‘Started with defending building sites against green heavies. Went on from there.’ He shrugged and smiled. ‘Talk about it another time…How did you get to be a mad scientist?’
Janis took a long swallow. ‘This must sound like a sheltered upbringing. A bit of that old middle-class privilege, you know? Grew up in Manchester. It’s all straight Kingdom, no autonomous communities. Not much violence. ANR sparrow units knock off soldiers and officials now and again…
‘My parents are both doctors.’ She gave a self-deprecating smile. ‘Real doctors. Uh, physicians. Two brothers, both younger than me. One’s a mining engineer in Siberia, the other’s in medical school. I was always interested in medical research – all the code-cracking breakthroughs happened when I was just old enough to understand. Grammar school, university, research. I only came down here because of the restrictions – not enough F S Zees up north.’
Kohn nodded slowly. ‘And now Norlonto. Just a natural progression.’
Janis grimaced. ‘I wouldn’t want to get mixed up in black technology.’
It was a cant phrase for the sort of research that was rumoured to go on in Norlonto. Not quite deep technology, but treading the edge; neural-electronic interfacing, gene-splicing, potentially lethal life-extension techniques, all tested on higher animals or human subjects whose voluntary status was distinctly dubious: debtors, crime-bondees, kids who didn’t know what they were getting into, the desperate poor, mercenaries…
He lit another cigarette and leaned back, blowing smoke past his nostrils and looking at her along his nose. ‘That’s a good one,’ he remarked, ‘in the circumstances.’
‘There’s a bloody difference!’
‘Explain that to the cranks.’
‘What can we do, then?’ Janis glanced around the now livening bar as if checking for infiltrators.
She looked so worried that Kohn relented. He’d made his point.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘This place is a black hole for the state and for the terrs – nothing to stop them getting in; it’s getting out they find difficult. Nobody’s signed the Convention here; the Settlement doesn’t apply; we’re not in the UN. We don’t have any of these stand-offs in a state of war. What we have instead is a trade-off, anarchy and what the movement calls law and order. Anybody can carry a gun, and anybody who uses one without good cause is liable to get wasted. So they’ll have to work their way round to us, and before they do – give it a few days – we have lots of options. Vanishing into the crowd by going deeper into Norlonto. Going public and datagating the whole deal. Taking to the hills. Crossing the water—’
‘Ireland?’ Janis looked shocked.
Kohn had been there, handling security at one of the many conferences that could be safely held only outside the Kingdom. It was a strange place, that other Republic, a black-and-white photograph of the colourful enthusiasms he remembered from his childhood. United, federal, secular and social democratic, a welfare state where you got liberalism shoved down your throat from an early age, with vitamin supplements…It had been a disturbing experience because of its very ambiguity, like tales his grandmother had recounted of visits to East Germany. He tried to shrug away what he suspected was on Janis’s part a lingering prejudice from years of Hanoverian disinformation.
‘Think of it like cryonics,’ he said, getting up to go to the bar.
‘How d’you mean?’
‘As an alternative to death there’s a lot to be said for it.’
Her laughter followed him, but he could see she wasn’t convinced.
Jordan snatched the VR glasses off and pressed the heels of his hands against his tight-shut eyes. The dull kaleidoscope of false light made the other afterimages go away. Then he opened his eyes and reassured himself of the solid and insubstantial realities around him.
He had been looking for information about the Black Plan. The ANR itself denied all knowledge: his cautious inquiry resulted in its garish VR/PR office dwindling abruptly to a dot in the distance. Then he had turned to the competing newslines of the radicals and libertarians and socialists, his search patterns hauling in a succession of titles that floated up past him as he checked them out one by one:
eu.pol
us.lib
fourth.internat
sci.socialism
soc.utopia
freedom.net.news
fifth.internat
alt.long-live-marxism-leninism-maoism-gonzalo-thought
theories.conspiracy
soc.urban-legend
comp.sci.ai
news.culture.communistans
left.hand.path
That last one had been a mistake. It had rattled his nerves so much that coffee could only calm them, not still them entirely. The whole net, this evening, was like jangled nerves. The afternoon’s system crashes had set off claims and counterclaims, wars of rumour. Cross-tracing Black Plan and Watchmaker references had scored dozens of hits as transitory anomalous events – from the crashes to bombings to disappearances of well known militants to emergency hands-on audits in Japanese-owned car factories – were attributed to one or the other, or both.
Jordan sipped coffee and ran the rumours through the hand-held’s freeware evaluation routines and his own mind. It took him about a quarter of an hour to arrange the possibilities in a spectrum. At one extreme of inferences from the net the Black Plan was already the Watchmaker, and was being used by the Illuminati through the Last International and its front organizations – including the Fourth International and the Fifth International and the International Committee for the Reconstruction of the Libertarian International – to take over the world by flooding the market with Black Plan products recognizable by barcodes all of which contained the number 666. At a minimum, though, there was definitely something happening on the Left, using the term in a fairly broad and paranoid sense to include the ANR and the Left Alliance and parts of the space movement, but the signal-to-noise ratio was so high there was no way to get much further without a reality check.
Time to look for some live action.
Jordan paid his tab and lugged his pack outside the door. As he buckled the strap a woman’s face caught his eye. An open, friendly face which he recognized but couldn’t place. She looked at him as if the recognition were mutual, but puzzled. A man walked beside her and a flicker of annoyance creased his brow as she stopped and said hello to Jordan.
Her dress seemed made of flames, a friendly fire that licked and played around the movements of her body. Salamandrine faces peeped and winked between her breasts and thighs. Her eyes were amused, when he reached them.
‘Enjoying your first taste of life in space?’
When she spoke he remembered her: she was the woman who’d checked him in.
‘Oh, hello again,’ he said. ‘Yes, but. It’s all a bit intense.’
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Uh…Well I want to meet people to talk to about…radical ideas, radical politics, you know? And to be honest I’d rather do it somewhere a bit more—’
He hesitated, not wanting to offend.
‘Normal and natural?’ she teased.
‘Yes,’ he admitted.
‘OK.’ She turned to her companion. ‘Do we know anywhere reasonably conservative, but relaxed?’
He thought for a moment, then said, ‘You could come with us. The Lord Carrington. That’s where the revolutionaries hang out.’ To Jordan it seemed wild enough, as he stood at the bar and drank his first honest litre. There were pubs in Beulah City but they were the sort of place where the Salvation Army was the entertainment. The Christians had an almost miraculous talent for turning wine into water. He smiled to himself and looked around.
The couple who’d come with him had been instantly dragged into a group of people in urgent discussion, leaving Jordan with a not unfriendly wave. The guy had been right about the sort of place it was. Conservative, relaxed and revolutionary: it caught the style. Cotton and leather and denim, a fashion statement echoing down generations: from cattle drivers to factory hands to leftist students to pro-Western youth in the East and back to the workers the last time the West was Red, and now to those who remembered that period or hoped for its return – the Levi jacket as much a badge of dissent as any enamel emblem pinned to its lapels.