The Sky Road

8 Western Approaches

“It’s over,” Valentina was saying.

“What’s over?” Myra asked. She shook her head, looking around her office. Val and Andrei and Denis were all there, perched on desks or window sills. The command-centre screens had vanished like a dream. Parvus hovered on the edge of her vision, looking as though about to speak.

“The putsch,” Valentina explained.

“Just like that?”

Myra stared, blinking through options presented by Parvus. The personal had its own analysis, and it was busy agreeing with Valentina. The battlesats seized by the space movement were enough to guard their beleaguered enclaves and launch sites, but not to tilt the balance of world power in their favour. The Security Council nations retained their control over the ReUN, but the battlesats that had resisted the coup had done so in their own name, not that of the ReUN. They remained dangerously autonomous.

At ground level all sorts of local balances had been tilted, almost entirely by the rapid re-evaluations of the real weight on the various sides that the bloody flurries of actual combat had induced. Disputes had been resolved or reopened, entire armies had mobilised or disbanded on the strength of the gigantic shadows thrown on the screens of analysis by the small engagements in the field.

“God,” said Myra disgustedly. “This is so decadent.” It reminded her of the Renaissance mercenaries that Machiavelli had moaned about in the Discourses, working out who would have won if they’d fought and abiding by that decision like gentlemen, while omitting the bloody business of actual battle. “Nobody wants a real fight, they’d rather follow the sims. Talk about the pornography of violence. Wankers.”

“It’s worse than that,” Denis said coarsely. “We’re fucked.” He threw a projection of a time-slice from Jane’s and laser-pointed the relevant areas. “Look.”

The ISTWR’s military profile and general credibility was no longer something that cautious strategists, estimating from past actions and present rumour, rated highly. It was negligible.

“We’ve been found out,” said Denis Gubanov. “In exactly the wrong way. They must have always reckoned with at least the possibility that we had nukes. Mutual Protection—or Reid, anyway—knew we had them. Point is, we didn’t use them, so it’s assumed we either don’t have them or don’t have the stomach to use them. We’ve gone from being Upper Volta with nukes to being Upper Volta without. And the weapons we did use didn’t work.”

“They worked—” Valentina began, rather defensively.

“Huh!” Myra snorted. “They worked just fine, only they didn’t destroy the targets. Yeah, I can see that doing our deterrence posture a power of good.”

The hotline phone—a solid, old-fashioned, unambiguous red phone on Myra’s desk—began to ring. She looked at it doubtfully for a moment, then shrugged and picked it up.

“Myra Godwin-Davidova.”

Pause.

“Hello, Myra. Dave here.”

She gave him a moment of nonplussed silence.

“Myra? It’s David Reid.”

“Yes. Hello,” she said. “What do you want now?”

There was a second’s delay in his reply.

“What do you want, is more like it.” Even over the crackly laser-to-landline link, she could hear his fury. “You had the whole situation in the balance, you know that? You had the fucking casting vote, Chairman Davidova! You had the nuclear option, and you threw it away! I’d almost rather you had used your goddamn nukes against us—at least that way the Security Council would have had control, and would’ve had to take responsibility. There’d be some chance of an end to the chaos, which is all we really wanted. As it is you’ve turned what should’ve been the endgame into another fucking stalemate.”

“I don’t see how that makes you any worse off.”

She heard a knocking noise and realised after a moment that he was banging something on his head.

“It’s made us all worse off! It’s like entropy, Myra, can’t you see that? Everybody’s climbed up a few flights, escalated, that’s the fucking word for it. We’re all higher up but relatively we’re no better placed, and we’ve lost energy, wasted work in the process. And you know the only people who’ll gain from that? The marginals, the fucking barb, that’s who.

Including your local godless communists.”

“It’s you who should have thought of that. Before you launched your bloody coup.”

Reid took a deep breath, a long sigh down the wire.

“Yeah, you’re right. It is my fault. Didn’t expect a counter-coup, that’s all.”

“What counter-coup?”

Again the odd delay.

“Don’t play the innocent. Somebody’s taken over most of the battlesats, and it sure wasn’t my lot. Nor the UN’s, come to that.”

“You don’t know who it was?”

“No. So who was it? You must know.”

Myra thought about this. Ah, hell, he’d find out anyway.

“The Fourth International,” she told him. “Space fraction, mil org.”

A second ticked past, then she heard Reid’s loud laugh. “Ha-ha-ha! OK, Myra, be like that. I’ll find out anyway. Meanwhile, take a look at the northeastern border, and see if it all still seems so funny. I’m well out of it—I’m on a shuttle for Lagrange. Bye.”

He closed the connection in some manner that sounded like slamming down the receiver on an old-fashioned phone, with an impact that made her wince.

Before she could look at the north-eastern border, Parvus stepped into frame and raised a hand. Myra gestured to the others to wait.

“Yes?”

The stout phantom waved his hands expansively. “Ah, Myra, I have had to move fast on your investments. I received the hot inside tip—” he laid a yellowed finger to his ruddy nose “—that Mutual Protection are liquidating their assets.”

“What!” Myra had by this time got so used to “assets” being a euphemism for “nukes” that she almost ducked under the desk. Her startled gaze raced down the latest news bulletin—nothing.

“Oh, you mean financially.”

“Of course financially. When the last war starts I will tell you straight. No, Mutual Protection are selling up, pulling out.”

“Pulling out from where?”

“From here. From Kazakhstan.” He looked at her sadly, almost sympathetically. “From Earth.”

Over the next few days it became clear that the main gainers from the brief lurch into actual violence were the marginals, who took their own advantage of the distraction—and Mutual Protection’s hasty liquidation—to expand their domains in country after country; and the Sheenisov.

They made a push along the pass at Zaysan, to the south-east. Kazakhstani long-range bombers pounded the Sino-Soviet combat drones—devices of unsetding and diverse appearance, combinations of almost Soviet mechanical clunkiness with quasi-organic nanotech sheen. Their wrecks, or corpses, littered the roads and hillsides outside Buran. Any functioning components had a disturbing tendency to reassemble. The Kazakhstani bombing-runs stopped as supplies of bombs began to run out. Sheenisov spetsnatz teams—casting hologram feints, radar ghosts, sonic body-doubles—skirmished among the wreckage and dug in at the furthest limit of their advance. Meanwhile, a tank-borne human army, or horde, was outflanking the Altay Mountains at the northern end of the range: rolling south and west from the Katun basin, and down the road and railway from Barnaul, unopposed. By the end of the fourth day after the coup attempt they’d crossed Kazakhstan’s northern border, and paused.

The oblys council in Semipalatinsk—evidendy softened by intimidation or subversion—invited them in, and they cheerfully accepted the invitation. They rode in like liberators, welcomed by cheering crowds, and settled down with every appearance of being there to stay.

The red phone rang again.

“Chingiz Suleimanyov,” the caller identified himself. The current President of Kazakhstan; his nickname of “Genghis President” was not quite fair. “I have a proposal for your government, Madame Davidova, and for you personally…”

The following morning Myra got up and dressed, and packed. She had most of her luggage sent on to the airport. She loaded stacks of old files, in formats going back all the way through floppy disks to actual paper, into a couple of crates, sealed and diplomatic-bagged and sent off to another destination. Then she began stripping her flat, with a kind of rage at herself. She commandeered some kids from the militia to take the stuff down the stairs—physically, she wasn’t up to that, and she knew it.

The bedroom’s contents went first, all the cushions and throws, the tatting and trim, the lacework and lacquer and lapis lazuli—out, all of it, into big black plastic sacks that went straight to the nearest craft-market stall for a derisory sum. Let them make their own way again, let them travel the circuits like trade-goods, like cowrie shells and crated Marlboros, back to the Camden Locks and Greenwich Villages of the world. The posters on the walls went next, to another stall, for other collectors. The vinyl records and the compact discs—that was what they were called, she thought with a smile, as she hefted their stacked bulk—to a third.

And then the books. That did hurt, but she went on with it; grimly, grimily hauling them down from their shelves, sorting and stacking. Again and again tempted to sift, to stray; now and again lost in a book, or in the reminiscences it provoked. Blink, knuckle the eye, slam the covers shut, sneeze out the dust, move on. Her eyes reddened, her fingers blackened and her shoulders ached.

Most of the books, too, went to the bazaar. The remainder she had loaded in the back of a small truck. She washed herself and looked around the echoing emptiness of her flat. It was still habitable; it was a place to which she could return; but in it nothing of herself remained.

She shoved her 2045 Library of Congress and her other libraries and concert halls, art galleries and archives into the top of her overnight bag, and distributed her knives and pistols about her belts and pockets. The lads who’d lugged her stuff to the market came back one by one, with sheaves of money. She peeled off more than enough to pay them, one by one.

The truck with the books went ahead of her, well ahead, as she hefted her overnight bag and herself on to the horse, and rode out for the last time to the camp.

“Open up!”

Myra yelled, rattling the iron gate. The truck had parked itself in front, waiting with robotic patience for the obstacle to clear. Any electronic pleas it had made had evidently been ignored.

Myra could see why. There wasn’t much left of the camp but the fence, and away to one side—too far away to be useful for her—she could see men taking it apart with wire-cutters and rolling it up in great bales and wheels. Nothing but grass and roadway stretched ahead of her for a few hundred metres. Where the huts had been she could see only clumps of dark material on the steppe, with men and women wandering around and children racing about. The factories were not gone, but they were visibly shrivelling, as though their construction were being run in reverse.

She flipped down her eyeband, upped the gain, gazed at the scene. Nobody’d heard her shouts. Damn. She eased her old New Vietcong knock-off Glock from its holster, steadied and soothed the horse, and fired not into the air but carefully at a tussock a few tens of metres distant. The mare shied and the bullet ricocheted anyway, but the shot got the result she wanted. A figure detached itself from the milling crowd and marched towards her. Kim Nok-Yung, carrying a rifle.

“Hi, Myra.” He couldn’t stop smiling. He tapped a code into the lock’s plate. The gate creaked open, and he left it open. Myra led the horse through, and the truck followed, then kept pace beside her. Nok-Yung hopped on the running-board and hung on with one hand, flourishing the rifle triumphantly with the other, as if he was riding a tank into a liberated capital.

Isn’t this great!”

She got caught up in his enthusiasm.

“Yes, it’s wonderful. I’m so glad it’s over, Nok-Yung.”

They passed one of the factories, vanishing before their eyes, crumbling back from its edges into curiously ordered dust, dust that trickled like columns of ants along paths on the remaining machinery, or on the grass. Some of the dust heaped itself up into blocky stacks that hardened into colour-coded cubes, inert, from which the wind blew not a speck. Other lines of dust coalesced into glassy spheroids, obsidian-black or crystal-clear, that lay in the tall grass like gleaming pebbles and stones and boulders.

“Control components, computers and so on,” Nok-Yung indicated. “The cubes are construction material.”

“Will anyone collect them, I wonder?”

The Korean laughed. “We’ll take some of the control parts with us—they might be valuable, where we’re going.”

“Oh?”

He glanced sidelong at her, almost apologetic. “Semipalatinsk,” he said. “To the Sheenisov.”

Myra restrained herself from reining in the horse. “What? Why, for God’s sake?” She waved an arm, wildly, around and behind. “You can stay with us—you’re welcome here, in our republic or anywhere in Kazakhstan. Hey, man, Baikonur will take you on, think of that!”

He shook his head. “Some of the prisoners will setde here, of course. But I and Se-Ha and the others, we are going to the Sheenisov. Some of us have friends and family with them already. There is no other place for us. Even with Mutual Protection—” he turned aside and spat on the grass “—gone, we still have the debts, and the black-lists. No work to be had back home but debt-bondage. Among the Sheenisov we will be free.” He grinned, no longer apologetic but feral. “And there is work to be done there—work for us. They are the future.”

“But you don’t know anything about what they’re really like. Just because they call themselves communists doesn’t mean they’re nice—you should know that!”

Nok-Yung laughed harshly. “They have no Great Leader or Dear Leader, you can love it or leave it, and we’re going to try it.”

By this time they had reached the edge of the crowd. Myra reined in the horse and signalled the truck to stop. Nok-Yung jumped off the running-board. What had seemed from a distance like aimless wandering resolved itself into people moving about purposefully, retrieving and stacking their possessions from the self-disassembling huts. Most of them ignored her arrival. Myra was not surprised or put out. The benefits of her oversight were easy enough to overlook, and the camp committee itself was not a popular body among the prisoners, elected though it was. Like a company union, it had partially represented the interests of the labourers, while often enough relaying the will of the owners.

She noticed Shin Se-Ha, dapper in a sadly dated sarariman suit which he’d probably worn for the first and last time at his trial, but which for now signified his new freedom. He carried a small case through the scooting children and trudging adults. By now other vehicles and beasts were trundling or plodding into view, summoned by phones restored to their proper owners.

Myra stood, fondling the mare’s neck, quieting it, as the Japanese mathematician picked his way towards her. She tried to search her memory of what he’d been sent down for: misuse of company resources or some such pretext—he’d run refinements of Otoh’s neo-Marxian capital-reproduction schemata, primed with empirical data, on the university’s computers. The real reason was his results, which he’d indiscreetly spread-sheeted around: the sinister algebra of the Otoh equations added up to complete breakdown in two more business-cycles.

That had been one boom and one slump ago.

“Hello, Myra,” he said. He put the case down. Probably contained all he owned, he was that sort of guy. Frightening, in his way.

“Hi, Se-Ha. Nok-Yung tells me you’re going—” she nodded forward “—East.”

“I am. Sorry if you do not approve.”

Very direct! The sun shone in her face like an interrogation-lamp and the wind made a constant white noise. It was a time for telling the truth or facing worse ordeals.

“Whether I approve or not is not the point,” she said. “You’re free, and I have no say in what you do. But I should warn you that the Kazakhstani Republic will resist the Sheenisov, and so will I. We will not be rolled over. I would be sorry to be on the opposite side to you in a battle, but—”

She shrugged.

“I would be sorry too,” said Shin. “But ‘so it goes’, ah-so!”

“Ah-so indeed,” she smiled, and suddenly realised how Reid had been able to keep up his no-hard-feelings enmities for so long. “Meanwhile, I have something for you.” She waved a hand at the truck. “This, and everything in it.” She tossed him the truck’s control-panel, which he deftly caught. “Go on, have a look.”

Doors clicked open, banged shut. He came back. He caught her hand; he bowed over it, as though about to kiss her knuckles, and stepped back.

T am in your debt,” he said, stiffly. Then he spread his hands, looking Western and abashed rather than Eastern and indebted. “What can I say, Myra? You’re very kind.”

“Ah, don’t be silly, my friend,” she said. “You and Nok-Yung and the others made my work here a lot more rewarding than it would otherwise have been. I owe you it, if anything.” She shared with him a conspiratorial chuckle. “And a library of revolutionary theory might just come in handy where you’re going, eh?”

Tes. I don’t know if I can take the responsibility.” He shook his head, thinking about it. “There are books and documents in that van which have never been scanned in.”

Myra patted a pocket. “Not even in the 2045 Library of Congress?”

“Not even that!” He seemed to find the thought awesome, a violation of the order of nature. It gave pause even to Myra’s resolution, as half a lifetime’s easy assumption that everything was archived, that every jot and tittle lived unchanged in silicon heaven, was suddenly confronted with the reality that some thoughts might only face eternity in the frail ark of woodpulp, and that she was responsible for them. Her commitment rallied.

“Oh, well. I should have read them by now, and if not, it’s too late for me.”

The bustle around them was increasing. Vehicles were whining, horses and camels were whinnying and spitting. Some children, even some adults, were in tears at leaving this place, which for all its duress had not imposed any too severe privation, and which was familiar. Some folk were assiduously picking up the glassy stones, whether as talismans or as trade-trinkets Myra couldn’t tell. The thousands of former prisoners were dispersing to all the round horizon.

Half a dozen other men were converging on where she stood, gathering around, talking in Korean or Japanese, smiling at her and climbing into the back of the truck. Nok-Yung came up and shook hands.

“We’ll keep in touch.”

There was so much to say, so much that could not be said.

“We’ll meet again.” Myra said. “All the best, guys. Good luck with the commies.”

“Hah!” Nok-Yung raised a clenched fist and grinned at her. “You’ll be with us some day, Myra, you’ll see. Goodbye, and thanks!”

He threw his bag in the truck and sprang into the driving-seat, then laughed as Shin Se-Ha climbed through the opposite door and flourished the control-panel under his nose. Still shouting and waving, the men drove off, bumping across the steppe, resolutely north-east.

Myra watched them out of sight and then mounted her horse and rode back to the town. Only once did she look behind, and saw that there was nothing left to see.

The airport of the capital of the International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic had only one terminal building. It was a big, open-plan space, dotted with franchises. They’d never bothered with Customs, or Immigration Control. Between the floor-to-ceiling windows—with their charming views of steppe, runway, apartment-blocks, gantries and more steppe—hung equally gigantic posters of Trotsky, Korolev, Kapitsa, Gagarin and Guevara. The idea, many years ago, had been to make the concourse look Communist: a bit of macho swagger. Right now it had the look of a place about to fall to the commies, rather to Myra’s disgust. Crowded with people sitting on too much luggage, their expressions flickering between impatience and resignation with every change on the departure screens. For heaven’s sake, thought Myra—Semipalatinsk was a hundred miles away, they were over-reacting.

Her own flight’s departure-time was not for another hour. She confirmed her booking at the check-in, made sure her luggage was on board, and declined the offer of waiting in the first-class lounge. Instead she made her way to the old Nkafe franchise, and sat down with a coffee and a cigarette, to rest her feet and indulge in a little nostalgia.

In the good old days before the Third World War she’d sipped many a coffee here, with many a man on the other side of the table. Always a different man, and almost never one that she’d liked: ugly, jowly military men for the most part, jet-lagged and stubbled, in creased dress uniforms heavily medal-lioned; or diplomats or biznesmen, sleek and shaven and cologned in silk suits. And always, hanging around a few metres away, outside the glowering ring of bodyguards, would be the photographers and reporters, there to record the closing of the deal. The ISTWR had never gone for secret diplomacy—openness was the whole point of tradable nuclear deterrence.

It had worked fine, until the nuclear war.

The Germans had launched the War of European Integration without a nuke to call their own. This hadn’t been an oversight—it had been essential to the element of surprise. Once their first wave of tanks was safely over the Polish border they’d made Myra a very generous offer for some of her tradable nuclear deterrence. Myra’s frantic ringing around her clients had found no one willing to deal: not for any amount of money, on the entirely rational basis that the Third World War was not a good time to sell. Myra had considered cutting them out and selling the Germans the option anyway, but her business loyalty had got the better of her. It had also got the better of the German occupiers of Kiev, and the German civilians of Frankfurt and Berlin. She still felt guilty about that.

For want of company, she flipped down her eye-band and summoned Parvus. For a laugh, she sat his virtual image in the seat across the table from her. The construct triangulated his apparent position, saw the joke and smiled.

“What can I do for you, Myra?”

Tell me what you think of the General.” She wasn’t bothered by appearing to talk to empty air; she wasn’t the only person in that cafe area consulting a familiar or a fetch.

“That is a tricky one,” said Parvus. He ran his fingers through his thatch, rummaged in his crumpled jacket for cigarettes. Lit up and relaxed; the addictive personality was part of the package, an aspect of how the thing hung together. “There are of course rumours —” dismissive smoketrail “—that the FI has long had access to a rogue AI. Or the other way round, according to its opponents.” Parvus showed his teeth. “It goes back to when AIs of that sophistication were rare—before the Revolution, or the Singularity.”

“This is the Singularity?” It was Myra’s turn to wave a cigarette. “Not like you’d notice.”

“It’s one of these things you don’t notice, when you’re in the middle of it,” agreed Parvus. “Like the mass extinction event that’s going on around us right now.”

“But that’s slow, that’s the point. The Singularity’s supposed to be fast on something more than a geological scale.”

“It was.”

“Oh.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to take this discussion any further. “Anyway, back to the General, and what you make of him.”

“Ah, yes. Well. Very dangerous, in my opinion. His use of face and voice is remarkably effective at getting under the skin of… people with skin. Count yourself lucky he can’t use pheromones, at least not over the net.”

“You’re impervious to his charm yourself, I take it.”

“Yes,” Parvus sighed. “Fortunately for me, I lack self-awareness.”

Myra was still gaping at her familiar’s unexpected remark—surely ironic, though she wasn’t sure on what level—when Parvus’s place was occupied by a Kazakh man with smooth clothes and a lined face. He had a distracting small child in tow, and a silently accusing puffy-eyed woman behind him. The woman took another chair, held the squirming toddler in her lap.

Myra blinked Parvus out of her sight, vaguely hoping that the AI wasn’t offended, raised her eyeband and smiled at the man and his family. His returning smile was forced.

“Good morning, Madame President. Why are you leaving us?”

Myra looked around. Nobody else seemed to have noticed her. The cult of personality was another strategic omission from their socialist democracy. Just as well—she didn’t want to be mobbed on her departure. “I’m not leaving you,” she said earnestly, leaning forward and speaking as though confidentially. Her mission had not yet been publicly announced, but she had no objection to starting a truthful rumour in advance. Only the details were sensitive, and at that level secrecy was pointless—she was confident that her full itinerary was already circulating the nets, buried among hundreds of spurious versions, all of equally authoritative provenance. I’m going to the West, to get help. Economic and military assistance.”

The man looked sceptical. “Against the Sheenisov? But we haven’t a chance, against them. We have no defensible borders.”

“No, but Kazakhstan has—and it’s on behalf of Kazakhstan that I’m going.”

Tor Chingiz?” The man’s face brightened; he glanced at his wife, as though to cheer her up. “So we are going to drive the Reds out of Semey?”

“We can’t bomb Semey,” Myra said, repeating exactly President Suleimanyov’s words to her. “But we can hold the pass east of Lake Zaysan, and we can stop any further advance in the north-east. If we get help soon. The SSU forces are unlikely to try anything for some weeks, because they’re stretched. And they don’t like frontal fighting. As long as the Kazakhstani Republic stays hostile to them, they won’t come in.” She grinned encouragingly. “And I can be sure our own republic will stay hostile.”

She was not sure at all. There was enough social discontent, understandable enough, in her redundant workers’ state for the Sino-Soviets to work on. No doubt the first agitators were already drifting in, among the first refugees from Semipalatinsk. But the man took her words to heart.

Tes,” he said, adding, “if Allah wills. But we are leaving, with all we have.”

“I can’t blame you,” Myra said. T wish you well. I hope you see your way clear to come back, when things are more… settled.”

“Perhaps.” The man shrugged, the woman smiled thinly, the child suddenly bawled. They departed, looking up disconsolately at the screens, leaving Myra depressed.

The man had looked like a small trader, one of the large middle class raised by the republic’s mixed economy. Despite all the devils it painted on its walls, the ISTWR had always stood more for a permanent NEP than a permanent revolution: only its defence and space industries were state-owned, and apart from the welfare system everything else (which in GNP terms didn’t add up to much, she had to admit) was more or less laissez-faire. She wondered what the family had to fear from the Sheenisov, who by all accounts would have left their property and piety alone. In a way it was not surprising: the Sheenisov had made their advances by bluff and intimidation, by looking and sounding more radical and communistic than they actually were, and their absence from the comms net left a great blank screen for the most sinister speculations to play on. So perhaps this kind of unwarranted fear was the price of their progress.

Well, she would make them pay a higher price, in a harder currency. She drained her coffee and headed for the departure lounge.

At Almaty she picked up her documents, diplomatic passport and line-of-credit card in a snazzy Samsonite Diplock handed over by a courier, and on the flight to Izmir she sifted through them. The papers were literally for her eyes only, being coated with a polarising film tuned to her eyeband which in turn was tuned to her. Even so, and even sitting in the company class section at the front of the jet, alone apart from the flight-attendant, Myra felt the impulse to hunch over the papers, and wrap her wrist and elbow around their corners like a kid in class trying not to be copycatted.

Suleimanyov had struck a bold deal with the ISTWR, and with her. It was a deal which had been proposed by Georgi Davidov, who’d died before he’d been ready to return with it. Myra’s lips tightened whenever she thought of that; her suspicions stirred and were not soothed back to sleep. He’d had the contracts drawn up in the briefcase that was found with his body in the hotel room. The terms were simple, a straightforward offer of economic union and military alliance. Kazakhstan would take over the ISTWR’s residual social responsibilities, assimilating all of its inhabitants who wished to become Kazakhstani citizens, subsidising the rest. It would provide for the smaller state’s conventional defence, leaving to its People’s Army and Workers’ Militia the only functions for which they were actually fitted—internal security and border patrols, principally the guarding of the spaceport and airport. In return, Myra’s government would integrate its space-borne weapons, including the nukes, into the greater republic’s defence forces. They would retain ultimate operational control—there was no way Suleimanyov could expect them to surrender that—but for all public and diplomatic and military purposes, they’d work together under one command. At a stroke Kazakhstan would have a military force commensurate with its land area rather than its population.

This new Great Power could then negotiate assistance from the West. It could stand as a solid bulwark—possibly even an entering wedge—against the Sheenisov, which the inchoate regimes of the Former Union and warlorded China could not. The nuclear weapons would be their bargaining counter. Useless themselves—in any but the shortest term—against the Sheenisov, they could be made available to the US or UN in exchange for the hardware and orbital back-up and even, at the outside, troop deployments that could hold back this new Red tide.

Myra, as the oldest available politician, with the longest experience and the widest range of Western knowledge and contacts, would make the initial approaches. In a way she would be going back to her old business of selling nuclear deterrence policies; the only difference being that there was, now, only one logical customer. And because it would be an arduous job, on a tight schedule, they were going to give her a week’s break before she started, and a lot of money. She was to use that time and money to get young again.

Rejuvenation was something she should have done long ago. Now, thinking it over, she found it difficult to disentangle her reasons for procrastinating. It wasn’t that the process was unaffordable, or even obscenely privileged—many of her own citizens and employees had made a trip to some Western clinic. Dodgy black-market strains of the relevant nanoware circulated wherever health services existed at all, and patches for their shortcomings were a widespread and legitimate trade. But Myra’d never gotten around to it, partly because she had been satisfied with her present condition—attractive enough to pull interesting and interested men, fit enough for her work and her undemanding exercise routines, but in no way good enough to fool anyone that she was actually young, once they saw more of her than her face, or saw her face close up.

Another aspect, she realised, was a certain patriotic stubbornness, of the kind that kept her driving her ancient Skoda Traverser. She didn’t want to buy youth from… not so much the West as… the new breed, the post-nanotech generation. She ^vanted to muddle along with the fixes that had worked for her so far: the Swiss collagen jabs, the British circulatory-system microbots, the Georgian bacteriophage immune-system back-ups, the Vietnamese phytochemical neural regenerators, the American telomere hack… all assembled in a post-Soviet package deal that the health services of the Former Union and the communistans had been doling out for decades.

The Kazakhstani President had taken about thirty seconds to persuade her that it was her personal right and patriotic duty to go for the full works, the one-shot nanotech silver bullet for death. Freed from the burden of responsibility for the ISTWR, given a mission on which even history might some day smile, that legitimacy somehow legitimised her selfish stab at immortality.

But still, memento mori, when her mind drifted the words came back.

Death follows me.

She thought that death had caught her several times over the next few hours. The journey from Izmir’s airport, Adnan Menderes, to Olu Deniz on the Aegean coast was terrifying, even in the armoured limo. It wasn’t just the hairpin bends, the appalling driving, the precipitous drops and—after nightfall—the way the headlamp beams swung out into empty black space. It was all that, and the dead men.

The car had just laboured up an incline, overtaking a couple of coaches with centimetres to spare between the booming metal of the coaches on one side, and a tyre-width away from the drop on the other, and two seconds to get out of the way of an oncoming truck. In the crook of the bend, a stand of pine a little away from the main forest; three bloodied men hanging from the branches, by the neck, dead. The mind retained from the sight a shocking impression of absences: at the faces, at the ends of limbs, at the crotch. Blink and you’d miss it.

Myra yelped. The driver’s gaze met hers in the mirror. The crinkles around his eyes deepened to a smile.

“Greek partisans.”

He started telling her the story, of how Izmir had once been Smyrna before Kemal liberated the nation, and had—only thirty-five years ago—been Smyrna again, and the airport had been named after the Greek fascist Grivas rather than the Turkish democrat Menderes, and how the Greeks had begun to re-colonise, and how the New Turks had risen to again drive out the Hellenic chauvinist pawns of imperialism, and… and so on. Myra listened intently to the long, winding tale of nationalist grievance; it distracted her, it kept her mind off all but the worst of the roadside attractions and the most heart-stopping turns in the road. This was a place where the small wars were real, with no simulations played and no quarter given.

Why had Suleimanyov booked her into a clinic here, of all places? She knew the answer had something to do with the complex diplomacy of the rest of her journey—the Turkish Federation was as usual in dispute with the Russians, who were backing the Bulgars and Serbs and Greeks, and most of the US successor regimes were backing Turkey, and Kazakhstan’s on-again-off-again relations with the rest of the Former Union were currently in “off” mode, so…

But still.

At last, in the darkness, she saw that they were heading down a long incline, towards the bottom of a valley that opened to the sea. Lights dotted along the roadside and along the sides of the valley increased in frequency to a cluster behind the beach, beyond which were the lights of ships. As the road levelled out the driver turned left, then right through a big iron gate which opened for them. Concrete walls topped with coils of razor wire, a short gravelled drive. She stepped out and looked around. She could see a swimming-pool with a bar, and multilevel apartments. The driver handed her luggage to a couple of lads in jeans and polo-shirts. She tipped the driver, checked in, followed the guys to her room, dumped her gear, tipped the lads and made her way down the stairs and over slippery tiles to the bar, where she ordered a Pils. She sank it in seconds. After the air-conditioned interior of the car the heat was horrendous.

She was on to her third lager and fourth cigarette when a small, dark woman in a white lab-coat strolled over to her.

“Madame Davidova?” She stuck out a hand. “Dr. Selina Masoud.”

“Hi. Pleased to meet you. You’re looking after me?”

“Yes.” Dr. Masoud clicked a tablet out of a dispensary. “Swallow this. Wash it down with—”

Myra swallowed. Dr. Masoud smiled. She had curly hair and pretty white teeth. “Something non alcoholic, I was going to say. But it’s all right—it’ll just make you sleepy, now, that’s all.”

Tine,” said Myra, covering a yawn. “I’m tired already. Smoke?”

Thank you.” The doctor took her cigarette and flipped a gold lighter, slipped it back into her pocket, inhaled gratefully. “Ah… I needed that.” She sat up on the stool beside Myra, ordered a Coke.

“So when do I go for treatment?” Myra asked.

Dr. Masoud flashed her brows. “That was your treatment,” she said. “You stay a week in case there are any complications, any bad reactions. There won’t be. Slightly feverish is normal.”

“Oh,” said Myra. It seemed something of an anticlimax. “So what should I do?”

“Relax. Drink a lot—mainly non-alcoholic, to avoid dehydration. If you want to help the process along, smoke and sunbathe as much as you can. Both are carcinogenic, and they denature collagen too, you know—”

She said it as though relaying a recent and controversial discovery.

“Yes,” said Myra. “And?”

“They catalyse the telomerase reactions.”

She smiled, downed the Coke, hopped off the tall seat. “I must go. Enjoy your stay.”

The muezzin’s taped cock-crow cry from the minaret’s tannoy woke her before eight. She lay for a while enjoying the coolness of the room, and the fast-growing light. The room was, compared with her own, refreshingly uncluttered: painted and furnished in shades of white, the crisp straight lines of the decor and fabrics jiggled here and there with a twiddle of eyelet or a tuft of lace, as though the white ambience wavered between clinical and bridal, undecided whether it signified a hospital or a hotel. Not a bad honeymoon destination, Myra guessed—she’d noticed plenty of young, loud couples at the bar the previous evening, though she couldn’t help wondering if the implications of staying together for ever might not strike home a litde too hard, too soon, in a place like this.

By the pool she sat on a lounger and rubbed sun-cream on her limbs and torso. Her hands were as claw-like (but supple), her muscles as stringy (but strong), her skin as mottled (but taut) as they had all been for forty years.

On her left, behind the clinic’s main buildings, the ground rose as a farmed foothill to a high, barren cliff. Across the kilometre or so of valley bottom, it faced a lower cliff, which sprouted scrub and trees. Overhead, the sky was deep blue. Paragliders, their canopies shaped like brighdy coloured nail-parings, drifted by, from a higher range far behind the high cliff, to the beach a mile or so distant. Cicadas whirred like small electrical devices. The rest of the people here seemed to be either young, getting their fix, or old like her, getting their rewind.

For two days, it was great. The sun rose above the cliff on the left, set behind the cliff on the right, regular as clockwork. In the evenings the barren cliffs looked red and martian, and the clinic like a Moon colony, a little artificial environment over which the gravity-defying paragliders swooped. Myra spent her days in sunshine and swimming and not dying. It was better than heaven. She rolled over and let the sun bake her back.

Big bare feet stopped in front of her face, in a spreading stain of water on the concrete tiles. Her gaze tracked up hairy brown legs, wet stretched trunks, hairy brown chest, to a face. Beaky nose, bright brown eyes, dark red-brown strandy hair swept back. The man smiled down at her, nodded unconsciously to himself.

“Myra Godwin?”

“Yeah?” like, what’s it to you?

He squatted. Big, white, irregular teeth.

Jason Nikolaides,” he introduced himself. “I’ve been asked to speak to you.”

She felt slightly befuddled.

You’re Greek?”

He laughed. “Oh no. Not for generations. American.” He bowed slightly. Drops of water fell from his hair. “CIA. We have a few things to talk about.”

Myra rolled over, swung her legs round, sat upright. Fumbled a cigarette. She looked at him, eyes screwed up against the sunlight and the smoke. She sighed.

“It’s been a long time,” she said.