Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [235]
He looks again at Parris.
‘Woof,’ he says.
Wilde had more than one cigarette-stub at his feet by the time he saw the girl striding towards him through the market crowd. He straightened up from leaning on the mainframe.
‘Tamara Hunter,’ the machine said over his shoulder as the girl stopped and stuck out her hand. ‘Jonathan Wilde.’
She cocked her head sideways and looked him over as he shook her hand.
‘My God,’ she said. ‘You really are him.’
Wilde grinned. ‘You look somehow familiar yourself.’
‘The pub last night,’ Tamara reminded him. ‘Mind you, if ever anyone had eyes only for one woman, it was you.’
‘Ah, of course,’ Wilde said. ‘You were with…Dee.’
‘Yes,’ Tamara said. She looked about. ‘Where’s your robot?’
‘Hah!’ Wilde snorted. ‘You and I are supposed to be on the same side, according to this electric lawyer here, so don’t you go saying “your robot”. I’m damned if I’ll admit it’s my robot. The fact is, it’s fucked off on its own somewhere.’
‘Oh,’ Tamara said. She glanced at the Invisible Hand mainframe. ‘We’re going for a private discussion,’ she told it.
‘Very well,’ the machine said. ‘I shall proceed with the technical aspects of the case.’
Tamara turned to Wilde. ‘Talk about it over a beer?’
‘God, yes.’
They wended their way between stalls and under trees. The market boomed around them. When they were – as far as it was humanly possible to tell – out of Invisible Hand’s earshot, Wilde asked, ‘Just as a matter of curiosity, is that piece of legal machinery self-aware?’
Tamara laughed. ‘Nah, it’s just an expert system. It has its little quirks, mind.’
‘Yeah, you could say that.’ He looked at a cluster of tables around an array of counter, refrigerator and grill, all small and all scorched. A tall Turk stood in the middle, his hands dealing out drinks and sandwiches for greasy wads of money. ‘Here?’
Tamara nodded, with an appreciative smile at his good judgement. Wilde ordered two litres of beer. They sipped for a minute from the beaded brown bottles, in thirsty silence, and checked each other out.
‘Smoke?’ Wilde said, retrieving a now battered pack.
‘No thanks,’ Tamara said. ‘But go ahead.’
Wilde smiled at her. ‘This is my first pack for centuries,’ he said as he lit up. ‘Not that that’s much of an excuse. For one thing, to me it all happened the day before yesterday, and for another it’s smoking that got me killed.’
Tamara frowned. ‘The books tell different stories, but I thought you died in some shoot-out.’
‘That was it,’ Wilde nodded. ‘Tried to run faster than a bullet, but –’ He looked ruefully at the cigarette, and took another drag as Tamara laughed.
‘This is weird,’ she said. ‘I’ve talked to some people who were in the ship, and who actually came from Earth – hell, my grandparents did – but they never talk about having been dead. They talk about having been “in transition”.’
‘Yeah,’ Wilde said sardonically. ‘“In denial” is the technical term for that frame of mind.’
‘But you do…and you being, like, a historical character. Wow, fuck!’ She studied his features judiciously. ‘You look different in the pictures. Older.’
‘In what pictures?’ Wilde demanded.
Tamara reached into an inside pocket, and passed to Wilde a plastic wallet containing a set of cards.
‘I, um, collect them,’ she explained as Wilde began to spread them out. ‘They come free with, uh, a cereal that gets made in this area.’
‘Harmony Oats!’ Wilde shouted with laughter. He spread out the wood-cut portraits. ‘Let’s see…Owen, Stirner, Proudhon, Warren, Bakunin, Tucker, Labadie, Wilson, Wilde. They’ve got the ancestry right, but I doubt I deserve such exalted company. I’m not sure whether to be flattered or appalled.’
He looked down at the scored lines of the iconic faces, and passed a hand over his own fresh features. He shook his head.
‘When I first looked like I do now I was far from famous,’ Wilde said. His voice sounded sad for a moment, cheerier as he added: ‘Perhaps it