The Sky Road

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 Gameronians 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 datag-loved 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.”