Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [33]
They stuck around long enough to cover the retreat. Later Kohn remembered lugging about two-thirds of Johnny Smith towards a Red Crescent chopper and then looking down at what he carried and just dropping it, just stopping. It wasn’t that there was nothing left of the man’s face except the eyes – maxilla, mandible, nares blasted clean away – but that those eyes were open, unblinking, pupils not responding to the searing flashes overhead. Blood still bubbled, but Johnny Smith had been brainstem-dead for minutes. Anything worth saving had gone to his God. The organ-bankers could have the rest.
The woman had been with him when they were airlifted out through the dense smoke. And there had been another mercenary in the Mil Mi-34, one who chewed coca leaves and held on to his shattered right arm as if waiting for glue to set and kept saying, ‘Hey Moh, why do they call us Kelly girls?’
They swung on to the A40. Troubled by his sudden silence, Janis glanced at Kohn sidelong, and saw his face had taken on again that look – of inhuman acceptance of some deeply fallen knowledge – which had startled her when he’d come out of the trance back in his room. It passed, and the harder lines of his features returned. He was still looking at the traffic.
‘How do you feel now?’ she asked.
He shivered. ‘It’s like…I might have changed the world forever today, and there’s this thing like – oh, hell.’ He lit a cigarette, closed his eyes and sighed away the smoke. ‘You ever try to imagine seeing nothing, maybe when you were little? Not darkness: nothing. To see what it is that you don’t see out of the back of your head.’
‘You mean, visualize the boundary of your visual field.’
‘There you go. Science. I knew there’d be a way to make sense of it. Anyway. If I do that now, Janis, there’s something there. Something like’ – he cat’s-cradled his fingers, moved them flickering like fluent Sign – ‘that isn’t like light, same as it used to be not like dark. And – you know when you wake up, and you know you’ve had a dream and you can’t remember it?’
She felt a chill at the reminder. Everything gets everywhere.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know just what you mean.’
‘Well it’s like, if I try to remember, I remember, but I never know what it is until—’
He stopped. ‘They hit me like flashbacks. At first it was’ – he struck his forehead repeatedly – ‘bang bang bang. Now I can consciously not do it. Most of the time.’ He looked at her with disconcerting intentness. ‘Was that what you were aiming at? Everybody remembering everything?’
‘I never thought about it like that.’
‘Makes me ask myself, who did? Who would want people to remember?’
‘That’s too…general,’ she said. ‘It could have all sorts of applications – enhanced learning, delayed senility, that kind of thing.’
‘That kind of thing. Sure. But memory’s more than that. Memory’s everything. It’s what we are.’
‘Speaking of memory—’ She hesitated. ‘This is – there’s something I just thought of that I want to ask you.’
‘Ask me anything you like,’ he said.
She paused, then said in a rush, ‘You know what you said about the Star Fraction, about the code being something your father wrote, when you were a kid. Uh, is there a reason you can’t just ask him—?’
She stopped again.
‘Yeah,’ Kohn said flatly. ‘They got killed. My father and my mother.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He made a chopping motion with his hand. ‘Happens.’
‘Was it in the war?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It was afterwards. In the Peace Process.’
He fell into another introverted silence, his cigarette smouldering to ash that dropped off, centimetre by centimetre. Suddenly he stirred himself, stubbed out the cigarette and reached up for another switch.
‘See if we’re on the news,’ he said.
The windshield screen went wild and then stabilized to rapidly changing images as Kohn scanned the news channels. Every few seconds he’d mark an item; after a minute he stopped and pulled