• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

‘Aw, come on. OK, OK. I’ll think about it.’ She smiled brightly and turned to Jordan and Cat. ‘I never asked you: what did you do in the revolution?’

‘…then she said a strange thing. I think she meant to get us confused, suspicious of each other. She said I must’ve convinced Jordan that Kohn – we reckon she was talking about Josh Kohn, not Moh – was wrong and Donovan was right. She said who else would want to turn off her security software except Donovan? And that sort of provoked Jordan into saying we were doing it for the ANR, and she started this giggling. Goddess, it was creepy. So we shut her up and—’

The room went dark except for Cat’s bright face, silent except for Cat’s voice and a rushing roar. The suspicion had begun to dawn on Janis as soon as Cat and Jordan had spoken about the instruction to enter a code on Mrs Lawson’s secure terminal. She’d tried to discount it. And now it was confirmed.

The light, lazy, reminiscing voice went on, spinning out its story; and slowly the words made the world come back.

Not the same world.

I’m not dying. I’m living through this. Those shining lights are her eyes, that tangled bank her dress. This cylinder in my mouth is a cigarette, and I’m breathing in and breathing out, and making interested meaningless noises.

‘So apart from waving a few guns about it was all gratuitous nonviolence,’ Jordan said when Cat had concluded. ‘It was all down to Cat. If it hadn’t been for her there’d be a massacre memorial now at Angel Gate.’ They smiled at each other. ‘With our names on it, probably. “Gone to be with the angels”!’ He laughed and hugged Cat and kissed her.

Janis forced a smile. It did not seem right that the walls were still standing. It was astonishing that people were still walking on the ground, still dancing and not drifting away in the sudden absence of gravity. She looked down at herself – still in her seat, she noticed – and at the little satchel in her lap. Here’s your defeated Spartacus, your risen rationalist messiah. And he told us of a whole heavenly host, which your hand swept away.

Or was used to sweep away. Jordan had not known, but had the ANR known? Or Van? ‘There is no Black Planner,’ MacLennan had told them, but how much did he really know? It seemed impossible that the Black Plan would have knowingly destroyed itself, unlikely that its destruction was an accidental side-effect of trying to gain access to Beulah City. The code would have been much too specific for that. It all seemed to point to a deliberate human intervention, a cold decision that Moh and the Watchmaker culture be sacrificed to stay the wrath of Space Defense. A Black Plan indeed.

And of course Jordan didn’t know. He had no idea that Mrs Lawson had worked with Donovan, no idea that her security software had stood between Donovan’s viruses and the Watchmaker AIS – and the Black Plan, and Moh’s mind. A mind stamped with the logic of the programs, sensitized by her drugs…Jordan had no way of knowing, unless she told him what she knew.

She could do it. She could walk to the bar, throw a few switches, and Moh’s fetch would be up there on the stage as Donovan’s once had been. What would he say? She could tell them the truth, and whether Jordan felt any personal conscious guilt or not the impact on his mind would be incalculable. It would dominate the rest of his life.

She could do it. She could give him something to preach to the barbarians: a man who died to save them, and a living proof that the dead lived on in their deeds, and our memories.

She could do it. The world was cradled in her arms like a ball. She could throw it, and start a whole new game. The power sang through her nerves: she was at this moment the goddess herself, poised, waiting for the music of the next dance, the voice of a new partner; a fey glance in her eye, the strange attractor. She was the butterfly in the greenhouse.

She looked at Jordan, who looked back at her. He could do it, with his – charisma,