The Sky Road tfr-4

by Ken MacLeod

  “ Good morning, Citizen.”

  That title was already an honorific. Myra Godwin-Davidova smiled and handed him the reins.

  “Good morning,” she said, swinging down from the horse. She could hear her knee-joints creak. She lifted the saddlebags and slung them over her shoulder. The weight almost made her stagger, and the guard’s arm twitched towards her; but she wasn’t going to accept any help from that quarter. “That will be all, thank you.”

  “As you wish, Citizen.” The guard saluted and replaced his cap. She was still looking down at him, her riding-boots adding three inches to her five-foot-eleven height.

  She patted the big mare’s rump and watched as the guard led the beast away, then set off towards the accommodation huts. As she walked she pulled off her leather gauntlets and stuffed them awkwardly into the deep pockets of her long fur coat, and tucked a stray strand of silver hair under her sable hat. Hands mottled, veins showing, nails ridged: tough claws of an old bird, still flexible, but a better indication of her true age than her harshly lined but firm face, straight back and limber stride. Her knees hurt, but she tried not to let it show, or slow her down.

  The camp perimeter was about one kilometre by two. Beyond the far fence she could see straight to the horizon, above which rose the many gantries and the few remaining tall ships of the old port. It had been a proud fleet once. How long before she would have to say, all my ships are gone and all my men are dead?

  As if to mock her thought, a small ship screamed overhead; she caught a glimpse of it: angular, faceted, translucent, a spectral stealth-bomber shrieking skyward from Baikonur on a jet of laser-heated steam. The trail’s after-image floated irritatingly in front of her as she turned her gaze resolutely back to earth.

  One of the camp’s factories was a couple of hundred metres away, a complex of aluminium pipework and fibre-optic cabling in a queasily organic-looking mass about fifty metres wide and twenty high, through which the control cabins and walkways of the human element were beaded and threaded like the eggs and exudate of some gargantuan insect. The name of the company that owned it, Space Merchants, was spelled out on the roof in twisty neon.

  As she approached the nearest workers’ housing area it struck Myra, not for the first time, that the huts were more modern and comfortable than the concrete apartment block she lived in herself. Each hut was semi-cylindrical, its rounded ends streamlined to the prevailing wind; soot-black polycarbon skin with rows of laminated-diamond windows.

  This particular cluster of accommodation huts was in two rows of ten, with the rutted remains of a twenty metre-wide paved road between them. A gang of a dozen men was engaged in repairing the road; the breeze carried a waft of sweat and tar. The men were using shovels, a gas burner under a tipping-and-spreading contraption, and a coughing diesel-engined road-roller: primitive, heavy equipment. On the sidewalk a blue-suited Mutual Protection guard lounged, picking his teeth and apparently watching a show in his eyes and hearing music or commentary in his ears.

  The loom of Myra’s shadow made him jump, blink and shake his head with a small shudder. He started to his feet.

  “No need to get up,” Myra said unkindly. “I just want to speak to some of the men.”

  “They’re on a break, Citizen,” he said, squinting up at her. “So it’s up to them, right?”

  “Right,” said Myra. Physical work counted as recreation. It was the intellectual labour of design and monitoring that taxed the convicts’ nerves.

  She turned to the men, who waved to her and shouted greetings and explanations: she’d have to wait the few minutes it would take for them to finish spreading and rolling some freshly poured tarmac. Not offering one to the guard, she lit a Marley and let the men take their time finishing their break. She’d always insisted that her arrivals and inspections counted as work-time for the labourers.

  Her spirits lifted as the Virginia and the Morocco kicked in. The labourers had their yellow suits rolled down to the waist, and were sweating even though the temperature had just climbed above freezing. Most of them were younger—let’s face it, far younger—than herself; dark-tanned Koreans and Japanese, muscular as martial arts adepts—which, indeed, some of them were. She enjoyed watching them, the effect of smoke amplifying the underlying undertone of lust, the happy, hippy hormonal hum…

  But that reminded her of Georgi, and her mood crashed again. Georgi was dead. Sometimes it seemed every man she’d ever fucked was dead; it was like she carried a disease: Niall MacCallum had died in a car crash, Jaime Gonzalez had died—what?—seventy years ago in the contra war, Jon Wilde had died in her arms on the side of the Karaganda road (on snow that turned red as his face turned white), and now Georgi Davidov had died in the consulate at Almaty, of a heart attack. (They expected her to believe thai?)

  There had been others, she reminded herself. Quite recent others. It wasn’t every man she’d ever fucked who was doomed, it was every man she’d ever loved. There was only one exception she knew of. All her men were dead, except one, and he was a killer.

  Even, perhaps, Georgi’s killer. Fucking heart attack, my ass! It was one of their moves, it had to be—a move in the endgame.

  A door banged open somewhere and the street suddenly swarmed with children pelting along and yelling, their languages and accents as varied as the colours of their skins. Few of the camp’s bonded labour-force were women, but many of the men had women with them; there was every inducement for the prisoners to bring their families along. It was humane, but politic as well: a man with a woman and children was unlikely to risk escape or revolt.

  Surrounded by children calling to their fathers, poking fingers in the hot asphalt, crowding around the machines and loudly investigating, die gang knocked off at last, leaving the guard to mind the newly tarred road. Myra savoured his disgruntled look as she crushed the filter roach under her heel and stepped out into the centre of the untarred part of the street.

  “Hi, guys.”

  They all knew who she was, but the only ones among them she recognised were two members of the camp committee, Kim Nok-Yung and Shin Se-Ha. The former was a young Korean shipyard worker, stocky and tough; the latter a Japanese mathematician of slender build and watchful mien. Kim seized her hand, grinning broadly.

  “Hello, Myra.”

  “Good to see you, Nok-Yung. And you, Se-Ha.”

  The Japanese man inclined his head. “Hi.” He insisted on taking her saddlebags. The whole gang surrounded her, flashing eyes and teeth, talking to each other and to her without much regard for mutual comprehension. They shooed away the children and led her into the nearest hut. Its doorway film brushed over her, burst in a shower of droplets with an odour of antiseptic, and reformed behind her. She blinked rapidly and shrugged out of her heavy coat, throwing it on to one of a row of hooks that grew from the curving wall.

  Her first deep breath was evidence enough of how effective the filter film was at keeping out the dust. At the same time, it brought a flush to her skin as her immune system rushed to investigate whatever she’d just inhaled of the nanoware endemic to the building’s interior. She followed Kim into the dining-area, an airy space of flat-surfaced furnishings—some a warning red to indicate that they were for heating, others white for eating off. The chairs were padded black polycarbon plastic. Around the walls, racked on shelves or stacked on floors, were thousands of books: centuries’ worth of classics and bestsellers and blockbusters and textbooks, as if blown from the four winds and fetched up against these barriers. It would have been the same in any of the huts. The next most common items of clutter were musical instruments and craft equipment and products: plastic scrimshank, spaceships in bottles, elaborately carved wooden toys.

  As they sat down around a table Myra felt prickly and on edge. She tugged her eyeband, a half-centimetre-wide crescent of translucent plastic, from her hair and placed it across her temples, in front of her eyes. A message drifted across her retina. “Nanoprotect56 has detected the following known su
rveillance molecules in the room: Dataphage, Hackendice, Reportback, Mercury, Moldavian. Do you wish to clean up?”

  She blinked when the cursor stopped on the Proceed option, took a deep breath, held it until her lungs were burning, then exhaled. The faces around the table were incurious and amused.

  “Cleanup in progress,” the retinal display reported. Myra took a deep breath. It felt cool this time, as well as smooth.

  “So we have privacy,” one of the Koreans said, with heavy irony.

  “Ah, fuck it,” Myra said. “Happens every time. You gotta assume they’re listening.” There was bound to be something else her current release of ’ware wasn’t up to catching: she imagined some tiny Turing machine ticking away, stitching sound-vibrations into a long-chain molecule in the dirt She took a recorder—larger and less advanced than the one in her mental picture—from her pocket and laid it on the table. “And I’m listening. So, what have you got for me?”

  A quick exchange of glances around the table ended as usual with Kim Nok-Yung accepted as the spokesman. He rustled a paper from an inner pocket and ran a finger down the minutes; Matters Arising started with the routine first question.

  “Any progress on POW recognition?”

  Myra was touched by the note of hope with which he asked the question, the hundredth time no different from the first. She compressed her lips and shook her head. “Sorry, guys. Red Cross and Crescent are working on it, and Amnesty. Still no dice.”

  Nok-Yung shrugged. “Oh well. Please make the standard protest.”

  “Of course.”

  As they ticked their way down the list of complaints and conditions and assignments and payments, Myra noticed that the whole pattern of production in the camp had changed. The intensity of the work, and the volume of output, had gone up drastically. Twenty engines and a hundred habitat modules completed for Space Merchants in the past month! Nok-Yung and Se-Ha were subtly underlining the changes with guarded glances and shifts in tone, but they weren’t commenting explicitly.

  Myra looked around the table when they reached the end of the agenda. No one had complained about the speed-up. They didn’t seem troubled; they had an air of suppressed excitement, almost glee, as they waited for her to speak. She checked over again the figures in her head, and realised with a jolt that at this rate most of the men here would work off their fines—or “debts”—in months rather than years.

  Another endgame move. Myra nodded slightly and smiled. “Well, that’s it,” she said. “Don’t overwork yourselves, guys. I mean it. Make sure you get in plenty of road-mending, OK?”

  The prisoners just grinned at their shared secret She reached for the saddlebags, as though just remembering something. “I’ve brought some books for you.”

  The men leaned inward eagerly as she unpacked. They weren’t allowed any kind of interface with the net, and nothing that could be used to build one: no televisions or computers or readers or VR rigs, not even music decks. Nothing could stop Myra carrying in whatever she liked—the saddlebags were legally a diplomatic bag—but any electronic or molecular contraband would have been confiscated the moment she left. So hardbooks it had to be. The prisoners and their families had an unquenchable thirst for them. Myra’s every visit brought more additions to the drift.

  This time she had dozens of paperbacks with tasteful Modern Art covers and grey spines, 20th Century Classics—Harold Robbins, Stephen King, Dean Koontz and so on—which she shoved across the table to the men whose names she didn’t know. For her friends Nok-Yung and Se-Ha she’d saved the best for last: hardbooks so ancient that only advanced preservation treatments kept them from crumbling to dust—

  Rather like herself, she thought, as the books passed one by one from her gnarled hands: an incredibly rare, possibly unique, copy of Tucker’s edition of Stirner; the Viking Portable Nietzsche; and a battered Thinker’s Library edition of Spencer’s First Principles.

  Kim Nok-Yung looked down at them reverently, then up at her. Shin Se-Ha was in some kind of trance. Nok-Yung shook his head.

  “This is too much,” he said, almost angrily. “Myra, you can’t—”

  “Oh yes, I can.”

  “Where did you get them?” asked Se-Ha.

  Myra shrugged. “From Reid, funnily enough.”

  All the men were looking at her now, with sour smiles.

  “From David Reid? The owner?” Kim waved his hand, indicating everything in sight.

  “Yeah,” said Myra. “The very same.”

  There was a moment of sober silence.

  “Well,” Nok-Yung said at last, “I hope we make better use of them than he did, the bastard.”

  Everybody laughed, even Myra.

  “So do I,” she said.

  She settled back in her chair and passed around the Marley pack and accepted the offer of coffee.

  “OK, guys,” she said. “The news. Everything’s still going to hell.” She grimaced. “Same as last week. A few shifts in the fronts, that’s all. Take it from me, you ain’t missing much.”

  “A few shifts in which fronts?” asked Se-Ha suspiciously.

  “Ah,” said Myra. “If you must know—the northeastern front is… active.”

  Another silent exchange of glances and smiles. Myra didn’t share in their pleasure, but couldn’t blame them for it. The two encroaching events that filled her most with dread were, for them, each in different ways an earnest of their early liberation.

  She said her goodbyes, wondering if it was for the last time, and took her now empty bags and stalked away through the restitution-camp streets, and mounted her horse and rode out of the gate, towards the city.

  Thinking about Reid, trying to think calmly and destructively about Reid, she found her mind drifting back. He had not always been such a bastard. He’d been the first person to tell her she need never die. That had been eighty-three years ago, when she was twenty-two years old. She hadn’t believed him…

  Death follows me.

  “You don’t have to die,” he told her.

  Black hair framed his face, black eyebrows his intent, brown-eyed gaze. Dave Reid was dark and handsome but not, alas, tall. He wore a denim jacket with a tin button—a badge, as the Brits called them—pinned to its lapel. The badge was red with the black hammer-and-sickle-and-4 of the International.

  “What!” Myra laughed. “I know it feels that way now, everybody our age feels like that, yeah? But it’ll come to us all, man, don’t kid yourself.”

  She rolled back on her elbows on the grass and looked up at the blue spring sky. It was too bloody cold for this, but the sun was out and the ground was dry, and that was good enough for sunbathing in Scotland. The grassy slope behind the Boyd Orr Building was covered with groups and couples of students, drinking and smoking and talking. Probably missing lectures—it was already two in the afternoon.

  “Seriously,” Dave said, in that Highland accent that carried the sound of wind on grass, of waves on shore, “if you can live into the twenty-first century, you have a damn good chance of living for ever.”

  “Says who? L. Ron Hubbard?”

  Dave snorted. “Arthur C. Clarke, actually.”

  “Who?”

  He frowned at her. “You know—scientist, futurist The man who invented the communications satellite.”

  “Oh, him,” Myra said scornfully. “Sci-fi. 2001 and all that,” She saw the slight flinch of hurt in David’s face, and went on, “Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s impossible. Maybe hundreds of years from now, maybe in communism. Not in our lifetimes, though. Tough shit.”

  Dave shrugged and rolled another cigarette.

  “We’ll see.”

  “I guess. And the rate you smoke those things, you’ll be lucky to be alive in the twenty-first century. You won’t even get to first base.”

  “Och, I’ll last another twenty-four years.” He sighed, blowing smoke on to the slightly warm breeze, then smiled at her mischievously. “Unless I become a martyr of the revolu
tion, of course.”

  “ ‘I have a rendezvous with death, on some disputed barricade’ ” Myra quoted. “Don’t worry. That’s another thing won’t happen in our lifetimes.”

  The shadow of the tall building crept over Dave’s face. He shifted deftly, back into the sunlight.

  “That’s what you think, is it?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I think.” She smiled, and added, with ironic reassurance, “Our natural lifetimes, that is.”

  Dave hefted a satchel stuffed with copies of revolutionary newspapers and magazines. “Then what’s the point of all this? Why don’t we just eat, drink and be merry?”

  Myra swigged from a can of MacEwan’s, lowered it and looked at him over its rim. “That’s what I am doing right now, lover.”

  He took her point, and reached out and stroked the curve of her cheekbone. “But still,” he persisted. “Why bother with politics if you don’t think we’re going to win?”

  “Dave,” she said, “I’m not a socialist because I expect to end up running some kinda workers’ state of my own some day. I do what I do because I think it’s right. OK?”

  “OK,” said Reid, smiling; but his smile was amused as well as affectionate, as though she were being naive. Irritated without quite knowing why, she turned away.

  The city was called Kapitsa, and it was the capital of the International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic, which had no other city; indeed, apart from the camps, no other human habitation. The ISTWR was an independent enclave on the fringe of the Polygon—the badlands between Karaganda and Semipalatinsk, a waste-product of Kazakhstan’s nuclear-testing legacy. A long time ago, Kapitsa would have looked modern, with its centre of high-rise office blocks, its inner ring of automatic factories, its periphery of dusty but tree-lined streets and estates of low-rise apartment blocks, the bustling airport just outside and the busy spaceport on the horizon, from which the great ships had loudly climbed, day after day. Now it was a rustbelt, as quaintly obsolete as the Japanese car factories or the Clyde shipyards or the wheat plains of Ukraine.