QUANTUM NON-LOCALITY: THE UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR SPACE FIRST! NO COMPROMISE IN DEFENCE OF EARTH’S CHILDREN!
She nudged Moh. ‘One of yours?’
‘Nah. Just a bunch of extremists.’
The Elevated station had been built around a 1930s bus terminus decorated in the style of a futuristic past. They sat in the station’s glass-fronted cafeteria, their backs against a grooved aluminium pillar, and had coffee and doughnuts. Janis watched the people come and go through what looked like a small set from Things To Come, apart from the outfits. Not a short tunic or a short-back-and-sides to be seen. Moh spent a few seconds flipping through maps on a computer.
‘Big drawback of the arrangements here,’ he remarked as he slipped the machine into his shirt pocket, ‘is that there’s no King’s highway. Everything is private. Property and access can be a bit of a minefield.’
‘I hope you don’t mean that literally.’
‘Not exactly, but if we do have to trespass I’ll rely on my friend’ – he patted his bag – ‘rather than legal precedents.’
‘That’s where you’ve got the gun?’
‘Not so loud. Yeah. Comes apart.’
‘And I thought we were alone together at last.’
‘Better two and a bit than none, my dear.’
He was watching the crowd almost all the time. The few moments when he looked directly at her he would half-smile and she only had time to half-smile back before his glance darted away again. She wondered if to him it was a long, searching look…She couldn’t complain: it was her drugs that had done things to his sense of time and his memory, and her money that was paying him to keep watch.
And she had fallen for him, hard. As in: a hard man is good to find. One part of her mind – the sceptical, analytical, scientific part – was looking on sardonically, with a knowing smirk, seeing her sudden swept-off-her-feet attachment to Moh as, ultimately, the springing of a genetically loaded trigger, a survival strategy: her best bet was someone strong and kind, dangerous to others and safe, safe, safe to her. The rest of her mind just felt weak whenever he looked at her. What her body felt was different, and weak did not come into it.
Moh was tapping at his phone. He slid it to where both of them could see it and nobody else could: the picture was set to flat, not holo.
Mary Abid’s face appeared on the screen.
‘Oh, hi,’ Mary said. ‘Jordan’s back, if that’s what you want to know. Threw him in at the deep end, didn’t you?’
‘Can I speak to him?’ Moh said impatiently.
‘Sure…passing you over.’
Jordan looked up at them, evidently via a camera mounted on the top of a screen he was working at. He had a black eye and a few scratches.
‘You all right, Jordan?’
‘Yes,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘We got into a bit of a scuffle, but that was all. You should have seen the police, Moh. They ran like rabbits.’
‘Yeah, well, I told you the Neos—’
Jordan smiled. ‘It wasn’t your commie headbangers that chased them off – it was the market ladies!’
‘Good for them. And they’re not my commie headbangers, as I keep telling you. Did Sol Bernstein get away OK?’
‘Yes. Never saw anyone so old move so fast. He had his books packed up by the time I reached him, and we chugged off on his electric tractor right through where a fight was going on. That was when I got a few knocks, but it was nothing really.’
He obviously felt it was a bit more than that and was quite pleased with himself. Janis hoped Moh wouldn’t burst Jordan’s little bubble of satisfaction at getting through his first rumble.
‘Sounds like you did all right,’ Moh said. ‘How are you getting on with the net searches?’
Jordan’s expression flipped from smug to serious.
‘Well…first, about Catherin…Cat. There was a queue of replies to your message when I logged on. Nobody’s seen her. One or two people have mentioned that Donovan’s got a call out for her as well.’
‘I bet he has,’ Moh said. ‘What about the ANR?’
Jordan sighed in exasperation. ‘I can’t raise them. All the messages bounced. At first I thought I was doing something incorrect, and I got the comrades to check. But by then it was all over the news. The ANR has gone off-line, left all their phones off the hook. Well, not exactly: you get an answer-fetch giving a standard spiel.’ He passed a hand across his eyes. ‘It gets irritating after the twentieth time.’
‘What’s it saying?’
‘Basically, a bit of rousing propaganda and then something to the effect that, if your message can’t wait until after the final offensive, they’ll know about it through other channels anyway.’
‘Modesty was never their strong point—’
‘Modesty!’ Jordan’s sudden grin was blocked by the fish-eye loom of his delighted air-punch or clenched-fist salute. ‘Yo! Never thought of that!’
‘What?’
‘The Black Planner yesterday, he ordered a load of silk through this Beulah City fashion company. I might be able to track the consignment, get a lead to the ANR that way.’
‘Nice one,’ Moh said. ‘But I doubt if they can be tracked that easily.’
‘I know, but Modesty can be! I saw a Modesty truck yesterday, might have been headed for Norlonto. I’m sure I could hack in, work backwards from there. Most of their deliveries are finished goods, right? Import fabric, export fancy frocks. So if I find any fabric exports…’
Moh shook his head. ‘Bills of lading are the easiest things to switch, and that’s assuming the Black Plan was actually pulling in silk in the first place. More likely that was a cover as well, and what they got from China was a cargo of knock-off Kalashnikovs.’
Jordan looked a bit discouraged, and Janis said quickly: ‘It’s worth a try anyway, Jordan. It’s all we’ve got to go on.’
‘Fair enough,’ Moh said. ‘OK, Jordan, you do that, and keep looking for Cat any way you can think of. Pass on any bit of news you find interesting.’
‘Hah! Getting back to that…you know about the space-traffic crackdown?’
‘Logan told me.’
‘Fine. OK, the other thing is Donovan’s citizen’s arrest thing. He’s posted the offer to lots of newsgroups.’
‘That figures.’
‘Anything I can do about it?’
‘Ask the comrades to toss out countercharges, challenges on my behalf and so on. Get our lawyers to issue a few nasty messages. Make it look like a real tangle. Might scare off any casual adventurers.’
‘OK, I got that. What are you going to do?’
Moh laughed. ‘Keep jumping borders,’ he said. ‘Like the libertarian comrades say: Norlonto ain’t the law of the jungle, it’s a jungle of laws.’
For the next two days they wandered through a tiny proportion of that jungle of laws, the disparate communities of Norlonto. Unlike the patchwork of the Kingdom, these were not separate fiefs but layered, interwoven properties and neighbourhoods. Some welcomed anyone passing through. Some had gates on the streets, or took a toll, or turned back anyone who hadn’t been invited by a resident. Carrying weapons on the street might be prohibited, permitted or required. It was a matter for the street-owners, like wearing ties in restaurants, smoking or non-smoking. There were sinister, seedy areas that had been all bought up by nazis and made most of their money from tourists and memorabilia. There were women-only territories. There was a whole district called Utopia University, which consisted of experimental communities being crawled over by sociologists (who were mostly funded by estate agents doing market research). One sharply delimited estate, the Singularity Sink, had no laws or morality at alclass="underline" anyone who entered was deemed to have renounced any protection but their own. It had a certain appeal for suicides and psychopaths, and for adolescent macho adventurers. (There was of course nothing to prevent violent rescue missions, either, and very rich and desperate relatives had been known to send in armoured columns.)