The Star Fraction

16

The Winter Citizen

I woke to the sound of armour in the streets, and lay on my back for a while staring up through the hexagon panes of the dome at the pale cold sky. It was ten o’clock. I’d slept in, but the ANR, as usual, had arrived on time. After yesterday’s exhausting round of television interviews and visits – actual and virtual – to militia units, I felt I had a right to a rest. I no longer even had the responsibility of being Norlonto’s nominal dictator – I’d resigned as chairman of the Defence Liaison Committee as soon as the last militia commander had come on side.

An airship floated by above, its shape distorted by the ripples of the glass. Then another, and another, close behind. I wondered if a lot of people were getting out before the state moved in. Doubtless there were those who didn’t want to hang around for questioning: Hanoverian recusants, spillover from the civil war, Army deserters…perhaps even space movement libertarian idealists, off to grab a place on a launch vehicle before Earth’s exit hatch shut down completely, as the more alarmist ones thought it might. And now, after twenty-odd years as a denizen of a functioning anarchy, I was a citizen again. The tanks and APCs continued to trundle by outside, the airships and helicopters to drift or buzz past above. Annette mumbled and stirred beside me. I ran my fingers over her long white hair and slid from under the duvet, hastily wrapped her fur coat around me and padded down the stair-ladder from our nest under the top of the dome.

I printed off newspapers and fired up a pot of coffee and went to the door. Our housing association’s cluster of domes was set back a little from the street, among paths and ponds, lawns and cannabis gardens. Children raced about, chickens strutted their fenced-in runs. Only the dogs still bothered to react to the Army’s passage.

The tanks, as always, moved faster and quieter than you’d expect. The soldiers sitting on them wore ANR uniforms customised with bandanas and bandoliers and the insignia of forces they’d defected from or defeated. They chewed or smoked and looked down their noses at us, discordant rock music blaring from sound-systems. I stood for a long time, shivering, shanks prickling, and watched.

Then I stooped and picked up our deliveries: juice, milk, eggs, bread and rolls. The bags and cartons had a fur of frost over them; they must have been there for hours. Not much petty crime in Norlonto. I wondered how long that would last. As I fried eggs and bacon and tore off pages from the papers a supermarket bill caught my eye. In our division of domestic labour, shopping was down to Annette. The price of coffee and cigarettes shocked me, the price of local foodstuffs gave some comfort. I checked the delivery bill.

Fruit juice cost about ten times as much as milk. Nothing to do with the inflation – that only applied to the Republic’s official joke currency, and we paid in good South African gold.

Crazy prices. What was the world coming to?

There I was, thinking like an old man. I shook my head and carried Annette’s breakfast and a wad of her favoured newspapers upstairs. Then I washed and dressed and settled down to my own breakfast and news, trying to figure it out.

I was on my second coffee and first cigarette before I remembered that these, like the fruit juice, were imported. For a wild moment I wondered if the Republic had slapped on taxes or tariffs, then realised that such an outrage would hardly have passed me by. I’d have heard about the riots; heck, I’d have been in the riots.

A trawl through the Economist’s database set me straight. Raw-material prices had risen sharply over the six months since the Fall Revolution, while the prices of finished goods and services had dropped. There were plenty of articles explaining why, which in my absorption in our little local difficulties I’d overlooked.

The defeat of the US/UN, and the collapse of its financial scams such as the IMF and World Bank, had had divergent effects. The primary products tended to come from the less developed areas, the old Second and Third Worlds. Their instabilities made our civil wars look like peaceful picketing. Without the empire to police them, protection costs and risk had gone up. Meanwhile, in the more advanced regions, the reduction in taxes – and the end of the headlock on technological development imposed by UN arms control – had allowed manufacturing to enjoy a spurt of growth. Even nanotechnology looked as if it might come on-line at last, if only somebody could entice its best minds out of hiding.

So much for the price of coffee. What was still bothering me was why we weren’t as poor as we should have been. My income from the university had dropped to a token stipend, as the only lectures currently being given there were from the ignorant to each other. (God, let them grow out of that. Soon.) Royalties from my writings had gone up, but not by much, because most of the increased circulation was of those I’d disdained to copyright. Our pension funds were paying out regularly, but they were pretty basic and they certainly hadn’t gone up. And yet – unlike most people since the Revolution – we hadn’t had to tighten our belts.

I keyed up our bank statements and almost spilled a mug of expensive instant coffee. An ordinary expensive cigarette smouldered undrawn to a butt. Our regular income had indeed dwindled, but the balance was being made up by increased payments from my small, almost-forgotten stake in Space Merchants. I cursed the fund-management software for letting me eat my capital, then called it up.

We weren’t eating my capital. We were using up part of the income, and a small part at that. The value of my stake had increased far more than I’d ever expected, and had almost doubled since the Revolution. We were moderately, comfortably, and inexplicably rich.

‘I don’t see what you’re complaining about,’ Annette said, over a late lunch. No urgent phone-calls; I assumed this meant the occupation was proceeding smoothly. ‘I’m thrilled. I never particularly wanted to be rich, but I’ve always thought it would be nice.’

She looked around the dome, at the stacked books and climbing plants and the dodgy cabling of the electronics, blatantly thinking of improvements.

‘Yeah, well, me too,’ I said. ‘But to make money in space these days is, like, defying gravity. Space Defense was run on defence budgets that are due for the chop. All the space industries, even the settlements – even NASA – were like the shops in a garrison town. Like the whorehouses! The whole system should be in a severe slump. A lot of it is – the battlesats are running on empty, hawking microwave beams to electricity companies or some such. So why is Space Merchants doing well?’

Annette’s eyes had a glint of amusement or sadness. ‘You won’t stop, will you?’ she said. ‘You think you’re on to something, and you won’t stop.’

‘Yup,’ I said, rising and clearing away the plates.

‘If you find out it’s all been a terrible mistake, just do me one favour,’ she said. ‘Take the money and run. I don’t care who it belongs to, they owe you this much.’

‘Half a day under the state,’ I said, ‘and you’re thinking like a politician.’

‘No,’ she corrected me, standing up and laughing. ‘I’m thinking like a politician’s wife.’

The soldiers stayed, the camps were pacified, people from all wings of the space movement denounced me. I made no reply to the attacks. Snow fell. We kept ourselves warm, and worked on the puzzle as a team. Annette followed the news, and I followed the money. For an advocate of the free market I was embarrassingly ignorant of finance, and a few days went by before I could find my way around the FT’s pink screens without frequent tabs to the Wizards.

Then on to the great databases of Companies House…in VR you could wander through it like a vast mall, its connections and intersections emulating the impossible topologies of an Escher print. I went as myself, and so did some of the other searchers and researchers there, but most were in cryptic fetches, corporate icons or the mirrored samurai armour of the latest discretion software from the Kobe code-shops (‘Zen cryptography – don’t even think about it’, the ads said).

From Companies House you could see the world.

I saw the intricate geometries of Thailand’s Islamic banking system crumble before the assault of the anti-technological Khmer Vertes; Vladivostok’s port economy, liberated by the Vorkuta People’s Front, rise in new and strange shapes; America’s frayed networks of scientific information glow brighter around the coasts, flicker and die in the heartlands as the Scientific Fundamentalists and the White Nationalists shut down the corrupting institutes of what they called ‘rootless naturalism’ in public and ‘Jewish science’ in private.

I saw Kazakhstan’s cosmodromes stretch skyward, and I saw too the tributaries that fed them, the KomLag archipelago of the forced-labour companies. Some in the Former Union – old skills put to a new use – but most in the freer world. A few right here in Norlonto.

Wherever the victorious forces of the Fall Revolution could do it, they were keeping the more useful employees of the defeated US/UN empire – and especially Space Defense – at work for a pittance, in partial restitution for past exploitation. They were supplemented by a new and expanding use for non-political criminals, earning out their payback at high speed, in the high-risk, high-wage space economy.

‘Slavery,’ Annette said. ‘I just don’t believe it’s come to this.’

‘It isn’t really slavery,’ I said uncomfortably. ‘It’s just bonded labour.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Like we don’t have capital punishment, we just let psychopaths pay off their blood-debts by starring in snuff movies?’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Do you still want to take the money and run?’

‘No!’ She looked fiercely at me, then down at the table. ‘On the other hand, there’s no-one to give it back to, it would be counter-productive to sell the shares to someone with even less scruples than you, and it’d be pretty hypocritical just to give the money away.’

‘Not to say wimpish.’

‘Yeah. C of E.’

‘So what’s the answer?’

‘Use it to expose where it’s coming from,’ Annette said firmly. ‘Dig into it some more, then run a campaign to get it all out in the open and discussed. You could do that.’

‘And accomplish what?’

‘Oh, come on! If there are any abuses going on, it might help to stop them.’

We both found ourselves laughing at this statement, but as Annette said after we’d lapsed into a gloomy silence, what else was there to do?

I circled warily in the dataspace around the representations of the Kazakh spaceport hinterland, and noticed the tag-line of the company I’d started so long ago: Space Merchants. It had strong flows of material and information linking it with Myra’s Kazakh workers’ ministate and Reid’s Mutual Protection defence agency. I amplified the resolution, trying to trace what was going on.

They’d all changed, grown beyond anything any of us had initially intended. Space Merchants had become an import–export business between Earth and low orbit, almost as distant now from its innocent, fannish origins in the space-trash market as the latest SSTO boosters were from Goddard’s amateur rocketry. The International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic, its nuclear teeth long since drawn, had changed its specialty to launch-vehicle development. The ISTWR had held out against the surge of Kazakh reunification, and Mutual Protection had a major presence there. And not only there: Mutual Protection now ran security and restitution facilities on three continents, usually guarding installations and extracting payback from any thieves or saboteurs foolish enough to mess with its clients.

It was weird to see that personal triangle between myself, Myra and Reid, replicated as a commercial connection, like the family relations of dynastic armies; but whether those connections meant anything was a different matter. (As I pointed out in Ignoramus!, my work on the counter-conspiracy theory of history, everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who…(etc.), and it’s the easiest job in the world to inkin those pencilled lines; to speculate that the surprisingly few handshakes that separate the obscure from the famous are all funny handshakes…My incautious illustration of this with a diagram of my own second- and third-hand connections, ‘proving’ the existence of a mysterious Last International linking the world’s libertarians and futurists to each other and to a long list of historic usual suspects, had resulted in a certain amount of misunderstanding: for years afterwards I’d received anonymous mailings of what purported to be the Last International’s Central Committee minutes.)

Firewalls guarded most of the companies’ data, the remnants of recent hack-attacks fading on the matt virtual surfaces. I moved along, seeking entry nodes. Out of nowhere, something pinged my fetch. My hands, in the datagloves, felt warm. Warmer. Hot.

I was holding what looked like a sealed envelope, iconic equivalent of a personal message: based on an anonymous transaction protocol, it couldn’t even be read on screen, only in VR through the intended recipient’s fetch. It was also a delivery method of choice for target-specific viruses. I looked at it – damn, it was beginning to give off smoke – and hastily reached behind me and tugged the emergency back-up bat. Seconds trickled by as the contents of my home computer were transferred to isolated disks. When it was safe to do so I opened the now smouldering envelope.

dear jon, it read, it’s too fast. help me. love, myra.

Then it crumbled to bits.

Well, that was a lot of use, I thought as I backed out and sat blinking in chill daylight, Annette’s quizzical smile teasing me from the other side of the table.

‘You’ve heard from Myra,’ she said.

I stared at her. ‘How do you know?’

‘From your face,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen that look before.’

I’d been in contact with Myra perhaps a score of times, in more than a score of years: when we’d had the Bomb, and on deals I’d brokered for the space movement in the Norlonto decades. There was a direct airship link between Alexandra Port and Baikonur, and I’d met her a few times when she was passing through, but most of our contact had been remote.

I reached for Annette’s hand. ‘You’re not jealous? Good God, it was seventy years ago!’

‘I know,’ Annette said. She squeezed my hand. ‘And I know you love me. But you loved her, too. I think she was the only other woman you were ever in love with. And it’s true what they say: love never dies. You can kill it, sure, but it never dies by itself.’

Her words may have echoed any number of sentimental songs and stories, but she spoke them as if they were a bitter, reluctantly accepted scientific truth. She laid a hand over my open mouth before I could protest, expostulate, explain.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. Then: ‘What does she want this time?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I explained about the message, and where I’d found it. ‘She’s in some kind of trouble, and she wants me to help.’

‘“It’s too fast.”’ Annette stared past me, into some virtual reality of her own. ‘That fits, you know. The bonded labour, the profits from space – something is happening too fast. If you look at the news it’s like the world’s coming apart, and I think it’s…being pulled apart, by something we don’t know about.’

I laughed. ‘If it was, somebody would have told me.’

‘I think somebody just did,’ Annette said. ‘Anyway, there’s only one way to find out. Go to Kazakhstan. I assume it won’t be difficult to find Myra, or she’d have told you how.’

I looked at her, astonished. It was a proposal I was just working around to myself. From Annette I’d have expected, if anything, a fight against it.

‘I don’t want you to go,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know if you do. But I’m more afraid of doing nothing. Nobody’s spoken out for you since the troops came in. I don’t think they trust you any more.’

‘They?’

‘The space movement people. The comrades.’

‘There’s no conspiracy,’ I grinned. It was one of my catchphrases.

Annette’s eyes were sad and serious.

‘This time, you could be wrong,’ she said.

She stood up and moved to the house computer, keying the board in a brisk rattle. ‘Well come on,’ she said. ‘Go and help her. I’ll try and book you a flight. You get ready, and for heaven’s sake remember to pack your gun.’

I complied, shaking my head. None of the thoughts Annette had expressed had ever crossed my mind before. ‘Love never dies’.

Well, fuck me.

I was tempted to make the journey by one of the steadily plying airships, but as Annette pointed out those took days, and were usually loaded with freight and crowded with space-workers hung over after a month’s leave in Norlonto. So I found myself leaving Stanstead on a regular jet, much larger than the one that Reid and I had taken thirty years earlier. No anti-aircraft fire this time; the Urals corridor had long since been bombed into a safe passage.

Stanstead to Almaty, its airport still shell-pocked from the victory of the Kazakh People’s Front; north to Karaganda, a frightening, grimy place, black even in the snow: post-Soviet, post-industrial, post-independence, post-everything. From Karaganda there was a regular hop to Kapitsa; because the ISTWR was still an independent enclave, I was detained for a check – the first in my whole journey. Front cadres and local officials scrutinised my documents, tapped my details into some ancient mainframe (located in India, if the response time was anything to go by) then broke into smiles and offers of Johnny Walker Red Label when my records came up. I had said good things about the KPF, when it wasn’t fashionable. They insisted on telling me how much they admired this, and after a few whiskies I told them how much I admired them. They’d fought the US/UN, reunited their country without fueling nationalist fires, and refrained from imposing their state on the one part of the country that didn’t want it.

‘The ISTWR?’ They thought this was funny. They hadn’t refrained out of any high-flown principles.

‘Why not, then?’ I shrugged slightly, glanced at the map above the customs-officers’ desk. Not the little enclave’s defensive capacity, that was for sure.

‘Bad lands,’ I was told. ‘Bomb country.’

They say the steppe around Kapitsa glows in the dark, but it’s just starlight reflected off the snowfields. That’s what I told myself on the flight, as I dozed off the effects of good whisky taken neat, jolted awake and smoked and dozed again. Only two other seats on the aircraft were occupied, and their occupants were as keen to keep their own company as I was. I kept my reading-light off, pressed the side of my face to the window, and watched the black thread of the road from Karaganda to Semipalatinsk wend across the steppe, and even fancied I saw the tiny sparks of light from the snow-ploughs.

We landed in a twenty-below dawn on a runway just cleared of snow. A minibus hurried us to the terminal. Beyond the swept-up mounds of dirty snow the gantries stood skeletal and dark. Few aircraft were parked, none were coming in. The airport building was as bright as ever, its workers as secure in their casual employment as before, redundantly supervising busy machines. The republic’s heroes still loomed large in their posters.

But compared with its bustle when the place was exporting nuclear deterrence, it might as well have been deserted. Its sinister emptiness recalled the public squares of the old Communist capitals. I set off across the concourse with the nervous hesitation one feels on entering a large, old, and possibly unoccupied house.

I had no idea what to do next. If Myra had wanted to tell me, I’d assumed she would and could; if she’d had any warnings, she’d have included them in the message. As it stood it appeared that the only aspect of our contact which she wanted to keep secret was that she needed my help.

The coffee franchise was still there, and open. It was where she’d met us before. I walked over and ordered a coffee and sat down with it and a copy of the English-language edition of Kapitsa Pravda, which lived up to its name in that it gave an apparently truthful account of the news. I had reached the sports pages before I realised that it contained no news whatsoever about Kapitsa.

I scanned the concourse, eagerly fixing on any figure who chanced to resemble my memory of Myra, and sat back disappointed each time. An hour passed. Mutual Protection guards wandered through as if they owned the place. More people came and went. I heard one, then two more aircraft come in. Their passengers straggled individually or in small knots to the glass doors, outside which a dozen taxis idled their engines in the cold.

Maybe I should just look her up in the phone-book…I was standing at the booth and gazing at the search page before I realised that I didn’t know her current surname. It even took me several seconds of racking my memory before her original surname came back to me: Godwin. I tried that. No luck.

I put an encrypted call through to Annette.

‘Hi, love. I’ve arrived safely.’

She smiled. ‘Glad to hear it. That’s not why you’ve called.’

‘Why d’you say that?’

‘I know how your mind works, Jon.’ She laughed. ‘It’s Davidov. I looked it up on the old insurance policy.’

I suppose I must have looked embarrassed. Annette grinned and stuck out her tongue, a pink millimetre on the tiny screen. ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘Take care.’

The screen blinked off. I sighed, suddenly feeling very old and alone, and keyed up the phone-book again.

Davidov, Myra G., Lieut-Cmmdr (ret’d) lived at Flat 36, Block 7, Ignace Reiss Boulevard. No other Davidov was listed at that address; Myra’s marriage had broken up years ago. The building, when the taxi dropped me off there, turned out to be a classic Soviet block, recently built in a kind of perverted homage to the workers’ motherland but with its concrete already crumbling and discoloured. Only one car was parked outside, a big black Skoda Traverser. Myra’s, I guessed: it looked just the sort of vehicle that would be at the disposal of a retired People’s Commissar.

The lift, in another neat touch of authenticity, didn’t work. I lugged my travel-bag up three flights of stairs. My knees hurt. Time I got a new set of joints. I rang the doorbell and looked around for a CCTV camera. There wasn’t one. Instead, a shutter flicked back, exposing a fisheye lens sunk into the door. Bolts squeaked, chains rattled. The door opened slowly. Yellow light, heavy scent, stale cigarette-smoke and loud music escaped. Then a hand reached out and tugged me inside. The door swung and clicked behind me, and I was caught in a warm and bony embrace.

After a minute we stood back, hands on each other’s shoulders.

‘Well, hi,’ Myra said.

Her steel-grey bobbed hair matched the gunmetal satin of her pyjama-suit. Her face had the waxy, dead-Lenin sheen imparted by post-Soviet rejuvenation technology, a glaring contrast to the mottled and ropy skin of her hands. Like me, like all of the New Old, she was a chimera of youth and age.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘You’re looking well.’

She laughed. ‘You aren’t.’ Her fingertips rasped the stubble on my cheek.

‘Nothing a shower wouldn’t fix.’

‘Now that,’ she said with a sharp look, ‘is a very good idea.’ She reached past me and flipped a switch. Shuddering, firing-up noises came from the walls. ‘Half an hour,’ she said, leading me into her living-room. It had one double-glazed window overlooking the street. The view extended past the replicated streets of the district, over the older prefab town and out to the steppe.

A central-heating radiator stood cold beneath the window-sill, an electric heater threw up hot dry air. Insulation was what kept the room warm; it was thickly carpeted, the walls hung with rugs, their patterns – blocky like the pixels of an early computer-game – a display of traditional Afghan designs of helicopter gunships and MiGs and AK-47s. Between them were political and tourist posters of Kazakhstan’s history and geography (the ISTWR itself being deficient in both), and old advertisements of rocket blast-offs and nuclear explosions. A television screen, hung among the posters, was tuned, sound off, to a Bolshoi Luna ballet; floating flights and falls, the form’s illusions made real under another sky. Huge antique Sony speakers high up on over-loaded bookshelves pounded out Chinese rock.

An old IBM PC stood on the table beside Myra’s hand bag and a stack of coding manuals. A glance over their titles suggested that she’d had to encrypt her message by hand. No wonder it was so brief: it must have taken days.

She made me a breakfast, of cereal and yoghurt and bitter Arabic coffee. We chatted about the flight, and about the changes in our lives since we’d last met, several years earlier in an Alexandra Port bar. She still saw her ex-husband, the dashing officer she’d once subverted, and I got the impression that something was still going on between them, but for months he’d been in Almaty, supposedly negotiating with the KPF. She implied that he was being kept out of the way.

‘So is this place still a Trotskyist state?’ I asked.

Myra set down her cup, her hand trembling slightly.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It’s…just like Russia when Lev Davidovich was in charge.’

That bad? I raised my eyebrows; she nodded.

‘And you’re not in the government any more?’

‘Not for some time.’ She smiled wryly.

‘I’m sure you still have a lot to say,’ I said. ‘Does anyone listen to you?’ I cocked my head.

‘They sure do,’ she said. ‘I can’t complain.’

She looked at her watch. ‘Your shower is ready.’

The shower was in a stall off her bedroom. I laid my clothes on the foot of her bed, carefully – I didn’t want them creased. As I smoothed out my jacket my fingers brushed the hard edge of my pistol, a neat, flat plastic piece no longer or thicker than my hand. After a moment’s thought I took it out and as I got into the shower laid it across the top corner of the stall. Then I turned the shower on and stood in its steamy spray, grateful that this at least was built to spec. I had barely rinsed off my first soaping when the splash-door opened, and Myra stepped in.

‘It’s an old trick but it works,’ she whispered in my ear, rubbing my back. ‘White noise is white noise, no matter what they use.’

‘You really think you’re being bugged?’

She laughed. ‘It’s what I would do, in their position.’

‘Who’s “they”? What’s going on?’

She picked up a tiny disposable razor and an aerosol that extruded pine-scented foam. She lathered my face and began to shave it, thus ensuring the fixity of my gaze. Just as well, because it almost took lip-reading to make out her whispered words in the steady hot rain, and there was no time for her to repeat herself or for me to interrupt.

‘You know there’s something going on,’ she said. ‘I left that message weeks ago, because I thought if anyone was gonna investigate, it’d be you.’ She grinned. ‘And I was right. OK, here’s the story. Deep technology – nanotech, genetic engineering, AI and so on – was restricted under the Yanks, and it’s still under attack in most places, what with the bloody Greens and religious zealots and shit. Two things happened. One, places like this took in scientific refugees and let them get on with their work under cover of other projects. Two, the US/UN and especially Space Defense kept up their own work. The bans were for everybody else, not for them. Now it’s all come together: our scientists are working with theirs, and you can bloody well bet theirs are co-operating – it’s the only way they can work off their debts. Same goes for a vast POW labour force. They’re shipping stuff into space like there’s no tomorrow, and at this rate, there won’t be. I think they’re going for a coup.’

‘In Kazakhstan?’

‘In the world, stupid!’

I really did feel stupid. That, or she was crazy.

‘For fuck sake, who? And how?’

‘Your space movement – OK, maybe not yours, but – anyway, they had people in the official space programmes, even in Space Defense. And they can see how things are going, since the Fall Revolution. “Fall” is right! Everything’s falling apart – it’s like a global version of the Soviet breakup. Another few months, years at most, and there won’t be a rocket lifting from anywhere. The word is, it’s now or never if we’re ever to get a permanent space presence. We’re in what they call a resource trap.’

That at least fitted with what I’d seen, and what Annette had suspected.

‘I’ll take that for a “why”,’ I said. ‘I asked who, and how. Even SD couldn’t really dominate the world, without back-up on the ground, and now that’s gone, splintered –’

‘I told you,’ she hissed. ‘As much as I could in the time I had. “It’s too fast”, remember? Nanotech. With that you can build spaceships, not big dumb rockets but real ships so light and strong they can get to escape velocity like that.’ Her hand planed upwards. ‘Whoosh. They have AI that can guide laser-launchers, send ships up on a needle jet of super-heated steam. And with nanotech, you got one, you have as many as you want, you can grow them like trees!’

I shrugged, under the pouring water, absently sponging her skinny flanks.

‘If you have all that, you don’t need to rule the world. All you have to do is save it.’

Myra shook her head, sending drops flying. ‘They don’t want to save it, and they don’t think it wants to be saved. Oh, Jon, you hung out with all those humanists and anarchists, and you just don’t know how much bitterness and contempt there is among the scientific-technological elite for the ignorant masses! That’s why they threw me out, after the Fall Revolution, when I got in on a little bit of this and began to kick up a fuss. They called me a populist and a – a revisionist!’ She laughed. ‘They suffered and chafed for years under the UN bureaucrats and the Stasis cops and the Green saboteurs, and they don’t want to have to mess with those people ever again. They really believe that if news gets out of what they’re up to, the mobs will march on the labs, demagogues will push governments into another crackdown, and it’ll all be over.’

I looked up from flannelling her shins. ‘They could be right.’

‘Don’t say that! That’s what Reid’s been telling them for years!’

I stood up, almost slipping on the stall’s wet, sudded floor.

‘Reid?’

‘Ssshhh. Yes, I thought you knew. He’s running the whole show, and he’s been planning it for a long time. I think he might even have done it if the Revolution hadn’t happened, but now it has he’s moving faster than ever. Mutual Protection and its goddamn privatised gulags are the muscle behind it all, and he’s the worst of the lot. He thinks like you sometimes used to write, about freedom, but with him it’s absolute – no ethics, no politics. Even the scientists are afraid of him.’

I could believe that. Ever since he’d stopped being a communist, Reid had followed no interest but his own. So had I – being one’s brother’s keeper was to my mind still the original sin – but I’d never quite achieved Reid’s single-minded dedication in that regard.

The shower died to a trickle.

‘What are we going to do?’

Myra looked at me. ‘I know what I want to do,’ she said with a wicked smile. She looked down. ‘Jeez – does this this kinda talk turn you on?’

We dried each other silently in the tiny space that Myra’s big bed left in the room, and continued the conversation under cover of the bedding and some very loud music. She told me what we were going to do, and then we did it, and then lay on our sides, face-to-face, legs entwined, talking dirty politics. We whispered under the bed-clothes, like children after lights-out.

Simply exposing what was going on might well result in the very outcome that Reid’s faction feared. Letting it go on could result in a chaotic and bloody splitting of humanity, between a tiny space-based minority and an earthbound majority dominated in all probability by anti-technological, paranoid leaderships. Either way, the prospects for a civilised future were dim.

There was another way, Myra argued: to get what she called the ‘legitimate’ space movement to organise a campaign for exactly the same things as Reid’s group wanted – access to the technology developed by the UN and the scientific underground, a big effort to hold the space programme together – but openly, and voluntarily, funded by donation rather than extortion. Get it all out in the open, and discussed. That was the only way to undermine the suspicions on both sides: let the technologists see that people really wanted what they could give, and that they would actually pay for it. Let the ordinary folk see that deep technology wasn’t really going to turn the biosphere into germ-sized robots or them into machines, and all the other things they’d been told they had to fear.

‘And you,’ she said, ‘are the only person I know of who could make it work.’

‘Me? You flatter me, lady.’

‘You have the contacts, the credibility…’

‘I’m not too popular with the space-movement cadre any more,’ I said. ‘To tell you the truth, I think most of them already think the way you say Reid’s group does.’

And (I didn’t say) there was only one thing that could turn the supporters of the movement against its organisers, and that was exposing the plot, if such it was. I lay in the dark tent of the quilt for another minute, looking at Myra’s face, and thinking some thoughts which I hoped didn’t show on mine. Starting with the big one: she had told me a pack of lies.

‘Let’s do lunch,’ I said.

Lunch was in a tiny Greek restaurant around the corner.

‘Why Greeks?’ I asked, nibbling hot shish.

‘They followed the Tatars back here, before the Tatars went home,’ Myra explained.

‘That’s a lot of history,’ I suggested.

‘Yeah,’ said Myra. She glanced around. ‘Leave it.’

We drank good wine and some ferocious brandy. Myra talked about safe, non-controversial subjects, like how the whole state of the world was my fault.

‘If you’d sold the Germans the option,’ Myra explained, ‘the fucking Israel is –’ (it was always that with Myra, like one word) ‘– would never have dared do what they did, and the Yanks would never have taken over, and…’

‘And so on.’ I laughed. ‘Come on. There must have been scores of people in the same position as me, who made the same decision.’

‘Yeah, but they all needed their nukes. You didn’t. You just hung onto them out of principle.’

‘No I didn’t! I’ve never made a principled decision in my life! I’m an opportunist and proud of it. Anyway, why didn’t you just let them have their deterrent, and settle up afterwards?’

Myra grinned at me, shrugged.

‘Bad for business.’

I grinned back at her.

‘That was my reason, too.’

We’d reached the honey-cake and coffee and the last shots of brandy. Myra picked and licked and sipped. Stopped, a grin of enlightenment on her face.

‘That’s it!’ she said. ‘I should know better than to blame individuals. The whole goddamn’ mess is the fault of –’

‘Capitalism!’ I said loudly, and the garson came over with the bill.

Back at her flat we dived into bed again. She left the sound-system on. We hardly noticed when the rock music changed to military music, but we both lay in silence afterward, when the announcement that the airport was temporarily closed boomed through the house.

We didn’t need to talk about what this meant. Martial music and closed airports were the traditional prelude to an announcement that the country had been saved. Someone had made their move. It was time I did likewise, before the roadblocks went up – or Myra turned me in, for her own protection and mine.

I stroked a strand of hair away from her face.

‘Are you ready for a cigarette?’ I smiled.

‘God, yes.’

‘I’ve got some in my jacket,’ I said, sitting up and reaching toward the end of the bed.

‘No, no,’ Myra said. She threw back the covers, caught my forearm. ‘You must try some of ours. Really.’

She smiled into my eyes. Had she thought I might be going for my gun? If so, she must think it was still in the jacket. She’d have felt it there when we embraced in the hall, and not checked again before getting in the shower.

She reached over to a bedside cabinet, opened the drawer. I didn’t take my eyes off her for a second, and she didn’t let go of my arm, as she fumbled around inside the drawer and took out a pack of cigarettes. We smoked in thoughtful silence. The strong, rough cigarette made my head buzz. Did she suspect that I suspected?

I stubbed out the cigarette, gave her a broad wink, and said, a little too loud, ‘Myra, would you mind driving me to my hotel?’

She grinned back at me and said, again as if for the benefit of anyone who might be listening, ‘No problem.’

I put on all my clothes except my jacket, stooped to zip up my overnight bag, and said: ‘Ah, I left my cloth in the shower.’

I leaned into the shower stall, recovered the pistol, turned around –

My foot reached the drawer of the bedside cabinet a second before her hand, and slammed it shut. As she jerked back I opened the drawer again, and fished out the pistol that I’d known for sure would be there.

Myra sat rigid, white-faced, clutching the quilt as if for protection.

‘I’m ready,’ I told her. I slipped her big heavy automatic into my jacket pocket, picked up the jacket and draped it across my arm and hand. ‘We can leave as soon as you’re dressed.’

When she was dressed, and we were back in her living-room, she tried a casual reach for her handbag, but I got to it first. I pocketed yet another pistol, this one even smaller and lighter than my own, tossed her the keys and nodded for the door. She pulled on her long fur coat, and descended the stairs in front of me. The black Skoda still stood alone on the street.

Following my silent indications, she opened the passenger door and slid across to the driver’s seat. I got in and closed the door. She turned the key and the engine started immediately, as did the heater. Just as well – I was freezing after going those few steps in the open without my jacket.

She faced me, tears in her eyes.

‘Jon,’ she said, ‘what are you doing? I trusted you. Are you working for Reid?’

‘I see you’re not worried about bugs in your car,’ I remarked. ‘I don’t think you were worried about bugs in your flat, either. Start driving.’

Her shoulders slumped. ‘OK, OK,’ she said. ‘Where to?’

‘Karaganda.’

‘What?’ She looked at me, open-mouthed. ‘That’s hundreds of kilometres. Semipalatinsk is closer.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Shut up and drive.’

The border on the Karaganda road was only fifty kilometres distant, and I knew – from my conversation with the KPF cadres the previous night – that the greater Kazakh republic had a border post there, and the ISTWR hadn’t.

Myra engaged the gears, and the vehicle pulled out as the first snow of the day began to fall.

Myra’s story, I’d decided, just didn’t add up. If she and her doings were under surveillance, my visit had to be known. If she was out of favour with the authorities, her contact with me could only be interpreted with suspicion. It must be as obvious to her as it was to me that the first thing I’d do once I was safely home was to give her story all the publicity I could, risks or no risks.

It followed that both she, and the ISTWR’s security apparatus, wanted me to expose it – and that she was still well in favour with that apparatus. This implied that her story of the little republic’s having been completely taken over by some faction linked with Reid’s company was false. Far more likely it was that the core of the state was opposed to a (no doubt encroaching) company take-over, and wanted my earnest exposure as the perfect political pretext (before or after the fact) for reasserting their own control.

So whatever was going on, whether it was the company or the state that had struck first, there was no way I wanted to get involved. And there was no way, either, that whatever deeper threat we faced from Reid’s technocrats would be countered by political campaigning. The only way out that I could see was to take the whole story to the one state that could act swiftly, and whose intentions I trusted slightly more than those of any other state I could think of: the surrounding Kazakh Republic.

Which was why we were now driving along between metre-high, ploughed-back ridges of snow, on a road covered by a fall already centimetres deep.

Myra tried to speak once or twice, pleaded with me to explain what I was doing, and each time I told her, as harshly as possible, to shut the fuck up. I wanted her scared, off-balance; I wanted her to think me capable of shooting her. Which I certainly was not, but her sincere belief that I was should help to keep her out of trouble, whoever won.

In less than an hour the border was only a minute’s drive away. We topped a scrubby ridge and I could see the lights of the Kazakh border post through the snowfall. And a moment later and three hundred metres ahead, a line of men in bright yellow survival-suits with big black rifles, waving us down.

‘Mutual Protection,’ Myra said, with a bitter laugh. ‘So what now, smart-ass?’

‘Stop the car,’ I said levelly. ‘Slew it so your side is nearest, and get out with your hands up.’

I looked at her startled face and added as she applied the brake, ‘If that’s OK with you.’

‘It’s OK,’ she said.

She was a good driver. She brought the car to a halt just fast enough to skid the rear end around and bury the front in the snowdrift.

I opened the passenger door, rolled out with my jacket and gun, and pushed my way through the top of the oily, gritty snow of the drift, keeping the car’s bulk between me and the company guards. I crawled forward on knees and elbows until the approaching line of men had passed me on their way to the car. I could hear Myra’s raised, officious, protesting voice, and hoped that whatever she thought of me getting away, the last thing she’d want was for me to fall into her opponents’ hands.

I kept crawling forward, as close to the roadside snow-ridge as possible. The grit lacerated my palms, elbows and knees. The warmth was bleeding from my body with every passing second. When I could bear it no longer, I lifted myself to a sprinter’s crouch. The lights of the border post were half a kilometre away. I glanced back. The men were inspecting the car, Myra was kicking up a major political incident.

I started to run. At first I tried to run doubled-up, but I couldn’t do it. I straightened up and began to run flat-out. My sides felt as if they were being skewered on hot swords. I swore I’d never smoke again.

Then I felt a great thump on my back, and saw the blood spurt from my chest, and I followed its red arc forward onto the snow, as if I could catch the drops.

I was on my back, looking up at a white sky. Above me an impossible object floated, a diamond ship: faceted, sparkling, like the delicate white ghost of a stealth bomber, suspended on ridiculously faint jets. A rope-ladder snaked down from it, a white-clad man descended. I raised my head a couple of centimetres as he reached the ground, and faced me. It was David Reid. His face told me nothing.

Yellow suits, goggled faces. Myra, her arms firmly held as she strained towards me.

‘Love never dies,’ I tried to say, and died.