The Sky Road

prisoners shrugged, then nodded.

Nok-Yung and Se-Ha sat on either side of her, the two bodyguards on separate benches a few metres away. Children, snug-wrapped in quilted satin bomberjackets and padded trousers, capered about and yelled, oblivious to the adults.

“So how are you getting on, in this brave new world?” Myra asked.

“We’re fine,” said Nok-Yung, his comrade nodding emphatically. “Our families are joining us soon, and in die meantime we have much to do.”

“You both got jobs?” Myra smiled.

“There are no jobs,” Se-Ha said primly. “There is work. We have been… co-opted, and we have been sent to talk to you.”

“Well, I had guessed this was hardly a coincidence,” Myra said. “But I had not expected to see you as Sheenisov cadre already.”

“It’s an open system,” Nok-Yung said. “Interesting contributions are quickly taken up; amplified; discussed.”

“The opposite of the nets, then,” Myra said. They laughed.

“And the opposite of the Leninist system,” Nok-Yung said earnestly. “Once you are in, you are in, there is no… apprenticeship? No candidacy, no working your way up. Past experience,” he added rather smugly, “counts.”

Myra flashed her eyebrows. No doubt the militant and the Marxist mathematician had found their niches quickly. Tm sure that’s all fascinating,” she said. “But I’m here to put a diplomatic proposal to the Sino-Soviet Union as a whole. Can I do that, just by talking to you?”

“Yes.”

“Very well.” She put it to them, straight: the deal, the crossing corridors. Let the revolutionary horde flow around Kazakhstan, like a flood around a rock, and they could swamp the rest of the world, for all she cared. (Gould and would run into the sand, she did not say, but that was what she expected.)

They listened politely, now and then asking for clarification, making notes and doodling maps on hand-held slates that—while obviously information-retrieval devices—looked as though they were made of… slate. Se-Ha stood up.

“I must consult,” he said, nodded, and walked briskly away. Nok-Yung accepted a cigarette, and leaned back luxuriantly, sprawling out with his elbows on the back of the bench. He regarded Myra through narrow eyes and curling smoke.

“Why do you resist the SSU, Myra?” he asked mildly. “It is only democracy. It is only socialism. A means—and an end, compatible at last, after all the disasters and crimes done in the name of both.” He spread his hands. “There are no secrets here, no deceptions. When you were as young as you look—” he smiled “—you would have thought this revolution, this liberation more wonderful than your wildest dreams.”

“Don’t let my mujahedin friends hear you say that!” she warned, half in jest. She glanced over at Nurup Kerbayev. He smiled back, eyes and teeth flashing like knives.

“But you’re right,” she went on. “Let’s just say… I may look young again, but I’ve had a long, long life in the meantime. I’ve come to believe in myself, and in… my country, Kazakhstan. And I will not be assimilated, and nor will we.” She waved a hand around. “These people, they may seem… happy enough to wait and see. But deep down, no—just below the surface—they are seething with suspicion. They are not your Mongolians or Siberians, who God knows had it bad enough under Stalinism but who found everything since was worse. To the Kazakhs socialism means ‘the tragedy’ of the 1930s: the forced settlement, the famine. It means the nuclear tests, the cancers, the birth defects. They don’t want to be the subjects of any more experiments. And if you want to point to the ISTWR as a counterexample—that was a special case. A self-selected minuscule minority. Our socialism was always a joke, more black humour than Red. Trotskyism in one country—what a laugh!”

What a laugh she gave. She frightened herself. One of the scampering children playing around them stopped, put his thumb in his mouth and ran away.

“We ran a benign state capitalism, nothing more,” she went on. “In your case, my friend, it was not even that. God, I feel disgusted with myself that we did it, that we ever allowed ourselves to be compradors for Reid’s goddamn private gulags.”

Nok-Yung stared at the sky for a moment. T don’t know what to say, Myra,” he said at last. “Your regret over the Mutual Protection camps is… well taken. But about the other matters—you must surely know that none of what you have been talking about, the USSR and so on, is socialism as we understand it, and as you understood it. So stop confusing the issue.”

“Oh, I’m well aware that you are different. That you may well be the genuine article: Marx and Engels, Proprietors. And you know what? I don’t care. I don’t want it, for myself or for anyone.”

“Why not?” Nok-Yung sounded more puzzled than offended.

Myra pointed across the river to the insectile shape of a fighting-machine, patrolling the water’s edge with heron-like steps.

“Because of those damn things,” she said. “And the calculating-machines.”

“What!” Nok-Yung’s eyes creased up in amusement. “Luddism is not your true ideology, Myra. I cannot believe this. These machines are one of the most marvellous achievements of the Sheenisov—a whole alternative nanotechnology, worked out quite independently of the West. You know how the machines scale down, all the way to the molecular scale, and are all mechanical and chemical and optical, with no need for electronic interfaces? That’s their—our—secret weapon, an open secret. A computer system that the enemy cannot penetrate, but that everyone can understand and access. I’ve just begun to use it, and I tell you, it has the most intuitive interface I’ve ever come across. The capitalists would kill for it. Or rather, they would kill to be able to monopolise it. But it’s free, so they can’t.”

“I know about your strange machines,” Myra said. “The CIA told me all about them.” She tapped her temple, smiling ironically. “ ‘I have detailed files.’ ”

Nok-Yung caught the allusion. “It is not The Terminator, you know! Not—what was it in the films?—Skynet. It is not… inimical.”

“Not now, perhaps. But what will it do, when it—or you-have covered the world, like a banyan tree?”

Nok-Yung spat a puff of air and smoke. “More Luddism! The machines will form a benign human environment, a second nature, within which human nature can flourish, truly, for the first time.” He leaned forward, speaking confidentially. “Let me tell you what we have done, something that no other system would have dared to do. We have nanofac-tured a virally distributed, genetically fixable version of the anti-ageing treatment. It spreads before our migrations like a benign plague. You may be already infected, yourself. A gift.”

“God, that is so irresponsible!” Myra jolted rigid. “Viruses mutate, dammit, in case you hadn’t heard!”

Nok-Yung made a planing motion with his hand. “Not this one. It has self-repair built in. It has tested stable through a million virtual generations.”

“ Virtual generations, yes! Man, you did enough design work in the camp to know what that’s worth in the real world!”

“Different system, different design philosophy,” he said, with infuriating complacency. “Our testing kits are themselves part of the real world. It’s like the difference between a working scale model and a simulation. There is simply no comparison. And the computing resources are vast, vaster even than anything the spacers have yet built.”

Myra felt her gaze sinking into the bottomless pool of his self-confidence. It was truly terrifying; it was, she realised, what she most feared for herself—to be so sure. To be absolutely certain that she was right would, as far as she was concerned, be the end of her. Doubt was her only hope, her comfort and companion since childhood, her scepticism her sole security.

Shin Se-Ha returned and sat down, affecting not to notice their frozen moment of mutual incomprehension. He looked at Myra, gravely, and shook his head.

“No deal, I’m afraid.”

Myra could scarcely believe it.

“Why ever not? The alternative is to fight your way through Kazakhstan! All you have to do instead is not fight us! What more can you ask of us?”