‘Which you won’t?’
‘That’s right.’
They locked looks for a second.
‘Just one thing,’ Jordan said, gathering his thoughts. ‘Moh’s made contact with the ANR. Can you confirm that?’
Cat thought about it for a moment, then nodded.
‘All right,’ Jordan said. He smiled with relief. ‘I guess he’s off my hands.’
‘You could say that,’ Cat said dryly.
‘As to who I am…Basically, I’m from Beulah City. I owned part of a business there. I left a few days ago because…I got a very unusual business proposition, yeah, and it gave me the chance to leave and…a rather urgent reason to leave.’
‘Did you need one, beyond not being a believer?’
Jordan felt himself go red before her unblinking blue-eyed scrutiny. ‘Maybe I was irresolute, maybe a bit too reluctant to hurt my folks.’ He tasted gall. ‘Maybe cowardly.’
‘Crap,’ she said. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. That’s how those places bloody work, dammit – all the ideologies you were ranting about tonight. You start to doubt them and before you know it you doubt yourself, you feel guilty because you’re going against what’s been rammed into you and you feel guilty because you’re being dishonest about it every day.’ She paused, eyebrows raised.
‘Yes! that’s it. Exactly.’
‘OK. Well, I’m sure you’ve sussed out by now that there’s nothing wrong with you.’ The very casualness of the way she said the words sent them straight to his solar plexus, where they glowed. ‘What you probably don’t realize is you’re not alone: there are people in all the mini-states – even in BC, take it from me – who’re as alienated as you were.’
‘Could be.’ He didn’t see it himself. ‘Anyway, Moh seemed to think there might be some mileage in that. He wanted me to help him with’ – Jordan waved his hands, smiling – ‘this bit of trouble he’s in, and later in tracking you down, but he definitely wanted me to do a bit of ranting, like you said, as well. Can’t see it making much difference to whatever’s gonna happen, though.’
‘Me neither.’ Cat grinned disarmingly. ‘But you said you thought people were changing their minds by the hour, coming round to thinking: ah, fuck it, the ANR is in with a chance, yeah? Well look at this place, they’re all doing just that.’
‘That’s down to you?’
Cat nodded. ‘Yup.’ She grinned. ‘Easiest bit of agitation I ever pulled.’ Again her gaze was inescapable. ‘And you?’
‘Yeah, I…I’d like to see them win, sure, but…that’s as far as it goes. It’s not some kind of conversion.’
‘That’s all it ever is, in these situations,’ Cat said. There was a moment while they both paused, reflecting. In these situations…Revolution was like a war, Jordan thought. You just never knew how you’d react when something like that loomed. Patriots could become pacifists overnight, and vice versa; cynical bright young men fly off and die for king and country. And an individualist who loathed the suffocating clots of conformity known as the Free States could suddenly see the virtue of bulldozing them all flat, into a united republic…
Cat broke into his thoughts.
‘OK, so that’s one thing you can do. Speak, write, patch stuff from anything on the net or here that catches your eye’ – she waved a hand at the mass of pamphlets – ‘whatever. Don’t talk about the ANR – talk about how stupid the Free States are, and the Kingdom and the UN. And get as much information as you can about what’s going on, how things are lining up.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, yeah. Something else. You say you were a businessman? Know anything about stock trading?’
Jordan found he’d bounded to his feet. ‘Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact I do.’
Cat stood up. ‘Great,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the comrades to shove some of the money they’ve been sitting on into your work-space. Any time you get a moment, speculate.’ She paused, frowning. ‘Can you actually make money in a falling market?’
Jordan grinned broadly. ‘You bet.’
‘OK,’ Cat said. She picked her way across the untidy floor. ‘Got to it. Stop about, oh, not long after midnight.’
‘Then what?’
Cat looked at him over her shoulder from the doorway. ‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘You’re soon going to need all the sleep you can get.’
And with that ambiguous promise she was gone.
16
The Eve of Just-In-Time Destruction
Jordan, up to his eyeballs and elbows in virtual reality, was occasionally aware of Cat’s feral, feline, female presence as she whispered in his ear, disturbed the air around him, brushed against his back. It fired him up and drove him, and it was more bearable and less distracting than being haunted by her image, tormented by her absence.
She’d shaken him awake at 05.30. He sat up, staring at her with a sense of unreality. She struck a pose like a good fairy, in the shimmer and sparkle of the same dress she’d worn the previous night, and she held out a mug of coffee and a plate with a bacon sandwich on it.
‘Good morning.’ He swallowed. ‘Thank you.’
She passed him the breakfast and said, ‘Hi. Mary said to tell you Vladivostok’s fallen, Tokyo’s down, and the pound’s two point three million to the mark and rising.’
‘Rising?’ The central banks must be desperate. Jordan found himself at the small table where the glades and computer were jacked in. By the time he had formed a picture from the market reports the coffee and sandwich were finished. A pause after shifting some yen into sterling brought a vague feeling of disquiet. He came back to actual reality to find that he had no clothes on. It didn’t bother him; he guessed that it hadn’t bothered Cat. After another quick look at the market he showered and pulled on jeans and a tee-shirt and hurried down to the comms room.
He spent the morning and early afternoon doing as Cat had suggested, flipping from the agitated, agitating chatter of the newsgroups and information channels to the consequences in the markets. He was on a roll, he was ahead of the game…As soon as nerves rattled by the fall of Vladivostok (to what the channels described as the Vorkuta Popular Front) settled down, a surge of hot money flowed back into Britain. The investors and speculators seemed impressed with the government’s steady hand; there was a lot of smart advice about how the ANR offensive wasn’t shaping up.
Hah!
Convinced he knew better, Jordan rode the upswing as far as he dared and sold out around midday, moving as sharply as he could into gold after doubling his own stake as well as the Collective’s; the latter was a disgracefully large sum to have left in a low-interest savings account. Mercenaries just weren’t mercenary enough, he thought.
He returned his attention to the news networks, flipping channels, sifting through screeds to build more or less by natural selection a filter program that focused on what he found interesting. He contributed a small amount himself, both spoken and written rants. Coming out of the VR he leaned back and watched the screen on flat, letting the program choose what to sample.
Cat appeared at his elbow.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Not too bad.’
A strange face appeared on the screen – gaunt, unshaven, red-eyed, talking hoarsely about the iniquities of the Free State system: ‘…you may be free to leave, but if you are systematically denied any accurate information about what you might find if you do leave, what freedom is that? We need to break down the walls…’
It was only the words that he recognized as his own.
‘Hey, that’s good,’ Cat was saying.
‘Good goddess.’ Jordan waved the sound down. ‘Do I look like that? I’m a bloody disgrace.’