by Ken MacLeod
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.”
&nbs
p; 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 t
he 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.”