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By Root 1123 0

shift, handled sales and purchasing for a good fraction of its companies, missions and churches. Serious stock trading was the prerogative of the Deacons and JOSEPH, their ethical investment expert system, but Jordan’s small operation was free to risk its own fees on the market. Beulah City’s biggest current commercial success was Modesty, a fashion house that ran the local rag trade and also sold clothes-making programs for CAD/CAM sewing machines. They’d enjoyed an unexpected boom in the post-Islamist countries while ozone depletion kept European sales of cover-up clothing buoyant – though here suncream competed. Suncream was not quite sound, and anyway the ungodly had it sewn up.

MacLaren had had a good night in Armenia. Jordan turned west and called up Xian Educational Software in New York.

‘What you offering?’ XES asked.

Jordan scanned the list of products scrolling down his screen’s left margin.

‘Creation astronomy kit, includes recent spaceprobe data, latest cosmogonies refuted. Suitable for high-school use; grade-school simplification drops out. One-twenty a copy.’

‘WFF approved?’

Jordan exploded the spec. The World Fundamentalist Federation logo, a stylized Adam and Eve, shone at top right. That meant it could be sold to Jewish and Muslim as well as Christian literalists: all the people of the book, the chapter, the verse, the word, the letter, the jot, the tittle.

‘Affirm.’

‘We’ll take fifty thousand, an option on exclusive.’

Jordan hit a playback key: ‘God BLESS you!!’

‘Have a nice eternity.’

Go to hell. He punched a code. The software to produce exactly 5 × 104 copies of Steady State? The Spectra Say No! became a microwave burst. And there was light, Jordan thought. Oh, yeah. He made the stars also. They’d racked and stretched that line, tortured a whole cosmology, a whole philosophy of science out of it, until it had confessed all, admitted everything: it was a put-up job; the sky was a scam, a shop-front operation; the stars had lied about their age. The universe as afterthought, its glory an illusory afterimage…there was the blasphemy, there the heresy, the lie in the right hand, the spitting in Creation’s face! He tilted his baseball cap and looked up at the sky beyond the tinted roof. A contrail drew a clean white line across the ravaged clouds. Jordan smiled to himself. In this sign conquer. Some folk believed in UFOs. He believed in aeroplanes.

He bought shares in Da Nang Phytochemicals, sold them mid-morning at 11 per cent just before a rumour of NVC activity in the Delta sent the stock sharply down. He shifted the tidy sum into a holding account and was scanning for fashion buyers in Manila when the graphics melted and ran into a face. A middle-aged man’s kindly, craggy face, smiling like a favourite uncle. The lips moved soundlessly, subtitles sliding along the bottom line. A conspiratorial whisper of small alphanumerics:

hi there jordan this is your regional resources coordinator

Oh, my God! A Black Planner!

i’m the legitimate authority around here but i don’t suppose that cuts much smack with you still i have a proposition you may find interesting.

Jordan fought the impulse to look over his shoulder, the impulse to hit the security switch and get himself off the hook.

don’t worry this is untraceable our sleeper viruses have survived 20 years of electronic counterinsurgency all you have to do is make this purchase from guangzhou textiles and a sale of same to the account now at top left at cost if you key the code now at top right into the cash machine at the end of the street at 12.05 plus or minus 10 minutes you will find a small recompense in used notes i understand you have a holographic memory so i say goodbye and i hope i see you again.

The markets came back. Jordan saw his hands quiver. Until now the Black Plan had been a piece of urban folklore, the phantom hitch-hiker of the Cable, a rumoured leftover of the Republic’s political economy just as the ANR was the remnant of its armed forces. Allegedly it godfathered the ANR, scorning the checkpoint taxes and protection rackets