The Star Fraction

11

Quantum Localities

Donovan’s mail filter routinely discarded 98.3 per cent of incoming messages: sabotage attempts by enraged systems administrators, enquiries from journalists, advertising shots for everything from nuclear depth-charges to anti-fouling paint. That still left a lot, and it was just lucky that Moh’s message caught his eye. As he read it he laughed at the desperate naivety of the mercenary’s direct approach.

So Catherin had taken his advice and disappeared.

Too soon.

Donovan stood up and tried to massage his stiff shoulders with his aching hands. He’d been up all night, winding down the mechanical ferocity of his virtual hordes. It would probably be another day before the process was complete and they’d have a clear sight of whatever the Watchmaker entity was doing.

A girl in denims and deck-shoes came up from the galley with his breakfast coffee. He nodded to her and motioned her over. She approached with an air-hostess smile that relaxed to gratitude and relief when he asked her to massage his shoulders and neck. The insistent pressure and warmth of her fingers soothed his mind as well as his muscles. He drank the coffee and scanned the news. The increasingly fraught international situation came almost as a relief: it might give the CLA and Stasis time to deal with the Watchmaker entity while Space Defense was busy iraqing the Japanese.

He turned around in his seat. ‘Thank you,’ he told the girl. ‘You can go now.’

‘You’re…welcome, Mr Donovan,’ she said, and walked, very carefully, across the floor and down the ladder. Donovan waited until the sound of her footsteps was lost in the sough of the sea and the sigh of ventilation, and put out a call for Bleibtreu-Fèvre.

Within seconds the Stasis agent’s face appeared on a flat screen. If he had been up all night he certainly didn’t look it. Used to it, perhaps: Donovan had a vague image of him sleeping through the day, hanging upside down by his feet. Bleibtreu-Fèvre apparently mistook Donovan’s momentary amusement for cordiality, and returned him a thin-lipped smile.

‘I’m about halfway there,’ Donovan said. ‘How are your people reacting?’

‘There is no panic,’ replied Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘I have reported my suspicions, but the consensus is still that it was sabotage, if not by your movement then by some freelance hacker. The disruption seems to be over, for the moment. However, Mrs Lawson reports a small but persistent unaccounted increase in net traffic since the…event. Barely detectable, unless one is specifically looking and applying appropriate diagnostics. Like global warming.’ Another thin smile. ‘It is rising – by a very small fraction, but it is rising. It will be obvious to the dimmest sysadmin within about three days, to the rest of my agency some time before that and, no doubt, to Space Defense some indeterminate time after…How banal it will seem,’ he added, ‘if the first tangible evidence of a new intelligence on our planet should be unexpectedly high telephone bills, ha, ha.’

‘Some would say it’s been with us a long time,’ Donovan said, sourly acknowledging the joke but smarting inwardly: Bleibtreu-Fèvre was playing back to him an idea he’d advanced a little too seriously in Secret Life. ‘What about Dr Van?’

‘There we may have a problem,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘I have not heard from him for some hours. He has an infuriatingly vague answer-fetch which takes the form of a pretty young lady who sounds as if she is promising to put him in touch with you immediately, but as soon as the call is over one realizes she has promised precisely nothing.’

‘Probably an actual person,’ Donovan said as gravely as he could manage. ‘The skill is almost impossible to automate.’

‘Any progress with Kohn?’

Donovan flipped Kohn’s message into Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s field of view.

‘So much for that scheme,’ the Stasis agent remarked after reading it.

‘Perhaps,’ Donovan said reluctantly. ‘However, Catherin Duvalier is almost certain to contact me if Kohn does find her. It’s in her interests to have the matter settled.’

‘I suggest you put out another call for a freelance arrest,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘Please inform me of any contact immediately. This man may be extremely dangerous, possibly even an informational plague carrier for the AI entity. Given who he is – who his father was, and what happened to him – we cannot expect his cooperation. I will attempt to bring him in personally.’

‘Isn’t that a risk for you while he’s in Norlonto?’ Donovan asked. Space Defense had a way of overreacting if Stasis crossed into even notionally extraterrestrial territory.

‘Yes,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘But it’s a risk we may have to take.’

‘And if he leaves Norlonto?’

‘I have thought of that,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘In my line of work, as in yours no doubt, one cultivates contacts who may be a little – shall we say? – irregular in their ways, but who are on fundamental issues basically sound.’

The barb. Green partisans. Give them a few trinkets, tell them this machine or that person was an enemy of the earth: aim and fire. Donovan nodded enthusiastically, reflecting that, as far as Stasis was concerned, he was little more than a useful barbarian himself.

The phone-booth was a bubble of scratched plastic bolted to the outer wall of the shopping centre, the exchange itself a bevelled black chunk, like a small version of the monolith in 2001. And, also like that, the exchange had resisted everything up to and including laser fire. Kohn ducked into the booth while the others stood facing outwards, giving him a modicum of privacy. He linked his throat-mike, the gun and the telecom box and ran the key for Logan.

A holo appeared in the black depths, a show-off display of the signal’s path: Alexandra Palace – Telecom Tower – Murdoch GeoStat – bounce around a few more comsats – ping to Lagrange where a sargasso of space habitats rolled in the gravitational wake of Earth and Moon. There the line vanished into a scribble of local networks. The right-hand digits of the bill’s running total were flickering as fast as they had the last time he’d called Logan, when it had been a voice-only link, no fancy graphics (mips are cheaper than bandwidth). Somewhere in there: Dissembler, his father’s work.

Logan’s face appeared abruptly, at a slant; behind and around him plants, fishtanks, cable, tubing, everything stacked and looking as if it were about to topple; an overhead window with passing bars of light in constant unsettling motion behind it.

‘Moh Kohn! I was expecting—’ He stopped. ‘Hey, man, this a secure feed?’

‘It’s your crypto,’ Moh said wryly.

Logan responded with the usual delay. It looked slow-witted, as always until your mind adjusted, pacing the light-seconds. ‘Jes, well, the Amerikanoj haven’t cracked it, but – you slot in some of your own?’

Moh thumbed a hot-key. The pictures dissolved to snow, graphic characters, a vertiginous glimpse of crawling low-level ASCII, then snapped back.

‘Safe now?’ Logan asked. Behind him a chicken flapped inelegantly past, its beak open as if in surprise at remaining airborne.

‘We’re talking infinite monkeys,’ Moh said. ‘Shoot.’

‘OK. This about the Star Fraction?’

‘Yes!’

‘Uh-huh. The old code. It’s gone active. Years it’s been following me around, every so often this message comes up: don’t do anything. This time yesterday, suddenly it’s Move your ass, comrade, this is the big one. And what’s it telling me? Crack out the ammo? Even crank out the leaflets? Hell, no, it’s: buy fucking lab equipment! Sequencers, cryogenics, neurochemicals, dedicated hardware. I mean, we got stuff like this up to here, up here’ – he waved at the scene behind him – ‘but this is like way beyond what we need to run our ecology. Meanwhile I’m getting calls from comrades I never knew I had. Space movement, Internaciistoj, ANR, the lot. All of them think the program (whatever the fuck it is) thinks they’re in the Star Fraction (whatever the fuck it is). And it’s telling them to – well, depends where they are. Ground, it’s ship stuff out. Orbit, pull it in and put it together. All bio gear, communications software and computer kit with backup storage like they use for disaster recovery. Core memory that can ride out near-miss nukes.’

Near-miss nukes. Moh thought of the news: the Kyoto suburbs, the Sofia streets. A memory of shelter sweat made his skin itch.

‘And are you doing all this?’ was all he could think of to say.

‘Course I am. I got calls on hold right now, man.’

‘How are you paying for it?’

Logan grunted a laugh. ‘Checked our earthside account. Money’s coming in, earmarked. Could be capital investment from a Bolshevik bank robbery back in 1910 for all I know.’

‘Close enough,’ Moh said. ‘It’s from the Black Plan.’

Logan stared at him for a longer time than the transmission lag could account for.

‘How do you know that?’

‘I think it was me that stirred it up,’ Moh said. ‘I was poking around yesterday. Something in the system asked me for a code that I remembered from way back when Josh was writing it. That was when things started to happen—’

‘Josh wrote the Black Plan?’

‘So Bernstein says.’

Logan nodded. ‘Go on.’

‘It’s something to do with the Star Fraction, I know that much. Fact is, my mind’s got a bit – shit, I don’t know, maybe screwed up with some memory drugs I got exposed to. Good to get some confirmation, yeah? The other thing that happened is this load of encrypted data got downloaded to my gun’s computer, and I wondered if you might have some idea what to do with it.’

Logan frowned. ‘Could be pre-emptive backup. If I set up the rig that the program’s telling me, it’ll be able to pick up tight-beam transmissions. That’s real dicey, especially if it’s encrypted. Lose one digit and it’s junk. OK, you can get around that, throw redundancy at it like there’s no tomorrow. Even so, if nukes are in the picture you get emps, you get borealis hits, comms out for days.’

‘You think that’s on the cards?’

‘Nukes? Ne. If you’re right, though, about when the thing was set up, you can see why—’

‘Shit! That’s it! Just before the last one!’ Goddess, that was a relief. Up to a point.

‘—it’s got a real sensitive ear for rumours of war.’

‘So. What d’you reckon, I should take this into space?’ Moh crushed a stray syringe under his boot, wondering how he’d scrape the fare together. Work his passage, ride shotgun…

‘You kidding? Haven’t you heard, man?’

Moh shook his head, suppressing the impulse to give Jordan a kick. Eyes on the net, that’s the sodding job description…

‘Yanks have declared an emergency; space traffic and launches are bottlenecked. Nobody with any form’s gonna get out until the face-off with Japan’s over. With a load of encrypted data? – forget it.’

‘What about all this stuff you’ve ordered?’

‘It’s all clean,’ Logan said. ‘Empty storage, legitimate supplies. And it’s on its way. Expedited before the crackdown.’

‘Neat,’ Moh said. Somehow it didn’t surprise him. ‘So what do I do with this chunk of non-access RAM?’

‘Go to the ANR,’ said Logan. ‘Safest place.’

‘Ha fucking ha.’

‘I’m serious. The knaboj, they’ll look after you. Anyway, it’s theirs. The Black Plan.’

‘You know what I think?’ Moh said, looking down at the gun’s memory case. (The Party must always command the gun; the gun must never command the Party. Mao.) He looked up just as his words reached Logan. ‘They’re its.’

Logan stirred, shifting without noticeable attention into one of the isometric exercise routines that low-g folk had to keep up if they were ever to be one-g folk again. ‘There’s a lot going on,’ he said. ‘A lot coming down the line. We know about the offensives and…things are moving out here, too. The space-movement fraction I told you about, we’ve made progress, we’ll do what we can—’

‘Hey,’ said Moh, ‘is there any connection between these comrades and the ones in the Sta—?’

Logan smiled, his face moving towards and away from the camera.

‘Don’t even ask,’ he said. ‘Gotta go. Take care.’

Click to black. Then, unexpectedly, the screen came on again:

Message To: mk@cheka.­com.­uk

From: bdonovan@cla.­org.­ter

Display here?

Moh hesitated, wondering whether anything nastier than a message might arrive. He decided that, since the Kalashnikov firmware had withstood everything ever thrown at it, there was little risk. There was not the slightest possibility that his reading the message would give its sender any trace of his physical location. In a sense he wouldn’t even be reading it here; his agent programs would have automatically done a search of the standard maildrop host machines as soon as he’d linked into the communication net. He hit Enter.

No pathway listing; pretty good anonymity. Just:

You wrote:

Donovan I got a problem with Cat shes

left the hospital and is’nt tracable.

Can you delay the Geneva Court bisines

until I get this sorted out. Please axcept

my apologies for offending you’re org it was

just a personal thing with Cat I was pist of

with her working for the CLA because she should

of known better. I know the CLA are good fighters

and we have always treated hostages and

casualties etc by the book.

I appreciate that, and I understand your problem, but I must insist that it is *your* problem. The challenge has been issued and I cannot retract it without further possible loss of respect. Privately, I agree to delay any appeal to the Geneva Convention court system but in the meantime the call for a citizen’s arrest must stand until you personally claim a ransom for Ms C Duvalier the aforesaid person to be in your (nominal) custody at the time. In normal cases a settlement between our respective organizations would suffice but this has become a question of the good name of both Ms Duvalier and myself.

Regards

Brian Donovan

Carbon Life Alliance

Registered Terrorist Organization #3254

Go to the ANR, Logan had said. The idea had its merits, not least that it would get him out of the whole mess with Donovan. Still leave the comrades in it, though – that was the problem. At some point he might have to approach the ANR in any case, although what they would make of his story was anybody’s guess.

Moh turned and stepped out of the booth. Jordan and Janis looked up at him, but he nodded absently and ignored them. Asking them to keep a lookout had been careless: it wasn’t what they did for a living, or what they habitually did to keep on living. He flipped his glades down and made a slow sweep of all he could see.

The streams of people entering and leaving the mall had, if anything, thickened. Smaller groups wandered around the outlying stalls in the building’s shadow or in the harsh sunlight. The only breaches of the peace going on were knots of Neos swaying back from their lunchtime drinking sessions, raucously singing assorted national-communist anthems.

In the distance, traffic on the old flyover was stationary. Nothing unusual in that – it was a public road – but…

Some kind of commotion in the shanty-towns piled up below the road. Moh unclipped the gunsight and held it up, patching the image to his glades. Typical settlement scene, lots of visual clutter: the distracting diversity of the shacks, clothes-lines sagging across yards and paths, diverted power cables strung all over the place, aerials on jury-rigged pylons, grey gleam of sewage streams. In among it all, the gaudy colours of variegated costumes and flapping rags on…people moving, fast, scattering and scurrying from…

A spread-out line of black-clad, visored figures striding steadily through the narrow lanes. Kingdom cops. Moh could hardly believe the sight until he remembered that this wasn’t legally part of Norlonto at all. It still seemed outrageously provocative of the Hanoverians to march in like this – the area was if anything more anarchistic than the anarchy around it.

He whirled around, calling to Janis and Jordan to look over there, and started checking for any reaction. Nobody’d noticed yet, or they were taking it calmly. Glancing from group to group he saw a familiar face in the crowd – couldn’t be, wrong walk – wait a second, never saw her walking, why…

His attention, and a moment later his stepped-up vision, focused again on the girl who’d been at the space-movement table. She was threading her way purposefully through the crowd, more or less towards where he stood. Her whole manner and posture were at odds with her earlier pose. Thinking back Kohn could see that it had been doubly faked, imitating an imitation; some of the younger and sillier people in the space movement thought it a cool pose, and she’d been imitating that.

Might not mean anything, but suddenly everything had meaning – in a wash of good old communist paranoia: comrades, this is no accident – and Moh started walking, fast, in a direction he at first thought was random.

‘What’s going on?’ Jordan asked, loping beside him, Janis jogging to keep up. Moh stopped, throwing them both off-balance.

‘Jordan, time to split. You nip back in, help old Bernstein pack up. He has places to dive into around here. Hole up with him until it’s over, then take the monorail back to our place. Start a search for Cat: you’ll pick up the trace on the house phone; go from there and keep an eye on the net. Try to contact the ANR. I’ll call you later.’

‘Until what’s over?’

Jordan was puzzled; the situation was just beginning to dawn on Janis. Moh, fighting a surge of impatience, had to remind himself that neither of them was exactly streetwise.

‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Not staying to find out. You see the cops coming in? Just a show of strength maybe but with all those kids—’

He heard the crash of the first bottle.

‘Knew it,’ he said. ‘Balls for brains, these guys. Move it. You got two minutes before this place is a—’

Something burst over the wall where they’d just been sitting. Long strands of sticky stuff drifted down on to a couple of reckless Neos, who instantly began a predictably counterproductive effort to swipe it away.

Kohn tugged Janis’s arm and they both started to run. The last he saw of Jordan, when he glanced back a second or two later, the youth was standing, still dumbfounded, waving and moving backwards as if on a station platform: goodbye, goodbye.

Clutching her sunhat and backpack, Janis followed Moh as best she could as he hurried through an obscure exit from the shopping centre into a tiled tunnel lit with flickering fluorescent tubes and smelling of urine and disinfectant. Eventually they came out in a more open foyer where a man in a peaked cap and dark uniform stood by a robust barrier. There were posters – yellowing now, but once heartily colourful – on the walls; between them, damp paint bubbled and flaked. Another uniformed man looked out impassively from behind a pane of wired glass. Moh went over and pushed a few low-denomination coins through a space under the pane. After half a minute’s deliberation, the man pushed a couple of tickets back the other way.

Moh handed Janis a ticket and walked in front of her, putting the ticket in a slot on the barrier. With a wheezing, sucking sound the barrier – a pair of padded jaws at hip-level – opened and Moh stepped through. Not half a second passed before the jaws thunked shut again, emitting a momentary groan as if cheated of their prey. Moh turned and snatched the ticket as the machine ejected it.

Janis went through with her eyes shut, then down some broken concrete steps covered with plastic shopping-bags and empty cans and dry leaves and out on to a broken concrete platform. There the litter had apparently metamorphosed into its adult form: overturned bins, shopping trolleys and the remains of small trees. From the edge of the platform railway tracks could be seen for a few tens of metres in either direction; beyond that, they vanished among weeds. But they were at least shiny, not rusty.

‘What is this place?’ Janis asked.

Moh looked at her. ‘It’s the Underground,’ he said.

‘The Tube? Is it still running?’

‘Occasionally,’ Moh said, looking anxiously up and down the track. ‘Main thing is, the Kingdom cops won’t come here, not without a lot of hassle. We’ve crossed a border.’

‘Into what?’ A second look along the platform revealed about a dozen people, most of them very old, sitting waiting as if they had been doing just that for a long time.

Moh sighed. ‘One faction of the Republic accepted the Settlement, and this is what they got for it. The rump of the public sector. It even gets a subsidy from the Kingdom. But it’s a Free State in its own right.’ He grinned. ‘Sort of a reformistan.’

‘I hope Jordan’s OK,’ Janis said. From the direction of the mall she could hear the sounds of breaking glass, yells, riot-poppers. Further away, the instantly recognizable black smoke from burning tyres rose above the shanty-town.

‘He’ll be fine,’ Moh said. He was gazing into the distance at a rapidly approaching aerostat. ‘Bernstein has forgotten more ways out of there than the cops’ll ever know.’

‘What did they barge in here for anyway?’

‘The Hanoverians are always a bit touchy about history,’ Moh said. ‘But right now I think it’s the future that’s bugging them.’

‘Don’t you feel like getting involved?’ Janis asked mischievously.

‘No point,’ Moh said. ‘The cops are way outnumbered. They’ll pull back or call in reinforcements. Either way…’ He shrugged.

The aerostat – a thirty-metre black disc like a flying saucer from a hostile alien empire – slid across the sky overhead and, with a deafening blast as its propellers altered pitch, stopped. It descended slowly behind the shopping centre and laid down a brief barrage of gas. Rope-ladders uncoiled from it, and in a few minutes were swinging as the retreating cops scrambled up. As soon as they were on board the machine wobbled, tilted and wallowed off to the west.

‘Overloaded,’ Moh observed in a satisfied tone. ‘They’re good for terrifying crowds, but that’s about it.’

People began straggling into the station, most of them arriving at a run and then losing much of their momentum and wandering around in a dazed manner, as if they’d been ejected from a pub into the street. They had bleeding heads, pouring noses, weeping eyes. Janis couldn’t see any serious injuries, and felt a selfish relief there weren’t any casualties that would make her feel obliged to help.

After about half an hour a series of increasingly frequent and agitated, but otherwise incomprehensible, bursts of sound from a PA system indicated that a train was due. After another half hour it arrived, carrying a swaying crowd of commuters: beggars and prostitutes, mostly, coming back from the early-to-late-morning shift in town.

A few seats were unoccupied but Janis had no intention of sitting on any of them. She stayed as close to the doors as she could, clinging to the handhold. Moh stood, stooped, beside her, keeping his balance unaided as the train lurched and laboured along. In low-voiced, brief sentences, barely audible above the noise – and falling silent whenever it ceased – he told her what he’d learned from Logan and from Donovan.

‘Sounds like this thing’s into biology,’ she said. ‘I’d have expected something political, but this…Goddess, it’s creepy.’

‘Creepy crawlie.’ Moh shook his head, his eyelids hooding an intense, abstracted gaze. ‘I know what you mean…but I don’t think it’s that, nothing sinister, like…the Watchmaker idea, creating new life or taking over the world or whatever. It’s a lot more worrying than that.’

‘How?’

‘Something Logan said in passing: disaster recovery. That’s the political meaning of what it’s doing. It’s worrying because – it’s worried, so to speak. Fits in with how Josh thought – he used to talk about what he called the Fall, what might happen if we didn’t get a’ – Moh grimaced, as if embarrassed – ‘a new society. A saner world. We’d go back, to an older kind of society. Pre-capitalist.’

‘Instead of post-? Yeah, yeah.’ She smiled up at him sceptically. ‘“A catastrophe threatens the entire culture of mankind”?’

Moh frowned. ‘Where did you get that from?’

‘It’s in the transitional programme, the death-agony thing—’

‘So it is.’ He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Trotsky…OK.’ He opened his eyes again. ‘Had me confused there. Anyway. You get the point. The programme, again.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘he was wrong the last time, wasn’t he. I mean, all that doom and gloom was written, when? 1938?’

Moh laughed and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘You’ve cheered me up, you really have. It’s not like some kinda global catastrophe started in 1939, huh?’

They got off at a station which the Underground shared with the Elevated monorail. Both Underground and Elevated ran at ground-level here: Hein-leingrad, well inside the Greenbelt, where all the old placenames had been scraped away. The gutted Underground part of the station was scrawled with colourful graffiti and wilfully obscure slogans:

NEITHER DEATH NOR TAXES

QUANTUM NON-LOCALITY: THE UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR SPACE FIRST! NO COMPROMISE IN DEFENCE OF EARTH’S CHILDREN!

She nudged Moh. ‘One of yours?’

‘Nah. Just a bunch of extremists.’

The Elevated station had been built around a 1930s bus terminus decorated in the style of a futuristic past. They sat in the station’s glass-fronted cafeteria, their backs against a grooved aluminium pillar, and had coffee and doughnuts. Janis watched the people come and go through what looked like a small set from Things To Come, apart from the outfits. Not a short tunic or a short-back-and-sides to be seen. Moh spent a few seconds flipping through maps on a computer.

‘Big drawback of the arrangements here,’ he remarked as he slipped the machine into his shirt pocket, ‘is that there’s no King’s highway. Everything is private. Property and access can be a bit of a minefield.’

‘I hope you don’t mean that literally.’

‘Not exactly, but if we do have to trespass I’ll rely on my friend’ – he patted his bag – ‘rather than legal precedents.’

‘That’s where you’ve got the gun?’

‘Not so loud. Yeah. Comes apart.’

‘And I thought we were alone together at last.’

‘Better two and a bit than none, my dear.’

He was watching the crowd almost all the time. The few moments when he looked directly at her he would half-smile and she only had time to half-smile back before his glance darted away again. She wondered if to him it was a long, searching look…She couldn’t complain: it was her drugs that had done things to his sense of time and his memory, and her money that was paying him to keep watch.

And she had fallen for him, hard. As in: a hard man is good to find. One part of her mind – the sceptical, analytical, scientific part – was looking on sardonically, with a knowing smirk, seeing her sudden swept-off-her-feet attachment to Moh as, ultimately, the springing of a genetically loaded trigger, a survival strategy: her best bet was someone strong and kind, dangerous to others and safe, safe, safe to her. The rest of her mind just felt weak whenever he looked at her. What her body felt was different, and weak did not come into it.

Moh was tapping at his phone. He slid it to where both of them could see it and nobody else could: the picture was set to flat, not holo.

Mary Abid’s face appeared on the screen.

‘Oh, hi,’ Mary said. ‘Jordan’s back, if that’s what you want to know. Threw him in at the deep end, didn’t you?’

‘Can I speak to him?’ Moh said impatiently.

‘Sure…passing you over.’

Jordan looked up at them, evidently via a camera mounted on the top of a screen he was working at. He had a black eye and a few scratches.

‘You all right, Jordan?’

‘Yes,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘We got into a bit of a scuffle, but that was all. You should have seen the police, Moh. They ran like rabbits.’

‘Yeah, well, I told you the Neos—’

Jordan smiled. ‘It wasn’t your commie headbangers that chased them off – it was the market ladies!’

‘Good for them. And they’re not my commie headbangers, as I keep telling you. Did Sol Bernstein get away OK?’

‘Yes. Never saw anyone so old move so fast. He had his books packed up by the time I reached him, and we chugged off on his electric tractor right through where a fight was going on. That was when I got a few knocks, but it was nothing really.’

He obviously felt it was a bit more than that and was quite pleased with himself. Janis hoped Moh wouldn’t burst Jordan’s little bubble of satisfaction at getting through his first rumble.

‘Sounds like you did all right,’ Moh said. ‘How are you getting on with the net searches?’

Jordan’s expression flipped from smug to serious.

‘Well…first, about Catherin…Cat. There was a queue of replies to your message when I logged on. Nobody’s seen her. One or two people have mentioned that Donovan’s got a call out for her as well.’

‘I bet he has,’ Moh said. ‘What about the ANR?’

Jordan sighed in exasperation. ‘I can’t raise them. All the messages bounced. At first I thought I was doing something incorrect, and I got the comrades to check. But by then it was all over the news. The ANR has gone off-line, left all their phones off the hook. Well, not exactly: you get an answer-fetch giving a standard spiel.’ He passed a hand across his eyes. ‘It gets irritating after the twentieth time.’

‘What’s it saying?’

‘Basically, a bit of rousing propaganda and then something to the effect that, if your message can’t wait until after the final offensive, they’ll know about it through other channels anyway.’

‘Modesty was never their strong point—’

‘Modesty!’ Jordan’s sudden grin was blocked by the fish-eye loom of his delighted air-punch or clenched-fist salute. ‘Yo! Never thought of that!’

‘What?’

‘The Black Planner yesterday, he ordered a load of silk through this Beulah City fashion company. I might be able to track the consignment, get a lead to the ANR that way.’

‘Nice one,’ Moh said. ‘But I doubt if they can be tracked that easily.’

‘I know, but Modesty can be! I saw a Modesty truck yesterday, might have been headed for Norlonto. I’m sure I could hack in, work backwards from there. Most of their deliveries are finished goods, right? Import fabric, export fancy frocks. So if I find any fabric exports…’

Moh shook his head. ‘Bills of lading are the easiest things to switch, and that’s assuming the Black Plan was actually pulling in silk in the first place. More likely that was a cover as well, and what they got from China was a cargo of knock-off Kalashnikovs.’

Jordan looked a bit discouraged, and Janis said quickly: ‘It’s worth a try anyway, Jordan. It’s all we’ve got to go on.’

‘Fair enough,’ Moh said. ‘OK, Jordan, you do that, and keep looking for Cat any way you can think of. Pass on any bit of news you find interesting.’

‘Hah! Getting back to that…you know about the space-traffic crackdown?’

‘Logan told me.’

‘Fine. OK, the other thing is Donovan’s citizen’s arrest thing. He’s posted the offer to lots of newsgroups.’

‘That figures.’

‘Anything I can do about it?’

‘Ask the comrades to toss out countercharges, challenges on my behalf and so on. Get our lawyers to issue a few nasty messages. Make it look like a real tangle. Might scare off any casual adventurers.’

‘OK, I got that. What are you going to do?’

Moh laughed. ‘Keep jumping borders,’ he said. ‘Like the libertarian comrades say: Norlonto ain’t the law of the jungle, it’s a jungle of laws.’

For the next two days they wandered through a tiny proportion of that jungle of laws, the disparate communities of Norlonto. Unlike the patchwork of the Kingdom, these were not separate fiefs but layered, interwoven properties and neighbourhoods. Some welcomed anyone passing through. Some had gates on the streets, or took a toll, or turned back anyone who hadn’t been invited by a resident. Carrying weapons on the street might be prohibited, permitted or required. It was a matter for the street-owners, like wearing ties in restaurants, smoking or non-smoking. There were sinister, seedy areas that had been all bought up by nazis and made most of their money from tourists and memorabilia. There were women-only territories. There was a whole district called Utopia University, which consisted of experimental communities being crawled over by sociologists (who were mostly funded by estate agents doing market research). One sharply delimited estate, the Singularity Sink, had no laws or morality at all: anyone who entered was deemed to have renounced any protection but their own. It had a certain appeal for suicides and psychopaths, and for adolescent macho adventurers. (There was of course nothing to prevent violent rescue missions, either, and very rich and desperate relatives had been known to send in armoured columns.)

But most of it was normal and respectable. Mutually compatible areas had found it profitable to adjoin, or buy up linking corridors, or sponsor rapid transport between them. You could travel widely through Norlonto and never see anything that would have looked out of place in Bangkok. A sidestep away you could see and do things that would be banned in Tehran.

Each new locality they crossed into was another stream to wash away their trail. Everywhere they found an undertone of caution, the racket of protection being strengthened, the buzz of departing money; fortunes, capitals as Moh called them, queued up on the wires like birds preparing to migrate. Every time the government announced the rebels were bluffing and the situation was under control, more smart money took wing for warmer climes.

Moh kept calling Jordan every few hours except through the night: the ANR was still unreachable; Jordan was building up an elaborate hack on Beulah City’s shipping companies and fashion houses, but he had no progress to report yet; and Donovan’s challenge was arousing some interest among various bounty-hunting agencies. Much to Moh’s disgust, a new newsgroup had opened, alt.fan.moh-kohn, for enthusiastic amateurs to report sightings of him and discuss the case; so far, none of the sightings had been authentic. Moh took out a policy for himself and Janis with the Mutual Protection Agency; the understanding was that he wouldn’t tell the company their location but Mutual Protection would download a map of areas where they could guarantee delivery of reinforcements within ten minutes of a call.

‘What if we do get attacked or something,’ Janis asked, ‘and the attacker has a contract with another agency? Do they shoot it out?’

‘Give it some mips,’ Moh said. ‘Proper channels are part of the deal. The agencies take any differences to a court they both acknowledge is fair—’

‘And suppose an agency popped up that didn’t accept any court that Mutual Protection suggested?’

‘Then a court they didn’t accept would find against them, without them even defending themselves, and they’d lose customers. In serious cases they’d be hunted down like dogs. What the agencies sell is legal protection as well as physical. If you want to protect criminal acts you just need your own guns, or preferably a state – that’s a real lawless defence agency for you, and run like any other monopoly to boot: rip-off prices, lousy service, rude staff.’

‘You’re not talking about the forces of the Crown by any chance?’

‘Now what gives you that idea?’

Janis had another objection. ‘You’re forgetting about the poor,’ she said. ‘How are they covered?’

Moh replied as if he’d been over this a few hundred times. ‘We all pay for security in every facility we use anyway, but if all else fails, if somebody’s kicking your shack down or putting the screws on you and you’ve not bothered to do without maybe a packet of smokes a week to pay for protection, you can always call on charity. The Black Cross, the St Maurice Defence Association, the Emancipation Army. Or us, if we’re in a generous frame of mind.’

They were sitting at a pavement café. The waiter brought Janis her vodka-cola. She took it and smiled down at him, gave him a quarter. He thanked her with a gap-toothed grin and ran back inside.

Moh looked after him sadly.

‘Anarcho-capitalism works,’ he said. ‘As much as any kind of capitalism works. It’s that sort of thing I find hard to take. Child labour. Prostitution. Slavery—’

‘What!’

‘Oh, it’s not legally enforceable. But on the other hand you can’t prevent people selling themselves for life, and some do. And there’s legal slavery as well, to pay off crime-debts, though that’s a lot different.’

‘All the same, slavery…’

‘It’s a feature of most utopias,’ Moh said gloomily. ‘It comes with the property.’

Late morning, two days and nights after Jordan had watched Janis and Moh dodge the shopping-centre riot, the comms room was hot and airless. He paused for a moment before running his latest program, giving it a final check in his mind before committing it. He found his thought processes warping under the influence of the other person in the room.

Mary Abid was working through the day on night watch in a chemical factory in Auckland, NZ. The satellite link didn’t make for fast reflexes, but she didn’t need them; the semi-autonomous robots that she guided around had reflexes of their own, and her main task was to put some human common sense in the loop.

Whatever she was doing, sitting and swivelling in a basic-model telepresence exoskeleton, it involved stretching and switching and sweating and cursing, and something in her sweat or scent or swearing was transmitted to Jordan as a distracting subliminal sexual tension. He barely associated it with the Kurdish woman in the telly-skelly. During the hours he’d been sitting hunched at the Glavkom VR apparatus, spinning an elaborate web of nuance and inference, looking for a trail of silken thread, and looking for Cat, it had been the photograph of Cat on the wall of Moh’s bedroom that Mary’s female pheromones brought unbidden to his mind.

Cat. He’d extracted a patchy biography of her from the Collective’s records. A teenage rebellion against a staid petty-bourgeois background – her parents ran a VR rental franchise on the fringe of Alexandra Port – had led her into a loosely leftist militia. She’d literally bumped into Moh Kohn during the Southall Jihad, worked with the Collective for two, three years until some inextricably intertwined doctrinal/personal dispute had taken her away into a succession of idealistic combat units and one or two of the numerous factions that made up the Left Alliance.

The Left Alliance, unlike the ANR, was taking calls, but Jordan had a distinct impression that they had more pressing matters on their minds. Any people or systems he’d contacted about Cat had simply referred him to the standard cadre-availability databases, all of which had Cat down as damaged goods. The group she was currently in – he’d eventually tracked it down, the Committee for a Social-Ecological Intervention – had been barely willing to acknowledge that she might possibly have had some association with them at some indefinite time in the past.

Of course, as all concerned admitted, if Cat’s current little legal difficulty could only be sorted out…

Jordan felt a rising indignation at what Moh had done to her, much as he could see Moh’s point about the dubious nature of the coalitions that Cat’s political trajectory embraced.

He’d made more progress on the Beulah City/Black Plan connection, or so he hoped.

‘RUN SILK.ROOT?’

The system message floated in front of his eyes like an afterimage. Jordan took a deep breath.

He nodded, chinning Enter.

Hacking into Beulah City’s systems directly had proved difficult. Quite apart from his earlier – and, he now thought, overhasty – action in liquidating his business interests there, a data-security crackdown was evidently in progress. Mrs Lawson, he guessed, was busy. Nevertheless, he retained access rights to a few of the smaller systems which had, so far, not been revoked. This had given him one angle of attack. Next, he had set up a completely spurious trucking company (created with an apparent age, he wryly told himself, like the stars in 4004 BC). As far as one of Modesty’s subsidiaries was now concerned, River Valley Distribution Ltd had an excellent record of deliveries within Norlonto. The phantom details would be discovered at the next audit, but that wasn’t due for another month.

The program now running in SILK.ROOT had Jordan’s virtual company inquiring about the possibility of putting in a bid for more work. It was asking for some background information – just a breakdown of Modesty’s deliveries to British locations in the past month. If he’d set up the right parameters on the systems he had managed to hack into, they’d accept this highly irregular request without a blink.

He found he had his eyes closed, his fingers crossed.

Ping. And there it was, on twenty pages of spreadsheet: dates, times, companies, goods sent. He excluded finished garments, reducing it to five pages, and tabbed down through the list of fabric sales. He was beginning to think he might as well have called up the Yellow Pages for dressmakers when he noticed – among all the Lauras and Angelas and Blisses and Bonnys – a customer called the Women’s Peace Community.

Three consignments in the past month, all consisting of tens, no, hundreds of metres of fine silk. One order still outstanding: the fabric had just come in by air, and awaited delivery. The order had been placed four days ago, in the morning. When he’d encountered the Black Planner.

Yee-ha!

As he stared at the line of information it began to blink. A message came up.

‘CROSS-REFERENCE ON WOMEN’S PEACE COMMUNITY EXISTS. DISPLAY?’

A big Y to that. The pages rippled as the program followed pointers through the Collective’s databases. Then the scene cleared to display a videophone message that had been waiting in the Pending file since the day before yesterday.

The phone’s flat screen popped up in the middle of the virtual scene. As the picture stabilized Jordan thought, for a startled moment, that he was seeing an interior view in Beulah City itself: a parlour with overelaborate furnishings and drapes; two women in long, likewise overelaborate dresses, all petticoats and pinafores. The woman in the foreground sat primly, hands folded in her lap, facing the camera. The other sat on a sofa behind and to the left, paying no attention to the call; she was concentrating on a piece of needlework, her fair curls falling forward in front of her face.

‘Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence Collective?’ the first woman asked, the words sounding incongruous. She nodded at the confirmation. ‘Good. We require professional advice on neighbourhood security, and we understand that you have some experience in this field. Please call us as soon as possible. Thank you.’

She reached forward to sign off, and just as she did so the woman in the background looked up. She looked straight at the camera from across the room, brushing her hair back from her forehead with her wrist.

Jordan jumped at the shock of recognition.

It was Cat.

The picture clicked off.

Jordan passed a note into Mary’s work-space, asking her to take a break. She did, after another strenuous minute. Jordan ran the message for her.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘That’s Cat! At the end there.’

Mary frowned. ‘Let me see that again.’ This time she magnified the last section. ‘Yeah, well it certainly looks like her, but…’

‘You’d never expect to see her dolled up like that?’ Jordan smiled to see he was right. ‘It’s the way she’s pushing her hair back. It’s like the picture in Moh’s room, shows her doing just the same thing. Except in the picture it’s a spanner she’s working with, not a needle.’

‘Well, Jordan, I don’t know how you think we live, but I’ve never been in Moh’s room,’ Mary said with a giggle. ‘You’ll have to show it to Moh.’

Jordan was about to do that when he remembered what the message was actually about, and how he’d found it.

‘Let me just fix something up first,’ he said.

‘Yeah, that’s Catherin all right,’ Moh said. He saved the image from his glades and cleared the view, turning his attention to the Tinkerbell-sized fetches of Jordan and Mary above his hand-phone. ‘Well spotted, Jordan. I might have not have recognized her myself if it weren’t for that thing with the hair. Cat disguised as a lady – that’s a laugh.’

‘I think you were meant to spot it,’ Jordan said. ‘You or one of the comrades. They’re telling you: Cat’s here, come and get her!’

‘So why not call us and say that? Who are these people, anyway?’

‘Feminists – femininists,’ Mary corrected herself. ‘Women’s Peace Community, some kind of sweetness and light outfit—’

‘Yes!’ Moh shouted. ‘The Body Bank!’

Janis, who like him was prone, looking at the phone display, winced as the sound filled the narrow volume they lay in.

‘Sorry, Janis.’

‘What’s that about the Body Bank?’ Mary asked.

‘There’s a teller at the Body Bank at Brunel University – she’s a femininist. Only one I’ve ever met, as far as I know…’

‘It’s been getting quite fashionable recently,’ Janis interjected.

‘OK, interesting. Anyway, I remember this lady noticing that Cat wasn’t included in the deal over the crank bomb team. She might have followed it up.’

‘That’s possible,’ Jordan said. ‘But why should Cat go there?’

Mary shook her head. Moh shrugged.

‘Oh, for pity’s sake,’ said Janis. They all looked at her. ‘Cat had just been thoroughly shafted in this game of soldiers. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if she wanted out, wanted at least a bit of peace and quiet. Even if it did mean having to sit and stitch. In fact, especially. Soothes the mind.’ She rolled over and laughed. ‘Try it sometime, guys and gals.’

‘Sanctuary,’ Moh said. ‘OK. That makes sense, I guess. Just as well you noticed the message.’

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ Jordan said carefully. ‘It wasn’t the search for Cat that brought it up, it was the…Beulah City follow-up.’

‘But why—?’

Moh was about to ask why the ANR should have any connection with this Women’s Peace Community when he remembered that Mary wasn’t in on the whole story. ‘Uh, what’ll we do, call them back?’

‘I already have,’ Mary said. ‘Didn’t say anything about you, just said we’d send someone over today.’

Moh turned to Janis. ‘You game for this?’

‘Sure. Should get Donovan off our backs, at least.’

‘At least,’ Moh agreed. And maybe lead us to the ANR as well. ‘I’m thinking about how we’ll get there,’ he added. ‘Mass-transit might take us out of our insurance cover.’

‘That’s all OK,’ Jordan said. ‘I’ve set it up. They’re taking a delivery of silk from Beulah City –’ Jordan paused, as if to make sure Moh had got that point. ‘But it’s in a place that no driver from Beulah City would go.’

‘Not one of those terrible places, is it?’ Janis asked.

‘Oh, no,’ Jordan said.

Mary smiled impishly. ‘It’s a small semi-closed neighbourhood in the Stonewall Dykes,’ she explained.

‘I see,’ Moh said after a moment. ‘Major fire-and-brimstone target area. So how do we get there?’

‘The truck comes out of Beulah City, goes to a pick-up point where it’s handed over – Mary’s got the map – and you drive it the rest of the way. It’s all in the name of a dummy company I’ve created.’

‘Sounds safe enough,’ Moh said. He had a thought. ‘Not a women-only area, is it?’

Jordan turned to Mary with a baffled gesture.

‘It’s OK,’ Mary said. ‘I’ve checked. They have no objection to men. In their place.’

‘This community is sounding more sensible all the time,’ Janis remarked, running a possessive hand down Moh’s back. He turned and grinned at her.

‘Hey, I’m quite used to being dominated by women.’

‘You should be so lucky,’ Mary said. ‘Right, here’s the details. Jordan’s made all the arrangements.’ She did something out of view, and streets and times appeared on the phone screen.

‘And get up, you two,’ she added, just before she and Jordan vanished. ‘It’s a fine afternoon.’

There wasn’t room to stand up in the double bed-cell they’d rented, so it took them a while. They had to get their clothes on, lie face-down and slither under their packs, then crawl backwards out of the hatch and down a ten-metre ladder to the ground.

‘Weird,’ Janis said as they walked out along narrow passages between banks of bed-cells. ‘Like left luggage.’

‘Left passengers.’

Little Japan hit them like a rock concert as they stepped out of the door. They took the slidewalk, changing tracks frequently, swaying in the crowds. Moh found he was half-consciously generating a running mutter of body-language that created a small space around them, whatever the crush. He gave up trying to process the incoming information, the solid-state semiotics of the place.

‘Doesn’t feel oppressive,’ he said. ‘That’s what’s so strange.’

‘Something in the food,’ Janis said. ‘Inhibits the anti-crowding pheromones.’

It bothered him that he couldn’t tell if she were making it up.

The trailer park, in an indeterminate zone between Little Japan and one of the more multi-cultural areas, felt like open space. There was an average of a metre between bodies here. The huge trucks lay charging up, drivers lounged, and vendors vended.

‘Ah, the wonders of the free market,’ Janis grouched, narrowly avoiding a tray of hot drinks being carried at alarming speed on the head of a five-year-old.

‘Not as free as it looks,’ Moh said. ‘These places tend to be run by gangs. Shady jurisdictions and that.’

They found the light container truck they were after in a corner of the park near the feeder road. The driver shoved a magazine into his pocket as they approached, and stood up, looking slightly embarrassed.

‘Hi,’ Kohn said. ‘River Valley. You’re expecting us?’

The man smiled and nodded. He handed Moh the key, took a receipt and headed off, evidently not straight to the nearest rail station.

Janis and Moh climbed into the cab. The truck was owned by a rental company and changed hands often – that much was obvious from the condition of the interior. Moh had a sudden thought. He passed the key to Janis.

‘You drive,’ he said.

Janis took the key, smirking, and turned the switch with a flourish. The engine responded with a faint hum.

‘Aw,’ she said. ‘It’s not like the films I saw when I was little.’ She made internal-combustion-engine noises as the truck glided out of the park.

‘Nah,’ Moh said, adjusting his seatbelt. ‘It were a man’s job in them days – aaarrrgh, stop…’