The Sky Road tfr-4

by Ken MacLeod

  Tes,” he said, adding, “if Allah wills. But we are leaving, with all we have.”

  “I can’t blame you,” Myra said. T wish you well. I hope you see your way clear to come back, when things are more… settled.”

  “Perhaps.” The man shrugged, the woman smiled thinly, the child suddenly bawled. They departed, looking up disconsolately at the screens, leaving Myra depressed.

  The man had looked like a small trader, one of the large middle class raised by the republic’s mixed economy. Despite all the devils it painted on its walls, the ISTWR had always stood more for a permanent NEP than a permanent revolution: only its defence and space industries were state-owned, and apart from the welfare system everything else (which in GNP terms didn’t add up to much, she had to admit) was more or less laissez-faire. She wondered what the family had to fear from the Sheenisov, who by all accounts would have left their property and piety alone. In a way it was not surprising: the Sheenisov had made their advances by bluff and intimidation, by looking and sounding more radical and communistic than they actually were, and their absence from the comms net left a great blank screen for the most sinister speculations to play on. So perhaps this kind of unwarranted fear was the price of their progress.

  Well, she would make them pay a higher price, in a harder currency. She drained her coffee and headed for the departure lounge.

  At Almaty she picked up her documents, diplomatic passport and line-of-credit card in a snazzy Samsonite Diplock handed over by a courier, and on the flight to Izmir she sifted through them. The papers were literally for her eyes only, being coated with a polarising film tuned to her eyeband which in turn was tuned to her. Even so, and even sitting in the company class section at the front of the jet, alone apart from the flight-attendant, Myra felt the impulse to hunch over the papers, and wrap her wrist and elbow around their corners like a kid in class trying not to be copycatted.

  Suleimanyov had struck a bold deal with the ISTWR, and with her. It was a deal which had been proposed by Georgi Davidov, who’d died before he’d been ready to return with it. Myra’s lips tightened whenever she thought of that; her suspicions stirred and were not soothed back to sleep. He’d had the contracts drawn up in the briefcase that was found with his body in the hotel room. The terms were simple, a straightforward offer of economic union and military alliance. Kazakhstan would take over the ISTWR’s residual social responsibilities, assimilating all of its inhabitants who wished to become Kazakhstani citizens, subsidising the rest. It would provide for the smaller state’s conventional defence, leaving to its People’s Army and Workers’ Militia the only functions for which they were actually fitted—internal security and border patrols, principally the guarding of the spaceport and airport. In return, Myra’s government would integrate its space-borne weapons, including the nukes, into the greater republic’s defence forces. They would retain ultimate operational control—there was no way Suleimanyov could expect them to surrender that—but for all public and diplomatic and military purposes, they’d work together under one command. At a stroke Kazakhstan would have a military force commensurate with its land area rather than its population.

  This new Great Power could then negotiate assistance from the West. It could stand as a solid bulwark—possibly even an entering wedge—against the Sheenisov, which the inchoate regimes of the Former Union and warlorded China could not. The nuclear weapons would be their bargaining counter. Useless themselves—in any but the shortest term—against the Sheenisov, they could be made available to the US or UN in exchange for the hardware and orbital back-up and even, at the outside, troop deployments that could hold back this new Red tide.

  Myra, as the oldest available politician, with the longest experience and the widest range of Western knowledge and contacts, would make the initial approaches. In a way she would be going back to her old business of selling nuclear deterrence policies; the only difference being that there was, now, only one logical customer. And because it would be an arduous job, on a tight schedule, they were going to give her a week’s break before she started, and a lot of money. She was to use that time and money to get young again.

  Rejuvenation was something she should have done long ago. Now, thinking it over, she found it difficult to disentangle her reasons for procrastinating. It wasn’t that the process was unaffordable, or even obscenely privileged—many of her own citizens and employees had made a trip to some Western clinic. Dodgy black-market strains of the relevant nanoware circulated wherever health services existed at all, and patches for their shortcomings were a widespread and legitimate trade. But Myra’d never gotten around to it, partly because she had been satisfied with her present condition—attractive enough to pull interesting and interested men, fit enough for her work and her undemanding exercise routines, but in no way good enough to fool anyone that she was actually young, once they saw more of her than her face, or saw her face close up.

  Another aspect, she realised, was a certain patriotic stubbornness, of the kind that kept her driving her ancient Skoda Traverser. She didn’t want to buy youth from… not so much the West as… the new breed, the post-nanotech generation. She ^vanted to muddle along with the fixes that had worked for her so far: the Swiss collagen jabs, the British circulatory-system microbots, the Georgian bacteriophage immune-system back-ups, the Vietnamese phytochemical neural regenerators, the American telomere hack… all assembled in a post-Soviet package deal that the health services of the Former Union and the communistans had been doling out for decades.

  The Kazakhstani President had taken about thirty seconds to persuade her that it was her personal right and patriotic duty to go for the full works, the one-shot nanotech silver bullet for death. Freed from the burden of responsibility for the ISTWR, given a mission on which even history might some day smile, that legitimacy somehow legitimised her selfish stab at immortality.

  But still, memento mori, when her mind drifted the words came back.

  Death follows me.

  She thought that death had caught her several times over the next few hours. The journey from Izmir’s airport, Adnan Menderes, to Olu Deniz on the Aegean coast was terrifying, even in the armoured limo. It wasn’t just the hairpin bends, the appalling driving, the precipitous drops and—after nightfall—the way the headlamp beams swung out into empty black space. It was all that, and the dead men.

  The car had just laboured up an incline, overtaking a couple of coaches with centimetres to spare between the booming metal of the coaches on one side, and a tyre-width away from the drop on the other, and two seconds to get out of the way of an oncoming truck. In the crook of the bend, a stand of pine a little away from the main forest; three bloodied men hanging from the branches, by the neck, dead. The mind retained from the sight a shocking impression of absences: at the faces, at the ends of limbs, at the crotch. Blink and you’d miss it.

  Myra yelped. The driver’s gaze met hers in the mirror. The crinkles around his eyes deepened to a smile.

  “Greek partisans.”

  He started telling her the story, of how Izmir had once been Smyrna before Kemal liberated the nation, and had—only thirty-five years ago—been Smyrna again, and the airport had been named after the Greek fascist Grivas rather than the Turkish democrat Menderes, and how the Greeks had begun to re-colonise, and how the New Turks had risen to again drive out the Hellenic chauvinist pawns of imperialism, and… and so on. Myra listened intently to the long, winding tale of nationalist grievance; it distracted her, it kept her mind off all but the worst of the roadside attractions and the most heart-stopping turns in the road. This was a place where the small wars were real, with no simulations played and no quarter given.

  Why had Suleimanyov booked her into a clinic here, of all places? She knew the answer had something to do with the complex diplomacy of the rest of her journey—the Turkish Federation was as usual in dispute with the Russians, who were backing the Bulgars and Serbs and Greeks, and most of the US successor regimes were ba
cking Turkey, and Kazakhstan’s on-again-off-again relations with the rest of the Former Union were currently in “off” mode, so…

  But still.

  At last, in the darkness, she saw that they were heading down a long incline, towards the bottom of a valley that opened to the sea. Lights dotted along the roadside and along the sides of the valley increased in frequency to a cluster behind the beach, beyond which were the lights of ships. As the road levelled out the driver turned left, then right through a big iron gate which opened for them. Concrete walls topped with coils of razor wire, a short gravelled drive. She stepped out and looked around. She could see a swimming-pool with a bar, and multilevel apartments. The driver handed her luggage to a couple of lads in jeans and polo-shirts. She tipped the driver, checked in, followed the guys to her room, dumped her gear, tipped the lads and made her way down the stairs and over slippery tiles to the bar, where she ordered a Pils. She sank it in seconds. After the air-conditioned interior of the car the heat was horrendous.

  She was on to her third lager and fourth cigarette when a small, dark woman in a white lab-coat strolled over to her.

  “Madame Davidova?” She stuck out a hand. “Dr. Selina Masoud.”

  “Hi. Pleased to meet you. You’re looking after me?”

  “Yes.” Dr. Masoud clicked a tablet out of a dispensary. “Swallow this. Wash it down with—”

  Myra swallowed. Dr. Masoud smiled. She had curly hair and pretty white teeth. “Something non alcoholic, I was going to say. But it’s all right—it’ll just make you sleepy, now, that’s all.”

  Tine,” said Myra, covering a yawn. “I’m tired already. Smoke?”

  Thank you.” The doctor took her cigarette and flipped a gold lighter, slipped it back into her pocket, inhaled gratefully. “Ah… I needed that.” She sat up on the stool beside Myra, ordered a Coke.

  “So when do I go for treatment?” Myra asked.

  Dr. Masoud flashed her brows. “That was your treatment,” she said. “You stay a week in case there are any complications, any bad reactions. There won’t be. Slightly feverish is normal.”

  “Oh,” said Myra. It seemed something of an anticlimax. “So what should I do?”

  “Relax. Drink a lot—mainly non-alcoholic, to avoid dehydration. If you want to help the process along, smoke and sunbathe as much as you can. Both are carcinogenic, and they denature collagen too, you know—”

  She said it as though relaying a recent and controversial discovery.

  “Yes,” said Myra. “And?”

  “They catalyse the telomerase reactions.”

  She smiled, downed the Coke, hopped off the tall seat. “I must go. Enjoy your stay.”

  The muezzin’s taped cock-crow cry from the minaret’s tannoy woke her before eight. She lay for a while enjoying the coolness of the room, and the fast-growing light. The room was, compared with her own, refreshingly uncluttered: painted and furnished in shades of white, the crisp straight lines of the decor and fabrics jiggled here and there with a twiddle of eyelet or a tuft of lace, as though the white ambience wavered between clinical and bridal, undecided whether it signified a hospital or a hotel. Not a bad honeymoon destination, Myra guessed—she’d noticed plenty of young, loud couples at the bar the previous evening, though she couldn’t help wondering if the implications of staying together for ever might not strike home a litde too hard, too soon, in a place like this.

  By the pool she sat on a lounger and rubbed sun-cream on her limbs and torso. Her hands were as claw-like (but supple), her muscles as stringy (but strong), her skin as mottled (but taut) as they had all been for forty years.

  On her left, behind the clinic’s main buildings, the ground rose as a farmed foothill to a high, barren cliff. Across the kilometre or so of valley bottom, it faced a lower cliff, which sprouted scrub and trees. Overhead, the sky was deep blue. Paragliders, their canopies shaped like brighdy coloured nail-parings, drifted by, from a higher range far behind the high cliff, to the beach a mile or so distant. Cicadas whirred like small electrical devices. The rest of the people here seemed to be either young, getting their fix, or old like her, getting their rewind.

  For two days, it was great. The sun rose above the cliff on the left, set behind the cliff on the right, regular as clockwork. In the evenings the barren cliffs looked red and martian, and the clinic like a Moon colony, a little artificial environment over which the gravity-defying paragliders swooped. Myra spent her days in sunshine and swimming and not dying. It was better than heaven. She rolled over and let the sun bake her back.

  Big bare feet stopped in front of her face, in a spreading stain of water on the concrete tiles. Her gaze tracked up hairy brown legs, wet stretched trunks, hairy brown chest, to a face. Beaky nose, bright brown eyes, dark red-brown strandy hair swept back. The man smiled down at her, nodded unconsciously to himself.

  “Myra Godwin?”

  “Yeah?” like, what’s it to you?

  He squatted. Big, white, irregular teeth.

  Jason Nikolaides,” he introduced himself. “I’ve been asked to speak to you.”

  She felt slightly befuddled.

  You’re Greek?”

  He laughed. “Oh no. Not for generations. American.” He bowed slightly. Drops of water fell from his hair. “CIA. We have a few things to talk about.”

  Myra rolled over, swung her legs round, sat upright. Fumbled a cigarette. She looked at him, eyes screwed up against the sunlight and the smoke. She sighed.

  “It’s been a long time,” she said.

  9

  The Sickle’s Sang

  I looked back at the pub door, shook my head, and then walked along the side of the square and turned a corner to the street where I lodged. I went to my lodging, ran upstairs and dumped my bag, then downstairs and out again.

  Without taking thought, I turned right, in the opposite direction from the station and the square. I crossed a pedestrian bridge over the railway and walked along the road out of the town, past the flood-plain of the Carron River and along the southern shore of the Carron Loch. The railway line was on my right, between the road and the sea. The sun was lowering ahead of me, but not yet shining into my eyes. On my left the wooded hills shouldered up. I walked past the hamlet and glen of Attadale, and on beside and beneath the slope of Cam nan Io-mairean.

  I’d walked about five kilometres before I stopped, walked over the railway line and sat down on a rock on the shore at Immer. The tide was high and the loch was still; I could hear clear across it the fiddler playing at some revel in the wood at Strome Car-ronach. The Torridonian hills, their rocks older than life, older than the light from the visible stars, loomed black behind the hills of Strome.

  In all that walk I’d met no one, and encountered few vehicles. The whole landscape seemed to shut me out, and to remind me that I was a stranger here, excluded from everything but God’s terrible love. A couple of hundred metres away, a man with a scythe was working the long grass of a meadow, as his ancestors had done and his descendants, no doubt, would do. Menial had, on Saturday up in the hills, recited a bit of tinker doggerel that meant more to her than it did to me:

  The hammer rang in factory The sickle sang in field The farmer proved refractory The hammer made the sickle yield.

  No hammer, no factory had stopped this man’s scythe; its rhythmic swing slashed the grass as though the centuries had never been.

  Then the man laid it carefully aside, and jumped to the seat of his tractor, and its methane-engine’s fart scared the birds as he lowered the baler and set about raking up the hay.

  I laughed at myself, and stood up, and walked back to the town.

  She’d left, the barmaid told me, shortly after our quarrel. I thanked the girl, avoided my mates and headed for the tinker estate.

  “She isna here.”

  I turned from my futile chapping on Menial’s white door. A small boy in shorts and shirt, both too big for him, regarded me solemnly from the path. I stepped over.

  �
��Do you know where she went?”

  He was very clean, as far as I could see in the low sunlight, except for a red and evidently sticky stain on his chin, furred with fluff. I resisted the urge to spit on my finger and wipe it.

  “I canna say,” he told me, with artless guile.

  “Well, can you take me to somebody who can?”

  As he shook his head I became aware of the crunching of gravel around me and realised that I need not look far. A dozen tinkers, young and old, male and female, seemed to drift in from nowhere. They gathered in a loose semi-circle around me, none closer than three metres away. Some of their faces Fd seen on my previous visits to the camp; others were altogether strangers to me. All of them were dressed in that mixture of simplicity and artifice which I was beginning to recognise as a peculiarity of tinker garb; it was as though the rest of us wore the cast-off finery of some reduced aristocracy, while the tinkers alone cut their own elegant cloth.

  Tm looking for Menial,” I said, boldly enough; in the silence my voice sounded as startling and thin as a curlew’s in a field.

  “Aye, we know that,” said a young man. “But you’ll not find her here.”

  “And I know that,” I retorted. “So where can I find her?”

  He shrugged. Somebody tittered. Finally, and as though with sympathy, an older man added, “That’s for her to say. If she disna want you to find her, it’s no for us to help you do it. If she does, you’ll find her soon enough.”

  “So you do know where she is?” I sounded, even to myself, pathetically hopeful. The only response was more shrugs and a giggle.

  “There’s someone else I want to see,” I said. “Fergal.”

  “Oh,” said the older man, with a pretence at puzzlement, “there are a lot of men by that name. You wouldn’t happen to know his surname, would you?”