Fractions (74 page)

‘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.'