The next day I reported to the office next-door to Abalain’s. It wasn’t furnished nearly as nicely, but it wasn’t a cellar and there was nobody shooting at me, so I decided I was better off. I never saw either the lieutenant or any of my fellow-targets again. I confess I didn’t really worry about them, either.
Abalain had told me to meet him in order to learn about my new assignment. I was pretty sure I already knew what it was, and while waiting for him to show I decided to investigate. I couldn’t help myself; when presented with a mass of data I have to know what it is, and the battered metal desk that dominated the room was a pictorial definition of “mass of data.” There were three distinct piles on top of the desk; the talus slopes of their near-collapse pretty much covered the entire surface. Two of the piles were paper, the third was of various storage media: magneto-optical disks, a couple of ancient Zips and even a holocube or two.
The paper pile nearest to me consisted of various official garbage: press releases, wire story print-outs. The ones I looked at were all from either the UN or one of the three main Blanc organizations. The other pile was a series of virtually indecipherable French-language documents that I was eventually able to identify as field reports from libertine officers and operatives.
“You can make some sense of that, yes?” Abalain stood in the doorway.
I looked him in the eye for a second, then returned to the reports. “What kind of sense do you want me to make?”
“You will do what you described to me when you were first—ah—recruited. I have need of information which I suspect is buried within these reports and press releases. You will use your skills to draw that information forth.” He smiled at me with what he no doubt thought was encouragement. Maybe he’d been a management consultant before deciding that the revolution offered better opportunities to fuck with people. “You will work here, and send the information to me as you assemble it. You will use the clipboard and wearable that are in the upper-right-hand drawer; they connect to a fibreoptic pipe linked directly to a secure folder on my desktop. You will, regrettably, have no outside access. But don’t worry about that; I’ll see that you get all of the information you need to do your work.”
More than enough information, I told myself.
Day 30: The Revolution Will Not Be Franchised
“I gotta admit, I just don’t understand this revolution.”
“What’s not to understand?” Abalain offered me a Marlie; I was somewhat surprised at the gesture, and even more surprised to find myself shaking my head. “We’re not really revolutionaries, you know. We’re trying to restore the glories of French civilization; in a way, that makes us conservatives.”
I believe the accepted term is ‘reactionaries’, I thought. “Which no doubt explains why so many of your slogans seem to have been drawn from fast-food advertising,” I said, waving a flimsy at him. “‘La France: Have It Your Way’?”
“The fast-food philosophy is inherently French,” Abalain said. “It’s a peasant philosophy, not some tarted-up bourgeois haute-cuisine thing. It’s like the epoxy cobbles you and your ‘Old Paree Hands’ are so dismissive about. They’re perfectly in keeping with the scientific rationalism of the original revolution.” He spoke in crisp, rapid French. He’d caught me listening too intently to one of his phone conversations the week before and confronted me with a barrage of French. When my facial expression made it clear that I understood every word, he’d nodded smartly and went back to his conversation, as though he’d suspected it all along.
“Unless they’re laid down by Disney,” I said.
“Then it’s cultural imperialism,” Abalain said. I’d have liked him just a little if he’d smiled, or showed any sign of having a sense of humor. But he was deadly serious, and I hated him even more for it.
“So what’s your part in all this?” I asked. “You a spook?”
“I’m nothing of the sort, M’ser Rosen. And if I was, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.” He blew a jet of smoke past my left ear; I smelled burning garbage. “I’m just a servant of the Commune,” he said. “I do what I can to bring France back into the sunlight of scientific rationalism. Please know that we are all grateful for the assistance you have been providing.”
And that you’ve been taking credit for, I thought. “I could do more,” I said, “if I had access to more information.” What I’d been given so far wouldn’t have been enough to help a fundamentalist preacher track down sin. I had to be able to make a big score in order for my plan to work.
“I’ve been impressed with what you’ve given me to date,” Abalain said. Jesus, I thought. If they’re impressed by that merde, this will be easier than I thought. “Granted it hasn’t had much direct tactical value. But already we’ve been able to wrong-foot the Penistes at least twice in the media. We’ve taken the lead in the propaganda campaign; in the long run that may be as important as anything our fighters do.”
“At least let me see the uncensored field reports.” I pulled a handful of crumpled flimsies from a pants pocket. Two-thirds of the text had been blacked or blanked. “I should be the judge of whether or not information is usable.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
The next morning an unhappy-looking frère kicked a plastic box into my office. The papers, flimsies, and chips were chaos illustrated, but I didn’t care. I always get a rush from a fresh source of data, and the rush was greater this time because the stakes were so much higher.
One of the first things I learned when I finally got down to analysis was that my old ami Commandant Ledoit was dead. The first reference was in a press release from a couple of weeks ago; he’d been killed, it was claimed, by the Blancs. But it didn’t take much sleuthing to suss out that he had in fact been dusted by the Commune. I found a reference to a series of denunciations by Abalain’s juniors, and while the accusations weren’t detailed the result was still clear enough. If I hadn’t already had my suspicions raised, that would have set my spideysense tingling.
As it was, I was more grimly satisfied than surprised. Every revolution eventually eats its young, someone once said. For the Paris Commune, the buffet had apparently begun. That was fine for me; in fact, my plan depended on it.
I worked hard over the next week. After what I’d been through, there was a deep, almost rich pleasure in being able to throw myself into investigation. Little by little I spun my web—making sure that I also took the time to generate some truly killer conclusions about what the Blancs and Penistes were up to. It was actually pretty easy. Compared with most corporations, governments are as complex as nap-time at a daycare. And neither the Blancs nor the Penistes—nor the Commune, come to that—was even a government by any normal conception of that word. So it was only a few days after I started when Abalain brought me a bottle of really good Remy by way of congratulating me on my utter fabness. I’m more of a bourbon than a cognac type, but I accepted the bottle anyway. It was the least Abalain could do for me; I intended to make sure of that.
After he gave me the bottle, I didn’t see the sergeant for two weeks. I took advantage of the break to wander around the building, and eventually even the neighborhood. It hadn’t taken long for word to get out that Abalain had himself a pet spook, and nobody really paid any attention to the grubby guy in the soiled white suit. That dusted whatever doubts I may have had about Abalain’s juice within the Commune; the man wore his sergeant’s stripes like sheep’s clothing.
Discovering the truth about Sissy’s fate did not create my resolve to kill Abalain; it only deepened it. I’d hardly spared her a thought since the fresh lieutenant used me for a decoy, but in one raft of papers, I turned up an encoded list of inductees from the Dialtone. It was nicely divided by sex and nationality, though the names themselves were encrypted. Only one female Canadian appeared on the list. I realized then that it had been weeks since I’d thought of Sissy, and I felt myself poised atop a wall of anguish so high that I couldn’t bear to look down. Instead, I went back
to work, and turned up an encrypted list of bunk assignments—it was nearly identical to the list of inductees, but a number of the female names were missing, including the lone Canadian one.
Putting two and two together is what I do. I couldn’t stop myself, then. Sissy and any number young, carefree trustafarians had been conscripted for a very different kind of service to the Commune—the kind of service that required a boudoir rather than a bunk.
Up until then, I’d been trying to formulate a plan that would put paid to Abalain while I walked away scot-free. When I saw the second list, I felt a return of the unreal, uncaring fatalism I’d felt when I walked out into the street lugging the bag of ammunition. Abalain would die, and I would die, too.
The freedom to move around that Abalain’s patronage afforded also gave me all the opportunity I needed to type in some new reports from a variety of unsecured terminals and wireless keypads, using the IDs I’d picked up from the uncensored reports Abalain had given me. There was nothing flamboyant or, God forbid, clumsy about these reports. I even managed to duplicate the horrible grammar some of the frère field agents had used. And most of the information I put into them could easily be verified, since it was just cribbed from other sources or from my own validated speculation on what the other side was doing. That’s how you do it, you see: you put in so much truth that the few bits of fabulation go more or less unnoticed.
More or less, that is, until somebody decides that all those trees must mean something and makes a point of looking at the forest. I was pretty sure that, like all revolutions, this one had its share of tree-counters.
I have to admit, though, that I was pretty nervous by the end of the second week. You like to think that you know your job, that the outcome of something you start is predictable within the limits of your experience. But every job carries with it the fear of complete catastrophe, and if this job went down in flames … It didn’t bear thinking of.
So I was more than a little shocked when Abalain burst into my office late one afternoon, looking as though he’d just learned that capitalism really was the most effective economic philosophy.
“We have to go, you and I,” Abalain said.
“Go where?” I asked. I hadn’t expected to see him again; had, in fact, expected to read his obituary in the next batch of Commune press releases.
“I’ll explain later. But take your notepad with you.” He cut the pad free from its lock and cable, and handed it to me. “We’re going to need this to get through the lines.”
“Through the lines?”
“Don’t be dense, and just do as I say.” Abalain seemed to be reverting to the bourgeois martinet I’d always suspected him of being. “I have some things to do. Meet me in the lobby in five minutes. Be there, Rosen, or I’ll have you shot.”
Normalment, I’m not so slow on the uptake. I guess that only the fact that I was so sure I’d done for Abalain had blinded me to what had really happened: the bastard had found out that he was going to be denounced, and had decided to take his leave of his frères before they removed his head from his shoulders, or however it was that they dispatched those who no longer fit with the Commune’s vision of the past-into-future.
I was only thrown off my game for a moment, though. My business forces you to think on your feet, and I was on mine in a second. I slipped into Abalain’s office, and started filling my pockets with whatever was lying about. I made sure that I grabbed his wearable; the computer was locked, of course, but I was rapidly formulating a plan for dealing with that.
My suit may have looked a little bit rumpled when I got to the lobby, but the frères were a pretty sartorially challenged bunch at the best of times, so I wasn’t surprised that nobody noticed my bulging pockets.
“What’s happened?” I asked Abalain as soon as we were outside and walking on the poly-resin cobbles. He’d headed us north, presumably toward the toney arrondissements of the north-east where the Blancs still held sway.
“A friend let slip that I was going to be denounced before the Central Committee,” he said. “There’s no justification for such a thing, of course.”
“Of course,” I said.
“But a man in a position such as mine inevitably seems to inspire jealousy, and justified or not I’m pretty sure things wouldn’t go well for me if I let myself be called. So with regret I have to end my service to the revolution and the Commune. It’s their misfortune.”
“And me?” I stuffed my hands in my pockets in case Abalain got too curious about their shape.
“But I thought you were eager to return to your home.” Abalain made a sympathetic little moue with his mouth, and it was all I could do to keep from kicking him in the balls. “You, M’ser Rosen, are my ticket through the lines, of course.”
“Of course.”
As usual, Abalain was ahead of the curve on the whole denunciation thing. His casual wave was enough to get us through the various check-points and posts we encountered as we walked through the Communard zone; nobody’d been told yet that he was now an enemy of the revolution. I began to regret not spreading my disinformation a little more widely.
“Do you want to tell me how you plan to do this?” I asked him as we walked away from yet another group of fawning, too-serious-for-words frères. “I feel like someone being told to invest without seeing the prospectus.”
“Capitalist humor. How droll,” he said. “It’s quite simple, really. We’re headed toward a checkpoint in a comparatively stable part of the front. I’ll talk us through our—the Commune’s—lines. We’re doing some field intelligence work, you and I. Once we’re through our lines, we duck out of sight, approach the Blanc lines from a different angle, and then you provide me with my entrée to the Blanc sector. Simple, no?”
“And how do I play my part in this clever plan?”
“Patience, my old. Patience. I’ll explain when you need to know, and not before.” I shrugged. It wasn’t a question of whether Abalain intended to dust me, but when and how. I felt the weight of his wearable around my waist and hoped he’d at least wait until we reached the Blanc lines so that I could surprise him before he surprised me.
The checkpoint showed all the signs of a front that hadn’t changed in weeks, possibly months. The smart-wire had accumulated a patina of grime and pigeon-shit you just didn’t see on the more active parts of the city. Dogs danced around the feet of the listlessly patrolling frères; there was no power armor in sight. Someone had liberated a video lottery terminal from somewhere and set it up in the observation post Abalain dragged me into; the vlt’s reader slot was stuffed with an override card that made play free but also eliminated any payout, and as Abalain drawled his lies to the lieutenant I joined a group of bored frères watching the symbols flash in pointless sequence across the terminal’s screen. You’d never know, looking at the crap that had accreted around this corner, that there were parts of Paree where bits were being blown off bodies and buildings as the world’s most pointless renovation project continued on its nasty way.
“We go now,” Abalain said from behind me. “Do you think that you can tear yourself away from this excitement?” I bit back my reply, and turned to follow. He hadn’t even waited for me, and I had to jog for a moment to catch up with him. We ducked into a building, descended to the basement and spent a freaky few seconds in a dark, humid tunnel that brought back nightmares of my brief sojourn as a hot-wired guinea pig, before emerging into the wreckage of an old Metro station. In the distance, I thought I saw a flash of light—reflection from a sniper’s scope?
I stopped, imagining the weight of the sniper’s gaze on my chest, just below my sternum, and had a sudden vision of Sissy standing just as I was now. Who knew how many trustafarians had been sacrificed to flushing out the Blancs, and then had their bunks reassigned. I felt a strange mixture of sorrow and relief—it had been quick then, for her; not the drawn-out nightmare of serial rape that had been slithering through my subconscious.
Abalain showed no hesitati
on; I’ll give him that much. He grabbed my arm and pulled me out into the street. This close to freedom I found myself a lot less cold-blooded about being shot than I had been a couple of weeks before. Then we were safely across the road, and inside an abandoned block of flats sheltered from both Communard and Blanc eyes. We were able to traverse a couple of hundred meters of picturesque ruins without being exposed to any more than electronic surveillance. I figured we’d be nearly on top of a Blanc outpost before the frères finally copped to what Abalain was doing.
“So what are you going to do once you’re out of Tomorrowland and back in the real world?” I asked him when he stopped us in what seemed to have once been a pretty nice courtyard. “How does a scientific revolutionary make his way in a bourgeois schematic?”
“I’ll pretend that was a serious question and not just another pathetic attempt at snideness,” he said. “Never try to out-sneer the French, m’ser. We’re the masters.” You be expansive, you little shit, I thought. Expand away; it’ll be more fun to watch you collapse. “The fact is, M’ser Rosen, I’m an extremely adaptable man. I won’t have any trouble fitting into my new life. I’ll probably have to move from Paris, and that will be a shame. But even if Bucharest or Buenos Aires isn’t the City of Light, I can be comfortable.”
He produced a small pistol and pointed it at me. “After all, competitive intelligence work can be done anywhere.”
If he was expecting me to look shocked, I disappointed him. I hope I did, anyway. Frankly, I’d expected something a bit more clever. I was grateful, though, that an identity switch was the best he could come up with. After looking at me expectantly for a moment, he scowled and waved the pistol. “Let’s go, Sergeant Abalain,” he said.
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