TU leave you to it,” Irina said.
Thanks.”
Myra, alone, pulled down her eyeband, upped the gain, looked down at the crates and sighed. They were still bound with metal tape. She clicked her old Leatherman out of its pouch and got to work opening them, coiling the treacherously sharp bands carefully into a waste-paper basket. Then she had to pull the nails, like teeth. Finally she was able to get the files out.
She sorted the paper files into stacks: her personal stuff—diaries and letters and so on—and political, sorted by time and organization, all the way back from her ISTWR years through to internal factional documents from that New York SWP branch in the 1970s. These last still made her smile: had there really ever been anyone daft enough to choose as his
She worked her way, similarly, through the formats and conversions from Dissembler through DoorWays to Linux to Windows to DOS, and through storage media from the optical disks and bubble-magnetic wafers and CD- RWs (’CD-Rubs’, they used to be called) to the floppy disks, almost jumping out of her seat at the noise the ancient PC made when it took the first of those. In the quiet building, it sounded like a washing-machine on the spin cycle.
After about an hour and a half, which passed in a kind of trance, all her optical and electronic files were copied to the Institute’s electronic archive. She blinked up her eyeband menu, and invoked Parvus.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hello,” he said.
She felt almost awkward. “Do you mind having a copy taken, and its being downloaded?”
The entity laughed. “Mind? Of course not! Why should I mind?”
“OK,” Myra said. She uncoiled a fibre-optic cable from the terminal port and socketed it to her eye-band. “I want your copy to guard this collection of files—” she ran her highlighting finger over it “—and anything you’ve got with you right now, applying the kind of discretionary access criteria that your existing parameters permit. Give the scaling a half-life of, oh, fifty years. Got that?”
“Yes.” Parvus smiled, doubled, then one of him disappeared dramatically like a cartoon genie swooshing back into a bottle.
“Done,” he said. It had taken longer than she’d expected—she must have had more files on her personal datadeck than she’d realised.
“Thank you,” said Myra. “Anything to report, by the way?”
Parvus shrugged expansively. “Nothing that can’t wait. Except that Glasgow Airport is closed.”
“What?”
Surely not a coup, not here—
“Fighting on the perimeter. Damage to the runways. Just Green partisans, nothing serious, but there’s no chance you’ll get your flight on Monday.”
“Oh, shit. Book me a train. For tomorrow, OK? Catch you later.”
She disengaged the cable link and let it roll back. Then she got to work labelling the stacks, dating the paper folders and making notes for the Institute’s archivist.
Somebody clattered up the stairs, strode into the library and flicked the light on. Myra turned around sharply and met the surprised gaze of the girl who’d identified her at the demo.
“Oh!” said the girl. She slowly slid her tartan scarf from around her neck and flicked her long, thick black hair out from under her denim jacket’s collar. “What—what are you doing here?”
Myra straightened up, feeling irrationally pleased that she was marginally taller than the younger woman.
“I was about to ask you the same question,” she said.
“I work here! I’m a post-grad student.”
She said it with such confusion of face, such a widening of her big brown eyes, that Myra couldn’t help but smile.
“And a political activist, too, I understand.”
The girl nodded firmly. “Aye.” The comment seemed to have allowed her self-confidence to recover. She stepped over to a chair and sat, stretching her legs out and propping her boots on a book-caddy. Myra observed this elaborately casual behaviour with detached amusement.
“I was an activist myself, when I studied here,” Myra said, half-sitting on the edge of the table.
“I know,” the girl said coldly. “I’ve read your thesis.
Myra smiled. “It still stands up pretty well, I think.”
Teah. Can’t say the same about your politics, though.” She frowned, swinging her feet back to the floor and leaning forward. “In a way it’s nothing… personal, you understand? I mean, when I read what you wrote, I like the person who wrote it. What I can’t do is square that with what you’ve become.”
That was laying it on the line! Myra felt a jolt of pain and guilt.
“I don’t know if I can, either,” she said. “I changed. Real politics is more complicated than—ah, fuck it. Look—uh, what’s your name?”
“Menial MacClafferty.”
“OK- Menial. The fact is, the Russian Revolution got defeated, and never got repeated—perhaps because the defeat was so devastating that it made any subsequent attempt impossible.” She laughed harshly. “And like the man said, it’s gonna be socialism or barbarism. Socialism’s out the window, it was dead before I was born. So barbarism it is. We’re fucked.”
Menial was shaking her head. “No, nothing’s inevitable. We make our own history—the future isn’t written down. ‘The point is to change it.’ Look at the Sheenisov, they’re building a real workers’ democracy, they’ve proven it’s still possible—and what do you do? You fight them! On the side of the Yanks and the Kazakhstani capitalists.”
“Like I said,” Myra sighed. “Real politics is complicated. Real lives, mine and those of the people I’ve taken responsibility for. The future may not be written but the past bloody well is, and it hasn’t left me with many options.”
“You mean, you haven’t left
“Tell you what,” Myra said, suddenly annoyed. She waved at the stack of cardboard and paper around her. “Here’s my life. There’s a lot more on the computer.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Password’s ‘Luxemburg and Parvus’ for the easy stuff. You’re welcome to all of it. The hard stuff, the real dirty secrets, I’ve put a hundred-year embargo on, and even after that it’ll be the devil of a job to hack past it. If you’re still around in a couple of centuries, give it a look.”
“This is what you’re doing?” Merrial asked. “Turning over your archives to the Institute? Why?”
Myra could feel her lips stretch into a horrible grin. “Because here it has a very slightly better chance of surviving the next few weeks, let alone the next few centuries. You want my advice, kiddo, you stop worrying about socialism and start getting ready for barbarism, because that’s what’s coming down the pike, one way or another.”
Merrial stood up and glared down at Myra. “Maybe you’ve given up, but I won’t!”
“Well, good luck to you,” said Myra. “I mean that.”
The young woman looked at her with an unreadable expression. “And to you, I suppose,” she said ungraciously, and turned on her heel and stalked out. Whether automatically or deliberately, she switched off the light as she went. Myra blinked, fiddled with her eyeband and got back to work.
“Everything all right?” Irina Guzulescu was limned in the backlight of the library doorway.
Myra straightened up and dusted off her hands.
“Yeah, I’m doing fine, thanks.” She laughed. “Sorry about the dark, I was using my eyeband to see with, instead of putting the light on.”
“Probably just as well,” the small woman said. She advanced cautiously into the room, past the opened crates and labelled stacks of Myra’s archives. “Some of the books in here are so fragile, I fear sometimes one photon could…” She smiled, and handed Myra a mug of coffee.
“Oh, thanks.” It was cold in the library’s still, stale air. She clasped her hands around the china’s warmth. “Is
