Fractions (9 page)

As he ascended the stair-ladder to the attic he heard low murmuring voices. Adrenaline jolted his heart. When his head came above floor-level he saw straight through the open door of his bedroom. His mother and father were sitting side by side on his bed, heads lifted from an open book in their laps. At their feet lay a scatter of antique paperbacks and older hard-backs. They were books he wasn't really supposed to have, ones he'd picked up here and there from bookleggers, hard to control even in the Christian community: old rationalist works in the beautiful brown bindings of the Thinker's Library – Bradlaugh and Darwin and Haeckel, Huxley and Llewellyn Powys, Ingersoll and Paine – and battered paperbacks by Asimov and Sagan and Gould, Joachim Kahl, Russell, Rand, Lofmark, Lamont, Paul Kurtz, Richard Dawkins. The dread heresiarchs of secular humanism. He'd concealed them at the back of a high bookshelf, behind volumes of sermons and a thousand-page commentary on the Book of Numbers. It wasn't the sight of these books that made his knees weak and his heart sick. It was the sight of the one they'd been looking at: his diary.

They weren't even particularly old, his parents. They'd married young. His father's beard had grey hairs coiling among the black; his face had lines like cuts. His mother's eyes were reddened. Both parents watched him in silence as he walked up.

‘I feel totally betrayed,' his mother said. ‘How could you write such vile, satanic filth? To think how we
trusted
you—'

She turned away, laid her face on her husband's shoulder, and sobbed.

‘Now look what you've done to your poor mother.'

Jordan had expected to feel guilty at this moment, the moment he had put off for so long, the moment when he let his parents know what he really thought. Now that they had found out for themselves he felt embarrassed, sure – his cheeks burned at the thought of them reading his diary – but most of what he felt was anger at their doing this. The gall of it, the effrontery!

‘Don't I have any
privacy
?'

He snatched the diary away and snapped it shut. His hands and voice shook.

‘Not while you're under my roof and my responsibility.'

His father looked set to launch into a denunciation. Jordan spoke before he had a chance.

‘That's
it
! If I can't live under your roof with the minimum civilized decency of knowing I won't be spied on or have you rummage through my possessions then I won't live here at all!'

His father jumped up. ‘Now, you wait a minute! We don't want to drive you out. We're worried – terribly, terribly worried about you. What you've been reading – even what you've been writing – if we talk about it, take your doubts to a minister or a counsellor, I'm sure you'll come to see how you've been led astray by these wicked, lying rationalistic libertines whose philosophy and vain deceit have been refuted over and over again by Christian thinkers.'

‘No.'

Jordan let his eyes wander. He'd decorated the room as near as he'd dared to his tastes: space prints of distant galaxies and supernova shells (Creationist propaganda), pictures of tribal peoples (mission appeals), pictures of chastely clad but pretty and subtly alluring girls (Modesty advertisements). Ah well. The books they'd heaped together were all he really wanted to take. He dragged a rucksack from the corner and stooped to gather them up, then walked around randomly grabbing clothes. Emotions are commanded by thoughts, and who but you commands your thoughts? Thus spake Epictetus, or possibly Wayne Dwyer. Whatever. Jordan commanded his thoughts.

‘Don't turn your back on us,' his mother said. ‘Don't turn your back on the truth.'

‘You call yourself a free thinker,' his father taunted, ‘but you don't want to face anyone who might change your mind! All you're really interested in is going after your own way, indulging your own carnal lusts. All this atheist garbage is just a miserable excuse. If you rely on that you will one day face God Himself with a lie in your right hand.'

Jordan felt he had swallowed ice.

‘As if I hadn't heard all their arguments already!' He took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I'll listen to them. I'll argue with your Christian thinkers but I'll do it from out of range of the guns in
their
right hands.'

‘Don't make me laugh! Nobody is threatening you with a gun.'

Jordan buckled the rucksack. He saw one remaining book that had been kicked aside, and retrieved it. Another of the Watts & Co Thinker's Library:
The History of Modern Philosophy
by A. W. Benn. He smiled to himself, then straightened his face and back.

‘How do your Elders keep ideas out, people out, books out? With guards, with guns! You can't have a free inquiry or discussion here.'

His father ignored the parry and asked, ‘Where do you think you'll find this precious freedom? Some dirty communist enclave? Fine freedom you'll find there!'

‘You're probably right,' Jordan said, thinking:
Communist?
‘So I'm going to Norlonto.'

The high colour left his father's face. His mother threw herself back on the bed with a moan. She said something into the pillow about the cities of the plain.

‘You would go from Beulah to that Babylon? Then you're beyond reasoning with.' His father looked at him with contempt. ‘Just you try it! You'll soon be back with your tail between your legs. You don't even have a passport.'

‘Yes I do,' Jordan said. His hand patted his side pocket, felt the weight like a book. ‘Freedom's own passport. Money.'

‘So you're a thief as well as a renegade.'

‘It's not stolen—' Jordan began hotly, then stopped.

The enormity of what he'd done struck him for the first time. Until now he'd been thinking forward, not backward, of the implications of having that money. What it amounted to was taking a fee from the ultimate enemy, the foe of the community, of the state that protected the community and of the alliance that shielded the state. And they knew or suspected it.
That
was why his father had thrown ‘communist' in his face! Mrs Lawson must have found out something about his unauthorized activity and dropped some heavy hint.
Scheming Christian witch.

‘Think what you like,' he said.

He hefted the rucksack and took a step towards his parents, with some vague notion of a handshake, a kiss –
stupid, stupid.
They recoiled from him as if frightened. Jordan backed off to the door, and on a sudden inspiration smiled and waved and stepped out through it and closed it and locked it. It wouldn't take them long to get out, he thought as he descended the stair-ladder, the stair, the steps. But, maybe, long enough. When he reached the street he turned left and started running, down the hill.

 

He cursed every subversive atheistic volume in his possession a lot sooner than his parents would have dared to hope. About ten minutes after leaving them, as he hurried along Park Road. It was a well designed frame rucksack, and it didn't dig into his back and shoulders, but the weight was enough to send sweat flying from his face. He walked past upmarket shops – delis, boutiques, craft – and respectable apartment houses. This, however, was the faintly disreputable fringe of Beulah City, the abode of essential but intrinsically unreliable types: inspirational artists, clean-minded scriptwriters, decent clothing designers, conservative sociologists…they all found it necessary to congregate close to the border, and even to make discreet business trips across it. No amount of sarcastic pulpit speculation about what possible benefit they could derive from this proximity to the imminent Ground Zero of divine wrath made any difference. A fine sight they would make at the Rapture (Jordan had heard on innumerable Sundays) when,
if
– and, one was given to understand, it was a very big ‘if' – they were among the chosen, they would float skywards miles away from the main body of ascending believers, clutching their drinks or worldly magazines!

But, scrupulous though it was about what it allowed in, Beulah City, as a literally paid-up member of the Free World, couldn't afford to be seen restricting people from going out. A population self-selected for enthusiasm had to be a better advertisement for a way of life than a conscript citizenry. Such liberal principles didn't apply to fleeing felons. And apart from the money, which, even if its source was as untraceable as the Black Planner had made out, would be difficult to account for, he now had a charge of unlawful imprisonment to answer.

After a kilometre the traffic on the road beside him slowed to a pace that had him overtaking one vehicle after another. Little electric cars and long light trucks, bumper to bumper. Jordan glanced at them idly. The flowery italics of a Modesty logo caught his eye. He had of course been aware that a lot of the community's exports were high-cost and low-weight, ideal for transport by airship from the skyport – Alexandra Port, just up the hill in Norlonto. He simply hadn't made the connection before.

He shook his head. The habit of averting eyes and thoughts had worn deeper tracks in his brain than he'd realized. But how else had he put up with it all for so long, put off the confrontation? To hell with it. He selected another truck. BP: Beloved Physician, the drug company. He jumped on to the running-board and grinned at the driver, who looked up startled from a laptop.

‘Any chance of a lift, mate?' he yelled. The driver, a lad about Jordan's age, looked at him doubtfully for a moment, noticed the rucksack and leaned over to open the door.

‘Thanks.' Jordan followed the rucksack inside.

His disconcerting capacity to lie went into overdrive.

‘Oh, man,' he said, ‘am I glad to see you! My company does a lot of business with this lot, and just before we closed today they asked me to nip up to the port and deliver a stack of manuals and catalogues to one of their reps.' He hefted his luggage. ‘Weighs a ton, too. You'd think in this day and age…'

‘Yeah,' said the driver. ‘Don't I know it? They just don't trust the networks, that's why they have to put that stuff on paper. Don't want their ideas ripped off, you know? Mind you, between you and me I dunno why they bother. Know what I've got in the back?'

Jordan settled back into the seat. ‘Medicines?' he hazarded.

‘Modified diamorphine for hospices! Designer heroin for the dying, if you want to be crude about it. Stops pain, but it doesn't get you so high you can't take in the message of salvation. Now, I don't agree with gambling and all that, but if I did…how much would you bet some poor militiaman wouldn't spare a sample for some kind officer who comes to shake his hand? And before you know it they'll be using it to psych people up before combat. No guarantee it'll only get to Christian militias either. Makes you think, dunnit?'

‘It sure does,' Jordan said.

 

The first border post, the Beulah City one, was just before the road forked. To the left it went up to Muswell Hill, to the right into Alexandra Port. Each road had its Norlonto border post, with a couple of guards, and behind them, strung out along the roadside, a welcoming party of drug dealers, prostitutes, cultists, atheists, deprogrammers, newsvendors…Twenty or so Warrior guards devoted most of their attention to the incoming traffic, which their efforts had backed up to somewhere over the hill on both roads.

One of them opened the door on the driver's side and leaned in. Black uniform, visored helmet, knuckles and buckles. He scrutinized the driver's pass.

‘Don't see anything about a passenger,' he said.

‘Sorry officer, last minute…'

The Warrior pointed at the rucksack.

‘Let's have a look in there.'

Jordan was reaching towards it when a hand grasped his wrist. It was the driver's.

‘Don't you touch it, mate. That's confidential to the company.' He turned to the Warrior. ‘If you want to open that bag, you'll have to account for it to my boss. And his.' He held out the laptop. ‘Form's on there somewhere, shouldn't take more'n oh I dunno ten minutes, fifteen
outside.
'

The guard hesitated.

‘It's all right,' the driver said. ‘We're not in a hurry.'

Jordan noticed how cold the sweat felt as it dried.

‘Ah, gerron with you,' the guard muttered. He backed out.

The engine whined into life.

‘Thanks,' Jordan said.

‘It's nothing. I'm used to them.' The driver grinned at Jordan. ‘Lucky I'm a better liar than you, huh? What you got in there, anyway?'

‘Oh.' Jordan felt hot again. ‘A load of irreligious books, actually.'

‘Good on you.' Jordan thought: What? ‘Flog them where they can't do no harm, get some money off the bastards. Can't expect the Elders and the cops to see it that way, mind.' He slowed at the junction. ‘You'll be wanting the other road, the town not the port. See ya.'

Jordan wanted to say something grateful, shake the guy's hand, give him some money, but the driver barely looked at him, concentrating on the traffic. So he just said ‘Good luck', and jumped out.

He walked past the cars up to where a bored-looking young woman toting a rifle took a piece of plastic from each driver going in. Mostly she handed the plastic back. She turned to him. Dusty freckled face under a black knotted headband with a blue enamel star. Space-movement militia.

‘Got a chit?'

Jordan shook his head.

‘Got any money?'

Jordan took out, cautiously, a fraction of his fortune. She fanned the wad.

‘That'll do,' she said. He thought she was going to keep it, but she handed it back. ‘You can live on that till you get work, if you want. But you'll have to give me a hundred if you're going in.'

She gave him a receipt, a thin stiff plastic card. ‘Hang on to this chit and you won't have to pay again, no matter how many times you come back or how long you stay. You'll have to pay for services, but that's up to you.'