‘He started going live ten minutes ago,’ Van said, not looking at her. ‘Appears to be doing a core trawl – ah!’
The colours bled together for a few seconds. Kohn gasped and looked away from the screen, shoving the glades on to his forehead and yanking out the jacks. He rose and stalked to the window.
‘What’s the matter?’ Janis said. ‘Isn’t it working?’
Kohn turned to her and Van, his face a mask.
‘It’s working all right. I made contact.’
‘With the same entity as before?’ Van asked eagerly.
‘Yes.’ Kohn frowned. ‘Well – that’s a question. There are millions of them. Billions. There’s a whole civilization of the things in there. Out there. It’s incredible!’
‘Credible to me,’ Janis said. ‘No, no it isn’t. The Watchmaker…oh goddess, oh Gaia, what have we done?’
She’d never believed it.
Van sighted at Kohn along a pointed finger, which appropriately enough seemed to have smoke coming from it.
‘We have a long time to find the answer to that,’ he said dryly. ‘Now there is only one question, the big question: will it or they side with us in the final offensive?’
All of a sudden Kohn was beaming, punching the air, sweeping the Vietnamese scientist and Janis up in the same hug: ‘Yeah, man! They’ll side with us! Final offensive, hell! We could pull off the world revolution with them on our side! We could go for the big one! We should do it – go for broke!’
Van grinned all over his face, but shook his head. ‘You can’t overthrow capitalism just by a push, a putsch, my friend.’
Moh stared at him. ‘Capitalism? Who said anything about capitalism?’ Janis could see in his eyes the authentic fanatical gleam as he looked first at Van, then at her. ‘We can smash the United Nations!’
He woke to the sound of iron hammering the stairs outside and the chopping blades of a helicopter at the window. He lay rigid for a moment in his bed as a searchlight beam blazed through the thin curtains and lit the room (the plastic model spaceships hanging from black threads the old Warsaw Pact poster of a little girl cradling the Earth DEFEND PEACE the piled clutter of toys and books and tapes the VR space-helmet). Moh jumped up and had reached the bedroom door when the outside door crashed down. His father came out at the same time, then his mother. Both naked, both scrambling into clothes.
‘Get back, get back!’ His father pushed him towards the door of the bedroom. A howl rose from his younger sister’s room. Moh could not take his eyes from what stood in the flat’s splintered doorway. His mother screamed. Moh found himself behind his parents, their arms out at their sides pushing him back. He himself was pushing his sister back.
The teletrooper ducked through the doorway and stepped inside. Something crashed off a shelf. The teletrooper’s shielded lenses scanned them; its gun-arm swung to cover them. It was hard not to see it as a robot, or as a giant armoured exoskeleton with a man inside, but Moh knew the operator was metres or miles away. Two youths in tracksuits and bandanas followed it into the flat and stood behind it. Their M-16s looked like toys beside its armaments, and they like boys. They had blonded hair and two days’ worth of thin stubble.
‘Get out,’ Moh’s father said. HUH HUH HUH HUH went the teletrooper’s speaker grille. The two youths sniggered. One of them glanced at a piece of paper.
‘Joshua Kohn? Marcia Rosenberg?’
‘You know damn well who we are,’ Moh’s mother said.
‘Don’t swear at me, you fucking traitor commie cunt. We know who you are.’
Joshua Kohn said, ‘You can see we’re not armed. You have no right to—’
‘You have no rights!’ one of the youths yelled. ‘You’re part of the Republican war machine and you’re going to pay for it. Get your brats out of the way and come with us.’
Moh flung one arm around his father and the other around his sister and shouted, ‘You won’t take them away! You’ll have to kill us all!’
‘Get back,’ his father said levelly. ‘Let go, Moh, let go.’
Moh made no move. He could feel his sister’s chest shaking with dry sobs.
‘All right,’ the youth who had screamed said. He spun his rifle into position for firing.
HEY MAN YOU CAN’T DO THAT.
The teletrooper lurched forward and leaned over them. Moh saw for the first time the blue roundel on the brow of its dome, the white circle of leaves, the line-scored globe. The 20-millimetre barrel retracted into its right forearm and its two hands reached over and picked up Moh and his sister like dolls.
OK YOU CAN TAKE THEM OUT NOW.
The firing seemed to go on for a long time.
The teletrooper dropped Moh and the small girl, picked up the corpses of their parents and followed the men out.
The report said the terrorists had been executed in the street, and not in their house in front of the children, which would have been a war crime under the Geneva Convention.
None of the other people in the block told a different story.
Moh saw Van’s fingers tremble as he lit another cigarette and asked, ‘How you do propose to do that?’
‘The AIS can weaken the state – the state machinery’ – Moh felt his lips stretch to an awful grin – ‘everywhere at the same time. The world’s full of groups and movements like ours and yours just waiting for their chance. We can give them that chance. Fuck up the enemy’s communications, divert supplies and reinforcements, overextend the bastards. They’re already getting tied down a bit with the Sino-Soviets and the Japanese. When the insurrection’s launched here we can create two, three, many Vietnams!’
‘We can’t,’ Van said. ‘Space Defense is ready for that, poised to strike at the first sign of AIS running wild in the datasphere. They’re quite willing to knock out the entire infrastructure of civilization to counter it. Thus giving the wrong movements their chance.’ He paused, tapping a wisp of ash from the glowing cone of his fast-drawn cigarette. ‘Many Cambodias.’
Heat lightnings of pain flickered behind Moh’s eyes. The room went in and out of focus, swayed on the edge of darkness. He sat down again, with a cold feeling as if all his rhythms had troughed at the same moment and all the anti-som had worn off.
‘Coffee,’ he said. ‘Load a sugar.’ Janis disappeared and came back – instantly, it seemed. Instant coffee. He took it like a fix, half-listening to Van spelling out again the warning that the Stasis agent had given. He was shaking inside, his initial elation from the ecstatic vision of the Watchmaker entities, the Watchmaker culture, giving way to a terrified awe. Van’s grim talk of gigadeaths only echoed into contemplation of the overkill, the sheer overwhelming redundancy of it alclass="underline" a new stage in evolution, as a spin-off from a political-military expert system and a bit of biological data-theft and an organization whose purpose was a mystery to its own members? A scale too vast, surely, for anything Josh might have planned.
Moh sighed and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I take your point about the dangers if Space Defense notices what’s going on. But they’ll find out anyway, so our only chance is to hit hard and hit fast.’
‘And what happens,’ said a sarcastic voice, ‘when they hit us hard and fast?’
MacLennan had come in silently. They all turned to face him.
‘Let them,’ Moh said. ‘Remember they’re counting on breakdowns to do their work for them, not mainly direct effects. They don’t have the ammo for that, anyway. So we’re still the best chance because we’ll be able to replace the electronic organization with our own organization – crude maybe, but enough to tide us over for the few weeks it’ll take to get the comms working again.’