‘Yeah, OK, OK.’
Her anger subsided. ‘Couldn’t you sort of…hack into the hospital’s records, see if they’ve got anything that might give us a clue, trace her agency?’
‘We’re talking about a hospital, Janis,’ he reminded her gently. ‘Not a university or some kinda secret research establishment. Same goes for the Body Bank.’
She didn’t get it. ‘I thought the university had good security. They use our own crypto and AI, state-of-the-art.’
He rolled on the bed, caught her and made her laugh. ‘If you ever come across a bank that guards its vaults with a crowd of recidivist safe-crackers and apprentice locksmiths, supervised by guys who can’t remember ten digits without writing them down somewhere – just let me know and I’ll cut you in on it, yeah?’
Jordan woke up on the long couch to find the long room full of people either coming in and removing kit or tooling up and going out. He saw a dark-haired woman put on camouflage like make-up, select weapons like accessories, smile at him and at herself in a wall mirror, and leave. He saw a tired and dirty man grilling bacon. The man saw him and brought over a roll and a huge mug of black coffee. Jordan accepted them gratefully and, when he had finished eating, gathered the blanket around him and dug clothes and a towel out of his rucksack.
‘Bathroom?’
‘Second left down the corridor.’
He stepped through a half-open door to find a room full of not enough steam to conceal two women and a small boy in a bath and a man sitting naked on a lavatory reading a newspaper. He nearly backed out, then remembered that he’d come here to live rationally.
Closing the shower curtain was just to avoid splashing the floor.
He found Moh and Janis sitting at the table in the main room, eating cereals while giving their attention to newspapers. Janis was tearing them off as they printed out and passing them to Kohn to read. Kohn always had one in his hand; Janis had a growing stack beside her.
If he was reading them it was fast.
Jordan joined them.
‘What’s the news?’
Janis looked at him.
‘Oh, good morning. Don’t mind Moh. He gets like this sometimes. Now,’ she added oddly, vaguely. She passed a sheet into Moh’s outstretched hand. ‘News is nothing – well, what you’d expect. Russland–Turkey, everybody. London Sun–Times thinks second big story is Yanks hit Kyoto suburbs – lasers, precision. Nihon Keizai Shimbun, on the other hand, reports loss of Army convoy in Inverness-shire. Lhasa Rimbao prays for peace. No surprises.’
‘Looking for surprises,’ Moh said around a mouthful of muesli. ‘Shoosh.’
A little later he stopped and became civil. ‘How are you this morning?’ He crunched up a page of hard copy and chucked it into a trash can on the other side of the room.
‘Fine. Well, I will be. Maybe another coffee…You know, I think hash really does make holes in your brain.’
‘Nah, that’s the drink,’ Kohn said. ‘Proven fact. Brains of rats and that.’ He grinned at Janis, apparently unaware that he’d binned a dozen balls of paper, one by one, without looking. ‘Anyway, Jordan, time to fill you in.’ He glanced at a whiteboard markered with scrawled words and snarled-up arrows. ‘Comms room is clear. Talk about it there.’
‘That’s some story,’ Jordan said when they’d finished. Moh and Janis looked back at him hopefully, like clients. ‘Sounds like a load of serdar argic.’ (He’d picked up the net-slang unconsciously, used it self-consciously; it referred to the lowest layer of paranoid drivel that infested the Cable, spun out by degenerate, bug-ridden knee-jerk auto-post programs. Kill-file clutter.) He looked down at the workbench, picked at a solder globule. ‘But I believe it.’ He laughed. ‘Well, I believe you.’
‘Can you do it?’
They wanted him to hack-and-track for them, follow lines back, be their eyes on the net. He ached to get on with it, but was uncertain if he had the skill to match.
‘Sure,’ he said.
‘That’s OK,’ Moh said. ‘You’ll pick it up.’
‘So what’s the plan for today?’ Janis asked. She sounded edgy.
‘Find Bernstein,’ Moh said. ‘Take it from there.’
‘Bernstein!’ Jordan said. ‘The booklegger?’
Moh nodded, turned to smirk at Janis. ‘Told you,’ he said. ‘Everybody knows Bernstein.’
‘I’ve got his phone number,’ Jordan said. ‘Somewhere.’ He searched his memory, then dived into the main room and ran back with the small book he’d stuck in his jacket pocket. He flipped it open to look at the purple ink of the seller’s rubber-stamped logo on the inserted bookmark. It opened at the frontispiece.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he swore, for the first time in his life. ‘Will you look at that.’
He held the book forward for them to see: the old photogravure of a statue of a man in a hooded robe or cloak, hands outspread, eyes faint white marks in the cowled shadow.
Kohn looked up, puzzled. ‘Who is it?’
Jordan screwed up his eyes and shook his head.
‘Giordano Bruno. He was burned at the stake in 1600 for saying the planets might be inhabited, among other things. First space-movement martyr.’ He gave an imitation of a hollow, echoing laugh. ‘I just realized what his name would be in English. “Jordan Brown”!’
He looked at it again, hairs prickling on his neck. Moh clapped his shoulder.
‘Bernstein’s way of saying hello, Jordan,’ he said. ‘So give the man a call, already.’
After a few rings a reply came on the line, from not an answer-fetch but a flat tape. ‘Hello,’ said a thick-tongued voice. ‘Thank you for calling. Solly Bernstein isn’t in at the moment, but you can find him at’ – pause, clunk – ‘Brent Cross Shopping Centre. Usual place. Look for the revisionist rally.’
Moh refused to explain what was funny about that.
They took the monorail north. Moh had insisted they all brought some gear, on the assumption they might not be coming back. He’d pulled a couple of JDF-surplus backpacks from under a bench, packed his in moments and gone into a huddle with Jordan over the household computer, filling him in on the tasks rota.
Janis had looked at her pack as its solar-powered flexor frame made random movements in a patch of sunlight. ‘This,’ she’d announced in an aggrieved tone to the world in general, ‘is what I call a make-up bag.’
Now it sat in her lap like a small fat animal with bulging cheek-pouches, its phototropics hopelessly confused by the flicker of stanchion shadows. Janis had a seat by the window. She couldn’t look away from the view.
‘I always knew it was there,’ she said. ‘It’s just…’
‘Yeah, isn’t it just?’ Moh grinned at her from the opposite seat, the gun between his knees.
The Greenbelt. Ahead of them it sprawled to left and right, all along the horizon. A whole new London of shanties and skyscrapers, streets, factories, nuclear power plants; the sky alive with light aircraft, airships, aerostats – a chaos that even as she watched resolved itself into complexity, a pattern of differences like small fields seen from a great height. She looked at it through Moh’s binoculars, scanning slowly, lost in the endlessly deepening detail of it all. She remembered Darwin: It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank…
‘It’s like an ecosystem,’ she said at last.
‘That’s the real Norlonto,’ Moh said. ‘The core, except it isn’t central. The leading edge.’
‘Pity it doesn’t stretch all the way round.’
She thought of what lay beyond Uxbridge, out to the west. Badlands all the way to Wales, a firebreak between that ineradicable hostility and London. A lot of people would privately admit they’d prefer the Welsh marching to the endless trickle of saboteurs from these new Marches.