‘A nice theory,’ MacLennan said. ‘You can be sure we have no intention of testing it. The Hanoverians will be quite enough for us to deal with. A few minutes ago the Black Plan indicated that an opportunity for us to launch the uprising is coming in the next twenty-four hours.’
They looked at him in silence. Kohn realized with a chill that the stirring forest, the waking giant, the walking dead he had walked among had been almost certainly a vision of the ANR’s revolutionary expert system coming to the conclusion that it was time for the days that shook the world to come round again.
‘Well,’ Janis said, ‘what is to be done?’
MacLennan lit his pipe, squinting at them through the flare of a match. ‘The Army Council are no doubt considering it. As for us – Kohn, you are not to do again whatever you did today, until the offensive itself.’ He raised a hand as Moh opened his mouth. ‘Taine and I talked about it earlier, and I can see with my own eyes what that process does to you. You look like a ghost yourself, man. You have also, I might add, set off more disruptions in the net this afternoon than anyone has seen since the dates turned over in the year 2000. If you can believe that!’
He shook out the match. ‘So we do the time-honoured military thing in these circumstances. We wait.’
He laughed. ‘Try to relax.’
15
Expert Sister
She sat down at the sewing-machine, hitching up her skirt and petticoats to free her foot for the control pedal. This wasn’t like the basic machines in the workshop: it had so much software built into it that a complete beginner could produce marvellous work within an hour. So it claimed, in a bright voice, as Catherin paged through its menus and selected stitches and colours and sizes. She placed the denim jacket under the needle’s foot, bringing it over the pieces and outlines she’d made. When she’d started she’d intended to finish it unaided, in an attempt to fit into the community’s pattern. Now she no longer had a reason to fight down her seething impatience with the finicky tediousness of handicraft. She just wanted to finish it.
After Valery had returned from seeing Moh off they’d had a few minutes of tense recrimination. Valery had told her that the reason she’d been invited here in the first place was to keep her – and Moh – out of Donovan’s reach. Cat had known all along, having explained her situation to the sisters, that they were trying to get Moh here and that for some reason they had to do it indirectly – hence her fleeting appearance in the videophone call – but she was annoyed to find their main purpose was not to clear her name but to rope Moh in for some purpose of their own. Valery tactfully pointed out that Cat, too, had had a trick up her sleeve.
Cat’s outrage had subsided somewhat. It was a valid point, she grudgingly conceded.
‘All right,’ she’d said. ‘Fair enough. But can you just tell me – what the hell’s going on?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Oh come on. I’m sure you were gratified when Moh Kohn suddenly decided to rally to the flag, but you know as well as I do that he must have done it to get out of a desperate situation. I’ve never seen him look like he did when I told him the CLA were sending a couple of agents round, and I’ve been under heavy fire with that guy. He’s like a lot of fighters – he’s not foolhardy but he’s, uh, fatalistic, you know?’
Valery nodded. ‘I’ve been there,’ she said. ‘There’s one with your name on it; what’s for you won’t go past you, it’ll go through you; when your number comes up your number comes up. All that crap. As if we hadn’t heard that Chaos exists and God doesn’t.’
‘Yeah.’ Cat grinned, seeing Valery for the first time as someone a bit like herself, a fighter. ‘It is like a superstition, isn’t it? Huh. If you put all the fighters’ shit-kickin superstitions and all their red-handed scruples together you’d end up with some kind of caveman religion. Anyway, what it all adds up to is that when they can’t see no way out they’re just stupidly brave. I mean, I’ve seen that guy in action, and he laughs at death. It’s literally true. OK. Well, when I told him about the cranks, he was shitting himself. He was white. And then he just sort of smiled and relaxed. That must have been when he sussed this place was ANR.’
‘No, I’d already told him. And, even before then, he’d recognized the parachutes. We must find out how he did that…we’ve shown hundreds of people around the areas he saw and nobody’s suspected a thing.’ Valery snorted. ‘He’s taken the Republic’s shilling now, so no doubt he’ll have to tell us.’
‘And what can you tell me?’ Cat persisted.
Valery looked at her, frowning distantly. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I have some things to check out. Meanwhile…’ And she’d suggested that Cat go to this shared but private workroom. One corner was a sewing area, with the machine, a dressmakers’ dummy, and a chest-of-drawers full of fabrics. In the opposite corner stood a computer terminal and a locked rack of diskettes. The walls were an apple-green shade of white; one of them was almost covered by a television screen, with a comprehensive array of subscriber attachments.
<SKY BLUE> she cursored, and the sewing-machine console’s ammo-belt of reels rattled around and slotted one into place. The thread was caught by a pair of clicking pincers and pulled through guides and finally the needle’s eye. ‘Begin,’ said the machine, with what she thought an understandable smugness.
For a while Catherin lost track of time altogether; one part of her mind absorbed the shades and shapes as another part worked away in another place. She began to understand how the sisters could combine their super-ficially frivolous occupations with…preoccupations, in hard and cold and logical thought about logistics and politics, strategy and tactics.
As she now did. She’d thought she had set Moh up, and now saw that she herself had been – first by the ANR, and then by the CLA. As far as she knew she was free to go, now the cranks had cleared her name. She was back on the Committee for a Social-Ecological Intervention’s databases as a gun for hire – she’d checked that as soon as the rent-cop had given her Moh’s receipt and left. But she had no intention of working for the CLA again, united front or no united front. It was obvious that Donovan was out to get Moh, and that something bloody big – big and bloody both – was coming down.
<RUBY> for the lettering. <90mm. serif.>
Rumours of yet another ANR final offensive had circulated throughout the summer and into the autumn. On the very reasonable assumption that it would be a surprise when it came, she’d discounted the story even while spreading it. This hadn’t been irresponsible, in her view. It was perfectly legitimate disinformation, because the Alliance, the spectrum coalition brought together by a faction of the official wing of the Labour Party, was definitely planning a hot autumn of demonstrations and fraternizations, with a few daring armed actions by the Red Rose Brigades thrown in. So, at least, the state media alleged, and the free media denied and confirmed and debated.
The lettering was finished. She smiled at the words. Now back to outlining the appliqué, filling in the spaces.
<LEAF GREEN>
Anything to get the enemy as confused as we are. Talk about poor bloody infantry. She felt a sudden surge of anger at it all, the deception and manipulation and calculation, the trade-offs and stand-offs, the violence to vulnerable human flesh. Something had genuinely attracted her, she saw now, in the femininists’ cover story, the make-up and veiling of their sinews of war.