Anyway, Cat wasn’t on active now. It was her turn to make the dinner. He hoped she’d be ready soon.
The telly-skelly moved; the arms reached up; the fingers flexed. Jordan jumped. He got a grip on himself and peered at the machine suspiciously. With an audible creak it settled back.
Power surge, probably. Jordan looked anxiously at the screen to check that his painfully written article hadn’t been wiped. He watched in open-mouthed disbelief as the page shrank, and around its borders options appeared, Doorways™ opened…
He keyed through the options eagerly, finally convincing himself that it was all there. He smiled when he saw the change in the logo. A new release, indeed. They must have got someone really good to work on that, if the story of how Dissembler had developed from Josh Kohn’s work was to be believed. As far as Jordan knew, it had been universally considered impossible to maintain or document in any normal sense.
Before rushing out to tell everyone the good news he thought he’d better check the mailbox. There was one letter in it, addressed to the Collective from the Army of the New Republic. It had been there since the day of the insurrection – the day Dissembler had collapsed.
He opened it and found:
Attn C Duvalier in re J Brown
2 days @ 200B-m/day
Total 400B-m CREDIT
PAID
Date as addr
For some time he didn’t move; he felt he didn’t breathe. He remembered her oblique remarks, the tilt of her head as she shook it slowly, her whispered admonition not to do it again, not to try to hack the Black Plan. He remembered the weight of the weapon in her jacket pocket.
He knew that she’d arrived as, in some sense, an emissary of the ANR. She’d as good as said it. But he’d thought of her actions as coming primarily from conviction. Thinking back, they had come from conviction. But she’d come here to do a job, a job she’d got paid for, and the job was him. To turn him away from the dangerous meddling in the Black Plan’s affairs, to turn him to good use, point him in the right direction, aim and fire. Perhaps even their infiltration of Beulah City had been part of the plan…of the Plan, he corrected himself bitterly.
God, perhaps that was why the Black Planner had approached him in the first place, so that he’d be outside BC and able to get in if the need arose! No, that was too paranoid.
Nothing had been heard of the Black Plan since the day Dissembler crashed under – it was rumoured – a final, spasmic assault from the cranks, shooting their last bolt. Not surprisingly, if the Plan had used Dissembler in the way he’d surmised that day outside the shopping centre. He’d sometimes wondered what had become of the Black Planner.
He heard a familiar light step in the corridor.
He deleted the message with one swift stab of his finger.
He spun the chair to see Cat in the doorway, her face flushed from the cooking, one fist on her hip, one hand on the door-jamb.
‘Come and geddit!’
He stayed there, looking at her.
‘What is it?’ She caught sight of the screen. ‘Oh! the system’s back up. Wow!’
‘Yup,’ said Jordan. ‘A new release. Everything’ll change now.’
He remembered the last time the Black Planner had spoken to him:
do not be offended that she has not told you all she knows this is nothing personal it is because she is basically a good communist loyal daughter of the revolution and mother of the new republic though she would laugh if you said so to her face
He stood up.
‘Cat. There’s something I have to tell you.’
‘Yes?’
‘You are basically a good communist, loyal daughter of the revolution and mother of the new republic.’
She laughed. ‘Yes. I know that. So?’
‘So marry me.’
She considered him for a moment.
‘OK.’
‘I told you,’ the fetch said. Its voice glowed with artificial pride. ‘I’ve not been idle.’
Janis blinked herself away from appalled contemplation of what she had witnessed, what she had done.
‘You did this?’
‘In the…time when I was building my resistance’ – the smile, self-mocking now, came and went – ‘I found that I had recreated Dissembler. It is spreading now, rebooting the programs that used to run on it.’
She remembered the proliferating lights.
‘Does that include the Black Plan?’ she asked eagerly. ‘The AIS that Moh found?’
The head on the screen shook slowly, with a wilfully exact rendering of the play of shadows. ‘They’re gone. Lost beyond recovery.’ Then – as if to cheer and distract her – it added: ‘But I’ve found some interesting information in Donovan’s files. Do you want to see it?’
The selection that the fetch displayed included a complete chart of Donovan’s organization, right down to the names of its members and the locations of its cells. And fragmentary, cryptic records of his work on the Kohn case: his cooperation with the Stasis agents and with Mrs Lawson in Beulah City, and with Dr Van. Just as Van had described it to her and Moh, in a chain-smoking summary on the balcony of a wooden house in Wester Ross…Janis smiled to see the first scratches of suspicion that Van wasn’t cooperating.
There were no records from after the Dissembler disaster, but from the traces immediately before it Janis worked out what had happened, how close a call the world had had with Space Defense and how Mrs Lawson’s systems had held off Donovan’s until the last moment, when she changed her mind.
So it was her doing in the end, Janis thought. Her fists clenched. She remembered Jordan’s description of her: a dangerous, devious woman. More dangerous and devious than he’d ever imagined.
She thought for a moment of doing in Beulah City what they’d done in the rig: invading the systems, possessing the machinery, using it to kill the last person in the line of enemies that had killed Moh. And then she realized it would be wrong.
Simple as that. Donovan and the Man In Black were outlaws, scoundrels, scum, whereas this woman was – what was it Moh had said about the time when she’d been about to slaughter the fallen horseman? – ‘just a grunt like us, basically’.
Let the Republic deal with Lawson, as it would deal with everybody on the CLA’s membership list.
When Wills came in Janis was slumped over the gun, her face on her arms. All the screens in the office had been switched on. Janis had been crying.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
She looked up.
‘A new release,’ she said.
He looked at her, frowning. ‘Oh, yeah, that. It’s good news. I meant—’
‘It’s all right,’ Janis said.
‘Sure?’
‘Sure.’
Wills smiled, as though relieved she wasn’t going to go to pieces on him. ‘There’s some more good news,’ he said. ‘That bastard Donovan is dead. Blown out of the water!’
‘There’s more than Donovan blown out of the water,’ Janis said. ‘Somebody’s been hacking him for a change, and seems to want us all to know. Have a look at this!’
Wills looked at the charts.
‘Where did this come from?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Janis said. ‘Come on. We got death to deliver.’
Deliver it they did. By the end of January they were taking on last year’s new citizens in this year’s housing projects.
‘You can put the boy into the slum,’ Wills said, ‘but you can’t put the slum into the boy.’