Chicken roti and a tall glass of vanilla lassi were what hit the spot for Moh. He ate in a corner seat, leaning against the window while Janis nibbled tikka and Jordan chomped through some kind of potato-in-pastry arrangement, turning over the pages of a prewar Khazakh cosmodrome brochure.
‘You really a communist, Moh?’ he asked. ‘After all that’s happened?’
Moh grunted, still watching out for Bernstein. ‘What’s past is prologue,’ he said. ‘The future is a long time. We ain’t seen nothing yet.’
‘When have we seen enough?’ Janis’s voice had an edge to it. A double edge, Moh guessed: getting uneasy about hanging around here, getting dubious about the connections with the past which had seemed so obvious before.
‘I remember things,’ he said, for her benefit as much as Jordan’s. ‘I’ve seen the working class making days into history, and that’s not something you forget.’ The lost revolution grieved him like a phantom limb. ‘The thing to forget about is the communistans and the states these guys down there think weren’t so bad after all. That ain’t where it’s at.’
Jordan was saying, ‘OK, but that’s where it ended up—’ when Moh raised a hand. He’d spotted a battery-powered vehicle hauling a tiny and overloaded trailer through the crowd.
‘There he is,’ he said. ‘Hey,’ he added as the others moved to rise. ‘Take it easy. Give the man time to catch a breath.’
He sucked up the last of the lassi noisily and, just to rub it in, lit a cigarette.
Kohn sometimes wondered idly if Bernstein were the actual genuine Wandering Jew. He wasn’t young, but damned if he ever got any older. When he looked up with a snaggle-toothed grin of recognition he appeared exactly the same as when Moh had first stood alongside impatiently while his father haggled over some new acquisition (Lenin and the End of Politics, Lenin and the Vanguard Party, Lenin as Election-Campaign Manager, Lenin as Philosopher, Lenin’s Childhood, Lenin’s Fight Against Stalinism, Lenin’s Political Thought, Lenin’s Trousers…)
Bernstein clapped Moh’s shoulder and shook hands with Janis and Jordan while Moh introduced them. He chatted with Jordan for a few minutes about the underground book-trade in Beulah City, then turned to Moh.
‘You got through the bomb scare all right, then,’ Moh said.
‘Bomb scare?’ Bernstein sounded startled. ‘All I saw was sodding Kingdom cops doing a sweep in Kentish Town. Had to take the long way round. Didn’t fancy explaining where I got all those old CC minutes.’
Central Committee minutes. That could be revealing.
‘From before –?’ Moh tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice.
Bernstein shook his head. ‘Post-war stuff. Split documents.’
Moh shrugged one shoulder.
‘What are you looking for this time, Moh?’
‘Not history,’ Moh said wryly. ‘Politics.’ But he couldn’t resist looking over the stall, just once. He picked up a pamphlet, a nice edition that he didn’t have, and in mint condition. The Transitional Programme, by Leon Trotsky. Introduction by Harry Wicks.
‘Good bloke,’ Bernstein said. ‘Heard him speak, once.’
‘You heard Trotsky?’ Jordan asked.
Bernstein gave him a forgiving grin. ‘I was talking about Wicks,’ he said.
‘How much?’ Moh asked.
‘Sixty million quid, in whatever you’ve got.’
‘Yeah, I’ll take it,’ Moh said, counting out twenty marks. ‘That really is a bit of history.’ He was a sucker for this kind of thing.
‘It’s not what you came for,’ Bernstein remarked.
‘Not exactly,’ Moh said. ‘What I wanted to ask you was – you don’t happen to know where Logan is these days?’
Bernstein reached under the table and started flipping through a scuffed leather-bound book of pages held together by metal rings, some kind of hard-copy filing system. ‘Yeah, he’s on a free-wheel space colony. New View. Utopian and scientific, geddit? Ah, here it is. Still got PGP, I see.’
Moh scanned the characters laboriously into his smart box.
‘Remember him going on about the Star Fraction?’ he asked lightly. ‘Ever find out anything about it?’
‘Nah,’ Bernstein said. ‘Saw Logan a couple years back, says he still gets the odd message.’ He cackled. ‘An odd message, that’s what it is all right. I reckon it’s something Josh built into the Black Plan.’
Moh heard the sound of blood draining from his head, like a faraway waterfall. He watched Bernstein’s face, and the whole mall, go from colour to a grainy monochrome.
‘The Black Plan?’ he heard himself say.
‘Sure,’ Bernstein said. ‘Your old man wrote it. Thought you knew.’
Kohn fought the flashbacks.
To no avail.
Heavy metal industrial shelving, loaded with electronic equipment, tools, the guts of computers. Trotsky’s collected works. Hardware and software manuals. Glossy computer magazines (softporn, his mother called them). Moh was lost in one when he heard a cough.
He turned to the table in the middle of the room.
‘Morning, Josh,’ he said, smiling.
His father glanced up from the screen and nodded. ‘Hi, Moh.’ He reached out to one side, snapping his fingers. ‘Get us the Dissembler handbook. Third shelf from the top…thanks.’
The keyboard keys clattered for a few more minutes. Moh watched in silence, then levered himself up by his elbows on the table to take a closer look. He gazed at the screen, intent, fascinated, as indented lines of code trickled upward. He didn’t understand what the code was doing, but he had learned programming literally on his father’s knee and he could see the logic of it, could see that at some level it all made sense: he knew, just before it happened, when the next symbol would be the one for ENDMODULE. A keystroke later and the module dwindled into distance, becoming faint horizontal hatching on a box connected to other icons on the screen.
‘What you doing, dad?’
Josh frowned distantly at him for a moment, then smiled with resignation. He straightened up in his tall chair, bringing his shoulderblades together, sighed out his breath and reached for a packet of cigarettes. He lit one and leaned on the table, now and again remembering to blow his exhaled smoke the other way.
‘It’s part of a big project,’ he said. ‘Uh…I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about it to anyone.’ He gave Moh a quick co-conspiratorial smile. ‘It’s complicated…resource planning, logistics and financial genetic algorithms, with a bit of contingency planning hard-coded in.’
‘What’s “contingency planning”?’
‘It’s…the things you do just in case.’
‘Like burying guns!’ Moh aimed an imaginary rifle.
‘Yeah.’ Josh sighed again and looked once more at the screen. ‘This is one for the Star Fraction.’
‘What’s the “Star Fraction”?’
Josh looked at him, distant again, then shook his head as if coming out of a reverie.
‘Forget it,’ he said harshly. There was a tone in his voice that Moh had never heard before, and the dismay must have shown in his face because Josh suddenly smiled and put an arm around his shoulder, and laughed, and hummed: ‘Five for the years of the Soviet plan and four for the International…’
Moh joined in, continuing: ‘Three, three the Rights of Ma-an, two for the worker’s hands working for their living-oh, and one is workers’ unity which ever more shall be so!’
Josh drew a blue line of smoke under the question of the project. ‘Well…how’s workers’ unity coming along in the Young Rebels?’ he said.