the screen. Mandelbrot snowflakes drifted across it, faded, and died to a dot.

‘System crash,’ Jordan said, thinking on his feet. ‘Mrs Lawson’s trying to fix it. She’s a bit caught up in it but she’d like to see you in about ten minutes. Some files I left lying about,’ he added in a vaguely apologetic tone. ‘See you around.’

He followed Cat out, aware that Debbie was still standing and watching them with the expression of someone who just knows they’ve missed something, but…

‘That stuff about Donovan,’ Cat said as they left the office. ‘D’you think that’s what she thought?’

‘Could be,’ Jordan said. ‘Or a bit of disinformation. She’s an expert at it.’

‘And why did she mention Moh?’

Jordan stood still. The question was nagging at him. How had she connected him with Moh? Then he remembered.

‘She didn’t say Moh, she said Kohn. Maybe she meant Josh Kohn, she’s old enough to know about him and the Plan, and she knew I’d done something on the Plan.’

‘Yeah, he has a reputation,’ Cat said. ‘But how did she guess who I was?’

Jordan grinned. The answer seemed obvious after his trawls through the net. ‘You’ve got a reputation, too!’

Jordan began to descend the stairs backwards, holding the rail with one hand and reaching the other towards Cat.

‘Sod this for a game of soldiers,’ she said.

She returned to the top and slid her thumbs deftly around her waist, then shoved down hard on her skirt. With a rending noise it came away from the bodice. She stepped out of the collapsing structure.

‘Velcro,’ she explained. ‘Gimme my jacket.’

Jordan took it from the bag and felt a sudden impulse to be free himself. He scrambled out of the suit and into his jeans as Cat did something arcane with the crinoline frame, folding and telescoping it to flat quarter-circles, making it and the skirts vanish into the bag. (How do they do these things? he wondered. Where do they learn them? And what are the military applications?).

He looked at her, tall boots and short guns, tight jeans, bodice tucked into them like a fancy fitted shirt under the big jacket. She put one hip forward and held a fist to it.

‘Calamity Jane rides again,’ she said.

‘Minor detail,’ said Jordan, glancing down the stairs. ‘The guard. Unless you’re going for the final shot of Butch and Sundance.’

‘Nah,’ she sneered. She passed him one of the side-arms and signed to him to follow her down the steps. At the foot they crept to the door and flattened against the wall. Cat reached out and very slowly turned the knob and inched the door open, then let it swing inwards.

There was a rush of noise. Cat waited for a moment and risked a look around the jamb. She laughed and stepped into the doorway. The Warrior had left, and in the street there was…

‘A multitude,’ Jordan said.

Bleibtreu-Fèvre had found an antique CRT buried among the vast arrays of screens. On experimenting with it he discovered it was a television. It picked up only four channels, none of which showed anything but ballet or marching bands. The old state broadcasting system, responding to a crisis of the state in the time-honoured fashion. He flicked idly between Les Sylphides and the 2039 Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

He felt exhausted, burnt-out on anti-som, fatalistic. They were doomed. He had worked with Donovan all night, helping as best he could while the old crank honed and refined his hunter-killer viruses, repeatedly launching them with high hopes only to see them snuffed out by Melody Lawson’s diabolically effective countermeasures.

With his inside knowledge and Donovan’s hacking expertise, they eavesdropped on communications between Stasis and Space Defense. Most of it was unbreakably encrypted, but from what they could pick up it was obvious SD was in the final stages of confirmation that a genuine emergency existed, working through the fail-safes, the dual-keys, to the inevitable, fated and fatal decision that the datasphere was beyond the command of man and had to be destroyed at any cost.

He’d considered contacting SD or Stasis directly, telling them what was going on, getting them to force that stupid, stubborn Christian woman to disable her countermeasures and let Donovan have at least one good shot at the AI…but he knew in his altered bones it was hopeless, that even if he could reach a high enough command level they’d just treat it as further confirmation that the emergency was real.

They were doomed.

Donovan’s shout of triumph brought him to his feet. The old man dashed from terminal to terminal, whirled his arms in elaborate movements, wrestled with virtual shapes. He paused to yell at Bleibtreu-Fèvre: ‘She must have changed her mind! The counterviruses are gone!’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre moved out of Donovan’s way and watched as he slowed, wound down, and eventually stopped to look around from screen to screen.

‘They’re free,’ he said. ‘The very best, keyed to the Watchmaker’s memes.’ He smiled at Bleibtreu-Fèvre, and at that moment he did not look old, or mad, or evil – the very opposite: he stood proud and glad, a white magician who had saved a great but simple folk from forces darker than they had the strength to know.

‘We’ve done it!’ he said. ‘They’ll have no reason to hit the datasphere now. There will be no gigadeaths.’

Billions died.

Billions of living things, conscious minds, with subtler and sharper feelings, with higher joys and deeper hurts than any human would ever know.

They died: ruptured like cells in strong saline, exploded from within like the 15psi house, blasted from without like a head struck by a bullet, vaporized like a satellite in a particle beam, vanished like flesh in a firestorm.

Moh had seen them all, the classic slo-mos, the freeze-frames, the stills, the instantaneous archaeology of recent and sudden death. He had never flinched from facing the deaths he had dealt out himself. These – image and reality inseparable memories now – provided him with the signs for what he saw, what he heard and felt as choking smoke boiled out of the ground, out of the air, and every particle of the smoke became a ravening engine of destruction that devoured one bright artificial intelligence, then twisted and turned unsated for the next. Thought of his thought, mind of his mind, sharing the vanishing point of his reflection of the self that knew: the minute fraction of their anguish that he experienced was pain beyond endurance, loss beyond recovery.

The black smoke engulfed the world, and was gone: it cleared to show the world as it had been, unchanged except for the extinction of its newest life. Moh stared at the wasted planet for a long second, and saw that the smoke had not dispersed as it had cleared: it had concentrated to a point, a black hole in the datasphere, the pupil of a single eye with a single thought behind it. It looked at him. It saw the signature of the software that ran his window on the system, and dilated. His eyes, in helpless reflex, dilated in response. The flickering lethal morse found an answer in the software that shared his brain.

White-hot needles stabbed through his eyes into his head, into his brain: a new environment for the information viruses, where they replicated, forming snarls of complex logic that entangled him, clanking mechanisms that pursued him from one thought to another, down corridors of memory and forgotten rooms of days.

He heard the rattle of keyboard keys and turned to see Josh working on the CAL system. He reached out to warn him.

There was a splintering crash and an iron arm burst from the screen. Servomechanical fingers grasped his father’s head. The whole metal monster followed the arm out of the ruined screen and reared up on the table, lifting the man by the head. Bits of plastic and glass and circuitry slipped from its head and down its sides; blood dripped from Josh Kohn’s. The hand opened and the body thudded to the ground. The clustered sensors on the thing’s head unit swung, seeking, scanning, but Moh was out of the window crash and running, a man again, but without a gun.

teletrooper ducked through the doorway shielded lenses scanned gun-arm swung to cover

two youths in tracksuits and bandanas followed it into the flat M-16s like toys beside its armaments and they like boys blonded hair and two days’ worth of thin stubble

fucking traitor commie cunt

HEY MAN YOU CAN’T DO THAT

the blue roundel on the brow of its dome the white circle of olive-leaves the line-scored globe

OK YOU CAN TAKE THEM OUT NOW

death is not lived through

He ran up the Coyoacan corridor gasping in the heat and burst into the Old Man’s study. There was no one at the desk. Dust-motes danced in the yellow shaft from the window. He reached out for the paper on the desk. It crumbled as he picked it up, and as he looked around the room he saw the shelves emptying and the books crumble and rot: there was a momentary, overpowering and disgusting whiff of mildewed paper.

Someone behind his shoulder

Jacson, with his ice-pick raised high, and smashing down on

But it is in my brain

It crashed into the desk into the crumbled paper the yellow pamphlets

Death agony tasks transitional program

He ran

Greenbelt streets green grass

and sunlight everywhere

dark now

He saw them as teletroopers, an endless and ever increasing army of marching metal, that hacked into all the systems, all the hard ware and the soft: the neural networks burned, the programs corrupted and degenerated.

He was driven back and back as they pried into, levered apart and splintered memory, intellect, feeling, sense; until the last shard of his shattered mind was broken smaller than the quantum of reflection, and he died.

A single cry came from him, and his head crashed forward and down on to the databoard. Janis leaped to his shoulder, with Van a moment behind her. They lifted him and tilted him back in the seat. Janis stared into his unblinking eyes as she felt his neck for a pulse. There was none.

Van helped her lower him to the floor, then snatched a phone. As soon as he put it down it rang again. He listened, hardly speaking, then turned to where she laboured to save Moh’s life. For minutes they took turns blowing into his lungs, hammering his breastbone. A screeching stop; feet on the stairs. Janis paused, drew back, drew breath. Two paramedics stuck trodes to his head, stabbed a needle into his heart, pumped oxygen into his mouth, slapped shock-pads to his chest.

Then they looked at each other, looked at her and Van, and stood back.

‘I’m sorry,’ one of them said. ‘There’s nothing—’

‘Nothing you can do?’ she whispered.

‘Nothing there. Not a reflex, nothing. The nerves aren’t even carrying the shocks.’ He paused as if appalled at what he had said. ‘What happened to him?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!’

Janis threw herself over the body and howled.