The Star Fraction

20

The Queen of the Maybe

She pushed open the heavy door of the Lord Carrington, flashed her invitation at the door heavy, and walked into a haze of smoke and a tolerable volume of music. The Precentors were on the stage, their images faint in the filtering sunlight of a February afternoon.

She smiled to herself, remembering, and looked over the crowd as she absently passed her coat – and a bag containing the dismantled parts of the gun – to a small woman sitting between two overloaded racks of coats and weapons. She slung the small leather bag containing the gun’s CPU over one shoulder. Glancing down, she saw sensors peering over the edge of the bag, hooded by its flap. She brushed her hands over her dress – black velvet bodice, short bottle-green taffeta skirt over black net – feeling strange and exposed in it. It had been months since she’d worn anything but combat gear or put anything on her face that wasn’t meant to hide it.

Jordan was sitting at a table talking to some people she vaguely recognized from the Collective. He saw her, stared at her for a moment and then jumped up and bounded over to her. They threw their arms around each other.

‘Oh, wow, Janis! It’s great to see you. Good of you to make it.’

‘Hey, good of you to ask me, man. Congratulations.’ She caught his shoulder and held him at arm’s-length, looking him up and down critically. He had lost weight and seemed to have gained height. Black boots, black jeans, black leather coat, plain white cotton shirt with a black bootlace tie. ‘Very smart you look too. Kinda like a gamblin’ mahn…or a preacher mahn…hey!’ she added with mock suspicion. ‘You didn’t do it in a church, did you?’

‘Haill, no!’ said Jordan. ‘We got a ceremony from the British Humanist Association.’ He laughed, and repeated, as if amused and amazed by the whole idea, ‘The British Humanist Association! God, I had no idea atheism could be respectable.’

‘Songs by Carly Simon, readings from Alex Comfort, that sort of thing?’

‘That sort of thing.’

‘I wish I could have been there,’ Janis said. ‘But I only got back this morning to my old flat in Uxbridge and found the invite. This is my first leave. Uh, thanks for your letter. Did you get—?’

‘Yeah, I did, Janis. Thanks.’

He looked at her so sadly that she wanted to grab him and tell him everything, but instead she squeezed his shoulder and said, ‘I’m all right, Jordan. Now come on, take me to see your—’

She saw the bride coming round the corner of the bar and walking towards them; she held the image, taking it all in, storing it not only for the ghost that shared her vision but for herself. The girl was eye-wateringly beautiful; in her wedding dress she looked like a princess of the galaxy from an improbable future. Her hair, a nimbus around her head and falling back between her shoulderblades, made any veil redundant. Her dress fitted closely to her arms, breasts, waist and hips, twined with flower and leaves, re-embroidered in blazing natural colour on white lace. The lace flowed away into a crepe skirt which flared from above the knee, floating freely when she walked, hanging almost vertical when she stood still.

Janis blinked and took the hand that had been held out to her.

‘Hello, Janis.’

‘Hello, Cat. It’s wonderful to meet you. And today. I don’t know what to say. Congratulations.’ She hugged Cat and Jordan together. ‘Goddess, Cat, you look incredible. I’ve never seen a dress like that anywhere.’

‘Thank you.’ Cat smiled, stretching and flexing her arms. ‘I feel as if I could do anything in it. Run, swim, walk up walls. Fly.’

Jordan answered the unstated question. ‘She’s not telling,’ he said. ‘I suspect an arrangement with a colony of nimble-fingered faerie folk.’ He looked past Cat. ‘Just a minute.’ He plunged into the crowd and tapped a young woman on the shoulder and started talking to her.

‘Does he often rush off and talk to strange girls in pubs?’ Janis asked.

‘All the time.’

Janis had worried about this moment. If she and Jordan were affected by Moh’s death, how must it be for Cat, who had known him longer than either of them, loved him for years? She wanted to acknowledge this, yet didn’t want to cloud Cat’s happiness. Just standing next to the woman was like being in a sunlit garden.

‘Drink?’ Cat asked.

‘Uh, vodka-cola, thanks.’

Cat made some mystic gestures and two drinks appeared beside them.

‘Shall we sit?’

She strode to the nearest table, which by the time they sat down had become unoccupied, wiped clean and furnished with a translucent ashtray.

‘Cheers.’

‘Live long and prosper.’

‘I—’

‘I—’

‘No, you—’

Cat smiled. ‘All right. This probably sounds terrible, but if I don’t say it now it’ll be on our minds, you know? Moh’s death was a shock to all of us. It just came up on our screen, against his name. Well, that’s how it does,’ she added, defensively. ‘Killed in action. Soldier of the Republic. Sincere condolences and hasta la victory and all that…’ She blinked hard and sipped her drink. ‘The thing is, Janis, we—’ She stopped again. ‘These things happen to us, to people like us. Like Moh. You get used to knowing it’ll happen – hell, you get used to it happening. No, you never get used to it, but…you get to have ways of dealing with it. And you, you were just sort of thrown into it. I mean, I want to say I understand you must have felt it so much more—’

‘Aw, Cat, don’t say that. But I know what you’re saying, and—’ She clasped Cat’s hand. ‘I loved him, and I know you loved him.’

Cat took a deep breath through her nose and smiled. ‘Yes. And I’m sure you know how he thought. Last thing he’d’ve wanted would be for two of his old girlfriends to be crying in each other’s drinks about him. He loved life so much because he knew and believed so strongly that it’d go on without him. That’s how he responded to other people’s deaths: comrades, people he was close to. Mourn them and…go on. Don’t act as if they’re hanging around like ghosts, watching what you do and resenting you having a good time.’

Janis nodded. That sounded like Moh all right. She sighed, relaxing, and raised her glass. Cat nodded and raised hers, too, and they both drank, smiling at each other.

‘Well, Cat,’ Janis said, ‘what you been doing since the revolution?’

Cat was about to reply when some other guests crowded around the table and led her off. ‘Long story,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Catch you later, Janis.’

Janis stood up, saw her glass was empty and went to the bar. Once the glass had been filled the table was no longer vacant.

Jordan appeared again.

‘Hi, Janis,’ he said. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’

The woman he’d been talking to stepped forward and stopped just beside him. Janis took an instant liking to her. She had rough-cut red-brown hair and a sun-exposed, freckle-dusted face, and she was wearing as her only jewellery a blue enamel star pinned to the shoulder of her red silk shift. At the moment the expression on her frank, open face was one of frank, open reserve.

‘Janis, Sylvia,’ Jordan said. ‘Sylvia’s the first person I met in Norlonto. She actually pointed me towards this pub.’ He looked at Sylvia, apparently oblivious to how she felt. ‘I’d probably never have met you, or Cat, if it hadn’t been for her. Talk about chance, huh? The blind matchmaker.’ He grinned, then seemed to realize that the phrase had painful echoes. ‘Anyway, she’s in the space-movement militia.’

He waved a hand between them and turned away.

Sylvia leaned an elbow on the bar and ordered a beer.

‘Well, hi there, soldier,’ she said. ‘So how does it feel to be doing me out of a job?’

‘What?’ Janis stared at her, bewildered.

‘Don’t tell me you don’t know,’ Sylvia said. She raised her mug and said with heavy sarcasm, ‘Ladies and gentlemen: the Republic!’

‘Oh, Christ!’ Janis put her drink down on the bar and stared at it for a moment. She shook her head and looked up. ‘Believe me, Sylvia, I didn’t know. And I don’t agree with it.’

‘OK.’ Sylvia gave a guarded smile. ‘Are you free to talk about it?’

‘Sure.’ Sure.

‘Well,’ – Sylvia slid up on to a tall stool – ‘the militia’s been ordered to disband and merge with the army. We don’t like it, but all the movement leaders say we don’t have much choice. Any day now, the army’ – so that was what people called it now! – ‘is going to move in and enforce it. Put an end to Norlonto’s so-called anomalous status.’

‘But why?’ She knew why.

‘Officially, it’s because it’s a security risk, full of refugees and conspirators from the Free States.’

‘Hah!’ If she knew anything about Norlonto the objection was that its militias and defence agencies could maintain law and order, could stamp on any terrorism or other clear and present danger, and do it a lot more effectively than any occupying army.

‘Indeed,’ said Sylvia. ‘It’s because it’s outside their control and they don’t like it. A decadent blot on the face of the earth.’

‘Yeah. A fun-loving, freedom-loving decadent blot.’

‘You said it.’

‘Well, actually, Wilde said it,’ Janis acknowledged. ‘And now they’re going to wreck the only good thing to come out of the Settlement. Goodbye to the fifth-colour country.’

Sylvia looked surprised, then smiled in agreement.

Janis noticed Jordan standing just a metre away, listening, and decided she’d underestimated his awareness of what was going on. She swung her head to indicate to him to come closer, and leaned inward to talk in a low voice to them both.

‘I know what you think I’m thinking. That it’s all very well doing this sort of thing to unpleasant little Free States, breeding grounds of reaction, but Norlonto’s different, Norlonto’s special because Norlonto’s free.

‘That’s not what I think at all.’ She took a long swallow, enjoying the looks they were giving her. ‘I think what we’re doing is wrong all down the line.’ There, she’d said it.

‘So what do you want then?’ Jordan asked, frowning. ‘Another Settlement? Let places like BC go on tyrannizing their inhabitants, poisoning their minds and screwing up their personalities? God, Janis, you don’t know what that kind of power is like!’

‘You don’t—’ she began. Then she recognized the song The Precentors were playing, just starting into the refrain again. She held up her hand. ‘Listen.’

If you had been whaur I hae been

ye wouldnae be sae canty-oh.

If you had seen what I hae seen

on th’ braes o’ Killiecrankie-oh…

They heard it out. Jordan turned to her, his ears burning.

‘Point taken,’ he said.

‘Is it that bad?’ Sylvia asked.

‘It’s bad,’ Janis said. ‘Don’t get me wrong – it’s not like it’s Afghanistan. I’m not talking about atrocities. But people’s lives are being devastated just to make a political point.’

‘But we had all of that under the Hanoverians,’ Jordan said. ‘The enclaves fought all the time—’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘Not all the time, and not like this. OK, OK. But it’s hard to stop. There’s a big sentiment for national unity, and against the mini-states.’

‘If the Republic wins,’ Janis said, ‘it isn’t going to be like Norlonto with taxes. It’s going to be like one big mini-state!’

She laughed for a moment at her own contradictory phrases, but Jordan looked at her sharply.

‘If—’

Janis felt her shoulders slump. ‘The fact is,’ she said, ‘we’re losing.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Jordan said lightly, catching someone’s eye and moving away. ‘I knew that.’

‘So what do we do?’ Janis said.

Syvlia snorted. ‘I know what I’m going to do. Move out.’

‘Move out – oh! To space.’

‘Yeah, while this place is still a spaceport, where you can hook on to something moving. While we still have space.’

Janis stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s a lot of talk about cutting back. A good deal of the space effort was a Space Defense boondoggle, let’s face it. Now they’ve suddenly realized how vulnerable they are to the space unions. Space is still bloody expensive. Maybe if we’d had the steam-beams – ah, shit.’

‘So why go there?’

Sylvia grinned all over her face. ‘We’ll be there. The settlements can survive. There just won’t be much coming up. Maybe none.’ She swirled what remained of her litre moodily, and added as if changing the subject, ‘You hear the Khmer Vertes hit Bangkok?’

‘You getting all this?’

‘Yes.’

‘You OK?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine, Janis. Gotta admit it’s fucking weird, though.’

She touched the tiny phone behind her ear, smiling.

‘Take your word for it, gun.’

She circulated. There were a lot of space-movement people here, the comrades, some of Jordan’s…she didn’t know what to call them. Not, she hoped, followers. She talked, she drank, and sometimes she talked to herself without moving her lips.

Turing said if you could talk to it and you couldn’t tell if it was a person or not, it was a person. Searle said, suppose you had a man in a room who didn’t understand a language, say Chinese, and the room was full of books of rules for combining words in that language, and you shoved some writing in that language under the door, would…?

And Korzybski said a difference that makes no difference is no difference.

She could live with that.

‘You knew Moh Kohn?’

The man who spoke to her was short and stocky, with very short greying hair and with wrinkles around his eyes, but otherwise looked a bit younger than these features suggested. He waved out a long arm and invited her to a seat at the table where he sat, slightly stooped, over a drink.

‘Yes, I knew him.’ She sat down. ‘Did you?’

‘I heard he was killed in the revo. Sorry to hear it. Name’s Logan, by the way. Not Slogan.’ He laughed at what was obviously an old joke and reached across the table to shake her hand.

‘Logan! My God!’ She grabbed his hand.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s a welcome I didn’t expect! What’s the story?’

‘My name’s Janis Taine, I’m – that is, I was a biologist, and I was…working with Moh when he contacted you about’ – she lowered her voice – ‘the Star Fraction.’

‘The Star Fraction!’ Logan shouted. ‘Yee fucking hah!’ His fist in the air carried her hand, rather painfully, with it.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said as she sucked her knuckles.

‘It isn’t a secret any more?’

He shook his head. ‘Not here.’

‘Did it work? Did you get the data, or—?’

‘It worked fine,’ Logan said. ‘We got it all, just before Dissembler went down. It’s all out there now. The whole fucking Genome Project databank. We could grow the world from a bean.’

‘That’s good to know,’ Janis said. She felt a weight of concern, a concern that had grown so familiar she’d ceased to notice it, go. At least that much had worked: the systems that Josh Kohn had set up had performed to specification.

She let herself relax.

‘Maybe you can tell me something,’ she said. ‘You knew Moh for a long time, right?’

‘Just met him now and again over the years. Starting with the first time I was victimized. Overdose of rads. Anyway, it’s water out the jet now. Fifteen years ago. I must’ve been, oh, twenty and counting. I was speaking at a meeting the local comrades did.’

‘He told me about that,’ Janis said. ‘When he was looking for the Star Fraction…One thing I never did figure out. He was a communist, or a socialist, yeah, and I can see why he backed the Republic in the end. But why was he so keen on this place?’

‘The Lord Carrington?’

‘No!’ Janis snorted. ‘Idiot. Norlonto.’

‘He never explained that? Bastard. It’s something him and me figured out years ago, arguing with that old geezer, whatsisname, Wilde. See, what we always meant by socialism wasn’t something you forced on people, it was people organizing themselves as they pleased into co-ops, collectives, communes, unions. Now look at this place. Look at space, come to that. It’s crawling with them! And if socialism really is better, more efficient than capitalism then it can bloody well compete with capitalism. So we decided, forget all the statist shit and the violence: the best place for socialism is the closest to a free market you can get!’ He leaned back and laughed. ‘I had one hell of a faction-fight over that one!’

‘Well,’ Janis said, ‘that makes some kind of sense. I suppose.’ She gave him a conspiratorial wink. ‘Moh told me about fractions and factions.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Just what party was the Star Fraction a fraction of?’

Logan grinned and held up four fingers. Janis remembered Moh, doodling symbols in spilt wine.

‘Oh. The International.’

‘The Fourth.’ Then he spread both hands: not to indicate ten, Janis realized, but something opening. ‘And the Last.’

Janis frowned. ‘I thought the Last International was a myth!’

‘Yeah, it is.’ Logan laughed. ‘That’s the point! It gets around all the old problems of recruitment and security by having no membership, no apparatus, nothing except front organizations. The fronts are real; the party behind them is a mirage. A virtual organization!’

‘But what does it stand for? What’s it about?’

‘Freedom,’ Logan said flatly. Then, as if that were too grandiose a statement, added: ‘And defeating all its enemies, of course.’

‘A conspiracy of paranoids?’

‘Absolutely,’ Logan agreed cheerfully. ‘And Josh roped in lots of them to his virtual conspiracy, because he thought back then that the war was coming, right, that it would go nuclear, right, and that would be it. The end, the fall. Wrong. We pulled through that one. But now, the way things are going—’

‘Why does everybody keep talking about the way things are going? I thought things were going your way?’

Logan guffawed, then looked apologetic. ‘Sorry, no offence, mizz.’ (Mizz?) ‘What we thought was the revolution,’ he said slowly, as if spelling something out to himself, ‘was only a moment in the fall.’

‘That’s what they call it in America,’ Janis said, laughing. ‘The Fall Revolution!’

Logan didn’t take it as a joke. ‘That’s what it was, all right,’ he said. ‘We defeated the Kingdom, jes, and the US/UN, but we have too many of our own defeats behind us.’

‘Who’s this “we”?’ she challenged him. ‘The socialists?’

Logan sighed. ‘No. The workers. The city folk. We’ve been bled for over a century now by wars and depressions and purges and peace processes, and every one of them took more of our best away. Those of us who are left’ – he grinned sourly – ‘are the bottom of the barrel.’ He drained his drink. ‘Myself very much included.’

‘That’s not what I’ve heard about you,’ Janis said. She punched his shoulder as she went to the bar.

‘What have you been doing since the revo?’ Logan asked when she returned.

‘Cheers…I’ve been in the army.’

‘I gathered that,’ Logan said with a lopsided smile. ‘And what have you been doing? Recently.’

She thought about it. ‘Falling back,’ she admitted. It was no secret.

‘Yeah,’ Logan said. ‘We all are.’

Jordan and Cat had silently joined them at the table. The black and the white, the right and the left, the light and the fair.

‘We can’t just be going down like that,’ Janis protested. ‘Just because of a few ambiguous victories? Contradictory situations. Come on, give it some mips. We had the revolution. It just wasn’t your revolution. So what? I knew Moh; he told me some things. I know how you guys think. You just keep coming back.’

Cat shook her head. ‘It’s not only recent, Janis. It all happened a long time ago. Who was it – Engels or Trotsky or somebody – said the defeat of Spartacus was the victory of Christ? Meaning the defeat of the slaves meant there was no way forward, so people turned inward.’

Janis thought of the new citizens, the barb in the shanty-towns and the urban fringes, developing whole industries out of junk, rearming and recruiting…recycling.

‘It isn’t just a matter of turning inward,’ she said. ‘The trouble with our wonderful society is that it constantly leaves people behind, constantly turns masses of people into barbarians in the midst of civilization. Just as Rome did. Say what you like about Christianity, it created a new world-view where everybody counted.

‘And so do the greens! They’re barbarians, all right, but they’re barbarians civilizing themselves. How many people do you know who can grow crops, heal wounds, generate electricity? Most of us just flick a switch and expect a light to come on! Your average green anti-technology freak is a master of dozens of technologies, while we wander like savages in our own cities.’

Janis felt excited by her own explanation. She didn’t welcome the looks of gloomy agreement from the others. There was always a chance, as long as you could make sense of things. They’d see that soon enough…and meanwhile, carpe diem.

‘Aw, fuck, this is just too grim for a wedding! Give me a joint!’

They built one between them. ‘Where’s the new messiah, huh?’

Jordan looked over his shoulder. ‘Not here.’

They all laughed.

‘What is to be done?’ Janis inhaled deeply. ‘Heard that one before.’

‘We’re staying,’ Jordan said. ‘We’ll preach reason to the barbarians if we have to.’

Logan shrugged. ‘I’m going back out tomorrow. We got a freewheel space colony. New View. You should see it. You should see the view. And we got ships. Swiped them from Space Defense, in the strike. State of war – no way are they gonna get them back. We got our eye on Mars. The Red Planet.’ He cocked his head, looked at Janis with an aptly ape-like cunning. ‘You’re a biologist.’

‘Aw, come on. OK, OK. I’ll think about it.’ She smiled brightly and turned to Jordan and Cat. ‘I never asked you: what did you do in the revolution?’

‘…then she said a strange thing. I think she meant to get us confused, suspicious of each other. She said I must’ve convinced Jordan that Kohn – we reckon she was talking about Josh Kohn, not Moh – was wrong and Donovan was right. She said who else would want to turn off her security software except Donovan? And that sort of provoked Jordan into saying we were doing it for the ANR, and she started this giggling. Goddess, it was creepy. So we shut her up and—’

The room went dark except for Cat’s bright face, silent except for Cat’s voice and a rushing roar. The suspicion had begun to dawn on Janis as soon as Cat and Jordan had spoken about the instruction to enter a code on Mrs Lawson’s secure terminal. She’d tried to discount it. And now it was confirmed.

The light, lazy, reminiscing voice went on, spinning out its story; and slowly the words made the world come back.

Not the same world.

I’m not dying. I’m living through this. Those shining lights are her eyes, that tangled bank her dress. This cylinder in my mouth is a cigarette, and I’m breathing in and breathing out, and making interested meaningless noises.

‘So apart from waving a few guns about it was all gratuitous nonviolence,’ Jordan said when Cat had concluded. ‘It was all down to Cat. If it hadn’t been for her there’d be a massacre memorial now at Angel Gate.’ They smiled at each other. ‘With our names on it, probably. “Gone to be with the angels”!’ He laughed and hugged Cat and kissed her.

Janis forced a smile. It did not seem right that the walls were still standing. It was astonishing that people were still walking on the ground, still dancing and not drifting away in the sudden absence of gravity. She looked down at herself – still in her seat, she noticed – and at the little satchel in her lap. Here’s your defeated Spartacus, your risen rationalist messiah. And he told us of a whole heavenly host, which your hand swept away.

Or was used to sweep away. Jordan had not known, but had the ANR known? Or Van? ‘There is no Black Planner,’ MacLennan had told them, but how much did he really know? It seemed impossible that the Black Plan would have knowingly destroyed itself, unlikely that its destruction was an accidental side-effect of trying to gain access to Beulah City. The code would have been much too specific for that. It all seemed to point to a deliberate human intervention, a cold decision that Moh and the Watchmaker culture be sacrificed to stay the wrath of Space Defense. A Black Plan indeed.

And of course Jordan didn’t know. He had no idea that Mrs Lawson had worked with Donovan, no idea that her security software had stood between Donovan’s viruses and the Watchmaker AIS – and the Black Plan, and Moh’s mind. A mind stamped with the logic of the programs, sensitized by her drugs…Jordan had no way of knowing, unless she told him what she knew.

She could do it. She could walk to the bar, throw a few switches, and Moh’s fetch would be up there on the stage as Donovan’s once had been. What would he say? She could tell them the truth, and whether Jordan felt any personal conscious guilt or not the impact on his mind would be incalculable. It would dominate the rest of his life.

She could do it. She could give him something to preach to the barbarians: a man who died to save them, and a living proof that the dead lived on in their deeds, and our memories.

She could do it. The world was cradled in her arms like a ball. She could throw it, and start a whole new game. The power sang through her nerves: she was at this moment the goddess herself, poised, waiting for the music of the next dance, the voice of a new partner; a fey glance in her eye, the strange attractor. She was the butterfly in the greenhouse.

She looked at Jordan, who looked back at her. He could do it, with his – charisma, that was the word, the precise technical word – and his beautiful wife, his earthly angel. He could found a new faith in reason that would shine through any dark centuries to come, and live to blaze into a solar civilization. Her eyes stung with a sharp nostalgia for that future, for the countless trillions of individuals of organic and electric life, sharing or striving but always living in the light.

It all went through her mind in a handful of seconds.

She looked at Jordan and Catherin.

She could not do it.

She smiled, shaking her head, and said, ‘You did good at the Angel Gate.’

She turned to Logan, who had used the occasion of Catherin’s talking at length to fall into a trance of besotted admiration, and said: ‘Apeman, spaceman, come on and give me a dance.’

She woke up naked on a bed in the upper floor of the Collective’s house with a splitting headache, a long hairy arm around her and red-brown hair in her face. She looked at the time, yelled Logan and Sylvia awake, scrambled into her best and now only dress and grabbed the bag and muttered to the gun. She remembered the memory drugs; she found them still in their cold-box in the refrigerator with the explosives.

Logan and Sylvia ran with her down the Broadway and they waited, jumping up and down, while she dived into a Sexu/Ality shop and bought a telesex bodynet. At Alexandra Port she turned for a final look over London, one city now, and saw the APCs moving up Park Road with the Republic’s pennants fluttering from their aerials.

They caught the airship to Guiné and the airbreather to low orbit and the tug to high orbit and the slow ship (the ‘space shuffle’, Logan called it) to the Lagrange point where they docked with a vast, crazy, leaky turning wheel, one of many, built from discarded stages and abandoned platforms and aborted missions. Inside, the air smelled of earth and people and plants, and buzzed with bees and human speech, and was stirred by flying children and tumbling butterflies; a green and crowded world of ground she could float over, skies she could stand on and look out and see beneath her feet what had always been there: everything. And closer to hand, nearer than infinity, she could see the other free wheels turn. Stars and stripes and hammers and sickles flaunted their fading colours to the real stars that held no promises, only hopes and endless, endless lands.