Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [73]
If he was reading them it was fast.
Jordan joined them.
‘What’s the news?’
Janis looked at him.
‘Oh, good morning. Don’t mind Moh. He gets like this sometimes. Now,’ she added oddly, vaguely. She passed a sheet into Moh’s outstretched hand. ‘News is nothing – well, what you’d expect. Russland–Turkey, everybody. London Sun–Times thinks second big story is Yanks hit Kyoto suburbs – lasers, precision. Nihon Keizai Shimbun, on the other hand, reports loss of Army convoy in Inverness-shire. Lhasa Rimbao prays for peace. No surprises.’
‘Looking for surprises,’ Moh said around a mouthful of muesli. ‘Shoosh.’
A little later he stopped and became civil. ‘How are you this morning?’ He crunched up a page of hard copy and chucked it into a trash can on the other side of the room.
‘Fine. Well, I will be. Maybe another coffee…You know, I think hash really does make holes in your brain.’
‘Nah, that’s the drink,’ Kohn said. ‘Proven fact. Brains of rats and that.’ He grinned at Janis, apparently unaware that he’d binned a dozen balls of paper, one by one, without looking. ‘Anyway, Jordan, time to fill you in.’ He glanced at a whiteboard markered with scrawled words and snarled-up arrows. ‘Comms room is clear. Talk about it there.’
‘That’s some story,’ Jordan said when they’d finished. Moh and Janis looked back at him hopefully, like clients. ‘Sounds like a load of serdar argic.’ (He’d picked up the net-slang unconsciously, used it self-consciously; it referred to the lowest layer of paranoid drivel that infested the Cable, spun out by degenerate, bug-ridden knee-jerk auto-post programs. Kill-file clutter.) He looked down at the workbench, picked at a solder globule. ‘But I believe it.’ He laughed. ‘Well, I believe you.’
‘Can you do it?’
They wanted him to hack-and-track for them, follow lines back, be their eyes on the net. He ached to get on with it, but was uncertain if he had the skill to match.
‘Sure,’ he said.
‘That’s OK,’ Moh said. ‘You’ll pick it up.’
‘So what’s the plan for today?’ Janis asked. She sounded edgy.
‘Find Bernstein,’ Moh said. ‘Take it from there.’
‘Bernstein!’ Jordan said. ‘The booklegger?’
Moh nodded, turned to smirk at Janis. ‘Told you,’ he said. ‘Everybody knows Bernstein.’
‘I’ve got his phone number,’ Jordan said. ‘Somewhere.’ He searched his memory, then dived into the main room and ran back with the small book he’d stuck in his jacket pocket. He flipped it open to look at the purple ink of the seller’s rubber-stamped logo on the inserted bookmark. It opened at the frontispiece.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he swore, for the first time in his life. ‘Will you look at that.’
He held the book forward for them to see: the old photogravure of a statue of a man in a hooded robe or cloak, hands outspread, eyes faint white marks in the cowled shadow.
Kohn looked up, puzzled. ‘Who is it?’
Jordan screwed up his eyes and shook his head.
‘Giordano Bruno. He was burned at the stake in 1600 for saying the planets might be inhabited, among other things. First space-movement martyr.’ He gave an imitation of a hollow, echoing laugh. ‘I just realized what his name would be in English. “Jordan Brown”!’
He looked at it again, hairs prickling on his neck. Moh clapped his shoulder.
‘Bernstein’s way of saying hello, Jordan,’ he said. ‘So give the man a call, already.’
After a few rings a reply came on the line, from not an answer-fetch but a flat tape. ‘Hello,’ said a thick-tongued voice. ‘Thank you for calling. Solly Bernstein isn’t in at the moment, but you can find him at’ – pause, clunk – ‘Brent Cross Shopping Centre. Usual place. Look for the revisionist rally.’
Moh refused to explain what was funny about that.
They took the monorail north. Moh had insisted they all brought some gear, on the assumption they might not be coming back. He’d pulled a couple of JDF-surplus backpacks from under a bench, packed his in moments and gone into a huddle with