The Sky Road

“Not personally. With me, it’s just stabilising, right? With you—” he smirked sidelong at her “—it’s got a lot of work to do.”

“Thanks.”

“It makes you feel strange. Euphoric and judgemental.”

“Yeah, that’s me all right!”

It was the fifth day since she’d swallowed the surgery. The nanomachines had differentiated and proliferated inside her, spreading out through her circulation like an army of sappers, tearing down and rebuilding. She felt their waste heat like a fever, burning her up. Her moods swung from normal to high, she didn’t have depressions any more, it was like a biological Keynesianism, except that in the long run she was not going to be dead. She was not immortal, not really—who could tell? The best guess was centuries and in that time something else would come along—but she felt immortal, she felt like people did in their twenties before their cells started running down and their neurons began to die, no wonder she could remember the seventies so vividly, no wonder she was getting so arrogant!

Sex with Jason had been a foregone conclusion, from about the second she saw him. He was an imperialist agent, a strategic enemy even if a tactical ally, and she didn’t care, she wanted to seduce him and subvert him herself, turn tricks learned in a lifetime that would curl his toes and grey his dark-copper hair. If he had any inhibitions or revulsion from her still-aged body they had been dissolved in the first evening’s first bottle of raki. She’d sucked him rigid, fucked him raw, taught him much and told him little.

The little she told him was about Georgi, and the circumstances of Georgi’s death. For reasons which Jason didn’t spell out, but which Myra suspected had “Agency asset—poss future use?” scribbled in their margins, the CIA was conducting its own investigation into that death which had been so deniably convenient for somebody.

In the early hours of the mornings, when he thought she was asleep, he would go out to her room’s tiny balcony and talk for a long time on the phone. She pretended not to notice and didn’t object, instead using these times in murmured pillow-talk on her own, using the eyeband to consult Parvus and to listen to v-mail from her Sovnarkom colleagues about the situation back home. It wasn’t good.

Denis Gubanov, in particular, was glum. His summaries of popular attitudes—derived from agents’ reports and readers’ letters to Kapitsa Pravda—indicated what to Myra was a surprising groundswell of opposition to the whole deal with Kazakhstan. All unnoticed, a thick scrub of patriotism had grown up over the years on her tiny republic’s thin, infertile soil. Its independence had come to matter to its citizens, far more than it ever had to her. Each night she looked at shots of the growing daily picket outside the government building: red flags, yellow-and-black trefoil flags, pictures of Trotsky. She’d sigh, turn over and pretend to be asleep when Jason came back.

At Hisaronu, a pleasant small town scattered across a hilltop surrounded by higher, distant mountains, they stopped at a pavement cafe on the main street. They drank Amstel and ate Iskander kebabs, under a striped plastic awning. When they were smoking, and sipping muddy coffee, Myra leaned forward across the table and clasped Jason’s hand, letting their fingers intertwine.

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

He clasped back.

“Apart from what I’ve got?”

“Yeah.”

He disentangled his fingers from hers and pulled from his pocket and unfolded a Mercator projection world- map, furred at the creases. He elbowed aside his drink and a plastic ketchup bottle and spread the map out on the metal table.

She pointed. “We’re here.” She dusted off her hands and made as if to rise. “Glad to be of help.”

“Sit,” he said, laughing. “Look.”

She sat down again. “Who else is looking? If you’re about to give me a briefing, wouldn’t VR be better?”

Jason waved his hands and looked around. Tourists and soldiers and locals ambled along the noonday street. “Nobody’s looking.” He combed his fingers through his hair. “And you’ll have noticed, I don’t have an eyeband.” He shrugged. “All the networks are compromised anyway, have been for years. That’s why I listen to the radio, and read newspapers, and write in a notebook, and carry paper maps.”

“Fair enough,” said Myra, lightly, to hide her cold shock at what he’d just said. Then she realised she couldn’t let it pass. “What do you mean, ‘compromised’?”

“Insecure, no matter what you do. Codes, hiding the real message in the junk, whatever—there are systems that’ll crack every new variant as soon as you set it up. Quantum computation killed cryptography, and there are better methods than that now, implemented on things nobody understands. They’re out there, Myra. I’ve seen them.”

She smiled sceptically. Things that man was not meant to know?”

Jason nodded vigorously. Yes, that’s it exactly!” he said, as though he’d never heard the expression before. Perhaps he hadn’t. The youth of today. He looked down again at the map, dismissing the subject with a twirl of his hand. Myra let it drop too, but she didn’t dismiss it. She was pretty sure he was mistaken, or lying, or had been lied to. And in whose interest might it be for her to distrust her ’ware?

Hah.

Jason jabbed a forefinger on North America, ran it around the Great Lakes and partway down the Eastern seaboard. “OK, here’s my country, was yours. The United States, as we still call ourselves. Not exactly ‘sea to shining sea’ any more. ‘From St Lawrence to the Keys’ never quite caught on, and even that’s hard to hold. I mean, we need Maine between us and the Canadian hordes, but, shit. We’re holding down major insurgencies everywhere between Baltimore and Jacksonville. And the only reason we hang on to Florida is for Canaveral, frankly, and the only reason they stay with us is they’re scared of El Barbudo.” He glanced up under his brows, cast her a wry smile. “You should hear the old boys at Langley kicking themselves about that one. After the Pike Commission put a stop to the exploding cigar capers they just thought fuck it, the bastard’s gotta die sometime. Not.”

He opened his fingers like dividers and straddled the continent. “West Coast…” He sighed. “La-la Land. They got a rival claim in to be the successor state, so diplomatically we don’t get on, but between you and me and the gargon here—” he absently waved his other hand, snapped fingers, pointed to their glasses “—we’re the best of friends.” He brought the heel of his palm down on the middle of America, masking off a large area between the Appalachians and the Rockies. “Compared with how we get on with the rest. The Mormons, the militias, the fundies, the White Right, the Indians—name it, we lost to it.”

“Yeah, well,” Myra said. “I had heard.”

“Lucky for us,” he went on, “they’re a bit down on scientists. They got oil and minerals, all right, but with Flood Geology they won’t find much more of it. This ain’t rocket science. Speaking of which, we and our La-la friends got all the aerospace and comp sci and nuke tech experts. At least, we got the ones who didn’t die trying to convince some hick inquisitor with a mains supply and a jump-lead that they really, really didn’t know where the alien bodies were buried. Or where the crashed saucers were stashed.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish. Turned out more people believed in the UFO cover-up than ever believed in the Jewish bankers. When they got their hands on some of yer actual eevill guvmint scientists… you can imagine the fun they had.” He had a thousand-yard stare, past her, for a moment. “Some of the scientists confessed. In astonishing detail. Names, dates, places, A-to-Z files.”

The kid serving tables put down another couple of bottles. Myra smiled at him, shoved him a few greasy gigalira notes, waved a cigarette at Jason.

“Any of it true?” She laughed uneasily. “I’ve sometimes wondered, like about the diamond ships…”

Jason blinked, shook his head. “Oh, no. Total corroborative hallucination. Like alien abductions, or witches’ sabbats. They’d heard the stories too, see?

Hell, maybe some even believed it themselves, who’s to say. The diamond ships, nah, that was just black tech from way back. Your basic Nazi flying saucer. Neat idea in principle, but it never was practical until the right materials came on-stream with the carbon assembler.”

Myra leaned back, refilling her glass, wishing she could consult Parvus. “You’re telling me,” she said, “that East America has border security problems too? Well, let me put your mind at rest. We’re not about to embarrass