The Sky Road

walked past the soldier who held the door open for her. A ten-metre strip of red carpet over polished parquet, at the end of which was a small chair in front of a large desk. The chair was plastic. The desk was mahogany, its green leather top bare except for a gold Mont Blanc pen and a pristine, red-leather-edged blotter. Glass-paned bookcases on either side of the room converged to a wide window with a mountain view. The room’s central chandelier, unlit at the moment, looked like a landing-craft from an ancient and impressive alien civilisation making its presence known.

The President stood up as she came in, and walked around his intimidating desk. They met with a handshake. Suleimanyov was a short, well-built Kazakh with a face which he’d carefully kept at an avuncular-looking fiftyish. He was actually in his fifty-eighth year, a child of the century as he occasionally mentioned, which meant that he’d grown up after the Glorious Counter-Revolution of 1991 had passed into history. The reunification of Kazakhstan in the Fall Revolution had been his finest hour, and he always called himself a Kazakhstani, not a Kazakh: the national identification, not the ethnic. He didn’t have any of Myra’s twentieth-century leftist hang-ups. He had never had the slightest pretension to being any kind of socialist. However, he followed Soviet tradition by wearing the neatest and most conventional business-suit that dollars could buy.

“Good afternoon, Citizen Davidova,” he said, in Russian. She responded similarly, and then he waved her to her seat and resumed his own. The soldier closed the door.

“Ah, Myra my friend,” Suleimanyov said, this time in BBC World Service English, “let’s drop the formality. I’ve read your reports on your mission.” He gestured with his hands as though letting a book fall open. “What a mess. Though I must say you are looking good.”

“I’m sorry that I was not more successful, President Suleimanyov—”

“Chingiz, please. And no need to apologise.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes for a moment. He looked tired. “I don’t see how anyone else could have done better. Your action in leaving Great Britain was perhaps… impetuous, but even with hindsight it will probably turn out to have been for the best. What a long way down they’ve come, the English. As for the Americans—well, what can I say?” He chuckled, with a certain schadenfreude, and gazed upwards at the crystal mother-ship. “Fifteen years ago they were stamping their will on the whole planet, and now a few nuclear weapons are too hot for them to handle. In my father’s time they were willing to contemplate taking multiple nuclear hits themselves.” He looked back from his reminiscence to Myra. “Sorry,” he said, suddenly abashed, “no offence intended. I forget sometimes that you were —are—an American.”

“No offence taken,” Myra said. “I entirely agree with your assessment. What a crock of shit the place is! What a pathetic lot they are! The chance of a long life has only made them more afraid of death than ever.”

The President’s bushy eyebrows twitched. “It has not done that for you, then?”

Myra shook her head. “I can see the rationality of it—people think they have more life to lose if they have a long one to look forward to—but I think it’s a false logic. A long life of oppression or shame is worse than a short one, after all.”

She stopped, and looked at him quizzically. He smiled.

“True, we are not here to discuss philosophy,” he said. “Nevertheless, I’m happy that you think it better to die free than to live as slaves. We may get the chance some day, but let’s try to delay our heroic deaths for a bit, eh?”

“Yes indeed.” She wanted very badly to smoke, but the President was notoriously clean-living.

“Very well,” said Chingiz. “Something I did not tell you before… I arranged for other cadres with similarly relevant experience to make similar approaches to the governments of France, Turkey, Brazil and Guangdong. They have encountered a similar lack of interest. So we have to face the Sheenisov on our own. I need hardly tell you that we don’t stand much of a chance, over anything but the short term.”

“I have a suggestion,” Myra said. “If the West is unwilling to assist us, then to hell with them. Let’s cut a deal with the Sheenisov! All we want is our territorial integrity, their withdrawal from Semipalatinsk and access to the markets, trade routes and resources of the Former Union. What they want, presumably, is a passage across or to the north of Kazakhstan, as they make their way west to the Ukraine, which is the nearest soft target but still one that will take them many years, perhaps decades, to assimilate. I don’t think they’re ready to take on Muscovy or Turkey just yet. It strikes me that these aims are not incompatible.”

“Yes, yes,” Chingiz said, “the option of our switching sides has occurred to me, and to my Foreign Secretary. The difficulty is that no one has ever ‘cut a deal’ with the Sheenisov. They have no leader, or even leadership—at least, none that the world knows. They are indeed a horde, without a Great Khan like my namesake. That makes them difficult to deal with—in every sense.”

“Ah, come on,” Myra said, feeling bolder. “Even the anarchists had their Makhno. I don’t believe a leaderless horde could accomplish what they have, even in military terms. It’s applying guerilla tactics at the level of strategy and of main-force confrontation—that is novel, but it requires precise coordination. There is nothing random going on here.”

Chingiz’s lips set in a thin line for a moment. He shook his head. “A system without a centre can achieve more than we may intuitively expect, Myra.

That after all is the lesson of the twentieth century, no? It works in economics, and in nature, and to some extent in military affairs too.”

“Good point,” Myra said. She didn’t want to bring the deranged Green rumour about the General into this level of conversation. “Let’s assume they have no leadership. In order to have the co-ordination they display, they must have horizontal communication between the units, and some method of arriving at a common response… even if it’s only some social equivalent of excitation and inhibition in a neural network. In that case, any offer made to a sufficiently large unit would be spread through the rest, as would a response. It would still be worthwhile contacting them.”

“Hmm,” said Chingiz. He steepled his fingers. “And what do you propose? Walking towards them until they take notice, then talking to the first person able to understand you?”

“That’s about it.”

“It sounds dangerous, apart from anything else.”

“Actually, I propose announcing my intention beforehand, through whatever channels we have, then heading for Semipalatinsk.”

“Come, come,” said Chingiz. “Things are not that bad, not yet. You can still fly in, direct.”

“And out?”

“Oh, yes. Air-traffic control is still functioning. As are radio and television, on selected channels. It’s only computer interfaces that are being blocked—by physical cutting of landlines or by electromagnetic jamming. It’s incredibly differentiated stuff—very clever. We couldn’t do it.”

She peered at his calm face.

“What reports are we getting?”

“About life under the Sheenisov? Hah. In some respects, life goes on as normal. There are certainly no democidal activities. There are what the Sheenisov call reforms. Workplace democracy, and so forth. They are very insistent about that. Many businesses dependent on the net are failing—they either reorient to the Sheenisov internal communications system, whatever that is, or they pick up sticks and go, or they are expropriated on the grounds of abandonment.” He rubbed his hands. “Needless to say, this is giving our republic a temporary influx of people, of capital, and of comms gear and computer capacity. Some refugees are destitute, but not many.”

“Any willing to join the fight back?”

“No mass rallying to our armed forces, I must say. The usual dashnik emigre diversions—plotting, pleading, mounting sabotage expeditions, low-key terrorism. We don’t encourage it.” He rubbed a finger up and down the side of his nose. “Naturally, we try to prevent it… to the best of our ability, but our resources are quite inadequate for such a task.”

“But of course.” Myra smiled. “Could you raise me some muj? Two or three good men, not fanatics, not suicidal, but willing to take a risk and have a go if necessary. I’m still deeply reluctant to fly into Semey. Too much opportunity for an opportune mechanical failure—frankly, I’m getting a little paranoid about anything that’s computer controlled, on either side. So, if I may, I’d like to drive, with bodyguards.”

Ghingiz raised his eyebrows. “Drive all the way?”

“No, no. Fly to Karaganda, announce what I’m doing, then drive to Semey, bypassing the ISTWR.”