Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [19]
‘Now let’s see what we’ve got, Mr Kohn,’ the teller trilled as she minced away from the counter and tapped at a keyboard, taking care with her nails, which extended a centimetre beyond her fingertips. ‘You have four against the Carbon Life Alliance, right?’
‘Three,’ said Kohn.
‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ She looked up at him, a neat pair of creases appearing for a moment between her plucked, pencilled eyebrows; then she looked down again. ‘Well, isn’t this your lucky day? One of your people is held by the Planet Partisans, and they have a standing arrangement, so that’s one out of the way. Bye-ee! Your friend’s just been released. Ah. The CLA are willing to offer ten thousand Dockland dollars—’
‘No thanks.’
‘—or equivalent in negotiables – arms or neurochemicals at today’s opening prices – per combatant, less equipment losses.’
‘What?’
She looked up and fluttered thick black eyelashes.
‘You did damage a timing mechanism, didn’t you?’
‘It wasn’t worth fifty grams!’
‘Oh, that’s quite acceptable. Delivery as usual?’
‘The Ruislip depot. Yeah, we’ll take it.’
She buzzed through to one of the huts and told Kohn’s three hostages they were free to leave, then brought the papers over for him to sign. He hadn’t seen her before. She wore floating chiffon, a mass of brown ringlets, plus heels and lipgloss. After the uniformity of the hospital and the greenery-yallery of the campus, it was like meeting a transvestite. She saw him looking and smiled.
‘I’m a femininist,’ she explained as she passed over the release forms.
‘A feminist?’
Kohn’s father had reminisced about them, but this didn’t match.
‘A femininist,’ she repeated sharply.
‘Of course…Well, thanks and good luck to you. I hope I never meet your fighters!’
It was a polite form of words when you first encountered a new outfit, but the woman took it seriously.
‘We don’t have any,’ she told Kohn’s hastily retreating back. ‘We don’t believe in violence.’
Not long after midday and already he wanted to sleep. He would crash out for a couple of hours, then take some more anti-som and go home. Give the comrades time to set up the music.
Kohn walked back towards the accommodation block. His head felt like it had sand in it. He thought over what the teller had said. A faction without a militia. Just wait till the gun heard that one. Some people were really sick.
Quite suddenly he felt as if he had been walking towards the redbrick accommodation blocks for…for some indeterminate time. The sunlight bounced off the concrete paving slabs and hurt his eyes. He flipped the glades down. Colours stayed vivid: the garish yellow-brown of the withered grass, the blinding grey of the concrete, the booming silver overcast through which the sun burned like its tiny burning-glass image through paper. Placing one foot in front of the other became difficult, complicated, tricky, an awkward business, more than he’d bargained for, a whole new belt of slugs. Worse, associational chains kept echoing away in his head, amplifying and distorting, repeating and refining – no, that wasn’t quite it…
Kohn persisted. Marching grimly forward was one of his skills, on his specification, part of the package.
The colours of objects detached themselves like damaged retinae and spun into spectrum-sparkling snowflakes the size of icebergs that crashed in utter silence through the earth.
At the same time another part of his mind filled with lucidity like clear water. He knew damn well he was sliding unstoppably into an altered state of consciousness. Hurrying groups of students parted in front of him – not exactly fleeing, but separating to left and right as he stalked forward,