Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [22]
The corridor had lengthened while he’d been in the study. Hundreds of metres down its darkening length Kohn saw a darker figure approach. As it drew closer he saw a belted raincoat, a hat pulled down low over the eyes. Inappropriate, for such a hot place.
The man stopped about three metres away. He tilted the brim of his hat, revealing spectacles over an intent but remote face, dimly recognizable.
‘Who are you?’ Kohn asked.
‘My name is Jacson. I have an appointment with—’ He inclined his head towards the door.
Kohn stepped forward. What did Jacson carry under that coat? The feeling that he should be remembering something gnawed like guilt, as if he knew that he would have known if only he had paid attention.
Jacson made as if to shoulder past.
‘No you don’t,’ Kohn said.
He grabbed for Jacson’s wrist. Jacson lashed sideways. The blow caught Kohn’s lower-right ribs. He gasped and spun away. Off the wall and back at Jacson. Jacson had a pistol in his hand. Kohn kicked and the pistol arced away. He slipped and crashed into Jacson’s legs. His head hit the floor. Everything went black.
Jacson’s knees knocked the breath from his chest. Kohn opened his eyes to see Jacson’s hand raised, holding high his infamous ice-pick, poised to bury it in Kohn’s brain.
But it is in my brain, he thought desperately as he flinched to the side.
Jacson howled. The cat leapt on his arm and sunk its teeth into his wrist. The ice-pick clattered along the floor. Jacson pulled back his and the cat was at his throat. Kohn heaved. Jacson fell, limbs thrashing.
The blood went everywhere. Kohn stumbled in red mist.
Then everything fell away, but it all fell into place in cool grey letters on his mind like the read-out on a watch
Goin to meet the Watchmaker goin to meet the man goin to see the wizard.
A barrier of anticipation and dread, and then he was through. No, not him. The other had come through.
A delicate, hesitant moment, the edge of indiscretion or transgression. The feeling of eyes waiting to be met, and the knowledge that meeting them will commit. He chose to look. No eyes, no one, but some thing, something, something there.
Huge blocks of afterimage shifted behind his eyes, taking on structure that evaded his efforts to focus. He ached with frustration from throat to goin, the basic molecular longing of enzyme for substrate, m-RNA for DNA, carbon for oxygen. The lust of dust.
He grew aware that the intolerable desire came from outside him, or rather from something other than himself. There was a sense of an obligation to fulfil, and a trust already fulfilled. Whatever it was it had given him the keys to his memory, and it wanted some return: another key, but this time a key that was in his memory. A key that it had given him the key to reach.
Turning to face whatever faced him had been the overcoming of a resistance. Now he turned, slowly and with pain, like a pilot on a high-gee turn struggling to see a vital reading on his instruments, fighting an appalled reluctance, to reach into his own memory—
to face those memories—
to remember past that face he’d never seen—
past the roar of unanswered guns—
to the bright world—
to—
‘the star fraction’
listen closer—
‘this is one for the star fraction’
—his father’s voice, and an isolated, singular memory:
His father’s arm around him, the smell of cigarette smoke, the blue light of morning through the polygon panes of the geodesic roof, the green light from the screen, the black letters trickling up it in indented lines like poetry in a language he didn’t know.
But he knew it now, recognized the code as the key.
And his fingers began to spell it out.
The answer that suddenly seemed so simple a child could see it fled through his fingertips into the gun, the touchpad. The screen blazed with the light of recognition.