All the men were looking at her now, with sour smiles.
“From
“Yeah,” said Myra. “The very same.”
There was a moment of sober silence.
“Well,” Nok-Yung said at last, “I hope we make better use of them than he did, the bastard.”
Everybody laughed, even Myra.
“So do I,” she said.
She settled back in her chair and passed around the Marley pack and accepted the offer of coffee.
“OK, guys,” she said. “The news. Everything’s still going to hell.” She grimaced. “Same as last week. A few shifts in the fronts, that’s all. Take it from me, you ain’t missing much.”
“A few shifts in
“Ah,” said Myra. “If you must know—the northeastern front is… active.”
Another silent exchange of glances and smiles. Myra didn’t share in their pleasure, but couldn’t blame them for it. The two encroaching events that filled her most with dread were, for them, each in different ways an earnest of their early liberation.
She said her goodbyes, wondering if it was for the last time, and took her now empty bags and stalked away through the restitution-camp streets, and mounted her horse and rode out of the gate, towards the city.
Thinking about Reid, trying to think calmly and destructively about Reid, she found her mind drifting back. He had not always been such a bastard. He’d been the first person to tell her she need never die. That had been eighty-three years ago, when she was twenty-two years old. She hadn’t believed him…
“You don’t have to die,” he told her.
Black hair framed his face, black eyebrows his intent, brown-eyed gaze. Dave Reid was dark and handsome but not, alas, tall. He wore a denim jacket with a tin button—a badge, as the Brits called them—pinned to its lapel. The badge was red with the black hammer-and-sickle-and-4 of the International.
“What!” Myra laughed. “I know it feels that way now, everybody our age feels like that, yeah? But it’ll come to us all, man, don’t kid yourself.”
She rolled back on her elbows on the grass and looked up at the blue spring sky. It was too bloody cold for this, but the sun was out and the ground was dry, and that was good enough for sunbathing in Scotland. The grassy slope behind the Boyd Orr Building was covered with groups and couples of students, drinking and smoking and talking. Probably missing lectures—it was already two in the afternoon.
“Seriously,” Dave said, in that Highland accent that carried the sound of wind on grass, of waves on shore, “if you can live into the twenty-first century, you have a damn good chance of living for ever.”
“Says who? L. Ron Hubbard?”
Dave snorted. “Arthur C. Clarke, actually.”
“Who?”
He frowned at her. “You know—scientist, futurist The man who invented the communications satellite.”
“Oh,
Dave shrugged and rolled another cigarette.
“We’ll see.”
“I guess. And the rate you smoke those things, you’ll be lucky to be alive in the twenty-first century. You won’t even get to first base.”
“Och, I’ll last another twenty-four years.” He sighed, blowing smoke on to the slightly warm breeze, then smiled at her mischievously. “Unless I become a martyr of the revolution, of course.”
“ ‘I have a rendezvous with death, on some disputed barricade’ ” Myra quoted. “Don’t worry. That’s another thing won’t happen in our lifetimes.”
The shadow of the tall building crept over Dave’s face. He shifted deftly, back into the sunlight.
“That’s what you think, is it?”
“Yeah, that’s what I think.” She smiled, and added, with ironic reassurance, “Our
Dave hefted a satchel stuffed with copies of revolutionary newspapers and magazines. “Then what’s the point of all this? Why don’t we just eat, drink and be merry?”
Myra swigged from a can of MacEwan’s, lowered it and looked at him over its rim. “That’s what I
He took her point, and reached out and stroked the curve of her cheekbone. “But still,” he persisted. “Why bother with politics if you don’t think we’re going to win?”
“Dave,” she said, “I’m not a socialist because I expect to end up running some kinda workers’ state of my own some day. I do what I do because I think it’s right. OK?”
“OK,” said Reid, smiling; but his smile was amused as well as affectionate, as though she were being naive. Irritated without quite knowing why, she turned away.
The city was called Kapitsa, and it was the capital of the International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic, which had no other city; indeed, apart from the camps, no other human habitation. The ISTWR was an independent enclave on the fringe of the Polygon—the badlands between Karaganda and Semipalatinsk, a waste- product of Kazakhstan’s nuclear-testing legacy. A long time ago, Kapitsa would have looked modern, with its centre of high-rise office blocks, its inner ring of automatic factories, its periphery of dusty but tree-lined streets and estates of low-rise apartment blocks, the bustling airport just outside and the busy spaceport on the horizon, from which the great ships had loudly climbed, day after day. Now it was a rustbelt, as quaintly obsolete as the Japanese car factories or the Clyde shipyards or the wheat plains of Ukraine.
Myra, however, felt somewhat cheered as the mare took her through the light traffic of the noonday streets. The apple trees were in bloom, and every wall had its fresh-looking, colourful mural of flowers or stars or ships or crowds or children or heroes or heroines. Real ancient space-age stuff, an effect enhanced by the younger— genuinely young—people enjoying the chilly sunshine in the fashionable scanty garb, which recalled the late 1960s in its jaunty futurism. She looked at girls in skinny tights and shiny, garish minidresses and found herself wondering if they were cold… probably not, the clothes were only an imitation of their nylon or PVC originals, the nanofactured fabrics veined with heat-exchangers, laced with molecular machines.
The bright clothing gave the people on the street an appearance of prosperity, but Myra was all too aware that it was superficial. The clothes were cheaper than paper, easily affordable even on Social Security. Over the past few years, with the coming of the diamond ships, the heavy-booster market had gone into free fall, and unemployment had rocketed. The dole was paid by her department out of the rent from Mutual Protection, and it couldn’t last. Nostalgia tourism—the old spaceport was now a World Heritage Site, for what that was worth—looked like the only promising source of employment.
Before she knew it, the horse had stopped, from habit, outside the modest ten-storey concrete office-block of the republic’s government on Revolution Square. Myra sat still for a moment, gazing wryly at this week’s morale- boosting poster on the official billboard: a big black-and-white blow-up of the classic Tass photo of Gagarin, grinning out from his cosmonaut helmet. She remembered the time, in her grade-school classroom on the Lower East Side, when she’d first seen this human face and had formed some synaptic connection between Gagarin’s grin and Guevara’s glare.
Space and socialism. What a swindle it had all been. She shook the reins, took the mare at a slow pace around to the back, stabled it, wiped the muck from her boots and ascended the stairs. The corridors to her office —at the front of the building, as befitted a People’s Commissar for Social Policy and Prime Minister Pro Tern and (now that she came to think about it) Acting President—were filled with a susurrus of hurrying feet and fast-fading whispers. Myra glanced sharply at the groups she passed, but few seemed willing to return her look.
She closed the door of her office with a futile but soul-satisfying slam. Let the apparatchiks worry about her mood, if she had to worry about theirs. The last time she’d sniffed this evasive air in the corridors had been just before the first—and only—time she’d fallen out of power, back in 2046. Then, she’d suspected an imminent move
