Changing it.
Something had got into the university’s system, tracked one of his agent programs back to the gun. The macro computer had hacked into the micro. Now – punching messages straight along his optic nerves in the mind’s own machine code, digitizing the movements of his fingertips – the system was hacking into him.
The colours vanished, a spectrum spun to white. Nothing but that Platonic lucidity remained. Memory opened, all its passwords keyed.
Test: rough sheet ocean smell mouth hair
Test: warm soothe smooth soft swing la-la
Test: chopper clatter black smoke hot bang crowd roar fierce grip run
Test: sick fear shut mouth shoulder shake harsh voice swear boy swear all right god damn the bloody king head sing metal taste thrown book slam face run
Test: Cat
Test: Cat
Test: Cat
Enough.
All there, in all the detail you could ever want. Panic washed him as identity became memory; life, history; self, story. Millions of pinpoint images which could each (eye to pinhole, camera obscura) become everything at a moment’s noticing. He tried to turn the intense attention on himself, and found – of course – the self that turned was not the self turned on. And on, leaping his racing shadow, chasing his reflection through a succession of facing mirrors.
You are a man running towards you with a gun CRASH you are a man with a gun running towards you CRASH you are a running man with
Without a gun, and suddenly it is all very clear.
Moh Kohn found himself standing in a clearing in a forest. Some kind of virtual…Forget that: take it at face value. The virtual can be more dangerous than the actual. So: a forest of decision trees, labels growing from the branches. The ground was springy, logically enough: it was all wires. Chips scurried about on multiple pins. A line of tiny black ands filed determinedly past his feet. Something the size and shape of a cat padded up and rubbed against his calf. He stooped and stroked its electric fur. The blue sparkle tingled his hand. Words flew between the trees, and swarms of lies buzzed.
The cat stalked away. He followed it, out of the would to an open space. All was plain, and Kohn set off across it. He found it as difficult as walking across the campus had been. Blocks of logic littered, making varied angles to the ground. Chapter and verse, column and capital, volume of text and area of agreement interrupted his path. The sky was like the back of his mind and he couldn’t look at it.
A woman stepped out from behind an elaborate construction. She wore a smart-suit, strangely: she was far too old to be a combatant. It made her hard to see against the background assumptions, which remained rigid except when changing without acknowledgement. She lifted the helmet of her smart-suit and shook out long white air. The cat sat back on its hunches.
‘You are here,’ the woman said in a thin voice.
‘I know.’
‘Do you? Do you know that here is you?’ She laughed. ‘Do you know what a defence mechanism is?’
‘Yeah. A gun.’
‘Very good.’
She wiped the sarcasm from her lips and shook it in small drops, like sneers, from her fingers.
‘Who are you?’ Kohn asked.
‘I am your fairy godmother.’ She cackled. ‘And you have no balls!’
She waved and vanished. Kohn looked down at himself. He was naked, and not only had he no balls he was female. A moment later he was female and clothed, in a jet-black ballgown, tiered skirts sloping from small waist, scalloped flounces petalling from bare shoulders. He flung down a fan that had materialized in his hand – arm movement ludicrously feeble, a childish swipe – grabbed fistfuls of skirt and strode manfully forward. After a couple of steps he stopped in bewildered agony. Then he kicked off the obsidian slippers, and trudged on. It looked as if he had been cast as a negative Cinderella: you shall go to the funeral.
Time passed. He felt the cat against his ankles. His familiar body-image had been restored. The other one might have been interesting, godmother, only not when I’m on a hike.
On the horizon he saw an isolated house. Big. Spanish colonial. Walled, watchtowers, barbed wire. He walked quickly now, the cat bounding ahead. The horizon began to run out. Nothing beyond but space. Never thought the mind was flat, but maybe it’s logical. You never do get back to where you started.
A man stood by the gate. Open-necked shirt, trousers that went up too far. He held a hunting rifle and looked too young and fresh-faced to be frightening; but when Kohn looked in his eyes he saw something he’d seen in his own. And it was a face he’d seen before, in a faded photograph: one of Trotsky’s guards – good old Joe Hansen, or doomed Robert Hart? Kohn didn’t ask.
The guard scrutinized Kohn’s business card.
‘Wouldn’t Eastman have loved that,’ he remarked. ‘Go in. You’re expected.’
The cat gave the guard a nod that Kohn could only think of as familiar.
A wild garden: wires – telephone cables, trip-wires – everywhere. Rabbits hopped about. The house’s cool interior was silent. At the ends of long passages Kohn saw young men and women hurry, an old woman with a sweet sad look, a running child.
He went through the door of the study. Around its walls, on tables, overflowing on to the floor, were more hardbooks than he’d ever seen. What Norways, what Siberias had gone to make all this paper?
The Old Man sat behind his desk, a pen in one hand, a copy of The Militant in the other. He looked up, his pince-nez catching the light.
‘If there existed the universal mind,’ he said conversationally, ‘that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace; a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and of society – such a mind could, of course, a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan.’ The Old Man laughed and dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. ‘The plan is checked and in considerable measure realized through the market,’ he went on sternly. ‘Economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations.’
He stared at Kohn for a moment, then, his expression lightening, gesturing at the window.
‘I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and a clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.’
The gentle words, harshly spoken in a polyglot accent, made Kohn’s eyes sting.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We haven’t done very well.’
The Old Man laughed. ‘You are not the future! You – you are only the present.’
‘Always the optimist, Lev Davidovich, eh?’ Kohn had to smile. ‘What’s past is prologue – is that what I’m here to hear you say?’
You ain’t seen nothing yet, he thought.
‘I know more than you think,’ the Old Man murmured. ‘You know more than you know. I have to tell you to wake up! Be on your guard! Small decisions can decide great events, as I know too well. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The battles may be determined, but not their outcome: victory requires a different…determination.’ He smiled. ‘Now go, and I hope I see you again.’
The corridor had lengthened while he’d been in the study. Hundreds of metres down its darkening length Kohn saw a darker figure approach. As it drew closer he saw a belted raincoat, a hat pulled down low over the eyes. Inappropriate, for such a hot place.
The man stopped about three metres away. He tilted the brim of his hat, revealing spectacles over an intent but remote face, dimly recognizable.