The Star Fraction

5

The Fifth-Colour Country

The armoured car was smaller than Janis had expected, low and angular, its black so matte that it was difficult to get an idea of its exact shape: a Stealth vehicle, she thought. Inside, it looked old. Cables joined with insulating tape hung in multicoloured loops under the instrument casings. The two leather seats at the front were frayed. Two even more worn seats faced each other in the back. What appeared to be windows were wrapped around at head-level in the front, but showed nothing.

Kohn demonstrated how to strap in, and then leaned back in his seat. He reached up and flicked a switch. Nothing happened. He cursed and flicked it again. The wrap-around screens came to life as the car began to move: the effect, uncanny, vulnerable-feeling, was of riding in the open.

The vehicle was waved through the exit gate. The traffic was heavier now on the main road, and as the car slipped through it there were moments when Janis thought it was actually invisible to other drivers. Kohn seemed unperturbed.

They stopped at her flat long enough for Janis to pack a few bags, shake her head sadly over the mess, and leave a note and a credit line for Sonya. Kohn fumed and fidgeted, making a big thing of checking every room and watching from windows. Back in the car, his choice of route baffled her.

‘Why are we stopping?’ Janis felt irritated that she sounded so anxious.

‘Won’t be a minute,’ Kohn said.

He jumped out, leaving the engine running and the gun on the seat with its muzzle pointing out of the door. Janis kept looking around. Gutted houses, boarded shopfronts, incredible numbers of people swarming along the whole street. Braziers glowed; weapons and teeth glinted in the shadows of weird crystalline buildings among ruins.

Kohn returned and dropped a package by her feet. The armoured car moved slowly down the street, avoiding children and animals. Janis looked at the package: white paper, blue lettering.

‘You stopped there to buy a kilo of sugar?’

Kohn glanced at her. ‘Don’t put it in your coffee.’

They passed through a checkpoint (Kohn paid the tax in ammo clips, which struck Janis as entirely apt) and then they were out of Ruislip and back on the A410.

‘Afghans,’ Kohn said, relaxing. ‘Don’t want to sound racist or anything, but you let them move in and bang goes the neighbourhood.’

Janis looked at the soaring towers of Southall away to their right.

‘It’s hardly their fault that the Indians had better antimissile systems. I saw it on the tel, back home. Manchester. It looked like a horrible firework show.’

Kohn switched to auto and leaned back, hands behind his head. Janis tried to ignore the road-tanker wheels rolling beside them.

‘Never happened,’ Kohn said flatly. ‘There was no missile exchange between the Afghans and the Indians. It wasn’t even the Hanoverians did that damage, another version I’ve heard, including from locals. No, it was the fuckinyouenn, man.’

‘The fucking you…? Oh, the UN! The Yanks.’

‘Yeah, the great Space Defense force, the peacekeepers. Hit them from orbit, not a damn’ thing they could do.’

‘And it got covered up?’

‘Nah! They announced it! Your local tel station must’ve had reasons of its own for lying about it.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s no conspiracy.’

Janis fought down a helpless sense of chaos, a reverse paranoia.

‘How did things get this way? Don’t you people have theories about history, about why things happen?’ She looked at him sharply. ‘Or is your guess as good as mine? Was it all wrong what I learned in school about Marxism?’

Kohn fingered the controls unnecessarily, staring straight ahead.

‘I have my own ideas about the answer to the first question,’ he said. ‘For the rest it’s yes, yes, and probably. We’re in the same ship as the rest of you, burning the same air. Burning it up.’

There was not enough violence on television, Kohn thought as he crouched behind rubble and waited for the order to attack. On television and in films the shots followed the shots, the picture gave you the picture. It was just not good enough, no preparation for the real thing. A bad influence on the young. Most of the time you never saw the enemy, even in house-to-house fighting. Most of the time you were lucky if you knew where your own side was.

He’d fought before, but that had been scuffles, rumbles. This was a real war, even if a tiny one. Somewhere in those burnt-out houses two hundred and fifty metres away were men who wanted him dead. His first fight was against unreality, the what-am-I-doing-here feeling. There was some sound political reason for it, he knew: the Indians were being backed by the government in their dispute with the Afghans, and several leftist militias were fighting on the Muslim side out of conviction. The Cats had joined in for the money.

Johnny Smith, the young Hizbollah cadre beside him, looked up from his computer, poked his Kalashnikov over the rubble and let loose a five-second burst.

‘OK, guys,’ he said quietly over everyone’s phones. ‘Last one dead’s a sissy!’

He jumped up and over the wall, waving Kohn to follow, and sprinted up the street. Kohn found himself, without conscious decision, running after him. The gun was making a hell of a noise. Then he hit dirt behind an overturned car and glanced around to see what the rest were doing. Oh Gaia! They were running on past him! A mortar round crumped into where they’d been seconds earlier. Rubble thudded around him. He changed magazines and ran forward again, firing. This time he ended up slammed into a gutted shop doorway. Another figure hurtled in almost on top of him. Their armour clashed together. They fell apart. The other flipped up a visor to wipe sweat away from her face.

Her face. It was an amazing face and it was grinning like a maniac’s. Kohn suddenly realized that he was too. His cheeks ached. The visor came down.

‘Come on,’ she said.

Kohn saw out of the corner of his eye the corkscrew contrails spiralling lazily in—

‘NO!’ he roared. He caught her arm and pulled, then ran straight out to the middle of the street. The ground bounced under their feet and the building came down like a curtain. A couple of klicks to the north Ruislip was going the same way.

They stuck around long enough to cover the retreat. Later Kohn remembered lugging about two-thirds of Johnny Smith towards a Red Crescent chopper and then looking down at what he carried and just dropping it, just stopping. It wasn’t that there was nothing left of the man’s face except the eyes – maxilla, mandible, nares blasted clean away – but that those eyes were open, unblinking, pupils not responding to the searing flashes overhead. Blood still bubbled, but Johnny Smith had been brainstem-dead for minutes. Anything worth saving had gone to his God. The organ-bankers could have the rest.

The woman had been with him when they were airlifted out through the dense smoke. And there had been another mercenary in the Mil Mi-34, one who chewed coca leaves and held on to his shattered right arm as if waiting for glue to set and kept saying, ‘Hey Moh, why do they call us Kelly girls?’

They swung on to the A40. Troubled by his sudden silence, Janis glanced at Kohn sidelong, and saw his face had taken on again that look – of inhuman acceptance of some deeply fallen knowledge – which had startled her when he’d come out of the trance back in his room. It passed, and the harder lines of his features returned. He was still looking at the traffic.

‘How do you feel now?’ she asked.

He shivered. ‘It’s like…I might have changed the world forever today, and there’s this thing like – oh, hell.’ He lit a cigarette, closed his eyes and sighed away the smoke. ‘You ever try to imagine seeing nothing, maybe when you were little? Not darkness: nothing. To see what it is that you don’t see out of the back of your head.’

‘You mean, visualize the boundary of your visual field.’

‘There you go. Science. I knew there’d be a way to make sense of it. Anyway. If I do that now, Janis, there’s something there. Something like’ – he cat’s-cradled his fingers, moved them flickering like fluent Sign – ‘that isn’t like light, same as it used to be not like dark. And – you know when you wake up, and you know you’ve had a dream and you can’t remember it?’

She felt a chill at the reminder. Everything gets everywhere.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know just what you mean.’

‘Well it’s like, if I try to remember, I remember, but I never know what it is until—’

He stopped. ‘They hit me like flashbacks. At first it was’ – he struck his forehead repeatedly – ‘bang bang bang. Now I can consciously not do it. Most of the time.’ He looked at her with disconcerting intentness. ‘Was that what you were aiming at? Everybody remembering everything?’

‘I never thought about it like that.’

‘Makes me ask myself, who did? Who would want people to remember?’

‘That’s too…general,’ she said. ‘It could have all sorts of applications – enhanced learning, delayed senility, that kind of thing.’

‘That kind of thing. Sure. But memory’s more than that. Memory’s everything. It’s what we are.’

‘Speaking of memory—’ She hesitated. ‘This is – there’s something I just thought of that I want to ask you.’

‘Ask me anything you like,’ he said.

She paused, then said in a rush, ‘You know what you said about the Star Fraction, about the code being something your father wrote, when you were a kid. Uh, is there a reason you can’t just ask him—?’

She stopped again.

‘Yeah,’ Kohn said flatly. ‘They got killed. My father and my mother.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He made a chopping motion with his hand. ‘Happens.’

‘Was it in the war?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It was afterwards. In the Peace Process.’

He fell into another introverted silence, his cigarette smouldering to ash that dropped off, centimetre by centimetre. Suddenly he stirred himself, stubbed out the cigarette and reached up for another switch.

‘See if we’re on the news,’ he said.

The windshield screen went wild and then stabilized to rapidly changing images as Kohn scanned the news channels. Every few seconds he’d mark an item; after a minute he stopped and pulled them all together.

‘Look,’ he said.

Janis stared at the multiple patches of flitting pictures and sliding subtitles. After some silence she said, ‘Oh, Gaia.’

Hundreds of system crashes, all around the world. None, in themselves, terribly serious, but together they amounted to the software equivalent of a minor earth tremor set off by a nuclear detonation, ringing the globe like a bell. Detecting the source involved microsecond discriminations. Wherever anyone had bothered to do that, all the arrows pointed to London.

The Carbon Life Alliance had denied responsibility, but said they’d like to contact anyone who could plausibly claim it.

‘Think we should take them up on it?’ Janis teased.

Kohn flicked the screen back to clear.

‘No doubt they’ll be in touch,’ he said. He turned to her. ‘Still think it was all in my head?’

‘No, but that doesn’t mean your experience was what you think it was.’ She felt that she had to be stubborn on this point. ‘And remember, there really are AIS on the nets. Nothing conscious, I’m convinced of that, but perfectly capable of fooling you. Some of them designed by highly mischievous mind-fuckers.’

‘I know that,’ Kohn said. He sounded tired again. ‘Gopher-golems and such. Try to get you into arguments. I keep telling you, I done all that. You want me to show you my kill-files?’

‘OK, Kohn, OK.’ She smiled uncertainly. ‘I’m only saying you should keep an open mind…’

Kohn laughed so loud and long that she had to join in.

‘“Keep an open mind.”’

‘You know what I meant.’

The car passed under a great concrete arch alive with lights.

‘Welcome to space,’ Kohn said.

‘Oh. Yeah, I’ve heard of that. Extraterrestriality.’

‘A concept of dubious provenance, but it puts this place on the map.’

She laughed. ‘A five-colour map!’

‘Damn’ right. We live in the fifth-colour country, the one that has no borders. The next America.’

‘I thought it was the present America that really ran things up there.’

‘“You – you are only the present”,’ Kohn said obscurely. ‘In theory their writ runs down here too: Stasis can’t get in, but Space Defense can zap us any time they want. America, huh. The US/UN ain’t America. More like the England that tried to own the New World. More like bloody Portugal for all the chance it’s got of succeeding. Look at these: I’ll bet on them against any battlesats ever built.’

She followed his pointing finger and saw a sight she seldom bothered to notice, a flight of re-entry gliders descending from the south, black arrowheads against the sky.

‘“Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.”’ This time she knew he was quoting. ‘Costly bales, Janis, costly bales. That’s where it’s at. That’s where I’ll put my money.’

‘Hi, mum!’

No answer. Jordan let the door close behind him and bounded cheerfully up the stairs. The house’s familiar smells of cooking and cleaning, furniture polish, soap, stew in the pot, obscurely reassured. Sometimes they made him feel as if he were suffocating, and he had to stick his head out of the skylight window, get a good breath of industrial rather than domestic air. As his two elder brothers and his sister had left home he’d inherited more and more space, and now had the entire attic to himself.

As he ascended the stair-ladder to the attic he heard low murmuring voices. Adrenaline jolted his heart. When his head came above floor-level he saw straight through the open door of his bedroom. His mother and father were sitting side by side on his bed, heads lifted from an open book in their laps. At their feet lay a scatter of antique paperbacks and older hard-backs. They were books he wasn’t really supposed to have, ones he’d picked up here and there from bookleggers, hard to control even in the Christian community: old rationalist works in the beautiful brown bindings of the Thinker’s Library – Bradlaugh and Darwin and Haeckel, Huxley and Llewellyn Powys, Ingersoll and Paine – and battered paperbacks by Asimov and Sagan and Gould, Joachim Kahl, Russell, Rand, Lofmark, Lamont, Paul Kurtz, Richard Dawkins. The dread heresiarchs of secular humanism. He’d concealed them at the back of a high bookshelf, behind volumes of sermons and a thousand-page commentary on the Book of Numbers. It wasn’t the sight of these books that made his knees weak and his heart sick. It was the sight of the one they’d been looking at: his diary.

They weren’t even particularly old, his parents. They’d married young. His father’s beard had grey hairs coiling among the black; his face had lines like cuts. His mother’s eyes were reddened. Both parents watched him in silence as he walked up.

‘I feel totally betrayed,’ his mother said. ‘How could you write such vile, satanic filth? To think how we trusted you—’

She turned away, laid her face on her husband’s shoulder, and sobbed.

‘Now look what you’ve done to your poor mother.’

Jordan had expected to feel guilty at this moment, the moment he had put off for so long, the moment when he let his parents know what he really thought. Now that they had found out for themselves he felt embarrassed, sure – his cheeks burned at the thought of them reading his diary – but most of what he felt was anger at their doing this. The gall of it, the effrontery!

‘Don’t I have any privacy?’

He snatched the diary away and snapped it shut. His hands and voice shook.

‘Not while you’re under my roof and my responsibility.’

His father looked set to launch into a denunciation. Jordan spoke before he had a chance.

‘That’s it! If I can’t live under your roof with the minimum civilized decency of knowing I won’t be spied on or have you rummage through my possessions then I won’t live here at all!’

His father jumped up. ‘Now, you wait a minute! We don’t want to drive you out. We’re worried – terribly, terribly worried about you. What you’ve been reading – even what you’ve been writing – if we talk about it, take your doubts to a minister or a counsellor, I’m sure you’ll come to see how you’ve been led astray by these wicked, lying rationalistic libertines whose philosophy and vain deceit have been refuted over and over again by Christian thinkers.’

‘No.’

Jordan let his eyes wander. He’d decorated the room as near as he’d dared to his tastes: space prints of distant galaxies and supernova shells (Creationist propaganda), pictures of tribal peoples (mission appeals), pictures of chastely clad but pretty and subtly alluring girls (Modesty advertisements). Ah well. The books they’d heaped together were all he really wanted to take. He dragged a rucksack from the corner and stooped to gather them up, then walked around randomly grabbing clothes. Emotions are commanded by thoughts, and who but you commands your thoughts? Thus spake Epictetus, or possibly Wayne Dwyer. Whatever. Jordan commanded his thoughts.

‘Don’t turn your back on us,’ his mother said. ‘Don’t turn your back on the truth.’

‘You call yourself a free thinker,’ his father taunted, ‘but you don’t want to face anyone who might change your mind! All you’re really interested in is going after your own way, indulging your own carnal lusts. All this atheist garbage is just a miserable excuse. If you rely on that you will one day face God Himself with a lie in your right hand.’

Jordan felt he had swallowed ice.

‘As if I hadn’t heard all their arguments already!’ He took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I’ll listen to them. I’ll argue with your Christian thinkers but I’ll do it from out of range of the guns in their right hands.’

‘Don’t make me laugh! Nobody is threatening you with a gun.’

Jordan buckled the rucksack. He saw one remaining book that had been kicked aside, and retrieved it. Another of the Watts & Co Thinker’s Library: The History of Modern Philosophy by A. W. Benn. He smiled to himself, then straightened his face and back.

‘How do your Elders keep ideas out, people out, books out? With guards, with guns! You can’t have a free inquiry or discussion here.’

His father ignored the parry and asked, ‘Where do you think you’ll find this precious freedom? Some dirty communist enclave? Fine freedom you’ll find there!’

‘You’re probably right,’ Jordan said, thinking: Communist? ‘So I’m going to Norlonto.’

The high colour left his father’s face. His mother threw herself back on the bed with a moan. She said something into the pillow about the cities of the plain.

‘You would go from Beulah to that Babylon? Then you’re beyond reasoning with.’ His father looked at him with contempt. ‘Just you try it! You’ll soon be back with your tail between your legs. You don’t even have a passport.’

‘Yes I do,’ Jordan said. His hand patted his side pocket, felt the weight like a book. ‘Freedom’s own passport. Money.’

‘So you’re a thief as well as a renegade.’

‘It’s not stolen—’ Jordan began hotly, then stopped.

The enormity of what he’d done struck him for the first time. Until now he’d been thinking forward, not backward, of the implications of having that money. What it amounted to was taking a fee from the ultimate enemy, the foe of the community, of the state that protected the community and of the alliance that shielded the state. And they knew or suspected it. That was why his father had thrown ‘communist’ in his face! Mrs Lawson must have found out something about his unauthorized activity and dropped some heavy hint. Scheming Christian witch.

‘Think what you like,’ he said.

He hefted the rucksack and took a step towards his parents, with some vague notion of a handshake, a kiss – stupid, stupid. They recoiled from him as if frightened. Jordan backed off to the door, and on a sudden inspiration smiled and waved and stepped out through it and closed it and locked it. It wouldn’t take them long to get out, he thought as he descended the stair-ladder, the stair, the steps. But, maybe, long enough. When he reached the street he turned left and started running, down the hill.

He cursed every subversive atheistic volume in his possession a lot sooner than his parents would have dared to hope. About ten minutes after leaving them, as he hurried along Park Road. It was a well designed frame rucksack, and it didn’t dig into his back and shoulders, but the weight was enough to send sweat flying from his face. He walked past upmarket shops – delis, boutiques, craft – and respectable apartment houses. This, however, was the faintly disreputable fringe of Beulah City, the abode of essential but intrinsically unreliable types: inspirational artists, clean-minded scriptwriters, decent clothing designers, conservative sociologists…they all found it necessary to congregate close to the border, and even to make discreet business trips across it. No amount of sarcastic pulpit speculation about what possible benefit they could derive from this proximity to the imminent Ground Zero of divine wrath made any difference. A fine sight they would make at the Rapture (Jordan had heard on innumerable Sundays) when, if – and, one was given to understand, it was a very big ‘if’ – they were among the chosen, they would float skywards miles away from the main body of ascending believers, clutching their drinks or worldly magazines!

But, scrupulous though it was about what it allowed in, Beulah City, as a literally paid-up member of the Free World, couldn’t afford to be seen restricting people from going out. A population self-selected for enthusiasm had to be a better advertisement for a way of life than a conscript citizenry. Such liberal principles didn’t apply to fleeing felons. And apart from the money, which, even if its source was as untraceable as the Black Planner had made out, would be difficult to account for, he now had a charge of unlawful imprisonment to answer.

After a kilometre the traffic on the road beside him slowed to a pace that had him overtaking one vehicle after another. Little electric cars and long light trucks, bumper to bumper. Jordan glanced at them idly. The flowery italics of a Modesty logo caught his eye. He had of course been aware that a lot of the community’s exports were high-cost and low-weight, ideal for transport by airship from the skyport – Alexandra Port, just up the hill in Norlonto. He simply hadn’t made the connection before.

He shook his head. The habit of averting eyes and thoughts had worn deeper tracks in his brain than he’d realized. But how else had he put up with it all for so long, put off the confrontation? To hell with it. He selected another truck. BP: Beloved Physician, the drug company. He jumped on to the running-board and grinned at the driver, who looked up startled from a laptop.

‘Any chance of a lift, mate?’ he yelled. The driver, a lad about Jordan’s age, looked at him doubtfully for a moment, noticed the rucksack and leaned over to open the door.

‘Thanks.’ Jordan followed the rucksack inside.

His disconcerting capacity to lie went into overdrive.

‘Oh, man,’ he said, ‘am I glad to see you! My company does a lot of business with this lot, and just before we closed today they asked me to nip up to the port and deliver a stack of manuals and catalogues to one of their reps.’ He hefted his luggage. ‘Weighs a ton, too. You’d think in this day and age…’

‘Yeah,’ said the driver. ‘Don’t I know it? They just don’t trust the networks, that’s why they have to put that stuff on paper. Don’t want their ideas ripped off, you know? Mind you, between you and me I dunno why they bother. Know what I’ve got in the back?’

Jordan settled back into the seat. ‘Medicines?’ he hazarded.

‘Modified diamorphine for hospices! Designer heroin for the dying, if you want to be crude about it. Stops pain, but it doesn’t get you so high you can’t take in the message of salvation. Now, I don’t agree with gambling and all that, but if I did…how much would you bet some poor militiaman wouldn’t spare a sample for some kind officer who comes to shake his hand? And before you know it they’ll be using it to psych people up before combat. No guarantee it’ll only get to Christian militias either. Makes you think, dunnit?’

‘It sure does,’ Jordan said.

The first border post, the Beulah City one, was just before the road forked. To the left it went up to Muswell Hill, to the right into Alexandra Port. Each road had its Norlonto border post, with a couple of guards, and behind them, strung out along the roadside, a welcoming party of drug dealers, prostitutes, cultists, atheists, deprogrammers, newsvendors…Twenty or so Warrior guards devoted most of their attention to the incoming traffic, which their efforts had backed up to somewhere over the hill on both roads.

One of them opened the door on the driver’s side and leaned in. Black uniform, visored helmet, knuckles and buckles. He scrutinized the driver’s pass.

‘Don’t see anything about a passenger,’ he said.

‘Sorry officer, last minute…’

The Warrior pointed at the rucksack.

‘Let’s have a look in there.’

Jordan was reaching towards it when a hand grasped his wrist. It was the driver’s.

‘Don’t you touch it, mate. That’s confidential to the company.’ He turned to the Warrior. ‘If you want to open that bag, you’ll have to account for it to my boss. And his.’ He held out the laptop. ‘Form’s on there somewhere, shouldn’t take more’n oh I dunno ten minutes, fifteen outside.’

The guard hesitated.

‘It’s all right,’ the driver said. ‘We’re not in a hurry.’

Jordan noticed how cold the sweat felt as it dried.

‘Ah, gerron with you,’ the guard muttered. He backed out.

The engine whined into life.

‘Thanks,’ Jordan said.

‘It’s nothing. I’m used to them.’ The driver grinned at Jordan. ‘Lucky I’m a better liar than you, huh? What you got in there, anyway?’

‘Oh.’ Jordan felt hot again. ‘A load of irreligious books, actually.’

‘Good on you.’ Jordan thought: What? ‘Flog them where they can’t do no harm, get some money off the bastards. Can’t expect the Elders and the cops to see it that way, mind.’ He slowed at the junction. ‘You’ll be wanting the other road, the town not the port. See ya.’

Jordan wanted to say something grateful, shake the guy’s hand, give him some money, but the driver barely looked at him, concentrating on the traffic. So he just said ‘Good luck’, and jumped out.

He walked past the cars up to where a bored-looking young woman toting a rifle took a piece of plastic from each driver going in. Mostly she handed the plastic back. She turned to him. Dusty freckled face under a black knotted headband with a blue enamel star. Space-movement militia.

‘Got a chit?’

Jordan shook his head.

‘Got any money?’

Jordan took out, cautiously, a fraction of his fortune. She fanned the wad.

‘That’ll do,’ she said. He thought she was going to keep it, but she handed it back. ‘You can live on that till you get work, if you want. But you’ll have to give me a hundred if you’re going in.’

She gave him a receipt, a thin stiff plastic card. ‘Hang on to this chit and you won’t have to pay again, no matter how many times you come back or how long you stay. You’ll have to pay for services, but that’s up to you.’

‘Services?’

She gestured impatience. ‘Protection. Some roads. All that.’

Jordan pocketed the chit. ‘What does this pay for?’

‘The space you take up,’ she said. ‘And the air you breathe.’

Jordan walked slowly up the hill. The air felt free.