And they really were young, not rejuvenated old folks like her; she could hardly understand it, because she’d been thinking of the International, for decades now, as a club of ageing veterans. But then she thought of how the most formative and exciting experience of their childhoods had been a revolution—the British section of the Fall Revolution, yes!—and how that might have given them an idea of what the real (that is to say, ideal, never-actually-existing) Revolution might be like.
They’d regarded her, of course, as an old comrade, a veteran revolutionary who’d actually made a revolution, and actually ran a workers’ state; but they’d soon lost their reserve, perhaps unconsciously misled (she fancied) by her increasingly believable apparent youth; and told her in more detail than she needed to know of the inevitable rancorous rivalries that had pitted them against, and the rest of the local Left for, her regime’s liberal critics and/or Sino-Soviet communist foes.
She was grateful for their support, of course, and told them so; but she thought their ingrained acceptance of far-left factionalism was blinding them to the depth of genuine hatred and moral outrage she’d aroused, and indeed to its justification. There had been nothing in the angry man’s diatribe which she hadn’t at one time or another said to herself.
You fucking sell-out, you fucking capitalist whore.
Yes, comrade, you have a point there. There may be something in what you say.
At the same time she found that the comrades were over-solicitous, certain that she’d be in danger if she wandered around on her own in Glasgow. They urged her to contact the consulate, and to travel officially. Myra had demurred, pointing out that that was exactly what had got her into this trouble in the first place. She hadn’t told them what she did intend to do, however—
somebody
must have leaked the news of her unheralded and early arrival, and she had no reason to suppose it might not be one of them.
She passed the old church, St Jude’s, which still looked much too grand, too
catholic
for the tiny denomination it served, and opposite it the Halt Bar where she’d drunk with David Reid and with Jon Wilde, separately and together, during and after the brief, intense affairs that had nudged all their lives on to their particular paths.
And thus, the lives and deaths of countless others. Jon had virtually started the space movement, and founded Space Merchants. Reid had built up Mutual Protection, and Myra the ISTWR. All from small beginnings, inconsequential at the time, all eventually affecting history on a scale usually attributed to Great Men.
Perhaps if they had not, there would have been some other Corsican … but no. Chaos reigned, here as elsewhere.
At the green bridge over the Kelvin she paused, gazing down at the brown spate and white swirl. How trivial were the causes of the courses of any particle, any bubble on that flow. No, it was wilder than that, because the water was at least confined by its banks: it was more like how the whole course of a river could be deflected by a pebble, by a grain of sand, a blade of grass, at its first upwelling; where the great forces of gravity and erosion and all the rest did minute but momentous battle with the surface tension of a particular drop. History was a river where every drop was a potential new source, a fountainhead of future Amazons.
She walked on, past the salient of Kelvingrove Park on the left and up the steepening slope of Gibson Street, and turned to the right along the still tree-shaded avenue to the Institute. She rang the bell, smiling wryly at the polished brass of the nameplate. Once the Institute of Soviet and East European Studies, then of Russian and East European Studies, then …
The Institute for the Study of Post-Civilised Societies, was what they called it now.
The woman who opened the door looked very East European, in her size (small) and expression (suspicious). Her dark eyes widened slightly.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘Godwin.’
‘Yes, hello.’ Myra stuck out her hand. The woman shook it, with brief reluctance, tugging Myra inside and closing the door at the same time.
‘This place is watched,’ she said. She had black bobbed hair; her age was hard to make out. Her clothes were as shabby as Myra’s: blue denim smock, black jeans grey at the knees. ‘My name is Irina Guzulescu. Pleased to meet you.’
They stood looking at each other in the narrow hallway. Institutional linoleum, grey paint and green trim, black stairway. The place smelt of old paper and cigarette smoke. Posters—shiny repro or faded original—from the Soviet Union and the Former Union: Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev, Antonov, solemn; Gagarin, smiling. The Yeltsingrad Siege: heroic child partisans aiming their Stingers at the Pamyat Zeppelins. The building was completely silent and there was nobody else around.
‘I was kind of expecting more people here,’ Myra said. ‘I left a message.’
‘Like I said.’
‘Oh.’ Myra felt baffled and miffed.
‘Your cases arrived safely,’ Irina said, as though to mollify her. She escorted her up the narrow black-bannistered stairs to the library. The stair carpet was frayed to the point of criminal negligence. The library itself was cramped, a maze of bookcases through which one had to go crabwise. Several generations of information technology were carefully racked above the reading-table. Myra’s crates were stacked beside it.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Irina said.
‘Thanks.’
Myra, alone, pulled down her eyeband, upped the gain, looked down at the crates and sighed. They were still bound with metal tape. She clicked her old Leatherman out of its pouch and got to work opening them, coiling the treacherously sharp bands carefully into a waste-paper basket. Then she had to pull the nails, like teeth. Finally she was able to get the files out.
She sorted the paper files into stacks: her personal stuff—diaries and letters and so on—and political, sorted by time and organisation, all the way back from her ISTWR years through to internal factional documents from that New York SWP branch in the 1970s. These last still made her smile: had there really ever been anyone daft enough to choose as his
nomme de guerre
for a debate about the armed struggle ‘Dr Ahmed Estraguel’?
She worked her way, similarly, through the formats and conversions from Dissembler through. DoorWays to Linux to Windows to DOS, and through storage media from the optical disks and bubble-magnetic wafers and CD-RWs (‘CD-Rubs’, they used to be called) to the floppy disks, almost jumping out of her seat at the noise the ancient PC made when it took the first of those. In the quiet building, it sounded like a washing-machine on the spin cycle.
After about an hour and a half, which passed in a kind of trance, all her optical and electronic files were copied to the Institute’s electronic archive. She blinked up her eyeband menu, and invoked Parvus.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ he said.
She felt almost awkward. ‘Do you mind having a copy taken, and its being downloaded?’
The entity laughed. ‘Mind? Of course not! Why should I mind?’
‘OK,’ Myra said. She uncoiled a fibre-optic cable from the terminal port and socketed it to her eyeband. ‘I want your copy to guard this collection of files—’ she ran her highlighting finger over it ‘—and anything you’ve got with you right now, applying the kind of discretionary access criteria that your existing parameters permit. Give the scaling a half-life of, oh, fifty years. Got that?’
‘Yes.’ Parvus smiled, doubled, then one of him disappeared dramatically like a cartoon genie swooshing back into a bottle.
‘Done,’ he said. It had taken longer than she’d expected—she must have had more files on her personal datadeck than she’d realised.
‘Thank you,’ said Myra. ‘Anything to report, by the way?’
Parvus shrugged expansively. ‘Nothing that can’t wait. Except that Glasgow Airport is closed.’
‘What?’
Surely not a coup, not here—
‘Fighting on the perimeter. Damage to the runways. Just Green partisans, nothing serious, but there’s no chance you’ll get your flight on Monday.’
‘Oh, shit. Book me a train. For tomorrow, OK? Catch you later.’
She disengaged the cable link and let it roll back. Then she got to work labelling the stacks, dating the paper folders and making notes for the Institute’s archivist.
Somebody clattered up the stairs, strode into the library and flicked the light on. Myra turned around sharply and met the surprised gaze of the girl who’d identified her at the demo.
‘Oh!’ said the girl. She slowly slid her tartan scarf from around her neck and flicked her long, thick black hair out from under her denim jacket’s collar. ‘What—what are you doing here?’
Myra straightened up, feeling irrationally pleased that she was marginally taller than the younger woman.
‘I was about to ask you the same question,’ she said.
‘I work here! I’m a post-grad student.’
She said it with such confusion of face, such a widening of her big brown eyes, that Myra couldn’t help but smile.
‘And a political activist, too, I understand.’
The girl nodded firmly. ‘Aye.’ The comment seemed to have allowed her self-confidence to recover. She stepped over to a chair and sat, stretching her legs out and propping her boots on a book-caddy. Myra observed this elaborately casual behaviour with detached amusement.
‘I was an activist myself, when I studied here,’ Myra said, half-sitting on the edge of the table.
‘I know,’ the girl said coldly. ‘I’ve read your thesis.
Detente and Crisis in the Soviet Economy.’
Myra smiled. ‘It still stands up pretty well, I think.’
‘Yeah. Can’t say the same about your politics, though.’ She frowned, swinging her feet back to the floor and leaning forward. ‘In a way it’s nothing … personal, you understand? I mean, when I read what you wrote, I like the person who wrote it. What I can’t do is square that with what you’ve become.’
That was laying it on the line! Myra felt a jolt of pain and guilt.
‘I don’t know if I can, either,’ she said. ‘I changed. Real politics is more complicated than—ah, fuck it. Look—uh, what’s your name?’
‘Merrial MacClafferty.’
‘OK—Merrial. The fact is, the Russian Revolution got defeated, and never got repeated—perhaps because the defeat was so devastating that it made any subsequent attempt impossible.’ She laughed harshly. ‘And like the man said, it’s gonna be socialism or barbarism. Socialism’s out the window, it was dead before I was born. So barbarism it is. We’re fucked.’
Merrial was shaking her head. ‘No, nothing’s inevitable. We make our own history—the future isn’t written down. “The point is to change it.” Look at the Sheenisov, they’re building a real workers’ democracy, they’ve proven it’s still possible—and what do you do? You fight them! On the side of the Yanks and the Kazakhstani capitalists.’
‘Like I said,’ Myra sighed. ‘Real politics is complicated. Real lives, mine and those of the people I’ve taken responsibility for. The future may not be written but the past bloody well is, and it hasn’t left me with many options.’
‘You mean, you haven’t left
yourself
—’
‘Tell you what,’ Myra said, suddenly annoyed. She waved at the stack of cardboard and paper around her. ‘Here’s my life. There’s a lot more on the computer.’ She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. ‘Password’s “Luxemburg and Parvus” for the easy stuff. You’re welcome to all of it. The hard stuff, the real dirty secrets, I’ve put a hundred-year embargo on, and even after that it’ll be the devil of a job to hack past it. If you’re still around in a couple of centuries, give it a look.’
‘This is what you’re doing?’ Merrial asked. ‘Turning over your archives to the Institute? Why?’
Myra could feel her lips stretch into a horrible grin. ‘Because here it has
a very slightly better chance of surviving the next few weeks, let alone the next few centuries. You want my advice, kiddo, you stop worrying about socialism and start getting ready for barbarism, because that’s what’s coming down the pike, one way or another.’
Merrial stood up and glared down at Myra. ‘Maybe you’ve given up, but I won’t!’
‘Well, good luck to you,’ said Myra. ‘I mean that.’
The young woman looked at her with an unreadable expression. ‘And to you, I suppose,’ she said ungraciously, and turned on her heel and stalked out. Whether automatically or deliberately, she switched off the light as she went. Myra blinked, fiddled with her eyeband and got back to work.
‘Everything all right?’ Irina Guzulescu was limned in the backlight of the library doorway.
Myra straightened up and dusted off her hands.
‘Yeah, I’m doing fine, thanks.’ She laughed. ‘Sorry about the dark, I was using my eyeband to see with, instead of putting the light on.’
‘Probably just as well,’ the small woman said. She advanced cautiously into the room, past the opened crates and labelled stacks of Myra’s archives. ‘Some of the books in here are so fragile, I fear sometimes one photon could …’ She smiled, and handed Myra a mug of coffee.