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And Korzybski said a difference that makes no difference is no difference.

She could live with that.

‘You knew Moh Kohn?’

The man who spoke to her was short and stocky, with very short greying hair and with wrinkles around his eyes, but otherwise looked a bit younger than these features suggested. He waved out a long arm and invited her to a seat at the table where he sat, slightly stooped, over a drink.

‘Yes, I knew him.’ She sat down. ‘Did you?’

‘I heard he was killed in the revo. Sorry to hear it. Name’s Logan, by the way. Not Slogan.’ He laughed at what was obviously an old joke and reached across the table to shake her hand.

‘Logan! My God!’ She grabbed his hand.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s a welcome I didn’t expect! What’s the story?’

‘My name’s Janis Taine, I’m – that is, I was a biologist, and I was…working with Moh when he contacted you about’ – she lowered her voice – ‘the Star Fraction.’

‘The Star Fraction!’ Logan shouted. ‘Yee fucking hah!’ His fist in the air carried her hand, rather painfully, with it.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said as she sucked her knuckles.

‘It isn’t a secret any more?’

He shook his head. ‘Not here.’

‘Did it work? Did you get the data, or—?’

‘It worked fine,’ Logan said. ‘We got it all, just before Dissembler went down. It’s all out there now. The whole fucking Genome Project databank. We could grow the world from a bean.’

‘That’s good to know,’ Janis said. She felt a weight of concern, a concern that had grown so familiar she’d ceased to notice it, go. At least that much had worked: the systems that Josh Kohn had set up had performed to specification.

She let herself relax.

‘Maybe you can tell me something,’ she said. ‘You knew Moh for a long time, right?’

‘Just met him now and again over the years. Starting with the first time I was victimized. Overdose of rads. Anyway, it’s water out the jet now. Fifteen years ago. I must’ve been, oh, twenty and counting. I was speaking at a meeting the local comrades did.’

‘He told me about that,’ Janis said. ‘When he was looking for the Star Fraction…One thing I never did figure out. He was a communist, or a socialist, yeah, and I can see why he backed the Republic in the end. But why was he so keen on this place?’

‘The Lord Carrington?’

‘No!’ Janis snorted. ‘Idiot. Norlonto.’

‘He never explained that? Bastard. It’s something him and me figured out years ago, arguing with that old geezer, whatsisname, Wilde. See, what we always meant by socialism wasn’t something you forced on people, it was people organizing themselves as they pleased into co-ops, collectives, communes, unions. Now look at this place. Look at space, come to that. It’s crawling with them! And if socialism really is better, more efficient than capitalism then it can bloody well compete with capitalism. So we decided, forget all the statist shit and the violence: the best place for socialism is the closest to a free market you can get!’ He leaned back and laughed. ‘I had one hell of a faction-fight over that one!’

‘Well,’ Janis said, ‘that makes some kind of sense. I suppose.’ She gave him a conspiratorial wink. ‘Moh told me about fractions and factions.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Just what party was the Star Fraction a fraction of?’

Logan grinned and held up four fingers. Janis remembered Moh, doodling symbols in spilt wine.

‘Oh. The International.’

‘The Fourth.’ Then he spread both hands: not to indicate ten, Janis realized, but something opening. ‘And the Last.’

Janis frowned. ‘I thought the Last International was a myth!’

‘Yeah, it is.’ Logan laughed. ‘That’s the point! It gets around all the old problems of recruitment and security by having no membership, no apparatus, nothing except front organizations. The fronts are real; the party behind them is a mirage. A virtual organization!’

‘But what does it stand for? What’s it about?’

‘Freedom,’ Logan said flatly. Then, as if that were too grandiose a statement, added: ‘And defeating all its enemies, of course.’

‘A conspiracy of paranoids?’