And all the time the question that bugged her, that stuck in and perplexed her mind, was what did the ANR want with all that silk?
3
Hardware Platform Interface
Betrayed.
Cat lay in the bed, gazing at the LCD on the plastic cast, watching the numbers flicker and her fingers clench and unclench. The anaesthetic, whatever it was, made her feel remote and detached, as if her anger were a dark cloud that she drifted into and out of. After Kohn had left she had checked her status, hoping against all she knew about him that he’d been bluffing. Except that of course he hadn’t. She wasn’t a prisoner any more but a patient: recommended to stay one more night in case of delayed shock, but otherwise free to go.
Her hospital bill had already been charged to the Dzerzhinsky Collective’s account. They’d take a loss on that, with no ransom to recover it from. Small change, smaller consolation. She decided to run them up a phone bill as well, and called the Carbon Life Alliance’s hotline. The answer-fetch took her message without comment, and told her to await a response.
She put on some music, and waited.
The response surprised her. She’d expected some low-level functionary. She got the founder-leader of the Carbon Life Alliance, Brian Donovan. He came to her like a ghost, a hallucination, a bad dream: jumping from apparent solidity at the end of the bed to being a face on the television, and back again, talking all the while through her headset phones. It was as if all the machinery in her bay of the ward were possessed. She felt like muttering exorcisms. Donovan looked like a necromancer himself, with long grey hair and a long grey beard. He was stamping about inaudibly and cursing very audibly indeed. Cat found herself cringing back against the head of the bed until she realized that Donovan’s wrath was directed not at her but at Moh.
‘…don’t need this. Nobody does this to me, nobody gives me this kind of aggravation. Not if they want to live.’ He inhaled noisily, obviously wearing a throat-mike. He looked her straight in the eyes, a remarkable feat considering how he was patching the projections together and probably viewing her through the grainy line-feed of a security camera somewhere up in a corner of the ceiling.
‘Well, Miss Duvalier,’ he said, visibly calming down, ‘we can’t let this insult pass unchallenged.’
She nodded quickly. Her mouth was too dry for speech.
‘D’you have anything on the bastard? Not his codes – I’ve picked them up already from the hostage claim last night, and I’m working on that. But where does he hang out in Actual Reality, eh?’
Cat swallowed hard. ‘I just want this matter settled,’ she said. ‘Not to start a feud.’
‘I was thinking in terms of a legal challenge,’ Donovan said. ‘Releasing you without demanding ransom is so far out of line that it’d be a very painful challenge for him to meet. I would like to present it to him in as public a manner as possible.’
‘You’ll find him hard to trace in the nets,’ Cat said. She saw Donovan begin to bristle. ‘But,’ she went on hastily, ‘I can tell you his usual haunts.’
The CLA leader listened to her, then said, ‘Thank you, Miss Duvalier. And now, you would be well advised to do your best to disappear. I’ll be in touch.’
‘How will you—?’ she began, but Donovan had vanished.
Screen and phones filled again with the jackhammer beat of Babies With Rabies.
The Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence Collective rented a unit in one of the student accommodation blocks, and for now it was Kohn’s place. Bed and desk and terminal, cupboard, shelves, fridge, kettle. Door so flimsy it wasn’t worth locking. Moh had painted a hammer-and-sickle-and-4 on it, and it worked like charms, like wreaths of garlic, like silver crosses and holy water don’t.
He called up the collective on the open phone and left a message that he was off-active and looking forward to some good music when he came home. In their constantly shuffled slangy codes, ‘music’ currently meant party, ‘good music’ meant some heavy political problem had come down. He pacified the ravenous cravings that usually followed marijuana with a coffee, biscuits and a tobacco cigarette. A week of night shifts and his circadian rhythms were shot. And any day or week or month now he could be trying to deal with not one but two insurrections. One of which would target sites he and his company were paid to protect.
Once he would have welcomed both. Now, the thought of yet another of the ANR’s notorious ‘final’ offensives filled him only with a weary dismay, for all that he wished them well. Still theoretically a citizen of the Republic, true-born son of England and so on and so forth, Kohn had what he considered a sober grasp of the ANR’s chances. On any scale of political realism they’d be registered by a needle twitching at the bottom end of the dial.
As for the other lot, the Left Alliance…Their only chance lay in the remote possibility of detonating the kind of social explosion which they had discounted in advance by the alliances they’d made – with the cranks, the greens, the barbarians, the whole rabble that everyone with a glimmer of sense lumped together as the barb. Socialism and barbarism. Some factions of the old party, fragments of old man Trotsky’s endlessly twisting and recombining junk DNA, were in the Alliance, just like they were in all the other movements: lost cause and effect of a forgotten history that had taken too many wrong turnings ever to find its way back. Nothing left for him now but to fight a rearguard action, to hold back the multiplying divisions of the night, where red and green showed the same false colours in the dark.
Good music.
He thought about Cat, how nearly he had come to killing her, but her image was pale, fading off into the background. He kept seeing Janis Taine – his memories sharp, delineated, definite. Like the woman herself. One of his most distinct impressions was that she wasn’t at all impressed with him. Part of him, he realized, had already marked that down as a challenge.
Memories. She was investigating memory. He’d discovered this interesting fact while checking damage reports after coming off-shift, and it had brought him moseying and nosing along this morning. Her conversation had confirmed it, and now it was time for him to investigate it.
Kohn had a problem with memories. He had vivid memories of his childhood and of his teens, but there was a period in between where it was all scratches and static. He knew what had happened then, but he found it almost impossible to think himself back to it, to remember.
He got up and laid the gun gently on the desk and connected it to the back of the terminal.
‘Seek,’ he told it.
In his own mind he called it The Swiss Army Gun. He’d customized it around a state-of-the-art Kalashnikov and a Fujitsu neural-net chip, upgraded its capabilities with all the pirated software he could lay hands on – he’d stripped processors and sensors out of security devices he’d outwitted, out of little nuisance maintenance robots he’d potted like pigeons, and he’d bolted the whole lot on. He suspected that its hardware capacity by now vastly exceeded its resident software. Besides the standard features that made it a smart weapon, it ran pattern-recognition learning systems, natural-language HCI, interfaces that patched images to his glades, and enough specialized information-servers to start a small business – gophers to explore databases and bring back selected information, filters to scan newsgroups – all integrated around and reporting back to a fetch that could throw a convincing virtual image of himself: his messenger, decoy and stunt double.