The Sky Road tfr-4

by Ken MacLeod

  The taxi exited the motorway and took a few sharp turns to arrive at the western end of St Vincent Street, slowing down just across from the New Britain Hotel, where she had a room booked.

  “Bit ay a problem…” said the driver.

  A crowd of a couple of hundred was outside the hotel, almost blocking the pavement, and spilling over on to the street. It consisted of several small and apparently contending demonstrations; three separate loud-hailer harangues were going on from perilous perches on railings and ledges of next-door buildings; lines of Republican Guards segmented the groups. The reverse sides of placards wagged above bobbing heads.

  “Ah, no problem,” Myra said. “Just a lefty demo.”

  Probably protesting the presence of a representative of some repressive regime, or possibly an unpopular government minister staying at the New Brit. As the big car described a neat and illegal U-turn and glided to a halt a few yards from the left flank of the demonstration, Myra idly wondered what specimen of political celebrity or infamy she’d be sharing residence with.

  The driver stepped out—on the wrong side, as she momentarily thought—went around the rear, pinging the boot open on his way, and opened the door for her. She gave him a good flash of her long legs as she swung them out and emerged, in tall boots, short skirt, sable hat and coat. The rejuvenation was definitely making her legs worth seeing again; she’d have to rethink her wardrobe…

  The driver lifted her two big suitcases from the boot; she waited for a moment as he clunked it down and closed the nearside door, then she walked towards the hotel entrance, looking curiously at the demo as she hurried past it. There was about three yards of clearance between the shopfronts and the half-dozen or so Republican Guards deployed along the pavement to demarcate the front line of the demo. Behind the Guards the crowd was jumping up and down and yelling and chanting.

  She glanced up at a placard being waved above her and saw at the centre of it a blurrily blown-up newsfeed-clip picture of her own face. Suddenly the contending chants became clear, like separate conversations at a party.

  Victory to—the SSU!”

  That one was in a battle of the soundwaves with, “Sheenisov—hands off! Viva—Kazakhstan!”

  Above them both, not chanted but being shouted repeatedly through one of the loud-hailers, “Support the political revolution in the ISTWR!”

  A competing loud-hailer was going on in a more liberal, educated and educational tone about the crimes of Myra Godwin’s regime—she caught the words “nuclear mercenaries” and “shameful exploitation” in passing.

  For a moment Myra stopped walking; she just stood there, too shocked to move. Her gaze slid past the reflecting shades of a Guard to make eye-contact with a young girl in a tartan scarf. The girl’s chant stopped in mid-shout and Myra couldn’t look away from her disbelieving, open-mouthed face. Then the girl reached over the Guard’s shoulder and pointed a shaking finger at Myra.

  “That’s her!” she squealed. “She’s here!”

  Myra smiled at the girl and looked away and walked steadily towards the steps up to the hotel door, now only about ten yards away. The driver puffed along behind her. The chants continued; it seemed she was getting away with it.

  And then a silence spread out, just a little slower than sound, from the girl who had identified her. The chants died down, the loud-hailer speeches ceased. The crowd surged through the wide gaps between the Guards, blocking the pavement. A young man, not as tall as Myra but more heavily built, stood in front of her, yelling incomprehensibly in her face.

  Her old understanding of the Glasgow accent restored from memory.

  “Ah despise you!” the man was shouting. “Yi usetae call yirsel a Trotskyist an yir worse than the fuckin Stalinists! Sellin nuclear threats and then sellin slave labour! And noo yir fightin agin the Sheenisov! They’re the hope o the world and yir fightin them for the fuckin Yanks! Ya fuckin sell-out, ya fuckin capitalist hoor!” He leaned in her face ever more threateningly as he spoke. His fists were balling, he was working himself up to take a swing at her. Three yards behind his back somebody holding up a “Defend the ISTWR!” placard was pushing through the press of bodies. Myra took one step back, bumping into one of her suitcases—the driver was still holding it, still behind her. Good.

  She slipped her right hand inside her coat. The yelling man’s clamour, and forward momentum, stopped. Another silence expanded around them. Myra reached into a pocket above her thumping heart and pulled out her Kazkhstani diplomatic passport. She thumbed it open and held it high, then waved it in front of the nearest Guard’s nose.

  “Officer,” she said without turning around, “please escort my driver into the hotel.”

  “Aw right, ma’am.”

  “Thanks!”

  The driver passed by on her left surrounded by uniforms. Myra took advantage of the accompanying flurry of distraction to dive behind the man who’d yelled at her, and to push herself into the small huddle of pro-ISTWR demonstrators. She glanced quickly around five shocked but friendly faces, noticing lapel badges with a flashed grin of recognition and pride—the old hammer-and-sickleand-4, a solidarity-campaign button with the ISTWR’s signature radiation trefoil, sun-and-eagle stickers…

  “Comrades,” she said, “let’s go inside.”

  The comrades clustered around her and together they stepped back on the pavement. The angry man was being restrained by some of his own comrades, but still denouncing Myra at the top of his voice. Myra’s group marched up the steps and through the hotel’s big swing doors into the now crowded foyer. White marble floor, black-painted ironwork, fluted mahogany at the reception and stairwell, a lot of flowers and stained glass. The militiamen and the driver were standing off to one side, some hotel-management chap was hurrying up with a politely concerned look and a mobile phone, and—looking back—she saw that everyone was inside and the steps were clear and the door was being secured.

  Jesus H. Christ,” she said. By now she was thoroughly ratded. She reached inside her coat again. Everybody froze.

  She stayed her hand, and looked around; smiled grimly.

  “Anybody else need a cigarette?”

  The iron fire-escape door was spring-loaded and would clang if she let it swing back, so she closed it slowly, letting go of its edge at the last moment.

  It clanged.

  Myra looked up and down the fire-escape and around the back yard of the hotel. Dripping pipes, rattling ventilation ducts, soggy cartons, moss and lichen and flagstones. She padded down the steps, almost silent in her battered sneakers, old jeans, sweater and padded jacket. At the bottom she pushed her eyeband under the peak of the baseball cap under which she’d piled her still-grey hair, jammed her fists in the deep pockets, feeling the reassurance of the passport and the gun, and strolled across the yard, through another one-way gate, along an alley to Pitt Street then down on to Sauchiehall.

  She caught her reflection in a shop-window, and smirked at how like a student she looked. It wasn’t a perfect reflection, so it also made her look flatteringly young—like she’d look in a month or two, she hoped. And she already had the bearing, she could see that as she glanced sideways at the reflection of her walk, jaunty and confident. Her joints didn’t hurt and her heels didn’t jar and she had so much energy she felt like running, or skipping, or jumping about just to burn some of it off. She couldn’t remember having felt this good when she really was young.

  And things were coming back, memories of an earlier self, earlier personal tactics, like, before her rejuve, if she’d got caught up in a situation like that outside the hotel she’d have turned to the Guards to protect her, as though by reflex, and no doubt sparked a riot right there; not now, it had been a lightning calculation that the demonstrators, however, hostile to each other or to the militia, would not attack an innocent minion like the driver an would not attack her while she was shielded by the comrades. No violence in the workers’ movement, no enemies on the Left—it didn’t work all the time
, but by and large the truce was honoured; mutual assured deterrence, perhaps, but then, what wasn’t?

  Sauchiehall, Glasgow’s main shopping street, had been depedestranised since she’d last been here and it thrummed with through traffic, electric mostly but with a few coughing old internalcombustion engines and speeding cyclists and, jeez, yes, cantering horses among them. Myra raced the red light at the end of the street, kept up her jog as she crossed the pedestrian bridge over the howling intersection above the M8 and up into Woodlands Road. There she slowed and strolled again, relishing the old patch, the familiar territory, the nostalgia pricking her eyes. (God, she’d flyposted that very pillar of that overpass for a Critique seminar in 1976!)

  But the area was posh now, full of Sikh men in suits—bankers and lawyers and doctors—and women in saris accompanied by kids and often as not a Scottish nanny; pavements over-parked with expensive, heavy Malaysian cars. Not like old times, not at all, except for the occasional curry aroma and the feel of the wind and the look of the scudding clouds above.

  Talking to the comrades in the New Brit, that had been like old times. It had been like fucking time travel, and far more like homecoming than any encounter she’d had in New York. After she’d thanked the militia officers, flatly refused to press assault charges, and insisted on giving a huge tip to the driver, she’d retired to the hotel’s cafe for a coffee and a smoke with the five young people who’d escorted her in: Davy and Alison and Mike and Sandra and Rashid, all proud members of the Glasgow branch of the Workers’ Power Party, an organization much fallen-back from its high-water mark in the 2020s under the old Republic but still struggling along, still recruiting and still the British section of the Fourth International.

  And they really were young, not rejuvenated old folks like her; she could hardly understand it, because she’d been thinking of the International, for decades now, as a club of ageing veterans. But then she thought of how the most formative and exciting experience of their childhoods had been a revolution—the British section of the Fall Revolution, yes!—and how that might have given them an idea of what the real (that is to say, ideal, never-actually-existing) Revolution might be like.

  They’d regarded her, of course, as an old comrade, a veteran revolutionary who’d actually made a revolution, and actually ran a workers’ state; but they’d soon lost their reserve, perhaps unconsciously misled (she fancied) by her increasingly believable apparent youth; and told her in more detail than she needed to know of the inevitable rancorous rivalries that had pitted them against, and the rest of the local Left for, her regime’s liberal critics and/or Sino-Soviet communist foes.

  She was grateful for their support, of course, and told them so; but she thought their ingrained acceptance of far-left factionalism was blinding them to the depth of genuine hatred and moral outrage she’d aroused, and indeed to its justification. There had been nothing in the angry man’s diatribe which she hadn’t at one time or another said to herself.

  You fucking sell-out, you fucking capitalist whore. Yes, comrade, you have a point there. There may be something in what you say.

  At the same time she found that the comrades were over-solucitious, certain that she’d be in danger if she wandered around on her own in Glasgow. They urged her to contact the consulate, and to travel officially. Myra had demurred, pointing out that that was exactly what had got her into this trouble in the first place. She hadn’t told them what she did intend to do, however—somebody must have leaked the news of her unheralded and early arrival, and she had no reason to suppose it might not be one of them.

  She passed the old church, St Jude’s, which still looked much too grand, too catholic for the tiny denomination it served, and opposite it the Halt Bar where she’d drunk with David Reid and with Jon Wilde, separately and together, during and after the brief, intense affairs that had nudged all their lives on to their particular paths.

  And thus, the lives and deaths of countless others. Jon had virtually started the space movement, and founded Space Merchants. Reid had built up Mutual Protection, and Myra the ISTWR. All from small beginnings, inconsequential at the time, all eventually affecting history on a scale usually attributed to Great Men.

  Perhaps if they had not, there would have been some other Corsican… but no. Chaos reigned, here as elsewhere.

  At the green bridge over the Kelvin she paused, gazing down at the brown spate and white swirl. How trivial were the causes of the courses of any particle, any bubble on that flow. No, it was wilder than that, because the water was at least confined by its banks: it was more like how the whole course of a river could be deflected by a pebble, by a grain of sand, a blade of grass, at its first upwelling; where the great forces of gravity and erosion and all the rest did minute but momentous battle with the surface tension of a particular drop. History was a river where every drop was a potential new source, a foun-tainhead of future Amazons.

  She walked on, past the salient of Kelvingrove Park on the left and up the steepening slope of Gibson Street, and turned to the right along the still tree-shaded avenue to the Institute. She rang the bell, smiling wryly at the polished brass of the name-plate. Once the Institute of Soviet and East European Studies, then of Russian and East European Studies, then…

  The Institute for the Study of Post-Civilised Societies, was what they called it now.

  The woman who opened the door looked very East European, in her size (small) and expression (suspicious). Her dark eyes widened slightly.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Godwin.”

  Tes, hello.” Myra stuck out her hand. The woman shook it, with brief reluctance, tugging Myra inside and closing the door at the same time.

  “This place is watched,” she said. She had black bobbed hair; her age was hard to make out. Her clothes were as shabby as Myra’s: blue denim smock, black jeans grey at the knees. “My name is Irina Guzulescu. Pleased to meet you.”

  They stood looking at each other in the narrow hallway. Institutional linoleum, grey paint and green trim, black stairway. The place smelt of old paper and cigarette smoke. Posters—shiny repro or faded original—from the Soviet Union and the Former Union: Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev, Antonov, solemn; Gagarin, smiling. The Yeltsingrad Siege: heroic child partisans aiming their Stingers at the Pamyat Zeppelins. The building was completely silent and there was nobody else around.

  “I was kind of expecting more people here,” Myra said. “I left a message.”

  “Like I said.”

  “Oh.” Myra felt baffled and miffed.

  “Your cases arrived safely,” Irina said, as though to mollify her. She escorted her up the narrow black-bannistered stairs to the library. The stair carpet was frayed to the point of criminal negligence. The library itself was cramped, a maze of bookcases through which one had to go crabwise. Several generations of information technology were carefully racked above the reading-table. Myra’s crates were stacked beside it.

  TU leave you to it,” Irina said.

  Thanks.”

  Myra, alone, pulled down her eyeband, upped the gain, looked down at the crates and sighed. They were still bound with metal tape. She clicked her old Leatherman out of its pouch and got to work opening them, coiling the treacherously sharp bands carefully into a waste-paper basket. Then she had to pull the nails, like teeth. Finally she was able to get the files out.

  She sorted the paper files into stacks: her personal stuff—diaries and letters and so on—and political, sorted by time and organization, all the way back from her ISTWR years through to internal factional documents from that New York SWP branch in the 1970s. These last still made her smile: had there really ever been anyone daft enough to choose as his nomme de guerre for a debate about the armed struggle “Dr Ahmed Estraguel”?

  She worked her way, similarly, through the formats and conversions from Dissembler through DoorWays to Linux to Windows to DOS, and through storage media from the optical disks and bubble-magnetic wafers and CD-RWs (’CD-Rubs’, they u
sed to be called) to the floppy disks, almost jumping out of her seat at the noise the ancient PC made when it took the first of those. In the quiet building, it sounded like a washing-machine on the spin cycle.

  After about an hour and a half, which passed in a kind of trance, all her optical and electronic files were copied to the Institute’s electronic archive. She blinked up her eyeband menu, and invoked Parvus.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hello,” he said.

  She felt almost awkward. “Do you mind having a copy taken, and its being downloaded?”

  The entity laughed. “Mind? Of course not! Why should I mind?”

  “OK,” Myra said. She uncoiled a fibre-optic cable from the terminal port and socketed it to her eye-band. “I want your copy to guard this collection of files—” she ran her highlighting finger over it “—and anything you’ve got with you right now, applying the kind of discretionary access criteria that your existing parameters permit. Give the scaling a half-life of, oh, fifty years. Got that?”

  “Yes.” Parvus smiled, doubled, then one of him disappeared dramatically like a cartoon genie swooshing back into a bottle.

  “Done,” he said. It had taken longer than she’d expected—she must have had more files on her personal datadeck than she’d realised.

  “Thank you,” said Myra. “Anything to report, by the way?”

  Parvus shrugged expansively. “Nothing that can’t wait. Except that Glasgow Airport is closed.”

  “What?”

  Surely not a coup, not here—