‘This’ll be easy,’ she said. ‘It’ll save us hours.’
I sat on the windowsill, smoking a cigarette, while her fingers flickered
over the small keyboard, making a pattering noise like rain on a roof. It struck me that there seemed to be no discernible difference between the white logic and the black, but no doubt this only showed my ignorance.
‘Yess!’ she said. ‘No bother.’
She hit a key and sat back. Then she leaned forward again, peering at the stone.
‘Oh fffuck!’
I eyed her warily.
‘I used fucking two-digit year-dates. Force of habit. Fucking thing falls over on the year 2000.’
The pattering started again.
About half an hour later Merrial had the files partially ordered by date, and we could dig about in them with a little more confidence in their relevance to our concerns.
‘“Defence Policy Contract (Expiry), Vatican City, 11 December 2046”,’ Merrial read out. ‘That looks interesting.’
She pressed one of her keys and the file, as she put it, opened: instead of the title glowing a little brighter among the others, we could see the whole document. Parts of it were in impenetrable legal language (parts of it, in fact, were in Latin) but there was enough there for us to form a good idea of what it was about.
Merrial paused before opening another file, one labelled ‘Mutual Protection/Space Merchants/2058’.
We looked at each other, both a little pale, each waiting for the other to speak first.
Merrial swallowed hard, and reached for one of my cigarettes.
‘You do know,’ she said slowly, ‘just what the Deliverer had to do to make a living, under the Possession?’
‘Well …’ I could feel my lower lip moving back and forth over the edge of my teeth, and stopped it. ‘Yes. It’s one of the aspects of history that historians tend not to talk about. In popular works, that is.’
‘Ohh!’ Merrial let out a held breath in relief. ‘You know about the slave camps, then.’
‘What?’ For a fleeting instant, I literally saw a black shadow before my eyes. I pointed at the seer-stone’s script. ‘I thought you were talking about the nuclear blackmail!’
Merrial looked puzzled. ‘Nuclear blackmail? I know she got some nuclear weapons from the
Papanich
, that’s right here. What has that to do with how she made her living?’
‘Oh, Reason above!’ I clutched my head. ‘Let’s get this straight.
You
think the dirty secret is that she ran
slave camps.
I think it’s that she trafficked in nuclear threats.’
Merrial sighed. ‘Yes, that’s it.’ She unfurled her hand and forearm with parodied politeness. ‘You first.’
‘All right.’ I noticed that my left knee was juddering up and down; I stood up, and paced the floor as I spoke. ‘You know about nuclear deterrence?’
‘Oh, aye,’ she said, with a grimace.
‘Well, yes, to us the policy of threatening to burn to death many great cities and their inhabitants seems wicked, but the ancients didn’t see it that way. In fact, some of them began to see nuclear deterrence as a good, which like all goods would be better bought and sold by businesses than provided by governments. The trouble was, all nuclear weapons were owned by governments, and were impossible to buy and hard to steal.
‘So Myra Godwin and her husband, Georgi Davidov, stole a government. Davidov was a military man, and he carried out a military coup in a part of Kazakhstan, in a region which was very unpleasant and barren but which did happen to have a large stockpile of nuclear weapons. In a way, what happened was that the soldiers who manned the nuclear weapons decided to claim some territory, and nobody dared gainsay them.
‘The local people had suffered grievously under the rule of the Communists. Stalin had starved at least a million of them in the 1930s. But things had improved a lot, and after the fall of the Communists they found themselves worse off under the lairds and barons and usurers. The real answer to their problems was not known at the time, or not known widely enough, and they began to hanker for the secure if limited life they had known before.
‘This was where Myra and Georgi had their stroke of genius. While Myra was studying here she was a follower of a man called Trotsky, who had been killed by Stalin and who became a banner for a different kind of communism, purged of Stalin’s crimes. As if there could be such a thing!’
‘What do you mean?’ Merrial asked, narrow-eyed.
‘Oh, come on, you know,
communism
—’ The word made me physically nauseous, as though dirty hands were pawing me. ‘Everybody minding each other’s business, everybody
owned
by everybody else, and that’s just the ideal! What could that be but evil? Let alone the reality, of a small ruling group doing the minding and the owning!’
‘How did that help the Deliverer?’
I shrugged. ‘She may have believed it when she was young. Nobody’s perfect. But when the Davidovs set up their state, they did so in the name of Trotsky, even though they did not really believe in him anymore. They kept enough communism to keep people secure, and enough freedom to let them be happy and rich.’
Merrial’s face was set in an interested but carefully neutral expression.
‘And the way they got rich,’ I went on, ‘was this. They started selling options to use the nuclear weapons they held. That way, states that had no nuclear weapons of their own could have nuclear deterrence. They were quite open about it, but they had to stop after the Third World War, when the last empire consolidated its grip.’
I sighed and shrugged. ‘It’s a blot on her record, I’ll give you that. But they never actually used them.’
Merrial looked a bit shaken. ‘So the scholars have known that all along? Well, I know what Godwin’s people did after they lost their little nuclear threat business.’ She smiled, thin-lipped. ‘It seems you don’t.’
She opened the other file. This one, which I read with growing horror, was about a very different contract. It was a monthly report on work done by prisoners, guarded by a company called Mutual Protection, for another company called Space Merchants.
‘Prison labour was another
good
,’ Merrial said, ‘that our Deliverer thought best to supply on the free market.’
‘But that’s slavery!’
‘Indeed it is,’ said Merrial. ‘That’s why we don’t talk about it. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of your scholars have covered it up too.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Maybe some of the senior tinkers know about this nuclear business, and all. But they don’t talk about it.’
We sat looking at each other, with the sudden passion of people who have lost something that they believed in, and have only each other left. It was all the more bitter because we each had separately thought we had been told the worst about the great woman, had smugly thought we were mature enough to know it and keep it quiet from the gullible populace, and we each had found that we had ourselves been gulled by our own guild; that there was an even darker tale to tell. My mind was racing, and I could feel a headache coming on. At the same time I felt a sense of release, a small deliverance, as the image of the Deliverer toppled in my mind.
With a short break when we wandered out into the warm evening for dinner in a fish restaurant by the Kelvin, we worked through the files. We found plenty about Myra Godwin’s strange career—more than enough to write a pretty sensational biography—but nothing about what had happened around the time of the Deliverance itself. It was after nine when Merrial jumped up and hissed, ‘Shit! Shit!’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’ve found a catalogue file. No meaningful title, wouldn’t you just fucking believe it. And it’s got far, far more entries than we’ve got files here. We just got the low-security stuff! The rest is still in the University’s dark storage.’
I rubbed my sore eyes, and reached out for Merrial’s hand. ‘So what’s still there might be
worse
?’
‘You said it. It might even contain the stuff we’re looking for. We have to go back.’
Long ago there had been another country, called the International. It was a country of the mind, a country of hope, and it encompassed the world. Until one day, in August 1914, its citizens went to war with each other, and the world ended. Everything died in that war, God and Country and International and Civilisation; died, and went to hell. Everybody died. The survivors thought they were alive, but they were not. After August 1914 there had been no living people in the world—only dead people on leave, the damned and the demons.
The last morally responsible people in the world had been the Reichstag fraction of the German Social-Democratic Party. They had voted the credits for the Kaiser’s war, against every resolution of their past. They had known the right thing to do, and they had chosen the wrong. All subsequent history had been that of the damned, of poor devils struggling in the hell these men had pitched them into; and nobody could be judged for how they behaved in hell.
This thought, with its bleak blend of Christian and Marxist heresies, had originally been expounded to her by David Reid, one night many decades ago, when he was very drunk. It had sustained Myra through many a bad night. At other times—in the days, and the good nights—it seemed a callow undergraduate nihilism, shallow and wicked and absurd. But in the bad nights it struck her as profound and true, and, in its way, life-affirming. If you thought of people as
alive
and
each having a life to live
, you’d get so
depressed at what so many had got instead, this past century and a half, that on a bad night you’d be tempted to add your own death to theirs, and thus make an undetectable increment to that already unimaginable, unthinkable number.
A number which Myra, on her bad nights, suspected she had already increased quite considerably. Not directly—if she had sinned at all, it had been a sin of omission—and nobody had ever blamed her for it, but she blamed herself. If she had sold the deterrence policy to the German imperialists when they’d needed it, torn up all her existing contracts and sorted them out later, how many people would now be alive who now were dead? On the bad nights the answer seemed to run into millions. At other times, on more sober reflection, she realised she wasn’t in that league; she wasn’t up there with the Big Three; there was almost a sort of adolescent self-dramatisation in the pretension; if she belonged in that company at all it was in the second or third rank, below the great revolutionaries but up there with the more destructive of the great imperialists, Churchill and Mountbatten and Johnson and people of that ilk.
Her shoes were kicked off under a chair, the black crêpe and dévoré dress was across the back of the chair, the sable hat was flung in a corner, the black fur coat was on the floor, the whisky bottle was open on the table and Leonard Cohen’s black lyrics disturbed the smoky air: Manhattan, then Berlin, indeed.
Myra was having one of her bad nights.
The late-spring night outside the thin, old curtains was cold, and the central-heating radiator didn’t do much to hold back the chill. The main room of the flat felt small, almost cramped, like a student bedsit. She had a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom; but most of what defined her life was crammed into this living-room. The shelves were lined with books, two or three rows deep, though she had the entire 2045 edition (the last) of the Library of Congress, sharing space with its Sterling search engine on a freebie disk somewhere in the clutter. Her music, her computer software and hardware, her pictures, all were piled up in similarly silted layers of technological generations, with the most recent stuff at the top or on the outside, and everything back to CDs and PCs and even, at some pre-Cambrian level, vinyl, in the strata below. She had, in her eyeband, ready access to any scene on Earth or off it, but she still had posters on the walls.
Once, these posters had consisted mainly of old advertisements for the ISTWR’s exports. But in recent years, one by one, the tacked-up shots of liftoffs and payloads, missiles and explosions had been tugged down in moments of shame and fury, to be crumpled and binned, and replaced by scenes of Kazakh nature and tradition. Mountains and meadows, horsemen and peasants, dancers in embroidered costumes—a whole oriental Switzerland of
tourist attractions. Kazakhstan was not doing too badly, even today. It had moved away from its disastrous, Soviet-era polluting industries and extractive monocultures, and put its prairies to a more productive and natural use in cattle-raising. The Kazakh horsemen were back in the saddle.
Myra leaned back and stretched. It was nearly midnight. She’d had far too much to drink. Her few hours in the bar with Valentina had been followed by an hour or two of drinking on her own. She was so drunk she was lucid, ‘fleeing’ as Dave used to call it. Or possibly she was sobering up, smoothly and gradually, and was in the state where repeated applications of the hair of the dog were postponing the inevitable hammer-blow of the hangover. But drunk or sober, with or without Reid’s antinomian justification, she had to act. She had to reach the International.
There were two Internationals (‘for large values of two’ as Reid had once put it, alluding to the numerous splits): the Second and the Fourth. When most people talked about
the International
, they meant the Second—the successor of the one that had torn itself apart in 1914, and had painfully reassembled its severed limbs in the course of three world wars, five world slumps and one successful world revolution. Even today it was massive: the Socialist International’s affiliated parties and trade unions and co-operatives and militias had an aggregate membership in the tens of millions, still.
What Myra meant, and Valentina meant, and Georgi had meant by
the International
was a less imposing institution, a remnant of a fragment, most of it embedded in the greater body of the Second, a splinter travelling slowly through its veins. The Fourth International’s membership was in the low thousands, scattered around the world—and, as Valentina had reminded her, off the world, thanks to its pioneering efforts at unionising the space rigs back in the 2020s. It was now almost dormant, a tenuous network of old comrades who couldn’t quite say goodbye to each other, or to the dreams of their fervent younger days.
The radical sects of the English Revolution, the Muggletonians and Cameronians and Fifth Monarchy Men, had persisted as dwindling, marginal congregations for centuries after their Kingdom had failed to come; so it would be, Myra thought, for the erstwhile partisans of the Fourth. She knew that, but still she had paid her dues.
Now it was time to get something back for her money. For a start, she could find out what her comrades had done with her country’s nukes.
Myra flew through virtual space, drunk in charge of a data-drive. New View floated before her, its image filling her eyeband’s field. The habitat was a sort of orbital commune—world socialism, in a very small world—which had been put together by the left wing of the space movement, back when such
ideas seemed to matter. The graticule showed it was hundreds of metres across, a circular accretion of habitats, salvaged fuel-tanks, cannibalised spacecraft. She reached out and turned it about in her datagloved hands, mildly amused at the chill, prickly tactile feedback, and peered at the small print of addresses on the hull until she found the name she sought.
Logan; whether forename or surname, real name or party name she didn’t know; she’d never heard the man called anything else. There it was, scribed on a hull panel from an old McDonnell Douglas SSTO heavy-lifter. She tapped it and the view zoomed in, to show a window with the man’s face peering out. It was an engagingly apt interface. Myra zapped a hailing code, and the face at the window responded.
‘Oh, hi? Myra Godwin? Just a moment, please.’ The fetch wavered and Logan’s real face, subtly different, seamlessly replaced it, pulling back as the window icon widened to an interior view of an actually windowless room.
The compartment was full-spectrum strip-lit, the glowing tubes like shafts of sunlight among intertwined vines and branches, cables and tubes. Logan floated in the centre of the room. His cropped white hair matched his white stubble. He wore a faded blue singlet and baggy pants. Around his brow was a toolkit headband on which a loupe and a light were mounted; a standard eyeband was shoved higher up on his forehead. He was bent around the open back of a control-panel which he had gripped between his feet and was working on with a hand laser and a set of jeweller’s screwdrivers.
He flipped the loupe up from his eye and grinned at her.
‘Well, Myra, long time no see.’ He still had the London accent, overlaid with a space-settler drawl. His space fraction had picked up a lot of people she and Georgi had known in Kazakhstan, tough trade-union militants blooded in the Nazbarayev years.
‘Yeah, I’ve missed you too, Logan. How’s life on New View?’
Logan gestured with one hand, automatically making a compensating movement with the other. ‘OK. We’ve got pretty much up to complement population-wise, near a thousand last time I checked. We’re making a good living, though—got a lot of products and skills the white settlers need. And the old Mars project is chugging along.’
‘You’re still doing
that
?’
Logan turned up his thumb. ‘Kitting out the expedition, bit by bit. No intention of hanging around here forever—not with the white settlers staking out the Moon, anyhow. Nobody’s even got much scientific interest in Mars any more, ‘specially after that contamination thing came out.’
Myra nodded glumly. It had indeed come as a bit of a disappointment that Mars had an entire biosphere of busily evolving micro-organisms, of recent origin; in the 1970s the Soviets had proudly deposited a piece of paper
autographed by Leonid Brezhnev on the Red Planet, which was now being very slowly terraformed by the descendants of bacteria from the General Secretary’s sweat.
‘So we’re gonna go for it,’ Logan went on. ‘Some time in the next couple of years, we’re moving it out.’
‘You’re going to move
New View
?’ Myra smiled at Logan, and at herself—each question so far had ended on a high note of astonishment.
‘Minus a few hundred tons of stuff we won’t need, but basically, yes. Fill her up—well, fill up a few tanks, I mean—with Lunar polar water, buy a fusion engine from the white settlers and push off on a Hohmann orbit. We got enough old spacecraft lashed into this junk-heap to build landers, then habitats on the ground.’
‘You’ve got it all worked out, I see,’ said Myra. ‘Well, good luck to you with that.’ The Mars colony scheme had been pending, Real Soon Now, on Logan’s agenda for as long as she’d known him. ‘However, I’ve got something a bit more urgent to ask you. These white settlers of whom you speak, they aren’t by any chance the people I once made a lot of money out of sticking on top of Protons and Energias and sending out there?’
‘That’s the ones,’ Logan said. ‘And the new lot coming out on the diamond ships, of course.’ He laughed. ‘The colonial bourgeoisie!’
‘Well, whatever you want to call them,’ said Myra, ‘you know they’re planning to take charge, through the ReUN and the battlesats?’
‘Oh, sure,’ Logan said. ‘Everybody knows that.’ He shrugged. ‘What can you do? And anyways, what difference is it gonna make to us?’ He flourished his tiny laser. ‘We’re safe.’
‘No, you’re not,’ said Myra. She flicked her gaze upwards, checking the firewall ’ware. It was sound. ‘I’ve just learned—from my Defence Minister, no less—that
I
have a clump of city-buster nukes stashed somewhere in the clutter around you.’
‘Is that a problem?’ Logan asked. ‘Best place for them, surely.’
She had to admire his cool.
‘Somehow I don’t think that was why the International asked for them to be put there.’
‘Ah,’ said Logan. ‘So you know about that.’
‘Yeah,’ said Myra. ‘Thanks a bunch for not telling me.’
Logan mumbled something entirely predictable about need-to-know. Myra cut off his ramble with an angry chop of her hand.
‘Give me a fucking break,’ she said, exasperated. ‘I can figure that out for myself. The nukes are an element of the situation, but they’re not my main concern right now. I just thought I should let you know that I know about them, for the same reason that you should’ve told me: for the sake of politeness, if nothing else. OK?’
‘Well, yeah, OK,’ Logan allowed, grudgingly. ‘So what is your main problem?’
‘I was wondering,’ said Myra, ‘if you’d grabbed them because you intended to do something about the coup. Like, you know, stop it.’
Logan laughed. ‘Me personally?’
‘No. The International. And don’t tell me you
personally
are the only member it’s got up there.’
‘Oh, no, not at all.’ Logan stared at her, obviously puzzled. ‘We got plenty of comrades, I mean New View is basically ours, but it’s been a long time since the Party had an army, Myra, you know that as well as I do. We do have a military org, like, but it’s just a … a small cadre.’
‘Of course I know that. But I also know what a small military cadre is
for.
It’s so that when you do need an army you can recruit your soldiers from
other
armies. You telling me the space fraction’s done no Party work on the battlesats? In all those years?’