The Star Fraction

15

Expert Sister

She sat down at the sewing-machine, hitching up her skirt and petticoats to free her foot for the control pedal. This wasn’t like the basic machines in the workshop: it had so much software built into it that a complete beginner could produce marvellous work within an hour. So it claimed, in a bright voice, as Catherin paged through its menus and selected stitches and colours and sizes. She placed the denim jacket under the needle’s foot, bringing it over the pieces and outlines she’d made. When she’d started she’d intended to finish it unaided, in an attempt to fit into the community’s pattern. Now she no longer had a reason to fight down her seething impatience with the finicky tediousness of handicraft. She just wanted to finish it.

After Valery had returned from seeing Moh off they’d had a few minutes of tense recrimination. Valery had told her that the reason she’d been invited here in the first place was to keep her – and Moh – out of Donovan’s reach. Cat had known all along, having explained her situation to the sisters, that they were trying to get Moh here and that for some reason they had to do it indirectly – hence her fleeting appearance in the videophone call – but she was annoyed to find their main purpose was not to clear her name but to rope Moh in for some purpose of their own. Valery tactfully pointed out that Cat, too, had had a trick up her sleeve.

Cat’s outrage had subsided somewhat. It was a valid point, she grudgingly conceded.

‘All right,’ she’d said. ‘Fair enough. But can you just tell me – what the hell’s going on?’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘Oh come on. I’m sure you were gratified when Moh Kohn suddenly decided to rally to the flag, but you know as well as I do that he must have done it to get out of a desperate situation. I’ve never seen him look like he did when I told him the CLA were sending a couple of agents round, and I’ve been under heavy fire with that guy. He’s like a lot of fighters – he’s not foolhardy but he’s, uh, fatalistic, you know?’

Valery nodded. ‘I’ve been there,’ she said. ‘There’s one with your name on it; what’s for you won’t go past you, it’ll go through you; when your number comes up your number comes up. All that crap. As if we hadn’t heard that Chaos exists and God doesn’t.’

‘Yeah.’ Cat grinned, seeing Valery for the first time as someone a bit like herself, a fighter. ‘It is like a superstition, isn’t it? Huh. If you put all the fighters’ shit-kickin superstitions and all their red-handed scruples together you’d end up with some kind of caveman religion. Anyway, what it all adds up to is that when they can’t see no way out they’re just stupidly brave. I mean, I’ve seen that guy in action, and he laughs at death. It’s literally true. OK. Well, when I told him about the cranks, he was shitting himself. He was white. And then he just sort of smiled and relaxed. That must have been when he sussed this place was ANR.’

‘No, I’d already told him. And, even before then, he’d recognized the parachutes. We must find out how he did that…we’ve shown hundreds of people around the areas he saw and nobody’s suspected a thing.’ Valery snorted. ‘He’s taken the Republic’s shilling now, so no doubt he’ll have to tell us.’

‘And what can you tell me?’ Cat persisted.

Valery looked at her, frowning distantly. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I have some things to check out. Meanwhile…’ And she’d suggested that Cat go to this shared but private workroom. One corner was a sewing area, with the machine, a dressmakers’ dummy, and a chest-of-drawers full of fabrics. In the opposite corner stood a computer terminal and a locked rack of diskettes. The walls were an apple-green shade of white; one of them was almost covered by a television screen, with a comprehensive array of subscriber attachments.

she cursored, and the sewing-machine console’s ammo-belt of reels rattled around and slotted one into place. The thread was caught by a pair of clicking pincers and pulled through guides and finally the needle’s eye. ‘Begin,’ said the machine, with what she thought an understandable smugness.

For a while Catherin lost track of time altogether; one part of her mind absorbed the shades and shapes as another part worked away in another place. She began to understand how the sisters could combine their super-ficially frivolous occupations with…preoccupations, in hard and cold and logical thought about logistics and politics, strategy and tactics.

As she now did. She’d thought she had set Moh up, and now saw that she herself had been – first by the ANR, and then by the CLA. As far as she knew she was free to go, now the cranks had cleared her name. She was back on the Committee for a Social-Ecological Intervention’s databases as a gun for hire – she’d checked that as soon as the rent-cop had given her Moh’s receipt and left. But she had no intention of working for the CLA again, united front or no united front. It was obvious that Donovan was out to get Moh, and that something bloody big – big and bloody both – was coming down.

for the lettering. <90mm. serif.>

Rumours of yet another ANR final offensive had circulated throughout the summer and into the autumn. On the very reasonable assumption that it would be a surprise when it came, she’d discounted the story even while spreading it. This hadn’t been irresponsible, in her view. It was perfectly legitimate disinformation, because the Alliance, the spectrum coalition brought together by a faction of the official wing of the Labour Party, was definitely planning a hot autumn of demonstrations and fraternizations, with a few daring armed actions by the Red Rose Brigades thrown in. So, at least, the state media alleged, and the free media denied and confirmed and debated.

The lettering was finished. She smiled at the words. Now back to outlining the appliqué, filling in the spaces.

Anything to get the enemy as confused as we are. Talk about poor bloody infantry. She felt a sudden surge of anger at it all, the deception and manipulation and calculation, the trade-offs and stand-offs, the violence to vulnerable human flesh. Something had genuinely attracted her, she saw now, in the femininists’ cover story, the make-up and veiling of their sinews of war.

It was finished. Cat looked at the clock icon, surprised at how many hours had passed. She snipped and tied off the last threads and took the jacket out of the machine. She stood up and admired it at arm’s-length for a minute, then draped it around her and admired it again, looking over her shoulder in a mirror.

‘That’s really good.’

She turned quickly to see Valery standing in the doorway. The jacket slipped from her shoulders.

‘Yes, I’m quite pleased with it, even if using this machine was a bit of a cheat.’ She half-knelt to pick it up. Her skirt settled in slow billows, like a parachute.

‘Nonsense, Cat, it’s the design and the carrying of it through that matters. The method is just technical.’

‘Like, the end justifies the means?’ Cat straightened, smoothed the skirt, and looked at Valery with a demure smile.

‘Hah!’ Valery swivelled the console’s chair and sat down. ‘We never claimed to be pacifists, you know.’

Cat shook her head, as if to rattle her synapses back to their old pattern, and stood up.

‘What a scam. You had me worried there. I thought I was going soft myself when all the time I was being – softened up! To work for the ANR, of all the macho elitist gangs!’ She caught the sides of her skirt and swirled it around her in a joyous flurry.

‘That’s not how I see it,’ Valery said, a half-embarrassed smile on her lips. ‘As it happens…we have a job for you to do. A job for the ANR.’ Her smile broadened. ‘Usual rates.’

Cat considered this. ‘And the alternative is staying here, right?’

Valery nodded. ‘We can’t risk letting you go back to Donovan’s gang. All right, all right, you can say you won’t, but unless you have a contract with us there’ll be nothing to stop you changing your mind as soon as you’re out the door. So either you do this job – nothing too risky, by the way – or you sit out the insurrection behind a sewing-machine, making parachutes.’

Cat knew that Valery was putting it to her gently. The ANR had a short temper and a long memory.

‘I’ll do the job,’ Cat said hastily, fighting off a panicky, smothered feeling. ‘What is it?’

‘That’s the spirit,’ said Valery. ‘Good girl.’

Jordan looked at the message in the work-space, restraining an impulse to bat the reply tag yet again.

Moh says search over, do your own thing.

It wasn’t just the gnomic brevity of the message that frustrated him. The sender, the Women’s Peace Community, had vanished from the nets as if it had never existed. Jordan had sent a dozen responses, all of which had bounced. His suspicion that the femininist community was connected to the ANR intensified.

Moh, wherever he was, wasn’t taking calls either. Jordan had little doubt that the message came from him; it echoed what Moh had said when he’d first asked Jordan to help him. And now, apparently, he expected Jordan to drop the investigation. Some chance, comrade. Jordan had spent the afternoon since contacting Moh and Janis in a succession of net trawls. He’d detected the effect of Moh’s settlement of the dispute with Donovan, and the clearing of Cat’s status. In the narrow, fiercely contested fringe where Norlonto’s private defence agencies and political-military groupuscules fought indistinguishably in the dark, Catherin Duvalier was a respected minor player. Every so often, through the afternoon, the thought would come back to Jordan of Cat returning to that.

Mary Abid had gone back to work on the other side of the world, oblivious. The comms room was still airless, and hot. Jordan pulled in the original message, the videophone call, and froze it at the exact moment when Cat looked up, brushing her hair from her face. He trimmed away the rest of the image, enlarged and enhanced the picture of Cat and printed it on A4. It came off as a good-quality colour photograph. Jordan powered down the machines he’d been working on, left the room quietly and went upstairs to Moh’s room, where he stuck the picture beside the photograph of Cat on the wall. He stood back and looked at them.

There was no question that they were of the same girl, making the same gesture and the same caught half-smile. Only the clothes she wore were different: the dirt-stiff overalls, too big, the sleeve rolled back, a streak of oil smeared on her forehead by the passage of her wrist; the starch-stiff frill of the pinafore over the precisely fitted dress, a fall of lace from the cuff snagging slightly as it brushed across the hair at the side of her face. Jordan found a disturbingly erotic charge in the contrast: a passing thought vaguely associated the second picture with the Modesty advertisements that had been the pin-ups in his bedroom. The oddity was that neither outfit was intended to look sexy – in fact, the opposite, the one sexless and shapeless like the uniform of some puritan communistan, the other chaste, a model of modesty indeed – and yet Cat’s sexuality burned through both of them.

Or so it seemed. Perhaps it was just his own frustration. One of the liberating discoveries he’d made in reading the humanist philosophers was the innocence of furtive masturbation, but that was not much comfort here. By historical standards Beulah City wasn’t too bad: its churches denounced premarital sex but encouraged early marriage; its laws forbade homosexuality (theoretically on pain of death, but in practice it was almost impossible to bring a conviction, and anybody charged with it had every opportunity to shake the dust of Beulah City from their feet) and abortion, although they tolerated contraception. The only grounds for divorce that it recognized were adultery or desertion, but the complete ban on any public explicitness about sex was coupled with a reasonable provision of counselling for legally married couples. Even so, that left plenty of room for sexual ignorance, incompatibility and misery, to say nothing of hypocrisy.

Coming from that environment into this part of Norlonto was like stepping from an air-conditioned building into a hurricane. The pervasive pornography and prostitution had repelled him. He wasn’t sure whether his objection derived from the Christian beliefs he’d rejected or the humanist principles he’d embraced. The people in the Collective showed no interest in commercial sex, but he felt they disapproved of it. Their own sexual attitudes and relationships were difficult to figure out with social skills developed for an entirely different society. Mary, Alasdair, Dafyd, Lyn, Tai, Stone and the rest were to him so many black boxes, connected by arrows of desire.

Mary Abid’s long black hair and large dark eyes had been a target for some of his arrows, but she had a thing going with Stone (that relationship, at least, had been easy to identify). Jordan had also quite fancied Tai, and had even – shyly, obliquely – attempted some chatting up until he’d realized the slim, small, pretty Singaporean wasn’t a girl. And wasn’t gay either, just in case that still-unthinkable thought had crossed his mind. So until now he’d made do with highly unrealistic fantasies about Janis, whose image had floated in and out of the background of his communications with Moh.

He felt absurdly ashamed of that now as he looked at the two pictures of Cat. He didn’t want a fantasy of Cat; he wanted – it was a distinction realized, a revelation, a resolve – the reality of her. You couldn’t fall in love with someone you didn’t know, with a face in a picture; but looking at those pictures he wanted nothing else but to find this woman, to have her and hold her and protect her. And if she wouldn’t have that, if she wouldn’t have him, he could at the very least try to dissuade her from putting her beautiful body on the line in those futile fights.

Tired and restless, he threw himself face-down on the bed. For a few minutes he slept, then woke with a dribble of spittle and sweat on the pillow under the corner of his mouth. He rolled over and lay with his hands behind his head. Posters shouted down at him from the walls. British Troops Out Of English Troops Out Of London Troops Out Of Federal Troops To. Solidarity with this. Solidarity with that. Solidarity with Solidarity. (Now, what the heck did that mean?)

There was a sort of reproof in their conflicting urgencies. Moh had wanted him to speak his mind, to push his ideas up the Collective’s tiny entry ramp to the information highways, and he must have had some reason. Jordan thought he saw part of it: as a cover story for the comrades – they were all expecting him to do something like that, and had assumed that his investigations were research for it. In a sense, they were – he’d learned a great deal in the past couple of days, a lot of details of what was going on in the world which Beulah City, even at its most exposed interface to that world, screened out. It had only deepened the conviction he’d expressed to Moh and the urge to tell people they could live their lives better – and longer – if they would only walk away from their fights.

He had little new to say, he reflected wryly, about what they could do if they did walk away from them. The godless gospels had answers to that, answers he agreed with, which essentially amounted to making the fullest use of the one life that was all and enough. They disagreed about how to do it, of course. From the same starting-point, one lot would suggest we all marched off to the left, another that we raced off to the right, while a substantial body of enlightened opinion held that the best bet was to sort of wander about with our eyes and options open.

Jordan sat up with a jolt, open-eyed himself. There was a name for that attitude, that outlook, a name that had recently gained currency: post-futurism. Pragmatic, disillusioned, refusing to hold up images of an ideal society or to crank out small-scale models of it on patches of contested ground, it had been widely denounced as radically conservative or blindly subversive. There had been a big fuss a few years back when someone had applied the label to the ANR, in some fashionable, controversial book – what was it called?

On a sudden hunch Jordan jumped up and searched through Moh’s collection of political literature, digging through drifts of pamphlets for the solid chunk of the occasional hardbook. And there it was: Towards the End of the Future by Jonathan Wilde, the old space-movement guru. He picked it up and flipped through it, smiling at Moh’s pencilled underlinings and scrawled, misspelt remarks. One proposition which had met with heavy black lines, exclamation marks and ‘Yup’ was Wilde’s comment that:

Aside from the space movement itself (which, paradoxically, is oriented to a former future which has now become merely the present, with all the problems of the present), the thinking which I have provisionally labelled ‘post-futurist’ is most strongly – if unconsciously – embodied in the diverse and ineradicable resistance movements against US/UN hegemony: the Khazakh People’s Front, the ex-neo-Communists of the NVC, the nonexistent but influential conspiracy known as the Last International, the Army of the New Republic, and many more.

No shared ideal unites them – on the contrary. Having every cause to rebel, they need no ideal, no ‘cause’. One stubborn conviction is common to all of them: No More New World Orders.

I will not conceal my own conviction that in this they are right.

For we have seen the future – we have by now centuries of experience of the future – and we know it doesn’t work. It’ll be a great day when the future goes away! It’ll be a great day of liberation, when the armies, the functionaries, the camp-followers, the carpet-baggers of the future go away and leave us in peace to get on with the rest of our lives!

Intrigued, Jordan went back to the beginning of the book and read it the whole way through. It took him about an hour and a half, sitting down or wandering up and down the stairs for coffee, book in hand. When he’d finished he dug out Wilde’s earlier works from Moh’s collection and read them: The Earth is a Harsh Mistress, No More Earthquakes – short, blazing manifestos that he scanned in minutes. Wilde hadn’t changed his principles – he was still the libertarian space nut that he’d been as long as anyone could remember – but his sense of the historical possibilities had subtly altered since the heady, crusading excitement of the space movement’s early days. He no longer seemed to think the ideas he propounded were about to sweep the world, nor did he even want them to: a respect for diversity which had been theoretical, tolerant, in his earlier writing had by now deepened to a commitment to diversity for its own sake rather than as a pool for selection in which the one true way might be found.

Post-futurism was Wilde’s way of coping with living on, into his own imagined future – albeit in a constricted, local form – and finding it, as he’d said, merely the present. Jordan doubted if Moh fully sympathized with this view – still a believer in a socialist future, still a receiver of news from nowhere – but the connection between post-futurism and Jordan’s own detestation of the competing ideologies of the mini-states helped to clarify why Moh had been so keen on getting Jordan’s ideas out on the Cable.

Cunning bastard, Jordan thought. Moh had wanted him to attack the ideologies, do his best to weaken the mini-states because, in doing so, he’d be doing his little bit to help the ANR! Not that Moh had shown much faith in the ANR but, as he’d said, ‘anything rational would be better than those smelly, cosy subtotalitarianisms’. And it couldn’t be a short-term thing, either: there was not enough time before the ANR’s offensive for anybody’s words to make much difference.

But after the offensive – when the ANR’s future, its New Republic, had itself become the present – then it might make a difference. Places like the one Jordan had come from, the ideal society a few kilometres down the road, might fall militarily at a good push. Undermining their self-confidence would be a slower process.

Well, why not?

Wasn’t that what he thought anyway? Wasn’t that what he had to say?

And there was one particular person he wanted to say it to. Even if she never heard it. He went out of Moh’s room and down the stairs and along the corridor to that other room where the cameras waited.

His voice was hesitant at first, becoming more confident as he found his pace.

‘This is Jordan Brown, with…the Global Village Atheist Show. I’m here to entertain, enlighten, and enrage.

‘Since this time yesterday, another forty thousand people, plus or minus the odd thousand, have been killed. Killed quite legally, according to the famous Annexe to the Geneva Convention, in recognized conflicts around the world. All the noncombatant deaths were inflicted under Paragraph 78, section 10, subsection 3. That’s the one saying that civilians can be killed only by explosive devices aimed at legitimate military targets, and yes, I have checked, and I can assure you that no instances of poisoning, machine-gunning in front of freshly dug trenches, release of radiation or radioactive substances, or throat-cutting have come to the attention of the relevant authorities.

‘And how do we know? We know because we’re watching. The whole world is watching. About fifty years ago somebody in Edinburgh came up with a video-camera the size of a coin. Within a few years they were in mass production, and getting smaller and cheaper by the year. And they started turning up on the killing fields of Central Europe, in the torture chambers of the Americas, on the blighted plains of Africa.

‘Now they’re so small that you can take someone apart bit by bit before you discover that one of those cockroaches on the floor was a bio-comp news-gatherer, heading for home with some very interesting pictures. And that your face is on satellite television, your genetic fingerprints are on public databases, and various public-spirited if not – ha, ha – public-funded agencies are bidding up the price of your head. Just think: there was a time when torturers only had to worry about getting letters from Amnesty International!

‘So, whereas once it was possible to bomb entire countries – Laos – bludgeon a tenth of the population to death – Cambodia – or wipe out a third – East Timor – and plausibly deny that it had ever happened (the “ongoing process of holocaust revisionism”, as I think a famous linguist called it), they couldn’t get away with it any more. The silent slaughter ceased. The blood dried on the walls of the torture chambers. Starvation simply had to be wiped out, and it was, as efficiently as populations once had been, and often with the same equipment.

‘That was when this century’s first great discovery was made: the use of nuclear weapons. Until then, they didn’t have a use. A threat, a deterrent effect – even Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, in a sense, only a threat. A demonstration atrocity. It was an unknown genius in Azerbaijan who discovered what nuclear weapons are actually good for. Intercommunal massacre. Tactical nuclear intercommunal massacre. We know the result.

‘Naturally, this had to be stopped. Hence the next great discovery: a use for space-based lasers and indeed for space-based nukes. They were originally designed to drive the communist bloc to beggary, which they did, and shortly afterwards they drove the USA to bankruptcy – all of this before they were even built at all! Like the mythical tachyon bomb which destroys the target before it’s launched, orbital weapons struck backwards through time. But of course they were built anyway, and they keep the peace today by zapping any facility that looks as if it conceivably might be used to build nukes down here.

‘So there you have it: the wonderful checks and balances which have freed us from starvation, from the fear of nuclear war, from inescapable tyranny, and allow us all to go to hell in our own way. But with fourteen million, six hundred thousand combat deaths a year, we have surpassed the kill-rate of the Second World War on a permanent basis. It’s not all that different from the bad old days when we all went to hell together.

‘Don’t get me wrong: I’ll take my chances with animal-liberators, machine-wreckers, or born-again Christian militias any day rather than face new Hitlers, Stalins or Johnsons. But I’d like anyone who’s watching to entertain the possibility that maybe we could do better than this. And to ask yourself: where’s the vulnerable point in this multiple-choice totalitarianism? It seems…seamless. What can an individual do against it?

‘I’ll tell you. One of the ancestors of our modern militias was a group called the Falange. They had a slogan: Credere. Obedere. Combatere. “Believe. Obey. Fight.” I suggest that you doubt, disobey, desert. Particularly if you are called upon to fight against those who insist, against all the evidence, that we are one people.’

He paused for a moment, as if to indicate that he knew exactly what he was saying.

‘But, of course, that’s only my opinion.

‘And now, a word from my sponsors, the Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence Collective, who have very different opinions. Goodnight. Go without God, or the goddess, if you’re godless; and, if not, go with.’

Jordan drained the coffee mug and put it down, too hard. Drained was how he felt. He watched the comrade whose turn it was to wash up without even a twitch of that impulse to help which had so amused the others on his first evenings here.

When he’d finished speaking and Mary was tidying the cameras away after their regular slot, she’d said, not looking at him: ‘That was really…something. Where d’you learn to talk like that?’

Jordan sighed. ‘Televangelists,’ he said bitterly. ‘I’ve sat through enough of them. Must’ve soaked it up.’

Pre-adapted for speaking on the Cable, just as his job had pre-adapted him for seeking on the nets. It was an eerie, deterministic thought, like Calvinism…

Oh, shit. This wasn’t getting him anywhere. He jumped up, had a shower, changed and went downstairs again. The table in the long room had been cleared, the studio gear tilted away. Havana Vice was on the television. Dafyd and Stone were sitting on a sofa by the window-screen (a metre-by-two version of the glades, which made him feel exposed even while knowing it was one-way and armoured), sharing a joint and cleaning their weapons.

‘Hi, Jordan.’

‘Hi, guys.’ He sat down on one arm of the sofa, inhaling sidestream smoke and watching with a not coincidentally increasing fascination the intricate pattern the men’s hands made as they rubbed and scraped, bolted and fitted, stripped and re-assembled, drew and passed. They worked and smoked in silence except for the occasional cryptic remark, usually followed by helpless laughter.

‘Don’t put all your progs on one diskette.’

‘Oiling the cormorant, that was.’

‘So he looked at the judge and said, “These things are sent to try us.”’

That one killed them. The two mercenaries rolled off the couch and attacked the floor. After a minute of kicking and hammering it was clear that the floor had won. They lay on their backs, wiping away tears.

‘What was all that about?’

Stone recovered first.

‘It was something us ’n’ Moh did once, ended up in court, and AAH HA HA AH HAAA,’ he explained.

Jordan looked at them and shook his head. He walked over to the terminal and jammed his card in it. His speech seemed to have been taken up, and was spreading as people replayed it and passed it on. Not many, but there was a thin trickle coming in of royalties and his own cut of the usual donations. He felt he should donate some of it to a worthy cause himself.

‘Come on guys, sober up,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘I’m going to stand you some drinks.’

They were up like a shot.

At the Lord Carrington, The Many Worlds Interpretation was playing to a quiet midweek crowd. The band evidently believed in using the potential of the medium to go beyond the illusion of presence, and had a trick of swapping around unpredictably. Somebody would sing one and a half lines, then another member of the band would be standing there delivering the next phrase, while the original singer would be dripping sweat on to the guitar. The first five times this happened it was amusing.

Jordan had never been out with Dafyd and Stone before, and was surprised and relieved to find they drank more moderately than they smoked. They’d take about half an hour over a litre, speaking in low voices, chain-smoking tobacco cigarettes. They talked shop, about factions and alliances, and Jordan was privately pleased with himself that he was able to make a perceptive comment now and again. It had been part of his job, after all. One reason for their relative sobriety soon became apparent, although only to a close observer: they were unobtrusively checking out the women.

It was Jordan who saw her first, though, walking in as if the place were one small franchise in her chain. She moved like a dancer, glanced around like a fighter. She had a shining halo of blonde hair, bright blue eyes, skin the colour of pale honey, high cheekbones and the kind of jawline that the rest of humanity would take about half a million years to evolve. She wasn’t tall, but she had long legs, covered to just below the knee by a dress that had quite plainly been made out of cobwebs beaded with morning dew. Over it she wore a faded denim jacket several sizes too big. As she went to the bar to order a drink, Jordan saw that it had an intricate embroidered patch on the back: Earth from space, almost floating behind her shoulders, with the words EARTH’S ANGELS around it.

She was served a drink in seconds. She turned around, and saw him looking at her across ten metres of smoky half-light. He stared, still unable to believe it was really her. Far away, just beside his ear, he heard Dafyd call out delightedly, ‘Cat!’ The woman gave a heart-stopping smile and walked over.

Jordan moved faster than the others to make a space for her. She gave him a nod and a quick, tentative smile, and sat down beside him. She reached over the table-top to Dafyd and Stone and grabbed their hands.

‘Hi, guys. It’s great to see you again.’

‘You too, Cat.’

‘Been a long time,’ Stone said. He grinned at her. ‘We missed you.’

‘No you fucking didn’t!’ Cat stretched out her left arm, showing a plastic cast. ‘You hit me!’

Stone looked back, untroubled. ‘Business is business,’ he said.

Cat smiled. Even from the side, Jordan could feel the warmth.

‘Yeah, that’s OK, come on.’ She shrugged, retracting her arm, and took a sip of her drink.

‘You get the tangle with Moh sorted out?’ Dafyd asked.

‘Oh,’ said Catherin. ‘Yeah, I have. How d’you know about it?’

Stone guffawed. ‘Moh told us. Eventually. Even if he hadn’t, we’d have heard.’ He laughed again. ‘What an idiot. Where is he now?’

Stone, Jordan noticed, was looking at Cat intently.

‘Off somewhere with his lady scientist,’ Cat said. Her tone was vague and light, as if passing on a piece of idle gossip. Stone frowned, looked away from her, and seemed to see Jordan for the first time since Cat had come in.

‘Ah, Cat, this guy here is Jordan Brown, he’s staying with us for a bit—’

‘I know,’ she said. She turned to Jordan. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’ She put down her drink. ‘I’m Catherin Duvalier,’ she said, holding out her right hand.

Jordan felt like kissing it. He shook it.

‘You’ve been looking for me?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

Jordan’s whole face felt like a beacon. He said the first thing that came into his head. ‘I’ve been looking for you, too.’ His mouth was dry and he took a gulp of beer.

Catherin laughed. ‘Looking, hell,’ she said. ‘You found me!’

‘Yeah, well, you weren’t—’

‘Hey.’ Cat ducked her head forward, then looked up, pushing the hair back from her eyes with her wrist and grinning at him mischievously. ‘That?’

‘That.’

‘Smart.’ She shifted in her seat, half-turned away. ‘But it wasn’t that. It was the way you got to that.’ Her narrowed eyes looked at him sidelong.

‘Oh, the—’

Cat raised a hand quickly, edge-on to the others, spread palm facing him. ‘Later.’ Her eyes flicked away; she caught her lower lip momentarily in her teeth.

Stone looked from Cat to Jordan, frowning. ‘What’s goin on here?’

Cat rested her elbows on the table, her chin on her knuckles. ‘None of your business.’ She smiled brightly at Dafyd and Stone. ‘So…how is business?’

Dafyd shrugged. ‘Still running on the kind of contracts you didn’t like,’ he said. ‘The movement stuff’s drying up a bit, but there’s plenty of site-protection work coming in. What you doing yourself?’

‘Nothing risky.’

‘Ah,’ said Stone.

‘I didn’t come here to look for a job,’ Catherin said. She leaned further across the table. ‘What you said about movement work drying up – how d’you explain that?’

‘People holding back,’ Stone said. ‘You know why.’

Dafyd grunted. ‘The ANR’s talking about the final offensive. Mind you, they did the same five years back and it was just a few raids came of it. Wouldn’t account for all that’s going on – or not going on, more like.’

‘Loss of confidence in the political-violence industry,’ Jordan said, feeling he should make a contribution. ‘Why shell out on bombing today what’s gonna be bombed tomorrow?’ He dropped into a cockney girn. ‘Bad for business, innit, all this talk about final offensives. Leads to stockpiling. Hell, some outfits are gonna be putting streetfighters out on the streets.’

He laughed at their uneasy laughs.

‘You got it,’ Catherin said, turning to him. ‘It’s part of the plan. Tactics, comrade, tactics.’

‘Huh?’

‘Think about it. “Streetfighters out on the streets.” They’re not going to sit around with their comm helmets upside down beside them and a bit of cardboard saying “Out of ammo – please help”.’ She waited for their smiles to fade and continued. ‘Actually…there is something coming in. Don’t know when, but any day now. The ANR and the Alliance – I don’t know which is intending to use the other as a cover, but they’ll both hit at the same time. This is fac.’

Jordan thought over what he’d learned and what he’d already known about the forces and dispositions of the fragmented opposition. Difficult to quantify, given the Representation of the People (Temporary Provisions) Act, but between them they could probably muster about a third of the population, and history showed that was enough when it wasn’t votes that counted. Hairs prickled down the back of his neck.

‘You know, if this offensive comes off, we’re talking about a revolution,’ he said to Catherin. He said it unself-consciously, just imparting information.

She nodded, just as seriously.

Jordan felt his eyes sting.

‘Yee-hah,’ he said.

‘You pleased about this?’ Stone asked. ‘I heard you tonight. Thought you were against fighting.’

Jordan stared at him, shaken at how easy it was to be a bit too subtle.

‘I’m gonna have to work on that,’ he said sourly. ‘What I meant was, I’m against all the stupid fighting that’s going on now. Fighting to end it, that’s different. So is not fighting to keep it all going, which is what I was trying to suggest.’

‘The war to end war,’ Dafyd said dryly.

Cat turned her head sharply. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Precedents aren’t too good,’ Stone said. ‘World War Three, for starters.’

Jordan choked briefly on his beer.

‘You should read books,’ he spluttered. He snorted hop-smelling froth out of his sinuses, grinning apologetically. ‘Ah, forget it. You been on the net recently?’

Stone and Dafyd shook their heads. Catherin was watching him. He glanced at her only occasionally as he talked, or so he thought at the time; afterwards, looking back, all he remembered of the conversation was her face and a vague recollection of what he’d said. At the time everything was clear: all the bits of information he’d picked up on the net and the street coming together, the buzz that was suddenly so loud in the aching silence left now the ANR had gone quiet. He spun a story of the shifts he’d noticed, in a way that he thought would make sense to the two (or three? what was Catherin into?) politically motivated fighters. And all the time he knew he was winging it, that it was in part guesswork which he could only hope was inspired.

‘Something’s happening,’ he concluded. ‘Happening fast. People are changing their minds, making up their minds by the hour. And they’re coming down on the side of the ANR, or at least against the Kingdom and the Free States.’

Catherin looked interested, Dafyd and Stone sceptical. Jordan spread his hands. ‘Check it out, guys.’

They started to argue. Jordan got another round in. Cat moved over, not looking at him, still arguing, and he sat down beside her, on the outside of the seat this time.

‘No point us talking about it,’ Catherin was saying. ‘You’ve been out on active for a week, and out of your heads when you weren’t, yeah?’

Stone and Dafyd acknowledged the justice of this with hoots.

‘So go and talk to somebody else, OK!’ she said. Something in her fierce stare made the two men suddenly notice some comrades at the bar. They left to join them.

‘Can you help me out of this jacket?’

She turned away in a silky movement. Jordan slid the jacket from her shoulders, resisted the temptation to bury his face in her hair or trace the botanic filigree of thread on the back of her elflandish dress. He looked again at the floating planet, the flaring letters.

‘“Earth’s Angels”,’ he said. ‘This is your gang, is it?’ He began to fold the sleeves when he felt something heavy and bulky in an inside pocket. Catherin took the jacket from his hands at the same moment and laid it carefully along the back of the seat. She rested her arm lightly on it, and settled in a sideways position, facing him.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Polluters tremble when we ride into town on our bicycles…No, I just thought it sounded good.’

‘It’s not “earth” as in “Mother Earth”, it’s “earth” as in “earthly”. Earth’s angel.’ He dared to look at her, to take her all in in a long unbreathing draught of sight. ‘Yes, it’s you.’

She returned his gaze with an appraising look that made him think, Is this how we look at them?, and feel a surge of lust more intense than being the sender of such a look had ever aroused in him. Whosoever looketh on a woman to…he was committed already in his heart.

‘And you’re earth’s preacher,’ she said. ‘I saw you tonight, on the tel.’

‘Oh, that’s, that’s great.’ He took a swallow of beer, his ears burning. ‘What did you think?’

‘I…kind of agreed with it,’ she said. She smiled. ‘But that…isn’t why I’m here.’

He tried not to sound disappointed. ‘I didn’t think so.’ He looked at her, for the first time not seeing her, but thinking. ‘You said something about, uh, how I found you?’

Catherin nodded.

‘And how,’ Jordan asked, ‘do you know about that?’

Her face showed nothing. Jordan was suddenly aware of how little he knew about her, a thought which rapidly changed to how much he wanted to find out…about her, Moh, her and Moh, what had happened…

He smote his forehead with the heel of his hand.

‘Agh!’ he said. Of course. ‘You saw Moh today!’

Catherin smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I did.’

‘That place you were at, is it—?’

She tilted her head, shook it slowly. Not no, but you don’t ask.

‘I got something to tell you,’ she said.

The level of sound in the place would have made it impossible to overhear their conversation from a metre away. Catherin glanced around, then brought her mouth up to his ear. He felt her warm breath and forced himself to attend to the words she breathed.

‘What you did – don’t do it again.’

She straightened up and looked at him, her expression as awkward and embarrassed as was (he felt sure) his own. What he had done…when he found her…surely nobody, not her, not whoever had sent her, could object to his hacking into a system in BC? His mind went back over the trail, the SILK.ROOT program, and he suddenly realized exactly what he’d been doing when he’d traced the silk consignment to the Women’s Peace Community.

He had been hacking the Black Plan.

Possibly blundering around in something pretty sensitive, if the offensive were as imminent as she’d said.

‘Ah.’ His lips felt dry. ‘I get it.’

Catherin smiled up from under her eyebrows. ‘Well. OK. That’s that done.’ Head back, hair pushed back with her wrist, she laughed with a sound of relief. ‘Hey, Jordan. There’s things I can’t tell you. If you’ve been mixed up with Moh, there must be things you can’t tell me, yeah?’

‘Uh-huh.’ He had been thinking about that.

‘Get used to it. You’re in the revolution now.’

‘Oh, I am, am I?’

She knocked back her drink. ‘You better believe it.’

She stood up and put on her jacket, patted an inside pocket. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

Stone and Dafyd gave him grins full of knowing surprise and complete misunderstanding as he passed.

‘See you back at the house,’ Cat called to them over her shoulder as he held the door for her. ‘Don’t be long.’

After the pub’s interior the evening sky was bright.

‘Look at those clouds.’ Catherin tilted her head back. Jordan looked at the clouds, lit by the sunset, a rippled formation like wave-marks on sand.

‘Like ruched peach satin…’ Cat said, then laughed at herself. ‘Listen to me!’

‘The femininists were getting to you, were they?’

‘Yeah. They were.’

She barely glanced at him as she spoke, threading her way through the crowd with a constant alertness that made his own progress feel clumsy. The street appeared to Jordan even busier, and with even more business going on in it, than usual: more people walking, hurrying, talking; more openly carried weapons.

Streetfighters out on the streets…

Cat had already had herself re-entered in the house’s security system, and he followed her through the door with a strange feeling that he was the stranger, the guest. They found Mary Abid busy with the Cable-editing console, Tai studying maps spread on the table, Alasdair doing something with a soldering iron to a piece of kit Jordan didn’t recognize. The children were counting bullets and loading them into magazines, sticky-taping together the curving AK clips. Nobody gave Cat more than a glance as she breezed through the haze of flux, coffee aroma and cigarette smoke. Evidently she’d roped everybody at the house into whatever she was up to before going to the pub to find him. She’d left a couple of carpet-bags and a strappy bundle of belts and holsters and pistols in a corner, more or less out of the way.

The comms room was fully occupied. Cat turned to him.

‘You got personals?’

‘Sure.’ He tapped the case of the computer and glades on his belt.

‘You’re staying in Moh’s room?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK, there’s a port there.’

In the room she tossed her jacket on to the bed and looked around, as if checking a returned-to, familiar place. Her gaze stopped at the two pictures of herself on the wall. She gave Jordan a quirky smile and turned to the stacks of pamphlets in which he’d found the book by Wilde.

‘Aha,’ she said. ‘You’ve started.’ She sat down in the clutter, bringing her hem to her ankles and her knees to her chin, wrapped her arms around her legs and looked up at Jordan expectantly, like a small girl waiting for a story.

He frowned down at her, puzzled.

‘OK, Jordan,’ she said, patting the floor. ‘Let’s not piss around with what we can and what we can’t say. We’ve got a bit of time, and there’s a lot that we can talk about.’

Jordan pushed aside some pamphlets with the edge of his shoe and sat down facing her, the soles of his feet on the floor, his elbows on his knees.

‘For a start,’ Cat continued, ‘who are you, and what are you and Moh up to? I know Moh’s running scared of Donovan catching him, and that ain’t like him at all. We’ve all been in the Body Bank, and the CLA do fast trade-offs, you know? I mean, shit, Moh’s done time. What’s going on?’

Some question. Jordan tried to think fast. It seemed that the deal was that Cat wouldn’t talk about whatever linked the femininists with the ANR, and he wasn’t expected to talk about whatever Moh had wanted to keep secret: the drugs, the Black Plan…The Black Plan was in both their secrets, their controlled zones of conversation.

‘I don’t know for sure,’ he said. It was true, up to a point. ‘As far as I know, Donovan was after Moh to settle accounts because of you. Janis – that’s this scientist Moh’s going around with – she’s in some kind of trouble with Stasis.’ A thought struck him. ‘What if Donovan and Stasis are working together?’

‘Oh, goddess.’ Cat’s face betrayed dismay. ‘That would explain a lot.’

‘Which you won’t?’

‘That’s right.’

They locked looks for a second.

‘Just one thing,’ Jordan said, gathering his thoughts. ‘Moh’s made contact with the ANR. Can you confirm that?’

Cat thought about it for a moment, then nodded.

‘All right,’ Jordan said. He smiled with relief. ‘I guess he’s off my hands.’

‘You could say that,’ Cat said dryly.

‘As to who I am…Basically, I’m from Beulah City. I owned part of a business there. I left a few days ago because…I got a very unusual business proposition, yeah, and it gave me the chance to leave and…a rather urgent reason to leave.’

‘Did you need one, beyond not being a believer?’

Jordan felt himself go red before her unblinking blue-eyed scrutiny. ‘Maybe I was irresolute, maybe a bit too reluctant to hurt my folks.’ He tasted gall. ‘Maybe cowardly.’

‘Crap,’ she said. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. That’s how those places bloody work, dammit – all the ideologies you were ranting about tonight. You start to doubt them and before you know it you doubt yourself, you feel guilty because you’re going against what’s been rammed into you and you feel guilty because you’re being dishonest about it every day.’ She paused, eyebrows raised.

‘Yes! that’s it. Exactly.’

‘OK. Well, I’m sure you’ve sussed out by now that there’s nothing wrong with you.’ The very casualness of the way she said the words sent them straight to his solar plexus, where they glowed. ‘What you probably don’t realize is you’re not alone: there are people in all the mini-states – even in BC, take it from me – who’re as alienated as you were.’

‘Could be.’ He didn’t see it himself. ‘Anyway, Moh seemed to think there might be some mileage in that. He wanted me to help him with’ – Jordan waved his hands, smiling – ‘this bit of trouble he’s in, and later in tracking you down, but he definitely wanted me to do a bit of ranting, like you said, as well. Can’t see it making much difference to whatever’s gonna happen, though.’

‘Me neither.’ Cat grinned disarmingly. ‘But you said you thought people were changing their minds by the hour, coming round to thinking: ah, fuck it, the ANR is in with a chance, yeah? Well look at this place, they’re all doing just that.’

‘That’s down to you?’

Cat nodded. ‘Yup.’ She grinned. ‘Easiest bit of agitation I ever pulled.’ Again her gaze was inescapable. ‘And you?’

‘Yeah, I…I’d like to see them win, sure, but…that’s as far as it goes. It’s not some kind of conversion.’

‘That’s all it ever is, in these situations,’ Cat said. There was a moment while they both paused, reflecting. In these situations…Revolution was like a war, Jordan thought. You just never knew how you’d react when something like that loomed. Patriots could become pacifists overnight, and vice versa; cynical bright young men fly off and die for king and country. And an individualist who loathed the suffocating clots of conformity known as the Free States could suddenly see the virtue of bulldozing them all flat, into a united republic…

Cat broke into his thoughts.

‘OK, so that’s one thing you can do. Speak, write, patch stuff from anything on the net or here that catches your eye’ – she waved a hand at the mass of pamphlets – ‘whatever. Don’t talk about the ANR – talk about how stupid the Free States are, and the Kingdom and the UN. And get as much information as you can about what’s going on, how things are lining up.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, yeah. Something else. You say you were a businessman? Know anything about stock trading?’

Jordan found he’d bounded to his feet. ‘Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact I do.’

Cat stood up. ‘Great,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the comrades to shove some of the money they’ve been sitting on into your work-space. Any time you get a moment, speculate.’ She paused, frowning. ‘Can you actually make money in a falling market?’

Jordan grinned broadly. ‘You bet.’

‘OK,’ Cat said. She picked her way across the untidy floor. ‘Got to it. Stop about, oh, not long after midnight.’

‘Then what?’

Cat looked at him over her shoulder from the doorway. ‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘You’re soon going to need all the sleep you can get.’

And with that ambiguous promise she was gone.