‘You took me by surprise,’ Kohn said.
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve been wanting to do this for hours.’
‘Wanton woman.’
‘Abandoned,’ she agreed. ‘An outcast of society.’
She stubbed out the filter roach. Kohn kicked off his boots, shrugged out of his waistcoat, then leaned forward and drew her on to him. She trailed her hair from his shoulders down to his hips, then did the same with her lips and tongue, discovering as she did so that it was time to get his trousers off. She straddled him and took her time with the belt and zip. She moved on her knees down over his thighs, tugging the trews and shorts away, and then suddenly it got urgent and she pulled them fiercely over his feet. She sat on his bare thighs, facing away from him, while he pulled the silk top over her head and unlaced her basque. She slipped her own trousers and pants off. She leaned forward, letting her hair tickle his toes, until the pale opalescent shell of the basque fell away from her chest, and his arms slid around her waist. His erection pressed against the small of her back. She turned over on her knees and put her hands on his shoulders and he lay back and she moved forward and up and Moh rose to meet her and she moved, slowly up and swiftly down, and so they continued, the cannabis in their racing blood stretching time.
She did not know when it was she spoke his name and got no answer; and looking down at him, smiled to see that he had fallen asleep just like that.
10
The Transitional Programmer
Moh woke with a jump from a dream of shouting, a dream of fighting, a dream of falling.
Janis stirred and mumbled beside him, then pulled the quilt even more firmly around her, leaving only a tuft of red hair on the pillow like a squirrel’s tail to indicate her presence. Moh let his shoulders adapt to the chill as he lay back with his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling.
Cautiously, as if tonguing a loose tooth, he turned his attention to the back of his mind. The new thing was still there, the sense of lines where there had been tangles, of sky where there had been floor. He could still lean over that cliff and look out at the bottomless chasm of his past. But it no longer sent him whirling with dizziness, hurtling with fear. He could turn away from it, he could walk confidently along its edge.
He had the feeling that he had forgotten something. He smiled at the thought, and continued to lie and think. Whatever was going on in his head, whether it was an effect of the drugs or of the entity he’d encountered or of their interaction, it was real and it had not gone away. He was awed by it, and annoyed. It had always been a matter of pride if not of principle that he didn’t have any fixes, any patches; that he never touched smart drugs. (Only stupid ones, he reflected ruefully. Whatever else might be going on in his head, it ached.)
There was the problem of what to tell Jordan, and what not to tell the others. A shadow of guilt crossed his mind, about not taking Stone into his confidence: good comrade, best mate, years together…but all that still seemed like a good reason for keeping him out of it. If something should go drastically wrong (death, madness, things like that) the Collective would need someone uncontaminated by whatever had happened.
Not that he had a clear view of what it would mean for things to go right. Despite the inscrutable download to the gun, he wasn’t certain that whatever he’d encountered had an objective existence anything like what it had seemed. The net had spawned a whole subculture of people who claimed that free and conscious AIS spoke to them, gave them messages of profound import for humanity, incited them to perform violent or bizarre acts…a dream meme of AIS, successors to the angels and aliens of former times. Meanwhile the real breakthrough, the indubitable emergence of genuinely other minds, remained on a receding horizon – whether because of the intrinsic difficulty of the endeavour; the restrictions imposed by Stasis and by the cruder, more hardware-oriented interventions of Space Defense; or the ceaseless sabotage of the cranks.
The cranks – Christ, that was what he’d forgotten! He had to contact Cat, tell her he was coming to see her, ask her to stay put or arrange a meeting. Last night he’d been too high on alcohol and hash and adrenaline and on whatever-it-was to think straight. He should have done it then. The drugs were no excuse. What had he been thinking of—?
The major distraction, the prime reason why he hadn’t thought straight last night chose that moment to roll over and wake up. She looked at him, momentary bewilderment giving way to a distractingly self-satisfied smile.
‘Hi.’
‘Good morning.’
‘You must be freezing. Come in here.’ She flipped the quilt over him and pulled him in, kissed and cuddled and nuzzled him and just when he was warming up again said, ‘God, I could do with a coffee.’
Moh disengaged reluctantly. ‘With you in a minute.’ He rolled out of bed and wrapped himself in the warmest towelling robe he had. He crept downstairs and started up the coffee. Jordan was still fast asleep on the couch. Moh went to the comms room and called up Hillingdon Hospital.
The account for Catherin Duvalier, charged to the Collective, was closed. After a few minutes of brushing through the layers of answer-fetches Moh reached an administrator who confirmed that, yes, the patient was gone. Hours earlier, without any forwarding trace.
Moh broke the connection and stared at the vacant screen, feeling like banging his head against it. There was no way to get back to Cat. He didn’t know what faction she was in. Not that it would help: after her unconditional release they wouldn’t want to know her. If he couldn’t meet Donovan’s challenge, he and maybe the whole Collective could end up with an indictment against them in the so-called Geneva courts, the ones that handled intercommunal and intermovement disputes. No self-respecting defence agency in Norlonto ever appealed to them, not when there were reputable court companies vying for customers. The Geneva Convention courts were for terrorists and states to squabble in with their extorted money. Even if Donovan’s case wouldn’t stand up for five minutes, that five minutes and however many months it took to get there could cost the Collective a fortune and a reputation.
He had to find Cat. He had to fix things with Donovan, or just hope the revolution came before they lost too much business. If the ANR won they would sweep the Geneva courts away. Some chance.
There were other slim chances. He sent out a general message to the Collective’s entire mailing list, asking urgently for information about Catherin Duvalier’s present location. Then he sent a personal, encrypted message, explaining the problem and asking for some grace on the deadline, to the only publicly known address for Donovan: bdonovan@cla.org.ter.
Giving himself a hard time, he made the coffee and went upstairs. Explaining this whole mess to Janis wouldn’t be easy, but it would be a fine warm-up for explaining it to the comrades.
‘You,’ she told him when he’d finished, ‘are a fucking idiot.’
Yes, he agreed silently. And clinically insane as well, probably. At least in Norlonto that’s a victimless crime.
Another thought came to him as he watched genuine anger fighting against a sort of stoical, appalled amusement for possession of her face: And obsessed with you.
He saw the anger win.
‘Is this how you guys function?’ she asked. ‘Drink and dope and drop-dancing and goddess knows what else shit in your head?’
‘Not when I’m on active,’ Kohn said. ‘Bear that in mind.’
‘You were on active, dammit,’ she said. ‘We got a contract, remember?’