Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [193]
The music stops. Lights flood. People blink and stumble. At the same moment Dee’s right hand reaches down, her right foot kicks up behind her – still in a move that could be part of a dance-step – and her high-heeled shoe flies into her hand. She holds it high like a hammer, ready to nail the grep through the eyeball. Recognition of this ripples through the muscles and blood-vessels of his face as the speakers suddenly speak. The voice of the IBM, to Dee’s Soldier-speeded senses, now sounds deeper and more menacing than anything in de Mille:
‘Invisible Hand client threatened; please assist.’
The grep backs off, and the one beside Tamara does too. Everybody else looks momentarily off-balance, except Tamara, who’s looking at Dee with a dawning, jaw-slackening awe. Dee’s sweeping glance around the crowd, before Soldier subsides to a watchful withdrawal, shows her that there are other faces, dotted through the crowd, responding to the call as best they can: tensing, rising or crouching or – in the case of one or two machines – telescoping. These folk start up a slow-hand-clapping chant: ‘Out! Out! Out!’
And Dee shoves the man, and Tamara shoves, and the two greps are shoved and man-handled from one person or robot to another until they’re ejected from the edge of the crowd into the waiting grasp of a couple of heavy bikers, who escort them away.
‘OK,’ Dee says. She smiles around and slips her shoe back on, waves and calls out ‘Thanks, everybody!’ in a girlishly grateful voice that sends Soldier away in a squirm of embarrassment and brings a small flush to her cheeks.
The music and the lights resume their rhythm.
Dee dances; but she knows the next time won’t be so easy. These guys may not come back, but somebody will.
Dee’s in a small room at the top of a house on Circle Square, overlooking the Ring Canal. Tamara has brought her back to a flat in this tall house, after what seems like hours at the outdoor party – and retired to her own room to sleep, with apologetic explanations that she starts work early in the morning. ‘Ax will sort you out,’ she’s told her.
Dee is used to vague human speech. She doesn’t ask for explanations. Her own human flesh and nerves are tired. She doesn’t need to sleep, but she needs to rest, and to dream. One after another her selves have to shut down, go off-line, compress and assimilate and integrate the doings of the day.
The room is seductively comfortable, with the rain drumming on the roof just behind the sloping ceiling; its dormer window supplying more eye-tilting angles; a dressing-table with stoppered bottles and pots, beads and scarves and ribbons hung over the mirror, clipped fashion-shots tacked to the walls, a dozen dolls on a shelf. There’s a curved, satin-padded wicker chair in a corner, a wall cupboard (locked), and a bed with a clutter of quilt and lace-trimmed pillows. There’s something faintly troubling about the human smell behind the flowery and musky scents, but she can’t be bothered to analyse it.
She takes her clothes off and folds or hangs them, adjusts her body temperature to her comfort, and lies down on the bed. Her eyelids shut out the window’s view of Ship City’s familiar reality: a damp, dripping city of silicate towers, a city veined with canals, crowded with stranded starfarers and free or enslaved automata, haunted by the quick and the dead. Her minds spool to Story, who spins another episode of her endless starring role in a self-perpetuating soap opera steeped in all the romantic glamour of ancient Earth, where…
…she’s the eldest daughter of a Senator and set to inherit his place in the Duma and all the privileges of his democratic anointment, but she’s been kidnapped by agents of the Archipelago Mining Corporation and held captive by its young and dark and devilish