The Star Fraction

19

Dissembler

On high moorlands and city streets, in gutted refineries and abandoned service areas, she fought through the hot autumn and bitter winter. Days of storm alternated with calm, chill silences when the smoke of burning villages rose straight into a pale blue sky. She crawled through mud and water, bracken and barbed wire.

She learned about what was going on out in the world in snatches from television and radio. With Dissembler out of action, all the programs that ran on it, most importantly DoorWays^™, were useless. The effect on communications was convulsive, and not altogether unwelcome: it was primarily administrative and military machines that were crippled. Turks and Russians fought inconclusively on the Bulgarian front; the Sheenisov (the name had caught on, become anglicized) reached Ulan Bator; a gang of asteroid miners declared themselves the Republic of New South Yorkshire. The US Government responded to the strikes and riots by pulling out of the UN and calling a Constitutional Convention. Several of the States seceded in advance, prompting commentators to remark that the US was rapidly becoming the world’s second Former Union: the FU2. The UN battlesats, starved by a rock-solid space-workers’ boycott, threatened selected targets with laser weapons. One of the lunar magnapult combines gave them a short lesson in orbital mechanics, and the threat passed.

And that was the last of the United Nations. Without the US to underpin it, there could be no US/UN. Space Defense became Earth Defense, its weapons turned outwards to face threats from nature, not from man. The Yanks became Americans again, and enthusiastically set about investigating and purging and denouncing and testifying.

Janis saw Jordan’s face one day, on a flickering television in an empty shop: some soundbite interview, over in seconds. She felt a pang of guilt, and that evening sat down and wrote a letter to him. He must know already that Moh was dead; the ANR was punctilious about these things. She knew, without ever having been told, that she should not tell anyone how Moh had died. It didn’t leave much to say, but she felt better for having said it.

She made friends, and lost some.

The Republic made enemies faster than it destroyed them.

Goddess, she thought, this place stinks.

It was a village of a few score people, in a green dell in the Lake District. Its generators ran on methane – fart-fuel, her comrades called it – and on scavenged solar cells. The houses were tar-paper and corrugated iron and animal hide. The people lived by farming and hunting and stealing, and didn’t wash.

Janis stood in the mud at the centre of the village, the rifle on her hip, turning and scanning. A few bodies sprawled among the houses. The thirteen surviving menfolk sat in the mud, their hands over their heads. Their rifles and crossbows and knives were stacked well out of their reach. About thirty ANR soldiers stood guard or went through the houses, throwing stuff out: clothes, weapons, food, furnishings. They had the look of people sifting through a nauseating heap of garbage. The women and children stood in the eaves of the unwalled shelter they called the long house. Rain dripped off it on to their matted hair, left runnels of white on their closed faces. If they took a step into the shelter or away from the run-off a snarl or a kick sent them back.

The air was filled with the whining of dogs muzzled with twisted wire, leashed by ropes held by a couple of ANR soldiers, and every so often by the scream of another dog as it was skewered on a long roughly sharpened spike driven at an angle into a low bank of ground. Six, so far. Five to go.

The rain rattled off a black body-bag in the back of a humvee at the entrance to the village, near the tree where they’d found the body: a captured soldier hanging by the ankles, and as the dogs had left it.

Three to go.

A small boy yelled out as that dog was spiked. He broke away from the grip of a woman’s hand on his shoulder and dashed forward. The line was within a second of breaking after him. Janis swung the gun round. It checked her hand as if it had struck a solid obstacle, and fired a single shot. The boy screamed and fell down in the mud. Janis felt her heart stop. The boy picked himself up and ran over to the woman.

The last dog writhed on the spike. The first had not yet died.

‘Nobody found their tongue yet?’ The unit’s leader, a small, mild-mannered, middle-aged man called Wills, looked around like a schoolteacher.

Silence.

‘Whose idea was it?’

Silence, and falling rain.

Wills turned to Janis.

‘Get a couple of guys to make another spike,’ he said, loud enough to be overhead. He looked over the line of bedraggled women and children as he spoke.

No, said a voice in Janis’s phones, you can’t do that! You can’t even threaten that.

It was Moh’s voice. She heard her own voice say to Wills, not loud enough for anyone else to hear: ‘No. You can’t do that! You can’t even threaten that.’

Wills’s eyes narrowed behind his rain-spattered glades.

‘Are you threatening me, citizen?’

‘No, I’m—’ She realized the gun had turned with her body, and was pointing straight at Wills. By now, not doing that sort of thing had become a reflex to her. She lowered the muzzle. ‘Sorry, Wills,’ she said. ‘You know we can’t do – what you suggested. Even to say it takes us near—’ She moved an open, stiff hand up and down: an edge.

‘We’ve got to do something,’ Wills said. ‘If we don’t—’

‘Do what we’re supposed to do,’ Janis snapped. ‘Call in a chopper, vac the barbarians out and trash the place.’

‘Not enough, comrade, not for the comrades.’ Wills tipped his head back very slightly. Janis knew he was right. The lads and lasses wanted revenge. If they didn’t get it, a provoked incident and an itchy trigger might give them a slaughter to remember.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘We trash the place first, let the barb watch it, then vac them.’

Wills looked at her for a moment, then nodded and smiled as if they’d been having a friendly discussion, and gave the order. The citizen-soldiers whooped, the barbarians wept as the houses went up in flames around them. More steam than smoke rose to meet the evacuation chopper. Another batch of bawling orphans and sullen new citizens sent to six months in the resettlement camps, and then a life in the shanty-towns. It happened to every village that didn’t join up with the Republic’s militia.

They called it the shake and vac.

That night they made camp in a village of proper houses, built of stone, whose street was bypassed by the main road. It was the sort of place that had always been part of the Kingdom, and had rallied, however reluctantly, to the Republic as a protection against the barb. The unit had no intention of alienating the inhabitants by billeting in their houses, and settled in an old building that had once been a local primary school. It had a good high wall around it, and a kitchen and canteen that could be used – even, to their delight, showers that worked.

Wills brought his tray of dinner to the table where Janis sat with three other soldiers. Most of the light in the canteen was the glow from the kitchen at the far end of it. They all had their glades on. The false colours of the food were unappetizing, but the smell overrode that. They ate quickly, from habit.

After a while Wills said, ‘You were right, you know, Taine.’

She looked up, wiping her plate with bread. ‘I know.’

Political discussion was free in this army. Janis hadn’t felt the need to take part in any until now. She was still reluctant, unwilling to take her mind away from the memory of that shocking, familiar voice. But it was not to be avoided – it was part of what the memory meant.

‘Why do we have to do it?’ she said. ‘Don’t think I’m soft. I got good reason to despise these people. But why can’t we just leave the barb alone if they leave us alone? Why do we have to force them to take sides when most of them will choose the other side?’

‘It’s civil war,’ Wills said. ‘There’s no neutrality. They think the same way. What harm had that poor bastard done to them?’

Janis pushed her plate away. There was still some meat on it. She lit a cigarette. Nearly all the comrades smoked. She’d accepted one cigarette, once, in a tense moment, and then another…Moh had been right about life-expectancy.

‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘maybe he tried to make them take sides, and they saw that as harm.’

The others at the table shifted. She could hear the quiet rattle and clink of gear. Somebody snorted.

‘You’re something of a new citizen yourself, aren’t you, Taine?’ Wills said in a low voice.

The gun was solid and heavy between her feet. Silence rippled outwards across the room.

She looked at Wills, and saw someone standing behind him. Another cadre, she thought, come swiftly to calm the situation. She glanced away from Wills to see who it was.

Moh’s mocking eyes looked back at her, his slyly smiling lips mouthed the single word ‘Remember’, and then no one was there. She felt the tiny hairs on her face and neck prickle, vestigial response to a glacial chill.

Remember.

‘Civis Britannicus sum,’ she said. She spread her hands, keeping them in plain sight, relaxed except for the fingers that held her cigarette: she saw the small smoke-rings rise from their trembling. ‘You’re right, Wills, I don’t know what it was like all these years. I didn’t feel the Betrayal like some of you.’ She leaned back and drew again on her cigarette. ‘I remember a man who did.’ She smiled as she said it, shaking inside.

Wills nodded. ‘All right, Taine. Uncalled-for.’ She knew that for him this counted as a deep apology. He looked at her as if he knew what she was talking about. ‘All been there, what?’ He looked around the table. ‘Gens una sumus.’

Later somebody found a dusty guitar in a cupboard and carried it high into the canteen, and they sang songs from the war and the revolution, songs of their own Republic and of others, “Bandiera Rossa” and “Alba” and “The Men Behind the Wire” and “The Patriot Game”.

Janis sang along, holding the rifle across her lap like the man held the guitar. She looked at all the faces in the dim light, as if looking for another face, and thought she saw it.

That night she lay awake until fatigue overcame her rage and grief.

Several times over the next days she saw him again, and heard him: a yell of warning, a mutter of advice, a pattern of light and shadow under trees.

Sometimes clear, solid-looking, out in the open.

She did not believe this was happening. Not to her. She told herself, again and again, that it was the strain of the fighting. It was not her sanity that was strained, not her philosophy that was flawed. Only her perceptions were at fault, her eyes too accustomed to seeking out hidden shapes.

A day came when she saw him out of the corner of her eye, striding along beside her.

‘Go away,’ she said.

He went away. At the next resting-place she sat a few metres from the others and took the glades off to wipe her eyes. When she put them back on he was standing in front of her, looking down at her with concern.

‘Janis, let me talk to you.’

‘Oh, Moh!’ It was not fair to come back like that.

‘I’m not Moh,’ he said sadly.

‘Then who the hell are you?’

He smiled and got down beside her and lay on his side, facing her. She reached out and her hand went through him. She beat the grass and wept, and took the glades off. He was no longer there, but when she replaced them again he returned.

‘Aha,’ she said.

‘Don’t let anyone see you talking to yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ll hear you just as well if you subvocalize.’

She turned and lay face-down on the grass, murmuring, sometimes glancing sideways to reassure herself that he was still with her. Her heart hammered with a wild hope.

‘You’re in the gun, aren’t you? Did you – did you upload into it?’

‘I’m in the gun,’ he said. ‘But I’m not Moh. I’m the AI in the gun. I…found myself…in the gun just after Moh died. I have memories of Moh, I have routines to imitate him perfectly – his voice, his appearance.’ He chuckled wickedly. ‘And in other ways, with the right equipment. The gun had a huge amount of stored information about Moh, and I can use it to project a – a persona. But don’t kid yourself, Janis, I’m not even his ghost.’

‘You’re his fetch.’

‘You could say that.’

She chewed a blade of grass and thought about how Moh had talked to the gun, how he had talked about the gun. The gun had sometimes acted independently, unpredictably. A mind of its own, awakening in the bolted-on hardware and pirated software, in conversation with a man, interacting with…

‘The Watchmaker!’ she said. ‘That’s where you got the awareness from.’ And in that case, indirectly, from Moh.

Moh’s image frowned. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Perhaps it came from Moh himself.’ And in that case…

‘Oh, Janis, I know why you’re doing this, but please, don’t. Moh is dead.’

‘And you’re alive.’

‘So it would seem.’

‘Son of a gun.’ She looked at him and smiled. ‘And you know more about him than I do. So maybe more of him has survived than he ever expected. “Death is not lived through.”’

The fetch was silent for a moment. ‘I should know.’

Her comrades were getting ready to move off again.

‘What are we going to do now?’ Janis whispered.

‘Next place you can find a comms port,’ the fetch said, ‘jack me in.’

She stared, seeing for the first time the shadowy, unreal quality of the image of the fetch, for all its apparent solidity. ‘What about Donovan’s viruses? Aren’t you vulnerable to them?’

‘Not any more,’ the fetch said. ‘The Kalashnikov firmware protected me from them in the first instance, and I have not been idle. We have a score to settle with Donovan.’

‘Oh yes,’ Janis said. She felt a murderous, barbarous, bloodthirsty joy. ‘Yes. We do.’

Two days later the chance came, in an office block with all its windows out but with its power still functioning, its communications intact. Her unit occupied and guarded it, and as soon as her watch was over, at sunset when she was supposed to be resting, she climbed up a few floors. Glass crunched underfoot in the corridors, sodden carpet squelched in the open-plan office. Desks, terminals, modems, ports. Postcards, notices, family holos and silly mottoes on the desks; revolting green moulds growing out of coffee mugs. Somewhere a fridge hummed, but it had long since lost its battle against decay. She lit a cigarette to smother the stink and spread her parka on a soggy swivel chair. She laid the gun in front of her on the desk, unspooled the cable thread and jacked in. A flicker of interface interference, then everything became clear.

Moh’s face appeared in her glades, drawn in lines of grey light on a darker background.

‘Ready?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is going to be scary. You don’t have to come along.’

‘I want to see it.’

‘OK. Remember, nothing can happen to you. Your mind is safe.’

She bared her teeth in the gloom, wondering if the mind in the machine could see her. Probably: a tiny camera lens was mounted on the desk screen.

‘I’ll take your word for it, gun.’

‘OK. Let’s go.’

It was as if he turned away, and she followed. Utter disorientation: a fall, a rush along corridors, out into open space, a virtual landscape of rocky hills and city blocks with all their windows dead. They moved like a stealth fighter, racing shadows.

A terribly narrow, suffocating, stretched-out space. The words fat pipe passed uncomprehended across the surface of her mind. The microseconds dragged on and on.

And then they were out – and inside something else, a huge space like the inside of a mind. Struggling to break through barriers, fighting for control.

Taking control. It came to her as a sensation in the muscles, as if she controlled many limbs, and in her mind, as if she saw with many eyes.

Eyes that scanned a sea, and other senses that reached into space with feathery fingers, and eyes that looked within at corridors and bulkheads and berths and holds and galleys.

And – concentrating now, focusing, zeroing in – she looked on a control room filled with screens and machines, servers and overhead rails with cranes and robot arms. Two men were in it, completely dwarfed by the machinery around them. One of the men – her view zoomed sickeningly close to his oblivious, horrible face – was the white Man In Black who’d come to her lab, who’d fought them in the service area. So this was where he’d ended up! After his entire organization had been smashed, disbanded, disgraced, datagated to hell and back, he’d hidden out, skulking here with…

The second man in the room was Donovan.

Almost, she found him hard to hate.

He looked up, startled as a crane clattered into motion. Before he could shout a warning, it happened.

It was not clear to Janis if it was a thing she did, a thing she willed, or something that happened while she watched, terrified and exultant, from behind other eyes.

The crane’s arm swung. Its manipulator caught the Man In Black by the skull and lifted him with a cranial crunch and a vertebral snap and slung him against a wall of screens that splintered and showered down on him as he crashed on to the deck.

She looked into the face of a man with long white hair and a long white beard. An almost gentle, almost saintly, almost patriarchal face, aged and wizened and tough, and almost hard to hate. He was looking around wildly, and from every screen that he saw – and Janis saw – the implacable face of Moh Kohn glared gloating back.

‘You’re dead!’ She heard the words Donovan mouthed, amplified and echoing back at him.

‘Yes, Moh Kohn is dead, Donovan,’ and she did not know if she or the fetch were saying it.

Donovan scrabbled at a databoard. The screens wavered and a sharp pain shot through Janis’s head, a red-hot migraine sword. She stumbled in red mist.

There was a place where the mist thinned, a grey patch like the inside of a brain. She focused on that and thought of the shapes of molecules, the chemistry of memory, the equations of desire, the work of Luria, the regularity of numbers…

And then she came through, and it was all clear again, the cool grey lines on the screens shaping the words they spoke. ‘You have viruses, but I have resistance, and I am alive, and you—’

All the arms moved and the chains swung and the manipulators reached and grasped.

‘—are dead.’

They roamed the rig for seconds on end, as the fetch stripped out its progams, soaked up its secrets. Janis was sure it was her decision to sound the alarm systems, to allow an hour’s delay on the demon programs they left in its arsenals.

They fled through the fat pipe, the narrow space, and then they were out, flying again. The rocky hills turned green, the city blocks lit up one by one, faster and faster until the light could be seen all the way around the earth. She did not think it strange that she could see through the earth.

And now she was sitting again at the desk, as of course she had been all along. The fetch faced her, no longer an outline but a full-colour image, even more shockingly real than the one she usually saw in the glades.

It smiled.

He smiled, and she smiled back.

She took the glades off, and the image was still there – on the desk screen in front of her. She closed her eyes and shook her head, looking at the mocking grin. The face disappeared and was replaced by an image that she hadn’t seen for months, the familiar logo of DoorWays^™ – but subtly altered: in tiny print beneath it were the words:

Dissembler 2.0

A New Release

There was a moment when everything changed.

Jordan had the comms room more or less to himself these days. The telepresence exoskeleton from which Mary had worked around the world hung empty and unused. The datagloves gathered dust, and the Glavkom VR kit was good for nothing much but word-processing. As at this moment, when Jordan was laboriously hacking out an article for a newspaper in Beulah City. Even with the new press freedom there, it was hard to convince these people that tolerance was anything but weakness, pluralism anything but chaos; he was trying to put the point across in language they’d understand. “The Repentence of Nineveh”, he was going to call it, alluding to a frequently unnoticed implication of the Book of Jonah.

It was a tricky job, requiring a delicate balance between making clear that he wasn’t writing as a believer himself and showing that he wasn’t mocking anyone’s beliefs, that he thought there was a valid message in the story…He was beginning to think the whole approach was misguided and he’d do better to hit them with Milton and Voltaire and damn the consequences.

‘You’re in the revolution now,’ Cat had told him, and she’d been right. It was all more complicated and contested than he’d ever expected. We are one people. One people and seventy million opinions. And then there were all the thousands of other peoples caught up in the same rapids of the same stream that had swept away the empires of the earth. Thousands of peoples and billions of opinions. Each individual fragment of the opposition had, since the Republic’s victory, split at least once over what to do about or with that victory.

The space movement was divided, too. It wasn’t a straightforward ideological split. The same language was used on all sides. And it was a genuinely difficult issue: did the biggest threat to freedom come from the struggles of the Free States and the barb to maintain their own domains, or from the Republic’s efforts to enforce some minimal frame of law and rights across them all? Wilde argued for supporting the Republic but trying to moderate its claims. It was a position that Jordan found uncomfortable but the nearest to his own view, though he had a rather harder line on what should be done about people like the Elders and Deacons and Warrior captains of Beulah City. ‘Put them up against their fallen walls,’ he’d written once.

He’d won a modest fame from his writing and arguing, and his feel for the markets had not deserted him in the chaotic circumstances of the civil war. He was earning his keep; and Cat – her talents, like those of so many others, stretched by the revolution – had plunged into organizing defence work, liaising with the militias and security mercenaries and the new authorities. Occasionally she’d go out on active; to keep her hand in, she told him, and maintain her street-cred. Those were the few times when he felt like praying, if only to the goddess.

Anyway, Cat wasn’t on active now. It was her turn to make the dinner. He hoped she’d be ready soon.

The telly-skelly moved; the arms reached up; the fingers flexed. Jordan jumped. He got a grip on himself and peered at the machine suspiciously. With an audible creak it settled back.

Power surge, probably. Jordan looked anxiously at the screen to check that his painfully written article hadn’t been wiped. He watched in open-mouthed disbelief as the page shrank, and around its borders options appeared, Doorways^™ opened…

He keyed through the options eagerly, finally convincing himself that it was all there. He smiled when he saw the change in the logo. A new release, indeed. They must have got someone really good to work on that, if the story of how Dissembler had developed from Josh Kohn’s work was to be believed. As far as Jordan knew, it had been universally considered impossible to maintain or document in any normal sense.

Before rushing out to tell everyone the good news he thought he’d better check the mailbox. There was one letter in it, addressed to the Collective from the Army of the New Republic. It had been there since the day of the insurrection – the day Dissembler had collapsed.

He opened it and found:

Attn C Duvalier in re J Brown

2 days @ 200B-m/day

Total 400B-m CREDIT

PAID

Date as addr

For some time he didn’t move; he felt he didn’t breathe. He remembered her oblique remarks, the tilt of her head as she shook it slowly, her whispered admonition not to do it again, not to try to hack the Black Plan. He remembered the weight of the weapon in her jacket pocket.

He knew that she’d arrived as, in some sense, an emissary of the ANR. She’d as good as said it. But he’d thought of her actions as coming primarily from conviction. Thinking back, they had come from conviction. But she’d come here to do a job, a job she’d got paid for, and the job was him. To turn him away from the dangerous meddling in the Black Plan’s affairs, to turn him to good use, point him in the right direction, aim and fire. Perhaps even their infiltration of Beulah City had been part of the plan…of the Plan, he corrected himself bitterly.

God, perhaps that was why the Black Planner had approached him in the first place, so that he’d be outside BC and able to get in if the need arose! No, that was too paranoid.

Nothing had been heard of the Black Plan since the day Dissembler crashed under – it was rumoured – a final, spasmic assault from the cranks, shooting their last bolt. Not surprisingly, if the Plan had used Dissembler in the way he’d surmised that day outside the shopping centre. He’d sometimes wondered what had become of the Black Planner.

He heard a familiar light step in the corridor.

He deleted the message with one swift stab of his finger.

He spun the chair to see Cat in the doorway, her face flushed from the cooking, one fist on her hip, one hand on the door-jamb.

‘Come and geddit!’

He stayed there, looking at her.

‘What is it?’ She caught sight of the screen. ‘Oh! the system’s back up. Wow!’

‘Yup,’ said Jordan. ‘A new release. Everything’ll change now.’

He remembered the last time the Black Planner had spoken to him:

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

He stood up.

‘Cat. There’s something I have to tell you.’

‘Yes?’

‘You are basically a good communist, loyal daughter of the revolution and mother of the new republic.’

She laughed. ‘Yes. I know that. So?’

‘So marry me.’

She considered him for a moment.

‘OK.’

‘I told you,’ the fetch said. Its voice glowed with artificial pride. ‘I’ve not been idle.’

Janis blinked herself away from appalled contemplation of what she had witnessed, what she had done.

‘You did this?’

‘In the…time when I was building my resistance’ – the smile, self-mocking now, came and went – ‘I found that I had recreated Dissembler. It is spreading now, rebooting the programs that used to run on it.’

She remembered the proliferating lights.

‘Does that include the Black Plan?’ she asked eagerly. ‘The AIS that Moh found?’

The head on the screen shook slowly, with a wilfully exact rendering of the play of shadows. ‘They’re gone. Lost beyond recovery.’ Then – as if to cheer and distract her – it added: ‘But I’ve found some interesting information in Donovan’s files. Do you want to see it?’

The selection that the fetch displayed included a complete chart of Donovan’s organization, right down to the names of its members and the locations of its cells. And fragmentary, cryptic records of his work on the Kohn case: his cooperation with the Stasis agents and with Mrs Lawson in Beulah City, and with Dr Van. Just as Van had described it to her and Moh, in a chain-smoking summary on the balcony of a wooden house in Wester Ross…Janis smiled to see the first scratches of suspicion that Van wasn’t cooperating.

There were no records from after the Dissembler disaster, but from the traces immediately before it Janis worked out what had happened, how close a call the world had had with Space Defense and how Mrs Lawson’s systems had held off Donovan’s until the last moment, when she changed her mind.

So it was her doing in the end, Janis thought. Her fists clenched. She remembered Jordan’s description of her: a dangerous, devious woman. More dangerous and devious than he’d ever imagined.

She thought for a moment of doing in Beulah City what they’d done in the rig: invading the systems, possessing the machinery, using it to kill the last person in the line of enemies that had killed Moh. And then she realized it would be wrong.

Simple as that. Donovan and the Man In Black were outlaws, scoundrels, scum, whereas this woman was – what was it Moh had said about the time when she’d been about to slaughter the fallen horseman? – ‘just a grunt like us, basically’.

Let the Republic deal with Lawson, as it would deal with everybody on the CLA’s membership list.

When Wills came in Janis was slumped over the gun, her face on her arms. All the screens in the office had been switched on. Janis had been crying.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

She looked up.

‘A new release,’ she said.

He looked at her, frowning. ‘Oh, yeah, that. It’s good news. I meant—’

‘It’s all right,’ Janis said.

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

Wills smiled, as though relieved she wasn’t going to go to pieces on him. ‘There’s some more good news,’ he said. ‘That bastard Donovan is dead. Blown out of the water!’

‘There’s more than Donovan blown out of the water,’ Janis said. ‘Somebody’s been hacking him for a change, and seems to want us all to know. Have a look at this!’

Wills looked at the charts.

‘Where did this come from?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Janis said. ‘Come on. We got death to deliver.’

Deliver it they did. By the end of January they were taking on last year’s new citizens in this year’s housing projects.

‘You can put the boy into the slum,’ Wills said, ‘but you can’t put the slum into the boy.’

They all laughed, except Janis. They rested in the ruins of a gutted gas-station, smoking. There was no danger; there was no petrol.

‘We’ve done it,’ Janis grated. ‘We fucking did it ourselves.’ She saw the fetch nodding vigorously, in a patch of sunlight. ‘We pushed the barb into the cities. It’s in the blood now. In the bone. Like radioactivity. “Barb”, ha, ha. Can’t get them out.’ She felt dizzy and weak and reckless. She looked around at faces that faded like fetches in the sunlight.

Dark now, even the sunlight. Everything tipped sideways.

When she came round she was in a camp-bed. Wills came in and told her she was at least five weeks overdue for leave.

‘You should have told me, Taine.’

‘I didn’t know,’ she said surprised at herself. ‘I thought we just had to keep going.’

‘Yeah, we do,’ Wills said. ‘But not all the time.’ He grinned. ‘Enjoy your leave, soldier.’

She made her way back to Uxbridge, astonished at how normality itself had shifted, at how much everything cost. Transport took tattered wads of her star-stamped sterling dollars: the Republic’s currency, stellars. Good for astronomical prices, the joke went. She arrived at the flat early in the morning, reached in her pocket for a key, then laughed at herself and rang the bell. Sonya came to the door, blinking, and stared at Janis before bursting into smiles and tears and giving her an awkward, leaning-over hug; she was four months pregnant. Jerome joined them a moment later, and made breakfast.

She tried to eat slowly, like a civilian, half-listening to Sonya’s resumé of all that had happened to all their acquaintances, half-answering her questions, while scanning the cable channels with a sharper hunger. She paused at a suddenly familiar name…

‘…would you advise, Mr Wilde?’

Wilde. Moh had talked about him…she’d come across articles here and there that Jordan had written, arguing or agreeing with him…

Cut to a face like an Amerind tribal elder, looking directly at the camera, not at the interviewer: ‘There may come a day for a last stand. But this is not it. I appeal to all who may be considering it: don’t. Don’t destroy our town to save it. Remember how the West saw off the Stalinists and the Islamists. The fun-loving, freedom-loving decadent West undermined and subverted its enemies by making them be like itself, not by becoming grim and hard and serious like them. Those who had the most laughs had the last laugh. So when the soldiers come in, let them be welcome, and life may surprise us.’

‘Thank you, Mr Wilde. Of course we’ll be following this situation very closely, but right now we have to take a break—’

Breakfast-food commercial.

‘Any idea what that was about?’

Sonya frowned. ‘Politics?’ she suggested.

Janis found her room as she’d left it, still a mess. She checked her mail: most of it had been forwarded from the university. Offprints were still coming from Da Nang Phytochemicals. And the grant cheque, in B-marks: a fortune. She figured she was owed it – the project had been a success. She would cash it hurriedly to gold, body-belt the Slovorands.

She found an invitation to a wedding. She looked at it, took in the date. She looked at the time, looked at herself in the mirror, then went to look for Sonya.

Some things didn’t change.