by Ken MacLeod
“ ‘Necessity is its own law’,” she said, as though quoting, but the expression came from no sage I’d ever read. “Anyway, Clovis, it’s not as dangerous as you may think.”
Curiosity drove me like prurience. “How do they do it safely? Draw pentagrams with salt, or what?”
“No,” she said, quite seriously. “They make lines with wire—isolated circuits, you know? That’s what confines anything that might be waiting to get out. There are other simple precautions, for the visuals—” she made a cutting motion with her hand in response to my baffled look “—but ninety-nine times out of a hundred there’s nothing to worry about anyway. Just words and pictures.” She chuckled darkly. “Sometimes strange words and pictures, I’ll give you that.”
“And the hundredth time?”
“You meet a demon,” she said, very quietly but emphatically. “Most times, you can shut it down before it does any damage.”
“And the other times?” I persisted.
“It gets loose and eats your soul.”
I stared at her. “You mean that’s actually true?”
She laughed at me. “Of course not. It makes your equipment burst into flames or explode with a loud bang, though.”
“I can see how that might be a hazard.”
She reached over and touched my lips. “Shush, man, don’t go on like an old woman. Most of the stuff in the dark storage is useless to us, or evil in a different way from what you think. Evil ideas from the old times, they can make you sick, and make you want to share them, so they spread like a disease.”
She leaned back again and closed her eyes, enjoying the sun like a cat. “I reckon you and I are strong enough and healthy enough in our minds to be safe from that sort of thing.” She opened her eyes again and gave me a challenging look.
The path of power is always a temptation, as Mer-rial had so lightly said last night. Until now, it had never seriously tempted me; I knew the dangers, and knew no way of getting to the undoubted rewards. Now such a way was being offered; it might reduce by years the time required for researching my thesis, it might even give me a head start on the Life. The lust for the lost knowledge made my head throb.
The question was out before I knew what I was saying. “Do you want me to help you to do it?”
Her eyes widened and brightened. “Could you? That would be just—wonderful!”
She was looking at me with so much admiration and respect that I could not imagine not doing what it would take to deserve it. But even in my besotted eagerness to please her, my genuine concern about the problem she thought she’d uncovered, and my own desire for the knowledge and for the adventure of obtaining it—even with all that, my whole training and my natural caution came rushing back, and I wavered.
“Oh, God,” I said. “I’ll have to think about it.”
“Can you get your thinking about it over by eight tonight?” Merrial asked drily.
“Maybe. And what if I say no?”
She held me in her level gaze. “I won’t think any the less of you. It won’t change a thing about that.”
“Sure?” I said, not anxiously but mischievously. I had already decided. She had seduced me into a frame of mind that feared neither God nor men nor devils. “Then what will you do?”
She shook her head. Til find some other way, or at the worst just register my protest in the record, and go on with my work as I’m told.”
“That sounds like a more sensible course in the first place.”
“It is that,” she said. “But I’d rather have the satisfaction of knowing the ship is safe, one way or another, than of saying ‘I told you so” afterwards.”
I couldn’t argue with that, and I didn’t want to. What she said must have had some deeper effect on me, because when we descended the perilous steps down from the heathery eyrie, each of us one stumble away from the welcoming arms of Darwin, I wasn’t afraid at all.
My room was narrow and long, under the slope of the roof. After the heat of the day it was full of the smell of old varnish and warm rust and the sound of creaking wood. The westward-facing skylight let in enough light to see by, and enough air to breathe.
I came in from work and threw off my overalls and shirt, tossed my temporarily heavy purse on the bed, and uncapped a chilled bottle of beer I’d bought at the bus-stop. I opened the skylight to its fullest extent and sat myself under it on the room’s one tall chair, and leaned my elbow on the window’s frame as though sitting at a bar. Beside my forearm tiny red arachnids moved about on the grey and yellow lichen like dots in front of my eyes.
Merrial and I would meet again in two hours. Plenty of time to wash and shave and dress, to consider and reconsider. I was almost tempted to have a brief sleep, but decided against it, attractive though the barely straightened bedding seemed at this moment. After soaking up the beer I’d get a good jolt of coffee. I lit my fifth cigarette of the day and gazed out over the rooftops towards the loch, my parched body gratefully absorbing the drink, my tired brain riding the rush of the leaf.
Merrial’s disturbing but alluring proposition had preoccupied me all afternoon, and although my decision was made I had plenty of doubts and fears. I would not be the first to mine the dark archives in the interests of history, or of engineering for that matter; it was neither a crime nor a sin, but it had always been impressed upon me that it was a dangerous folly. And, to be sure, I could think of no good reason for doing it, other than the ones which motivated myself and Merrial; no doubt everyone who had taken that path had felt the same about their reasons. Rationally, it was obvious why the dangers were better publicised than the benefits—those who found only madness and death in the black logic could not but be noticed, whereas those who found knowledge or wealth or pleasure discreedy kept their sinister source to themselves.
What hypocrisies, I wondered, did the tinkers practise, if they themselves would on occasion turn their hand to the leftward path? Until Menial had mentioned it, I’d suspected no such thing: but then, with the tinkers’ virtual monopoly of an understanding of the white logic, it was in their interests to publicly disparage the black. Optical and mechanical computing, and more especially the delicate interface between them—the seer-stones set like gems in the shining brass of the calculating machinery—were their speciality and secret skill. What would happen if people outside their guild were to start exploring the left-hand path in earnest, as a public enterprise rather than a private vice, heaven only knew. A new Possession, perhaps; in which case the tinkers might have to engineer a new Deliverance. It was not a reassuring thought.
I stubbed out the cigarette and sent the butt tumbling down the slate roof-tiles to the dry gutter. The sounds of people going home, of engines and hooves and feet, rose from the street below. I turned back into the room and finished the beer, then undressed and went into the sluice-shower and washed myself down. The water ran cold just before I got the last soap-suds off; I gritted my teeth and persisted, then leapt out and dried myself off while the electric kettle boiled. I filled a ewer with a mixture of cold and hot water and shaved carefully, then set some coffee to brew while I got dressed: in the same trousers and waistcoat as I’d worn the previous night, but I thought the occasion deserved a clean shirt.
The bed was close enough to the table for the two items of furniture to form a somewhat unergonomic desk. I sat down with the coffee and looked at the stack of books and papers I’d brought with me to read over the summer. I reached over and hauled a volume from the stack, cursed and got up and found a rag and wiped dust and cobwebs from all the books, washed my hands and sat down again. Sipping the cooling coffee, turning over the pages, I tried to focus my mind on the matters they contained.
When I was awakened for a third time by my forehead hitting the table I gave up and poured another coffee and turned my mind to my real worry, the one I didn’t want to think about: what if Merrial were simply using me? That she had sought me out in the first place because she wanted me to do a job for her?
I walked up and down the room’s narrow length, turning the question over almost as often as I turned around. After several iterations I decided that I couldn’t have been fooled about her feelings, that her passion was real—and that if she’d been intent on manipulating me, she would have done it more subtly—
But then, perhaps that itself was evidence of how subtly she’d done it. At that point I stopped. To suspect manipulation that subtle—an apparently clumsy and obvious approach disguising one devious and elegant—was to undermine the very confidence in my own judgement on which all such discriminations must perforce rely.
So I forgot my suspicions, and looked once more at the books, and at a quarter before eight went out into the evening to meet her, and my fate.
4
Paper Tigers
Three flags hung behind the coffin: the Soviet, red with gold hammer and sickle; the Kazakhstani, blue with yellow sun and eagle; and the ISTWR, yellow with black trefoil.
About two hundred people were crammed into the hall of the crematorium. The funeral was the nearest thing to a State occasion the republic had had since the Sputnik centenary. The entire depleted apparat was there, and a good proportion of the workers, peasants and intelligentsia was probably watching on television. The distinguished foreign guests included the Kazakhstani consul, the head of the Western United States Interests Section, and David Reid, who was wedged between a couple of Mutual Protection greps. Myra sat with the rest of Sovnarkom in the front row, dry-eyed, as one of Georgi’s old comrades—another Afganets—delivered the eulogy.
“Major Georgi Yefrimovich Davidov was born in Alma-Ata in 1956. At school, in the Pioneers and the Komsomol, he soon distinguished himself as an exemplary individual—studious, civic-minded, with great athletic prowess. After obtaining a degree at the University of Kazakhstan, where he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he completed his national service and chose a military career. In 1979 he qualified as a helicopter pilot, and later that same year was among the first of the limited contingent of the Soviet armed forces to fulfil their internationalist duty to the peoples of Afghanistan.”
A ripple of dissidence, expressed with indrawn breaths, or sighs, or shifting of feet, went through the room. Myra herself sniffed, compressed her lips, looked down. All those nights he’d woken her by grabbing her, holding her, talking away his nightmares; all those mornings when he’d said not a word, given no indication that he remembered any interruption to his sleep, or to hers.
The speaker raised his voice a little and continued undaunted.
“His service earned him promotion and the honour of Hero of the Soviet Union. In 1985 he applied for transfer to the space programme, and after training at Baikonur he won the proud title of Cosmonaut of the Soviet Union. However, many decades were to pass before he was able to fulfil this part of his destiny.”
By which time it was a fucking milk-run, and there was no fucking Soviet Union, so get on with it—
“During the turbulent years of the late 1980s, Major Davidov took some political stands about which his friends and comrades may honesdy differ—”
Nice one, he was a fucking Yeltsinite, get on with it—
“—but which testify to his true Soviet and Kazakh patriotism and the seriousness with which he took his civic duty and the Leninist ideals of the armed forces, which in his view proscribed the use of violence against the people.”
Myra was not the only one who had to choke back a laugh.
“After the Republic of Kazakhstan became independent, Major Davidov’s expertise in the areas of nuclear weaponry and questions of nuclear disarmament gave him a new field for his great political skill and personal charm…”
Myra bit her lip.
He was in front of her in the taxi queue outside the airport at Alma-Ata. Tall, even taller than she was, very dark; swept-back black hair, eyebrows almost as thick as his black moustache; relaxed in a stiff olive-green uniform; smoking a Marlboro and glancing occasionally at a counterfeit Rolex.
Myra, just arrived, lost and anxious, could not take her eyes off him. But it was the yellow plastic bag at his feet that gave her the nerve to speak. Printed on it in red were a picture of a parrot and the words:
THE PET SHOP
992 Pollockshaws Road
Glasgow G41 2HA
She leaned forward, into his field of vision.
You’ve flown in from Glasgow?” she asked, in Russian.
He turned, startled out of some trance, and looked at her with a bemused expression which rapidly became a smile.
“Ah, the bag.” He poked it with his foot, revealing that the carrier was bulging with cartons of cigarettes and bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label. Toil’re a stranger here, then.”
“Oh?”
“These plastic bags have nothing to do with Glasgow. They’re used by every shop from here to China, God knows why.” He laughed, showing strong teeth stained with nicotine. “Have you been to Glasgow?”
“Yes,” said Myra. “I lived there for several years, back in the seventies.”
Something cooled in his look. “What were you do-ing?”
“I was writing a thesis,” Myra said, “on the economy of the Soviet Union.”
He guffawed. “You got permission to do thai?”
“It wasn’t a problem—” she began, then stopped. She realised that he’d taken her for a former-Soviet citizen. Former nomenklatura, if she’d had clearance for such dangerous research.
“I’m not a Russian, I’m from the United States!”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Your accent is very good,” he said, in English. His accent was very good. They talked until they reached the top of the queue, and then went on talking, because they shared a taxi into town, and went on talking…
Would she ever have spoken to him, Myra wondered, if it hadn’t been for that yellow bag? And if she hadn’t spoken to him, would she ever have seen him again? Perhaps; but perhaps not, or not at such a moment, when they were both free, and on the rebound from other lovers, and in that case…
She wouldn’t be here, for one thing, and Georgi wouldn’t be in that coffin, and… the consequences went on and on, escalating until she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. For want of a nail the kingdom was lost—and the result of that triviality, the fictitious Pollockshaws pet-shop address on the plastic bag, had gained her a republic, and imposed on others losses she could not bear to contemplate. Or so it might seem, if anyone ever learned enough about her to see her hand in history.
But then again, maybe not, maybe old Engels and Plekhanov had been right after all about the role of the individual in history: maybe it did all come out in the wash—at the end of the French Revolution someone, but, of course, ha-ha, “not necessarily that particular Corsican’, would have stepped into the tall boots which circumstances, like a good valet, had laid out for a man on horseback.
She’d never found that theory particularly convincing, and it gave her small comfort now to even consider it. No, she was stuck, as were they all, with her actions and their consequences.
“—in recent years Georgi Yefrimovich played a leading part in the diplomatic service of the ISTWR, in which duty he met his death.” The eulogist paused for a moment to direct a stabbing glance at the distinguished foreign guests. “He is survived by his former wife and loyal friend, Myra Godwin-Davidova, their children and grandchildren—”
Too many to read out, and none of them here, get on with it—
Messages were, however, read out from all of the absent offspring, other relatives, old friends. The eulogist laid down his sheaf of papers at last, and raised his hand. The crematorium filled with the oddly quiet and modest sound of Kazakhstan’s national anthem. The coffin rolled silendy through the unobtrusive hatch. Everyone stood up and sang, or mimed along to, the Internationale. And that was that. Another good materialist gone to ash.
Myra turned and walked out of the crematorium, and row by row, fr
om the front, they fell in and walked out behind her.
Her hands were shaking as she fumbled with her black fur hat and tried to light a cigarette in the driveway. Out on the street, cars were being moved into position to carry the dignitaries off to the post-funeral luncheon function. Somebody steadied her hand, helped her with the cigarette. She lit up and looked up, to see David Reid. Dark brows, dark eyes, white hair down to the upturned collar of his astrakhan coat. He looked less than half his age, with only the white hair—itself an affectation—indicating anything different; none of her give-away flaws. She was pretty sure his joints didn’t creak, or his bones ache. They had better fixes in the West. His minders hung about a few steps away, their gaze grepping the surroundings. People were milling around, drifting towards the waiting cars.
“Are you all right?” Reid asked.
Tm fine, Dave.”
He scuffed a foot on the gravel, scratched the back of his neck.
“We didn’t do it, Myra.”
“Yeah, well…” She shrugged. “I read the autopsy. I believe it.”
You’d be dead if I didn’t she disdained to add. She believed the autopsy; she had no choice. She believed Reid, too. She still had her doubts about the verdict: natural causes—it might be one of those dark episodes where she could never be sure of the truth, like Stalin’s hand in the Kirov affair, or in the death of Robert Harte… But Reid took the point she wanted him to take. He seemed to relax slightly, and lit a cigarette himself. His gaze flicked from the burning tip to the crematorium chimney, then to her.
“Ah, shit. It seems such a waste.”
Myra nodded. She knew what he meant. Burning dead people, burying them in a fucking hole in the ground—it was already beginning to seem barbaric.
“He didn’t even want cryo,” she said. “Let alone that Californian computer-scan scam.”
“Why not?” Reid asked. “He could’ve afforded it.”
“Oh, sure,” Myra said. “Just didn’t believe in it, is all.”