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It was finished. Cat looked at the clock icon, surprised at how many hours had passed. She snipped and tied off the last threads and took the jacket out of the machine. She stood up and admired it at arm’s-length for a minute, then draped it around her and admired it again, looking over her shoulder in a mirror.
‘That’s really good.’
She turned quickly to see Valery standing in the doorway. The jacket slipped from her shoulders.
‘Yes, I’m quite pleased with it, even if using this machine was a bit of a cheat.’ She half-knelt to pick it up. Her skirt settled in slow billows, like a parachute.
‘Nonsense, Cat, it’s the design and the carrying of it through that matters. The method is just technical.’
‘Like, the end justifies the means?’ Cat straightened, smoothed the skirt, and looked at Valery with a demure smile.
‘Hah!’ Valery swivelled the console’s chair and sat down. ‘We never claimed to be pacifists, you know.’
Cat shook her head, as if to rattle her synapses back to their old pattern, and stood up.
‘What a scam. You had me worried there. I thought I was going soft myself when all the time I was being – softened up! To work for the ANR, of all the macho elitist gangs!’ She caught the sides of her skirt and swirled it around her in a joyous flurry.
‘That’s not how I see it,’ Valery said, a half-embarrassed smile on her lips. ‘As it happens…we have a job for you to do. A job for the ANR.’ Her smile broadened. ‘Usual rates.’
Cat considered this. ‘And the alternative is staying here, right?’
Valery nodded. ‘We can’t risk letting you go back to Donovan’s gang. All right, all right, you can say you won’t, but unless you have a contract with us there’ll be nothing to stop you changing your mind as soon as you’re out the door. So either you do this job – nothing too risky, by the way – or you sit out the insurrection behind a sewing-machine, making parachutes.’
Cat knew that Valery was putting it to her gently. The ANR had a short temper and a long memory.
‘I’ll do the job,’ Cat said hastily, fighting off a panicky, smothered feeling. ‘What is it?’
‘That’s the spirit,’ said Valery. ‘Good girl.’
Jordan looked at the message in the work-space, restraining an impulse to bat the reply tag yet again.
Moh says search over, do your own thing.
It wasn’t just the gnomic brevity of the message that frustrated him. The sender, the Women’s Peace Community, had vanished from the nets as if it had never existed. Jordan had sent a dozen responses, all of which had bounced. His suspicion that the femininist community was connected to the ANR intensified.
Moh, wherever he was, wasn’t taking calls either. Jordan had little doubt that the message came from him; it echoed what Moh had said when he’d first asked Jordan to help him. And now, apparently, he expected Jordan to drop the investigation. Some chance, comrade. Jordan had spent the afternoon since contacting Moh and Janis in a succession of net trawls. He’d detected the effect of Moh’s settlement of the dispute with Donovan, and the clearing of Cat’s status. In the narrow, fiercely contested fringe where Norlonto’s private defence agencies and political-military groupuscules fought indistinguishably in the dark, Catherin Duvalier was a respected minor player. Every so often, through the afternoon, the thought would come back to Jordan of Cat returning to that.
Mary Abid had gone back to work on the other side of the world, oblivious. The comms room was still airless, and hot. Jordan pulled in the original message, the videophone call, and froze it at the exact moment when Cat looked up, brushing her hair from her face. He trimmed away the rest of the image, enlarged and enhanced the picture of Cat and printed it on A4. It came off as a good-quality colour photograph. Jordan powered down the machines he’d been working on, left the room quietly and went upstairs to Moh’s room, where he stuck the picture beside the photograph of Cat on the wall. He stood back and looked at them.
There was no question that they were of the same girl, making the same gesture and the same caught half-smile. Only the clothes she wore were different: the dirt-stiff overalls, too big, the sleeve rolled back, a streak of oil smeared on her forehead by the passage of her wrist; the starch-stiff frill of the pinafore over the precisely fitted dress, a fall of lace from the cuff snagging slightly as it brushed across the hair at the side of her face. Jordan found a disturbingly erotic charge in the contrast: a passing thought vaguely associated the second picture with the Modesty advertisements that had been the pin-ups in his bedroom. The oddity was that neither outfit was intended to look sexy – in fact, the opposite, the one sexless and shapeless like the uniform of some puritan communistan, the other chaste, a model of modesty indeed – and yet Cat’s sexuality burned through both of them.
Or so it seemed. Perhaps it was just his own frustration. One of the liberating discoveries he’d made in reading the humanist philosophers was the innocence of furtive masturbation, but that was not much comfort here. By historical standards Beulah City wasn’t too bad: its churches denounced premarital sex but encouraged early marriage; its laws forbade homosexuality (theoretically on pain of death, but in practice it was almost impossible to bring a conviction, and anybody charged with it had every opportunity to shake the dust of Beulah City from their feet) and abortion, although they tolerated contraception. The only grounds for divorce that it recognized were adultery or desertion, but the complete ban on any public explicitness about sex was coupled with a reasonable provision of counselling for legally married couples. Even so, that left plenty of room for sexual ignorance, incompatibility and misery, to say nothing of hypocrisy.
Coming from that environment into this part of Norlonto was like stepping from an air-conditioned building into a hurricane. The pervasive pornography and prostitution had repelled him. He wasn’t sure whether his objection derived from the Christian beliefs he’d rejected or the humanist principles he’d embraced. The people in the Collective showed no interest in commercial sex, but he felt they disapproved of it. Their own sexual attitudes and relationships were difficult to figure out with social skills developed for an entirely different society. Mary, Alasdair, Dafyd, Lyn, Tai, Stone and the rest were to him so many black boxes, connected by arrows of desire.
Mary Abid’s long black hair and large dark eyes had been a target for some of his arrows, but she had a thing going with Stone (that relationship, at least, had been easy to identify). Jordan had also quite fancied Tai, and had even – shyly, obliquely – attempted some chatting up until he’d realized the slim, small, pretty Singaporean wasn’t a girl. And wasn’t gay either, just in case that still-unthinkable thought had crossed his mind. So until now he’d made do with highly unrealistic fantasies about Janis, whose image had floated in and out of the background of his communications with Moh.
He felt absurdly ashamed of that now as he looked at the two pictures of Cat. He didn’t want a fantasy of Cat; he wanted – it was a distinction realized, a revelation, a resolve – the reality of her. You couldn’t fall in love with someone you didn’t know, with a face in a picture; but looking at those pictures he wanted nothing else but to find this woman, to have her and hold her and protect her. And if she wouldn’t have that, if she wouldn’t have him, he could at the very least try to dissuade her from putting her beautiful body on the line in those futile fights.
Tired and restless, he threw himself face-down on the bed. For a few minutes he slept, then woke with a dribble of spittle and sweat on the pillow under the corner of his mouth. He rolled over and lay with his hands behind his head. Posters shouted down at him from the walls. British Troops Out Of English Troops Out Of London Troops Out Of Federal Troops To. Solidarity with this. Solidarity with that. Solidarity with Solidarity. (Now, what the heck did that mean?)