The Sky Road

“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 detenence?”

“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?” Menial 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 any more. They kept enough communism to keep people secure, and enough freedom to let them be happy and rich.”

Menial’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.”

Menial 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 honor, 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,” Menial 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 our selves 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 tide, 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 Mer-riaFs 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.”

6 Light Weapons

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 crepe and devore 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.