The Sky Road tfr-4

by Ken MacLeod

  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. “A
nyway, 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.