Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [117]
So this bleakly beautiful territory was her country still. The stepmotherland.
The chords of an anthem she’d once sworn to, her small fist raised high, came crashing into her mind.
She walked briskly down through the trees, back to the mental fight.
She found MacLennan in the kitchen, hunched over a databoard from which thread-like cables trailed to wall ports. Upstairs Van was sitting on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, smoke rising unregarded as he stared at the screen.
‘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.