The Sky Road

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 surveillance 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.”