The Sky Road

12 Dark Island

Coming in from the West on the M8, the taxi hired by the Kazakhstani consulate to take Myra from Glasgow Airport was hit by small-arms fire just as it came of! the flyover at Kinning Park.

Myra saw white starry marks pock the smoky armoured glass, did-did-did, heard the wheels’ whee of acceleration; her hand went reflexively to the shoulder holster under her coat and got caught in the strap of the seatbelt For a moment, as she looked down at her recently, newly smooth and now suddenly white hand, she thought death had found her at last—that she was going to die old and leave a good-looking corpse.

Then they were out of it, smoothly away, swinging around up and on to the Kingston Bridge over the Clyde. Myra twisted about and looked back and to the left, where the standard-practice burning-tyres smokescreen rose somewhere among the office-blocks and high-rises into the pale-blue late-May morning sky. A helicopter roared low and fast above the motorway, making the big car rock again, and flew straight at one of the tall buildings. A diagonal streak of punched square holes was abruptly stitched across the reflective glass of the building’s face. The helicopter paused, hovering; the car swooped from the brow of the bridge, and the scene passed out of sight.

“Jesus,” she said, shaken. “What was all that about?”

The speaker in the partition behind the driver’s seat came on.

“Greens,” the man said. “They sometimes shoot at traffic from the airport.” She saw his reflected eyes frown, his head shake. He wasn’t wearing a peaked cap. He was wearing a helmet. The car slowed as the traffic thickened. “Sorry about that.”

“Can’t be helped, I guess,” Myra said. “But—” she put on her best ignorant-American tone “—I thought you folks had that all under control. In the cities, anyway.”

Not what she’d call a city—there were taller buildings in Kapitsa, for fuck’s sake! Even with its hills Glasgow looked flat. She could see the University’s bone-white tower above the stumpy office-blocks. The place had changed considerably since the 1970s, but not as much as she’d expected, considering all it had been through: the 2015-2025 Republic, the Third World War and the Peace Process; then the Restoration and the guerilla war against the Hanoverian regime, and the Fall Revolution and the New Republic, itself now in its fourteenth year of (what it too, inevitably called) the struggle against terrorism. The blue, white and green tricolour of the United Republic and the saltire of the Scottish State flew from all official or important buildings.

“No, I’m afraid it’s not all under control at all,” the driver was saying. “They’re right here in the towns now, and there’s bugger all we can do about them. Apart fae bombing the suburbs, and it’s no that bad yet.”

“Just bad enough to be strafing tower-blocks?”

“Aye.”

Myra shivered and setded back in the seat. Her not very productive mission to NYC had taken up less time than originally scheduled, leaving her a couple of days before her pencilled-in meeting with someone from the United Republic’s Foreign Office. She was beginning to wish that nostalgia—and an itch to personally sort out the disposal of her archive—hadn’t made her decide to spend that Saturday and Sunday in Glasgow.

The United Republic, though not her first choice of possible allies, was still the next best thing to the United States. It was politically opposed to the Sheenisov advance, but hadn’t done much to stop it because it had a healthy distaste for entanglements in the Former Union. On the other hand, thanks to shared oil interests in the Sprady Islands it was a strong military and trading partner of Vietnam, which was standing up pretty well against the Khmer Vertes, which… after that it got complicated, but Parvus had the story down to the details. The upshot was that with an actual state on offer as a stable ally, the UR might well be interested in a deal, nukes or no nukes.

The taxi exited the motorway and took a few sharp turns to arrive at the western end of St Vincent Street, slowing down just across from the New Britain Hotel, where she had a room booked.

“Bit ay a problem…” said the driver.

A crowd of a couple of hundred was outside the hotel, almost blocking the pavement, and spilling over on to the street. It consisted of several small and apparently contending demonstrations; three separate loud-hailer harangues were going on from perilous perches on railings and ledges of next-door buildings; lines of Republican Guards segmented the groups. The reverse sides of placards wagged above bobbing heads.

“Ah, no problem,” Myra said. “Just a lefty demo.”

Probably protesting the presence of a representative of some repressive regime, or possibly an unpopular government minister staying at the New Brit. As the big car described a neat and illegal U-turn and glided to a halt a few yards from the left flank of the demonstration, Myra idly wondered what specimen of political celebrity or infamy she’d be sharing residence with.

The driver stepped out—on the wrong side, as she momentarily thought—went around the rear, pinging the boot open on his way, and opened the door for her. She gave him a good flash of her long legs as she swung them out and emerged, in tall boots, short skirt, sable hat and coat. The rejuvenation was definitely making her legs worth seeing again; she’d have to rethink her wardrobe…

The driver lifted her two big suitcases from the boot; she waited for a moment as he clunked it down and closed the nearside door, then she walked towards the hotel entrance, looking curiously at the demo as she hurried past it. There was about three yards of clearance between the shopfronts and the half-dozen or so Republican Guards deployed along the pavement to demarcate the front line of the demo. Behind the Guards the crowd was jumping up and down and yelling and chanting.

She glanced up at a placard being waved above her and saw at the centre of it a blurrily blown-up newsfeed-clip picture of her own face. Suddenly the contending chants became clear, like separate conversations at a party.

Victory to—the SSU!”

That one was in a battle of the soundwaves with, “Sheenisov—hands off! Viva—Kazakhstan!”

Above them both, not chanted but being shouted repeatedly through one of the loud-hailers, “Support the political revolution in the ISTWR!”

A competing loud-hailer was going on in a more liberal, educated and educational tone about the crimes of Myra Godwin’s regime—she caught the words “nuclear mercenaries” and “shameful exploitation” in passing.

For a moment Myra stopped walking; she just stood there, too shocked to move. Her gaze slid past the reflecting shades of a Guard to make eye-contact with a young girl in a tartan scarf. The girl’s chant stopped in mid-shout and Myra couldn’t look away from her disbelieving, open-mouthed face. Then the girl reached over the Guard’s shoulder and pointed a shaking finger at Myra.

“That’s her!” she squealed. “She’s here!”

Myra smiled at the girl and looked away and walked steadily towards the steps up to the hotel door, now only about ten yards away. The driver puffed along behind her. The chants continued; it seemed she was getting away with it.

And then a silence spread out, just a little slower than sound, from the girl who had identified her. The chants died down, the loud-hailer speeches ceased. The crowd surged through the wide gaps between the Guards, blocking the pavement. A young man, not as tall as Myra but more heavily built, stood in front of her, yelling incomprehensibly in her face.

Her old understanding of the Glasgow accent restored from memory.

“Ah despise you!” the man was shouting. “Yi usetae call yirsel a Trotskyist an yir worse than the fuckin Stalinists! Sellin nuclear threats and then sellin slave labour! And noo yir fightin agin the Sheenisov! They’re the hope o the world and yir fightin them for the fuckin Yanks! Ya fuckin sell-out, ya fuckin capitalist hoor!” He leaned in her face ever more threateningly as he spoke. His fists were balling, he was working himself up to take a swing at her. Three yards behind his back somebody holding up a “Defend the ISTWR!” placard was pushing through the press of bodies. Myra took one step back, bumping into one of her suitcases—the driver was still holding it, still behind her. Good.

She slipped her right hand inside her coat. The yelling man’s clamour, and forward momentum, stopped. Another silence expanded around them. Myra reached into a pocket above her thumping heart and pulled out her Kazkhstani diplomatic passport. She thumbed it open and held it high, then waved it in front of the nearest Guard’s nose.

“Officer,” she said without turning around, “please escort my driver into the hotel.”

“Aw right, ma’am.”

“Thanks!”

The driver passed by on her left surrounded by uniforms. Myra took advantage of the accompanying flurry of distraction to dive behind the man who’d yelled at her, and to push herself into the small huddle of pro-ISTWR demonstrators. She glanced quickly around five shocked but friendly faces, noticing lapel badges with a flashed grin of recognition and pride—the old hammer-and-sickleand-4, a solidarity-campaign button with the ISTWR’s signature radiation trefoil, sun-and-eagle stickers…

“Comrades,” she said, “let’s go inside.”

The comrades clustered around her and together they stepped back on the pavement. The angry man was being restrained by some of his own comrades, but still denouncing Myra at the top of his voice. Myra’s group marched up the steps and through the hotel’s big swing doors into the now crowded foyer. White marble floor, black-painted ironwork, fluted mahogany at the reception and stairwell, a lot of flowers and stained glass. The militiamen and the driver were standing off to one side, some hotel-management chap was hurrying up with a politely concerned look and a mobile phone, and—looking back—she saw that everyone was inside and the steps were clear and the door was being secured.

Jesus H. Christ,” she said. By now she was thoroughly ratded. She reached inside her coat again. Everybody froze.

She stayed her hand, and looked around; smiled grimly.

“Anybody else need a cigarette?”

The iron fire-escape door was spring-loaded and would clang if she let it swing back, so she closed it slowly, letting go of its edge at the last moment.

It clanged.

Myra looked up and down the fire-escape and around the back yard of the hotel. Dripping pipes, rattling ventilation ducts, soggy cartons, moss and lichen and flagstones. She padded down the steps, almost silent in her battered sneakers, old jeans, sweater and padded jacket. At the bottom she pushed her eyeband under the peak of the baseball cap under which she’d piled her still-grey hair, jammed her fists in the deep pockets, feeling the reassurance of the passport and the gun, and strolled across the yard, through another one-way gate, along an alley to Pitt Street then down on to Sauchiehall.

She caught her reflection in a shop-window, and smirked at how like a student she looked. It wasn’t a perfect reflection, so it also made her look flatteringly young—like she’d look in a month or two, she hoped. And she already had the bearing, she could see that as she glanced sideways at the reflection of her walk, jaunty and confident. Her joints didn’t hurt and her heels didn’t jar and she had so much energy she felt like running, or skipping, or jumping about just to burn some of it off. She couldn’t remember having felt this good when she really was young.

And things were coming back, memories of an earlier self, earlier personal tactics, like, before her rejuve, if she’d got caught up in a situation like that outside the hotel she’d have turned to the Guards to protect her, as though by reflex, and no doubt sparked a riot right there; not now, it had been a lightning calculation that the demonstrators, however, hostile to each other or to the militia, would not attack an innocent minion like the driver an would not attack her while she was shielded by the comrades. No violence in the workers’ movement, no enemies on the Left—it didn’t work all the time, but by and large the truce was honoured; mutual assured deterrence, perhaps, but then, what wasn’t?

Sauchiehall, Glasgow’s main shopping street, had been depedestranised since she’d last been here and it thrummed with through traffic, electric mostly but with a few coughing old internalcombustion engines and speeding cyclists and, jeez, yes, cantering horses among them. Myra raced the red light at the end of the street, kept up her jog as she crossed the pedestrian bridge over the howling intersection above the M8 and up into Woodlands Road. There she slowed and strolled again, relishing the old patch, the familiar territory, the nostalgia pricking her eyes. (God, she’d flyposted that very pillar of that overpass for a Critique seminar in 1976!)

But the area was posh now, full of Sikh men in suits—bankers and lawyers and doctors—and women in saris accompanied by kids and often as not a Scottish nanny; pavements over-parked with expensive, heavy Malaysian cars. Not like old times, not at all, except for the occasional curry aroma and the feel of the wind and the look of the scudding clouds above.

Talking to the comrades in the New Brit, that had been like old times. It had been like fucking time travel, and far more like homecoming than any encounter she’d had in New York. After she’d thanked the militia officers, flatly refused to press assault charges, and insisted on giving a huge tip to the driver, she’d retired to the hotel’s cafe for a coffee and a smoke with the five young people who’d escorted her in: Davy and Alison and Mike and Sandra and Rashid, all proud members of the Glasgow branch of the Workers’ Power Party, an organization much fallen-back from its high-water mark in the 2020s under the old Republic but still struggling along, still recruiting and still the British section of the Fourth International.

And they really were young, not rejuvenated old folks like her; she could hardly understand it, because she’d been thinking of the International, for decades now, as a club of ageing veterans. But then she thought of how the most formative and exciting experience of their childhoods had been a revolution—the British section of the Fall Revolution, yes!—and how that might have given them an idea of what the real (that is to say, ideal, never-actually-existing) Revolution might be like.

They’d regarded her, of course, as an old comrade, a veteran revolutionary who’d actually made a revolution, and actually ran a workers’ state; but they’d soon lost their reserve, perhaps unconsciously misled (she fancied) by her increasingly believable apparent youth; and told her in more detail than she needed to know of the inevitable rancorous rivalries that had pitted them against, and the rest of the local Left for, her regime’s liberal critics and/or Sino-Soviet communist foes.

She was grateful for their support, of course, and told them so; but she thought their ingrained acceptance of far-left factionalism was blinding them to the depth of genuine hatred and moral outrage she’d aroused, and indeed to its justification. There had been nothing in the angry man’s diatribe which she hadn’t at one time or another said to herself.

You fucking sell-out, you fucking capitalist whore. Yes, comrade, you have a point there. There may be something in what you say.

At the same time she found that the comrades were over-solucitious, certain that she’d be in danger if she wandered around on her own in Glasgow. They urged her to contact the consulate, and to travel officially. Myra had demurred, pointing out that that was exactly what had got her into this trouble in the first place. She hadn’t told them what she did intend to do, however—somebody must have leaked the news of her unheralded and early arrival, and she had no reason to suppose it might not be one of them.

She passed the old church, St Jude’s, which still looked much too grand, too catholic for the tiny denomination it served, and opposite it the Halt Bar where she’d drunk with David Reid and with Jon Wilde, separately and together, during and after the brief, intense affairs that had nudged all their lives on to their particular paths.

And thus, the lives and deaths of countless others. Jon had virtually started the space movement, and founded Space Merchants. Reid had built up Mutual Protection, and Myra the ISTWR. All from small beginnings, inconsequential at the time, all eventually affecting history on a scale usually attributed to Great Men.

Perhaps if they had not, there would have been some other Corsican… but no. Chaos reigned, here as elsewhere.

At the green bridge over the Kelvin she paused, gazing down at the brown spate and white swirl. How trivial were the causes of the courses of any particle, any bubble on that flow. No, it was wilder than that, because the water was at least confined by its banks: it was more like how the whole course of a river could be deflected by a pebble, by a grain of sand, a blade of grass, at its first upwelling; where the great forces of gravity and erosion and all the rest did minute but momentous battle with the surface tension of a particular drop. History was a river where every drop was a potential new source, a foun-tainhead of future Amazons.

She walked on, past the salient of Kelvingrove Park on the left and up the steepening slope of Gibson Street, and turned to the right along the still tree-shaded avenue to the Institute. She rang the bell, smiling wryly at the polished brass of the name-plate. Once the Institute of Soviet and East European Studies, then of Russian and East European Studies, then…

The Institute for the Study of Post-Civilised Societies, was what they called it now.

The woman who opened the door looked very East European, in her size (small) and expression (suspicious). Her dark eyes widened slightly.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Godwin.”

Tes, hello.” Myra stuck out her hand. The woman shook it, with brief reluctance, tugging Myra inside and closing the door at the same time.

“This place is watched,” she said. She had black bobbed hair; her age was hard to make out. Her clothes were as shabby as Myra’s: blue denim smock, black jeans grey at the knees. “My name is Irina Guzulescu. Pleased to meet you.”

They stood looking at each other in the narrow hallway. Institutional linoleum, grey paint and green trim, black stairway. The place smelt of old paper and cigarette smoke. Posters—shiny repro or faded original—from the Soviet Union and the Former Union: Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev, Antonov, solemn; Gagarin, smiling. The Yeltsingrad Siege: heroic child partisans aiming their Stingers at the Pamyat Zeppelins. The building was completely silent and there was nobody else around.

“I was kind of expecting more people here,” Myra said. “I left a message.”

“Like I said.”

“Oh.” Myra felt baffled and miffed.

“Your cases arrived safely,” Irina said, as though to mollify her. She escorted her up the narrow black-bannistered stairs to the library. The stair carpet was frayed to the point of criminal negligence. The library itself was cramped, a maze of bookcases through which one had to go crabwise. Several generations of information technology were carefully racked above the reading-table. Myra’s crates were stacked beside it.

TU leave you to it,” Irina said.

Thanks.”

Myra, alone, pulled down her eyeband, upped the gain, looked down at the crates and sighed. They were still bound with metal tape. She clicked her old Leatherman out of its pouch and got to work opening them, coiling the treacherously sharp bands carefully into a waste-paper basket. Then she had to pull the nails, like teeth. Finally she was able to get the files out.

She sorted the paper files into stacks: her personal stuff—diaries and letters and so on—and political, sorted by time and organization, all the way back from her ISTWR years through to internal factional documents from that New York SWP branch in the 1970s. These last still made her smile: had there really ever been anyone daft enough to choose as his nomme de guerre for a debate about the armed struggle “Dr Ahmed Estraguel”?

She worked her way, similarly, through the formats and conversions from Dissembler through DoorWays to Linux to Windows to DOS, and through storage media from the optical disks and bubble-magnetic wafers and CD-RWs (’CD-Rubs’, they used to be called) to the floppy disks, almost jumping out of her seat at the noise the ancient PC made when it took the first of those. In the quiet building, it sounded like a washing-machine on the spin cycle.

After about an hour and a half, which passed in a kind of trance, all her optical and electronic files were copied to the Institute’s electronic archive. She blinked up her eyeband menu, and invoked Parvus.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hello,” he said.

She felt almost awkward. “Do you mind having a copy taken, and its being downloaded?”

The entity laughed. “Mind? Of course not! Why should I mind?”

“OK,” Myra said. She uncoiled a fibre-optic cable from the terminal port and socketed it to her eye-band. “I want your copy to guard this collection of files—” she ran her highlighting finger over it “—and anything you’ve got with you right now, applying the kind of discretionary access criteria that your existing parameters permit. Give the scaling a half-life of, oh, fifty years. Got that?”

“Yes.” Parvus smiled, doubled, then one of him disappeared dramatically like a cartoon genie swooshing back into a bottle.

“Done,” he said. It had taken longer than she’d expected—she must have had more files on her personal datadeck than she’d realised.

“Thank you,” said Myra. “Anything to report, by the way?”

Parvus shrugged expansively. “Nothing that can’t wait. Except that Glasgow Airport is closed.”

“What?”

Surely not a coup, not here—

“Fighting on the perimeter. Damage to the runways. Just Green partisans, nothing serious, but there’s no chance you’ll get your flight on Monday.”

“Oh, shit. Book me a train. For tomorrow, OK? Catch you later.”

She disengaged the cable link and let it roll back. Then she got to work labelling the stacks, dating the paper folders and making notes for the Institute’s archivist.

Somebody clattered up the stairs, strode into the library and flicked the light on. Myra turned around sharply and met the surprised gaze of the girl who’d identified her at the demo.

“Oh!” said the girl. She slowly slid her tartan scarf from around her neck and flicked her long, thick black hair out from under her denim jacket’s collar. “What—what are you doing here?”

Myra straightened up, feeling irrationally pleased that she was marginally taller than the younger woman.

“I was about to ask you the same question,” she said.

“I work here! I’m a post-grad student.”

She said it with such confusion of face, such a widening of her big brown eyes, that Myra couldn’t help but smile.

“And a political activist, too, I understand.”

The girl nodded firmly. “Aye.” The comment seemed to have allowed her self-confidence to recover. She stepped over to a chair and sat, stretching her legs out and propping her boots on a book-caddy. Myra observed this elaborately casual behaviour with detached amusement.

“I was an activist myself, when I studied here,” Myra said, half-sitting on the edge of the table.

“I know,” the girl said coldly. “I’ve read your thesis. Detente and Crisis in the Soviet Economy.”

Myra smiled. “It still stands up pretty well, I think.”

Teah. Can’t say the same about your politics, though.” She frowned, swinging her feet back to the floor and leaning forward. “In a way it’s nothing… personal, you understand? I mean, when I read what you wrote, I like the person who wrote it. What I can’t do is square that with what you’ve become.”

That was laying it on the line! Myra felt a jolt of pain and guilt.

“I don’t know if I can, either,” she said. “I changed. Real politics is more complicated than—ah, fuck it. Look—uh, what’s your name?”

“Menial MacClafferty.”

“OK- Menial. The fact is, the Russian Revolution got defeated, and never got repeated—perhaps because the defeat was so devastating that it made any subsequent attempt impossible.” She laughed harshly. “And like the man said, it’s gonna be socialism or barbarism. Socialism’s out the window, it was dead before I was born. So barbarism it is. We’re fucked.”

Menial was shaking her head. “No, nothing’s inevitable. We make our own history—the future isn’t written down. ‘The point is to change it.’ Look at the Sheenisov, they’re building a real workers’ democracy, they’ve proven it’s still possible—and what do you do? You fight them! On the side of the Yanks and the Kazakhstani capitalists.”

“Like I said,” Myra sighed. “Real politics is complicated. Real lives, mine and those of the people I’ve taken responsibility for. The future may not be written but the past bloody well is, and it hasn’t left me with many options.”

“You mean, you haven’t left yourself-—”

“Tell you what,” Myra said, suddenly annoyed. She waved at the stack of cardboard and paper around her. “Here’s my life. There’s a lot more on the computer.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Password’s ‘Luxemburg and Parvus’ for the easy stuff. You’re welcome to all of it. The hard stuff, the real dirty secrets, I’ve put a hundred-year embargo on, and even after that it’ll be the devil of a job to hack past it. If you’re still around in a couple of centuries, give it a look.”

“This is what you’re doing?” Merrial asked. “Turning over your archives to the Institute? Why?”

Myra could feel her lips stretch into a horrible grin. “Because here it has a very slightly better chance of surviving the next few weeks, let alone the next few centuries. You want my advice, kiddo, you stop worrying about socialism and start getting ready for barbarism, because that’s what’s coming down the pike, one way or another.”

Merrial stood up and glared down at Myra. “Maybe you’ve given up, but I won’t!”

“Well, good luck to you,” said Myra. “I mean that.”

The young woman looked at her with an unreadable expression. “And to you, I suppose,” she said ungraciously, and turned on her heel and stalked out. Whether automatically or deliberately, she switched off the light as she went. Myra blinked, fiddled with her eyeband and got back to work.

“Everything all right?” Irina Guzulescu was limned in the backlight of the library doorway.

Myra straightened up and dusted off her hands.

“Yeah, I’m doing fine, thanks.” She laughed. “Sorry about the dark, I was using my eyeband to see with, instead of putting the light on.”

“Probably just as well,” the small woman said. She advanced cautiously into the room, past the opened crates and labelled stacks of Myra’s archives. “Some of the books in here are so fragile, I fear sometimes one photon could…” She smiled, and handed Myra a mug of coffee.

“Oh, thanks.” It was cold in the library’s still, stale air. She clasped her hands around the china’s warmth. “Is there anywhere I can go for a smoke?” she asked.

“Oh, sure, come on down to the basement.”

The basement seemed hardly changed; the big table that took up most of the room brought back memories—the long discussions and arguments around it, the adventures planned there, the afternoon she’d talked with Jon and Dave, and gone with Jon.

Along the way, Irina had picked up her own mug at the kitchenette cubby-hole. She sat down opposite Myra and shoved an ashtray across the table. In the unforgiving light she looked older; she’d obviously had the treatments, but the weight of her years still pulled at her face; it didn’t sag, but it showed the strain.

“Well,” Myra said, lighting up, “uh, that thing you said? About the place being watched? Why’s that?”

Irina moved her hand as though flicking ash. “Police mentality,” she said. “Obviously if we study the post-civilised, we’re potentially sympathetic to them, and to the enemy within.”

“The what?”

“The Greens.” Irina laughed. “The FU and the Greens, it’s like it used to be with the SU and the Reds. In the good old days of the Cold War, being interested in the other side at all was suspect, no matter how useful it might be. And of course the same on the other side.” She smiled. T worked at the Institute of American Studies in Bucharest. Securitate on my case all the time.”

Jesus. You must be nearly as old as I am.” Myra thought the remark tactless as soon as it was out of her mouth, but Irina preened herself at it.

“Older,” she said proudly. “I’m a hundred and ten.”

“Wow. Hundred and five, myself. Had the earlier treatments, of course, but I’ve just had the nano job.”

“Ah, good for you, you won’t regret it.” She smiled distandy. “You know, Myra Godwin, you are part of the history. Of this Institute, and of the societies it was set up to study. I supervised a student a few years ago in a PhD thesis on the ISTWR.”

“Never thought I’d end up in charge of my very own deformed workers’ state.” A dark chuckle. “Not that I ever believed that’s what it was, or is,” Myra hastened to add. “Or that such a thing could exist. Ticktin cured me of that delusion a long time ago.”

“Hmm,” said Irina. “It was Mises and Hayek for me, actually. Ticktin didn’t rate them very highly. Or me.” She laughed. “Used to call me ‘Ceauşescu’s last victim’.”

“Well, yes,” Myra said. “Never found the liberals terribly persuasive myself, to be honest. The question that always used to come to mind was, ‘Where are the swift cavalry?’ ”

Irina shook her head. “I’m sorry?”

“Oh, it was something Mises said. If Europe ever went socialist, it would collapse, and the barbarians would be back, sweeping across the steppe on swift horses. Well, half Europe was—not socialist as I would see it, but as Mises would see it—and where are the swift cavalry?”

Irina stared at her. As though unaware of what she was doing—the reflexes of a habit she must have thought was conquered coming back—she reached across the table for Myra’s cigarettes and lit one up.

“Oh, Myra Godwin-Davidova, you are so blind. Where are the swift cavalry, indeed.” She paused, narrowing her eyes against the stream of smoke.

“What mode of production would you say exists in the Former Union?”

“The post-civilised mode?”

“A euphemism.” She waved smoke. “What would your Engels call a society where cities are just markets and camps, where most people eat what they can grow and hunt for themselves, where almost all industry is at the village level, where there is no notion of the nation?”

“Well, OK, it’s an old-fashioned term,” Myra said, with half a laugh, “but I suppose technically you could call it barbarism. Technologically advanced barbarism, but yes, that’s what it is.”

“Precisely,” Irina said. She looked at her cigarette with puzzled distaste and stubbed it out. “There are your swift cavalry. Look outside our cities, at the Greens. In fact, look inside our cities. There are your swift cavalry!”

Myra really had never thought of it like that.

“The only swift cavalry I’m worried about,” she said bitterly, “are the goddamn Sheenisov.”

To her astonishment and dismay, Irina began to cry. She pulled a grubby tissue from her pocket and sobbed and sniffled into it for a minute. On a sudden impulse, Myra reached across the table and grasped her hand.

“Oh God,” Irina said at last. “I’m sorry.” She gave a long sniff and threw the tissue away, accepted Myra’s offer of a cigarette.

“No, Fm sorry,” Myra said. T seem to have said something to upset you.”

Irina blinked several times. “No, no. It’s my own fault. Oh, God, if you just knew. I stayed here to see you, not just to let you in.” The cigarette tip glowed to a cone, she was sucking so hard. “Nobody else wanted to come in this morning and meet you. They think you are a terrible person, a monster, a criminal. I don’t—” She blinked again, brightening. “I go back, you know. To Romania, and to… other ‘post-civilised’ countries. All right, to the Former Union. And you know what? People are happy there, with their farms and workshops and their local armies and petty loyalties. The bureaucrats are gone, and the mafias have no prohibitions to get rich on, and they are gone. The provinces have their small wars and their feuds, but—” she smiled now, sadly “— I sound like a feminist, if you remember them, but the fact is, it’s just a testosterone thing. Young men will kill each other, that’s the way of it. For a woman, Moscow—hell, any provincial post-Soviet town—is safer than Glasgow.”

Oh, not another, Myra thought. A Green fellow-traveller, a political pilgrim. I have seen the past and it works.

“And when I see something like communism coming back,” Irina went on, “when I see the goddamn Sheenisov riding in their tanks, collectivising again, assimilating all those little new societies, I want to see them stopped.”

She looked straight into Myra’s eyes. “You can do it, you can stop them. You must fight, Myra. You’re our only hope.”

Myra felt like crying, herself.

The Brits just didn’t do trains.

They’d invented them. They had a couple of centuries’ experience with them. They had more actual enthusiasts for trains per head of the population than anywhere else. They’d invented trainspotting. And they still couldn’t seem to figure out how to make trains run on time.

So here they were on a bright, cold Sunday morning, somewhere south of Penrith, and under traction from one electric engine that sounded like it came from the sort of gadget you would use for home improvements. Wooded hillsides slid slowly past. At least she had a seat in First Class. The train’s guard was just wandering through the adjoining Second Class, where all the screaming kids were, and the refreshments trolley was being trundled along behind him.

Myra lit a cigarette and gazed out. She felt relatively content, even with a long journey, made longer by bloody typical Brit inefficiency, ahead of her. She had plenty of reading to do, right there in her eyeband. Parvus had prepared her a digest of recent British foreign policy, last time she’d done a download. About 100 kilobytes, not counting hyperlinks and appendices. Stacks of v-mail to catch up with.

Not to mention the news. By now there was a regular CNN spot, on the world-affairs specialist news-feed, dealing with the ISTWR. The demos opposing the policy of federation with Kazakhstan had grown to a daily assembly of two thousand or so, with a couple of hundred people braving the chilly nights in tents in Revolution Square. Some of their banners were what Myra would’ve expected from her local ul-tralefts, the sort of folks she’d tangled with outside the New Brit. Others were liberal—pro-UN—or libertarian, with a pro-space, pro-Outwarder undertone.

Nobody on the street—or on the net—seemed to have yet found out about the nukes; a small mercy, but Myra suspected that some at least of those behind the various demonstrators knew about them. Reid, for one, certainly did, and she thought it possible that his hand was reaching for them through the ISTWR’s home-grown space-movement militants.

Myra had spent the first hour or so of the journey at her virtual keyboard, writing out reports back and instructions and advice for her commissars, Denis Gubanov in particular. She wanted every chekist he could spare to get busy infiltrating and investigating these demos.

The partition doors hissed and thunked open. The guard came through, a tall, stooping man in a uniform, with a holstered pistol on his hip.

“Tickets from Carlisle, please.” He had a slightly camp voice, gentle and pleasant. He smiled and checked the tickets of the business executive sitting opposite and across from Myra.

“Scuse me,” the steward sang out, behind him. The steward was a small, scrawny youth in a white shirt, tartan bow-tie and trews. Spiky black hair.

The trolley rattled and jangled into the compartment. The guard stepped aside to let it pass. As he did so the train lurched a little, setting the trolley’s contents ringing again, and the brakes squealed as the train came to a halt.

There was a crackly announcement, from which Myra could only make out the words “trees on the line”.

A ripple of derision ran through the carriage. Myra added her hoot to it, and glanced out of the windows. There were trees beside the line, to the right, but they were about a hundred yards away, across a puddled meadow, On the other side, a sharp slope, with trees above the scree.

She heard a gasp from the steward, and a sort of cough from the guard. A large quantity of some red liquid splashed across the table she was sitting at, and some of it poured over the edge and on to the lap of her skirt. Myra recoiled, looking up with a momentary flash of civilised annoyance—her first impression was that somehow the steward had spilled a bottle of red wine over her.

The guard fell sideways across the table with a shocking thud. His throat gaped and flapped like a gillnslit, still pumping. She could see the rim of his severed windpipe, white, like broken plastic. His mouth was open too, the tongue quivering, dripping spitde. His eyes were very wide. He raised his head, and looked as though he were trying to say something to her. Then he stopped trying. His head hit the table with a second thump, diminuendo.

The steward was still standing, clutching a short knife in one hand and an automatic pistol, evidendy the guard’s, in the other. His shirtcuff had blood on it, as did the front of his shirt. It looked like he’d had a nose-bleed which he’d tried to staunch on his sleeve. It was surprising how thin a liquid blood was, when it was freshly spilled, still splashy, a wine-dark stream.

The steward flicked his tongue across his lips. He waved the pistol in a way that suggested he was not entirely familiar with its use. Then, in a movement like a conjuring trick, he’d swapped the knife and the pistol around and worked the slide. Lock and load; he knew how to use it, all right.

“Don’t fucking move,” he said.

Myra didn’t fucking move. She’d stuck her small emergency-pistol in the top of her boot when she’d taken off the holster with the Glock, which was now lying under her jacket on the luggage-rack above. There was no way she could reach either weapon in time. Nor could she blink up a comms menu on her eyeband—the phone was in her jacket, too. The other passenger, who was sitting across the aisle and facing the opposite direction, didn’t move either. Somebody, not a child, in the Second-Class compartment was screaming. The steward had his back to that compartment, and at least several people in there must have been aware of what had happened. Without moving her head, or even her eyes, Myra could see white faces, round eyes and mouths, through the glass partition.

She was thinking why doesn’t someone just shoot this fucker in the back? Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement outside, along both sides of the train. Men and women on horseback. Long hair; feathers and hats; leather jerkins and weskits; rifles and crossbows brandished or slung. Like cowboys and Indians. Green partisans. Barbarians.

Far behind her, near the back of train she guessed, there was a brief exchange of fire and a distant, thin screaming. It went on and on like a car alarm.

Every door in the train, internal and external, thunked open. OK, so somebody’d got to the controls. Myra felt a cold draught against the warm and now sticky liquid on her knees. The colour washed out of the world. Myra realised that she was about to go into shock, and breathed hard and deep.

Some of the horsemen, dismounted, leapt aboard the train. At the end of each carriage, a pair of them faced opposite ways, covering the passengers with rifles. The man who landed facing Myra filled the partition doorway. “Barbarian” was not an epithet, applied to him; he was tall and broad, he had a beard and pony-tail gleaming with grease, and his jacket and chaps bore smooth-edged, irregularly shaped plates of metal attached to the leather with metal rings, a crude and partial armour.

“Hands on heads! Everybody outside! On to the track!”

Myra put her hands on top of her head and stood up and shuffled sideways into the aisle. The steward-punk who’d murdered the guard still had her covered, and was backing out past the big fellow, whom he obviously knew. The businessman, standing up, had a curiously intent look on his face. Myra guessed instantly that he was about to make himself a hero, and in a fortuitous moment of eye contact she shook her head. His shoulders slumped slighdy, even with his hands in the air; but he complied with the shouted command and the minutely gestured suggestion, jumping out to the right and landing on the permanent way on his feet and hands, then scrambling up and running across the adjacent track to the low bank with the fence by the flooded meadow.

Myra raised her hands and stepped over the guard’s buckled legs, edged past the barbarian and the steward and jumped out. She landed lightly, the impact jolting her pistol uncomfortably but reassuringly deeper down the side of her boot, and walked across the track and up the bank, then turned to face the train.

People were all doing as she had done, or helping kids—silent now—down to the broken stones. The Greens strode or stood or rode up and down, yip-peeing, all the time keeping their rifles trained on the passengers. There were at least a score of the attackers on each side of the train, probably more. About a hundred people, passengers and crew, had come off the train. Somebody was still on the train and still screaming.

Myra stood with her hands on her head and shivered. The sight of so many people with their hands up made her feel sick. The barbarians probably intended to loot the train—they must know that some at least of the passengers would be carrying concealed weapons, but they weren’t as yet even bothering to search for them. The hope that they would be spared would be enough to stop almost anyone from making an inevitably doomed attempt to fight. It might just stop them until it was too late. If the Greens intended a massacre they would do it, of that she was sure, just when least expected. The Greens would manoeuvre inconspicuously so that they were out of each other’s lines of fire, and the fusillade would come. Then a bit of rape and robbery, and a few final finishing shots to the head for the wounded if they were lucky.

One tall man in a fur cloak and leather-strapped cotton leggings was stalking around from one group of passengers to another, peering at and talking to every young or young-looking woman. When he reached Myra he stopped on the slope just below her, rested his hand on his knee and looked up, grinning. He was clean-shaven, with long sun-bleached red hair tied back with a thong around his brow. On another thong, around his neck, hung a whistle. Beneath his fur cloak he wore a faded green T-shirt printed with the old UN Special Forces motto: SORT ’EM OUT—LET GOD KILL ’EM ALL.

“Ah,” he said, “you must be Myra Godwin!”

He had a London accent and a general air of enjoying himself hugely. Myra stared at him, shaken at being thus singled out. He recognised her, and she had a disquieting feeling that she’d seen him somewhere before.

“Yes,” she said. “What’s it to you?”

“You got any proof of that?”

“Diplomatic passport, jacket pocket, above the seat I was in.”

“I’ll check,” he warned, eyes narrowing.

“Oh, and bring my fucking Glock as well. You are in deep shit, mister.”

“We’ll see about that,” he said. He turned around and yelled at the big man who’d emptied her carriage; he was still standing in the doorway, rifle pointed upward.

“Yo! Fix! Get this lady’s stuff out. From above her seat.”

He didn’t take his eyes off her as the big man passed him the folded jacket and he fingered through it. One quick glance down at the opened passport, and he put the whistle to his lips and blew a loud, trilling note, twice.

“Right, Fix, spread the word,” he said. “We got her. Tax them and leave. Let’s get outta here before the helicopters come.”

The other man jogged off, shouting orders. In a minute, out of the corner of her eye, Myra could see the tax being organised: the people from the train had all been herded into one group, and a man with a shotgun and a woman with a sack were going around, taking money and jewellery and small pieces of kit and personal weapons. People handed their stuff over with a sickeningly eager compliance.

“Want your jacket back?”

Myra nodded. He tossed it, still folded, to her; held on to the holstered automatic, the passport and the uplink phone.

“You’ll get these back later,” he said.

She put the jacket on. It was a thin suit jacket and didn’t do much to keep out the chill.

“What do you mean, ‘later’?” she asked.

He laughed at her.

Tou’re coining with us. Well let you go soon.”

The wind just got colder.

Myra gestured at her blood-spattered blouse and blood-soaked skirt.

“Excuse me if I don’t believe you.”

“War is hell, ink?” he agreed biighuy. He moved his hand as though tossing something light away. “The guard was a spy, anyway.”

Myra said nothing.

“OK, youse lot!” some guy on a horse was shouting. “Get back on the train and stay there. Don’t try chasing us, don’t anyone try shooting after us. “ ’Cause if you do, we’ll come back an’ kill youse all. And don’t leave the train after we’re gone, neither, or the choppers will pick you off in the fields.”

The group filed into the train through one of the doorways. Myra could see them dispersing along the carriages.

“That’s all you’re going to do?”

The red-haired man nodded. “This time.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “I mean, I feel sorry for these people, but not sorry enough to kill them. And I’m not going to waste time searching the train for valuables. No point in being greedy, otherwise the trains would just stop coming through. Just enough tax to cover the op, you know.”

“What op?”

He stared at her. “Getting hold of you.”

Oh, shit. She’d thought that was what he’d been driving at. She blinked rapidly, recording his image, and triggering a search protocol on her eyeband, to see if this knowledgeable bandit was known himself.

“You did all this just to get me?” She smiled sourly, over chattering teeth. “How did you know I was on the train?”

The man looked at her scornfully. “That wasn’t difficult,” he said. He waved a hand expansively but evasively. “We’re everywhere.”

“Seems a bit excessive.”

“Some things you just can’t say in a phone call,” he said idly. Then he shifted his feet and straightened up, grinning. “Besides, raiding is such fun.” He drew in a long breath of fresh air as though inhaling a drug. “It’s a lifestyle thing.”

A slender, dark-skinned woman with curly, wavy blonde hair down to her waist rode up on a big black horse, leading a similar horse and a dun mare. She smiled at the tall man, and turned a colder smile to Myra.

“You know how to ride?”

In a moment everyone was mounted. Myra tugged up her bloody skirt as she settled in the saddle. The tall man waved and whistled three blasts. Suddenly the Greens were dispersing away from the train, diagonally up the scree-slope to the trees or, as those around Myra did, straight across the wet meadow. She found herself on a hell-for-leather gallop behind Fix, with the blonde-haired woman and the red-haired man on either flank. Over a hedge, down a path, into a narrow wooded dell.

Somewhere far away, the sound of a helicopter. Then some short machine-gun bursts, though at whom they were aimed, Myra did not wish to guess.

Myra rode silently like the others, but in the spectral company of Parvus; the AI was murmuring into her bone-conduction earclip and flashing Grolier screens up in front of her eyes. Nothing more current was available without the uplink phone. He’d provisionally identified the man who’d captured her, but it wasn’t very enlightening—the latest pictures of him were from about twelve years ago, and he hadn’t been a land-pirate then. He had been a net commentator, and—before that—a minor agitator in the Fall Revolution. The television clips of his rants explained why he looked vaguely familiar—she’d watched the British national democratic revolution in the time she’d been able to spare from following the Siberian Popular Front’s assault on Vladivostok.

The dell opened to a larger valley, thickly settled. Old stone houses, geodesic domes, wattle huts, new thatched cottages, a few nanofactured carbon-shell constructions. A lot of cattle and sheep in the fields; kids running everywhere. The path became a gravel road which widened, at the centre of the main street, to a small cobbled square. In the centre, just by a verdigrised copper statue of a Tommy with a fixed bayonet, memorial to the fallen of three world wars, was an outdated but still effective anti-aircraft missile battery. No higher than the statue itself, it held a rack of a dozen metre-long rockets. Myra could read the small print of what they were tipped with: laser-fuser tactical nukes.

People crowded around, welcoming the returning raiders. They called the red-haired man what she thought at first was “Red”, which made sense; then realised it was “Rev”, which made no sense at all. It certainly wasn’t the name her search had come up with. The kids were cheering and doing the high-stepping, highjumping Zulu war-dance called toyi-toying.

Fix reined in his horse in front of a large stone building which had a low-ceilinged front room open to the street: a cafe. Myra followed suit, dismounted and was led through into a back room with a fire, and high leather chairs around a table. The room smelt of woodsmoke and alcohol and unwashed humanity and damp dogs.

“Have a seat.”

Myra sat and the two men and the woman sat down opposite her. They regarded her in silence for a moment. She decided to hazard the Grolier’s guess.

Jordan Brown,” she said. “And you must be Cat Duvalier.” That name was in the entry’s small print as Jordan Brown’s wife.

“Well done,” the man said, unperturbed. “Nifty little machine you’ve got there.”

Myra flipped the eyeband back. “Yes. So tell me, Mr Brown, what it is you want.”

“It’s Reverend Brown,” he said. “First Minister of the Last Church of the Unknowable God.” He smiled. “But please, call me Jordan.” He looked over his shoulder and shouted an order. “Beer and brandy!”

He slung his cloak over a chair; without it, leaning over the table in his T-shirt and wild hair, he looked somewhat more intimidating. Some absence in his gaze reminded Myra of spetznatz veterans, or old Afghantsi. The Blue Beret slogan on the T-shirt just might not be ironic, she thought. A boy padded in carrying glasses and bottles.

“All we’ve got at the moment,” the woman called Cat said. “What’ll you have?”

“I’ll have a beer.”

She accepted the drink without thanks, and lit a cigarette without asking permission or offering to share. Damned if she was going to act as though she was enjoying their hospitality.

“You were saying, Reverend.”

Jordan Brown spread his hands. Just to talk things over.”

“You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to do that.”

“I sure have,” he said. Tve risked the lives of my fighters, I’ve exposed one of my agents, I’ve had a man slaughtered like a pig—which he was, but that’s nothing to you—and had another train guard shot in the belly just for trying to do his job. Quite possibly, some of the passengers have already fallen to friendly fire.” He shrugged. “And I would have killed more, if I’d had to. The point is, I’ll get away with it.” He waved his hand above his head. “We all will. The helicopter was the worst the British can do against us.”

Myra looked straight at him. “Like I care. You might not get off so lightly when this gets back to the Kazakhstani Republic.”

Jordan nodded soberly. “No doubt I’m trampling all over diplomatic niceties. But it’s you that came to Britain to get help, not the other way round. So you’ll forgive me for not worrying too much.”

“Hah!”

“Anyway,’Jordan went on, Tve no wish to get into a pissing-contest. I have something more important to say to you. So. Are you willing to have a serious conversation?”

Myra shrugged, looking around theatrically. “Why not? I don’t see any better entertainment.” She poured a brandy chaser, again without false courtesy.

Jordan Brown leaned forward on his bare forearms, took a swig of brandy and began to speak.

^You’ve come to Britain to get military aid against the Sheenisov. You might even get it. What I want to tell you is two things. One, don’t do it. It won’t do you any good. You can’t fight communism with imperialism. It’s just throwing napalm on the fire.”

Myra favoured him with a look that said she’d heard this before. “If you say so. And what else do you have to tell me? Try and make it something that’s news to me, how about that?”

“You’re in worse trouble than you think,” Jordan said. “The entity you call the General is working for the Sheenisov.”

Myra almost choked on her sip of brandy. She coughed fire for a moment. She felt totally disoriented.

“What? And how the hell would you know?”

“Strictly speaking,’Jordan Brown said, “the Sheenisov are working for it. As to how I know He held out a hand towards Cat. She leaned forward as Jordan leaned back.

“Myra,” she said earnesdy, “I may be a barbarian now, but I used to be like you. I used to be in the International.”

“Oh, Jesus!” Myra exploded. “Half the fucking world is run by ex-Trots! Tell me something I don’t know, like how you heard about the FI mil org—the General.”

“I was coming to that,” Gat said, mildly enough—but Myra could read the younger woman’s face like a computer screen, and she could see the momentary spasm of impatient rage. This barbarian lady was someone who’d got dangerously used to not being interrupted. Cat forced a smile. T still hear rumours.”

“Rumours? That’s what you’re relying on?”

“It seems you’ve just confirmed one,” Jordan said, dryly.

Myra acknowledged that she had. But it seemed a situation where stonewalling would be less productive than admitting that the General existed, and trying to find out where the rumour came from. Parvus hadn’t spotted anything like that…

“Did you pick this up off the net, or what?”

Jordan looked at Fix and Cat, and all three of them laughed. To Myra, it sounded like a mocking laugh.

“God, you people,” Jordan said. His tone changed as he went on, becoming an invocation, or an imprecation. “You have a screen between you and the world all the time. We have the human world, and the natural world. We have the whole world that you call marginal, the scattered society of free humanity. We have the whisper in the market, the gesture on the road, the chalked mark on the pavement. The twist of a leaf, the turning of a twig. We have the smell carried on the wind. We have the night sky and the names of all its fixed and moving and falling stars. We have our friends in all your cities and camps and armies. We have the crystal radio that receives and the spark-gap that transmits, in codes you have forgotten, on wavelengths you no longer monitor, in languages that you disdained to learn.”

He tipped his head back and began glossolaliat-ing in Morse code, da-da-dit-di-da-dididididah… Cat and Fix cocked their heads, listening, and after a minute grinned and guffawed.

Jordan looked a little smug at this demonstration. “See, I can joke in tongues. We have our own Internet, and our own International. Don’t bother looking for a leak from yours.”

“Besides,” said Fix, speaking up for the first time, “we know this thing from way back. Jordan and Cat fought in the revo, and so did it. It was called the Black Plan, and it was used by—or it used—the Army of the New Republic. We’ve all encountered it, and we know where it went. To New View, your commie-cult commune in space.”

“And we know how it thinks,” said Cat. “We can see its hand in what the Sheenisov are doing, in their tactics and in their strategy. It’s not exactly malevolent, but it is… ambitious.”

“So?” Myra shrugged, trying hard to stay cool, and to reassert her control over the conversation. “We—that is, my country, Kazakhstan—” there, she had said it, and the words my country, Kazakhstan could not be unsaid “—we are not relying on this thing. We take no orders from it, not since—well, it got on the wrong side of me, put it that way. I don’t say I believe you about its taking the side of the Sheenisov, but—let’s say I wouldn’t put that past it. If you’re so worried about it, why do you object to my getting help to stop it?”

“Because,” said Jordan, emphasising each word with a chop of the hand, “it can not be stopped. Not by fighting it. If it finds itself on the losing side it will change sides, or work for both sides, and it will win. Its only real enemies are rival AIs, such as those of the space movement, and those strange ghosts of genius that some of the spacers are trying to turn into. It will defeat them, or absorb them, and then it will be content in its… singular godhood, spreading with humanity to all the worlds to come. It will look after our best interests, whether we like it or not.”

“Hah, come on. You can’t possibly know that.”

Jordan sat back and looked at her with an ironic expression. “Oh, yes I can, but call it an educated guess if it makes you feel better. If the British Republic were to come in on your side, I’m sure they’d be delighted to get their old planning-system back. They’d jump at any offers it made them. Or they would accept similar Greek gifts from the space movement’s AIs. So whoever wins—the Western powers, the space movement or the Sheenisov—humanity will be living inside some machine or other, for ever.”

“Would that be so bad?”

“No,” said Jordan. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He jumped up. “But what the hell. You do as seems best. If you still want to ally with the British when you get to London, go right ahead. Much good it’ll do you.”

He downed his remaining brandy and looked around at the others, then at Myra. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you to the road.”

She rode along beside the red-haired man, troubled but unconvinced by his strange tirades. Wet branches of beech and birch brushed past them, making her duck and blink. The stony path led up the side of the hill above the settlement. Myra looked back down at it before it passed from view.

“How do you people live?” she asked. “You can’t live just on raiding, and some day soon, according to you, there’ll be nothing left to raid. Like, who pays for these anti-missile missiles?”

“We all do,” Jordan said. “We don’t have taxes, that’d be a laugh. We—not just this village, all of the free people—have a couple of simple economic principles that have been applied in communities like this for nearly a hundred years now. One is that we don’t have rent, but land ain’t free—God ain’t making any more of it, but we keep right on making more people. So we apply the equivalent of rent to community purposes, like defence. The other is that any individual, or any group, can issue their own currency, backed up at their own risk. No landlords, no usurers, and no officials.”

“Oh, great,” said Myra. “A peasant’s idea of Utopia.

Single tax and funny money! Now I’ve heard everything!”

“It does work,” Jordan said. “We, as you can see, flourish. We’re the future.”

Jordan,” she said, “you know I found some clips of you on my encyclopaedia? Well, from them I’d never have figured you for going over to the Green Slime. Or for a preacher, come to that.”

Jordan laughed, unoffended. “The world will fall to the barbarians or to the machines. I chose the barbarians, and I chose to spread some enlightenment among them. Hence the preaching, which was—to begin with—of a kind of rationalism. I can honestly say I have led many of my people away from the dark, heathen worship of Gaia, and from witchcraft and superstition. But I also found, like many another missionary, that I preferred their way of life to the one from which I’d come. And along with loving nature, I came to love nature’s God.”

“You were an atheist.”

“So I believed. I later realised that I was an agnostic. A militant agnostic, if you like. All theology is idolatry, all scripture is apocrypha. All we can say is that God is One. God encompasses the world, there is nothing outside him, and nothing opposed to him. How could there be? So God approves of all that happens, because all that happens is his will. God loves the world, all of it, from the Hubble to the Planck, from the Bang to the Crunch. God is in the hawk hovering up there and in the mouse that cowers from its claws in yonder field. God is in the sickle and the sheaf, the hammer and the hot iron, the sword and the wound. God is in the fire and in the sun and in the holocaust. God was in the spy I had killed today, and in the man who killed him.”

Antinomianism was, Myra knew, a common enough heresy in periods of revolution or social breakdown. Four hundred years ago, these same words could have been ranted forth on those very hills. There was nothing new in what Jordan said, but Myra felt sure it would not disturb him in the slightest to point this out. He had probably read Winstanley and Christopher Hill for himself.

“You seem to know a lot about this unknowable God of yours.”

That I do.”

“Is God in the machines, in the AIs that you fear?”

“That too, yes.”

“What’s the difference between a God who makes no difference and takes no side and no God at all?”

They had reached the crest of the hill. Jordan reined in his horse. Myra stopped too, and looked down the hill at the grey ribbon of the motorway and the white blocks of a service-station.

So close, all the time.

“You can walk from here,” Jordan said dryly. He took her horse’s reins as Myra dismounted. He soberly returned her holstered weapon, her passport and her phone.

“Oh, and to answer your question. There is no difference, in a sense. But to believe that God is in everything, and is on your side whatever you do and whatever happens, gives one a tremendous access of energy.” He grinned down at her. “Or so I’ve found.”

And with that, the agnostic fanatic was gone, swift on his horse.

Myra slogged down the hill to the service area, cleaned up, made some phone calls while she ate in the cafeteria, and hired a car to take her to London.

She arrived, through all the obstacles thrown up by the small battles on the way, on the evening of the following day. She had long since missed her appointment with the Foreign Office; she had told them that in advance, and they’d asked her to call back when she arrived, to make another.

But, after all she had seen along the way, and all she had not seen—such as any evidence that people like Jordan’s band, and worse, operated with anything other than insolence and impunity, give or take the odd gunship attack—there didn’t seem to be a whole hell of a lot of a point.