‘Some would say it’s been with us a long time,’ Donovan said, sourly acknowledging the joke but smarting inwardly: Bleibtreu-Fèvre was playing back to him an idea he’d advanced a little too seriously in Secret Life. ‘What about Dr Van?’
‘There we may have a problem,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘I have not heard from him for some hours. He has an infuriatingly vague answer-fetch which takes the form of a pretty young lady who sounds as if she is promising to put him in touch with you immediately, but as soon as the call is over one realizes she has promised precisely nothing.’
‘Probably an actual person,’ Donovan said as gravely as he could manage. ‘The skill is almost impossible to automate.’
‘Any progress with Kohn?’
Donovan flipped Kohn’s message into Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s field of view.
‘So much for that scheme,’ the Stasis agent remarked after reading it.
‘Perhaps,’ Donovan said reluctantly. ‘However, Catherin Duvalier is almost certain to contact me if Kohn does find her. It’s in her interests to have the matter settled.’
‘I suggest you put out another call for a freelance arrest,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘Please inform me of any contact immediately. This man may be extremely dangerous, possibly even an informational plague carrier for the AI entity. Given who he is – who his father was, and what happened to him – we cannot expect his cooperation. I will attempt to bring him in personally.’
‘Isn’t that a risk for you while he’s in Norlonto?’ Donovan asked. Space Defense had a way of overreacting if Stasis crossed into even notionally extraterrestrial territory.
‘Yes,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘But it’s a risk we may have to take.’
‘And if he leaves Norlonto?’
‘I have thought of that,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘In my line of work, as in yours no doubt, one cultivates contacts who may be a little – shall we say? – irregular in their ways, but who are on fundamental issues basically sound.’
The barb. Green partisans. Give them a few trinkets, tell them this machine or that person was an enemy of the earth: aim and fire. Donovan nodded enthusiastically, reflecting that, as far as Stasis was concerned, he was little more than a useful barbarian himself.
The phone-booth was a bubble of scratched plastic bolted to the outer wall of the shopping centre, the exchange itself a bevelled black chunk, like a small version of the monolith in 2001. And, also like that, the exchange had resisted everything up to and including laser fire. Kohn ducked into the booth while the others stood facing outwards, giving him a modicum of privacy. He linked his throat-mike, the gun and the telecom box and ran the key for Logan.
A holo appeared in the black depths, a show-off display of the signal’s path: Alexandra Palace – Telecom Tower – Murdoch GeoStat – bounce around a few more comsats – ping to Lagrange where a sargasso of space habitats rolled in the gravitational wake of Earth and Moon. There the line vanished into a scribble of local networks. The right-hand digits of the bill’s running total were flickering as fast as they had the last time he’d called Logan, when it had been a voice-only link, no fancy graphics (mips are cheaper than bandwidth). Somewhere in there: Dissembler, his father’s work.
Logan’s face appeared abruptly, at a slant; behind and around him plants, fishtanks, cable, tubing, everything stacked and looking as if it were about to topple; an overhead window with passing bars of light in constant unsettling motion behind it.
‘Moh Kohn! I was expecting—’ He stopped. ‘Hey, man, this a secure feed?’
‘It’s your crypto,’ Moh said wryly.
Logan responded with the usual delay. It looked slow-witted, as always until your mind adjusted, pacing the light-seconds. ‘Jes, well, the Amerikanoj haven’t cracked it, but – you slot in some of your own?’
Moh thumbed a hot-key. The pictures dissolved to snow, graphic characters, a vertiginous glimpse of crawling low-level ASCII, then snapped back.
‘Safe now?’ Logan asked. Behind him a chicken flapped inelegantly past, its beak open as if in surprise at remaining airborne.
‘We’re talking infinite monkeys,’ Moh said. ‘Shoot.’
‘OK. This about the Star Fraction?’
‘Yes!’
‘Uh-huh. The old code. It’s gone active. Years it’s been following me around, every so often this message comes up: don’t do anything. This time yesterday, suddenly it’s Move your ass, comrade, this is the big one. And what’s it telling me? Crack out the ammo? Even crank out the leaflets? Hell, no, it’s: buy fucking lab equipment! Sequencers, cryogenics, neurochemicals, dedicated hardware. I mean, we got stuff like this up to here, up here’ – he waved at the scene behind him – ‘but this is like way beyond what we need to run our ecology. Meanwhile I’m getting calls from comrades I never knew I had. Space movement, Internaciistoj, ANR, the lot. All of them think the program (whatever the fuck it is) thinks they’re in the Star Fraction (whatever the fuck it is). And it’s telling them to – well, depends where they are. Ground, it’s ship stuff out. Orbit, pull it in and put it together. All bio gear, communications software and computer kit with backup storage like they use for disaster recovery. Core memory that can ride out near-miss nukes.’
Near-miss nukes. Moh thought of the news: the Kyoto suburbs, the Sofia streets. A memory of shelter sweat made his skin itch.
‘And are you doing all this?’ was all he could think of to say.
‘Course I am. I got calls on hold right now, man.’
‘How are you paying for it?’
Logan grunted a laugh. ‘Checked our earthside account. Money’s coming in, earmarked. Could be capital investment from a Bolshevik bank robbery back in 1910 for all I know.’
‘Close enough,’ Moh said. ‘It’s from the Black Plan.’
Logan stared at him for a longer time than the transmission lag could account for.
‘How do you know that?’
‘I think it was me that stirred it up,’ Moh said. ‘I was poking around yesterday. Something in the system asked me for a code that I remembered from way back when Josh was writing it. That was when things started to happen—’
‘Josh wrote the Black Plan?’
‘So Bernstein says.’
Logan nodded. ‘Go on.’
‘It’s something to do with the Star Fraction, I know that much. Fact is, my mind’s got a bit – shit, I don’t know, maybe screwed up with some memory drugs I got exposed to. Good to get some confirmation, yeah? The other thing that happened is this load of encrypted data got downloaded to my gun’s computer, and I wondered if you might have some idea what to do with it.’
Logan frowned. ‘Could be pre-emptive backup. If I set up the rig that the program’s telling me, it’ll be able to pick up tight-beam transmissions. That’s real dicey, especially if it’s encrypted. Lose one digit and it’s junk. OK, you can get around that, throw redundancy at it like there’s no tomorrow. Even so, if nukes are in the picture you get emps, you get borealis hits, comms out for days.’
‘You think that’s on the cards?’
‘Nukes? Ne. If you’re right, though, about when the thing was set up, you can see why—’
‘Shit! That’s it! Just before the last one!’ Goddess, that was a relief. Up to a point.
‘—it’s got a real sensitive ear for rumours of war.’
‘So. What d’you reckon, I should take this into space?’ Moh crushed a stray syringe under his boot, wondering how he’d scrape the fare together. Work his passage, ride shotgun…