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Stone interrupted the now more social conversation with a remark about some people having jobs to go to. There was a sudden scramble for weapons, and in a few minutes she was alone with Moh and Mary Abid.

‘Time for the news,’ Mary said. Janis looked around for a TV screen.

Mary smiled. ‘We roll our own,’ she said.

She cleared a space in the electronic clutter, sat down, adjusted a light, and suddenly was a professional-looking newscaster, expertly patching together agency material with jerky head-camera stuff from comrades on demonstrations, in street fights, unionizing space rigs, crawling through dangerous industrial processes…Janis, watching it on a monitor, was rather unwillingly impressed. Most defence agencies televised their own activities and used the results as both crime programme and self-advertisement, but this group seemed to be trying to make a genuine political intervention as well.

‘How many subscribers have you got?’ she asked when Mary had signed off.

Mary shook out her hair, which she’d tied back for her screen image. ‘A few hundred,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t bring in much, except when one of the bigger opposition networks picks up something we’ve put out. Lots of groups do it, swap stories and ideas and so on all the time, on the net. Gets to people who don’t want to sift through all that but don’t want to rely on the standard filters.’

‘All the anti-UN groups feed off each other,’ Moh said. ‘It’s a global conspiracy of paranoids. The Last International.’

Mary shot him a black look from under her black hair.

‘Janis is all right,’ Moh said. The banter had gone out of his voice. Mary looked at him for a moment, frowning, then turned to Janis with a smile that didn’t hide her embarrassment.

‘No offence?’ she said. Janis shook her head, feeling she’d missed something. Before she could ask what it was Moh said: ‘Oh well, might as well see what the other side has to say.’

The main news filters were, for once, agreed about what the lead item was: Turkish troops had fired on a demonstration on Sofia. The Russians had warned that they shared a ‘Christian and orthodox heritage’ (or, on some readings, ‘Orthodox’; war critics earnestly debated whether they meant Orthodox Christian or orthodox Communist) with the Bulgars and would not tolerate indefinitely these outrages. The President of Kurdistan was shown boarding a KLM Tupolev for Moscow on what was officially described as a routine meeting with the President of the Former Union.

Mary made a gloating O-sign and left.

The news item about the day’s software disruptions, now irremovably pinned on the cranks, came well after the news about a US/UN warning to a Japanese car company.

‘Not a word about wildcard AIS and smart drug breakthroughs,’ Moh said as he switched the screen off. ‘Knew it. Capitalist media cover-up!’

‘Didn’t see anything in your alternative media,’ Janis said.

‘Lucky for us.’

‘Yeah…Aren’t you going to tell the…comrades anything about all of that?’

Moh scratched his head. ‘Not as such.’

‘Hardly comradely, is it?’

‘Oh, but it is. It’d be difficult to explain, and they don’t need to know. It wouldn’t lessen any danger they might be in. Might even increase it, what you don’t know can’t be—’

Can’t be got out of you, she thought. She nodded sombrely.

‘So what are we going to do?’

‘There was this guy I met years ago, name of Logan. A space-rigger who was grounded. He was in the Fourth International—’

In response to her puzzled look, Moh dipped his finger in a splash of wine on the table and traced the hammer-and-sickle-and-4 while saying, ‘Tiny socialist sect, would-be world socialist party. Trotskyists. Same organization as my father was in. Logan was kind of intrigued to meet me. It was like…he was expecting something from me. He asked me if I knew about the “Star Fraction”. He was in the space fraction. That was something else.’

‘Sounds close enough,’ Janis smiled, trying to cheer him up. ‘A different faction, perhaps?’

‘Not the same thing. Faction and fraction. Not the same thing.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘You can have a faction inside a fraction,’ he told her with self-mocking pedantry, ‘but not a fraction inside a faction.’

‘That really clears it up. Why can’t you have a—’

‘Democratic centralism. Or maybe dialectical materialism.’ He grinned at her. ‘I forget.’

‘Where’s Logan now? Back in space?’

‘Yeah, he got off Earth again, but he was blacklisted to the Moon and back. I lost touch with him after a few jumps. The only person who might know where he is is Bernstein.’

‘Who’s Bernstein?’

Moh looked surprised. ‘Everybody knows Bernstein.’

‘I don’t. Is he on the net?’

Moh laughed. ‘No, the old bastard’s done too much time on semiotics charges for that. He’s a hard-copy man, is Bernstein.’

Janis decided to let that lie.

‘All right, so what do we do now?’

‘Well, I’m expecting to find a few people down at the local pub who might know more about what’s going on. Check out a few things with them, maybe get some leads. After that we can stay here overnight, look up Bernstein in the morning, then hit the road.’

‘The road to where?’

Moh grinned at her. ‘Ah, I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. Let’s discuss it in the pub.’

‘Now you’re talking.’ The desire to relax in a sociable civilian place, to let a little alcohol smooth over the rough day, came into her like a thirst. Her mouth felt dry. ‘Where can I crash out afterwards?’

‘My room’s free,’ Moh said. There was no insinuation in his tone.

‘And what about you?’

‘I’ll find a place.’

It could mean anything. She gave him a speculative smile. ‘Do you ever sleep?’

‘I took a tab.’

‘Oh yeah. You didn’t score it at that disco, did you? Off a blonde girl?’

She could see his eyes widen. ‘How the fuck did you know?’

‘“Wakesh you up jusht like zhat”,’ she mimicked derisively. ‘Well, let me tell you, in another four hours you’re gonna fall asleep jusht like zhat.’

They lugged her bag upstairs. Moh’s room was on the second floor at the back of the house. It was bigger than she’d expected, with a double bed, a large wardrobe. Lots of old political posters, a metre-wide video screen.

‘I need a shower,’ Moh said, ‘and all my stuff’s here—’ He sounded almost apologetic.

‘Get on with it, idiot.’

She idly flicked through Moh’s collection of diskettes while he disappeared into the adjoining shower room. One box was labelled ‘CLASSICS’, and the worn sleeves suggested the films had been watched many times: El Cid, Battle of Algiers, 2001, Z, Life of Brian…She smiled.

He had few books, but racks and stacks of political pamphlets: she found a copy of The Earth is a Harsh Mistress, the original manifesto of the space movement, glossy with old holograms; The Secret Life of Computers, which had the same scriptural status for the AI-Abolitionists; a neo-Stalinist tract called Did Sixty Million Really Die?; she turned over the brittle pages of a pamphlet published a century ago in New York, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International – it was subtitled The Transitional Program. Weird, she thought. Did they have computers back then?

She glanced over the first couple of pages: ‘Mankind’s productive forces stagnate. Already, new inventions and improvements fail to raise the level of material wealth.’ Oh, so they did have computers. ‘Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.’ She didn’t get it; she had what she knew was a commonplace notion that communists were basically OK, always banging on about markets and democracy and sensible stuff like that, whereas anything to do with socialism was a catastrophe that threatened the entire culture of mankind. It was something she’d have to sort out sometime. Not now. She put the pamphlet back.