‘Hah!’ Cat snorted. ‘That was the trouble!’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I really loved him,’ she said. ‘I still think he’s, well, an amazing man. But just thinking about him makes me angry; it calls up all the things we fought about.’ She laughed, swirling her drink and looking into it. ‘Mostly about fighting. I always believed you had to…believe, to fight. Like you said. Goddess, was I the original fanatic! I doubt if you ever believed in religion the way I believed in the politics, if you ever read the Bible like I read the latest perspectives document from the faction leadership. But Moh I could never figure out. I got to think he was cynical.’
‘A gun for hire?’
‘That’s it. I suppose you’ve met the gun.’ She shared a smile with him. ‘A dedicated follower of Comrade Kalashnikov. But back there in the hospital I found that he thought I was the loose cannon. The opportunist. Huh. He’s got a side all right, but I don’t know what it is.’
Jordan pointed upwards. ‘That’s his side.’
Catherin frowned for a moment, then nodded.
‘Space…yeah, he was always into that. What he really believes in is us getting into space – I mean, like the space movement wants to, getting out there past the Yanks – and for him the left and the right, the plan and the market, are just—’
‘Launch vehicles!’
They both laughed.
‘And what about you?’ Jordan asked.
Catherin was sitting facing him along the couch. She took her feet out of her shoes and curled her legs and gazed again into the peaty pool in her glass.
‘I never saw it,’ she said, looking up as if she’d found some answer. ‘The way it seemed to me was we were aiming for a better society here on earth, starting with here in Britain. Space – yeah, sure – but why make that the one and the zero? I like this planet, dammit! I was happy to side with the greens against the people who’re wrecking it, even if these people have something to do with getting a few more thousand of us off it.’ She smiled at herself. ‘I’m a party animal – in both senses.’
She jumped up and went over to the music deck and slid in a disk. The room filled with the folky, smoky melody of an old hit from a band called Whittling Driftwood. Catherin twirled and held out a hand to him.
‘Come on, you devil’s chaplain,’ she said. ‘Dance with me.’
Jordan had never danced before. He stood, and Catherin stepped up to him with her hands raised in front of her, fingers opened out. He lifted his hands in the same way and their fingers interlocked. He guessed the trick was to step lightly in time with the music, and to sort of move your hips to a different but mysteriously related time, fraction or multiple of the music’s rhythm, and to pull towards and away from your partner in yet another periodicity.
Oh, yes, and to maintain eye contact. He looked up from his and her feet.
After a couple of tracks the music changed, got slower, and there didn’t seem to be any provision for pulling away. He brought their arms down and let go of her fingers and slid his hands behind her, and his elbows to her waist, and she did the same with him. They turned slowly, feet more careful now. The track ended. He stood still and kissed her. Her tongue entered his mouth like an alien animal, a blindly urgent exploratory probe, and then drew his tongue back with it, a startled abductee. Her mouth tasted of whisky and water and something ranker, carnivorous. They swayed together for an interval, and suddenly they were both gasping in atmosphere again.
‘Catherin,’ he said. ‘Earth’s angel. Cat.’ His hands were moving on her flanks and waist, feeling the heat and shape of her through varying textures. He found a row of buttons and opened one, then another. Catherin dived a hand blatantly down the back of his jeans. A cool fingertip pressed his coccyx, traced up his lower spine. Then she took her hand out and caught his arms.
‘It’s easier from the top,’ she said.
‘So let’s go up.’
‘Yes.’
17
The Good Sorcerer
‘Relax, the man said.’ Moh kicked a pebble from the shingle out across the still water of the sea-loch. Janis was not surprised to see that it skipped several times before sinking. He did it again and the same thing happened. ‘This is worse than waiting for a US/UN deadline to pass.’
Janis caught his hand. ‘Walk,’ she said.
They continued on around the shoreline to where it curved out to a narrow spit of land that led to a peninsula about four hundred metres long and thirty or forty metres high. It was known locally – with what Janis considered a peculiarly Gaelic logic – as The Island. She squinted into a low morning sun that was lifting the dew and night-mist in the promise of another fine day.
Moh, though still tense and moody, looked a lot better than he’d done the previous afternoon when he’d come out of his encounter. They probably had MacLennan to thank for that. With an almost motherly admonition about Building Up Your Strength, the ANR cadre had treated them to a dinner of smoked salmon followed by venison at the village hotel.
Janis had been charmed by MacLennan. He might look like a farmer but he acted and spoke like an officer and a gentleman, with fascinating tales to tell of the years of the Republic and the struggle. The one thing he would not talk about, that he instantly and politely quashed the slightest allusion to, was the events of that afternoon and their implications.
The hotel overlooked a golf course so low on the shore that clumps of dried seaweed were scattered on its greens. The bar, where they’d had what was by Moh’s standards a very quiet drinking session, had filled up over the evening with the entire reduced population of the village. Janis had watched incredulously as the locals enjoyed what they considered a few quiet, civilized drinks – four or five litres of beer helped along by liberal shots of whisky – and then gone off to drive home. The vehicles ranged from sports-cars to articulated lorries but were all driven in much the same way.
It was the sound of vehicles in the morning that had wakened them: a slow, revving chug on all the roads. When they walked down to the village after breakfast they’d found the whole place deserted, an eerie clearance complete…
A sheep-track led them through long wet grass and gorse to the top of the Island, where a low roofless brick building stood. As they approached, a head appeared over the wall, and then a young woman came out. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen; dark hair, bright eyes. She wore an ANR jumpsuit and carried a weapon that looked too big for her: a metre-long rocket on a launcher with a pistol-grip.
‘Hello,’ she said shyly. ‘You’ll be the computer people.’
Moh laughed. ‘Have you ever heard of need-to-know?’
‘We all need to know,’ she said, sounding baffled by the question.
‘What do you do?’ Janis asked.
‘Air defence,’ the girl said.
Inside the walls was a trodden area of sheep droppings and earth; a camping stool, binoculars, a dozen more rockets.
‘It’s an old observation post,’ the girl explained. ‘From the last war, that is’ – her brow furrowed momentarily – ‘that is, the war before the last but you know what the old folk are like.’
Moh nodded soberly. ‘And you’re using it for air defence?’
‘Yes.’ She whipped the launcher into position with startling speed. ‘The stealth fighters: they fly low, they can fool radar and instruments, they don’t make a sound but they’re not invisible.’ She patted the nose of the rocket. ‘Tail-chaser. I’ve got two seconds to get down after it’s launched, then the fusion engine kicks in. Voom.’
‘Yeah,’ Moh said. ‘“Voom.” You don’t want to be standing behind one of them. And stay down and keep your eyes shut till you see the flash.’