The Sky Road

10 Forget Babylon

They made their way back from the ossuary, ducking under arches and through hammered holes in the walls, into the church. Beneath pocked, defaced Orthodox murals a Turkish woman sold silver and jade and crochet. They ignored her gestured pitch, stepped outside, stalked past more stalls. Across the hollow from the hilltop where the church stood, a hillside of streets of empty, roofless stone houses fought the slow green entropy of birch and bramble. The light was blinding, the heat choking, the silence intense. The cicadas broke it, the birds, the skitter of a lizard.

Jason wandered around to the front of the church, traced a date in coloured pebbles on the paving.

4912,” he said. That’s when they finished it. How proud of it they must have been. Ten years later, they left. Voluntary population exchange, hah.”

Myra squatted in the sunlight, swigged Evian, sucked Marlboro. “Worse things have happened since.” The dry, ancient ribs and femurs in the ossuary hadn’t disturbed her as much as the fresh bodies she’d seen the evening she arrived.

“No doubt.” Jason shrugged. “But you know, this place, it makes me feel like I’m a Greek, for the first time in my life. Even a goddamn Christian.” He glanced at the hawkers a few tens of metres away, hunkered down beside her and spoke in a low, earnest voice. “As in, you know, Western. It’s a different culture. They don’t like us.”

Myra stared at him, shocked. Karmilassos, or Kaya, or Kayakoi, or whatever it was called (the Turks shamelessly called it “the Greek ghost village”) oppressed her too, but the CIA agent seemed to be drawing entirely the wrong moral from it.

This is what nationalism does,” she said. “And what that kind of thinking does. No, thank you. I don’t buy it.”

Jason looked somewhat hurt. He tilted his hat back and started skinning up a joint. His age—he claimed, and she believed, though who could now be sure?—was twenty-four. The last time she’d been seriously hassled by the CIA had been just over sixty years earlier. There was something awesome about a man following up a file so much older than he was.

(Last time: the man from the Agency had talked to her over lattes in a Starbuck’s off Harvard Square, in July 1998 when she was touting for medical aid to Kazakhstan’s fall-out victims; the campaign’s poster child had a cleft palate. A surgeon she’d met had set up the contact; someone who’d worked at the consulate in Almaty, he’d said, but she wasn’t fooled. She brought a tape-recorder, discreet in the pocket of her blouse. She expected someone who looked like a Mormon, a Man In Black. He was young, dark, bright; blueberry T-shirt, baggy camos. Called himself Mike.

They chatted about Britain. Mike was interested in Ulster. The Orangemen were marching at Drum-cree. Myra told him nothing he didn’t know; he knew more about her than she did, casually name-dropping demos she’d been on in the seventies as he idly turned the foreign news pages of the Boston Globe. They took their coffees outside, sat on a low wall while Myra had a smoke.

Mike nodded at the clenched black fist of a faded black power mural high on a wall on the other side of the street, above the map shop on the corner. “All that’s over,” he said. “No more arguments about the politics, Myra. All of the line-ups are new, now. We aren’t asking you to betray anyone, or anything. Just share information. We have mutual interests. You’re going to a dangerous place, after all.” (Ah, there it was, the threat.) “You never know when the right contacts might be crucial.”

“Indeed,” she said. She was staring abstractedly at a teenage girl with pink hair, sure she’d seen her before. She shook her head. “I’ll bear it in mind,” she said. “Here’s my mobile number.”

Mike gave her his, and went away. That night Myra phoned her tape of the whole conversation through to the office of one of the local sections of the FI, and to a reporter on Mother Jones. The journalist was dubious, the local cadres—after a quick, panicky consultation—told her to play along.

Two weeks later she was in New York, and met Mike again, leaning on the rail of the Staten Island ferry. The last round trip of a day which had been humid, and was now hazy. Commuters dozed on the benches, tourists posed for pictures of themselves with the Statue of Liberty or the towers of Manhattan, the apparat of capital, looming in the background. She agreed to liaise with the consulate when she got back; and in the years that followed, she did, now and then, as she and Georgi clawed their way up the structures of post-Soviet Kazakhstan, through revolutions and counter-revolutions. Mainly she reported on people who were as much her enemies as they were the CIA’s; smugglers of drugs and people and arms, dealers in corruption and mineral concessions and resource looting. She told the FI about every such encounter, and nothing came of it, and it all faded out. After the Fall Revolution a lot of files were opened. Myra had idly run searches on her own name and code-names in them, and found that most of the individuals and companies she’d shopped to the CIA were working for the CIA.

But they still had her down as an asset, the bastards, after all those years and changes.

And the girl with pink hair had been on the Staten Island ferry, too. She never did figure that out, and in the end put it down to coincidence.)

Jason passed her the joint, and they smoked it together as they ambled down the steep, rocky path through neglected olive-trees to the foot of the hill, where they’d left their hired jeep. The dingy little settlement there had consisted of newly built concrete houses, and a few of the stolen stone houses in the first street of the long-emptied Greek town. All of them had been gutted years ago, the Turkish families living there slaughtered by Greek partisans in the last war. The blue-and-white ceramic eyes—for good luck, against the evil eye—above the doors were cracked, the timbers blackened. Myra ground the roach into charcoal ashes that still lay inches deep. She didn’t feel high, just focused, her sight enhanced as if by a VR overlay. She could see why this land was worth fighting over.

Jason got into the driver’s seat as Myra climbed in the other side. He looked at her sympathetically, as though half-sorry for having brought her here.

“Sometimes God is just,” he said.

“Yeah. In a very Old Testament way.”

Jason started up the engine and swung the jeep around on to the narrow road to Hisaronu. The road climbed, scraping trees, edging precipices. Pine and rock and dry gullies—it was like a hot day in Scodand. Myra remembered a day with David Reid, by a river between Dunkeld and Blair Atholl, that had felt just like this. He had talked about depopulation and forced migration in biblical terms as well, she recalled.

“Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,” she heard herself say.

“What?”

“That thing from the Bible. You know, about the king of Babylon? ‘Thou art weighed in the balances, and found wanting.’ ”

“I’m aware of the source,’Jason said, keeping his eyes on the road. “It’s the relevance that kind of escapes me.”

“It’s the way I feel,” Myra said. She stuck her hand in the air above the windscreen, feeling the cool rush between her fingers.

“That’s how you feel about yourself? That’s bad.”

“No,” she told him. “About the fucking world.”

“That’s worse.”

She laughed, her spirits lifting.

“Anyway,” Jason went on, “it’s just the rejuve talking. People get like that.”

“You would know, huh?”

“Not personally. With me, it’s just stabilising, right? With you—” he smirked sidelong at her “—it’s got a lot of work to do.”

“Thanks.”

“It makes you feel strange. Euphoric and judgemental.”

“Yeah, that’s me all right!”

It was the fifth day since she’d swallowed the surgery. The nanomachines had differentiated and proliferated inside her, spreading out through her circulation like an army of sappers, tearing down and rebuilding. She felt their waste heat like a fever, burning her up. Her moods swung from normal to high, she didn’t have depressions any more, it was like a biological Keynesianism, except that in the long run she was not going to be dead. She was not immortal, not really—who could tell? The best guess was centuries and in that time something else would come along—but she felt immortal, she felt like people did in their twenties before their cells started running down and their neurons began to die, no wonder she could remember the seventies so vividly, no wonder she was getting so arrogant!

Sex with Jason had been a foregone conclusion, from about the second she saw him. He was an imperialist agent, a strategic enemy even if a tactical ally, and she didn’t care, she wanted to seduce him and subvert him herself, turn tricks learned in a lifetime that would curl his toes and grey his dark-copper hair. If he had any inhibitions or revulsion from her still-aged body they had been dissolved in the first evening’s first bottle of raki. She’d sucked him rigid, fucked him raw, taught him much and told him little.

The little she told him was about Georgi, and the circumstances of Georgi’s death. For reasons which Jason didn’t spell out, but which Myra suspected had “Agency asset—poss future use?” scribbled in their margins, the CIA was conducting its own investigation into that death which had been so deniably convenient for somebody.

In the early hours of the mornings, when he thought she was asleep, he would go out to her room’s tiny balcony and talk for a long time on the phone. She pretended not to notice and didn’t object, instead using these times in murmured pillow-talk on her own, using the eyeband to consult Parvus and to listen to v-mail from her Sovnarkom colleagues about the situation back home. It wasn’t good.

Denis Gubanov, in particular, was glum. His summaries of popular attitudes—derived from agents’ reports and readers’ letters to Kapitsa Pravda—indicated what to Myra was a surprising groundswell of opposition to the whole deal with Kazakhstan. All unnoticed, a thick scrub of patriotism had grown up over the years on her tiny republic’s thin, infertile soil. Its independence had come to matter to its citizens, far more than it ever had to her. Each night she looked at shots of the growing daily picket outside the government building: red flags, yellow-and-black trefoil flags, pictures of Trotsky. She’d sigh, turn over and pretend to be asleep when Jason came back.

At Hisaronu, a pleasant small town scattered across a hilltop surrounded by higher, distant mountains, they stopped at a pavement cafe on the main street. They drank Amstel and ate Iskander kebabs, under a striped plastic awning. When they were smoking, and sipping muddy coffee, Myra leaned forward across the table and clasped Jason’s hand, letting their fingers intertwine.

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

He clasped back.

“Apart from what I’ve got?”

“Yeah.”

He disentangled his fingers from hers and pulled from his pocket and unfolded a Mercator projection world-map, furred at the creases. He elbowed aside his drink and a plastic ketchup bottle and spread the map out on the metal table.

She pointed. “We’re here.” She dusted off her hands and made as if to rise. “Glad to be of help.”

“Sit,” he said, laughing. “Look.”

She sat down again. “Who else is looking? If you’re about to give me a briefing, wouldn’t VR be better?”

Jason waved his hands and looked around. Tourists and soldiers and locals ambled along the noonday street. “Nobody’s looking.” He combed his fingers through his hair. “And you’ll have noticed, I don’t have an eyeband.” He shrugged. “All the networks are compromised anyway, have been for years. That’s why I listen to the radio, and read newspapers, and write in a notebook, and carry paper maps.”

“Fair enough,” said Myra, lightly, to hide her cold shock at what he’d just said. Then she realised she couldn’t let it pass. “What do you mean, ‘compromised’?”

“Insecure, no matter what you do. Codes, hiding the real message in the junk, whatever—there are systems that’ll crack every new variant as soon as you set it up. Quantum computation killed cryptography, and there are better methods than that now, implemented on things nobody understands. They’re out there, Myra. I’ve seen them.”

She smiled sceptically. Things that man was not meant to know?”

Jason nodded vigorously. Yes, that’s it exactly!” he said, as though he’d never heard the expression before. Perhaps he hadn’t. The youth of today. He looked down again at the map, dismissing the subject with a twirl of his hand. Myra let it drop too, but she didn’t dismiss it. She was pretty sure he was mistaken, or lying, or had been lied to. And in whose interest might it be for her to distrust her ’ware?

Hah.

Jason jabbed a forefinger on North America, ran it around the Great Lakes and partway down the Eastern seaboard. “OK, here’s my country, was yours. The United States, as we still call ourselves. Not exactly ‘sea to shining sea’ any more. ‘From St Lawrence to the Keys’ never quite caught on, and even that’s hard to hold. I mean, we need Maine between us and the Canadian hordes, but, shit. We’re holding down major insurgencies everywhere between Baltimore and Jacksonville. And the only reason we hang on to Florida is for Canaveral, frankly, and the only reason they stay with us is they’re scared of El Barbudo.” He glanced up under his brows, cast her a wry smile. “You should hear the old boys at Langley kicking themselves about that one. After the Pike Commission put a stop to the exploding cigar capers they just thought fuck it, the bastard’s gotta die sometime. Not.”

He opened his fingers like dividers and straddled the continent. “West Coast…” He sighed. “La-la Land. They got a rival claim in to be the successor state, so diplomatically we don’t get on, but between you and me and the gargon here—” he absently waved his other hand, snapped fingers, pointed to their glasses “—we’re the best of friends.” He brought the heel of his palm down on the middle of America, masking off a large area between the Appalachians and the Rockies. “Compared with how we get on with the rest. The Mormons, the militias, the fundies, the White Right, the Indians—name it, we lost to it.”

“Yeah, well,” Myra said. “I had heard.”

“Lucky for us,” he went on, “they’re a bit down on scientists. They got oil and minerals, all right, but with Flood Geology they won’t find much more of it. This ain’t rocket science. Speaking of which, we and our La-la friends got all the aerospace and comp sci and nuke tech experts. At least, we got the ones who didn’t die trying to convince some hick inquisitor with a mains supply and a jump-lead that they really, really didn’t know where the alien bodies were buried. Or where the crashed saucers were stashed.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish. Turned out more people believed in the UFO cover-up than ever believed in the Jewish bankers. When they got their hands on some of yer actual eevill guvmint scientists… you can imagine the fun they had.” He had a thousand-yard stare, past her, for a moment. “Some of the scientists confessed. In astonishing detail. Names, dates, places, A-to-Z files.”

The kid serving tables put down another couple of bottles. Myra smiled at him, shoved him a few greasy gigalira notes, waved a cigarette at Jason.

“Any of it true?” She laughed uneasily. “I’ve sometimes wondered, like about the diamond ships…”

Jason blinked, shook his head. “Oh, no. Total corroborative hallucination. Like alien abductions, or witches’ sabbats. They’d heard the stories too, see?

Hell, maybe some even believed it themselves, who’s to say. The diamond ships, nah, that was just black tech from way back. Your basic Nazi flying saucer. Neat idea in principle, but it never was practical until the right materials came on-stream with the carbon assembler.”

Myra leaned back, refilling her glass, wishing she could consult Parvus. “You’re telling me,” she said, “that East America has border security problems too? Well, let me put your mind at rest. We’re not about to embarrass you by asking for ground troops. Or even teletroopers.”

“God, if it was that…” Jason had the long gaze again. “No, it’s a bit more complicated. You’re going to Ankara next, right?”

“What?”

“You’re going to ask the Turks for ground troops.”

“I don’t know where you got that idea,” Myra said, carefully not denying it. Ankara wasn’t on her itinerary at all, but she was very curious to know why Jason thought it was, and what bothered him about it.

“Sources,” Jason said. “Anyway, that’s what I’m here to tell you would be a very bad idea. If you want to get any help from the US, that is.”

“Hmm,” said Myra. She glanced at a soldier trawling a souvenir rack a few metres away. “I’m just looking at a US-made GI uniform, US KevlarPlus body armour, a US Robotics head-up with Raytheon AI, a US Colt Carbine-14…”

“Yeah-yeah-yeah,” said Jason impatiently. “Valued customers. Old friends. Doesn’t mean we’d be happy to see their standard-issue US Army boots tramping all over Central Asia.”

“Even to stamp on the Sheenisov?”

Jason leaned his elbows on the table, steepled his hands in front of his face to mask his mouth, and spoke quiedy.

“Look, Myra, these ain’t communism’s glory days. I mean, in our glory days we’d have been pounding them with B-52s round the clock, for all the good that would have done. I understand your, ah, fraternal allies have tried that in their own inimitable way, with Antonovs. I’ve been authorised to let you know—off the record, and deniably—that if you come to New York or DC you’ll be welcome, and your requests will be listened to sympathetically. But. Our threat assessment of the Sheenisov—where the fuck did that name come from?—is pretty low-key. If a motorised horde of Mongols in plastic yurts want to plan their economy with steam-driven computers, that’s their problem, and if it turns out to be popular in your country, that’s yours.”

Myra stared at him, rocked back. “Jeez. That’s me told.”

“Hey, nothing personal. It had to be me—or someone like me—who told you this, because at the level you’re gonna be dealing with in NY or DC it’d be… undiplomatic and impolitic to put it to you so bluntly. I’m not saying you won’t get anything. You will, just—maybe not as much as you’d like.”

She narrowed her eyes, leaning forward again. He looked so straightforward, so frank. He couldn’t know about the nuclear card up her sleeve.

“OK, OK,” she said, as though not too bothered, which she wasn’t. “So, you’re more worried about the Turkish Federation expanding than you are about the SSU?”

“You got it. And, well, there are bigger concerns than that. The coup attempt has—let’s say it hasn’t made things easier for us.”

“How?”

Jason compressed his lips. “You’ll find out,” he said gloomily.

“All right,” said Myra. She swirled her beer, looked in it, divined no clues. She looked up and smiled at Jason. “Nothing personal, point taken. So let’s get back to personal.”

Jason relaxed suddenly. “Yeah, OIL.”

“And it’s from the Gaelic, by the way.”

“What?”

“The name—Sheenisov. I think it was David Reid who coined it.”

“Well, whaddaya know.”

“What I want to know,” said Myra, draining her glass and getting up, “is what’s this about them having steam-driven computers?”

“Ah,” said Jason, as they returned to the jeep, “I can tell you all about that.”

“Should you be driving?”

“Ah, I guess not’Jason switched the jeep over to autopilot, and as it took them back down the long road to Olu Deniz he told her all about the Sheenisov’s strange machines.

It was a strange machine that took her to America.

On her last morning she woke before Jason did, lay for a while, then reached automatically for her contacts. She was on the point of putting the disposables in when she noticed that she could see clearly, all around the room. A quick look out of the window confirmed that she wasn’t myopic any more. She brought her hand within two inches of her face, and it stayed in focus; she didn’t have long sight, either.

In the shower she looked down at her body, but apart from seeing her toes clearly she couldn’t see any difference. Towelling her head afterwards, she found a loose hair in her hand. She stared at it.

Jason, lookit that, lookit that!”

“Wha?” He sat up, looked at her, examined the hair.

“It looks like… a hair.”

“No, look at the end. No, the other end.”

“There’s something to see?”

Was he awake? She shook his shoulder again.

“There’s a quarter inch of blonde there! Not grey!”

“Oh, Jesus. I’ll take your word for it.”

“Hah,” she said. “Obviously the fix hasn’t done anything for your eyes. I’d have them checked, if I were you.”

“They’re good enough for the road, anyway.”

He helped her load her luggage on the jeep, disappeared politely—probably for another surreptitious phone-call—while she sweated through a final check-up by Dr Masound, and was waiting at the wheel of the jeep when she skipped out of the clinic and hopped in beside him.

“All set?”

“Yup. All clear.”

“Welcome to eternity,” he said, gunning the engine and slewing the jeep out of the driveway in a spatter of gravel.

“Just don’t send me there first!”

“Ah, I’ll be fine,” Jason said, turning right on to the road up into the hills, towards Fetiye. They climbed and climbed, overtaking taxis and trucks and dolmushes, being carefully polite to the troop-carriers. The valley farms and roadside stalls were almost all worked by astonishingly old people, who looked as though they’d had the basic metabolic rejuvenations but couldn’t afford the cosmetic ones. Instead of being small and stooped they were tall and straight, but their faces were like Benin masks, dark and corrugated, with bright eyes glittering out.

So, as Jason remarked, no change there.

They crested a rise and Myra could see again before and below them the impossibly blue, the Windolene-dark sea. A mile or so offshore, visible even from that distance, that height, was the ekran-oplan. Smaller craft buzzed around its hundred-metre length. Beyond them all the naval hovercraft and hydrofoils busily patrolled; still further away, across the strait towards Rhodes, Myra could make out their equally assiduous counterparts, the patrol-boats of the Greek Threat.

They followed the long swooping road down to Fetiye, passing the Lycian tombs in the cliffs and turning right before the mosque and down along the edge of the bazaar to the harbour’s long mole and esplanade. They pulled up at the embarkation point, beside a star-and-crescent flag and a glowering statue of Kemal.

The engine spun to a halt. Jason looked across at her.

“Well,” he said. “Will I ever see you again?”

“If we’re both going to live forever,” Myra said wryly, “probably yes.”

“I’ll take that as a no.” Jason stuck out his hand. “Still. It’s been a good few days. Keep in touch. And if the investigation turns up anything, VU be in touch.”

She caught his hand, her newly sharpened sight blurring suddenly. “Oh, don’t take it as a no!” she said, dismayed at his casual acceptance of her casual words as a permanent parting. This was like adolescence all over again, this was more than lust, she had a crush on him and she was saying the wrong things. She startled him with a fierce embrace, her lips wet on his, her eyelashes wet on his neck, and all the while thinking this wasn’t like her, this wasn’t right, she was supposed to be a diplomat and she was falling for a fucking CIA agent who had been sent to do a different kind of job on her; this was Not The Done Thing, at all.

They pulled apart, holding each other’s shoulders, staring at each other, oblivious to the chattering crowd of small boys around the vehicle.

“Myra, you’re amazing,” Jason said. Til never forget you, I’ll keep in touch, I’ll try to see you again, but we both…”

Yeah,” Myra said. She made a long sniffly nasal inhalation. “We’re both grown-up people, we have jobs, we might not always be on the same side and—” she giggled “—‘we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth’.”

“Or something. Yes.”

Jason disengaged, with a smile that to Myra still looked like a regretful adieu. They remained awkwardly formal with each other as Jason dismissed the boys’ unwanted offers of porterage, helped her take her luggage to the shutde boat, and shook hands as she stood at the top of the ladder.

As the small boat chugged out across the harbour to the larger craft, Myra watched Jason restart the jeep, turn it around and drive it away, vanishing at a turn off the boulevard.

She sighed and turned around to face the ekran-oplan. The vast machine looked even more improbably huge as it loomed closer: an aircraft the size of a ship, with stubby wings. A ship that flew. It was on the regular Istanbul to New York run, which stopped off at Izmir and Fetiye before hitting its stride. The boat steered its way through its competitors and hove to under the shadow of the port wing, where a set of steps extended down to a pontoon platform. Officials officiously tagged the luggage for loading into the cargo hold, and the passengers ascended into the ship.

Myra made her way to the forward lounge, bought a gin and tonic at the bar with her remaining handfuls of Turkish gigalira notes, and took the urgent multilingual advice to sit down before the ship took off.

She’d never before travelled in one of these hybrid vehicles—a Kruschev-era Soviet invention, she remembered with residual pride—and she was suitably stunned by its speed and above all by the impression of speed, as the great machine roared across the Med at a mean height of ten metres and a top speed of three hundred miles per hour. It left Fetiye at noon, chased the day across the Atlantic, and arrived in New York fourteen hours later at 6 p.m. local time.

Myra spent most of those fourteen hours relaxing, sleeping, sight-seeing and thinking about how to save the Earth.

From the sea, Manhattan had a weird, unbalanced look, the Two Mile Tower growing from the Lower East Side throwing all the rest out of perspective. South Street Seaport was still battle-damaged from the coup, and smelt more than ever of fish. Myra made her way along the duckboarded temporary quay, indistinguishable in the stream of disembarking passengers until she stepped into the waiting embassy limo with its sun-and-eagle pennant and welcoming chauffeur, who had the door slammed before anyone could so much as gawk.

The long car nosed arrogantly into the traffic flow. The driver, a stockily built Kazakh who looked as though he moonlighted as a bodyguard, caught her glance in the rear-view.

“The embassy, Citizen Davidova?”

Myra leaned back in the upholstery. Outside, through the armoured one-way glass, she could see people sitting around fires. “No, the UN, thank you.”

“Very well, Citizen.”

The car lurched as its front, then rear, suspension coped with a shallow shell-crater. Or maybe a pothole, NYC’s municipal finance being what it was.

“But I’d appreciate it if you could track my luggage from the ship to the embassy, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He began talking rapidly in Russian into a phone.

They pulled in at the UN building about ten minutes later, the heavy gates of the compound rolling back for them, closing quickly behind. Myra checked her make-up in a hand mirror, stepped out of the car and checked her jacket and skirt in the bodywork sheen. Everything looked fine; in fact, she felt rather over-dressed for the grotty old place. Puddles on the plaza, repairs on the windows, rust on the structural steel, and the Two Mile Tower overshadowing the glass-fronted obelisk. On a coppice of flagpoles the two thousand, three hundred and ninety-seven flags of the nations of the Earth and its colonies flapped in the breeze like a flock of birds preparing to migrate from some long winter to come.

She took the driver’s mobile number, and told him he’d have at least a couple of hours before she called him on it. He thanked her, grinned and walked off briskly. Myra walked slowly past the old late-Soviet sculpture—St George slaying the Dragon of War, in ploughshared missile metal—careful in her Prada heels, around the puddles and across the crumbling tarmac, to the doorway. An expert system recognised her; a guard saluted her.

In the foyer she stood lost for a moment until she remembered that the whole place had been gutted and refurbished, probably several times, since she’d last been here. This time around, it had been done out in the modish retro futurist style, rather like her own office. The colour-theme was leaves, from shades of green through brown to copper. Soothing, though the people in this calming environment scurried about looking haggard. A huge UN flag, blue ground with stylised globe and olive wreath, hung above the reception desk. Myra registered a momentary shock; it was like seeing a swastika.

Two men approached, their steps light on the heavy carpet. She recognised them both: Mustafa Khamadi, the Kazakhstan UN ambassador, short and dark; and Ivan Ibrayev, the ISTWR’s representative, tall and cropped-blond, some recessive Volga-German gene manifesting in his bearing and complexion.

Khamadi shook her hand, his smile showing the gold Soviet teeth he’d kept through two rejuvenations; Ibrayev bowed over her hand, almost kissing it.

“Well hi, comrades,” Myra said, eager to break with formality. “Good to see you.”

“Well, likewise,” said Khamadi. “Shall we go to my office?”

Ivan Ibrayev shot her a look.

“Ah, thank you,” Myra said. “But perhaps for, ah, diplomatic reasons, Citizen Ibrayev’s might be…?”

“Very good,” said Khamadi.

As they waited for the lift his tongue flicked his lips. “Ah, Citizen Davidova—”

“Oh, Myra, please—”

“Myra,” he went on in a rush, “please accept my belated condolences on your former husband’s death.”

Thank you,” she said.

“I only knew him slightly, of course, but he was widely respected.”

“Indeed he was.”

The doors opened. The two men made way for her as they all stepped in. The doors closed.

“I still think those spacist bastards killed him,” Ibrayev said abruptly. He glared up at the minicam in the corner. “And I don’t care who knows it!”

The whoosh and the rush, the slight increase, then diminution of the g-force. Myra felt her knees wobble as she stepped out of the lift into a long corridor.

“Investigations are continuing.” She shrugged stiffly. “Personally, I don’t think Reid had a hand in it, that’s all I can say.” She flashed a smile across at Ivan, down at Mustafa. T knew the man… intimately.”

Ivan’s fair face flushed visibly. Mustafa displayed a gold canine.

“It leads to complications, the long life,” he said. “It makes us all close, in the end. What is the theory, the six degrees of separation?” He laughed harshly. “When I was very young, I shook hands with a woman who had been one of Lenin’s secretaries. Think of that!”

Myra thought of that. “Come to think of it,” she chuckled darkly, “so did I.”

But it still hit her, the pang like a blade in the belly: all my ships are gone and all my men are dead.

No, no. Not yet. She still had ships, and she might still have Jason.

Ivan Ibrayev’s office was small. They sat with their knees up against his desk. The trefoil flag hung on one wall, rocketry ads on the others. The window overlooked the East River. The door was open. A flunkie appeared with coffee and cups, then vanished discreetly. Ivan closed the door and turned on the audio countermeasures. Myra swallowed, trying to make the strange pressure in her ear-drums go away. It didn’t.

She swallowed again, sipped her coffee. The two men leaned forward, glanced at each other. Ibrayev gestured to her to go ahead.

“OK.” she said. “You know why I’m here, right?”

“To negotiate US military aid,” said Ibrayev.

“Yeah, well. East American, anyway.” They laughed. “I’ve already been given to understand that not much will be forthcoming. What the person who told me that didn’t know, what you probably don’t know, is what we have to offer them.” She paused. Their faces showed nothing. “The ISTWR still has some functioning nukes.”

“Nuclear weapons?” Khamadi asked. Ibrayev smirked, as though he’d always suspected that the little state he served still sheathed this hidden sting.

“Weapons,” Myra nodded. “City busters, mostly, but a reasonably comprehensive suite—all the way down to battlefield tactical nukes, which—” she shrugged “—aren’t that hard to come by. But still.”

“We knew nothing of this,” said Khamadi. Ibrayev nodded emphatic concurrence.

“Chingiz Suleimanyov didn’t tell you?”

“Nyet.”

“Good,” Myra said briskly. “Well, that’s what I’m here to tell you. Kazakhstan is now a de facto superpower, for what that’s worth.”

Ivan Ibrayev steepled his fingers. “How do we use them, that’s the question. They’re not much direct use against the Sheenisov—no point in nuking steppe, eh?”

Khamadi’s eyes brightened, his mouth shaped a shining snarl. “We could point out that they need not be aimed Eastward…”

“Huh!” Myra snorted. “Citizens, comrades.… I am an American, and I can tell you one thing the Americans—East, West or Middle—won’t stand for is nuclear blackmail. This is a people whose nuclear strategy involved megadeath write-offs on their side. They may have come down in the world a bit, but they’re not too demoralised to take us out before we know what hit us if we even try that. No. What the President wants me to do is almost the opposite: offer them—under our control of course, but a public, unbreakable deal—to the US, or the UN, in exchange for a military alliance that can stop the Sheenisov in their tracks.”

The two men pondered this proposal with poker-faced calm. Ivan opened a pack of Marlboros and offered one to Myra. She lit up gratefully.

“It’s worth trying,” said Khamadi. “I must say, between ourselves, I think we may regret giving up the new power which the nukes would place in our hands.”

“It’s not much of a power,” Myra said. “In a sense we are proposing to blackmail the Americans, not with possible use against them but with possible use against someone else without their permission.”

Khamadi refilled the cups, frowning. “The UN still has some nukes itself, as we’ve just seen. I suspect their stock has been significantly depleted by their use. So they might just be keen to replenish it.”

Ivan gestured at his wall posters. “It has occurred to me,” he said, “that we could go all the way back into the old business: selling deterrence to everyone who wants it!”

Myra laughed. “Deterrence against whom? The UN? I don’t see that working for long.”

Khamadi grimaced, as though the coffee were more bitter than he’d expected. “Yes, I take your point. Perhaps it is for the best. So what can we do to facilitate this?”

Myra drew hard on her cigarette. “Apart from verifying my authority?” She smiled at them. “You can arrange—I hope—somebody to represent the other side. I’ve given this a lot of thought on the way over, and checked through the US personnel here, and I have a suggestion for the right person to approach.”

“Sadie Rutelli,” Ibrayev said.

“That’s it! How did you know?”

Ibrayev tapped his eyeband. “Great expert systems think alike.”

“Oh, well,” Myra said, feeling a bit deflated. “I guess she’s the obvious choice. What are the chances of meeting her?”

Ibrayev rolled his eyes and blinked a couple of times. “According to her public diary… pretty good. She has a blank space between 10 p.m. and midnight, which is when she intends to go home. Would you like me to set up a paging program to arrange a meeting?”

“I sure would,” Myra said.

“It’s late,” Khamadi said. “She’ll be tired.”

“Make it the offer of a dinner date,” Myra suggested. “She can choose, I’ll pay. Just the two of us—I hope you don’t mind, guys?”

The diplomats dismissed the very idea that they might even have the slightest thought of such a deeply unworthy emotion. Myra and Ivan matched fetches, and their electronic secretaries got busy trying to reach Rutelli’s.

“It may take some time to get through to her,” said Ibrayev. “She’s busy.”

Myra stood up. “Then I’ll get a shower and some sleep at the hotel. If somebody says they want me urgently, call my fetch. If Rutelli comes through, call me straight away, direct. Otherwise—call me in the morning!”

“I hope you’re not still enough of an ex-commie to be embarrassed about all this,” said Sadie Rutelli. She passed Myra a flute of chilled champagne from the minibar of the limo that had picked her up at the Waldorf.

“Indeed not.” Myra toasted her ironically. She was leaning back in the leather seat and enjoying every second of it. “I know all about the expenses of representation. It’s all in Marx. We ex-commies are all hardened cynics on these matters.”

“It’s great to see you again, Myra. It’s been a long time.”

“Yeah, what? Thirty-four years. Jesus. And you look like 2025 is when you were born.”

Sadie, sitting in the seat opposite, looked quite stunning with her long black hair, sable bolero and indigo evening-dress. Myra remembered her as having been just as stunning in blue fatigues. She’d been one of the UN Disarmament Commission agents who’d stripped the ISTWR of its nukes after the war. She had done it with tact and determination, and despite the strained circumstances, Myra had warmed to her.

“Oh, you flatter me,” Sadie said. “I must say you look younger yourself than I remember.”

“Ah, I’m still working on that. Or the little machines are.” Myra stroked the backs of her hands, relishing their now smoother and softer feel, the kind of thing that cosmetic creams promised and nanotech machines delivered.

She felt vigorous, as well—she wasn’t experiencing jet-lag (ekranoplan-lag…) and her snatched two hours’ sleep had refreshed her more than seemed proportionate.

“Still,” said Sadie, “you can’t beat back-ups, if you really want to be sure of living… a long time.”

“Oh, really?” Myra tried not to scoff. “You believe that thing works?”

“To the extent that I’ve had a back-up taken, yes.”

“Has anyone ever come back from a back-up?”

Sadie frowned. “Not as such, no. Nobody’s ever been cloned and had their backed-up memories imprinted on the clone brain. Though there are rumours, about some tests Reid’s men did, way back…”

“With apes. Yeah, I know about that. How do you tell if a fucking chimp’s personality has survived?”

Sadie smiled. “Ah, Myra. You’re still a goddamn dialectical materialist. I was going to say, there have been cases where people have got the backed-up copy to run, in VR environments. It’s expensive, mind. Latest nanotech optical computers, those things that look like crystal balls. Takes one hell of a lot of processing-power, but there are some people who can afford it: rock-stars, film-stars and such.”

“Don’t they worry about the competition?”

“No, no!” Sadie stared at her. “That’s the point. The copies do the performances—the originals just retire!”

“Sounds like a raw deal,” Myra said. “Imagine waking up and finding you’re living in a silicon chip, and you have to work for the benefit of your selfish original. Jesus. I’d go on strike.” She struck a guitar-holding pose, sang nasally, “Ain’t gonna play Sim City…”

Sadie laughed. “Until your management reboots you.”

Myra was laughing too, but it chilled her to think of this new way for the rich to desert the Earth, not to space but to cyberspace, with their bank accounts; to live for ever on television, where their faces had always been. And what a laugh it would be if, in their silicon heaven, they were to meet the General…

Ah, shit. Back to business.

“Is this car secure to talk?” she asked, suddenly sure that the restaurant wouldn’t be.

Sadie waved a languid hand. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I know what you have to offer—the fact that you asked to see me kinda gives it away, yeah?”

“Seeing you put it like that… but the devil’s in the details.”

“We don’t need to worry about the details,” Sadie said. “Not tonight. Just a little discretion and circumlocution, and we’ll be fine.”

Myra smiled thinly. Probably Sadie knew a lot of the details. It was still her job to keep track of nuclear deployments. Her eyeband—Myra ^guessed the fine sparkly band around Sadie’s forehead was an eyeband—would show her every suspected tac nuke on Earth and off it. And she’d have a shrewd idea where Myra’s strategic nukes were, too.

Myra glanced out of the window. The car was making reasonable speed up… Amsterdam Avenue, getting to the high numbers. The old buildings were blistered, the pavements cluttered with nano-built squatter shacks like spider bubbles, linked by webbed stairways and ladders and swing-ropes. Their dwellers, and the people on the street, were in this part mostly white. Office-workers, mostly Black and Hispanic, threaded their way among the crowds, ignoring their importunity.

“Middle-American refugees,” Sadie said. “Okies.”

The restaurant, when they reached it a few minutes later, was well into the Harlem spillover. Black flight had long since changed the character of the area; Myra and Sadie stepped across the stall-cluttered pavement under the incurious, inscrutable stares of Peruvians and Chileans. It looked like an America where the Indians had won. In fact, these Indians had lost everything they had to the Gonzal-istas, a decade or two earlier. The Gonzalistas had been defeated, but their intended victims had no intention of leaving the US. Now the former refugees’ petty commerce filled the offices and shop-fronts and spilled on to the pavements, just as their huge families filled the old public-housing projects.

But still, Myra thought, getting away from the killing peaks at all was winning. The Gonzalistas had been a nasty bunch, even for commies; the kind who would dismiss Pol Pot as a revisionist.

The restaurant was called Los Malvinas. Inside it was crowded, mainly with young old-money Latinos, preppily dressed, snootily confident of their social and racial superiority over the newer immigrants on the streets but exploiting—in their fashion-statements as in other ways—their cultural connection. The air smelt meaty and smoky, the walls had huge posters of Peron, Eva, Che, Lady Thatcher and Madonna. Sadie was welcomed by name by an attentive head waiter who escorted them to a table out the back, in a small yard enclosed by trees and creeper-covered walls.

“Nice place,” Myra said. She looked down the menu. “Doesn’t look like it’ll take a big chunk out of the company card, either.”

“Knew you’d like it,” Sadie said. She shrugged her bolero on to the chairback, revealing her bare shoulders. “Jug of sangria?”

“Good idea.” Myra tapped the menu. “You’ll have to advise me on this. Just as well I’m not a vegetarian.”

They put together an order which Sadie assured her would be both good and huge, and sipped sangria and smoked a joint and gnawed garlic-oil-dipped bread while waiting for it.

“OK,” said Myra. She glanced around, reflexively. Half a dozen Venezuelan oil engineers, in shirts and shorts, were talking loudly around the only other occupied table; she shrugged and shook her head. “OK. Let’s talk. Hope you don’t mind me saying, but, hell. You got authority to negotiate at the level we’re talking about?”

“Sure,” Sadie told her. “Don’t worry about that. Straight line to the top. Not that this is one of the Boss’s top priorities, mind you.”

“How about on the UN side?”

Sadie waved a chunk of bread dismissively. “That’s all squared.”

“No change there then, huh?”

“Changes, yeah, but we’ve rolled to the top again. For what it’s worth.”

“Right, I know what you mean. ‘For what it’s worth’ seems to come up in conversation a lot these days. Anyway. Here’s the deal. We sell you exclusive rights to the package, you back us up against the commie hordes. Shopping-list to follow, but like you say, later for details.”

The waiter arrived with a hot platter and a couple of dishes; a girl followed with bowls of salad and rice. The main dish was like a salad of meat, in which most possible cuts from a cow were represented, along with the tastier internals and a few of the less tasty.

“Enjoy your meal, ladies.”

Thank you,” said Sadie. She stubbed out the roach. “Oh, and another sangria, please.”

Myra was ravenous, her appetite honed even keener by the joint, and spent about twenty minutes in atavistic carnivorous ecstasy and exclamation before slacking off enough to take up the conversation properly again.

“So, Sadie.” She put down a rib, wiped her fingers and chin. “What do you say?”

Sadie took a long swig of sangria, the ice chinking slushily.

“You know, that guy we sent to speak to you? From the Company?”

“Bit hard to forget him.”

“Uh-huh.” Sadie sighed. “Well, Myra, sorry about this, but—” She scratched her ear. “It’s still the deal, basically. We can give you some kit, sure, but nothing like what you’re asking. Definitely no alliance.”

Myra rocked back. She heard the feet of her metal chair scrape the flagstones.

“That’s even with what we’re offering?”

“Even with.” Sadie picked up something intestinal-looking, dragged it through her teeth. “Because we can’t take it. It’s no use to us anyway, frankly.”

“Oh my God. Oh, shit.”Myra reached for her cigarettes. “Mind if—”

“Go ahead. Yes please.”

“What’s the problem with our package?”

“Skill sets and legacy systems, basically.” Sadie looked at the tip of her cigarette, wrinkled her nose and sucked grease from her lips. “Look above my head. Up. What do you see?”

Myra gazed southward and upward.

“Top of the Two Mile Tower?”

“Right. Know what’s in it? Squatters, mostly. Damn thing damn near built itself, like a stone tree. But the builders couldn’t find enough businesses to rent work-space in it.”

“That sort of thing’s common enough,” Myra said. “Speculative spectacular buildings are usually finished just before the recession hits, and stay empty until the next boom.”

“If there is another boom…” Sadie said gloomily.

Myra remembered Shin Se-Ha’s version of the Otoh equations. “There will be,” she said. One more, anyway, she didn’t say. “What’s your point?”

“We’re losing people,” Sadie said. “It’s no secret. The coup has succeeded in more ways than it’s failed. A hell of a lot of our best scientists and engineers have migrated to the orbital colonies, and they support the faction that Mutual Protection have been running supplies for.”

“The Outwarders.”

“Yeah. Think civilisation on Earth is doomed, and they’re getting out. And, more to the point, so is a lot of the big money. Most of the corporations have been headquartered in orbital tax-havens since at least the Fall Revolution. Now they’ve got the muscle—technical, military—to back that up. And the on-site personnel. They’ll finance us, all right, but strictly as user fees, like hiring a defence agency, and only as long as we don’t step out of line. You may think of the US as the old imperialist oppressor, but these days we’re just another banana republic. The whole Earth is one Third World. Big money and skilled labour are in space, and what’s left down below is mostly surplus population.” Sadie smiled wryly. “And bureaucrats, like you and me.”

“So you’re saying the US empire still exists,” Myra said. “But its capital—in both senses—is now in orbit.”

Teah, exactly!”

“Fair enough,” said Myra, “but how does that affect our offer?”

“Well.” Sadie leaned back, took a short draw, like a sip, on her cigarette. “Let me draw you an analogy. Suppose, just hypothetically, for the sake of argument, that the US wanted to go back to a strategic nuclear posture. Leave aside the fact that the Third World War did for nukes what the First did for gas. At least in terms of using them on Earth—the UN got away with the Heaviside Layer blasts, but that was a bit of a fluke. Leave aside the fact that the big money in orbit is becoming virtually Green with paranoia about nukes in space, too.”

Aha, Myra thought. She would not leave that aside, at all. This was the crux, however valid the rest of Sadie’s points were.

“Leave aside the fact that there simply aren’t that many big nukes left around. Suppose somebody came to us with, I dunno, a stash of old post-Soviet city-busters: laser-fusion jobs, long shelf-life, low maintenance. They still wouldn’t be any use to us, because our whole military doctrine has shifted away from reliance on nukes. There’s a lot more to maintaining a credible strategic nuclear deterrent than maintaining the actual weapons. You need missile and bomber crews, tactical boys, analysts, constant practice. Hell, I should know, I worked hard enough at dispersing the teams and scrubbing the records, back in my disarmament days. We don’t have people with the relevant skills any more, and we don’t have the people to train new ones. We need all our available skill pool to keep our stealth fighters flying, and our teletroopers, smart-battle tactics and techniques up to scratch.”

“1 think I see your point,” Myra said dryly. “So, by the same kind of reasoning, our offer of, uh, mining rights in Kazakhstan isn’t really of interest.”

“You could say that. That is the analogy, yes.”

Myra doubted that their reversal of analogy and actuality would have fooled any snoop for a second, but there was a protocol to be followed on these things. It was, she recalled, illegal for public officials under UN jurisdiction—after the Fall Revolution as much as before—to even discuss nuclear deterrence as a serious policy option.

And of course they hadn’t. Not in a way that would stand up in court, which was all that mattered.

“There is of course one advanced country that isn’t a banana republic just yet…” Myra said. “Never even rejoined the UN, come to that.”

Sadie shrugged. “Go to the Brits if you like,” she said; lighdy, but she acknowledged the implied threat. “Not my problem. But it will be somebody else’s.”

“Just so long as we know where we stand,” Myra said, likewise taking the hint. “OK Forget about the package deal. What about ground troops and air support?”

“The latter, maybe. At a pinch. And hardware. Hardware, we got. Troops, no.”

“Oh, come on. Even mercenaries. We can pay good rates.”

“Mercenaries?” Sadie laughed. “Mercenaries are the best we have. We use them to put some backbone into our crack regiments. And the crack troops are about all that’s left. It’s become just about impossible to raise ordinary grunts. Conscription? Don’t even think about it.”

Myra still looked sceptical. “I’ll show you,” Sadie told her.

They chatted amiably for a while longer, agreeing to dump on Khamadi and Ibrayev the detailed work of negotiating what little aid the US had to give; but basically, the discussion was over. Myra settled the bill, left a generous tip and followed Sadie out. As they recrossed the crowded pavement to the limo, Sadie startled Myra by walking boldly up to a bunch of Andean lads hanging around a headware stall. The boys looked her up and down, lazily curious.

“Hi, guys,” she said. “How’re you doin’?”

“Fine, lady, fine.”

“How ’bout work?”

“This our work.” They grinned at the stall’s owner, who smiled resignedly back.

“Ever thought of joining the Army? Good pay, great conditions. Tough guys like you could make a good go of it.”

They had to hold each other up, they were laughing so hard.

“Not gone get killed fighting hicks and geeks,” one of them said. The sweep of his arm took in everything from the Two Mile Tower to the stall’s bristling headware whiskers. He spat away, on to the pavement.

“You preferred tech to men,” he said. “Let tech defend you.”